Watching
the Alpha Geeks
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com
Stanford EE380
November 19, 2008

We’re best known as a book publisher
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What We Really Do At O'Reilly
Change the world by spreading the
knowledge of innovators
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How we do it
• Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
• Amplify their effectiveness by spreading
the information needed for others to
follow them.
• Books
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How we do it
• Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
• Amplify their effectiveness by spreading
the information needed for others to
follow them.
• Books, Conferences
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How we do it
• Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
• Amplify their effectiveness by spreading
the information needed for others to
follow them.
• Books, Conferences, Online
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Some Examples
• First books on Linux and Perl - 1991
• First book on the internet, covered WWW
when there were only 200 web sites - 1992
• Launched first commercial web site, 1993
• First advocacy about web services - 1997
• Organized meeting where term “open
source” was adopted - 1998
• Coined term Web 2.0 to describe rules for
new internet platform - 2004
• Make: celebrates the new DIY - 2006
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Watch the Alpha Geeks
• New technologies first exploited by hackers, then
entrepreneurs, then platform players
• Three examples
– Wireless community networks
predict universal Wi-Fi
– Screen scraping predicts
web services and the internet
as platform
– “The pedal powered internet”
predicts new focus on energy
Rob Flickenger and his potato chip can antenna
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\"The future is here. It's just not
evenly distributed yet.\"
--William Gibson
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Closer to home...
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“A PC on every desk and in every home”
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“The PC is just a toy.”
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In 1998, search had largely been written
off as a business opportunity...
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“Organize all the world’s information”
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Hackers Like Big Challenges
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Ten Things That Will
Rock Your World
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com

1. “Harnessing Collective
Intelligence”
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Web 2.0 is about finding meaning
in user-generated data,
and turning that meaning into real-time
user-facing services
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OpenCV: Computer Vision
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2. Technology for Social Action
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How can I make any difference?
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\"A victory small enough to be
organized is too small to be
decisive.\"
--Eliot Janeway,
Struggle for Survival
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Tracking Illegal Deforestation in Brazil
with Google Earth
Source: New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/world/americas/19brazil.html
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3. The End of the
Relational Database Paradigm
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4. Energy and Global Warming
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“We’re F**ked!”
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5. Government (and Business)
Transparency
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6. Re-mix Culture Goes Mainstream
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7. Hacking Gets Physical
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The Sensor Revolution
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VCR Cat Feeder
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8. Open Source Hardware
and the future of manufacturing
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9. Instrumenting the World
We are moving out of the world in which people
typing on keyboards will drive collective
intelligence applications. Increasingly,
applications are driven by new kinds of sensors.
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Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robot Dogs
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3D beijing
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What’s Next?
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11. Body and Mind Hacking
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12. Synthetic Biology
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For More Information
• What is Web 2.0?
http://www.oreillynet.com/go/web2
• http://tim.oreilly.com
• http://radar.oreilly.com
• http://www.makezine.com
• http://www.oreilly.com
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