The Missing Manual for The Future (or The Future: The Missing Manual)

O’Reilly Media, is famous for is producing  “missing manuals” for new technologies, but thinking of O’Reilly as just a publisher of books would be like saying Facebook is just a website (this came up in the discussion at Media Round Table at Web 2.0 Expo, NY, 2010).   In recent weeks, I managed to catch Tim O’Reilly at several events, Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo, Hadoop World, and the free webcast Tim did with John Battelle on The Battle for the Internet Economy (although Tim spoke several other times during this period!).

It occurred to me, as I immersed myself in the depth and breadth of innovation showcased and discussed at these events that Tim O’Reilly, and the O’Reilly team, are creating, The Missing Manual for the Future.

As Tim puts it, we are “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.” Tim uses a quote from William Gibson to illuminate what is at the heart of the O’Reilly project:

“The Future is here, it is just not evenly distributed yet.” (William Gibson).

But Tim O’Reilly makes another point about the future when he speaks.  The future unfolds unexpectedly – so we must invent for an unknown future not a known future, or as Alex Steffen put it so well in his post, Why Our Bright Green Futures Will Be Weirder Than We Think, – “The world we need is one we’ve never yet seen.” The magic of attending an O”Reilly event is that it gives you a chance to work on this koan in interesting ways, and to take more responsibility for how things turn out.

Tim O’Reilly also urges that we think more deeply about what we are doing.  His keynote for Hadoop World , NYC, billed as, “The Business of Data” turned towards “The Consequences of Living in a World of Data.” The 900 strong crowd at Hadoop World was probably one of the most savvy crowds in the world about the business of data, so this was a nice turn.

Web 2.0 Expo with the theme, Platforms for Growth, was a deep dive into the business of innovation.  Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo,  “Thinking Hard About The Future” (or rather “thinking a little bit creatively or differently about the future)  – see video here, developed the call he made at Web 2.0 Expo 2008, to “work on stuff that matters,” into a Four Cylinder Engine for Innovation.   The first of the four cylinders in the firing order is, “Having Fun!” But,  at Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo, and Hadoop World I got an inside look at the workings of all four cylinders, and there is more to come, I am sure, as the other O’Reilly events unfold over the coming months including,  Web 2.0 Summit, Strata (a new O’Reilly conference on The Business of Data), and Where 2.0, 2011.

In a free webcast, last week (recording here), previewing Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly discussed the Points of Control Map which is developing into a fun and useful tool to examine a very serious topic, “The Battle for the Internet Economy,” and how the “increasingly direct conflicts between its major players” could effect “people, government and the future of technology innovation.”   In my previous post, Platforms for Growth and Points of Control for Augmented Reality, I had a great conversation with Chris Arkenberg using this map as a springboard.  More on Points of Control later in this post.

The Four Cylinders of Innovation

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From Jet Ponies to Jet Packs: The First Cylinder of Innovation – “Have Fun”

The “maker” energy and its spirit of play, and the courage to create, hack, reinvent and re-purpose everything and anything, is a quintessential example of the first cylinder of innovation firing big.  Many “maker” projects also go on to fire on all four cylinders.   But the Maker forte definitely is in the first cylinder zone (and safety third as some of the rides, including Jet Ponies, warned).  The photo opening this post by Marc de Vinck – for more pics see here, is of Tim riding The Jet Ponies at Maker Faire which took  the New York Hall of Science by storm in late September – see The New York Times coverage here.  The ride was “built by the dastardly danger-hackers at the Madagascar Institute.“ See this wonderful interview with Hackett on his work to design “our specific jets from a patent that was filed in 1960s by a Mr. Lockwood, for Valveless Pulse Jets.” Hackett points out:

“Louder than god, glowing white-hot and looking like the trombone of the Apocalypse, pulse jets are also really shitty, inefficient engines,”

But, he adds:

“I have always wanted a jetpack, and one of the reasons I learned to build these things was to further that goal.”

This grand vision behind the Jet Ponies is a key to firing, The Second Cylinder of Innovation,  “Hey, we can change the world!”

But Jet Ponies, as a stepping stone to jet packs, also really struck a chord for me as I have been devoting a lot of time lately to the emerging Augmented Reality industry, a technology which was lumped in the same category of sci fi chimera as jet packs until very recently.

Data is the Gasoline

“The faces are coming from the sky.  The locations are coming from the sky.  All these apps depend on something, somewhere up.  And that, to me, was always the heart of Web 2.0.  And I am so delighted that people are finally getting it.  Because for a long time, people thought, ‘Oh, Web 2.0, it’s about lightweight advertising supported in a web start up.’  So I went, ‘No, no, no. It’s about the fact that we’re building these giant database subsystems in the sky that are going to drive applications.’  And now, of course, the same application is on your PC, it’s on your phone, it’s on you iPad.  And clearly, the applications are just sort of an interface to something that is being driven from the cloud, and that is fabulous.  That’s the difference.  People get it now.” (Tim O’Reilly, said this as part of a response to the first questioner at the Media Round table Web 2.0 Expo)

Answering questions about the importance of “Having Fun” to innovation doesn’t look quite as fun as riding Jet Ponies! Photo above from luca.sartoni’s Flickr stream

“ the data that is generated by the sensors and the applications that use that data is going to be where people are going to be innovative.” (Tim O’Reilly)

During the Media Round Table, I had a chance to ask Tim more about the role of bottom up innovation in a world where big data is the gasoline for increasingly sophisticated engines – platforms integrating machine to machine intelligence and real time analytics.

Tish Shute: You brought up Maker Faire in your keynote, and again now.  I was there, which not many people in the audience were  [not too many hands went up when Tim asked during his keynote].  But I think one of the things that struck me was the jet ponies – they were just earthshaking to stand near.  They made the ground tremble; they made the world shake.  Yet, most of your keynote, and most of what’s on our minds here, at Web 2.0 Expo, is extracting intelligence from the big data [in the sky], and algorithmic intelligences are the jet engines of the internet.  And of course, not to be forgotten, as we are here in New York City, where the trading markets are creating the air we breathe  [although we probably don't realize it until we lose our mortgage or something] and these algorithmic economies or “robot casinos” as Kevin Slavin put it, are all about speed – it’s not just real-time, issues of latency are  so critical that co-location is key to winning the game of the markets.  [Kevin Slavin brilliantly unpacks this in his talk, "Loitering on the Motherboard." For more in this see my conversation with Kevin Slavin below].

So my question is, who’s making the jet ponies for the algorithmic economies in the sky that you just described?   How can we make a play from the bottom up?  I always feel Ushahidi is one of the jet ponies of the data algorithmic space [because of their great work to bring human and machine intelligence together to solve problems in crisis situations].  But who do you think is doing exciting work and how can we ensure that this powerful world of data and algorithmic intelligences does not become hidden in a closed black box [only really accessible to elite players like the NYC trading markets]?

Tim O’Reilly: “Well, I think there’s certainly a lot of interesting things happening in, say, the financial services that a lot of, kind of, the Internet folks are kind of blind to.  I think that there are companies like Next Jump which are really good with data and good with algorithms. But kind of speaking specifically to the maker side of this, that whole sensor enabled world which is going to produce data is in its infancy.  What we have that I think is so powerful right now is we have the first portable sensor platform.  I said in my talk the other day, you know, your phone has ears, it has eyes, it has a sense of where it is.  And these are all available to application developers. You know, you can compare, say, Dodgeball to Foursquare, you can see how different… Dodgeball is Foursquare in the tele-type era.  Foursquare is now possible because there are so many more capabilities on the phone.

And I think that we are going to see a lot of other areas that are revolutionized by the sensors in the device.  It could well be that some of them will come explicitly out of the maker kind of projects, or it could just be that make is sort of a proxy for them.  So yeah, Arduino is this great maker sensor platform, but hey, here’s a consumer sensor platform [holding up phone]. Maybe we vaulted past the maker stage already and we just didn’t know it.

And that’s not entirely true, because Arduino is building a whole economy of special purpose devices.  But it feels a little bit like the days when people rolling their own PCs coexisted with the rise of Dell, who was a kid in his college dorm room who made his own PCs and sold them on the net, but figured out how to scale it pretty quickly and get good at it. But there were still a lot of garage shops, you know, ‘I’ll make a PC and sell it to you’ people for probably a decade before there was really a clue that that was a commodity industry.  In fact, I do think the sensor platforms are going to become a commodity industry.  And the data that is generated by the sensors and the applications that use that data is going to be where people are going to be innovative.”

The internet operating system is a data operating system and it is happening in real time (Tim O’Reilly)

click to enlarge the image above  – a slide from Mike Olsen’s  (CEO of Cloudera) keynote at Hadoop World

Not only do we have a portable sensor platform in our pockets  but developers also have powerful platforms and tools to make sense of data that fuel our apps.   Opensource Hadoop makes available, to anyone with some data munching chops, the power to work with giant unstructured databases and do the kind of real time analytics previously only available to giants like Google.  Big players like Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter use Hadoop (Jonathon Gray from Facebook noted they add 10TB a day).   But, as this great roundup of Hadoop World points out, while Hadoop gets the press for handling petabytes of data , Mike Olsen (CEO of Cloudera) noted, the fastest growing area of users are working with clusters smaller than 10TB and over half of the Hadoop clusters were under 10TB in size.

Four Square: A Platform for Growth with an ecosytem built on top of data that exists in the real world

As an augmented reality enthusiast it is not hard to guess that one of my favorite platforms for growth is Four Square.  See Dennis Crowley’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo here.  The Four Square API has been available to developers since November 2009,  and there are already a number of  interesting applications, and there will be many more to come.  The screen shot above is of geopollster – see the gallery of Four Square apps here.

@dens tweeted recently  “Politics + @Foursquare = @GeoPollster” http://geopollster.com <- I love love love that people are using 4SQ to think about election tools

As Kati London pointed out in her keynote, Four Square is the “kind of augmented reality that is aimed at shifting or changing a person’s social reality, e.g. the mayor badges in Four Square that change my relationship to the people and the place I am in, and augment engagement and reputation through socially driven consumer tie ins.” We are already see augmented reality developers beginning to work with the Four Square API – see here, Foursquare + Augmented Reality + Virtual Graffiti = ARstreets.

As augmented reality development tools mature, Four Square will, increasingly, become an important platform for creative AR developers interested in integrating the power of this platform for augmented engagement and reputation with “device aided augmented reality that can shift visual experiences of situated geolocal experiences.” With the Qualcomm vision based augmented reality SDK now available for download, and Wave in a Box soon? to be released, and an ARWave client working on Android (almost!), I have been exploring the Four Square API in my non existent spare time!!

The Four Square API also offers some interesting possibilities for exploring games that take the complex economy of Four Square – not personal data but aggregates of behavior, as their subject matter (for more on this see my conversation with Kevin Slavin later in this post and in an upcoming post).

I took this picture of Dennis at Where 2.0, 2009 at the beginning of Four Square’s phenomenal growth (they are at 4 million plus users now).

Pachube (Patch-Bay): a web service for storing and sharing sensor, energy and environmental data

Eighteen months ago, I interviewed Usman Haque (architect and director, Haque Design + Research) and founder of Pachube – see Pachube, Patching the Planet.   Usman pointed me to this wonderful evocative image from T.R. Oke’s book, “Boundary Layer Climates” (original photo source Prof. L. E. Mount’s The Climatic Physiology of the Pig).  “It’s the same piglets, in the same box, but on the right hand side the temperature has been increased. This small change in how the space is “programmed” has dramatically changed the way the ‘inhabitants’ relate to each other and how they relate to their space.”

The Challenge of Connecting people and environments.

At Web 2.0 Expo, I got the opportunity to talk with Usman Haque again.   Pachube, is becoming an established platform now, Usman explained.  They have a development team of eleven and robust back end.  And, they will now be spending some more time on the front end, including a redesign of the website, making “it a lot easier to widgetize the entire website so that you will be able to take almost any element and embed that into your own website.” And, as Usman mentioned in his presentation, they are working on an augmented reality interface, Porthole, for facilities management and, “as a consumer-oriented application that extends the universe of Pachube data into the context of AR – a ‘porthole’ into Pachube’s data environments..  Usman is also contributing to the AR standards discussion and on the program committee now for the W3C group on augmented reality.

Click to enlarge the image above from Chris Burman’s paper for the W3C, Portholes and Plumbing: how AR erases boundaries between “physical” and “virtual”

Pachube, is sometimes described as the Facebook for Data or an analogy Usman prefers, a Twitter for Sensors.  At Web 2.0 Expo, I had an amazing opportunity to hear from Twitter and Facebook about their strategies as platforms for growth.  This gave me lots of fuel for questions about Pachube’s approach to developing their platform.  Simplicity was a theme that Facebook  and Twitter both affirmed as a key.  One of Pachube’s challenges will be to deliver ease of use, and the equivalent of Facebook’s “like” and  Twitter’s “follow” to gain mass appeal.

Here is a brief excerpt from my upcoming conversation with Usman:

Tish Shute: So as a platform you see Pachube as having more in common with Twitter – a Twitter for Sensors. In what ways is Pachube similar to Twitter?

Usman Haque: Well we are the Twitter of sensors, devices & machines in the sense that, really, the API that enables all this communication is important, much more so than the website itself. It is where, basically, most of the millions of our hits actually go, is to the backend. And we’ve now got dozens of applications built on top of the system, a little bit like Twitter’s applications; you know, all the apps are the important part.

But we are actually going to be doing some quite exciting things with API keys that we haven’t really spoken that much about in public. But we have come up with a pretty innovative solution to make almost every resource have granular privacy options on it, now discussed here.

At Hadoop World, Tim O’Reilly also raised some interesting broader questions that are very relevant to Pachube’s vision to “patch the planet”, e.g, the problem of digital identity in the age of sensors? (Smart phones already know their users by the way they walk!) And, “How should we think about privacy in a world where data can be triangulated?”

Usman talked about Pachube’s approach to both the technical aspects of how to build a massively scalable system, and the conceptual aspects of how people connect to each other, and what they might do with these new opportunities to connect environments and sensor data  (see my earlier talk with Usman, Pachube, Patching the Planet, for a detailed explanation of some of the concepts behind Pachube).

I look forward to posting this conversation. Pachube is growing, and Usman always goes beyond the familiar tropes of connecting human and machine intelligence.

2nd Cylinder of Innovation: “Hey Can We Change the World!”

The possibilities for reimagining of the role of data in healthcare produced some of the most powerful “Hey Can We Change the World” moments for me at both Web 2.0 Expo and Hadoop World.  The slide above is from Esther Dyson’s brilliant Ignite presentation, “What you can and can’t learn from your genes?” are here,   Tim O’Reilly also brought up the powerful role real time data analytics can play in improving healthcare in his Hadoop World Keynote.  Also see Alex Howard’s post, 10 Lessons for Gov 2.0 from Web 2.0 for some more great, “hey we can change the world moments” at Web 2.0 Expo.  The keynote from Lukas Biewald of CrowdFlower and Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource (screen shot below) in particular, is a provocative exploration of the future of work in the new ecologies of human and machine intelligence.

Changing the World When Our Lives Are Increasingly Shaped by Forces Invisible To Us?

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Mike Olsen, CEO of Cloudera, noted that “the largest area of data growth does not come from humans interacting with machines; rather, it’s from machines interacting with each other” (see here in Minor Technical Difficulties).   One of the most interesting presentations at Web 2.0 Expo was Kevin Slavin’s, “Loitering on the Motherboard,” which, as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his keynote at Hadoop World, is a talk that raises all kinds of questions about a system where big players are gaming the data for their own ends.

Kevin Slavin, a founder of Area/Code, notes the operating system of our mortgage, life insurance, the operating system of currencies and gold is now governed by machine to machine intelligence and algorithimic economies outside of human cognitive processes.  The markets are now legible only to bots in an algorithmic arms race with bots surveilling bots, and throwing off false information in a bid for counter-surveillance.  He showed some slides of the eery but beautiful visualizations of traces of the trading bots created from the Nanex API.

The screenshot above is from the Nanex: Crop Circle of the Day – Quote Stuffing and Strange Sequences.  “The common theme with the charts shown on this page is they are all generated in code and are algorithmic. Some demonstrate bizarre price or size cycling, some demonstrate large burst of quotes in extremely short time frames and some will demonstrate both…” This one is a zoom of the NSDQ “Wild Thing.”  Wild price/size repeater from NSDQ running at 1,000 quotes per second, effecting the BBO along the way (I love the great names Nanex gives the different patterns and traces produced by the trading bots).

Nanex supplies a real-time data feed comprising trade and quote data for all US equity, option, and futures exchanges. They have archived this data since 2004 and have created and used numerous tools to “sift through the enormous dataset: approximately 2.5 trillion quotes and trades as of June 2010.” May 6th 2010 (day of the flash crash), had approximately 7.6 billion trade, quote, level 2, and depth records.

Kevin points out that our lives are being shaped by criteria invisible to us and the old hackneyed tropes of machine to machine intelligence such a robots reading HUDs in English are long worn out.  The latter point is, perhaps, something for us augmented reality geeks absorbed in ideas of “making the invisible visible” to chew on.

Changing a world shaped by forces that are, increasingly, invisible to us presents a huge challenge.

But I had the glimmer of a, “Hey Can We Change the World” moment, when I attended Kevin Slavin founder of Area/Code’s presentation and had a conversation with him after his talk.  Could games take these complex economies as their subject matter?  The economies of  Farmville and games like WoW are not opaque at all, and these are environments with complex economic behavior, “where you can actually have enough data to understand what it is” – “it’s not so much about personal data.  It’s more about, like, aggregate behaviors.” “Games that can really model those, and play with those, and take those as the subject the way that Monopoly takes Monopoly as a subject could be really interesting.” Kevin made many fascinating points – more to come on this topic.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson, of Kevin Slavin speaking at Web 2.0 Expo NY, 2010, from the O’Reilly Conferences Flickr stream

Here is the beginning of our conversation:

Talking With Kevin Slavin

Tish Shute: You began your talk today about visibility and where some of the algorithmic masters of disguise went to work, after they had solved the math behind stealth bombers.  I thought perhaps you were leading into ideas about a reverse surveillance society.

But you surprised me, as I felt you made visibility itself kind of a non-issue by the end of your presentation and that counter surveillance became basically a time and speed issue.  Now I am not sure quite how to imagine a counter-surveillance society, something I try to think about…

Kevin Slavin: Well, let’s see.  There’s a couple ways to think about it.  I think one point is just that when we talk about counter-surveillance, we usually locate that as something that comes from  the bottom up, something that comes from the population. Think about the way the plane spotters discovered the CIA black rendition flights.

I think in general, when people talk about counter surveillance, or sousveillance, they imagine it as an inversion of the traditional relationship between the people and the state.

But that’s what’s interesting. What’s happening now, is that there are forms of surveillance and counter-surveillance that are in play beyond any human perceptual horizons. These forms are at their most sophisticated in financial services, in the markets.

If you were a bot, and could read the market legibly (which humans cannot), what you would see, effectively, are bots that are surveilling bots. Then you have bots that are throwing off false information in a bid for counter-surveillance. Many of the bots are, themselves, surveilling other bots; each one of them is trying to figure out what all the other ones are going to do. In essence, it’s an algorithmic arms race, and game theory has become concrete, since the theories are code, the code is action, and the action affects, let’s say: your mortgage.

And so, basically what you have is you have this series of algorithms that are all looking to discern each other, while also trying to prevent themselves from being discerned. I think of the tunnels under the trenches in WWI, tunnels to surveil the trenches, and then, later, tunnels to surveil the tunnels. There’s a few examples of this kind of thing.  But It’s especially strange when it’s computer code, and at the magnitude we’re seeing today.

All of it, as noted in the talk, accounting for 70% of all the trades in the market. 70% of the market trades are never touched by human hands or even seen by human eyes; they don’t move through a conventional cognitive process.  And that’s why you get things like the Credit Suisse algorithm, it was buying, selling 200,000 shares of stocks to itself over and over and over again. It was a bug and it slowed the market to a crawl.

Credit Suisse was fined, in essence, for failing to control an algorithm. Maybe that’s the first time an algorithm was treated like a human, in a way. As if the algorithm broke the law, and Credit Suisse was responsible for letting it do so. For me, that feels like a threshold event.

It’s not that humans never made mistakes when trading on the market. But when algorithms err, they err with magnitude.

The idea that we now have bugs in the United States market economy is really worth looking at.  If Apple can’t keep code bugs from the most simple iPhone apps in a closed and regulated ecosystem, I’m pretty certain we’ll have a lot more Credit Suisse type bugs in the future.

And that will be pretty interesting. There will be viruses, and the operating system they will operate on will be the operating system of the United States. The operating system of your pension, your house, your life insurance. The operating system of currencies and gold.

Tish Shute: I was hard-pressed by the end of your talk to think of like, “Well, what would be the equivalent of, sort of a people’s uprising to create a better fairer society in this kind of world where, really, the things that affect the key aspects of lives most are going on beyond human perception at an algorithmic level?”  But you made a pretty radical suggestion at the end…

Kevin Slavin: Well I think increasingly the markets have become delaminated from anything meaningful. First from goods, then from fundamentals, and now finally from homo sapiens. So that’s hard to fight.

It’s the race towards abstraction that makes it impossible to simply “resist.” The latest version in the long series of fiscal catastrophes was based on Wall Street finding goods that could be rolled up and sold with false valuations, but goods that would take a long time to fail. Mortgages are handy like that. It’s the tradition of extending the abstraction as long as possible, until finally the bill arrives and the banks fail. I don’t know if that’s something to rise up against or not. It’s like a rally against evil.

But really, I think the point is that it won’t be the people that rise up. It will be the financial services themselves that rise up. They’ll just detach completely.

That was harder to do with cotton or with wheat, with simple futures; they keep financial services tied to the ground.  So what we’re doing is creating increasingly complex financial instruments that are further and further removed from anything you can touch.  Like the way a mortgage is abstract. But, of course, the bottom line is that at the end of that mortgage lies someone’s home.

It’s said that Wall Street is now moving onto life insurance, because that’s going to take even longer to fail.  They’re doing the exact same thing. The word is that they are rolling up CDOs made out of crap life insurance policies, same way they rolled them up with crap mortgages a few years ago.

And those will probably take, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years to unwrap and unravel.  But what you see in the meantime, is that they are looking for things that are increasingly abstract, intangible, removed as far as possible from the experience of everyday life.

So maybe this is good. Maybe that’s financial services rising up. Lifting off. I think best case scenario now is that they actually leave humans alone altogether.  That, someday, they are just trading, effectively, completely arbitrary goods, the stocks could be anything at all, maybe for crops that no longer exist, and I’m just saying that then these bots would no longer affect what we do and what we are, it would just be a robot casino, an invisible paradise in the air.

People are the platform: How Games Can Be Engines of Innovation in Our Lives

See the video of Games that Know Where We Live here (screen shot above)

Kati London, Senior Producer, Area/Code, in her keynote showed how games that know where we live can shift players perspectives – from device aided augmented reality that can shift visual experiences of situated geolocal experiences to a kind of augmented reality that is aimed at shifting or changing a person’s social reality, e.g. the mayor badges in Four Square that change my relationship to the people and the place I am in, and augment engagement and reputation through socially driven consumer tie ins.

Area/Code has recently developed two games for the Knight Foundation that take people as the platform.  Macon Money, uses very simple games dynamics (for more see the video of Kati’s keynote) in a game designed to help “Knight’s continuing efforts to support revitalizing Macon and creating a vibrant college town.”

The other game that Area/Code has designed with the support of the Knight Foundation  is for the Biloxi and Gulf Coast community, a game called Battlestorm.  “The game’s purpose is to increase awareness about natural disasters and change the way people prepare for them.”

3rd Cylinder of Innovation: Build products, business models and entire industries.

Glympse – real-time, private location tracking

Julianne Pepitone, Yahoo! Finance, nailed the essence of Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, this year in her post, Web 2.0 Expo startups are big on neighborhoods, storytelling.  She writes:

“At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, executives from big sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora all spoke about industry trends. But the showcase of 27 startup tech companies stole the show.”

Listen carefully to Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, question their picks from the startup showcase at Web 2.0 Expo.  Also see this video of Fred and Tim discussing their conversations with all the start ups.  This  is one of the clearest public windows onto both how to present your company to VC, and how to figure out what are the most important questions for you as an entrepreneur  building a business in a world of data.

Glympse successfully pitches their “jet pony” strategy for a location based business, and is Fred’s pick.  They hold up well under pressure and answer Tim and Fred’s hard questions about how their start up will not get overtaken by an encumbent player with resources and market share before they can gain traction.   food52 responds to Tim’s probing about their strategy for business data analytics that he points out are vital if they want to survive with the small margins of ecommerce.  There is a list of all the participants in the start up showcase in Brady’s post here. hour.ly was the audience pick.

Shazam for Faces!

My favorite start up was a biometric service doing face, iris, and finger print matching, Tactical Information Systems.

Tim and Fred also liked them, and they have an interesting discussion about the merits or not of approaching your platform through a narrow first application as Tactical Information Systems are with WanderID -  an application to help identifying lost Alzheimer patients.  As Fred pointed out, they are potentially the Shazam for faces, so why start so small?

I  had asked TIS the same question when I met them in the “speed dating” session.  This is just their first toe in the water as they are a two person company at the moment. Their vision for their platform is big.  Mary Haskett and Dr Alex Kilpatrick, the founders of this quintessential jet pony for the algorithmic economies in the sky, are not only a partnership with the credentials to do a  Shazam for faces – see their bios here, they are the people I would want to be running a Shazam for faces!  They really get the consequences of living in a world of data – check out Dr Kilpatrick’s absolute killer Ignite talk, “Defeating Big Brother.” (screenshot below)

How Can Augmented Reality Add Value to the Real Time Internet/Data Operating System?

planefinder.net – an augmented reality app that lets you find information about planes by pointing your phone at the sky, “including flight number, aircraft registration, speed, altitude and how far away it is” (via MacLife).

The new opportunities in the algorithmic economies in the sky were center stage at Web 2.0 Expo and there are some interesting AR apps for the real time internet/data operating system emerging, like planefinder.net.  But Augmented Reality was still pretty low profile at Web 2.0 Expo (except that NVidia augmented reality demo attracted a lot of attention at the sponsors expo).  However, everyone working in the emerging industry of AR should recognize that apps big on “neighborhoods and story telling” are heading right up the AR street, and that platforms like Four Square and Pachube present enormous opportunity to explore the possibilities of AR.  And if augmented reality enthusiasts are not already paying attention to real time data analytics, and Hadoop, they should be (see this post for an excellent round up on Hadoop World).

At Hadoop World, Tim O’Reilly referenced the great tagline from the  IBM commercial:

“Would you be willing to cross the street — blindfolded — on data that was five minutes old? Five hours? Five days?”

As I have noted in several earlier posts – see here and here for starters,  we are just seeing the tools  for developing near field, vision based, mobile, social AR become widely available to developers, so there should be a new level of AR apps emerging through 2011.  There is a wonderful discussion in the comments of this post by Mac Slocum, “How Augmented Reality Apps Can Catch On,” between Mac, Raimo one of the founders of Layar, and Chris Arkenberg on what constitutes a platform for growth for augmented reality.

Mac’s post, the comments and Chris Arkenberg’s post on the latest edition of the Gartner Hype Cycle, that rather curiously placed Augmented reality almost at the peak of inflated expectations. really got me excited about exploring an idea I have been thinking about for a while, which is to get the AR community to discuss the Points of Control map.    See my discussion with Chris Arkenberg here, Platforms for Growth and Points of Control for Augmented Reality. The recording of  John Battelle’s and Tim O’Reilly’s webcast on Points of Control is posted here.

The interactive Points of Control map is an amazing tool to think with! Check it out in movements, territory and movements, acquisition mode.  There is a competition for the most interesting comment and most interesting acquisition suggestion.  The prize is a ticket to Web 2.0 Summit!

What is the Future of Social?

The recent “defection” from Google to Facebook – see Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook,  is as MG Siegler of TechCrunch points out, “the biggest one since Chrome OS lead Matthew Papakipos made the same jump in June” (TechCrunch also notes “current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor was heavily involved in the launch of Google Maps”).

These moves have drawn my particular attention as did Bret Taylor’s response in his conversation with Brady Forrest at Web 2.0 Expo to Brady’s question, “How soon until we get the Facebook firehose?”

If you have been reading Ugotrade you already know how important I think an open, distributed, standard for real-time communications such as the very innovative Wave Federation Protocol could be for AR development  -  see ARWave and my presentation at MoMo13, Amsterdam last year, The Next Wave of AR: Mobile Social Interaction Right Here, Right Now!

The anticipated release of  Wave in a Box, has raised hopes in the developer community that  WFP will soon become easier to work with, and hopefully more widely adopted.  Like many others, I wonder what will happen to Wave in a Box now?

But the innovation of Wave is deep and broad (and as many have pointed out hugely ambitious).  Perhaps the boldest attempt yet to innovate both at the low level of architecture (where Google is so powerful) and at the high level of the Mark Zuckerberg, “big idea,” which as Tim O’Reilly notes is, “What is the future of social?” MG Siegler noted Facebook Groups Is Sort Of Like Google Wave For Human Beings.

But I deeply hope that the open, distributed standard part of the Wave big idea is not lost in the mix here.

Fourth Cylinder of Innovation: Keep the Ecosystem Going, Create More Value than You Capture

The Points of Control map is interactive, so please click here or on the image above for the full experience.

Tim O’Reilly points out that there is a worrisome dark side to the Points of Control Map – see Tim’s keynote here.  To paraphrase some or his points:

There are companies on the map that are forgetting to think about creating a sustainable ecosystem.  Rather than growing the pie, they are trying to divide up the pie and that threatens to cause the fourth cylinder of innovation to misfire.  This fourth cylinder is essential to the ecosystem.

Tim O’Reilly looks back to the lessons of the personal computing industry which was incredibly vital and creative, and lots of people made money until a couple of big players “sucked all the air out of the ecosystem” and innovation had to go elsewhere.

The Power of Platforms is to create value not just for your company but for other people.   Create value for yourself by creating value for other people.  Tim O’Reilly used the wonderful example of  Henry Ford inventing the weekend so that there would be enough people with time and money to buy his mass produced cars.  Think about building the ecosystem that will support the future your are going to build.  Grow the pie rather than cut up the pie.  This will be the vital fourth cylinder of innovation in a Web Squared world.

Tim O’Reilly has long proposed that  Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence,  But as Gartner predicts, “By year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20 percent of non-video internet traffic.” Yet another previously unevenly distributed future is going mainstream, and if you haven’t read it already, now is the time to read this paper by Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle, Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On.

The Consequences of Living in a World of Data

To bring this very long post to a close!  Here are just a few of the key questions re The Consequences of Living in a World of Data that Tim O’Reilly raised during his keynote for Hadoop World:

“How would we solve the problem of digital identity in the age of sensors? (Our smart phones are able to know their users by the way they walk – their gait!)

“How will we input data when our devices are smart enough to listen on their own?”

“How should we think about privacy in a world where data can be triangulated?”

“We are moving to a world in which every device generates useful data, in which every action creates information shadows on the net.”

“Shouldn’t we regulate the misuse of data rather than the possession of it?”

“How do we avoid a data arms race?”

“Create more value than you capture.”

Here  is the “world premier” of  the  ARWave demo – also see on youtube here.  Below are the slides from our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook presenting on “10 reasons Why Ar Not a Flash in the Pan,”  Jeremy Hight, spoke on “Augmenting the Map,”  Sophia Parafina presented on “Citizen Sensor,” and I presented the “ARWave” project.  These slides are also posted on the Where 2.0 site.  Joe Lamantia was unable to come from Europe due to last minute obstacles, but you can check out his slide deck here. The videos of the Where 2.0 keynotes are up, and I highly recommend watching what went on at this watershed event.

We got so much positive feedback for the ARWave project at Where 2.0 that I am very excited about the next steps, and about our session at WhereCamp tomorrow.

WhereCamp will be at Google, Maxwell Tech Talk and the buzz continues!  The latest from WhereCamp is:  WE ARE OVER-SUBSCRIBED. HOWEVER PLEASE SIGN UP ANYWAY. THE EVENT TAKES PLACE OVER TWO DAYS. IF WE REALLY HAVE TO TURN PEOPLE AWAY ON SATURDAY YOU CAN STILL COME ON SUNDAY.  Hope to see you there!

HomeCamp is a home hacking, automation and green technology community that will be gathering in London tomorrow, Saturday 25th April 2009, 10am until 6pm BST (GMT + 1), and in an OpenSim event running alongside for virtual participation, to brainstorm new possibilities for distributed sustainability, creative smart meters, monitoring, graphing and visulaizing energy usage.

More details and videos on the blog. The wiki, which includes signup, is the main portal to all the online activity.

As James Governor notes here:

there has been a huge amount of code and applications released focused purely on using technology for home energy monitoring and automation.  We have an active google group and quite a few videos and content showcasing the various applications and hardware currently being used by geeks to save money and live greener.

Now the challenge is to see how this seedling home energy management movement can really grow into widely adopted distributed sustainability solutions that everyone can use, and participate in.

Both Chris Dalby (see here), Andy Piper, James Governor of Monkchips (see here),  and Tom Raftery of GreenMonk (see here), have posted on tomorrow’s HomeCamp event. So I am just going to add some quick notes, especially to highlight some of what will be going on virtually for those of you, like me, who can’t make it to London.

You can tune in either on the live video ustream, or sign up on ReactionGrid and join the OpenSim event. Also, you can keep up on what is happening on Twitter #homecamp. I highly recommend that you catch Tom Raftery’s talk which will be streamed from Spain live into the London meeting, the OpenSim event on ReactionGrid, and Ustream. Tom Raftery, a leading Green technology analyst at RedMonk (see also GreenMonk), will be picking up, in depth, on some themes raised in his brilliant ETech 2009 presentation, “Electricity 2.0: Applying the Lessons of the Web to Our Energy Networks.”

There will be homecampers dropping in to virtual homecamp in ReactionGrid throughout the day, including Chris Hart (the awesome “girl-geek”@dstrawberrygirl), MiketheBee, and Cminion, who has a number of cool projects to demo, including his energy turbines.  Dave Pentecost (pictured above with his Tweetawatt, Pachube Orb) and I (see our presentation for EarthWeek SL here) plan to be at Virtual Homecamp on ReactionGrid between 9am and 10.30am EST. Dave has done a number of cool energy monitoring hacks including a Pachube link to and from OpenSim.

Also keep your eye on Dave’s blog, The Daily Glyph, for what’s new in distributed sustainability. Dave just posted some great links on Sustainable Interaction, design and work by ITP researchers and others in sustainable use of technology.

Sustainable Interaction | Main / Papers

Sustainable interaction design | Sustainable Minds

Design For the Other 90% | Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

If you are in London, look out for Oliver Goh of Shaspa as Oliver will be at Homecamp in London. As I mentioned in my previous post, Oliver will soon be launching both Shaspa commmunity and enterprise hardware and software packages for “Intelligent Energy Management.”

For a bit of homecamp history, James Governor (picture below from Chinposin), recaps  some of the successes of  the first HomeCamp here.

And last but not least, a big thanks to sponsors, CurrentCost, Greenmonk, Pachube, Onzo, and ReactionGrid,  and media partner theattick.tv who are making the London and virtual homecamp events possible.

]]> https://www.ugotrade.com/2009/04/24/homecamp-2-home-energy-management-and-distributed-sustainability/feed/ 2 https://www.ugotrade.com/2007/05/24/the-mixed-reality-metarati-at-destroy-tv-merging-art-commerce-politics-and-play/ https://www.ugotrade.com/2007/05/24/the-mixed-reality-metarati-at-destroy-tv-merging-art-commerce-politics-and-play/#comments Fri, 25 May 2007 04:36:42 +0000 http://www.ugotrade.com/2007/05/24/the-mixed-reality-metarati-at-destroy-tv-merging-art-commerce-politics-and-play/

The Mixed Reality Metarati came out to the Fuse Gallery/GHava{SL} Center for the Arts for the launch of Destroy Television Wednesday night. This ten day mixed reality interactive virtual/real “lifelogging” is an independent, art world foray from Jerry Paffendorf and Christian Westbrook of Electric Sheep Company, with collaborator and curator Annie Ok.

The MindBlizzard Blog posed the question “Who Are the Metarati?” and has begun a list on Metarati.org (Contact VeeJay Burns for more suggestions).

In the category of Immersive Worlds so far there is:

- Philip Rosedale (Linden Labs)
- Reuben Steiger (Millions of Us)
- Jerry Paffendorf (Electric Sheep Company)
- Ron Britvich (WebWorlds, Active Worlds)

I have become particularly interested in the work of a new category of Metarati – The Mixed Reality Metarati (see 3pedia for origin of term Metarati).

Mixed Reality events have been emerging everywhere lately. The millipedes are in the refrigerator now (see earlier post) and moving freely in and out of formerly sealed virtual worlds on many limbs.

MindBlizzard explains – The Digerati emerged from “the age of computers and internet, the age of information technology as we know it.”

And, now the days of the Metarati have come in – “a new era filled with Web 2.0 and immersive worlds.” (Metarati)

The Mixed Reality Metarati, are taking the next step as they begin virtualizing real life and augmenting reality in meaningful ways,” (virtualizing real life is a phrase I picked up on from CJ Chowderhead).

And, these new mash ups of virtual and real worlds, are bringing together art, science, commerce, popular culture, politics and play in new and interesting ways, to create hybrid worlds.

The title *rati, of course, has to be earned through a combination of uber geekiness and extraordinary vision

In the last few weeks, I have attended the corporate mixed reality showcases of Xerox and IBM Impact 2007, and popular culture mash ups from (Spin Martin (Eric Rice), Johnny Ming (Swords), Second Cast live podcasts, and Virtualive.tv). And, I interviewed IBM, Hursley Park Senior Inventors, and RL/SL link creators, Epredator, and CJ Chowderhead.

But, there are a wide variety of the mixed reality projects emerging. Last night, at the Destroy Television launch, I had a chance to meet several other key innovators in the mixed reality field in person.
It was an incredible pleasure to meet Nathanial Freitas (a.k.a. nat mandelbrot). He is the creator with Will Meyer and Jon Oakes, of online media sites such as such as Cruxy, MUX, and ION. (and the Cruxy Player for Second Life). Cruxy has just been selected for:

UNDER THE RADAR CONFERENCE: Entertainment & Media, June 28, 2007, Microsoft Campus – Mountain View, CA
Meet the innovators that are not only shaping the future of digital entertainment and media but are also inspiring the most important audience to do the same: us. We edit the clips, mix the sound, airbrush the pics, animate the avatars, post the video and blog the masterpiece. This isn’t digital evolution. This is digital revolution.

But, also, Nathanial Freitas is a volunteer and Board Member to groups such as the Students for a Free Tibet, Mobile Active, and The Ruckus Society.

Nathan worked with the team that went to Everest to “turn up heat on Beijing Olympics.” He was responsible for all the video streaming over satellite technology that made it possible to get the photo below, of the protest at the Chinese Mt. Everest Base Camp, in the Wall Street Journal. The activists seem to have left a lasting impression on the Chinese Government (see here).

Baghdad Streets In Real and Second Life

I also talked to Mark Wallace of 3pointD and Rik Panganiban. Rik has blogged:

the powerful new interactive exhibit “Baghdad Streets” organized by PT Witte on Better World Island (teleport SLURL). “Baghdad Streets” is an extension of the PT’s real-life-work “bringing the truth of life in the killing zone of Baghdad” to the awareness of as many people as possible. Walking through the maze (I recommend using mouse-view) brings you face to face with the reality of the conflict and its effects on innocent lives. You encounter real stories of people caught up in the conflagration, their daily frustrations, and steps you can take to encourage peace in the region.

PT Witte is Mark Wallace’s real life father, who:

has been connecting students and teachers in Baghdad and New York City for four years via email. Excerpts of these moving communications are at Better World Island as well as the project blog at 121Contact.typepad.com

Conversations Merging Art, Technology, Politics and Play

I had a long recorded conversation with Andy Fundinger. I will come back to some of the ideas we talked about. The topics ranged from the development details of SL/RL interfaces (see his blog for more), to how different cultures on Second Life would want different things out of RL/SL interfaces. And, how at this point “it was difficult to say what the widely used apps will be” (this was the message I also received earlier in the day direct from Philip Linden’s Blackberry!) But, Andy (a.k.a. Ciemaax Flintoff) and his co-developer on some SL/RL interfaces, William Ward, said they might be ready to push a few new apps out to the world, and see how people picked them up and used them.

Their project, “Weather Wisdom – RL Weather in SL, was in the NMC Connect art show.

Here’s the finished in-world build:

And the finished real world controller:

Also, at the Destroy TV art and technology, SL/RL, mashup/meetup were Marshall Sponder artist, blogger and web analyst for IBM, and Matthew Rodriguez. I met them both at MobileCampNYC. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Derek Lerner. But, we met briefly. And, when I checked out Ghava.com later, I wished we had talked. Ghava is an artist collective and agency that explores the collaborative process and its effects on commercial and fine art projects.

And, in the picture below (on right) the award winning machinimist Pierce Portcarrero talking with artist Ryan Ford.

Check out PierceP’s cool mixed reality machinima here.

Tags: Second Life | Web 2.0 | Web 3D | Web 3.D | Machinima | Mixed Reality | Augmented Reality | Metarati | Digerati | Baghdad | Free Tibet | Beijing Olympics 2008 | Cruxy | Destroy TV | Virtual Worlds | Virtual Reality |

These two pictures are from Nicolas Nova’s Media and Design Lab, Mediamatic Workshop, Amsterdam, May 2007 (see Pasta and Vinegar). The picture on the left is what hybridization is NOT about – rather think from a less utilitarian point of view as in picture on the right. (Nicolas Nova).

This IS What hybridization is about!

Destroy Television (DTV)

If you live in New York City, or can get here, you have an amazing opportunity to participate in a full on hybridization experience, this Wednesday May 23rd:

Go to the Other Here to get:

some background and details (when, where, who, what, why/vision) on the Destroy Television art show at Fuse Gallery, GHava{SL}, dtv.sheeplabs.com, and in Second Life. Take a look, come hang out in New York or Second Life during this Wednesday’s opening, and plan your performance if you want to make a splash in Destroy Television The Movie. On this…..

Invitation To Attend And Participate In The Destroy Television 10-Day Second Life Avatar Lifelogging Art Show Movie…Thing

Destroy Television is the name of an avatar in Second Life who streams live video of her life and adventures to dtv.sheeplabs.com, where you see and chat and influence her movement and camera controls in SL from the web. But wait! There’s more! Destroy Television, or DTV for short, records and shares her life through a process called “lifelogging” or “lifecasting” (to define terms, logging is keeping the record and casting is sharing it live — a popular example of real life lifecasting is the 24/7 mobile camera at justin.tv).

An avatar of Justin in Second Life

We wonder if lifelogging in virtual worlds, that is, taking advantage of virtual worlds having essentially baked-in wireless internet and communications, cameras, GPS, RFID, and meta data about people and locations, will help prototype a more transparent, searchable, and personally and socially and globally understandable real world — the reeeaaally flat world.

Data Blogging – an advanced form of blogging.

Collecting the traces of new interaction partners is a trend in hybridization.

Question: Why would objects want to blog? Why would I be interested? (see Julian Bleeker’s blog on Techkwondo)

Answer: Traces (where you have been where you are going in a geospatial sense), history, (“turn a history on interactions into a continuous experience – object to learn from their histories”), content production (see The Aibo [the toy dog] That Blogs), and agency – e.g., having a voice in cultural circulation on public networks -streams, feeds, trackbacks, permalinks, wiki and blog posts.

Critter Cams from Nicolas Nova

And, we cannot ignore, reality mining and lifelogging’s shadow “big brother” (Justin cop helmet cams are all the rage too now).

Hybridization at an “Unconference”

Jose Marinez, at MobileCampNYC, presenting on, “The Poor man’s SMS Gateway.” There are instructions for setting up the SMS gateway on his blog

On Saturday (May 19th) our whole family went to MobileCampNYC. For a very generous description of our presentation, “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion,” see Marshall Sponder at WebMetricsGuru.

Nokia (who unveiled a beta mobile web server) lavishly sponsored the event and supplied an abundance of Nokia 95s, some of which were given away. A bit disappointed not to get one the Ugotrade family went shopping for their N 80 IE’s that evening with our co-presenter on “Metaverse and The mobile space, Rich LaBaca.

While as Dave Winer, Scripting News, commented:

People don’t seem ready yet to accept that knowledge is distributed through the room, we’re here to be taught.

I felt MobileCampNYC, an “unconference,” did maintain the feeling of a hybrid event. Presentations from corporate giants rubbed shoulders with more down to earth innovations such as “The Poor Man’s SMS Gateway,” Dave Harper, founder of Winksite, Cocoa UltraSMS, Paul Notzold – txtual healing ” (see Marshall Sponder for an excellent write up ), “Mashup your phone with GPS” – WHERE.com, Mexuar – who will soon be announcing a very interesting new app. for Second Life, and then there was the Ugotrade family road show!

Akaalias uploaded this picture of Ugotrade junior to MobileCamp’s Flickr pool noted:

This DS contained a Revolution R4 card with a microSD memory card embedded in it. I wasn’t expecting to get out-teched by a someone under 10. (noted by Everyplace )

Many thanks to everyone who played with UJ while I participated. As Akaalias observed in the title to this picture, Ugotrade Junior was on a mission to “Remote Control the Camp.”

Also, Timo Arnall flew in from Norway, just for this conference, and gave an inspiring presentation on Physical Hyperlinking.

Timo covered a lot of ground. He outlined many technologies for physical hyperlinking, and their creative uses in intereactive marketing and community projects. Go to Timo’s blog to really get a feel for how creative and far reaching his thinking is.

Timo has put many of his wonderful slides up too – RFID, “smart posters,” Bluetooth marketing – “turn on bluetooth to receive something naughty,” building size QR codes, Semapedia’s hyperlinking, experimental and niche market projects such as one to tag the provenance of craft items and unusual interpretations of QR codes, and much more.

Metaverse Roadmap

I have been quite absorbed with the Mirror World, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging quadrants of the Metaverse Roadmap lately. This picture is from Jerry Paffendorf’s (futurist for The Electric Sheep Company) blog. See here for much more on the Metaverse Roadmap project and where lifelogging and reality mining all fit in a vision of the 3D Web.

Jerry Paffendorf points out that:

massively multi-user avatar environments in whatever form, are and will become even more of a driver of the other areas [in the picture above] because of their capacity to purely simulate things digitally and because they inherently have RFID, GPS, WiFi, and metadata out the kazoo baked right into them.

You can, for example, prototype any imaginable augmented reality application inside of a virtual world, which may also be a mirror world, before you put it out onto the street, or inside of a building, or wherever out in physical space.

He also explains the importance of lifelogging and indicates what might be the future of lifelogging.

recording your actions and experiences both in the digital world and/or in the real world to create a picture of yourself over time that you can revisit to learn from and share with other people.

Linking Real Worlds and Virtual Worlds

My post on CJ Chowderhead’s virtualized lab on Second Life (in this picture with his duck that reports temperatures from Real Life locations) was picked up by several other blogs including Rob Smart’s blog, Disordered Cogitations, and Mark Wallace from 3pointD, who had this to say:

This is just one kind of application that could start to make Second Life a much more useful place. I’d love to see entities and conditions being tracked around SL in real time. Why? Because there’s a ton of information to be extracted from a digital environment, which can then be applied to real-world problems from logistics to marketing to sociology, you name it. That said, this won’t start to get really interesting until we have a nearly plug-n-play solution. Which is probably one of the things IBM is working on. Keep your sensors tuned.

All About Mobile Life also linked to the post and pointed me to the work of Mike Conway, Instanceof Idea, who has been working on “mashup info in the 3D world” in Second Life.

Mike Conway uses the freely available tools, that you and I have access to – such as Ruby On Rail’s, to get data both into SL and out to RL. He has some pretty nifty ideas he’s working on too.

He seems to be working on a storm display map that is somewhat interactive. For example, you can point and click on a storm icon on the map to bring out more information presented in what he calls flyouts (very appropriate considering dropdowns and popups are in widespread use today). He also has at least one GPS app with 2-way data. Although, he admits that the data out side is a bit buggy. The weather map also appears to have 2 way gps functionality. That is he can get the real world location of a truck and show its 3d icon on a virtual map updated as it moves. Furthermore, he talks about sending some new GPS location to it and having it go there.

Mike Conway seems to have quite a lot going on considering he is working with text streams like, RSS feeds, rather than the data input/output that IBM’s MQtt manages.

IBM IMPACT 2007 SOA event in Second Life

This picture is from the IBM Impact 2007 SOA conference that was streamed into Second Life.

SOA (service orientated architecture) is the bridge between IT and business that IBM has been pioneering. And, as far as I can tell it must be hot, hot, hot! I feel I have to mention this event, even though I need to wrap this post up. The event had the flavor of a kind of corporate Woodstock, not just because it was on an extraordinary scale for Second Life (see video on Youtube to get a sense of this), but because one got the feeling that something about this gathering was going to have a big effect on the wider culture.

And, in terms of being a global cultural mixer, it was an extraordinary event. There were multiple cultures and languages. And, aided by translator HUDs, Real Life and Second Life, and pop and corporate cultures, intermingled and exchanged ideas in kaleidosopic patterns hardly imaginable in Real Life. I am on my way back in-world as soon as this post is up!

Tags: Second Life | Web 3.D | Web 3D | Web 2.0 | physical hyperlinking | hybridization | reality mining | lifelogging | mobilecampnyc | barcamp | unconference | Impact 2007 | IBM SOA | augmented reality | mirror worlds | virtual worlds | lifescasting | Destroy Television | sensor mapping | GPS | QR codes | mobile space | mobile innovation | Nokia | bluetooth marketing | RFID | interactive marketing | WiFi | Metaverse Roadmap | blogjects | geospatial mapping | SOA | IBM on Second Life | data blogging | virtual worlds | virtual reality |

2D bar codes, or “QR codes,” made their debut (input as data) in Second Life today, thanks to the efforts of Dave Conway-Jones “CJ Chowderhead.”

This morning, CJ kindly spent time doing an interview with me. But, of course, if you are lucky enough to meet an inventor, what you really want is an invention! And, CJ Chowderhead did not disappoint. He came up with a solution to an on the spot request to bring a 2D bar code into Second Life, not merely as a texture or image, but as a QR code sent as data and readable by a mobile phone from within 2nd Life. If you project that image full screen (while in SL) a phone should be able to read it.

The QR code in this pic points at the eightbar blog. And, so yet another way to bring 1L and 2L (RL and SL) together, or at least build a small bridge between them, is born. Could it be a seed for a form of hyperlinking in Second Life?

Dave Conway-Jones” is a Senior inventor, IBM Hursley Park, Winchester, UK. He works in the “Emerging Technology Service Group.” In real life he builds and experiments with sensor networks designed to monitor real life, real time devices. These are often used for asset monitoring systems and process control. (If you are not familiar with these terms think Dow jones or your personal stock portfolio for “asset monitoring,” and robotic production lines or automated lab analysis for “process control.” Not that either of these are the actual applications that CJ is working with – at least as far as I know. I’m just trying to establish a general understanding.)

Virtualizing Real Life in a Meaningful Way

I can use Second Life to virtualize my real life sensors and see them in a more meaningful way – or more. abstract way or more interesting way – or whatever else we feel like (CJ Chowderhead).

For this project they use the IBM MQtt messaging system that Ginger Mandelbrot invented to hook all the monitoring devices together. And, Yossarian Seattle (also Rob Smart of Eightbar and creator of the much lauded SL Translator HUD), created the link from MQtt to Second Life so that messages can flow in and out of Second Life.

CJ explained to me what is going on in these pictures of his virtual office in Second Life. And, here is some of what I picked up on (we talked on skype, so I didn’t have the SL chat log to go back to!).

The floor plan is of the offices surrounding CJ in Real Life. The blue balls with white designs represent active Bluetooth devices. The pyramids scattered about the floor represent other people working, with the color designating things like physical presence or telepresence. The flame in the pic on the left is a probe under the lamp, “so when lamp is on the temp goes up.” The black rectangle in the righthand pic is a RL door (so CJ knows when someone enters his lab).

I don’t remember what CJ said about the flowerpot. But, a good guess might be that it represents the output of a bevy of environmental sensors such as temperature, humidity and light, the same things that a plant would need to thrive. I am also guessing about the building with the smoke coming out of the chimney. But, it could well represent air quality monitors.

I do know about the the duck on CJ’s shoulder though! It speaks and says:

“Quack ! The temperature in CJ’s 1st life Greenhouse is 24.0 degrees C,” or for outside or inside CJ’s house – randomly.

The pink bunny slippers no doubt represents someone always hopping around, dealing with so many different issues and problems like we all do occasionally.

Sensor Map projects have a lot of potentially very cool applications, and huge societal implications. 3pointD recently posted on this, “mirror worlds,” and Microsoft’s recent offer of “unrestricted funding” for the development of geospatial and mapping applications.

Mobile Phones as a Virtual/Real Interface

CJ explained how they use mobile phones as an interface to the data (represented in SL) both for input (voice, text, and now even bar codes!) as well as for output in the form of dashboards (think of a car dashboard of gages and other information presented in the form of instrumental readouts).

Semapedia - hyperlink your world:
QR codes will be a hot topic at MobileCampNYC

A Semapedia tag going up!

For those who have not yet been introduced to QR codes, they are a way of representing more information than can generally be put into your standard grocery store bar code. One of the big adopters of this has been Nokia who developed software for many of their phones to be able to translate these into URLs and lookup web pages of appropriate information about something near where someone has placed one of these 2DBC’s.

Semapedia is collecting and mapping sites where many of these QRs have been placed.

Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

To accomplish this, we invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. You just hyperlinked your world! Others can now use their cellphone to ‘click’ your Tag and access the information you provided them.

Twitter Users Second Life Meet Up

The Meet Up organized by 57 Miles of Metaversed today was packed with Twitterati and Metarati whose uber connecting creates flows all around the Web and the Metaverse. Apps like SLTweets, Twitterbox, Squawk, Jaiku (see Metaverse’s 5 ways to integrate your Second Life into the web), Flickr (and see Mashable for more on SL plus Web 2.0 Virtual World Mashups) and Snapzilla (post cards from life #2) were probably all in action this morning as the chat ranged across many hot topics. Wrestling Hulka was posting to Tumblr.

Johnny Ming sported a Jaiku sign – showing his continued allegiance to just saying no to the unpleasant symptoms of Twitter cat allergy?

Chisel’s Inventor, Vyrnox Ming, talked about a HUD that “works rather well with the Electric Sheep Company’s search.

And Fox Diller, of Crystal Studio, explained the work they have done running 120 sims for their client Sprott-Shaw with their own grid/asset/login/sim services. Also, Fox has a Second Life client running on the Motorola Q Smartphone.

This was my first Twitter Meet Up on Second Life. But, if you want to know what is happening on the frontiers of Virtual Worlds and Web 2.0, it is a good place to hang out. And, even though there were a lot of avatars, 57 Miles did a great job of welcoming all. See you next time!

Tags: Second Life | Web 2.0 | Augmented Reality | Semapedia | physical hyperlinks | Twitter MeetUp | IBM Hursley Park | sensor maps | lifelogging | virtual reality | internet of things | social media | social networking | IBM inventors | QR codes | virtual world mashups |

My friend and partner in many R & D adventures, Otto Leichliter, veteran of Ericsson’s Messaging R & D team, 3D vision, robotics, special effects for film and television, and system development, will be helping me lead a discussion, “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion” at MobileCampNYC .

We will talk about how the standard pipeline of WiFi will transform cell phones, from the “mashup consumers” they are now, into true interface engines that open up the relationship between real and virtual worlds. And how, as the metaverse meets the mobile space, 3D printers/fabricators may be both the killer app. for virtual worlds and sustainable development.

But, the topic is wide open. And, if you would like to help us lead this discussion, please add your name to the wiki page.

A Fab@Home Model 1 Fabber. See PopSci – The Desktop Factory

Roboticist Hod Lipson wants you to stop shopping and use his portable 3-D printer to make your own stuff.

I hope to see you at MobileCampNYC, if you live in the Metropolitan NY area. Please add your name to the wiki now if you want to attend as there is a limit of 100 people! MobilecampNYC is a BarCamp:

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The name is a playful allusion to its origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off from Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only unconference hosted by open source publishing luminary, Tim O’Reilly.

A BarCamp in progress in Chennai, India. Original image at Kiruba’s Blog.

WiFi to link Virtual and Real Worlds

The difference between WiFi and all the various cell phone protocols currently in use is the equivalent to the difference between public access and pay per view.

WiFi is based on the TCP/IP networking communication standards and not some oddball proprietary standard that only Telcos provide.

TCP/IP is the network standard and must ultimately become the mobile phone standard as well if cell phones are to become true linking engines between virtual and real worlds. Otherwise phones will continue to be (as they are now) consumers of (costly) services, that are regulated and restricted and far from open source or user friendly.

WAP, 3G , GPRS, WAP (Wireless Access Protocol), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)?, 3G, GSM, EDGE, TDMA, CDMA – don’t worry if you don’t know all these – the point is that WiFi can leapfrog them all with direct access to the internet, and that includes internet telephony and (with the resolution of bandwidth issues) access to virtual worlds like Second Life.

People used to talk about service anytime, anywhere – it shouldn’t matter if that’s a real or a virtual anywhere.
Zygmunt Lozinski, IBM

And, as bandwidth obstacles diminish, there will be, increasingly, a natural interaction between virtual and real worlds. And, our experience of virtual and real mixed mode events, and augmented reality events e.g. Second Life HUDs (Heads Up Displays) integrated with Real Life events will not, of course, be limited to qwerty keyboards and monitors.

The integration of virtual and real worlds in the mobile space has significant implications for developing countries and sustainable development (see several earlier posts on Ugotrade on role of mobile phones in developing countries, and also see earlier post on Bruce Sterling and Splimes).

Building Bridges Between Virtual and Real Worlds:
It doesn’t have to be all headsets and Sci Fi.

Bridge building between virtual worlds and real worlds via the mobile space is not merely in the realm of speculation. Last Friday, I was fortunate to spend time with Ian Hughes (a.k.a Epredator), Metaverse Evangelist, Senior Inventor and Innovation Catalyst and Consulting IT Specialist, with about 17 years in IBM. My inspiration to do the discussion on “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion,” at MobilecampNYC came from this meeting with Epredator on Second Life.

I met Epredator on one of the many IBM islands on Second Life. And, he took me to several locations during the interview. However, IBM’s presence on Second Life is far to extensive to cover in one post, so I will come back to other aspects of IBM’s exploration of virtual worlds and Second Life in later posts.

It was very exciting to have this opportunity to meet one of the pioneers of the merger of virtual and real worlds. Ian Hughes brought Wimbledon to Second Life and this project is an outstanding proof of concept demonstrating how real data can be gathered pumped to the web and to Second Life, and also to Real Life to produce a mixed reality event.

On Eightbar Ian Hughes describes a number of different ideas that were demonstrated by bringing Wimbledon to Second Life. He explained to me:

We gather the real data and pump it to the web, pump it to SL, and also to real life scoreboards on-site……so if someone wants to see the hawkeye replay, or overlay the line call, we have all the data. And, with a WiFi network we can merge the two.

It doesn’t have to be all headsets and Sci Fi. I could hold my mobile phone up and use the screen as a viewer through which to superimpose the data.

Mobile – “anywhere you need it” in virtual and real worlds: overcoming patchy connectivity

IBM caused quite a stir at the recent 3GSM World Congress where Zygmunt Lozinski showed off a service button that calls someone in Real Life and patches them in to Second Life. In an interview to BBC Click Online, Mr Lozinski said:

So for example, you can make your avatar ring a bell, like in a hotel lobby, and that would send a message to the owner of that area, to their mobile phone, to say ‘there’s somebody who’s interested in talking to you’. Because obviously you can’t spend your entire life in a virtual shop hanging around waiting for someone to stop by and buy something.

You can then see a photo of the avatar who’s calling you. You can then record a video with your mobile, and send that back so your potential customer can see that video being played to them on a video wall in the virtual world.

In effect, IBM’s model removes the need for people to exist within a virtual world.

If you’re traveling you may not always have good enough connectivity to interact with people in a virtual world, even if you need to. People can communicate irrespective of whether they’re in the virtual or real worlds.

Helping people link to virtual worlds despite patchy connectivity will have significant implications for the role virtual worlds can play in positive global development.

“3D printing is a real killer app. tacked on the side of Second Life,” says Epredator

Epredator stood for a capture session in SL, and then received a parcel from Michael at fabjectory containing “this excellent Epredator potato figure straight out of a 3d printer,” (see eightbar for more great pictures).

In my interview with Epredator, he brought up how important local manufacturing elements, 3D printers and Home “Fabbers” could be for sustainable development.

We spend a lot of time shipping products around, packaged to travel. [This could be avoided in many cases] if we rezzed them in the real world at the point we needed them from basic raw materials.

If you want to buy a product from a website and you have local 3D printing we only have to ship the model information.

Well as you you can see, my chat with Epredator left me with a lot to think about. There was so much ground covered that I will have to come back to these ideas in later posts.

As I mentioned in my previous post, and see eightbar, at IBM, Hursley, they are dreaming up the internet of things at every opportunity they get!

I do hope, if you can, you come to MobileCampNYC to discuss some of these ideas about blurring the lines between virtual and real worlds and linking the Metaverse with The Mobile Space.

MobileCampNYC is bringing together mobile enthusiasts, explorers and professionals from the NYC metropolitan area to share the current state and their visions for the future direction of mobility. MobileCampNYC hopes to support the many voices helping to unlock the potential of a truly digital life. Topics may include – but are not limited to – mobile gaming, entrepreneurship, social mobility and presence, near field communication, physical hyperlinking, mobile storytelling, the importance of open standards, protocols, and platforms, linux based devices, and mobility on other continents.

Tags: Second Life | Web 2.0 | Web 3.D | Metaverse | Virtual Worlds | Virtual Reality | Augmented Reality | Barcamp | MobileCampNYC | IBM | IBM on Second Life | Zygmunt Lozinski | Epredator | WiFi telephony | open standards | internet connectivity | 3D Printing | home fabbers | 3GSM | fabathome | home fabber | fabjectory | Wimbledon on Second Life | digital divides | social entrepreneurship | positive global development | sustainable development | internet telephony | internet of things | splimes | Bruce Sterling | mobile innovation |