Bright and early this morning at 8 am PT, BoomTown will be jacked into the matrix for an invitation-only media and analyst briefing to hear exactly what the heck Cisco (CSCO) has been yammering on about of late.

Last month, the networking giant said in a mysterioso email that it would be making “a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.”

Significant? Forever? It had better be good.

Like a jet pack from which you can communicate your Foursquare location (“I’m Mayor of the Clouds!”).

Or perhaps a chip you can implant in your head that will give you live updates of every single Apple (AAPL) iPad rumor.

Or a cogent explanation of how to extricate yourself from Google Buzz.

Or, at long last, maybe Cisco has figured out a way to fix the dropped calls crisis on the AT&T (T) mobile network–a tech solution I would nominate for a Nobel Prize if it ever came to pass.

In all seriousness, due to the speculation around what Cisco will unveil, its stock hit a 52-week high yesterday–up 92 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $26.13–and analysts were speculating on what the company will say.

The consensus: A new router to improve–please, oh Lord, please–wireless transmission of Web video and heavy data that often slow mobile and ISP networks.

It’s part of a new focus on the ever-growing but ever-slowing wireless data networks.

Google (GOOG) said recently that it was planning to build a superspeedy broadband service. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is set to unveil its own ambitious plan to improve high-speed Internet access across the United States.

Well, it’ll be good, since the consumption of video online is growing like crazy and a constant bottleneck is likely without some relief.

Cisco has gotten deep into video of late, both in pushing networking gear and in acquiring video device maker like Pure Digital, the company behind my beloved Flip digital camera.

It is also working on innovative holographic and television-based home telepresence technologies.

So, is it too much to ask Cisco for a simple jet pack that works? I think not!

This week: We had a Skype visit with, asked some questions of and gathered a few pertinent stats about Leslie Fine and Crowdcast, an uber-geeky business intelligence tool that helps decision makers tap into the collective knowledge of employees.

In other words: No one person knows the future, but all of us together might.

Who: Leslie Fine

What: Chief Scientist, Crowdcast

Why: Crowdcast blends ex-Caltech statistical analysis chops with a simple wagering interface to create a game played among employees. At its most basic, it provides a way for businesses to download all the experience and knowledge possessed by their employees about an arena or pending decision.

Where: crowdcast.com (Web site); @lesliefine (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who else: Inkling also provides predictive tools, but isn’t as consulting-oriented.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in Her Facebook Profile

When Did You Catch the Geek Bug?: When I was at Caltech, my adviser, John Ledyard, was amazing at making very complex analysis problems very folksy. He was very good at telling stories.

Has a Geek Crush On: Are dead people okay? If so, his name is Leo Hurwicz; he won the Nobel Prize in mechanism design a few years ago.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?: I have to grow up?

Wishes There Was an App for: Oh yeah, it’s actually my Plan B. I call it Seat Sniper. You tell it about your seating preferences (window, front, exit row) and in the 72 hours before a flight when seats are moving around, it continually pings the airlines Web site to see if there are any maximizing moves to me made. Then, it does it for you.

Fails At: I’m terrible at delegating, and that’s something I am having to learn here.

Bio in 140 Characters

Wesleyan, then to CalTech. She joined HP Labs; wasn’t ready to retire. Became chief scientist for Crowdcast, so she could tell the future.

The Five Questions

Crowdcast seems super technical. Break it down for us.

Crowdcast is an enterprise software platform that helps companies make better forecasts by tapping the knowledge stored in their employees. People you hire are the best informed to help businesses understand their own targets. For lack of a better term, we ask them to place bets on things that we then tie back to real incentives when bets are made accurately. The software plays like a stock market or betting game. It is like duck on a pond. It seems simple on top, but underneath there are lots of moving parts at work.

What kinds of questions is Crowdcast good at answering?

We spent a lot of time in our first year as a new company debating that because prediction markets can, in theory, solve any kind of problem. Where we’ve seen the most traction are in a couple areas.

Questions whose outcomes will be knowable in three months to a year and where there is very dispersed knowledge in your organization tend to do well. An example would be bringing a new product to market, where there are many silos involved and lots of funky incentives. We nail questions like, “When will it [a new product] come out?” and “How good will it be?” and “How much will it cost to do so?”

How do you handle outliers? They might be telling you something you need to know, and they might just be way off.

Yeah, that’s a good question. We pay close attention to game players whose predictions are one standard deviation or more away from the average guess. They get a little light box pop-up that asks them why they’ve bid that way, so that we can gather any potential special intelligence.

What’s your ah-ha technology moment, when you realized you were living in the future?

We had this little app at HP Labs called Zoomgraph–this is in 2000–where you could look at all the data flows in your computer.

There’s like a million free Facebook apps that do that today, but, in 2000, it was showing back to me, on a screen, a map of my world. It was very navel-gazing, which we did a lot of at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Labs. It was amazing in a passive way.

You work on developing games intended to tell the future. Are you competitive about this stuff?

Ha ha. Yeah, we use our product internally to predict all kinds of stuff–some business related, some just fun. I’m very competitive with it. We keep track of points here and I think I’m 4x above the nearest competitor. I bought most of my Christmas presents with Amazon (AMZN) gift cards I won that way.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100129/almost-famous-leslie-fine-of-crowdcast/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:00:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009-2/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:00:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071009/nobel-prize-grm/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/nobel-prize-grm/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:31:44 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/nobel-prize-grm/ Apple once said of its first iPod that “1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything.” And while that may be true, it wouldn’t have changed much without the pioneering work of Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, who discovered GMR (giant magnetoresistance), a nanotechnology that makes it possible to read data that is densely packed onto the surface of a magnetic disk.

Today Fert of the Université Paris-Sud in France and Grünberg of Forschungszentrum in Jülich, Germany, were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work that made “1,000 songs in your pocket” a reality.

“In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect–giant magnetoresistance, or GMR,” the academy’s prize citation explains. “Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. Soon researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads. In 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.”

Amazing, yeah? Without Fert and Grünberg’s work, we’d be lucky to store a single song in our iPods.

“It’s no good having computer hard drives that can store gigabytes of information if we can’t access it,” Jim Al-Khalili, physics professor at the University of Surrey, told the Financial Times. “The technology that has appeared thanks to the discovery of GMR has allowed hard-disk sensors to read and write much more data, allowing for bigger memory, cheaper and more reliable computers. GMR is one of those wonderful phenomena from the weird world of quantum physics that has been put to use very quickly.”

Asked if he’d ever thought his discovery would have such an impact on consumer electronics, Fert told the Associated Press, “You can never predict in physics. … These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say “‘Wow, he’s using something I put together in my mind.’ It’s wonderful.”

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