I  saw two things on waves and innovation in the last week.   One was the movie Riding Giants.   Laird Hamilton is unbelievable!!   …  and “innovation” is often about not accepting that “it can’t be done”.

Laird on a small wave ... for him

The other, which my strange make-up found equally exciting was a talk by Norman Winarsky of SRI that discussed coming “Waves of Innovation”.     Now to be honest,  Norman discussed the “Five Waves of Innovation”.    I know that because that’s what my notes are titled.    I then have notes on four waves.    So, much like my surfing ability,  I somehow missed a wave.      The four I did catch were nice rides, however:

1. Robots/Agents

   I think this may have been two waves, one being bots that probe, investigate and possibly disrupt ”the network” and the other being agents.    Regardless, I believe that “agents” piece of it is most interesting.    Norman demonstrated an “agent” application that is in market presently: “Siri” (SRI’s baby?).     Pretty compelling demo.    It’s a phone app, speak to it, ask it to DO something, (e.g. “Make me a reservation at Manressa at 8pm on Thursday”) … done.     I expect it will be received as a “breakthrough” app.    And as is often the case in “breakthroughs” there’s only a little that’s new … it’s mostly a set of developed technologies that are ready to be put together in a new and useful way:

   Speech Recognition – It’s a done deal, speech can be recognized to greater than 99% accuracy, especially in context.   Go buy an app from Nuance.    I also believe this is further evidence of Jeff Hawkin’s model On Intelligence,  all good speech recognizers are trying to “predict” what you’re saying and they do a better job with better predictors.

   Web Search -  I don’t have much to add … if you want to learn more “Google it”.

   Select and act – This is the “new” technology, and this is the result of $150M of government investment in the CALO project.    I think it’s great,  but it certainly builds upon the fact that good search technology has given you a list that almost all of the time has everything relevant in the first handful of results (when was the last time you found what you were looking for on the 2nd page of a web search?).    From there it’s building a “confidence score” on whether and how to act and the mechanism for recovery, i.e. “trying again”.   The “difficult” problem in the UI  is when the agent doesn’t get it right, the human response is to simply repeat the same words slower and louder (“I said, I NEED A ROLL OF TOILET PAPER!!!”).     The machine has to be “smart enough” not to more accurately get to the same, wrong result.

   I look forward to watching Siri progress.   

   I also believe, in general, voice will come back as a viable and important UI as the personal device moves from Notebook to Smart Phone.    I just can’t buy that thumb typing on a virtual QWERTY keyboard is the optimal way for a human to efficiently instruct a machine (the original keyboard layout was designed to prevent mechanical jams of letter swing-arms!?! C’mon … we can do better). 

2. Pharmaceuticals

   This, in my opinion, is the biggie!!   The 20th century was the century of physical sciences.   In scientific terms, the century began with J.J. Thompson’s discovery of the electron and the century comically ended with the Luddite fear that the Y2K effect would “stop the world” as we had become too dependent on the “buggy” computer, the culminating economic application of electron theory and electronics.    I think the 21st century will be remembered as the century of biological science.    The Human Genome Project completed two years ahead of schedule in 2003 and the result is a complete map of the human DNA.    More telling, the cost of DNA sequencing has dropped so dramatically that instead of it costing $100M’s that it cost to sequence the human species, any other species can be sequenced for a mere few million dollars.  

   Our ability to understand and control biological processes, as a result will be astounding. The near term result is good types of “designer drugs” that have unprecedented effectiveness.    The “Cure for Cancer”, in general, may be no nearer than it was 20 years ago but the cure for an individuals cancer is getting pretty close.    Catch the early signs, use a biological simulation to model the metastasizing mechanism and develop a drug “cocktail” that prevents and reverses it’s course for that individuals body and biological processes — cancer stopped.    And so we attack and cure the biggies: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer.    They are all simply biological processes that can be “modified”.    Does this mean eat right, see your doctor regularly and when he occasionally catches something awry he provides an appropriate cocktail and makes sure you live to be 100?  Maybe it’s so.  And what about aging itself, isn’t that just a biological process that can be understood and controlled?

   So we’re going to learn to live forever … or pretty close to it.   I won’t touch upon the ethical and moral debate it raises but I do think it’s worth thinking about, especially in context of the dramatic demographic changes the world will see in the next 10-20 years as discussed in the current Economist.

3. Alternative Sources of Energy

   There’s been a lot written about the new potential sources of energy and there’s been a lot already done to diversify the energy supply away from oil. It’s surprising, however, how little impact “green sources” have made so far and speaks to the breadth and magnitude of the opportunity.    The graph below shows that everything “green” outside hydro-electric generation as of 2007 comprised less than 1% of Total Supplied Energy on a world wide basis!

   

   I won’t re-iterate here what alternative sources look most promising and why (think wind and waves) but I will observe that conservation or, maybe more appropriately, efficient energy use remains a strong “pseudo-source” that has the added benefit of reducing carbon footprint.     The graphic below speaks to this “other” opportunity (source: Dr. George M. Whitesides).    This graph shows the inputs and outputs of the U.S. as an energy system.    It deserves some study but the big “take-away” is that over 50% of the energy produced is “lost” in distribution to or at the end application.     Do you hear that “humming” when you go under power lines, it uses power to make that sound.

   

   It speaks to the importance of the Smart Grid initiatives occuring on a worldwide basis.    These initiatives may well have the impact the development of the interstate highway system in the 1940′s and 1950′s did in the last century.    Remember, growth in our new economy, is more about moving electrons and information than it is about moving things.

4. Enhanced Reality

   I’m not sure what to say about this one. I think I get it … it’s video games, the new multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. And you can easily understand how practical and “cool” it is when you head down to Dave and Buster’s and play Pebble Beach on their golf simulator. It’s not such a big leap to believe you’ll be able to afford to put one in your basement or backyard for your year 2020 birthday. There’s a lot of innovators out there who are going to find lots of “non-entertainment” ways to make this technology useful. And then how far away are we from the vision in Bruce Willis’ latest movie, Surrogates? I’m not sure I like that particular vision … but if I could get anywhere near the thrill Hamilton must experience on the elevator drop of a 50 foot wave, sign me up.