Tim Bradshaw:

Tom Coates lives in a house that tweets. “Hey @tomcoates, I just noticed some movement in the sitting room. Is that you?” it posts to @houseofcoates when a motion sensor is activated in the British designer’s San Francisco home.

It’s not the sort of giant leap forward in technology that would have got Steve Jobs donning his polo neck for a big announcement. But, sometimes, it’s the quiet developments that creep up on us that end up changing our lives.

Coates, co-founder of a yet-to-launch start-up called Product Club, spent a few hundred dollars on Amazon to create a simple system that allows his house to tweet to him when certain “smart” devices are used. He likens its quotidian updates – about the temperature, lights switching on or whether his plant needs watering – to posts from a friend abroad. “You don’t care about everything they’re doing but it’s nice to have a sense that they are there,” he says, noting that it also functions as a cheap burglar alarm.

By Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone on November 22, 2011:

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’ ”

John Kirk:

In a phone network, the value is in the phone owner.

– In a mobile computing network, the value is in the app, not the mobile phone owner.

– In a phone network, the more phone owners there are – the more people you could call and be called by – the more powerful the network effect and the more valuable the phone network becomes.

– In a mobile computing network, the more developers there are – the more apps available for consumption – the more powerful the network effect and the more valuable the computing network becomes.

– In a phone network, there is no difference between a phone owner and a phone user – they are one and the same.

– In a mobile computing network, there is a HUGE difference between the mobile phone owner and the mobile user.

Learn more about Virtual Properties 5th generation native iPhone, iPad and Android apps, here.

Henry Binswanger:

Government suppression of private money is inevitable in the entitlement-state era. What is the alternative? Are governments going to stand idly by while more and more people avoid taxes and sidestep inflation? Government largess depends on taxation and monetary debasement. If there were private money, the welfare state could not exist. So, can there be any doubt that the government will throttle virtual currencies?

Consider the attraction of bitcoin and the like. People are desperate to have a stable, non-debaseable medium of exchange–so desperate that they are willing to try a virtual currency backed by nothing, so long as they believe that its supply will remain relatively stable. But what makes for this desperation? Why isn’t the government-controlled dollar stable in value? Why does government inflate and debase its own money? The answer is: to finance the entitlement state.

Consider. It is politically impossible to tax people enough to pay for the cancerous federal spending. Just perform this simple calculation. Divide the $4 trillion of government spending by the number of taxpayers in the country. There are considerably fewer than 100 million Americans who pay any significant amount in income tax, but take that figure. The division works out to $40,000 per taxpayer per year. And of course spending is always growing.

Charles Arthur:

Pretty much everyone (myself included) has been reading Google+ wrongly. Because it bears many superficial resemblances to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter – you can “befriend” people, you can “follow” people without their following you back – we’ve thought that it is a social network, and judged it on that basis. By which metric, it does pretty poorly – little visible engagement, pretty much no impact on the outside world.

If Google+ were a social network, you’d have to say that for one with more than 500 million members – that’s about half the size of Facebook, which is colossal – it’s having next to no wider impact. You don’t hear about outrage over hate speech on Google+, or violent videos not getting banned, or men posing as 14-year-old girls in order to befriend real 14-year-old girls. Do people send Google+ links all over the place, in the way that people do from LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Facebook? Not really, no.

There’s a simple reason for this. Google+ isn’t a social network. It’s The Matrix.

The Mediterranean Cafe
and, across the street:

Tap or click on the photo for a larger version.

teslamotors.com.

Judy Faulkner’s Epic Systems has grown explosively over the past decade. I thought it time to capture a few landscape images of Epic’s sprawling Verona, WI campus from nearby public roads (tap or click on the images above to view larger versions).

While certainly a fan of Epic’s growth, I am very disappointed that the most recent impetus has been driven by a significant federal “stimulus” tax credit:

Eligible professionals can receive up to $44,000 through the Medicare EHR Incentive Program and up to $63,750 through the Medicaid EHR (electronic health record) Incentive Program.

. This means that we get to pay twice, once via our ever increasing health insurance fees and second, via taxes. I am unaware of any other industry that has a substantial per person automation tax incentive.

Fiscal indulgences, indeed.

Epic’s growth has begun to attract attention, particularly around system interoperability and Faulkner’s presence as the only industry representative on a federal panel overseeing the $19 billion EHR stimulus incentive.

A few links:

• An Interview With The Most Powerful Woman In Health Care
• Epic Systems: Epic Tale
• An Epic Voyage
• twitter.com/FakeEpicJudy
• Questions raised about Epic software – Kaiser official quits in flap on cost overruns Epic responds to critics of electronic record installation
• Epic has been involved in some political skirmishes as well.
• Epic Systems’ Tough Billionaire
• Epic’s website, Facebook flickr
• Epic diss: Verona health records company left out of new industry collaboration

Markus Nagele. Very Nice.

Julian Assange:

“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.