Originally written at
http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/what-kind-of-clouds-should-we-build-and-what-economic-or-open-source-models but is also relevant to the forums of any unique kind of cloud, like Bitcoin. You're the kind of people who like to ride the cuttingedge of clouds.
The purpose of this thread is to help members of this forum find or start new projects which are profitable to all involved. That profit may be direct from customers of our new kinds of computing clouds or indirect from what happens after the world sees you built open source that changed the world even in a small way. It may also be a combination, as a common business model these days is to offer an open source version and some proprietary plugins or to make money on technical support for it or helping to install it in new systems. Theres a variety of economic and open source models which bring valuable things to those who contribute.
Many people see this forum only as a form of entertainment or keeping up with new techs. Much fewer are actively working on cuttingedge projects. Others come here to get a perspective on global trends that affects their actions in existing or new paradigms in the world. The target audience of this thread may appear small, but you never know when someone only observing may decide to join the game. Welcome to the paradigm of building paradigms.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/transforming-this-forum-into-an-economical-forcehttp://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/lets-some-of-us-get-together-and-make-a-quick-few-million-dollarsMost new things in the world are going to be involved in cloud computing in some way. New kinds of clouds are popping up like they're a species, most very specalized.
A few of the more interesting clouds:
* Smartphone app markets
* Antivirus networks distributing new virus definitions
* FoldIt protein folding research
* EyeWire brain mapping research
* WolframCloud scientific calculations and storage
*
http://liveperson.com cloud of people which use datamined graphs and searches and chat with you
* Bitcoin decentralized money with theoretical expansion to secure computing
* Namecoin decentralized money with built in storage of URLs or other small data
* Ethereum decentralized secure computing paid for with you can define any number of new kinds of money
* Nuance
* Pandora AI predicting what music you will like to hear next
* Netflix AI predicting what videos you will like to watch next
* Wikipedia offers backups of their database and is updated by anyone, then updated again by someone who thinks their change wasnt "neutral point of view"
* Sourceforge storage of open source software
* Amazon EC2 general computing cloud, set up a computer then copy/paste it many times, then they talk to eachother and run your app with that much computing power. Also S3 storage based on sets, object contains set of other objects, as binary data.
* Google Brain
* webcrawlers
* Money clouds, which we call banks, especially Paypal, Dwolla, and cryptocurrencies
* Democracy clouds, like Reddit, Facebook Like button, and Google +1 button
* AI clouds - I've heard about them in general, but it appears near everyone wants to keep their AI internal and just provide the thinking service on specific things. Here's one of them supposedly coming soon
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/29/scaled-inference-2* Virtual world clouds - Minecraft, SecondLife, BattleNet
Please add to the list of interesting clouds or kinds of them. We need to know what's happening in the expansion of new kinds of clouds to predict what kind of projects are likely to survive and expand.
I think the next kinds of clouds will combine Human intelligence and AI using an open market of ways to view, edit, create, play, and work with it. Imagine an open ended space on the Internet with as few or many dimensions as needed at the time and place, where the basic kinds of data we normally use (text, pictures, shapes, drag-and-drop with mouse, URLs, agents, posting and reading text, voting, and whatever else is fun and useful), are organized in realtime by millions of people social networking with eachother and with the AIs that automate things for them, that we can train for any purpose within the space. This would not be a cloud built for a specific task. It would be a cloud to make available to everyone the basic parts of our online world in a unified space, so they can build a world inside. Imagine a game that you build from inside the game, and it becomes real as it hooks into more systems in the world. Thats what the Internet should be.
There's more than enough opportunities to go around. Nobody these days should be unemployed with all the progress there is to make and new paradigms of organizing the efforts of large groups of people toward common goals.
I'm not telling you what to build or how to build it. I'm trying to help you see whats possible that we might want to build together as it expands and more people help build it from inside it while they're using it. Clouds, like Wall Street, can be abused as control paradigms, but they can also be a powerful tool for change and balancing power fairly between everyone. A tech is neutral until you choose how to use it.
