Singly’s appearance at the startup showcase at Strata 2011 this week has excited thought leaders across the web since the story got out. Singly is a new startup that exists to provide oxygen and commercial support to the open source Locker Project, and new protocol TeleHash.

With some wonderful serendipity I met Singly on my first night at Strata.  The next day, I talked in depth to Jeremie Miller and Simon Murtha-Smith, two of the three Singly co-founders (see later in this post). I also had the opportunity to ask Tim O’Reilly, Alistair Croll and Roger Magoulas for some of their thoughts on the significance of this project (see below for their comments).

It was a real – pinch myself in case I need to wake up from a dream experience – for me, to stumble across Jeremie Miller with Simon Murtha-Smith sitting behind a hand written sign demoing Singly at Strata (see my  pic opening this post). As Marshall Kirkpatrick notes:

“Jeremie Miller is a revered figure among developers, best known for building XMPP, the open source protocol that powers most of the Instant Messaging apps in the world. Now Miller has raised funds and is building a team that will develop software aimed directly at the future of the web.”

Singly’s appearance at Strata began auspiciously when they won the judges choice award in the startup showcase. And following Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post, Creator of Instant Messaging Protocol to Launch App Platform for Your Life , and The Locker Project: Why Leave Data Tracking to Others? Do It Yourself, Singly have been burning up Twitter.

Singly, by giving people the ability to do things with their own data, has the potential to change our world.  And, as Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, this won’t be the first time Jeremie has done that.

“Pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration,” by Bloom

I was drawn over to the Singly table when an awesome app they were demonstrating caught my eye. Fizz, which is running on a locker with data aggregated from three different places is a first glimpse of one of Bloom’s, “pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration.”

Fizz is an intriguing early manifestation of capabilities never seen before on the web – the ability for us to control, aggregate, share and play with our own data streams, and bring together the bits and pieces of our digital selves scattered about the web (for more about Bloom and Singly, see Tim O’Reilly’s comments below). The picture below is my Fizz. In Fizz, large circles represent people and small circles represent their status updates. Bloom says:

“Clicking a circle will reveal its contents. Typing in the search box will highlight matching statuses.
This is an early preview of our work and we’ll be adding more features in the next few weeks. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions.”

If you are not already familiar with The Bloom team, Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, and Jesper Sparre Andersen – go directly to their about page and you will understand why the match of Bloom and The Locker Project is a cause for great delight.

The Locker Project – a whole new way to connect from the protocol up

As Jeremie began explaining the depth and breadth of what The Locker Project is facilitating, I was utterly gob smacked. And when the penny dropped and I realized this is the whole 9 yards, bringing awesomeness to people with a whole new way to connect, from the protocol up, all I could think was, OMG finally!

Luckily I have had time to catch up with the whole team since then, and recovered my composure enough to ask some coherent questions. But I can still barely contain my enthusiasm for this project.

Singly, The Locker Project and TeleHash take on, and deliver a simple, elegant, and open solution to some of the holy grails of the next generation of networked communications. I have written on, and been nibbling at the edges of some of these grails in various projects myself for quite a while now. Even if you haven’t been reading Ugotrade, just a glance at the monster mash of my pre Strata post will give you an idea of how important I think Singly is.

My previous post raised the question of how to invert the search pyramid and to transform search into a social, democratic act. But if you are really interested in social search, I suggest staying keyed into what Singly is doing with The Locker Project!

One of Singly’s three founders, Simon Murtha-Smith, was building a company called Introspectr, a social aggregator and search product. Singly’s other founder Jason Cavnar was working on another similar project. And they came together as Singly because social aggregation and search is a very hard problem for one company to solve, and they realized that the basic infrastructure needs to be open source and built on an open protocol.

As Jeremie puts it, “We shouldn’t…(every startup that wants to do something interesting) have to spend this much time aggregating the data, building robust aggregators.”

To me what is so important about the Locker Project is that it is built on a new open protocol, TeleHash. And having the Singly team focused on supplying tools and the trust/security layer for the Locker Project will mean that developers have the whole stack they need to do some interesting stuff very soon.

I asked Jeremy to explain the relationship between TeleHash, The Locker Project and Singly.

Tish Shute: So TeleHash…

Jeremie Miller: It’s a peer-to-peer protocol to move bits of data for applications around. Not file sharing, but it’s for actual applications to find each other and connect. So if you had an app and I had an app, whenever we’re running that app on our devices, we can actually find those other devices from each other and then connect. Our applications can connect and do something.

For the entire edge of the network, basically, out there in the wild, and let those things mesh together.

And TeleHash is actually what has led to the Locker project itself.

Tish Shute: So TeleHash led to the The Locker Project and the Locker Project led to Singly?

Jeremie Miller: Singly is a company who is sponsoring the open source Locker Project…the three of us as founders, [left to right in pic below - Jeremie Miller, Jason Cavnar, Simon Murtha-Smith, ]

I took the pic above of all three founders being interviewed by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web for his post, “Creator of Instant Messaging Protocol to Launch App Platform for Your Life.“  I think we will look back on this moment and say it was an inflection point for the web. At least I tweeted that!

Jeremie Miller: TeleHash is a protocol that lets the lockers connect with each other and share things. The locker is like all of your data. So it’s sort of like a digital person…

Tish Shute: A locker for bits and pieces your digital self?

Jeremie Miller: Yes. So TeleHash lets the lockers connect and directly peer-to-peer connect with each other and share things. Singly, as a company, is going to be hosting lockers first and foremost. But the Locker Project is an open source project. You can have a locker in your machine or you can install it wherever you want…

Tish Shute: Yes it’s often too difficult for a lot of people to set up something locally…so Singly makes it easy to have a locker right?

Jeremie Miller: A lot of people see this cool app or this cool thing they want to do, it’s something that you run in your locker that they need to be able to turn on a locker somewhere very easily.

Tish Shute: So Singly will provide the trust layer and hosting?

Jeremie Miller: Yeah, Singly is a company that will host lockers, as well as…when people build applications that run inside your lockers or use your data, you need to be able to trust them. Maybe it’s like social data and you don’t care that much. But especially once you start to get any of your transactions in there, your browsing history, your health data, like your running logs or sleeping…fit-bit stuff…then it’s much more important to be careful about what you’re running inside your locker and sharing.

So Singly will also look at the applications that are available that you can install and actually run them and look at what data they access, and look at who created them, and be able to come back and either certify or vouch for them.

And I hope in the long-run, as this grows and builds, that power users may actually be able to buy a little device that they can plug into their home network that is their locker. Wouldn’t that be cool? This little hard drive or whatever that you plug in.

Tish Shute: Wow – that would be very cool! Architecturally is TeleHash and the Locker Project related to your work on XMPP?

Jeremie Miller: Architecturally, some of the stuff I’ve learned, XMPP, in Jabber it was designed for the specific purpose of instant messaging, but it was still a federated model, in that you still had to go through sort of a central point so you could…a server that lived somewhere. So it was really optimized for like businesses and small groups, teams, as well as big companies out there; ISPs can use it.

So it was designed with that in mind—for the communication path to be routed through somewhere. And where I’ve sort of evolved over the years since then is really fascinated with truly distributed protocols that are completely sort of decentralized so that things are going peer-to-peer instead of actually through any server.

The last 10 years, peer-to-peer has gotten a pretty bad rap with file sharing.

Tish Shute: A really bad rap, yes.

Jeremie Miller: Yeah. And almost because of that, and because it’s really hard to do, that it hasn’t gotten…the potential for it’s awesome. There’s so many really good things that can be done peer-to-peer. And it hasn’t gotten used very much.

But the other side of the peer-to-peer thing that I think is critically important, look at the explosion of the computing devices around a person anymore, both in the home and on our person. We have one, two, three, four even. And the number of devices that are online for you that are yours…I look at my home network router and I’ve got 30 devices in my house on Wi-Fi. What the heck? That’s a lot of devices.

But right now, all of those devices, for me to work with them, I’m almost always going through a server somewhere, through a data center somewhere, which is ridiculous at face value. You go five, 10 years out from now, there’s probably going to be 300 devices on me in some form.

Tish Shute: So we need a peer-to-peer network just to manage our own devices?

Jeremie Miller: A peer-to-peer, yes. You know, my phone should be talking straight to my computer, or to the iPad, or to the washing machine, or refrigerator. The applications in my TV, or whatever, they should all be talking peer-to-peer. And it should be easy to do that. It shouldn’t be that the only way you can do that is to go through a data center somewhere.

[Our conversation continued, but to sum things up, for now, here is the final question I asked Jeremie which pretty much packs in everything I would like to do with TeleHash, the Locker project, and Singly tools/trust layer all in one!]

Tish Shute: How can TeleHash, the Locker, and Singly help people combine personal data from different sources – web and mobile for example, so the data locked up in our social graph on the web can be integrated with, for example, the location data and “the data wake” from our cell phone sensors, to know not only where we have been but to give us more ways to know where we are going?

Jeremie Miller: That’s a pretty packed question, but here’s my simple answer, hopefully just seeds the right discussion

Telehash is the protocol that lets the apps (mobile, sensor, or anywhere) talk to a locker as well as lockers talk to each other, it’s the chatter, moving the bits around the network. The locker is the storage for a person’s data and the crunching ability to analyze it or trigger actions from it. Singly is the company sponsoring the project(s) and helping anyone dev apps atop it. We’re going to build the platform and looking to the world to create some amazing things on top of it (we have lots of our own personal ideas we already want to create, hah!).

The Locker Project is not just “one more rebel army trying to undo these big data aggregations,” Tim O’Reilly

@lockerproject: “We’ll be posting updates on the Locker Project (https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker) here as we make progress, very awesome stuff “

During the Strata Media Conversation I asked Roger Magoulas about Singly and The Locker Project because Roger played Yentl and brought Singly and Bloom together!  Although there was not much time to discuss it, the relationship of TeleHash, The Locker project and Singly to the social network encumbents, came up, and Roger Magoulis and Tim O’Reilly gave some very insightful comments on this when I talked to them afterwards (see below).

Roger Magoulas pointed out:

“I think Singly has Facebook like aspects, but I think a better description is an app platform that integrates your personal and social network data – including data from Facebook. Sing.ly is likely to have challenges with some of their data sources, particularly if Sing.ly gains traction with users.

I like the app platform business model, although they face risks getting critical mass and app developer attention, and I like how they plan on using open source connectors to keep up with changing social network platforms. Jeremie has credibility with the open source community and is likely to find cooperating developers. The team seems to bring complementary strengths to the project and you can tell they all work well together. ”

And Tim O’Reilly went on to elaborate the awesome potential of this platform to bring something new to the ecosystem, and to comment on just how interesting Bloom’s insight into, “data visualization as a means of input and control” is.

Talking with Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: So will the Locker Project be able to break the lock of Facebook’s and other big sites’ control of everyone’s data. Sometimes I feel we are stuck in the era of Zyngification, where you have to do what Zynga did and leverage the system in order to gain traction or do anything with social data?

Tim O’Reilly: I don’t think that is the objective of the Locker Project —to break the Facebook lock, because I tend to agree, the value of Facebook is having your data there with other people’s data. What Singly may be able to accomplish is to give people better tools for managing their data. Because if you can actually start to abstract the data from various sites and you can set it and manage it yourself, then you can potentially make better decisions about what you’re going to allow and not allow. Because right now, the interfaces on a lot of these sites make it very, very difficult to understand exactly what the implications are.

And I think all this done right will create a marketplace where people will build better interfaces that will give people more control over their data. They’ll still want to put it on those sites, because why do you put your money in the bank? You know, because it’s more valuable being with other people’s money.

And I think that to conceive of it as one more rebel army trying to undo these big data aggregations is just the wrong way to frame it.

Tish Shute: Yes and framing the question the way you just did – that this is not just one more rebel army, might mean that the stage at Strata will be filled with new startups next year! That’s what I thought when I found out what The Locker Project and Singly was about – that we are about to see an explosion of creativity with personal and social data.

Tim O’Reilly: Yeah, sure. I mean, because at the end of the day, if you can start to extract your personal data in ways that make it more useful, you can potentially create the ability for people to build better interfaces. It’s not just Facebook.

You know, you think, “Oh, wow, I’d really like to have a management console for all my contacts.” And you go, “Well, I’m stuck with, I can use Facebook, I can use LinkedIn, I can use my address book in Outlook or Gmail or whatever, or on my local machine.” The tools are pretty primitive. And if we get a better set of tools, I think we’ll see a lot of innovation.

Now, some of those startups might well be acquired by a Facebook or a Google. But it if moves the ball forward in giving people better visibility and control over their data, that’s a good thing.

Bloom’s insight, “data visualization will become a means of input and control.”

Tish Shute: I loved the marriage with Bloom, which is interesting, because Ben and the Bloom team haven’t really talked a lot about Bloom yet, but I gather Bloom is moving to consumer facing work with data?

Tim O’Reilly: What’s really interesting about Bloom is the notion…You know people think of data visualization as output. And the insight that I think Ben has had with Bloom is that data visualization will become a means of input and control.

Tish Shute: Right, very cool.

Tim O’Reilly: So I’ve started to feel like data visualization as a way of making sense of complex data is kind of a dead-end. Because what you really want to do is to build these feedback loops where you actually figure something out, some particular atomic action well enough that you can create an application that let’s somebody actually do something with it. But the idea of visualization as a way of manipulating the data in real-time, data visualization as interface rather than as a report, it’s a small but subtle shift that I think becomes kinda cool.

Talking with Alistair Croll

Sing.ly – Join or Die from Singly Inc on Vimeo.

Alistair Croll: So I’m a big fan of Singly. They were my choice for the Startup Showcase. I think it’s certainly the right time – the team can execute on it. But the thing I like the most is I thought back to the early days of Photoshop.

So, Photoshop was a neat application that could take data in the form of an image and manipulate it. But the real value from Photoshop came from these amazing plugins. Like, there’s a company called Kai’s Power Tools that made these things that would allow you to do manipulations. Today, commonplace things that are built in. But at the time, they were things like building bubbles, and spheres, and drop shadows and stuff like that, cutouts, in amazing ways.

Another company, I think, called Alien Skin that made these things. There’s whole ecosystems of plugins. So you could go and get a plugin and transform that original data in ways you hadn’t thought of. And eventually, there was a macro language for scripting how you could do those things, and that found its way into the Photoshop environment.

But you think about the transformation of digital design from Photoshop, I think if you can take that same pattern of you create the basic ecosystem of a few tools, and then you allow people an open system on top of that, that’s unprecedented. I think it really does allow you to take ownership of that.

And then when you allow people the proper tools to federate that information. I was actually thinking of starting a company a couple of years ago based on data federation like that. But what you really want to say is I’ve got a pattern…It’s almost like a multi-channel mixer. You’ve got a band that is your health, your weight, your blood pressure, family photos, words you’ve used. You know, the more data I record when I carry my phone around with a headset of whatever, all of that stuff goes in, all my searches, everything.

And then I say, “Ah, I want to federate height, weight, and blood pressure with my doctor. I want to federate sleep cycles and nutrition with my child’s teacher,” and so on and so on. And you start to create these federated sources of data where now you have a teacher data mining, in a safe manner, the sleep and health habits of all the students along with report card information. And you suddenly realize that Johnny is borderline diabetic and falls asleep at recess.

That’s something that never would have happened. And that happens when you have tools to federate data and then compute on top of them. So this idea of, like, lifestreaming or life logging, this is a logical consequence of the whole lifestreaming movement; that whole recorded future stuff.

Tish Shute: Yes it really is a wonderful fruition to the visions of the lifestreaming movement [see this interview with David Galernter]. And best of all it sits on a new open protocol, TeleHash and the open source Locker Project that will give tools to everyone to work with these data streams.

Alistair Croll: Exactly. This is the toolset that sits on top of that stuff. Because once I’ve life-streamed everything, great, I have this bucket of stuff that I did that I never look at again. But if I can suddenly unlock that with data mining tools and analyze patterns, all of a sudden that life logging has a reason to have existed.

The biggest problem we have with data right now is we don’t have apriori knowledge of what will be useful. We could have been recording crime reports in the city of Chicago, and a year later it turns out that data is really useful for predicting diabetes in the city, but we didn’t know it was related.

So the problem, and one of the things I think that distinguishes big data from traditional data, traditional data is collected to some apriori knowledge of how it will be used. Big data tends to be collected for the sake of…it’s almost collected on faith that later on it will be useful for something.

Tish Shute: I am very interested in this idea of federation, I actually went as far as to deep dive into Wave servers because of this….

Alistair Croll: Yeah, Wave was a great example of federation, just too complicated. When it was canceled, both users [and developers] were furious.

Tish Shute: Yeah, I suppose you could see Google Wave as a bit of an Icarus project, right? I am so excited by Singly because it is coming sort of bottom-up – a very different approach…

Alistair Croll: And remember, Facebook didn’t work before Friendster. The only difference between being wrong and being too early is that too early costs a lot of money. So it may be that this is an idea that works now, but a couple years ago didn’t work.

Alistair Croll, co-chair of Strata 2011, in his post, reframed the question, “Who Owns Your Data?” as, “It’s not who owns the data, it’s about who can put the data to work.”

And I am sure there will be many more people able to put data to work, and into play, in a multitude of  interesting ways, now we have TeleHash, the Locker Project, and Singly.

Photo by Duncan Davidson.
Strata 2011 is presented by O’Reilly Media. Produced by Good Company Communications.

I think the photo above gives a good idea of how I felt on the last day at the Strata conference. Yup – like the cat who got the cream!

And in case you are wondering where AR is in this story – it is everywhere!  Below is a pic of the AR concept designs that were omnipresent in the media communications at Strata.  The one below I snapped off the job board.  But as Sophia Parafina noted,  “AR is maturing from displaying last year’s text bubbles and dinosaurs to big data overlaid on the world.”

We are in the age of unearthing and uncovering data, and only just at the beginning of the age of processing data and dealing with it (see my interview with Anselm Hook, Part 2 upcoming).  O’Reilly’s Strata Confernence 2011, will explore, “the change brought to technology and business by data science, pervasive computing, and new interfaces.” It is, perhaps, one of the most important events of 2011.

Data is driving a revolution much as coal, oil, and steel powered the industrial revolution.  And the world changing insight from Karl Marx that “the industrial revolution polarized the world into two groups: those who own the means of production and those who work on them,” is taking on on new life, as  Alistair Croll, co-chair of Strata 2011, points out in his post,  “Who Owns Your Data?”

“The important question isn’t who owns the data. Ultimately, we all do. A better question is, who owns the means of analysis? Because that’s how, as Brand suggests, you get the right information in the right place. The digital divide isn’t about who owns data — it’s about who can put that data to work.”

Strata is where a vanguard will be meet, not only to discuss this revolution’s futures, but to define how to create, handle, and build the platforms and experiences that will harness the data. My flight is booked!  (Also check out BigDataCamp which takes place the night before Strata.)

The picture opening this post is from Michael EdgeCumbe’s  Fall 2010: ITP Winter Show Project.  A project exploring ways to intuitively get the feel of what it going on with big data sets using “the gestural manipulation and stereoscopic visualization of complex data to create a meditative state for data analysis.”  Michael project will be part of the Science Fair at Strata.  For more on Michael’s work see Noise Derived. I also have a number of the  interesting new interface sessions at Strata in my schedule.

The daily Strata Gems on O’Reilly Radar are great place to get a gestalt of some of the Strata themes, and this post by Edd Dumbill, program chair for Strata, Three key data trends for 2011, looks at the year ahead.  This week, I got the chance to ask Edd a few of the questions that I will have on mind at Strata – see his responses below.

If you have been reading Ugotrade, you will know I am interested in our mobile social augmented futures and there is no question in my mind that these will be unleashed by our new capacities to work with data (see my post here).

Data is the how.

The pic above is from “Secrets of BackType’s Data Engineers.” This post on ReadWriteHack by Pete Warden, an ex-Apple engineer, and founder of OpenHeatMap, really lives up to its title.  Check it out if you want to know how  “three guys (the BackType team ) with only seed funding process a hundred million messages a day?”

I asked on Quora, “What would be the most important developments for Augmented Reality in 2011,” Michal Avny, Strategist & Real Time search expert, wrote:

“AR strongly relies on localized personalized real time information.

Having a stream of tweets based on keyword search, location or circle of friends doesn’t really make the AR experience; it is the processed real time relevant information that will make AR useful and intensify the experience.”

In 2011 Real Time search and Social Search will drastically change to provide the infrastructure required.”

I followed up on Michal’s Quora answer with some more questions – see below in this post.

Also note the response from David Molnar, here is an excerpt:

“2. A wave of actionable, important data APIs opened up, enabling useful non-gimmicky AR apps for the first time. Think geoloqi.com , or the work Max Ogden has done with Portland civic data. Plus of course face.com , email providers and calendar providers, etc.”

Amber Case, one of the founders of Geoloqi, is on the programming committee of Strata and will be speaking. Be sure to catch her session! Posthumans, Big Data and New Interfaces, and if you haven’t already seen it, Amber’s TED talk is a must see.

Geographic proximity is a powerful filter, as is route, and time. But clearly social proximity, social relevance, and shared tastes are also key dimensions for location based experiences, (see my convo with Schuyler of Simple Geo, upcoming).

While the whole business of location based search and curation of augmented mobile social experiences is still, for the most part, uncharted terrain, the danger of key points of control being only really accessible to elite players looms large. I asked Sophia Parafina, a pioneer in the open geo space for some thoughts on real-time local /geosearch and geomessaging, and the future of openess & big data (see Sophia’s response below).

Is the market ready yet for P2P cloud computing?

This is another question I’m following,  Is the market ready yet for P2P cloud computing? It is one of those questions that we seem to have been asking in various forms for a very long while now, but without a  major shift in sight.  The pic above is from, The Cloud Made Open Source “Invisible” This Year.  But, perhaps, we are at the point when open p2p clouds will find a place in the market because of their potential importance in real time social search and discovery. Borislav Agapiev, Search Entrepreneur and founder of Vast.com, writes on Quora:

“I believe a P2P cloud is ideally suited for social & real-time search and discovery.

Consider MapReduce, a very interesting and popular paradigm for distributed computing. MapReduce is very much about bringing computation to data i.e. doing computation at nodes (map) and then aggregating results through network (reduce).

It is very clear now that user attention data (what they click on) is very valuable for search and discovery, yet a centralized model relies upon uploading all that to a single location and then doing a supposed local MapReduce. Clearly, MapReduce could be done across the network, without any centralized uploads.

In addition to the efficiency argument raised here, it is even more important to consider privacy issues. Uploading massive amounts of user attention data to a centralized location is not something that is going to make users warm and fuzzy as we are increasingly seeing.

In a P2P cloud, there is no big brother watching over anyone, all computation and data storage is done in the cloud, fragmented in many, many small encrypted pieces ala BitTorrent.”

Picture above from Brynn Marie Evans, “It takes two to tango: review of my social search panel“

The Delta of Now – Transforming Search into a Social Democratic Act

Picture of Maneki Neko “beckoning” cats from Journeyetc

New ecologies of human and machine intelligence are beginning to change basic social structures – see the Future of Work (Biewald and Chirayath Janah 2010). And projects like Swift River, using search and machine mining to filter out streams on topics of interest that can then be subsequently curated by human beings. This may be extended to the curation of real-time data streams and employment of machine learning algorithms based upon the explicit relationships.

Augmented mobile social experiences are a new frontier in which ideas and practices from a number of fields collide, including: ambient findability (Morville 2005), urban psychogeography, narrative structures, ambient games and devices, 4d (time-space), explorations of place and memory, enchanted objects and people (Kuniavsky 2010), and designed animism (Laurel 2010), to mention just a few.

Mobile local interaction presents an opportunity to invert the search pyramid and to transform search into a social, democratic act (see my interview with Anselm Hook upcoming).  Up until now search has been predicated around a very narrow revenue model. Google has an implicit model of a B2C – business to consumer brokerage. We are only just beginning to get a glimpse of the disruptive potential of C2C – consumer to consumer brokerages. Mobile local C2C brokerages that allow us to transact in a trustworthy way over our local geography in close to real time (Hook 2010) have the potential to enable new forms of social organization. Bruce Sterling’s short story about a networked gift economy, Maneko Neki, is a brilliant glimpse at the disruptive potential of such re-imaginings.

Augmented experiences that shift or change a person’s situated geolocal experience of social reality, and change our relationship to the people and the place by augmenting engagement in, and reputation through, socially driven consumer tie ins and game dynamics, like Four Square, & Gowalla are beginning to emerge, as Kati London pointed out in her excellent keynote at Web 2.0 Expo. And, while the integration of mobile local interaction and an augmented view that shifts our geolocal experience visually will involve creative solutions to some well churned mobile, tracking, mapping and registration challenges, the exploration and development of new dimensions through which we can filter and create trusted and meaningful augmented mobile social experiences is vital, whether you are considering a mobile screen, map, camera view, or futuristic HUDs and gestural interfaces.

Talking with Edd Dumbill

Picture from O’Reilly Community.

Tish Shute: First congratulations on Strata! On the Strata homepage there is a quote from Jason Hoffman:

“My gut feeling is that we’re going to look back at the upcoming Strata Conference like we do at the Web 2.0 Conference in 2004/2005.”
—Jason Hoffman, CTO/Founder, Joyent, Inc.

Why do you think Jason’s comparison might be prescient?

Edd Dumbill: Web 2.0 is a development that ran through every brand that has a web presence and radically changed the way business is done for many companies and brands.

Strata will have a similar impact: every business has data, every business collects an increasing amount of data. This data is the new oil – a valuable raw material that when refined or combined creates value and opportunity.

Tish Shute: The rise of real time was one of your three key data trends for 2011. Hadoop is bringing the capacity to work with big data to more than just a few elite players. But the challenge is still real time. You mention we will be seeing a hybrid approach to real time and batch MapReduce processing. Will we hear more about these approaches to real time at Strata? And, what do you see as the most important conversations on real time data analytics emerging at Strata?

You point out “open source projects and cloud infrastructure means developers can evaluate and learn to love technologies without requiring support or approval from above.” What are the most exciting developments on the horizon for open source tools?

Edd Dumbill: Here are some projects worth watching, in the key areas of real time, cluster management and Hadoop.

* Cassandra and MongoDB — NoSQL databases that will prove vital for anybody with real time big data needs

* Mesos — a compute cluster management tool, modeled after that which powers Google

* Hadoop ecosystem’s continuing maturation, especially HBase and Hive.

Tish Shute: Do you think the market is ready for p2p cloud computing?

Edd Dumbill: The market is emerging for decentralized and distributed cloud computing, and P2P technologies are one way of achieving that. They key trends will be moving computation nearer the data sets or nearer the point of user consumption of the result.

P2P is a difficult model for anybody wanting to commercialize a service, so I think it will tend to form part of a hybrid solution.

Tish Shute: We have seen enormous strides in our ability to work with giant unstructured databases recently. Do you think, perhaps, that the dream of a web of linked data – “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,” will be attained through brute force – i.e. through our ability to harness the power of massively parallel processing, as much as by Semantic Web approaches focused on machine readable metadata? [Also see my question on Quora, “Is this a good approach (www.dist-systems.bbn.com/people/…) to use Hadoop to build a scalable, distributed triple store?”]

Edd Dumbill: I’ve been an observer of the SW for over a decade and I tend to believe that on the web, data means to you whatever meaning you give it as the consumer. With that model, the links are made by the consumer rather than sitting out there explicitly. Some links become de facto standards, and some very few become web standards.

I think the actuality will be a mix of both explicitly stated metadata and that which is inferred. The Semantic Web is a great framework for certain operations, especially interoperable exchange of metadata. A great many more private meanings, never intended to be shared, will be created by consuming software.

There’s no question that machines will learn how to process most of the Web. Furthermore, machines will learn how to process most of the physical world we’re in. And that by the end of this decade.

Talking with Sophia Parafina

Picture of Sophia at Where 2.0

Tish Shute: Sophia you have worked in the trenches for a long time now to support the growth of open geo data. What do you hope to see emerge in 2011 in the field of geo-data?

Sophia Parafina: Better support for displaying and handling location data across multiple apps. Fred Wilson recently blogged about content-shifting, he talks about overcoming content silos across devices. We’ve worked very hard to reduce data silos via formats, but devices are creating their own silos. I would like to see a standard method for sending geo data and geo information to mobile devices.

Producing content for mobile is different from producing content for a computer browser. Web 2.0 produced a lot of infrastructure for browser based interfaces, but in mobile devices that gap has been filled with apps which is fragmenting how data is handled by various devices. What is even more interesting in the mobile space is that devices can push data back that contains location, user updates, photos and even sensor data.  If mobile data standardizes, it could lead to browser based applications and stem the continued fragmentation of the mobile application market.

Tish Shute: Simple Geo and Factual are startups emerging in the geodata space. What do you see on the horizon in terms of both the growth of business opportunities and an open geo data community?

Sophia Parafina: In the near future think we’ll see startups providing curated data + API and in response we will also see companies that provide a single interface across multiple data providers. We saw this when everyone released a mapping API and companies such as Mapufacture provided a single interface across multiple APIs.

We will see a resurgence in data providers repackaging the the 2010 US Census data in different ways to respond to market segments, some of this will be open data but all of it will be provided through an API instead of file. Additionally, we’ll see more data from outside the US.

Tish Shute: What are the biggest obstacles to having the open geodata sets available that we need to enable mobile local interactions and social augmented experiences?

Sophia Parafina: Licensing for both crowd sourced data and private curated open data will become an issue. We recently seen VLC, the open source video player, pulled from the Apple app store because of licensing issues. Also, licensing of content by geography will be problematic, limiting searches by geographical location. In addition, how will licensing of data that is updated by crowd sourcing work?

Multiple APIs for accessing data sources. The current trend for each provider to create an API for their data sets will result in data silos – there needs to be a single sign-on equivalent for requesting data.

Size of data on the wire, the current models for delivering data is based on broadband connections. However, as mobiles increasingly become the way people use the web, the data needs to be sized accordingly. This also goes for mobile interfaces. Have you tried to shop on a mobile device, or buy a train or plane ticket? It’s frustrating and error prone. There is a large untapped market of people who only use the Internet on mobile devices.

Tish Shute: You pointed me to this link in Strata Gems re “an interesting and pertinent (also a competitor to GeoLoqi),” – the Android Tasker app. What do these emerging services bring to the table in terms of the next generation of location based services?

Sophia Parafina: This app let’s your device interact with the environment. I think that this is a great way of using the sensors on existing platforms to increase interaction and to implement ambient findability. The basic premise of Tasker is that some action happens in response to an event in an application, time, date, location, event, or gesture. Tasker has defined 180 actions that can occur based and number or combination of events. This can provide a basic vocabulary for interaction between the user and the device and more importantly between users. Tasker also can use Android script plugins, which lowers the bar to creating your own ambient application.

Programs such as Tasker can provide a way for people to interact with social networks beyond sending messages. People can use their mobile devices to interact with their surroundings with out having to interact with the device.

Tish Shute: We have had many conversations about emerging ideas of geo-search, geo-messaging and geo-fencing. What are the most interesting developments in these areas and what do you see on the horizon for 2011?

Sophia Parafina: The map will fade into the background and become less important. Display of information will be context aware, that includes location. For example, let’s say I make a grocery list, when I’m at the grocery story, the list will just pop-up without the need for me to find the app that has the list. Or reminders or offers pop-up when you are near a place at a certain time, let’s say you need to buy a present for a birthday party for a child, you could send out a request that you are looking for an item and retailers could offer “on the spot” discounts if you are in the area.

Geo-search, geo-messaging, and geo-fencing are geared to towards mobile devices, so I expect to see them soon as part of apps. Building generic applications that implement geo* will fail because that sort of information is useful only within a context. Geo* apps are solutions looking for an problem. The killer mobile app will use these functions transparently to reduce the cognitive load of the user who is busy moving around in the world.

User data gathered from multiple web applications will become consolidated profiles that will used for context aware applications. For example, there could be a service which matches prices of items that you have shopped for on the web, so for example the service would have access to your cookies, know your favorite retailers, things you have shopped for, your location and activity patters (when you are at home, work, restaurant). When you are in the vicinity of a brick and mortar retailer with the same or similar items, the service can send you alert to match the price of the item you found on line. So your digital life will become more closely linked with your day to day activities.

Talking with Michal Avny

Tish Shute: At Web 2.0 Summit, one of the highlights for me was the, Q&A:The New Search Insurgents lunch where Charlie Cheever of Quora, IMO, stole the show. I tweeted:

“One of my takeaways from #w2s is that #quora points to future of augmented mobile social experiences – a search filter for experience! #AR”

In your view what are the biggest challenges for location Q&A to emerge as a search filter for location based experiences?

Michal Avny: The biggest location Q&A challenges yet to be conquered are immediacy (real time dynamic data), relevancy (strong personalized filters) and user experience (simplified interface).

Location Q&A enables different use cases. The most prominent are Follow (follow places, topics and friends to learn about a location), Interact (meet new people based on common interests), Plan ahead (plan a trip, night out or a shopping day by asking and searching for local information) and On-site (check for recommendations, friends, deals, events and traffic nearby).

Unlike Follow, Interact and Plan ahead that can be added to existing Q&A platforms (such as Quora) by attending location specifics as they share similar characteristics, the on-site mode introduces a completely different experience, first and foremost it requires immediate attention. It is real time based and the nature of the data is dynamic. Traffic updates, current events, nearby friends, all that changes constantly. Posting a location question on-site implies the response should be in real time (e.g. best kid friendly restaurant), the normal Q&A response latency wouldn’t work.

Strong relevancy filters are required to accommodate for the overwhelming flood of information. Moreover, some of the data should be filtered by user behavior and preferences, check in notifications (type of relation), restaurant recommendations (type of food, price level, etc), shopping deals (commercial categories) and more.

Mobile experience requires ease of use and simplicity. A new Q&A interface and query language that allows for posting questions should be defined as well as coherent summarized response interface. User on the go should not have to post lengthy questions, browse through tens of results or search for the right service, but instead use a simple intuitive tool.

Tish Shute: Real- time location based search is in its infancy. Real time questions can be answered using different services such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Waze, Foursquare, IMDb and more. But what are the challenges to moving forward with aggregating these sources and then into “locals” that are able to process and deal with vast amounts of information?

Michal Avny: Using some of the leading location services to answer question is sufficient to start with.

In order to provide broad coverage (worldwide) and reliable information, aggregation of the different services is required for instance to normalize product and service rank, aggregate classified, and more. This is quite challenging as there is no one standard available.

When location Q&A user base is big enough, I foresee a tendency to rely more on ‘locals’ input as the base of information. As the platform grows, communities will be formed with different cultures, relationships and trust levels, making the information more valuable and customizable. Some of the challenges I already mentioned are implementing filters, query language and interfaces to enable using the vast amounts of real time data in a mobile environment. More of the challenges lying ahead are integrating the ‘locals’ data with location based services as they are integral components of the Q&A ecosystem. Merging trust levels and relationships while adhering to different privacy guidelines is a challenge yet to be explored. (This should be discussed in more detail under the protocols topic).

It is quite evident that Quora is now facing growing pains and is struggling to maintain its character. Same as with Quora, it will also be a challenge to support and maintain the ecosystem while allowing for massive scale-up.

Tish Shute: I have been very interested in exploring protocols that will be enablers to micro local interaction and mobile social interaction for AR – particularly the XMPP extensions and operational transform work of Google Wave (now Apache Wave), and PubSub protocols like PubHubSubbub and Erlang based RabbitMQ. We are beginning to see protocols emerging that could enable new real time local services. What do you think are some of the most valuable use cases for “locals” that this new generation of real time protocols can enable?

Michal Avny: AR is about interacting with digital information; the AR ecosystem is composed of layers and components such as devices, platforms, browsers, applications and content. For the different components to interact new protocols, security guidelines, and privacy policies must be in place. A standard will enable local vendors and service providers to publish specials, deals, updates and events for any application to broadcast, identify people and places by proximity (without having to use the same application or device), local recommendations will be shared by services, devices will be able to interact, location based platforms, such as Q&A, will have access to vast breadth of information, geo aware devices will provide consistent experience globally, and much more.

Tish Shute: What do you think are the biggest challenges to going mainstream for this emerging field of real time social discovery?

Michal Avny: The biggest challenge is building towards real time, geo-aware, localized, personalized ambient data. Discovery is in its infancy, location social based Best, Top, and Trending lists with some basic filtering options are available, and this is great as people are getting accustomed to information surrounding them. To some degree it can intensify the AR experience, for instance suggest the most popular dish in a restaurant, or map the best coffee shops nearby, but it is customized at best by friend recommendations and depends on the coverage and broadness of the specific discovery service.

There is a need for the next generation of discovery, customized geo social aware discovery that filters the vast amount of real time data by learning user preferences and behavior (built on top of the much needed local social real time open protocol)

Tish Shute: Who are your favorite startups/upstarts in the the field of real time search and why?

Micha Avny: My6Sense - My6sense provides a sharper and better way to experience your information from feeds you subscribe to (Social Networks, News, RSS feeds, etc.). It’s personal – Content is ranked based on what’s relevant to you. It learns what’s valuable to you by translating your consumption behavior into a personalized ranking function.
My6Sense – because it is a personalized prediction filter, a critical foundation for AR

Topsy – Topsy is realtime search powered by the social web that finds the most relevant conversations happening online. The site’s underlying technology examines popular links as well as the influence of each person citing a link. Topsy augments traditional search engines by finding information that people are talking about.
Topsy – because its ranking is based on retweets and influencers, a great social experience

Collecta – Collecta is a real-time search engine for the social web. It monitors the update streams of popular realtime blogs and sites like Twitter, WordPress, and Flickr, and shows results as they happen. Results can be filtered by status updates, comments, stories, or photos. The entire engine is built around the XMPP standard, which pushes out data on a continual basis, so that for every search you end up watching a stream that keeps updating itself.
Collecta – because it is built around XMPP, a real time experience

Where 2.0 is going to be epic this year (see my interview with Brady Forrest here), and it is so exciting to be part of it.  Location technologies and augmented reality are annointed rulers now.  Time Magazine recognized augmented reality as one of its 10 Tech Trends for 2010 (for more see ReadWriteWeb).

The photo above is by Jeremy and Lisa Hight.  Jeremy Hight is an information designer, theorist and artist working in Augmented Reality and Locative Media.   His essay “Narrative Archaeology” was named one of the 4 primary texts in Locative Media.

Jeremy Hight will be part of our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook, Joe Lamantia, Sophia Parafina and myself. We will debut the video of the ARWave project demo that brings together augmented reality, geolocation, and wave federation (more details later in this post).  And, Jeremy will bring to our presentation some augmentations on his recent brilliant work and paper, “Writing Within the Map.”

Greg J. Smith’s points out in his in depth look at Jeremy’s work that it, “dovetails with some of the main points in Bruce Sterling’s recent atemporality keynote at Transmediale” – fortunately there is a transcription of Bruce’s keynote here.  What is so awesome about this dovetailing is that you can get a feel for the fun part of living in an, “atemporal network culture.”  And, if you want to really understand just how much locative media and augmented reality have changed us, you  might want to dig into these texts.

Bruce Sterling and Jeremy Hight, and members of the ARWave team, and a superb cast of augmented reality movers and shakers – including Will Wright and Jesse Schell, will be speaking at Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, June 2nd and 3rd.

But, this week, the AR community’s attention will be on the events at Where 2.0.   The keynote speakers will be streamed live, so if you are not fortunate enough to be there, tune in!

The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

On our panel, Jeremy Hight, Anselm Hook, Sophia Parafina, Joe Lamantia and I will cover some of the key social, cultural, technical and interactional questions for exploring social augmented experiences. There will be five lightning presentations, and an opportunity for questions from the audience, and a world premier of the ARWave demo!

1) “Augmenting the map as interface: AR and Locative Narratives” - Jeremy Hight

*Map augmentation of the historic route 66 can house an essay contest and publication globally but as embedded within that map augmentation instead of books or even web sites.

* A place on a map can be a graphic index and database to save and collect
the writing of that place with a graphic or textual search index.

*One can pop immersive visualizations of abandoned or lost buildings from map location in shared software and collectively augment (imagine channels within the lost core of detroit where one is memories and accounts tagged within parts in the immersive visualization while another is of poems and stories written by people moved by the place and its semiotics and story).

*The news stand is to be the map.

*New forms of literature will be born of mapping, spaces,augmentation and
new tools

The concept drawings below (click to enlarge) are a collaboration between Jeremy Hight and Paul Wehby, Senior Designer at LA County Museum of Art.

2) Anselm Hook will look at, “10 reasons why AR isn’t a flash in the pan,” and how, “AR can help us see the world we would like to have exist.”

Anselm notes, “So much of what we do is so fickle and I’m looking for ways to connect digital media work to deep values.”

3) Sophia Parafina will present on, “Social AR and Crisis Response”

“Augmented reality as a multi-party conversation.  Rather than being passive viewers of AR with a limited ability to  checkin to places and make annotations, current devices can broadcast sensor information that can be fused into an interactive stream. AR users can send and receive information, location, and sensor data from their mobile device.  The streams can be federated into a unique AR view composed by the user.

Entertainment and gaming are obvious applications, but it can also be applied to crisis situations such as the search and rescue operations in Haiti.  Efforts such as Mission 4636, the SMS translation service, could benefit from AR views.  The collaboration among the Mission 4636 volunteers was the key element  in their success for providing location and rapid translation to responders on the ground.

With an AR view, responders can send back their sensor information from their mobiles to provide contextual information to remote volunteers.  This extends the conversation between remote volunteers and on the ground responders and fosters collaboration which was a key element for the success of Mission 4636″

4) Joe Lamantia, an experience design and strategy consultant helping to define the interaction framework and scenarios behind ARWave, will discuss, “Design Principles For Social Augmented Experiences:”

“With the exotic mixed realities envisioned by futurists and science fiction writers seemingly around the corner, it is time to move beyond questions of technical feasibility to consider the value and impact of turning reality inside out for everyday social settings and experiences. Thanks to the inherently social nature of augmented reality, we can be sure the value and impact of many augmented experiences depends in large part on how effectively they integrate with the social dimensions of real-world settings, in real time.”

Joe will share, “eight guiding principles for designing experiences that engage naturally with the social dimension, and increase the value of augmented experiences.”

5) “ARWave – A demo and state of play,” from Tish Shute

I will have the awesome privilege, on our Where 2.0 panel, of showcasing ARWave.   We will  premier the ARWave demo which shows how ARWave has accomplished the basics of geolocating data on Wave Federation Protocol (and real time collaboration on this geolocated data).  If you’re interested in the ARWave project join the Mailing list, FAQ are here, and have a peek at the current state of development at Google Code, and the specification for an AR Blip.  We also have Waves for the project hosted on Google Wave.  You can join the general discussion here, and the technical side here.

The picture below is a screen shot from the demo video produced by core AR Wave developer and concept designer, Thomas Wrobel.

Click on the image to enlarge, and note: “The pink thing is from Dennou Coil. Its an anti-virus program (that literally chase’s down bugs and glitches and removes them).”

ARWave

In ARWave, stories or art are tied to place. And as Jeremy Hight writes:

“The possibility exists to take a part of an area and overlay a dystopia, a utopia, multiples of each of these, or even recreations of previous incarnations in the past. Writing and publication thus cannot only be of place, and form(s), but of selected augmentations of icons, streets, buildings and related texts on top of the map. These spaces can be built in real time and can be turned on and off as channels of augmentation that over time illustrate many faces of place in its present, past, possible futures,etc. with texts within these alternate spaces as commentary, as fused aesthetic analysis, or simply creative writing relevant to these charged and hybrid spaces.”

As Thomas notes, Jeremy Hight’s,  “idea of channels ties into the concept of waves = a layer, and people can have many layers on at once.”

This is different from the Layar concept of a layer or rather “layar.”

“We are not talking about layers in the classical map layer way of thinking, where you have a layer of all restaurants or a layer of all mountain peaks, etc.,” notes ARWave developer Markus Strickler.

Currently all geo location apps like Layar have to use their own servers, so users have to use different clients with different log ins to see data from different sources.  But because ARWave uses federation, we don’t depend on centralized infrastructure where the client of one company can only connect to the server of that company.  This opens up many exciting new possibilities for how people can decide to view and publish geolocated data.

With AR Wave, via one login, people can access the whole distributed network of servers (see diagrams below), and any content will be accessible to them. ARWave will make it easy for individuals, not just developers, to layer their environment – allowing the creation of augmented reality content to be as simple as contributing to a Wave.

“ARWave will enable individuals to publish easily to everyone….or just a few people,” Thomas notes:

“To ‘publish’ is also self publication and distribution in communities or like minded groups without the hard read of publication or rejection.” = publishing on a Wave. No one approves it, anyone can publish to communities, or their friends and family. Or even just personal publishing it for their own reference.”

But ARWave does not compete with existing AR Browsers.   On the contrary, AR browsers like Layar, Wikitude and others, could implement ARWave and use it to enhance their applications.

“Layar has a killer browser already,  ARWave would add social features. They can keep their “walled garden” of data and still join the federation of open data too ” (Thomas Wrobel)

Yup, that is the cool part of federation – you can have your cake and eat it too!

Sophia Parafina and I will be organizing a discussion session on ARWave and Federation at WhereCamp, right after Where 2.0, April 3rd and 4th, and Dan Peterson who is in leading the federation effort for Google Wave will join us.

The diagrams below illustrate how ARWave and federation can revolutionize the way we share our augmented realities.

Real Time Social Augmented Experiences

Another key aspect of ARWave is it’s near to real time update capabilities.  As Jeff Pulver pointed out in, “SXSW 2010: The days twitter became less relevant:”

“At South By Southwest 2010 (SXSW), a strange thing happened on the way to Austin. A community of twitter faithful shifted from sharing everything about everything on only twitter (and maybe Facebook) and changed their habits to rely on learning about what was happening and where things were happening by using foursquare and Gowalla instead. I’m sure there were other products and platforms being used including Loopt and GySPii but foursquare and Gowalla were the dominant platforms.”

Later Jeff wrote:

“There were times where I could feel the ebbs and the flows of the people move as different people checked into various locations. While most of this was felt locally in the place I was in, it also became apparent on the platforms when hundreds of people would rush to check in to a location. There were also times when it felt like I was chasing ghosts; These were the times I would go to a spot because a friend had checked into that spot only to discover they were no longer there.”

ARWave’s realtime collaborative capabilities are going to introduce some fascinating dynamics to “chasing ghosts,” as the ARWave framework gets integrated into services like foursquare – a project we have already begun to look at.

Augmented Reality Search

As I mention in my previous post, ARWave presents some fascinating possibilities for AR Search.  For example, one might do advanced searching within waves using SPARQL, which could then display in the form of a personal blip in your viewpoint (which in turn could be shared with others).  Linked data will be massively important in filtering and delivering useful info for augmented views (see my conversation with Will Wright about the problem of augmented reality overriding our very smart instincts and not being useless or worse as a result).

Anselm Hook, who I interviewed in depth recently about, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, has some very interesting thoughts on real time stuff, trading brokerages, and  the view within a single city block, which he elaborated on in the second half to this interview which is upcoming on Ugotrade soon!

The ARWave Developers

There are three people who unfortunately can’t join us at Where 2.0 –  the costs of travelling from Europe being an obstacle.  But as they have been developing the code for ARWave that will rock our augmented world, I asked them, in a Wave conversation, to give me a few comments about their interest in working on ARWave, and a pic and a short bio.   Also I should mention the work of the PyGoWave team whose incredibly fast work creating PyGoWave has given ARWave a rocket launch pad.  Also many thanks to the Wave community, see the Wave Federation Protocol documentation, Google’s Wave Server, RubyOnSails (Ruby On Rails based Wave server).

Davide Carnovale @need2revolt

“Imho, the coolest geolocated related thing is that we’re making a world where the info does not necessarily comes from an explicit search from the user, but comes also from the actual locaton you’re in. For instance, you can have special offers in stores like fourquare does, or your friends can leave geolocated notes for you that are triggered when you walk by.  We can have games based on the treasure hunt schema requiring you to actually go to specific location.

Other than this I can think about self-guided tours of the city, maybe user generated too, or for museums.

Naturally these are long term goals with some rl use cases.

As for my bio, there isn’t much to say… I got a first level degree in computer science and I’m taking the second (and last) level. I’ve developed with mobile agents, osgart/artoolkit, brain computer interfaces, linux kernel and that’s pretty much all…”

Thomas Wrobel

“If you are looking for specific advantages of using Wave I’d say;

* Federated – Letting creators tap into bigger userbase. Each new app or data layer will add to the “incentive” for users to join in. Google had some good stats a few months back as to how much a simple login screen can put people off using stuff.  By breaking that barrier it should make AR userbase’s grow.

* It deals with user accounts, permissions, and real-time updating without creators needing to make a new server standard themselves. It lowers barriers to development.

* As the clients, servers, and data can be made separately by different parties, its easier for developers to concentrate on just providing what they want. You want to just make content? No problem! You dont need to worry about doing anything else but that. It would become as easy as making a webpage (or easier!).

* Bots will allow the development of interactive AR games very easily. Just like modern version of IRC bots, the infrastructure does the heavy lifting, and interesting things can be done with just simple scripting.

* The idea is anyone will be able to make a layer onto the world, and people can mix, match and share their layers as they wish. Its not just the data that becomes interesting to see augmenting our world, but the combinations of data! For example, perhaps you could see the profits generated by different companies above their buildings, but also see how environmentally friendly they are at the same time. Or maybe see pollution levels against health-statistics.  Seeing combinations of geolocated data from different sources at the same time has many interesting possibilities both for scientific as well as casual (game/ map/ chat) use.

hmz..I could go on forever listing stuff here really…..

I guess if we are supposed to be forming a roadmap of significant/interesting things for ARWave?

* Example clients letting people make their own layers (waves) and add points to them.

* Letting people log in to different servers

* Servers federated together. (not our responsibility, but essential part of the roadmap).

* Anyone logged into any server can see data from anyone else that’s shared with them, regardless of where they are logged into

* 3D support, demonstrating various sorts of geolocated data.?

* Use of bots for example games?
—-
My Bio’s quite simple.
Studied 3D Animation in Portsmouth, UK.
Moved to the Netherlands, have since been working in creating ARG games, in the last year founded Lostagain (Lostagain.nl).”

Markus Strickler @kusako

“I think the main point behind ARWave is to go beyond simply displaying existing placemarks on top of a live camera view, towards a highly personalized, augmented world where everybody can edit and share localized information collaboratively and in real time. Wave provides the means to do this through its model of persistent real time conversations and adds even more by providing a way for personal agents (robots) to participate in these conversations.

As for my Bio: I’ve been developing Web applications for the last 15 years, hold a degree in Image Sciences and am currently working as a Java developer in Cologne, Germany.”

Images  from Mitsuo Iso’s Denno Coil (Click to enlarge), the game “Metroid Prime,” and Terminator.

Thomas Wrobel, Sophia Parafina, Joe Lamantia, Matthieu Pierce, and I will lead a  session tomorrow for AR DevCampNYC introducing the AR Wave Project.  Thomas, Joe and Matthieu will be participate via skype (10am to 11.30am EST), and Sophia Parafina and I will both be at AR DevCampNYC at the The Open Planning Project office (TOPP).  The PyGoWave crew will be introducing PyGoWave via LiveStream.

At 1.30pm EST to 2.30pm EST there will be a shared PyGoWave/AR Wave session with Mountain View (if bandwidth permits).

The skype conference will be at ardevcampnyc .  To participate in Wave,  please join the public Wave,  AR Wave: AR DevCamp Session.  There is also a AR Wave Wiki up now – see here.

Dimitri Darras (avatar Dimitri Illios) is working on streaming the AR DevCampNYC sessions into Second Life,  SLURL here.

Thomas has done a very nice introduction and FAQ below.  This should help people new to this project to get up to speed quickly.

There are already several Waves that show the history of this project including: AR Wave: Augmented Reality Framework Development,  AR Wave Use Cases, PyGoWave AR Tech Discussion,  AR Wave Augmented Reality Wave Development, AR Wave / Muku Organization and Admin.

Also I have several posts for people interested in more of the background, including: The Next Wave of AR: Mobile Social Interaction Right Here, Right Now!, AR Wave: Layers and Channels of Social Augmented Experiences, Total Immersion and the “Transfigured City:” Shared Augmented Realities, the “Web Squared Era,” and Google Wave.

Thomas uses the term Arn (augmented reality network) which is one of the candidate names for the project, Muku (crest of a Wave) is another suggestion.  Thomas’ intro and FAQ below can also be found here.

What is the AR Wave Project?

In simple terms its a protocol for storing geolocated data on Wave servers that’s currently being developed.

We believe this will help lay the foundations for an open, universally accessible, and decentralised system for shared augmented reality overlays which various clients can connect to and use.

This AR Network should spark a lot more rapid adoption of AR technologies, give existing browsers more functionality, and provide the network infrastructure, allowing many of the fictional depictions of AR to become a reality one day.

The AR Network.

When we speak of a future AR Network, we mean one as universal and as standard as the internet. One where people can connect from any number of devices, and without additional downloads, experience the majority of the content.

Where people can just point their phone, webcam, or pair of AR glasses anywhere where a virtual object should be, and they will see it. The user experience is seamless, AR comes to them without them needing to “prepare” their device for it.

The Arn should be an inclusive and open platform where any number of devices can connect to, and anyone can make and host their own location-specific models or data.

It should allow people to communicate both publicly and privately, and not have their vision constantly cluttered with things they don’t want to see.

This is our vision, and we think a Wave protocol will help it become a reality.

Why Wave?

Wave allows the advantages of both real-time communication, as well as the advantages of persistent hosting of data. It is both like IRC, and like a Wiki. It allows anyone to create a Wave, and share it with anyone else. It allows Waves to be edited at the same time by many people, or used as a private reference for just one person.

These are all incredibly useful properties for any AR-experience, more so Wave is open. Anyone can make a server or client for Wave. Better yet, these servers will exchange data with each other, providing a seamless world for the user: a single login will let you browse the whole world of public waves, regardless of who’s providing or hosting the data. Wave is also quite scalable and secure: data is only exchanged when necessary, and will stay local to just one server if no one else needs to view it.

Wave allows bots to run on it and thus allowing blips in a waves to be automatically updated, created or destroyed based on any criteria the coders choose. Wave even allows the playback of all edits since the wave was created.

For all these reasons and a few more, Wave makes a great platform for AR.

How?

In basic terms, we will diverse a standard way to geolocate a bit of data and store it as a Blip within a wave.

This data could be a 3d mesh, a bit of text, or even a piece of audio.

Then various clients on various devices could logon, locate, interpret and display this data as they see fit.

Click on image above to enlarge.

A typical example of this might be holding up your phone and seeing messages written by your friends and family in the locations which they are relevant.

You could see an arrow hovering over the café your meeting a friend at, notes above their flat saying if they are in or out, or messages by shops telling you to pick up the particular brand of cereal they like.

This data would be personal to just yourself and whoever you invite to share that wave with.

Other forms of data could be public, like city-maps, online games, or historical landmarks being recreated. Custom views of the world with data for entertainment, commercial, environmental or informative purposes.

The possibilities with geolocated data are endless, as are the various ways to display and make use of them.

One of the things I’m most passionate about is people being able to see many different types of data, both public and private at the same time and from many different sources at once.

For instance, if your playing a AR game, why shouldn’t your chat window be viewable at the same time?

If you have skinned your environment with a custom view of the world, why shouldn’t you also see mapping or restaurant recommendations?

The ways to present these layers of data and toggle them on/off in the most intuitive and flexible ways would be a task for the client markers, and I’m sure we will see many innovations in those areas.

But by using Wave it at least provides the framework for having multiple information sources controlled by many different people yet accessible, and user-submittable, via the same protocol.

Who?

This idea first sprouted from a paper I route focusing on the potential for IRC to be used for AR;

http://www.lostagain.nl/testSite/projects/Arn/AR_paper.pdf

I suggested near the end Wave might be a better alternative (using Google Wave was an idea Tish Shute, Ugotrade, brought up in response to the Arn prototype design on IRC), and it quickly became apparent that Wave was a very suitable medium.

Since then, there was a lot of interest, and numerous people have offered to help.

In particular, recently, the PygoWave team is helping us out, as they have an existing server supporting c/s protocol, which is currently being actively developed.

Where?

You can join the general discussion here;
Augmented Reality Wave Development

Technical side here;
Augmented Reality Wave Framework Development

When?

There’s lots still to do, and we are at an early stage.

Our current targets: (last updated 11/12/2009)

• Getting reading/writing of prototype ARBlips to the PygoWave sever. (the PygoWave team have already made a standalone client and have the protocol for this sorted!)
• Establishing a minimal spec for ARBlips to be later expanded.
• Writing a very simple prototype online client showing how to store/retrieve the data.
• Expanding client to work for some use-cases.
• Establish a logo/branding for the project.

Other FAQs.

Where’s the catch?

While we believe Wave is highly suitable for development, it has the drawbacks of being a new system with just a few servers worldwide, which (at the time of writing this), have not yet been federated together yet.

Naturally, as a new technology, its likely to have some growing pains. And building a new technology on other new technology will multiply that somewhat. The first pain is the lack of a standard client / sever protocol. PygoWave have stepped in to the rescue a bit here, by being not just one of the most developed Wave server other then Google, but also leaping ahead with support for Json based c/s interaction. Google has stated they want community to take the lead on on a c/s protocol, so we are hoping they will adopt a Json variant, or a XMPP one and add it to the spec. We hope in much the same way as POP3/IMAP have been a standard for email server interaction, a similar one will develop for Wave.

In the meantime we plan to keep the code for writing ARBlips somewhat abstracted so as to make it easy to adapt in future.

As for the newness of Wave and other potential problems it will bring, we aren’t that worried as its built on XMPP, which has proved reliable already.

The other catch is we are unfunded, which slows development down considerable as we have to fit it around our other jobs.

I’m making my own AR Browser, and am slightly interested in maybe supporting you.

We are naturally very keen for support, and particularly for those with skills and visions to give feedback on the proposed protocol. Specifically: what do you want stored in a blip?

That’s what’s important at this stage.

We don’t see the Arn as a replacement for existing browser systems at the moment. We don’t want to restrict innovation or development in this fast developing market as we are very impressed at what’s been achieved so far. In many ways our task is small in comparison to what’s already accomplished.

However, we do believe the Arn will make a good addition to existing browser systems. It will allow users contribute data and have social features without having to worry about accounts or hosting.

It will still be quite some work to support; new GUIs will need to be developed to make it easy to submit data from the devices, as well as to login to waves.

However, we hope over time to build a set of example libs to make the read/writing of ARBlips as as easy as possible to implement in your software.

Perhaps a good way to think about it is existing AR Browsers are like word-processors, supporting the Arn will be like adding support for *.txt, but doesn’t limit what you can do with your own format.

Eventually we do hope ARBlips hosted on Wave will become the majority of AR data, and its functionality will be analogous to the internet is today. We truly believe in the long run a standard is essential.

But for now we think merely getting a baseline format established for how AR data can be communicated will increase user-ability, usefulness, and help the market grow.

Can I help?

Sure.

We particularly need people with technical skills in relevant fields. (both gwt/javascript web programming and c++(/qt)standalone programming help very welcome!).

But we also welcome people just with vision to help focus use-cases and to conceptualise what we want to be able to do with the system.

Please either join the relevant AR Waves or Wiki

We are especially interested in those with JSON and Comet experience. Specifically those with the abilities to make standalone applications to read/write to a sever using these methods.

What type of data will a AR Blip store?

This is still actively being decided, but essentially its a physical hyperlink.

A connection between a physical location (or object, see below) and a piece of data.

Specifically, we are thinking about the following fields;

Location in X,Y,Z,
Coordinate System used for the above,
Orientation,
MIMEType [the type of data stored]
DataItself [either a http link for 3d meshs and other larger data, or an inline text string if its just a comment]
DataUpdateTimestamp [so clients know if its necessary redownload]
Editors [the user/s that edited/created this blip]
ReferanceLink [data needed to tie the object at a non-fixed location, such as an image to align it to an object in realtime],
Metatags [to describe the data]

Are you purely tying stuff to fixed geolocations?

Certainly not
As part of of the spec we wish to be able for people to be able to link data to dynamically moving objects, trackable by image or other methods.

The idea being that one day someone could link a piece of text or 3d mesh to an image on a t-shirt they are wearing, or perhaps link a dynamically updating twitter feed, or perhaps provide information on a product (based on its logo).

There’s a large number of possibility’s for image-based linking alone, and that’s not even considering possibilities like linking RFIDs, or other forms of less precise but invisible binding data.

We need a lot of feedback from those companies already doing markless tracking. What types of images do you need, idly to link a mesh to an object? is one enough?

Summary of AR Wave Work to Date

Purpose: To provide an open, distributed, and universally accessible platform for augmented reality. To allow the creation of augmented reality content to be as simple as making an html page, or contributing to a wiki.

Specific Goal: To establish a method for geolocating digital data in physical space (or linking it to physical objects) using wave as a platform.

(For justification as to why we are using Wave see: our faq )

Wave as a platform

We are developing on the PyGoWave server at the moment but the goal is to be compatible with all Wave servers

PyGoWave has already achieved an important aspect in enabling the project in being a waveserver with a working and well documented server protocol. This allows both standalone and webbased clients to interface with it already.  See - The PyGoWave Qt-Based Desktop Client

This is one of the reasons why we have chosen to develop for the Pygo server at this stage.

However, the overall goal of AR Wave is to have a framework compatible with all servers using the Wave Federation Protocol. As more wave servers get c/s protocols then ARblips (the data needed to geolocate objects) could be posted and retrieved from various servers using the same client software. For this a standard should emerge. Just as websites don’t have to be hosted on specific servers, neither should AR data need to be hosted on specific wave servers.

In order to reach our goal, there are a few very achievable steps involved – see below.

Feedback

We are still actively seeking feedback, so feel free to join the Wave discussions, and see the history of how the specifications of the protocol evolved. You can also read the justification for some of the choices already made. Note a new discussion for AR DevCamp will be begin at AR Wave: AR DevCamp Session

This will, of course, only be the first draft of the specification, and it is sure to develop much in future.
The important thing now is to make working prototypes while maintaining flexibility.

So what do we need to do?

Steps :

* Establish the overall method – Done.

Each Wave will be a layer on reality which an individual or a group can create.  Each Blip in this Wave refers to either a small piece of inline data (like text) or a remote piece of larger data (like a 3D mesh) as well as the data needed to pin-point it in either relative or absolute real space.
We call these blips: ARblips. They are simply blips that stored the data necessary to augment a single object onto a specific bit reality.

It is up to the clients how they interpret and display the data. They could interpret it as a simple 2d list of nearby objects, or as an advanced 3D overlay, whereby multiple waves from different sources could to be viewed at once. What’s important is that there is a standard way to link the digital data to the real world space.

* Establishing the specification for the ARblip – In progress
We have a good idea of what’s needed to be stored in an ARblip, and we have hammered out a rough format.
The data might be stored as blip-annotations, but this has yet to be finalised.
A rough outline of the type of data stored can be seen in this c++/qt header for ARblip data can be seen at the end of this document.

* Storing and retrieving these pieces of ARblip data on the PyGo server – In progress.
The Pygowave team has made some excellent libraries that should make reading and writing data on the PyGoWave server very trivial for those with c++ skills.
This, however, is a real critical step, so more developers with C++ skills are very welcome!

* Making the above client mobile, and using a devices gps device to place the data. – Not started.
The next step would be to port the code to a mobile phone and use it’s gps-input  to post geolocated data and view what others have posted. This would be a fairly simple and not to useful app in itself. However, it would mark the first time anyone could post AR data and anyone could view it, all using open-source infrastructure.
As a bonus, because we are using wave infrastructure, the updates to any ARblip should appear in near realtime.

* To continue with the proof of concept, we would like to have simultaneous wave input from a PC
and mobile phone at the same time. – Not started.
For example, someone could post a pin on Google maps API and have that data posted to a ARBlip in a wave. Someone logged into that wave on their mobile device would then see the data posted appear.
More so we hope that when the Google map pin is dragged about, the mobile phone viewer, with just a few seconds lag, will see its location updated in real time.

We hope to make a modest yet practical app at this stage.

* After all this, we can go onto the interesting things:
3D data, camera-overlays, data fixed to objects and many more.  There’s plenty of existing software using these features (such as Wikitude, Layer) and some that are even open source software (like Gamaray and Flashkit). The open source code can give us a leg-up. However, we prefer to establish the protocol first. So naturally, these fancy features aren’t a priority for us. Rather we think our energy is better spent establishing the protocols and infrastructure so that other people can build more advanced bit of software easier.

However, once our primary goals are established, we will look to make a open source augmented reality browser ourself which will surely feature many of these features.

Overall, we hope once we have a simple proof of concept, there will be many groups, both existing and new, wanting to use this Wave system for their own apps, games and data.

Conclusion:
Really it’s now all about growing the community. We hope as soon as we show how great Wave can be for augmented reality, that lots of individuals and teams will start making their own clients to read/write geolocated data.
Overall we don’t think anything we make will be that impressive in itself. That’s not our goal.
We instead hope that our project will enable AR-content to be made as easily as web content. That games, information and apps will be able to be created without the creators having to worry
about the infrastructure behind it.

Technical information -

Current ARBlip header file

(below is a c++/qt header file for an ARBlip object that should illustrate the data being stored)

{

public:

arblip();

~arblip();

arblip(QString,QString,double,double,double,int,int,int,QString);

QString getDataAsString();

QString getEditors();

QString getRefID();

QString getXAsString();

QString getYAsString();

QString getZAsString(); bool isFaceingSprite(); 

private:

//ID reference. This would be a unique identifier for the blip. Presumably the same as Wave uses itself.

QString ReferanceID;

//Last editor(s)

QString Editors;

int PermissionFlags = 68356;  // default 664 octal = rw-rw-r–

//Location

double Xpos;   // left/right

double Ypos;   // up/down

double Zpos;  // front/back

//Orientation

// names, ranges and directions are taken from aeronautics.

// If no orientation is specified, it’s assumed to be a facing sprite.

// Roll: rotation around the front to back (z) axis. (Lean left or right.)

// range +/- 180 degrees with + values moving the objects right side down.

int Roll;

// Pitch: rotation around the left to right (x) axis. (tilt up or down)

// Range +/- 90 degrees with + values moving the objects front up. (looking up)

int Pitch;

// Yaw: rotation around the vertical (y) axis. (turn left or right.)

// range +/- 180 degrees with + values moving the objects face to its right.

int Yaw;

bool FacingSprite; //if no rotation specified, this should default to true

//if set to true when a rotation is set, then it keeps that rotation relative to the viewer

//not relative to the earth.

//Data format

QString DataMIME;

QString CordinateSystemUsed; //The co-ordinate system used. This should be a string representing a Open Geospatial Consortium standard. This could be earth-relative for gps co-ordinates, or in some cases relative to the viewer, for data to be displayed in a HUD like style.

//Data itself

QString Data;

QString DataUpdatedTimestamp; //Time the Data was updated changed

//Note; A seperate timestamp should be used for updates that dont effect the data itself.
//(such as if a 3d object moves, but its mesh isnt changed)

//Data metadata QMap<QString, QString> Metadata;

};

The biggest news at Where 2.0, 2009 came from the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group. Tyler Bell, announced Yahoo! Placemaker and the opening up of the GeoPlanet data set, “all of the WOEIDs [Where On Earth (WOE) IDs] available as a free download under Creative Commons in June” (see Brady Forrest’s post for more details).

WhereCamp 2009 was held immediately after Where 2.0 and was a great place to chew on the events and ideas of Where 2.0.  In the picture above Anselm Hook addresses the WhereCamp morning circle in the courtyard outside the Social Text offices in Palo Alto. Anselm pointed out to me:

“there are interesting implications of placemaker in combination with other yahoo assets – in particular YQL – placemaker by itself is neat – but placemaker combined with everything else is a natural missing piece that is a big enabler.  Yahoo has been impressive.”

With all the Geo platform power available to us now, also (also see New Geo for Devs from Google I/O), there isn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind Brady is right when he said, just before the Where 2009 conference: “Location is no longer a differentiator it’s going to become oxygen” (quote from WebMonkey).

The Yahoo! GeoPlanet team at WhereCamp – Tyler Bell, (talking to Brady Forrest in picture on the left) is sporting his spatial junkies T-Shirt. Photo on right, Aaron Cope, Tyler Bell, Martin Barnes, Gary Gale.

WhereCamp was alive with key figures from the social geography movement who knew the power of these new tools (see some of my photos of WhereCamp on Flickr here).

The importance of the Yahoo! announcement really became clear to me at WhereCamp where I attended sessions all day Saturday including the Curating Big Data Session led by Tom Carden, Stamen Design and Aaron Straup Cope, Flickr, (see Aaron’s slides from his Where 2.0 presentation on “The Shape of Alpha” here and video here).

Anselm Hook, a prime mover for WhereCamp, is a leading philosopher of place making and veteran software developer who led Platial engineering and is now at web consultancy http://makerlab.com. If you missed Anselm at WhereCamp he will be presenting on, Ubiquitous Angels at The OpenSource Bridge, Portland, Oregon, June 17th -19th, 2009.

Anselm describes where he thinks the challenges are:

“We should be mapping information that in some ways has been historically unmappable because it is 1) not valued or is 2) actively seen as threatening or is 3) simply too hard to map using traditional tools.”

The WhereCamp Schedule

The Shape of Alpha

Screen capture from Aaron’s Where 2.0 presentation on “The Shape of Alpha. Original photo from Flickr user “NickIsConfused”.

Aaron Straup Copes’s work on “The Shape of Alpha” puts key questions about curating big data center stage.

Firstly, the exploration of what it means to curate/collaborate over meaning from “the abundance of data produced in the precise but distant language of machines” (also see The Interpretation of Bias (and the bias of interpretation). The Shape of Alpha uses a process of reverse-geocoding to translate machine-generated geographic data into place names that people can understand and relate to.

The shapefiles are built with nothing but geotagged photos and some code called clustr (written by the brilliant  Schuyler Erie – co-author of Mapping Hacks). Anyone can make these shapefiles. You can get the shapefiles out of the  Flickr API. Aaron has been keying off WOEIDs (Where On Earth (WOE) IDs) but as Aaron noted you can key off anything you like – tags are an obvious choice.

Wow! You can reinvent mapping with this stuff.

Very importantly, “The Shape of Alpha,” tells us something about how we relate to place versus location. The emotions, disputes and behavior related to place also emerge through crowd sourced corrections.  For more see this very evocative post by Aaron about corrections and treating airports as cities.  There is a glorious thread/riff and ode to the genius of  J. G. Ballard pursued by Aaron and Dan Catt in their posts (also see Dan Catt’s, J.G. Ballard, Flickr, naked singularities and 3-letter airport codes, and Aaron pointed me to this brilliant “geo-detective work” on Concrete Island, by Mike Bonsall .

Dan Catt created geobloggers and “seeded the geotagging community around the Web.” I met Reverend Dan Catt (Twitter @revdancatt ) at Where 2.0 when he was kind enough to share part of his seat so I could join a very interesting discussion with Aaron on The Shape of Alpha.

As Aaron points out they decided to treat “the airport itself as the town…”  not (only) because they admired the work of J.G. Ballard,  “but because it is the right thing to do.”

Dan Catt has excellent blog posts “describing the nuts and bolts of how ‘corrections’ works.”  Aaron points out,  “in the nerdier of the two Dan sums it up nicely by saying”:

“On a slightly more philosophical level, it’s a never ending process. We’ll never reach a point where we can say “Right that’s in, all borders between places have been decided.” But what we should end up with are boundaries as defined by Flickr users.

…

For us, it’s a first small step into an experiment, and actually a pretty big experiment as we’re potentially accepting “corrections” from our millions and millions of users. We’re not quite sure how it’ll all turn out, but we’re armed with Maths, Algorithms and kitten photos.”

Psychosynthography – “Wearing Geography as a Perfume”

Psychosynthography screen capture from Aaron Straup Cope’s Where 2.0 presentation . Original photo from Flickr user,  “NiteLynx.”

As I mentioned before, many of the ideas raised at Where 2.0 were unpacked and worked through at WhereCamp. For example, Aaron introduced a word psychosynthography in the last 24 seconds of his talk at Where 2.0.

So I spent as much time as I could listening to Aaron at WhereCamp, and asking him about psychosynthography and more (post of this interview upcoming).

Aaron urged the Where 2.0 audience to pay attention to the Psychogeography movement seeded by Guy Debord, and “to wear geography like a perfume.”

Joseph Hart writes in a “New Way of Walking” psychogeography is:

“a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”

Curating Big Data

Tom Carden, Stamen, (picture above) paired with Aaron for the Curating Big Data session. Tom noted:

“The Curating Big Data session for me was an attempt to learn from other attendees (as opposed to teach/lead, as with the Stamen session, “Real Time Web-Based Visualization and Mapping”).  Also, it was an excuse to get Aaron to recap parts of the Flickr Shapefile story for WhereCamp folks, and to get *input* on how to do more things like it. I was a bit disappointed that nobody had really good examples for us, but I was happy with Brad Stenger’s suggestion to look into the upcoming census data as a relevant area.”

Aaron’s work on the The Shape of Alpha and The Corrections project shows, as Tom noted:

“what you can do once you have 150 million geotagged photos, and millions of users who are willing to say I took this thing here and my name for that place is …..”

And part of the significance of opening up the GeoPlanet data set is that now:

“we can try and start talking about the same places, as far as, [for example], these shape files go. So if you are interested in what comes out of the Flickr shape files project and but you also have your own opinion about what shape those places are so the IDs have be open you have to be sure that you are talking about the same thing in the first place.”

And, as Tom pointed out, collaborating over geo data informs us about curating any big dataset:

“it should lead to an overarching discussion about any kind of dataset geo or otherwise and ways in which we can talk about it, and think about patterns for improving that data, for collaborating, even on things like cleanup.”

Warp speed geo-genius Andrew Turner, Fortius One, took these excellent notes for the “Real Time Web-Based Visualization and Mapping” (on left) and “Curating Big Data” (on the right).

On my way to Where 2.0 I took the train from SFO to San Jose which was a delight but a little slower than I imagined. So, unfortunately, I arrived on Tuesday just after Michal Migurski (Stamen Design), Shawn Allen (Stamen Design) presented  Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up. This was on my MUST attend list and it was a wonderful opportunity to get into, “Real Time Web-Based Visualization and Mapping.”   I did get a chance to talk to Michal and Shawn a bit later in the conference but I will try to catch up with them soon for an in depth story.  Below is  Shawn Allen’s map of overlapping data sets from, “Trees, cabs and crime in San Francisco:”

Another follow up I am really looking forward to making is with Liz Barry and her work on S+EM, “an environmental mapping and social networking design project that links New York City trees with the people who care for them” (also see, Creating a Greener San Francisco Tree by Tree).  Also I got a chance to talk to another fellow New Yorker (we have to travel to the West Coast to find time to chat!), John Geraci of DIY City who presented DIY City:  An Operating System for Cities.

Machine Intelligence and Human Intelligence

Aaron Cope, Flickr, on the left is talking to Andrew Turner on the right the CTO of FortiusOne (see Andrew’s presentation at Where 2.0, “Your Own Private Geo Cloud”)

Many of the most interesting conversations happened in between sessions at WhereCamp and Where 2.0.

I caught this one in which Aaron Cope and Andrew Turner where discussing some of ideas Aaron raised in his presentation, “Capacity planning for meaning in the age of personal informatics” (see Aaron’s blog post, Tree planting and tree hugging in the age of personal informatics). The core question they were discussing was what happens when you wire the world at the scale people are talking about and it breaks… Aaron argues that you already have a whole class of people in systems operations that can tell us a lot about how to answer this question.

Ryan and Anselm shared the pulpit for the morning circle pulpit with Ross Mayfield of Social Text who was the generous host to WhereCamp.

Social Reality Mining

“As it stands today, we have no idea what terms and limits of a cloud based citizenship of the Google Caliphate will entail and curtail. Some amalgam of post-secular cosmopolitanism, agonistic radical democracy, and post-rational actor microecomics, largely driven by intersecting petabyte at-hand datasets and mutant strains of Abrahamaic monotheism. But specifically, what is governance (let alone government) within this?” from Benjamin Bratton’s talk at ETech 2009 (picture above), Undesigning the Emergency: Against Prophylactic Urban Membranes.

The other big take away from WhereWeek – Where 2.0 and WhereCamp, was not so much news, but a confirmation of something that has been pretty clear for a while now. (Check out Brady’s posts on reality mining at Where 2.0 last year).

We are moving headlong into the era of reality mining with all its myriad possibilities from: “hedonistic optimization” (this term came from Stig Hackvan when I asked him about some of the ideas central to the HeadMap Manifesto -more about HeadMap later in this post); to new forms of marketing (social reality mining the inside to predict if someone is going to trade business cards in the next 120 seconds – Alex “Sandy” Pentland, MIT, Where 2.0);  to stuff that matters to save us from mass extinction like distributed sustainability – greening production and consumption and our cities; to open government;  empowering indigenous communities (also see Rebecca Moore’s Indigenous Mapping: Emerging Cultures on the Geoweb Presentation); and not to be forgotten, the troubling possibility of new forms of social control.

Smart phones are powerful networked sensor devices in the palm of our hand

As Sandy Pentland MIT pointed out in his Where 2.0 keynote, “Reality Mining for Companies, or, How Social Networks Network Best,” mobile phones have created an ubiquitous instrumented reality that goes way deeper than location awareness. Smart phones are powerful networked sensor devices in the palm of our hand that know a lot more about us than location. With proximity, motion, (accelerometers), voice, images, call logs, email – what is enabled is not just knowing where people are but knowing more about them.

Many of the issues raised by Adam Greenfield in Everyware and in my interview with Adam were on my mind during WhereWeek, also questions that were distilled and explored in this presentation by Matt Jones last year, Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics and Timo Arnall’s presentation, The Web in the World.

Google Wave, Pachube  Feeds, Sensor Networks and Microsyntax!

Visualizing 24 hours of Pachube logs, feeds all around the world -  built with Processing.

I found myself really wishing Pachube founder Usman Haque had been able to come to Where 2.0 this year – Usman was originally on the Where 2.0 schedule but had to drop out. My small contribution to WhereCamp was to discuss Pachube, Natural Fuse and OpenShaspa in the, Urban Eco-Managment session (see my interview with Pachube Founder, Usman Haque here).

Pachube announced – mapping mobile feeds in realtime, with 3d datastream value time & location based graphing just before Where 2.0.

And, as I was writing up this post, I was delighted to see this post by Bruce Sterling on Pachube Feeds and his challenge, offering:

“(((Extra credit for eager ubicomp hackers: combine this [pachube feeds] with Googlewave, then describe it in microsyntax. Hello, 2015!)))”

Also Anselm Hook, who has an extensive background in video game development, made an interesting point about Google Wave to me:

“btw – there is a preexisting metaphor for the wave – the wave is notable in that it is making the web like a videogame – its bringing real time many participant shared interaction to the web”

“Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.”

For more on microsyntax see microsyntax.org

Aaron pointed out to me re microsyntax:

“This is ultimately the “magic word” problem, which is essentially the semweb vs. google-is-smarter-than-you problem.”

I will have some more questions for Aaron on the the “magic word” problem in my upcoming interview post.  At the moment I am busy studying some of the thoughts in these links.

http://delicious.com/straup/magicwords

http://www.slideshare.net/straup/the-papernet/22

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/16/edfg.html

http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/135

Privacy: Towards a Win Win and Community Sensing

While a key element of  Yahoo! Geo Technologies portfolio of platforms, FireEagle, not only gives an important set of tools to allow people to “share their location with sites and services through the Web or a mobile device” but also offers up some vital privacy tools, the community sensing work of Eric Horvitz takes privacy and data sharing into new terrain.

Eric didn’t have time to discuss his privacy work in his Where 2.0 presentation, Where, When, Why, and How: Directions in Machine Learning and Reasoning about Location, – it came up in his very last slide. But I ran up after his talk with my trusty old ipod recorder in hand, and got the part we missed! Fascinating stuff that will be the subject of an upcoming interview post. Here’s a little taste of what is to come. Eric describes one of the directions his team will be exploring.

“One thing I want to do, on our research team, I’d like to develop something very simple for people to use. A challenging problem with privacy is usability and controls. Aunt Polly and Uncle Herbie just don’t get all these authentication controls and sliders, nor do they want to invest in figuring them out. They also don’t get why they’re being asked with pop up windows to yes or no to various questions and so on. One Idea is having a useable privacy lens, that you can hold up anywhere and it tells you what you’re showing anybody or any organization, what does the world know about you. And you would like to have buttons to turn sharing off for some items. You’d also like to have a way to go back in time and view prior sharing and logging over periods of time, and to have buttons to push to say erase that segment of your logs.”

Understanding the social implications of what it means to live in an instrumented world is a topic that we cannot afford not think about. But luckily there are lot of people who have been thinking pretty deeply about this for a while now.

And I did my best at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp to seek out as many of geothinkers as I could, and do interviews wherever possible (I have not had time to mention everyone I talked to in this post but hopefully all the interviews will get on Ugotrade soon!)

HeadMap Manifesto

In the bar of The Fairmont on the last night of Where 2.0, I heard some of the history of Where 2.0, GeoWanking, and The HeadMap Manifesto from Sophia Parafina, Director of Operations for OpenGeo and Rich Gibson, programmer, GeoWanker,  Gigapanner and co-author of Mapping Hacks with Schuyler Erie and Jo Walsh (Jo did a lot of key early work on bottom up urban informatics but unfortunately couldn’t make it to WhereWeek this year).

Check Gigapan.org out! “The GigaPanSM process allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe.”

Also I interviewed Paul Ramsey, Senior Consultant, OpenGeo, so more on OpenGeo is upcoming (see Paul’s Where ReCap). Justin Deoliveira (OpenGeo) and  Sophia Parafina did a session, GeoServer, GeoWebCache + OpenLayers: The OpenGeo Stack, which unfortunately I missed as it was before I arrived Tuesday.

I met Rich Gibson at Etech 2009 playing Werewolf and Rich introduced me to his co-author on Mapping Hacks and alpha geek supreme, Schuyler Erie, who also wrote the clustr code that The Shape of Alpha uses.

Joshua Schachter founder of Delicious and the GeoWanking mailing list, [and GEOURL - and MemePool!] now at Google came to WhereCamp and was mobbed by a small crowd eager to get their hands on one of the developer G Phones he was handing out from a large box.

GeoWanking, which is now run by O’Reilly Media, has been the incubator for all things location aware and “neogeography” discussions since 2003 – check out ‘sproke for a Paleogeography vs Neogeography (which, as Sophia notes, was a common topic of discussion at Where 2.0) smack down in which geowanking rules in the form of a list traffic comparison.

Sophia and Rich shared some of their perspective on the early days of GeoWanking and the creation of the HeadMap Manifesto with me and pointed me to many other people to talk to. The prime mover of the Headmap manifesto, Ben Russell, has retired from the scene – perhaps bored by seeing a radical vision gone thoroughly mainstream, or exhausted by the rigors of carrying an idea through the early blue sky years, or just s simply doing something else? I don’t know.

The HeadMap Manifesto is still vibrant today even as much of what it envisaged has already been realized. HeadMap assembled the future in a poetry of fragments:

“you can search for sadness in new york people within a mile of each other who have never met stop what they are doing and organize spontaneously to help with some task or other.”

Anselm explained to me what powered all this social cartography revolution, from his POV, was actually IRC.

“We had a channel on IRC called “#geo”.  And many of us met there.  I met Ben Russell at MathEngine in the UK. Ben and I were fascinated by the future of maps.  Ben, Jo and I met Schuyler, Dav, Dan Brickley (who worked for Tim Berner’s Lee who invented the Web), Rich Gibson, Joshua Schachter (who was just a geek at Morgan Stanley at the time ) … and the snowball took off….  many others.

We stormed ETECH ( Schuyler met Jo there).  We got invited to FooCamp. Schuyler was married to Jo by Marc Powell (Food Genome) and lived at his house.  We pushed so hard on the social cartography revolution.

I did a spinny globe for geourl – a project by some hacker named Joshua Schachter…  we were all friends for years and we had never even met.”

“Can AR researchers harness these new approaches to index reality?”

Radiohead’s laser (as opposed to video) clip made using Lidar

If you have read my interview with Ori Inbar, you will know how excited I was to attend The Mobile Reality panel.  The video is up and it is really awesome to hear Raven Zachary (on twitter @ravenme) get into the fray with augmented reality.

The main take away for me from the Mobile Reality panel was that we shouldn’t get too hung up on the difficulties of achieving fully immersive visual augmented reality and twiddle our thumbs waiting for the long anticipated sexy lightweight eyeware – which is still in a coming soon phase (for more on immersive augmented reality see my upcoming interview with Blair MacIntyre). Because, in the meantime, there are plenty of delightful and useful ways to augment our experience of the world – and not all of these augmented realities rely soley on smart phones as John S. Zeleck showed in his presentation on “Wearable Sensory Substitution Device for Navigation.” Also I had an interesting discussion at lunch with Ori Inbar about the use of audio for augmented reality projects.

Where 2.0 clearly demonstrated that we have an unprecedented amount of information from mapping our world, Ori Inbar noted in his conference roundup. Ori writes:

“My point is not a shocker: all we need is to tap into this information and bring it, in context, into people’s field of view.”

As Ori noted Earthmine and Velodyne’s Lidar showed off two new approaches to mapping the world that have potential to create new opportunities for augmented reality:

“Earthmine uses its own camera-based device to index reality, at the street level, one pixel at a time. They have just announced Wild Style City an application that allows anyone to create virtual graffitis on top of designated public spaces. However, at this point, you can only experience it on a pc!”

Lidar, Ori notes, has also embarked on a mission to map the outdoors. But, the question Ori highlights is:

“Can AR researchers harness these new approaches to index reality?”

Brady Forrest inspects John S. Zelek’s “Wearable Sensory Substitution Device for Navigation” at Where Fair before putting it on and being guided by sensory nudges at the cardinal points in the belt.

Coolest Mobile Locative Media App. at Where Fair

Atsushi Shionozaki of Place Engine – “a core technology that enables a device equipped with Wi-Fi such as a laptop PC or smart phone to determine its current location,” demoed the coolest location aware mobile app in Where Fair – Oedo Yokai. Working with ethnologist, Dr. Hiro Kubota and artist Atsushi Morioka, “Oedo Yokai” is Koozyt’s “first attempt to cross IT (Location Information) and Folkloristics.”

“The Japanese “Yokai” are known to dwell and appear at specific locations. They can frequently be seen within the grounds of shrines and temples, believed to be the border between this world and the afterlife, or in more common places like on a hill or at a crossroads. If the “Yokai” symbolize the mystery, legend, and lore associated with places, as our interests fade from actual locations, the rol, es they play in modern day society will diminish, and the “Yokai” might then cease to appear at all.”

I love this idea of bringing the ancient spirits of place back into our lives with our new tools of location awareness.

Odeo Yokai also reminds me of Aaron Straup Cope’s work on “the idea of every spot being a “history box” which he explained is “one of the threads behind the ‘nearby’ project at Flickr.”

The Food Genome

I cannot end this roundup of WhereWeek without a mention of The Food Genome.

“Food Genome is a big hungry brain that scours the internet, trying to learn everything there is to know about food.”

Watch out for the upcoming launch of this project, it stole the show with an exciting presentation at WhereCamp. You can follow @foodgenome on Twitter now.

To get one of the gorgeous Food Genome brochures you had to ask Mark Powell a good question. Notice an eager hand reaching out in the picture below. I asked, “how would the basic building blocks of the food genome be licensed?” I got my brochure and a rain check on an answer to my question.

The Ubiquitous Media Studio

Another highlight of WhereCamp was hearing from Gene Becker about his new project, Ubiquitous Media Studio which will be located in Palo Alto. The project is still in the early stages of devlopment but it sounds really exciting. I am looking forward to being involved from East Coast.  If you’re curious where this is going, follow @ubistudio on Twitter to stay updated.