La Tecnología no nos idiotiza, nos abre nuevos conocimientos.

Technology.

Technology Doesn't Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. By DAMON DARLIN Published: September 20, 2008

Christophe Vorlet

EVERYONE has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr. To save you some time, I was going to give you a 100-word abridged version. But there are just too many distractions to read that much. So here is the 140-character Twitter version (Twitter is a hyperspeed form of blogging in which you write about your life in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, including spaces and punctuation marks): Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains' wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence. If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress. With Twitter, people subscribe to your "tweets." Those who can make life's mundane details interesting garner a large audience. Several services have been created to compete with Twitter. Others have been started to help people manage the prodigious flow of information from Twitterers. There is even a version, Yammer, for use inside companies. You follow the word bursts of particular employees. ("In the weekly staff meeting. Good bagels. Why is everyone wearing khakis? All staff must file their T.P.S. reports on time, O.K.?") As if there weren't already enough to distract us in the workplace between meetings, phone calls, instant messages, e-mail messages and those Google searches. If people question the benefit of Google, which has largely liberated us from the time-wasting activities associated with finding information, there is outright hostility to a tool that condenses our lives into haiku. The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was asked by M.I.T.'s Technology Review magazine — in a tweet, of course — why when people who aren't familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are "uncomprehending or angry." His response was brief and unsatisfying: "People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It's what you make of it." It is hard to think of a technology that wasn't feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man's ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn't be the last time.

Smartphone WiFi Computers.

When Hewlett-Packard invented the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, in 1972, the device was banned from some engineering classrooms. Professors feared that engineers would use it as a crutch, that they would no longer understand the relationships that either penciled calculations or a slide rule somehow provided for proficient scientific thought. But the HP-35 hardly stultified engineering skills. Instead, in the last 36 years those engineers have brought us iPods, cellphones, high-definition TV and, yes, Google and Twitter. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating. Many technological advances have that effect. Take tax software, for instance. The tedious job of filing a tax return no longer requires several evenings, but just a few hours. It gives us time for more productive activities. But for all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. The proportion of time-wasters to time-savers may only grow. In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time. THE pessimistic assumption that new technologies will somehow make our lives worse may be a function of occupation or training. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death. Those people aren't necessarily wrong. But the engineer's point of view puts trust in human improvement. Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

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Copyright by the New York Times 2008

"Economía Posmoderna": Gratuita Y Basada En Publicidad.

Domingo, 14 de Septiembre, 2008 Google Chrome Contra Microsoft. Guerra De Navegadores II Harold James Profesor de Asuntos Internacionales de la Universidad de Princeton © Project Syndicate, 2008 . OPINIÓN El Modelo De Google Es Un Excelente Ejemplo De Lo Que Podría Denominarse "Economía Posmoderna": Gratuita Y Basada En Publicidad. Diez años después de su nacimiento, Google amenaza con reiniciar las "Guerras de navegadores" de los años 90, cuando Internet Explorer de Microsoft eliminó a su rival, Navigator de Netscape. Sin embargo, esta vez es Chrome de Google el que promete transformar la economía subyacente a toda la industria del software, y no sólo debido a su innovación técnica de vincular dos tipos muy diferentes de software en un navegador de Internet. Al hacerlo, elimina la necesidad de un programa como Windows, que anteriormente controlaba el acceso a todo tipo de software. La nueva tecnología de Google es notable y, sin duda, resultará siendo conveniente para muchos clientes una vez que se hayan resuelto los problemas iniciales de seguridad. Sin embargo, la innovación fundamental radica en otro aspecto. Chrome es un hito porque ofrece un enfoque completamente nuevo al dilema creado por el régimen legal y normativo de la política sobre competencia en las dos mayores jurisdicciones legales del mundo: Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea. Entre 1995 y 1997, Explorer erradicó casi totalmente a Navigator. La mayor ventaja del Explorer no era tanto técnica, sino que Windows de Microsoft proporcionaba el software operativo de la abrumadora mayoría de los ordenadores. Como resultado, un navegador de Internet –y, de hecho, otros programas de medios– se podía integrar al marco de Windows como un paquete de software completo. La capacidad de que los sistemas operativos y el software vinieran juntos facilitó mucho la vida al consumidor promedio. Simplemente recibían todo lo que querían (y, probablemente, mucho más) con la adquisición de un ordenador, pero esto también reducía la posibilidad de escoger, seleccionar y combinar programas diferentes. Los críticos de Microsoft se han quejado interminablemente sobre esto, afirmando que la integración del navegador al sistema operativo dejó fuera del camino mejores opciones de software. Por ejemplo, muchos usuarios preferían el procesador de texto WordPerfect a Word de Microsoft, pero la facilidad de tener una solución integrada hizo que el uso de Word se generalizara, llevando así a su rival a la extinción. La ventaja de Microsoft, y su modelo de negocios, se remonta a otra prolongada batalla legal. Originalmente, el software para ordenadores no era un producto que se debía comprar, sino un servicio. IBM logró una posición enormemente dominante porque arrendaba en leasing un paquete individualizado y adaptado cuidadosamente a las necesidades del cliente. No vendía nada, ni ordenadores ni software. El modelo de leasing de IBM parecía desafiar toda la concepción legal de la política estadounidense sobre competencia creada en tiempos de Roosevelt. Sin embargo, la política sobre competencia tiene grandes dificultades para tratar con industrias en que los avances técnicos pueden crear monopolios aparentemente instantáneos. En línea con la idea de desafiar las posiciones dominantes, el Departamento de Justicia de E.U. comenzó en 1969 una importante investigación a IBM. El juicio se prolongó hasta que se lo desechó en 1982 por "carecer de mérito". Sin embargo, mientras el juicio antimonopolio siguiera representando una amenaza, IBM iba a estar nerviosa. La posición actual de Microsoft es un resultado directo del juicio antimonopolio emprendido contra IBM. Cuando IBM lanzó su computador personal, preocupada de que las autoridades de Estados Unidos la acusaran de intentar controlar un nuevo mercado, IBM dejó el Sistema Operativo de Disco (DOS) para los nuevos PC a cargo de una pequeña compañía nueva que nadie veía como una amenaza: Microsoft. Por supuesto, Microsoft se metió en sus propios problemas legales cuando se hizo con la que era la posición dominante de IBM, enfrentando largas causas judiciales a ambos lados del Atlántico. La posición de Google es tan interesante y potente porque la concepción legal que reta toda posición ascendente, incluso en una industria en la que parece natural el surgimiento de monopolios, sigue vigente. Arrendar en leasing software y hardware, como hizo IBM inicialmente, es problemático. Pero también lo es vender servicios informáticos de una sola vez, a la manera de Microsoft. En comparación, no puede haber nada malo en ofrecer servicios y productos gratuitos y luego simplemente aprovechar las oportunidades publicitarias resultantes. El modelo de Google es un excelente ejemplo de lo que podría denominarse "economía posmoderna". La fascinante historia de las innovaciones técnicas es que ha sido difícil, y sigue siéndolo, que los innovadores se beneficien de los avances tecnológicos radicales. Los productores de algodón de la época de la Revolución Industrial en Inglaterra no se enriquecieron demasiado, a pesar de que sus productos revolucionaron la higiene y la vida personal, e incluso ampliaron la expectativa de vida. En nuestra propia época, viajar en avión se ha vuelto mucho más barato, pero las aerolíneas pierden dinero; llamar por teléfono ha dejado de ser prohibitivamente costoso, pero las compañías de telecomunicaciones pierden fortunas tratando de superar ofertas en las licitaciones de los derechos de telefonía móvil. Google ha llevado a sus últimas consecuencias la lógica de la tecnología que causa pérdidas, al no cobrar nada por su producto. HAROLD JAMES guisan@eltiempo.com.co Abrir artículo en el Sitio Web de "El Tiempo". COPYRIGHT © 2008 CASA EDITORIAL EL TIEMPO S.A. Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular. Reproduction in whole or in part, or translation without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.

Los humildes heradaran la WEB2.0/WEB3.0

Monitor

Sep 4th 2008 The meek shall inherit the web From The Economist print edition Computing: In future, most new internet users will be in developing countries and will use mobile phones. Expect a wave of innovation

Illustration by Belle Mellor

THE World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that leads the development of technical standards for the web, usually concerns itself with nerdy matters such as extensible mark-up languages and cascading style sheets. So the new interest group it launched in May is rather unusual. It will focus on the use of the mobile web for social development—the sort of vague concept that techie types tend to avoid, because it is more than simply a technical matter of codes and protocols. Why is the W3C interested in it? The simple answer is that the number of mobile phones that can access the internet is growing at a phenomenal rate, especially in the developing world. In China, for example, over 73m people, or 29% of all internet users in the country, use mobile phones to get online. And the number of people doing so grew by 45% in the six months to June—far higher than the rate of access growth using laptops, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre. This year China overtook America as the country with the largest number of internet users—currently over 250m. And China also has some 600m mobile-phone subscribers, more than any other country, so the potential for the mobile internet is enormous. Companies that stake their reputations on being at the technological forefront understand this. Last year Lee Kai-fu, Google's president in China, announced that Google was redesigning its products for a market where "most Chinese users who touch the mobile internet will have no PC at all." It is not just China. Opera Software, a firm that makes web-browser software for mobile phones, reports rapid growth in mobile-web browsing in developing countries. The number of web pages viewed in June by the 14m users of its software was over 3 billion, a 300% increase on a year earlier. The fastest growth was in developing countries including Russia, Indonesia, India and South Africa. Behind these statistics lies a more profound social change. A couple of years ago, a favourite example of mobile phones' impact in the developing world was that of an Indian fisherman calling different ports from his boat to get a better price for his catch. But mobile phones are increasingly being used to access more elaborate data services. A case in point is M-PESA, a mobile-payment service introduced by Safaricom Kenya, a mobile operator, in 2007. It allows subscribers to deposit and withdraw money via Safaricom's airtime-sales agents, and send funds to each other by text message. The service is now used by around a quarter of Safaricom's 10m customers. Casual workers can be paid quickly by phone; taxi drivers can accept payment without having to carry cash around; money can be sent to friends and family in emergencies. Safaricom's parent company, Vodafone, has launched M-PESA in Tanzania and Afghanistan, and plans to introduce it in India. Similar services have also proved popular in South Africa and the Philippines. Mobile banking is now being introduced into the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean where many people lost their life savings, held in cash, in the tsunami of December 2004. For the W3C, M-PESA and its ilk are harbingers of far more sophisticated services to come. If mobile banking is possible using a simple system of text messages, imagine what might be possible with full web access. But it will require standards to ensure that services and devices are compatible. Stéphane Boyera, co-chair of the new W3C interest group, says its aim is to track the social impact of the mobile web in the developing world, to ensure that the web's technical standards evolve to serve this rapidly emerging constituency. The right approach, Mr Boyera argues, is not to create "walled gardens" of specially adapted protocols for mobile devices, but to make sure that as much as possible of the information on the web can be accessed easily on mobile phones. That is a worthy goal. But Ken Banks, the other co-chair of the W3C's new interest group and the founder of kiwanja.net, which helps non-profit organisations exploit mobile technologies in the developing world, points out that simple services based on text messages are likely to predominate for some time to come, for several reasons. All mobile phones, however cheap, can send text messages. Mobile-web access requires more sophisticated handsets and is not always supported by operators. And users know what it costs to send a text message. As countries work their way up the development ladder, however, the situation changes in favour of full mobile-web access. Jim Lee, a manager at Nokia's Beijing office, says he was surprised to find that university students in remote regions of China were buying Nokia Nseries smart-phones, costing several months of their disposable income. Such handsets are status symbols, but there are also pragmatic reasons to buy them. With up to eight students in each dorm room, phones are often the only practical way for students to access the web for their studies. And smart-phones are expensive, but operators often provide great deals on data tariffs to attract new customers. Xuehui Zhao, a recent graduate of the Anyang Institute of Technology in Henan province, explains that a typical monthly package for five yuan ($0.73) includes 10 megabytes of data transfer—more than enough to allow her to spend a couple of hours each day surfing the web and instant-messaging with friends. It is also much cheaper than paying 200 yuan per month for a fixed-broadband connection. As this young generation of sophisticated mobile-web users grows up, what sort of new services will they want? Many NGOs and local governments are trying things out. Several examples were discussed at a workshop in June organised by the W3C in São Paolo, Brazil. The government of the Brazilian state of Paraná, for instance, is using text messages and voice-menu systems to notify the unemployed about job opportunities and farmers about agricultural prices. But the workshop also highlighted the limits of what such efforts can achieve. It quickly became apparent that more or less identical services are being developed from scratch repeatedly in different parts of the world. There is clearly room for more co-ordination of such efforts, which is exactly what the W3C has in mind. Furthermore, many clever systems are being developed by NGOs with no apparent interest in setting up commercial services. As Mr Boyera points out, this raises the issue of sustainability. What happens when the NGO's funding runs out? One conclusion from the workshop was that promoting social development through the mobile web will mean engaging with businesses. Regulators can also help by fostering cheap mobile access.

Open article at "The Economist" Web Site

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007. All rights reserved. Legal disclaimer Privacy policy Terms & Conditions

Los humildes heredarán la WEB2.0/3.0

Monitor

Sep 4th 2008 The meek shall inherit the web From The Economist print edition Computing: In future, most new internet users will be in developing countries and will use mobile phones. Expect a wave of innovation

Illustration by Belle Mellor

THE World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that leads the development of technical standards for the web, usually concerns itself with nerdy matters such as extensible mark-up languages and cascading style sheets. So the new interest group it launched in May is rather unusual. It will focus on the use of the mobile web for social development—the sort of vague concept that techie types tend to avoid, because it is more than simply a technical matter of codes and protocols. Why is the W3C interested in it? The simple answer is that the number of mobile phones that can access the internet is growing at a phenomenal rate, especially in the developing world. In China, for example, over 73m people, or 29% of all internet users in the country, use mobile phones to get online. And the number of people doing so grew by 45% in the six months to June—far higher than the rate of access growth using laptops, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre. This year China overtook America as the country with the largest number of internet users—currently over 250m. And China also has some 600m mobile-phone subscribers, more than any other country, so the potential for the mobile internet is enormous. Companies that stake their reputations on being at the technological forefront understand this. Last year Lee Kai-fu, Google's president in China, announced that Google was redesigning its products for a market where "most Chinese users who touch the mobile internet will have no PC at all." It is not just China. Opera Software, a firm that makes web-browser software for mobile phones, reports rapid growth in mobile-web browsing in developing countries. The number of web pages viewed in June by the 14m users of its software was over 3 billion, a 300% increase on a year earlier. The fastest growth was in developing countries including Russia, Indonesia, India and South Africa. Behind these statistics lies a more profound social change. A couple of years ago, a favourite example of mobile phones' impact in the developing world was that of an Indian fisherman calling different ports from his boat to get a better price for his catch. But mobile phones are increasingly being used to access more elaborate data services. A case in point is M-PESA, a mobile-payment service introduced by Safaricom Kenya, a mobile operator, in 2007. It allows subscribers to deposit and withdraw money via Safaricom's airtime-sales agents, and send funds to each other by text message. The service is now used by around a quarter of Safaricom's 10m customers. Casual workers can be paid quickly by phone; taxi drivers can accept payment without having to carry cash around; money can be sent to friends and family in emergencies. Safaricom's parent company, Vodafone, has launched M-PESA in Tanzania and Afghanistan, and plans to introduce it in India. Similar services have also proved popular in South Africa and the Philippines. Mobile banking is now being introduced into the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean where many people lost their life savings, held in cash, in the tsunami of December 2004. For the W3C, M-PESA and its ilk are harbingers of far more sophisticated services to come. If mobile banking is possible using a simple system of text messages, imagine what might be possible with full web access. But it will require standards to ensure that services and devices are compatible. Stéphane Boyera, co-chair of the new W3C interest group, says its aim is to track the social impact of the mobile web in the developing world, to ensure that the web's technical standards evolve to serve this rapidly emerging constituency. The right approach, Mr Boyera argues, is not to create "walled gardens" of specially adapted protocols for mobile devices, but to make sure that as much as possible of the information on the web can be accessed easily on mobile phones. That is a worthy goal. But Ken Banks, the other co-chair of the W3C's new interest group and the founder of kiwanja.net, which helps non-profit organisations exploit mobile technologies in the developing world, points out that simple services based on text messages are likely to predominate for some time to come, for several reasons. All mobile phones, however cheap, can send text messages. Mobile-web access requires more sophisticated handsets and is not always supported by operators. And users know what it costs to send a text message. As countries work their way up the development ladder, however, the situation changes in favour of full mobile-web access. Jim Lee, a manager at Nokia's Beijing office, says he was surprised to find that university students in remote regions of China were buying Nokia Nseries smart-phones, costing several months of their disposable income. Such handsets are status symbols, but there are also pragmatic reasons to buy them. With up to eight students in each dorm room, phones are often the only practical way for students to access the web for their studies. And smart-phones are expensive, but operators often provide great deals on data tariffs to attract new customers. Xuehui Zhao, a recent graduate of the Anyang Institute of Technology in Henan province, explains that a typical monthly package for five yuan ($0.73) includes 10 megabytes of data transfer—more than enough to allow her to spend a couple of hours each day surfing the web and instant-messaging with friends. It is also much cheaper than paying 200 yuan per month for a fixed-broadband connection. As this young generation of sophisticated mobile-web users grows up, what sort of new services will they want? Many NGOs and local governments are trying things out. Several examples were discussed at a workshop in June organised by the W3C in São Paolo, Brazil. The government of the Brazilian state of Paraná, for instance, is using text messages and voice-menu systems to notify the unemployed about job opportunities and farmers about agricultural prices. But the workshop also highlighted the limits of what such efforts can achieve. It quickly became apparent that more or less identical services are being developed from scratch repeatedly in different parts of the world. There is clearly room for more co-ordination of such efforts, which is exactly what the W3C has in mind. Furthermore, many clever systems are being developed by NGOs with no apparent interest in setting up commercial services. As Mr Boyera points out, this raises the issue of sustainability. What happens when the NGO's funding runs out? One conclusion from the workshop was that promoting social development through the mobile web will mean engaging with businesses. Regulators can also help by fostering cheap mobile access.

Open article at "The Economist" Web Site

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007. All rights reserved. Legal disclaimer Privacy policy Terms & Conditions