tcotav

Video “On the Brink”.  20-minute piece on the future in a networked world.  Talks with some people who made things happen in the last 15 years as well as some at the forefront now.

One interesting inclusion was CCP Games in Iceland and Eve Online.  They don’t get a lot of airtime, but it was definitely smart to include <opinion>one of the smartest, most advanced MMO</opinion> in existence…  The marketing director of CCP was talking about how games will become more prevalent (and yes, giving the verbal nod that it was in her company’s best interests for this to be true) as people’s lives become that much more mundane.  Another solution, of course, is take your new mobile freedom and live a little ;-)

Great point though — many kids are growing up now with the world accessible to them via a small tablet in their hands.  They can watch any movie they want (assuming someone has ripped it and posted it), find any text they want, research, talk.  We can talk to our heroes in real-time. 

Very interesting idea for farming inside of stackable used shipping containers.  Read the comments for an almost better slice of information than the article itself.

Looking at the picture showing the inside of the container immediately screamed “wasted space”.  Imagine that whole space filled top to bottom with shelves of plants, soil, plus light vertically stacked inside.  Imagine the curation of the plants is taken care of by a very simple set of robots on wires/rails that move along the length/width of the container.  Think of those little spray hoses in the produce section of your grocery store.  Imagine then that you could mount small color cameras to keep an eye on all of the plants.  The same cameras could easily measure the growth of a given plant.  The soil could be monitored … well, the same way that it is now.  The same soil probes could monitor moisture and control the watering robots overhead as well as the sun lighting system. 

You would have full data on your environment — what works, what doesn’t.  Full records of environmental air and soil conditions, completely controllable by the farmers.  You would have records of the plant growth over time.  How sexy would all of those graphs be?

Pretty remarkable.  His point about the leadership of all the companies being in their 50s and 60s and watching from a distance the intarwubz revolution is spot on.  Its pretty hilarious that he’s telling them this to their faces.  This line of thought seems especially important to the media companies that are clinging to their printed materials and 730 time slots