This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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The compass functionality is still a bit underutilized

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” I believe that iPhone and what have followed since it are enabling just this. I also believe by just being “stuff that works” was the feature that made iPhone what it is today, while Nokia was fiddling around with technologies.

When I’m talking about mobile phones as Human-World Interface, I’m not really talking about augmented reality. For most part augmented reality is just hype and worst of all, it was just technology. There was some cool factor in being able to see where the London Tube stations were, but all of a sudden it seems like people are far more interested in “monetizing” the technology instead of looking for applications.

Instead, in my view one of the examples of how iPhone gives you an interface to the world around us are the public transportation guides. With access to your location, you can easily check out when the next bus or tram arrive and what bus or tram you actually need to take to get wherever you’re going. I think that the applications for more specialized uses are more interesting, like snipers using iPhone for calculations and doctors using it for stethoscope. For me, Human-World Interface could be summarised as the ultimate universal remote for the world.

I think we’re finally arriving to the vision of a PDA. What the things we used to call PDAs a decade ago were crucially missing were mobile internet and user contexts (fe. location). One important part is also a universal information exchange protocol, and for most part the Web fills that role on modern phones. Right now it would look like instead of general-purpose web, one-application “Apps” are the way to go. I don’t think this is a sustainable way forward, though. It works as long as you only focus on one device (like the iPhone) and you believe in an Apple monopoly, but if/when in the future we have forward-incompatible iPhones and plethora of smartphones running Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android, you might be better off falling back to the common Web.

Google’s opinion is that the Web will eventually win, but you have to keep in mind that their whole business depends on that. In the short-term, there’s still loads of money to be made in Apps, but in the long-term investing in the Web will pay off. It is however quite hard to justify investing for the long-term unless you have boatloads of capital, but Google’s planning to be here for that long. There’s no money to be made in infrastructure or technology per se (as RSS and Atom have shown) but once you have an application that depends on them, it all pays out (but you really need an application that has or adds value, not just a fancy feed reader/parser).

One of the still-in-R&D technologies for smartphones is Near Field Communications, which would enable one to (finally?) use one’s smartphone for paying for public transportation or at point of sales. Unfortunately this stuff has been so long in the pipeline that it might really be a technology in search of a problem. It is however a foray into the world where we would use our smartphone to interact with the world.

A similar idea of replacing one’s wallet with one’s mobile phone has been one that Nokia et al. have at various times tried to push, but like NFC, the main problem is that the advantages are not really significant (yet?) and there are serious drawbacks compared to the things you actually have in your wallet. For example, the credit card you have in your wallet is probably almost universally accepted, unlike mobile payment. Overcoming this rather crucial shortcoming is a chicken-egg-problem, however for mobile phone manufacturers. The companies that should develop this stuff are the credit card companies.

The same thing goes for everything else, like using your phone to open your garage door. The two things that need to happen for a universal remote for thw world are open technologies (in this case an API for your garage door), which in turn requires a business case for the companies to open up their interfaces. Only then is the Internet of Things possible. I believe that for Internet of Things to emerge, there’s little point in just identifying everything around us, but also interacting with them. Other than implants, mobile phones seem to be the best thing we have to do that.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has said that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and for him, it’s vastly superior to what Kirk had in Star Trek. I’m not as optimistic about iPhone of today, I’m sure there’s going to be much more cooler things in the future. Of the things that we have right now, I have to agree.

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This movie was one I anticipated for some time. I’m a Sci-Fi geek, a movie freak, and a Cameron disciple (ever since Terminator 2). Most important to me today however: seeing whether the world of cinema was about to change forever… or not. My review will *not* be about the story, but about a number of themes it addresses, namely the 3D experience, motion capture, and (some spoilers) it’s environmental message.

First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

• The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
• Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
• Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

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Hi, Vincent here. I have neither the intent, nor the talent to develop this application, but it was a thought/pain I experienced at a museum today and an iTunes search didn’t reveal an app like it.

A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!

Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.

Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.

1. Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
2. image recognition happens (how?),
3. it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
4. and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.

It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.

The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).

Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen

So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!

/Vincent

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I’m starting to think that I’m wayy too interested in maps and geographical coordinates. Things like Google Maps and GPS just make me want to make something great out of all the information we have lying around and put in a map context. I think this is also the reason behind all the location based services, everyone is trying to see what would work. Most of them are fun experiments, but let’s see what sticks.

Finnish boxy architecture, now on Google Earth.

The one thing that reminds me that we do live in a future foretold by all the great 80’s sci-fi movies is Google Earth on iPhone and especially it’s useless feature where you can change the view by tilting the phone. It serves no purpose whatsoever, but it’s cool and feels like “future”. I think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash really showed the vision what Google Maps/Earth ultimately could become (think real-time satellite feeds).

A while back magical elves -generated buildings started appear in selected cities in Google Earth, which was also pretty cool. Unfortunately these magical elves were somewhat sloppy about the finer architectural points of our human buildings so most of them look like boxes – and, well, some of the 60-70’s era concrete buildings are in fact (ugly) boxes.

So, when Google revealed their new Building Maker, I was pretty much hooked. It allows you to easily model buildings out of aerial photography. And if you’re good enough, those models might just end up on Google Earth.

This tool reminded me of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which was also interesting in how it allowed to harness the human processing capability to tasks unsuited to computers (or magical elves, who don’t grasp our architectural styles). Some might remember how it was used (unsuccessfully) to search for the remains of Steve Fosset’s plane. Google does have some experience in this fields as well, they did something similar with their Google Image Labeler, which paired random people in a game of labeling images. Unlike Mechanical Turk, Image Labeler was mostly harmless fun and a game to kill time for participants. It is this fun part that I find really important in these things. I think Google accidentally or on purpose have also some fun elements in Building Maker, in addition to it’s crack-like addictiveness level.

The best thing about the Building Maker is that it runs in your browser and is dead simple to use. It’s fun. It’s like a small flash game, but instead of just wasting time you waste time in benefit of a commercial, listed company.

So, now I have 25 models worthy of Google’s acceptance criteria. It’s these accomplishments that keep me coming back to model things. Unfortunately, many models were rejected by Google and that of course isn’t fun. The main reasons for rejections so far have been “Incomplete texturing” and “Floating”. The frustrating thing about this is there’s very little I can do about these two problems. It’s a bit frustrating to notice that Google doesn’t have imagery for all sides of the building after you have started to model a building and short of renting a plane and taking pictures yourself there’s not much you can do. Floating is even more frustrating, because there’s very little hinting you can do to tell the modeling software that the box you’re trying to make should, in fact, be on ground level instead of floating couple of meters in the air.

Yes, if you want, you can import the model from Google’s servers into SketchUp and refine the model there, but that’s both extremely difficult and requires a lot of effort. Not fun, but maybe, just maybe, that refining could get your model listed…

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It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

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OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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Business is all about three things: generating income, generating growth, and making smart spending-decisions to generate both of them. Within that framework, it’s not surprising that business often make compromises as to the feature-set that they offer. This is especially true of web-businesses, who, while they may have built a relatively cheap business (compared to the physical alternative), also find it difficult to create sustainable business models. And, considering the barriers to entry are as low as ever, I imagine that this situation won’t change anytime soon.

My “rant” today is about relevance, which I define as targeting your app or service to work within the context of your consumer. Many internet-businesses focus on two things: building easy connections to other web-users and trying to prevent total breakdown when viral growth reaches a peak.

The fallacy in that mindset is that users are being treated like nodes, who connect back or connect to other users. A node, in a P2P network, is a static entity, one that doesn’t move. A user is, typically, a human being, one that not only moves, but exists on a different plane, the physical world. A lot of web-businesses fail to make that distinction and it has created not only the reality that we are being bombarded with connections whenever we sit at our PC, but we are expected to be connected 24/7.

I alluded to this last year, when I asked “what place does the web take?” The point of that article was really about the relevance of the web to real life. According to a theory, there are three places relevant to people: the first place, which is home-life, the second, which is work-life, and the third, which is leisure. The web, through email, blogs, work-apps, twitter, media, has become a hub in all three places, but its consequences are both information overload and obesity, both caused by passivity.

When you look up the word “break,” it’s defined as “a period of time taken out of one’s professional activity in order to do something else.” If the web is work and the web is home, then the break should not be the web.

Relevance is, once again, having services be context-driven, i.e. being relevant or shutting up at the right time and the right place and for the right person. A pretty complex task, but that is an ideal to live for.

Let me give some examples. Both TheFilter and Last.fm are services that both passively monitor media-life and actively provide services (such as radio-stations and the like). When I plug in my iPod after a run (a third place-activity), Last.fm asks me whether I want to “Scrobble” my tracks, which it in turn uses to make recommendations. TheFilter is not quite there yet, but it passively scans my iTunes-behaviour and creates custom-playlists for me if I want. You may think this is no big deal, but you’d be surprised how few services make even that tiny step from the web to the desktop.

A bigger deal, in my opinion, is NearByNow, which allows shoppers to search the shopping-malls that they visit, not by searching every store, but by entering a search-term for a product on their mobile or via the web, and having it search the retailers’ inventory. I wrote about it here before. This is just a first step, but especially in retail there’s much room still for merging the web with the shop.

Some more examples are the Nintendo Wii, which brings a physical dimension to gaming, and even the MacBook Air and the Asus EEE, both of which are clearly designed to not chain users to a location.

Relevance is something that a lot of commercial and non-commercial services are battling with nowadays. How do you sell a good online that you need to smell, taste, feel, or try on? How do you integrate virtual friendships into real life? How do you limit the amount of noise that your online customers are exposed to? How do you “synergise” the power of the web—information at a finger-tip—with a fragmented physical world? How do you create business models based on both the online and offline behaviour of consumers?

Those are the real questions to answer, not only for the web to become truly mainstream, but for it to stop treating us “users” like grey square boxes with a blue light shining out of it. We, the kids, the workers, the retired, are people dammit, with muscles (not just in the fingers), mouths, and other senses. We were not put on this planet to read 12/7 and type the other 12.

The next liberation-age is, I hope, about freeing ourselves from the machines and living life again as the hybrid entities that we are, producing both physical and mental energy.

Rant over.

Vincent

(The picture is the cover of the book “Snow Crash“—still the most relevant book about a very possible future of the information age today… if you ask me.)

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Fred Brunel is a friend of mine. He used to be the software architect at IN FUSIO and back then I’ve been working with him on a daily basis to industrialize our Online Transaction Platform for mobile industry services. Not only does Frederic have a genuine passion for information and communication technologies, but he also has this rare ability to transmit the passion. In addition, he is not this type of techno addict that just develop features to enjoy the technology : Frederic always is business driven. Last but not least Fred has been pushing me to blog ever since 2004 !

Fred has joined XtraNormal in Montreal a year ago as Director of Product Development. He published on his blog the presentation XtraNormal did at Demo08 in San Francisco.

I have been amazed by their software application. (Note to Fidji : this is exactly the type of apps you’re interested in). Their product has a great interface to help creates animation and small clips from text entered by the user. These video clips can then be uploaded to social web apps such as Facebook, MySpace or Google. Awesome !

Check out the presentation here.

I am very glad to announce that, unsurprinsingly (considering the quality of their software), XtraNormal has won an award during Demo08.

Congratulations to XtraNormal, and great job Fred !

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I’ve only got a few minutes to write this post, so pardon me if I’m sketchy on the details.

A blogpost at GigaOm covers some of the iterations that social networks on the internet went through over the years. Pretty interesting, though incomplete. The author also warns that it is dangerous to predict the next wave, based on the past, and I’m not even going to try.

But what I am certain of is that Facebook will eventually fail. Why?

Because what Facebook lacks, and this is a flaw in the whole digital ecosystem, is c o h e s i o n. While it allows me to contact any friend on there at the touch of a button, it does not actually bring our lives much closer together. Instead we live our lives in parallel, sometimes continents apart, and all we see of each other is what we choose to publish online.

It operates on a very superficial level, and soon becomes quite monotonous to follow the twitter-like life-stream of what are essentially caricatures of a distant memory of friendship. And because it is the nature of things that people become less and less involved, it will not take long before Facebook becomes a stale contact-list, with the only blips of life coming from “those youngsters” that think that anyone actually cares to read their status. And when it reaches that state in the mind of its users, it won’t be long before a new, fresher “contact list” comes along.

We are still not at the level where a social network online is the same what it means offline. In the real world, a network is a chemical thing, where people interact on many different levels, stimulate each other, anger each other, change each other, etc. And this is just as applicable to personal networks, as it is in business.

I’m not sure if it will ever be possible to reach that same level of involvement with an internet-app. I’d like to think that at least the social network on mobile-phones both overcomes the geographic and the psychological barriers that exist. So technology can definitely be compatible with chemistry to some extent. But text, which clearly has advantages in other areas, is a different matter.

But this is just an opinion. What do you think? Is Facebook enough? What characteristics do we need in a technological network for it to become a true social network?

Vincent

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Just a quick find that I found fun, and genuinely interesting, as it is not yet another try at bulky and/or expensive VR systems (remember those huge helmets and gloves that made you dizzy after 30 seconds?).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw]

It is still in the early stages of development – and is not even an official/business-oriented development, but hey: it seems simple enough to have a realistic dream about it being in our living room in the near future.

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