Monday, April 14, 2014

open sourcing imagination #2

It's been a while since I penned down my last blog. This is typical me. Gain interest, lose interest, all at a rapid pace. But hey, it's a rapid world out there. Startups form and die, before you even know they were formed. Kickstarter gives us a live, streaming insight into the future, previously folks used to track patents to peep into the future. Nanotechnology is converting the paradigm of humanity from dealing with scarcity to dealing with abundance. My kids do 5 things at the same time using 3 devices and 4 channels. Robots are using evolution algorithms to learn to talk to each other. evolution Algorithm!  You must be kidding me, no one taught me that when I did my double master degrees....

so hey, with all this evolution around me, I am entitled to my own sand dunes of interests....

I was having a kadak chai with a business partner today and I saw his eyes gleaning whilst reflecting on the times we live in. I saw a reflection of my soul in that glean. I feel totally inspired everyday, just with the mere fact that i live in these times. There is entrepreneurship blossoming at every corner of the world, there are people from all walks of life giving wings to their dreams. And technology underpins most of those dreams.  My daughter follows this YouTube superwomen. She is a producer n director of a great show, which is a satire on Indian families dealing with contemporary times. Superwomen has over 1.7 million subscribers. She also does all three roles in her production. The father, the mother and the daughter. A celebrity, an actor, a director of this age.

An idea, a camera, an Internet connection and off you go....

Imagination is now open sourced. You can download thoughts from the stream of information flowing in front of you, convert these thoughts into ideas and start something big.

Here are some of my thoughts,  open sourced, creative commons licenced to build...

Startup cafe

Cities such as dubai could do with startup cafes where people from the innovation ecosystem come to intersect, discuss and build ideas, over a chai n a muffin. Folks with ideas, folks with money, folks with resources and folks with a good appetite. The menu card should not only tweet the trending chai flavours but also hot ideas being liked and under formation in the cafe.  A physical space for human beings to invent, share and eat.  A startup cafe.

Appstores blossoming at a garden near you

A godzillion apps are being built. But hey the big players such as Google and Apple seem to have a monopoly over app stores. Have the times arrived for verticalized app stores? Maybe one for retail, one for travel, one for banking et al. Sharpens the focus and removes latency and friction for someone looking for an app. Best to register those domain names,  just in case the idea picks up..www.ideas.appstore.com!

One second advantage

" I go where the puck is going to be"  the one second advantage of prediction. An art a science .. a game changer. Perhaps the next ecosystem for India and Indian companies to nurture. Ingredients : math, science, computing, art all mixed together and then delivered at scale. I would start with data science courses in the schools n universities to build capabilities ground up, just like we did with computer engineering all those years back...perhaps pilani can be the next bangalore. Companies should then form vertical cognitive and prediction hubs, as each vertical needs the models to be calibrated and fine tuned.  Generic data science and machine learning competence centres will not cut it. Go deep, go vertical, go forth...

Around

Humanity only looks down nowadays. Just walk around and watch. People are walking heads down, deep in love with their mobile devices. Chatting, posting, reading or just staring at their devices, praying for a notification to arrive. Something, an email,  a ping, something........

someone create a simple app for them please. An "around" app. It runs on all those devices, all those wearables, on everything that makes humanity gaze down. And all it does is to remind human beings to look around them,  smell those roses a few centimetres away, gaze at the tallest building in the world, admire the eyes of another fellow human passing by and around, look beyond at the horizon at the unique cloud formation. Link into the real world.
look back, look left, look right...look around.

That's it for now.




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