About Tom Foremski

Recent Posts by Tom Foremski

Searching For Race In Social Media

Dana Oshiro, publishing analyst at ad network NetShelter, poses an interesting question: “how do you determine race and ethnicity online? ”

This question arose from her recent attendance at the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit in San Jose, CA where plans were discussed on how to use social media and online marketing to target the Hispanic population. The goal is to offer programs that will raise the number of Hispanic students in colleges by 4.5 million over the next ten years.

Could Buildings Be Improved If They Were Designed Like A Web App?

David Galbraith has embarked on a fascinating journey, exploring the notion that the flow of people and their interactions inside buildings, is similar in design to the flow of data and user interaction of Web apps.

Could best practices in Web app design be applied to architectural design?

Dave is a buddy and he belongs to what is a very small group of people I know, who are both insightful and foresightful, about the tremendous changes that our digital technologies are creating around us. In this essay: Use Case Study House #1 – A house designed like a web application he offers a home floor plan (above) that looks very much like a flowchart for designing a web application:

The title is a play on the Case Study Houses of the 1940s. It’s not a UX design but a UX inspired one.

…

Many architects tend to think of buildings as objects, the greatest ones, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, often thought about them as interconnected spaces but they focused on the spaces rather than the flow through them – this is analogous to looking at the stage set rather than the choreography.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to design a building like you would choreograph a dance – so that the end design was a picture of a person moving rather than the environment and where if that was sophisticated enough the environment would be defined by the person’s movement.
…

Web design is very linear, its all about flow and eliminating the niche, to get the bulk of people through a primary use case.

I’m intrigued by Dave’s approach to architecture, it’s one that is long overdue. Examples of great architecture seem to be always about image, loud statements about wealth, importance, or aesthetic panache. Architectural prizes reward a beauty that’s nearly always skin deep, and rarely judge how well a design supports the actual work of a building. Apps are always judged on how well they work.

Dave’s approach is sound and very sensible and it got me thinking: what would result if say you considered a home, or an office, as a container for a collection of life apps – a platform, an operating system (OS). Each app has a specific user interface but each having to share databases, processes, and the constraints of their hardware.

For example, a home or office building, is like an iPhone platform that runs apps such as Laundry, Cook, WatchTV, Exercise, Sleep, Work, etc. Each app has its own user interface designed for that specific activity but each shares the same restrictions defined by the building, the OS, such as the size of kitchen, building codes, etc.

Smaller homes would require different designs but each “Home OS” or “Office OS” would result in floor plans optimized to the available resources, and user loads, similar to the way apps are adapted for different sized displays, processor speeds, and network services.

Architectural designs that work well for one user, would surely work well for many, providing a scaling factor similar to the design of good software, which should attract entrepreneurial activity in licensing effective designs.

Testing out web apps is easy – testing out home or work spaces is not. Which means progress will be slow.

However, it should be possible to identify what works and what doesn’t from what has already been built. Cheap sensors could capture masses of data about people flow in buildings and homes. Algorithms could quickly identify what works well and map it against its architecture. Best use cases could be quickly identified and improved in future designs.

It’s using big datasets in a similar way that web app developers analyze Internet traffic flows and millions of user interactions, to identify what works best.

I hope other architects take notice of Dave’s experiment. I hear that unemployment rates are the highest in their profession – which means there’s a lot of them sitting around with time on their hands.

My advice: take a free Code Academy or Google online programming course, so you can start to familiarize yourself with the best principles of web app design. (And if you design future homes or offices please include this tiny detail: a usb charger plug alongside every power socket!)

 

Cloud Computing Is Driving A Digital Arts Renaissance

While cloud computing may be nothing more than pie in the sky to some, a smaller creative agency in Berkeley, CA, believes it is driving a real renaissance in the digital arts. John McNeil Studio recently began using on-demand datacenter processing power to help it make computer-generated animations. The agency discovered that it could create high-quality animations in less time at a reasonable price if it offloaded the rendering process to a cloud computing service.

“I could never compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney, given what I have at my disposal inside the walls of the studio,” said John McNeil, the chief creative officer and founder of the digital arts and communication company.

“But if I factor in the cloud, all of a sudden I can go there,” he said. “And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.”

(John McNeil, left). In September, John McNeil Studio was asked to create an immersive, 3-D animation using origami art to illustrate how a laptop unleashes human creativity. J. Watson, co-director of image and motion at McNeil, knew that the studio’s eight MacBook Pros wouldn’t allow it to meet the 2-month deadline.

“To make things move like paper, to model characters in 3-D that look like they could’ve been made from paper and then have the whole thing come together in a way that’s natural and tells a story is a big challenge,” said Watson. “And it required lots of computer-crunching power to render graphic images into motion.”

The need for compute horsepower led Watson and co-director Brandon Kuchta to try Amazon’s EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. The Amazon service allowed the McNeil team to access the processing power of hundreds of computers to simultaneously render several phases of the animation project and dial up or down the amount of processing power and storage space used for each phase.

“With Amazon, it’s pay as you go, so we can fire up 300 machines at once,” said Kuchta. “If we needed them just for a few hours, that’s all we would pay for and then we would spin them down until we needed them again.”

In contrast, the upfront cost of building an in-house render farm can seem astronomical.

“With just eight machines, you could be looking at $50,000,” said Kuchta. With only four big projects a year, he said that kind of investment might not be fully utilized.

“The cloud helped us finish in a timely manner,” said Watson. “We had 9,000 hours of rendering that had to take place. On one machine, that takes a year and yet we had a week to do the rendering phase of this particular project. If we were to try and render this project on our internal render farm, we’re talking more like 6 weeks to render everything.”

“We now realize that we have a big behemoth behind us that can render just about anything we throw at it,” said Watson. “We don’t have to lower quality or spend so much time fine tuning how long something is going to render; we actually can just get it going and move on to the next scene.”

From Big to Tiny Screens and in Between

“We’re seeing more and more artistic expressions that are borne out of the technology,” said McNeil. “There’s a much closer relationship between how you’re creating the art at the onset and how it’s going to be deployed digitally as an interactive program.”

Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at Altimeter, isn’t seeing a rise in demand for high-production animations by advertisers.

“End users don’t have the latest browser or hardware required to play cutting-edge experiences,” she said. But she says that Immersive Lab’sinteractive retail billboard, Intel’s Museum of Me and even Burger King’s Subservient Chicken are just a few examples of companies creating engaging digital experiences, which are often designed for TV or the Internet, and sometimes both.

Hype or Game Changer

According to the Cisco Cloud Index, there will be 12 times more cloud computing traffic processed inside datacenters by 2015 compared with the amount of traffic in 2010. Yet Jon Peddie, a technology analyst and president of JPR research, doesn’t see cloud services as a major disruptor to the digital arts industry. Rather, he says it has more to do with Moore’s Law, which generally states that computing performance continues to increase over time while the cost drops.

“Using servers on a demand basis is certainly more economical than having your own rendering farm and the incumbent support and overhead associated with it,” Peddie said. “But there is no free lunch,” he warned. “All potentially faster and cheaper rendering does is move the problem to another part of the pipeline.”

Peddie points to Blinn’s Law, which states that as technology advances, rendering time remains constant because rather than using improvements in hardware to save time, artists tend to employ it to render more complex graphics. The axiom is named for Jim Blinn, a computer scientist who created animations for NASA’s Voyager project and worked on the Carl Sagan “Cosmos” documentaries.

McNeil says that the business model for his studio simply would not work without affordable technologies like cloud clouding, and increasingly sophisticated consumer-level software and hardware available today.

“This allows me to have designers working next to motion graphics people, working next to people doing web development, working next to people finishing video, working next to people editing video, working next to people writing scripts,” McNeil said. “And that creates a really interesting opportunity for us.”

Peter Hirshberg: San Francisco’s Innovative Gray Area Foundation For The Arts

I’m a big fan of the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA), a unique non-profit organization that has a fascinating approach to the arts and technology and it’s efforts to bridge the culture gap between the geek world and the arts, allied with a very strong civic focus.

It’s situated in the historic Warfield building in the heart of the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods. Its innovative art exhibitions and educational programs are rooted firmly in the deep cultural traditions of San Francisco, an area that has consistently contributed to leading edge arts, literature, and ideas, nationally and globally.

Yet it seems that very little of that rich culture and diversity of San Francisco and the Bay Area is reflected in our tech communities, which draw in people from all over the world, but then trap them into insular startups and a monotonous always-on cubicle culture. GAFFTA is one of the few bright spots, an organization where “geek” and “art” aren’t mutually exclusive terms.

Last month I met with Peter Hirshberg, a co-founder of GAFFTA, at his home in San Francisco, just a few blocks from my apartment near JapanTown.

There’s not much cultural awareness among the tech community of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. GAFFTA was formed to address that cultural divide and become the first “digital” arts gallery.

- GAFFTA is located in the Warfield building on Market Street in the Tenderloin, a part of San Francisco that is being redeveloped thanks to tax-free programs offered by the city to companies such as Twitter.

- One of GAFFTA’s innovative programs in 2011 was the “Summer of Smart” — a series of hackathons and events that brought together city planners, software engineers, local residents, and artists to create applications for city living.

- The Summer of Smart managed to produce several interesting apps. It was a success in that it managed to involve a lot of city officials and staff. The hackathons showed city administrators what could be achieved from engaging the community to help solve problems.

- Singapore is very interested in the Summer of Smart and has invited Peter Hirshberg to visit and help set up similar hackathons. The top-down approach in Singapore could push through various apps and programs faster there than in San Francisco.

- Cities share many common problems so solutions that work in one city could likely be applied in others, too. Traditionally, people come to city officials to complain about services, etc, GAFFTA reframed this and said here’s how communities can help cities solve problems.

- Some city officials were worried that the hackathons would highlight how little their departments have done in terms of creating useful apps for public use.

- GAFFTA’s mission is dedicated to furthering the use and advancement of creative technology for social good.

- GAFFTA has a strong commitment to education and runs weekend courses teaching anyone how to code and create apps through its Creative Technology Studies program. Participants are certified in four areas: Audio Emphasis – teaching cutting digital audio edge techniques; Visual Emphasis – teaching principles of generative art, data visualization, design and aesthetics; Web Emphasis - teaching critical thinking, user interface design and coding; Physical Interaction Emphasis – which includes principles of 3D art, prototyping, multitouch interfaces, and how to use conductive fabrics.

- GAFFTA budget is about $1 million a year. It held a very successful fund raiser in December.

- GAFFTA wants to involve more people from the tech communities, especially those that are moving into the mid-Market Street area.

- The organization is hoping that it will help spawn similar non-profit groups in other cities. It hopes that it is starting a civic and arts movement.

 

- It is building a “Maker Lab” facility which will be used to teach people a variety of production skills using high-tech equipment, which can also be used by local artists to create new works.

- GAFFTA’s research program has created initiatives such as Summer of Smart and City Centered – a festival focused on locative media and urban communities. These will be annual events.

- It’s important to attract a diverse group of people because that helps generate new ideas. We want to create ideas that are worth stealing.

- We are still figuring things out and learning as we go. We want to figure out how to scale up our efforts.

 

 

- Here’s a presentation at TEDx Silicon Valley by Peter Hirshberg and GAFFTA co-founder and Executive Director Josette Melchor.

- Here’s a gallery of apps that came out of GAFFTA programs: Hacks – Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

- GAFFTA is seeking volunteers and interns able to commit to a three-month period of around 3 to 6 hours per week. And instructors to teach courses in its Creative Technical Studies program.

- The gallery space is open for rental for corporate events, the money supports its work in education and urban planning.

More info:

New York Times: Mid Market, at Last, May Be on the Cusp of Revival

Vox Populi: Innovations in Civic Hacking

San Francisco Chronicle: SMART Muni app designed over a weekend

 

Christopher Hitchens: Toll The Bell — The Wicked Hitch Is Dead

The British journalist and author Christopher Hitchens managed to rile people from the Right and the Left, and across the religious spectrum. Erudite and eloquent he honed those skills to call out foreign despots and take on some of the most powerful figures in the US — he was truly a modern Cato.

The first time I saw Christopher Hitchens was nine years ago smoking a cigarette outside The Commonwealth Club in downtown San Francisco where he was due to speak later that evening.

I pretty sure it was Hitchens even though I had never seen a photo of him. A middle aged man, slightly disheveled in an academic style, and with a pale pallor that suggested a preference for late nights and late conversations. He looked very much in need of a glass of Mr Walker’s wonderful restorative. He looked hungover.

However, when it came time for his talk, he was in excellent form. His oratory was extraordinary, I loved it. His effortless narration and the twists and turns of his phrasing was a pure delight. I had forgotten the pleasure of hearing things well said.

He spoke about his recently published book, a biography of George Orwell, and Orwell’s huge influence on his life and work.

Orwell became a harsh critic of both capitalism and communism, a similar journey for Hitchens, and his several decades-long transition from Trotskyist activist to Iraq war supporter.

But Hitchens’ political transitions were not the cliche of a revolutionary intellectual turned right wing zealot. He views fit best with Libertarianism — a perfect place from where Hitchens’ skillful iconoclasm could range freely and unrestrained by any political loyalties to Republicans or Democrats.

What impressed me the most about Hitchens was his fearlessness in calling out some of the most powerful people around. He did not mince words, he stood by his convictions even if they were unpopular at the time. His remarkable integrity drove him relentlessly, and sometimes that meant changing his views on key issues when faced with evidence from his own eyes, as a journalist and his extensive travels and meetings with foreign leaders and underground activists.

I’m inspired by his muckraking journalism, his unflinching willingness to take on the rich and the powerful when needed. Muckraking journalism used be far more common in the US as newspapers investigated graft in city hall, or uncovered hosts of nefarious activities by politicians and business leaders. Muckraking meant standing up for the public good, pointing out the corrupt and the criminal, campaigning against exploitative industries and organizations, etc.

We need more muckrakers like Hitchens in times like these. But now we have one less.

Here’s a quote from a wonderful piece on Hitchens in Slate, written by his friend Jacob Weisberg:

For young D.C. journalists, nothing was headier than Hitchens’ boozy instruction in radical politics and literature…

…I learned better than to try to drink like the Hitch. But his example was in every other way an inspiring one.

Like all of us, he was often wrong, but never in the way everyone else was wrong. His originality was a constant, his independence an unstoppable engine.

He loved to argue and debate, not because he was a bully but because he thought it pointed in the direction of truth. And possibly because he was better at it than anyone else. It was moving to see Christopher applying his integrity to the experience of dying. He went out on his own terms, with no sentimentality or regret, telling it straighter than anyone else would dare.

Former ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate-Thrush On New Domain Names

(Peter Dengate-Thrush, far right, outside an ICANN meeting in Paris. Source: ICANN)

ICANN, the California non-profit organization responsible for setting the name of all domains, will soon allow a vast array of new names to be created. Beginning next year, for the right amount of money ($185,000) you’ll be able to create the right to use almost any word as a top level domain name (TLD) instead of generic TLDs .com, org, etc.

US Spending Cuts Will Harm Innovation, Jobs Warns MIT President

American ingenuity and innovation, the twin engine of the country’s economy since World War II, is in danger of losing steam and job growth potential if federal legislators allow “automatic” spending cuts to kick in next year rather than earmarking federal funds to advance education, research and manufacturing, according Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield.

Hockfield sounded the economic alarm bell at a recent event at the Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley.

“The big question is: Where will our much needed jobs come from?” she asked. “Will we let other nations lead or will we seize the lead?”

Spending cuts may help solve America’s immediate budget deficit woes, but Hockfield warned of dire consequences to not making critical, long-term investments that will drive the innovation economy that has generated more than half the new jobs in the last 50 years.

Hockfield’s scolding wasn’t limited to Beltway legislators. She also had stern words for Silicon Valley’s startup culture.

“Don’t just create ideas, also make products here,” she said. “Buying back technologies that we invented changed our surplus into deficit. We need to have a substantial fraction of technologies that are made in America.”

Despite the stinging criticism, Hockfield praised Silicon Valley for being one of the industrial wonders of the world and integral to maintaining America’s innovation lead.

“It’s where big, new ideas get transformed into products that create new markets and put people to work,” she said.

She highlighted Silicon Valley’s role in making the country a global leader in semiconductors after serious threats from a fast rising memory chip industry in Japan during the 1980s. Hockfield extolled how industry and government leaders worked together during that time to createSEMATECH, a consortium that helped America recapture the tech lead with semiconductors.

“The entire computer industry came out of basic investments in research,” she said. “We have to engage with government leaders and help them understand what we do. There are very intelligent people in Washington, but political forces trump all.”

She claims there has been a “lackadaisical approach to education” and many government leaders “don’t understand the pipeline, the engine of economic growth.”

The 1990s were the most successful decade for the innovation economy, according to Hockfield, who noted that between 1995 and 2000 America sustained 4.2 percent GDP growth and 22 million jobs were created each year.

The United States remains a leading producer of advanced technology products, but its dominance has eroded in the past 10 years ago. Hockfield wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed, “We enjoyed a trade surplus in advanced technology manufactured goods; today, that category accounts for an $81 billion annual trade deficit.”

Hockfield, the first woman to lead MIT, sees a future shaped by engineers collaborating with physical and life scientists to bring new discoveries that benefit industries and lasting economic growth.

Recently, she was appointed to the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a group of industry, academic and government leaders looking for ways to speed research in advanced materials and processes.

Photo: Susan Hockfield, President of MIT, speaks about the innovation economy at the Commonwealth Club. (Flickr image.) By Intel Free Press.

If Steve Jobs Were Looking For Funding Today He Wouldn’t Get It — He’s A Marketeer

I watched the PBS documentary on Steve Jobs recently: “One last thing” and it was well done, mixing a fair bit of the good, the bad, and the ugly about the life of the man.

And there was a lot of praise for the “marketing genius” of Steve Jobs.

Then it struck me: If Steve Jobs were starting out today in Silicon Valley, he would have trouble getting funding because he’s a marketeer — not an engineer. VCs generally won’t fund startups without a tech lead.

For example, Mark Suster, a popular VC blogger, writes on “Both Sides of the Table” that his ideal type of startup has mostly engineers, five out of six, and “dominance of tech personnel relative to others.”

Technology is not a product

Yet technology is not a product, as I like to remind people. Here’s Matthew Ingram, writing on GigaOM, Steve Jobs and why technology doesn’t matter:

Gates says he liked Jobs, but that the Apple CEO “never really understood much about technology.” The Microsoft billionaire no doubt saw that as a put-down, but looked at another way, it was one of Jobs’ biggest strengths.

…

But while Gates saying that Jobs “never really understood much about technology” was probably intended as a criticism, the truth is that in most cases the technology is the least important thing about Apple’s products, and probably wouldn’t appear anywhere on the list of the main reasons why devices like the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad are so appealing.

Someone like Gates, who spent his youth programming and was involved in much of the code behind things like Windows, would like to believe that superior technology wins — but for most users of both software and hardware, design is what wins.

Much has been said about the rarity of Steve jobs and how much Silicon Valley needs more people like him. But the fact remains, that if Steve Jobs were starting out today and were looking for funding — he’d have a very tough time because he is not an engineer.

Since when are apps startups?

A few of months ago I asked my friend, Paul Mooney, how a tech conference in New York turned out, and he said it was OK but added, “Since when are apps startups?”

This struck and stuck in my mind ever since because he was right. Since when does an app become a business? Surely a business is formed that creates and sells an app rather than the other way around?

Why should a couple or three engineers that have created an app now have to build a business? These are engineers not business builders. They know how to code apps. If they wanted to be business executives, surely they would have chosen that career?

Wouldn’t it be better to create a business formed by professionals, including an engineering component, but not make the engineers run the company? A Steve Jobs master marketeer as leader, with a couple of other experienced business professionals, and a couple or three engineers should make for a killer startup.

Not if you are in Silicon Valley. Engineers rule over all else — even reason it seems, that’s how strong the cult of the engineer is here.

Lord Sugar disdains engineers

Lord Alan Sugar is one of Europe’s leading entrepreneurs. He also stars in the UK version of The Apprentice. Earlier this year he had to choose between two apprentices, he chose to fire the one that was an engineer, saying, “I have never come across an engineer that can turn his hand to business.”

It was a cold comment, coming from a man who knows engineers very well. He was on the receiving end of a lot of criticism, and rightly so, because there are many examples of engineers founding great companies, Silicon Valley is full of them.

But that doesn’t mean that only engineers should lead companies.

 

Silicon Valley’s Achilles’ Heel

The cult of the engineer is a potential weakness for Silicon Valley. Why try to teach engineers about marketing, business strategies, PR, business alliances, etc, to retrain them for jobs for which there are plenty of experienced hands around?

But that’s what happens. Incubators such as the excellent Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, are essentially crash-course workshops that try to teach engineers about the business of being a startup, they are trying to turn engineers into marketeers in 60 days or less.

Why not let engineers stay engineers? They’d rather be coding than promoting on social media channels, figuring out design, and evaluating marketing strategies. Let the professionals, the Steve Jobs of this world, who are good at marketing lead the startups.

Surely that’s a better formula for success?

Silicon Valley startups have massive failure rates, less than 1 in 20 make it beyond a few years. Maybe it’s because they are invariably engineer-led.

We need more people like Steve Jobs but the irony is that even if we had them, Silicon Valley wouldn’t know what to do with them, and most VCs would ignore them.

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