Making Future Headlines

by Elizabeth Corcoran, 08.13.08, 06:00 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated September 01, 2008

Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly are the Thomas Paines of the DIY revolution.

If the do-it-yourself trend is a revolution, then Dale Dougherty (above, left) and Tim O'Reilly (right) are its Tom Paines.

Their three-year-old quarterly magazine, Make, is the DIY manifesto, urging readers to unleash their creativity with little more than a screwdriver and a soldering iron. Want an electric guitar? Start with a cigar box. Need an aerial picture of your house? Try rigging a camera to a kite.

The playfulness of Make, however, disguises a provocative and potentially disruptive trend: giving individuals the power to change hardware just like they do software. "Why can't I do to my car what I do to my computer?" asks Dougherty, Make's publisher.

"We're seeing the collision of computing and 'stuff,'" adds O'Reilly, who is widely seen as a digital age prophet. "It's telling us something about the shape of the future. It's a bellwether." (To see our pick of techno-wizards, check out "In Pictures: Eight People Inventing The Future.")

Neither O'Reilly, 54, nor Dougherty, 53, is an engineer. O'Reilly majored in classics at Harvard University; Dougherty was an English major. "I make books," declares Dougherty.

But they're awfully good at spotting trends. As the software industry began to gel in the mid-1980s, they wrote computer manuals, hawking their soft-cover books at conferences. The collaboration grew into a small trade press house now called O'Reilly Media. Their books became travel guides through the rough landscape of computerese: Perl, Python, JavaScript and the Internet itself. These were books for people-in-the-know, the antithesis of "Dummy" guides.

The books positioned O'Reilly and Dougherty at the front of every technical trend. "We didn't get to sell books; we sold a movement," says O'Reilly, who became the leading evangelist and public face of the company, now based in Sebastapol, Calif., a 90-minute drive north of San Francisco.

As the Internet was unleashed from government and university labs in the early 1990s, O'Reilly and Dougherty rode the waves, publishing the influential, if optimistically named, Whole Internet User's Guide. (It's now out of print.) They created one of the first Web portals, the Global Network Navigator, which cataloged sprouting Web sites. (AOL snapped it up.) Their business grew to $70 million in revenue by 2001, then crumpled by almost 30% when the dot-com bubble burst.

But once again, they spotted the first bump of the next wave. In 2004, the pair hosted a conference on open-source software. Dougherty dubbed the efforts "Web 2.0," suggesting technologies that turned the Internet from a place that displayed content into an active tool shop of programs that mashed together information (maps meet numbers such as sales data spreadsheets and tallies of fishing hauls). Web 2.0 has become a dominant trend in enterprise computing.

O'Reilly Media now runs about 18 conferences each year, including a delightful science program, "Science Foo Camp." These are serious alpha-geek gatherings--and they have helped the company, as of last year, reach $76 million in revenue (see "Back To Silicon Valley's Future").

It was Dougherty that, a few years back, started drawing connections between a different set of distant dots: the profusion of powerful, cheap electronics; a deft software hacking community; crafting as popularized by Martha Stewart; and the growing green--or recycling--rage. "Dale had the genius to say 'These are part of the same movement,'" O'Reilly says.

Make debuted in 2005, part book, part magazine, evoking the techno-enthusiasm of the 1950s with a splash of new-age punk. Rather than writing about people who invent, Make is a recipe book of invention. Dougherty scoured the Web to find people inventing gadgets and invited them to describe, step by step, how they did it.

It was a quick success and now has a paid circulation of 120,000. Next step: inviting all those enthusiasts together. This year's "Maker Faire" held in San Mateo, Calif., drew a crowd of 65,000, up from 20,000 in 2006. Austin, Boston, Chicago and New York are on the short list for future Maker Faires. In January, Twin Cities Public Television will debut a weekly Make television show.

O'Reilly is also selling kits to help jump-start wannabe DIYers--much like the old Heathkit models so many older engineers used as kids. They come wrapped in retro brown Kraft paper and include projects like the $15 "Make a Blinkybug," an electronic gizmo with LED eyes and sensors, or the MintyBoost USB Charger Kit ($20) that turns an old Altoids tin into an iPod charger. The kits are a decent business for O'Reilly, pulling in about $1 million a year.

The company is also putting money on the line by seeding some venture companies. The investments are tiny by Sand Hill Road standards; O'Reilly raised money from limited partners to create an investment fund of $52 million. Individual investments are $500,000 to $1 million apiece. So far, O'Reilly's sunk money into 10 start-ups, including wifi device maker Chumby and travel site TripIt.

"Our mission is to amplify what's already happening," O'Reilly says--the Web circa 1992 or the early days of Web 2.0 all over again. Hardware, or "stuff," is becoming as customizable as software. It seems like fun and toys now, O'Reilly and Dougherty say, but here's their prediction: from the hobbyists will spring new technologies, ideas for companies, and, ultimately, a new industry.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/13/diy-innovation-oreilly-tech-egang08-cx_ec_0813oreilly.html

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Column: Back To Silicon Valley's Future

Letter From Silicon Valley

09.11.06, 6:00 AM ET

BURLINGAME, CALIF. -Tim O’Reilly has invented a time machine. Not the H.G. Wells version, but an intellectual time shifter that briefly brings back some of the inventive magic of Silicon Valley’s past. Last month he offered me a ride. It was a vivid reminder of what made Silicon Valley great--and a tempting promise of things to come.

For the past 28 years, O’Reilly has run a privately held publishing and conference company located in Sebastopol, Calif., a 45-minute drive north of San Francisco. Many of the books published by O’Reilly are intensely geeky: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is among its top sellers. O’Reilly doesn’t care about becoming a media mogul. Instead, he continues to feed the old home-brew spirit of innovation, while providing savvy commentary on the state of techdom.

In 2003, O’Reilly kicked off a series of conferences, mischievously called “Foo Camps" (the name is a tribute both to programmers, for whom “foo” is a placeholder word like “whatchamacallit," and to himself, as in “Friends of O’Reilly"). The camps--which sometimes actually take place in an old apple orchard outside O'Reilly's Sebastopol woods--are purposely not about business plans and marketing proposals. That's where the time travel comes in: The gatherings are a throwback to Silicon Valley's early days, when it was populated by dreamers who reveled in building stuff and did only what they had to do to
pay the bills.

The Internet changed all that, raining so much money on the Valley that business plans washed away chip diagrams. But O’Reilly is still inspired by ideas, not cash. And so he’s made his Foo Camps a place for starting conversations, not generating business leads.

In August, O’Reilly, in conjunction with Nature magazine and with support from Google, convened the first SciFoo: A gathering of about 200 carefully picked scientists, pundits and writers. The broad mandate was to discuss emerging science and science policy ideas, particularly ones that have been supercharged by the Internet or other vast database technology. That was it. No agenda, no keynote speakers, no public relations crews and no trade floor booths. People came to stir up ideas. And as far as I could tell, everyone went home thinking about something different from when they arrived.

SciFoo was held at the memorably indulgent Googleplex, in Mountain View, Calif., where the cafeteria is lavish, the bathrooms feature high-tech toilets with warm seats and nozzles for squirting water at delicate spots, and a glassed-in laundry room offers employees a chance to take a personal hygiene break.

Many of the SciFoo “campers” were the people that other conferences are built around: Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and inventor of Berkeley UNIX; Danny Hillis, co-founder of Thinking Machines, one of the first massively parallel supercomputers; Esther Dyson, long-time technology pundit and now venture capitalist; the Google duo, Larry and Sergey, along with their new compatriot, Larry Brilliant, who helped squash smallpox and is now running the billion-dollar Google Foundation; and Donald Hopkins, who directs health programs at the Carter Center and is leading the fight to eradicate guinea worm disease.

O’Reilly’s team plopped a big whiteboard in a common area just outside the Google cafeteria and suggested that people sign up to give presentations on their work or host a session on a topic they find interesting. The board filled quickly with topics such as managing enormously complex datasets, fighting pandemic diseases, teaching science to children, building robots and studying the history of technology. Some sessions attracted dozens of people, others just a handful. In every case, however, I saw some of high-tech’s big names listening and brainstorming with people they had never met before the conference.

One researcher described the change in the way the World Health Organization tracks emerging potential epidemics, due in part to a tiny Canadian organization called Global Public Health Intelligence Network. Since the most effective way to derail an epidemic is to catch it early, the WHO relies on countries to report the health trends they’ve detected within in their own borders. But GPHIN has sped up detection enormously by also sifting stories and Web sites from global media sources, using carefully chosen keywords. Stories that use the term “dead birds” and “dead nurses," for instance, may indicate an outbreak of avian flu.

Now imagine expanding that kind of Internet trolling to include many more sources, starting with personal blogs. What would researchers see? Who should get the findings? How reliable would they be? What if people tried to send out misleading information?

Another researcher proposed creating an even earlier flu warning system by using low-cost sensor chips to test for a thousand strains of different viruses. The chips could be put in health clinics around the world and the data could be fed into a central organization. Could that kind of mesh help researchers catch--and quash--epidemics? Again, who would get to see the data? What if it missed a virus?

In another conversation, researchers described projects that collect information from webs of tiny sensors, measuring everything from ocean currents to lightning strikes, and then plot the data on global maps, such as Google Earth. (For example, see Biltzortung.org for data on lightning strikes in Europe or Ogle Earth for a blog about using Google Earth maps.) What else could be mapped? Where else are people gathering data? What happens when databases are fused together--say, mapping demographic or income tax data onto local maps?

Getting nonscientists excited about science was another favorite topic. One intriguing approach is a new series of comic books, slated to come out early next year. Saul Griffith, an alum of the Media Lab at M.I.T., has been developing what he calls “HowToons,” an adventure series in which kids design cool gadgets. (See Instructables or check Amazon.com.) Griffith gives kids, with a bit of help from adults, step-by-step instructions on how to make cool gadgets, including marshmallow shooters and rocket ships. Will Griffith’s work inspire kids to detach themselves from computer monitors and head to the garage?

The conversations continued long into the evening. Future collaborations were forged; proposals began to germinate. Guessing what real change might come from such a meeting is harder than pinning down a cloud. But surely, without such conversations, innovation would happen more slowly.

http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2006/09/08/conference-science-google_cz_ec_0911valleyletter.html


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