Outside Innovation

TEDx Boston Celebrates Revolutionary Innovations

Creating electricity from dirt, empowering 300,000 kids to become musicians in Venezuela, inhaling chocolate without calories, designing mobility on demand solutions for the worlds' cities, integrating left brain nirvana with right brain analysis, reverse mentoring (Kids teach elders), redesigning eldercare, celebrating Alzheimers, designing zero cost medical diagnostic systems for developing countries, and being bathed in world-class music.. these were just some of the left-brain/right-brain experiences that 250 of us enjoyed at Fidelity's FCAT center in Boston when we attended the first TEDx Conference in Boston on July 28th. This first TEDx Boston was masterminded by TEDster Sean Belka, who is an SVP at Fidelity Investments and one of my Visionaries.

 

TED is a conference and networking phenomenon that was started by Richard Saul Wurman and has been continued by Chris Anderson. The conference features Inspirational talks on a broad range of topics and networking with amazing people. TEDx provides the opportunity for loyal TEDsters to run free mini TED sessions in their locale, taking advantage of the proven TED format and featuring TED Talks (videos from former TED conferences) as well as their own live TED Talks by local visionaries and creative thinkers in many different fields of endeavor.

The theme of TEDx Boston was "Revolutionary Ideas" and most of the presenters were local. Among the "aha!'s" I took away was how a well-blended environment that merges left and right brain thinking is required to support innovation and creativity. The presentation that stuck with me the most was the incredible TedTalk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuro-anatomist from Harvard University. She provides an amazing look at how our left and right brains function as she tells the personal story of how it felt to lose her own left brain function.

Among the innovations described at the conference, one of my favorites was a talk by Hugo Van Vuuren, a young man  who is the director of the Idea Translation Lab at Harvard. He described an innovation that came out of his lab in which a challenge was given to a group of students--how to provide electricity cost effectively to 500 million people in Africa. After researching power generation solutions, the students came up with a known technology--microbial fuel cells--that can create small amounts of energy from dirt! They have designed bags with cathodes, ion barriers, fuel, and anodes, that can be buried in the dirt, watered and hooked up to low power LEDs to create light!

If you have the opportunity to attend a local TEDx conference, or to sponsor one, jump at the chance!

Thoughts about Google's Web Operating System

Google announced this week that it will roll out Chrome OS for Netbooks and Internet-connected computers in 2010. My reaction: Why not? I already rely on Google for much of my Internet experience (email, calendaring, search). Why not keep going? I suspect I will like Chrome OS if it does, in fact, allow me to get up and running to access my email, calendar, and other critical applications within two seconds, backs up everything, and is accessible from anywhere that I can get online. No doubt Google Chrome OS will help spawn many new application services from open source developers. So I like the idea that we'll all have additional software platforms that will become popular enough to spur more innovation from a broader community of developers.

However, I don't expect that I will be migrating to a solely Google OS. I typically switch among three operating systems in the course of a working day. I don't care about the operating systems I use unless they get in my way. I do care about the applications and services I use. And these are increasingly network-based application services with rich user interfaces.

Among the applications and services I use today, Google's services are useful and good enough to get the job done. Apple's user experience on both hand-held and Mac is satisfyingly seductive. Microsoft's user experience for browsing, search, and office applications is improving precisely because Google and Apple provide great alternatives. I find Mozilla Firefox productive and generally adopt many of its third party plug-ins. I use Adobe's Flash, Flex, and AIR on a daily basis without being aware of them as I hop from widget to applet. I happily use Ajax-style interactive tools because they give me quick ways to accomplish my tasks and to iterate among different choices.

What do I want out of an operating system? Invisibility, plug and play peripheral support, security, back-up, performance, and stability.

The Real Killer Service: Filing. But what I really need is a better cross-operating system file system. Today, every OS has its own. None of them is quite right. Do I trust Google to build a better file system? No. Google thinks that search is the best way to find anything. Those of us who want to be able to impose our own mental model on the messy reality that we swim in, need to be able to do more than search and tag. There's a human need to categorize, classify, and organize things, as well as a need to find the things that have been mis-categorized or mis-filed. My ideal filing system would turn successful search queries into dynamic file folders. But it would also allow me to set up and re-set up my electronic filing systems as my needs evolve over time. Each previous filing hierarchy would still be "there." But as I evolve my thinking and re-categorize things, they would "move" to the new, current categorization scheme.

My filing system is my database for keeping track of things. I want to organize things into hierarchical categories and subcategories and to search and sort based on attributes that emerge over time.

I suspect that Google's desire to provide an operating system is a Trojan Horse for Google's desire to store (and index) all of my files and everything that I have pointed to, tagged, or linked. If Google really wants to be the utility that I use to interact with the world, they should focus on helping me categorize and organize my stuff. But since Google doesn't believe in "putting" things in folders, and human beings like to organize their own desk drawers, file cabinets, folders, and stacks, in order to make sense of the world, I'm still looking for the killer app. And it’s not an operating system.

Twitter and Activism: Supporting Protesters in Iran

I have been riveted to the demonstrations in Iran. I haven't turned on my television set once. I've been watching the reports from the protesters and their supporters on Twitter. As you're probably aware, Twitter delayed a planned maintenance shut down because Iranian activists needed to be able to use Twitter as a way to communicate with one another in order to plan their real-time activities. It was one back-channel that was going unmonitored (for a while) by the militia. Twitter was the first wave of mobilization. Soon many Web site proxies sprang up, enabling Iranians to get uncensored news out of the country and to communicate with one another. It's now a global support movement with citizen journalism ahead of the "real" press—many of whom have been thrown out of the country. It's inspiring to see so many people rallying to support the Iranian demonstrators and activists.

I have only one question: Why aren't we using social media and galvanizing world opinion to support activism in this country? As one person tweeted, "Why didn't we protest the U.S. 2000 and 2004 elections in the same way that the Iranians are protesting their election results?"

Why do we let the traditional media and corporate PR and advertising dollars shape our national dialogue about important issues like healthcare? I wonder if American activists could make more progress for their respective causes if we focused on galvanizing the attention of the global social media? In the U.S., we tend to pay more attention to U.S. pundits than we do to the voices of outrage and support in other parts of the world. Tweet on!

Whose Data Is It? Who “Owns” Your Medical Records?

Way before my Dad showed symptoms of Alzheimer's, he advocated for patients' access to their electronic patient records. On a personal note, he was afraid that none of his doctors and specialists would have the whole picture. He feared they might miss something important. He felt it was his responsibility, and that of his family members, to assemble and preserve our medical records so that we could all control our own healthcare.  He began to advocate about the need for electronic medical records and for patients to have unfettered access to their own records. In the 1980s, he convened meetings at his retirement home, in which he and other residents, many of whom were retired physicians, told the management and caregivers at their assisted living facility, what they expected and wanted: to have all of their medical records digitized, to have these readily available for themselves, their family members, and any medical specialists who would be called upon to serve them.                                                           

John W. Seybold

My father was a remarkable man. As the "father" of computerized typesetting in the 1960s, he knew a thing or two about computers and digital information. He didn't live to see his own records available in digital form. But if he were still alive, he would be an active advocate for patient’s access to their complete digital medical records. So it's up to me to carry on!