David Sasaki about Cloud Intelligence at Ars Electronica 2009

David Sasaki (*), who is "Director of Outreach" of Rising Voices (sub-organisation of Global Voices), hold an interesting introductory talk about Cloud Intelligence. What was interesting for me, was his comparison of the developement of electricity and computing. When electricity was invented by Edison, he used direct current to transmit it. Direct current has the disadvantage that is cannot be transported over long distances. On the contrary, alternating current, invented by Tesla, was capable of exaclty that. After a period of "Current Wars" eventually alternating current succeeded. Why? Because it enabled centralized power plants and long-distance cables, whereas direct current would need basically a power plant on every desktop, oh sorry in every city. This analogy is commonly used to emphasise the advantage of centralized, server-based computing, or cloud computing (Firstly used by Nicolas Carr). One critique by Edison towards a centralized system, was that it is more vulnarable as a system based more and smaller power-plants. This problem remains with cloud-computing as well, but also cloud computing includes many other characteristics and maybe problems to be talked about. One attempt to tackle Cloud Computing on its very basic nature was later in the Symposium given by Steven Downes in his talk (text here).

See also Davids whole talk including video, slides and text (Recommended!!!).

note: all videos from the Cloud Intelligence Symposium on blip.tv.

(*) (who has been to badgastein according to dopplr on 17-19th of august - my homevalley)