The Natural User Interface And The Differently Abled

English: NASA StarChild image of Stephen Hawking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think the Natural User Interface, of which the touch is just the beginning and gesture is the next big step, though not the final step, not by a long shot, is a big gift for all of us, but it might be extra promising for the differently abled. Senior homes can make use of drones and robots. Voice commands would cut language barriers. The Internet is not meant for English only, and should not dump you into your particular language silo. You communicate, let the Internet translate.

The keyboard, if you think about it, does feel unnatural.

The ultimate is being able to command your computing environment with your eye movements, Stephen Hawking style.

At some level we are all differently. A lot of start wearing glasses early on. As soon as you put one on, you have gently stepped into the differently abled zone. Smart, robotic limbs are not a challenge anymore. They are not innovation challenges, they are simply now scaling challenges.

Your brain is one of the last parts of your body to give up on you. Which means the NUI taken to its logical conclusion will allow us to raise the retirement age. And since retirement is voluntary anyways, a lot of us could hope to live long productive lives through NUI.

Education remains the great unsolved mystery of our knowledge age, ironically. The industrial era education engines/structures don't recognize concepts like people learn at their own paces with their own styles. That individualization is now possible. But there are old institutional structures that get in the way.

There are enormous implications on education and health because a knowledge economy puts a major, unprecedented emphasis on human capital. Human capital is a concept much bigger than human rights because it takes human rights for granted.

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Swype's Language Innovations

Image via CrunchBase

Fast typing is not just about keystrokes. It is also about language. It can be argued it is primarily about language. Voice input for text is quite a treat too. It is great for taking quick notes, to be corrected later, or not. A Gmail saved draft is easy to correct later on a laptop.

Smartphone Dictionaries Go Gangnam Style

may also eventually enable Swype to roll out customized dictionaries based on a user’s geographical region or occupation, and add support for smaller languages that are often ignored by technology companies. .... language varies tremendously from person to person and place to place, and it’s hard to keep up with constantly changing jargon and slang—not to mention doing so in many different languages. ..... Swype Living Language .... If Swype sees a critical mass of people adding a word or phrase—such as “MakerBot”—it will push that out to participating users ..... Swype is also trolling popular blogs and websites for new words that can also be added to its collection. This only goes so far, though, as terms like “Gangnam Style” can show up in users’ vernacular well before becoming popular in the media ...... noticed tens of thousands of appearances of the word “Lochte”—referring to Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte ..... very up-to-date dictionaries that include subjects trending in the world around us. .... new Living Language words will expire after six months unless they retain a certain amount of popularity .... A doctor might use one type of Swype dictionary, while a tech journalist would get another

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Race, Gender, Tech

Image via WikipediaGroup dynamics is the number one thing I bring to the table for work. And there gender as a topic stands out. And I don't even mean in a political way. It is fascinating as a topic like stars might fascinate astrophysicists.

The zen of tech makes it even more possible to see the threads of race and gender. In a city where the subway ride is cheap, even at free events why do you end up seeing a room that is almost all people of one kind? Culture is a powerful force. Like Facebook did not create the social graph, it merely mapped it, tech in general helps you see social threads.

The other day I saw a group photo of the Tumblr team somewhere and it was an all white team, and I noticed. My teams in India are all Indian. (Doubling Down On Tech Consulting) I was at an event in Jackson Heights on Friday and it was a room full of people from Nepal.

And you come across women who would like you to believe they are on the cutting edge of things like the glass ceiling, only it simply does not involve a single white male they might personally know. Or when a white woman does her racist bonding thing with a white male to portray you as The Other. The same platform also is open to acts of sexist bonding, but do you really want to go for that? But then corporate warfare has its twists and turns. And the Internet is globalization on steroids. A billion Indians would not be my idea of a minority.

Permanent War

Revolutionary Poverty Alleviation

Image via WikipediaThere are natural lakes, and there are man made lakes. Well, all poverty is man made. Poverty does not have to exist.

I once heard a billionaire say there is enough marble just in West Virginia to build a mansion for every family on earth, but we have not reached that organization level yet as humanity. We keep getting in each other's way.

My industry - microfinance - has been a failure to date. Every year that the industry has existed, the number of poor people on the planet has gone up. That is failure.

Adam Smith And The Inbox Space

Image via CrunchBase

This guy Adam Smith popped up in my inbox today. Responding to an urge by Fred Wilson a few days ago, I signed up for the Venture Hacks mailing list, and today they sent me Adam Smith. It has been a cool find. Although I remember getting amused by the inbox spelled backwards thing from a few years back, in passing, (I remember watching that Bill Gates video that Adam inserts in his presentation in the video below, and I might be off on the time stamp) I am learning the guy's name for the first time today.

Venture Hacks Daily Newsletter

My interest in Adam Smith is that I have been giving some thought to the inbox space here at my blog recently.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I like it how he says no he has not solved the inbox problem, that problem is too big, he has not even attempted to solve the inbox problem. More than humility, it is a matter of fact. There is much work that can be done in the inbox space. Could you make the inbox sexy again?

@asmith
@dharmesh



Adam Smith's blog. (founder of Xobni) "We make email software that makes it easier for people to manage relationships and find information in their email......included in the MIT Technology Review's list of Top 35 Innovators Under 35, and Inc Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30."

From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned
Amazon S3’s Pricing Model is Arbitragable, and the Future of Cloud Storage
The Market Opportunity to Undercut Sonos Let me know if you’re interested. There are a couple of other interesting product and marketing angles that we could jam on, and I might want to put some money in.
The Great Q& A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 The major players are now Quora, StackOverflow, and Hunch..... Aardvark had about 40 bytes of information about me. They knew I was into startups, programming, and San Francisco. ....“everyone on the SO team works remotely from home” ..... dreaming about the company's problems at night, not talking at too many conferences, or doing other fake CEO stuff.
Magic in the software -- what the point and shoot camera industry needs I take pictures on my iphone using the Dropbox app. Pictures I take are immediately copied to all of my computers. .... There are a ton of apps that remain out of reach to point and shoots. ..... The magic is in the software.
Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected, and State Sponsored Deep Packet Inspection Seven of the 36 sites I tested sent passwords in the clear, available for an Internet Service Provider to read. .... 50% of the Chinese websites I tested were offenders. .... There are well known, easily implementable techniques for securing passwords sent back to a server.
Technology to circumvent online copyright enforcement “Why it might become civil disobedience to serve up random data.” .... Any given copyrighted work could be expressed across 10 random-looking files.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 4
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 3
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 2
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 1
My Startup Bootcamp Talk
How To Find A Market For Your New Company, Family Edition
How MIT Didn't Prepare Me For a Startup, Part 1
13 Ways Acting Classes Improved My Public Speaking Skillz
MIT Students Send Cameras Into Stratosphere, Very Cool!
Some Thoughts: the Online Backpacking Travel Industry

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