Singularity Hacker

The API economy is in full force. Businesses and startups large and small are providing data and processing programmatically. APIs have rapidly become key structures in business and revenue models.

At the advent of the web, businesses had to adjust to the idea that they needed a web presence and subsequently adjust to web 2.0 with its emphasis on customer reviews and social recommendations.

Less than five years later, we are experiencing the mobile revolution where we are compelled to adopt ‘mobile first’ methods of development. The next epoch in this trend of technological ubiquity and abstraction is the API.

Great Forbes article on the API economy: http://onforb.es/Twzlch

An amazing source on API first development: http://api-first.com

As the name implies, APIs are written for developers and programmers, but a new kind of service is emerging that makes their advantages available to the non-programmer. These services aggregate APIs and create user interfaces so the average person can piece together actions into automations. Let’s take a look at three of those services:

1. Ifttt: If This Then That. Put the Internet to work for you. http://ifttt.com

Ifttt is the first comer on the scene in this space so all other similar services will naturally be compared to it. It is extremely easy to use, free, and has many ‘channels’ to build automations from.

2. Zapier: Sync your data between web apps. https://zapier.com

Zapier could be described as an Ifttt for business users. It has more channels to choose from but limited automations for non-paid users.

3. Wappwolf: Automate your Dropbox http://wappwolf.com

Wappwolf focuses more on Dropbox and file manipulation than either Ifttt or Zapier. 

So these are three resources for easy automation and they have all been made possible by the growth of the API economy. Rest assured that there will be more aggregators and channels. There is a treasure trove of possibilities inherent in these new tools. Expect to see increasingly sophisticated workflows coming from people who have never heard of an API.

*It could be argued that the API revolution is just a corollary of data-driven decision making, but that’s another post altogether.

The basic principle of an information economy is that the individuals who can perform the most efficient, creative, and useful transformations on data make the most money. Thats an over simplification but it still gets at the heart of the matter. Well what happens when the tools of information processing become dramatically more powerful? Productivity and value explode. Today, a teenager with a $200 tablet computer can process information with greater efficiency than an entire organization of fifty years ago.

This is nothing compared to the productivity increases society is about to see in the next fifty years. We are on the verge of seeing an explosion in personal software agents.

A software agent is a software program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency. - Wikipedia/Software_agents

Think little personal AI’s that tirelessly do our bidding. Lets look at the first players in this budding market.

At the high end, we have IBM’s Watson but it will not be long before the same kind intelligence is available in your handset. Watson 2.0 will be mobile phone accessible.

Can we be confident that this kind of technological acceleration will continue. I’ll let the images below answer that question.

On the left we have a Cray 2 supercomputer from 1985 and on the right we have an iPad 2 from 2011.

The present impact of emerging knowledge systems on different domains:

Watson on Law: Yale Law Journal Ponders Watson as a Judge

Watson on Medicin: IBM’s Watson supercomputer to diagnose patients

Watson on Wall Street: IBM Watson heads to Wall Street

Misc links of interest:

- Siri api: What Would a Siri API Look Like?
- Get your AI assistant now: Cydia app to make Siri more like a personal assistant
- Intelligent Agents 101.pdf

Several development sandboxes have popped up online in the last year that are well worth your time to check out. Dev sandboxes allow for bug isolation, test driving new libraries, sharing programming problems, and saving solutions for later referral. These are the top four.

jsFiddle - This is the king of online fiddles. Test html, css, and JavaScript in one convenient view. Includes build in versioning and the ability to add external scripts. jsFiddle is quickly becoming the standard of quality questions and answers on Stackoverflow.

sqlFiddle - Test SQL Server 2008, 2012, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL.js, and WebSQL all from the comfort of your browser! I’m hating SQL just a little less all because of this testbed.

xmlFiddle - *A sandbox for XML development, including XSL, XPath, XQuery, Schema, DTD and RelaxNG.

reFiddle - Get down with with all your RegEx goodness at reFiddle. Works with JavaScript, Ruby, and .NET. Easily make fiddles public or private as well.

I hope you find these resources useful. Let me know in the comments how you are using them or plan to use them. Now..

*Note: This website is actually called XML Playground but I took the liberty of purchasing the xmlfiddle.com domain and forwarding it to the site.

Follow me on Twitter at @SingularityHack

If you want to thrive in the exploding information economy of the 21st Century, it is essential that you learn to understand, write, and think in code. 

Software Is Eating The World – Wall Street Journal

Mathematics has been called the queen of the sciences because it stands over all the other sciences. It’s a meta-science. Computer science is increasingly taking on the same role. I don’t mean computer science in the technical, track of study, sense. I mean the ability to break down a problem into logical units and apply computational processes to solve it. 

Programming Is the New Literacy - Edutopia

Artificial intelligence is already here. Every piece of executable code is a collection of intelligent agents ready to tirelessly do someone’s bidding, and the segment of people who command those agents will rule the world. The digital divide is not about the haves and have-nots, it’s about those who can code and those who can’t.

Programmers: The New Political Elite - Washington Post

The good news is that it’s not too late for you. I’m going to lay out everything you need. The three websites bellow compromise your academy. They offer video tutorials that can be consumed at a meager rate of ten minutes a day.

1. teamtreehouse.com 

2. net.tutsplus.com 

3. w3schools.com 

The three websites that follow are your interactive tools. They will make your learning experience fun and enjoyable. Code is fun! You just have to learn the rules of the game. They are also socially engaging so you can begin to show off what you’re learning.

1. codecademy.com 

2. coderace.me 

3. codeavengers.com 

jsFiddle is your new coding environment. You will work through and save all of your lessons there. By doing this, you will be able to go back and reference them. It’s also the most effective way to ask questions of other programmers.

- jsFiddle.net 

Lastly, this is your community of new friends. When, not ‘if’, you have questions, Stack Overflow will be the single most rewarding place for you to be, both to be helped and to help. 

- stackoverflow.com 

In conclusion, let me encourage you as a fellow student. You can do it! You must do it. Keep going and don’t give up. Cultivate humility. No matter how 1337 you think you’ve become, there are code ninjas, wizards, samurais, and pirates that are incomprehensibly better. Welcome to the gild.

The evolution of human/machine interface will travel through several definable epochs. Each epoch does not make the previous obsolete but does drastically alter and improve the efficiency and ease of our interaction with technology and information.

The evolution can be described and visualized as follows:

Text - Graphical - Haptic - Immersive

Augmented reality is the ultimate foreseeable culmination of the user interface. It is the most direct way to interact with information because it places the UI around you. It’s as if you stepped inside a computer simulation.

There are certain necessary technological steps that we must pass through before getting display glasses that throw us into 24/7 simulation space. One very large challenges is transparent display technology. Fortunately, Samsung has just announced that they will be bringing laptops with transparent displays to market within the next year.

As the efficiency of producing transparent displays increases, we will see the technology in smaller form factors. Transparent displays will find their way into our cell phones and tablets. Notice that AR is one of the only real advantages to designing devices with transparent displays.

In time, the technology will reach a point where it is feasible to wear. This will usher in the fully immersive augmented reality world. Entirely new challenges of user interface will present themselves that make the UI challenges associated with the move from mouse to touch oriented seem small in comparison.

Augmented reality will culminate in a fully immersive experience like the one shown in the video below.

Augmented reality will open new worlds. Listen and see:
2 Hi3 Fr0m Far Cil3nia Pt. 1 (mp3)
2 Hi3 Fr0m Far Cil3nia Pt. 2 (mp3)

Original posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010

I am truly shocked that so many people are being duped by BlackBerry’s recent announcement of their tablet, the PlayBook. I have read endless comments from people who are saying they can’t wait to get this tablet computer. Well, I think I have some bad news for you folks.

There is no evidence that the PlayBook exist as advertised.

Why do I say this? I will make it brief.

1) There is not a single frame in the BlackBerry PlayBook commercial that shows the actual device! The only thing being seen in the commercial is CG special effects. Don’t believe me? Watch the ad again. Sure, those special effects are amazingly fast and responsive and cool but where is the device?

Remember the ads for the BlackBerry Torch? They were entirely done with special effects too. The Torch seemed so fast and cool in those ads. The only problem is the actual real phone didn’t operate nearly as good as it did in the CG ads. The BlackBerry Torch ads are awesome but the phone is crap. Take note.

2) The PlayBook was never demoed at the Live Announcement. The dude is supposedly holding the device in his hands and he doesn’t touch the screen once. Let me repeat that. He never touches the device once! The screen never changes and it never gets dark. I cant help but wonder if he’s just holding a dummy (plastic) device. 

Compare this to Apples iPad announcement. There was a frigin camera over Steve Jobs shoulder while he operates the actual device. If this PlayBook is so cool, why not actually show it off?

3) No one in the public has even been able to touch the PlayBook. Once again, compare this to the iPad announcement. Every one who attended the iPad announcment was actually able to handle and touch the device. They had tons of them on tables for every one to test out. What did the attendees of the PlayBook announcement get? A device encased in glass playing videos. The new OS isnt shown once, just a repeating video ad. Why not let everybody test out that amazing screen and new os? Judging by the video, that glass encased PlayBook with the wire attached could just be a dumb lcd screen. Is there a single shred of evidence to say otherwise?

4) Just look at BlackBerry’s last venture in touch screen gadgets, the Storm and Torch. Need I say more. Given the above considerations, whats more likely? That a company went from the Storm and Torch phones to the PlayBook in this short period of time as or that things are not as BlackBerry is making them to appear?

I will admit, I could be wrong. I would be happy to be proved wrong, I just don’t think that that’s going to happen.