Belatedly, but as promised, here is the SlideShare link to the Emerging Technology: 2020 presentation I delivered at the Emerging Technology Conference at ISU, as well as the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds conference at NDU. I will provide an annotated one in the near future as well.
This upcoming week, I will be in Washington D.C. at the National Defense University keynoting the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds conference. I'll be walking through the next ten years of demographic and technology shifts, and the key role immersive technologies will play in these shifts.
If you are attending the adjacent 3DTLC conference, or FCVW, please be sure to stop me and say 'hi'.
For those of you who attended my plenary talk at the Emerging Technology Conference at the VRAC in early April, this will be a similar presentation (which I promise to post to this blog and slideshare) with more emphasis on virtual worlds and government, and less on biogerontology, Chinese urban unemployment, and the problems surrounding illiteracy in the Indian interior.
As many of you have noticed on my LinkedIn profile, I recently joined Palisade Systems as their CEO and President. I thought I would provide a little background and context of the recent move for those that are interested.
We pondered this for a while, and eventually created two projects to determine our strategy for Data Loss Prevention (also known as Data Leak Prevention). During this process, I happened to bump into Palisade at a local venture conference. Palisade was founded 12 years ago as a web filtering company, as well as providing other network security functions. We spoke, and I mentioned the burgeoning regulatory drivers surrounding DLP and the demand imminent for this type of solution. They already had a number of the key software components necessary to move into this adjacent market, which they did over the next 12-18 months.
I have kept in touch with Palisade over the years, tracking their progress. After leaving Cisco, I advised them part-time on their strategy and roadmap. Recently, the opportunity arose to become their President and CEO, which I have since accepted.
DLP is an emerging technology, and even more so in the Small and Medium business markets that Palisade serves. I am an emerging technologist at heart, having been on the bleeding edge of tech since I began my professional career. This makes sense.
For those that track my other emerging technology activities, such as dynamic workspaces and virtual worlds, these are still on my radar, however will be de-emphasized as I help the excellent Palisade team take their technology to the next level. We'll be continuing to add to the Technology Intelligence Group blog and ongoing research, but will be dialing-down any new research areas while I concentrate on this. Bob, my indefatigable business partner on TIG, is hard at work on his next venture around revolutionizing and disrupting the event ticketing market.
Palisade will be starting their own blog soon, so I don't anticipate much DLP chatter on this, my personal blog. When it starts, I'll be sure to post a link. In the meanwhile, we've been busy working with press and analysts to raise awareness of the company and their technology, which can be viewed here, here, and here (under my prior, part-time, advisory title).
Thanks to all of you who have already extended their congratulations on the new venture.
My current 'object of desire' is the absolutely gorgeous Fisker Karma. Built by Fisker Coachbuild, and powered by a powerplant from Quantum Technologies, the Karma is an eco-geek's dream machine. It is a plug-in-hybrid, which operates exclusively off of it's batteries, with a gasoline engine to power the electric plant in the event that the driven range exceeds 50 miles between charges. If your commute is less than 25 miles in each direction, the gasoline engine never kicks on, and you end up with an effective 100MPG. When you have returned home (or if you have an AC outlet at work), you plug it in and charge the batteries and you are ready to roll after work or the next morning.
The clever folks at Fisker Auto also have the option of a solar array on the roof of the car to keep the cabin (and batteries) cool during idle periods, thereby boosting the batteries' efficiency. Rumor has it that there is also a garage-roof-solar-panel option with the car as well, to allow it to charge using solar while parked. Of course, if you drive home from work in the evening, that doesnt give you much time to harness the sun to charge the battery unless you have some sort of fuel-cell that stored it up all day.
In my case, with two young children, it is the perfect pairing of exotic sportscar (it goes 0-60MPH in 5.8 seconds) and family sedan. Granted, the estimated retail price is somewhere north of $80,000, so it is unlikely that my smarter-and-better-half will green-light the pre-order in these harsh macro-economic times.
Never one to be deterred, I set about trying to justify the value to myself (in preparation for the harder sell to my wife), and was surprised to discover some nasty facts about electric power in the United States that caused me to think twice about a plug-in hybrid.
I'm going to lay out some data that I uncovered, and hope that some astute readers can point out the holes in my concerns, or new data, so I can justify this after-all:
"It is better to travel well than to arrive" - Buddha
In the last year or so, I've spoken with a number of soon-to-be-frequent travelers, and passed along a bit of accumulated travel wisdom to each. My wife and I were talking about the merits of travel tactics at lunch again today, and it occurred to me how many tips and tricks you aggregate over the years. I've been a 'frequent traveler' (defined as being in the gold/executive tier of airline loyalty programs) for just shy of half of my life.
For what it's worth, and there are plenty of websites who would probably argue with me on each of the following points, but here are the rules I travel by and am rarely disappointed.
[Disclaimer, if you are traveling as a group tour or with children, these may be of considerably less utility to you, but you'll know which ones apply to your own circumstances]
Long before: Pick an airline that goes to your expected most-frequent destinations, or the one with the largest presence in your local airport. Sign up for their loyalty program (but not their credit card, they are not competitive for interest rates). Stick with this airline. Fly them whenever possible unless they are much more expensive than the competition (and consider shifting your loyalty to the competition).
Why? This is the latter half of the 'fly early, fly often' motto of travel. The more you fly, the more frequent flyer miles you accumulate (useful for free trips and upgrades) but more importantly, the higher status with the airline you accrue. Status = priority boarding, priority for standby lists (this will show up later), and priority for requested & impromptu upgrades to higher classes of service.
"There is a devil in every berry of the grape" - The Qur'an
Cellaring wine is a great hobby. It frees you from the whims of stocking levels at wine shops or grocery stores, allows you to lay down wines when young (and inexpensive) and enjoy them in their age, and is an insanely difficult equation to optimize. There are many multi-variable equations in life, but wine collecting has got to be one of the more complicated ones I've come across.
For starters, Wine is a living thing. You can take a great vineyard, and vines that have produced fabulous wine over the centuries, and a freak rainstorm or heatwave will render this year's production worthless to all but vinegar producers. Winemakers are a fickle breed as well, constantly tinkering with their post-harvest techniques in order to pander to the palette of this or that wine critic. Then you have the problem of provenance.....what happened to the wine after the winemaker bottled it? Did it sit in a nice cold, humid cave somewhere, or in the hot backroom of some wine shop, getting slowly cooked? How was it shipped.....air conditioned and dark, or in the back of someone's pickup truck in the Arizona sun?
And that's just one bottle! Last month I was looking forward to a tasting of wines from Saint Estèphe, a sub-appellation within Bordeaux. One bottle in particular, a 1986 Chateau Cos D'Estornel, was at the top of my list to try, after a life-changing glass of the wine in 2004. The wine-tasting night arrived, the blind tasting commenced, and I didn't find the spice box of Cos among the glasses. There were some amazing wines, and some horrid ones, but the elusive chimera of Cos was nowhere to be found.
Shiatsu. Swedish. Thai. Rolfing. Abhyanga. Balinese Foot Massage. Reiki.
It sounds like the Monty Python Cheese Shop Sketch, doesn't it?
I've been a massage advocate since I can remember. Everywhere I've lived, everywhere I've traveled, I always hunt out local massage therapists. There are an infinite variety of massage styles, and each country seems to have it's own methods and techniques. It consistently amazes me that there is so much possible variation in 'massage modalities', when you assume there must be a finite number of ways to knead sore muscles.
During a lovely couples-massage my wife scheduled in honor of our wedding anniversary last night, I wandered through the room in my memory palace dedicated to massages I have received, and thought I'd share a fraction of them that seemed worth sharing.....
There are good things and bad things when discussing the trade-off between privacy and transparency. Back in the days when I frequented many a Santa Fe Institute lecture, there was lengthy discourse about The Beer Game, which simulates a distribution system for beer sellers with knobs to allow for certain levels of transparency from retail to distribution to wholesale. The point of the exercise is to determine 'How much transparency is too little, and how much is too much'. If you don't expose your retail demand in a timely fashion, you end up having no inventory. If you expose too much, you end up 'flapping' your distribution chain with wild inventory swings.
I think back on this exercise frequently when it comes to the Internet+Social Media, and the blood/brain barrier of privacy and transparency. Should I share my trip details, or keep them private? What efficiencies (e.g. catching dinner with friends also in town) do I miss by omitting my travel plans from my blog, etc..
In this day, it's difficult to ascertain the level of data being collected about you, especially when I methodically opt-out of every data-gathering clause I find, deliberately out of my frothing libertarian paranoia.
You can imagine my surprise when I just received an automated telephone call from CostCo, a big-box retailer in the United States, alerting me that the Clif bars that I purchased 'between June and December' were possibly a infection vector in the recent Salmonella Typhimurium Outbreak. They were able to determine this based on the fact that each SKU (part number) is tracked through sale, and tied to a particular CostCo member identification number. Since they have my telephone number from the CostCo application, they were able to call me and notify me to trash the Clif bars else risk the wrath of Salmonella.
Am I happy that they warned me? Absolutely. Am I surprised that they were (admittedly well integrated and efficient) tracking my purchases to that level of resolution? Absolutely. Will it stop me from purchasing more goods at CostCo? Nope. Now I get to be tied up with this privacy/transparency quandry for a while.
What would you do? Does this type of tradeoff offend you or do you feel that you'd sacrifice privacy for this entitlement? Do you mind that Google knows more about you than your family physician? Speak up!
First and foremost, allow me to apologize for the lengthy delay since my last post. Pursuing the 'Hollywood style of work', as I do, means that my work is sometimes very busy and sometimes the opposite. The months of November and December were very, very busy.
The reason for tonight's late post is a series of twitters that occurred today surrounding a relatively innocuous Ars Technica posting. The posting concerns a 'Taxpayer Advocate' that recommended to the IRS that virtual worlds should be taxed. Other than the sheer complexity of taxing virtual economies, which has been extensively discussed elsewhere by such august minds as Professor Richard Bartle and Professor Edward Castronova, among others, the idea of taxation at a micro-transactional level caused me to fire off two quick twitters:
(Nina Olson being the taxpayer advocate in question)
quickly followed by:
This set off a storm of direct messages and public replies asking me about taxation, mostly defending it. Most specifically, how are we to pay for police and schools.
To begin, as most of you know, I am a libertarian and am not the least bit frightened by the thought of a complete lack of federal, state, and local government intervention and services. I have yet to see an instance of a government program that worked as advertised and was delivered at or under budget. Most recently, the TARP program came under fire as there were no reporting guidelines on how the public funds were used. When this proposal, that the bailout-ees would have to account for how the largess was used to the baleout-ors, their reponse was:
"Iowa Banking Superintendent Tom Gronstal said he believes it will take some time before specific tracking mechanisms are put into place."
Ok, it was a 25 question application to apply for TARP funds, which went speedy quick. But when the people who give you the funds want to know how the funds are being spent, 'it will take some time'. If you had a stockbroker who refused to tell you how your deposits were performing, would you wait or find a better option. Would you have even put your money with him/her in the first place?
So, my response regarding taxes, like all government programs, is that they are perpetuating an unsustainable model. There will never be enough programs to make the government happy, and the government never shrinks itself. It's self-perpetuating, because the people in charge of deciding what to shrink are the people who stand to gain by expanding instead of shrinking the programs in question. Compound this extensive human self-gratification and you have a tax rate of >50% for many of us.
I live in a house that I own outright. I still pay a five-figure property tax bill, of which the monthly payments would afford me a lovely Italian or German sports car. In addition, I pay ~50% in income taxes, and am taxed a 6% consumption tax (sales tax) on any of the remaining proceeds I try to utilize.
On top of this, I write hundreds of dollars in monthly checks for both of my childrens public schools, for supplies and the like. Even given the $33 billion allowance afforded to the k12 system through the 2007 federal budget (and not including any additional funds from state or local sources), the teachers are still overworked, horribly underpaid, and begging parents like me for more money for supplies. If you were really generous with this allowance, and gave everyone in the U.S. 19 or under an equal share, they would each walk away with nearly $400 a piece, not counting any state/local sweetners.
My advice for those that are concerned that lack of taxes would render us school-less? Try it. Privatize all of it. Watch how capital efficient and quality-competitive education would become. It works every day in industry (barring misguided government regulation of energy and finance sectors), so why not education? Look at the quality of private higher education, like Stanford, and tell me that education is a unique snowflake that cannot be privatized without severe damage.
Public services such as Police and Fire are trickier. The Romans, who at one point only paid taxes three days a year, individually contracted private security and fire services. This was rife with problems as one would expect, with Julius Caesar's own cash-heavy-friend Crassus having made his fortune by instituting the first Roman fire department. That Crassus used it to extort the flaming homeowners to sell to him at remarkable discounts is unconscionable, however does not invalidate the private security model (e.g. ADT, Westec, Secom, San Francisco "Police Specials") and other more recent success stories.
Do you think that you know more or less than some administrator how and where your children should be educated? Do you think that a private company with a service-level-agreement for pay/profit would be faster or slower than your local police/fire/ambulance? I worked for an ambulance company at one point, and discovered that municipalities 'bid out' these franchises to private companies who run them at a profit. If you can do that for ambulances, why not fire and police services as well? Why not let the homeowners themselves decide what security/fire/ambulance companies they want a contract with, rather than some overpaid local administrator?
Net-net, taxes are a bad idea in the virtual world just as they are in the real world.
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