Russ: This is a BusinessMakers WebXtra a continuation of the radio interview of Jason Pontin the Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review. Earlier we were talking and contrasting paper media versus electronic media. One of the neat things about electronic media is that the story continues to grow and you can actually change it and add to it. Does that happen often with articles from Technology Review?
Jason: I'm an old print guy. So at first I had many of the prejudices against electronic publishing that print guys do. I have learned that there are beautiful parts about publishing on the web that you don't go and get with print. For a start, you are not beholden to your mistakes, as you said. You can make emendations. You can change things. You can admit you screwed up. You can put an update, and you can say how you got it wrong. But the really really cool thing is I can see it already a high granularity of detail what my readers like and don't like. I can see how deeply they read into a story. I can see if most of them gave up after the first page. I can see that story X was 12 times more popular than story Y. And they comment. You have comments online. And they write back to me and say you idiot or you genius. And it's just very fulfilling being part of a community. The people used to say that print editors were like bar tenders. That people came to the bar kind of expecting a certain level of service and certain kind of drinks. They expected you to surprise and delight the punters and that's kind of true, but it was still a one way relationship. It was my bar and I was giving you the drinks that you could ask me for stuff and maybe I'd do it but I made my martini my way. Online it's much more like being part of a family, a community. I'm still the guy in some ways writing the story but in terms of the number of words, on any single story we write, if you go to our comments page for our successful stories, you will see there is far more verbiage produced by our very smart readers than we ever produce in a web story. That's just great. So, I mean I have learned to stop worrying about electronic media and embrace the things that make it special.
Russ: Moving on now to the new emerging world and I shared with you earlier that we had had an expert on the show previously about entrepreneurship in India contrasting that to America, and I know that you have a perspective on that as well. I'd love for you to share that with us.
Jason: Yeah so I love India. I should say that I've been going to India since 1996, that I spent my honeymoon there and that we just launched Technology Review in India with our partner, CyperMedia. So I feel I have some with affection and understanding of the country. I think Americans when they see these Indian entrepreneurs and they feel awe at them, they don't know the half of it. In India, to fail is a deeply shameful thing. You can literally outcast yourself, which means you can't get a job, means that you can't get married and that really no one will even eat with you. So when you meet these guys who are willing to start companies and leave their home, it's an extraordinary thing. One of the things Americans don't give themselves enough credit for is that failure is okay in this country. My friend, John Doyle, a venture capitalist, even says he doesn't trust an entrepreneur until he's crashed at least twice.
Russ: Well, before I let you go, I know you do this special publication every year about 10 emerging technologies that you think are going to have an impact on the future. Share with us your favorite one or two of those for 2009.
Jason: So I just say that Technology Review covers emerging technologies, so they're not research projects; they do have market pull, but they are things that you will see in the marketplace not next year but in 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. So let me just give you the two I think are most important. The guy at IBM who created the RAM memory that your iPhone uses has an entirely new form of memory called Racetrack memory. Racetrack memory would allow us to have the equivalent of 20 hard drives in something the size of a grain of dust. And this means that memory could be embedded in the ordinary things of life in a very dramatic way; so that sensors and your walls and your clothes-it would really change the way we think about processing. Computing would become ubiquitous like electricity is now. And as part of that kind of ubiquitous computing idea is another trend we like this year. Piezo Electronics. Piezo Electronics uses a very basic mechanical property of crystals that if crystals feel some pressure, they actually produce a small electric force. So if you combine these two technologies, Piezo Electronics and Race Track memory, you could begin to do some very interesting and strange things. Those, I think, are the two technologies that are going to have the most long-term disruptive effect. If you thought the PC, having a computer in your home and you desk, made things different, imagine if computing power was, as I say, as ubiquitous as light as electricity. That's going to be freaky.
Russ: Jason, I really appreciate you sharing your insight with The BusinessMakers Show.
Jason: It's been a pleasure, Russ. Thank you much for having me.
Russ: We've been speaking with Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review. And this is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.
