Kameir

Last night (02/11/2010) the German American Chamber of Commerce, the  San Diego French American Chamber of Commerce, the Swedish American Chamber of Commerce, and the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce of Southern California joined together at the Westgate Hotel for the 1st European-American Business Mixer.  Since the provided laptop crashed half-way through my speech I had to free-form the rest of my talk. So, below please find the presentation slides for my playful speech on cultural factors at the event.

Will automated decision support tools replace the business analytics? Whereas removing the ‘human element’ always seems like a good idea (“it’s never the computers fault!”), there’s something to be said for adding a ‘creative’ momentum in form of the human mind to a decision. So called decision engines might be able to point out upcoming trends but creativity in implementing learnings from analytics should never be underestimated and will not be able to be replicated by an automated system.

Daemon is an futuristic novel, which sets out not only to entertain, which it surely does, but also to challenge the reader to consider social issues as broad as the implications of living in a technologically advanced world and whether democracy can survive in such a world. And for us geeks: what we can expect from near-future technologies.

The storyline portrays one possible world consequent to the development of the technological innovations that we currently live with and the reality that the author, Daniel Suarez, imagines will evolve, and it is chilling and tense (on thedaemon.com the reader can find evidence that the seemingly incredible advances Suarez proposes could – and likely will – in fact become real). Daemon is filled with multiple scenes involving power displays by the Daemon’s allies resulting in complete loss of control by its enemies, violence with new and innovative weaponry, explosions, car crashes, blood, guts, and limbs-cut-off galore. – As far as technological complexity, Daemon will satisfy any computer geek’s thirst!

Big Brother German?! With amazement I discovered that Germany – of all countries! – censors Google results. That makes it one of only two other nations – the other being China and France – to restrict access to search engine results. Under German law, hate speech and Holocaust denial are illegal. Violent or sex-related sites such as YouPorn and BME that the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien deems harmful to youth are also censored. Google has complied with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results (Google does however list the number of excluded results at the bottom of the search result page).

Google announced that the company is buying Gizmo5, the San Diego VoIP company founded by my friend Michael Robertson. Since its inception as Grandcentral, the service has offered a wide range of features for managing your phone calls, with one exception: calls passing through Google Voice have to be directed to another phone number if you actually wanted to answer them. This gap can bow be closed through Gizmo Project.

As currently implemented, Google Voice in conjunction with Gizmo allows to place unlimited free calls to the United States and Canada (and low rates into other countries), but requires two separate accounts. Launch the Gizmo software on your Mac to log into your Gizmo account, then start browser to log into Google Voice; calls placed in Google Voice can be redirected to ring your Gizmo account before connecting to the person you’re calling.

Let’s hope Google gets the interface right this time.