FastForward Radio
Breakthrough Ideas for 2009, Part 2
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talked about breakthrough business ideas for 2009. Can innovation revive our economy? And what cool stuff is around the corner?
They also talked about "Watchmen" and other fun stuff.
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Topics:
- Phil and Stephen both saw Watchmen this weekend. It's a brilliantly conceived and executed film that raises some interesting moral questions and then gives some disturbing answers that Stephen - mostly - disagreed with.
Phil pointed out that this film earned its R rating - big time. Dr. Manhattan (the glowing blue guy) is full frontal for much of the film. There are a couple of sex scenes. The JFK assassination is shown in grisly high def detail. And, actually, that's not even the worst of the violence shown. Not one for the kids.
- Michael Darling spent part of his weekend working with kids with the Denver Area Robot Club. This club is associated, Stephen believes, with Dean Kamen's FIRST program.
- During the show Phil and Stephen completed their overview of Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas for 2009." The final ten HBR ideas are:
- A Central Nervous System for the Earth
- A Looming American Diaspora
- Harnessing Social Pressure
- Western Union World
- How Social Networks Network Best
- Should You Outsource Your Brain?
- What You Need to Know About the Semantic Web
- The Business of Biomimicry
- The Dynamics of Personal Influence
- Forget Citibank - Borrow from Bob
Next week they - Phil, Stephen, and Michael - plan to offer their own breakthrough ideas for 2009.
Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."
Our exit music this week is from The Zac Mac Band. The song is "Roll Me Over."
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Comments
Just a comment on the semantic web (and yes, it has been "coming soon" for a long time, but it's a really big job): the promise of the semantic web is not what it can find for you--as you pointed out, you can do OK with well targeted searches today--but what it can DO with what it finds. A common "language" for data elements between sites across the web is what will put the data into context, and allow us to have smart software "agents" that can both search and act on our behalf. As a simple example, your agent can book an appointment with your doctor using your calendar, the doctor's website, and maybe some other web resources related to health records or insurance and payments. Or book a trip for you, from soup to nuts, based on your preferences, without you having to wade through all those sites to do it yourself. Obviously there will be many more sophisticated applications (and many that we can't even foresee yet) that will arise once this common understanding is in place. So, when it finally does happen, I think it will be a big breakthrough, but it is one of those things that has to reach critical mass before it becomes really useful.
Posted by: Leslie Kirschner | March 10, 2009 03:24 PM