David Hanson: Machine Versus Human

I had a chance to talk to David Hanson of Hanson Robotics in-depth at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco on August 14. He holds the view that humans do want robots to look, feel and sound human - after all, asking humans to think otherwise would be asking humans to re-wire the way they think.

The conversation that unfortunately didn't make it into the video was around robot(ic) behavior - robots versus humans, more specifically robots versus actors. We were talking about some of the best actors actually ARE the character, they don't go INTO character. My example specifically are both women: Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. both of them have a way of drawing you into their character and make you believe nothing else exists. They ARE that character and nothing else; the character is in fact their DNA not who they are in their off-stage life.

I could imagine a world where you could actually buy a 'program' that is set to a particular character. In the future, I'd love an 'open source' robot like the PR2s that Willow Garage is building, and I'd like to separately buy a program, just like I buy a DVD movie today. I insert it into the robot and he/she becomes the character he/she has just been programmed until I change the program. Something you can imagine in our lifetime? What about other human aspects? Listen to David thinks about these topics.

Stickybits: The Newest Addition to the Business Social Media Toolkit?

This year’s SXSWi-ers were the first user group to be introduced to the world of Stickybits, a new user-gen content-and-location app. It’s been making pretty big waves across social and news media so we decided it was time to have a go with it in the office.

Essentially, it is a barcode to which you can upload content with your smartphone and stick to real-life objects. You can attach any sort of content to it (pictures, images, copy, audio, etc...) including the location, if you want. Other people can then discover and scan the barcode to see what you’ve uploaded (the content that ‘owns’ the bar code) and can add content to it (a bit like commenting on a blog - so everyone who scans/views the code after you will be able to view the content you've added).

Try scanning the barcode above (you will have to download the app, but it's free) to see how it works.

Official barcodes can be bought or downloaded from the Stickybits site but, in an interesting twist, you can apparently also ‘tag’ (add) your content to existing barcodes as well (yep, even the one on that can of cola on your desk).

I’m not entirely convinced it’s eternally practical, especially in a broad scope of accessibility as it's a smartphone app and not a web based app. Part of the appeal of Twitter, Facebook, et al. is that they are web-based with mobile capacity, meaning they are more accessible to more people, in more ways, in wider demos. Stickybits is for smartphone users only (and not even all smartphone users - though Adam, our resident Googlevangelist, is happy they’ve included Android).

I also imagine there’s a huge amount of trust needed to make this work in a family-friendly, legit way for any sort of long term stability. I don’t think anyone wants to see streets lined with Stickybits or stumble across disturbing content (though apparently there is a ToS to abide by) while they're innocently scanning away.

Still, it’s intriguing. It opens up the door for brands (and not just the consumer ones, either!) to add another layer of interactive messaging to a physical product; a new layer of contact for building relationships.

It's a great step in the direction of on and offline integration and there’s huge potential to get really creative with it. Brands can incorporate reviews, best practice guides, user manuals, product notes,  inventory, tracking, feedback forms, viral contesting , maps, business information, networking details… the barcode is your oyster.

So now I put it to you – have you tried it out? Come up with some good ideas? Have any thoughts on its practicality, longevity or even relevancy?

Biz Tech Day Hits Seattle, New York & San Francisco This Fall

For those of you who are not aware of Biz Tech Day, it's a one day event that brings together 1,500+ influential and passionate entrepreneurs under one roof in three cities across the U.S. in the fall: Seattle, New York and San Francisco.

The goal for Attendees? To strengthen their business and ventures by learning about the most practical business ideas and technology strategies to accelerate your company's growth.

What I love about their events is the focus on practical solutions. You have an opportunity to listen to 10 practical business talks, watch 10 innovative technology demos and meet people who will change how your business work and turn your dreams into a reality.

Registration for the BizTechDay 2010 is now live. August early bird discount available until August 31st.

_____________________________________________

Discount code for Down the Avenue and We Blog the World readers:

August 1 – 31st - 30% Off

Discount Code: WeblogtheworldEarly

September 1 till BizTechDay - 20% Off

Discount Code: Weblogtheworld

More Than an MP3......

A bit of horn-tooting for one of Omobono's (former) own, Andy, who has used his digital mastery for an exciting new project of his own, called 3DiCD.

It is a digital experience for online music, providing interactive packaging along with the music files. As they have said: “With a 3DiCD, listeners get the whole packaging experience; engagement and immersion all within the online environment.

Last week, Andy and the 3DiCD team launched with a digital version of Imogen Heap’s Grammy award winning album, Ellipse. You can check it out here.

We wish Andy and the team the best of luck.

2010 Singularity Summit - A Meeting of the Minds

The 2010 Singularity Summit, held this past weekend in San Francisco, was, quite literally a meeting of the minds.  Not just because the assembled group consisted of a fair number of the brainiest people on the planet, and not just because the general consensus was that a meshing of silicon hardware with our carbon wetware appears to be a future inevitability, but also because of the discussion about animal intelligence and how it is similar to yet different from our own.

Now that the event is a week in the past there have been a number of very interesting posts written on what happened there and what people think of it.  I've taken the time to pull together a detailed listing of the event itself as well as the press the Summit received and I've organized it into the Pearltree below.

Some of the interesting content you'll find in the links below include:

• Steven Mann on H2Organ at Singularity Summit 2010
• Singularity Summit | Summit 2010 > A Sample of the Singularity Summit -Includes full videos to the 2009 Singularity Summit Talks
• Patrick Takahashi of Huffington Post on The Singularity Summit 2010 - 
• ZDNet's CHris Jablonski on: Singularity Summit 2010: No place for human values in a 'posthuman' future?
• A collection of the links and tweets from the 2010 Singularity Summit: Accelerating Future » Singularity Summit 2010 Tweets and Links
• Additional Collected Press Coverage of the Summit: A Selection of Singularity Summit 2010 Coverage
• Mathilde Berchon covers the more physical aspects: Singularity Summit 2010- Human Health and Body Improvements Innovation Round-Up
• Summit Volunteer, Kevin Fischer provides his thoughts on the event before the fact.
• A comprehensive list of abstracts, bios and deep links on presenters.

Smart New Uses for Old Technology

If you want to know what's going to happen next with a technology perhaps the smartest way to predict the future is to ask your kids - or someone else's... It's amazing what you might learn.

The other night, for example, I was having a meeting with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher.  His son, Matt, also happened to be present.  I needed to log into their WiFi to go over a few things and as I did so I noted a number of funny networks in the area - phuckphace, for example.

When I mentioned this Matt told me how he and his friends are using the SSID - and it's both clever and surprising:  they use it to broadcast general messages to their local area.  An example:  someone's SSID might be "shutyourdogup" (the intent being obvious).  Another might be "partyatmyplacenexthurs".

Sure, this is non-specific, but if you know who the network belongs to (or you know you've got a barking dog issue) this is a quick, dirty and free way to get the word to folks that are local to you.

Have you heard about another clever new way to use a technology you thought was fully exploited?  Did you learn about it from someone half your age?

I'm curating a Pearltree on this topic, so please include links with your comments and I'll add other cool tips to the Pearltree so that you can see what other folks have discovered.

PhoneTell Builds "Impossible-To-Find" Numbers into Your Phone

Yesterday, PhoneTell announced a new mobile app for Android phones that incorporates “IMPOSSIBLE-TO-FIND” phone numbers into the app so you can easily access that information instantly from your Android phone.

Convenience at your fingertips is the idea. We've all had the experience of searching for a hard-to-find phone number and coming up short, particularly at times when we need to put our hands on the number quickly. PhoneTell has added hundreds of the most difficult, hard-to-find, buried-five-layers-deep and at the bottom of a web page in mouse-type numbers into its mobile application for Android phones.

Essentially, anyone with an Android phone can download PhoneTell free from the Android market or GetJar starting today. Whether you’ve lost your luggage and need the 800# for the airline baggage claim or you’re trying to locate the customer service number for Amazon.com, Apple, Paypal, Toyota, MasterCard or Dell, PhoneTell instantly provides you the precise phone number to reach a real live person to solve your problem.

Launched earlier this year at TechCrunch Disrupt, PhoneTell expands phone number search beyond your mobile phone address book, connecting you to your "personal cloud" of contacts in Gmail, LinkedIn or Salesforce.com, as well as contacts in the “public cloud” such as Yelp!, Yellow Pages, White Pages and Bing– all in one app. PhoneTell instantly scours these data sources and with its patent-pending algorithms, searches, verifies, de-dupes and delivers ranked search matches instantly to your phone.

The new list of additional phone numbers is comprised of hard-to-find customer service numbers (e.g. Direct TV, Disneyland Resort, the Geek Squad, PayPal), unlisted numbers and national 1-800 numbers. These are numbers that you can’t get by calling 411 and are impossible or nearly impossible to find on the Internet. Some hard to find numbers included in PhoneTell are Amazon Customer Service, American Airlines Baggage Claim (haven't we all needed that more than once or twice), AOL Customer Service, Apple Customer Service, Ameritrade Customer Support, Bank of America Credit, eBay Customer Service and IRS - Individual Taxes among countless others.

Singularity Summit Promises to Stimulate Your Brain

The Singularity Summit, held in San Francisco this past weekend, is not new to me since I helped market the very first one, which was held at Stanford in 2006. The goal of the first Summit was to further the understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of human technological progress.

The idea over time is to improve people’s thinking about the future and increasing public awareness of radical technologies under development today and of the transformative implications of such technologies understood as part of a larger process.

It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether that be as a scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.

Speaking of skeptics, the last talk of the event was by James Randi, who some think of as a magician, but he is also known as a debunker.

I first learned of Randi's work at TED where he spoke several years ago. The title defunker equates to his strong and very vocal skepticism, which he writes and speaks about extensively. Fascinating as ever, Randi has the ability to draw you into his logic even if you don't necessarily agree with him.

Gregory Stock is a renown biophysicist who I had the pleasure of meeting at PopTech in Maine more than five years ago. What I love about Stock is his ability to move from academic, physicist and author to entrepreneur and philosopher all within a one hour window. He also has a very engaging curiosity about random things outside his world when you talk to him one-on-one that most experts lack. He wrote the book Redesigning Humans, which is considered a transhumanist classic, now eight years ago.

You can't have a Singularity Conference without a bunch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) geeks running around, which at this event, included Eliezer Yudkowsky (also a profilic writer about human rationality), Ben Goertzel, who is Chief Scientist of AI firm Novamente and Ray Kurzweil, who joined us remotely via video and as always, delivered a rivoting and mind-expanding talk.

My favorite line all day was a Kurzweil one: "My feelings about the brain, the mind and AI - If it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If it seems conscious it is conscious" -- meaning a conscious being.

Below Ben Goertzel on the Singularity Summit Stage

Psychologists Irene Pepperberg and John Tooby (considered a pioneer of evolutionary psychology) also brought their perspective to the table as did neurobiologists Terrence Sejnowski, Brian Litt, Dennis Bray and Demis Hassabis, who is a research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at the University College of London.

"Futurists like to predict how genetic engineering and computational implants will allow humans to become a super-species, but few examine the application of similar technologies to nonhumans," says Pepperberg.

David Hanson, who I first met at TED more than six years ago, is a well known roboticist. When I first met him, he was working at Disney Imagineering and while you may not think of a roboticist as an artist, this one is. Formerly a sculptor, he has merged his artistic way of looking at the world with his left brain ability to design and develop a robot with human-like expressive capabilities. He holds a patent on Frubber, a novel material that imitates the look and feel of human skin. I had an opportunity to touch it while I was talking to their very human robot named Zeno. (a video of my experience coming later this month).

Below David Hanson and his very human-like robot Zeno, who has a sexy British accent and has accepted a date with me as soon as he is given 'legs' - I told David I'd fly to Dallas for the occasion.

Also on the agenda was Anita Goel, who works at the intersection of physics, nanotechnology and medicine, Lance Becker, a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Venezuelan born Jose Luis Cordeiro who is the Director of the Venezuela node of the Millenium Project. Jose, who I met at the cocktail party the night before the event, has been working in Asia. Prior to that however, he lived in Ecuador for a year around the time the currency changed over to the dollar.

Engaging and witty on stage, Steve Mann doesn't look like your ordinary professor. A pioneer in the study and practice of virtual reality, he has been dubbed the world's first cyborg. He even published a book with its name in the title: Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. Together with collaborator Ryan Janzen, a Canadian researcher, scientist and composer, they demoed the very powerful and mesmorizing Hydraulophone, a tonal acoustic musical instrument played by direct physical contact with water where sound is generated or affected hydraulically.

Below Toronto-based Steve Mann is engaging, interactive and wows the audience with his examples of virtual reality and demo of the Hydraulophone on stage.

Other impressive talks from other disciplines included Shane Legg, who won the 2008 Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research Prize, Ellen Heber-Katz whose research focuses on molecular biology and genetics of healing, and Ramez Naam, who is the author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement.

Since I'm a right brain, I must admit that my favorite part of the day was playing the Hydraulophone, which I'm doing below with Ryan Janzen's guidance and interacting with Hanson's robot, the very endearing Zeno.

Tech4Africa: Building for a Global Technology Market in Africa

If only Johannesburg were closer. Too many buds and too many interesting discussions were happening at the Tech4Africa Conference. Below is a recap taken from MemeBurn, which focuses on web and innovation technologies for the emerging market sector. 

The panel discussion was called: “Building for the Global Market. Lessons and Learnings From The Coalface.” Leila Janah of Saiasource, Sheraan Amod of Personera and Malcolm Hall of Open Box Software discussed the challenges of building tech companies from Africa. The discussion was facilitated by Toby Shapshak of Stuff magazine. MemeBurn's wrote-up below. 

  ON BREAKING INTO THE AMERICAN MARKET 

Leila Janah: The biggest challenge we face is that Africa has a damaged reputation in the service sector. And being a non-profit doesn’t exactly help us either. There is a perception that people in Africa can’t do this kind of work. Many educated people in the West don’t even know that there are PC’s in Kenya, let alone that there are over 2 million Kenyans on Facebook. 

You need to overcome bias at the start and the best way is to get results. We did many trial jobs for free to build a relationship and people were pleasantly surprised. You can’t compromise on quality when you’re a non-profit, especially when you’re from Africa.

Sheraan Amod: In the US, there is a lot more energy and innovation than there is in Europe or anywhere else, and people are willing to speak to new businesses. To succeed, you need to stand out. I preach 2 major actions if you want to build a product business that can scale to the US.

Firstly, your product needs to be something they have never seen before. If it’s unique, they will see it and they will take it seriously. Secondly, you need to get a solid introduction to the people who matter in Silicon Valley. That introduction is like a stamp of approval. We are lucky to have Vinny Lingham as an investor, and he is very well connected in the San Francisco tech scene so he setup a few crucial introductions. 

Leila Janah: We have to work as hard as a “for profit” company, because leads come in because of who we are, but no one will sign on the dotted line because of a good story. There is a lot of anti-outsourcing sentiment right now because of the crisis in us. We want people to understand we’re not in to screw American workers. 

Malcolm Hall: The key differentiator is the quality of your product. I don’t believe that it matters where you are. If you deliver something good, then people will use it, no matter where its from. 

ON MAINTAINING A PRESENCE IN THE UNITED STATES 

Leila Janah: There’s a benefit to understanding what your customers are doing so it makes sense to have part of your business where your customers are. You need to have a great product/customer fit and living amongst them is so important. Whether it’s from casual conversations or more formally, you have to get feedback from your customers. 

Malcolm Hall: Certainly it’s important to have a sales and marketing presence in the larger markets. That then allows you to have developers back here at home working comfortably in T-shirts and slip slops. And getting paid in rands. 

Sheraan Amod: If you haven’t lived where your customers are, then probably don’t start. It’s critical that you understand how they live. 

 ON FINDING THE RIGHT MARKETS FOR YOUR PRODUCTS 

Leila Janah: Outsourcing requires pretty mature markets. Our market is definitely in the Fortune 500 companies. But if you can monetize many tiny transactions, like M-Pesa has done then perhaps your focus is different. But at Samasource, when we talk about technology companies, we gravitate towards the United States. 

Audience: The BRIC countries are very interesting markets for South Africans. We are in a unique position of being comfortable in transitioning between 1st and 3rd world environments in the same country. We can navigate all of that very easily and should take advantage of it. 

Toby Shapshak: My contention for a while has been that Africa is the next China, the next Russia and Brazil. So it’s very important to grow your market right here in Africa and South Africa is going to be the springboard to all of that. It’s an exciting time. I always say that South Africa’s best export is South Africans.

Ray Kurzweil on the Mind and the Brain

Ray Kurzweil answers a question from the audience remotely via video in real-time at this weekend's Singularity Summmit in San Francisco.