FaceBook's IPO, The End Of The Social Web Or The End Of The Beginning Of The Social Web?

FaceBook's announcement of a possible IPO next year is largely seen as the defining moment for the social web. Will going public and thereby having to transparently report and justify activity in every corner of it's business change FaceBook's approach to innovation?  The thrust and parry cycle of privacy incursion and backlash backpeddling will have to change in some way as FB goes public.  It is this cycle that in part powered the success of FaceBook, moving large enough numbers of people into the social web as we know it(and a certain subset of users off FaceBook). Transparency and the influence of Wall St., could make the company hesitant, possibly hardening now fluid UI features(and privacy policies) into dependable, Ad earnings friendly utilities. It will be interesting to see what kind of floor and/or ceiling develops for others in the social web as FaceBook's stock price weighs in on every change to their product.  FaceBook will now have a more complex balancing act. The tradeoff between probing our willingness to give up more and more personal information in exchange for greater connecteness, will now have to compete with responsibilities to shareholders. 

If we see a solidifying of features post IPO, FaceBook will have provided a line in the sand, a before and after period,  much like the moment the Telephone or Radio made enough of an impact to change everything going forward. 

Palm Pilot to CDMA cellphone Data Dock

Around 1998 I thought it would be cool to snap my Qualcomm Thinphone and Palm Pilot together to create what we now call a Smart Phone. Created the short concept video to raise some internal $ to have a prototype built. The QCP Thinphone and Palm Pilot connected through a COM port, which allowed the Palm Pilot to treat the cellular IS-95 data connection like a 14.4kbps modem. Estimated cost of the Data Dock accessory was less than $100. 

A couple years after prototyping this concept, Qualcomm released the pDQ, which combined a CDMA modem with Palm Pilot hardware, running Palm OS 3.0 I believe.  

Millimeter Scale Computer & Bio Power Source

Photo Credit: Greg Chen

This 1mm computer mentioned on CNET promises to enable really exciting implant sensor control and communication applications. The article does not really go into how this chip would be powered, apart from mentioning batteries or solar panels, which for bio apps would not be very practical. A few months ago I ran across an article covering research into a glucose based electrity generation system, which could allow this tiny computer to draw all the power it needs from the body. I can imagine having one of these implanted at birth to monitor a basic set of health sensing devices, with others added perhaps as part of elective or more advanced theraputic implants over our life cycle as needed.

A basic health application of this chip might perform acoustic analysis of our beating heart, counting time between beats, or identifying abnormal electrical signitures of various heart components over time. 

An example of an elective device might be an implant that goes near the ear canal, serving as a sort of sound-card, producing MIDI-like patterns, or synthesizing text to speech for devices located within the body, or outside. 

The number of areas this sort of chip can be applied within the body will be limited only by our imagination. Speaking of imagination, if you find this kind of stuff interesting and you're into Scifi, Acts Of The Apostles a novel by John Sundman is a must-read. You can find the first few chapters of his book and buy the rest on his website http://www.wetmachine.com

P2P Wireless Networking

TechCrunch has a post on Peep Wireless and their CES announcement of a new P2P wireless voice call system. I think going for a voice network using wifi is an admirable goal, but will no doubt have challenges. That said, there is no way to get things like this going without giving it a try.

You can not account for human behavior when it comes to stuff like this. I remember in the early 90's when people thought that multi-player internet gaming would never work because of the latency of the net. Well, what they did not count on was that folks would simply stay away from game servers that were to laggy. Same thing here, if you have queues from the UI that let you know when you can/cant use the P2P voice, you'll adjust your behavior if there is a significant payoff to using the system. There have to be enough goodies locked up in a system like this to hang in with it when its performance degrades.

I would like to see a small step before going full voice, moving short messages, images between phones in a store & forward mode, where each client/server device accepts files and forwards some of their own. Reminds me of Epizoochory(really? yep, really), or the dispersal of seeds by animals. Imagine all the interesting stuff that would drift around the planet(just encrypt what you want private) when passed by proximity as phones make and break connections in freeway traffic, at the mall, etc. What if your local venue could not only check-in to you, but could tag you with a file that spreads to your friends just by being near them? 

NFC Smart Locks

NFC(Near Field Communication) will enable our phones to talk with things such as gas pumps, vending machines and cash registers, basically anything you might want to transfer money to.

NFC could also allow our phones to interact in new ways with old objects, like say, a door lock. You would hold your phone close to the lock while turning the knob. An electromechanical power circuit converts that turning force into enough energy for about about 300 miliseconds, or about 1/3 of a second processing time. A low power microcontroller within the lock accesses a connected NFC chip containing the locked/unlocked status of the lock. This NFC chip would receive it's power over the air through the short range RF interface with the phone's corresponding NFC device, relaying the unlock code to the lock's microcontroller. The balance of the doorknob turning force would then be used to mechanically move the bolt, opening the door.