Digg Labs: Another Alternative To Represent Data

Similar to tag clouds, where tags grow in size the more often they are being used, this version called bigspy from the Digg Labs called of digged articles displays the respective article headline in a bigger sized font the more people digged it. Check the "all activity" section to get a clear picture of the concept.

The other lab products are interesting as well, but I don't find them as visually intuitive, more playful than useful really.

Guerilla Ads

Memorable ads that play with the unexpected and strange in everyday-surroundings.

Deadlines

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Douglas Adams

What? Only 669 kbps ? - Yeah, I just stumbled on it.

Two new nice tools I, well, stumbled upon. The first one: StumbleUpon. A recommendation engine somewhat similar to digg, running via its own toolbar. In setting this up one selects topic of interest (e.g. books, news, internet tools, movies, robotics etc.), downloads the toolbar as an .exe and off it goes. The space at the top of my browserscreen is now becoming a bit crowded, with the address field, the menu-items, the Yahoo toolbar, the "Links" row, two delicious buttons that take up a row of their own, the Google toolbar and now the StumbleUpon toolbar. Somebody should come up with some sort of dynamic toolbar integrator that condenses different toolbars into single buttons, and displays them on-the-fly or something.

Anyhow, the toolbar has a "Stumble" button that calls up websites from your declared areas of interest - and that have been given a thumbs-up voting by other users. You can then vote on it for yourself. And it works: the results I received so far very actually really good, most of them got a "thumbs-up" voting from me.

One site that I will definitely use more often is a network speedtest. I thought I had a 2Mbps connection - but oh well, theory and practice.

Well, according to this speedtest I am actually at 1822 kbps . I guess it depends on which server they ping to determine downlink / uplink speed - surely it is also a factor of network traffic on my broadband providers network, but does is vary that much ?

Have not tried the video feature yet, but that's next.

Snapshots: context is content

In the past months I quite enjoyed when I came across websites that had the Snapshot site preview implemented, that opens a small pop-up window with a miniature preview of the target website, when a user moves the cursor over a link. So when they announced today that they have extended this approach to further contextual concepts such as wikipedia-definitions, stockquotes, movies etc. I decided to give it a go myself.

The setup via the snap.com site the is very simple, well designed user interface. This blog-URL was identified and the instructions automatically provided specifically to a Blogger blog. All that is required is to copy/paste a Java Script code snipped into the HTML header of the blog template. This snippet references a .js file, which then does all the magic.

Conceptually I think it really creates value to the user to be able to preview the destination of any given link, and to decide whether it looks like a worthwhile site to access. The additional snapshot-contexts follow the trend that tabbed-browsing, widgets and other tools set, which is to make the browsing experience ever more integrated. The more relevant information is accessible on-demand in a convenient way in a single place, the more seamless the user-experience will be, the quicker the relevant information will be available and therefore processed.

Cool stuff.

Mobile Monday London

Last night's Mobile Monday featured a set of interesting presentations around location based services. First up was SeekerWireless, who provide a localization service that - according to the speaker - in terms of accuracy is half-way between GPS and Cell-ID based systems. I would like to find out more about what technology they employ (I did not understand how they use SMS) and also would like to see the system in action (there was no live demo yesterday). But I also was not clear that accuracy in locating a user is still a major issue in the LBS world. Specifically a slide outlining the various restrictions Nokia defines in the N95 GPS manual I felt made the drawbacks of GPS very clear.

Next up was LocoMatrix, outdoor games. The speaker was a sympathetic, entertaining if somewhat timid guy, with an obvious passion (which I totally respect): to help getting kids outdoors and moving around, in order to tackle isolation and obesity. Just not sure I was convinced by the games that were presented, I don't see that they can compete with the WIIs and Playstations / PSPs and indeed more and more advanced mobile games of this world. But cudos for the cause.

Trackaphone offers a service that helps tracking people, with apparently a focus on security-related use cases. They have a "red button" emergency concept, where upon acttivation of that feature a SMS/notification is sent to a number of defined recipients and the device starts recording what is going on ( I believe audio only). Living in a high-crime rate area of London I welcome any such technology, but wouldn't want this button to be pressed involuntarily while the phone is in my pocket without the keypad being locked.

Buddyping is one of those LBS products that I personally feel can play a part in LBS living up to its long unfulfilled hype. I don't believe that many users will look for the famous "pizza" place nearby, or be happy about receiving dozens of promotional SMS as they walk around (the Starbucks scenario). However, keeping track of your buddies with a Twitter component I think has huge potential. Which brand / product eventually establishes itself in that area remains to be seen, but I am positive that this kind of service will become exponentially more popular in the near future.

A neat tool for joggers, skiiers etc. to keep track of where they have been going in what time, distance, with a great maps integration is SportsDo. Definitely want to check it out, although need to check if I have a device they support and also - more importantly - need to get my lazy butt moving, and start running on a regular basis again.

The final presentation was by m-spatial, which again I think I need to play around with more - the demo showed how different content sources are integrated for any local search query. Another feature they presented was a tool that allows the user to highlight an address on a PC-desktop webpage, and then receive a link via SMS that takes the user to a mobile page with additional information about that location.

Art in Second Life

Interesting article about a new art-magazine (in print form) that illustrates / catalogues art being produced in Second Life. Apparently there are already 200 galleries with Second Life. The publisher of this magazine also argues that every avatar, as a creative, unique and novel expression of the person creating that avatar, can be seen as art. Apparently SL art is already being sold (IBM is named as one of the biggest buyers), despite the infinite reproducability of digital art - with the lack of scarcity prices will not increase.

The visual part of the cloud

A recent conversation brought up the question of how many images can be found out there in the cloud of the Internet. The actual question was "unique significant images". I was caught off-guard by this topic, and realized that my attempts at coming up with a likely overall figure took me to wild assumptions which in hindsight seem rather ridiculous. But the question persists in my mind and I wonder how to best tackle such an assessment.

Two definitions:
- "unique": well, meaning just that, a unique image - so I take a photo of my house, which is unique, and share it via email with 10 people, and put it on my blog and on Flickr. The image then exists 12 times in the cloud, but for the sake of the figure we are looking for it only counts as 1.
- "significant": I needed explaining for this - e.g. structural images for designing a page (borders of a box etc.) are not signifcant, neither are ads or page titles etc.
- cloud: means all of the Internet, hidden and visible web, email accounts etc. - not just what search engine crawlers would be able to see and index.

So then where do images reside in the Internet:
- on newspaper websites
- on blogs
- on photo sharing sites such as Flickr
- in the image search server caches of search engines
- in email accounts
- on FTP servers
- on other websites (from personals to porn to company websites and anything else)

Let's work with these. I think there are about 2 billion websites out there. A website being defined as any number of pages that make up a common site. Many of these pages are likely to be generated dynamically, where a page can load up with different images each time it is accessed or on different days of accessing the same page (e.g. newspaper homepages). So the relevant quantity here would be the number of images residing in the database of this site.

Furthermore, there are currently about 750 million Internet users out there.

One way of assessing the overall quantity of "unique significant images" would be to work with the users. Let's assume on average each of these users over their Internet-usage lifetime so far has shared 5 unique images in one way or another. I think that is a conservative assumption, give the proliferation of camera phones, digital cameras and the popularity of sharing images via mail, messenger and photo sharing site.

This alone would result in about 3.75 billion "unique significant images", with a growth curve that is probably more exponential than linear in nature.

Alternatively, one could drill down on each of the categories above of places where images reside in the cloud. But that opens a whole barrel of problems: e.g. how does one assume the number of newspaper sites out there, and the number of images in the databases of those newspaper sites? In terms of blogs, I read a recent figure that there are 80 Million blogs out there - but how many images per blog? The list goes on and on, for each type of site. Porn alone is going to account for a massive amount of images - but the overall quantity would be impossible to guess without deeper inside into the number of porn sites out there and the avg. number of images per porn site.

My point is that I find it impossible to come up with a verifiable estimate. Is it 5 billion images ? 50 billion? 100 billion ? These figures seem too large, but then - who knows?

Another Go at Artificial Intelligence: Hierarchical Temporal Memory

Last week I read this interesting WIRED article about Jeff Hawkins (creator of Palm Pilot and Treo) and his passion / project / company Numenta. Their objective is no small deed: they aim and claim that their software replicates the human brain. Based on the axiom that the basic working principle of the brain consists of passing information through several level of hierarchically structured layers of neurons, Numenta's objective is to create software that independently recognizes patterns in the outside world (focusing on computer vision). Lower nodes transfer their limited recognition of a pattern to higher nodes, which integrate these sub-patterns to eventually an integrated whole pattern - this process happens over time, hence temporal(the litmus test, Hawkins says, is for the computer to be able to differentiate between cats and dogs).

Hawkins believes that his program, combined with the ever-faster computational power of digital processors, will also be able to solve massively complex problems by treating them just as an infant’s brain treats the world: as a stream of new sensory data to interpret. Feed information from an electrical power network into Numenta’s system and it builds its own virtual model of how that network operates. And just as a child learns that a glass dropped on concrete will break, the system learns to predict how that network will fail. In a few years, Hawkins boasts, such systems could capture the subtleties of everything from the stock market to the weather in a way that computers now can’t.

Then today I found this 12min podcast interview with Hawkins, which led me to check out Numenta's website, where a about one-hour video of a talk Hawkins gave at a cognitive computing event very nicely explains his concept (turns out Hawkins is an excellent speaker).

It is obviously a intriguing idea and research-area, and naturally brings to mind the likes of R2D2, Data, Hal 9000 etc. Independent of the feasibility of Hawkin's concept I wonder how much longer it will take until a system is developed that passes the famous Turing test. Just around the corner? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? It may seem rather inconceivable, but then - so of course would today's world seem to a person 500 or 1000 years ago.

And - also a common question in most science fiction stories dealing with AI - will such a system ever have self-consiousness, a sense of "I"? In the human brain the sense of "mind" or "I" is either postulated as a emergent quality of the interplay of the brain's various subsystems (the rational-materialistic school) or - in various spiritual / religious variations - as a (eternal) soul. Considering the former to be case, then the question is on which level of complexity / interaction such a system would wake up to a sense of "I" and self ... which then in turn of course raises ethical questions about the "right to exist" of such an entity etc. ... anyhow, purely academic at this point of course, but fun to ponder.

Datafountain

Check out this example as an approach to redistribute data to alternate non-screen/desktop-based media - data displayed as water fountains. Cool stuff.

Ting-a-Ling Timequakes, No Assholes and the 8th Habit

Interesting inspirations in the form of three different books I picked up while walking around town today. First, still embittered after a recent break-up with my Japanese girlfriend and walking up Charing Cross Road to my bus-stop on New Oxford Street I stumbled into one of these half-indie bookstore / half adultstore places - and came across Kurt Vonnegut. I had not heard about this author, which given the other authors surrounding his books (Paul Auster, Graham Greene, Albert Camus etc.) surely exposes me as blatantly ignorant. But after scanning through one of his books titled "Timequake" and reading a few deliciously pessimistic and misanthropic (see my state of mind above) paragraphs I decided to spend some quality time with this book and a grande Cappuccino at the Starbucks up the road. I really enjoyed the read, and continuously felt reminded of Charles Bukowski - perhaps the same outlook on life, albeit in a more sophisticated, intellectually charged language.

Here is one of the paragraphs that resonated well with me today:

The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."

Then, after getting off the bus at Liverpool station and planning to buy some DVD, I found myself browsing through the business section at the local W.H. Smith store. I ended up buying "The No Asshole Rule" by the Stanford Management professor Robert Sutton, and Stephen R. Covey's "The 8th Habit".

The former resonated with my past and current job experiences, where from the top down I have found and continue to find myself confronted with some characters that I would label as "certified assholes" per the definition of the book and common sense. Getting some tips on how to deal with such jerks, and also just reading about how frequent a work-experience this is to millions of others, is very welcome.

The latter book made sense as I generally don't like to wallow in mire such as the one described above, and I remember being uplifted / motivated / inspired by "The 7 habits" before. Just started the first chapter, which relates the story of Muhammed Yunus's micro-finance banking concept (Grameen Bank) for the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh (for which he of course won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006). And - lo and behold - I feel more uplifted / motivated / inspired already :-)

Nothing like a healthy dose of misanthropic cynicism followed by a shot of philanthropic can-do-ism to keep heart and mind balanced.

Back to those books.

One Afternoon on the High Street and 167 Messages in my Inbox

Another nice example of what is typically hyped as a standard future scenario for location based services, but in reality would completely backfire, can be found on MobHappy.

The scenario typically has two variants:
a) find me the closest Starbucks. Problem: as outlined in my post below, most of the time most of us move in a familiar environment and therefore will not use this feature.
b) Starbucks sending coupons: I liked this example so far, but have to agree now that this is not feasible, at least when done via SMS. Users would have to opt-in, and even then might perceive a bombardment with coupons as they walk down high street as spam. Apart from that, the advertiser would need to cover the SMS costs, which might quickly eat up any profitmargin of an advertised product.

Self Geo-Tagging

Further to my post below about realistic location based services, I just read about Plazes (apparently a Swiss company) - for some reason I missed that they won the Mobile Monday Global Peer Award at this year's 3GSM. The service enables users to define and share (e.g. in their blog, MySpace or - nice idea - in their email footer) their current location, tagged on Google-maps or alternatively a flash-based map, and keep an archive of where they have been in the past. The user sends an SMS of the following format to set his location:

at centre pompidou in paris
or
at sony center in berlin

The product is still in Beta, and if I wasn't too damn lazy to continuously update my location I would probably start using it. Well, may be I will give it a shot in any case.

Regarding the community aspect: one can search for other users in locations - I checked one of their biggest locations (based on size of cityname in tag-cloud on the homepage), Berlin, and there were about two dozen people displayed on the map of Berlin. If this service takes off, then a city-map would quickly become too crowded and meaningless, so the level of "search location" granularity would have to be on a street/block/specific venue level.