Last week the words of science fiction writer William Gibson ran rampant over the Twitter back channel at the inaugural NASA IT Summit when a speaker quoted his observation that "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." That's a familiar idea to readers of the O'Reilly Radar, given its focus on picking up the weak signals that provide insight into what's coming next. So what does the future of technology hold for humanity and space flight? I've been reading the fiction of Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, David Brin, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and many other great authors since I was a boy, and thinking and dreaming of what's to come. I'm not alone in that; Tim O'Reilly is also dreaming of augmented reality fiction these days.

Last week I interviewed NASA's CIO and CTO at the NASA IT Summit about some of that fiction made real. We discussed open source, cloud computing, virtualization, and Climate@Home, a distributed supercomputer for climate modeling. Those all represent substantive, current implementations of enterprise IT that enable the agency to support mission-critical systems. (If you haven't read about the state of space IT, it's worth circling back.)

Three speakers at the Summit offered perspectives on emerging technologies that were compelling enough to report on:

• Former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency Lewis Shepherd
• Gartner VP David Cearley
• Father of the Internet Vint Cerf

You can watch Cerf speak in the embedded video below. (As a bonus, Jack Blitch's presentation on Disney's "Imagineers" follows.) For more on the technologies they discuss, and Shepherd's insight into a "revolution in scientific computing," read on.

The last decade has seen the rise of collaboration as a by-word for innovation success. This is now often referred to as ‘open innovation’ which we define as sharing the risks and rewards of innovation with others. This may sound simple enough and yet in our experience many large organisations struggle with implementing it as open innovation is it can be highly counter-cultural and disruptive. In this short article we present seven tactics and incentives that can really help to spark open innovation success.

1. Share both Risks and Rewards

Most people feel pretty comfortable with the idea of spreading the risks of innovation with others, however more interesting and difficult is how we collectively share the rewards. It is essential to recognise that open innovation inevitably means sacrificing some short term benefits in return for valuable longer terms relationships. You can no longer run away from your reputation as you once could and so all organisations, both large and small, ought to strive to be the partner of choice in your field, through being open, honest and approachable. A company who understands this really well is Procter and Gamble who seek to be the first port of call for any innovator with a product or service that fits one of their brands. This market positioning has significant commercial benefit and their primary competitors lose out by often only ever seeing opportunities that P&G have rejected.

"A regulated Internet is a comforting thought to the access providers and a frightening thought to entrepreneurs and the ecosystem around them."
- Fred Wilson

One thing to note about net neutrality is that it is not something that proponents are looking to change about the net. As it is now, the Internet is a level playing field, and service providers cannot discriminate between their customers. Net neutrality is instead something its supporters are looking to uphold - a fundamental cornerstone of the net whose loss would be detrimental to most.

The level playing field of the net today allows small companies to grow very quickly and to challenge larger players. With everyone operating on the same bandwidth (for example), a startup can theoretically compete with large established companies. Without net neutrality, the larger companies with bigger budgets could position themselves to wedge out any smaller competition, stifling innovation.

Late last week, Apple (AAPL) reported $13.5 billion in revenue for the first quarter of the year. You might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a huge multinational corporation. But here’s why – despite its impressive earnings – Apple is more like a startup than you might think. In fact, it’s the key to its success.