On Tuesday I got the chance to attend a lecture at the London School of Economics. They have free public lectures for anyone who might be interested in those topics. This time it was Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. His thesis was that the new social networking technologies, such as facebook, have empowered people to cooperate and organize themselves without elaborate hierarchies and structures and unleash their collective power to make the change they want.

He started by recounting the examples of Chinese earthquake a few years back and the HSBC’s friendly scam to extract money from its student account holders. China would have gotten away with not reporting the level of destruction in the earthquake and the faulty construction that lead to all the casualties and HSBC would have gotten away with charging people for something that they initially stated they wouldn’t. Both were relying on the difficulty of organizing a collective action. In both cases people used social networking tools such as facebook , twitter and video sharing sites to immediately share information with the world and stop governments or organizations from controlling and manipulating them.

This wouldn’t be the first book highlighting the ability of new technologies belonging to the Web 2.0 wave to transform society and bring the “power of the people” to internet. Wikipedia, a great example of collaborative effort that has brought about and impossible amount of information in one place for reference and not only reference but highlighting all kinds of views regarding it. Facebook allowed people to network and share information and interests. Youtube allowed people to share videos and rate the most interesting up from the least. Digg, Reddit, Delicious allowed collaborative link sharing. They keywords being sharing, collaboration and then action.

History is full of examples where the power of people has transformed the circumstance to suit their wants and needs. If the people want it enough, they get it. All these examples in history have been revolutionary ones, the modern society can’t handle it anymore. So it has come up with a evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, version of power of people called, Democracy. The Web 2.0 wave represents the same, democratization of the web.

In all these discussion I have noticed that people get too carried away and create unrealistic expectations from technology and its ability to impact situation. At the end of the day, it is the will of the people that transforms not technology. Technology is just an enabler. Clay mentioned that initially he too got carried away and promoted these ideas with religious zeal but with time he better understood its potentials and limitations.

An interesting example came up during the presentation where the campaign group of President Obama setup a website and asked people to tell them what their priorities are for him to deliver. Guess what came up #1? Legalized marijuana! This demonstrates the fallibility of the crowd intelligence. To a great degree people do possess the power to decide what's right and what’s wrong but they are also prone to whims and weakness and can easily go into the ‘sheep’ mode of thinking. It also exposes the weakness of the system as an anonymous internet can be fooled and a ‘bunch of pot-heads can game the system’.

Still these technologies cannot be ignored in the modern world and they have proved themselves as highly transformative. Let’s see what future brings.

Which server is that? It is true that they have really kept quite on this one. I never heard of any such product in the making, until now. It was announced at the CES 2007 by BillG himself. According to one of the member's blog this is the result of three years of effort and from what I see they have integrated in it all the new features they had, among them a new storage technique to be released with Windows 2003 Server R2. Here is a general list of its features from its official website which claims to treat one of the oldest problems PC users faced: "Digital Amnesia".

Storage

• Expandable storage, which means you can simply add hard-drives and increase storage according to your future needs. This technology has been around for quite a while in the server space, now its available to the home user as well.
• Centralized storage. Which is more of an obvious purpose to have a server in between so that all files can be stored at a central location for easy sharing and efficiency as well.
• Auto Organizing. You had the windows desktop search, which organized things for you in search results by their type. Similar technology was supposed to be introduced with vista, where the info on all files would be kept in a database with their tags assigned by the user. Which means that you could logically organize files in many ways while only having a single copy. Here you go.

Sharing

• Easy access. When you have a copy of everything in one place, your sharing problems have been solved.
• Shared printers. That I suppose is just one peripheral, you could have more like scanners etc.
• Remote access. If you have your server online then you could access the content from anywhere, anytime. Integrate it with Windows Live and you have your own hosting server for your websites content

Protect

• Automatic backups. The solution to digital amnesia we never practised.
• Health monitoring. When you a central system why not use it to update all connected PCs with anti-virus definitions, security patches and spyware definitions.
• Full system restore. Now the system restore service for the whole network

Official Press Release

According to this article on CNN Money, the following ten ideas today's venture capitalists are willing to sponsor:

1. iDrive: "A driver's tech fantasy fully realized: an in-dash computer with a keyboard built into the steering wheel and a full-screen heads-up display projected on the windshield."
2. Flyweight Database:"A new database company. Don't yawn. Draper loves startups that can upend corporate giants with simple products and cheap technology."
3. Better Energizer: "Khosla, a legendary Silicon Valley VC whose winners have included Juniper Networks and Redback Networks, and Kaul are looking for an engineering team to build a lithium-ion battery with five times the life of anything found in cell phones, PDAs, or cameras."
4. Spreadsheets:"A Web-based platform to make company spreadsheets--for revenue forecasting and other analytical chores - more easily viewed, updated, and shared by managers."
5. Patient Monitoring to Go: "An engineering team to design implantable wireless devices capable of 24/7 patient and data monitoring for conditions such as heart disease and diabetes."
6. New Tricks for Old Drugs: "A team of researchers that can identify, patent, and market new uses for prescription drugs with expiring patents. The typical drug discovery process at a large pharmaceutical company can last 15 years and cost $500 million. But "repurposed drugs"--already approved by the FDA for safety in treating specific illnesses--can be turned around quickly and cheaply and used to treat other maladies."
7. Search for Small Screen:"Delivery of new types of Web search to mobile phones. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all taking a swipe at this, but Rimer believes they're betting on a losing strategy by simply shrinking their existing desktop features into a handheld package."
8. GPS-Guided Coupons: "PS-enabled ads and coupons piped to your mobile phone at just the right time and place. Location-based marketing is a concept that's been bandied about for years, but only now is the required technology becoming cheap enough to implement. "
9. Text Ads on the Fly: "Text-messaging software that allows local merchants to send offers to mobile phones. Some companies already do this in basic form; Moldow's idea would give merchants more control. "This is bringing the blue-light special to your phone," he says. Five or so people could write the code; a sales demon is also needed to enlist merchants."
10. The eBay of Product Placement: "Lee, a co-founder of application-hosting company Corio, is prospecting for a team to develop an online auction site that would aggregate product-placement opportunities and put them in front of advertisers the instant they emerge - often when scripts are finalized by writers and producers. To augment the service, Lee says, the startup might also measure the results by tracking viewership or box-office figures against the resulting sales of the product that was placed."

Not the greatest of ideas, though practical ones given their market. This also points to the fact that the entrepreneurs have to know what is needed in the market, to start their business.

Competitors are coming with web-based alternative to MS products. I had no idea there were so many of them and they were fighting hard. Everyone is targeting web because of broadband that is now possible. You can have an application that runs completely through web. Compare this to the case few years back when 56K was the norm, then, no one was making such software services, at least in the user software domain. There were ASPs of course. Read the article for more details: 17 MS Office Killers

We come full circle once again. From dumb terminals to high-powered workstations, to thin clients. We had poweful mainframe computers, with their superlative applications, which did everything from booting a dumb-terminal to executing a database query to performing high-performance scientific calculations. Then, the user became more demanding and powerful workstation-server was introduced. The rise of the mighty workstation. That allowed you to run heavy applications like spreadsheets and word-processors and graphic manipulation softwares on your desktop. You could even play games on it! Then, came the mighty web-server that reversed the trend. Everything you did on your workstation was now done by a web application. Though not completely, yet. Why is it that we have such powerful client machines, still we host the application on a web server somewhere else and use a thin client like a browser to access its functionality? Many reasons that have now become important -- manageability, availability, easy maintainance and client independence. SaaS (Software as a Service) is taking away all client softwares to the server, though not completely, yet. Later on we will have all kinds of devices, with all kinds of capabilities, in terms of display, memory, speed and mobility accessing the internet. Naturally, no one would like to design application for all of these. Rather, clients will be designed for applications. Every device will have the ability to use Web Services. The tide is turning once again, back to the same place where it came from. From dumb terminals to high-powered workstations, to thin clients. Can you predict the next cycle? :)