Seth Yates

Elias Bizannes wanted to know “What is the next big thing?” and tagged me and a few other people.

I reckon the “Next Big Thing” will be The Device Web / The Interconnected Me.

Part I - The Device Web

First, there will be a consolidation of the “Web 2.0″ applications as the recessional and market forces choose winners (there will be some carnage in The Valley).  Thanks to the social tools that will likely make it through (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), we now have networks of our friends, acquaintances and co-workers.  All nicely annotated.

As more advanced handsets (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc) are released and become more prevalent, WiFi/WiMax/3G+ networks are more widely available and carriers break down the walled gardens, we will increasingly move our Web usage to the Mobile Web.  This will be similar to the fast broadband revolution that happened at the beginning of “Web 2.0″.  You’ll no longer see tables of geeks at the front conferences, typing away on their laptops.  The audience will instead be typing away on their mobile devices.  Connected Mobile apps will be big.

Twitter (or whatever it survives as) will go mainstream.

Add some Semantic Web goodness, and nascent web-database/applications will begin to appear.  Knowledge will begin to be codified and machine-understandable (not just readable).  Think about what happened when Google Maps came out, with local business listings.

Part II - The Interconnected Me

Now, here’s where it gets a bit Singularity / Orwellian:

We’ll begin seeing human-computer input devices beyond keyboards and mice.  Emotiv and other companies will release direct human-computer input devices using brain waves. No more “type, type, type, click, click, click”.  Simply think of the command and the computer will react.

Instead of the bulky headsets required today, in 10-20 years (2020-2030), they will be downsized to a device the size of a bluetooth headset (remember the first mobile phones?).

Natural Language recognition, processing and understanding will be widespread for a few languages (Hungarian will, sadly, not be one of them).

In the 20+ year timeframe (i.e., after 2030), we will develop human-computer feedback mechanisms.  No longer will we need the screens of an LCD or mobile device, but will instantly receive computerised feedback directly:

• Want to know the nearest Thai restaurant (like you can’t just look and see one across the street, in Sydney)? Just ask the GBrain which will use the pervasive Mobile Internet and knowledge of your Social Web/Profile, and will query a Semantic Web service, returning the location, ratings and directions directly to you.
• Want to talk to a friend in Sacramento? Just think about them and SkypeBrain will check to ensure they’ve not blocked you in the social network and will dial them and connect you, brain-to-brain (hope you’ve got a good firewall installed).
• Want to know what your friends are up to? Just subscribe to their TwitterBrain feed, and you’ll instantly know when they update (seems like Psychiatry is going to be a big profession in the ’40’s).

Then all we would need to do is integrate Mechanical Turk….

UPDATE: Brad Howarth has a written post about Emotiv.

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UPDATE: Further fiddling confirms the FAIL (below).

UPDATE: Reported bug and found a workaround for VMWare (below).

The upgrade from 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) has not been smooth for me:

• Auto-detect sound did not work initially.  I installed the i386 kernel modules which broke networking.  Reverting to generic kernel modules seems to have fixed both networking as well as sound.  Very odd. UPDATE: Hold that.  It fixed it for a short while.  Its broken again on the generic kernel.  Setting the sound settings to ALSA instead of Autodetect works around the issue.  Symptom is when you try to play any sound, you get the message “audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=music: Failed to connect stream: Invalid argument”.  I’ll be opening a bug report about this later in the weekend.
  UPDATE 2: Looks like its a common bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191027
• Firefox 3.0b5 is installed by default, breaking all of my add ons.  Will have to try to downgrade back to Firefox 2.0. UPDATE: Rolling back to firefox-2 wasn’t very smooth either.  Stuck with 3.0b5 for now, waiting for the add ons to catch up.
• Looks like compiz-fusion was uninstalled, breaking my theme (bye bye Aero look).  Will have to investigate.  UPDATE: Turns out that only ‘emerald –replace’ was dropped out of Sessions.  Added that back in and presto! Aero look back.  Happy again.
• The Awm dock is buggered, with the launcher icons floating well above the dock.  UPDATE: Still buggered.
• And worst for last…VMWare no longer works as it depends on vmware-server-kernel-modules and libssl0.9.7 which I can’t get to install.  Will also have to investigate.  UPDATE: The instructions to get this working are here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4357442&postcount=10

So far, not too impressed…

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The Twhirl Adobe AIR application is a great client for Twitter. Unfortunately, neither Twhirl or Adobe AIR officially support Linux (yet). Having recently switched to Ubuntu for my primary OS at home, I’ve been missing Twhirl. Knowing that Adobe AIR supports Mac OSX, I decided to see if there was a Linux edition in the works. Turns out there is an Alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux. Armed with this, I decided to give it a go. Here’s how to install Adobe AIR and Twhirl on Ubuntu (current for 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon). Please note that Adobe AIR for Linux is still Alpha and is a bit unstable. There, you’ve been warned. Now for the fun:

1. Open the Terminal
2. Run the following commands:

cd ~/Desktop
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
wget http://www.twhirl.org/files/twhirl-0.8.air
chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
sudo ./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

3. The installation then presents the following dialog:

4. Click on “I Agree” and it commences installation (into /opt/Adobe AIR - yes, with a space in the path):

5. If all goes well, then you get the following screen.

6. Back in Terminal, run the following command:

/opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller ~/Desktop/twhirl-0.8.air

7. The first thing you get is this very frightening dialog:

Hm. UNRESTRICTED access to my computer. What could possibly go wrong? Click “Install” to find out.

8. Next, you get the twhirl installation preferences dialog. Set the preferences you want and click “Continue”:

9. Once the installation is done, Twhirl will open. Sign in to your Twitter account. Having run Twhirl on Ubuntu for several hours, I’ve managed to make it crash or simply disappear several times. Adobe AIR on Linux is indeed ALPHA quality currently. I’ve found that changing some of the default settings has made it more stable. First, untick “hide when minimised”:

10. Then click on Notify and untick “show notification windows” (found that the notification windows would sometimes play up with the window manager):

11. Click Save, and you should be twitterhappy with Twhirl on Ubuntu.

Addendum: The default icon on the Twhirl launcher is the generic AIR icon. If you want to change this so you can easily identify it as Twhirl, follow these steps:

1. Right click on the Twhirl launcher on the Desktop and select Properties:

2. Click on the red AIR icon on the upper-left.

3. Enter or navigate to /opt/twhirl/icons/twhirl-48.png and click Open.

4. Click Close and then you can drag/drop the launcher to your main menu or window manager.

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TechCrunch has picked up on the “Don’t Be Evil” thread I posted on earlier:

Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, first uttered by Googler Paul Buchheit (now founder of FriendFeed) in 2001, has long been the pillar of their self-imposed code of conduct.

…

[The] core motto is still displayed prominently on the Google Investor Relations site, and the company appears to be supporting it up 100%.

Not so, apparently. Last week, however, Google’s Marissa Mayer said “It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto” during an interview in Australia, adding “I think that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is a very easy thing to point at when you see Google doing something that you personally don’t like; it’s a very easy thing to point out so it does get targeted a lot.”
…

This is most likely not a precursor to an official move away from the motto. I imagine it’s little more than a venting of a frustration that Google continues to be held to a promise made six years ago, when they were under significantly less scrutiny than they are today. Google can’t ditch the motto (the press would eat that up), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live up to it. What can they do? Not much. They made this bed. It’s too bad they couldn’t get Buchheit to take it with him when he left to found FriendFeed.

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For me, this report confirms that Google’s famous “Don’t be Evil” philosophy is complete B.S.

Here’s the news from ValleyWag:

A recently departed DoubleClicker tells us that Google managers asked employees at the online ad company it acquired last month to sign one-year noncompete agreements. Most agreed, thinking that it would spare their jobs — but then layoffs came a week later. They were “pretty pissed” over the bait-and-switch and were forced to find jobs outside their industry.

Read the text of the noncompete clause here on ValleyWag.

Looks like Google needs to add another “full disclosure” to the bottom of their philosophy:

* Full-disclosure update #2: When we first wrote these “10 things” four years ago, we included the phrase “You can make money without doing evil.” Over time we’ve learned that you can in fact make much more money by doing evil.  In that time, we’ve expanded our company by gobbling up others and actions that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our philosophy (such as screwing employees of companies that we acquire). This doesn’t mean we’ve changed our core mission (total domination); just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more blurry those once lofty ethics have become.

Have you signed any employment contracts recently with non-competes?

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I spent a good portion of the weekend at Barcamp Sydney 3. This was my first Barcamp and first time to really jump in boots and all in the tech community in Sydney outside of the office (having come up for air from a very intense last 12 months).  Here’s my observations from the weekend:

• Twitter was massive.  There were several of us tweeting incessently from the event, especially @NickHodge, @trib, @bananasontoast, @eskimo_sparky, and @kcarruthers amongst others.
• The Data Portability session co-hosted by @liako was probably the keynote of the Barcamp.  Lots of great discussion.  I think the topic really struck a chord with the attendees.
• Good Barry presented on their 5 startup lessons, main tip that stuck out for me was “don’t fine tune too early”.  Too true.  While I believe in measuring, you’ve also got to know when its too early to let rigour stifle something before it really finds its way.
• Richard Hayes presented on “talking to rich blokes” (or something similar) - basically funding/pitching 101.  Good mention of Sydney OpenCoffee Meetup, which I had already planned on attending.  Also mentioned Startup Kitchen (can’t google any webpage), based in St. Leonards which sounds like an interesting “Y Combinator” style incubator.  Richard also mentioned “Women on Boards” to tap some top talent as well as “Information Memorandum” for early stage rounds.
• @trib talked about his passion - social tools, language and enterprise 2.0.  Great talk (and great slides @trib!).
• An interesting presentation of Project Pier which looks like BaseCamp, but you install it on your servers.
• @liako presented on the Semantic Web, giving us a history of the Internet from the alphabet to Gutenberg’s Bible to HyperText.  Seemed to me that one of the biggest challenges with this would be the old bugbear of trust/reputation.
• Finally, on Sunday afternoon there was a pitch session where local startups could get up and make their pitch.  Apart from one very good pitch by Richard, the rest confirmed my earlier post (Do Australians suck at pitching?).  Some weren’t even pitches at all.

All in all, the weekend left me feeling positive about the smart people in the tech industry in Australia and where it is heading.  We still have a long way to go to being competitive with places like Silicon Valley.  We need to work together more collaboratively as a community (entrepreneurs, innovators and angels/VC’s).  We need training/seminars to help entrepreneurs develop their business plans and pitches.  We need forums (like a Barcamp) where entrepreneurs, innovators and angels/VC’s can mingle like happens in the Valley.

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Just noticed the Google Adsense on my blog has the following ads:

• MyCareer.com.au
• Rugby Back Attack Game
• Air New Zealand
• Another MyCareer.com.au
• Refresh the West - “Change the WAN Board”
• Social Networks Australia (links to @silkcharm’s blog)

Wonder where its gotten those topics

Writing a blog post on this will probably cement those ads to my blog…

A mate says I should start writing about mortgages, credit cards, insurance and prescription drugs to boost the AdSense revenue

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As covered by TechCrunch, LinkedIn has added a Company Profiles feature. This feature shows detailed information about companies, including data from Capital IQ, Business Week as well as information discovered from its own database.

Information includes:

• Summary description
• Employees
• New hires
• Recent promotions and changes
• Popular profiles
• Related companies (career path before and after)
• Top locations
• Common job titles
• Top schools
• Median age
• Median tenure
• Gender

Its pretty impressive what they’ve been able to pull together from their database. Here’s a sampling on interesting info from the Fairfax Digital company profile page:

Fairfax Digital is an online publisher that focuses on areas including news and classifieds and city search directories [ed. not since 2002 when we sold CitySearch]. The company operates Internet portals such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review [ed. operated by Fairfax Business Media], mycareer.com.au, drive.com.au and domain.com.au. Fairfax Digital was formerly known as F2 Network. The company is based in Sydney, Australia…. see more Fairfax Digital operates as a subsidiary of John Fairfax Holdings [ed. now called Fairfax Media].

Mostly right, but looks to be based on information that several years old.

Popular Profiles

• Ed Schmidt, Director of Operations - Southern Cross View
• Seth Yates, Chief Technology Officer
• Jack Matthews, CEO
• Nikhil Jain, Online Marketing Manager - RSVP
• pippa leary, Product and Marketing Director

Related Companies
Divisions

• Fairfax Media
• The Age

OK, so they got that wrong, Fairfax Media (the parent company) and The Age (a sister subsidiary) aren’t divisions of Fairfax Digital. Sure we can get it fixed up.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Career path for Fairfax Digital employees before:

• News Corporation
• Sensis
• IBM
• Telstra
• ninemsn

Career path for Fairfax Digital employees after:

• News Corporation
• ninemsn
• BBC Worldwide
• Optus

So there’s a lot of two-way traffic between Fairfax and News Corp and ninemsn. But it looks like once you’ve left Telstra/Sensis, there’s no going back.

Fairfax Digital employees are most connected to

• Myca
• News Corporation
• realestate.com.au
• Sensis MediaSmart

Looks like LinkedIn has misinterpreted “MyCareer” / mycareer.com.au (one of our business units) as Myca, which is a startup hedge fund in New York. Again, probably easily fixed.

Key Statistics

Top Locations

• Sydney Area, Australia (300)
• Melbourne Area, Australia (62)

Industry: Online Media
Type: Public Company
Status: Operating Subsidiary
Company Size: 1001-5000 employees [ed., that's the size of Fairfax Media]
Website: www.fairfaxdigital.com.au

Median Age: 30 years
Median Tenure: 2 years
Male: 58%
Female: 42%

Common Job Titles
Business Development Manager 7%
Web Developer 6%
Account Manager 6%
Journalist 4%
Developer 3%
Top Schools
Univ. of New South Wales 10%
Univ. of Sydney 10%
Univ. of Tech., Sydney 9%
Queensland Univ. of Tech. 4%
Royal Melbourne Inst. of Tech. 4%

Its interesting to have a look through the company profiles of companies in the industry and see the similarities and differences (e.g., most other media companies I browsed was 62% Male / 38% Female according to LinkedIn).  Although they have some work to do on getting the data more accurate (and they are apparently going to “wikify” the profiles to let employees edit the data), this is a great start.

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Sandra Hanchard has shared some interesting research on the Kiwi Webosphere, with her key takeaways being:

• News & Media – 6.7% share of visits
• Portal Frontpages – 5.78% share of visits
• Travel – 2.67% share of visits
• Shopping & Classifieds – 7.18% share of visits

My key take aways were:

• How dumb are Telecom feeling now? One year ago, Telecom split from a JV xtramsn.co.nz with Microsoft and relaunched a new portal offering with Yahoo!7 in which both parties were panned for poor sites. One year on and MSN.co.nz has a commanding 38.31% share of visits, and Yahoo!xtra a paltry 15.98%. Go from owning 50% of the leading portal to owning 50% of the #2 portal with half the traffic. FTW!

• Shock: TradeMe leading in Shopping & Classifieds. Real shock: Category higher than in Oz. Shopping & Classifieds sites accounted for 7.18% market share of visits in NZ compared to an underweight 5.73% in Australia. Can this be accounted for by the concentration/network effect on TradeMe NZ (general, cars, property, jobs) and the fragmentation (in the big end of town: ebay, trading post, carsales/carpoint, carsguide/drive, seek, mycareer, careerone, realestate, domain, myhome, etc, etc, etc) in Australia? Or are Kiwis just bigger (online) shoppers than Aussies?

Disclosure: I am employed by Fairfax Media, who own TradeMe in New Zealand.

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The Age had a report today stating that “Fairfax online a threat to WAN: Seven“.

Disclosure: I am employed by Fairfax Media.

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