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Michael Liebhold's blog
Re-engineering the Internet
During a workshop at IFTF this week, I offered a forecast that there is at least a 50% probability of a fundamental re-engineering of the internet. Here's a bit of detail on this forecast and why I think this last week has been a critical turning point.
IFTF 2004 Forecast demo now an iPhone application
It was bound to happen: Colleen Morgan, an archeologist from the University of California, Berkeley working at the historic San Francisco Presidio, has created an almost perfectly similar mobile mapping application for an iPhone as a nearly identical demo application that Chris Goad created, and Jason Tester populated with both real and fanciful geodata for the IFTF Technology Horizons New Geographies conference in 2004 also at the San Francisco Presidio!!
Gold Farming in games means real income in China
A couple of years ago, as part of our work on Cybernomadics, IFTF forecasted the blending of the real money economy and virtual economy. I'm amazed at the growth and magnitude of the trend of creation, aggregation and sales of virtual assets for video games:
"A vast shadow industry has mushroomed in rural China. Savvy entrepreneurs harness teams to play popular online games, gathering magic spells, battle hammers, armor and other virtual assets. " ...
Geospatial and Contextual Interoperability
Technology Horizons members who participated in our conferences over the last couple of years will recall that one of the leading conclusions of IFTF research on context awareness, and on the Geoweb was that integrating high level information about places is a tough computational problem. There's lots of good news recently that projects are beginning aimed at solving some of challenges we described in our research.
Off-Deck in the Walled Gardens
As a longtime advocate of a geospatial web, I'm constantly alert for signs that mobile wireless mobile carriers are seeing benefits of opening up their networks as a platform for experimental and entrepreneurial mobile applications.
Lately, I've been seeing mentions of a new meme: 'off-deck' services which I've now found out are mobile wireless content services offered independent of carriers' content portals -off deck- yet billed to customers by and through carriers.
Harvard Mathematical Visualizations
As part of IFTF Tech Horizons' ongoing research on the future of mathematics, abundant computing, and lightweight infrastructure, I discovered the amazing and beautiful work of Eric J. Heller and his colleagues at Harvard University working at the intersection of physics, chemistry, mathematics and computing. Heller and his team often employ vivid visualizations as research tools to help them understand and communicate abstract phenomena like this visualization of energy moving through a nanoscale wire:
China's Independent Internet
While preparing for a seminar on the future of China's Internet hosted by IFTF colleague Lyn Jeffery leader of IFTF's Virtual China project (blogged here ) I took a closer look at the details of China's decision to set up new Chinese character domain names. Although the new domains cannot be acurately described as a separate Internet, that in fact is what is developing. One engineer after looking closely said, "If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck."
Thinking About Context
We're beginning to gather a considerable body of research contributions from IFTF Technology Horizons workshops and interviews with experts investigating context awareness. Meanwhile, we've also been reading some great works by other leaders in the field. We'll try to introduce a few of these here, for your review, if you are interested in pre-reading for the upcoming Tech Horizons conference in October.
Geodata Obscura
While a new wave of users are geocoding informal or folksonomic contextual information by using new homegrown geotagging extenstions to google maps, del.icio.us and flickr, a legion of geographers, librarians, and computer scientists are quietly building a global library of more traditional digital cartographic data.
