Wow, are we having a JFK or Gettysburg Address moment? Obama may have delivered the speech of our lives:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787…. ” My favorite line - “As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity”

Listen here

Source: Wikipedia

During a special TED conference session today Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Carl Bernstein blamed the decline in the quality of U.S. news reporting on Rupert Murdoch "the decline began in the 80’s after he bought the NY Post".   Bernstein was a member of a panel organized by the BBC exploring the impact of new media on the quality and comprehensiveness of news reporting.

A few weeks ago celebrity blogger Robert Scoble wrote that "Microsoft researchers make me cry" but couldn’t tell us why.  It turns out its the World Wide telescope.  The telescope really is not a literal telescope - it is a marvel of integrating information from telescopes throughout the world in a way that astronomers can have a much richer view of space that is bordering on a 3D virtual reality.  I saw a demo that had us zip zooming in that feels like Electronic Arts produced it but it has the scientific integrity of Johns Hopkins.   Check it.  The inventor is Curtis Wong who is a researcher with Microsoft.  It will be a downloadable application for the PC.  I look forward to flying to Pluto soon.

UPDATE:  Here is the Talk

For my mom… A BitTorrent client is any program that implements the BitTorrent protocol. Each client is capable of preparing, requesting, and transmitting any type of computer file over a network, using the protocol. A peer is any computer running an instance of a client.

To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a “torrent.” This small file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.

Though both ultimately transfer files over a network, a BitTorrent download differs from a classic full-file HTTP request in several fundamental ways:

* BitTorrent makes many small P2P requests over different TCP sockets, while web-browsers typically make a single HTTP GET request over a single TCP socket.

* BitTorrent downloads in a random or in a “rarest-first” approach that ensures high availability, while HTTP downloads in a sequential manner.

Taken together, these differences allow BitTorrent to achieve much lower cost, much higher redundancy, and much greater resistance to abuse or to “flash crowds” than a regular HTTP server. However, this protection comes at a cost: downloads can take time to rise to full speed because it may take time for enough peer connections to be established, and it takes time for a node to receive sufficient data to become an effective uploader. As such, a typical BitTorrent download will gradually rise to very high speeds, and then slowly fall back down toward the end of the download. This contrasts with an HTTP server that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rises to full speed very quickly and maintains this speed throughout.

In general, BitTorrent’s non-contiguous download methods have prevented it from supporting “progressive downloads” or “streaming playback”. But recent comments by Bram Cohen suggest that streaming torrent downloads will soon be commonplace and this appears to be the result of those comments.

- Wikipedia

I have been looking at outsourcing for years for call centers, product customer support and lightweight web development. Now for roughly $5,000 you can rent Indian surrogate mothers. This nominal fee includes agency costs, embryo implantation, and delivery. India has already established itself as an attractive place to conduct this sort of business because the hospitals are good and the costs are low and apparently there are plenty of willing women. In America, by contrast, a complete surrogacy process would cost closer to $50,000.

The leader in this new business wit the Akanksha Clinic at the Kaival hospital in Anand India. The staff at this facility are focused on infertility which boasts a 44% success rate and has a waiting list of more than 1,000 couples. Its created a whole new ecosystem around the service called “reproductive tourism” where hotels, restaurants and excursions are tailored to the donor couples. Lisa Ling who recently produced a piece on Oprah on the service has been taking some heat for her lack of a balanced report on womb outsourcing. I personally have no issue with the the practice for infertile couples but do think its a little scary as I do know a few busy women that probably would have paid the dough rather than going thru pregnancy and delivery. What do you think?

Photo credit: www.scienceclarified.com

When I first heard abut the Tesla 100% electric powered car my inner voice said 2010, if ever.  Then I met the founder Martin Eberhard at the TED conference and heard about how they are engineering and producing this thing with a totally different mind set than Detroit which was inspiring.   He also had secured some amazing funding from one of the fathers of the PayPal success. Martin seemed to have it all figured out including some clever market positioning on the initial model, the Roadster, where it will compete with super high performance vehicles where price, convenient service, etc. is much less of an issue than with a commuter car.  So, with that, I bumped my estimate up to 2009.  Then I read in the Mercury News that the car was delayed for the "third time" to Q1 2008 which is a win in my cynical mind.  I am pretty sure that there that there will not be a fourth time as they have already gone thru all the normal excuses and changed CEO’s.  Still if they can ship 100 cars in the first half of 2008 I think that is a huge accomplishment.  Also that is $10MM in revenues as the cars cost $100,000!  (The second 100 cars will be the bigger accomplishment as there are not that many billionaire tech CEO’s.)

Here is their recent promo video.  This piece is good evidence they need to fire their PR agency.  Who the hell chooses a graffiti laden inner city location for a photo shoot on a $100,000 car?  They must have mixed up the Taser video shoot and Tesla.  Ah, marketers.  They should let Martin do that job.

Picture source: Serious Wheels

There has recently been a rash of articles and blog posts about the Rosie Coffee Table. I have been bewildered that a fairly basic touch screen personal computer has gained so much interest. Is it because it is in a coffee table? I think that it will be a while before touch screens stretch beyond basic kiosk uses due to a whole host of factors particularly the lack of applications and the glacial speed of user adoption of new user pointing and manipulation devices. As sad as it may seem, I think the speed of change in this area will not accelerate until my kids start hacking and it will be a truly transformative experience much like the iPhone is to your basic WAP experience and will be something more similar MIT’s high resolution multi touch system that Jeff Han demo’d at TED:

Technorati Tags: Rosie Table , Jeff Han

I have been noticing a photo of a modern home on materials from Wired Magazine for a few months that caught my eye as the house looked like a Ray Kappe design. I see the photo all over the place on billboards and other magazines. So I was proud of myself yesterday when I was reading that it was in fact a Kappe design and the developer of the house was Living Homes which is an LA based company that is innovating in the green modular home space. The Wired home is in Brentwood and will be available for tour next month which is awesome since I live in LA. The photo above home is a different home built by LivingHomes which, I believe, that company’s founder lives in.

I can’t wait to see this house as it has a USBC Gold Leed rating and will use 36% less energy than a normal house. That is a lot of coal savings if they can achieve this in mass! The Brentwood home is being constructed literally as I write. You can check the web cam.

The folks at Living Homes say their homes cost $200 to $250 per square foot, utilizes the latest technology to maximize sustainability and the most amazing thing is that they can be assembled in a day. Living Homes has an awesome video showing a time elapsed install. Very cool. I just wish I had some ocean front property in Malibu to build one. Some day.

Image Source: LivingHomes
go on reading »

About a year ago the Victor Division of JVC announced they had invented a dodecahedral speaker where the entire 12-sided surface emits sound such that the listener is barely aware of the speaker location. Now they have teamed up with CopenMilan a Danish/Italian design firm that has taken those ugly engineering breadboards and created a work of art. I can’t wait to see these in person and and try them out. No word on the cost.

Source: Yanko Design
go on reading »

Hewlett Packard is offering a state of the art video conference solution, HP Halo, that they claim is a “high-bandwidth, full-duplex, no-perceived- delay connection experience between HP Halo studios.”

From the demo it looks like it rocks but then again for $450k per node it better. Oh and that is just the start, you get to pay $18k a month for the service which allow “remote diagnostics and calibration, ongoing service and repair, and a 24×7 concierge service, eliminating the need for enterprises to operate or otherwise service the HP Halo Studio.” I guess I will have to stick with GoToMyPC and Skype.

Source: HP
go on reading »