Inspire

Paul Saffo on Effective Forecasting

Below one of my favorite presentations from the LongNow Foundation on Fora.tv. Paul Saffo - one of the most experienced and high-impact forecasters around the world - talks about tips for effective forecasting, the evolution of the web, robotics, the singularity, climate change, uncertainty, inflection points, the S-curve, the importance of history and psychology. Highly recommended, especially the second half and the Q&A at the end.

Video on Augmented Reality Using a Mobile Phone

Below a demonstration of Augmented Reality using a mobile phone. Opens up new possibilities for eMarketing and branding.

Augmented Reality GPS Tour Video

Event Update: Second Mobile Monday Amsterdam and PICNIC07 / Cross Media Week Amsterdam

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

• Presentation of Jyri Engestrom from Jaiku the next stage for social objects/networks/graphs and FaceRank instead of PageRank. FaceRank is based on social proximity (same connections), physical proximity (offline closeness), shared social objects and shared taste/values. Jyri was our first keynote spreaker at Mobile Monday Amsterdam. I was enthrilled by his deepening of his vision in just a few months. Definitely, one of the leading thinkers on social networks in my view.
• PhotoSynth with a incredible zoom-in and zoom-out function with breathtaking beauty and precision. Good to combine with Pixsta and Etsy.com
• Pablos Holman with a terrific and funny talk on different practical hacking stories and cases
• Stefan Sagmeister with an outstanding and highly creative overview of his work, just stunning !
• Alex Steffen with heartfelt stories on the environment and practical and positive case studies helping our world to be a better place. This video from TED by Steffen shows us the way
• Polar Rose for content analysis and searching photos
• Jack Meyers on branding and marketing in virtual worlds. En passant he gave a terrific overview of digital marketing trends worldwide, even on behavioral targeting !
• David Burden with a sublime presentation on the Metaverse Roadmap, Second Life, Augmented Reality, Mirror Worlds/Google Earth and Lifelogging. And how they interact and converge. One second favorite speech of this great week. Thrilling ! Soon you can download his presentation in this link from Platform Virtuele Werelden (PVW) and Jack Meyers prezzie is already here. Staggering to see a live presentation of real-time flight information fed into Second Life from Google Earth, opens up huge possibilities. Also, communicating with your 2L avatar using RSS. David will speak later this year on the Metaverse Summit where I can see him again :-)
• Portable Social Networks: a great workshop with Jyri Engestrom, Marc Canter, Dick Hardt, Biz Stone, Yme Bosma and many other leading thinkers. This was highly content driven (moving/synching/federating social networks, Identity 2.0, microformats, openID, lock-in, business models) and inspiring. I felt like witnessing the leading edge worldwide in social networking brainstorming for yet unknown solutions to complex, urgent and important problems and issues. No final answers as yet while I left the room but it was very special. I really hope these kind of sessions will become more commonplace going forward.
• Dennis Crowley on social networks, tagging the real world with cases like Sharkrunner and Plundr. His prezzie resonated strongly with the one from David Burden integrating real time, real data within games, virtual world and alternate reality games. 
• Nicolas Nova on augmented reality and twittering with your cat :-D  Here you can see his blog
• Adam Greenfield on Urban Landscapes, Gaming and Computing. Mobile Devices + Shared Visualisations+Tagging = Social Object = Jyri's presentation :) Extending the insights of Jyri Engestrom on social objects on location as a social object. More later in my blog and presentations
• eLens from MIT as an insightful example of city guides with personal and social overlays
• The Urban Garden: self organised bus stop with user generated content/tagging, craigslist data, narrowcasting and feeds from ubiquitous computing
• Emotion Maps and Biosensing
• Ben Cerveny on serious gaming, game culture, simulations, multidimensional and visual representations of pervasive and ubiquitous computing combined with augmented reality and GeoWeb. This was my ultimate highlight of this week. Shivers all over ! Complexity Science applied to games and real life. An extension of David Weinbergers' presentation on Everything is Miscallenous integrating different external data sources and categorizations on real life and serious gaming case studies. Here your can see his video from the LIFT Conference this year. His talk on PICNIC07 was different however, in my view even much better.

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).

On EveryScape, Google Earth and other Virtual Worlds

This post on Technology Review on EveryScape shows us the evolution of Google Earth and other virtual worlds. Google StreetView is similar to EveryScape but the demonstrations on the website of EveryScape are more spectacular in my view, especially the demo on the MIT building. Happy exploring !

"Everyscape CTO and founder Mok Oh says that the transition works because it simulates people's real-life attitude toward moving from place to place. "Getting there is not what you want," he says. "Being there is what you want." In the future, EveryScape hopes to add more interactive features to help businesses function virtually. Future additions might give users the ability to buy merchandise inside a store with the click of a mouse, or might add a virtual maître d' that could help visitors make dinner reservations at a restaurant and recommend items on the menu."

My Own Presentation on Trends, Digital Media, Marketing, Digital Marketing and Communication: Why Identity, Authenticity and Creativity Will Dominate Our Lives

Here is my presentation on different trends, digital media, web 2.0, web 3.0, marketing, digital marketing and communication/branding. Dutch only as yet, English one will follow soon. Focus is on different technological, environmental, economic and political views (macro perspective) as well as psychological, social and cultural views (micro perspective) and how they intersect, converge and reinforce in many different ways on different levels of analysis.

Key take away: Identity (knowing your intrinsic motivation, purpose and talents), Authenticity (being) and Creativity (doing) as reinforcing themes and values in the emerging and increasingly open space of the next web(s), biotech and ubiquitous computing where the all-encompassing and increasing availability of more granular and personal data of all sorts make the invisible visible and explicit to the benefit of ourselves, our social network, our peers and the market/global brain/humanity as a whole. The essential used to be invisible to the eye....until now and it will bring about massive transformations for the benefit of us all.

Hope you'll enjoy it.

Bruce Sterling on Spimes, the Internet of Things, GeoWeb, RFID, Cradle to Cradle and the Future of the Web

To me Bruce Sterling is one of the most inspiring speakers around. In September, 2007 his latest book will be released called Ascendancies - The Best of Bruce Sterling. I pre-ordered it. Here you can watch his presentation and powerful vision during the LIFT Conference on different important emergent trends like GeoWeb, RFID, Augmented Reality, mobile search, mobile social networks, Internet of Things and sustainability.

Highly recommended as this is in my view one of his best presentations I have seen so far.

On Publicis and Other Classic Ad Agencies and Their Positioning Within The Digital Marketing Ecosystem

The New York Times has some news on Publicis (a.o. Digitas) and how they envision the evolution of digital marketing. In my former posts on this blog (see the eMarketing tag on the right side of this blog) I shared my view on how Marketing 2.0 might be look like on a tool level, the impact of the Google-Doubleclick merger and the evolution of digital marketing and the key underlying principles of Marketing 2.0 and the meltdown of old media and their outdated ad models. Below some quotes from the NYT post.

My 2 cents:

• I like the idea of personalizing ads with ad variants, this clearly is one of the ways digital marketing will move forward as this will boost online ad ROI. As I wrote on my analysis of the Google-Doubleclick merger, I believe we will soon witness automated integration of clickstream data of users in different digital marketing tools like banners and e-mails.
• I wonder how Publicis can integratie advertisers' consumer data in their solution
• If you have the pull (not push) data from consumers, you are in the driver seat in the evolving digital marketing space. Clickstream data on search engines - my take-away from the outstanding book The Search by John Battelle - (albeit PC-based, mobile, iTV, Augmented Reality apps, 3D Web or gaming) are key in this respect in my view. So the question looms how Publicis will compete on this level with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. In my view, Google clearly is in the lead on most fields at this point in time
  
• Publicis assumes there will be a separation between online media and online ad agencies. In my view Google, Yahoo and Microsoft see this differently. Search engines are a key connector of consumer purchase intentions and online media, connecting content and commerce.
• Unfortunately, the vision of Publicis doesn't seem to take the impact of social networks and social networking on the digital marketing space into account (this is pull advertising as well like buzz marketing and open source marketing). Same applies for user generated online ads (and its variants). Their vision doesn't resonate enough in my view with the Wikinomics principles: openness, peering and sharing. They do dig the Global Operations part though
• What is the impact of open source ad networks and what is the role of Publicis in this respect ?

Looking forward to seeing your views on this topic. Thanks.

"Digitas uses data from companies like Google and Yahoo and customer data from each advertiser to develop proprietary models about which ads should be shown the first time someone sees an ad, the second time, after a purchase is made, and so on. The ads vary, depending on a customer’s age, location and past exposure to the ads.

Digitas executives say that consumers end up with a better experience — even a service — if the ads they are shown are relevant and new. “We now know how many times they’ve seen this ad, so stop annoying them,” said Mark Beeching, executive vice president and worldwide chief creative officer of Digitas. “The more you can standardize and automate in terms of making different versions, hallelujah. That money should be spent creating more content.” Along with automation, low-cost workers abroad will help create more versions of ads."

Second Earth: What Happens When We Merge Second Life and Google Earth ?

Some readers e-mailed me asking me why I have a tag combining Augmented Reality, UbiComp (Ubiquitous Computing) and GeoWeb. You can see the answer for yourself in this impressive and very important article from Technology Review/MIT about Second Earth.

There is a current media backlash on Second Life. In my view this is shortsighted as can be seen in this article. Just like the Apple Newton failed as the first smart phone and UMTS failed at first as an entry for mobile Internet, Second Life will return in full effect. Innovation comes in cycles, the timing at first might seem 'wrong' but it is about the fundamental drivers below. Same applies to 3D Web, especially combined with Augmented Reality and real-time data integration.

"For people who haven't spent much time in a 3-D world, of course, it's hard to imagine feeling comfortable in either. But such environments may soon be as unavoidable as the Web itself: according to technology research firm Gartner, current trends suggest that 80 percent of active Internet users and Fortune 500 companies will participate in Second Life or some competing virtual world by the end of 2011. And if you take a few months to explore Second Life, as I have done recently, you may begin to understand why many people have begun to think of it as a true second home--and why 3-D worlds are a better medium for many types of communication than the old 2-D Internet.

I asked David Gelernter why we'd need the Metaverse or even mirror worlds, with all the added complications of navigating in three dimensions, when the time-tested format of the flat page has brought us so far on the Web. "That's exactly like asking why we need Web browsers when we already have Gopher, or why we need Fortran when assembly language works perfectly well," he replied.

The current Web might be capable of presenting all the real-time spatial data expected to flow into the Metaverse, Gelernter elaborates, but it wouldn't be pretty. And it would keep us locked into a painfully mixed and inaccurate meta­phor for our information environment--with "pages" that we "mark up" and collect into "sites" that we "go to" by means of a "locator" (the L in URL)--when a much more natural one is available. "The perception of the Web as geography is meaningless--it's a random graph," Gelernter says. "But I know my physical surroundings. I have a general feel for the world. This is what humans are built for, and this is the way they will want to deal with their computers."

On Questions and Answers, Answers and Questions and the Role of Search Engines, Transformation and Social Networks

Some musings on questions, answers and search engines. My passionate blog readers know that my core focus in my blog is on the intersection between technology and the mind. The theme below is haunting me for a while now.

With the rise of mobile devices and their search engines, the search for (standard) answers will be shortened and less important. Additionally, the increasing importance and impact of virtual agents (Web 3.0, semantic web) as well as Augmented Reality applications will raise the bar even more for hard answers. At least, for some matters. Why ? Communication has four different levels : weather, facts and figures, emotions and intimacy. I suspect in the future the most interesting (and hard) questions and answers will migrate slowly towards emotions and intimacy. And this is where the importance of Transformation (Joseph Pine II) and social networks comes to the fore. The weather and facts are non-personal, emotions and intimacy by default aren't. Furthermore, every answer gives rise to new questions, more deep questions that is. Combine this insight with the rising importance of multi-disciplinary studies, disciplines and professionals and we see the rise of more integrated questions and answers with much more depth. We can already witness this in the increasing saliency of scientific papers encompassing different disciplines.

In short, technology is changing the nature of questions we will ask ourselves and the world around us.  We will ask more personal questions using technology than ever before. More deep factual, scientific questions, more emotional questions as well as more questions on intimacy. Perhaps Ray Kurzweil was right: we might end up being spiritual machines after all ;-)

How do you see this unfold ?