SAF06 - How I learned to stop worrying and love the imminent internet singularity...

Garry Flake

Microsoft Live labs

Live Labs is a partnership between MSR and Windows/Windows Live.

Singularity - introduced by Vernor Vinge in 1993 - the idea that the exponential speed of technological improvements will produce super-human capabilities, making the future completely unknowable.

Hmmm.

Is it the end of humanity??

Making a case for the internet singularity

• Democratization
• Greater and greater power in devices
• Lower and lower entry barriers
• Content
• documents
• office, html
• images
• movies
• audio
• publishing
• blogs
• software
• opensource
• research
• wikipedia, search
• metadata
• tags, play lists
• Power law distributions and long tails
• The weight of the tail is greater than the head
• Coined by Chris Anderson an a Wired article
• Implications
• Consumers start to become producers
• Playlists
• Remixes and mashups
• Aggregations...
• The small producers may outweigh the large producers
• But is it all worth reading/listening/watching? I'm doubtful...but the important thing is that the good stuff bubbles to the top.
• Internet ecosystems and network effects
• The value of a network increases as a function of the number of participants
• The Innovators Dilemma
• Cray killed by SGI
• SGI killed by Sun
• Sun killed by PC
• PC killed by cellphone?
• The first companies must destroy themselves to survive - innovations come in from the bottom
• Companies often fail to look downward - they only look upward
• Online world causes the innovators dilemma to run much faster - months versus years

The internet as a mirror

• We are putting more and more information on the internet
• The internet becomes more and more a reflection of the physical world
• Because it is on the internet it is accessible
• Analysis occurs across the internet
• For example, data mining of natural language based upon internet hosted information (text)
• For example, genome data
• For example genome research papers on the internet so that data miners could access both the research and the data - programmatic data miners can access both the papers and the data and result in new discoveries.
• This is a circular process
• The body of knowledge increases

Live Labs

• A little under a year old, reports to Ray Ozzie
• A virtual organisation that aspires to hit a suite spot between
• Users and businesses
• Short versus long term
• Problems and solutions
• Science and engineering
• (This sounds dubious to me...)
• Garry then gave a demonstration of Microsoft Live Labs- Photosynth which is worth viewing if you haven't yet tried it.

My thoughts - lots of opportunity if you know how to mine it. Analytical techniques and tools become so important in this.