“The Physical Web”
- Apple, Fro Design, now Google
- contrast experience of Amazon Whispersync (zero experience, it just works) vs Jabra headphones (waking his wife up in other room)
- mobile moving too fast to standardize yet, eg pull to refresh is great but won't be here forever; even steering wheels haven't been standardized, need for it will go away, and history is quite varied; dialectic between users and technology
- shape of innovation: familiarity -> maturity -> revolution; eg DOS -> Lotus 123 -> GUI; lesson 1 – we'll always borrow from the past, lesson 2 – maturity is an intellectual gravity well that's hard to escape
- limiting factor isn't technology but our own psychology; everyone wants innovation but not risk; not afraid of future but attached to the past
- Internet of Things changes everything; not a lot of good thinking evidenced in the media today; smart devices – Nest and Quirky Egg Minder, individual functional devices; home automation – everything connected and networked; we need to think about the implications and consequences with all this stuff in combination
- IoT can't be a set of if/then rules because humans are goofy and do unexpected things
- Moravec's Pardox: HardEasy (think it's hard but turns out easy like chess) vs EasyHard (think it's easy turns out hard like translation) – home automation is an EasyHard problem; systems that expect us to be human rather than forgetting it
- smart devices: today each device has its own app; can't sustain that, they don't scale to millions of smart devices
- just-in-time interaction: use it then lose it, don't need to hold on to it or remember it after your done
- smartness layers: coodination (whole environment collaborates), control (one device), discovery (things project tiny bits of data); lose apps and we can think small; web needs a discovery service, smart devices project a URL and phone can make them available; “proximity DNS”; URLs are flexible, lightweight, extensible, and standardized
- “I'm more of a terraforming guy than a VC”; ong term, big change thinker; only 2 kinds of ideas – truck ideas and road ideas; no one wants to build roads right now, just trucks and toll roads; eg Malcom ??? invented and patented cargo container; reduced shipping costs by 26x; gave his patents away to ISO; was even more successful
- Apple's success has blinded us; we need to discover, invent, and move on to new things; need a physical web