Inspire

Mobile search and P2P

This article from Russell Beattie makes me wonder if and when this will really take off in the mobile space. I wonder about how many mobile users will 'tag' all their own (individual?) user generated media as it will take quite some time. And as we all know time is a scarce resource these days. Additionally, the bandwidth costs on mobile networks at this moment are too high to make this a big market. But in the long run I do see value in this as it is effective shortcut to getting specific media from your friends in your social network (MoSoSo). That special picture or video from the wedding, party, event, birthday, holiday trip, etc. And this might be valuable in tandem with the upcoming tangible interfaces. Mobile P2P search in case you missed sharing on the spot when the media was created and tangible interfaces for sharing that immediately.

"This would be so easy to mock up with Series 60 phones: Create central index site "neatomobilesearch.com" and then whip up a Python script that goes through the normal data repositories (image, video, messaging, documents), indexes what it finds and periodically connects to the server to upload its results, and also see if there's any pending requests that it needs to fill. If the script connects, and it sees a few requests for files (from a search), it then uploads those files as well. And like I said above, the search interface could be based on some sort of social network or it could just be based on what I decided to make public or not."

Upcoming blogging events in Paris and Amsterdam

2 upcoming blogging (and social software) events which might be of interest to you:

1) Blognomics Event during the TINE 2005 in Amsterdam

2) Les Blogs (Blogging and Social Software) in Paris / Les Blogs Event Info

The latter is a key event with great and leading speakers like Joi Ito, Dave Sifry, Caterina Fake and Doc Searls. Really looking forward to this 1 day conference.

I will be there as well.....hope to meet you over there :-) Drop me an e-mail...

Yuri

Mobile content or mobile communications?

Hollywood is trying to impose their business models and restrictions onto the mobile Internet space. This article reinforces the current debates among Hollywood versus different P2P networks like Grokster ((lawsuits), Creative Commons versus copyrights/DRM and the great Mobile Internet Manifesto by Howard Rheingold advocating an open mobile Internet instead of a walled garden approach by mobile operators. An open mobile Internet will also be more condusive to The Long Tail. My guess will be that all these sides will be represented in the fixed and mobile space for a long time, side by side...fluctuating over time but gradually move to the open/sharing model. Personally, I believe most value in mobile data/content will be based on different applications of GeoWeb and Augmented Reality and mobile social software, both from the end user as well as mobile operator perspective. All these concepts can trigger increased traffic on mobile networks. Mobile content from mainstream companies will be adopted slowly (music might be an exception due to the mobile setting) but it will only be a minor part relative to bottom-up, self-organized end user initiatives enabling better communications and sharing. An elaborate article from Gerrit Visser substantiates this view incorporating the Smart Mob book from Howard Rheingold.

"The problem is that they've learned the wrong lessons from the Internet. They think that broadcast-style content was slow to take off on the Internet because they didn't have control over things and couldn't lock it down. However, the real reason is that the Internet is a communications platform -- not a broadcast one. People go online to communicate, not to consume broadcast content. The same thing is true of the mobile Internet -- which is only going to merge more and more with the existing Internet as time goes on. With a communications platform you want to encourage people to communicate. That means sharing content, not making it harder to share content. It means freeing up the ability to communicate by whatever means necessary -- not locking it down so that only a few approved broadcast channels can be accessed."

To brand or not to brand: case study

New approaches to branding are coming in daily. This one by American Apparel is provocative and I wonder if it is possible to sustain the image of a non-brand. In the end, all hypes or trends seem to become a brand anyway. And I believe this approach will strike a cord with many youngsters, even though in the Netherlands most teenagers are still focusing on known brands according to different surveys.

"American Apparel is a youth-directed company, founded without the assistance of institutional investors. Having no political ties, the company has rejected established norms on all sides; we've dismissed both the corporate right and the politically correct left in favor of something new.

Oh, so it’s not one of those “let’s pretend this isn’t a business” propositions. No, sir. At first, this casual flipping of the bird in the direction of the Thomas Franks of the world seems gratuitous, but then you notice the obvious: AA is not a union shop. This is a middle way: anti sweat shop and anti union.  Tools down.  All out." 

Global warming, Gulf stream and economic impact

A new document on global warming and its possible implications. Reminds me of the report of Global Business Network by Peter Schwartz on the same topic. Somehow, the Gulf Stream issue is not given a lot of attention in the general news. It can have considerable economic, political and health implications, perhaps even within the coming 5 years.

OurMedia: Personal Media Revolution

In this website called OurMedia we can witness the future of blogging or personal media in broader terms. Highly recommended. This website can be one of the highlights of this year I guess. A blog syndication tool would be a good add-on though ;-)

"OurMedia encompasses among others:
Podcasting: free hosting, bandwidth and storage for personal audio broadcasts.
Videoblogging: free hosting, bandwidth and storage for videoblogs.
P2P: Support for BitTorrent as a legal way to share each others’ works (soon).
Fair Use Zone: for discussions about how and when students and others may borrow copyrighted music or images to incorporate into their own works.
License searching: allows users to search on every piece of media available for remixing. Ourmedia will serve as an enabler of legal remix culture.
RSS: automatic subscriptions available to every media category on the site."

Tangible interfaces, NFC and mobile phones

Tangible interfaces in the future. Nice. Saves time indeed. NFC as a short range technology also allows for temporarily sharing of content with others as to avoid DRM issues.

"What exactly is a tangible interface? We're looking at how touch can be used to execute a number of tasks or interactions so you don't have to switch contexts from the real world to the world inside the screen. For instance, one person could touch his device to someone else's and give them a "digital gift," to borrow a phrase from our old boss Marko Ahtisaari. That digital gift might be something as simple as a URL or a photo that I've taken of a moment we just shared. To set up a swap over Bluetooth might take twenty or thirty clicks. This completes the interaction with one touch. Although, for security purposes, we also have a confirm button. There's something very human about giving someone a gift while looking them in the eye and touching the devices together instead of both people squirreling away in the interfaces trying to do the data exchange."

Consensus Based Location: mobile tagging the world

GeoWeb (or locative media) and tagging meet in this article. Interesting, also the comments. Tagging the physical world with your mobile (or PC?) might be of interest to users for their own use (see the LifeBlog from Nokia) or by looking at the tags of others, preferably their (close) friends. I believe tagging will be restrictively presented to the end users as to avoid clutter and waste. In that sense an eventual convergence of different memes of trends is likely in this respect: mobile social software (MoSoSo), locative media with their searchable tags. Practically, this means that a friend of mine in my mobile social network leaves an interesting note or tag on a club or restaurant for example. This might be personalized (even a surprise tag?), for his network or for general public. It might be on the map closeby only (as to tease) or on a broader map (as to inform). I see value in that and the operators will benefit as this might stimulate conversations/calls based on the tag. 

"Although modern mapping systems depend heavily on computers, some of the most fundamental maps we use daily are drawn and redrawn on an ongoing basis by our own wetware. From the moment we become aware of spatial relations, we begin a complex process of constructing personal thematic maps. Maps of our mommies, daddies, bottles, favorite albums, movies, books, food, friends, pets, conversations and experiences -- anything to which we can attach associations, meaning and relationships. But these maps live on an almost subconscious level. My map of, say, the best shopping in Stockholm or the spiritually resonant zones of cyberspace, may look very different than yours. That's why the people involved in open-source mapping and locative media are so committed to helping us make our associative maps more explicit and geospatially representative. If we could only collaborate on our mapmaking, these visual aids may just help us communicate better, and start to see some of our collective challenges from a shared frame of reference."

Tagging, search, indexes, RSS and sharing

Very good article from News.com on the impact of 'social tagging' or 'free tagging' or 'folksonomies" on the Web. Wiki definition on tagging can be found here. Put into historical context. I strongly believe many large web services will be impacted by this trend as the scale of Web usage is large enough, both on the fixed Internet (online dating, anyone?) and mobile Internet (as witnessed by the WaveMarket application and other upcoming LBS based tagging services). And what about all those P2P tagging possibilities? And what will be the impact of tagging on The Long Tail? Tagging is all about emerging concepts, discovery, serendipity and emotional/social connecting with others. In my view, the latter aspect is neglected in most discussions on tagging, especially the emotional part of it. Bottom-up tags convey more emotion and identity than top-down categories or indexes. It is in a sense an extension of companies like Autonomy (bottom-up knowledge management) but then human-like and socially more impactful (Kevin Kelly's network effect or Metcalfe's Law). This brings to light some risks: spam and the (necessary) time invested in tagging.
Highly recommended reading.

"The democratization of information is the real interesting thing about this, said Bob Rosenschein, CEO of GuruNet, an answer search engine. They're messy and noisy and they're not always accurate, but they're people talking about real subjects; and in that manner they have tremendous statistical interest when they get to scale. There's a wisdom of the crowd. The most interesting applications are before us. It's a deceptively simple premise that holds enormous consequences for information management, boosters believe, provided the stars align properly. In addition to Flickr, up-and-coming communities at Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and others have many people pondering the future of free tagging, as some call it."

The Long Tail vs. Bottom of Pyramid

Nice investigation of the parallels and differences between The Long Tail concept and the Bottom of Pyramid concept from C.K. Prahalad.

"In all these cases, the BOP model is focused on taking a single product or service and finding ways to make it cheap enough to offer to a larger, poorer, market. This is why I think it's essentially about commodification.The Long Tail, on the other hand, is about nicheification. So the Long Tail is made up of millions of niches. The Bottom of the Pyramid is made up of mass markets made even more mass.  Both lower costs to reach more people, but they do so in different ways for different reasons. They're complimentary forces, but fundamentally different in their approach and aims."