Futures Group

James Fallows of Atlantic Monthly at the Aspen Ideas Conference right now, from his blog a snippet on the US not leading at any of the green technology fields.

On energy, a disturbing factlet. (And obviously not the only disturbing observation on the energy-and-climate front.) I heard three people separately observe that when it comes to future sources of “clean” energy, there is not a single field in which U.S. companies are the technical or market leaders. One person gave an informal ranking of the leaders this way:
Solar-powered electricity (ie, photo-voltaic systems): Norway, Japan, China
Solar-thermal systems (for heating water or buildings) Spain the leader in getting systems deployed
Wind power: Holland, Denmark, China
Geothermal power: nobody
Nuclear power (“clean” in the carbon-footprint sense): France, Japan
CCS, “Carbon capture and sequestration” (stripping out CO2 and burying it): Norway, Australia, Canada.

This person said that his list was rough and ready, and that US firms were in a close second place in some fields. But the main point, he said, is that “American firms are acting as if there is not going to be a vital, profitable, globalized clean-tech industry a decade from now, and as if they don’t care about competing in it.” He had some other more hopeful things to say about how sustained investment could help close the gap. But the list itself was news to me.

And from their latest piece here, excellent read on the elusive green economy. Clean energy, like other utilities, will be succeed or fall with consistent government support/inaction. China is now one of the largest players in clean technology because of government support. So is Germany’s solar play. Unlike Internet start-ups with lower funding costs, energy plays require much larger funds to starup that most VCs cannot afford. Government grants are needed, but that would mean choosing winners. Technology, policy and finance will intertwine, who knows when the breakthrough green tech will emerge from this interplay?

From WL our colleague, a look into what are the possibilities open when peak minerals (like peak oil) occur, and how recycling is both an environmental and economic win-win for all. We’ve previously blogged on peak minerals here.

This started out intriguingly by iFTF’s Anthony Townsend‘s “The Future of Technology-led Economic Development“. Research parks and incubators are starting to show their age as an economic development tool. Tectonic shifts in the way scientific research and technological innovation happen are leaving them behind, and pioneering new models of collaboration that will require us to rethink how we create places for these activities.

Townsend’s work focuses on the impact of new technology on cities and public institutions, essentially the intersection of science parks + incubators, mobility + urbanisation, future R&D models. It’s fascinating stuff, especially relevant as Singapore was one of the first to enter the real estate science park play and make it really work as a driver of growth.

Townsend is now building out the iFTF ‘Science in Place’ program, which will focus on understanding how future science and technology trends will shape innovation at various scales: the laboratory, the campus, the region and the world. Townsend’s ideas are also summarised in his slideshares below.

I think the last slideshare is the more interesting one. Specifically, most of what Townsend mentions are not unknown to Singapore, and we are already doing it. What is missing is the flexibility, what in FG we used to call scalable infrastructure, to quickly build out for prototyping. Here you might want to take a look at slide 34 for the ecosystem of innovation that builds in community buzz and experimentation (instead of science being isolated) and slide 44 which actually urges mixed uses for future science spaces. Our Biopolis is a step in the right direction, but so much more should be done.

Finally, also in collaboration with Townsend, a Future of Science Parks map. Both Townsend and the creators of the prezi map mention they will unveil the full results of the future of science parks forecast at the XXVI Annual World Conference of the International Association of Science Parks in Raleigh, North Carolina, June 1-4, 2009.

Excellent post from the Atlantic by James Fallow here. There are several distinctions that James highlights in the road China is carving for itself in the face of collapsed global demand. You can read the original article for the details, they are (a) China will not go the way of Soviet Union (implode) or Japan (muddle along) and (b) Disruptive innovation – China will use this time to design high value high profit margin products.

Which brings me to what my colleague JP said. He had mapped an axis of what SGP imported/exported, with what China imported/exported. Besides showing how much of SGP’s trade eventually ended in the G3 markets, it also showed that where we were in direct competition with China lay a lot in (b), those high value high profit margin products that once China gets the ‘China price’, it is very hard for anybody else to occupy that space. Where China bought what Singapore made, it was a thin slice of products and services. We are in a precarious position if we don’t plot out the future of China’s demand and how Singapore can meet it.

Likewise, what can we do for India? And for the GCC? And for the new markets of G3 post-crisis?

I thought I could wrap up the Future of Global Demand project soon, but now I see what we’ve done is the base. More work should still be done on fleshing it out. I am grateful for the work JP has done in the past few months, and inshallah God willing, what I create as the next phase of Singapore and Future of Global Demand will do it justice. Many thoughts on this…

Day Two/ Three/ Four of 2009 O’Reilly Etech Conference in San Jose

It is interesting to note that wherever you look, you will definitely spot someone using either a Macbook or Iphone… 

Anyway, day two kicks off with a presentation by Alex Steffen on the topic of Sustaining the American Family. In what was related to as a “Massive Inter-generational Ponzi Scheme”, we are in danger of reaching the tipping point in peak population, peak carbon emission (No prize for guessing who is the greatest Ponzi of all time!). He reckoned that the world would be in ruins if the developing countries (poor) followed the path to richness as experienced by the Western developed countries. While America is in no position to stop the poor from seeking a better life, there is a need to educate them on the risk, else it would be difficult or impossible for anyone to sustain their current way of life. Hence there were talks on 1) energy efficiency and CO₂ admission – by introducing electric cars, and how we can measure our energy footprint/ consumption, so as to better improve and optimize usage; 2) Design and Density – moving toward closed loops design, so as to have 100% recyablity (e.g. Crocs shoes) as well as urban homesteading/ clustering to share common resources as well as eliminate unnecessary traveling. There were further discussion in the session by Gavin Starks (founder and CEO for AMEE) on Energy Identity – Interesting to note that 2½ Kg Mac laptop has a 460 Kg CO2 emission footprint (Yap! Guilty faces of all the geeks/ techies in the room!). Energy identity is best describe as a digital embodiment of a user’s physical consumption. With 20 largest cities consuming up to 75% of the world’s energy, and more than 600 million people moving into cities over the next five years, we need rapid innovation in energy efficiency technology, service transformation (high carbon prices/ tax would result in business shift from products to services, i.e. having more efficient public transportation system, reducing car ownership, etc), as well as redefining how our communities’ perception to understand and enjoy quality of life through simplicity rather than money.

Elizabeth Goodman’s topic on Urban Green Space Planning had a different twist, in which people from the same community can register to form a working group to grow and maintain their neighborhood plants (Landshare) as well as reap the benefits/ fruits of their labor. This is no easy task, especially when most of us will have no prior knowledge in the art of farming, and you may need one to have good project management skills to schedule and plan resources to ensure the that plots are well maintained. Then there is the talk on Urban Homesteading by Mark Frauenfelder (Make Magazine) on the seven guiding principals leading to a successful urban farming: 1. Grow only useful things; 2. Region matters (understanding your surrounding environment); 3. Build your soil; 4. Water deeply and less frequently; 5. Work makes work (i.e. work with nature, not against it); 6. Failure is part of the game; and 7. Pay attention and keep notes. Mark also taught about rearing chickens, which I reckon it makes no sense to talk about it here…

In a slighter different light on urban planning, Brad Templeton shared how Robot Cars may be able to solve everything. Well, almost… He wanted a robotic car that parks, delivers and refuels itself, and would definitely be a great hit in countries such as Japan, Singapore, etc… Went on to share video of the DARPA grand Challenge, where competitors compete against each other through a series of test runs, both through urban as well as country-side driving. In addition to the fundamental issue of battery lifespan clouding the development of electric cars today, Robotic cars will bring about a different set of problems such as reliability/ safety, political, national security (terrorism).

Mary Lou Jepsen (recently named as one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time Magazine – May 2008 for her work in creating Pixel Qi) speaks of Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing in order to reach out the billions of youth in developing countries, deprived of proper education, in her “one laptop per child” project. Though her project fell short of achieving the production target of 8 million laptops last year (actual production figures not disclosed), Mary is still hopefully that the recent downturn would help to drive material/ production cost down in her bid to produce small inexpensive laptops. On the technology front, she claimed that the war for more powerful CPUs are over, laptops are now being widely used as a medium for reading. Hence the development lies in having a low power, sun-light readable, high resolution screen.

We also get the opportunity to see Carl Taussig (HP Lab) introduce flexible paper-like screen, and the technology behind how roll-to-roll manufacturing. In time to come, we will be holding such flexible screens to read our news…

And the theme of Networking with Smart Sensors, which create quite a stir w.r.t. data ownership/ IP and the invasion of personal space. On Wednesday, Tony Jebara (Sense Network) talk about how Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People. With social network portal such as Facebook, Flickr, Gmail or mobile phone with wireless capability (Iphone, blackberry, etc), laptops/ desktop with IP addresses, tons of data are being transmitted and collected at any given time. On one project, they monitored people working in San Francisco financial district, using mobile signals to track their activities (such as working hours) and the correlation to stock market (Though there were questions raised as to how to determine if those monitored are actually bankers, clerks, janitors, etc); on the other project, they tried to map out and cluster group of individuals with similar interest who frequent certain type of restaurants, bars, etc (flow analysis). The latter was deemed to be useful as companies can use these data for their advertising, marketing, strategy planning/ churning (if a few members from the clustered groups start switching to a different network, they would promote themselves to the remaining individuals of similar group to retain their service); demographics; collaborative filtering.

In another session – Real Time City by Andrea Vaccari (Senseable City Lab), he showcased the visualization of mobile traffic between New York and other countries, which gives us a pretty good picture as to how New York is connected to other parts of the world, and social network portals like facebook, flickr, which will reveal the location of the users (I posted in my facebook that I will be in ETech this week!), and then Nick Brachet educated us on how we are being “tracked” daily (sounds like some James Bond movie…) – three nodes to identify location and a fourth to synchronize timing (based on the theory of six degree of freedom).

Though we now know how our digital footprint is revealing information of us at all time, it seems that the application of such data sounds rather trivial and non-conclusive. It would take a lot more (Political, regulations, signal networking, etc) before we establish more use for such technology.

Lastly a special mentioned on the session with Lisa Katayama (blog: TokyoMango.com) and Fumi Yamazaki on Japanese Tech Culture. Interesting to note that just this week, Hatsune Miku music software created a digital song (i.e. sang by computer) that tops their music chart (#2) – Makes you wonder what’s installed for the future of artists…

Oh, I forgot to mentioned that we are treated to the music of Zoë Keating on Wednesday night. Cool!

Day One of 2009 O’Reilly Etech Conference in San Jose (March 08, 2009)

Here we go, my first post with team (FG)… Sat through more than 25 sessions listening to 56 speakers. Hectic week? Below are some of the interesting topics.

(Tutorial/ Workshop, Keynote Address, Ignite Etech)

Brady Forrest (Chair of ETech) kicks off the conference by giving a brief introduction to this year’s theme of “Technology of Abundance and Constraints”. Main focus will hover around open source software/ hardware, energy identity/ urban planning, low cost computing, and smart sensors. It is also interesting to note that Etech is handing out RFID tag for the first time, which can be used to explore fun interactive projects, such as photo booth, personal info collector (to replace exchanging namecards), etc…

They have eight workshops running concurrently (four each in morning and afternoon session) on day one. Attended Holistic Service Prototyping: Sketching Hardware and Software presented by Matt Cottam of Telart, where he shared the transformation of America’s focus from agriculture to manufacturing to services. Consumers are demanding more than just the ownership of a product but the suite of related services that co-exist with the product. An easy to understand example would be Apple’s IPod – Not only is this a media player, but it also provides users the option to download music from iTunes. He then moved on to share this interesting project he did with elevator maker, OTIS, where tenants are able to use their IPod/ Iphone to communicate and control their elevator system, merely by the touch of an Icon – Doesn’t this sounds cool! Wouldn’t it be nice for a change to have the elevator/ cab/ train wait for you instead? Optimization at its best… Designers/ companies in this emerging field must develop new approaches for communicating (thru smart sensors, RFIDs, low power signals, etc) and conceptualize comprehensive service offerings to meet the demanding needs of the future consumers… Ended the workshop by participating in an exercise to brainstorm how the use of sensors can benefit future consumers… E.g. The future of guidance systems for the blind would include a proximity sensor shoes, coupled with force pressured belt linked to a GPS system (with RFID capabilities) to provide direction and suggestions of where to dine, shop, etc. Similar technology could be adopted to fit the collar tag of your pet so that you never lose a dog again!!! Hmm, you wonder wonder wonder!!! Good fun and great interaction opportunity with the crowd!

As for the afternoon session, I initially wanted to attend the workshop on 3D Printing by Zach Smith, but unfortunately this was cancelled. Ended up attending the workshop with Rob Faludi, who is the co-creator of Lilypad, XBee. Again, another workshop on how we use sensors (point to multi-point) in this new era of low-bandwidth, low cost, low power wireless network to device communications technologies that changes the way of life. However the content of the workshop hinges mainly of the product XBee (Open sourced hardware – more of this topic will be in Day Two session), where attendees installed the XBee (which can be purchased on the spot, if you wanna keep’em) into our laptops to communicate with the rest of the field, and also performed simple programming to compete and see who get the monkey clapping… Unfortunately, rather boring as my Macbook was one of the three laptops using Mac OS X software, which conflicted with the software installation… Sigh! Sat through the session looking over the shoulder of the guy beside me – It’s like learning to drive without getting your hands behind the wheels. Anyway, the entire exercise was merely to exhibit the ability to use low cost, low power, multi-point networking to communicate or transmit signals.

The highlight of the day would definitely have to be Tim O’Reilly’s take on how we should focus on the Stuff That Really Matters, especially in times like these where the world’s economy is falling into ruins. He then quoted how the creators of Facebook are spending time in developing application for one to “throw a sheep/ poke a friend”, which in his point of view has not much value. He urges us to relook at how we live our lives or model our business case, not only from the financial/ economic aspects but as a social venture (More Es – Ecological, Environmental than F – Financial) – how we can reinvent the future to take on the imminent challenges (such as global environmental issues) that we are facing today.

In short, two key takeaway from his speech – 1. Work on something that matters to you more than money; and 2. Create more value than you capture. If we are to innovate, allow flexibility for the system to evolve and in return, be friendly to those who extend you…

Lastly, the late night special – Ignite ETech. Backed by popular demand, after great review from last year’s session. There are a total of nine speakers, each having 20 slides for 15 seconds. Sniplets of the more interesting topics below:

Free Space (Jane McGonigal): Not really an emerging technology but merely a platform to sniff and generate innovative ideas from the crowd in a forecasting game based on the scenario in 2020 that custom satellites are cheap to built and cost only $99 (iSAT). What would be your strategy?

Cloud Efficiency (Niall Kennedy): Techie term for internet efficiency. With the rapid expansion in Internet usage in recent times, more is required to regulate and perhaps develop a efficiency rating for each website, so as to ensure efficiency use of data resources. Interesting idea to adopt similar concept of energy efficiency rating on Internet usage…

Arduino (Tom Igoe): Announced the launch of Arduino MEGA which has evolved with improvement in memory, pins allocations. Fyi, Arduino is the next generation of open sourced electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware. Is this the next Intel???

Paradox of Identity: Cloud Computing is Evil (Brad Templeton): Brad discuss how users are gradually shifting from the use of local PC (data stored in your hard disk) to time sharing (Network/ internet based). Personal data/ information are now being shared in the Internet, simply by having a user signed up to gmail, yahoo, facebook, etc. Now that your data is out there, where is the security in all this? Will there be any policy regulating the use of such data? The bigger question here would be: Who owns the data – you?

Even in the midst of downturn, developments like these keep USA on the fringe of innovations and breakthroughs. I’m intrigued that there are people out there willing to take such leaps of faith to start something like that, to bring “sci-fi” into reality sort of. Very niche, very forward looking.

The Singularity University was recently announced at the TED conference this week. It is established based on Ray Kurzweil’s futuristic The Singularity is Near – a very non-mainstream ‘forecast’ on AI, robotics and what future human life would be like. The SU is sponsored by wealthy individuals who support scientific breakthroughs (X-Prize, Google, VCs etc), and had a founding conference comprising who’s-who luminaries in the futuring and ‘extension of humanity and technology’ fields. SU aims to bring together graduate students working in different fields, to look at same problems from different lenses for new breakthroughs. Eg. Nanotech student gets expert briefings in futures studies & finance etc amongst 10 disciplines. Faculty includes science celebrities, and students are also expected to pitch ideas to nearby VCs for funding. SU is located in one of NASA’s research centres in Silicon Valley.

See too, recent Business Week article on this.

Newsweek recently published a pretty cool article titled “Saving the World for a Latte”

The article tracks the story of RecycleBank, a 4 year-old green-tech startup out of New York that runs a recycling business. Unlike traditional recyclers,  RecycleBank is marked by all the exciting elements of tech upstarts and market creativity - ”high-tech, RFID, frequent flier program, instant transmission to web, coupon redemption, new york, venture capitalists, silicon valley, creative fee generation (from advertisers)”.  In essence, the company “doesn’t run the trucks”, instead “They are a marketing tool”.

I must say also that I love the redemption and frequent flier idea (much like credit cards and airlines) and am tickled by the ways that customers try to cheat (they must have a lot of unwanted bowling balls)!!

Below is an interesting excerpt from the article:

…. as a white truck rumbles through this working-class suburb of Boston, there’s something overshadowing the roadside cans: huge 96-gallon maroon recycling containers. At each stop, workers wheel the bins onto hydraulic lifts on the back of the truck. They pull a lever and a clanging mix of beer bottles, soup cans, milk jugs and newspapers spills into the truck. Before swallowing up that waste, the high-tech system scans radio-frequency ID tags embedded in the containers and weighs how much each household recycled that week. That data is instantly transmitted to a Web site, where it’s converted into points that homeowners can redeem for discounts at stores like CVS or on national brands like Coke. Basically, it’s like a frequent-flier program for recyclers.