“Microsoft and Adobe [are] in a duel to become the dominant Internet software platform,” writes Ben Bajarin in PajamasMedia. Here is the essence of the clash that is heating up between Microsoft and yet another titan:

It’s easy to forget that, like Microsoft, Adobe also touches millions of people daily – though to a lesser degree . . .except for one incredible product: Flash. Flash software has been the industry standard for glossy/multimedia/interactive web experiences for about a decade now and it continues to gain developer attention and mind share. It is the Windows of multimedia. And Microsoft wants that market.

Adobe has several tricks up its sleeve to maintain its lead. For example, the underlying architecture for Flash is called “Flex” and it runs in the Adobe Integrated Runtime Environment or “AIR.” This combination is crucial for Adobe because it is likely that someday all computing applications and processor heavy lifting will migrate from the local desktop to the Internet. When that happens, the world will need a standard Internet platform to run on — and right now, Adobe AIR is the leading contender.

But now Microsoft is making its move.

Obviously, with Internet Explorer, Microsoft already owns the main consumer conduit to the web. But the world is changing fast, and Microsoft is racing to adapt. In particular, in the world of software, power has shifted to the developers – and they care less about the plumbing than the tools. Microsoft understands this and has developed its own proprietary programming environment, its Flash Killer, called Silverlight.

Teemu Arina posts this great video about the past two decades, and upcoming couple of years, of mobile phone design.

Then Arina offers this brisk, bold vision of what he thinks is coming down the pike:

“The future of mobile phones is perhaps… not a mobile phone at all, but rather a contextually aware and active mobile magic wand. It’s not about skins anymore. Not even about features, open source, multi-touch or iPhoney. It’s about who is going to make the device interact with your environment as well as capturing it in context. It’s a wand, I tell you. You know what, it’s going to talk with the clouds rather than with native applications. It might or might not link with the global brain.

But what I know for sure, it’s going to combine cloud computing, augmented reality and the internet of things in a meaningful way.”

(via Bruce Sterling)

Android apocalypse

For millenniums mankind has been the most powerful species on Earth. And yet, perhaps without knowing, man slowly but surely has been creating his evolutionary successor. Once dismissed as fantasy, the idea that scientists could build a machine that surpasses the human brain’s mental capabilities is becoming a reality.
Source: Charles Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, June 30, 2008

Bags to help laptops pass air security

For years at airport security checkpoints, passengers have heard the refrain, almost a dirge: “Laptops must be removed from their cases and placed on the belt.” Get ready for a change. The Transportation Security Administration has given the go-ahead for passengers to use newly designed carry-on bags that will let them pass through security without having to take their laptops out for the X-ray inspection.
Source: Joe Sharkey, The New York Times, July 1, 2008

Logan will install body scanners

The Transportation Security Administration said yesterday it will beef up screening at Boston’s Logan International Airport with better X-ray machines to check carry-on bags and full-body scanners that can see through clothing to detect whether travelers are concealing objects.
Source: Nicole C. Wong, The Boston Globe, July 1, 2008

Ray-Ban gets arty with flash mob stunt

What do you do when you want to generate a crowd to look at your latest ad? Pay them of course! Ray-Ban has done just that to promote its latest outdoor creation – a huge building wrap created by Ron English.
Source: UTalkMarketing, July 4, 2008

OhMyNews English edition has posted the text and video of my address to the Korean people, in response to the recent smart mob political demonstrations that have been taking place in Seoul recently. Video now also available on my videoblog.

A UC San Diego computer scientist has turned his face into a remote control. One of his goals is to ‘use automated facial expression recognition to make robots more effective teachers.’ In fact, this project is ‘at the intersection of facial expression recognition research and automated tutoring systems.’ Changing the speed of the delivery of automated lessons to remote students could make a huge difference in learning. If the robotic teacher goes too fast for you, you need to tell it that it needs to slow down. And this can be done through smiling or frowning at a simple webcam installed on your laptop. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Marshall Kirkpatrick reports on the ReadWriteWeb that the Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among them “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy.” Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. The official Iranian news agency reports that the bill is intended to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society.”

In a video that flashes the history of mobiles before our eyes, Teemu Arina captures the rapid change in the devices and then poses:

The future of mobile phones is perhaps… not a mobile phone at all, but rather a contextually aware and active mobile magic wand. It’s not about skins anymore. Not even about features, open source, multi-touch or iPhoney. It’s about who is going to make the device interact with your environment as well as capturing it in context. It’s a wand, I tell you. You know what, it’s going to talk with the clouds rather than with native applications. It might or might not link with the global brain.

But what I know for sure, it’s going to combine cloud computing, augmented reality and the internet of things in a meaningful way.

The insightory is an open place designed to “share management insights.” It offers Shared Insights in categories of Featured, Recent, and Popular. As its About section explains, it is a linking of insights among doers, thinkers, and learners:

Insightory is a platform for management professionals, academicians and graduate business students to share their knowledge and insights with the corporate world, solve management issues collaboratively, and network with peers who have similar professional interests.

Our goal is to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge i.e. put it out on the “open” web, so that those who have expertise can add to it, and those who need the expertise can tap into it. In doing so, we will create powerful networks, with rich opportunities for “providers” as well as “seekers” of management knowledge.

Dan Gillmor runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, a new project of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I ran into him at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen in June, 2008, and asked him a quick question about the obsolete "mainstream media versus bloggers in pajamas" meme.

A Business Essay in the New York Times describes a project in which “Reuters has dispatched about 60 market reporters to the region to report on the going price for, say, oranges or onions, and to package the data into a text message that is sent to subscribers.” The mobile phone is being tried out as the basis for delivering market information power to and from remote locations:

WHETHER it’s for an Armani-suited Wall Street trader or a farmer in rural India, the right information at the right time is a baseline for success.

For 157 years, since signing a contract in 1851 to supply stock prices from exchanges in Continental Europe to the London Stock Exchange, Reuters has served up numbers to the finance set.

Now, Reuters is trying to provide analogous services to farmers in the developing world, where price information is stubbornly hard to compare. If successful, the program could become a model for economists and international agencies that have long proselytized for the use of technology — in particular, the mobile phone — to burnish economic growth in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa . . . .