NASA Press Release:
“2013 NASA Advanced Technology Phase I Concepts Selected For Study
WASHINGTON — NASA has selected 12 proposals for study under Phase I of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, which aims to turn science fiction into fact. Continue reading
Most Fortune 500, OK even Fortune 2000 companies, are not US companies. They may have been founded and incubated in the US. Their founders were or are US citizens. The technology may have come from the US government. However, many and soon most will be global organizations.
These global companies focus on making money for their shareholders. They make money where there is demand for their goods and services. They may have started in the US, but now are global. There are many implications to this, that is causing denial, disbelief, misunderstanding, and social unrest.
These global companies are offshoring core processes and outsourcing their intellectual property to economies where there is demand and revenue.
The implication of the above is that jobs are moving to where there is demand for their products and services.
These companies are not loyal to local communities or constituencies. Local communities in the US that incubated these companies are often in disbelief. They feel these home grown companies owe the community taxes, employment, and support of its citizens. It’s not working out this way.
This is a huge problem. It’s a revelation to the 99 percenters. It’s known and accepted by the 1 percenters. The 1 percenters know and accept that we live in a global economy that both Democrats and Republicans endorsed in the free trade mantra all boats and economies will rise. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Much of the world prospered. We’ve largely stagnated.
… In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:
With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially. Facebook got college students. LinkedIn got the white collar professionals. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.
Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm. Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.
Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.
From http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/ieeecw/issues/2012-05-02-email.html:
IEEE ComputerWise
Software, Systems and IT: News and Analysis May 2, 2012
Two US Appeal Court Opinions Throw Software-related-theft Laws a Curve
by Robert N. Charette
The U.S. Congress may have to revamp laws that ostensibly set the rules regarding what constitutes illegal activity when it comes to information technology. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the conviction of someone charged with stealing proprietary data from a former employer, reasoning that the wording of the law that prosecutors said he violated points specifically to hacking into computer systems and not the misappropriation of information residing there by an otherwise authorized user. A day later, a separate appeals court overturned the conviction of another defendant whose lawyers successfully appealed his conviction for violating that same law and two others—again arguing that the facts of the case didn’t fit the wording of the criminal statutes.
From http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/ieeecw/issues/2012-05-02-email.html:
IEEE ComputerWise
Software, Systems and IT: News and Analysis May 2, 2012
Two US Appeal Court Opinions Throw Software-related-theft Laws a Curve
by Robert N. Charette
The U.S. Congress may have to revamp laws that ostensibly set the rules regarding what constitutes illegal activity when it comes to information technology. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the conviction of someone charged with stealing proprietary data from a former employer, reasoning that the wording of the law that prosecutors said he violated points specifically to hacking into computer systems and not the misappropriation of information residing there by an otherwise authorized user. A day later, a separate appeals court overturned the conviction of another defendant whose lawyers successfully appealed his conviction for violating that same law and two others—again arguing that the facts of the case didn’t fit the wording of the criminal statutes.