Excellent talk by Manfred Bortenschlager (Samsung mobile research, London and “ex” Salzburg Research) on Samsung Bada – an ecosystem for mobile apps (the talk was given this afternoon at the ICT forum of FHSalzburg).
Together with IBM Salzburg, we are organising a series of events on the theme of making “Salzburg a smarter city”. The first circle took place on Friday, May 13, 2011, and it focused on innovations in traffic. We had around 35 senior experts from industry, research and the public sector. Here is the homepage of smart(er) Salzburg: http://www.smarter-salzburg.at/.
On voxeu.org I came across this interesting article by Jeremia Dittmar on the growth of cities its relationship with the development of the printed press. The argument basically is: those cities that adopted the printing press had higher growth rates, i.e., a faster growth in population and subsequently a better economic development.
For the current (mega-)trend towards cities (in the 21st century – by 2050 70 % of the world’s population will be living in cities), this could mean that information and communication technology (so to say: the Internet as the successor of the printing press) is the basis for future prosperity. But then: we also now that a creative milieu, the youth of the population, openness towards immigrants/and or new ideas are part of future city development.
The Diffusion of the Movable Type Printing Press in Europe, 1450 – 1500, by Jeremia Dittmar, available on voxeu.org:
The figure above gives an overview of the adoption of the printing press. Interestingly, the U.K. is sparsely populated, also, it seems that northern Italy is a real hotspot in 1500 (besides the Netherlands).
the growth argument in the article says, that those cities that adopted the printing press, had an advantage in growth of the population – against the other cities – of 21 points (1500 – 1600).
the reason for this could be that the diffusion was still difficult (the technology was almost kept proprietary for over a century, books were heavy) and thus the geographic coverage was limited. This in combination with positive spillovers (creative, intelligent, young people were attracted) finally led to growth. More concrete, the availability of books on arithmetic basics was key to trading countries and regions such as Portugal, northern Italy, etc. (in order to calculate exchange rates, profit shares, interest rates, etc.).
Technically, this is realised with a time of flight camera which recognises movements of people (standing in front of a shopping window) and interpreting them intelligently.
Dr. Manfred Reichl (see picture at picasaweb), Investor, Senior Adviser, Board Member and former director for Roland Berger Consulting in Austria, reported at an event organised by ITG Salzburg 2010 on the success factors of startups.
The remaining part of this entry is in German because it does not translate well
Was sind die Erfolgsfaktoren für Startups? Reichl argumentiert mit 7 Begriffen, die aus seiner langjährigen Erfahrung wesentlich sind:
380 Hummeln: jede Geschäftsidee kann was werden
Geist: das meint auch be-geist-ert; es hängt vieles von den involvierten Personen ab. Es braucht Feuer in den Augen und Pfeffer im Hintern
Zeug: das Zeug dazu. Überzeugt er/sie? Auch: muss das für ihn/sie erfolgreich sein, weil auch die eigene finanzielle Zukunft davon abhängt und/oder zumindest wesentlich beeinflusst wird?
Hebel: wie schaut der finanzielle Hebel aus? Wie schaut das Ökosystem im Sektor aus? Wie die Partner? Das Netzwerk?
Gesell: Bezug – auch im Kontext von Salzburg – auf Jedermann. Die Gestalt des “Gesell“, der aber auch der Teufel sein kann … Wie schaut die Gesell-schaft rundherum aus? Ist man bereit für das Thema, für die Idee?
Frosch: ein Frosch wird niemals dafür stimmen, dass der Teich in dem er lebt, trockengelegt wird. Die Führer der Gesellschaft/Politiker/Beamte werden daher nie das Verwaltungssystem wirklich reformieren.
Gott in zweierlei Hinsicht. Einmal als Abkürzung für Glück of the Tüchtigen; einmal aber auch als Verweis auf das Gottvertrauen, das man braucht.
Ralf Gerstner, from Springer Verlag in Heidelberg, gave an interesting talk about liquid books. The idea, put simply, is that for publishers like Springer, there is “something” in between the traditional, high quality and longer term printed book publishing and the creative-commons, all-free bottom-up way of publishing in a wiki. They refer to it as the “liquid book”.
See http://liquidpub.org/ for more information. Interestingly, as presented by Gerstner, there are commonalities between traditional software engineering and the way web applications are engineered today (i.e., Web Engineering).
This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.
The themes the students covered includes
Usability
Tag Clouds
Flash Overlays
geotaging on the iPhone
Open Street Map Clients
Rich-Client-Applications
We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.
Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.
There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.
… an interesting tool that allows a visual comparison of the coverage of various maps, e.g. google maps vs. open streetmap (OSM). Based on people’s enthusiasm, in many (local) places the OSM coverage is much deeper/exacter. However, with respect to quality necessary for routing and navigation applications, OSM in its current status will not be sufficient.
Comparing google maps (left) and open streetmap (right)
it points at Techno-Z, home of Salzburg Research. One can see that buildings, local paths, etc. are covered much better in OSM than in google maps. Still, this is what we as human users interpret; software/machine readability can be – and is! – quite different.
One of the issues is to define the scope of “future”, i.e., are we talking 10 years, 20 years, etc.? IMHO I believe that for applied research already 5 years is a pretty long period.
Anyway, there is a nice publication (in German only) by the Feldafinger-Kreis: “Trends, Technologies and Applications”. They argue for the following trends
Peer-to-Peer Networking
Embedded Software-intensive Systems
Security and Safety / Privacy / Self-Defending
Semantic Technologies
Knowledge Management
Intelligent Software-Agents
Service Grids in the Internet of Services
Intelligent Resource Management
Self-Managed Systems
e-Processes
Internet of Things
Mobility / Networked Vehicles
Ambient Assisted Living
Human-Computer Interaction
As far as our own work is concerned, I think that the following items are of particular interest to our research
the Internet of things (we were talking about all-Ip building infrastructure)
ambient assistance
realtime geography/mobile systems
semantic technologies
Also, in March 2008 the European Commission hosted an event in Slovenia on the Future Internet, see the following URL http://www.fi-bled.eu/ and a short video:
Excellent talk by Manfred Bortenschlager (Samsung mobile research, London and “ex” Salzburg Research) on Samsung Bada – an ecosystem for mobile apps (the talk was given this afternoon at the ICT forum of FHSalzburg).
