imran*

Category: Ideas

  • A dedicated iPlayer?

    Iplayer4iphone
    Last week the BBC announced the launch of it’s iPlayer service for the Nintendo Wii, hot on the heels of iPhone and iPod touch support last month. It’s great to see the BBC supporting so many platforms just a couple of months after the launch of the service and addresses the irony of having iPlayer available for every platform other than TV itself!

    However iPlayer on Wii is said to be slow and jerky when running fullscreen, so I got to thinking about how difficult it’d be to create a dedicated iPlayer set-top box…

    An Apple TV hacked to run full OSX is about the same cost as a Wii and includes handy support for a remote control, mouse or keyboard…you won’t even need to trick your browser’s user agent string into spoofing an iPhone or a Wii as the video and page format doesn’t really vary.

    Now if I had a £180 to spare, I’d give it a whirl…

    UPDATE: Sadly, though Playstation 3 can play embedded Flash clips from YouTube, it
    doesn’t seem to be able to cope with iPlayer (perhaps a later version
    of Flash) and I haven’t figured how to hack the PS3 browser’s user
    agent string.

  • TagTunes: Personal Discovery

    TagtunesEight years of friction-free access to digital media mean I have so much music that it’s becoming easy to forget what I do and don’t own.

    I know I have all four Bethany Curve albums, but after recently watching couple of the Indiana Jones movies I was surprised to find I also had one of the soundtracks!

    Technologies such as Spotlight make it easy for us to locate items we know we have and social discovery services such as Last.FM help us surface music we know we don’t have.

    However, there’s perhaps an opportunity for personal rather than discovery services; those that perform analytics on our existing media, recommending items we already own, but have neglected or simply forgotten about…tools that help us poke around in the unexplored corners of our music or photo collections for example.

    It’s not too difficult to envisage…

    • extensions to iTunes that visualises your listening and creates recommended playlists of music you’ve not listened to yet, but that matches your other tastes; even unwatched episodes of TV shows you’ve already downloaded
    • an adaptation of Flickr that reminds you of photos from a year ago today.
    • an address book, IM network or email service that reminds you of close friends and family you haven’t spoken to in some time.

  • Turkish Delight & The Slow Singularity

    Mturk When I first heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it was described to me as artificial-artificial-intelligence; the notion of wiring human intelligence into software is geekutopian, but strangely there are few great examples of mTurk applications…is this due to mTurk’s potentially severe challenge to labour laws?

    Yesterday, I undertook my first HIT (Human Intelligence Task), earning $0.30 for adding a specific URL to my del.icio.us account and tagging it as gardening and cool…enough revenue to pay for my S3 bills! It took me about a minute, so working a 40-hour week would project out to around $8700/year… here in the UK, that’s definitely less than minimum wage.

    How about some higher value mTurk applications…

    • My friend Ian has been unable to IM much in recent days due to his RSI. We joked that he should mTurk some people to impersonate his digital presences in Live Messenger, Twitter and email; an interesting twist on the Turing Test 😉
    • Recently I’ve had to fill out a number of governments forms, applying for public funding to sustain various startup ideas. I would love to mTurk these – they’re tedious and I’d love to fire them into an API and pay to get completed forms back for submission 🙂

    —

    A few months ago, while we brainstormed our thoughts on emerging technologies, Surj coined the term Proborg – Programmable Human/Software Hybrids- the next step from the collective intelligence of social software and prediction markets.

    If basic human cognition can be monetised by mTurk, the implications in connected places where cognition is cheap could give rise to an interesting Proborganism; a half-billion Indian and Chinese kids, equipped with mTurk-fed OLPCs and desktop fabs – the Slow Singularity?

  • 28 Days

    The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives.

    Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness…just three days ago, a distant cousin and my uncle Jawaid died suddenly and unexpectedly.

    However, amidst our sorrow, I became an uncle myself with the arrival of my cousin Nadia‘s newborn son, Idris,…only days later, my youngest cousin Yousef was born.

    —

    Last Friday, Boing Boing posted a piece on networked tombstones; though ostensibly a morbid fad, the concept is actually quite sensitively articulated. Each headstone carries a device connected to an online memorial, containing genealogical information, a Facebook profile and a family tree. I find this to be a wonderful concept. Cemeteries are not simple places, but densely layered records of human history – overlapping stories of lives, times, places and people that are our shared heritage. To make available the stories of those lost is a fitting monument to a life and also the basis for a locative medium that speaks to us all.

    A few months ago, I worked with students of IDII on digital identity, exploring the relationships between people, places and time. Many of the projects explored how we relate to places bustling with life and activity – notably cities and airports. To paraphrase James T. Kirk, if how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life then the places where our lives come to rest should be as significant a part of our digital identity as where our lives were lived.

  • Acronym.onio.us

    I have an irritating habit – whenever I hear a three-letter acronym, my brain starts working on smutty, childish, innappropriate variations. Someone usually has to tell me to stop. In the last few minutes, Aaron and I ping-pong’d out the following from ‘LCD’…

    • Lonely Cantankerous Drunk
    • Lizard Cock Dunker
    • Lovely Cock Deepthroater
    • Lying Crap Distribution
    • Lobotomised Curly Dome
    • Likely Colored Door
    • Love Can Doom
    • Lauren Can’t Dance
    • Lesbian (Cute) Dormitory

    We deliriously thought that this’d make a fun web app – no wait…a game! A circle of players are assigned three letters, each have 10 seconds in turn to come up with something funny (other players ‘digg’ it), the player with the most thumbs up, wins the round and the chain is shared online. Dead simple, kinda like an online You Don’t Know Jack 🙂

  • Snippets

    Some random ideas that came out of a chat with Aaron yesterday…

    • A variant of Terrapass that pays all contributions into an international publically owned and operated fund/trust/PAC for alternative energy issues.
    • Smarter Buy It Now, Add To Shopping Basket, or Checkout buttons that show how much money you have in your account in a tooltip…of course you need an API to your bank account.
    • Banking events as RSS feeds or some other form of notification stream. Warning me of overdraft events, credit limits – I wonder if such information, presented at the right point, could bring down US and UK consumer debt levels?
    • Better online banking – the ability to tag, sort and organise transactions for  receipts, savings folders, intentions – ‘put £100 in my Saving for a Macbook folder’ – could such ‘intentions’ be used to drive affiliate programmes? Aaron tells me that this is what Marc Hedlund is working on at Wesabe.
    • An IM client that’d automagically blog interesting conversations like this one 🙂

    We finished with a quick chuckle at one of the new Apple ads…

  • Clickstop Computing

    About a year ago I read a pair of articles that got me thinking about how much time I spend online and whether I use that time productively…

    Clicks_2 Coupled with the recent uptick in writing about the Attention Economy, I’ve noticed that there’s a real need for computing environments that help you manage your attention healthily. I don’t mean services that analyse your clickstreams or musical tastes, but tools that simply reflect what I’m doing and helping me make better choices about my behaviour. Reflective Computing perhaps? Some ideas…

    • A daily report from my laptop that tells me how I’m spending my time – perhaps by task (email, blogs, surfing), by application or even the ratio of creation to consumption 🙂
    • The ability to set personal rules – ‘no work email after 6pm’, ‘only 1 hour of Bloglines a day’ – that help me manage my time better.
    • Subtle reminders – perhaps by IM, or Tangible Media – that police my rules and allow me to modify behaviour as circumstances change. Perhaps even suggestions like calling a friend or family member that I haven’t contacted for some time.

    Fortunately, there are a few tools beginning to emerge that at least support what I call Clickstop Computing – managing the time spent on various tasks and applications…

    • Desktop Subversibles* -several playful applets that record, aggregate and visualise the activities of a group.
    • Hoverstop Mouse – vibrates to remind carpal tunnel sufferers to take a break.
    • SlimTimer – a web based stopwatch service.
    • TimeSprite – tracks how much time you spend in different applications.

    There’s a lot of fruitful research and innovation to be had in this area – perhaps oriented around Maeda’s emerging laws of simplicity…

    —

    * I remember seeing these at Media Lab Europe in 2003, but not really understanding the significance; they were cute, but actually I think they could be really useful now 🙂

  • Boredband/Fraudband

    Yes, yes – the 2.0 suffix is way overused. We (Orange) currently have 2.75m Livebox wireless routers installed in homes across Europe, with around 275’000 of those installed here in the UK. That looks like success, however we’re currently in the midst of a broadband price war; Sky, Orange and Carphone Warehouse have driven the consumer cost of broadband to zero in the UK.

    So where can operators like Orange begin to add additional value to a plain old broadband line? Music? TV? Cellphones? Free Calls? Everyone’s selling the same bundles. But how about just making that broadband line really useful and helping regular broadband-y activities become a little better – empower users to do the things they’re already doing, but better. Some ideas…

    • Orange Metro – turn 2.75m Liveboxes into the world’s biggest wifi hotzone, squishing FON, Wibiki and Placesight.
    • Orange Mediabox – a thin-client that can backup your computers, download torrents, share iTunes libraries and serve your files anywhere on the Web…something like this?
    • Orange Me – a place to manage store, share and syndicate your data, personas and relationships.

    Users aren’t going to buy their connectivity, communications and entertainment from one provider – so it’s perhaps sensible to grant them the freedom to unbundle – there’s still much value to be added to broadband.

  • Do Dinosaurs RSS?

    Ffminutes_2A few days ago, Winston Huang launched a pair of extensions for Firefox that let Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile customers see their remaining minutes from within their browser.

    That’s a great idea – but why aren’t Verizon and T-Mobile offering this capability themselves? Telcos need to open up a whole lot more.

    There’re two kinds of data locked up in two kinds of dinosaur, that could add immense value to the platform owners and translate into increased convenience for user.

    • Banks – my monthly statement is a timeline of events with some financial data; Barclays…can I this have delivered to my Bloglines account?
    • Telcos – my monthly BT and Orange statements are a timeline of communication events,..can I have some RSS for my aggregator?

    It’s kinda ironic that my money can now be streamed anywhere in the world that accepts my Visa debit card and I can stream my voice globally through my tri-band Orange cellphone…but all the interesting realtime data around that mobility isn’t so flexible.

    Opening up could create some interesting new applications and kick start a round of innovation that benefits banks and telcos, as well as the customer.

  • Tag-tical Awareness

    Back in January 2005, as Flickr and del.icio.us drove the adoption of tags, Brian Dear speculated (as did I) on the emergence of federated tagging; a Google for your tags – Taggle.

    TagticalNow, eighteen months later tags are everywhere – Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, Gmail, Vox, YouTube, Ning, Last.FM and our very own Simpatico, Klippr and Comcentrix. Tags have become an essential piece of Web 2.0 infrastructure, providing the defacto mechanism for organising and navigating information.

    Yet, no metaservices have arisen to enable users to pivot through their increasingly dense cloud of tagged messages, photos, songs, post and videos. Most of the services listed above make a user’s tags available through API access, but no one has joined up the dots – the tagsonomy/folksonomy/tagosphere remains fragmented.

    What I’d like to see…

    • Use of tag microformats in sites that support tagging – would that be rel-tag, xFolk or hReview?
    • A service that aggregated my tags and everyone’s tags – from known tag-based apps and items with microformatted content
    • A great Stamen-powered visualisation+UI, that lets me glance, pivot, find, search and scan; through people, time, places, spaces and things.

    C’mon – let’s taggle this problem!