Berkeley Blog

Way To Revive Oakland's Economy: Occupy Oakland

Everywhere we marched last night, from the Oakland Commune, with its tents, free food stalls, library, media center, first aid center, and a private bookstore fronting works by Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, and Edward Said in communal proximity, to the Port of Oakland, a good hour's walk away from city hall, businesses were open and marchers were buying food and drinks along the way. It was the first time I've seen downtown Oakland and parts of West Oakland along the route so vibrant (and safe) at night. 

Oakland should be lucky it's being occupied at all. Otherwise, downtown is usually a wasteland after 5 p.m. Last night, I saw Gray Panthers marching next to toddlers and infants in strollers; transvestites next to heterosexual and gay couples; people in wheelchairs and on bicycles, skateboards, and rollerblades; and people in unions representing teachers, health care workers, and government workers. I even saw a State Senator, Loni Hancock, although she only marched for a couple of blocks. There were the usual suspects from Code Pink, the Green Party, and Marxists of all factions, but mostly there were people who came because they were mad and they want change from the unregulated capitalism that permeates the politics and economics of this country today.

Although people don't seem to have particular answers -- or solutions, as we call them in high-tech -- they know there is a problem when health care, education, housing, and work are no longer accessible for most Americans. The American dream has become the American nightmare.

The mood was festive and hopeful. Spurred on by live music -- from drums to trumpets, clarinets, and vocalists -- the marchers carried clever signs, "We Need To Set a Maximum Wage," and climbed up on cargo containers at the port to wave on the rest of the crowd. News trucks with satellites bordered the marchers at the final stretch, and organizers with hand speakers moved the crowd along with time-worn political chants.

If I were mayor of Oakland, I'd harness that great good energy and have the marchers occupy Oakland forever. Open up abandoned buildings and fill the deserted streets at night with life, when the daytime bankers and lawyers have gone home to the hills or the suburbs. Occuping a city has far more potential for recreating our society than abandoning our cities, the way our government has abandoned us.  

Steve Jobs Memorial

Last night, Raines Cohen, cofounder of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, and I hosted a Berkeley Cybersalon to commemorate Steve Jobs. About three dozen of us sat around in a circle at the Hillside Club in Berkeley and talked about how the product lines from Apple had changed our lives.

Most of us had never met Steve Jobs -- although two of our attendees knew him well from Reed College days, when Steve still in search of Steve -- but we felt his presence in his products, and these products had profoundly touched all of our lives, even a pre-teen who attended with her parents and who said she couldn't imagine her life without Apple.

One of those who knew Jobs the best kept saying he acted like an asshole but that there were reasons for it. He had to fight against the behemoths of business who were always trying to keep him and his radical ideas about computing in line. And he had to fight his own demons about having been given away at birth by his own mother and raised by his adopted (albeit loving) parents. And mostly, he wanted to pursue a vision of his: to transform our most basic communication tools into objects of beauty. 

Had he lived in the age of the emergent television, tv sets of yore might have become art pieces instead of banal boxes.

Here's what people found through Apple: love, work, passion, respect, friends, comfort, and voice. Kaliya Hamlin, the identity expert, said that before the Macintosh, a computer was just a computer. The Mac is a joy to work with, she said. The beauty of its design and ease of use inspired her to get into computing. Eleanor Freed, who used to work at Apple as a design engineer, said that for the first time in her professional life, no one cared about her gender...they cared about her ideas. And her husband, Adrian Freed, who works at the Center for New Music at UC Berkeley, said that Jobs's interest in perfecting sound -- the NeXT cube had no fan -- led to his collaboration with French musicians in Paris long before the iPod was created.

Rarely do one person's ideas impact the world so powerfully. But as last night's memorial indicated, many of us have been affected profoundly by the beauty that Steve Jobs brought into our lives.

Yahoo Names Schwarzenegger As CEO

Yes, I'm kidding, but our former governor, bodybuilder, action actor, and housekeeperizer, could be selected as head of a flailing company like Yahoo for the brand recognition alone. 

That's what I felt when hearing the first reports that failed gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman was going to become HP CEO. All she lacks is movie-acting credentials, although her television campaign commercials came pretty close to Oscar levels for Riefenstahlian propaganda. 

What can I say? In high tech as in Hollywood, one fails upwards. I can't wait to see where Carly Fiorina gets her next paycheck...as CEO of eBay?

 

Technology Uber Alles at Singularity University

Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist to start a university. Peter Diamandis, founder of the Ansari X-Prize, which has promoted private space travel, started a graduate summer program three years ago called Singularity University. For $30 K, 40 or so participants who are usually graduate or post-graduate students, get ten weeks to listen to the likes of John Gage, Raj Reddy, Wil Wright, and Timothy Ferriss (?) while joining teams to create the basics of a new venture that will positively impact the lives of one billion people. 

At this year's graduation ceremonies, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the globally diverse teams presented their grand schemes for improving the world through the creative application of technology. AstroTrash -- a plan for eliminating trash in outer space that might interfere with satellite communications -- had a cool name but was a little murky in concept, whereas Matternet, which will build thousands of battery-empowered flying devices that could transport anything from vital medicines to love letters and other "matter" over impassable roads, seems more grounded on this planet. An actual mock-up of a low-cost, lightweight solar panel from IgniSolar looked like a winner in the sustainable energy space, and CorruptionTracker.net seemed like a very cool way to empower people to eliminate barriers to integrity and transparency in government and business (as long as no one can track the source of the informant, especially in countries that don't handle whistleblowers with kid gloves). 

It was obvious the SU participants enjoyed the process as much as the results of their team efforts, and that several new companies will succeed as a result. Vinod Khosla, the technology booster who cofounded Sun and has invested so well he's considered a god among the tech digerati, gave the keynote. He castigated forecasts of McKinsey and similar soothsayers, and threw a curveball quote from Karl Marx to back up his point. "When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals falls off," said the progenitor of his eponymous theory.

According to Khosla, "To invent the future, we have to ignore the experts." This was well received by an audience too young to appreciate the vagaries of the history of computing, although, ironically, we were seated upstairs from one of the largest collections of computer history in the world. Khosla went out to pitch his "black swan" theory of economic advancement, much like Joseph Schumpeter once decreed that "creative destruction" was the driving force behind economic progress. Black swans are disruptive technological visions like cold fusion and battery-powered Matternets that can create radical change to improve the world's environment, economy, and political processes. I don't know why, but Khosla very much reminds me of the architect in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged who thought that if you were smarter than everyone else, you were always right about everything, even about things -- like governance -- in which you had no expertise or experience.

Singularity University is predicated on Khosla's belief that new tools can improve "humanity's grand challenges." This philosophy seems to inspire expansion. This summer, Singularity held a session in Brazil, received financial support from the government of the Dominican Republic (which I always assumed was an underdeveloped nation), and is talking to the mayor of Milan about a technology partnership for a future World Expo. 

I suppose at best SU is like boot camp for aspiring techpreneurs. My driver, William Abernathy, a tech writer and writer for Make magazine, said the atmosphere at the graduation reminded him of a cult gathering, and one wonders whether a belief in the omnipotence of technology might obscure the complexity of change.

 

Master of Social Media Marketing

Today, at the monthly INFUSION tech lunch I host in partnership with the Berkeley Startup Cluster (www.berkeleystartupcluster.net/Events), Dennis Yu of BlitzMedia gave a short course on how to use Facebook to market your business or cause. He made some insightful observations.

First, you need to understand who your customers are. In other words, you need to be a good marketer; otherwise social media marketing won't do you any good. It's akin to when a plethora of typefaces first became available on the computer. People who didn't know the difference between Arial and Times Roman starting concocting streams of type that looked as if they were on mind-altering drugs. To transpose the analogy, to be a good social media marketer, you first need to master the basics of marketing.

Yu says that Facebook is all about ego: "You want to stoke your client's ego." So for one of his clients, Lane Bryant, which sells clothes to big (size 16 and above) women, Yu posts daily questions on its Facebook wall. He asked our audience of small Berkeley entrepreneurs for a question to post in real time on the Lane Bryant Facebook wall. We came up with "What's your favorite thing to wear on a Friday night?" Within five minutes, Yu had received dozens of responses, ranging from "hooker heels and yoga pants" to many "nothings." I don't know how the "nothings" are going to help fuel Lane Bryant's clothing sales, but it's obvious that a lot of potential clients are hanging out on the retailers Facebook wall.

What gets shared needs to have emotional content, says Yu. If we described FedEx as a company with the largest private fleet of airplanes in the world (2,200), the public would think of them as a transportation company. But most people equate FedEx with "trust." They know that when an item is fedexed, it will arrive on time. It's the emotion that counts, not the actually function a company provides, and your Facebook presence needs to support that emotion.

Yu says that a business or organization or person doesn't need a web site anymore. A Facebook page will do. He compares Facebook to the circuitry of the Web, connecting everything to everything. With Facebook's brilliant use of "like" plug-ins, it's easy for this connectivity to take place and let everyone know what you are promoting.

He has a point. There are 800 million people on Facebook. How many people click on your web site every week?

Yu told us he would critique any sites we'd like him to, so we volunteered the Chez Panisse Facebook page. It had hundreds of reviews, but the actual web site looked as if the owners could care less. "Why should Chez Panisse care about its web presence?" someone from the audience asked, "when it's one of the most famous restaurants in the world?" Yu agreed that there was no reason for Chez Panisse to beef up its Facebook wall or web site. In fact, he said, there was no reason for it to do marketing because its customers were its best marketers and it provided an excellent dining experience.

Which makes one wonder about the value of social media marketing for a product or service that people already love to use. Perhaps, one might spend more time on developing a really great product or service and less on marketing, although Yu does have a point: that Facebook can take far less time than traditional forms of marketing.

 

 

 

Inside Mainstream Media

You can't get more mainstream than The New York Times, and a newly released documentary film, Page One, takes us under the proverbial editorial kimono to show us just how the front page is put together. Of course, the front page, in this era of Digg and Google News and the HuffPost, is an antediluvian concept, and online, the Times conforms more to the time-based format of its digital counterparts than to the judgments of its editorial board. 

The film's Don Quixote is David Carr, media columnist and reporter for the Times (and recovering addict -- of cocaine and alcohol, not mainstream media). He's trailed by cameras at media forums, where he defends the pillars of mainstream media's high professional standards. In one such media debate, Carr holds up a printout of a Gawker site, then shows the same page with the articles that have been "repurposed" from mainstream media excised from the page. The page is full of holes, and people laugh. But do they change their reading habits as a result?

I'm afraid not. The film quotes many who have predicted the demise of the Times. The truth is the Times is dead NOW. Some people -- including these filmmakers -- have forgotten to take a pulse.

To deny this death, the film has some expert claim that Page One news has a ripple effect on the day's news throughout the nation's other media, particularly television news. I don't know many people under 40 who watch television news, so even if this seepage exists, it's still not the pervasive news source.

People are making the news. The HuffPost gets this, and that's why they have thousands of bloggers contributing to its site. All Voices, with citizen reporters all over the world, gets this. The Public Initiative Network, which sources tens of thousands of self-designated subject experts, who work hand in glove with journalists, gets this. And the millions of bloggers, tweeters, and YouTubers get this.

I don't think we should consider The New York Times mainstream media anymore. It's just a news stream, one of the many tributaries feeding into the waterfall of information.

Forgotten Nightmares; Food Trucks in Berkeley?

I have nothing against our Paleolithic predecessors or Paleolithic artists, but watching 90 minutes of 32,000-year-old cave drawings in Werner Herzog’s new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is more nightmare than dream. Herzog can turn anything into a movie. With a little original music and 3D glasses, like the kind you need to see Cave, Herzog could make a tour of my bathroom into a Cave of Forgotten (Wet) Dreams. He’d expose the century-old plumbing and imagine to what uses it had been put by its now forgotten inhabitants.

My litmus test for good art is not knowing who did it or where it came from. One of the triple-horse paintings in Cave wasn’t half bad – in fact it resembles some of the sketchings I did in my fifth-grade art class. But to spend at least 15 minutes going over and over this drawing because it was done by people we know nothing about a really long time ago is like shooting a single arrowhead discovered by a Boy Scout expedition in Montana over and over again.

There are lots of extraneous people in this film, like the perfume “master” who smells holes in this southern region of France, the Ardeche, to see if there might be a hidden cave around. This guy was neither charming nor informative, but maybe Herzog was trying to fill in the time before returning to the horse paintings. As in all of Herzog’s “documentaries,” the filmmaker takes mythopoetic license with the facts, such as suggesting that the footprint of an 8-year-old boy next to that of a wolf might have ended in the wolf eating the boy or they might have been friends (a la Disney). After nodding off at least three times during the film (Each time, the guy snoring behind me woke me up.), I would encourage all insomniacs to throw away their drugs and just watch this film anytime they want a good sleep.

Food Trucks Invade Gourmet Ghetto

Last week the City of Berkeley lifted its prohibition against food trucks and allowed them to park a few hours along the strip known as the Gourmet Ghetto. Thousands of people turned out and there was some grumbling from the restaurants along the way, which include Chez Panisse, Cesars, and Saul’s Deli.

To me, food trucks are like bloggers. They offer tasty morsels that are geared for specific tastes. They are also cheaper, and service is far faster than in a sit-down restaurants. And they stimulate the economy by allowing cooks who couldn’t afford to set up a restaurant a chance to sell their stuff. What's there not to like?

 

A Mind That Is Never Bored

He invents robots called moonbots with seductive eyes that try to pick up guys. Sometimes they succeed. He's created a waitress robot, which sometimes dumps food into a patron's lap, and a dancing robot that can be directed via Android to make the right moves with a live partner. 

Michael Winter's life is programmed to never be boring. Almost a decade ago, he and Sim City creator Will Wright started the Stupid Fun Club, based near the Fantasy Film building in west Berkeley, to create these robots. They also have a new company, Crazy Research, with the tagline, Technology made Fun. Crazy Research has even created a series of 12 episodes for Current TV called barkarma.

Before all this revenue-generating silliness, Robotmike (his email moniker), created Harvard Draw for Windows and a hot video game called Tribal Rage, which made fun of American hillbilly motorcyclists and was a raging success in England. He even did a stint at Microsoft, which seems to have been his only paying job in technology.

Robotmike brought his daughter, a serious robot builder with some equally serious tattoos emblazoned up and down her arms, and a couple of his robots to the INFUSION lunch I host each month at the Freight & Salvage nightclub in downtown Berkeley. There were lots of inventors in the crowd, including toy inventors Steve Beck (who also created the first PC screen-to-TV software) and John Hollis (who created a Velcro glove for babies so they can catch balls easily).

Robotmike showed a video of an autonomous motorcycle he worked on with Anthony Levandowski (who is building the autonomous car for Google). The motorcycle would start up easily but then flip over once it got rolling. Michael solved the problem by building kickstands on both side of the bike that would automatically eject every time the bike started to flip over. The stands would jettison the bike back to an upright position and get it rolling upright again.

Robotmike has also conjured an ingenious solution that warms the cockles of my bicycle-loving heart. He's figured a way to prevent dooring -- when car doors open right into the path of a moving bicycle -- by placing sensors in both the bicycle or the cyclist's smartphone and the driver's car door to alert both rider and driver of impending danger. He tested this out on Google engineers recently, and they welcomed the solution. 

Now if Robotmike could only figure out a way to get a bicycle lane on the west span of the Bay Bridge by 2013 -- the year we're going to be able to bicycle from Oakland to Treasure Island on the new east span of the Bay Bridge -- I'd be really happy, and so would thousands of other cyclists who could commute across the Bay for work or pleasure. Maybe he could divert some of those car-centric transportation officials with moonbots and robots that dance long enough for us to build the bike lane. 

Bill Joy on Radical Innovations

I had always been curious about Bill Joy, ever since he wrote an essay a decade ago for Wired magazine about the Frankenstein-like potential of self-replicating 21st century technologies for mass destruction. I can see the danger of computer viruses and perhaps even self-driving cars gone beserk, but the potential for technology to do good seems just as great as its ability to harm.

Obviously, Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and its former CTO, has changed his mind. He's now a founding partner of the Greentech Practice of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers (and i don't think any of those folks are still there, but VC firms like banks and investment companies stand firm about retaining the names of their founders long after they are gone). An electrical engineer by training, Joy's take on saving the world from resource depletion and climate change is to recycle and recapture at least 20 percent of the energy we expend. According to the ever compounding spreadsheet in his head, this will result in a tenfold improvement over the mess we're in today.

Many names were dropped during Joy's UC Regent's Lecture at the Center for New Media at UC Berkeley May 4. I heard Amory Lovins, Al Gore (more than once), John Doerr, and some guy who started Khan Academy, whose tapes Joy listens to while jogging. Also Nicholas Negroponte and the Polaroid founder, Edwin Land, who said "Innovation is the cessation of stupidity."

Joy's PowerPoint presentation targeted areas of investment opportunity where innovation could achieve tenfold (that's the determining payoff) yields in everything from electric efficiency to transportation and building efficiency. Lots of talk about watt hours reminded me of my high school physics class. It seems that if we invest in innovative ways to use less energy to do more, the next century won't be so bad.

Joy made three predictions: world wages will equilibriate; distance learning will deconstruct the universities except there will always be a need for labs; and dematerialization will lead to people owning less and sharing more, such as Zip cars and other devices. After a brief peak, capital material footprints will decline.

UC Professor Ken Goldberg, who invited Joy to speak, said that he hoped the prediction about universities deconstructing was not to be, but I wouldn't worry. Just ten years ago, Joy had worried about technology taking over our species, and now he is investing in technologies designed to save our species. What technology doesn't destroy, it transforms.

Should I Pay or Should I Go?

Today The New York Times put up a pay wall for reading the news. I wonder what took them so long, more than two years after the Wall St. Journal added its wall. Maybe it was difficult to figure out the revenue scheme, roughly $15 a month to get an e-version. 

Since I read most of the obits in the Times every day (except for the ones for athletes, unless they're cyclists or mountain climbers; for movie stars and pop celebrities; and for religious figures), I figured it's worth paying $15 for my monthly deadification. By giving up coffee drinks and depriving Starbucks of more revenue, I can help continue the tradition of fine journalism. And promote the continuation of excellently researched obituaries into the lives of past luminaries.

Indirectly, my $15 goes into the coffers of Techcrunch, GigaOm, and ReadWriteWeb, partners in news with the NY Times, although how many pennies they receive for my reads I do not know. If some of the
$180 a year I'm committing to the Times goes to support David Pogue and David Carr, both writers in technology, my investment will be justified. By me. 

Even with this new revenue scheme, I wonder if the paper can make it a go. If they gave up their print editions altogether, their expenses would be greatly reduced. My prediction is that within the next five years, a print edition of any newspaper except the ones published by and for homeless people will be as rare as dodo birds and telephone booths.