Mozilla Research Fellow Allen Wirfs-Brock has given a super interesting talk, The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology, where he makes the case that we’re entering the ambient computing era. If you’re interested in these kinds of things I recommend watching the first 30 minutes of his presentation. After that it get’s slightly more technical with a discussion of the role and importance of JavaScript in the years ahead. The presentation isn’t embeddable but it’s available here. There’s also a blog post here.
I jotted down a few thoughts on this last year, although from a slightly different perspective: Digitally Amplified Behavioral Communication.
I, for one, am looking forward to enter “seamless lazy mode” :)
“Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking “are we there yet?” and you’ll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you’re building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you’ve replaced email when it’s a fait accompli.” — Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
“Pinterest is where the puck is going, because web navigation is shifting from search to social and from “streams” towards “grids.” —
Haven’t really made up my mind about grids, but it sure feels directionally right.
Click here or on the screenshot to connect. It’s a live-streaming 3D point-cloud, carried over a binary WebSocket. It responds to movement in the scene by panning the (virtual) camera, and you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse. Currently you’ll need Google Chrome to try it, and the number of people who can tune in at once is limited for reasons of bandwidth. If you can’t connect, or nothing much is happening, try this short video on YouTube instead. It might be the future of video-conferencing. It could also be the start of a new wave of web-based movement-powered games.
(via A depthcam? A webkinect? Introducing a new kind of webcam at George MacKerron: code blog)
Really, really cool.
[video]
“Over the next years you’re going to see that the value that comes out of Dropbox is more and more the stuff that other people build. Whether it’s your TV or your camera or the apps on your phone, we want to make it easy for anything that consumes or creates data to be able to plug in. What we’re really trying to build is the Internet’s file system.” —
Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud - Technology Review
love dropbox
caro:
A map of Airbnb properties in San Francisco in 2008 versus today, from its Global Growth infographic.
(via stoweboyd)
“The pervasiveness of electronics in virtually every aspect of daily life has prompted designers to rethink the way that people interact with their devices and the world around them. The next evolution of natural user interfaces sees voice and audio recognition technologies capable of reacting to spoken commands and audio cues, enabling people to perform a wider variety of instant, hands-free operations from searching for information to surfing the channels.” — The Sonic Interface Trend [Need To Know: SXSWi] @PSFK
“If there was one lesson I’ve learned in the last three years working for [Secretary Clinton] and being witness to significant shifts in power around the world, it’s that there is a significant shift in geopolitical power globally right now, from hierarchies, like the nation-state, to individuals and networks of individuals. This is something that’s being accelerated by increasingly powerful and ubiquitous information networks.” — Alec J. Ross at Davos as reported by The New Yorker (via cacioppo)
(via cacioppo)
coding an app is like writing a story