Tim starts off with a well-known quote from William Gibson: "The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet." This leads to his "big hairy, audacious goal (otherwise known as a mission statement: Changing the world by capturing the knowledge of innovators. One of his key strategies for doing this is "leveraging alpha geeks."
Here's the editorial filters that Tim uses:
- Disruptive technology
- Technology uptake is accelerating
- Its on a long term trend (he quote Ray Kruzweiler: "It has to make sense in the world in which you finish, not the one in which you start.")
- Grassroots support--bottom up
- Inspires passion
- Has deeper social interactions
- There's a real need for information
- Has professional practitioners
- A possible business ecology
Here are some things that are hitting Tim's radar:
- Amazon Web Services. I think whats interesting here is that this is a social networking issue, not a web services issue. Amazon had already bought off on affiliate marketing and thus had a mind-set that was conducive to building web services for their platform. Companies that are having a tough time understanding Web services probably don't have a culture that values interacting with partners in a networked way. Tim has AWS up as an example of a larger trend: creating web-facing databases that can be repurposed. In other words, the same thing I'm talking about in Enabling Web Services.
- Tim Pozar is now talking about the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. This is a community network that has great potential for public safety. We, of course, have this problem in spades in Utah where there is so much rural area.
- Andy Phelps is a professor at RIT. He's showing a player user community web-site called Phank. He's not associated with them, but thinks they are an example of an interesting phenomenon. Phank is a online community, called a guild, built around the game Everquest. They have built a community that is stronger than the bond to the game and so they're looking at other games to migrate to. They fund their work by playing the game and selling information about it on eBay to other players.
