Inspire

Daniel Suarez Presents DAEMON - Bot-Mediated Reality at the LongNow Foundation

There are many incredible, fascinating and inspiring videos and presentations available on the web and this seems to increase every year. Below one of the better ones in my view. The reason is an upcoming science fiction novel called DAEMON - Bot-Mediated Reality by Daniel Suarez. Recently, he gave a high-impact presentation at the LongNow Foundation, of which I am an active/paid member since the beginning of 2008.

DAEMON deals with bots (software based on narrow AI incorporating algorithms for specific search, retrieve and actionable goals) and the future of the (mobile) web. Daniel shows us that bots are on the rise and that they redefine what it means to be human. What strikes me about this presentation can be summed up as follows:

• The first time it impressed me, but by the time of the second viewing this video really inspired me to broaden my vision.
• Bots are within my field of interest since May 2005 when I worked with/for Yme Bosma and Bas Verhart within MediaRepublic for extending the opportunities of the Eccky bot. Artificial Intelligence (AI), both narrow and general, is key to the development of chatbots.
• Recently, I visited the The Singularity Summit 2008, a remarkable and highly recommended event with speakers like Esther Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Nova Spivack, Eric Baum, Neil Gerschenfeld, Cynthia Breazeal (fantastic!) and Ben Goertzel. Many talks in this one-day-event considered AI, bots and robots. 
• Daniel Suarez raises several important questions based on the rise of bots. They focus on a new Internet (DarkNet with limited bot-access), lifelogging, pattern recognition, copyright (User Owned Data?), security, terrorism, privacy, authentication, authenticity, identity, outsourcing, (hyper)efficiency, games and virtual worlds and new organizational structures.
• Amazing insights related to advanced reputational (human) systems, social networks and Mobile Augmented Reality as a gateway to a newer, more secured and better Internet (DarkNet) as to block unlimited powers of bots in the next decades in the current internet.
• Bots are also related to the current global financial crisis. Bots are in almost all cases linear, dualistic and digital in nature. The non-linearity of the real world (see the remarks by Nassim Taleb) in most cases might imply sub-optimal decision making by financial bots as can be seen by our current crisis.

Recommended viewing by Peter Schwartz, Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly! The book will be officially released on January 9th, 2009.

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).

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.

The Metaverse Roadmap : The Future of Web 3.0, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality, MMORPGs, Lifelogging, Google Earth and All Other Key Trends in Digital Media

Finally, the Metaverse Roadmap 2006-2016 has been published with over 72 pages of very valuable content related to all subjects/tags from my blog and even much more. The section on Predictions (9) is just stunning and breathtaking, so much highly interesting insights. The coming months I will pick some topics from this report to give you my perspective on them.

This is probably one of the most important reports on the future of digital media as a whole. It covers all aspects: economic, social, cultural, legal, political, technological and psychological. To me, this Metaverse Roadmap report is the absolute number 1 resource at this moment. It's just incredible. Thanks to all who contributed.

Very highly recommended to all my readers !

Holographic Video in a Cost-Effective and Practical Way

Stunning. Cost-effective and practical holographic video is around the corner. More in this link from Technology Review. I used to think the development of holographic storage and video would take many years to come. Somehow MIT is advancing faster than predicted. How does it work ? The modulator converts a video signal into a vibration. When laser light is passed through the modulator, the vibrations modify the brightness and frequency of the light. The altered light is then shined on a screen, and the varying intensities and frequencies create a three-dimensional hologram.

What does this mean ? Will 3D video become mainstream across the board ? (e.g. 3D TV, 3D movies, 3D Web (Web 3.0; Google Earth+SketchUp as well as Second Life) and 3D printers). Or does 2D still provide most value while the different 3D propositions fill in niche applications ? When is 2D best and when 3D ? In my view 3D will become standaard within 10 years across the board due to the enriched experience, lower costs and practical benefits. And when will (smart) mobile devices become 3D ? And which exciting eMarketing videos can be made using holography ?

"The tyranny of two-dimensional computer and TV displays could soon be over. A team of MIT researchers has proposed a way to make a holographic video system that works with computer hardware for consumers, such as PCs with graphics cards and gaming consoles. The display, the researchers say, will be small enough to add to an entertainment center, provide resolution as good as a standard analog television, and cost only a couple hundred dollars.

A holographic video display could provide another way to view medical images such as MRIs and CT scans, as well as sets of complex, multidimensional data and designs for furniture and cars, says V. Michael Bove Jr., director of the consumer electronics program, CELab, at MIT. And the system would be a natural fit for displaying video games and virtual worlds."

eTech Recap: Creating Alternate Realities Presentation

Just saw an interesting presentation on Slideshare on Creating Alternate Realities. Especially slides 9 and 10 (on the new Happiness movement) and slide 38 hit home with me. There are quote a few trends in here converging: transformation, serious gaming and smart mobs.

Henry Jenkins - Convergence Culture: A Great Synthesis of Rheingold, Anderson, Benkler, Weinberger and Pine II

Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins (MIT) must be one of my all-time favorite business books. Just finished reading it. Just awesome ! This is a milestone book integrating the thoughts, ideas and insights from seminal works like Howard Rheingolds' Smart Mobs, Yochai Benklers' Wealth of Networks, Chris Andersons' The Long Tail, Joseph Pine IIs The Experience Economy and David Weinbergers/Doc Searls' The Cluetrain Manifesto. Not only integrates but extends in certain ways as can be seen below in some quotes from this amazing book. Themes in the book are: reality TV, machinima, Current.tv, gaming, transmedia storystelling, fan culture, The Matrix, mash-ups, The Sims, alternative reality games, Idols, Survivor, Big Brother, beta reading, Star Wars, anime, Harry Potter, Twin Peaks, The Apprentice, Lord of the Rings, fair use policy, comics, DRM, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon, X-Files, Pokemon and Yellow Arrows. Highly recommended reading !

“Transmedia storystelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience. The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down.

Think of these debates as exercises in popular epistemology. As we learn how to live within a knowledge culture, we can anticipate many such discussions centering as much on how we know and how we evaluate what we know as on the information itself. Ways of knowing may be as distinctive and personal as what kinds of knowledge we access but as knowing becomes public, as knowing becomes part of the life of a community, those contradictions in approach must be worked over if not worked through.”

Update on Games and Education

Jeremy Wagstaff from Wall Street Journal elaborates on the rise of edutainment or serious gaming. Below some quotes.

Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand....that's what comes to mind.

"The world is waking up to the power of games, both on the computer and off, as a way to convey complex ideas, engage and influence. "Serious games" now have their own summits (the second annual Serious Games Summit, held Oct. 30-31 in Washington, D.C.), think tanks (such as Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab, www.mixedrealitylab.org), and even university courses (Michigan State University is recruiting students for the 2007 launch of its Serious Game Design masters degree program). They can be found in fields including education, assisting emergency staff working at hospitals and dealing with fires and natural disasters (www.incidentcommander.net), and helping activists plan the overthrow of undemocratic governments (www.aforcemorepowerful.org/game).

Games are getting so sophisticated, in fact, that it's no longer just a case of learning about the past, but of improving on it. A game about World War II called Making History: The Calm and the Storm is so historically realistic that historian Niall Ferguson concluded that it offered a chance not just to make history relevant to today's kids, but to "play -- or rather replay -- the great game of history for themselves," as he wrote in New York magazine in October. Making History (www.making-history.com) was originally made for schools but will be released as a commercial product early next year. It's impressively hard: I felt like I struggled to save China from Japan just as much as Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong did.

This is just the beginning. Games will get so sophisticated that everything we do, from naming streets to invading countries, will be run through a simulator first. Then we'll gradually come to accept that a six-year-old can figure out the mechanics of these games quicker than we can, and we'll grudgingly hand over the reins of government/disaster relief/environmental planning to our kids."

Linerider: Simple and Effective Game

Just spotted an interesting and fun game called Linerider. I guess I am not the only one spotting this one as its success is driven by 15 million visits.

In my opinion a great way for setting up different viral marketing campaigns. User generated content gaming. Enjoy the ride !