This thought has been lingering in the back of my mind for a while. I first thought about it after a conference call we had with Coburn Ventures. While archiving my e-mail (yeah, the end of the year is coming up right?), I ran across that thought again. Line from the e-mail: “as we are developing to a transformation economy it seems ‘off’ to try to keep your customers attached to you, as that would imply you’re not transforming them at all.” What did I mean to say? Read on…

Last week we visited the Leaders in London conference. Al Gore made a comment about the self-fulfilling prophecy of Moore’s Law. It has been this law that has driven developers and engineers to make the progress predicted. So: because someone has stated that the amount of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, the engineers made sure they were able to do this in that rate. The prophecy made the development possible. That’s an interesting thought, because it rises the question which other predictions are self fulfilling and will thus become a reality?

How does change occur in society? We have a perspective on change, that derives from the interactions between people and the way memes emerge out of those interactions. We see a change as a three step process that is driven by the know-how, that transforms to an attitude and then in the final stage to a change in behavior, that can be observed by others and therefor transform a society. Actually there’s also a development that is a counter force to that. And that is: the influence that society has on that brain. These are a couple of thoughts that crossed my mind, during the European Futurists Conference in Lucerne this week…

Today Stefan and I visited the NGC (Nederlands Gespreks Centrum; Dutch) for a discussion on ‘embedded science‘. One of the more intriguing questions to me around that subject is: who determines what research is being done? During the presentations of four speakers from the world of science it occurred to me that ‘research’ is in fact the application of science and that science therefor should be seen as a source of creativity, not as a mode for business. But I see it like that not for the same reasons the speakers leaned toward the same conclusion…

A couple of weeks back I posted about the philosophical idea of the ‘simulacra‘. I’ve been thinking a bit more about the effects of creating a hyperreality that is linked to that idea. Interestingly the concept has a bigger impact on our daily lives than you might imagine. Ultimately it means that our lives are converging beyond the traditional borders that we see. When you also believe that convergence leads to divergence the question becomes: what’s beyond the next hill?

Release 2.0⁵ plots a number of interesting ‘applications’ on the edge of the Web. Zillion Dollar Dash is Jimmy Gutterman’s take on the music industry. Apart from the known examples of this extremely disrupted industry he ended with Amie Street. Amazon backed they explore demand-based pricing. Jimmy even dreams of “an MP3 futures market”. This is exactly what struck me!

The music industry has based its ‘empire’ on scarcity. Buying a record has been very much easier than copying the songs for a long time. But, not any more. Digitalization and the Internet are rapidly removing the scarcity of songs and albums. Any time, anywhere. The best way to make money of music is to sell iPods. But what Jimmy observed as an interesting model, demand-based pricing, might reintroduce scarcity again. Though I doubt it will solve the problems of the ‘traditional’ music industry. Read on to find out how a song might become scarce again.

In the last couple of weeks several big newspapers have stopped asking for a fee to access its archives. Last month the New York Times decided to open its archives after registering only 227.000 paying users, whereas there are almost 13 million registered users to read the paper for free. Now the Financial Times and most likely the Wall Street Journal will open up as well (link in Dutch). What is the impact of ‘giving away’ your content for free?

Quite a while back we interviewed Dutch philosopher Ad Verbrugge (in Dutch). This week I’ve been editing his interview (check the section ‘Our inspiration‘ soon, to view part of our talk), and once again I was intrigued by his insights. Verbrugge sees the alienation of the virtual space with our physical space, something that he calls the schizophrenic society, as the main reason for the polarization of communities. Quite an interesting thought: does the internet undermine our freedom?

Back in 1965 Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, wrote a paper in which he stated that the number of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit would double every two years (he adjusted that rate twice by the way). That statement has become known as Moore’s Law. As I was working on a story about his statement this week, the now 78 year old Moore was quoted saying that he believed his prediction will not be valid anymore in a decade or so, because the transistors by then will have reached the size of a couple of atoms and it will not get any smaller than that. Wow. Did we indeed come to the end of revolutions?