Tom Rabin, Dave Winer, Mark Bernstein and Larry Smarter

A recording from a conference panel, chaired by the BBC’s Steve Evans. Tom Rabin is EVP of Red Hat; Mark Bernstein is president and center director of the Palo Alto Research Center; and Larry Smarter is California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

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[BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] If you could grab your seats, please, we will begin.
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[BLANK_AUDIO] Well, as part of the ever- changing fire landscape, not only do we try this design challenge and a few other new things this year that we’ve never done before, but we also are happy to have the BBC joining us this year, and not only to do interviews offline but online.
And so Steve Evans has come to us from London to help us make hot spots a little hotter, and you’ll notice that it is a design change from prior years.
Everyone’s on stage at once.
And you have a professional interviewer now at your beck and call, instead of some amateur yeoman.
So we’re very, very pleased to have Steve with us, and you have a little extra time because one of our folks has had a family out.
So Steve Arnold will not be with us today.
And the rest of you have an extra few minutes, so thank you very much.
Thank you very much indeed.
I’m Steve Evans, obviously, I ’ve been introduced.
And basically I present a program called Business Daily, which goes out every day on a thing we’ve got called the World Service, to about 30 million people.
And I have to tell you that addressing a live audience is much more daunting than any of that stuff, cuz you ’re real people and you’ve got real thoughts.
And you laugh or you don’t laugh.
Anyway, the program that I do broadcasts to ordinary intelligent lay people.
We are a jargon free zone.
We love business, but we talk about it like ordinary people do.
We love technology, but we talk about it like ordinary people do.
We wanna know how technology affects us ordinary people.
And I’m gonna bring that rule about it being jargon free to this session here.
Not that I think it, I suspect it needs it.
This thing’s called a hotspot because I think it’s because it ’s where the hot thought is, it’s where you feel things getting a bit hotter before breakthroughs.
So it ought to be really interesting.
We’ve got four absolutely fascinating people.
I think there’s a theme to them and that is how you make money out of great ideas.
No shortage of great ideas, but how you have business models that turn those ideas into money is another matter.
On my immediate left, Tom Rabin , who’s the executive vice president of Red Hat, one of the pioneers of the open source movement.
I said earlier that he’s a pros elytizer, a disciple of open source, and he smiled, but he didn’t contradict me, so we’ll see all about that.
David Winer is the editor of Scripting News, developer of R SS.
Software central of podcasts, we all know that.
Big question about where’s the way of making money out of that .
Mark Bernstein, president and center director of the Palo Alto Research Center, one of the great iconic centers of thought on this planet.
And then Larry Smarter, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, better known as CalIT2.
So let me give you the floor first of all, Tom.
Tell me about what you do and why it’s important to us and where it’s going.
Well, Red Hat is basically our company brings open source solutions to the enterprise space.
Our customers are among the largest companies and enterprises in the world.
And basically what we’ve done is built a company and a business model around open source software.
Where we’ve basically taken consulting and training, added it along with the ability to set up our own development platform called Fedora, where we take software which is contributed by people all over the world.
That could be a college professor in Japan, it could be an engineer with NASA, it could be a college student at UC San Diego who have the ability to contribute to our development platform.
We take that code, we test it, we certify it.
We make sure it will work with other software.
And then we package it as a subscription and sell it to our customers.
And in return, they get constant updates and access to the newest and best technology out there.
So the way you make money is charging money for the service? For the service, exactly.
The software is basically free.
We just build a business around it.
And we fundamentally believe that the development model for open source software is much better than the proprietary model.
And that it would be like every Do Gates agrees? He may not agree, but interestingly enough within the last year, there’s been an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about the Gates Foundation.
And the good work they’re doing and trying to find a cure for AIDS.
And one of the requirements for receiving the funding from the Gates Foundation is a cure for AIDS is making sure you share that information .
So the thing that’s so exciting about the open source movement and about the small role that our business plays in it, it’s really all about collaboration.
There’s a wonderful book which I read recently that it’s entitled Mavericks at the Gate, and there’s a wonderful quote in that book.
And it says, nobody is smarter than everybody.
And I thought about that in the context of the meeting here at Fire and that Mark puts on and when I immediately opened the booklet that came with it, Mark’s talking about community and how important that is.
We just fundamentally believe that the power of the community is greater than the power of the individual.
Nobody can doubt the good words like community and together.
But the snag and the wisdom of crowds, the great buzz phrase of our time.
But the snag with community is that everybody thinks that somebody else will pick up the bill, what economists call a public cost.
How do you get around that thing? Everybody likes community.
Who doesn’t like community? You know, it’s very interesting in the software world.
I work with people with some of the brightest minds in the software world every single day that are real technologists, which I really am not.
And they basically have a sort of a technology meritocracy, where the best ideas bubble up to the top.
So in their minds, there is no greater tribute that one could be paid than to be recognized by their peers .
And in the context of software, what that means is getting some of their code put into the overall code itself.
There is a greater tribute that can be paid, and it’s a tribute in money.
People want pay not to be stro ked.
They like both, but they’re in it for the money.
Hey, well, interestingly enough, there are people out there, and there are lots of them, that everyone’s got to pay the light bill you understand, in the rent and all those fun things.
But there are people out there who are motivated by, they attach a greater degree of importance to being recognized as being a leader among their peers and doing something that helps mankind as opposed to making lots of money .
I’m going to change the format of this a bit, because I can see you nodding so furiously. No, it’s shaking my head.
[LAUGH] I find that disturbing.
Rolling your arms? I find that disturbing, because my background is as a programmer.
And originally, well, at one point from Silicon Valley.
And I was there during the height of the dot-com boom, and everybody was gone crazy about open source.
And that’s what they were saying.
They were saying, well, isn’t it great? You can get all the programmers you want, and they’ll work for free.
And meanwhile, the venture capitalists and the marketing guys were making millions and millions of dollars, and I was thinking, well, what’s wrong with this picture? And as a result, we sort of are thin on technology as a result of that, I think.
And so you have to strike the right balance.
I think that open source certainly has a place, but and there is money.
I think the way to deal, to answer that question that you asked is that there’s money to be made, but it doesn ’t have to be made directly off of the act of coding.
And but that money should be shared with the people who create the technology.
So certainly it’s nice to get recognition from your peers.
But as I agree with you, it’s also nice to take home a nice paycheck.
I love being stroked, but I ’ll tell you, I need to pay the bills.
Right, and getting a big paycheck is a nice way to get stroked, too, right? But let’s move on to you.
I mean, your technology has, I mean, it’s crucial to podcast ing.
And the issue of how you make money out of that, how you pay the people who come up with the ideas, is a dilemma we’re still having.
No, I don’t see it as a dilemma.
I mean, it sort of betrays a point of view.
I think that a person who comes from professional media would ask that question.
Would want to know, how would somebody who’s doing something that’s very much like what I do get paid for doing this? Well, there may not be a way to get paid for doing podcasts.
But that doesn’t mean people do it.
There’s no way to get paid for using the telephone either, right? Directly, but people still use the telephone.
A friend of mine, Doc Searles, likes to say there’s no business model for a front porch, but still like to have a front porch and entertain my friends.
That was sort of the answer for why how do you make money up of a blog? These are ways to communicate, and it’s much like the open source situation, is that the money may not come directly from the act of creating the podcast.
I give you an example, I started the scripting news in 1997.
Since then, that’s the only way I’ve communicated about any of the work that I’ve done.
So I’ve not run any ads.
I used to spend a lot of money on advertising.
I have not paid for any ads.
And I’ve managed to make a fair amount of money off my software .
So have I made money off my blog? Absolutely, lots.
Have I gotten paid directly for writing my blog? No.
So I think that it requires an adjustment in the way you think about things.
Sure, but that adjustment is still being made in all kinds of areas.
How your newspapers are clearly wrestling with it, aren’t they? Yeah.
How is that going to go? I mean, there is a thought that with blogs particularly, and I think the same is true of podcasts, that we’re all journalists now.
And therefore, the formal media .
No, I don’t think we’re all journalists now.
It’s a threat.
And I think that in the conversation we had, we emailed prior to this the question about what’s Web 3. 0.
I think that Web 3. 0 will be the realization on the part of professional media that we blog gers are not doing what you do.
And I think the accurate way to portray, and of course you can ’t make a generalization.
A journalist that writes a blog is a journalist, okay? They haven’t changed what they do just because they’re writing a blog.
But we’re more like your sources.
We’re the people that used to call up for quotes.
And what happened was we have stories to tell too.
And those stories were not being told by the media.
We would get little sound bites in the middle of articles that would be used to tell the story that you wanted to tell.
Cut like that very neatly.
Why me? Cut like that very neatly and san it up.
Right, exactly.
And strung together as if we’re having a conversation one after another.
When I met the person who spoke before me and the person who spoke after me.
So the point is that we want to tell our story.
So we disintermediated, which is what the internet does.
I know you didn’t like the jar gon, but that’s a big word.
It means cutting out the intermediary.
That’s okay.
That’s not jargon.
Yeah, it’s just something an intelligent person might say, right? I can do big words.
Right, I know.
I feel the same way.
I said marmalade and corrug ated quite frequently.
Exactly, so it’s not a ban on the number of syllables.
And you’ll see that happening in virtually everything the internet touches, that the intermediate or the middle man comes out.
Now, on the San Francisco Chron icle local paper where I live in Berkeley.
One of the local papers just laid off 25% of the staff.
And I wrote a piece in March saying that what I’d like to see them do is embrace bloggers, let’s do more of the directness.
Bring some of the bloggers into the pages and do very light editing, right? But that’s still the same thing .
You’re still presenting the information came to you from sources.
Isn’t it very good news for some newspapers and very bad news? For a lot more newspapers, New York Times, if everybody’s a journalist, when big things happen, you think, who do I turn to? Where do I go for? I don’t think So you go to the New York Times, I think.
So for some newspapers, the great explosion of sources on the web is very good news.
Because it means you’re a trusted source and that’s where people feel.
Maybe the BBC, not for me to say.
But for a lot of newspapers that don’t really offer anything special, it’s bad news .
I don’t trust the New York Times anywhere near as much as I used to.
They’ve betrayed the trust.
I think that it matters very much how you’ve managed the trust.
Let’s not argue about the particular newspaper, but the principle.
No, I think that there would be a place for new brand names to come up in journalism, or old brand names that may not have had much of a sheen to take a shine.
Just simply by embracing the new medium, rather than resisting it.
And there’s been a lot of resistance amongst the old media.
Not so much the BBC, I think the BBC’s done very well.
I also think the Times from the technology standpoint’s done very well.
And from the editorial standpoint, they’ve done terribly.
And they may be the last newspaper.
It might be inversely proportional to the size and success of the publication.
They have the least reason to change right now, because they ’re the richest, right? But the Chronicle has the opportunity to embrace right now, the whole thing.
In my formal chunk of the media, I have all kinds of rules.
I mean, within the organization about not putting people on the air without their permission, let’s say a whole heap of rules, in your bit of the media, there are no rules.
I think there should be rules in our part of the media.
How are you going to get on and what should they be? I think they should be more or less the same rules, disclose your conflicts of interest.
So we know where you’re coming from.
Never knowingly tell anything that’s false.
How can you impose on some blogger? We have a lot of mechanisms for doing that, a lot of them.
And I think we pay more respect to those mechanisms in general than the professional media does, because we get fact checked instantaneously.
And if we’re betraying the confidence, we’re not discl osing a interest that we have.
It’s going to get out of very quickly.
There’s a lot of, it’s the whole thing in open source, they talk about lots of eyeballs.
We’ve got the eyeballs and they ’re watching us very carefully.
They’re also watching the mainstream media too, but the mainstream media usually ignores what’s happening in the blogosphere.
So we figure out where the mistakes are very quickly.
I’m not that concerned about that.
The authority works the same way in our world as it does in yours.
If you lie a lot and you misle ad a lot, you’ll get the reputation for doing that and people will stop paying attention to you.
What stops me, Joe Blow? Who happens to be the son of somebody who’s got a big fancy company, just setting up a blog and saying what a marvelous product it is? Why don’t you do it? Go ahead.
Because I’m not Joe Blow, but Okay, well, I mean, I’m speaking to one of the Joe Blow’s out there, go ahead.
There’s nothing wrong with that .
I mean, why Without discl osing the link.
Well, I once had a teacher that said, I’m gonna ask you a question and you have a choice of either answering the truth or not answering or telling me a lie.
And I raised my hand and I said , well, you mean we can lie? I said, yeah, you can lie if you want, right? You can, the world’s full of lies.
What we have to do as people who use the news is we have to learn how to sniff them out and there’s nothing new about that.
Because you’re always getting point of view, whether you believe it or not, you’re getting point of view in professional media all the time .
You have to learn how to triang ulate, you have to learn how to figure out, okay, this is what somebody from that point of view would say about this.
This is what somebody with that point of view would say.
And then you try to figure out where the truth actually lies.
Let’s move on to Mark.
What’s Park up to these days? Well, we were, as I mentioned earlier, we were spun out from Xerox about five and a half years ago as an independent research center.
And what we’ve been about for that period of time is trying to create a profitable business from our research through the transformational impact it has.
And so our business model is around strategic research we do with partners.
It’s around licensing patents and technologies.
It’s about venturing, incub ating, and venturing on our own.
And it’s about doing some selective work for the government.
What are you doing at the moment that you want to talk about, that you think in ten years time, let’s say, we’re going to go wow? Yeah, I think the way I inferred the question was, what do we see happening in the future? And we reflect what we believe is going to happen based on the internal investments we make in projects that we do for ourselves.
We have a joint institute with Scripps, right up the road here , that has focused on the significant problems in life science.
And with park researchers trying to identify how our competencies can have an impact on those critical problems.
And one of the areas that we focused on is cancer.
And the area that we’ve been able to have significant success is in being able to detect tumor cells that are shed into the bloodstream and be able to detect their presence in very, very small concentrations.
So where does that work now, Gurwin? What are the possibilities if it goes the way it might go? Yeah, the impact of the technology, the fundamental technology, is it’s not just limited to cancer cells.
It can also look at fetal cells and address the need for amnioc entesis.
It can look at disease cells and look at a wide range of diseases.
Where we’re focused right now is being able to use the system for diagnostics to be able to detect cancers for the four major tumor groups.
And get that into the market as a piece of diagnostics equipment.
But fundamentally, where we’re aiming for is a blood test for cancer, for the presence of cancer in the bloodstream.
And that’s probably, given how the FDA operates, probably a five year proposition, five to seven year proposition.
So that would make the detection much, much earlier, treatably earlier.
Absolutely, that’s the point , is that you’re able to, at a very early stage, tumor shed cells.
And detecting those in the bloodstream and very low concentrations is an indicator that you have cancer.
It’s different from genotyping that you really have a predile ction for a cancer.
Any idea of, I mean, seeming it all pans out of how early various cancers could be detected and how, what the rate of success of cure would be at that level? Well, that’s a projection.
Where we are operating right now is working with doctors who have cancer patients who are metastatic, and looking at being able to detect the change in the cell count, the cancer cell count, based on the chem otherapies that they’re under, and being able to change those regimens for chemotherapy in real time.
And so what we are on the path to is being able to work up the latter from diagnostics and therapeutics to actual detection.
What’s the funding model for that research? Where’s the money come from? A lot of it has come from our internal investment.
We’ve put probably $8 million into the project over the last five years.
We have an NIH grant, which is sourcing about a million and a half dollars a year now, and that runs for another three years.
So it’s both government and internal.
And we’re talking with partners in both pharma and in healthcare.
And you’re doing work on filtering water and ubiquitous computing.
Right, that’s another area where we’ve made our own investment in clean tech about two years ago, focused on clean water, which is a fundamental challenge in the world, and also focused on solar energy.
And so there are two projects that we’re doing there.
One is at an early stage, using force spiral flow to be able to filter water.
Very simple, very powerful mechanism.
The other area we’re focused on is photovoltaics.
And one of the aspects we’re taking is, as photovoltaics progress over this year, the years has been this very shallow improvement in efficiency.
And what we’re trying to do is have sort of step function increases in that through some of our ejection technology.
Let me go on to Larry.
Tell me what you’re up to.
Well, we’re in a very different space, the public sector.
And our job at CalIT2 as a part of the University of California is to accelerate the innovation that ultimately drives the wealth creation engine of California.
And hopefully increases the quality of the citizens of California.
So we’re now about 1,000 researchers between two buildings, one of which we’ll be visiting tonight in San Diego.
And we have a very large number of faculty, students, but also companies directly involved, over 100 companies that are engaged one way and the other with us.
And we go to take the individual faculty who the University of California has optimized, 20 or 30,000 faculty that are great in what they do.
But now what we are looking for is opportunities to team these people together, often who don’t know each other.
But in this new world have to be cross-disciplinary to attack real problems.
One of the things I’m told you’re working on is high-defin ition videoconferencing.
It’s a contradiction in terms, I put it to you.
Well, we believe that it’s inevitable that distance is got to be eliminated for a lot of what we do.
There’s still a reason to touch the flesh and be in the presence of another physical body.
Animals do that and it’s important, I guess.
But after you’ve sniffed each other and you really want to just get down and get a project done, you need to have much more powerful tools.
So we’re going to look tonight at what Mark Anderson and I call real broadband, looking at, say, 1,500 megabits a second.
Over a gigabit per second with the University of Washington where we’re going to have a discussion using multimedia to understand how people can work together.
Another area that’s the heart of the economy is digital cinema.
After 100 years, the film industry is going to switch from putting stuff on silver film to a flow of bits and that has become a worldwide collaborative effort.
So as soon as the bits come out of the camera, they’re shooting off to Singapore for special effects.
They’re going to London, and so forth, to be editing.
And so it comes back in the digital dailies the next morning to the director with all of this value added to it.
Well, that’s fine except what comes out of one of the project ors you’ll see.
For high, not high definition, but four times high definition.
The standard for digital cinema now is 7. 6 gigabits a second out of the camera.
Okay, that’s broadband, not a few megabits to your home, which is the core excuse we have in this country for broadband.
And so you’re going to experience that as well.
What difference will that make? I mean, apart from the pictures being better, are they better even, I wonder? Well, you can judge for yourself when you see it tonight.
Most people say that they’ve never experienced anything like it, which is essentially that your brain suspends disbelief.
And you are essentially in the presence of the other person because the imagery is post-photographic, the people are larger than life.
And it’s not just the people, but it’s sharing now vast data sets that you’re working on collaboratively and so forth.
For instance, one of the things Craig talked about last night is this vast amount of ocean genomic data.
Well, visual computing is one of the things that Mark talks about as a big trend, we’re going to be showing you a bunch of those earthquakes, tornadoes, ocean currents.
But if you actually take that notion into the whole genetic world itself, now what happens is, as you’ll see, we have over 1,000 users coming into this data bank of the data he collected around the world from over 40 countries.
Well, those specialists all want to work with each other.
And trying to do that over this thin straw of the shared internet is just very difficult compared to what we could be doing, which is 100 to 1,000 times that bandwidth that allows for real interaction.
The clock’s ticking on, but I should ask you, what’s public funding of science and technology doing these days? Well, I think we’re at a once in 50 year shift.
The post-World War II Bush doctrine, Vannevar Bush of the endless frontier, where the federal government does it all is not the way it’s going to be anymore.
Our country in the United States is going to be fiscally enormously challenged over the next few decades as the chickens come home to roost financially.
And it’s going to squish the part of the budget that’s the so-called discretionary that includes all the federal funding agencies.
You’re seeing early examples of that.
This big metagenomic project that Craig and I are working on , that’s funded by the Moore Foundation.
That’s Gordon Moore’s fortune, a little bit of it, one person, okay? That grant is twice as big as the biggest computer science grant in the country that I also have from the National Science Foundation.
So the private foundations are really a major new thing.
Stem cells, you see California taking the lead there.
Here are states now beginning to have their own science funding project.
And why not? California is becoming its own nation state.
Its economy is bigger than France, almost as big as UK.
It has got to have a science infrastructure appropriate to a country of that scale.
Can the states, though, make good what may or may not come from the federal government? I mean, is that the way forward ? The federal government will continue to be a very important component of all of this.
But it will be a component.
It won’t have a monopoly.
And that’s where I think you’re going to see.
We’re talking about something like, I don’t know, a trillion dollars of generational transfer of funds from the wealth generation that went on in the ’90s.
Like we saw 100 years ago, the last time there was something like that.
And that’s going to be going out through foundations.
The more foundation is only five years old.
The Gates Foundation, a few years beyond that.
And now Warren Buffett has put his money into the Gates.
It’s almost like there’s a shakeout going on in the foundation space.
That’s the future.
Now, we hope that the federal government will continue to fund basic research.
But I think it’s going to become harder and harder as the budgetary reality comes to light.
The talks against this gentleman, fascinating.
It’s been a delight.
Thank you all very much indeed.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)