Below a video from Google TechTalk. Some highly innovative applications are highlighted related to mobile LBS visualization apps, OCR software with automated integration into Google Docs and Spreadsheet, edgy video/movie editing software, a HTML PC doc to Flash Mobile doc conversion tool and a push-delivery system for real-time web content with scheduling features.
Highly recommended !
Below a short presentation from TED 2008 which inspired me a lot. For the first time, the universe becomes more accessable, knowable, personal and sharable to all of us spurring different innovations going forward.
My previous (speculative) blog post on the impact of increasing parallellism and evolutionary thinking on the one hand and the decreasing (perceived) centrality of the human species on digital media resonates in my view with the WWT experience and learning, especially in relation to the decreasing centrality of humans and a deeper understanding of the evolutionary nature of our existence.
Experience, immersion, inspiration, education, consciousness expansion... thanks to Microsoft for all of this !
Just finished my favorite week of this year encompassing two key events : Mobile Monday Amsterdam (MoMoAMS) and PICNIC / PICNIC07 (also known as Cross Media Week Amsterdam). In one word: inspiring ! Both were in the second edition. Below some recommendations and sharing from my side...
Mobile Monday Amsterdam : Mobile Communities
As one of the founders and organisers I found it very thrilling to see around 230 internet, mobile and marketing professionals in one room. Among them many of the leading twitterazi, thinkers and innovators in the Netherlands. The presentation by Tomi T Ahonen - author of Digital Korea and Communities Dominate Brands and leading mobile thinker (Mobile as the 7th Mass Medium) - was impressive. You can find in presentation and video format on our blog : presentation and video by Tomi T Ahonen on Mobile Communities. Some take-away case studies: Kart Writer, Flirtomatic, CyWorld, Any Question Answered (AQA), mobile idle screen tickers and OCR recognition/translation software for mobile phones. The presentation above contains more mobile community examples than the video. It also includes the best mobile internet sources around as recommended by leading thinker Tomi T Ahonen.
PICNIC / PICNIC07
And of course all the dinners, talks and networking before, in-between en afterwards. Thanks to all who contributed, helped and organized ! See you soon at another inspiring web 2.0/3.0 or mobile event. I am planning to go to the next Mobile Monday Amsterdam (november), LeWeb3 (december) and Metaverse Summit 2007 (december; as a speaker, my first international speech on an inspiring event on lifelogging, augmented reality, web 3.0 and virtual worlds together with a.o. Jamais Cascio and David Burden).
Thanks to Yme Bosma for this great web app on real-monitoring the clickstream data of your friends and all others. It is called Cluztr. Fits nicely with trends like Lifelogging, Lifestreams, Smart Mobs and Subscribe-to-a-friend-trend. What do you think : is this complementary to Twitter and Jaiku or a substitute ? My take it is complementary. Cluztr is about clickstream data only, not about sharing other parts of your (offline and online) life with your social network like in Twitter. And to Yme, I believe privacy is not an issue in this respect. I think this is a valuable extension.
"Cluztr builds a detailed profile of each user’s surfing habits by tagging the sites and pages a user visits. This “attention data” is displayed live as a clickstream on each user’s profile page as well as aggregated with other users and shown in a public clickstream. The site uses this information to recommend webpages and people which may be of interest to the user. Users can also subscribe to other users’ clickstreams, to track what their friends are looking at.
"Cluztr is a collection of browser histories - yours, your friends’ and everyone else’s", said Jon Cianciullo, the founder of Cluztr. “This tells users what people, including their friends, are paying attention to right at that moment, so there’s a good chance you will want to check it out for yourself. There are other programs out there that offer a similar mechanism of social discovery - Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, for example, but what makes Cluztr different is the unique element of real-time.”
This screencast from Particls shows us new functionalities like attention driven RSS feeds presented in different ways based on relevancy. It is similar to NetVibes, yet more advanced due to prioritization of feeds. It is about attention instead of just plain information. Clearly, in line with the current work and thinking on Intention Economy, Social Networking, Personalization and Attention.xml. And it can be integrated with the service of Jaiku which is similar to a lifestream - centered around users - with photos, twitter streams, locations, blog posts etc. In my view you can segment websites in different ways: themes/categories/verticals, user/people, time/historic/futuristic, location/places and data. Clearly, Particls is built up from the user inside out. What I like personally is the option to integrate granular LinkedIn search categories. Thanks to Jeremy Wagstaff from Wall Street Journal. The whole post is here. Recommended !
"Particls (www.particls.com) looks simple enough: a downloadable ticker that runs across the top of your screen, pumping you information. Nothing new about this; the difference lies in what information it presents, and how it appears. Instead of shoveling data at you, Particls tries to figure out what you're paying attention to. Enter a few keywords of things you're interested in and Particls scours millions of blogs and news sources to find stuff that matches them. You can then tweak this flow by raising or lowering the relevance of any particular feed or keyword (from strongly like to strongly dislike).
What I like about Particls is that it starts not from an "information" point of view but an "attention" one: matching and presenting the information according to the time you can give it, so the amount of information you receive varies, as well as the type of information. Particls doesn't so much grab armfuls of stuff for you as cherry pick it."
I invite my readers to see a stunning video from Z Corporation on their newest 3D printer in this website. On the right side of the screen you'll find the video. To me, it seems like science fiction but it is real.
The implications of this development are interesting. Printing 3D personal objects and avatars from virtual worlds like Second Life or Laguna Beach comes to mind.
Jeremy Wagstaff from Wall Street Journal on blog spam, CAPTCHA and bots in this post. Clearly a relevant issue, even my own blog is comment spammed occassionally :-( On a broader scale, this could make authentic comments in the blogosphere less apparent or visible. It might blur interesting conversations. However, I do believe this co-evolutionary battle will be won by the authentic and real people boosting the interesting conversations throughout the blogosphere. It is the relevancy of the comments by real users that prevail.
"Spammers send millions of emails every day, just by pressing a
button. The same is true of comment spam. And yet my Indian spamming friend Mr.
Kumar isn't a bot. It might not be his name, but I'm pretty sure he's a real
person. He's part of the world of sweatshop spam, and a sobering reflection of
just how bad the spam wars have gotten.
How do I know he's real? Well, first we need to look at the ongoing battle against comment spam, a problem that could be as big as email spam. As much as 95% of comments posted on blogs are spam, according to Akismet, a company that filters comment spam using a basket of methods similar to those used by email providers to filter email spam. The problem is bad enough for other filtering methods to appear: forcing people who want to comment on a blog or site to register first, for example, or allowing the owner of a site to approve comments before they appear. Or making the would-be commenter complete a test called "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," or CAPTCHA. If you have ever come across a box where you have to type in the letters or numbers you see in a distorted image, you'll know what I'm talking about. CAPTCHA has become popular, not just on blogs but on many Web sites that are attractive to spammers. Most humans, unless they have visual or reading difficulties, can distinguish the characters even if they're behind a maze of lines, or at odd angles, or in different colors. Bots cannot.
Or can they? It is possible to decode some of the images by running them through an optical character recognition program -- the same sort of software used to convert a scanned document to text. Enterprising individuals like a Chinese programmer who goes by the name Wangrun have developed software to decode different CAPTCHA systems. Depending on the complexity of the CAPTCHA image, Anhui province-based Mr. Wangrun charges between $500 and $5,000 per decoder. He declines to say what his customers use the decoders for, but says he has "very many" of them."
Google Tech Talks on Google Video is similar to TEDtalks and both are an infinite pool for high-end inspiration on many many fields and it encompasses all the tags in my blog. Both are very highly recommended ! This is the future of eLearning. Kevin Kelly's talk on Google Tech Talk on the Scientific Process is interesting due to his reference to Synthetics/Simulations as ways to expand ourselves and our understanding.
The coming weeks I will report back on some of the most outstanding videos on Google Tech Talk.
Increasingly, we can spot different tools on the Web for polished self expression and presentation. Slide clearly is the market leader in the space of pimping your social network or blog profile. Recently, there is competitor called RockYou. Both provide ways to publish and share slideshows on different social networking sites and blogs. Millions of users adopt these services as to differentiate themselves from other users and to convey status skills.
Some questions pop up:
- Will these services dominate resumes in recruitment processes in the future (integrated professionally on LinkedIn or a blog) ?
- Will these services be integrated into Web 2.0 PPT sites like SlideShare (one of my favorite sites for research nowadays) ?
- How will social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, YouTube and Flickr react to their success ? Acquisition ? Blocking them ? Competitive offerings ?
- From a business perspective, do these services raise the bar for eMarketing / promotional activities using Social Media Optimization ? And will the special FX migrate to traditional means of communication and marketing or the other way around ?
Just ran into an interesting innovation called Fring. It is a mobile application that allows you to make mobile calls and send instant messages to other fring users and PC-based VoIP services such as Skype, Google Talk and MSN Messenger at no extra cost beyond your existing data plan. Calls cost nothing extra because they utilize GPRS, 3G and Wi-Fi mobile internet connections.
Fring roams seamlessly between Wi-Fi and 3G networks while bypassing traditional mobile voice and SMS text messaging services. This means that Fring enables mobile-to-mobile calls, mobile-to-landline calls, and mobile-to-PC calls including integration into Skype, Google Talk and MSN Messenger wherever you are.
The telcos have some food for thought I guess...
Recent Comments