TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Tokyo Arcology Proposed

As a sci-fi nerd (see “Slant” and “Queen of Angels“), I’ve long been fascinated by arcologies (wikipedia) - enormous “city within a building” structures designed to include all aspects of live - work, home, recreation, retail, services - within a single structure. Of late, arcology as a design school has been getting much more attention from the green building crowd due to the extreme population density that they allow: density is the easiest way to raise residential efficiency, lower energy consumption, reduce individual’s environmental footprint, and reduce the need for transportation infrastructure and its related issues. Here’s a great link-primer on the benefits of density.

Anyway, Gizmodo has a video proposal for the first real sci-fi arcology proposed for Tokyo bay (via Random Good Stuff): 3000 ft tall, with useable volume equivalent to 24 80-storey towers. It would provide home & work for 750,000 people and as the video notes, would have a transport system as long/extensive as San Francisco’s in 1/50th the area.

A lot of video focuses on the sensationaltastic CGI-friendly question of what would happen if a tsunami struck; don’t sweat that - just focus on the majesty of a structure from the future, built by people that aren’t afraid to push.

arcology, sustainability tokyo

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BBC on RFID / WiFi Gateway - Exactly what I’m talking about - the Semantic World

The BBC has an article today on the utility of combining RFID tags with WiFi for location tracking of people & resources.

Add to that presence-profiles (i.e.: changing your contact preferences based on whether you’re in a meeting room, your office, or the parking garage), and you’ve got the “Semantic World” where people, places, objects, and actions have meaning, properties, and methods - all of which can interact with each other.

I wrote on this a few weeks ago:

There’s a number of trends in technology that have the potential to come together and enable some truly radical changes in our day to day lives. I’d throw out RFID, location-aware devices, and pervasive wifi as primary examples. What I’ve really been hunting for, however, its a way to bring it all together - essentially a small, location-aware RFID-to-WiFi gateway.

Read the rest of that post here.

Sadly the BBC missed my blog post… and the larger implications of this combination of technologies.

bluetooth, gateway, gps, location, presence, rfid, scifi, semantic, semanticweb, semanticworld, web wifi

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An idea for Google or Meebo: IM + Translation = International Nirvana

If you read this and turn it into some kind of acquisition-worthy business, save a slice of the pie for me, OK?

Anyway: quick and simple - follow with me:

1. You know how you can translate a string of text (or a web page) via Google or BabelFish, right?
2. Well… messages in an IM conversation are strings of text.
3. If you can get a web translation service to work fast enough (Google should be able to make this happen if anyone can), then you can translate an IM conversation in REAL TIME.

That is to say, imagine the following usage scenario:

1. Set your language in your profile. In my case “English.”
2. If you’re speaking to someone who’s profile is set in different language (Spanish), the IM software picks that up.
3. The software then translates each side of the conversation into the correct language so that each participant sees the other’s messages in their native tongue. My English gets translated into Spanish, their Spanish into English.
4. This is all transparent: you don’t even see the untranslated messages unless you choose too. As far as you can tell, you’re talking to someone that speaks English.

Ok, so online translators are notoriously quirky in their translations: so be it. If speed can be addressed such that the process doesn’t add too much lag, I could see this being a great tool for business, and for generally furthering conversations across borders & cultures.

Personally, I’d see a natural home for this in Meebo: they’re the greatest innovators in the IM space in my eyes. They’d need access to a fast, scalable, and low cost translation API, however. Google - while not on the edge of the market - has the necessary infrastructure pieces ready to go (GTalk, and their translator), the resources to do it, and the corporate chutzpah to try it regardless of business-case shakiness.

So: what’s your take - is there something to this? Has it been done already?

In other news, AltaVista still exists! Who knew?

altavista, babelfish, culture, gtalk, ideas, im, innovation, language, linguistics, meebo translation

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The Semantic World - properties and methods for the r.w.

There’s a number of trends in technology that have the potential to come together and enable some truly radical changes in our day to day lives. I’d throw out RFID, location-aware devices, and pervasive wifi as primary examples. What I’ve really been hunting for, however, its a way to bring it all together - essentially a small, location-aware RFID-to-WiFi gateway.

Consider the following scenario:

You walk into a meeting room. Your IM presence flips to “busy,” your cellphone switches to silent and direct-to-voicemail, and friends/family/co-workers with access to your schedule can see that you made it to the meeting and how long you’ll be there. When you leave the meeting room, everything flips back, except IM status which flips to “on the road.” You get into a cab, get back to your office, and get out of the cab - payment is automatic. You finally make it back to your desk, at which point IM status changes to available, your phone calls route to your desk phone, and your PC logs itself back in.

Essentially, your identity is projected in a cloud around you (”extended identity”), and it can affect “things” around you, and be affected in turn - i.e.: the act of entering or leaving an area affects you; the act of leaving a cab with which you have a payment agreement affects the cab (it gets paid).

How this is enabled is by applying a software methodology to the larger world - creating a semantic world where a meeting room knows that its a meeting room, a taxicab knows that its a cab and can ask for payment, and your extended identity knows how (generally) to handle interactions that it encounters on your behalf. Each of these “realworld objects” has properties and methods associated with it to enable transactions. There two bits to this:

1. Semantic Infrastructure: For the meeting room above, I’d see the doorway as the semantic infrastructure bit - the frame would have either embedded RFID or Bluetooth infrastrucutre to communicate with the extended identities that pass through it.
2. Extended Identity Profile: A means of projecting and managing your extended identity; your profile would reside online, projected and accessed locally via a smartcard, or cellphone (Bluetooth again).

Anyway - bits and peices of this exist already - cars that don’t need keys, office-access smartcards, etc. But they’re far from pervasive, and built on a frustratingly fragmented infrastructure that doesn’t connect anything to anything else. Getting the technology more widely deployed will require a cheap, open, easily programmable, extensible, and connected device - something akin to the Sun SPOT. Stitching it all together into a useable, single-point-of-access “real world user profile” will require some serious software infrastructure; the company that positions itself to provide that will be 10 steps ahead of the curve.

</end nerdgasm>

bluetooth, gps, rfid, semantic, semantic web sun

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