Archive for the “The Equity Kicker” Category
Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media.
 Back in July I wrote about Google’s HTML5 initiatives on mobile – including their YouTube HTML5 mobile site and their Google Maps HTML5 mobile site. This week they have been showing off what HTML5 can do on the desk top – at least when running in Chrome. Check out this custom interactive video for the song “We used to wait” from Arcade Fire – I’m a sucker for music with a bit of a dance beat which may have influenced my opinion, but I loved it.
As a starter the video is pretty cool, but beyond that the customisation and dynamic rendering is awesome. You begin by typing in the address where you grew up and then, after a lengthy pause while the video is generated, the action kicks in. They integrated with Google street view to have me zooming up and down the street where I used to live in time to the music (nice to see my mum’s car is still there…) and dynamically grew trees in a line down the middle of the road. There are also a bunch of other nice effects including the ability to type directly onto the webpage in a generative typeface. If you are into this stuff you should check it out.
On a similar note check out Scribd’s HTML5 demo. It showcases rendering complex images and text directly in HTML and using browser functions like search and select text to directly manipulate documents. That’s much better than using Flash, PDFs and other plugins which take time to load, can crash the browser, and make documents difficult to manipulate.
So far so cool, and other HTML5 features including drag and drop, offline storage and geolocation will massively increase the power of browser apps.
Turning to the limitations – Techcrunch has a piece up today which highlights the immaturity of HTML5 standards. The cool stuff in the Arcade Fire video doesn’t work in Firefox or IE, both of which consider themselves to be HTML compliant, and in fact was written for Chrome. That is a really big deal, there is limited value in having cool features available if you have to code differently for each browser to get them to work.
Continuing my thought from yesterday – I’m also starting to think that to compete effectively with native apps the HTML5 standards will need to take advantage of the richness of touch screen interfaces – side swipes, two fingers down and other gestures should be incorporated into web page navigation.
Done right the web and the browser should be a more efficient way of delivering many if not most services – both desktop and mobile – but if the infrastructure and underlying standards aren’t good enough native apps will be more appealing to developers – which will slow the pace of innovation. The standards issues Techcrunch wrote about today are concerning from this perspective.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
 I got up this morning to find the world going crazy about the new Twitter iPad application – see this glowing Engadget review and the Techcrunch titled Twitter Just Killed Something Else: Their Own Website – the title gives a hint of where I’m going with this post. (Apologies for the fact this link is to the shortened post on TC – the full one seems to be currently unavailable).
So I installed the Twitter iPad app on the iPad I have in my kitchen at home, and – I loved it too. I won’t go into the features here (check out the Engadget review for that), but I will say that I got lost clicking around my timeline, user profiles and the tweet history of individuals in a way I haven’t done for a while. Put simply, the Twitter iPad app is a much more engaging way to use the Twitter service than any other interface I’ve seen.
I feel the same way about Flipboard for looking at my Facebook. Again I get lost browsing Facebook through Flipboard in a way I never do when I’m on the site itself. In fact, post Flipboard the site feels a bit dull.
Finally – I love reading Techcrunch and The Guardian via the Pulse app. It would be nice to have more flexibility to include the feeds I want, but it is a great experience for those two sites.
It is still early days for the iPad, and UI innovations are coming thick and fast – the Twitter app only just came out and Flipboard is only a month or two old – and already for media consumption the experience is getting way ahead of the browser. Apple and Steve Jobs have copped some flak for describing the iPad as revolutionary, but I’m starting to think they might be right.
Regular readers will know that I’m no Apple fanboy, and I don’t think that it is the iPad in and of itself that is making the difference. Rather I think it is richness and variety of touch screen navigation and the speed of the iPad apps that makes the experience so good – both features that can be replicated on other devices – e.g. these new Archos tablets. That said, the iPad is a beautiful and brilliant machine and Apple is clearly way out in front here.
What I’m wondering is whether consuming content on touch screen tablets is going to become such a better experience to consuming it on desktop or laptop computers that it will start to change the way offices are set up. As I said, we have an iPad in our kitchen at home, but I don’t have one in the office (yet) which is where I do the majority of catching up with blogs.
I’m also wondering if there might be a much better way read emails. One of the nice things about the iPad Twitter app is that it makes it easy to read the content behind links and navigate back and forth to the original Tweet and your timeline. By contrast Outlook forces me to open a browser and change application to look at a link (or any attachment for that matter).
If I’m even half right with the ideas in either of these last two paragraphs then revolution isn’t too strong a term for the changes the iPad is bringing.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
Last week I asked whether the TV and movie industry is ahead of the music industry in the race to build profitable streaming services. Today there is more news that suggests it is:
It looks like the American consumer will soon have access to a plethora of legal movie and TV services via their broadband provider. As I discussed with Alan Patrick in the comments to my previous post on this subject that will allow them to pay for the content they want and drop the subscription to the bloated cable TV bundle with tonnes of channels they never watch. There are clear analogies here with the declining popularity of music albums, many of which are bloated with second rate ‘album tracks’.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
You might have seen the news today that Google launched a priority email feature within Gmail. I am still using Microsoft Exchange for the vast bulk of my emails so I haven’t been able to experience the power of Google’s offering myself, but Jason Kincaid on Techcrunch thinks ‘it’s fantastic’.
This is a feature I would love to have in my email client, and I hope that it comes to Outlook soon, maybe via a plugin. I have to process a couple of hundred emails per day (excluding spam) and whilst most days I’m successful in getting to Inbox zero every week there is a day or two when I fail in that ambition. When that happens I spend increasing amounts of time searching through my Inbox for important mails – which is a real drag, particularly given that the reason I haven’t got to Inbox zero is that I’m going through a busy patch. So a priority email feature in Outlook would really help me.
The thing that interests me more about this development is the way it will change email usage. If our email clients start telling us that certain emails are important, and therefore others are not, then we are going to spend less time reading the unimportant ones. For many ‘Inbox zero’ will become ‘Inbox zero for the important emails and check the others once per week’. Then ‘check the rest once per week’ will become ‘once per month’, then ‘once every three months’ and so on. Ask yourself when you last checked your spam folder.
Some people have already declared ‘email bankruptcy’ and given up on getting back to everyone who has emailed them. As we all get more and more email more it is inevitable that more and more people will take this step. Google Priority Mail will accelerate that trend.
People already treat their Facebook and Twitter feeds like this, so it is a small step to get happy with emails flowing through our systems without getting seen.
I don’t think this is a bad development. I buy into the ‘river of news’ concept first explained to me by Stowe Boyd. The ‘river of news’ idea is that in the age of information overflow we can’t hope to stay on top of everything that happens but we shouldn’t worry about that, because if something is important multiple sources will bring it to our attention. Therefore, if it is important we will see it at some point, so long as we keep a reasonably close eye on our news and message feeds.
As an example – I try to keep an eye on Techcrunch and Techmeme and catch most deals when they are announced via those websites. If I miss something there, I often learn about it via email from a friend or someone related to the deal. If I don’t hear about it via email, sooner or later someone will tell me face to face, or I will read an article about something else which mentions it. I can’t think of an occasion recently when a deal of even minor importance has happened and I haven’t heard about it somewhere within a day or two.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post I am still using Exchange. In fact our whole partnership is using Exchange and it wouldn’t be straightforward for me to switch to Gmail if I want to, and much as this might not be the fashionable thing to say, I’m not sure I want to switch. I have a Gmail account I use for some personal mail, and in my experience, for the volumes of emails I read and write Outlook is still quicker – I have also read blog posts from Fred Wilson and others complaining about slow response times from Gmail.
I take a lot of care to keep my laptop running fast, including regular rebuilds of the entire machine, and I do that because performance is incredibly important to me. I do lot of stuff (mostly blogs, web apps and email) and it drives me nuts when my machine and/or services run slowly, because it means I don’t get through my work. Worse still, poor response times can sap my motivation to get stuck into tasks like clearing email backlog.
More…
No Comments »
 Companies have been building ways to establish authority and credibility online since the beginning of the web. Yahoo started life as ‘Jerry’s guide to the world wide web’, a site where Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang lent their authority to what they viewed as the best sites. Google’s link based algorithm did the same thing, but scaled better because it was automated. Turning from search to commerce, one of ebay’s great innovations was the supplier ratings system which put enough trust into the system for people to buy from other people they didn’t know.
More recently a lot of the innovation seems to be around looking for ways to lend authority to entities rather than content – entities can be people or businesses (often small businesses).
On the small business side reviews and recommendations are the most obvious way to extend the ebay concept to entities like restaurants, clubs, bars and other local businesses, and for the last couple of years a number of companies have been doing that with varying degrees of success – e.g. Yelp and Qype.
Where things are starting to get exciting now is a focus on people. A couple of weeks back Fred Wilson wrote about a UK company called Peer Index which is getting started in this space with an algorithm which establishes authority by analysing social media activity to determine the extent to which people are listened to (Azeem Azhar founder of Peer Index is a friend of mine).
The underlying activity which is being measured here is sharing of links and I’m writing this post this morning after reading on Techcrunch that sharing widget company ShareThis have started measuring social reach by tracking the number of times a link is shared AND the number of times it is clicked. Incorporating data on clicks is a good step as to my mind a link that is shared and clicked has a lot more significance than a link that is merely shared. (ShareThis is a DFJ Mercury company.)
Facebook’s Like button is also all about establishing authority – in this case via crowd sourced data.
So where is all this headed?
It seems to me there are parallels with the online advertising world. There is an increasing amount of authority related data swilling around and companies that have the traffic to help create more data will be in a good place (e.g. Facebook and ShareThis), but perhaps the most value will accrue to those that build services off the back of algorithms that crunch the data to tell us something useful (e.g. Facebook and startups like PeerIndex). I also think that this data could be profitably incorporated into ad targeting services.
To close I’m going to pull out a couple of interesting facts that ShareThis found. Firstly more links are now shared through Facebook than over email (45% of the total compared with 34%, Twitter is in third place with 12%), but secondly email links are much more likely to be clicked on than Facebook links (91% chance of click through on email compared with 80% on Facebook). This suggests a difference between the way people view content shared between the two services which is relevant for authority calculations. This data is from the Techcrunch post I also linked to above and is un-corroborated. The click through rates seem a little high to me.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
The graphic towards the bottom of this post was on Techcrunch this morning. It shows Google’s acquisitions over the last nine years. It is interesting for a number of reasons (not least size, (sub) sector, accelerating rate, and reason for acquiring) but I’m going to focus on geography.
I did a bit of analysis on the location of the last thirty acquisitions which takes us back to July 2007 which, yielded this pie chart.
The US bias is stark. I am sure Google is aware of all the great innovation going on outside the US and will be looking to change this balance in favour of the rest of the world (indeed I know some of the people inside Google who are trying to make that happen), but this shows how much there is to do. I’ve listed the companies by geography at the end of the post.
If anybody has any pointers I’d be interested to see comparable data for the other big tech acquirers, particularly in the internet space, and also for small internet acquisitions in the UK/Europe generally.
Location of the last 30 deals
US – Jambool, Slide, Instantiations, Metaweb, ITA, Invite Media, Simplify Media, Global IP solutions, Bump Technologies, Agnilux, Episodic, Docverse, Picnik, Aardvark, Appjet, Teracent, Gizmo5, Admob, reCAPTCHA, On2, Omnisio, Postini, Image America
Israel – LabPixies,
UK – PlinkArt
Finland – Jaiku
South Korea – TNC
Unknownd – reMail (Y-Combinator company though, so probably US), Zingku
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
Netflix, the US DVD rental cum video streaming business is out cutting $1bn deals with movie studios for streaming rights and Hulu is contemplating an IPO – both developments which suggest the premium video streaming business is starting to reach maturity. The music streaming business, by contrast, is still finding its way, and is characterised by conflict between the record labels and streaming service providers, none of whom are cutting $1bn deals or preparing to IPO.
The interesting thing here is that even though the traditional music business model is collapsing the music industry is more loath to embrace streaming than the movie/TV industry, whose legacy model is merely starting to decline (the number of US pay TV subscribers suffered a quarter on quarter decline for the first time ever in Q2 this year – detail here). Paradoxically, it might be precisely because the music industry is in freefall that its executives are unable to countenance the short term sacrifices that moving to internet distribution might entail.
The FT has a very good piece of analysis on developments in video streaming today which makes a number of noteworthy points:
- Analysts are divided on whether pay TV has a future [the first time I’ve seen this]. Some argue that Pay-TV’s advantages in live sport and prime time shows like American Idol will sustain it going forward, whilst others argue that “cable will go the way of the landline phone industry. It is nothing more than an empty pipe which the internet will replace”. [I’m in the second camp.]
- HBO plans to launch its own streaming service and won’t make its content available via any other sites. [I think this is the way forward for large content companies.]
- Netflix is in the first skirmishes of what could turn into a full-blown bidding war with the cable companies for movie rights. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was available on Netflix before pay TV. [A bidding war seems likely to me. Exclusivity drives subs like nothing else (look at the way Sky’s UK business was built on its Premiership football rights) and we may be on the cusp of a general land grab for streaming customers.]
- To enjoy streamed video services you need a 2MB internet connection to your home.
The other interesting piece of the movie/TV streaming conundrum is the device on which the streams are watched, and if it is to be the TV, how the streams will get from the PC to the TV. Anecdotally, increasing numbers are watching direct on their laptop screens, and there are a number of companies looking to sell set top boxes and/or technology embedded into TVs which will help bridge the living room – not least Google, Apple and Microsoft. And, of course, people can simply hook their PC up to the TV, either via cable or wireless. That’s what we’ve done in our house, and it seems to me like it could turn out to be the simplest solution for many others.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
Reading this Techcrunch piece on Chomp, a provider of search and discovery for iPhone apps, prompted me to explore a question that has been circling in my mind in a somewhat unstructured fashion for a couple of weeks now – namely what is the difference between an app store and a portal?
It seems to me that from a consumer perspective an App Store is really a portal dedicated to selling software written for a particular platform. It provides search and discovery, payment services (app purchases and virtual goods), reviews and provides a stamp of approval guaranteeing certain minimum standards, for example no malware – lets call this last piece ‘validation’.
Search and discovery is typically done very badly. This is the reason for Chomp’s existence and I’m sure many of you will have suffered as I have trying to search for apps. The weekend before last I was looking for an app to play BBC Radio One on our iPad and couldn’t find anything in the app store (I bought two, but neither delivered), I also searched on Google, but to no avail. When I tweeted my frustration I got two recommendations, one of which we’ve been using happily ever since (TuneIn Radio). I’m sure this story is pretty typical, and there really ought to be a technology solution which saves us from having to resort to social media.
Of course, App stores (or at least the Apple App Store) perform one other function – they are the only way to legitimately load a new application onto your phone. This is great for the phone manufacturer who can take 30% of all purchases, but it is hard to see how it helps anyone else.
It is of course possible to separate search, discovery, reviews, and validation from the payment and download function. This will become important once we have the same apps running on different platforms. Users of any given platform will benefit from reviews and validation of apps that run on other platforms and will most likely want a view of what is most popular across all platforms, not just their own. This implies they will most likely look to third party portals for search and discovery, rather than the one provided by the manufacturer of their phone.
If this scenario comes to pass (and I hope it does) Apple’s App Store will be reduced to providing payment and download services, and their 30% rake will look pretty steep, so they, along with other app store owners, will fight it. Their control of downloads and payments are formidable weapons.
HTML 5, of course, offers the prospect of getting (web) apps on mobile devices outside of the app store process, which is why it is so important. Or rather, might be so important, as I wrote in a comment on Fred Wilson’s blog last week my recent experience with Google’s HTML 5 Maps and Google apps on my iPhone leads to believe that there is a little way to go before the app paradigm faces a serious challenge.
I’m also starting to think that the longevity of the app paradigm versus open web standards will depend in large measure on who wins the hardware battle. Open standards at the software level probably will probably only prevail if hardware manufacturers with a PC mindset prevail over those with a preference for closed ecosystems, if you get my drift.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
This is the sixth and final post in a series summarising the key arguments of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. The previous posts were:
————————–—————
 Most of the disagreement with Kurzweil’s thesis stems from what he describes as ‘incredulity’ or ‘simple disbelief that such profound changes could possibly occur’. Many people think he is simply talking about too much change too quickly. The key counter arguments are variations of ‘the world is more complex than Kurzweil allows for and these changes are far more difficult/will take longer/may never happen’.
These arguments are applied in the specific to the different strands of Kurzweil’s Singularity thesis – e.g. hardware development, re-engineering the human brain in software and the nanotech revolution. For examples look in the comments on the posts in this series, or check out this recent conversation on Hacker News where people debate the depth of Kurzweil’s understanding of the brain and one contributor suggests it will take 75 years for us to reverse engineer the brain’s functionality, rather than the 20 years Kurzweil is predicting.
Kurzweil dedicates a chapter of The Singularity to countering the arguments of his detractors. His broad response to the ‘incredulity’ criticism is to point out the long history of exponential rates of increases in all key technologies (covered in the first post in this series) and to repeat the point that our brains aren’t wired to notice when we are on exponential curves, but instead interpret the progress as linear (i.e. the tangent of the exponential) and hence routinely underestimate the pace of change. He also notes (perhaps displaying a little hubris…) that humans have a long history of resisting notions that threaten the accepted view that our species is special – be it Copernicus’s insight that the earth was not at the centre of the universe or Darwin’s idea that we are only slightly evolved from other primates.
My view, having soaked up a lot of Kurzweil related material over the last few weeks, is that (rather boringly) the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Kurzweil has done a lot of good thinking and makes a lot of predictions across a lot of areas. Inevitably some of them will be right, and some will be wrong, particularly when it comes to timing. For me the important thing is not exactly when the brain will be reverse engineered or we will have nano-bots in our blood stream, but rather that we are headed in that direction. This last point is one that not too many people seem to take issue with. I also think that Kurzweil suffers from being a generalist, and as such he attracts criticism from specialists wanting to defend their turf.
Beyond incredulity there is one other objection to Kurzweil’s theories that I’m going to cover off in a little detail here, which is the argument that exponential trends don’t last forever. Proponents of this criticism point out that most exponential trends we observe hit a wall, usually driven by the environment. E.g. human population growth tails off when population density approaches critical levels. Kurzweil’s response is to me convincing. He recognises that the tailing off in computing power will come, but argues it is a long, long way off. To prove the point he describes at some length how we will be able to use more and more of the matter in the universe for computational purposes, and shows how this will provide all the computing power we need to get us a long way past the singularity.
For completeness I’m going to close by noting that there are a number of other criticisms that are beyond the scope of this post and which in my opinion Kurzweil adequately covers off in his book – e.g. brains are too complex to model, quantum computing will be required and is impossible, lock in to legacy technologies will prevent progress, and various philosophical and religious arguments which hold machines can’t be conscious. In most of these cases my (relatively uneducated) view is that Kurzweil’s arguments are much the stronger, although none of these issues are black and white.
————————–—————
So that is it for the ‘Kurzweil series’ – I haven’t enjoyed writing it as much as I expected I would, largely because the subject is much heavier than my normal posts. That said, I have learned a lot  . Thanks to everyone who commented and retweeted.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
This is the fifth post in a series summarising the key arguments of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. The previous posts were:
————————–—————
 Kurzweil begins his chapter titled ‘The Impact…..’ with the sentence “A Panopoly of Impacts”, which makes the point that the range of impacts is extremely far and wide, with the potential to change almost every part of life as we know it. I will give a small number of examples of positive impacts in this post, before turning to a brief discussion of the downside.
I have held off much discussion of the impact until now because many of the potential scenarios seem fantastical, and might serve to reduce confidence in the other arguments and predictions. Most of the things I have discussed in this series up to now have had a 20-30 year time horizon. These scenarios go beyond that.
A complete understanding of our genetic make up and a command of nanotech will enable us to build devices that plug directly into and interact with our conscious minds. This is the obvious next step from the rudimentary brain implants in use today for purposes including treating Parkinson’s disease.
One application that is much talked about is to integrate with the optical nerves to introduce computer generated images into our visual field – augmented reality inside the eyeball, if you will – this would replace in-visor displays for fighter pilots and other military applications and could also be used to augment our memories – e.g. to remind us of people’s names as we see them across the room.
Perhaps more exciting is the possibility of full immersion virtual reality. A computer could take over your entire visual field and by integrating with your other senses make it seem as if you were in another place, in every sense. Applications could include games and virtual meetings (which would become indistinguishable from real meetings).
Similarly, our memories could become downloadable and storable elsewhere for back up purposes – making every memory retrievable (should we want it). Taking it a step further our entire mind could be downloaded, and therefore uploaded again somewhere else – in a biological or non-biological body. The essence of what it is to be ‘me’ in this scenario shifts from the heap of flesh and bones it is today to pure information. I could then travel at the speed of light and exist (live) indefinitely.
On the more immediate horizon (20-30 years, at least to get started) is what Kurzweil terms ‘programmable blood’. Nanotechnologist Rob Freitas has already produced designs to replace our red blood cells, platelets and white blood cells with nano devices. Programmable blood has the potential to circulate itself around the body, removing the need for a heart, transport oxygen much more efficiently enabling us to hold our breath for vastly extended periods of time (and ultimately dispense with breathing altogether), and finally to download information on new diseases and pathogens via wireless connections to the outside world to target and remove dangerous foreign bodies before the patient experiences any symptoms.
There are, as far as I can see to types of downsides to these developments, specifically to the genetics, nanotech and robotics (strong AI) revolutions. The first is that they come with increased risks to life and society. Advances in genetics raise the possibility of terrorists releasing fatal designer diseases into society, nanotech advances raise the real risk of self replicating nano-scale devices enveloping the whole world (the grey goo problem), and strong AI carries the risk of the machines running rampant and using their vastly superior capabilities to destroy humankind. I think Kurzweil is spot on in his response, which is to say that the benefits outweigh the risks and we can’t stop it any way – if we were to ban development in the UK it would continue in the US, or in China, or Iran or Pakistan. I think everyone would agree it is far better for leading scientists to be operating in countries where the risk of irresponsible development is lower. There are also activities we could, should, and are undertaking to minimise each of the specific risks, and any other risks that exist or emerge – these activities are centred around policies, regulation and self regulation.
The second fear that these discussions bring is that in this vision where we all become cyborgs we will lose what it means to be human. We will lose touch with our bodies and our minds, and if we are reduced to information then what are we? This is a philosophical and possibly religious question and one where views are formed as much in the gut as in the mind. I will say only two things. Firstly, for me this view of the future is much more exciting than frightening – the possibilities for increased exploration and (self) understanding are endless. Secondly our sense of what it is to be ourselves has grown as we have evolved from no consciousness, to barely conscious to a more refined consciousness today – so there is nothing new about changes in what it is to be human.
On Monday I will close out this series with a post examining some of the critiques of Kurzweil’s position.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
This is the second post in a series summarising the key arguments of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. The first post entitled Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity and the accelerating pace of progress can be found here.
————————–
 The second idea I’m going to pick out from The Singularity is Kurzweil’s prediction that by 2025 personal computers (I think costing less than $1,000 in today’s money) will have the power of the human brain.
The first component to this prediction is an assessment of the computational power of the human brain. Kurzweil looks at a number of different ways to think about this question and they all yield estimates in the range of 10(exp 14) to 10(exp 15) calculations per second (henceforth cps) – that is one hundred million trillion cps to one billion trillion cps.
Today’s personal computers, or at least those back in 2005 when The Singularity was published provided 10(exp 9) cps and an extrapolation historical increases in computing power going forward yields the prediction that personal computers will have a capacity of 10(exp 16) cps by 2025.
Kurzweil goes on to add substance to this prediction by discussing the technologies that will yield the increase in computing performance that he is predicting.
First up is Moore’s law. As many of you will know Moore’s law was coined in 1965 and described the annual doubling of the number of transistors that can be fitted onto an integrated circuit (and remember if something is doubling every year it’s rate of increase is exponential). At the time Moore predicted the trend which he had only observed from 1959-65, would continue to 1975, a prediction that was widely seen as premature. Writing in 2005 Kurzweil cited Intel’s latest estimate for the end of Moore’s law as 2020.
A common reaction to the prediction of never ending exponential growth is that it has to end some day, e.g. through physical limits. That seems intuitive to people who observe exponential increases in populations tail off over time.
Kurzweil’s answer to that, which I think is a good one, is that the rate of increase will inevitably eventually tail off within a given paradigm, but that we always invent a new paradigm that will maintain the high level trend. This means that the long term exponential increase curve is formed from a series of s-shaped curves which combine together. Each s-curve represents a distinct technology which shows slow growth in the early years, very rapid growth in the middle years before tailing off in the later years during which period the next technology is invented.
Moore’s law describes the rapid growth period of the integrated circuit era and as we are coming to the end of that period there are a number of technologies in the formative stage which are candidates for creating the next s-curve.
The first thing to note is that integrated circuits are essentially 2-dimensional arrangements and transitioning to 3-dimensions will unlock the next period of growth. Kurzweil discusses a number of emerging computing paradigms that could enable that transition:
- nanotubes and nanotube circuitry
- molecular computing
- self assembly in nanatube circuits
- biological systems emulating circuit assembly
- computing with DNA
- spintronics (computing with the spin of electrons)
- computing with light
- quantum computing
It is beyond the scope of this post to examine each of these in detail, but Kurzweil’s description of developments in each of these fields coupled with the time left in Moore’s law, and the fact that throughout history a new invention has always been found to continue the trend in increasing computing power, leave me believing it is reasonable to predict that a personal computer will have the raw power of the human brain sometime in the 2020s.
Of course having the raw power of a human brain isn’t the same as being a human brain. For that you need software, which will be the topic of tomorrow’s post.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
Over the last 6-9 months American invetor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has had a profound influence on how I see the future and how I run my life today. His theories on the evolution of technology and its impact on society, and the impact technology can have on our health and longevity today have been around for a while, but it is only this year that I have become familiar with them, largely through reading two of his books (Transcend and The Singularity) and taking the weekly newsletter from his website, KurzweilAI.net.
I have only just finished reading The Singularity, which I found The Singularity to be so profound and thought provoking that I’m going to summarise it over a series of blog posts, of which this is the first. (Regular readers will know I occasionally write single posts about books I have like very much. This is the first time I will write a series.)
————————–
The full title of the book is The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology, and the subtitle gives a hint as to how far Kurzweil goes with his conclusions. I have very much enjoyed reading the book (despite the fact that it is a) weighty and b) densely written) and have talked excitedly with a number of friends about its various different parts. Those conversations showed me that getting Kurzweil’s arguments across clearly and convincingly is tough to do, I think largely because of the surprisingly far reaching nature of his conclusions and the fact that they involve a change in what it means to be human (or more properly what it means to be alive). So I thought I would set them out in a series of blog posts – probably around half a dozen.
In these blog posts I’m going to put his arguments together piece by piece and then finish with the conclusion. I’ve taken this approach as each of the steps on the way is very important in its own right and because I think it would be impossibly hard to make the conclusion seem credible in a standard length blog post. If you want to cut straight to the chase you can check out the wikipedia article about the book (also linked above).
The first idea to get across is that the rate of change in life/society/technology has always been increasing exponentially. I lump life, society, and technology together like that because their rate of change graphs look the same, although the time periods on the x-axis are successively shorter. The idea of the accelerating rate of change was first introduced to me by Anthony Giddens in my opening sociology lecture at Cambridge back in 1992 and is also something I mentioned on this blog before, when I first came across Kurzweil’s graph showing the continued exponential growth in computing power over the last one hundred years. I’ve reproduced the chart below because it is (along with its brethren) fundamental to Kurzweil’s argument.
This exponential growth in computing chart is one of many many examples Kurzweil gives of the exponential rate of change. In every case he produces historical evidence showing the trend going back over a long period of time and his argument at this stage is that the rate of change has been increasing exponentially for a long time and there is no reason why we should expect it to stop now. Other historical examples of exponential increases beyond the one above include evolution of the universe since the big bang, evolution of life from single cell organisms to humans, growth of the US fixed line phone industry, mass use of inventions, DRAM density, transistor prices, microprocessor clock speed, supercomputer power, DNA sequencing cost, number of internet hosts, decrease in size of nanotech devices, ecommerce revenues and indeed US GDP.
The important things to note here are:
- exponential increases are present in all walks of life (note the references to biotech and nanotech above – that will be important later)
- they are not limited to a single paradigm or technology – e.g. exponential increases in computing power pre-date Moore’s law and silicon substrates and will most likely continue long after the silicon chip becomes as dated as the valves we used to use
Kurzweil makes a big play of the fact that the human mind doesn’t easily grasp exponentials, and that at any given point the rate of change will be experienced as linear, particularly in the early stages before any given technology reaches the ‘knee of the curve’. In Kurzweil’s mind, and I buy into this, the intuitive ease of understanding straight line change coupled with the difficulty in imagining a future radically different from what we have today, combine to make us collectively under estimate the change that is coming.
Another way to look at this is to ask yourself whether people living in 1910 would have believed today’s reality to be possible.
Given the exponential rate of change we can expect people looking back on 2010 from 2060 to see a similar level of difference as we see looking back to 1910.
To close I want to return to the title of this post. You might have noticed that I used the word ‘progress’ in the header but until this point have been talking only about ‘change’ in the body of the post. I made that choice because change isn’t necessarily progress, and, whilst I believe that in this case it is, I wanted to separate the two arguments. Whether or not you believe all this change has been a good thing, and will continue to be a good thing, the most important thing to realise is that it has been happening, and absent some huge shifts in government or a huge disaster, will continue to happen. In fact absent total annihilation of the human race, the rate of change will probably continue to increase exponentially even if there is a big disaster – the two world wars of the last century didn’t have a noticeable impact on the rate of change. However, returning to progress, I’m with Kurzweil in believing that the world has become a significantly better place – as measured by human happiness, or more objectively, by the lessening of human suffering. On average we live longer, eat better, and endure less tragedy (e.g. infant mortality) than our forbears.
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
As many of you will know Paul Graham has been at the forefront of innovation in small company financing for a couple of years now. He is the founder of Y-Combinator, a startup accelerator that developed a new model for financing and helping companies at the very earliest stages and which has now been widely copied, and he writes and speaks extensively on the trends and developments in this space.
Two years ago he wrote that there was a big gap between the $20k financings Y-Combinator and others provide and the $2m+ that VCs like to invest. Angels exist in that space, but in Paul’s opinion there weren’t enough of them, particularly given the increasing number of companies that can do great things with that amount of money. And he was talking about the US. The dearth of angel funding is more acute in Europe.
Since then in the US the number of VCs investing at that level has increased and a cadre of specialist funds targeting seed level investments has emerged – e.g. my friend and former colleague Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Dave McClure’s new fund, and Founders Fund. Here in Europe the number of funds active at this level is also increasing – Fred Destin’s post from yesterday gives a good breakdown.
Earlier this week Paul Graham wrote another piece on the future of startup funding, describing where he sees things going next. The main thrust of his argument is that founders are getting more powerful relative to investors, and therefore the funding environment (terms, the way deals work etc.) will shift in their favour. Paul says that this is a meta-trend, and that Y-Combinator was based on it from the beginning.
Let’s explore that for a moment – if you think about investing as a market place for money then if the balance of power is shifting in favour of founders it must mean that the demand for money is falling relative to supply. I think that Paul is right in calling this trend due to movement on the demand side. The demand for investment equals the number of startups seeking cash multiplied by the average cash requirement, and whilst the former is increasing slowly the latter is declining rapidly and may have fallen by as much as an order of magnitude over the last decade.
It is important to note that declining demand for investment doesn’t mean the end of big VC rounds and the venture capital model as we know it. The average cash requirement that I’m talking about here is for an internet startup to get going and prove itself – either by getting significant traction or getting to profitability. For many there will still be large capital requirements after demonstrating the ability to cost effectively acquire customers – just look at the money raised by Twitter, Facebook and Spotify, and tradtional VC funds will be happy to operate in that space.
In Europe, of course, the supply of capital is less than in the US, so any shift in favour of the entrepreneur will likely be less marked.
This post is long enough already, but before I finish I want to note a couple of other interesting points that Paul makes:
- Despite the increase in the number of funds targeting seed investments he thinks there is space for more. After all the trends in favour of capital efficiency are only getting stronger. (Note – if this is true in the US, it is doubly true in Europe).
- VCs could do more smaller deals if they adapted their model – e.g. by taking less board seats;
- But not many well, and the new super angel funds will come to dominate the seed space leaving VCs to focus on later rounds
Related articles by Zemanta
More…
No Comments »
|
Back in July I wrote about Google’s HTML5 initiatives on mobile – including their YouTube HTML5 mobile site and their Google Maps HTML5 mobile site. This week they have been showing off what HTML5 can do on the desk top – at least when running in Chrome. Check out this custom interactive video for the song “We used to wait” from Arcade Fire – I’m a sucker for music with a bit of a dance beat which may have influenced my opinion, but I loved it. 
