Artificially Yours

Gmail wants me to try twenty different types of beef jerky from a producer in Montana. It also thinks that I might need some new car insurance, and a membership in a microbrew of the month club.

Anyone with a gmail account has, by now, noticed the ads that run in a sidebar, alongside your inbox. And anyone that has written an email briefly mentioning beef jerky has probably also noticed that the ads that begin to appear in this sidebar all follow a rather meaty theme. It’s highly-specific, targeted advertising, tailored to you and your epistolary pursuits, and it’s also the driving principle behind the new frontier of artificial intelligence, and…online flirting.

Om Malik, of GigaOm, recently interviewed the founders of the new startup Iminlikewithyou, whose Facebook-era application aims to put a little competitive human spice back into the game of online flirtation. Now, you wouldn’t think that Charles Forman and Dan Albritton’s new forum for auctioning off romance would have anything to do with Jeff Hawkins and his company Numenta, but, well, you’d be wrong.

Numenta, recently profiled in this Alex Iskold article over at Read/Write Web, has recently released its first product, “an experimental software aimed at researchers and advanced developers which embodies the algorithms and techniques pioneered by Jeff and his crew”. Iskold goes on to say that, essentially, these algorithms are responsible for the creation of a model that emulates a little something that we call intelligence. This intelligence isn’t necessarily the sort that enables Bob to wow his co-workers at the launch party with his recitation of the Canterbury Tales from memory, but, it is the sort that forms the basis of how we identify, process, and act upon newly received information, and in doing so, it imitates the capabilities of the neocortex of the human brain.

Hawkins’ model is capable of receiving input, classifying it, and using that classification to make ‘educated’ assessments about what to do with this input, with the final result being actions based on these assessments. Numenta has designed this chiefly as a research tool, at this point, but, it’s not hard to see the same basic principles at work behind a host of Web 2.0 applications, highlighting the importance of intent-driven interactions, and the human aspect of the modern internet environment–whether it’s a social networking application, or an ‘intelligent’ set of advertisements tailored to your tastes. An ‘artificially intelligent’ algorithm may be responsible for all of those tasty beef jerky ads, but, they were created, in a sense, by my human-authored email, and the words that I chose–just as members of Iminlikewithyou can earn points towards being able to contact the ladies by answering questions about themselves that result in similarly targeted advertising.

It is easy, when thinking about the concept of Artificial Intelligence, to get swept away, as Iskold notes, by visions of a robot-dominated future, where the machines that we created to aid us end up being our Schwarzeneggarian overlords. (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?). However, here, in the present, what seems apparent is that one of the main, driving forces behind the development of Artificial Intelligence is the desire to enrich human interactions and human experiences. The idea is not to create an artificial form of life that is superior to us, but, to create technology that will work in concert with our most noble aims, or our most personal tastes and preferences–a technology that will look out for our best interests.

This concept is also behind the updated features of the ElephantDesktop application, which, as mentioned previously by StartupSquad, “will intelligently respond to local machine conditions by taking advantage of Intel mobility SDK that gives access to low-level device megtrics such as batteries, memory, CPU, WiFi signal strength, and network connectivity”. It’s yet another example of an idea whose execution is via technology, but, whose genesis and outcome are to be found in the human element, and how it might be better served by the technology that it has created. And artificial or not, that’s a form of intelligence whose time has definitely arrived.

D’oh and Cents

Everything is capable of dramatic change in a matter of seconds, whether it’s the few seconds that you have in between realizing an accident is about to occur and seeing it happen, or, the moment when you realize that you have accidentally wiped out a disk drive that was worth billions of dollars.

I had occasion once, in college, while finishing up a paper on Irish poets, to rest my foot on the rocker switch of my power strip, shutting my computer off, sending my unsaved, non-backed-up work howling back into the void of other unwritten lit. papers. I remember sitting there dumbly, for a few seconds, staring at the black screen, willing the entire transaction to go in reverse, with all of the desperate, Diet-Coke fueled hours I’d just spent sweating over my keyboard flashing in front of my eyes. And this was just a paper. One can’t even begin to imagine the scalp-prickling horror of being the technician responsible for losing data worth $38 billion. Well, you can, but, chances are, it’ll give you the same feeling you have when you’ve stayed up for about thirty hours and have eaten nothing but Hot Pockets.

The end result of this disaster was, in terms of the fund recipients, fairly small, monetarily-speaking. However, the money that the fund had to spend to recover the data, and pay all of those involved in its rescue, was substantial, and is a fine example of a situation where that old trope, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ would’ve come in handy, in the form of an ElephantDrive account.

Backing up never seems more salient than when you’re facing the prospect of dealing with the aftermath of having not backed up your data–be it data worth billions of dollars, or, simply that one, priceless, well-turned phrase in a paper that was the by-product of a single caffeine-giddy moment you’ll never be able to recover. Either way, backing up, as I’m sure fund managers and students alike can agree, makes an infinite amount of sense.

Scheduled Maintenance Alert - March 20th, 2007, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM Pacific Time

Hi all,

Just wanted to make sure that ElephantDrive users and blog readers know that we will be conducting Scheduled Maintenance procedures today, from 3-7 Pacific Time. We’ll be adding more computing power to our infrastructure and further expanding our storage solutions. We hope to be back to full operational capacity in less time than we’ve alloted.

Please let us know if you have any questions by emailing us at support@elephantdrive.com.

The Team at ElephantDrive

I Herd it From StartupSquad

ElephantDrive got a great review today over at StartupSquad. I was particularly pleased to see that they mentioned the upcoming release of the smart version of ElephantDesktop–further evidence that this company is focused on the people who will actually be using their services, and that they are subsequently invested in finding creative ways to enhance the experience.

An Intelligent Move

Intel is investing in ElephantDrive.

I’ll Bring the Party Hats, You Bring the Presence

On Tuesday of this week, Paul Kapustka interviewed Alec Saunders, who, in addition to having the same last name as a number of my relatives, is one of the co-founders of the presence software startup iotum. Since writing last week’s post about the wonders of the virtual office, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to virtual communication, and what ‘face-time’ really means in an increasingly web-based society. I receive writing assignments via email, I communicate with those that I work for via message boards or additional emails, and a majority of the time, I don’t even exist in the same geographic location as the people that I am actively engaged with on a daily basis.

It isn’t surprising to me that, within this context, a company like iotum could come to be, and also thrive, because what is missing, from all of these interactions, is something that hasn’t been bred out of human consciousness quite yet: a desire to connect, in a more immediate, visceral way, with another human being. Saunders hopes to solve some of this with his application that enables you to move beyond a busy signal or interminable ’stay on the line’ muzak into a realm where you know, with some degree of certainty, whether or not the human being you’re trying to reach is actually there. It’s an effort, albeit one fraught with privacy issues, to put a human face, or at least a human presence, back on tech-based communication.

This concept brings me to TED. TED, the Technology Entertainment and Design conference (not the Ted vaguely related to your third cousin who enjoys sitting around in his wifebeater drinking gin out of mason jars), is a similar effort concerning technology and ‘presence’, if you will. Granted, it involves a hell of a lot more money, and is executed on a larger scale, but, I believe that those involved with it are intimately invested in the same basic concept: how do we, in our increasingly web and technology-based society, maintain and even celebrate the human element that these advancements are designed to serve? In making things ‘easier’ for ourselves via technology, how do we guarantee that we don’t write ourselves, and our interactions with one another, out of the equation?

Answering that question is, I believe, a matter of presence. The TED giftbags this year contain, amongst other things, a year-long gift subscription to the Home Edition of ElephantDrive. Accompanying this gift is a letter that emphasizes the company’s desire to find new ways to further their socially responsible efforts. And at first, to be entirely honest, I wasn’t sure what socially responsible data storage could look like. Sometime over the course of this week, however, and after reading Kapustka’s interview, I realized that it all boils down to, once more, this notion of presence. Not data storage in and of itself (though, it is admittedly excellent), but, who, exactly, was storing data, and who could later access it.

Presence, in this instance, can mean that a free ElephantDrive account, given to a school in southern India, will enable schoolchildren in western Massachusetts to access data that will open the door to another culture, another way of being, another understanding of a different human presence. It can be an opportunity for education, and a means of creating a greater shared sense of connection between groups of individuals, or individuals period, who might not ever have interacted otherwise.

It can be the difference, in a greater sense, between getting a busy signal , or going into the web 2.0 environment and hearing a very human ‘hello’. It is a chance to pause, and be present with one another, even though we are far apart. And that is a form of presence infinitely worth supporting, and preserving.

Who Says You Have to Wear Pants While Backing Up?

This blog post addresses, however obliquely, what is surely one of the best things about the web 2.0 office: the lack of pants. I know that they don’t just come right out and say it, but, I think we all know that in the great chain of business evolution, we are all working towards a single goal: to conduct a meeting sans pants.

And, of course, in the process of hailing the glories of the mobile, virtual office, Read Write/Web has also seen fit to give ElephantDrive the nod in its review of virtual team essentials (clearly, not only is this blog well-written and full of thoughtful, useable information, it is also staffed by people with exceptional taste).

Though the edition of ElephantDrive that they chose to review was, logically, the Professional one, as a user of the Home edition, I feel that I’m receiving many of the same benefits. My ‘team’, as it were, may consist largely of me, myself, and I, but, as more and more of my personal business takes place online, instead of in offices or even coffee shops (i.e., places where they require pants), finding a way to safely backup, store, and even share data has become increasingly important. I may not be backing up a vital spreadsheet, an entire year’s worth of Excel files, or even last year’s tax return, but, should I ever choose to do so, I feel confident that they will be just as safe with this program as all of those incriminating photos from last year’s Christmas Fondue Extravaganza.

And that, much like conducting a meeting in your well-loved skivvies, is a good feeling.