Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Some excellent points Lars, while I myself sometimes take certain (mischievous?) pleasure in declaring various “old” media like email just plain dead, the reality ( if we want to get picky about it) is of course far more subtle.

Better quality and availability of alternative communication mediums (e.g. so-called “social media” – not that that phrase makes as much sense in the business context) really just provides a greater choice in communication options for users/systems/humans/yourdog/cat etc.

Ideally, new mediums just let users select from the available tools those best suited to the job a hand. Which, in a lot of cases, won’t have to be email anymore.

What with the (nearly-alarming) proliferation of social/professional/marketing/media/hobby etc. community sites these days, I have this fear that within a few years 90% of all email (not counting the other 90% which will still be spam) will consist entirely of password reset emails and add-me-to-your-friend/buddy-list confirmation e-mails…

Posted by: Thomas Purves | 12 December 2006 at 14:03 GMT

You can read what argument I was replying to here on Lars Plougmann’s blog cheers. [hint: Lars has another good post in his ongoing conversation on social media killing off email as a useful tool for collaboration (or in this case, if social media like wiki’s are really any better or a complete substitute and so forth)]

Damn you fran, my dear friend of most remarkable and continuous Autobiographical Locality, has once again found herself afoot in vienna for Roboexotica with famous art interventionists Monochrom (wikipedia: Monchrom) mixing robots with alcohol.

Link to Fran’s tale:

I naturally then made my way to Roboexotica 2006 where Johannnes in his trucker hat was directing fan traffic. As usual there was no shortage of robot stunts. I walked between a scultpural catapult cocktail maker, a machine that simulated drunken driving…Han was peddling his robo-cocktail dorkbot t-shirts and I vowed to go back for more today….While in the last few weeks it has been a busy and crazy time in my work life and life all around, I am glad I came back to beautiful Vienna where the gold winks at you and pushes you along her well-proportioned streets encouraging you to let go.

Flickr photos tagged with roboexotica

From Boingboing, See also video of Fran, Johannes, Cory Doctorow and co. on Austrian community TV last year. Love the mock-seriousness with which they manage to conduct the discussion on this very important conference of international cocktail robotics.

Thanks to Michele for passing this link ” i hope you like the link – verrry relevant stuff. they wrote the internet of things paper last year, and what’s even better is that this year it’s available for free download”

Wow, very true ITU has published their 06 digital life report and once again it’s a treasure trove of information. Lots of stuff to dig in to here over the next few days. Great stuff on Business and ICT, changing media habits, the complexities of personal digital vs physical/national identities, and also look for Canada conspicuously missing in action on stats like mobile broadband penetration….

Here’s the link: ITU Digital Life 2006

and just one many tasty info-graphics:

(side criticism: do you appreciate the irony of the Digital Life report clearly formated entirely with print distribution in mind, hence everything in unwieldy .pdfs (yuck) and all those teensy squinty fonts in said graphic. Now blogging, I think they’ve heard of it… )