You may not have heard of Ward Cunningham.
He's the quiet guy who invented the wiki.
Which in the Hawaiian language means 'quick'
He created a new concept of collaborative editing of ideas through linked documents in 1994.
Hypercard was a set of pages , ideas connected to each other before the internet with weblinks and URLs came into being. People could navigate from one page to another.
As soon as a new idea was added, a fresh page would be created and anyone could write and edit the contents
The pages could evolve through collaboration but it took 2 years to get people to understand and explore the infinite possibilities.
This was before the early web browsers were built.
That experiment grew rapidly into what we know as Wikipedia today.
Jimmy Wales, the well-known face of Wikipedia made two vital contributions.
He got the licensing terms right, so contributors could not claim specific rights to content and fragment the site's immense knowledge base.
And he opened it up, so anyone, anywhere in the world could write and edit pages in any language about subjects they knew well.
That's why Wikipedia exists the way we know it.
The AI that takes lunch and dinner orders
In 2018, Sundar Pichai of Google showed an AI program that made a booking for a hair salon appointment.
The AI assistant made the call, responded to queries and wrapped up the job in less than a minute.
At one point, the AI says 'mmhmm' in response to a question instead of 'Yes' - a human response. It received thunderous applause from the audience
Turns out that these tight well-defined situations with a clear outcome is one of the best places to go ahead and install AI.
For a company called Kea in the US, it's the business model.
It reverses the roles, taking orders at restaurants for lunch and dinner from customers calling in.
Why is that a big deal?
Restaurants in the US are short staffed and employees are unable to respond promptly to customer calls at lunch and dinner time, resulting in long delays.
It's also a great problem for AI to solve because the context is narrow.
You ask for menu options, pick what you like and place an order.
The conversations are predictable and all you need to know is if your order has been taken down.
It's already live at over 250 restaurants
What if solar power didn't need panels?
Today the two are seamlessly joined.
Every time you think of solar power, the solar panel pops into your mind.
However, a young student from the Philippines had a different idea.
And it won him the James Dyson award this year for renewable energy innovation.
Mixing a luminous bio-resin and lining it with solar film, he was able to generate enough power to charge two mobile phones at the same time.
The clincher? It works by converting UV rays to visible light. And solar film converts that to energy far more efficiently than any available option.
It can be fixed to walls, roofs, or any other surface, essentially converting buildings into electricity generating structures.
There's no need to face the sun, since the absorption of UV happens even in the absence of sunlight.
Until now, this was one of the biggest problems to overcome - the sun shines for around 10-12 hours a day and the panels had to be oriented towards the sun's movement.
That will no longer be necessary.
Existing solar film manufacturers can incorporate the resin into the production process.
In the years to come, solar power generation may just blend into the decor.
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The idea tree that keeps growing