It’s really easy to get used to business models. As if they were natural things that have always been there.
But actually, all the successful machines that make money were at one point extraordinary - inspired wonder when the first company found them.
Here are some recent examples:
1) Flickr. Invented “freemium” for SaaS on an at all large scale. Before then on the Internet you had to either buy things, or things were free.
Unhosted is finally the project I’ve been waiting for, that stands a chance of decentralising the web.
It separates application writing from hosting your data. Encryption magic means that neither the writer of the application nor the storer of your data can access your data.
This will empower users, create more competition and boost open source web applications.
I’m sufficiently excited about Unhosted that I decided to tweet once a day about it for a week. Here’s what I said:
“Government U-turn over book scheme cuts” blares the Independent newspaper today. Apparently the UK Government decided to cut a scheme that gives books to all children last week, and has now changed their mind in order to decide not to cut it.
I don’t have any knowledge, or a particularly strong view, about how we should best encourage people to read as a society.
I do want to use this as an example, a simple and basic one, of how terrible information flow on the Internet is, and on how terrible modern journalism is. By terrible here, I mean just how utterly our society fails at giving the most basic tools for intelligent people to be able to have opinions based on any sort of knowledge or evidence.
![Official Monster Raving Loony Party [The]_1](/uploads/2010/03/Official-Monster-Raving-Loony-Party-The_1.gif "Official Monster Raving Loony Party [The]_1")
Looking for some sample data for the election quiz software I’m writing, I naturally went to the Official Monster Raving Loony Party website. The very first policy they list is:
Cool on the outside: To combat global warming and climate change all buildings should be fitted with air conditioning units on the outside. (Source: Monster Raving Loony manifesto proposals)
At first this sounds just funny… Until you realise that we do have a technology that is the same as “air conditioners on the outside”. Indeed, the office building I’m in right now is heated by one. They’re called air source heat pumps (Energy Saving Trust link).
I like John Redwood. I started reading his blog in 2006 while I was involved in the Save Parliament campaign, trying to stop the Government pass a Bill whose craziness you’ll have to read about by following the link. John spoke prominently on the Internet and in Parliament against the Bill.
Since then, I’ve seen eye to eye with him on issues such as David Davis’s resignation over civil liberties and the lack of quality in Parliament’s law making process.
Someone asked me to think up counterintuitive predictions for the next year - things which might happen, but where it would not be ordinary for them to happen. Things with a hint in the present world of their possibility.
Here’s some, make your own in the comments.
What are your wild predictions for the next year?
A year ago, I predicted “2008 to be quite a ride”. What happened?
On holiday, Eddie Izzard’s voice guided me round Wales. As we drove, a box smaller than my hand sang songs by a band that broke up nearly 40 years ago, as if they were in the car.
The same part of the US military which created the Internet funded the rat-sized cortex simulations. Most such projects in 60 years of Artificial Intelligence have come to nothing. I wouldn’t bet on them all, always coming to nothing.
I’ve written before about how I cherry pick campaigns that are most likely to be successful. You’d have thought that on such a large, difficult subject as climate change and our energy security, it would be impossible to cherry pick.
But it turns out there is a big gaping hole.
Nobody is running a single issue campaign for people across the political spectrum. One to lobby the UK Government to stop climate change destroying our economy and way of life, and at the same time to safeguard our supply of energy.
Travelling by car back from relatives yesterday, a woman’s voice, inside a box as small as my hand, knew exactly where we were at all times, and gave my mother detailed directions at every turn.
Earlier this year, a multinational corporation simulated a brain the size of a mouse’s on a supercomputer. This almost interactive simulation will help people learn more about the function of our own cerebral cortex, and hence how our minds work. They are moving on to a rat’s cortex, which is three times larger.
Some people complain that all the activism, campaigning, trying to change the world for the better never has any affect. In the last year I can think of 4 major victories, all in campaigns I’ve had a small involvement in.
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - I posted about this boring sounding but deadly Bill at the beginning of last year. We had to set up a whole Save Parliament campaign to try and stop it. The Bill was still passed, but was much less dangerous partly because the Government rewrote it under public pressure.