The financial ‘world’ has been driving progress from a certain wisdom. Even though we didn’t really understand what we were doing with products like derivatives, we all thought they worked. In cosmology we have the same situation. We have a model (the concordance model) that we can satisfactorily use to calculate and predict. But it gives no clue what the universe actually is. We actually can only ’see’ 4%, the other 96% is dark, matter or energy. How to deal with a system of which 96% is unknown, only inferred?

The winner of the Android Developer Challenge was an application called Locale. With Locale I can manage the settings of my phone based on where I am, similar to your timezone settings on your computer. The difference with your computer is that the Android determines its location automatically AND I make my Android move around all the time. The creators of Locale combined these characteristics and created an app that lets me configure my phone based on where I am. With Locale my Android is Situation Aware, it transforms virtuality to reality. The obvious example is to turn off your sound when entering a movie theater. The neat thing is that I can graphically (Google Maps) group several of these locations one situation. This way I can also change my ring tone when in the office, another obvious example. Twittering where you are is standard, and with the Locale SMS plugin I can even send an SMS when I enter a situation. How would you use this? What is your application?

Last week I had the first ‘View FRWD’ event, with about 10 other young professionals working in different fields of interest (curator, design, social networks, artificial intelligence, radio, marketing, professional trainings). One of the main subjects during the night was communities. Recognizable as a sign of the time in which we are living everybody was somehow involved with a community related project. Maybe even a better indication of this time are the troubles that seem to occur with communities. Companies, institutions, the government, all are eager to implement a community, but almost everywhere projects are bound to fail. The two main problems were formulated tonight as aim and design.

Ofcourse we know commodity-cruves like oil and commodity prices have peaked nearly every 30 years, as in 1920, 1951, 1980 — and next likely around late 2009 to mid-2010? But are we also aware that we have seen long-term peaks in our stock market and economy very close to every 40 years due to generational spending trends: as in 1929, 1968, and next around 2009?  The three massive bubbles that have been booming for the last few decades — stocks, real estate, and commodities — have all reached their peak and are deflating simultaneously. Economic forecaster Harry S. Dent, Jr.: “The year 2009 will be the beginning of the next long-term winter season and the initial end of prosperity in almost every market, ushering in a downturn like most of us have not experienced before. Conventional investment wisdom will no longer apply, and investors on every level must drastically reevaluate their policies in order to survive. But despite the dire news and dark predictions, there are real opportunities to come from the greatest fire sale on financial assets since the early 1930s. With the right knowledge and preparation, you can take advantage of new wealth opportunities rather than get caught in a downward spiral. Our lives are about to change for reasons outside of our control, but you can’t change the direction of the winds, but you can reset your sails!”

The popularity of the iPhone is enormous. And most of the iPhone users become instantly addicted. When their iPhone is challenged they suddenly become passionate, sometimes even offended. And I have to admit that since Android I do understand why you would want an iPhone. One of the most heralded features is its openess to developers, YOU can upload any app you want. I don’t want to discuss this myth (well marketed message) but as it turns out the iPhone users don’t benefit (yet?) They do go to the store, download, and try the apps. Your app will fair better being on the top 100. But the top 100 apps are disregarded just as easily. You might expect a payed app would be more interesting, but not significantly. Perhaps not surprising but the survey shows only games do well. A couple of weeks ago Apple celebrated its 500 millionth dowloaded app. But what is it worth if they are all one-hit-wonders?

The coming five years will be the major switch from analog television to digital broadcasting. This will also be the end of the famous TV aerial. Last weekend around 400 local TV stations in Orlando had a première, they turned off their analog signal while most TV watchers were asleep.Will this be a historic moment in time? Are we now most definitely in the digital era or network age?

When will we see real robots? 5 or 10 years from now? Even longer? Guess what, robots serve your food, ride you home, print your letters and open your doors everyday. For many the word robot is attached to the sci-fi metaphor. They need to see tin plate men walking the streets and talking in beeps and pings, before they recognize a robot, not noticing that they are in fact surrounded by robots in their daily lives. The same sort of metaphor is part of some peoples conception of artificial intelligence (AI). Their expectation is to see an autonomous machine, computer or robot, which blinds them for the AI that is actually already around them, within the robots the others could not see. Let us, then, sketch an alternative perspective that exposes a different conception of robots and AI.

In the days when we were still all on our dotcom cloud Amazon started a silent revolution. While we were building our walled gardens they radically changed direction, Amazon opened up. July 2002 Amazon Web Services was launched and from then on everyone could piggyback on Amazon’s accomplishments. With the inception of Amazon Mechanical Turk they showed they were serious. But lately this silent revolution op opening up is really starting to impress me. Late last year Amazon’s cloud computing platform (EC2, S3, etc.) was officially released, and we started paying for our servers per second. IBM is offering development version of their products for free. We only run a backup server for as long as it needs, it only ‘exists’ when it is necessary.

Some in our board of inspiration are talking about a new organization principle. Navi Radjou suggests mesh networking and Jeff Howe talks about crowdsourcing. Both are closely related to the upcoming intensive use of networks in the main economic sectors (production, transportation and communication). The rough idea is that whenever you have a problem you send it into the network, a swarm of people, then the message will spread like oil in the network and those able to solve the problem will pick it up and provide a sollution. No matter how simple the idea may sound, major companies still have problems implementing it, but in the US local governments are now using the principles of the network to support emergency services. I think this could make the crowd partly accountable for safety matters and I see this accountability as one of the features of the network.