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From China

We were talking to the drummer Gilbert, when minutes later, one of our bags was gone. The surveillance camera footage showed one of two chinese guys pulling the bag from under the table.

I lost my entire DSLR cam setup, two mobile phones, wallet. We did file a report with the police (which was another experience and a half), but knew that the situation was hopeless.

Apart from the gadgets, I was miserable about losing hours of work — just the previous day, I had spent half of an evening covering Shanghai’s speed juxtaposed with the old. All gone.

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As with every change, the outcome is at the minimum a duality and everything in between. If the at least, the opposite poles can be identified (at any particular instant — this is important), then it allows us to break down the problem into simpler blocks.

As an example — if a hundred cellphones are distributed in a village in Ethiopia — the two possible outcomes could be:a) A hyper-connected village, and a range of services / economic changes that emerge as a consequence.b) the cellphones are never used for productivity at all — they are used a jewelries instead.

The actual outcome would be a combination of the above opposites, of course.In that sense, if I try and analyze the outcome of an innovation such as a heart device with open api —

•  positive: a range of middle layer services that promote life — such as: heart beat based art creator, romance analyzer (does her heart beat faster when she’s around me?), stress analyzer (during war?), longer life expectancy, music which modifies according to the heart rate (different music during sleep and jogging), better monitoring of food quality…. there is literally no end. 
• negative: a range of possibilities that destroy life — such as: freaky weapons of mass destruction, employee exhaustion monitoring, mass scale deaths due to machine failures…

By tomorrow morning, I will think of fifty more possibilities. Of course, I am just ranting… early morning coffee induced rant. There is no point to this rant, since both of the above will happen sooner or later. The fact is, we are living a cyberpunk novel… we just don’t see it yet.

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“The surprise came in the form of a preview of an unfinished product: The iTV, a small, sleek box that will let people wirelessly move digital movies, TV shows, music videos and photos from personal computers to big-screen televisions.

‘I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea of where we are going,’ Jobs concluded after talking for about an hour.

Jobs called the iTV ‘the missing piece,’ and marks the clearest signal how Apple plans to leverage the success of content through iTunes (more than 1.5 billion songs have been downloaded and 220 television shows are available) and the broad appeal of the iPod (more than 60 million have been sold) to stake its claim in your living room. Jobs said the iTV will be available in early 2007 for $299….

…..

Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, noted that Apple’s new device will let people move videos from their computers to their televisions using only six buttons — versus the 56 needed for the Windows XP Media Center, which was released almost two years ago with similar ambitions to be a hub for home entertainment.”

Is this the beginning of the end of Satellite Television and media monopoly? I think so.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/15503747.htm

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