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Nokia Pilots: Handedness

Nokia Pilots Client Portal, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Wow. Handedness in a profile form is a first for me, although I think Ambithumbstrous should be an option.

This appears in the sign-up form at Nokia Pilots, where we can participate in steering the design direction for Nokia. A survey there revealed that I am a 'Technology Leader' sort of beast. Amazing! They figured that out with just seven or eight questions!

Last Minute Announcements: Orange Spotlight and /Aviso

There is just too much going down these days (and I am not just referring to the stock market). A few last minute announcements:

This afternoon, I am collaborating with Mark Plakias and Pascale Diaine in an Orange Spotlight event at Plug & Play in Sunnyvale:

[from Orange Spotlight: Collective Action at Plug & Play (Tuesday September 30, 2008) - Upcoming]

Tuesday September 30, 2008 from 3:30pm - 7:00pm
Plug & Play
440 N Wolfe Rd
Sunnyvale, CA, California 94085
Category: Other
On September 30th, 2008 , join us for an Orange Spotlight event.

PlugandPlayTechcenter and Orange Labs invite you to be part of a discussion about "Collective Action". We'll explore the power of the digital crowd, including the emergence of customer collaborations today and tomorrow.
Let's take our cue from Orange's tagline -- "Together we can do more" -- and explore using the Spotlight format, blending startup presentations with comments from a selection of experts as part of the audience. Stowe Boyd, the social web applications master will be our moderator. The discussions will keep going after the presentations around a glass of wine during an after cocktail party.
Presenting companies
- Predictify - Parker Barrile - http://www.predictify.com
- Lending Club - Renaud Laplanche http://www.lendingclub.com/home.action
- Right People - Dan Ake
- Spare Time - Steven Rose
- YourVersion - Dan Olsen http://www.yourversion.com/
- MyCauseTV - Jonathan Olsen http://mycausetv.com/
- Bojam - Andrew Greenstein http://www.bojam.com/

Detailed Agenda:
3:30pm - 4:00pm: registration and networking
4:00 - 5:30pm: Projects presentation
5:30 - 7:00pm: Discussion + Cocktail party

Space attendance limited, make sure to RSVP here on upcoming to save your spot.

Also last minute: I will be broadcasting a live /Aviso show, with co-host Alison McNeill, from the Startonomics show on Thursday, at 3pm PT. We have some things up our sleeves, like an interview from TechCrunch50 with the CEO of Yammer, and several other surprises. Track /Aviso at UStream.tv.

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Jason Calacanis And Thomas Friedman On A Brand New Day

Jason Calacanis is a survivor, and offers up some tough love for entrepreneurs who are shell shocked by the financial events of the last few weeks, on top of the chilling in start-up funding that has been worsening for some months now. He starts with a pronouncement:

[from Calacanis: Collapsing Economy Will Kill 50%-80% Of Startups]

It's my believe that the economic downturn will be much worse than it is today, and that 50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months.

Make a list of every Web 2.0 startup to raise an A or B round and cross 80% of them off the list, because they will not make it to their next round of funding or profitability.

It could be that a huge die-off of start-ups might be a good thing, even in the near term: although not necessarily for those working there. How many social bookmarking apps do we need? Is there really a place for seventeen social aggregators, or eleven blog comment plug-ins? Attention to hard numbers and real growth rates might lead hopeful entrepreneurs and investors to get smart fast and drop experiments that aren't working, and to go back and dream something up that is really innovative instead of just-another-fill-in-the-blank application.

On the other hand, Jason provides good advice for the CEO of one of these beleaguered start-ups: trim expenses, push execution hard, find streams of revenue and swim up them, and attract on the best and brightest.

I won't even argue Jason's basic premise -- that things are going to get much, much worse -- because things almost certainly will. Not necessarily in the next few weeks, or even months, but the basic structure of the world and US economy is really headed in the wrong direction. Burgeoning growth in India, China, Brazil, and other emerging economies almost guarantee increased demand for and use of fossil fuels with a commensurate rise in their price and their side-effects, especially global warming and other forms of pollution. America is involved in cowboy-on-holiday adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan that will ultimately cost trillions. The American dream has been hijacked and turned into a nightmare, where we will soon see the hollowing out of exurbia as foreclosures mount (even in the case of the most widely spread bailout, foreclosures will continue), and many will find it increasingly difficult to maintain a middle class standard of existence.

There is almost no doubt that whoever inherits the Presidency will have to work very hard indeed to even evert just the worst of these trends, and that blunting all of them will probably not be possible, at least not for years to come.

If there is a light at the end of this deep, dark tunnel it may be our opportunity -- forced upon us by circumstances -- to dramatically remake the world, and to make it batter. Thomas Friedman, writing about the bailout in today's New York Times makes the case that we need to invest in the future, not just clean up the drunken brawl that smashed Wall Street to bits:

We need a buildup. We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a “liar loan” from an underregulated bank with no money down and nothing to pay for two years. The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.

[...]

Indeed, when this bailout is over, we need the next president — this one is wasted — to launch an E.T., energy technology, revolution with the same urgency as this bailout. Otherwise, all we will have done is bought ourselves a respite, but not a future. The exciting thing about the energy technology revolution is that it spans the whole economy — from green-collar construction jobs to high-tech solar panel designing jobs. It could lift so many boats.

In a green economy, we would rely less on credit from foreigners “and more on creativity from Americans,” argued Van Jones, president of Green for All, and author of the forthcoming “The Green Collar Economy.” “It’s time to stop borrowing and start building. America’s No. 1 resource is not oil or mortgages. Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work — retrofitting and repowering America. ... You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart biofuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America.”

I think we will see a lot of the smartest entrepreneurs moving into green technologies, where the heat is going to be for the next generation. And I have started to see a trend in a new flavor of web companies -- where the web meets green -- that demonstrates some of the untapped areas for innovation that Friedman and Jones are arguing for.

There is a revolution in the works, and the spark for that often comes from deep despair when dreams are smashed by events. Jason relates his darkest hour -- the fall of Silicon Valley Insider, the .com bust leading some detractors to call him as a charlatan instead of visionary, and then 9/11 when his firefighter brother might have died -- and found that there was a light at the end of his tunnel, and that led to his started Weblogs.inc, a really new sort of media company.

But perhaps now the green fields might not be media, but the actually development of green technologies and web solutions to tie that into our everyday lives. We need to move into a new tomorrow, and innovators and entrepreneurs still have a big role to play.

Phweet: VOIP Via Twitter

My old pal Stuart Henshall showed me a new app he has developed called Phweet. Phweet tees up a VOIP call between you and other users of Twitter.

Here's the Tweet I got from Stuart inviting me to Phweet:

Phweet Tweet, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And once we connected:

Phweet - Public Alpha, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

We had a nice chat -- about Phweet -- via VOIP.

So a simple -- free -- VOIP service that builds on top of the Twitter ecosystem.

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Planning My Talk For Defrag: Lifestreaming From The Edge

Titles for talk often undergo a subtle shifting of meaning, over time. Then I first discussed speaking at Defrag with Eric Norlin back in May, I proposed a tentative title: "Flow: The Still Point Of The Turning World?". Somehow, after just a few months of acceleration in the coming-to-a-streaming-app-near-you web marketplace, my talk had become "Is the flow just too much? Lifestreaming at the edge" which I am hereby ammending to just the last phrase, dropping the note of panic from the talk.

I plan to examine the rise of streaming applications: first, as an outgrowth of (near) real-time communications in instant messaging and texting, and second, as an adjunct to the RSS feeds of blogging and other web publishing.

We are moving into a new period: a web where streaming may become the dominant motif for innovative social applications. What is this 'web of flow?' and how will it build on 'the web of pages' that has become second nature to us? What are the exemplar applications? How will this shift what we do on a interpersonal level and within the enterprise? What are the social implications? How will these technologies be adopted by media companies? Are we being changed, cognitively, by these new media, and if so, where are we headed?

I am not an alarmist, so my basic theme will be that these tools are a better way to deal with information onslaught, but that new patterns of user interaction, design, and application architecture may be necessary for the fullest realization of the promise inherent in streaming to emerge.

[Click here to register for the Defrag conference, and use code 'stowe1' for a $200 discount.]