The debate about how technology is changing education is gaining strength.

I just spent a few weeks in NYC and now I am back to Milan. NYC was a part-time vacation, let's call it this way. It was mostly about education, so I had some discussions about it too.

Good post about the Internet as an operating system and interesting comparison with the PC era world. 

I promise this will be today's last post, otherwise I will not be able to read an interesting paper I received from one of the participants at the AGI conference in Lugano. But I felt compelled to write one more post, because it follows perfectly from the previous two.

This article published on Edge is good food for thought; it is from David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale.

E tu, Apple?

Apple has finally decided to use patents to slow down the competition, represented by Android in the current form. The interesting spin to the news is that Apple is not suing Google, which develops Android, but is suing HTC, a handset manufacturer and one of the main adopters of Android.

I did not have time to go through the details, except reading the Slashdot story, but this patent, the way it is described in the abstract, covers what Splinder (the largest Italian blogging and community platform) was already doing in 2001/02; and BTW, Splinder was part of a US company based in NY (Tipic Inc. of which I was the co-founder and CEO).

This is a bit counterintuitive. Why would you want to put a videoconferencing system on a robot? Well it actually works, and it can be just the beginning of an interesting concept. 

I have been experimenting trying to integrate this site (powered by Drupal) with Facebook and Twitter. The Idea is to let my friends comment here using their accounts on those (and other) platforms.

So far I have not had much luck, because the FB module for Drupal cannot handle FB usernames, so if you commented here, your comment would appear as xxxx@facebook.com; the Twitter module, is still buggy and it seems that development has halted lately (hopefully I am wrong).

I have been thinking about this for years and now it seems that the technology and the business model are ready for prime time. Not that I wanted to start a company out of it, because the business is too much capital intensive for how I like to work.