Killer App

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About Stearns

Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse. Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.

3 Comments

  1. John
    October 5, 2008 at 11:22 pm

    What I like best about this app is that good maps still cannot find me. (When you type in my real address, it shows the wrong place.) I cannot tell you how comforting that is. I know, I know, it will not be a long-lived situation. The overmind is probably reading this comment right now and investigating. But for the nonce, it’s very satisfying.

  2. Stearns
    October 6, 2008 at 11:42 am

    Did you have something like this in mind: http://www.youtube.com/watc…

    Yes, I can imagine the Google overmind keeping track of how you vote, or maybe placing your vote for you.

    But really, for now I’m pretty damn pleased with:
    1) Making it easy to get info on how and where to vote.
    2) Having citizens — corporate or individual — to act to make such info available, even if your federal and local government don’t. (You may not trust corporations as good citizens, and history suggest you’d be right. But that’s no reason to not demand and expect that they should behave that way. Google is also participating in a general campaign to get out the vote.)
    3) Making it darn easy to enlist likeminded others to spread the (interactive) knowledge of how and where to vote.
    4) Using technology to achieve the above.
    5) To do something that matters. (I’m pretending, for the purpose of this conversation, that the election matters. A point that, staring at the black ceiling at night, I’m not entirely convinced of.)

  3. John
    October 7, 2008 at 9:26 am

    Wow, I love that video. And yes, that’s the feeling I’m talking about. So I’m glad that the Google Mind has not found me yet. (Remind me to tell you about the Sweet Life Cafe incident).

    I’m sure that the app is killer, and I support all the pro-democracy positions you list above. But I’m glad I’m still under the radar.

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