“The internet eats everything it touches,” write Brady Forrest and Nathan Torkington, O’Reilly Media, Inc., in their must read 2006 companion essay The State of Where 2.0 (PDF).  Now in 2010 that statement is more true than ever.

Last week,  I talked to Brady about what we can look forward to at Where 2.0, 2010,  and what he thinks will be the “internet eating” trends emerging this year.  Brady is uniquely positioned to get a glimpse of things to come.  His job for O’Reilly Media is tracking changes in technology and organizing large scale events, including Where 2.0 which he chairs, and Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC which he co-chairs.  Brady also runs Ignite, and previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search.  And, when not doing his day job, he participates in such Uber Geek activities as Steve the Robot H.E.AI.D – A Human Energized Artificial Intelligence Device…with lasers and generative sound, (click on pic above or see video here).  Look out for Steve the Robot H.E.AI.D, at Augmented Reality Event, June 2nd and 3rd, Santa Clara, CA,  and a presentation from Brady.

As Vernor Vinge pointed out in his intro to ISMAR 2009 – the “possibilities are both scary and wondrous” as “the physical world becomes much more like a software construct.”  Brady Forrest has taken a lead role, since 2004 – when “‘local search’ was interesting but not yet real,” in shaping this transformation.

Where 2.0, together with WhereCamp (this year at Google) constitutes WhereWeek – a crucible for emerging trends in web mapping platforms, and location based technologies.  This year augmented reality, proximity-based social networking, local search, and the rapidly maturing field of Crisis Management are in the  mix along with the huge and long established GIS industry which has moved rapidly into the Where 2.0 space.

But what business models will oxygenate the system is still a key question – one Brady discusses in the interview below.  Certainly, the usefulness of location based analysis, mapping, new interfaces, and bringing this data to every application is clear.

Crisis management is center stage this year Jeffrey Johnson (Open Solutions Group), John Crowley (Star-Tides), Schuyler Erle (Entropy Free LLC) who will present on, Haiti: CrisisMapping the Earthquake.  And Chris Vein & Tim O’Reilly will “discuss how cities and application developers will benefit from open data and what these programs will look like in the future”  in the plenary City Data.

Mobile social, proximity- based social networking, which may soon emerge as a challenger to web based social networks, and augmented reality are the sexy rockstars of  the Where 2.0′s 2010 showcase of potentially disruptive technologies.  Augmented Reality has had a breakthrough year, and this is reflected in its strong showing on the Where 2.0 schedule.  But, as Brady notes, AR awaits the killer app, that will drive it to the next level  Of course, we hope to unveil that at are2010!

At Where 2.0, I am presenting on The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences panel.  We will look at how social augmented experiences will be key to the next wave of mobile augmented reality.  Mike Liebhold, in a complementary presentation, looks at Truly Open AR. If you have been reading Ugotrade, you already know I am an advocate for an open, distributed, real time communications framework for AR – see ARWave.  Wave Federation Protocol is an open fast, compact, federated, communications protocol that is a dream come true for AR.  And, I would hazard a guess that in 2010, real time communications plus location will become oxygen.

But also key to the next wave of AR, as I discussed with Anselm Hook in this post on Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform, will be a view constructed through complex “hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques” (Jarell Pair), cooperating cloud data services, powerful search and computer vision algorithms, and apps that learn by context accumulation.”

And as Brady notes in the interview below,  a key step forward would be “to take advantage of your location, but it doesn’t need to have been mapped before.”

For some interesting news on the mapping front (and a discount code for Where 2.0 for Radar readers) see Brady’s post, Flickr Photos in Google Street View. These kind of human built maps have the potential to develop into “photo-based positioning systems” that could create new opportunities for augmented reality.  Brady asks:

“how often the Flickr photos get updated, where else these Flickr photos are going to show up in Google’s services (Google Goggles perhaps?) and will they show up in new search partner Bing? I am doubly curious if Facebook will ever let its photos be used in a similar way.”

Lior Ron of Google Goggles will be at Where 2.0 to tell us all about, Looking into Google Goggles.  And if you want to learn more about how our view of the physical world will be ” rooted in powerful computing, pervasive connectivity, and the cloud” don’t miss this one.  I will be there.  And I very much hope there is a Q and A with this session.

During our conversation (see the full conversation below) Brady gave me his short list for breakthroughs that he sees as having big significance in 2010:

“Well, I think Google Goggles is one of the most exciting things to me.  Having access to a visual search…having someone actually release a visual search engine in that way, to consumers, I think is huge.  You know, you see stuff like that in the labs. But I don’t see it… it’s rare to see it out.

I think Android is huge.  And the way Google is pushing hardware to show off the platform; so the Nexus One being another example and the fact that it’s breaking free from the carriers.  Because I think when we get away from the carriers we are able to see more innovation, it’s what’s going to allow people or developers and companies to really innovate.

And I think Twitter adding geo-location to their APIs and buying MixerLabs is a huge move. I think Twitter may end up becoming the end-all be-all of location services. They are going to be updated constantly by people; they are going to have a really good grasp, real-time, of what is happening in any one place, at least based on the people.

And then with the addition of the MixerLabs data, they’re going to have more datasets at their ready, as well as any data that they start to collect from the clients themselves, like from TweetDeck.

So there are global clients that are updating Twitter.  I think those are some of the most exciting things.  And again, just to come back to Yelp, I think Yelp’s Monocle is also pretty significant, just because it’s an AR [augmented reality] app that’s being pushed into consumers’ hands.

And we’ll see how useful they find it.”

Talking With Brady Forrest

Pic above from WhereCamp 2009, Brady Forrest, facing camera, checks out Mark Powell’s Food Genome Project.  Check it out here – it just woke up!

Tish Shute: So last year when you were interviewed by Michael Calore for WebMonkey before Where 2.0 you said, “Location is no longer a differentiator it’s going to become oxygen.” And after attending Where Week 2009, I agreed with you and wrote about it here.  But, in what ways did this prediction exceed expectations, and what ways were you disappointed now as we get close to Where 2.0, 2010?

Brady Forrest: Well, it exceeded expectations in that there are now five different mobile OS’s where you can load on third party applications that active users’ locations that can then be shared out.

And so, what it is making is the possibility of real-time social location aware applications.  And this is something that hasn’t truly been possible in years past. Looking back three years ago when the iPhone launched, it was the first major phone, especially in the US, to be location aware.  And a year later, the Apps Store launched, giving developers full access to location, which previously had been held onto very, very, incredibly tightly by the carriers.

And now, a year and a half later, you have Android, you have Palm Pre, you have Blackberry working on their SDK to make it better, but it still is there.  You have Windows Mobile working on their SDK.  And, you know, who knows?  Maybe even BREW will get into the mix.

And AT&T is opening up their own interactive store.  And so, AT&T and Verizon and all their smart phones may now be looking at BREW.

Tish Shute: Right. It was very exciting last year at Where 2.0, where we had all these new toolsets announced and then the iphone being location aware. What were the best implementations of these new capabilities that became available in 2009, do you think?  What, in your view, was the most creative, surprising and disruptive?

Brady Forrest: Well, I am a huge fan of Yelp Monocle. I think, you know, that is just a real life example of using Augmented Reality.  You are on a street.  You have got a bunch of restaurants.  You have got a bunch of businesses.  And just to be able to swing through and look for people…I mean and look for ratings and reviews.

They have just started to institute check in, so you will be able to know where your friends are and where your friends have gone.  And that type of real-time, incredibly useful data is what will make augmented reality a standard part of the landscape.

I think it is that type of data, more so than, say, reference data, that will make people want to have all the possible sensors.  So, what do you need for that?  You need a camera.  You need a compass for orientation.  You need a GPS or, at least, a decent location service.  And then you need a screen where you can actually see the data, and then you need an Internet connection.

So it is not like any phone can handle this.  And so, you are going to need those killer apps to actually drive people to the type of phones that can support this.  I don’t think AR is quite there yet.

Tish Shute: I agree, for true AR you need more that compass, camera, and GPS.  There are some missing pieces for the real deal experience – and not just a pair of sexy AR spec.  As you mention, hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques that can combine computer vision technology with  compass and GPS are vital.  We need the compass.  We need the GPS.  We definitely need the camera!  But we need this combined with computer vision techniques to get the tracking, mapping and registration for true AR, or even to deliver a stable experience with the post-it/geonote AR that we see emerging with Layar, Wikitude, and others. At the moment we need to put together the tools for a true AR hyper-local experience.

And, of course, another aspect of this is the kind of physical hyper-links that applications like Google Goggles are building.

Do you have a speaker from Google Goggles at Where 2.0.  I would be absolutely fascinated to hear more about their road map?

Brady Forrest: I was loading Google Goggles onto the program yesterday.

Tish Shute: Oh, you did?  Oh, fantastic. And you have Lior Ron speaking!

Brady Forrest: It is actually possible it is not up on the website, but I talked to them and got them to agree to do a talk on it.

Tish Shute: I very much want to hear more about their road map.  Google Goggle’s is a very, very significant step towards the physical internet and this integration of computer vision with sensor fusion techniques necessary for true AR.

Brady Forrest: I mean that combination with Computer Vision is going to be incredibly valuable, because,  and then the other issue you have there is like is it on the client,  or is it on the server?  And right now, Google Goggles is definitely on the server, and that is not fast enough in real-time AR.  So that is like more of a 10 blue links IO interface.

Tish Shute: And also, they haven’t got an open API, have they?

Brady Forrest: No, not yet.

Tish Shute: Maybe they will announce that.  Can you nudge them?  For true AR,  we need to move forward in several areas – of course, there is the mediating device issues, like access to the video buffers in the iphone, and the development of cool AR eye wear would be nirvana!

But my recent obsession has been working on a real-time communications infrastructure for AR, because that is quite doable now, yet we don’t really have that real-time infrastructure, i.e. a real-time mobile social utility that is really up to the real time requirements of AR [see more about this here and on ARWave wiki].

But we certainly don’t have the integration of computer vision and sensor techniques, and the access to the big image databases we need, let alone the clients we need to put it all together either!

Brady Forrest: Google has done work to help out the community with their support of Open CV.

It is based out of Willow Garage, but I believe that Google has done quite a bit of work on it.

Tish Shute: Could you talk a bit more about Open CV?

Brady Forrest: O’Reilly has  a 500 page book on it.  It came out of the Darpa Project, or the Darpa Contest, where unmanned vehicles are raced.  And that has since become, at least in my mind, the primary computer vision library that people work with.

I actually used it…or, one of the teammates did, on our project we did this summer.  We implemented an Open CV pretty quickly that detected where people were, and then we would play music based on that.

Uber Geek Meeting from ShellyShelly’s photostream
Tish Shute: Is that your Burning Man project? Do you have a link for that, and some pictures, video?

Brady Forrest: Yeah.  Heaid.com.  Human Enhanced Artificial Intelligence Dancing.

Tish Shute: Thank you! This year the augmented reality story has been fairly basic – relying on basic sensors, compass, gps, accelerometers.  But it has also been an exciting year because  we hadn’t even had  smart phones with the camera, and GPS, and compass before this.

But now, the big adventure is to hook this all these sensor fusion techniques up with computer vision so that we can actually do reverse positioning for example from photos from what we are looking at, right?

Brady Forrest: Yeah, and start to use it in a more ad-hoc manner so that as you are traveling around, yes, it will take advantage of your location, but it doesn’t need to have been mapped before.

Tish Shute: Right – moving from mapping to context awareness.  Could you give like a quick explanation of what you did in your Burning Man project and how that relates to this kind of,  ad-hoc, on the fly, beginning to know what you are looking at without it having been mapped before, that is fascinating.

Brady Forrest: Sure.  So we mounted a camera about 30 feet off the ground.  And as people would move underneath or dance, they would move from block to block.  And we had kind of created kind of bitmap of the area underneath and set up different sound zones.  So as people moved from zone to zone, it would play different music.

And we used Maxim FP to handle the computer vision, although it has Open CV library to handle the computer vision part and to handle determining which of the audio to fire off.  And then, also, we had a laser that would play at the same time.

And then we used Ableton Live, which is a very popular DJ software to actually handle the music.  So as someone moved from, say, square A to square B, it would fire off various MIDI signals and Ableton would interpret that.  And each person who went in, up to…well, theoretically, up to 4- 8 people.  But because of how small the stage was and how the sounds are played, realistically, more like 4-6 people.

Each person had there own set of sound.

Pic from extramatic‘s Flickr stream here

Tish Shute: Wow! Awesome.

Brady Forrest: We would be able to detect different people, assign them a sound, or a set of sounds, so, like bass, drums, vocals.  And then we would have clips that played well together that were 3-5 seconds in length.

Tish Shute: At what distance could you detect people?

Brady Forrest: We had a 22 foot area underneath the camera.  That was mostly based on what the lens could capture.

Tish Shute: OMG I love this!  This is really the next step for augmented realities – not just attaching reference data to the world but exploring new shared “cosensual realities” (see Anselm Hook’s interview part 2 upcoming).

I am very interested in how in something you talk about a lot in your “State of Where 2.0″ essay, about lifestyle coming first for a potentially disruptive technology, not commercial considerations.  I still have to post the second half to my interview with  Anselm Hook but Anselm has some brilliant ideas in this area.  He is working on a project called Angel, where part of the vision is for people to actually find what they need without explicitly having to ask for it having to ask for it.

And this brings me to something that is very, to me, noticeable about Where 2.0 this year, and very exciting.  This is that location aware technology and crisis management basically has matured, hasn’t it?  We are beginning to see really useful stuff in this area now.

What is different this year that has brought crisis management and location aware technology together, a world in crisis?

Brady Forrest: Well, I think the primary thing that has brought all these technologies together is Haiti.  Without Haiti…A lot of times, future crises benefit from the current one, because people put in a lot of work.  And so, there is new infrastructure being laid with things such as Ushahidi, which is an open source platform for tracking…well, originally for tracking election violence in, but now is being used to track people and their locations and food requests in Haiti.

Also, Haiti did not have solid, accessible, good maps at the time of the of the earthquake.  And there have been two volunteer projects that have sprung up to help with that.  One being headed by the Open StreetMap Wood Foundation and many volunteers.  And then the other, Google Map Maker. And in both cases the activity around Haiti on these programs went up exponentially…or, I don’t know about exponentially, but a lot.  In the case of Map Maker, it was up 100 times and was the most worked on country for that week.  And one of the most downloaded for that week.

Tish Shute: Yes the work being done in CrisisCamps around the country is very encouraging.

Brady Forrest: And then also, you know, not just Ushahidi or Open Street Map, but also the People Finder which had open API so that different organizations could share their data, thus learning from Katrina.  There are all these different pieces of technology will be used in the future and hopefully be able to save more lives.  I didn’t see…there are iPhones apps that were released.  But I’m not aware of any Android apps.  I’m not aware of any AR apps.

Tish Shute: We don’t have smart phones devices distributed widely enough for them to be appropriate, do we, in a lot of areas where crisis strikes.

Brady Forrest: Yeah and there was criticism that they shouldn’t have been on iPhone.  You know, that iPhones were a waste of time. Because they aren’t…a lot of on the ground agencies aren’t going to have iPhones.  However, a lot of people who are going from the States will, and if the apps are there, then people will start to have them.

But relatively speaking, an iPhone is not that expensive.

Tish Shute: One thing I noticed and actually I discussed this in the second half of the interview I did with Anselm which I am getting ready to post.  But one of the aspects of the crisis filter was having people working as curators looking at messages coming out of Haiti, and while integrating the streams that would be useful is still probably a challenge, many curators will be on iPhones because they are based in the US.

We need to work across all platforms probably.

Brady Forrest: Yes.  Patrick Meier of Ushahidi, who runs Crisis Mappers, he ran a 24/7 emergency room. It was out of the Fletcher School in Boston.

They had volunteers all over the States and Canada.  They had volunteers in Vancouver that were translating Creole messages in under ten minutes.

Tish Shute: Yes and another point that is interesting in terms of the reconstruction and rebuilding of  Haiti is  the whole idea of leap frogging, and the idea that you can really… there’s always, as we’ve seen in other parts of the world, opportunity, when you miss pieces of basic infrastructure, to skip a whole stage and go onto the next one, like how virtual banking took off in Africa because of the absence of brick and mortar infrastructure.

Brady Forrest: To skip to a topic that been in my head, I’m just so bummed that the iPad does not have a camera.

Tish Shute: I was bummed is barely the word I would use.  Particularly as we had just been planning our ground breaking AR/next generation ebook in the days leading up to the announcement!

I suppose there is the hope they’re going to put it in the next one.  But I suppose the play for conventional content delivery is so big that everything else is trivial in comparison – especially in seems jump starting the emerging augmented reality industry!

So we might get thrown a camera and compass in the next round but will we get access to the video buffers?  AR enthusiasts may have to live on table scraps from Apple a bit longer it seems.

But what blows my mind is why hasn’t the iTouch got a camera, been AR enabled?  AR gaming would get an enormous boost from that alone. My son loves even the simple minded AR games available now on the iphone, and he loves iphone games – he has 110 games downloaded!

Brady Forrest: Ridiculous.  Yeah.  I don’t know what they don’t like about cameras.  And I plan on getting an iPad, but because of the limitations I plan on using it for base content and will probably get the bottom line model. I can’t imagine…I don’t know.

Tish Shute: It is very interesting, who actually puts together the big enabling mediating device for AR is still an open question, isn’t it?  I mean, that’s the truth; we have sort of mediating devices but we don’t have the magic brew yet do we?

Brady Forrest: No. Not yet.

Tish Shute: Good enough in some ways, and certainly a start but not quite the real deal.  For me, Where 2.0 this year covers the groundwork for true AR, mobile social proximity-based social networking, visual search, computer vision and sensor fusion techniques….   And because all these things have a chicken and egg relationship laying the groundwork is basically as important as having the mediating device otherwise you can’t do interesting things when we get the mediating device, right?

Is this the year we get the magic brew for AR, i.e., the business model, the killer app, and the mediating device?

Brady Forrest: This is not the year.

Tish Shute: Then I should ask you. Are you in the Goggles camp? That is do you think AR needs eyewear to go mainstream?

Brady Forrest: I think this may be where we get…we start to see what is going to be the killer app that gets people to buy the hardware that will support AR.  You see what I mean?  And then from there the apps will come out and the hardware will advance in that direction.

I don’t think AR has made that leap yet.  It hasn’t, to use almost a cliché, it hasn’t crossed the chasm yet and it hasn’t proven that it will.  Because I don’t know if…I think it’s difficult to tell right now.  Is it going to be games?  Is it going to be data layers? What is going to drive people to an AR device, especially one fully dedicated to it?

Tish Shute: I think in terms of AR games taking off a bit of help from the mediating device e.g. access to the iphone video buffers would probably be enough to stoke up AR games into being a hot commodity.  But in terms of AR data layers  going mainstream, we need some of the other players in the location space to put together the magic brew on the business model, don’t we?

Brady Forrest: That’s why I’m so curious though…that’s why I gave Yelp their own talk.  They are…Those guys are gang busters, they’re a consumer company, very consumer facing website.  They’ve got amazing data stores.  They do a lot of interesting stuff with their data.  And I don’t think people always give them the geek credit they deserve.

Tish Shute: You began Where 2.0 back in 2004, when as you point out, “‘local search’ was interesting but not yet real” and you have always stressed something that’s proven to be absolutely true which is lifestyle before commerce, right?  And that if location based services were going to be big it was because they meant something in terms of our lifestyle, not just because they told us where to get another good burger.  Right?

I think there’s been a lot of breakthrough in that area this year in terms of what location based services and proximity based social networks are to us now, how they’re changing our lifestyle.  What do you see as the breakthroughs for in 2009 and what are you hoping for in 2010?

Brady Forrest: Well, I think Google Goggles is one of the most exciting things to me.  Having access to a visual search…having someone actually release a visual search engine in that way, to consumers, I think is huge.  You know, you see stuff like that in the labs. But I don’t see it… it’s rare to see it out.

I think Android is huge.  And the way Google is pushing hardware to show off the platform; so the Nexus One being another example and the fact that it’s breaking free from the carriers. Because I think when get away from the carriers we are able to see more innovation, it’s what’s going to allow people or developers and companies to really innovate.

And I think Twitter adding geo-location to their APIs and buying MixerLabs is a huge move. I think Twitter may end up becoming the end-all be-all of location services. They are going to be updated constantly by people; they are going to have a really good grasp, real-time, of what is happening in any one place, at least based on the people.

And then with the addition of the MixerLabs data, they’re going to have more datasets at their ready. As well as any data that they start to collect from the clients themselves, like from TweetDeck.

So there are global clients that are updating Twitter. I think those are some of the most exciting things. And again, just to come back to Yelp, I think Yelp’s Monocle is also pretty significant, just because it’s an AR app that’s being pushed into consumers’ hands.

And we’ll see how useful they find it.

Tish Shute: Gary Gale, Yahoo! Inc., is going to talk on overcoming the business, social, and technological hurdles so we can reach the long promised [Laughs] Hyperlocal Nirvana. I think you’ve outlined some of these obstacles in relation to  AR, where there are obstacles are in terms of mediating device, and bringing all the pieces together including computer vision techniques in order to have an AR view. That’s the AR side of it. But the layer below that, which is the layer where actual location based apps that are beginning to go mainstream now,  are these presenting successful business models for location-based services.

So in short, in your view, what are the big hurdles to Hyperlocal Nirvana before we get to AR, even just for these location-based services?

Brady Forrest: Well, how do you make money?

Tish Shute: Yeah, to put it bluntly. I like John Battelle’s way of putting it [laughs] how do we oxygenate the system!

Brady Forrest: So are location-based services something that you can make money in the long-term? Nokia bought NavTec for $8 billion. And then two years later, they’re giving it away free as part of Ovi Maps.

Tish Shute: Right.

Brady Forrest: I’m assuming that that’s actually part of the plan.  And that although their hand may have been forced by Google with their release of Turn-By-Turn that…but it’s still got to be a hard nut to swallow that this huge investment in location ends up becoming a loss leader to sell more phones.

So, can you make money through subscriptions, through selling apps? And I think that is still being proven. The other one is, can you use advertising? And it’s kind of scary to see that Apple is restricting the use of advertisers to use location.

It came out yesterday or two days ago that advertisers cannot use location, or app developers cannot use location for ads. They can only use location to show something interesting or useful to their customers.

And there’s a lot of speculation that it’s because Apple wants to control the location-based ads that go on the iPhone.

Tish Shute: Yes. I heard a strange rumor.  Actually its an un-strange rumor, a likely rumor in fact,  that Apple and MS are getting together to replace some of the Google aspects of the iPhone like search and maps?

Brady Forrest: Yes, …. Microsoft employees get 10% off at the Apple store. There’s a longstanding relationship between those two companies.

And Android is definitely more of a competitive threat than Windows Mobile is.  And it’s well-known what the relationship between PCs and Macs are. So I don’t think…I don’t find that to be that surprising of a rumor.  I do wonder if it would hurt the iPhone, but it doesn’t surprise me that they would consider it.

Tish Shute: I do know, certainly from the AR point of view, Microsoft has recently hired some of the key researchers, including Georg Klein. And they are looking for more people in the image recognition area so it seems currently MS is going to be making a bigger push not just with PhotoSynth, but with image ID.

So it could be a pretty powerful combo between the iPhone, and Microsoft – they have some of the key computer vision research that would be needed for full AR.

Brady Forrest: Oh, yeah. Microsoft has amazing research depth. They’ve got an amazing team.

Tish Shute: But it is a bit of a mystery to me why Microsoft haven’t done more with Photosynth.  As I noted in my previous post, Nokia’s ImageSpace is beginning to do what many thought Microsoft would do with photosynth two years ago.  And “photo-based positioning systems” -  3d models of the environment to cover every possible angle, and then software that can work out in reverse based on a picture precisely where you are and where your facing could be hugely important to AR.  But that brings me to another mystery why haven’t we seen more from Nokia in this space yet – the N900 doesn’t have a compass?

Brady Forrest: Yeah, I don’t know why Nokia hasn’t made more of a space for themselves in these things. They did a lot of early work in these areas. I think they are trying to…my guess is that they’re trying to restructure themselves. They made some pretty big changes on the web-Ovi made its own division. And they’ve been doing a lot of location-based acquisitions: Places, Gate 5 several years ago, Gossler, just the past six months. And so I think that’s really been their focus…and the research team.

And a large company, since they haven’t found a business model, which is what we’ve been discussing here, they are hesitant to launch it, or to…they don’t really know if this is a business that they need to launch, or if this is an app that they should have there out for fun.

Tish Shute: Yeah. And that’s back to the oxygenation of the system and location.  We really still have some work to do to with the business models

Final question!  At the core of many of today’s business model is the idea of hoarding data – that’s an underpinning.

But ultimately, for open AR, we want a situation where we can really share data so that we don’t really have the data all locked inside one particular browser or app. The current crop of AR browsers aren’t really browsers in the sense that we understand a browser on the web today, because the data’s locked inside each service, Wikitude, Layar, Acrossair etc.

I have become very interested with Federation as a model for solving this, so that we can begin to have an opportunity to build consensual relations around data, sometimes sharing, sometimes not. Federation is my big dream at the moment.  And now we even have something to work with in the Wave Federation Protocol. But how do we get from here to there, where we really have a federated world of data for AR and location-based services? But you think people need to solve the question of business models first?

Brady Forrest: I think people need…I think one potential is ads; so serving up content.  And by ads, I also mean coupons, meals, the Foursquare…. what it looks like Foursquare’s going to do, featured content, which is Layar’s.

So we need to see, is that the way we’re going to sell these? The other is to have the best viewer, which in some ways is a race in selling that, but that’s potentially a race to the bottom, price-wise.

Tish Shute: Right. Do you think Google Wave Federation Protocol has a chance of taking off and changing the game for real-time communications, federation, real-time…

Brady Forrest: Quite possibly with the real-time. I think they need to work on the UI.

Tish Shute: Oh dear we can’t discuss the Wave UI right at the end of the interview – of course I believe it would do better in an AR view!   I know you have to go  now but I have to say Google Wave not standardizing the client/server interface – so we could seem some new UIs for Wave [we are working with PygoWave for ARWave because of this], and  iPad’s lack of camera were two huge disappointments in recent months.

Brady Forrest: Yeah. It’s [the Wave client] is very difficult to use.

Tish Shute: But the Wave Federation Protocol is an open fast, compact protocol that is a dream come true for AR.  Open, distributed, real time communications is a very big enabler for AR.  I would hazard a guess that in 2010 real time communications plus location becomes oxygen.

Nathan Freitas holding a Peek with Oliver+Coady partner David Oliver talking to fans at New York Tech Meetup – Mobile Meets Social

Volunteerism and participation in public life seem to come naturally to Nathan Freitas. Nathan is one of the leading innovators/developers in NYC in mobile strategy/design (for more on his Android development read on). And he is much in demand as speaker who shows others how to realize their mobile experience and design dreams (for upcoming speaking engagements see Nathan’s blog). But also Nathan has spent much of the last ten years working on new ways for causes and non profits to benefit from technology.

Most recently Nathan has started working part time for the NY Senate under, “Albany’s King Geek,” the new CIO Andrew Hoppin:

“The CIO team is organizing training sessions for senators and their staff on social networking platforms and how to pay attention to online feedback. Last week, they hired mobile specialist Nathan Freitas to create new phone applications that will allow citizens to get government news on the go.”

Also, Nathan is currently supporting engineer on, The Extraordinaries, a smart phone application that explores territory “beyond the flattening tendency of online relationships” (see this list from Andy Oram of the Questions on Government participation).  The Extraordinaries is Ben Rigby and Jacob Colker’s prize winning project  – “a smartphone application that delivers volunteer opportunities on-demand.”

Ben’s post, Information Age Volunteerism – Open Sourced! Crowdsourced! and the extensive comments give a detailed analysis and critique of this brilliant and creative new approach to volunteersim in the information age.

Nathan, in my view, is a great example of how to “do well by doing good.” And, I am particularly excited by the work Nathan and his partner in Oliver+Coady, David Oliver, are doing on Android, e.g., Nathan’s new gReporter – opensource, geotagging, media capture report client (you can download the source here).

I first met Nathan when I interviewed him about Cruxy in 2007 (see my post, The Mixed Reality Metarati and “Destroy TV:”  Merging Art, Technology, Politics and Play).  Nathan recently announced that “the fat lady has just uploaded her last song.” Cruxy was an innovative distributed music venture Nathan started with Jon Oakes.  Although, as Nathan explains, Cruxy “never really broke through in the way we hoped.” Nevertheless Cruxy seems to have been a fertile garden for ideas that are coming of age in Oliver-Coady’s current mobile experience endeavors.  As Nathan explains, “the world, including Apple and iTunes, has shifted to embrace some of the ideals we have always had – open formats, more ways to distribute and promote online, more avenues for niche content to be discovered and heard.” Cruxy’s technology platform, built by the incomparable Will Meyer:

“was a great success in my mind, being one of the first to fully embrace Amazon’s cloud and provide a widget-based commerce system that actually worked!”

Nathan has a new company, Oliver+Coady. But Nathan told me that he feels he is over his “start up phase.”

Nathan Freitas: I am just tired of the term “startup.” I’m more interested in being defined as person than a member of a corporation. Also I am more interested in the ideas of cooperatives, and have been working on this idea (see here for more on the New York Creative Cooperative ).

Tish Shute: You do a high percentage of non profit work. Are you still managing to keep the home fires burning in the economic downturn?

Nathan Freitas: There is definitely profit to be made in non-profits because even if you only get paid half of what you get for corporate work, it is worth it in terms of fulfillment, ego, respect, and general contribution back to the planet. However, I’ve also been investing time & energy w/o pay into thinking about how causes can benefit from technology for over ten years. So its not just something you decide to do one day, and suddenly are successful.

Tish Shute: What are some of the highlights of your non profit work recently?

Nathan: Well, The Extraordinaries project is definitely a highlight. It is focused on a whole new approach to volunteering and winning the first prize at the WeMedia Conference for the non-profit tech category was a great validation of the work. I am just a supporting engineer on the effort, which was founded by my good friend Ben Rigby (a longtime non-profit tech guy as well) and Jacob Colker.

Ben wrote this excellent book on mobile tech and organizing, Mobilizing Generation 2.0 He’s done a ton of mobile work with youth voters via his non-profit, Mobile Voter.

The Extraordinaries is really taking all of our joint experience and putting it into a whole new system that is meant to go beyond generic email blasts that just ask you to “send a fax” or “send a link”. it gives people specific tasks they can accomplish on their phone or in their local area using their phone.

Tish: Did you do Twitter Vote Report with Ben too?

Nathan: Oh, no, Twitter Vote Report was with a different group of folks…mostly east coast-based, organized by the TechPresident.com blog. But Ben and I worked on SMS efforts for the 2004 election. We sent 40,000 messages out to SEIU labor members and MoveOn members… really the first time SMS was used in a wide-scale manner to help get out the vote on election day.

Tish: Do you have a new mobilization project planned?

Nathan: Its all about The Extraordinaries right now. We’ve got a big launch coming in June, and are working actively to add more causes that can benefit from volunteers and organizations that have volunteers but don’t know what to do with them.

Tish: I was just looking at your post on Peek too.

Nathan: Yeah… fortunately that is a completely  “for profit” gig.  But I like the company a lot, and think their spirit of providing access to email at a very low cost plays well with the non-profit world.

Tish: So it isn’t just iphone apps that are paying the bills?

Nathan: Nope. iPhone is just an aspect. Everyone is so obsessed with it and how to strike it rich quick, but in the greater scheme of things, there is a huge ecosystem of mobility out there for you to find a niche in, if you are looking.

Tish: Are you able to monetize your work on Android yet?

Nathan: here and there… releasing some for pay apps soon, also including “free” Android ports in some high-profile iPhone apps we hope to have out soon. Some successful iPhone app developers are looking for people to port their apps to Android, as well.

gReporter – opensource, geotagging, media capture report client

Tish: So what are your hopes for Android development in general and your gReporter app in particular?

Nathan: I think Android represents right now what Linux on desktops did in 99 or 00  Though as we all know, cycles of technology seem to speed up. There is huge interest in it at the academic level and there is also a genuine interest in its use by non-profit/development agencies working around the globe.

You have to jump through hoops to get an unlocked, open iPhone w/o contract. Android provides an alternative solution to this, that acts more like a true platform, and not just a consumer product.

Tish: At the moment the Android market place is only for free apps right?

Nathan: No, it now supports paid apps. I just bought one today for $2.99

Tish: What did you buy?

Nathan: An app that allows me to turn my G1 phone into a WiFi hotspot sharing my 3G connection to anyone who connects.

Tish: So what are the most important aspects of Android in your view?

Nathan: There are  two sites to help demonstrate what is really going on with Android that makes it significant

1) Open Intents – this is the ecosystem of developers, all creating services and apps that interoperate, share data, and generally build a very rich Microsoft style platform:
except all these are open-source and built by lots of small developers and not one big corporation.

2) Android on HTC – this is the home for all the efforts to port Android to pre-existing HTC/XDA mobile phone hardware. You can see the status of ports here: http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Android_devices  Imagine… taking an old Windows Mobile HTC phone, and then popping in an SD card that reformats it over to Android brand new phone!  For much of Asia, India and Africa, there is huge interest in this.

Tish: Nice! You mentioned earlier that you are thinking of doing SDK for the android sensor API’s?

Nathan: That would be part of the geo report app… expanding it to capture all sensing data and report that when you submit your text, photo or audio report.  Right now it just detects your lat and lon, but no reason it couldn’t also check your compass, altitude and whatever other data the device might offer.

Tish: So what will your geo report do now?

Nathan: It allows you to submit a text, photo or audio report, tagged with geo coordinates, timestamp, and basic user info (name, email, home location, etc) to whatever server it is configured to us. it is the latest release of code used for the TwitterVoteReport and InaugurationReport efforts.

There is also just a lot to learn or use from the code itself, which is available at: http://github.com/natdefreitas/georeport-android

Lots of little lessons learned packaged up into a functioning application

Tish: How many sensor APIs does android have?

Nathan: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/SensorManager.html

int SENSOR_ACCELEROMETER A constant describing an accelerometer.
int SENSOR_ALL A constant that includes all sensors
int SENSOR_DELAY_FASTEST get sensor data as fast as possible
int SENSOR_DELAY_GAME rate suitable for games
int SENSOR_DELAY_NORMAL rate (default) suitable for screen orientation changes
int SENSOR_DELAY_UI rate suitable for the user interface
int SENSOR_LIGHT A constant describing an ambient light sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the ambient light measure in lux.
int SENSOR_MAGNETIC_FIELD A constant describing a magnetic sensor See SensorListener for more details.
int SENSOR_MAX Largest sensor ID
int SENSOR_MIN Smallest sensor ID
int SENSOR_ORIENTATION A constant describing an orientation sensor.
int SENSOR_ORIENTATION_RAW A constant describing an orientation sensor.
int SENSOR_PROXIMITY A constant describing a proximity sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the distance between the sensor and the object in meters (m)
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_HIGH This sensor is reporting data with maximum accuracy
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_LOW This sensor is reporting data with low accuracy, calibration with the environment is needed
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_MEDIUM This sensor is reporting data with an average level of accuracy, calibration with the environment may improve the readings
int SENSOR_STATUS_UNRELIABLE The values returned by this sensor cannot be trusted, calibration is needed or the environment doesn’t allow readings
int SENSOR_TEMPERATURE A constant describing a temperature sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the ambient temperature in degree centigrade.
int SENSOR_TRICORDER A constant describing a Tricorder When this sensor is available and enabled, the device can be used as a fully functional Tricorder.
float STANDARD_GRAVITY
with a few easter eggs as well
GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I
SENSOR_TRICORDER

Nathan: They are all in the API however, there isn’t hardware to support all of them yet… for instance TEMPERATURE is not yet supported
nor is LIGHT.

Tish: and errr what is gravity_deathstar

Nathan: It is a value representing the fictional gravity on the Death Star from Star Wars – geek humour

Tish: That makes me think of this great essay by Julian Bleeker, Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design Science, Fact and Fiction:

“When you trace the knots that link science, fact and fiction you see the fascinating crosstalk between and amongst ideas and their materialization. In the tracing you see the simultaneous knowledge-making activities, speculating and pondering and realizing that things are made only by force of the imagination. In the midst of the tangle, one begins to see that fact and fiction are productively indistinguishable.“

Picture below is Nathan playing his dream ukulele – designed using the free, open-source Inkscape vector drawing tool (see his open-source Ukulele plans here)
See Nathan’s blog for the whole story of how the Flying V Rockin’ Ukulele Design he posted to Thingiverse a few weeks ago, after being inspired by Bre Pettis’ talk at ROFLThang materialized at the  NYC Resistor “amazing workshop laboratory in Brooklyn where they let anyone come over and hang out at, to learn how to make, build and fabricate pretty much anything. They also have a laser (aka “LAAAZZZOOOR”) which you can think of as an automagic thing cutter-outer!”

so this….

became this …

Nathan and David presented Coovents at NYTM – Mobile Meets Social. They had a large group of questioners surrounding them (see picture below).   I talked to David after the presentation.

David Oliver was a software architect, user experience designer and product manager in the areas of mobile/wireless and electronic payment at IBM for over a decade.  Most recently, he lead the effort to productize a mobile client for IBM’s Lotus Connections enterprise social networking suite.  As a software architect, David was often technical lead for IBM’s business partner relationships with mobile device manufacturers.  Prior to IBM, David was co-founder of the Internet’s first “micropayments” company, Clickshare.

Talking with David Oliver

Tish Shute: How are smart phones are causing us to rethink what networked online relationships are all about.

David Oliver: You know these [mobile] devices are .. there’s a long time we tried to pitch that we’re going to treat them like they’re PC’s, or they’re just like anything else. But they’re really not. It may be the same coding style but the way you think about using them is entirely different. And the way you think about your program. so if you use html, java and that kind of stuff, yes it’s same code type but the way you think about it is entirely different. And to me these little devices make what you said [relationships inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.] a lot more possible than a PC. because in a PC you almost have to sit in front of it and like it controls you. But the device is so little and there’s almost no user interface by comparison. You got to be very smart how you build something so that it’s almost invisible. And of course that’s the beauty of the iphone, Apple will tell you. The idea of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous what? Am I really computing? I don’t feel like I’m computing. I feel like I’m interacting or something.

I think twitter is very cool. The real way it’s cool is that there’s no required client. You can access Twitter any way you want.  You can imagine other ways to use it. Tweet Deck happens to be a nice for now. What I like about Twitter is, if you give it a tiny bit of thought, the Twitter network’s complete white noise, just like the internet itself. If you put a probe on the internet it’s all white noise, it’s all unordered packets. It makes no sense. So it’s cool that Twitter is at the level of little bitty conversations, but collectively all white noise. Totally meaningless white noise.  There’s some neat things going on, but I think we haven’t seen barely the first of what you can do with Twitter.

The way I see it is it’s like instant messaging where you don’t instant message to someone you instant message to the network and there are listeners. So normally in the old world of IM like AOL IM I would say Tish let’s talk and I kind of like grab you. Then it’s a narrow pipe you to me. You can add a few people in and make a little group, and that makes a bit of a closed network. But with twitter you just like talk into the air as if I were standing over there and you had a twitter client here, we could have the same interview. Because I would be watching you OH I see Tish’s question. I’d be over there talking  and you’d be picking me up over here. I’ts like you’re talking into white noise, like at this bar. You choose to hear me, this guy is not choosing to hear me right now.

Tish Shute: So what does Android bring to the party?

David Oliver: They have the notion that you have a telephone platform that’s open, and that everybody can use. And it’s got a variety of sensor data – not just location but also accelerometer and compass and more.  So in theory you can almost broadcast that data. It’s connected to a network. It’s easy, open API’s to get at that data. But the question is who are you going to broadcast it to or who are you sending it to. What are they going to do with it? How are you going to control it, and make sure people don’t misuse it? As you heard with the services tonight, there’s a central kind of service necessary to filter and rebroadcast that stuff back out to places that need it, or can use it, or you want to have use it. I think the mobile device is only one piece of this. Nat and I always talk about well we do mobile applications but a portion of it is on the server. And coordinating with the people or the group or the central resource that brings all this data together.

Tish Shute: There seems to be a lot of new location based services – platforms to aggregate location based data being developed (e.g. xtify and viaplace). What do you think about the direction this development is going in?

David Oliver: It’s not conventional wisdom but it’s one of these things where when a crowd of people does something, and that means people themselves are the service providers,  when they all get together the net effect is greater that the individual effect would be. Pooling together makes more sense than doing it individually. Its a little bit like an advanced version of you have to have a password for every single site and you manage your passwords. Location is the same way. If you had to give every single website that you enjoyed your location data or tell them how to get it, what a huge pain. So they’re offering a way to do that in a more general sense. There are humongous privacy issues though. Just like passwords. Would you really trust a place that held all your passwords centrally?

Even with the most basic level of calling. Now that you can call from anywhere. Largely people are getting into a mode where their mobile phone is them. It’s always with them. That’s how you reach me. Forget the home phone, the work phone it’s just a mobile phone. You have an address attached to you, an address I can reach you at that’s location independent. So there some beauty in that and it’s very freeing. It makes your location unimportant, you can call me anywhere. You can text me anywhere, message me anywhere. You can be anonymous. My son told me something recently. “I love going to New York City because I can just walk around and nobody knows me. I’m completely anonymous. That’s the coolest thing”, he says. At one level that is a good thing and a lot of good things can happen that way. But this new thing is sort of the flip side where everybody knows your location. And we haven’t figured out if that’s a good thing yet. But we’re in the throes of that whole changeover happening. And we’ll see. There’ll be some misuse. I’m not an advertising guy, so the fact that everything’s got to be ad supported makes it potentially very creepy and very dangerous. So we’ll see how that evolves.

Is there any model where you can go “Oh this is just like ‘S’”? I don’t see where that’s possible. It’s a new world. Where you’re exposed all the time, potentially. And how do you figure out either as an individual or a larger group, society or whatever, when that works and when that doesn’t. And you know there’s going to be some mis-steps probably. But the tangibility creates some of these interesting opportunities, there are just some amazing things that could happen, really, really good things. But we’re not going to get there in one step.

One of the things that was really a killer for privacy and a killer for in some ways the internet, was during the dot com bust. Prior to the bust, there were web sites that you’d given your name and email, and they said “we promise to preserve this privacy.” But as soon as those companies went bankrupt, their email list was gold. It was value. And a bankruptcy judge, in a court in Delaware, created a legal basis to sell that data. Those things that were formerly private were no longer private – “no no no that’s got value. I’m going to sell it so the shareholders get their money.” So all these web sites who had lists of user names that they promised were private, became public information. That was one of the biggest blows to privacy in the history of the internet. That’s going to happen again and again. Like if MeetMoi goes out of business the likelihood is all your shit’s going to get sold. I’m sorry it’s all going to be sold. It’s all a big joke. And that’s why central services are horrid, and I don’t like anything about a central service.

There are some pragmatic things about the way routing on networks actually works and the fact that the internet has gotten very centralized itself. The core ideas of the early internet which were essentially a survivable telecommunications network, remember it was the defense department that did the original internet? So the original idea of the original internet was survivability. The Russians could bomb the daylights out of the United States, territorial U.S. and we would still have a survivable network. That was the idea. And therefore all the nodes were dispersed and did not count on each other, and could reroute. Well now one company UUNET or whatever they are they own the whole thing. And you can look up all their locations on some internet database. 18 well placed bombs and the whole internet goes down. That’s what happens over time.

Well the whole cloud thing is also kind of a myth. It’s a very neat sounding term, and some aspects of it are different and new. Nate and I do a lot of cloud computing, it’s all on Amazon.

But we’ve always had that. That’s called time sharing. Strictly speaking it’s a thin contractual accompanied by a much much much easier application programming interface. That’s what cloud computing is. It’s a very skinny contract. Timeshare was a  huge contract. Literally it’s legal and a little bit of API ease. It’s just timesharing. But at Amazon and the other ones too, you’re not responsible for your node going down. If it goes down, they push it somewhere else automatically. Your disk goes down. You’re not responsible for backing up your disk, it’s already on 14 copies on 8 continents. They do that. So it’s a higher level of service. Nate and I have this thing called slice host. And we’ll probably build some services on it, and if they get popular, it’s like a vending machine. You just drop in a dime, they give you another slice. No contract at all. It is growth and learning about old ideas. Like this whole idea of software as a service. The company called ADP Automatic Data Processing, who basically in short do payroll for everybody. It’s software as a service. It’s been going on since 1952 or something. It’s more like a reconception using modern tools. It’s like virtual worlds are a different thing. That’s a whole different beast.

In a conversation with Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing) at Web 2.0 Summit 2008, Al Gore suggested that only the aggregate bandwidth of the internet could supply us with the kind of emotional intelligence we need to respond with appropriate urgency to the challenges of our times, for example, the CO2 targets necessary to avert catastrophe.

“People hear these things, and there are many other similar signals, and then the next day it’s gone. Now the neuroscientists have explanations for why that is ….. The urgency center of the brain is geared to snakes, spiders and fire and things that evolution posed as tests to our species…

But when we have to use our neo cortex to connect dots in an abstract pattern and then push that down to the urgency and fear center – that’s just a little footpath.

Its  like the internet, mostly, it’s an asynchronous connection.  There is a big connection going from the fear center to the reasoning process but just a very small pathway coming back.

It needs to be stored in the cloud. It is the aggregate bandwidth than counts. We need to have the truth – the inconvenient truth, forgive me, of this challenge stored in the cloud so that people don’t have to rely on that process and so that we can respond to it collectively.”

Tim O’Reilly responded: “Who knew you were the guru of Web 2.0 as well as global warming. You have totally outlined our premise here.”

(Photograph opening this post of the Former Vice President Al Gore on stage with Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle at  Web 2.0 Summit 2008, co-presented by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb. Produced by Good Company Communications. Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson – see Duncan Davidson’s Flickr stream for a complete photo essay of the event.)

I was trying to find a word to express how powerfully  Al Gore addressed the Summit audience.  And I was discussing this with a legendary serial entrepreneur, Richard Titus, who is also a great admirer of Al Gore, at the closing party. Richard came up with the phrase I was seeking.  “He was totally naked,” Richard said.

Al Gore described himself as a recovering politician.  And yes, he seems totally recovered from the “woodeness” of politics and utterly at home with the “nakedness” of participatory culture.

Al Gore made clear that to change the world we have to change ourselves (he did).

Bertrand Russell is often attributed with the following quote:

The mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.

Gore’s exhortation that the internet needs to be a puppy with a purpose resonated with his audience.  From climate change, global issues of health care, to rethinking global economies we desperately need to optimize our collective and individual intelligence.

Instrumenting the World: Life on the Cloud

Kevin Kelly’s  High Order Bit – a brilliant impressionist view of the internet’s next 6537 days describes what “Life on the cloud” will be like.

“If you are producing some information and it is not webized, i.e., it is online and not related and shared to everything else, it doesn’t count.”

This is already the case to some degree. And the challenge of understanding where our networked identities begin and end is with us. But Kevin Kelly points out, “life on the cloud” will heighten our dilemmas.

Nat Torkington’s presentation to the Privacy Forum in Auckland , New Zealand, “Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud” looks at our changing idea of identity through the lens of privacy – both “the nature of privacy” and “how expectations change over time.”  Nat cites William Gibson (interviewed by Rolling Stone on their 40th Anniversary):

“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real.  In the future that will likely become impossible.”

The critical layer between this database of things and the ultra, mega cloud (see Kevin Kelly’s slide below) is the web of shared intelligence. This is where the transformation will emerge with its dangers and opportunities.

Brian Solis, in his excellent post, “Barack Obama, The Social Web, and the Future of User Generated Government,” proposes Zappos and their “public and transparent customer-focused culture” is a good model for how government can use the internet not only to push out its message but to create a whole new culture of participation.

Far fetched?  Watch Tony Hsieh’s High Order Bit for yourself. The idea that every interaction at Zappos has relevance to the value exchange between consumers and producers is a very interesting idea to apply to the relationship between government and citizens.

“Ecological Intelligence”

Instrumenting the World requires new models of data sharing. Last year, Cory Doctorow described to me an instrumentation model of data.

An Instrumentation model for data differs from a surveillance model of data sharing.  Instrumentation is “when you know a lot about the world,” in contrast to surveillance – “when people in authority know a lot about you”.

(Note: Mashable has an interesting post on the theme of a “instrumentation,” see:  Seventeen Killers Apps for Taking Control of Your Government:“Government is increasingly putting much of its public records online, creating opportunities for developers to build useful applications for citizens.”)

But corporate culture and governments around the world have embraced the surveillance model of data up to now.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to ask Larry Brilliant, Google.org, a question about how the tables might get turned.  After his conversation with Tim O’Reilly,  I asked:

“What would motivate corporations and governments to participate in the kind of data sharing and transparency that could produce the changes that our world needs, particularly in the area of health and climate change? For example, why would corporations reveal the aspects of products we use and the food we eat that have negative effects on our health and our planet?” (This is more succinctly phrased than my original question!)

Larry Brilliant replied:

“I don’t know how many of you know Dan Goleman? He created emotional intelligence [quotient] – EQ. He is coming out with a book which I have just had the pleasure of reading in draft form which deals specifically with what you are talking about.

How we can have commercial intelligence. How we use the power of corporations and their various different stakeholders, including their customers to drive corporations to do the morally right thing by losing the commercial support of customers who won’t support them unless they are more green, fairer to women, respect gay and lesbian rights, do the things you would like them to do whatever that happens to be, so that you can vote with your dollars.

It is really a fascinating book:  “The Application of Ecological Intelligence to the Commercial World.”  I don’t know what the final title will wind up being but I recommend it to you.

Dan Goleman’s new book: “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything,” will come out in April, 2009.

An Extraordinary Gathering At An Historic Time

Web 2.0 Summit was a brilliantly orchestrated gathering of many of the thought/business leaders and entrepreneurs who have shaped the internet as we know it today.

As my friend Jonathan Hochman, Wikipedia, said on Day 1:

“If everyone here [Web 2.0 Summit] shut down their website it would be the end of the internet!.” (See my upcoming interview with Jonathan on Wikipedia and Jon Brouchard on Wikitecture and what these projects can teach us about participatory culture).

But also in this elite crowd of “C” level execs were the next generation of entrepreneurs who are working on a hunch and prayer to create the future Web.

And this year, as the Web 2.0 Summit architects explained in their intro, the decision was made to extend the scope of the Summit even further:

“….our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we’re expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.”

Truly an extraordinary gathering at an historic time – commencing the day after Barak Obama became President Elect, it seemed the causes and conditions for participatory culture and sustainable living were coming together at last!

Virtual Worlds and “The Web Beyond The Web:” Creating “A Supple Approach to Sharing Identity”

Virtual Worlds were not on the schedule.  But this is not surprising as their potential contributions to the very big problems at the heart of the Summit’s theme are only just beginning to emerge.

But new forms of  participatory culture were a recurrent theme of the Summit.  And Virtual Worlds at the high bandwidth tip of the pyramid of global connectedness and SMS at the bottom of the pyramid have a lot to teach us about participatory culture.

Crista Lopes recently co-founded with Christer Lindstrom a company, Encitra, that is focused on improving urban planning processes, starting with transportation, using virtual worlds. Christer Lindstrom has been a key evangelizer of PRT (personal rapid transit – see photo above).

Crista Lopes is Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Informatics (full interview coming soon).  Crista is using the dynamic shared viewpoint of virtual world technology to offer a way for the many stakeholders involved in a city scale transportation infrastructure change to participate in the process of planning. Crista is working with OpenSim – see the video of  “Encitra – Creating Immersive Worlds.”

There are a number of use cases for Virtual Worlds in sustainable living being developed. I have written several posts on Oliver Goh’s work,  “The Path to Sustainable Real Estate.” See my earlier posts here, and here, and IBM’s Virtual Network Operation Centers.“

Also see the recent announcement from Intel Research to create ScienceSim using OpenSim (more on this soon). Justin Rattner writes:

“Wilfred Pinfold (an Intel colleague and general chair of Supercomputing 2009) announced to the Supercomputing 2008 conference attendees plans to create a new virtual world called “ScienceSim.” Supported by Intel and the conference committee, this collaboration aims to use these immersive, connected environments to further cutting edge scientific research.”

George Jobi, Intel, writes in his post on ScienceSim: “Intel is one of the founding members of OpenSim and had been building its vision of open standards based 3D web architecture around OpenSim.”

The Achilles Heel of Web 2.0…….?

As Crista pointed out:

“The  Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is trying to build the concept of person in a platform that doesn’t have people, at the center of the architecture. With Web 2.0 we go through a lot of hoops trying to integrate basics concepts of identity and storage onto a platform that wasn’t designed for it.”

Most of us have bits of our identity scattered all over the web, e.g., partial friends list here, there and everywhere. Some of us have literally hundreds of different log ins and profiles. Our list of applications with pieces of our identity locked up in them might look something like the slide below from the High Order Bit of Beerud Sheth, Webaroo Inc.

In contrast, Crista noted:

“The key component that a Virtual World offers you is that you can take your identity from place to place and the presence of people is at the center of the whole thing.”

Crista has already submitted code that introduces hyperlinks to OpenSim (see here). Crista is computer scientist of many accomplishments including being the co-inventor of Aspect-Oriented Programming.

There is a long conversation in the comments on my interview with Tim O’Reilly about whether the concept of avatar is the Achilles Heel of Virtual Worlds. So I asked Crista:

“Are avatars the Achilles Heel of Virtual Worlds?”

Crista explained why she thinks this is not the case in the modular open source architecture of OpenSim at least.

“The concept of people is not tied to the concept of avatar in OpenSim: One of the important parts of the OpenSim architecture is that the concept of user is very different from the concept of avatar.”

In OpenSim, Crista noted:

User = identity +storage

When I asked David Levine, IBM, what Web 2.0 could learn from virtual worlds re sharing identity, David, who works on interoperability and protocols in the Architecture Working Group, said:

Immersive spaces, are the real time, multi-user online component of Web 2.0, and identity is deeply part of that……..virtual Worlds teach us, as they expose more resources to Web 2.0, that there needs to be increasingly “supple” ways of sharing identity that go beyond simply anchoring it on gmail or openID, or such.

Social media has been one of Web 2.0′s success stories – giving the impression that Web 2.0 has people at the core of its architecture. But, as Crista pointed out, this is not the case.

There is no way in Web 2.0 to do identity at the level of platform, at the moment. As soon as you want to create identity on the Web there is a big mess.”

Participatory Culture at the Bottom of the Pyramid: “The Web Beyond The Web”

The “Web Beyond the Web,” Beerud Sheth, Webaroo Inc quipped, is not his announcement of Web 3.0. Rather, Beerud is describing the parallel innovation at the bottom of the pyramid where lower prices on mobile devices rather than new features drives adoption and voice and SMS (short messaging service) rule.

SMS is the web of the people for most of the world.  The current ratio is 10:1 with 10 people using text messaging to every 1 that has web access and the SMS population is growing at a much higher rate than web users. The  innovation at the top of the pyramid, where a plethora of Web 2.0 apps are built on top of  http, looks like the unreadable slide above with a forest of applications.

In contrast innovation at the bottom of the pyramid, until recently, has been limited to ringtones, wall papers, and voice response mechanisms.  So Beerud introduced a new service GupShup.

Gup Shup = Chit Chat

“Think of GupShup as another cool word from the language that gave you yoga, nirvana and karma sutra,” Beerud said.

GupShup is a “Twitter for India” but on a vastly bigger scale (only 18 months from launch they are up to 12 million users).

But, Beerud points out, don’t just file away GupShup as another twitter clone.  While they have Web and WAP site, they are deeply intergated into SMS as the lowest common denominator. GupShup can be used entirely from mobile which is vital as they have more users already than the total number of web users in India.

This idea of fully integrating into the lowest common denominator medium, SMS, has allowed GupShup to grow extremely rapidly. And, interestingly, when you look at the use cases you see the end users are deploying many of the uses cases that are familiar from the web,

Beerud left the audience with the take away that all the use cases are surprisingly similar to the web as are the ways of monetizing them,  This is creating enormous opportunity for creativity and entrepreneurship in building out this web beyond the web.

He invited those who already know the possibilities of the web to come and join this new adventure.  The enormous scale of the “web beyond the web,” and the fact people are connected almost continuously, creates vast opportunities for participatory culture to expand beyond the small triangle at the top of the pyramid.

On the “web beyond the web” the potential of 160 characters is explored on a scale unimaginable on Web 2.0 where Twitter, for example, is just one app in a vast ocean of other possibilities.

Crossing the Chasm Between The Top and the Bottom of the Pyramid

This total separation between the top and the bottom of the pyramid is, in part at least, constructed through the current web culture of web exclusive subscriptions.

It is perfectly possible to write an app that would accept SMS text and post it on a web page without ever requiring a web visit from the SMS subscriber. The same app could also accept text input from a web page and send it out as SMS to one or many subscribers that have never visited a web page, thus enabling communication across this gap.

Oxygenating the System: Monetizing Doing the Right Thing

The VCs, business leaders and  entrepreneurs at Web 2.0 Summit had their entrepreneurial Spidy Senses (as John Battelle calls them) tuned to the challenges and opportunities of Web Meets World.  Some of the winners of the Web 2.0 Launch Pad Competition explored the premise that doing the right thing can be monetized.

Danny Kennedy’ Sungevity was the overall winner.  Sungevity’s aim is to “scale solar electricity as a solution to climate change.”  Their use of a Virtual Earth feed to streamline the installation of solar panels and ambition to be the SalesForce.com for the solar industry was a very winning combo.

Good Guide, a really excellent service (also available as an iphone app) providing a guide to all products from the perspective of their healthfullness, greeness and other socially valuable criteria clearly scored a 10 on doing the right thing.  But Good Guide’s ability to succeed on the monetizing side of the equation was questioned by one of the VC’s on the Launch Pad panel.

Carbon Networks pitched with the mantra “do the right thing and enhance the balance sheets in the process.” But the difficulty there, it seems to me, is that there are many questions re the benefits, or lack of them, of global carbon trading markets.

Carbon Networks argued that carbon markets, which are already a giant industry, present enormous opportunity for companies to monetize doing the right thing.

I asked Gavin Starks (who I interviewed recently about his venture AMEE – a BIG project to aggregate the world’s energy data) about the problems of carbon markets.

“They have high levels of inappropriate use even for a new market area,” he commented, noting:

“There are some superb projects out there, but it would be fair to say there has been good dose of snake oil in the space – which has certainly not helped to build consumer confidence. However, markets are necessary to engage with the scale of investment that is needed to address the issue – it’s the use of funds that needs more scrutiny and greater transparency needs to be given to the whole process.”

There are projects working with Voluntary Emissions Reduction which aren’t tradable on proper carbon cap-and-trade markets, “though in theory the step up to CERs (certified emissions reductions) isn’t too great a thing,” Gavin noted.

MicroEnergy Credits the  initiative presented on the Track Me panel by April Allderdice, co-founder and CEO, is a good example of this.

Gavin pointed me to CheatNeutral and their YouTube video for a hilarious and razor sharp look at the problems of carbon offsetting. The text below is from the CheatNeutral site.

Gavin also explained a new initiative Sandbag (beta). Sandbag aims to take the permits that allow polluters to pollute out of the system.

“Thanks to policy makers in the UN and Europe levels of pollution are now controlled. Permits must be bought by polluters to let them keep polluting. But there is a finite number of them in circulation and the good news is anyone can buy them. So by taking a permit out of the system we can reduce the amount of pollution taking place and force industry to invest in cleaner technologies. One less permit means one less tonne of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.”

AMEE is working with  Sandbag

Consuming Less and Redefining Prosperity

This picture is from the Sustainable Mobility Panel at the ASPO-USA Peak Oil Conference.

Perhaps nowhere is it more clear than when we look at the reports that link catastrophic climate change to the assumption of growth that what is really at stake in terms of averting catastrophe is not just retooling our energy infrastructure, but fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity.

Consuming less may be the single biggest thing you can do to save Carbon Emissions, Tim O’Reilly said, in his Tweet on “Why politicians dare not limit economic growth.”

A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. (New Scientist)

But few of us are willing to contemplate what a sustainable economy and averting the catastrophe of climate change require – redefining prosperity and reducing consumption (see Redefining Prosperity).

Web 2.0 Summit took on the challenge of reimagining giant industries like energy, food and transportation and how we might  be able to shift away from a culture of food and energy consumption that is basically killing us and our world (see Michael Pollan’s brilliant High Order Bit on the culture of food in the US).

The Summit gurus urged that taking risks and tackling very big problems has always been what Web 2.0 is about and indeed cultural shifts of the magnitude needed would be hard to imagine without a Web 2.0 perspective

Shai Agassi, Better Place, explained how paradigm shifts require new business models. See Shai’s High Order Bit here on the evolution of “Better Place,” -  by giving away free electric cars he is creating a new business venture that will bring clean cars into the mass market.  New business models not just new technology are required to drive change.

Breaking News From Reuben Steiger’s blog

First Israel.  Then Denmark.  A few weeks ago, Australia.  Today,  Mayor Newsom along with Governor Schwartznegger and the Mayors of San Jose and Oakland, announced that they would be making a major move towards bringing electric vehicles and the Better Place network to the Bay Area.

Please, visit Planet Better Place to sign the petition,  join the movement and bring Better Place to your town or country.

To motivate yourself and others how important it is to change patterns of consumption see Saul Griffith’s High Order Bit here and Project Wattzon

“…..from flying, driving, powering a home, eating, shopping, working and even one’s share of the energy necessary to make our society function. WattzOn helps users understand their personal impact on the environment and how they rate compared to others WattzOn users, as well as global averages.”

“The Secret Sauce”: New Business Models for Web Meets World

I spent some time talking to Don Dodge, Director of Business Development, Microsoft’s Emerging Business Division, about the future of  virtual worlds and what technologies he thought would play an important role in developing the participatory architecture of the web (full interview coming soon!).

“The question is how do you apply these technologies? Where is the best use for them? And this is the hard part.  When you look at social media and social networks and things like Wikipedia, don’t look so much at the technology because that is fairly simple.

Look at the rules of social interaction and how people interact, and how you put protections in there so that people don’t game the system or do bad things.  Look at the processes because that’s really the secret sauce of how it all works.  The technology is simple. It looks easy from a distance, when you start getting into how it really works from a social perspective that’s the secret sauce.”

(screenshot above from Threadless )

Also I caught up with John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing (see his Data Bill of Rights here), and Jennifer Pahlka, TechWeb, at a small press conference. I managed to squeeze in a couple of questions!

Tish Shute: If marketing has been the oxygen of the system up to now, what will oxygenate the system of the new participatory culture of Web meets World”

John Battelle: I don’t think marketing ever stops being one of the most significant pieces of the economy -  because it is, of the whole economy. So what I do think will happen, and this is the company that I run, I do think marketing will shift very dramatically in terms of its approach and how it is a part of the value exchange that occurs around goods.

One of the reasons that I had Tony Tsieh from Zappos was to show that.   Tony shows how every single human being in his organization is a marketer and sees every interaction they have as marketing.  Can you imagine  a company as big as Intel that has that kind of an approach?  That’s when we will have a real shift. Business models based on that idea are emerging.  I run a company that is involved in that. I don’t try to push it on the stage ..but I do it is right there Federated Media!  And now I am pushing it [laughs]

Its an idea that comes from all this staring at this. I do think marketing is going to shift quite dramatically. So we may see in 10 yrs that we don’t have a big media budget  pushing adds at people. But will there always be budgets for creation of value exchange between consumers and producers? yes! There will just be new models for how that money is distributed and spent and new services and intermediaries for that value exchange.

Tish Shute: But who controls definition of data will remain key right?

John Battelle: There is a reason why Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, all of whom are here, and Google, are all about the data….all about the data….sorry I have to go!

Jennifer Pahlka: I think in addition to the enormous changes that John was just talking about in marketing, and I think these are very significant – the way marketing will be seen completely differently 5 years from now.  There is also the shift in Web 2 away from an over identification with  Web 2.0 as being primarily about and driven by advertising  because of these models that are emerging for Web 2 that are driven by data, driven by services, subscription.  There are a whole bunch of other business models for Web 2 start ups and for enterprise that really don’t have anything to do with that at all.

Tish Shute: And in terms of participatory culture and sharing data?

Jennifer Pahlka: And even on a simpler level than the data.  Think of a company like Threadless [see screenshot above]. Their co-founders are keynoting at our Spring event.  They have taken some of the other principles of the architecture of participation and the creativity of the community and built a whole difference around that.  And all they do is sell T-Shirts.

“A Billion One-Person Enterprises”

New York Times writer, Saul Hansell, in his article, “Web 2.0 Gets Big and Corporate,” writes, “the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions.”  …..the big companies that make very complicated systems are reworking them using the principles of Web 2.0 companies.”

But “big companies” themselves may soon be a thing of the past.  One of the potential futures many my friends in virtual worlds have been looking at is, “if the future consisted of a billion one-person enterprises.”

Tony O’Driscoll described some of his thinking re the role virtual worlds will play in this potential future.  See Tony’s presentation, “A brief history of a potential future” on SlideShare. Tony’s research provides a window onto the new participatory architecture of business, government and the economy and the ways the individual and the collective will have new dynamic relationships based on “co-creation.”

Second Life and Wikipedia are the two great experiments in collaborative co-creation. They show us how co-creation can be one of the keys to a participatory global culture and sustainable living – part of creating an alternative to this economy of escalating consumption that has us in its death grip today.

• Actualités de la République Démocratique du Congo in the best Weblog category
• Diário de um Sociólogo from Mozambique in best Portuguese blog

Recently, when Joshua S. Fouts (a.k.a Schmilsson Nilsson in Second Life) who directs the USC Center for Public Diplomacy was interviewed by John Jainschigg for Grid Talk on Second Life, much of the latter part of the talk was spent discussing issues of digital divides with the audience.

Schmilsson noted that among other infrastructure challenges in Africa, “40 countries on the African continent do not have reliable Internet access. Thus, they are not a part of our conversations here. This is a major problem.” The conversation that followed covered a number of the hotly debated issues around the role of technology in situations where food, water, clothing and medicine are pressing needs.

This is an ongoing debate at Uthango’s Virtual Africa project (for more about this see Africa’s Second Life, Our Virtual Reality). Uthango are also coming up with creative ways to connect global virtual communities. They are currently organizing a BLOG CARNIVAL. The Grid Talk discussion on Public Diplomacy indicated there is much interest from Second Life residents in the topic of Infrastructure development in Africa. The blog carnival is an opportunity to connect this conversation to the wider online community and African bloggers in particular. Alanagh Recreant of Uthango explained:

We believe that Africans offer a unique perspective on global issues and all stops should be pulled out to increase their authentic presence in virtual worlds.

The BLOG CARNIVAL topic is: “Infrastructure as an Enterprise Enabler in Africa.” The carnival is managed by the acclaimed blogger Benin Mwangi (currently with African Path and respected writer for Global Voices Online, Africa Ready For Business).

It is really simple to participate by using the little form provided here:

http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_1680.html

Do you have any article or would like to say anything about INFRASTRUCTURE development in Africa? (This could include IT infrastructure or property or any other kind…)

Choose a blog article to share, and note its Permalink URL.
Fill in the other fields (hint: copy and paste!), and hit Submit .

Uthango’s Virtual Bike-a-thon

Uthango Social Investments is blazing the trail for African participation in immersive virtual worlds like Second Life while continuing to work at all levels of community development, on-line and off-line. Part of the registered not-for-profit company’s work include asset-based community development to identify gaps and find resources for adequate infrastructure, such as small business ‘incubators’ and shared community ICT facilities.

Another related ongoing project from Uthango in Second life is the [e]bizikile fundraising drive for a specific Opportunity Center in a Cape Town community for unemployed job seekers. Uthango’s Directors speak about transference from SL to RL and vice versa. They point out the [e]bizikile project could be an example of their attempts to do just that! Real life bicycles are also for sale as part of the project and will be donated to an African family in rural Africa.

“In many parts of Africa, bicycles (and mobile phones) are the appropriate technology to drive the local economy,” says Enakai Ultsch of Uthango.

Second Life residents can purchase virtual African bicycles designed by Shukran Fahid of !BooPeRFunK! for L$250 and next year, participate in a grid-wide virtual bike-a-thon (for more Ambling in Second Life). I picked up my bike at the November 15th launch party.

Coincidently Justin Bovington (avatar Fizik Baskerville) from Rivers Run Red invited me to join the beta trial of Vodafone InsideOut in Second Life on a day I really wanted to send messages from Second Life to all my friend’s “real” life mobile phones.

I wanted everyone to know that I was spending Saturday as my avatar Tara5 Oh standing in an avatar chain in Second Life to demonstrate for peace and justice in Myanmar (Burma). I was eager to ask my friends out enjoying the autumn weather in New York City to come and join me when they could in Second Life (see my previous post).

In the picture above I’m picking up my HUD from the Vodafone dispenser in Second Life. I’m wearing my T-shirt calling for the freedom of Burmese leader, Nobel Prize Winner and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.

I received a stream of useful URLs and ways to help the Burmese people from other Second Lifers at the peace demo. And, while I was there, I wanted to connect directly with my friends in real life as my avatar in Second Life. This is what Vodafone’s InsideOut is all about.

You can sign up here to join the beta trials and learn more about Vodafone InsideOut which “will allow you to communicate between virtual worlds and the real world via your mobile.”

Ingmar, Head of Technology for RRR, explained:

The service which has just come out of closed beta allows you to call and text in an out of Second Life. You get a HUD object (and a handset which is just for show and plays animations while you are on the phone.

You must sign up on the web page with your real mobile number and get verified. From then on you can call other users with your HUD, or text message them. If they are online, they get it on their HUD, but if they are off line they get the call or text on their mobile phone. The message/call comes from a virtual phone number, which hides your real one to keep your privacy. They can call or text the virtual number back at any time they want from their phone.

The virtual numbers assigned for the beta trial next week are from a German pool (+49) and, since it’s not restricted to users on Vodafone’s mobile network, when you call these your mobile network operator will charge you for whatever they charge for a call to Germany (based on where you are located in the world).

On the upside, for the beta trial the service will be free when used from Second Life which means free international calls and texts. We suspect some people will get a Second Life account just for that

The Second Wave in Second Life – Convergence and Relevance

Justin Bovington of RRR (a.k.a. Fizik Baskerville) spoke to me about Vodafone’s InsideOut project. RRR is working closely with Vodafone to bring the InsideOut to Second Life and other virtual worlds. Justin explained:

This is the start of Second Wave projects – the business tool world – convergence and relevance.

Open source is more than just a programming term, it should also apply to our thinking in terms of how we approach virtual world projects taking aspects of legacy systems [in this case Vodafone mobile communications], relevant technology and proven ways of working into Second Life will be the measure of future success.

InsideOut is very much about that. We’re not replacing the mobile phone. By trying to create a metaphor we’re using your real life moby as part of the experience. This is true convergence. Exciting stuff!

The emphasis has been on ‘modify the browser’, rather than looking at the bigger picture of integration. Open source is a call to action, not just a nerdy way to create cool interface changes. Integration is part of that message.

We’re seeing it more and more in relation to companies now viewing SL as a logical extension to their collaboration. We think that Vodafone is another level of validation in the same way Adidas did last October with the first true global brand presence [in Second Life].

I have written a lot in this blog about open source as a concept that is vital to develop “an operating system for planet earth.” And I have elaborated on how real life and second life integrations are paving the way for Second Life to play a big role in positive global development. I have argued that such integrations of open virtual worlds like Second Life will produce business and community applications that not only transform current modes of industrial production and design but are one of the keys to a sustainable future.

Integrating First Life and Second Life

There were other important landmarks last week for an increasing convergence and relevance between first life and second life.

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, spoke at length in Second Life on the important role he saw Second Life playing in domestic/global politics and civil life. You can find a full audio feed on the Clear Night Sky blog. It is rather ironic that a conservative should be one of the first major public leaders to come to Second Life to talk about the relevance of Second Life to “real” public life. Adding more weight to his words was the fact that he had actually engaged in the experience of being an avatar. He drives his own avatar and is knowledgeable about many aspects of Second Life (for more on this event, brought to Second Life by Clear Ink, see Reuters “Second Life Ready For Prime Time at Ginrich Event” and Rik Riel).

Public figures engaging with Second Life and innovations like InsideOut that allow Second Lifers to engage more fully with public life are certainly important markers of a Second Wave of relevance and convergence.

As with all technologies, the uptake of InsideOut by Second Life residents is sure to produce many creative and unexpected applications. And in Second Life especially because of the emotional bandwidth the experiential is a vital to understanding the possibilities for innovation in SL.

Certainly, for me, Justin’s words took on more significance as I stood in the avatar chain in Second Life thinking of all the ways this InsideOut HUD could enhance the already powerful experience of participating in something very close to my heart on Second Life that is showing my solidarity for the monks and people of Burma.

Creating an API and integrating Mobile Phones with Second Life

Another topic that I have written about on Ugotrade frequently is the important role mobile technologies have played in positive global development particularly in Africa. Also an underlying theme of Ugotrade is my hope that access to the global virtual economy and the immersive 3D space of virtual worlds like Second Life will be possible in all parts of the world soon.

I discussed with Philip Rosedale at SLCC the possibilities for the integration of mobile phone technologies with Second Life and how that might create new ways for people to access, participate, and benefit from the virtual economy of Second Life. Along these lines I had many questions for Rivers Run Red on how they had accomplished the integration for InsideOut.

I also wanted to know whether InsideOut was likely to expand into even more applications including a bunch of OutsideIn ones! Justin kindly introduced me to RRR’s head of technology Ingmar so I could discuss all the issues of integrating the mobile space with Second Life.

Prior to RRR Ingmar was working as an IT security consultant in Germany. “He started using the internet before web-browsing became widely accepted and has an extensive background in networking, security and system administration. Ingmar discovered Second Life in June 2003 and became immediately fascinated by it. He spent much of his time contributing to user created scripting documentation at http://lslwiki.net and creating interactive content in Second Life.”

I asked Ingmar a number of questions about the design of the API. I asked about how they had overcome some of the messaging bottlenecks that I frequently hear are an obstacle to developing APIs to SL.

We’ve designed and implemented an API together with Vodafone for both calls and text messages and all the other stuff we needed like account status and channel registration (so it keeps working when you go into another sim). All information exchange is encrypted and signed and the Vodafone servers are using Verisign SSL certificates to ensure we only connect to the authentic ones

The messages are near real-time, we just don’t need to send a whole lot of data, as SMS messages are fairly short in nature so bottlenecks with that weren’t that much of a problem (although they are for some things like contact storage).

LSL memory limits where a much bigger issue to the point were we couldn’t add some features we wanted because even with splitting the HUD up in a lot of scripts we eventually reached the point where the main code grew too large in bytecode size alone.

Securing Second Life: Will mobile phones be a gateway to virtual banking in Second Life soon?

I asked Ingmar what he saw in the future for Outside In applications for mobile phones and Second Life. And what were the challenges to making mobile phones an interface to virtual banking in Second Life? Re the second question issues of security are of course paramount. Ingmar began by pointing out that the introduction of Mono will make big differences for securing data messaging in and out of Second Life.

But the other major issue is that any bank (and all users) are trusting Linden Lab not to interfere – since Second Life currently runs on their servers. [I have written re LL ‘s intention to allow “trusted” providers to run Second Life on their own servers here.]

Mono is no manna from heaven. But it will hopefully help with the current limitations of LSL in that it will be faster and allow more memory – which is what’s currently limiting security because you can’t even fit a modern algorithm into LSL.

But you managed to do this project on LSL?

LSL is actually quite cool for what it is. I think this is one of the most complex items done in LSL The amount of linkmessages it uses internally is staggering (it spams you horribly when you actually make them visible).

Mono just runs bytecode so you have to have a compiler that converts any language to mono bytecode. I think LL was definitely intending for LSL to be one of those languages, and another hopefully will be Python.

Did you use Python for this?

No the backend is written in PHP. Personally I prefer Python but I did not write the backend, a Vodafone tech (Bruno Rodrigues) did. And we designed the protocol/API together. RRR did consulting work on the development of the backend (like explaining why some stuff should be done on the backend, because it’s such a pain to do it in LSL), but obviously left the telecomms stuff to them (things like integrating SMS messaging and calls).

Are you thinking of developing some OutsideIn project, e.g., mobile dashboards for SL?

Hm, interesting idea, but that’s really the opposite direction – bringing SL onto mobile devices. I can’t really talk about that at this time

Second Life will be “bigger than the web” and we’re “moving away from being a lab and into an operating system.” These bold statements by Philip Rosedale, in his keynote address at SLCC, inspired my questions in the interview Philip very graciously gave for Ugotrade that morning. Philip is wearing the “Missing Image” T-shirt, created by Millions of Us, that he opened his jacket to reveal during his speech.

The interview is divided in two parts. Part one looks at the possibilities for Second Life in Africa. Part two looks at how Linden Lab “can stop being a lab.”

You can read a full transcript of Philip’s keynote here.

Philip was very present at SLCC. He visited panels, discussed, debated, and answered pressing questions from residents and the press about all aspects of Second life. A stream of admirers seemed to follow him wherever he went asking for autographs, and for pictures of themselves standing next to the man who founded the virtual world that has come to mean so much to them.

But, these quotes, “bigger than the web,” and going from “a lab into an operating system,” certainly got the conversation going.

This is bigger than the Web. That’s a bold statement. How can I defend the statement that what we’re all working on is going to be bigger than the Web.

The essence of Philip’s argument, it seemed to me, hinged around two points. One, that Second Life allows a new form of global communication between cultures that is not limited, like the old Web to predominantly hyper-linked text that you need to be very literate to read and that you visit alone without any way of sharing your experience with others there at the same time.
For example:

[In Second Life] you get to explore it [Tokyo] using a geography and topology that you grew up with. Anyone on the Web, no matter how illiterate, understands it. Want to know more? Walk forward. And the best part, that you don’t see in this picture [screen of Tokyo on Second Life], is there will be other people there.

And secondly, the opportunity Second Life gives people to join a global virtual economy free of “fees and tariffs and taxes.”

I really believe the one thread that I see a lot of lately is that the rapid growth outside the US is confirming a lot of things. The fact that SL is so flat and globalizing is going to be a huge change agent. Globalization involves fees and tariffs and taxes. None of that is going on here. That’s going to be part of the pressure that’s going to drive an enormous amount of interest.

In response to a question by Prokofy Neva who asked about Second Life’s influences on First Life (see transcript), Philip elaborated on the power of Second life’s small but thriving economy (with the caveat, “That’s a big enough question that I obviously can’t say perfectly that I know.”)

shrinking of the communication sphere is one of our biggest influences. And then the other is the entrepreneurial early phase. SL is still very early and small. The thing that makes it grow is the success of individuals in two ways. Being able to find and connect to each other and those individuals who are able to work together. There are about 1000 people who make $1000 or more each month. That’s critical mass. That’s the real-life impact we’re having today. We’re creating jobs and opportunities at a small scale, but at a scale that’s large enough to be irreversible.

After the keynote, I was so excited by the implications of Philip’s projections for the future of Second Life that before I turned on my recorder there were about ten minutes of informal discussion on how Second Life could help the developing world, and Africa in particular. What follows is a transcription of the recorded interview with some editing of my rambling questions!

The unrecorded portion of the interview was a mini brainstorming session on broadband connectivity in Africa, and how Second Life could be made available to Africans. Africans have shown the world how mobile phone technologies can be used for virtual banking and to create new economic opportunities in areas with no banking infrastructure.

“Well over 80% in Egypt and South Africa alone, according to a report by the UN’s Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad)” rely on mobile phones to run their small businesses (BBC News).

Philip talked with me about the role of Second Life in positive global development at VW2007. And, if Africans had access to the global virtual economy of Second Life and its rich immersive forms of collaboration and communication, all our first lives and second lives might become immeasurably richer.

Africa is often called the “missing link” because until now it has been left out of the global broadband revolution. But, there are many new initiatives to get Africa connected, and to find ways to deliver cheaper international bandwidth.

Well over half of the countries on the continent now have some kind of broadband offer delivered through DSL, wireless or satellite.

If you are not tuned into connectivity issues in Africa yet, the best source for information on African connectivity, that I know, is the Balancing Act News network. For up to date information on the state of the African internet in various markets Balancing Act has (pay for) publications they make available at special rates for students and universities. Also, there is a download zone for longer research publications. If you go into these reports and the data provided you will see, not only is there are some very interesting Data Bandwidth forecasts for (2006 – 2011), but also of particular interest, may be, the paper, “African Broadband, Triple Play and Converged Markets.”

Well enough pre-amble here is my interview:

INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP ROSEDALE

Part One (my questions in bold type):

How could Second Life bring the benefits of a virtual economy to Africa?

It seems that if there were a few computers, even not individual computers but shareable cafe style computers. And then there was also a mechanism where you could redeem Linden dollars for something – you were talking about phone minutes, or a local currency. If you had that minimal point of infrastructure broadband access and an individual, I suppose to co-ordinate that bank transfer mechanism – my understanding is no-one can use Pay Pal to withdraw money from banks in Africa today, so you would need a person that could pay you in minutes or in local currency. But I think, if those two things were done, and you built a cluster of machines in an area there you might actually be able to see people log in, create accounts, and create jobs for themselves.

Yes, in Africa people use mobile phones to send money to each other in areas were there are no banks or ATMs for miles. And local entrepreneurs set up kiosks where people can redeem their minutes for currency…

Well we could probably make it possible even for people to trade Linden dollars. It would be relatively easy to trade Linden dollars for phone minutes directly. I mean if there is a phone company running a back bone there where that is quite common, it would probably to fairly simple to make it possible for somebody to take Linden dollars even on our site and say redeem them as phone minutes on the exchange. That would be something that we could potentially do, if there was a way to pay for phone minutes in the US in dollars and essentially get minutes on the phones there. We could allow someone to go to our exchange and put Linden dollars up for sale, get dollars back and have them basically put in their phone as minutes.

Given the current high rates for broadband in many parts of Africa, do you think it would be possible to organize and fund the introduction of Second Life in a community there, at least a proof of concept, even before these hoped for changes in broadband costs and connectivity have occurred?

I think the thing that I am a little skeptical about in that is, if you fund a program like that and then you come back and you say, “Wow we can give jobs to people in Africa if only broadband didn’t cost anything,” I would be rather frustrated by that because then you can’t just snap your fingers, nobody is just going to relent and say broadband is free in Africa now. I guess an interesting problem in all this is, if cheap broadband is absolutely necessary, I think you need the cheap broadband first. You can’t really use Second Life to argue that people should have cheap broadband somewhere, you need to provide it.

The thing to demonstrate is a wholly entrepreneurial model. Where I guess you could charitably help the world develop are those places where you can show an operational model that soup to nuts makes money for someone. I mean if someone could go into Africa somewhere and make money by allowing people in Africa to have the jobs using something like Second Life then you’ve got it. So the trick is how to finagle that. It seems that the connectivity is the key problem there.

Part 2:

At this point in the interview, I took sometime explain to Philip how interested and excited I am about the future role of Second Life in reducing the world’s carbon footprint through large scale energy monitoring, facility management, network control centers and other projects that link Second and First life in sensor/actuator networks for the mutual benefit of both.

I have blogged a lot about the potential of such real/second life integrations, so I launched into a rather long preamble that I won’t transcribe here, as there I have many posts on this topic. But, Philip quickly teased out the main question hidden in my long intro about such projects that must have secure and powerful communications between Second and Real Life!

“You mean how quickly are we going to open things up?” he asked.

Yes, I said. And, is it all going to happen at once or are there steps that can happen first, like will people be able to back up their own assets soon?

Well I think backing up assets is something that will be very soon. We are working on it right now, so that you can do much better off line back up of assets. But, that only covers one piece of it. You still have a state, how much money you have, the various flags and global markers that are on things are not things you can back up and restore. But I am not sure what else you have in mind……

Well I know Second Life can be incredibly useful not only for facility management and energy monitoring but for city and an environmental planning. And for these applications you need to be able to import large scale architectural models, for example?

With the open source code you will basically be able to do any kind of object importing and exporting you want. And the open source that is available on the site today will allow you to do multiple imports of CADs.

But, I think I have heard from architects that using the current tools to do this is a very long and complicated procedure?

I think in the next couple of quarters we will probably have rich interchange formats for objects – we like that. But I can’t tell you anything too specific about it right now.

When will it be possible to own islands on our own computer and connect to the main grid asset server?

That is the nearest term thing that we are going to try to do with respect to opening up the back end of the system. So that what we want to do is to allow people to, even before we are able to open source all the technology, we will probably find ways to have people operating servers outside of our building. We probably will not, until we reach the full open source point, have enough security in place to trust un-trusted individuals to run servers on the grid. But initially what we can do is we can establish a relationship with larger companies of operators that we would be able to trust with everyone’s assets in second Life.

Yes, its a good interim thing…

Yes, it’s a great interim thing! What I would like to do is have servers operate internationally as soon as possible so that people in Australia, for example, put their land on servers that are hosted in Australia. So that is something that we are working very hard on right now.

So how will Linden Labs make money after the opening sourcing of everything?

It is easy for us to make money this is just one of those things. If there are network effects, which push everyone to being in one single world, we can charge fees where appropriate for registering or connecting to that world. So even if we don’t host a server for example, we can still charge you whatever we like for attaching your server to the grid. We control the registry, we control DNS if you want to be to the North East of somebody else’s island only we can put you there, even if it is your computer, even if you are the one hosting it.

So that is a fine model. It is similar to DNS. It is one in which we basically we provide a global function to people, naming and the allocation of spaces, and charge a fee for it. And, that will actually look relatively similar to the business today. So we should be able to let people run their own servers, charge them a fee for attaching those servers to the grid, run some of our own servers that we collect if you will the whole fee for and it all works fine.

But if you open all the protocols then other people can do that?

No, because they won’t be able to get a hold of you. There is only one world that you have the name that you have in Second Life.

So they will have to set up competing worlds, if they don’t link to Second Life, closed of to your grid and then who would want to be there because no-one else would be there?

There is a powerful network effect behavior there. New York will always be the largest city in the continental United States. It has been that way for 200 years. So if you are the largest virtual city, you will always remain the largest virtual city. And, we are. So that means we can open up everything we are doing without the kind of risk that you might normally see.

So are you going to open up everything all the protocols?

Yes, everything.

So some people will just go off and do their own thing?

There is a good place for lots of little or purposeful applications to be built. But the internet was completely open protocols to begin with. I notice it is not fragmented. There is only one internet. Big surprise [said with irony!].

Thanks so much Philip, perhaps you could say it one more time about going completely open source!

Yes, open, open!

*********

Doing what they love & getting paid for it on Motarati Island.

The picture below shows Toby Rainbow and Suku Ming from Ponitiac’s Motarati Island in Second Life, and the USA in First Life. I met them while they were standing patiently in the long line of residents waiting to speak to Philip after his keynote at SLCC. They built a stock car racing track that caught the attention of Pontiac. Now it is part of Motarati Island. And, you can find them there everyday doing what they love, and getting paid for it!

I met with Alanagh Recreant (a.k.a. Dorette Steenkamp) from Uthango Social Investments, on Virtual Africa in Second Life. And, while Uthango’s Virtual Africa initiative has barely begun yet – terra forming is first on the agenda – there is already a very special feeling of possibility, and great things to come. Uthango has already put out tender to all the listed developers on the Linden Lab website. And, many of Second Life’s top developers, PR companies, marketing experts, and consultants have offered services, as well as pro bono work.

The core of the USI strategy for poverty relief in Africa does not primarily revolve around Second Life. But Uthango uses Second Life as an enabling platform for social innovation. By doing this, they are taking the visionary extra step of including Second Life in their strategy to make an impact in the lives of the people they benefit.

A participatory social media convergence bringing mobile, Web 2.0 and Second Life together for community engagement, is happening now and will – in itself – make the first steps to addressing the exclusive nature of 3D-platforms. And, USI is determined not to let the digital divide that is exasperated in Africa by expensive, inadequate/non-existent broadband coverage (for now) widen any further. While significant moves are afoot to bring broadband to large swathes of Africa, often known as the “missing link,” because of the lack of connectivity, access is still a big problem for all but the most privileged.

Uthango’s concerted effort to tackle inequality and social injustice in South Africa goes beyond advocacy for connectivity to other divides – economic, educational and access to opportunities as well.

Investment is our passion – to draw attention to investment opportunities for people in Africa.

But, Uthango is pioneering the inclusion of participatory new media and advocacy for connectivity in their vision. And, while broadband remains prohibitively expensive in Africa, they are preparing the way with projects utilizing mobile connectivity. Mobile phones have become a powerful tool for creative economic development in Africa (see African Uptimist). Uthango has a participatory social media initiative in the works that will link three very diverse communities – two with 65% unemployment and lack of resources, and the other an affluent sea-side community with better infrastructure.

We plan to institute an inter-cultural and civil engagement program across these communities, using video-blogging, mobile, and upload to a central server, and link it up to Google Earth. There will be a community portal, initially linked to computers at the schools and library and ultimately with an upload facility from mobile phones – a mobile magazine linked to the portal with community events. Ultimately, this extensive and integrated social network will be linked to Second Life. Meanwhile, innovation from the more inaccessible SL will be channeled back via the more modest communication framework in real life. This RL/SL convergence for social gain will be a unique example of an integrated ICT approach to development.

Uthango are working with partners and professionals in Second Life to explore the commercial value for companies and individuals and the social benefits for institutions such as universities and schools, in their preparation for Virtual Africa. A key initiative on Virtual Africa will be a Bottom-of-the-Pyramid Innovation Center (see ‘Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’ by C.K. Prahalad). Uthango are serious about seeking ways to bring community voices into Second Life while broadband issues are addressed.

But the plans for Virtual Africa also include creating one of the most sophisticated ecosystems on Second Life that will extend to the wildlife to ensure an exciting, educational experience: Eagles swooping, lions hunting, zebras reacting and mirroring wildlife patterns as closely as possible whilst highlighting endangered species and indigenous cultures. The vision of Second Life/Real life integrations possible for Virtual Africa goes well beyond educational and immersive goals into a vision that includes health, travel, adventure, e-commerce, environmental monitoring, and even disaster management.

Virtual Africa will be a key place for Uthango to bring attention to their Real Life work in poverty reduction, and collaborate with others on the goal of social investment in Africa. There are many initiatives already planned that will both bring in the Second Life Community to Uthango’s work, and make connections to Real Life projects – including concerts, a Second Life Bikeathon, publishing parties, and much more.

A new global market is emerging. The sellers are intelligent, energetic and pragmatic young African leaders with innovative projects in their respective fields. The buyers are equally intelligent, energetic and pragmatic young Westerners yearning to apply pragmatism to their idealism. The market place is new media, where stories are told, opportunities are elucidated, connections are made, and action is taken. (Joshua Goldstein, African Path)

From the Blogosphere, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Second Life!

I first met Yee, who is from Jinjiang, China and a recent graduate with a Business Diploma from HELP College University, in the blogosphere. Yee’s blog caught my attention and I linked to him in a post, “Bridging On Line Off Line Worlds.” And, Yee’s comments on my post re the task of bridge blogging were so wise that a connection was born.

Then we became friends on Twitter where I followed the obstacles Yee faced keeping his blog open to world despite the GFW (Great Firewall) of China. Then last night Yee joined Facebook. We instantly struck up a messaging exchange that covered everything from the role that religions played in American culture to how participatory media, blogs, social networks etc. could play and important role in intercultural communication. This is what Yee had to say on this topic.

There are many many English language learners in China. But a large number of them just take this language as a means to pass the exam or a “certification” for better job occupation, once they achieve these goals some of them will probably stop learning, in a word, they do not treat English as a tool for two-way communication. So you can see there are many many translations of English-to-Chinese blogs in China. But, there very few Chinese-to-English blogs.

To encourage participatory media in China, I think it’s important to help Chinese English learners realize that English is not only a means for graduation or better jobs. It’s a tool for communication! In addition, they must have confidence to use it properly

The obstacles: According to my experience, all Chinese people welcome the behavior of translating their posts or profiles or business documents into English. They have a strong desire to be understood by the world. However, things are not always so easy, as our logic and mind and culture are quite different from foreigners. And, culture conflict happens from time to time and sometimes conflict leads to bigger misunderstanding. Besides, on the internet, there is a Great Fire Wall which was founded by the Chinese Gov to block “sensitive info” from abroad.

I had asked Yee a little while ago if he had ever explored Second Life. I said I would love him to write about his experiences in SL for Ugotrade. Well in a matter of minutes after our Facebook exchange Yee had logged into Second Life for the first time. And so I met his avatar Yee Heron on Scope Cleaver’s sim.

It is hard to describe the excitement of meeting Yee for the first time in Second Life. The gulf of culture and geography and even the GFW of China seemed to dissolve as his avatar materialized in world.

Here is a picture of Yee, Scope Cleaver, Miko Omegamu (Scope’s right hand!), and I greeting Yee only minutes after he logged on and got his Second Life Avatar.

There were a few obstacles to getting Yee’s avatar fully rezzed. And, whether it was due to network connection issues, or the need for more memory on his lap top, chat was lagging and SL was taking a while to rez for Yee. Yee did mention that HiPiHi will not let him log in and was giving a message that he has not enough memory. Interesting that it was easier to get in SL from China than HiPiHi. But, we managed despite the technical obstacles to show Yee some of SL, including Scope Cleaver’s awesome virtual furniture store in Second Life, EOLUS One, and where to shop for cool clothes! And, here is a snippet of our chat as Yee saw Scope’s work on Second Life.

[23:29] Scope Cleaver: This is the office furniture building
[23:29] Scope Cleaver: I seel modern furniture here for Second Life residents
[23:29] Scope Cleaver: sell*
[23:29] Yee Heron: wow,so cool
[23:31] Scope Cleaver: the building looks empty but it’s only to hold all the production and hard work I’ll be doing on the coming months hehe
[23:32] You: Yee Scope is what they call a metabrand
[23:32] Scope Cleaver: in the making
[23:33] Yee Heron: IS Miko your partner, Scope??
[23:33] You: scope makes products and architecture just for the virtual world
[23:34] Scope Cleaver: Yes she is Yee
[23:34] Scope Cleaver: Been working in SL for a bit
[23:34] Yee Heron: cool, you do your business just as real
[23:34] Scope Cleaver: Yes indeed
[23:35] Scope Cleaver: You’ve been here less than half an hour and you look better than I do.
[23:35] Miko Omegamu: lol
[23:35] Yee Heron: are you a full time SL business woman?
[23:35] You: I know it is amazing Yee!
[23:35] Scope Cleaver: Should I work on my AV?

Yee stayed on Second Life for a couple of hours or more. And, we talked until the time difference meant I really had to leave to sleep. Welcome Yee to Second Life! We all look forward to seeing you again soon. And, as Scope Cleaver said:

[23:43] Scope Cleaver: Good luck Yee, and give SL a chance and it will reward you

Today, I had what felt to me like a ground breaking meeting with Alanagh Recreant on Second Life (a.k.a. Dorette Steenkamp in Real Life). Dorette Steenkamp is Executive Director of Uthango Social Investments, Cape Town, South Africa. Uthango is the first African-based NGO with a presence in Second Life.

You can visit Uthango’s newly established offices on Second Life here! SLurl: Uthango in Second Life.

Ginsu Linden, Linden Lab, told me earlier this month there was interest from Africa in the Linden Lab Global Provider Program. So, I was very excited to meet Alanagh in person, or rather in the pixels, and hear that an initiative to create an access portal and community for Africans on Second Life was actually underway.

“Not exclusively [for Africans] but with the exclusive aim to promote access to virtual reality.”

Uthango have just begun establishing their presence in Second Life. Their current offices are a first base from which to address the digital divide. But, please watch for more news about Uthango projects on Second Life to be announced shortly!

Uthango is an investment company specializing in finding and creating sustainable programs – connecting corporate/government with communities through collecting local intelligence and translating it to the business sector. But, “we only work at the invitation of communities. We are a relationship broker and bridge-builder between diverse interest groups to create mutual benefit.”

Uthango is serious about access for all. They will be working in parallel at establishing internet hubs in communities. And, they are seeking partnerships with mobile telecoms on mobile applications for Virtual Africa, and to develop links between mobile space and Second Life.,

They are putting together an Uthango Global Advisory Board that will be an innovation team both socially and commercially – to put out and receive ideas concerning producing a viable Virtual Africa Platform.

It is so exciting to see the first steps towards realizing a vision for a Virtual Africa being taken by Uthango. This group is deeply experienced at working on the ground with rural communities on sustainable development and poverty relief. And, they are expert at creating commercial partnerships with social value.

Uthango won the Centennial Award from Rotary International for Sustainable Projects in Communities in 2005, for District 9350, and The National Impumelelo Innovations Awards in the same year for Innovation in Private/Public Projects for their micro-enterprise project affecting a community of 45000.

I am especially impressed with how Alanagh, while very committed to expanding the possibilities for mobile technologies in sustainable development, is equally committed to the idea that Africans should not be excluded from high quality internet connectivity, access, and the potential that Second Life, as an immersive virtual world, has for Africa.

These are exciting times for African innovation!

Tags: Second Life | Virtual Africa | Africa on Second Life | Uthango Social Investments | Web 3.D | Linden Lab | Linden Lab Global Provider Program | Sustainable Development | Digital Divides | Poverty Relief | African Innovation | Africa Sustainable Development | Ginsu Linden | Alanagh Recreant | Web 2.0 | Dorette Steenkamp | mobile phones in Africa | mobile phones and sustainable development | mobile space and Virtual Worlds | Mobile Phones and Second Life | Metaverse | Virtual Reality | Virtual Worlds | World 2.o | virtual realities |

Jonathan Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, and Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, appeared in Second Life to talk about the future role of philanthropy in virtual worlds (also see Jonathan Fanton’s post.) The tireless crew of USC Center On Public Diplomacy (see my previous post for more on Anna Annenberg and Sitearm Madonna) did an amazing job of hosting this event that used four sims to bring so many people together (perhaps up to 250 at peak).

A recording of the event can be found at the MacArthur site for Digital Media and Learning here , a great post from Rik Riel here, and a call from Prokofky Neva for a new philanthropy here. But, the high point for me was the emphasis Jonathan Fanton put on Africa – developing access, connectivity, and bringing Second Life there.

In response to a question about using the combined energies of Linden Lab and The MacArthur Foundation to help Second Life to bring opportunities and training to communities in isolation – cutting out the middle man so to speak, Philip Linden said:

while they had nothing planned yet, this question was a fabulous example of the kind of barrier reduction that Second Life enables………cutting the costs of collaborating with people to close to zero sometimes.

And, Philip added:

I would love to work on ways, with the MacArthur foundation, to enable that.

Jonathan Fanton responded:

That question is a great example of what I hoped would come out of this conversation which is a series of concrete ideas that we could look at and develop into a program or two.

One of the challenges we face is being sure that places in the world that are remote, where people are desperately poor, that some of those people have access to the technology that enables them to come in and be part of Second Life. The MacArthur Foundation along with other foundations has a partnership for higher education in Africa working now in a dozen countries. One of the principle pieces of that initiative is to expand bandwidth at a lower cost and to get high quality internet connectivity through the continent of Africa.

Also, Jonathan Fanton described “being in the Google office and looking at the map of the world,” and :

how he remembered where inquiries were coming in ….and it is shocking to see that Africa was totally dark, just one or two places where Europe and the United States and places in Asia were bursting with activity. So, we have a real challenge in this world to get to the places where people most need us.

This project of developing high quality internet access and the opportunity to access virtual worlds like Second Life for all, especially people from remote and isolated communities, has been a prime motivation for much of my writing on Ugotrade.

The Magic of Second Life – talking one on one with Jonathan Fanton and Philip Linden

Both Philip Linden (above) and Jonathan Fanton stayed after the event to chat one on one with people (although Philip L. had to leave for the office fairly quickly).

I sent an IM to Jonathan Fanton about an African initiated Virtual Africa portal to Second Life (see next post!). And, I got an instant response. Not only did Jonathan Fanton himself want to stay in touch with project. He immediately sent contact information for the person most involved with Africa at The MacArthur Foundation.

“Africa Open For and In Business:” TED Global 2007

Soyapi Mumba writes about the mood at TED Global 2007 that convened in Arusha, Tanzania in early June:

everyone I met was determined to solve Africa’s problems without waiting for governments or donors. So I’ve come back energized and connected to the right community that will hopefully keep me motivated.

The picture above shows William Kamkwamba. His presentation was a highlight of TED Global 2007. Ethan Zuckerman who blogged every session of TED Global, and summarized in his post, “A New Wind Blowing In Africa.” Also, he noted the debut of William Kamkwamba’s Malawi’s Windmill Blog. William has begun blogging with the help of someone he met at TED.

Ethan Zuckerman writes about William:

He discovered a pair of books on energy, one of which included the design for a windmill, and he began work on a five meter tall windmill near his family’s home, built from scrap timber, an old bicycle frame, and blades made from PVC pipe heated and pounded into flat blades.

Innovators Meet On Second Life

William’s spirit of innovation and can do, will do, is the same kind of energy that has built Second Life. One of the points Philip Linden made again today at the MacArthur Foundation talk is one that is very relevant when considering Second Life’s potential in positive global development. Second Life hasn’t been built by corporations or institutions – it is ordinary people, with their boundless ingenuity, that have built the world’s first user generated metaverse, and its vibrant economy.

That is Satchmo Prototype (aka Chris Carella, Creative Director of The Electric Sheep Company) center in his low prim avatar for the always crowded Geek Meet. And, to his left is Robbie Kiama (from Lithuania) of Meta Mart (I am not sure who is typing?).

I hope one day I will meet William at one of Metaversed’s, now famous Friday Geek Meets on Second Life This week Cisco Systems’ Christian Renaud, Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr, and Ogoglio’s Trevor Smith, all presented on The Future of the 3D Web, and fielded challenging questions from a large group of Second Lifers.

Or, perhaps, William and countless other African innovators would be interested in the Wikitecture project on Architecture Island. This week Clear Ink’s Keystone Bouchard, (aka Jon Brouchoud) gave a Wikitecture demnstration on Architecture Island on Second Life.

Clear Ink tried to make arrangements to stream TED Global into Second Life, but logistical obstacles held sway. Clear Ink did stream the spring TED 2007 conference into their Allston sim HERE (SLurl). And, Cameron Sinclair, 2006 TED Prize winner, Executive Director of Architecture for Humanity, co-editor of the book ‘Design Like You Give A Damn‘ and contributing writer for Worldchanging.com was joined by Sun Microsystems founder John Gage in a live audio discussion in Second Life.

“Its a great time to be a reader of African blogs.”

Ethan Zuckerman also notes:

William’s not the only new African blogger to appear on the web this week. Ike Anya and Chikwe Ihekweazu have both leaped onto the scene with their new blog, Nigeria Health Watch, which looks at public health issues and innovations in Africa’s most populous nation. Welcome, guys. It’s a great time to be a reader of African blogs – if you’re not getting your daily dose, take a spin by BlogAfrica, Afrigator or Global Voices and make sure you’re getting your recommended daily allowance of African innovation.

There are some really great roundups now of the TED Global 2007. There is an awesome look at the blogging of TED Global here from Benin Mwangi. His post for Global Voices is packed full of excerpts from a huge storehouse of insightful writing that came out around the conference. Benin Mwangi notes that Jen Brea’s site (she is also a Global Voices author), Africabeat, describes an overall feeling that she found emanating from attendees at TED 2007 — that the time has come for the continent to write her own story.

Also, you can find some of the following bloggers first thoughts from home here. This is just some of the bloggers that wrote about TED Global.

Afromusing, Bankalele, Mentalacrobatics, Ethan Zuckerman, Mweshi, Afrigadget/White African, Africa: The Next Chapter.

“Put Africa Back In The Computer”

Afrrican Path writes up the presentation of Kwabena Boahen at TED Global. Boahen is researching “Why aren’t we seeing computers challenge the brain?” He is looking at ways to overcome the obstacles to Alan Turing’s 1946 prediction, “In 30 years, it would be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person.” (Also see Extropia DaSilva’s interesting essay on Mitch Kapor’s (angel benefactor of Linden Lab in the early days) “bet centered on a question: Will the Turing Test be passed by a machine by 2029? Ray Kurzweil said ‘yes’, Kapor said ‘No’ and whoever loses will donate $20,000 to a charity selected by the winner.”

Afrrican Path writes:

Why is the brain so much more efficient, using a hundred thousand times less energy than a computer? Boahen believes it’s all in the wiring. Computers put all data through a central bottleneck, either a CPU or an I/O processor. Brains, on the other hand, are networks – each neuron connects to hundreds of other neurons, and there is no central bottleneck. Computers are serial, rigid, while the brain is parallel, fluid. Or as Brian Eno said in 1995, “The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.”

Ethan Zuckerman noted:

Boahen’s presentation ended with a picture of a steel drum – what happens when you put Africa in the piano.

Boahen’s goal is to put Africa in the computer, generating thought, creativity and dynamism. It’s likely a long road from the artificial retina to an African computer, but Boahen is walking that road.

Tags: Second Life | MacArthur Foundation | Philanthropy | Virtual Worlds | Web 2.0 | We 3.D | Jonathan Fanton | Philip Rosedale | Linden Lab | digital divide | TED Global 2007 | TED 2007 | TED Global | Africa | Virtual Africa | Google | Philip Linden | African blogs | African bloggers | Turing Test | Kwabena Boahen | African Computer | World 2.o | African innovation | sutainable development | wikitecture | Geek meet | internet access | connectivity | positive global development | virtual worlds | virtual reality | metaverse |

Mirror Worlds on Second Life

Epredator (a.k.a Ian Hughes) and Yossarian Seattle a.k.a Rob Smart, both of IBM and Eightbar, gave Destroy TV a guided tour of Hursley. “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life,” says “the IBM island Hursley, is being kept strictly under wraps.” But, thanks to Epredator, Yossarian and Destroy TV, a tour of this inner sanctum of innovation – invention and insight, IBM’s incubator for pervasive computing and the meaningful virtualization of reality and more, on Second Life, is documented and searchable online in Destroy TV’s Flickr stream. Destroy TV has created the most searchable archive of Second Life to date.

“Innovation has to be part of your life.” (Andy Stanford-Clark)

The Real Life house pictured above is IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark’s Real Life farm, and Llama trekking business on the Isle of Wight, UK. On the right is the virtualization this house which is part of a Second Life Real Life Home Automation project. The pictures in the bottom row shows Stanford-Clark’s Real Life Llamas on the left and their virtual counterparts on Second Life on the right. Real and Virtual Llamas are linked through GPS and MQ telemetry so that Andy S-C can be a good shepherd when away from his farm (see this IBM podcast).

Pervasive and Mobile Computing and Virtualizing Reality: Why High End Business Executives Care

“because it’s what enables an event-driven, on-demand business.”

While his Llama mapping project began because Andy S-C needed to protect his trekking lamas from theft and misadventure, it evolved into a solution to a customer demand for “Pay As You Drive” insurance for Norwich Union.

If you want a detailed explanation of how IBM inventors are using Second Life and IBM’s MQtt messaging to virtualize and make meaningful data from Real Life on Second Life there are many relevant posts on Eightbar. Also see my earlier post on C.J. Chowderhead’s virtual lab.

Virtualized Worlds Are Key To Sustainable Development

Also, described in the IBM podcast and virtualized in Second Life (and visited by Destroy) is the bridge below where in Real Life Andy Stanford-Clark invented a flood monitoring system that has wide applications not only to the insurance industry for better flood prediction, but for monitoring the effects of global warming.

If you have read Ugotrade before you will know that I try to explore the possibilities of virtual realities and 2.0 thinking, pervasive and mobile computing in positive global development. The work of virtualizing reality has incredible significance for a sustainable future.

From an uber visionary perspective, this is a future where “green” means, perhaps, eliminating the need to build anything at all. This remark comes from Keystone Bouchard, Virtual Architect for Clear Ink, who was also visited by Destroy TV – more later this post about Keystone, and 3D Experience Architecture.

On Ugotrade I try integrate an expansive view that imagines an end to this era of industrial production, all it’s horrors of inequality, waste, pollution and scarcity, with an on the ground perspective that not only tracks corporate innovation, but looks at how people in developing economies (including Second Life) are using virtual realities in innovative ways, for example:

Mobile phones have enabled Africans to leapfrog lack of banking infrastructure and invent virtual banking. And, how ordinary people all over the world are reinventing their lives and careers in Second Life.

Virtualized Business on Second Life

Destroy’s visit to the IBM Business Center is also worth a mention. So much of business reporting on Second Life has focused on whether Second Life is “working” from a very narrow and often poorly conceptualized marketing/sales perspective. This kind of reporting on Second Life has been all too common lately, even by reputable business writers. But, it has been rife with inaccuracies and is based on many misconceptions – see here for a thorough analysis.

I found out, on the ground, some of the innovative ways IBM is developing their Second Life Business Center as a place to relate with their customers, on what is approaching a 24/7 basis, on Destroy’s Flickr stream!

A Searcheable Guide To Second Life

Destroy TV has, in the last ten days, created, an extraordinary guide to Second Life (which will be released as a DVD later). But this guide is available now as a searchable Flickr stream of more than 99,000 photos and the accompanying chat. You can check out Destroy’s flickr tags that logged every place she has been and every avatar she encountered here. Flickr tags were created from the Second Life chat lines and are correlated with a SLurl.

This is the first time that such a vast searcheable document of Second Life has been created. Perhaps, you can, tell how powerful it is by the way I was able to match up Second Life photos from Destroy’s record with Real Life photos I found through Googling Hursley Park on the web.

A toast to Destroy’s accomplishment!

The cover of “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life” is held in front of the camera streaming the Fuse Gallery event into Second Life.

Sharing The Experience Of Second Life

Steve Nelson from Clear Ink notes:

I think both machinima and exported live feeds will be an important part of one of the hurdles of SL, namely the learning curve. The more people are acclimated to the environment before they enter for the first time, the more accelerated I think their introduction to SL will be. It’s like visiting a new country after having seen videos – it isn’t as much of a shock when you actually get there.

As Destroy toured Second Life her adventures and chat were not only streamed live to the web at Destroy TV, they were also projected on a wall in Fuse Gallery, New York City, where people could watch and interact with the avatars. Also what was happening in the Real Life Gallery in New York City was streamed back into Second Life to the GHava{SL} Center for the Arts. This was quite a conceptual and technical achievement.

Pictured above is Clear Ink’s 3D Experience Architect, Keystone Bouchard. When Destroy accompanied by Jerry Paffendorf encountered the team from Clear Ink (one the most visionary agencies working on Second Life), they found people who really got the significance of the multiple levels of reaction this project created (photo from Destroy’s Flickr stream).

A good opportunity to check out Clear Ink and their work on SL will be this event on Autodesk Island HERE (SLurl), June 14, 10AM PST Chris Luebkeman : Future Challenges: Global Creative Contexts.

Annie Ok writes of this extraordinary meeting of minds in a long comment on this post on 3pointD. Here is an excerpt:

the exemplary moment of Destroy’s potential educational/informative application has been the happy accident of running into Keystone Bouchard and him immediately TP-ing in Theory Shaw and the ensuing tour they gave to destroy of architecture island and the Wikitecture project.

Keystone talked to me later about the Clear Ink encounter with Destroy. There are several key-points Keystone touched on:

Sharing The Experience of Second Life with People In Real Life

At Clear Ink, we had several people watching on my screen, who could see both my avatar’s movements and Destroy’s view through my browser. So, on my end, there were several people viewing both portals simultaneously. But, what makes it really interesting is that through this virtual medium, it ended up being both absorbed and transmitted through a multitude of experiences. Because, on their end, they had the virtual scene being projected onto the wall of a real life gallery with several people in real life witnessing the phenomenon – even taking pictures of themselves standing next to avatars – as you would in a real life gathering. It blurred so many lines – it was quite extraordinary.

Interacting With An Avatar On Second Life To produce A Shared Narrative

We could see what Destroy was looking at through the browser. I could see her camera so, when she would move her camera over to a certain build, I could describe what she was looking at, so the people in the gallery could read what i was describing. In a sense, we even transcended our avatars – and became invisible cameras – flying around the island looking at, touring and describing the entire island – while our avatars stood still. Plus, at Clear Ink, it was a great way to engage my co-workers, and show them a really unique experience – using SL in a way it hadn’t ever been used before.

Sharing Avatar Viewpoint To Enhance Collaboration On Second Life

Architecturally – in a virtual environment – understanding the avatar’s gaze is absolutely critical – and one of the biggest challenges in a virtual environment. Because, I can design something using Mouselook – and it could be visually compelling based on the way I use my camera – but another user would have an entirely different experience based on the way they use their camera. So, you have to design a building to accommodate many levels of approach and viewpoint.

Being able to see what Destroy was looking at did truly provide a missing link. I was able to give her a more thorough description of the island. At one point, I was describing the Wikitecture experiment. But I could see that Destroy was looking at the Architecture 101 build – so I shifted the conversation to describe that. At which point, Destroy started going from project to project, knowing that I could continue the narrative. The collaborative potential is something we’re very interested in and actively building experiments around on Architecture Island.

The Metarati In Action

Jerry Paffendorf at Destroy’s wrap party last Saturday at Fuse NYC watches Destroy’s visit to Relay For Life – the American Cancer Society’s SL adventure that has sparked enthusiasm and creativity from Second Lifers (three years on SL now!) Destroy was welcomed by a large crowd of avatars.

Jerry Paffendorf, Metarati and Futurist in Residence for the Electric Sheep Company (this is an independent project) teamed with artist Annie Ok, curator and collaborator, and Christian Westbrook (Metaverse Architect ESC) to create Destroy TV. Ben Byer, who is from Apple BSD technology group, was visiting from California, (on right). He came up with the name for Destroy TV.

It is an extraordinary feat of vision combined with some coding genius. They pulled off the extended two way streaming, projection and logging to Flickr with only a few minor burps. This is no minor feat. See Christian’s blog for a post on what happened when their Flickr stream topped 99,000.

Turning Extreme Lifelogging Into Meaningful Virtual Experience

I talked at length with Jerry Paffendorf at the closing party at Fuse Gallery about the challenge of extreme life logging in virtual worlds both from a technical and expressive point of view. Just like there is a need for a new language of virtual architecture as Keystone points out – “a more interactive, reflexive architecture” – there is a need to find an expressive language for life logging. Jerry Paffendorf has been pushing the envelope on this and has some very interesting projects in the pipeline (which I will let him reveal).

Flickr, the poster child of Web 2.0, began as a user generated virtual world.

Jerry talked about how Flickr is a big influence on his thinking right now. Flickr as he notes is the poster child of Web 2.0 – it gets better the more people that use it and interact with each other inside it. But, Jerry also pointed out something about Flickr that may not be so well known, i.e., it started out as user generated virtual world called Game Never Ending.

It is fascinating how Destroy TV by using Flickr to document Second Life begins to reconnect with this initial conception. Jerry noted that it is possible Destroy TV was the most prolific poster to Flckr in the world, during Destroy’s ten day adventure.

Also, Jerry sees the Destroy Project as a sketch for how we are our going to record and organize our own Real Lives – remembering the places that we have been and the people we have been around. This is what Destroy TV does, and documents. Like Game never Ending turned out not simply to apply to organizing a virtual world, Destroy TV is also about inventing ways to organize our experience of the real world, and bridge the imagination gap needed to do this (also see 3pointD on Ambient Gaming: Life Logging in Disguise). Talking about the future of Destroy TV, Jerry said:

What I want to see happen is that anybody who logs into Second Life, or any virtual world, can record absolutely everything that they see and create a lifelog of their Second Life experience.

Virtual Worlds have a big advantage over the real world re life logging because they have built in wireless, RFID, meta data and geolocation, so it makes sense for this to be a place we will proto-type life logging.

The search for a an expressive language for extreme lifelogging -where the traces and tracks of real life can be expressed in virtual space in meaningful ways – is where 3D experience design and the virtualization of real life merge to create innovative hybrid realities.

A 3D Experience Architect- building a new language for virtual design.

I have been meaning to visit Architecture Island for a while now, and seeing Destroy’s Flickr stream inspired me to go yesterday. First, I talked to Keystone Bouchard.

Keystone Bouchard is a Real Life architect who has recently transitioned exclusively to a virtual mode as a “3D Experience Architect” with Clear Ink. He is standing here in an experiment he is working on. You can click on the video grab below to see a short machinima.

The blurring of lines between familiar and unfamiliar experiences of music and space create an other-worldly environment that is cinematic yet still an invitation to interaction.

Keystone observed avatar movement and behavior on a Architecture Island, then wrote a piano score that approximated that movement. Then he transposed a video of him playing that score and imported the video. His goal is to make the architecture interactive so that it understands where you are and what you’re doing – and provides an audible reaction to it.

Wikitecture On Second Life

Keystone is also interested in the crossroad between the professional practice of architecture and virtual environments, as well as the development of a new language of virtual architecture. Keystone and Theory Shaw, pictured below, have teamed up to use virtual worlds as a tool for a collaborative approach to architecture in the Real World. Theory Shaw has outlined how virtual world can be used in the the planning of future cities.

The central build on Architecture Island is the Studio Wikitecture experiment – an open source approach to architecture that everyone is free to join – co-creating projects and participating in collaborative design.

Theory is an architect living in Chicago. He is currently researching the prospect of using an open source (or wiki) type paradigm toward the improvement of architecture and city planning.

I feel our cities are so complicated that no small group of people can possibly design them from the top down….it’s a such a grand problem, that we need to set up a framework (or platform) where people can come together and tackle the problem from a local perspective.

My ultimate goal is to use Second Life, or what will be ultimately the next metaverse, (and the tool you utilize for open source architecture should be just as open), as a tool for the world’s population to come together, and solve collectively, how architecture should be defined.

The Studio Wikitecture experiment needs a complete post, so I will not go into all of the interesting aspects of this project Theory mentioned in our chat right now. But, Theory has written a program and protocol for the experiment – available here.

Tags: Extreme Life logging | life logging | 3D experience architecture | Second Life Builders | Second Life | Web 2.0 | Web 3.D | Web 3D | mirror worlds | virtualizing reality | wikitecture | open source architecture | architecture island | vitual architecture | Destroy TV | virtual experience | IBM Virtual Business Center | virtual business | machinima | virtual worlds | metaverse | sustainable development | virtual banking | pervasive and mobile computing | virtualized worlds |