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.
