Thoughts Pad

As you may already know, Umit Project is in as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011, and it happens that we just got through the selection process, and earlier today Google announced the winning students!

This year, Umit received 42 proposals, from 40 talented students from almost all continents in the world! We were absolutely astonished with so many talented students willing to work with us this season. So many proposals took us a long while to evaluate, and all of them involved a long process interacting with the student and assessing their capabilities, time commitments, etc.

Do you know when a marketing campaign does so good that it goes viral and someone else comes and try to hitch a ride in the idea?

Volkswagen launched a marketing campaign during the super bowl, where a kid is shown in a tireless attempt to manipulate the force wearing a Darth Vader custom. All of that to show one of the car’s features at the end of the video. Worth watching:

Then, Marvel comes and does an extremely similar video, where a kid wearing a Thor custom is shown trying to unleash the power from Thor’s hammer. But the end is very different from what you would expect if you had watched the Volkswagen campaign:

When I was watching it, just though like: yeah.. daddy is going to bip his alarm, honk the horn or turn the engine on using the remote control, then suddenly the kid manages to unleash the power from the hammer. Then, you just realize that it wasn’t yet another vehicle campaign, but a movie one right after recovering from the shock. Now, try to think of the second one in a world where the volkwagen’s one doesn’t exist or in the mind of someone who didn’t watch it. Not so funny, uh?

Open Source is the key to innovation.

Innovation requires a lot of effort and while most companies rely on a limited amount of experts to develop the things they need, others open source whatever they develop and get a crowd of experts testing, using, debugging and contributing to their software in a scale that no company can afford to maintain.

That’s why Linux is the most advanced operating system in most of the areas that really matters. It is flexible, easy to extend and adapt to whatever environment you want: I’ve even seen a linux distro booting from a 1.44MB floppy disk! Today we have it running on a wide range of environments and machines that goes from mobile phones (guess what’s behind Android?) to large clusters and servers. Though I enjoy to work on my Mac, we all have to admit that Linux is the overall winner.

Now that people figured that Open Source is the key to innovation, we’re beginning to see companies and groups of people open sourcing their hardwares, like Facebook and Open Source Ecology.

Facebook just open sourced the technology they developed to build their datacenter, which involves all necessary info to build the server chassis, motherboard, power supplies, etc.

Open Source Ecology is a community trying to come up with the specs for easily building from scratch “50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts“. They even have an open source proposal for vehicles!

4 Years of Factor e Farm in 4 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

With a world evolving so fast, I can’t imagine another model to cope with our ever growing needs and challenges. Now, let’s take part of this crowd, jump in an give a hand!

Google reaps billions every year with advertisements, and people just get crazy about that dream of making “easy” money. Not saying that Google’s money is easy, because I know it isn’t easy at all to keep such a huge infrastructure. But, people just think it is… or they want to think it is, because they want to build the next Google or next highly profitable ad-clicking business model based company.

The fever for the last years was to find a way to build something, put of the web and reap money with advertisements. We see blogs, games, social networks and all sort of other fancy and trendding web sites possible written from scratch to match the requirements of an ad based business model.

Suddenly, someone asked the good question: “If instead of pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads, they pointed it at great unsolved problems in science, how would the world be different today?” – That was Jeff Hammerbacher, who left Facebook back in 2008. Ironic, uh?

Most digital mafiosi would loudly answer to Jeff’s question: Then I wouldn’t have my digital mafia and wouldn’t see snoopy dog blowing up an armored car live on ustream.

What do you think people is really interested in? Seeing snoopy dog blowing an armored car, or having our top world class ultra smart engineers finding a solution for making electric cars more efficient than combustion based ones, ways to make wind turbines and solar panels more efficient, or finding better treatments for cancer/aids/malaria/”your bad disease here”?

That’s what drives traffic: stuff that people enjoy doing to perpetuate indefinitely their state of procrastination and false entertainment. Cool… So is this the formula for easy money? Make a website that allows for people to procrastinate, then fill it with ads? Sorry, this is the bubble we’re talking about. This business model is a bubble, and sooner or later it will burst.

Fortunately, from my perspective, even people that would make themselves available on ustream to watch live snoopy dog blow the truck, are beginning to care more about changes that are happening in the world, and how our collective behavior impacts our lives. We’re seeing a lot more green products reaching mainstream, and that means something. Is that the beginning of a change?

PS: For those who missed this awful demonstration of what people really seems to care about, here is the thing:

Yesterday I read an article summarizing a speech from Tim Berners-Lee at a MIT symposium comparing web access to water. His speech covered other topics on his perspective of the future of the web, but the thing that most caught my attention was his statement that web access should be considered a human right.

Living in this world today is all about web access. If you don’t have it, then you just don’t exist. If you think of charity, then you think of providing food and potable water to those in need, right? In my opinion, real charity provides for the needy while helping them become self-reliant. There are people out there thinking that human right is just a mater of living and meeting basic physiological needs.

People think and dream. We’re mostly driven by our dreams and the desire to strive, and the internet is been one of the most important tools to make most of our dreams come true, if used the right way. Anybody, in any part of the world can use the internet to learn a new language, study in an open course at MIT, learn a profession or even work entirely through the web, just as I do. Internet is the greatest catalyst for improving lives and empowering people with life changing knowledge. Ironically, it is that life changing aspect that has led so many authoritative governments to seize this right from its citizens.

According to Berners-Lee  speech, the distance between people empowered by the access to the web, and people that lacks it is growing bigger and bigger. How big does this gap have to get until we realize people have the right be enlightened?