danah boyd* of Microsoft Research talks to Howard Greenstein at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009. danah‘s research on “social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society” quite well known, and she joined Microsoft Research in January.
At PDF her talk on The Not So Hidden Politics of Class Online was well received. In this Video we discuss that topic as well as other thoughts around how Social Networks allow us to connect and interact.
danah will be a speaker at this year’s Supernova conference.
Chris is both an early and late stage investor, and has invested in Photobucket and Twitter among many others. He also headed special initiatives at Google and advised the Obama campaign. (There’s more of a profile about Chris at Crunchbase.)
In this discussion he talks about several of his investments, including Twitter, phone service company Twillio, stealth-mode company Small Batch and more. He notes that all of these are enabled by the ability to host the sites in the cloud, and scale without needing to own their own infrastructure.
We hope to hear more from Chris at the Supernova conference this winter.
JP Rangaswami is the Managing Director of BT Design, a unit of British Telecom. He’s also much more than that. A long time blogger and Web 2.0 technology advocate, he was named as one of the top “Agenda Setters” by Silicon.com, above Ray Kurzweil, Craig Mundie of Microsoft, and Howard Stringer of Sony.
At the 140 Characters Conference in New York last week, I spoke with JP about how Business and Strategy are changing due to ubiquitous networks and new ways to access data. He noted that “Things that were previously synchronous, like voice communications, can now be asynchronous, and things that were previously asynchronous [like knowing people status, location or current work] can be synchronous.” There’s much more in the video.
JP Rangaswami is one of the many voices participating in the conversation here at Supernova Hub and at Supernova2009.
According to NetworkWorld and ReadWriteWeb, Google has reserved one million phone numbers via Level 3. NetworkWorld’s John Fontana writes:
“Google last month reserved 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, signaling that it may finally be ready to roll out its long-anticipated Google Voice service.
The free service, announced in March, lets users unify their phone numbers, allowing them to have a single number through Google Voice that rings a call through to all their phones.
Sources could not say when the 1 million numbers may be assigned. Level 3 has been supplying Google with phone numbers since the introduction of Google Voice, so the 1 million numbers are an indication Google is close to adding a significant amount of users.”
The question: How will a broader rollout of Google Voice affect/integrate/expand the Android mobile user base?
The big news today was the official release of the iPhone 3Gs, which plugged a number of the significant technical holes in the iPhone platform (cut-and-paste, camera quality, video, etc.) that had been the weak spots in the platform since its launch. (N.b. I received mine via UPS this morning, and was able to navigate the upgrade process without any significant hitches.) While most of the features are incremental upgrades, both the camera improvements (including video) and the speed improvements are definitely noticeable.
Although the iPhone seems to get a disproportionate share of the media attention, the market is definitely not a one-horse race. Palm has sold over 100,000 of its new Palm Pre devices, which became available on June 6 of this year. The Pre is a gorgeous, capable device that has the one thing the iPhone doesn’t — a slide-out, physical keyboard. Engadget says “Yes, this is epic stuff. The Pre (and its accompanying operating system) could likely decide the fate of the company largely credited with ushering in the age of the do-everything phone. Since Palm’s announcement at CES this year, news surrounding the Pre has been a veritable whirlwind of activity: rumors, half-truths, hate, love, fear-mongering, fanboyism, rampant gadget-lust… and even a little late night celebrity for the pint-sized phone. Finally the time has come to put rubber to road and get into the guts of this thing once and for all. Can the Pre and webOS live up to the hype — the kind of hype we haven’t seen since the launch of the original iPhone — or do they snap under the pressure?” Indeed, the Pre may be the make-or-break moment for Palm, which ruled the roost in the Personal Digital Assistant market for so long, but has seen its fortunes decline as the smartphone platform absorbed all the primary capabilities of what had previously been a standalone device.
Not to be outdone, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) announced earnings on Thursday, noting that it moved 7.8 million new BlackBerry devices, signed 3.8 million new subscriber accounts and raked in $3.42 billion in revenue for their first quarter. (Note that this means RIM moved twice as many BlackBerries as Apple did iPhones during the quarter.) Geek.com says: “[Research firm NPD] said that smartphone category grew its share of the overall mobile phone market six percent annually, having jumped from 17 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to nearly one quarter (23 percent) of the entire mobile phone market. According to Rubin, this serves as clear indication of the rising popularity of the smartphone category that, by many analysts’ estimates, is already reshuffling the entire market. ‘Even in the challenging economy, consumers are migrating toward web-capable handsets and their supporting data plans to access more information and entertainment on the go,’ Rubin noted.”
Handset giant Nokia is in the game as well, not surprisingly. Their Nokia N97 entrant also shipped this month, and carries forward touches like a high-end camera that earlier models such as the N95 sported. Gartner reports that Nokia shipped 60.9 million smartphones in 2008, and carried a global 43.7% market share…more than twice as much as nearest-competitor RIM.
So what does this mean? It means that the network is changing, dramatically. Nearly one quarter of the new mobile devices coming on line are smartphones, with a huge year-over-year jump in the rate of change. Capabilities in the areas of performance and storage seem to be doubling yearly. Integration with social networks, content sharing sites, chat and other social features are being built right into the platform. And, perhaps most importantly, the explosion in application development for the devices (led by the 50,000+ apps in the Apple iTunes App Store) indicate both developer embrace and customer uptake of the mobile device as a powerful – and perhaps soon-to-be primary – means of connecting with the network.
John Borthwick is Founder and CEO of Betaworks, which builds, buys and invests in early stage companies relating to the real-time web. In this interview, captured after he spoke at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference in New York, John discusses his views of the direction the real time web is going. As Betaworks’ portfolio includes Twitter, Bit.ly, StockTwits, TipJoy, and more, John is in a somewhat unique position to predict how many of us will interact with the real time stream.
Borthwick has been in the internet space for a very long time, having sold his 1994 company WP Studios to AOL’s Digital Cities back in 1997. His rise to Senior Vice President of Alliances and Technology Strategy for Time Warner Inc. was aidede by his keen insight into trends and his ability to be a little ahead of the market.
We hope to hear more of John’s insights at Supernova 2009.
UPDATE: John has been scheduled to speak at the Tech Crunch Real Time Stream Crunchup. After interviewing him, I can see why he’s in demand to talk about the real-time web.
Howard Greenstein from the SupernovaHub team is there with video camera in hand. We’ll have some video highlights later this week. Subscribe to the feed or to the Twitter stream to make sure you don’t miss them.
Back in 2002, I thought it was modestly innovative to hold a conference where online interactions were a core part of the experience, participants helped to co-create the content, information flowed in and out of the event in real-time, and the subject matter ranged across traditional industry boundaries. Modestly, because those developments seemed inevitable in an increasingly connected world. Yet here we are in 2009, and I still get asked about those features of Supernova, as though they were wild and novel. I haven’t changed my view about inevitability. And frankly, Supernova has moved forward a great deal since 2002.
Today, with so many fantastic online tools and information sources, a conference as an isolated physical experience is an anachronism. Gathering the right people in one location is still extremely valuable. Some conversations and insights only coalesce from human proximity in time and space. But here’s the crucial point: those conversations neither originate nor terminate at the physical event. They percolate through posts and Tweets and status updates, re-emerge at other events, and inform decisions in the real world.
After all, we’re living in the Network Age. Virtually everything is connected. Openness and sharing win. Platforms are key. These are insights Supernova has been built around for eight years. Going forward, Supernova itself must incorporate the lessons its program promotes. Two years ago, we started the Supernova Conversation Hub. Now we take the next logical step, and deeply integrate conversational social media with the conference resources. Welcome to the Supernova Hub!
This new Hub is designed to be a one-stop shop for insights on the many overlapping threads that highlight the transition to the Network Age. It’s going to make the conference better, and it’s going to make the experience for those who don’t attend the conference better as well. I’m thrilled that Chris Carfi, Isabel Walcott Hillborn, and Howard Greenstein are working with me to build the Hub. We’ll be looking for volunteer contributors and others willing to share some of their time and expertise with the extended Supernova community. And we’ll be monitoring and revising this experiment as we go along. Supernova is perpetually a work in progress. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So, let us know what you think, what we should be talking about, and who else should join the conversation. And stay tuned for more information about Supernova 2009 in December. We’ve got some fantastic speakers lined up already. And thanks to my time on the Obama Adminstration’s Presidential Transition Team, we’ll be in a unique position to bring together the exciting innovations in Washington DC and Silicon Valley.
Networks are changing. Supernova will continue to change and evolve as well. We welcome your participation in the Supernova community.
David Weinberger, a writer and fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society is interviewed by Howard Greenstein about the theme of Change Networks for Supernova 2009. They discuss the concept of the Web “exceptionalism,” the idea that the Web, as opposed to some other media, is really a game-changing phenomenon. Continuing, they consider how things like the “End-to-End” principal make the Net different than other media, and how the hyperlink changes the book culture of the past.
In this part of the interview, we discover the third piece in which the web is exceptional – the ability to allow collaboration on a scale previously unprecedented. David and Howard also discuss the ways that networks connect us, and note the fact that there’s a need for new words to describe friends (because of the use of the word “friend” in social networking services) is yet another reason to consider the shift in our society that the web is causing. Finally the two discuss “Networks for Change,” specifically how the Obama administration’s shift towards transparency is changing how governments react to people.
According to 
The big news today was the 
Although the iPhone seems to get a disproportionate share of the media attention, the market is definitely not a one-horse race. Palm has sold over 100,000 of its new Palm Pre devices, which became available on June 6 of this year. The Pre is a gorgeous, capable device that has the one thing the iPhone doesn’t — a slide-out, physical keyboard. 
Not to be outdone, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) 
Handset giant Nokia is in the game as well, not surprisingly. Their Nokia N97 entrant also shipped this month, and carries forward touches like a high-end camera that earlier models such as the N95 sported. Gartner reports that 
The 140 Characters conference is taking place today in New York, and the online buzz is reaching a crescendo. Here’s where to follow what’s happening:
