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tecnologia, economia digital, identidade virtual, inteligência artificial, redes sociais, sistemas, integração, pessoas, eventos, tecnologia

domingo, 24 de outubro de 2010

O que Tecnologia, Idéias e Sociedade tem em comum?


Não sei o quanto é possivel ficar sem uma interação tecnológica nos dias de hoje, sei que não é possível viver sem tecnologia para sempre. Até mesmo os mais remotos vilarejos tem - salvo certas exceções muito específicas - tem conhecimento de que, de alguma forma, a tecnologia muda o mundo lá fora - esse mesmo mundo em que todos vivemos.

Recentemente encontrei uma pesquisa da prestigiada revista The Economist - que dispensa apresentação - questionando a importancia da computação para o desenvolvimento tecnológico do século XX.

É claro que eu concordo.

Me atrai toda a frase que ressalta a influência, relevância, poder ou abrangência da tecnologia em todo e qualquer aspecto da vida moderna, mas a computação em si existe desde a década de 1980, houve somente 20 anos de computação no século passado, e por sua vez, em 2010, temos um mundo surpreendentemente mais conectado do que nunca. E assim será  para sempre, acredite.

Vale a pena gastar alguns minutos com as publicações da The Economist (www.theeconomist.com).

Meu pai tinha um XP500, tela verde, teclado e tela acoplados e disquete de 5,5 polegadas, foi assim que eu conheci o mundo tecnológico, a partir daí a velicodade das mudanças me fez entender que nunca haveria um fim para aquilo que se chamava computação, e que na verdade era um novo estilo de vida que surgia no final do século XX.
Mas a maior surpresa veio dos meus filhos, que já são operadores de iPhone Pleno, já sabem ficar navegando no You Tube pelo mouse do notebook, e já reconhecem o potencial da tecnologia em suas vidinhas ( 4 e 2 anos de vida).
O que o futuro fará com a vida dessa geração?

Outro assunto que me parece claro como a água, apesar do cunho futurista/progressista que o acompanha e motiva, é o fato de que a tecnologia vem para fortalecer a sociedade, extinguir algumas diferenças, nivelar a existência de todos que tem @cesso, e promover o bem estar comum, fortalecendo a liberdade e a individualidade - as vezes prejudicial - e muitos outros campos da vida em sociedade.

Uma referência muito produtiva para o conceito de tecnologia vs. "bem estar comum" - a que me refiro no parágrafo acima - é o livro "Poverty at tho Bottom of the Pyramid", de C. K. Prahalad, de origem indiana, professor nos EUA - em Wharton -, que desenvolveu um profundo e interessante estudo do mercado indiano e de algumas iniciativas regionais mundo afora - Casas Bahia incluido.

Imagino que no Brasil existe espaço para muito estudo nessa mesma linha de pensamento, assim como espaço para inesgotáveis oportunidades nesses mercados, que merecem outros posts e novas idéias.

O mundo que se abre na base da piramide vai, com sua movimentação social, mudar a cara do mundo, mudar a forma de distribuição do que hoje é uma pirâmide social para um diamante social, criando uma camada média maior que base e topo, homogeneizando a oferta de produtos e serviços, abrindo um grande número de novos nichos, com segmentação mais detalhada e profunda.

Bom, por hoje me dou por satisfeito em "estressar" o canal, que é a internet, com minhas bobagens e considerações. Lembre-se que o intuito não é agradar ou acertar a verdade, mas somente me manter são enquanto vivo.

Mas para encerrar, o que essas 3 coisas tem em comum?
Tecnologia, Idéias e Sociedade, todas são inesgotáveis em sua escência.

terça-feira, 6 de abril de 2010

The Tipping Point

Today i had the pleasure of discover some ideas about the theroy of epidemics, reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

One of the most interesting concepts, so far, are the 3 rules of epidemics:
1 - The Law of the few, where 20% respond fot 80% of all the occurencies
2 - The Stiskiness Factor, what make a message remain in our minds, instead of many other approaches, what is the stickiness of such a subject.
3 - Context Matter. We are always a product of the enviroment. Whom and Where are we matters more than genetical aspect.

Besides a long discusion about what an epidemic is or is not, we are talking about a thing close to a trend, the event of success that spread such a thing infecting many people all over the place, a given market or enviroment.

An excellent call for those interested in marketing or personal behavior.

segunda-feira, 29 de março de 2010

Cracking Facebook's Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer

Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementors of a new open source protocol called Salmon, which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to "@janedoe@twitter" and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It's a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it's part of your phone provider's network or not.

Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold.

Because Salmon is an open standard, any service can implement it without formal business relationships, and Google Buzz is expected to enter the Salmon ecosystem next. If a substantial portion of the technical community implements Salmon, Facebook could be under a lot of pressure to do so as well. (As it was with OpenID, for example.) If you could still message your friends inside and outside Facebook, it would be a lot easier for innovative new alternative networks to lure you away from the one big site that 400 million people use today.

The Players

Evan Prodromou of Status.net says his service has 1.2 million users, hosts 12,000 sites on its cloud and is adding 800 sites per week. It's a hot little startup that's fast implementing new technical protocols and making high profile hires. Status.net began rolling out Salmon support earlier this month but today announced that it was working with Cliqset on displaying the cross-network communication. "We've got disparate implementations communicating well using this open standard for cross-network conversations," Prodromou said today, "It's the first time!"

Cliqset is better at trailblazing innovation than user acquisition but is a very respected member of the technical community working to create social network interoperability.

Google Buzz appears to have seen a lukewarm public reaction to its launch but is most disruptive because of its support for open data standards. Salmon is still listed in the "coming soon" stage of the Buzz roadmap.

Today's news isn't just about those players, it's about the Salmon protocol that would allow any social network to participate. Salmonwas developed primarily by Google employee John Panzer. If you've seen the way that the Echo commenting system displays Tweets, trackbacks and other social media mentions below blog posts, that's the kind of model that Salmon aims to make open source.

Interoperability as Foundation for Choice, Innovation, User Control

Facebook's near monopoly on mainstream social networking means that users have limited options in how they experience social networking and they have to play by Facebook's rules. Not everyone likes how Facebook changes its rules, especially its privacy policy.

Likewise, though Facebook is incredibly quick to innovate, it's generally assumed that a market with more than one competitor gives all companies in question more incentive to try to win the hearts of users.

Simply put, if you could leave Facebook and still communicate with people using Facebook (you can't today) then leaving Facebook would be a lot easier and more social networks would have reason to invest in building a compelling service for you to use. If there was more than one meaningful option, those services would compete to build the best social network they possibly could. And Facebook would have more reason to be careful when considering dramatic changes in things like its Privacy Policy. Today, where else are you going to go without losing touch with all your friends?

That's why interoperability is important and that's why it's a big deal that two small social networks used by early adopters have pushed Salmon-based interoperability out into the wild.

sexta-feira, 26 de março de 2010

Time's 10 Tech Trends for 2010

This text was send in an email from Alvaro Seixas, friend of mine.
Enjoy
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1. Location, Location, Location
The biggest rumble down south was between a pair of location-based gaming services: Austin-based Gowalla and New York-based Foursquare. Both services are similar — users "check in" to real-world locations through their smartphones and are rewarded with badges and discounts for frequenting hotspots. Foursquare is the established favorite and has a larger user base, but Gowalla led a strong insurgency, with a slickly designed iPhone application and a heavy presence at the festival. Who won? We'll call this one a draw, as many festival-goers used both services simultaneously to locate their friends and track down parties.

Gowalla and Foursquare both face the same challenge ahead — breaking outside of the tech-heavy communities on the coasts to become a tool in everyday life. Its not an easy road. The two services must deal with privacy concerns (although they track your location only when you give them permission) while fighting to build partnerships with merchants and brands to help encourage skeptical users to give them a try. But even if these services remain niche distractions, location isn't going away anytime soon. The Web's social giants also want you to start sharing your whereabouts: Twitter has already added the ability to add location to tweets, and Facebook reportedly plans to roll out a similar feature in their status updates before the summer.

2. Building Platforms, Not Websites

Twitter has never been about going to Twitter.com — the website itself is pretty barebones, a fact founder Evan Williams freely admitted in his March 14 SXSW keynote. The microblogging service has gone one step further with their announcement of @Anywhere, a platform to help publishers and web designers build Twitter features into their own websites. The service, which will launch with 13 beta partners including the New York Times and YouTube, lets Twitter users post messages and find new people to follow without ever needing to leave a partner's website.

While details were scant, it is Twitter's first stab at matching the success of Facebook's Connect platform, which lets users sign in and interact with websites using their Facebook profile and data. But Mark Zuckerberg's social giant isn't resting on its laurels either — at an event for Facebook Developers, Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis characterized the company as a "service" rather than a Web destination. If you read between the lines, that means that Facebook is likely going to further de-emphasize the importance of going to Facebook.com and focus on making your Facebook profile a crucial part of everything you do on the Web.


3. Social Gaming

One new area where you'll see Facebook's new platform is in console video games. Developers showed off demos of games that had Facebook Connect built in, allowing you to share scores, statistics and even a personalized gaming highlight reel to your Facebook profile, direct from your Xbox 360 or Playstation. The latest generation of games on Apple's iPhone include the same sort of features, designed to let you share your achievements with friends.

But beyond that, the games themselves will become more social. In 2009, the success of games like Zynga's Farmville (estimated, by some counts, to have more players than Twitter has users) proved to developers that there's a winning strategy in targeting games less to gamers and more to users looking for fun ways to interact with their friends. And Farmville is really only ostensibly social — you can visit your friend's farm and offer rudimentary help, but that's about it. The next generation of online games — like the popular Bejeweled Blitz — will offer richer, more direct competition and game play between users.


4. Augmented Reality
Conceptually, augmented reality isn't anything new — if you've watched the Olympics or seen a first-down marker during a televised football game, you're familiar with digital overlays enhancing real-life events. But one challenge for 2010 will be harnessing the growing ubiquity of webcams and smartphones to make augmented reality useful as a tool in day-to-day life. One of the best examples yet is the virtual box simulator from the U.S. Postal Service, which taps into your webcam to let you figure out what size box is needed to ship an an item through overlaying a semi-transparent 3D model of the box. Other examples for 2010 range from a John Mayer music videoto Xbox's upcoming Project Natal.

Augmented reality is a hot trend in iPhone apps as well. They include offerings that let shoot you friends with virtual lasers in the iPew application or tracking down your parked car with Car Finder. Gimmicky? A bit. But developers are only just beginning to get a handle on the types of implementations that are possible.


5. Living in the Cloud

Get ready for your files to start living online, rather than on your computer. One of the most highly anticipated speakers at SXSWi was Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, a popular European music service that offers millions of songs streaming on-demand. Launching the service in the U.S. has been complicated by licensing issues with record companies, and there was hope Ek would announce a U.S. launch date at the festival. (He didn't.) Still, the service — and competing U.S. friendly offerings like Mog — manage to make the iTunes model of having a library of downloaded music look downright anachronistic. Who needs to rip CDs or buy songs when nearly any song imaginable is available, providing you have an active Internet connection? The argument becomes even more compelling when mobile applications are taken into account — Mog announced that its app will roll out in spring, with a subscription fee of $10/month.

Expect similar revolutions to take shape in video. Netflix already offers a library of thousands of streaming videos, and Major League Baseball lets subscribers watch any game on-demand. Rumors that cable networks such as ESPN are considering offering themselves through platforms like the Xbox are keeping the idea of taking TV into the cloud on the front burner.


6. Birth of the Backchannel

The growth of sites like Twitter and Facebook has given rise to the idea that events have both a frontchannel (the Super Bowl, for example) and a backchannel (the live, online discussion from fans watching the game.) The next generation of Web-connected TVs and software will include ways for people to monitor and interact with the conversation happening around an event, filtering live streams in real-time to display the most relevant discussions.

It works on a smaller scale. The best example of the power of the backchannel at SXSW was an inadvertent one. An interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams was wrecked by criticism on Twitter. Festival goers were unimpressed with the questions posed to Williams by moderator Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review and tweeted their displeasure before leaving the interview en masse. In a blog post later, Haque said he wished he had been monitoring the Twitter conversation from on stage.



7. Frictionless Payments
Micropayments were a $1 billion industry in 2009. If they hope to grow in 2010, these types of transactions need to be made easier. One of the slickest implementations was a application from Paypal, which lets users "bump" their iPhones or iPods to authorize a transaction between accounts. Owe a friend for pizza? Click your phones together and the debt's resolved. A startup called Venmo (now in private beta) goes even one step further. Friends can issue payments with text messages or create a special list of people who they trust, who are then allowed to pull money from their account at will.

8. Social Objects

The Web has made people more social. But what about objects? That's the thinking behind Stickybits, a startup launched at SXSW that adds a social layer to barcodes. Using the company's Android or iPhone application, users can scan barcodes, attach a piece of information — either a video, note or audio recording — and receive a notification whenever someone else scans the same object. Stickybits also produces unique, one-off barcodes of its own that, when attached to a postcard, for example, add digital memory to static objects. The company sees the codes being used in everything from product reviews to including a digital copy of your resume on your business card.

9. iPad
The buzz about Apple's upcoming tablet computing device continued at SXSWi. Even though very few in attendance had even held an iPad (the first models will ship in April), there was still a great deal of discussion on how the device would impact gaming, web browsing and print media. With developers still racing to put the first generation of applications together at launch, there were very few concrete examples on hand. One exception? Wired gave a full video demo of how they plan to port their magazine to the iPad, which received an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd on hand.

10. A Richer Web

The most controversial aspect of the iPad is its lack of support for the Flash plugin, a ubiquitous part of the Internet that powers everything from online games to sites like Hulu. Part of the reason Apple thinks it can leave out Flash is that the next generation of web coding, HTML 5, is already in use on the Web. HTML is the language most websites are created in, and this latest generation of standards includes tools for developers to include video on their site and build rich, full-featured online applications without requiring users to download and install a plugin like Flash.

One obstacle to implementation? People who won't upgrade their browsers. Older versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox are still the most popular browsers in use on the web and aren't capable of displaying HTML 5 content. Developers won't be able to include many HTML 5 features in their websites until the vast majority of users upgrade to one of the latest generation of browsers, like Google Chrome or the upcoming Internet Explorer 9.



quinta-feira, 18 de março de 2010

A organização das organizações

Não é tão fácil quanto parece.

São muitos milhares, e em muitos casos milhões em ativos diversos sob responsabilidade de um CIO. Portanto não pode ser inviavel ou dificil obter informações minimamente precisas sobre as tecnologias, os protocolos, sistemas, maquinas, serviços, processos e infra estrutura empregada no local de trabalho.

As estações precisam de manutenção, os sevidores precisam de atenção, sistemas precisam ser atualizados, recursos controlados, monitorados e planejados, informações extraidas com precisão, lojas, agencias, quiosques, PDVs, o comportamento dos clientes, projetos, projetos e mais projetos... para tudo isso espera-se ao menos uma ação complementar: a documentação.

Em sua forma mais crua, A ação de documentar.
Escrever sobre aquilo em que se trabalha ou trabalhou.

Especificar as estratégias adotadas, as demandas atendidas, as possíveis dependencias existentes e os contatos que integraram a solução.

Mas isso é menos frequente do que se espera.

Muitas vezes abre-se mão desse e de outro recurso de controle para ganhar tempo matando o próximo leão.
Estranho para mim, isso não soa como planejamento.

E muita coisa é deixada para trás.

Por aqueles que deveriam zelar pela sustentação do negócio.

quarta-feira, 17 de março de 2010

Blogar ou não blogar, nada vai mudar

O que mais eu poderia fazer em um momento de solidão, ou de introspecção, que não pensar na vida?
E o que pensar na vida pode me trazer de melhor?
Não sei responder agora. Mas acredito que organizando melhor minhas ideias, chegarei a esse ponto um dia.

Talvez. Não há garantia de nada.

Somente de que, escrevendo, conseguirei me lembrar melhor do que pensava quando ali estive. Tambem poderei organizar melhor minhas ideias, em busca da minha verdadeira persona.
Mas não é meu EU que esta em questão.

Ninguem é perfeito, e trabalhar com isso em mente já é um bom começo.

Voce acredita na relatividade das coisas e dos acontecimentos?
Me refiro ao fato de que, na vida, nenhuma experiencia é igual a outra, nenhum ponto de vista é exatamente semelhante, ninguem realmente acredita em tudo aquilo que defende no seu dia a dia de luta e sobrevivencia, e ainda assim não podemos nos culpar por isso. Até por que culpar é tentar desclassificar o outro, o que fere o espírito da coisa.

A vida é muito confusa para ser explicada em palavras, por mais que se tente (minha opinião pessoal).
E tentar explicar a vida pode ser bastante interessante.

Nossa mente reserva verdades inacessíveis ao nosso consciente. Essas verdades são muito presentes em nossa persona, e não somos capazes de explicar quem somos como um todo (according to Blink, de Malcolm Gladwel).

As pessoas atendem a incentivos, e esses incentivos nos levam a tomar decisões inconscientes, que não estão exatamente em linha com o que esperam (e esperamos) de nós.

Mantenha isso em mente junto com o outro pensamento, vai lhe poupar muita decepção.

Ser quem somos não é facil, e nem deveria ser.

Me despeço desse primeiro post agradecendo sua visita e seus comentários, lembrando que a felicidade não existe até que voce a construa em sua mente, permita-se ser feliz.