The other day we were having this discussion promoted by @ppinheiro76 at Twittlis about this semantic tagging concept. The idea was that every tag we use in del.icio.us, blogger, or whatever web-data-harvesting tool we use, be unambiguously defined and linked with it's Wikipedia definition. Well, even though we didn't found an universal way about how to do it, I did found on the internet an universal way to tag the REAL world and map it to wikipedia :)
The tool is called Semapedia
and it uses this new (in Europe) technology called smartcode which basically allows to encode information in a black and white pixelised structure (think: 2D version of the traditional supermarket barcode), like a web link.
Basically using sites like Semapedia, you can generate these smartcodes that contain an html link for any wikipedia article (like Wall-E, I liked Wall-E). Semapedia will return you with a pdf containing real world tags that you can readily print and glue wherever you find it interesting in your physical vicinity.
Then, the anonymous mobile troller that passes by, may take a snapshot and, if his mobile device has installed a smartcode scanner (I use the neoreader app for the iphone), he can scan the picture and extract the link that will give him instant access to the web page contained in the smartcode. Here's what I got on my first test:
Cute, hu?
This new technology can encode any textual information including links, SMS messages, microformats, you name it. The applications for this are really mind-blowing and it gets my vote as what regards the next disruptive big thing coming ahead! Wait 'till more people get mobile net access to watch those marketeers "smart tag" virtually any product around you! Heck, I want a t-shirt and a fake tattoo with a smartcode for my web-page!
With the iphone I used the free neoreader app. But I found out there are heaps of smartcode scanners available for hundreds of mobile devices out there. So, if you've got mobile web on your phone or pda and you're a tech enthus like I am, you may want to give it a shot at this service ;)
So far, there are several encoding standards that I know of: QR code, datamatrix and shotcode. You can very easily generate a smartcode to your web-site here, here and here. There, you'll find also useful links for smarcode scanners for your mobile device. UPDATE: You'll also find here a heap of interesting news related with 2d codes in Europe. In particular I found there a link to blog4mobile, which turns my blog into a mobile blog AND provides a QR code to it. Anyone knows of other such services?
People have already started tagging the real world, all over, using Semapedia smartcodes :) Is this the birth of a new socio-cultural movement?
How about you? Have you tried it yet? What smarcode generators/scanners do you use?
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Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.
Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal. He happens to play ball - real hard - both at the White House AND at Google. He's playing with fire though, and it could easily backfire on his employers.
The new Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the XXIst century, a prototypical example of the lacquay that out-wits the masters of the house he serves. This article, and the Edward Snowden case, are a glympse iMHO to a silent-war going on, mostly between the future world-dominating nations (or corporations???), US, China, ..., but also Facebook, Google, Baidu, etc ...
Scenarios outcomes? I would bet on political borders to become obsolete, and on social-network based new nations (or tribes?). Alexander, Julius, Napoleon, Adolf and Benito, they all had big plans, but they just missed the right technology to make the entire world yield into whole "Gaia Pax". Today, technology is almost ripe, almost, to make it a breeze to administrate over 100 billions of citizens, within the blink of a byte. Not only there CAN be only one, but I'd wager, there WILL be only one. It's only a matter of WHEN, and it's definitively not an IF.
For those who fight on good side of the force, I have only one word for advice (or is it three?): "peer-to-peer". Stick with this notion deeply incepted in your mind and we'll be safe enough. Nrº1 enemies? Anything that qualifies as a "walled-gardens" ;-) -
Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media". However, back then, it really wasn't the modern facebook-ish "social-media" model that was tingling my neurones; it was rather the emergent nature of these disruptive new tools such as blogs, wikis and web-based productivity apps such as Google Docs or Zoho. My senses would tell me that if these new tools would be embraced for collaborative work, then new buildings of knowledge and new scales of products could be created, because never man-kind had found a way to put more than a small team to work effectively on a single product (single document, single project, etc...). Wikipedia and the wiki concept was a fantastic demonstration of the capacity of harnessing of collaborative inputs in undetermined volumes that these new tools had capacited, in the right way too. Google docs and Zoho seemed like a perfect a bridge between the old medium and the new medium of getting content-producers to work together more efficiently. With the advent of RSS, mass publishing seemed like a solved problem, even moreso with pubsubhubhub.
However at some point, things drastically changed, and the unknown elite white wizards of tech that were driving the disruptive innovation got totally absorbed by this new platform, called mobile. It showcased cool smartphones and exciting tablets bidding for community-baked software, that lured them away from really important stuff, such as rss and open web platforms, and allowed for the green wizards of tech (evil leprechauns working for money and power) to create walled gardens in the publishing area for the masses such as the establishment of institutions like Facebook and Google+, the latter being a devoted follower and acolyte of the former (I still haven't figured out if I can email a set of photos from my google+ account as regular attachments with a simple text to a god-damn email address from my gmail address book! That's an obvious feature that's missing! Bastards!). But I digress... The point of this post isn't as much to discuss technology per se, but rather to share with you guys my experience at getting traction and involving fellow co-workers into these new collaborative tools and platforms. Because you see, the problem to me isn't much the tools, but rather the inertia in people's mind to fully adopt these new tools. And I mean to adopt tools such as wikis, web-based docs editors, web-based calendars, etc...
Mostly my experience tells me that if you don't have a strong leadership at the top, then people will give you a real hard-time to get into the new tools, say, in a medium sized company. Guerrilla wikis really have a hard time at getting adoption and traction from the bottom-up and climb through the hiearchy.
Back in 2006 I installed mediawiki for the group where I was working. Ever since then, the wiki proved to be a success, but of the 30 or so people that worked at my group, only 5 or 6 created about 90% of its content. And never, ever, people seemed motivated to focus on the wiki as a serious technical documentation publishing platform. It never got adopted officially from the top (a forum, created a few years earlier was heavily praised and adopted by top brass) and it survived only because, in many aspects, it became the best available public repository of documentation. Many times I had to battle to keep it going, to salvage it from extinction due to IT-related incidents, etc... it was hard, it was worth it, but it certainly wasn't because of the cheers of fellow co-workers. I did had the backup of the IT team and they certainly approved it. That was cool.
Another experience I had was with Google docs. In 2006 I tried to share a google doc for collaborative proof-reading and editing with a senior officer where I worked. I had a really angry reply from him. I had to sent him a word doc as an attachment via email but he kept some grudge on me, thinking that I was being too dispersive on these new technologies. Maybe he had a point, but I guess that I was too passionate about the potential these new tools could deliver that I couldn't understand the basics of human behavior. The bottom line is: using standard conformal technology actually increases effective collaboration. The standard technology however will change from context to context. Working with middle-aged lawyers in Portugal means that standard technology consists in printing out every email and having assistants digitize manuscripted replies (the amount of work produced is directly proportional to the amount of amassed paperwork that can meet the eye). Working in a regular office means using e-mail, MS-Office documents and printing stuff from time to time.
Ok, the most fun experience I had with collaborative content publishing was when I proposed a simple wiki site (jottit) to organize our new year's eve trip. About a dozen people, some of them I never met before, making about 80% of the partyers adhered. I had the chance that two big influencers in the group got attracted in the idea from the start. This created an "avalanche" of adherence. If it weren't for these two top influencers backing me up, it probably would have remained ignored. It was great, it worked really well. Here's the link: https://pedrogao.jottit.com/. The positive aspect is that it even allows to publish photos and videos as memories of that great trip. Best experience ever. However, a large percentage of the people going there were my former Physics course colleagues, many of whom are nowadays reputed scholars with PhDs (well, or at least about to be in the future, they're still all barely thirty years old). It was easier to work with them with collaborative web-tools.
And finally, the more meaningful success in collaborative working I had was with the week-end football matches I organize. Because most of these guys don't care about technology, they're not interested and they just want an efficient, quick, easy and secure way to organize a list of players. And the thing is that the players must sum up to the exact 14 integer number. At first, we would all use email and do email lists. It was the common denominator tool for all of us. However, email had some problems when players would cancel their enrollment by replying to another thread. The number of emails exchanged between more than thirty recipients was massive, with threads with over 100 entries. Email was our common denominator but it was too cumbersome for this fourteen-entries list. So then, after a weekend soccer game that went bad due to a mis-communication between one player that couldn't come, I proposed a wiki (jottit again) to create and manage the list. I was the top-brass at organizing these football games and I had earned enough credits and respects from all the players. Also, the editing was surprisingly simple enough - a single shared password, no logins, a super simple wiki syntax, great ergonomics, no-hassles website -. It was actually easier to use than to find the last thread in the email archives, and more reliable too. Also, we had a historical record to see who registered its name first, by the second (first in, first served at the fourteen spots list) and no clutter. At first, some were skeptical if it would work, but now nobody ever suggests to go back to the mail thread rat-race again. In the end, a problem with a former technology, a strong leadership and a new technology that solves the problem with a simple and intuitive interface were the key ingredients to make thirty or more tech-agnostic sport-jockeys adere to it.
Thus, these stories remind me (and you) that collaborative tools are peanuts to the amount of work, energy and leadership that it takes to convince people to work together in a *new* fashion.
That said, how have these tools evolved since 2006? It's been more than 6 years since my crush on Collaboration 2.0 grew! Well, I guess we can look at the Arab spring movements and we can see that the Retweet and the Facebook Event are perhaps the most meaningful tools of power for the people and for democracy. I personally lived a 300 000 citizens peaceful manifestation in Lisbon the 12/3/2011 that originated from a public event posted with a simple manifesto from anonymous citizens (they signed with their names but nobody reminds who they were, they were from the 99% and that was all it mattered), and from a song of the portuguese popular pop band "Deolinda" -- a song with a very similar reach to Bob Dylan's sixties song "Times they're a'changin'" --. These popular revolts 2.0 and Wikileaks are the most treasured things that have happened to the web since the web 2.0 term was coined in 2001 and are direct consequence of it.
But how about the working together as a team in a company for a niche business? What about the google docs, zoho and skype toolset? How has it evolved? Well, I do get to see a trend in file sharing tools for instance. I used to use drop.io, but they disappeared when Facebook bought them. Then I started using ge.tt which is my new favorite tool to share big files with my pupils. I also use dropbox because some colleagues use it too and it simplifies sharing. It is convenient for me because I can push and sync my documents between my several devices (ipad, android, work windows PC, personal debian laptop). Since I work at an university in a research unit in water quality modeling and operational oceanography, managing hundreds of scientific references is a relevant but menial task, so the group is nicely adering to Mendeley and Citulike; I've been using citeulike to manage my references since 2007. Both tools work nicely to share references with colleagues. However, the google forms, docs and calendars somehow never really caught up with my group. We're still stuck with MS Office like in the old days. I guess nothing really came as a reliable enough alternative. Since we develop code (we have this water quality modeling tool called MOHID), we use subversion and codeplex to share the code between developpers and advanced users. I'm still waiting for some web-based code development IDE to come, eheheh :) Sometimes, we use skype to held conference meetings. Google hangout works too, but I only used it with my wife, so far. Screensharing and recording for later screencasting are nice tools that I'd love to use. To do screencasts I use Jing for windows, but I don't consider it "collaborative" working. I also use youtube to broadcast promotional videos about a product or a service. But this isn't collaborative work as well.
Thus comes LucidMeeting, their team got in contact with me (yeah they found out I was passionate about collaborative tools, which was true back in 2006) and asked me if I would like to give their product a try. I said ok, but only for a little while. I did read their mission and I did look at their vision and I can attest that these guys have the passion for the problem they're trying to solve, this gives me confidence (and I'm a heavy user of web-based apps, check out my google profile...). The problem tha matters that they are solving is that there isn't a good enough tool that allows separated team members, distributed around the Earth, to enable them to meet face to face AND to keep record of what is decided AND to work together on documents, all at the same time. Lucid Meeting argues that Skype + Google docs isn't good enough because along the way one looses what was decided in the skype meeting. They argue that an integrated collaborative experiment from extreme-to-extreme provided by a single coherent suite of tools is the answer, and that is what they're trying to propose. This is the Apple way of thinking actually (I just finished reading the portuguese translation of the Steve Jobs bio). An integrated environment works best when you want to get tech out of the way by providing a smooth and coherent user-experience and let collaboration alone start happening. They could have a point and if I ever get to start a team with team members physically distant, I will certainly into LucidMeetings and see how things work.
Anyway here's two lists of tools that I use and their user-cases: one for Productivity 2.0, which is a mature concept in my opinion, which works and which won't disappear.
- Ge.tt - to share or publish large files
- Blogger, Posterous, Evernote, Cinchcast, Youtube - to publish texts, images, notes, audio or videos
- Delicious - bookmarks of sites and logins.
- Dropbox, Mendeley, Citeulike - To sync pdfs and bibliographical references between devices.
- Google docs - To archive documents that I don't need to sync with other devices with dropbox. To publish spreadsheets such as students grades and the like. But I don't use it much really. I tend to rely more on MS-Office for most docs I create.
- No decent latex web-based editor, ide.
- No decent web-based code IDE yet available.
- Google code - for hosting personal software projects.
- Google+, Facebook and Twitter - Useful to procrastinate :p
Here's another list for Collaboration 2.0 tools that I successfully used:
- Mediawiki - created the MOHID wiki. It rocks! But contributors are a limited percentage of its readers.
- Jottit - best hassle-free, free, simple, get-things-done wiki ever. Used it for party-by-partyers-for-partyers management. Used it to create a roster list for weekly soccer matches.
- Skype - video conference. I don't like it much, it works.
- Google calendars - I share one with my wife and the sms reminders she receives of events I schedule do work and she appreciates.
- Codeplex, Google code - for hosting and publishing open-source software projects.
- All in all google docs don't really work much for me and collaborators. The only person with whom I get to collaborate with with google docs is my wife.
Actually, Collaboration 2.0 has a much harder time to replace old forms of collaboration and it certainly doesn't capacitates collaboration where there was none prior.
The truth is that for a real collaboration disruption to happen it will take a big change in the mentalities and in the local organizational cultures. New tech really isn't the answer.
We can hope however that companies, organizations, institutions and whole nations, for them «to remain competitive, they will be forced to adapt and follow leading organizations with massive collaboration, such as Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the old Phone phreaking networks, the Internet. But this change will occur over a couple of generations probably. In this context, the speed of tech inovation beats demographical renewal time, thus making the latter the limiting factor to Progress.
Wow, that was a big post. Thank you for reading it through. Leave a comment if you like.
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Because now, all the links that I had disseminated through the web with mine and my wife's phd thesis are gone. Not a good thing for the sake of publishing, right? There used to be a time when I could feel a service would be good enough so that it wouldn't fail its users. Now it appears that good enough means being bought by some bigger fish and not caring about their former users.
I trusted drop.io with a whole semester of data from my classes. It made a great souvenir of how the class went, with all the students comments topping the shared files. Sure, I have all the basic stuff in my hard disk and in my backup. But I lost *all* the publishing factor, all the data, all the publishing polishing. And frankly, if your work is not linked to a tweet or to some publishing platform then it doesn't matter.
The drop.io dudes just dropped down on their users and this is bad, very bad. I didn't have the paid service, but I imagine how paying users must have felt.
This is not good for the image of Facebook, either. They're like a company that doesn't care about the delicate eco-system of web-services. Drop.io was the best service around and now, it's gone.
Will they do a drop.io at Facebook? No. Why? Because they *deleted* everything they had!! So they don't want to transfer the experience over to the Facebook domain, like blogger did, like Writely did (they became google docs), they're going to do something completely different and it won't be the same experience!
At least when Google buys other companies, the service is maintained, integrated or improved. Sure, they stall at some point, because the team splits up, but they don't *delete* my data.
The Friendfeed guys, they also got bought by Facebook, but they made a serious effort to, at least, keep Friendfeed going on. It actually maintained its activity (and could even be growing). This tells me *a lot* about Paul Buchheit and associates integrity.
Frankly, I blame the drop.io leader for that. Not that he's a bad person, but I just can't trust him anymore on any of his service he'll build. He was actually sitting on a gold nugget and he flushed it down the toilet, but that's not why I don't like him... I don't like him because he doesn't seem to *care* for his users. To me, it's all that matters in the end. It's all about trusting, respecting and caring.
As for the gold nugget that went down the drain, drop.io could have become the de-facto new file-system (or tweet-system, like I like to call it) where each atom of information is not a dumb file, but is rather a tweet, a drop (not anymore), a status update, a check-in ... Now the analog to a tweet for files - drop.io style - is gone forever. Probably it will reemerge somewhere within Facebook's walled garden, but I don't care much for walled gardens... Why? Because *walls* don't empower me! Quite the opposite. I want power, I want data-portability and I want it now!
Alternatives? Sure, Dropbox is a hit in Portugal (windows prevalent). But it's old fashioned, it's transient technology. *It's collaborative but it's not a publishing platform!* It bridges legacy old-style file-systems with tweet-system. Personally, the Box.net was my favorite, before I discovered drop.io.
Frankly, the best alternative out there is Google docs. (that's where I'm heading ...)
(Btw, I want to thank the person that allowed me to retrieve all my data from Facebook. It would be so nice if I could do the same with Google with one-click - gmail, docs, blogger, picasaweb, youtube - pfffft! You know?...)
Sincerely, a User0Add a comment
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Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ... what is the REAL future of computing, as seen from 2010?
I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.
But underneath all that (business models, making money, stakeholders, business executives...) - and not everyone knows this, not even Apple, not even Google - there is a revolution that will disrupt our lives, sky-rocketing us to a near future where everything will change, from social-order and political-power-owners to day-to-day-operations.
Basically, while some follow tech and gadgets and others follow data and algorithms, I follow what gives the biggest bang for your buck (read "energy") to what regards empowerment and *people*-empowerment. I can't help it, I'm a physicist with a mathematical/hacker mindset... I strive for new ways of creating power and applying it in efficient innovative ways on abstract systems, may them be Nature, the Universe or Society... It's my instinct. (Btw, I failed miserably at all that, so far. I still keep trying though...)
Back in Euler days, rocket-science was in shipyards and nautical-sciences, back in the Wright brothers days, rocket-science was in flying machines, but also in cinematography, carbon-fossil fueled engines, electricity... Finally came the transistor invention, the Turing machine, the atom-bomb and rockets, thus, there, was rocket-science... It all pinnacled with a moon-landing somewhere during the sixties. Mankind greatest achievement of all time, well in the middle of the last century, which btw, is already in the past millennium. And what is the biggest symbol that sticks in our heads ever since?
Indeed the biggest symbol that stick in our heads, ever since that famous lunar-shot is... nothing but ourselves, in our globe, Earth in all its might and beauty. Neil Armstrong was looking right back, at what the next great leap for mankind was about to be; and that is us.
I insist: the next big change is going to be in ourselves and in society. That's where the next rocket-science is going to lie: body-hacks and real-time-connectivity for all of mankind. Connecting ourselves, that is, to this giant bee-hive that mankind potentially can become, means the ultimate challenge of true progress. Take a step back in the past and look at how fast communications were. In caveman history? They were local, they were vocal, they reached the far-end of the cave and the far-end of the cave only, period. Much later, the mail/post was invented for the sake of managing great kingdoms and great empires. Much later came the telephone, the television, satellites, the cell-phone, the email... and then came the tweeting.
One tweet can reach instantaneously millions of people, in real-time, as it happens, as the plane crashes, as the riots happen, before anybody can take control of the situation. Furthermore, thanks to the retweeting concept, tens of thousand of followers can actively engage in that original tweet and spread the word, making it their own, thus making it not one person's voice, but thousands to millions of peoples voices. A many, many times retweeted tweet, given it has some form of political content (think "RT Free Assange" in opposition to "RT Look at me eating my breakfast"), is something with an aura of humongous power. It can shake politically established powers, it may allow political-party opportunistic maneuvers. Think of all the possibilities... What if the Martin Luther King period was happening now? What if Gandhi could tweet to his hundred of millions of fellow-followers? Imagine the possibilities... to me, it is the premise of a revolution!
How? People don't realize this yet, but we'll do this revolution one tweet at a time... (disclosure: by a tweet I mean a generic "status update" of any real-time social networking service such as twitter, facebook, google talk, foursquare, instagr.am, you know...).
What was it, that I was missing in 2004, and that I wrote in this four-year-old blog very first post? What was it, but asking for the power to do more with less, using nothing but present technology?
At the time, I wanted to work seamlessly between my laptop, my desktop and cybercafes while I was on the move. I realized, then, that technology was mature to do it, only somebody had to build it and put it all together, not failing this disruptive vision of a webtop. This year (2010) Google grant me my wish with the Chrome OS. Thank you Google. I'm also grateful to Apple that make me see that sensors are way more advanced than I thought. Indeed, ubiquitous and reliable ccd cameras, gps, compasses and accelerometers in hand-held devices are available for everyone. I mean, this IS satellite technology for the masses, this IS rocket-science in your pocket, literally!
Practically no-one realizes this yet, but, in the computer era, this slow motion from a file-system based society to a tweet-system based society - I'm convinced: the webtop I advocate is based on tweets rather than on files. Focus on that notion, that the atom of information is in a tweet and not in a file, and everything in the webtop will fall into place - will empower individuals AND digital mobs to such extent that political powerhouses will fall and new ones will rise, put there by the sheer will of beehive behavior.
Here's a short video by Anthropologist Professor Wesch that Tim O'Reilly chose at some keynote opening (circa 2006).
Here's another one that greatly illustrates the power that the web gives to individuals.
Who are my main influencers? Tim O'Reilly, by a wide-shot. He's the one that resonates the most with my own mind. He coined the "web2.0" word but, more than that, he gave it a deeper meaning, deeper than most of people would lend to it. He too advocates what empowers individuals. How? By advocating open-source. Open-source empowers individual developers (examples, see Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds). How? By advocating DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movements, Make magazine, and Open-Hardware ideals like Arduino (think patent-free, public, digital circuits blueprints). Maker fairs symbolize the next-big-thing-coming-from-a-garage. An example? Woz and Steve. Other big influencers: Jimmy Wales, the creator of wikipedia. He empowered individuals up to the point of allowing them to realize that, together, they *know*. Finally, another influencer, and possibly the most rowdy of them all, Julian Assange. He empowers individuals to the point that they can be a menace to super-powered governments by leaking thousands of classified top-secret documents. Privacy is dead. Long live transparency. We should all start dealing with it. After all, all the celebrities saw their secrets out there and survived. Today, every individual has to gain PR skills and learn how to cultivate their digital image. So be a star my friend, be the star of your world! Don't like it? Doesn't matter, you'll have to cope with it! It's called *progress*. Leaking secret documents. Is this bad or evil? Let me put this into perspective. If you were a new born on this Earth and God came and asked you to choose: "Do you want others above to rule you and your kinsmen, or do you want you and your kinsmen to rule by yourselves?" There is a manly answer and there is a wimp answer to that question... and I don't like wimps ;) In my opinion, Julian Assange made us realize that no longer do we have to be ruled by others above. We *now*, *presently*, have a choice and, if we're man enough, we, and our kinsmen, can rule ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves. And who are our kinsmen? Well, let me put it this way, mankind itself is not big enough to represent the whole of our kinsmen; but it'll do for now.
What do you mean with Assange and with ruling ourselves? I don't see how these two notions relate. Simple: Assange simply decided to pick up the samuraï sword that is leaning on this new ground ever since the internet and email came around. One individual can take the power and attack super-powers if he has the bravery to do it. Provided he has the right heart, the right courage and the right intent, mankind could follow him ... The party-model in this old-age democracy is going to crumble. Directly elect your statesman from twitter and facebook is what is going to be. The tech is there, we only need a new king Arthur to pick up the sword entangled in this shiny new stone.
Check out this prototypical entrepreneur, aka Jason Calacanis, talking about picking up the samuraï sword instead of picking rice. It's a must see for every entrepreneur and for every power-aspirant politician!:
Basically speed up the timeline and reduce the latency between every tweets, make them search-able through the whole of tweeting/facebook history. In a few decades from today, I can imagine our sons and daughters ruling themselves, by themselves for themselves all from twitter and facebook. New political parties and new political figures would be designated by the sheer will of their followers/friends. The law system would have to be revolutionized and agilized so that new laws and codes of conducts, morals and values be approved, respected and enforced by tweets only. Prominent thinkers would be hard-linked to their hordes of followers/believers. Prominent spiritual and religious-leaders would be hard-linked too. Heck, prominent leaders would be hard-linked to their followers, of course!
Someday, we will reach to the point that one individual has so many followers on twitter, that on his tweet for everyone to jump, the world will shake and turn faster. Beehives with their Queen-bees will fit better and more efficiently as a ruling system to our society. Patriarch-ism, feudalism, democracy and, finally, webcracy (as a side-note, a "connaissance" of mine maintains a tech-blog by that name. This tells me a long way about his vision...). I won't go into further detail of trying to describe what would be a webcracy, I just can't think of words to describe it, yet. For now, let's just put it as the "next name" in the latter sequence of types of governments and be on the lookout, for a clearer meaning of the concept, in the future. We can rest assure that, probably, whatever the webcracy will be, it'll probably come in a revolutionary way.
And all that, thanks to an important physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the HTML language over TCP/IP connection protocol for the benefit of the world. And all that thanks to an important algorithm that helped organize this massive new heap of information (PageRank). And all that thanks to these new empowering sensors embodied in miniaturized hand-held-devices (iPhone).
And with all this new potential to change the world, two of the four single biggest companies that could lead this revolution are merely, unconsciously, dominating advertisement (which can be seen as a tool for propaganda) and are dominating leisure-time (which could be seen as a tool for education), the single two most massive weapons to keep mankind asleep and to keep the next king Arthur at bay, in the nut-house. Mind you, I'm refering respectively to Google and Apple. The two other single biggest companies that are leading this revolution from the inside out and from the bottom up, Twitter and Facebook, are right on track. They are different in that they didn't clearly establish their business model, yet. Luckily for me, Zuckerberg wants to become the next king Arthur and take a shot at world domination, even if he doesn't realize this yet. Luckily for me, Twitter exploded out of control of their makers right from the beginning (remember the "fail-whale"?) and they're just too busy focused at making it scale smoothly to even care about their business model in the first place.
The dangers and actual threats of this future? The tablets and mobile devices (anything digital that works without a keyboard and a chair, in fact) mean doomsday for the next generation of developers. If our sons won't bother to learn low-level programming languages, mankind progress will stall. From my perspective, apps on tablets mean massive stupidification. Only objective-C and cocoa-based developers will be able to pull-out clever, meaningful hacks. I do hope that Html, css and javascript become the de-facto tech-standards of development. Objective-C in a cocoa framework means elitism, and this means the killing of the beehive effect of open-source. I want more people striving to build empowering tools from those sensors and not stupidifying drugs. Angry birds? OMG! Don't blog about *that*! I want people to explore the new sensors in their high-tech devices, DIY fashion, a bit like the "Android in space" saga:
"The future is out there now; it's just not evenly distributed." (William Gibson). To keep up with the future, I recommend following Tim O'Reilly for the vision, and Robert Scoble and Louis Gray for the gadgets and tech in general. Happy new year!
UPDATE: a friend of mine recommended me JP Allen, a scholar of open-source and web2.0. Even if his writings demand 2 years to get published, he still deserves the credit for giving credit to the web2.0 concept :) I'll follow his blog on my reader in the meantime. Keep up to date with what feeds me over at Google Reader, and follow my shares. The usual Facebooker just isn't quite ripe for this kind of information, so I cut the data flow to fb, although I do get surprises...0Add a comment
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Somebody wrote a while ago:
Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.
To which I add:
Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.
And, to my insistence, beyond games/apps, music, movies, tv-shows, books and magazines, Apple will try hard to become a vacations, travel and experiences re-seller. It's the natural next-step for them ...0Add a comment
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I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,
I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and a horde of PT finest geeks. I'll participate and assist to the biggest festival of creativity in PT geekdom. Missed it last year. But not his one I won't! Alright :)
Check ou my contest project pitch back in 2008 ;)0Add a comment
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One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.
Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.
Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted. I'm sharing the concept in this old blog because I got increasingly positive feedback from friends, family and business contacts. Hopefully, maybe you'll experience it too.
It uses moo cards, the new goo.gl url shortener and url tracking service, a QR-code and the google profile web-site.
The idea is to hard link your google profile vanity page into your business card, with a QR-code, through the goo.gl shortener service, and then track the hits you get. It's very simple.
Here's how I implemented it (costing me a total of around 40$ for 100 business cards). I used moo minicards - I just *love* moo cards -.
- Shorten the url to your google profile using the new goo.gl service.(Look for the goo.gl chrome extension).
- Click on the "details" link from your goo.gl dashboard.
- Save the black&white image, encoding the goo.gl short url, - it's called a QR-code -.
- Import, select and crop facebook photos for the special 100 moo facebook minicards, using the moo web-site interface. Use these photos for the moo cards flip-side.
- On the front-side, jot down your contact and upload the QR-code image on the mug-shot holder.
- Complete the order and wait a couple of days until you receive your brand new moo minicards :)
- To test the solution, download a qr-code scanner for your smartphone (I use the free app neo-reader for iphone 3G) and try it out on your moo cards.
- After you offer your freshly baked cards to your contacts, check out the impact on the goo.gl analytics site.
A few comments: Actually, I edited the qr-code image and added the shortened url in arial fonts for manual input (as not everyone I know owns a smartphone *with* a barcode-scanner). At the time I did this (more than 6 months ago), the goo.gl service didn't have analytics and the mobile version of the google profile didn't exist yet. Finally, I used the google charts api to generate the QR-code image. Fortunately, all these services significantly improved to help this business card with hard-link solution.
It works great! Every time I demo it people look very interested and ask me more about the qr-code image. The only turn off is that, under dim lighting, the iphone 3G camera makes it hard for the qr-code scanner to detect the link, and it can take up to 20 seconds of waiting. But under natural daylight, it works in a split second!
Do you have any similar experience with your business cards? Would you care to share it here?0Add a comment
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Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.
At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform. But first, the life/body-hacks platform will need to walk the walk it has to walk, and I expect it to be, at least, a five-years march. -
I'm reposting this entry posted back in April, in order to test some problems I'm having with the commenting systems...
Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ... And here's the drop.io to my submitted manuscript, if anyone cares (warning: heavy maths) -
Anyway, a lot has happened during these months (of course), and it's time, after four years of blogging about the shift of paradigm from the desktop to the webtop, to wander if the title still makes any sense today, or if it has aged? Is it time to go? Or is it time to keep on rock-and-roll?
First, let's recap the last months (more or less in the chronological order, as I far as I can remember -too lazy to do scrupulous search-):
1) Google announces the Chrome OS and its stateless, diskless version of the netbook. It runs web-apps and web-apps only. It boots zilch-fast, less than 2 seconds. Yet to be sold, reportedly by the end of 2010.
2) Html5 and some new video codecs are getting alot of buzz. Html5 allows non-flash video, offline caching for making cooler web-apps and more semantic-tags (remember the semantic-web meme?).
3) Apple launches the iPad and a new version of the iPhone OS. It still ditches Adobe's Flash in all its "magic-top"/"casual-top"/"touch-top" (erase the names you don't like) platforms (to keep control on the iDevelopers). The iPad is a magical device providing the best web-surfing experience EVER (so they say). It sheds another spotlight in this gadget that I'm very fond of, the Amazon Kindle, the revolutionary e-book reader. This means that the ebook trend will go up with all these great surface delivery platforms. That's a good thing. Furthermore, iPhone OS 4 adds background processes (only for 3GS phones). Finally, the old media renaissance hype on the iPad is decreted a fad by uber-geek-techy-mac-fanboys (too expensive, no sharing allowed, hence, too frustrating).
4) Google launches and sells the Nexus One, a google-branded Android powered smartphone. No other hardware known by man matches the iPhone, yet. Android doesn't beat the UX design of the iPhone neither (too many heads designing). BUT... the Android is the best web-touch-top available out there: it's always in sync with all your gmail, contacts, docs, calendar etc... So, my view is that it's a trade off between having a better sensorial multi-touch magic (choose iPhone) or a better, more open, more functional, sync-in-cloud machine (choose Android). Both the App Store and the Android market have lots of apps available (150K VS 35K) and both have quite strong titles. Frankly, I'm more bent towards the Android, as what I really need in a smartphone (with very limited autonomy) are my contacts, gmail and google stuff all synched-in-the-cloud. Then, maybe later, toss in a twitter and a facebook app, and I'll be fine. Smartphones are too slow and too battery limited and have a too tiny screen for me to go really heavy on apps. Most apps are just fads to me. They have a lot of hype because the App store delivers money to developpers. But, somehow, that's sadening to me (more on that later).
5) Palm is declared to be dying. Windows announces a windows mobile 7 phone and they report it as being great. We'll see...
6) Facebook keeps on steadily ramping up and roaring the whole world into its swirl. They have the fastest web-app out there, that I can think of. It just works lightning fast. A third of my friends (if not more) are all on facebook. I use twitter to make contact with geeks, but I use facebook (and email) for my non-geek friends. That's good, because it *is* added value. That's also bad because it's quite a closed garden. And how I don't like closed gardens :'( There should be an "openbook" social-app ...
7) "Game-mechanics" was the latest meme triggered by overhyped location-based apps, foursquare and gowalla. Very rough edges versions. They did standardized the "check-in" concept pioneered by Brightkite, as far as I can tell. At tne SXSW festival, gowalla won (but they played at home). It will be interesting to see how these apps evolve...
8) Twitter announces (finally) its business model (adtweets) and will add metadata to the tweets. Twitter builds a more solid partnership with its developpers (taking the queue from the App store success, for sure). It also buys the best clients out there for iPhone (Tweetie).
9) Last, but not least, the settled buzz over the basic tools for the cloud's infrastructure are called memcached, hadoop and map-reduce.
10) Where's the money? Google's business model (selling text ads in their search results) is well-developed for the desktop web experience but they needed to start from scratch in the mobile space. You see, when people search on mobile, they're only looking for a quick answer. No time to click on anything else, like, say, an interesting ad. But if people are casual-gaming, then maybe, they can spare a few seconds and click on some interesting banner ad. So the cash-cow in mobile advertising, so far, is displaying banner ads in apps. People are doing apps right now in mobile, more than anything else, a lot more than search. Banner ads in apps give money. This is what admob does and does very well. And that is why Google bought them and is working with them.
But Admob CEO is right when he said that mobile advertising is in the "Yahoo phase". I believe apps are only great for gaming, casual gaming, and they're mostly a fad. I believe in more powerful ways to make smartphones smarter. There is still a lot of work to be done. Namely, speech-to-text techniques need to be a hell of a lot better, and the processor power and snappyness needs still to become waaayy better. Telepathy-texting would also be a nice way to perform elaborated searches on mobile devices. Advertising needs also to take a serious advantage on the location-awareness of the hardware. Basically, admob banner ads is only at stage zero, and Google may buy them just to show off a few bucks made, but the biggest game-changing technologies in mobile need yet to be made: faster (processing-power), longer (battery-life), smarter (human-device communication channels -voice,thought,touch-). I'll admit that Apple solved the multi-touch human-device communication channel, and that's a lot! But we need faster and better voice-to-text tech, faster and better image and sound search. It's all about the smart use of all the sensors stuffed in our smartphones. We've only used but a small fraction of what they could do.
Anyway, I have mostly two more ideas that I want to share with you. The first idea is that I'm sensing a reversing in the vision of the webtop. There are too many developers with the app-store gold fever, spending way too much time learning Objective-C and Cocoa and not learning javascript and css tricks. I'm at this point, as in the story of "Dune", where Paul Atreides envisions two plausible pathways for the future to unfold. He drank from the sacred water and it shows either to go "webtop" or to go "mobile apps". In my vision of the future unfolding, I say it should definitively be web-based-mobile-apps, that's where I want to go; but Apple keeps luring developers in droves to its development platform, and this makes the webtop/cloudtop, whatever you want to name it, a little bit more distant. So, unless it is pushed by Google, the webtop will sit idle until things change. Thus, for me, the app store is the *evil*, the *dark*-side of the force. The *white-light* side of the force are web-apps, with html5, javascript, css, apache, php, couchdb, memcached. Those are the ones baby, the one and only.
Why I'm not all in for apps? Too platform specific. But most important of all, not open enough. Cutting short of Tim Berners Lee's vision is not where I want to be. Sure, games make gamers happy. Not my cup of tea, though.
The second idea (or trend, really) is that the free-model is reverting as well. Developers start to reinvidicate (righteously) for users to pay (take Ning for example). This has been imposed by the worldwide economic recession and also by taking the queue from the hottest platform of the moment, the app-store and the itunes store. This is partly good.
A couple of years ago, the most bleeding-edge mobile app developers were betting on windows mobile and blackberry, and they would use .NET and ASPX to develop their web-sites (like Loopt or Wizi). Mobile windows developers will be glad to hear that microsoft is teaming once more with them, and shipping a new and potentially big-deal mobile platform.
All in all, you guessed it: the webtopmania is here to stay. I predict a blossoming of touchtablets-oriented web-sites and the Google cloud productivity suite will get more and more traction. Long live the chrome OS, and may they build another "magical" tablet, one with Android or Chrome OS within...
Finally, a last thought about my vision of the ultimate ebook reader. Hint, it's not an iPad. What's 10 hour autonomy, compared to 10,000 hours? Besides, I like reading in B/W...
Oh, and this augmented-reality thingy? We'll see it popping around again in the near-future, somewhere near you ;)
As for me, I'll have to decide wether I'll keep investing in the web, whether in academia, whether I can do both... and start acting. -
Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ... And here's the drop.io to my submitted manuscript, if anyone cares (warning: heavy maths) -
Anyway, a lot has happened during these months (of course), and it's time, after four years of blogging about the shift of paradigm from the desktop to the webtop, to wander if the title still makes any sense today, or if it has aged? Is it time to go? Or is it time to keep on rock-and-roll?
First, let's recap the last months (more or less in the chronological order, as I far as I can remember -too lazy to do scrupulous search-):
1) Google announces the Chrome OS and its stateless, diskless version of the netbook. It runs web-apps and web-apps only. It boots zilch-fast, less than 2 seconds. Yet to be sold, reportedly by the end of 2010.
2) Html5 and some new video codecs are getting alot of buzz. Html5 allows non-flash video, offline caching for making cooler web-apps and more semantic-tags (remember the semantic-web meme?).
3) Apple launches the iPad and a new version of the iPhone OS. It still ditches Adobe's Flash in all its "magic-top"/"casual-top"/"touch-top" (erase the names you don't like) platforms (to keep control on the iDevelopers). The iPad is a magical device providing the best web-surfing experience EVER (so they say). It sheds another spotlight in this gadget that I'm very fond of, the Amazon Kindle, the revolutionary e-book reader. This means that the ebook trend will go up with all these great surface delivery platforms. That's a good thing. Furthermore, iPhone OS 4 adds background processes (only for 3GS phones). Finally, the old media renaissance hype on the iPad is decreted a fad by uber-geek-techy-mac-fanboys (too expensive, no sharing allowed, hence, too frustrating).
4) Google launches and sells the Nexus One, a google-branded Android powered smartphone. No other hardware known by man matches the iPhone, yet. Android doesn't beat the UX design of the iPhone neither (too many heads designing). BUT... the Android is the best web-touch-top available out there: it's always in sync with all your gmail, contacts, docs, calendar etc... So, my view is that it's a trade off between having a better sensorial multi-touch magic (choose iPhone) or a better, more open, more functional, sync-in-cloud machine (choose Android). Both the App Store and the Android market have lots of apps available (150K VS 35K) and both have quite strong titles. Frankly, I'm more bent towards the Android, as what I really need in a smartphone (with very limited autonomy) are my contacts, gmail and google stuff all synched-in-the-cloud. Then, maybe later, toss in a twitter and a facebook app, and I'll be fine. Smartphones are too slow and too battery limited and have a too tiny screen for me to go really heavy on apps. Most apps are just fads to me. They have a lot of hype because the App store delivers money to developpers. But, somehow, that's sadening to me (more on that later).
5) Palm is declared to be dying. Windows announces a windows mobile 7 phone and they report it as being great. We'll see...
6) Facebook keeps on steadily ramping up and roaring the whole world into its swirl. They have the fastest web-app out there, that I can think of. It just works lightning fast. A third of my friends (if not more) are all on facebook. I use twitter to make contact with geeks, but I use facebook (and email) for my non-geek friends. That's good, because it *is* added value. That's also bad because it's quite a closed garden. And how I don't like closed gardens :'( There should be an "openbook" social-app ...
7) "Game-mechanics" was the latest meme triggered by overhyped location-based apps, foursquare and gowalla. Very rough edges versions. They did standardized the "check-in" concept pioneered by Brightkite, as far as I can tell. At tne SXSW festival, gowalla won (but they played at home). It will be interesting to see how these apps evolve...
8) Twitter announces (finally) its business model (adtweets) and will add metadata to the tweets. Twitter builds a more solid partnership with its developpers (taking the queue from the App store success, for sure). It also buys the best clients out there for iPhone (Tweetie).
9) Last, but not least, the settled buzz over the basic tools for the cloud's infrastructure are called memcached, hadoop and map-reduce.
10) Where's the money? Google's business model (selling text ads in their search results) is well-developed for the desktop web experience but they needed to start from scratch in the mobile space. You see, when people search on mobile, they're only looking for a quick answer. No time to click on anything else, like, say, an interesting ad. But if people are casual-gaming, then maybe, they can spare a few seconds and click on some interesting banner ad. So the cash-cow in mobile advertising, so far, is displaying banner ads in apps. People are doing apps right now in mobile, more than anything else, a lot more than search. Banner ads in apps give money. This is what admob does and does very well. And that is why Google bought them and is working with them.
But Admob CEO is right when he said that mobile advertising is in the "Yahoo phase". I believe apps are only great for gaming, casual gaming, and they're mostly a fad. I believe in more powerful ways to make smartphones smarter. There is still a lot of work to be done. Namely, speech-to-text techniques need to be a hell of a lot better, and the processor power and snappyness needs still to become waaayy better. Telepathy-texting would also be a nice way to perform elaborated searches on mobile devices. Advertising needs also to take a serious advantage on the location-awareness of the hardware. Basically, admob banner ads is only at stage zero, and Google may buy them just to show off a few bucks made, but the biggest game-changing technologies in mobile need yet to be made: faster (processing-power), longer (battery-life), smarter (human-device communication channels -voice,thought,touch-). I'll admit that Apple solved the multi-touch human-device communication channel, and that's a lot! But we need faster and better voice-to-text tech, faster and better image and sound search. It's all about the smart use of all the sensors stuffed in our smartphones. We've only used but a small fraction of what they could do.
Anyway, I have mostly two more ideas that I want to share with you. The first idea is that I'm sensing a reversing in the vision of the webtop. There are too many developers with the app-store gold fever, spending way too much time learning Objective-C and Cocoa and not learning javascript and css tricks. I'm at this point, as in the story of "Dune", where Paul Atreides envisions two plausible pathways for the future to unfold. He drank from the sacred water and it shows either to go "webtop" or to go "mobile apps". In my vision of the future unfolding, I say it should definitively be web-based-mobile-apps, that's where I want to go; but Apple keeps luring developers in droves to its development platform, and this makes the webtop/cloudtop, whatever you want to name it, a little bit more distant. So, unless it is pushed by Google, the webtop will sit idle until things change. Thus, for me, the app store is the *evil*, the *dark*-side of the force. The *white-light* side of the force are web-apps, with html5, javascript, css, apache, php, couchdb, memcached. Those are the ones baby, the one and only.
Why I'm not all in for apps? Too platform specific. But most important of all, not open enough. Cutting short of Tim Berners Lee's vision is not where I want to be. Sure, games make gamers happy. Not my cup of tea, though.
The second idea (or trend, really) is that the free-model is reverting as well. Developers start to reinvidicate (righteously) for users to pay (take Ning for example). This has been imposed by the worldwide economic recession and also by taking the queue from the hottest platform of the moment, the app-store and the itunes store. This is partly good.
A couple of years ago, the most bleeding-edge mobile app developers were betting on windows mobile and blackberry, and they would use .NET and ASPX to develop their web-sites (like Loopt or Wizi). Mobile windows developers will be glad to hear that microsoft is teaming once more with them, and shipping a new and potentially big-deal mobile platform.
All in all, you guessed it: the webtopmania is here to stay. I predict a blossoming of touchtablets-oriented web-sites and the Google cloud productivity suite will get more and more traction. Long live the chrome OS, and may they build another "magical" tablet, one with Android or Chrome OS within...
Finally, a last thought about my vision of the ultimate ebook reader. Hint, it's not an iPad. What's 10 hour autonomy, compared to 10,000 hours? Besides, I like reading in B/W...
Oh, and this augmented-reality thingy? We'll see it popping around again in the near-future, somewhere near you ;)
As for me, I'll have to decide wether I'll keep investing in the web, whether in academia, whether I can do both... and start acting.0Add a comment
Add a comment