Archive for technology
October 12, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under design, technology
For a while, I have been pondering on this: can I create a bunch of extremely stupid automatons (actually, a tweak on Finite State Machines), that co-exist independently and making self-contained selfish decisions, and yet create an ecosystem that seems to be making smart decisions?
The idea is simple: I create a set of microprograms (I fondly call them ‘brats’!), each of which have their own selfish agendas, decision processes, survival rules, and their own I/O probes that constantly monitor the surroundings for resources they need (and perish soon if they don’t find them)… and then I spawn each variety of agent multiple times and see an overall behavior emerge.
The first set of such agents are already sweating their necks, making highly stupid decisions… and yet surviving, but my goal is to now take it a step further.
I now I want to go in two directions:
April 28, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under technology
We are an experienced startup team looking for interns/parttime/telecommute workers for some exciting web 2.0 projects we are executing.
If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.
The deal you get:
Equity amount depending upon the time commitment you can offer and efficiency of your effort.
Experience in bootstrapping a Web 2.0 startup
Understanding how to create web scale, high usage, social networking site
Lifetime bragging rights, “I helped create this cool site you so love to use”
February 25, 2008 at 11:09 am · Filed under play, technology
I was laughing recently at myself – always a good thing to do. I’m currently starting a research project into emerging digital cultures and Tactical media, especially in places outside the traditional US / Northern European domain that has been overcovered. So I’ve been doing the background info-rounds, locating the key focal points etc. So what repeatedly pops up everywhere is the importance of mobiles phones as the fastest growing technology of the future. For instance, an article in the Washington Post recently claimed that there are now an astonishing 3.3 billion mobiles phones on the planet – one for every second person! The article says, in specific
From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.
February 13, 2008 at 9:46 am · Filed under design, play, technology
So in our never-ending quest for the Idea, we have been recently throwing around some ideas around AI, aesthetics and creativity. To understand this particularly strange one, however, I probably will need to provide a few words of background to the wider project that we are interested in. I will try to keep it simple. Basically, the problematic/question that I am working around has to do with the “image of thought” in today’s digital cultures. One of the key tropes we are seeing emerging today is that the universe is made of patterns; or “abstract machines” as I prefer calling them after the French philosopher Deleuze. Without getting into unnecessary theoretical complexity here, what this means can perhaps best be seen inflected and explained in two ways:
Next entries »
Matti is a researcher, designer and visual artist working with emerging digital technologies globally. He is currently dayjobbing as a Teaching Fellow in Digital Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and spends time shuttling between London, Helsinki and the rest of the world.
Soum is a new media technology architect, ex-mixercast founding member, filmmaker, photographer, and a general wanderer who lives partly in London and rest of the time in Mumbai. He builds scalable web sites, dabbles in emerging technologies, and spends rest of his time in various film and photography projects.