Reading an interesting article on the coming computational search engine by Wolfram Research (the authors of the Mathematica software package): Wolfram Alpha is Coming — and It Could be as Important as Google.
The fact that natural intelligence itself is based on interaction between massive amounts of simple units (100 billion of neurons in the human brain), makes me think that parallelism and simple cellular automata are probably the technologies that will lead us to create intelligent machines.
The amount of information produced by humanity has exploded in the past 15 years, due to exponentially growing population compounded - even more importantly - with a discontinuity in content per capita brought about by digital tools and the internet.
New technologies have lowered dramatically the barriers to entry to content production, expanding by an order of magnitude the number of people transitioning from consumers to producers of information. Such a disruption possibly had an even more substantial impact than Gutenberg’s invention of printing press in the fifteenth century.
However, this wealth of information has been distributed on ephemeral media, such as floppy disks, hard drives, digital camers, optical drives, whose standards are changing every few years and moving into obsolescence at a fast clip. Who’s going to be able to read content from a CD or DVD in say ten years? How about in a hundred or a thousand years? How many terabytes of text, pictures, videos documenting our age are going to be lost forever, trapped into obsolete memory devices?
Similarly, a recent Guardian article points out that internet websites ever changing content is continuously lost.
I doubt we would have known about Hammurabi’s code if it was stored on a hard drive. Our information-rich era ironically will not leave as many traces as the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians or Romans and might just fall into oblivion like a modern Atlantis.
Some energy consumption stats from Google: one search consumes 1kJ (or what the human body burns in 10seconds) and produces 0.2 grams of CO2 (or what a car produces driving 1 meter).
I am very impressed at the simple fact that Google could even calculate and provide this data.
New York Times writes “text messaging is a wonderful business to be in”. With volumes growing at 30% a year to 2.5 trillion messages in the US, rates doubling from 10 cents to 20 cents, negligible variable costs and mostly fully depreciated fixed costs, text messaging is probably the largest source of profits for mobile telecom carriers.
Text messaging generated an estimated $130 billion in revenues in 2008 and it is expected to exceed $224 billion by 2013. They write revenues, you can read profits or even better free cash flow, which makes text messaging the largest profit pool of today’s information industry.
An extremely profitable application with very limited features, SMS text messaging is a textbook example of a technology waiting to be disrupted by some innovative new entrants. Mobile internet connections through 3G or WiFi are enabling the opportunity to offer an enhanced mobile messaging platform at cheaper prices and capture an attractive market. At the same time, the ease of use of native SMS clients on traditional cell phones, an overall small cost per user and a proven business model through carriers billing infrastructure represent significant barriers to entry.
Several startups are introducing mobile messaging 2.0 products, experimenting with different business models (mostly based on advertisement or premium content). One of those is btexty which I started in late 2008. Although btexty started as a consumer product, it has been built to become an open platform for mobile messaging alternative to SMS. The company business model is not based on advertising or premium short codes, but on low per-message fees.
Update: join a very interesting discussion on Hacker News.
Something weird happened today. I was checking out Facebook and a friend of mine contacted me on chat. He said he flew to London to meet a client but got robbed and didn’t have the money to buy the flight back to the States. I was quite worried for him and all ready to help.
I started realizing it was a scam when he asked me to wire money through Western Union.
Facebook became a de facto third party authentication authority, and I didn’t doubt the real identity of my friend for a good 15 minutes. To double check his identity I sent him a text message and found out the sad reality: his Facebook account was hacked (how scary is that!) and he was fine and warm in California.
Until today I thought it was safe to have my information and pictures on my profile, because I trusted the fact that only my friends could see it. Now beware, social scammers have arrived.
