— Uneven Distribution.

This post was also published on Technology Spectator.

“The computer industry is converging with the television industry in the same sense that the automobile converged with the horse.” – George Gilder , Life after the Television

IPTV seems to be on the verge of hitting the buzzword bingo card. I’ve had a lot of questions on it recently, and figured I’d post a few key bits I’d written in responses.

The below was originally published on Technology Spectator.

Sometime in the past few days, Google+ passed 20 million users. That’s not remarkable just because it’s the fastest piece of technology ever adopted. It’s remarkable because there are 20 million people who are putting a lot of trust in Google. A trust that this time is not simply about privacy, but something much bigger, and arguably much more important -  the trust of creating and curating what defines us as a global, national, and a local community. The ideas that create culture.

Given the rather hectic pace of TED, I thought I’d summarise the last two days in one final post.

Alain De Botton spoke about religion 2.0. It was brilliant. I won’t go on much more because I’m sure it’s all going to be in his book.

Erik Hursman is one of the people responsible for Ushahidi. If you’ve never seen or head of Ushahidi, go check it out. Started as a way of mapping reports of violence in Kenya through an open-source and accessible platform (anyone could SMS reports and they would instantly show up), the platform expanded to become applicable to all sorts of crises where collection, visualisation, filtering and aggregation of data was critical.

TED’s all about “Ideas Worth Spreading”. So in that spirit, here’s something that someone didn’t say at TED today: You shut your goddamn carbon-taxin’ mouth is a piece by Geoff Lemon. Please go read it if you haven’t. (I’ve just noticed the original post is down, luckily Marc testart re-published is here)

Geoff’s amazing, and is not just the most talented writer I know, but one of the most amazing people I have had the pleasure of spending many beers with. The media’s epic overhyping of the apparent assault on Australian’s “cost of lifestlye” seems to be reaching ridiculous proportions. I’m glad that with this piece Geoff has probably reached more people in the last 24 hours than Andrew Bolt.

Super quick braindump of highlights from Day 2.

Nathalie Miebach is yet another person who has challenged my anti-dataviz position in the past two days. She weaves weather data. Absolutely amazing.

Sonaar Luthra, one of the TED Fellows presented the water canary. A brilliant product in it’s own right, but part of one of the big trends I’m already noticing here – openness. The hardware is open sourced, meaning anyone in the world can improve on the idea. Which when you’re talking about detecting clean drinking water to prevent cholera, is a good idea. To finish off the day Allan Jones from the Allen Institute for Brain Science talked for 18 minutes about the most complex neuroscience you can imagine. I didn’t understand a word of it. But in the last 2 minutes he talked about the fact that all of the utterly amazing work they’re doing, will be an open data source. In the traditionally competitive and guarded world of bleeding edge science, this openness is a real positive change.

Some very brief highlights from day 1 of TEDGlobal that I thought worth posting…

“Data visualisations are like kaleidoscopes for adults.” – Lars Jan from Early Morning Opera

My new years resolution this year was to avoid data visualisations as much as possible. But Lars makes a good point here – used well and creatively, visualisation of complex data can create wonder that’s just not possible through any other method of communication.

There is a danger in oversimplification of complex ideas though. During the TEDUniversity session, the audience were asked what current trends would have a large future impact – and to summarise them in two sentences. The two that stuck for me…”Technology has outstripped out imagination” (from someone who’s name I didn’t catch), and “There is a growing and dangerous trend of reducing complex ideas to a single sentence” (from Alexander Macdonald, NASA).

Below is a post from Mumbrella last week…

What a day to be in London. James Murdoch’s announcement that after 168 years, this Sunday’s News of the World will be the last ever has ricocheted around the internet faster than a fake celebrity death. And if you’re an advertiser in any category in any country, there is a lesson to be learned from today.

So Fairfax have relaunched their iPad app, with versions coming out tomorrow for The Age and SMH. I won’t repeat all the commentary going on around this, but I did want to make one point.

The time that Fairfax has invested in developing this app is a complete waste of time.

Which isn’t necessarily a criticism of Fairfax. It’s a criticism of the approach to both tablet apps and paywalls that every single publisher has taken. In the article linked above, Jack Matthews makes a point that many thought they would never hear from a newspaper CEO:

“You can’t charge for something on an iPad and give it away free on a desktop. And you can’t charge for something in a newspaper and give it away free on a tablet,” he said.

”The idea that you’re going to get the same thing free in one area and pay for it in another area is probably yesterday’s strategy.”

The above statement is absolutely true for content. It’s not true for an experience.