Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)

"It is August, 1927, and Al Jolson is industriously, unwittingly, engaged in the destruction of one great art form and the creation of another...In four short years, the 'talkie' will completely subsume the silent movie." - from The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman

The "Come to Jesus" Moment for the Book Business
In the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people read anymore?

Web content, video games, iPhone apps, Facebook sessions, YouTube videos, iTunes libraries, and Hulu media programming drive significant portions of our clickstream activity throughout the day.

Talking on the phone, emailing, and other forms of messaging sop up huge chunks of our free time, too.

As a consequence, book sales are stagnating, and have been for some time (this coincides with declines in all forms of print media - news and magazines included).

In big box retail land, Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble, is on life support. The independent bookstore is a shrinking breed, with less than 10% of the market.

Meanwhile, Amazon is the book industry's boogeyman, given their market share and proximity to the customer's wallet (the all important "billing relationship"). And the Kindle e-Book reader has the potential to entirely dis-intermediate the book publisher or, minimally, exert even stronger pricing power over them.

More terrifying, the book industry has no idea how to effectively market a book in a world devoid of bookstores, save for the hail-mary of an Oprah recommendation.

"Media doesn't matter, reviews don't matter, blurbs don't matter," says one powerful agent. "Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them."

And owing to a decades-old "consigment logic," unsold inventory is "remaindered." This is a euphemism for the practice of shredding unsold books and magazines. Not exactly green-friendly.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 31 August 2009

Digital Textbooks Rock, Diagrammed Sentences, Urban Games, Quirky Food

1. CK-12 Textbooks Accepted by State of California -- kudos to open textbook non-profit CK-12 for having many of their textbooks okayed for use in classrooms. Their books did better than those from commercial publishers! (via Slashdot)
2. Diagrammr -- web app to diagram simple sentences. (via brian on delicious)
3. Noticings -- Noticings is a game of noticing things in cities. Snap a photo of something interesting you happen upon, upload it to Flickr, tag it with 'noticings' and geotag it with where it was taken. (via migurski on delicious)
4. White Castle Microwavable Frozen Hamburgers -- Cal Henderson and Joshua Schachter can be bribed with these after midnight. (via direct observation)

How Big Data Impacts Analytics

Research for our just published report on Big Data management technologies, included conversations with teams who are at the forefront of analyzing massive data sets. We were particularly impressed with the work being produced by Linkedin's analytics team. [We have more details on Linkedin's analytics team, in an article in the upcoming issue of Release 2.0.]

At the second Social Web Foo camp, I had a chance to visit with Linkedin's Chief Scientist DJ Patil. As a mathematician specializing in dynamical systems and chaos theory, DJ began his career as a weather forecaster working for the Federal government. Years later, he ended up in an analytics role at Ebay where his prior experience with massive data sets came in handy. In the short video below, DJ shares his observations on how analytics has changed in recent years, especially as Big Data increasingly becomes common. Companies are casting a wider net, and are hiring scientists from fields not traditionally known as fertile recruiting grounds for data intelligence teams.

DJ also talks about his personal journey from mathematics to e-commerce and social networks. Among his previous stints, DJ worked with the DOD and used "... social network analysis to identify terrorists."

Other short videos from Social Web Foo camp:

Improving High School Science Education

As I read this fascinating NYTimes piece on a Florida teacher covering evolution, I was reminded of an interesting email exchange I had recently with Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor in the Dept of Integrative Biology, and curator of the UC Museum of Paleontology. He was at Science Foo Camp, and afterward wrote in email:

My area is evolution, the most misunderstood concept in all of science. Two websites that help the public with this are at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology (evolution.berkeley.edu) and the National Center for Science Education (www.ncseweb.org) (our ExecDir Genie Scott was one of the other participants at camp). I'm in the process of constructing a website on major transitions in evolution to which scientists can contribute, and which will be available to all teachers, students, and textbook writers. We really want to get this stuff into textbooks so that the creationist assertions that we have no evidence for microevolution can be countered. I've outlined a strategy for this in an article (PDF).

Kevin was kind enough to send me a copy of his paper. His thesis is that highschools react to college demands, so providing great free resources for college textbook authors will raise the bar for highschool textbooks. He points to a new type of illustration, the evogram (caution: long, see also this PDF of the relevant slide), which clearly shows evolutionary continuity over both organisms and time. He suggests evograms as a useful addition to the educational toolbox.

My reaction was that I didn't think targeting colleges would work:

I enjoyed your paper. I disagree with your pivotal assumption, though, that if colleges up their game then the high-schools will have to follow. That's just not the case--you only have to look to computer science to see how CS has been gutted at the high-school level. It's as though math were taught in high-schools as "how to use a calculator". Despite our jests, math isn't that bad in high schools--there's still serious math education happening even if it could be done better, but there's precious little serious computing education at all.

Kevin stuck to his guns, though:

Interesting observation, but I think you're making a slightly different (and highly valid) point: that "simplification" for lower grade levels can mean "dumbing down" or even "subvert crucial skills" (like using calculators for everything because they're not making kids learn multiplication tables, estimates, and so on). As a result, the whole structure of CS -- what kids need to know to be literate about CS at the HS level -- is lost. That's exactly what happens when the whole science of macroevolution becomes reduced to making "molds and casts" of fossils instead of teaching concepts about biodiversity through time.

But I will stick to my thesis: K-12 curricula won't include this stuff unless it's taught at the college level. Everything is downward-driven. High schools structure their course offerings based on what will get their kids into colleges. Even at the university level we structure our major requirements for many science departments based on what medical and professional schools want as preparation. It doesn't necessarily mean that if something is in a college text it will be taught in high school, but I'm making a different point: if it's not an important part of the college curriculum, it definitely won't be taught in K-12.

PS: take a look at our UCMP website, evolution.berkeley.edu to see what can be done informally to circumvent the usual textbook-curriculum-standards bottleneck.

I now agree with Kevin—if something's critical at college level, high schools will want to teach it and teach it well. I also love the idea of providing free educational materials that make it easy for textbooks and teachers to cover a topic well. It reminds me of csunplugged.org (created by Kiwis!) that Google funded to be publicly available at no cost. I'd love to see more organized efforts to improve the high-school and college education of science (and computer science) through small reusable teaching resources. Anyone know of some?

Google's Social Graph API Learns a New Trick

This past February at Social Graph Foo Camp, Google released the first version of their Social Graph API. (see past Radar coverage) This API was focused on making it easier for developers to understand who a user is and find their other accounts around the web via publicly declared data.

Today I'm driving up to Foo Camp along with Brad Fitzpatrick, the developer of the API, where he has just pushed a new API method live called "OtherMe". This new methods focuses on making it easier for developers to get a holistic view of a user, their feeds, and some basic profile information. You can see this for my profiles in a pretty form from the API. Unfortunately it hasn't been documented yet, but if you're familiar with the existing API it is pretty easy to figure out and real documentation is on its way. This is another large step forward when it comes to opening the social graph. Today it has become many times easier to welcome a new user to your service by presenting a list of people they already know versus asking them if you can scrape contacts from their email address book(s).

Part of Brad's announcement of these changes is below:

Note that this is simply a mechnical transformation on the /lookup method, not offering anything that wasn't possible before. It's just that the transformation was tedious and error-prone and silly to have to repeat in each client library. Hopefully putting it in the server makes it more convenient for everybody.

Why is this useful? A lot of websites are now letting you list your other websites/profiles on your profile, but it's just as annoying to repeat this information on every site as it is to redefine your friends everywhere. If the site incrementally hits this API in the background as you enter profile URLs, the site can then recommend you link/share your other websites. Examples of sites that let you enter your other profile URLs and could use this API include: Pownce, Digg, Vox, Typepad, Movable Type, Plaxo, Friendfeed, Mugshot. And that's just off the top of my head from sites I'm familiar with. I'm sure there's a bunch more.

Startup Camp Companies Selected

Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp:

We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Startup Camp which will be held prior to this year's Foo Camp. There were so many great submissions that cutting the list to seven startups was extremely difficult. The companies selected include:

• Collective Knowledge
• EduFire
• LReady
• Neo Technology
• Reductive Labs
• Replicator
• Stonewall

If your company is listed above, you should have received an email from us with a formal invitation to the OATV Startup Camp and Foo Camp. If you applied and are not listed above, we thank you for your application. There were too many good proposals and we simply did not have enough room to invite more.

We also want to thank the following startup veterans who have agreed to lead various sessions at the OATV Startup Camp:

• Michael Arrington: founder of TechCrunch; co-founder of Achex, Zip.ca and Pool.com
• Dale Dougherty: co-founder of O’Reilly Media & GNN; publisher, MAKE magazine
• Esther Dyson: founder of EDventure Holdings, PC Forum, Release 1.0
• Mark Fletcher: founder of Bloglines and ONElist
• Marc Hedlund: co-founder of Popular Power and Wesabe
• Dave McClure: founder of Startup2Startup, conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns and Web 2.0 Expo
• Howard Morgan: founding investor of Idealab; partner at First Round Capital
• Tim O’Reilly: founder of O’Reilly Media
• Kathy Sierra: co-creator of the Head First series of books
• Evan Williams: co-founder of Pyra Labs (blogger.com), Odeo, Obvious Corp and Twitter

O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp

The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year's Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who've already been successful.

We're making space at OATV Startup Camp (and at Foo Camp to follow) for two people from each of six to eight early stage startups that we select from those that apply. Once we select the startups, we’ll tailor the sessions to their issues, but we're planning to cover things like fundraising, PR and viral marketing, and working with investors and a board of directors. And of course, you get to interact with all the people who'll be there at Foo Camp as well.

To apply, email your company presentation (no more than 20 slides) to foo at oatv.com. Then note that Foo Camp is all about bringing people together who are doing amazing things. What about your start up would be interesting to the people who come to Foo? At O'Reilly, we're not just interested in making money (although like all investors, we do care about that too!). We're interested in people and technologies that we believe have the potential to change the world for the better, and that tell us something new about emerging trends that everyone else isn't already thinking.

Some areas of interest include cloud computing, mobile, location-based services, open source hardware, physical computing and new materials, the future of manufacturing, tools for information management and open data, open source (especially as used to create Web 2.0 data assets), rich media and the future of creativity, cleantech, braintech (applied neuroscience), and personal genomics. Even better, surprise us with something you see that we don't.

We'll pick 6-8 early stage startup companies by June 20, 2008. Applications are due by June 6, 2008.

O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp

The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year's Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who've already been successful.

We're making space at OATV Startup Camp (and at Foo Camp to follow) for two people from each of six to eight early stage startups that we select from those that apply. Once we select the startups, we’ll tailor the sessions to their issues, but we're planning to cover things like fundraising, PR and viral marketing, and working with investors and a board of directors. And of course, you get to interact with all the people who'll be there at Foo Camp as well.

To apply, email your company presentation (no more than 20 slides) to foo at oatv.com. Then note that Foo Camp is all about bringing people together who are doing amazing things. What about your start up would be interesting to the people who come to Foo? At O'Reilly, we're not just interested in making money (although like all investors, we do care about that too!). We're interested in people and technologies that we believe have the potential to change the world for the better, and that tell us something new about emerging trends that everyone else isn't already thinking.

Some areas of interest include cloud computing, mobile, location-based services, open source hardware, physical computing and new materials, the future of manufacturing, tools for information management and open data, open source (especially as used to create Web 2.0 data assets), rich media and the future of creativity, cleantech, braintech (applied neuroscience), and personal genomics. Even better, surprise us with something you see that we don't.

We'll pick 6-8 early stage startup companies by June 20, 2008. Applications are due by June 6, 2008.

Social Graph Foo Camp--the Videos

On a stormy weekend back in February, O'Reilly hosted Social Graph Foo Camp (David Recordon and Scott Kveton were the instigators; we were happy to say "Yes" when they asked to hold the party at our Sebastopol campus). Google announced their Social Graph API on Friday morning, adding fuel to the fire as the intense discussions got underway. We managed to drag some of the Campers away from the proceedings, sit them in front of a video camera and capture their thoughts about the state of the social graph. We also included a summary in the latest issue of Release 2.0 (free excerpt). 

There's much more to be done if we're to create sane and useful approaches to the data portability, identity, and privacy issues created by the social networking juggernaut. The conversation continues today at the Data Sharing Workshop in San Franciso, and next week at Web 2.0 Expo, where a slew of SG Foo Campers will be speaking, including Joseph Smarr, Tom Coates, Niall Kennedy, John Musser, Gavin Bell, Artur Bergman, Ankur Shah, Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Marc Davis, Justin Hall, and Dave Morin.

What is Web Operations?

Theo Schlossnagle wrote a brilliant summary of one of the biggest challenges we discussed at the Velocity Summit in January:

What is this Velocity Summit thing? It was a bunch of web architects from highly trafficked sites sitting around talkin' smack. It was operated in Foo style. However, one thing that made me really appreciate this meet-up was the lack of self-importance displayed by attendees. Everyone was just there to talk -- not to make people understand how much they knew. We were talking about The O'Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference: what it should be and why.

Two things that I walked away with were (1) a realization of the lack of a career path for people who do what we do (no standard titles, no standard roles and responsibilities and certainly a lack of sex appeal) and (2) a clear lack of terminology for the technology requirements that are so common in these environments. Terminology is easy, in my opinion -- you just argue until someone wins. Of course, arguing is a hobby of mine, so I have bias. On the other hand, defining a career path that is an industry accepted path is hard.

The term Web Operations was used a lot during this event. While it isn't awful, I really don't like this term. The hard part is that the captains, superstars, or heroes in these roles are multidisciplinary experts. They have a deep understanding of networks, routing, switching, firewalls, load-balancing, high availability, disaster recovery, TCP & UDP services, NOC management, hardware specifications, several different flavors of UNIX, several web server technologies, caching technologies, several databases, storage infrastructure, cryptography, algorithms, trending and capacity planning. The issue: how can we expect to find good candidates that have fluency in all of those technologies? In the traditional enterprise, you have architects which are broad and shallow and their team of experts which are focused and deep. However, in the expectation is that your "web operations" engineer be both broad and deep: fix your gigabit switch, optimize your MySQL database and guide the overall architecture design to meet scalability requirements.

I struggle with this. Not everyone can be a superstar. More importantly, no one can really start as a superstar. If we use an apprentice model (which is common in industries without institutional support) we limit the total number of able workers in this field. So, how do we (re)define the requirements for a junior web operations person?  [read more]

One of the reasons I'm excited about Velocity is that we're increasing the pool of great operations people.  We're getting inquiries from companies interested in sending groups of 30-40 people, and I expect more as we confirm speakers and sessions.  You can secure a spot now and get a $350 early registration discount.

China Foo Camp: On the Outside, Looking In

I thought I'd share a few reflections on our just completed China Foo Camp while they are still fresh. We organized the event in Beijing in conjunction with IBM and the Institute for the Future. Unlike our US Foo Camps, where we have a rich network of people we already know whom we want to introduce to each other and learn the latest from, here our objective was far more basic -- we were hoping to meet interesting people who already deep into this market in a way that we are not. Instead of being at the center of the action, we're outside, with our nose pressed to the glass, looking for a way in.

The opening evening event, Ignite Beijing, was held in a fabulous converted military factory in the 798 Arts District, an area that highlights as just about no other the amazing cultural renaissance that's happening in China today. (You can wander for hours around small galleries tucked into otherwise empty factory buildings, a flower growing from the ruins of what was once a key part of China's military-industrial complex.) However, despite the fabulous ambience of the space, the acoustics were bad, and it made it very difficult to hear the speakers. And as a result, the crowd continued networking, making it even more difficult to hear the speakers... The presentations suffered; the people we met were terrific.

More photos.

The next day, we picked up the thread in the normal Foo camp unconference format at the Landmark Hotel. Here are some of the observations that come first to mind:

• As noted above, we're on the outside looking in. Wanting to get to know people, rather than already knowing people and wanting to connect them (which is my normal role at Foo Camp) created a very different dynamic for me. I was soaking up people like a sponge (even though I didn't get to everyone) but I realized how much joy I get out of being a connector, and here, I couldn't play that role. At our US events, I'm always dragging one person over to meet another, and then watching the sparks fly. I'm hoping we will eventually get to know enough people here that we can do that here too.

• While we met a fabulous group of people, that group was weighted towards expats (many of whom have been living here for years and are deeply connected, but still outsiders), folks from multinational companies with offices in China, Chinese who've been educated abroad, and Chinese bloggers like Isaac Mao who blog in English as well as Chinese. It was also weighted towards the internet industry and linux, while in the US Foo camps, we draw from these areas, but also hardware hacking, gaming, publishing, public policy, PC software, and the sciences. In a show of hands, about 1/3 of the attendees were programmers; 1/3 were entrepreneurs (with overlap between the two groups.) There was no one from any state owned enterprise -- still a huge economic sector in China. The university segment was also lightly represented.

• There are (reportedly) very large differences between the tech cultures in Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai is very entrepreneurial, with money as a common language. Beijing is more complex, richer by most opinions, but more difficult. We might have felt more at home in Shanghai, but because of the complex interactions between government, academic institutions (which are centered in Beijing), the artistic revival here, and business, many felt that the future is here in Beijing. Of course, they also said that the rivalry between the two cities is like the rivalry between LA and New York.

• While IBM, our local partner, had provided facilities for bi-directional simultaneous translation in two of the rooms, and for sequential translation in two others, no one even bothered to pick up the headsets (16 were picked up out of 100+ attendees). There were no talks offered in Mandarin, and apparently those who weren't comfortable enough with English left partway through the day rather than resorting to translation. Jon Hancock of ShellShadow, one of the instigators of BarCamp Shanghai, said it was the same way at the first Bar Camp, but by the second, the Mandarin-speakers got more comfortable with the format, and began to participate. Ironically, one of the features of Foo Camp, the discouragement of prepared presentations, may have been a barrier to some who would have been more comfortable with the support of slides. Rebecca Mackinnon wrote a post summarizing the difficulties we faced because of the language barrier.

• I got the sense that there really are two tech communities in China: the one we reached, and another one, that is more distinctly Chinese. Both are important. It's not really that there's this outer ring of westerners and Western-connected Chinese, with the "core" being the local industry. It's more that there is a Western-facing industry, and an indigenous one that is growing up in parallel.

• There really was some good two way exchange, but it seemed to be one way at a time. For example, there was a session led by Frank Yu about the China gaming market that I found fascinating, because I learned a lot about the structure of the market, the types of games played, the business models, and so on. But that would have been old hat to any Chinese gamer. Meanwhile, though, Deb Fallows, who, with her husband James Fallows has been living in China for the last year and a half, reported on a session she attended in which a western speaker (whose name she didn't remember) was talking about American marketing and business strategy, which elicited many questions from the Chinese members of the audience. In short, the two worlds are sufficiently far apart that many of the conversations that deeply interest people from one side are of less interest to the other. We didn't have the kind of sessions I've come to expect at Foo Camps in the US and Europe, where someone shows something that just blows my mind...

  There's an interesting side point here: discussions that feel really stimulating are ones where there is enough common ground for information to flow both ways. However, conversations where information flows mainly in one direction may also be extremely valuable, especially if they provide a foundation for later two way conversation. I'm hopeful that when we come back next year, we'll see more true collaboration, both because we've figured out how better to handle the language problem, and because we can now craft a program that looks for a combination of sessions that are of interest of one side or the other (Westerners looking to learn about China or Chinese looking to learn about the West), and those that find common ground.

Moving away from Foo Camp itself, a few comments about Beijing and China in general.

As already noted, there's a sense that a renaissance is going on here. I'm thinking of Horatio Alger's dictum: "Go west, young man." We reached the end of Alger's directions in California. China is now true west from there. Go west, young man, go west. What happens in China over the next decade is going to shape the history of the world.

On the down side, the pollution here in Beijing is unbelievable. We had one good day, but most of the time, the smog has been so thick that you can't see buildings more than a half mile or so away. The sun is like a burned hole in a blanket. Open a window at night and you think you've opened directly onto the outflow from a chimney. (Jim Fallows has some great pictures of the Beijing smog. It's been like that every day.)

That raises a specter of a future we don't like to consider. The environmental impacts of China's growth are not sustainable. We need to think about something like a carbon tax on products imported from China. America's addiction to cheap goods, and China's race to catch up to Western standards of living, is putting terrible impacts "off the balance sheet." One day, there will be hell to pay, and the party will be over. (When will we learn? "Off the balance sheet" seems to be a universal recipe for disaster, from subprime to the environment. Figuring out your true costs is essential if you want to survive long term.)

Opening up the Social Network Graph

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick and Open Source Awards winner David Recordon just posted a manifesto titled "Thoughts on the Social Graph". Brad and David presented their work at Foo Camp and have been sharing it with interested parties over the last couple of months.

Their project attempts to solve the problem of multiple overlapping social networks. This overlap makes it harder to establish new sites, as people tire of rebuilding networks on each social networking site. As a non-profit and opensource project, it aims to be vendor-neutral and usable by all vendors.

Brad sums it up:

Users and developers alike are going crazy. There's too many social networks out there to keep track of. Developers want to make more, and users want to join more, but it's all too much work to re-enter your friends and data. We need to lower the amount of pain for both users and developers and let a thousand new social applications bloom.

All I can say is: finally!

Foo Camp Takeaways

As many of you know, we held our annual Foo Camp in Sebastopol this past weekend. Foo Camp is a weekend geek campout that's been described as "the wiki of conferences," because there's no program beforehand. The program is developed on the spot on Friday night by people swarming a set of big whiteboards with rooms and time blocks. (This year, courtesy of Rabble's "foocal", we also got an online version.) Foo Camp is free to participants, but invitation-only -- not because there aren't thousands of great people who wouldn't be fabulous participants and contributors, but because we only have room for a few hundred, and we want to select people who are exploring areas we're interesting in, or people we want to introduce to each other.

We hold Foo Camp for a number of reasons:

1. To learn about what's next. I've often quoted William Gibson's observation that "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed," and noted that "alpha geeks", who are bending technology to their own interests, are often already living in pockets of a future that will one day spread to the rest of us. We learn a lot from what people present about that is NOT connected with their jobs or their startups, and we encourage people to talk about their passions and interests, not just their work. For example, last year, we had three or four independent presentations on human augmentation, suggesting that cyborgs are in our future.

   This year, one of the interesting takeaways for me was the disappearing laptop. In past years, there were lots of people lugging laptops between sessions, taking notes, hacking away and the like. This year, I saw lots more people whose principal technology artifact was their phone, and even more who were giving up on any form of technology mediation, and just going for the fuller bandwidth of simple human communication. Meanwhile, there were presentations like "How to eat like a caveman," "the 4-hour workweek", and "what if everyone followed their passions?" that suggest people are looking for more than they can find on a screen. One participant told me "I found myself not having any conversations about technology, but just asking people about their lives."

   (Mitchell noticed the lack of laptops too, and so did Leo, and each of them had separate hypotheses as to the reason. While there may have been local social dynamics such as they surmise, I believe there is a broader trend on display.)

   That being said, there were lots of cool technology presentations, with my own favorite news from the future being the update from Drew Endy and Christina Smolke on the state of synthetic biology, including a demo (developed by a high school team) of e-coli engineered to smell not like sh*t, but rather, either a banana milk shake, or wintergreen mint. Bio-engineering is in the stage equivalent to the transistor era of William Shockley, but the real whiff here is of a future era where people are hacking our code.

   Another major theme that emerged for me is one that I've been watching already, namely the idea of computing breaking the bounds of the "screen and keyboard" paradigm. Some of this comes with the increase in phone based applications, but we were also treated to quite a few robotics talks, various kinds of large-scale games (often using phones and other portable devices), speech interfaces, and applications of RFID technology. I believe fairly strongly that we're heading for a paradigm shift point in computer interfaces.

   There were also a number of very interesting talks and demos about energy, confirming our idea that energy is on the hacker radar as well as the Silicon Valley radar. (Hence our Energy Innovation Conference.) And there were quite a few talks on the social implications of technology, or how to make this a better world. But on both of these topics, there is at least some attendee selection bias at work, versus the "disconnection" meme that I mention above.

2. To test out new product ideas, and to find new authors, conference presenters, and possible investments. We get lots of great ideas and input for our books, conferences, and investing. For example, I was able to pick the brains of about 30 great people who know a lot more than I do about one of my latest brainstorms, the parallels between Web 2.0 and Wall Street. The attendees also have a great opportunity to test out their ideas on a knowledgable and passionate audience.

3. To spark other people. Our businesses flourish best in periods when innovation is bursting from the seams. So creating more cross connections between people who can spark each other is good for us, good for the participants, and hopefully, good for everyone who isn't here, but will benefit from what the participants learn and do. Some of my personal best moments include watching some of my favorite hackers, like Adrian Holovaty, Avi Bryant, and Andy Baio show each other their latest work.

   

   In addition, we hope to create a neutral ground where competitors can meet and share ideas. In the closing session, when we ask people what they particularly liked, many people remarked on this aspect. For example, when Larry Page, Jimmy Wales, Jason Calacanis, Peter Norvig, Danny Sullivan, and Mitch Kapor can get together to discuss the tradeoffs between algorithmic and people-enabled search, that's a good thing.

4. To meet new people, and to introduce our friends to each other. We meet new people, and we are always saying to each other "You've got to meet..." Sharing friends is one of the most satisfying kinds of sharing.

5. It's a blast. Exhausting, but a high point of our year. (My personal "fun" high point was a ride in Ian Wright's electric race car, 0-60 in 3.0 seconds. Made me glad that I'm not Donald Trump, as my hair would have been back in the parking lot if I didn't still have my own....) A close second was watching Adrian "Django" Holovaty play Django Reinhardt in real life.

Playing in a Public Hall

If you ever get really excited about playing pool (and it would be fair to say that I spent a significant portion of my college years studying the physics of collisions of rotating spheres -- a non-degree program, alas) you're likely to run into Robert Byrne's excellent books on the topic. They rank among some of the best educational texts I've read on any topic -- it's amazing that a skill based so much on visualization, stance and force can be improved so quickly simply by reading about it. He's enormously entertaining as a writer, taking side-trips into immigration trends, the history of colonization, cinema, gender and economic differences, and all variety of other topics that relate in some way to pool. Combined with great diagrams and a wonderful set of historical photographs, flyers, and quotes, the books feel like Head First Cue Sticks.

This weekend at Foo Camp, I thought a lot about one of the things Byrne says in his books (somewhere -- this morning I couldn't find exactly where), to the effect that the best pool players are not the ones that own their own tables and play on them every day; instead, the players who play in public halls against a wide variety of opponents have the greatest skills. The analogy to open source software development is obvious, but I found the same effect this year when I took the application I've been developing with my company and showed it to all variety of people at Foo (well, everyone but investors). When you get a collection of inspired, talented, creative people in one place and ask them to talk about whatever they might be thinking, the result is a flood of ideas and reactions that you can't find in any other setting. Foo Camp set me off on this project, two years ago, when I returned from the first one thinking, "How can I come back with something I'm proud to show?" This year I got to do that, and hearing some of the people I admire most, and some I'd never heard of or met from fields far from my own, tell me they love what they see -- and hearing those with doubts and those who wanted more or less in the final product -- is incomparable.

Foo Camp is one such venue. Wherever you find it, get out there, show people what you're doing, and find the public hall where you can play. Playing on your private table will never get you to the same level.

The birth of Chumby

Last night, we had our first ever "product launch" at FOO camp. (Joshua Schachter says he almost showed del.icio.us at the first FOO in 2003, but wasn't quite ready, and released it a few weeks later.) We normally try to focus on pre-commercial technology at FOO, since by the time there are lots of startups, you're much further from the cutting edge. However, there are so many interesting aspects to the Chumby that we were excited to get behind it, and invite a whole bunch of the chumby team to Foo for the launch:

1. Web 2.0 meets low-end consumer devices. Chumby is a kind of web-enabled wifi clock radio, with user-generated konfabulator-style info-widgets. There is an initial set of widgets, but the goal is for the community to extend the set. The value of the device is in the service of delivering new net-connected widgets, not in the hardware, or even the software.
2. Open source hardware. This is a major emergent theme at FOO. (Remember that we don't organize the program around concepts so much as we organize it around people. We find cool people, and they tell us what they're doing, often surprising us by the things they do that we didn't know about.) As there's more Make: style hardware hacking, there's a need for new tools for sharing the details of projects, for thinking through licenses, and the like. (A great example of FOO cross-fertilization: Colin Cross, also at FOO, is working on a linux-powered open source hardware mobile phone, the TuxPhone (project coming soon on SourceForge.) He was excited to meet the Chumby folks to pick their brains about their license.)
3. Open source software. In a session on forecasting, Paul Saffo remarked on the importance of paying attention to anomalies. The example he gave was a highway road sign that stated "Leaving emergency road side phone service area." This shift from communications being the exception to communications being the norm alerted him to the idea that communications, not processors, would be the driving force of technology in the 90's. So I think it's fascinating that Chumby puts a sticker on the back noting that all the software is open source except flash, which they use for some functions.
4. Soft hacking, aka Craft:. Chumby CEO Steve Tomlin remarked that Chumby is a device that "you can hack with a seam ripper." Unlike most other consumer electronic devices, it comes with a bean-bag style case (complete with various kinds of sensors so that squeezes and bumps control activity) that can be modded with a sewing machine. Want a hello-kitty version? It's up to you.
5. They wanted to see how a hacker audience would respond. The device is designed to be hackable on every level, so this is a great alpha group for seeing where a hacker community will take a device like this, as well as whether or not they respond. The prototypes are still under development, and the people at FOO who've gotten their hands on them thus become co-developers of the product before manufacturing goes to scale.
6. The idea was born at FOO. Key members of the Chumby team met at previous FOO Camps, and the idea was an outgrowth of the ferment we encourage here. So it's a great proof point of what we're trying to accomplish: pack enough smart people into a compact space that they create enough heat that ideas boil over.

Christine Herron gives a great summary of the product launch. The Chumby site has lots more info.