I recently visited the just-opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, a stunning $200m project, largely financed by the Warsaw regional and national governments, but with very strong support from the Bay Area's most impressive philanthropist: Tad Taube.

The museum from the back: still under construction but partially opened in April for the 71st Anniversary of the Uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I first met Mr Taube in 2009 during a ceremony at city hall celebrating the twinning of the cities of San Francisco, and Krakow, in Poland. I was extremely impressed with the work he and his foundations are doing in Poland, a series of extremely ambitious projects trying to bring back to life the 1,000 year old culture of Polish-Jews, destroyed by a five-year industrial-scale system of German premeditated murder.

From death to life: A monument to the heroes of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 - just outside of the new museum, which is a monument to the life of Polish-Jews.

Poland's Jewish population of 3.3 million Jews, 10% of the entire population, was almost completely wiped out with only 300,000 surviving. Add another 3 million Polish citizens of other religious and secular backgrounds to the death toll, and the horrors of the Polish experience in the Second World War are pushed beyond anything we can imagine today -- even with Hollywood's best efforts.

The museum is an attempt to resurrect, rediscover, and reconnect with Poland's rich Jewish history and the truly extraordinary contribution of its populations to global culture.

The goal of the museum is very clear: To understand Polish culture you have to understand Polish-Jewish culture -- a 1,000 year history that started at the same time as the Christian origins of the Polish nation itself, in 960 CE.

Similarities are stronger than differences...

I grew up in a Polish household in London, UK, and when I was younger, I was often puzzled and pleased to find Jewish culture so similar. The food, attitudes, words, music, and the shared nature of our mothers. A Jewish mother is a Polish mother and vice versa.

The familiarity I experienced was because the cultures have the same roots.

As many as 80% of US Jews have their ancestry in Poland and its former lands to the east. For centuries Poland was a thriving center of Jewish culture, mysticism, the arts, and more. Poland has a long history of tolerance, giving shelter to oppressed groups such as early Protestants, driven out of Germany by endless religious wars.

Above, part of the museum building is covered in letters that spell the word "Polin"

" The letters signify the word "Polin" () -- the Hebrew word for Poland -- interpreted as "Po-lin": po ("here") lin ("[you should] dwell"). In the dramatic reach of the building's exterior, the medium is the message. The message of "Polin," reported to have come to Poland's first Jewish settlers from a divine voice, was interpreted as "a haven for Jews." Now, in this very place, a thousand years of Jewish history will shine in the light of the building's faade..."

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews | Taube Philanthropies

A tale of two town squares...

Polish-Jews in much of Poland led segregated and insular lives largely because of adherence to traditional values. In the brilliant book "Konin," British author Theo Richmond reconstructs pre-war life in his parents' town of Konin in west Poland. As he searches for his Polish-Jewish roots, his meticulous research brings back to life a vibrant community, rich in characters and pathos. He describes a town with two town squares, separate shops and separate schools. Daughters would be sent to the local public Grammar schools and knew secular Polish culture very well, but the boys would be segregated in Jewish religious schools from early age. It describes how the two peoples, sharing the same space but also living apart, might misunderstand each other, not understand the same things at times, and be prone to wild speculation about each other because they don't know enough about each other..

Telling stories about each other...to each other

I've always believed that the role of journalists is to help tell the stories of people and their communities to each other, so that we won't seem so strange from each other. And today we have enormously powerful media technologies that help us see others, and see other communities, with great insight and humanity.

The best example of this is the incredible job that the British media have done in showcasing the many diverse communities that make up the United Kingdom. Success is measured in how little strife there is between very different peoples. It makes for an outstanding cosmopolitan culture that cannot be matched anywhere.

It's good to see Polish-Jewish culture coming out of its dark cave, where its ghostly martyrs have been telling its story, a vastly incomplete one, the prequels are far more interesting.

Warsaw's newest museum is a jewel and it's the start of Poland trying to reconstruct its cultural genetic code and rediscover its own stories – representing tens of millions of lives engaged across a thousand years of industry and the arts. It's a fabulous story but most of us have only known its killer ending.

It's truly inspiring to see the start of this process of rediscovery, and by that very process – to deny the remaining victory of the Nazis – the eradication of a millennium of Polish-Jewish culture.

- - -

Please return for a profile of Tad Taube - Silicon Valley's top philanthropist with more than $550m in funds managed through his Taube foundations and the Koret Foundation. He escaped from Poland in 1939 just two months before war broke out, aged eight. He has made several fortunes in the chip equipment industry and in real estate. He has worked long and hard to make this museum a reality. His achievements rank way beyond those of any other Bay Area philanthropist, both in amounts of money and the metric of making a real difference over a multi-decade time-span. No one comes close to Thaddeus Taube.

- - -

Culture Watch: A reminder to startups that all businesses are cultural artifacts that need to know and understand the cultures they exist in -- or they might not exist for long.

They miss the fact that Intel is a supertanker, you can't rock a supertanker no matter how much you jump up and down — you can just gradually change its direction.

What they also miss is the new face in the executive office: Renee James, president — the partner to Krzanich in Intel's "two-in-a-box" leadership team.

"I work for Brian, but the rest of the company works for Brian and I. We put the strategy together as a team," James told Oregon Live.

Her appointment shows the long-hand of Andy Grove, long-retired CEO (1998) and chairman (2004), at work, continuing to influence the course of the Intel supertanker. James worked as his technical assistant for four years — a mundane title that disguises the fact that it is always a fast track position into the top ranks of Intel.

This is what Andy Grove said about James nearly four years ago:

I would like to see her in the top role, or one of the top roles, at Intel.

Renee has an incredible ambition to do things and succeed, and then do something harder and succeed. It's a driving ambition, and it makes her undertake high-risk things. And it's not that she doesn't worry about the bumps ... But she takes them on.

Grove got his way.

It's significant that she was head of Intel's software group, the company now employs more software engineers than hardware engineers.

And its also significant that she is not an engineer, but has qualifications in business and marketing, similar to Paul Otellini, the retiring CEO, who was sometimes criticized for not being a technologist.

Intel's core business is alchemy

Krzanich has a chemistry degree, as did co-founder Gordon Moore, because making chips is all about chemistry. It's a process of alchemy, which transforms common sand into shiny slivers of advanced technologies that are each worth far more than their weight in gold.

Intel's board, which by the way is very much a "Grove" board, was completely remade by Grove in the mid-2000s, and essentially went back to basics with the appointment of the chemist Krzanich, but it made sure there was also an "outsider" perspective in Intel's strategy with the choice of James as co-leader.

Another significant point: James is based in Hillsboro, Oregon, where Intel is the state's largest employer. Its Silicon Valley HQ, where Krzanich works and is hundreds of miles away from its massive manufacturing operations in Oregon, and Arizona.

James's desk is next to Andy Bryant, Intel's chairman — she's much closer to the working heart of Intel than the distant Santa Clara, California HQ.

Andy Patrizio at Networked World, made a great point about her future role. 

She should be the CEO because these [Intel's business challenges] are all areas that require vision. Krzanich is an ops guy. That would have been something if Intel picked her, because then three of the largest firms in this industry — IBM, HP, and Intel — would all be led by women. But for now, she's the number two, and really the one to watch.

Background of Renee James, 48:

James grew up in Los Gatos, California. She came to Oregon to attend the University of Oregon (Class of 1986), where she ran track, majored in political science, and later earned a master's degree in business administration.

James joined the company in 1989 when Intel bought the small California company where James worked, Bell Technologies. James spent four years as technical assistant to Andy Grove in the 1990s when he was Intel's chief executive and chairman. Later, she ran various Intel software initiatives, and ran its Microsoft group before being promoted to head of the software group in 2005. She is a member of The Committee of 200, a group of 400 women business leaders.

Related stories

• Intel doubles-up on leadership

"Krzanich isn't inheriting Otellini's title of president. It will go instead to software chief Renee James, 48, creating a two-person "executive office" at the head of the company," wrote Peter Svensson of Winnipeg Free Press.

Back in early March, I suggested that Intel should double up:

He just got them and was super excited to finally have them; he had told all his social networks about it days in advance. When they finally arrived, he told his friends he couldn't post a photo of himself wearing them for fear of turning up on rapidly proliferating sites specializing in photos of "White Geeks wearing Google Glass".

I suggested that he try "black face", but that would probably set off another rush for domain names and specialized sites, and make his predicament worse than if he'd stayed natural. 

However, if my friend is concerned about posting a picture of himself wearing Glass, what about other geeks? What about any of them wearing their Glass in public? They will all be live fodder for anyone out there. Their photos of a white guy wearing Glass could end up online sooner or later — and not in a good, cool kind of way.

There are solutions. One is to only wear them at home in private, watching out for open windows and curtains. Or in public, but wearing large, black sunglasses to hide the interior Glass. Those types of sunglasses can be found at medical equipment stores and don't require a prescription.

Memes such as these can be product killers. Google knows how to track memes with services such as Google Trends. But does it know what to do in response to negative sentiment or how best to boost Glass.

Here's how Google can help boost Glass wearers: Encourage diversity within geek communities and workplaces — starting with a radical new hiring policy at Google.

By helping to build diversity within geek society and its sub-cultures, it will be great for business because it will mean that a "white guy" meme can't be stuck onto any Google products or its brand. Apple can have it back.

It would be a smart business move because it saddles Apple, a formidable competitor with a big problem. It'll be solved by Apple, in turn, by building diversity into its brand, and so on, in a domino diversity tumble across a global industry, and it might actually result in something great. All because of "White guys wearing Google Glass".

Update: Marcus Wohlsen writing in Wired Business a few minutes ago, agrees that "Guys like this could kill Google Glass before it ever gets off the ground".

Chris Velazco at TechCrunch reported:

Founded by Hicham Oudghiri and Marc Dacosta, and helmed by CEO Jeremy Bronfmann, Enigma taps into over 100,000 public data source,s from state and federal records, to SEC filings, to lists of frozen assets in the United Kingdom all the way, to Crunchbase. The end result is an incredibly simple, incredibly smart way to sift through and find connections in publicly available data.

Foremski's Take

Within a single public database, there's likely little of interest to society at large. But if there's links across tens of thousands of databases, then we will see many skeletons coming out of many people's closets, and probably on a scale larger than Wikileaks. It's a fabulous bonanza for investigative reporters, the ones that are still around.

However, you don't have to be elite and famous to fear the big data engines of Enigma, the databases will be picked over by multitudes of marketing companies researching information about individual consumers.

Big Brother technologies are on the rise and are being used to divine your intent. Fortunately, they aren't looking for mind-crimes but for the mundane — where you'll spend your next dollar.

That's a bold claim. The New York Times is more than 163 years old.

In a debate with [Marc] Andreessen at the Milken Institute Global Conference Monday, [Peter] Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, said he expects that Twitter's roughly 1,000 employees will have jobs a decade from now. The business case for Twitter is solid, Thiel said.

He contrasted the future of Twitter with that of The New York Times, a print media vanguard that he says is not guaranteed a future in the digital age ... Thiel, who doesn't tweet or own shares of the company, said the company's estimated $10 billion current valuation was fair.

Foremski's take

The New York Times will be around for a long time, even though it certainly won't be in its current formats.

The New York Times Company is valued at 1/10th of Twitter's valuation, but it has a far higher value in terms of trust. You won't find fake news in The New York Times.

On Twitter, you can't trust anything, because there is no editorial process. Twitter as a media brand has little value in itself, since it is an aggregate of the micro-brands of the personalities and companies that use the platform to publish to their networks, and of those many personalities, only some are real.

Twitter's valuation could change very quickly. People and companies are fickle users of social media platforms, while the "users" of The New York Times are often characterized by life-long loyalties.

Twitter has a higher market valuation because its costs are far lower than The New York Times, it employs far fewer staff members, and it doesn't face the considerable challenges of traditional media businesses.

The New York Times' legacy costs of business, primarily its massive pension obligations, will likely force a change in its fortunes faster than its ability to transition to new business models.

Andrew Nusca reported:

The first website in the world was, understandably, dedicated to the world wide web project itself ... The website described what the web was, and instructed how to access others' documents.

That original NeXT machine is still at CERN, but the world's first website is no longer online at its original address.

CERN seeks to change that. To mark this anniversary, the researchers announced today that they are beginning a project to restore the first website and "preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web".

My friend David Galbraith managed to find the exact room at CERN where Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web protocols and website. He said it is on the French side of the Swiss border, which would make it "le web" and a French invention by location.

Sir Tim had high hopes for the web:

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the web is to support and improve our web-like existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles...

The world can be seen as only connections, nothing else ... A piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning.

Sir Tim's ideals for the web were very egalitarian — a fitting connection with France's revolutionary slogan of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité".

That's also a credo shared by software engineers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, except they express it differently; they call it open-source software, where no part of the IP is beholden to anyone else, but shared equally, and progress is shared, too.

David Galbraith is pushing CERN to celebrate the web's origins a bit more than just with a web page.

Perhaps a computer scholarship could be created to fund the occupant of the room to do something that takes the spirit of the web further. Perhaps the original web server could be relocated to the room, and it could be explored by mapping it on say Google Streetview, so that everyone could visit it. Further still, there are the rooms where the project for the web was developed; these are also historically important.

If you believe, like I do, that preserving the location of the invention of the web would be a good idea, make yourself heard. Tweet to @CERN with this URL and the hashtag #savetheroom.

Save the room!

If war breaks out, the result would be "chaos".

… with the worldwide electronics supply chain grinding to a halt and stopping major market product segments in their tracks, including smartphones, media tablets, and PCs …

"It is important for companies to understand the magnitude of South Korea's role in the global electronics market — and to prepare for any contingencies," said Mike Howard, senior principal analyst for DRAM and memory at IHS.

South Korean electronics giants Samsung and Hynix are headquartered just 30 miles from the border of North Korea. And large manufacturing operations are within 30 miles of the capital.

War would severely limit production of most electronics and computing devices.

While some gadgets could have their amount of memory reduced — a smartphone with 32 gigabytes (GB) of NAND could be downsized to 8GB, or an 8GB laptop reduced to 4GB — other devices must have the memory for which they were originally designed, especially where DRAM is involved.

"A server with only half its intended DRAM is essentially half a server — and a smartphone cannot have its DRAM quantity changed, as it needs the original amount for which it was designed," Howard noted.

Few journalists understand Google's business, because if they did, they would be writing some amazing stories; stories that would attract scrutiny of the kind that Google wouldn't want.

This is why Google likes to point over there, and say, "Look at that car, it's driving itself!"

Or, "Look at our chairman, he's in North Korea and now he's in Myanmar, telling them to open up the internet." All red herrings designed to focus attention away from how Google makes money.

[Matt Cutts, Google's official web spam explainer, is another red herring — cut off and five steps behind Google's strategy. In January, he took 30 days off from the internet.]

Journalists run their Google beat as if it were based in Detroit, not Silicon Valley, because they don't understand the dynamics of its business, but they can understand a driverless car. They don't see that Google is engaged in a massive war against small business, which is fundamentally a war against jobs.

Google's dirty little secret is that its commercial algorithm is broken, and it can't distinguish between quality content and spam. Which is why it is backing big brands in a big way, because that's the easiest way to sort things out.

That's too bad for small mom-and-pop businesses and the backbone of the economy.

Please see Aaron Wall's latest article: Is Google Encouraging User Generated Spam on Social Media Sites?

Jawbone's founding CEO Alexander Asseily thinks everyone deserves a powerful voice online, so today he's launching State, a structured opinion-sharing network where people don't need to follow you [to] see your [opinion].

You can get an early invite to State if you give them your email address, and you'll probably get chosen if you are someone whose opinion counts.

It all sounds very similar to Swipp. Except with a bit more structure:

Swipp offers a simple ten-point scale on which anyone can register their opinion on anything. It seems, from the screenshots (above), that State offers a bit more direction; there's room for a "question + subject", while Swipp just has "subject." Also, Swipp is global, while State doesn't yet exist, except for one page.  

Surely there will be a new definition of "glassy-eyed stare".

By the way, here's a fascinating little peek into Google's senior level executive meetings, as told by Eric Schmidt — most of them can't make eye contact with each other.

Curt Woodward, senior editor at Xconomy, wrote:

During Schmidt's decade as Google CEO, before co-founder Larry Page took the helm, there was a standing rule for one senior-executive meeting: No computers, no smartphones, and talk to each other face-to-face for one hour per week.

It was so hard to resist the pull of the web, though, that Schmidt had to walk around the meeting room and look for people hiding their phones under the table, dispensing fines to the offenders.

"Even one hour per week, you couldn't have a civilized conversation. So when Larry replaced me, he gave up. And now I sit in the meeting, typing away like everybody else, with no eye contact. So if you like eye contact, I'm sorry — you lost," he said to laughs.

 — Schmidt: Google Glass critics "afraid of change", society will adapt | Xconomy

Related stories

• Old age is the killer app for Google Glass

Where Google Glass will make its mark, and find a large and loyal customer base is in helping families and communities deal with the ravages of old age.

We have a very large population of Baby Boomers. This is Generation A — a massive ageing population that's vulnerable to all the ills and predicaments that an older life brings.

Generation A is doing pretty well so far, but it can't live forever, even though it secretly thinks otherwise.

The realities of old age are well documented, such as brittle bones, difficulties in walking, small falls that can break hips, and many other injuries that were trivial when younger now become deadly. Prolonged physical inactivity due to injuries are a quick slide towards mortality. (Acturial tables are the original "Big Data" app.)

Older age brings other challenges, such as muddled thoughts, and for some, a slow slide into dementia because of Alzheimer's, or because of the effects of powerful medications.

With special Google Glass-based applications, however, we could soften the problems that Generation A is facing. And it can be done at a very low cost — probably for about the same amount of money as a monthly cell phone bill, which makes it affordable to nearly every family.

Here are some examples of Gen A Google Glass applications:

• Google Glass sensors can track a person's gait and identify mobility problems that signal a potential fall and broken bones in the near future. Early warning signs can trigger preventative treatments, and healthcare providers would be motivated to try stop a fall before it happens

• Reminders for taking medication and preventing double dosing — a big health problem. Plus, reminders of family birthdays

• People beginning to suffer from dementia would find Google Glass-based apps tremendously useful. For example, the device could recognize family members and offer simple messages, such as, "This is your son, his name is John. Say, 'Hello John, how are my beautiful grandchildren?"

• When John asks his aged mother, "Do you remember the trip we took last year to Las Vegas?" Google Glass can run a quick replay video of the highlights. Not only would John's mother recall the trip, but she could use John's wireless printer to print out her favorite photos for him, right there and then

• Families are often separated from their older members because of jobs thousands of miles away. They could check-in with their parents very easily. With Google Glass-type devices, they could patch into what they are doing, even what they are seeing (there would be a "courtesy" filter to screen out any embarrassing scenes)

• And if there were a problem, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" aid would be on the way in seconds

• Finding old episodes of "The Rockford Files"

The possibilities for Google Glass are huge in this older market. Why do companies chase the 19 to 25 year old demographic? Those kids have little money and the entire generation has lousy job prospects. 

The Baby Boomers of Generation A are the largest and wealthiest demographic of them all. They will love Google Glass.

Google's rush to Google Glass makes perfect sense if you consider that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are 40 and 39 years old, respectively.

With every day, they have more and more in common with 60 year-olds than with 20 year-olds. Google Glass is an exercise in future-comforting their old age.

And so is the hiring of Ray Kurzweil; it's to ensure that Google's founders get a front seat on the bus ride to the Singularity and its promise of immortality. (If you are in the back seats, you might not get there in time. It's a different type of digital divide.)

Related stories

• Live forever coming soon, says Ray Kurzweil... are we already in the Singularity?

Economists Guojun He and Jeffrey Perloff at the University of California, Berkeley, have published a study that details widespread illegal working conditions among Chinese companies despite the scrutiny of Western audits.

more than half of Chinese employees in audited firms worked more than the legal limit of 44 hours per week. Between one third and one half of those working overtime did not receive legally required overtime wages for the extra hours.

The study, Does Customer Auditing Help Chinese Workers?, categorically shows that the audits announced with great fanfare by Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and other firms such as Nike are not working. It's time to move beyond PR rhetoric.

They have the evidence from a neutral third party to act and be seen to be tough with their sub-contractors. Otherwise, people will talk about them, and it'll be a conversation about hypocrites.

My advice to those companies: "It's time to act, and it's good for your brand, too."

Let's have fair trade electronics now.

Related story

• Foxconn worker subsidies: Is Apple on track to be the 1st Fair Trade tech company?

Amazon's unremarkable financial performance, and the warning of a large loss, didn't upset shareholders by much; shares fell just 3 percent in after-hours trading.

As Amazon steps up competition against giants such as Apple, against HBO with its popular Netflix service, and against cloud computing vendors Rackspace and others, it has a massive competitive advantage: Its shareholders. They simply won't dump its stock, even when profits are weak and there's the prospect of a large loss.

On $16.1 billion in sales, Apple would have reported the equivalent of $3.5 billion in net profits. Amazon: just $82 million.

Apple is hugely profitable, but it has less room to maneuver. Take a look at this six-month chart comparing Amazon and Apple.

Apple shareholders dumped more than $279 billion in valuation over the past six months, simply because earnings per share missed by a tiny fraction, and explosive sales growth had slowed slightly.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has to be very careful; he can't take too many risks, or Wall Street will pummel the company's share price.

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos can take more business risks, such as trying out different tablet devices, or different business models for online content - that Apple simply cannot without weighing the considerable risks to its share price if it stumbles minutely.

It's an interesting paradox that a barely profitable Amazon can have a significant advantage over a much more profitable (42 times), and far richer ($145 billion cash vs. $11.5 billion) competitor. And it's because of its stalwart shareholders.

Keeping in the eye of the media is key to Amazon's strategy, because it helps communications with its shareholders. Jeff Bezos recently invested $5 million in Business Insider, an online news site founded by Henry Blodget. He's a former star Wall Street analyst who made his name by predicting Amazon shares would nearly double in a year, sparking a massive two-year bubble in e-commerce stocks. It's interesting to see the two aiding each others' fortunes, again.

Related stories

• Amazon's Q1 solid, 'other' AWS sales surge

As Google ships the first production units of its "Glass" glasses, and volumes of adoration spill from the geek community, I can't help thinking that this is a product that will fail along with other socially inept Google hardware, such as the short-lived Nexus Q media player.

Google Glass will fail for the simple reason that it won't be socially acceptable to be video or audio recording people around you without their permission, or to be online constantly without others knowing. It's just creepy, and people won't put up with people who wear them in their company.

I say this because I've been shooting a lot of photos and videos over the past year, in and around Silicon Valley. I always ask permission first, because I've noticed a growing reluctance among people to have others shooting photos and videos around them.

This never used to be much of a problem; people loved having their photos posted online, and video, too. It was all part and parcel of the novelty of the ease with which people could promote themselves and others through a variety of online platforms.

That novelty faded a long time ago. Today, most people's attitudes are far more wary toward being recorded in any way, and what is done with that content, and where it is published.

So, how will Google's goggles fit into a social and business events scene that is increasingly averse to being watched, recorded, and shared? The answer is it won't.

Don't record me, bro!

Surveillance is OK for buildings, but it's most certainly not OK for personal and business relationships.

With a smartphone, at least you know a person is using it, and what they are doing with it. With Google Glass, you don't know whether it's on, what the device is doing (is the "X-ray" feature active?), what the user is looking at on their screen, whether they are present or distracted. Are they publishing this online right now? Or later?

Google Glass is a product designed by engineers who clearly don't understand interpersonal interactions. It's for the culturally clueless, who will remain sidelined in social situations as they currently are now — without the glasses.

And here's another reason why Google's Glass won't replace smartphones: What will geeks stare at when they are out and about in public spaces, too awkward to meet people's gazes, if they don't have a phone screen to hide behind?

Will we see them sitting around with glassy, thousand-miles-away stares?

Industrial apps

I can see Google Glass being useful in many industrial applications, such aircraft maintenance, where access to manuals and related information can speed work and ensure it's done right.

Walking along a street is fine, but certainly not driving cars, where there are already restrictions on phoning and texting, and where more restrictions on smart device use will follow, most probably around "Glass"-type devices.

In social and business situations, they won't be acceptable. There will be a strong general cultural backlash.

Reality is the new black

In a world of constant digital intrusions, amid layers of augmented realities, good old unadorned reality will gain a new following, because it can't be manipulated, and it is rare — That sunset only lasts a few moments, that connection with your friend, that look, that touch. It's gone in an instant.

That scarcity will invest reality with so much more value than a million digitally rendered and recorded experiences.

People will show their respect for each other by showing that they are totally present with one another — and you can't do that if you are wearing Google's goggles.

In the near future, "Be here right now" will be a new (renewed) mantra.

Related stories

• 10 things about Google Glass: Could this be Google's iPad?

• The Google Glass Innovation Forum

• Google's 'Q' ball is pocketed from the first break

Mr. Lanier says he was one of the first in advocating digitizing the music industry and he used to argue that free music would enable artists to make money from live shows and merchandising.

The benefits of digitization are numerous. One of the benefits is that businesses can cherry pick the lowest-risk highest margin businesses and give away information services as a loss-leader.

He now says that this did not turn out well and that information should not be free because it doesn't create sustainable economies. 

Three wishes...

Good luck putting the Genie back into the bottle. Every industry undergoing transformation to a digital business is facing enormous disruption in transitioning to the new business models. The music and the news media are the most visible examples but there's plenty more.

The benefits of digitization are numerous. One of the benefits is that businesses can cherry pick the lowest-risk highest margin businesses and give away information services as a loss-leader.

Google does it all the time, other companies do it too, giving away content, apps, etc, that other businesses used to sell. 

Take a look at Craigslist, which cherry-picked free-classifieds and didn't have to produce the journalism that helped sell the classifieds ads. Craigslist only charges for job ads and its revenues were estimated to be $126m in 2012 and are expected to increase by  $27m to $153m in 2013.

It is clearing about $103m a year in profits -- not bad for a private firm employing just 35 people. But to make that money it has decimated the classified ads market.

A market that was worth $19.6 billion in 2000 had fallen to $6bn in 2009. The value of all those free Craigslists ads it gives away is more than $13 billion a year.   Craigslist has likely destroyed more than $100bn of revenues over its long span. And it's responsible for tens of thousands of lost jobs.

But it's not Craigslist's fault, it's simply the power of the Internet, a basket of virtually free, standardized publishing technologies, which manages to devalue every business it touches (except healthcare).

Digital destroys economies, creates ever smaller ones...

If a product or service can be digitized it can be produced or offered, for nearly free. If a business makes money on something else it can easily support "almost-free" to the detriment of other "non-free" businesses in that market.

Stewart Brand, a Bay Area publisher and techno-optimist, coined the infamous phrase "Information wants to be free" in 1985.

"Information can be free" -- is what he's actually saying. And because it can be offered for free  -- it often is. And software too, the open source movement is a perfect example of that trend.

We face a future that will be defined by the end of work - it can become a golden age or one of horrific consequences.

Mr. Lanier is right about the need for developing sustainable businesses and the inability of free information to provide a means of wealth creation, especially when the competitive strategy du jour is the simple bludgeon of scale: the biggest, most efficient computer platform, wins.

Backing away from the future...

It would seem a better use of their time if futurists such as Mr. Lanier focused on the future, and less on going back to the past. Developing sustainable economies won't be done by going backwards in time, a direction that Mr Lanier seems to be pointing.

We face a future that will be defined by the end of work - it can become a golden age or one of horrific consequences. Horrific because we have no means of dealing with this type of future. We have nothing that has prepared us for it. We only know how to punish and ridicule those that don't work. But what if there is no need to work? 

We need to figure out how we deal with the end of work -- it's the most important problem we face bar none.

There's more than 7 billion of us and we've all have to get jobs? We have hugely productive manufacturing and other technologies that operate on enormous scales and create all manner of things at extremely low unit costs. 

It doesn't require all 7 billion of us to produce the things we need for a sustainable, healthy, vibrant society. Yet we will impose austerities and false shortages to create scarcities, even famines at times, in a bid to monetize markets.

Irrepressible technologies of mass abundance

We have at our disposal immense, irrepressible technologies of mass abundance, yet we constantly seek to muzzle them, to create sustainable economies that are only sustainable within the GDP metrics that made sense in the past.

It doesn't add up, it doesn't make sense, and it's because we don't have the language and the concepts to even begin to know how to talk about living in a world that celebrates the end of work, the fruits of thousands of years of progress.

Don't look to Silicon Valley to create tens of milions of jobs, unless they are replacing hundreds of millions of jobs elsewhere.

Yet we insist that 7 billion people work, or else they are failures, failed societies, failed countries, failed economies. The Internet is helping to create a lot failed economies, it's what it does best.

Our technologies overall, replace more jobs than they create, that's why they are successful. Don't look to Silicon Valley to create tens of milions of jobs, unless they are replacing hundreds of millions of jobs elsewhere. That's what Washington DC and all other governments don't understand about innovation.

We need a new way of understanding the future and coming to terms with it on its terms -- and not those from our past way of thinking. That's going to be hugely difficult but we need to start now. 

Predicting the future is easy, figuring out how we live in it is much harder. 

A recently published study by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK and Microsoft Research, used an automated analysis of 58,000 volunteers' Facebook "likes" to make highly accurate predictions about a person's private and very sensitive personal attributes.

The authors of the study, Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior, claimed that they were able to use "easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes" to accurately predict a wide range of attributes that included:

Sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

The researchers developed a model that could predict whether a man was homosexual 88 percent of the time, and 75 percent of the time for women; ethnic origin (95 percent), gender (93 percent), religion (82 percent), political affiliation (85 percent), if they use addictive substances (75 percent), and relationship status (67 percent).

Margaret Weigel, writing on Journalist's Resource, noted that clicking "Like" on popular subjects such as "Britney Spears" or "Desperate Housewives" were among signs of a homosexual orientation.

The model was less accurate when attempting to predict the length of the parents' marriage (60 percent). "Individuals with parents who separated have a higher probability of liking statements preoccupied with relationships, such as 'If I'm with you then I'm with you. I don't want anyone else.'"

Foremski's take

Predictive models such as the ones used by the researchers in this study become even more accurate as more data is collected.

Easy access to such highly sensitive information could be used by employers, landlords, government agencies, educational institutes, and private organizations in ways that discriminate and punish individuals. And there's no way to fight it.

Big data is growing into a massive threat to individual well being in society. There is no difference between big data and Big Brother when it comes to commercial interests.

Big data is the Stasi of our online worlds

There are many "silent listeners" in social networks that collect people's "Likes" and other online behaviors so that the information can be sold discretely to third parties. Facebook, Google, and all other social networks also collect such behavioral information.

While the companies say that their behavioral big data is stripped of users' names, it is possible to use other databases such as electoral records, demographic information, and location data, to identify individuals by name.

It's essentially a secret dossier on more than a 1 billion social network users.

While this dossier is fragmented at the moment, sophisticated new technologies will soon make it trivial to pull together a massive amount of sensitive private data on every individual who interacts with the internet in any way.

Your phone records, or information about events and parties you attend, could implicate you in the future if they show a connection with people that are later identified as drug dealers, criminals, terrorists, or maybe even paedophiles.

Big data gradually accumulates a cloud of suspicion around you simply by association.

Deleting bad links

Google, for example, already assesses the quality of a website by who links to it. If you have lots of what Google considers to be low-quality, spammy site back links, it will downgrade your website's all-important PageRank and bury it deep within its index.

This is why website owners are desperately sending out letters to other websites asking them to delete their back links.

Think about how such methodology could be applied to determine the "TrustRank" of an individual in Google's world. People can't erase past links to friends and associates now considered "low quality" or possibly even criminal.

Welcome to the future obligations of your present life. Will people start purging their online social circles of unsavory characters? Or people they think might turn to criminal activities?

Big data knows you better than you know you

Big data technologies currently under development will be able to make highly accurate predictions about nearly every important aspect of your existence: Your health, your lifespan, even your sanity.

Big businesses loves big data because it helps them manage their risks — it's what corporations do best.

I was at a recent Cisco event featuring their futurists. One of them talked about people's FICA scores, which determine their ability to get a mortgage, and developing a type of healthcare "FICA" score for each person as a way of determining their ability to get healthcare insurance.

I pointed out that it was a brilliant idea for cutting healthcare costs, since it would likely result in mass hospital closures as companies only insured people with a low risk of needing their services.

The future benefits of big data are stacked firmly against the individual.

There's been a lot of research over the past couple of years about the life-shortening effects of sitting. Your chair really is trying to kill you, the more you sit the earlier you will die.

It might be best to avoid a stylishly comfortable Aeron chair and choose the most uncomfortable chair you can find so as to discourage prolonged sitting.

Part of the problem could be in the way we sit, our posture, and the posture we are taught from an early age to assume: straight back, shoulders back, etc, isn't a natural form.

Slumping, if it's done right, alleviates a lot of tension and allows the spinal column to do its job: redistribute stress and  support the body's organs to do the things they need to do.

Esther Gokhale, founder of the Esther Gokhale Wellness Center in Palo Alto, in the video above, shows how to assume a more natural "primal" posture. (Just published on Stanford University's video channel.) 

An Australian study of 8,800 people over a six year period found that for each hour spent sitting increased the risk of death from heart disease by one-fifth.

Is it because of a sedentary lifestyle? No.

A study that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for more than 12 years found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.

So maybe it is how you sit.

Your chair is trying to kill you... | ZDNet

Esther Gokhale's hunt for perfect posture - SFGate

Esther Gokhale … has pursued hundreds, even thousands of people around the world, mimicking their body alignment and walking style until her shadow matched theirs.

She has studied men and women in isolated African, Brazilian and Indian villages where back pain is virtually unknown, despite long hours spent harvesting, weaving, cooking and toting heavy loads….Over the years, she has become a "back whisperer" of sorts, winning over tech execs at Google and Cisco Systems, Stanford academics, working moms and medical doctors…

HP revealed the inquiry in a regulatory filing Monday, reported on NYTimes.com.

The PC maker reported an $8.8 billion write-off in the value of Autonomy last year.

The fallout to the disastrous deal could result in a major shakeup of HP's board as independent shareholder advisory firms recommend removal of chairman Ray Lane, a veteran Silicon Valley executive at Oracle, and four directors including Silicon Valley top VC Marc Andreessen. 

Rajiv Gupta, one of the directors named for removal, issued a letter to shareholders on Monday arguing that Mr Lane and the current board be retained.

Reuters reported:

…he highlighted Lane's global and management experience as former chief operating officer of software giant Oracle Corp.

"Losing some of our directors in an abrupt and disorderly manner could undermine our efforts to stabilize the company," Gupta, a former CEO of specialty materials maker Rohm & Haas, wrote on Monday.

Reuters said it is very rare for a serving chairman to receive a recommendation of opposition from ISS, the leading shareholder advisory firm. 

The shareholder advisory firms say that there was not enough due diligence by the board. Autonomy founder Mike Lynch denies HP's allegations of fraud.

This is a very unusual situation because Intel has a long tradition of providing a clear CEO succession path well ahead of any changes.

However, it appears that its board was surprised by Mr Otellini's resignation in August. At 62 years old he was expected to serve until 65, Intel's mandatory retirement age. 

Sean Maloney, a senior VP and 30-year veteran, was being groomed for the top job, but he suffered a huge stroke in 2010.

Mr Maloney told SVW, "Imagine waking up and you can't talk?" He said he has mostly recovered from the stroke but Intel hasn't because it still hasn't managed to name a successor to Mr Otellini, or signal potential candidates in the three years since Mr Maloney's stroke.

In late January Intel promoted eight vice presidents, which would have also provided a good opportunity to name the next CEO.

Intel's board said it would consider outsiders, a move that some Intel watchers would welcome as a way of possibly boosting the company's sluggish stock market performance under its current CEO. 

Intel's share value changed little from the day when Mr Otellini took over as CEO and the day of his resignation.

And this is what has frustrated Intel's board and its investors, that its stock market performance hasn't reflected the company's considerable growth in revenues and profits under Mr. Otellini's leadership.

There's a perception among investors that Intel is losing out to tiny British chip designer ARM, whose microprocessors are popular in mobile phones and tablets — a strategic market that's growing far faster than desktops and notebooks.

Reuters reporters Noel Randewich and Nadia Damouni write that the next Intel CEO will have to execute on a strategy begun by Mr Otellini, the building of a major contract chip manufacturing business.

Manufacturing chips on behalf of other companies is a major departure for Intel, which for decades has based its business on using its manufacturing prowess to offer its own PC chips superior to rival products. As PC sales contract and Intel's fabrication plants operate at less than full capacity, the chipmaker sees an opportunity to fill idle production lines while earning new revenue.

Foremski's Take:

Intel is up against a formidable competitor, industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, if it is to succeed in the foundry business.

Although Intel has a technology lead over TSMC of as much as two years, it will need that time and more, to learn how to work with large numbers of fabless chip companies, and how to transfer their designs to its unique chip making process — a far from trivial task.

Intel's internal culture is not one that welcomes chip designs from outside the company. This won't help if a customer wants Intel to build chips with ARM designs. This would be essential if Intel hopes to win Apple's chip contract.

It's a tough business and it's a business that Intel's tried before, in the late 1990s, and abandoned. 

The considerable challenges in building the contract chip business will occupy much of the time of the next CEO. It means less attention to answering Wall Street's serious concerns about the lack of Intel chips in mobile phones and tablets.

Winning big in the mobile chips markets is key for Intel's efforts to boost its share value and placate some of its Wall Street critics.

However, success in mobile chip markets, and in building a major contract chip manufacturing division, will pressure lucrative profit margins. Intel's next CEO will have to figure out how to prevent revenues from new business lines dragging on its quarterly financial results and upsetting investors.

The only way Intel can keep its high profit margins is by leveraging its lead in keeping Moore's Law alive and still very relevant. It's able to make the world's smallest transistors and cram more chips onto a wafer than anyone else, which means very low costs per chip.

But competitors aren't far behind and Intel will have to execute in near perfect order with little room for mistakes.

With two very different business challenges, it's not surprising that finding the next CEO is taking so much time. Maybe this is a good time for Intel to consider a two-CEO arrangement similar to that at SAP, the German software giant.

- - -

Please see: Intel's search for leadership | ZDNet