Inspire

Gerd Leonard on the Future of Mobile Content Types at Mobile Monday Amsterdam (MoMo #10)

Below the highlight of our latest Mobile Monday Amsterdam event: Gerd Leonhard. I met Gerd at the Club of Amsterdam in 2003 and there he talked about the future of mobile music. He was incredibly spot on as a futurist back then. In the presentation below he explains his vision on the future of mobile content during 45 minutes in a passionate way. Recommended viewing!

Our next Mobile Monday Amsterdam event on Monday June 1st, 2009 will feature seven world class mobile internet speakers, each covering a different aspect of mobile internet and sharing their long term vision. The speakers are:

• Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs guru)
• Jamais Cascio (Mobile Science/Sustainability guru)
• Joseph Pine II (Multiverse guru)
• Robert Rice (Augmented Reality guru)
• Alan Moore (Mobile Society guru)
• Andrew Grill (Mobile Advertising guru)
• Eric Petersen (Mobile Analytics guru)

This will clearly be our landmark event. More information will follow at Mobile Monday Amsterdam website. All videos and presentations will be streamed and can be seen on our website afterwards. I really look forward to this event as a lot of Dutch and international mobile passionate people will be there, even from around the globe some MoMo chapters will be there. If you want to attend this free (!!) event, please drop me a note on [email protected].

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.

Why is Mobile Monday Amsterdam a Nodal Point?

On November 3rd, 2008 we had our latest Mobile Monday Amsterdam event. In my view one of the best ones of all the eight MoMo events. People around the world often ask me why this event is so popular in the Netherlands. The video below gives an accurate explanation of different success factors. Again, I am proud to part of this innovative organizing team, so thank you all for making this a great ride, including all speakers, attendees and sponsors! In April 2007, Raimo van der Klein, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald and me started it and we never expected all of this to happen.

Bruce Sterling on the Internet of Things (New Version)

At our latest Mobile Monday Amsterdam event Bruce Sterling from Wired and The Well and highly acclaimed speaker gave a special talk on the Internet of Things and mobile devices. A great update from his thinking in Shaping Things and his previous LIFT Conference talk on SPIMES. The religious setting makes it complete. We from the Mobile Monday crew and our audience were uplifted. Thank you Bruce! 

Blackberry Storm versus Google G1: Video Review

Below a short entertaining video shot at the Mobile Monday Amsterdam event with reviews of the new Blackberry Storm and Google Android HTC G1 phone by me and Vincent Everts. I guess both devices have their value depending on your exact requirements for a smart phone. Personally, I adore the G1.

Lawrence Lessig, Vint Cerf and Jonathan Zittrain on Authors@Google on the Future of the Internet

A great historic, knowledgeable, funny and original overview of digital media in general and how they thrive. Now and in the future. Open/generative or closed systems ? In case you are interested in the evolution of the internet, this video is for you. But also in case you want to protect your privacy or if you are a developer for Facebook. Based on the book Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain. Highly recommended!

Chris Anderson on The End of Theory (Wired/Edge) and the Petabyte Age and Its Impact on Scientific Evolution

Chris Anderson recently wrote a thought-provoking piece in Wired and Edge called The End of Theory in which he focuses on the rise of massive datasets, computational algorithms and correlations (instead of causation) for the next step in scientific evolution. Highly recommended reading.

More importantly, different leading thinkers like Kevin Kelly, Bruce Sterling, Daniel Hillis, George Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Stewart Brand and John Horgan respond to the Anderson view in this post on Edge analyzing the pros and cons of The End of Theory article. Below some quotes by Anderson and his critics.

In my view, correlation might boost useful science in the sense of working or realistic correlations. Nonetheless, in most disciplines intuition, creativity, asking good questions (perspectives/frames !), understanding, models and theory still have a clear value add, albeit for social / sharing reasons on top of a deeper understanding of the why of natural or social phenomena. Additionally, the reasoning of Chris Anderson is relevant for the rise of the mobile internet and its ubiquitous computing role in the near future. All these real-time mobile sensors might boost correlations and predictive capabilities to a certain degree while still acknowledging the power of Black Swans. Furthermore, Andersons' view seems to resonate with the Internet Scenario and Digital Gaia Scenario within the Singularity according to Vernor Vinge in which the continuing profileration and advancement of the internet will give rise to posthuman sense of consciousness as its too complex to contemplate. Finally, the role of the Semantic Web/Web 3.0 is interesting in the light of Andersons' reasoning. He seems to disagree with the benefits of the meaning and top-down structures of the Semantic Web. It would be great to see the responses of Tim Berners Lee and Nova Spivack to the Anderson piece. 

"All models are wrong, but some are useful. So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

Chris Anderson seems to think computers will reduce science to pure induction, predicting the future based on the past. This method of course can't predict black swans, anomalous, truly novel events. Theory-laden human experts can't foresee black swans either, but for the foreseeable future, human experts will know how to handle black swans more adeptly when they appear.

Just because we remove the limits and biases of human narrativity from science, does not mean other biases don't rush in to fill the vacuum.

It is clear to me that while numerical simulation and computation are welcome tools, they are helpful only when they are used by good scientists to enhance their powers of creative reasoning. One rarely succeeds by “throwing a problem onto a computer”, instead it takes years and even decades of careful development and tuning of a simulation to get it to the point where it yields useful output, and in every case where it has done so it was because of sustained, creative theoretical work of the kind that has been traditionally at the heart of scientific progress."

Whrrl: Mobile Social Networking Using LBS, Reviews and Recommendations

A great new app for mobile social networking, LBS and recommendations in this post on Technology Review (MIT). I love Magitti even more than Whrrl as it is a more integrated and holistic way to give more relevant recommendations using social network analysis more elaborately.

Furthermore, the below quotes touch upon the importance of lifelogging using mobile phones as a way to authenticity, self awareness and filtering. In my view clearly the way forward, followed up by tight integration of key life goals and aspirations in the long run.

"The idea of community-generated reviews is, of course, not new. The popular recommendation service Yelp, for example, is already integrated into Google Maps. And the concept of locating friends using a mobile phone has also been around for years; Loopt, a service that runs on Sprint and Boost Mobile phones, is one of the most common examples. Whrrl, which can also be downloaded onto BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and Nokia N95 smart phones, is commonly compared to both types of service. But it differs from either in that it combines aspects of both. In addition, Vengroff explains, Whrrl has collected details on establishments in 17 cities, which allows the service to provide fine-tuned local search, letting the user narrow down the hunt for, say, a café to one that has outdoor seating and vegetarian options and is recommended by at least one friend.

In the future, she suspects, location-based services will include more predictive features. For instance, instead of explicitly requiring you to write a review, the software might recognize how often you visit a restaurant and infer that it is a favorite. "Eventually, I think that a whole lot of exciting technology will emerge that figures out how to reduce the burden on the user," Choudhury says. "There will always be the case where user input will be important, but when we find the sweet spot, that's when I think it will take off."

Mobile Internet Presentation: Content, Advertising, Services, Community and Conversations

Good presentation on mobile internet and community building, both offline and virtual. The case studies are good as well in my view.

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My Personal Vision on Mobile Phones, Mobile Internet and Authenticity

Connectivity breeds positive outcomes.

I would like to extend this idea a little to a possible logical (positive conclusion). At first for the rich countries, later on for underdeveloped countries as well. Here goes:

The overarching theme of our times in my view is authenticity and self realisation. The mobile phone and mobile internet in this respect is a key driver and enabler/facilitator. Why ?

1) The more we share (the more open we are), the more transparent we are. Open APIs, GPS data, photos, videos, blog posts, tweets, clickstream data and increasingly attention data concerning what we read and watch (see APML) are examples. This sharing (increasingly using our mobile phones) stimulates authenticity and honesty as inconsistenties and lies are exposed to ourselves, our family, our social network, our peers and even the market/public as a whole.

2) Information overload begets us the question of what is important to us ? Choices… Choices are based on your identity (who am I ? what are my values ? what is core to me ?). Filtering (using our mobile phones) based increasing identity awareness stimulates authenticity. If we are overwhelmed with options, possibilities and choices, we are drawn to ourselves.

3) Change is everywhere and seems to speeding up. This creates stress in people. In most cases, people can find their core personality in these circumstances as it makes us naked in our needs and wants. As a result, authenticity comes to the fore. As a mobile phones is present with us almost all the time, it seems likely this will be a key gateway to learn about ourselves in these circumstances.

4) Increasingly, (mobile) technologies are on the market for the automated detection of deception and lies. Examples are Facial Coding techniques integrated into and applied to videos and presentations. If you lie, certain particular facial expressions are salient. These expressions can be logged and analyzed using technology. Increasingly, these techniques will be incorporated into mobile phones. As a result, authenticity becomes not only a valuable choice (see point 1, 2 and 3) but also a necessity in certain instances.

5) Mobile phones transform conversational techniques due to ‘presence’ capabilities. If my loves ones and social network can follow all my updates and actions on Twitter, my blog, Facebook etc…this transforms my real-life interactions. The basic questions are skipped as they are already clear using mobile phones and mobile internet. In the past, the basic questions were a necessity due to the lack of the mentioned apps. As a result, real-life conversations focus on more deep questions related to emotions, feelings and intimacy. Shallow, factual questions are more unnecessary. All of this might stimulate authentic conversations and authenticity.

In short, the mobile phone is not only a fantastic connectivity and thus productivity, growth and empowerment tool but also increasingly IMO a tool for higher levels of trust, authenticity, self realization, transparency and honesty.

This is not a sure scenario, just a likely scenario IMO. It is evenly possible to construct an opposite case/scenario with fear (instead of hope and trust) as a key theme as a result of using a mobile phone and mobile internet (including Internet of Things/UbiComp). Fear due to increasing control by classic institutions and even ordinary people. Fear -> more closed systems -> negative outcomes across the board including Less authenticity. Yet again, I am an optimist :-)