Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight

[A note to start. My company, Wesabe, is funded in part by a venture firm, Union Square Ventures, which is one of the funders of Boxee, a character in the drama described below. That said, I've never met or spoken with anyone from Boxee, and have only ever talked to Union Square about them to ask for an invite. I don't have any access to any inside information about Boxee. This post is based instead on the time I spent working at Lucasfilm from 1997 to 1999. Well, really, the following isn't based on Lucasfilm itself, but instead on my conversations with the major studios (of which Lucasfilm is not one -- Fox/Disney/etc., who control distribution, are) about this topic of video on the Internet, which was just starting to be hotly debated at the time.

Some of the comments below also come from participating in discussions about copy protection and Divx, which, if you'll remember, was at that time a self-destructing DVD-like format that would let the studios control how long you could watch their entertainment. No, seriously, it started to self-destruct when it was exposed to air and these people all thought it was certain to win over DVD. Wrong, but instructive.]

The secret to understanding why Hulu's "content providers" -- and boy do they love being called that -- have instructed Hulu to block Boxee users from their "content" -- again, not what they would call it -- isn't some big secret. In fact, it was broadcast during the Superbowl, in Hulu's excellent Superbowl ad:

Here's the relevant part, as spoken by Alec Baldwin:

Hulu beams TV directly to your [sardonic gesture to the camera] portable computing devices, giving you more of the cerebral-gelatinizing shows you want, any time, anywhere, for free.

Emphasis added: portable computing devices. Not to your TV -- from your TV. To your dumb-ass laptop, you smelly, hairy, friendless, gamer-freak nerd. (Sorry, I hate to talk about you that way, but that's how they think of the Internet. I think you smell great.) To your TV is something completely different, and from the "content providers'" point of view, completely wrong. Aren't Apple and Tivo and YouTube bad enough as it is?

Boxee was featured in an awesome New York Times article one month ago, with a picture of their product on a big-screen TV, and Hulu's logo clearly visible in the upper right corner. I can almost hear some lawyer somewhere in Hollywood screaming, "I thought Hulu was a WEB SITE! I do NOT see a WEB BROWSER in this PHOTOGRAPH!" at the sight of it. Boxee's blog post on the controversy says they heard from Hulu about this two weeks ago; I'd bet Hulu heard from that lawyer two weeks before that -- the morning the article appeared. Those calls are fun.

You'd think the "content providers" would know already this -- Boxee -- would happen; even with Hulu gone from Boxee, I can still watch Hulu on my TV, albeit with a much lamer interface. Hooking a computer to a TV is easy enough. Maybe they did know, and just waited to see how Boxee would get along until it got too high-profile to ignore. I doubt it, though. Most entertainment lawyers don't go for the idea, "Let's allow it for a little while and see what happens." They instead argue, "Let's stop it immediately and see if we have a better option we can control more, later." I'd guess Hulu had a deal to show "content" on computers, and the "content providers" balked when those computers started talking to their precious televisions.

So why does Hulu exist at all? Hulu must have seemed like the "better option" for getting people to watch TV ads on their computers -- better, perhaps, than the iTunes Music Store selling the same "content" piecemeal and getting price control over video as they have for music. Or, perhaps, than YouTube, selling and showing ads without the studios necessarily involved in any way. Let's control ads on the Internet by putting them on our "content" through Hulu, an entertainment industry company, not a smelly nerd company. Great. It's a plan.

Maybe BitTorrent came up in the discussion, but I doubt it -- BitTorrent is for smelly nerds. This isn't about you folks. This is about the mass market. Those people can't be disrupting their TV watching with some WEB SITE they saw in the NEW YORK TIMES.

So that's my guess about why Hulu blocked Boxee: those ads you see on Heroes are higher margin when you see them on your TV than when you see them on Hulu, and the only reason they're on Hulu is to make money from Heroes when you watch it online, so Apple or Google doesn't make that money instead. They were meant for your "portable computing devices" and not your precious TV. Now go back to the couch until we call for you again.

I'm sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off "content providers." They might as well have told the studios they are the moral equivalent of the guy schlepping reels around the projector booth. Someone will win this war eventually, they seem to be saying, and you could have helped make it us. Now you have a choice: someone else -- not you, someone smart -- will win instead, or you can change your mind.

That's pretty much my view, too. DVDs (mentioned in the note at the start) became a big boon for the studios, once their crazy ideas about self-destructing Divx discs went the way of the Dodo. The studios have a very long history of betting against technology people want, and on technology people don't want. This is just another such case. The technology people want always wins in the end -- no duh -- and usually benefits the businesses who fought that technology to the death. Here's hoping the technology people want -- Boxee -- doesn't wind up benefiting the studios fighting it now.

Four short links: 18 Feb 2009

A day of optimism (or is it pessimism), mobile, and local. Enjoy!

1. How Are You Coping With Anxiety Collapse? (BoingBoing) -- the economy, collapse, potential Depression, world to wrack and ruin was a repeating theme of Kiwi Foo Camp this year. We had a debate, the moot being "New Zealand is Fucked". You'll be glad to know that the opposing team won, but largely on the grounds that "the rest of the world will be worse off than us". Best line was at the end, when moderator Russell Brown said, "ok, let's head back for a drink" and the final speaker of the opposing team pushed his glass across the table and said, "here, have mine--it's half full." Anyway, a timely and pressing subject and the human stories in the comments are fascinating.
2. Let my board and me become as one: the Wii balance board/Google Earth mashup -- groovy UI hack that lets you surf the world via Google Earth.
3. Exporting the Past into the Future (Matt Jones) -- wonderful exploration of location-based services from an eminently human point of view. "Where you are right now has limited value".
4. Top 10 UK Android Mobile Apps -- how utterly banal the items on the list are, proof positive that Android has made it into the mainstream.

Anatomy of "Connect"

I'm here at Webstock in New Zealand working on my talk for tomorrow (Open, Social Web) and one of the things I've been thinking about is all of the different "Connect" applications and products that have recently sprung into existence. I mean, we have Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpace (thankfully not "Connect") ID, TypePad Connect, RPX and I'm sure the list goes on. I'm trying to break down all of these products - ignoring the underlying open or proprietary technologies that make them tick - toward a straw man definition of a "Connect" application:

1. Profile: Everything having to do with identity, account management and profile information ranging from sign in to sign out on the site I'm connecting with.
2. Relationships: Think social graph. Answers the question of who do I know on the site I've connected with and how I can invite others.
3. Content: Stuff. All of my posts, photos, bookmarks, video, links, etc that I've created on the site I've connected with.
4. Activity: Poked, bought, shared, posted, watched, loved, etc. All of the actions that things like the Activity Streams project are starting to take on.

In my mind, the Goals of all of these "Connect" applications are focused on helping people discover new content, people they already know as well as new people with similar interests. They also all help to reduce some of the major pain points when it comes to decentralization of social networks; signing up for a new account, eliminating the manual process of filling out your profile, uploading a photo and going through that madness of "re-friending" your friends time and time again. While all of these features aren't new, how this style of application combines them all certainly seems to be. If 2008 was the year of social application platforms (Facebook Platform and OpenSocial), perhaps 2009 will be all about "Connect" - whatever that means.

(I've put together an example of this using Facebook Connect and Citysearch as it seems to be the most complete example that I can find.)

Web 2.0 Expo: Launchpad Extended, Developer Discount and Ignite!

The Web 2.0 Expo is our annual West Coast gathering of web technologists. As always there a lot of ways to participate -- many of which will not cost you a dime, all of them can be quite valuable to you.

Launchpad: We are giving 5 companies 5 minutes on stage at the Expo Launchpad this year. While the definition of a launch has gotten cloudy in this age of public betas, we're looking for new companies or products that make us take notice. And while venture capital has been the focus in past years, the reality of the market is that companies must gain the attention of customers. So our judging panel and criteria this year focus more on what is essential and transformational in today's market than on ability to get funded. The judges this year are Matt Marshall (VentureBeat), Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb), myself and our sponsor Microsoft Bizspark's Anand Iyer.

We are extending the Launchpad's submission deadline to 2/19. Put your hat in the ring!

Developer Discount: We're offering a special discount to the full conference for developers. If you're a developer you still need to learn from each other and share your stories. More than ever you'll need to learn how to communicate with marketing. You'll want to learn how to write faster code, be secure and, of course, be greener. You'll want to find out how to get value from data, how to process that data on less servers than before, and how to respect your users by giving them control of their data.

To get 20% off admission to the Web 2.0 Expo use websf09dev at checkout. This offer is open until 2/20.

Ignite: On March 31st we are going to hold our annual Ignite Expo at the DNA Lounge. Each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. We'll have ~16 speakers. The best Ignite talks are ideas, hacks, lessons, or war stories. Submissions are due by 3/9. If you're not familiar with Ignite our community site has videos from previous events.

This year's Web 2.0 Expo is strong. Our keynotes will feature Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Will Wright (Maxis), and Vic Gundotra (Google). Our Developer, Marketing, Design, Mobile, Ops, Enterprise and Security tracks are packed with great speakers. I hope to see you there.

Photo Courtesy Duncan Davidson

Updated with Anand Iyer's name.

Four short links: 17 Feb 2009

Four Tuesday quickies:

1. The Technology Behind Coraline -- 3D stop-motion movie used a 3D printer to make the dolls and things like drops of water.
2. Some OSCON Proposal Tips (Alex Russell) -- good advice for anyone submitting a talk to a technical conference.
3. Oscar Predictions You Can Bet On -- Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight turns his attention to the Oscars.
4. Web Hooks and the Programmable Web of Tomorrow -- a epic presentation of different ways to offer and use callbacks, URLs on your site that a remote service can hit when something happens on their service. (via Stinky)

State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market

As described in Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, and our other posts on the State of the Computer Book Market we have an updated series of posts that show the whole market's final 2008 numbers. Remember this data is from Bookscan's weekly top 3,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores. Simply put, if you buy a book in the United States, there's a high probability it will get recorded in this data. Retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon make up the lion's share of these sales.

Book Market Performance

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ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos

If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled Real Hackers Program DNA at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, March 9-12, in San Jose, California. And she's joining us here today. Thank you for taking the time.

RESHMA SHETTY: No problem. Happy to be here.

JAMES TURNER: So first of all, how do you make bacteria smell nice, and why? I get an image of a commercial, "Mary may have necrotizing fasciitis, but at least her hospital room smells minty fresh."

RS: Well, the original inspiration for the project was the fact that for anybody who works in a lab, who works with E. coli, when you grow cultures of the stuff, it just smells really bad. It smells really stinky, basically. And so our thought was, "Hey, why don't we reengineer the smell of E. coli? It'll make the lab smell minty fresh, and it's also a fun project that gets people, who maybe aren't normally excited about biology, interested in it because it's a very tangible thing. I can smell the change I made to this bacteria."

JT: So what was the actual process involved?

RS: So the process was, you basically take a gene, we took a gene from the petunia plant, which normally provides an odor to the flower, and you place that gene into the E. coli cell. And by supplying the cell with an appropriate precursor, you make this minty smell as a result. So it's fairly straightforward.

JT: Your degree, biological engineering, is a new one to me. How is it different from biochemistry or microbiology or genomics or any of the other traditional biotech degrees?

RS: Well, biology and biochemistry, and so on, are concerned with studying the natural world. So I'm going to go out and figure out how the natural world works. Biological engineering, instead, is really all about saying, "Hey, we have this natural world around us. Biology is, in some sense, a new technology through which we can build new engineered biological systems." Right? So the idea is, what's the difference between physics and electrical engineering? Electrical engineers want to go build. So in biological engineering, we're interested in going and building stuff, too. But using biology, rather than physics, as the underlying science of it.

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Google's PowerMeter. It's Cool, but don't Bogart My Meter Data

Last week I read this piece in the New York Times about Google's PowerMeter, their entry into the smart meter game. The story was picked up in quite a few places but neither the NYT piece or related articles from other outlets expanded much on Google's underlying press release. Google's FAQ isn't very satisfying either; it has no depth so I didn't really know what to make of it. When I finished reading it I was left with an inchoate unsettled feeling and then I forgot about it. But on Friday evening I had a random conversation about it with a colleague who works in the meter data management (MDM) space. By the time we were through talking about what Google might be doing I had arrived at a position of love / hate. I'll explain the love first.

In terms of the attention this brings to energy consumption at the household level, I really love what Google is doing with this initiative. As they put it:

"But smart meters need to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to near real-time data on their energy usage. We're working on a prototype product that would give people this information in an iGoogle gadget."

I agree completely. It's not exactly the same thing, but I've been amazed by how much my behavior behind the wheel changed once I started leaving average mpg permanently visible on my car's dashboard display. In short order I went from speed racer wannabe to one of those guys that gets harassed by co-workers for driving too slow. "Hey, can you hypermile on the way back from lunch? I'm starving."

While I am not sure that a gadget on the web will have the same right-there-in-front-of-my-eyes impact that my car's LCD display has, I'm convinced that Google has hit on something important. After all, today most of us have no idea how many kilowatts we use, what we use them for, or how much we're paying per kilowatt. We use power in our homes the way I used to drive my car.

Unfortunately, Google's FAQ doesn't really answer any questions about how the service works. But from statements like "Google is counting on others to build devices to feed data into PowerMeter technology" we can deduce that Google is proposing to correlate the total power reported by your smart meter with the data collected from individual loads inside the home. This is really cool, because not only does it make the information more generally accessible to you (in an easily accessible gadget), it proposes to tell you what it is in your house that is using that power, and when.

Google can do this because many national and state governments have begun to mandate smart meter programs. Most of us will probably have one on the side of our house pretty soon (especially if the stimulus bill speeds things up). Smart meters improve on their predecessors by automating meter reading, reporting consumption in intervals (typically 15 minutes), and they can send "last gasp" failure notifications in the event of power outages.

But, just like their dumb ancestors, they will be owned by the utility. This means that the data generated will ultimately be under control of the utility and hosted in their systems. The meter will talk to a utility data collector and from there its data will enter the utility's MDM system. The MDM will do a bunch of stuff with the data. However, from the point of view of you, the consumer, it will primarily send it to the billing system which will now be able to account for time of day pricing. Also, it will send those last gasp signals to the outage management system so that outage reporting will be automatic. This will make analysis and response faster and more accurate. Google appears to be leveraging their position and market power to make deals with the utilities to access that data on our behalf.

The biggest reason for smart meter initiatives is demand management. The utilities have to carry expensive excess capacity so that they can meet peak loads. If they can use interval metering coupled with better pricing and feedback systems, they may be able to change our usage patterns and smooth that load which will reduce the necessary peak capacity overhang. Also, as alternative energy sources with less predictable availability like wind power come on line the utilities will need more "load shaping" options. Ultimately they might be able to reach directly out to your smart appliances and turn them off remotely if they need to.

The laws that are mandating smart metering are focused on this demand side management. Practically speaking, most utilities will close the consumer feedback loop by offering a simple portal on the utility's web site that will let you monitor your usage in the context of your bill. However, this isn't the part of the system the utilities are excited about. The hardware and the meters are the sexy part. The contracts to build the consumer portals are probably going to go to low cost bidders who will build them exactly to low band pass requirements. In some cases they may provide provisions for customers to download historical data into a spreadsheet if they want to. A few enterprising customers will probably take advantage of this feature, but this is the hard way to do the kinds of correlations Google has in mind.

What should be apparant by now, is that the government is mandating a good idea, but they are mandating it from a utilty-centric rather than customer-centric point of view. There is naturally some overlap between utility and customer interests, but they are not identical. The utility is concerned about managing capital costs. They look at the interval data and the customer portal as a way to influence your time-of-use behaviors. They really don't care how much power you use, they just don't want your demand to be lumpy. On the other hand, we just want our bills to be low.

So, Google's initiative offers to take your data from the utility, combine it with data coming from devices in your home, and visualize it much more you-centrically. There offering will do a better job than the utility's portal illuminating structural efficiency problems in the home as well as usage pattern problems once utilities start implementing variable pricing. In short, while the utility is attempting to influence your "when I use it" decision making, Google is offering to help you make better "what I plug in" decisions along with the stuff the utility cares about.

So, what's not to like?

Google needs two distinct sources of data to make this initiative work. They need access to your data via the utility that owns your smart meter. Plus they need data from equipment manufacturers that are going to make your appliances smart or provide your home automation gadgets. It doesn't bother me at all that they get this data, as long as the utility makes it available for anyone else that might be able to innovate with it too, including me. You never know, I might want to use it for a home made gadget that sets up an electric shock on my thermostat any time my last eight averaged readings are above some arbitrary threshold, you know, just to make me think twice before turning it up.

The little bit of info that Google provides on this initiative is at their .org domain, but there is virtually no information about how to participate in data standards making, API specification, device development, or that kind of thing. If you want to participate, you pick whether you are a utility, device manufacturer, or government, fill out a form and wait for Google to get back to you. Imagine, the government fills out a form to participate in Google's initiative. Google has out governmented the government.

As I described already, governments are insisting on demand side management, but there don't appear to be any requirements to provide generic API's for meter readings or meter events. It's enterprise thinking rather than web platform thinking and we run the risk of your data being treated like utility "content." "In other news today HBO struck an exclusive deal with XYZ electric for all of their meter content, meanwhile Cinemax surprised industry watchers by locking up ABC Electric. As was reported last night, all of the remaining utility's signed with Google last week."

I'm guessing that Google is probably following the same pattern that they are using in the transit space and making (exclusive?) deals with the utilities to consume your data. You'll have to log into the utilty portal to approve their access (or check a box on your bill). But Google, or other big players that can afford to buy in, will probably be the only choice(s) you have. There is no evidence on Google.org that they are trying to create an eco-system or generalized approach that would let you, the owner of the data, share it with other value added service providers. If the utilities implement this under government mandate it will suck. If they install smart meters with stimulus package money and still don't provide eco-system API's it will worse than suck.

Any thoughts on how this plays out on the smart appliance / home automation side? Are there healthy open standards developing or is there danger of large scale exclusivity on that side of the equation too?

Google will be more innovative with this data than the electric utilities, I have no doubt about that. But I can easily imagine other companies doing interesing innovating things with my meter data as well. Especially as Google achieves utility scale themselves. If my electric utility is going to create a mechanism to share my data with companies like Google, I want them to make a generalized set of API's that will let me share it with anyone.

A quick note to policy makers in states who haven't yet finalized their programs. When you think about what to mandate, consider a more consumer-centric model (if it's easier, think of it as a voter-centric model). You should be shooting for a highly innovative and generative space where contributions and innovations can come from large and small firms alike, and where no one should be structurally locked out from participation. Don't lock us into a techno-oligarchy where two or three giant firms own our data and the possibility of innovation. If you insist on widely implemented consumer controlled API's and a less enterprise-centric model, you will not only encourage broader innovation at the consumer end, but you can use it to enhance competition on the generation side too.

Well, Google isn't really saying what they are doing, so maybe I got it wrong. Maybe they are about to get all "spectrum should be free" and roll out all kinds of draft API's specifications for comment. If you think I got it wrong, don't hesitate to let me know in the comments.

Update (2/17): Asa pointed out in the comments that Google does provide more about their intent in their comments to the California Public Utilities Commission. I missed that link before and it gives some useful hints.

Most interesting is the repeated reference to Home Area Networks (HAN). In the original post I assumed Google was taking current smart meters as a given and obtaining data from the utility MDM after it went through their data collectors. That looks like it was incorrect. Instead Google probably wants your meter to to talk to your HAN via wireless(?) and then on to them from there.

If Google can use their market position to make that data accessible off the HAN rather then from the utility MDM I think that's a good thing. Mostly because it makes possible the direct consumption and analysis of the data on my side of my home network's NAT / firewall. I didn't really touch on privacy considerations in the original post, but given that PowerMeter appears trivial from a computational point of view, I'd much rather run it locally rather than share my every light switch click with Google. If I want to know how I'm doing relative to peers I can share that data then, in appropriately summarized form.

The other point in the CPUC comments is this statement: "PowerMeter... we plan to release the technical specifications (application programming interfaces or API) so anyone can build applications from it."

This is great, but I would love to see the API's sooner rather than later. They aren't really PowerMeter API's after all, if I'm reading the situation correctly, these are proposed API's and data specifications for smart meters and smart devices. The API's that Google (and others) will be consuming, not the ones they are offering. If a whole ecosystem is going to be enabled through those API's, then the ecosystem should have a hand in developing them.

In summary, if Google manages to create a level playing field for the development of an ecosystem based on this data, I'll applaud them. Some people will use their service and, like they do with other Google services, trade privacy for targeted ads. Others will choose other approaches to using the data that provide those functions without exporting as much (or any) data.

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas.
In this interview Clay talks about

• The effects of low cost coordination and group action.
• Where to find the next layer of value when many professions are being disrupted by the Internet
• The necessary role of low cost experimentation in finding new business models

Four short links: 16 Feb 2009

A lot of Python and databases today, with some hardware and Twitter pranking/security worries to taste:

1. Free Telephony Project, Open Telephony Hardware -- professionally-designed mass-manufactured hardware for telephony projects. E.g., IP04 runs Asterisk and has four phone jacks and removable Flash storage. Software, schematics, and PCB files released under GPL v2 or later.
2. Don't Click Prank Explained -- inside the Javascript prank going around Twitter. Transparent overlays would appear to be dangerous.
3. Tokyo Cabinet: A Modern Implementation of DBM -- ok, so there's definitely something going on with these alternative databases. Here's the 1979 BTree library reinvented for the modern age, then extended with PyTyrant, a database server for Tokyo Cabinet that offers HTTP REST, memcached, and a simple binary protocol. Cabinet is staggeringly fast, as this article makes clear. And if that wasn't enough wow for one day, Tokyo Dystopia is the full-text search engine. The Tyrant tutorial shows you how to get the server up and running. And what would technology be without a Slideshare presentation? (via Stinky)
4. Whoosh -- a pure Python fulltext search library.

New Zealand Goes Black

The previous government in New Zealand enacted an amendment to the Copyright Act that required ISPs to have a policy to disconnect users after repeated accusations of infringement, over the objections of technologists. While it's possible to have a policy that requires proof rather than accusation, APRA (the RIAA of New Zealand) strongly opposes any such attempts at reasonable interpretation of Section 92. The minor parties in the coalition government oppose the "three accusations and you're offline" section and want it repealed. This is the last week before that law is due to come into effect and the Creative Freedom Foundation, a group formed to represent artists and citizens who oppose the section, has a week of protest planned to convince the ruling National Party to repeal S92.

The first day's action was blacking out Twitter and Facebook avatars. I did it, as did Channel 3 Business News, a Creative Director at Saatchi and Saatchi, oh and Stephen Fry. Kudos to Juha Saarinen who first put out the call. This is building up to a full Internet blackout day on February 23rd. I'm delighted to say that the idea was formed at Kiwi Foo Camp, and the folks who were at Kiwi Foo have been running wild with it--building banners, releasing templates, spreading the word.

Change Happens

Last night, I watched a 1951 British movie, The Man in the White Suit. The plot hinged on everyone's realization that a new fabric invented by a young chemist (played by Alec Guiness) would put the British textile industry out of business. The fabric never wears out and resists dirt. Both labor and mill owners unite to suppress the discovery.

We know now, of course, that the great British woolen, cotton and silk mills did go the way of the buggy whip, prey not to new synthetic fabrics but to low cost overseas competition. At the time, it was unthinkable that the British mills would become all but extinct. When my great grandparents worked at Lister's Mill in Bradford, it employed more than 10,000 people. My mother, who grew up "back of the mill," recalls how the streets were so packed with people at closing time that there was no room for vehicles. By the time I remember visiting with my grandparents on Silk Street in the late 1960s, the mill was still active, but a shadow of its former self. Thirty years later, this monument of a once great industry was turned into shops and luxury apartments.

I think too of how my grandmother, with the prejudices of her time, was alarmed at how the "pakis" were taking over Bradford. How pleasing it was, then, to hear from my friend Imran Ali recently about the evolution of Bradford, a rebirth in which his family from Pakistan made the city their home:

My Grandfather came to the UK in the 50s, settling in Bradford before bringing his brothers and sons here to work and study...he was in the Indian/British Army during WW2, before finding work in various textile mills across the Bradford area.

Coming to Bradford moved us up from that background to our family's first university graduates and now professional careers

So it's a place I'm so fond of I can't bring myself to leave. As much as I love coming to the Bay Area, Mt. San Bruno, Sonoma county, Burlingame and my other favoriite spots aren't the same as driving over Ilkley Moor on a snowy winter's day and seeing the Dales unfurl before me.

You might be interested to know a few interesting facts about the city since you may have last visited...

• The University of Bradford was one of the first two to teach computer science in the UK (Manchester being the other) - though it's disputed who was first!

• The university's school of computing gave the early UK web industry a great talent pool, including some of the founding team for Freeserve, the UK's largest ISP during the first boom, and also its biggest exit.

• Based on that we started a non-profit collective of new media companies called bmedi@ in 2001...

• The National Media Museum is located in Bradford and they just added their photo collections to Flickr.

• Grant Morrison wrote a graphic novel, Vimanarama, set in Bradford.

• The city's currently in the midst of a depression that goes back to the 2001 riots, but civic leaders have tabled an ambitious $3.2bn regeneration plan for the city's built environment.

There's actually a lot of interesting tech stuff going on regionally - a bunch of us have kickstarted grassrootsy-stuff like BarCamps, geek dinners and are starting to help a local university model itself on the Media Labs and ITPs of the world.

I won't say that this entry has that much spice, but I hope you can take a moment with me to see through time to allow wonder and delight to replace fear of change.

We're in the midst of enormous upheaval right now, between the Scylla and Charybdis of economic meltdown and climate change, with the promise of the Singularity visible in the distance like Apollo or Athena might have appeared to Odysseus' frightened sailors.

This is not new. History is full of optimism and despair, discovery and upheaval, with distant hope inspiring us to the great efforts that alone can save us. And despite all our attempts to prognosticate, it has a way of surprising us. The makers of The Man in the White Suit were fascinated and frightened by the possibilities of industrial chemistry: it had all the magic that today we associate with great advances in computing or synthetic biology. And inventions of new materials did in fact change the world, though not in ways that the film's creators lampooned.

Coming to terms with change is a basic life skill. If you don't have it, it's time to put it on your self-improvement to-do list. I'm reminded of something I wrote nearly 30 years ago in my first book, just out of college, a study of the work of science-fiction writer Frank Herbert:

One of [Herbert's] central ideas is that human consciousness exists on--and by virtue of--a dangerous edge of crisis, and that the most essential human strength is the ability to dance on that edge. The more man confronts the dangers of the unknown, the more conscious he becomes. All of Herbert's books portray and test the human ability to consciously adapt....

It is a general principle of ecology that an ecosystem is stable not because it is secure and protected, but because it contains such diversity that some of its many types of organisms are bound to survive despite drastic changes in the environment or other adverse conditions. Herbert adds, however, that the effort of civilization to create and maintain security for its individual members, "necessarily creates the conditions of crisis because it fails to deal with change."

In short, get with the program! The future isn't going to be like the past. What's more, it isn't going to be like any future we imagine. How wonderful that is, if only we are prepared to accept it.

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