Alan Alves Fortes
Base: Amsterdam
Social Media trends follower
Sustainable futurist. Open source advocate. Welcoming the great shift in economy & society. Radical innovation admirer.

My old site was unceremoniously dumped when Geocities closed down, so I built this one purely as a stop-gap until I can be bothered to build a proper new one. However I'm starting to really like Google's authoring software, so it might stick around for quite a while! These pages contain the same snippets of home-spun software, science, literature and philosophy from the old site, plus some new stuff: my Ruby projects with source code to download.

There’s a page devoted to my ideas about minimal software user interfaces called Simpleware with a couple of sample programs to try, and a page of collected quotes and reflections I call Cool Quotes.

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

A brief history of the foundation of twitter.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone
The Twitter Revolution
The brains behind the Web's hottest networking tool.

Attention, government and corporate IT types. Repeat after me: MD5 encryption is not secure.

In the wake of the hacking of top US government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton by famous international griefers-cum-hacktivists "Anonymous" (or Anonymous-offshoot AntiSec, to be more precise), security observers are left scratching their heads as to why the company was using super-weak MD5 encryption to protect American government officials and servicemen.

Booz Allen Hamilton maintained a database of usernames and passwords of people that accessed its systems. Included were members of US Central Command (CENTCOM), US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and apparently, private sector contractors.

saw Doug on Virtual revolution's internet rushes (from bbc2 series) - he says something very interesting about the relationship between value and capital today. He suggests that the financial crisis is as a result of the ability of the internet to offer us a free means of production; that the crisis is an adjustment to the fact that we now longer need capital to create value.

Singularity Hub is your place to keep informed about the daily advances mankind is making in nanotechnology, genetics, biology, artificial intelligence, aging, robotics, and various other fields as we work our way towards the singularity. The singularity is the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining.

The impossible is becoming possible. The future that you thought would not come in your lifetime is coming sooner than you thought. Singularity Hub is here to tell you about it.

Kevin Marks works at Salesforce as VP of Open Cloud Standards. From 2009 to 2010 we was ay BT as VP of Web Services. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the Quicktime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer.One of the driving forces behind microformats.org he regularly speaks at Conferences and Symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.

Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that's two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn't new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this "two-sided market" model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.

My name is Raghav Gupta but most people call me Rags, my nickname, which has stuck since 2nd grade. My family and I moved to the US from India when I was 7.

I work at Brightcove, the Internet TV startup, where I'm VP of International Partnerships, based out of London. I also serve as an advisor to some digital media or online service startups, such as MocoSpace, and help them with fundraising, business development, product and strategy. Prior to this I was a digital media consultant and worked with companies like NPR, kSolo - the online karaoke startup and Musikube. Up until March 2005, I'd been at Live365 Internet Radio as a member of their management team, for the past 5 and a half years.

Before that, I was at Mercer Management Consulting.

Before that I was in college at Princeton where I majored in Operations Research.

Professionally, I am interested in things having to do with the intersection of technology, media, entertainment and commerce. Especially in how the internet and related technology are empowering consumers to do things they could never really do before. Personally, I love seeing new places and cultures, experiencing new cuisines, consuming media (books, movies, music), and playing sports (squash, yoga, soccer).

Transcendent Man introduces the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor since the age of five and the most pre-eminent futurist in the world.
Exploring many of the ideas and predictions in his New Times Best-seller, The Singularity is Near, the film focuses mostly on Mr. Kurzweilʼs world-wide speaking tour, as he describes a fast-approaching, radically different future
in which we have merged with our computer creations, will live radically extended lives and will be billions of times more intelligent. Heavily criticized for being too optimistic about what the future will bring and how it
will affect our lives, Ray challenges his detractors even further by publicly stating for the first time his goal of using future technologies to ultimately bring back his late father.

Hypebot kindly alerts us to an unintentionally hilarious GQ column by U2 manager Paul McGuinness, supposedly on "how to save the music industry." Of course, that's not what it's actually about -- because the music industry doesn't need saving. Last we checked, it's doing great. As, by the way, are McGuinness and U2. McGuinness has been making similarly wrong arguments for quite some time, and we try to debunk them each time. It seems that we bloggers have finally gotten under McGuinness' skin, as he lashes out at internet bloggers in this piece, specifically for the criticism they gave of his Midem speech in 2008 (criticism such as mine).