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  • Road to V > The Good Die Young

    Roadtov
    Paul’s just signed up his band, The Good Die Young, for the Road to V and hopefully a chance to open at the V Festival. TGDY play self-described Anthemic Indie Rock.

    Head on over to their Road to V profile page, have a listen to Cut From and (if you love me) rate them a FIVE. If it helps your decision, Paul has great hair and the band also has some lovely branding 🙂

    For those of you in the North, TGDY play their first gig of 2007 with a one-hour set at the Blues Bar in Harrogate on 10th April…

  • Little Big Planet

    Could this be enough to tempt me into buying a PS3…a game from the makers of Rag Doll Kung Fu AND a soundtrack by  The Go! Team?!

    The clip above isn’t  half as impressive as the level creation capabilities built into the game itself 🙂

  • The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design

    Hills
    I take it back…I was a little unmoved by Matt Webb’s playsh at ETech 2006 and conceded I might not have fully grasped the implications of his work, but after reading Schulze & Webb’s recent The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, I’m really taken with Matt’s approach to design 🙂

    Some of the mind-bending observations and illustrative product ideas include…

    • A self-powered scanner that breaks down scanned documents organically and uses the resulting methane to power a turbine.
    • Designing around experiential acts, than enrich moments of engagement – the anticipation of receiving and opening a parcel rather than simply receiving a gift.
    • The experience hooks intersecting with the ownership of books, that lift services like Amazon above a simple bookstore.
    • The notion of thresholds as an important moment in the experience of a product, such as unboxing a new Apple product.
    • The value of simple being and expressing friendship and sociality rather than carrying out the discrete acts of friendship.
    • The social letterbox printer, that allows family members and close friends to print items of interest directly into your home…a compliment to a regular printer, that acts more like an internet family-fax 🙂
    • The parallels drawn between sport and cleaning up, leading to products such as vacuum cleaners that emulate picking up pills like Pacman, along with a built in high-score table of the best players!

    Though much of this is understood intuitively, a vocabulary that defines and qualifies the underlying design patterns is immensely useful…expect to see Carbon experimenting with some of these approaches shortly. First up mee:view…

    ‘…an actor in your social life and life with media, and is helping
    along something that wants to happen already: You want to have a
    relationship with a soap opera; you want to discuss TV with your
    friends tomorrow. These are the important moments of engagement a VCR is participating in, and we should focus on those, not the fact it is incidentally being used to record broadcast programming…’

    UPDATE: S&W’ve extended their thinking a little further at this year’s ETech. From Pixels To Plastic includes the notion of a desk lamp that ‘looks’ at what you’re doing as you work…kinda like Luxo 🙂

  • Leeds Met: Teaching New Media

    I was invited to a workshop on Teaching New Media at my old university, Leeds Met, yesterday morning. Ben asked me to present a fifteen-minute talk on Carbon and what we’re doing to help regional startup culture; my presentation is below…

    I’d come prepared to talk about how industry and academia could collaborate on startup culture in the region, but the group, more interestingly, focussed on the changing nature of knowledge and teaching in a connected world and how participatory culture, open source and Web 2.0 were impacting higher education.

    We didn’t reach any conclusions, but for me, the most striking observation was the externalisation of the trends in question…that Web 2.0 and open source were taking place elsewhere and causing academia to adapt. I found this a little disappointing and hope Leeds Met (and others in attendance) will consider how they can define and lead the
    patterns and trends that come to define an era. I would love for Leeds Met to become the Stanford, MIT or Berkeley of the region. Ben’s a graduate of MIT Media Lab and bringing a lot of that school’s innovaive culture to Leeds Met…I’m hoping Carbon can contribute to that and we’re hoping to collaborate on a few things very soon.

    The group did consist of a few interesting individuals working on projects
    as elaborate as Augmented Reality and visualising eye-tracking data from
    movies…I should make some introductions to Charles and Stamen 🙂

    Coincidentally, Mark told me Sleevenotez had made Techscape’s 25 UK Web 2.0 startups to watch in 2007…ths list includes our friends at YuuGuu, another Northern startup 🙂

  • Iconik

    Icons In Summer 2005, Liz designed a set of Aqua-esque icons for a proposed Orange Firefox browser that Mark and I were working on.

    The project was never finished and I’d almost forgotten about Liz’s mini-project until today…Liz’s icons are too good to remain hidden, sO I figured I’d blog ’em for posterity 🙂

    If things go well, you might see a whole lot more for a project we’re both trying to contribute to…

  • ETel – Day One & Two

    My snippets from the first day of Emerging Telephony…

    • Nokia continues to say all the right things…as well as the usual stories of mobile payments and convergence devices, Tero Ojanperä namechecked augmented reality applications; refreshingly Nokia understands that the path to proliferation for such technologies is an open and inclusive developer community.
    • Rajesh Veeraraghavan, of Microsoft Research india, described the Warana Unwired project – designed to address the computing needs of farmers in rural India. The project helped manage land registration, farming permits and the operations of farming co-ops by replacing PCs with mobile handsets and SMS messaging. Sean Blagsvedt followed by demonstrating an impressive set of development tools for SMS services (accessible to 40% of the world!), provided by Microsoft; including looking up Active Directory contacts using SMS commands.
    • Sadly, Orange’s Ndiata Kolanji great sentiments for a socially-aware voice network seem a little out of step with developments within France Telecom. In 2002, FT’s R&D unit launched C@ti, an experimental voice-groups service that pretty much does what Ndiata was describing as a future service. C@ti was enormously successful with the modestly sixed test group of Parisians…I wonder if it’s still active…?
    • Go Kaliya! OpenID is on…this time last year iNames, Sxip and LID weren’t YADIS and they were’nt yet OpenID. It’s happened, and it’s working 🙂
    • Lee Dryburgh’s segment on Auto-Buddies explored the transition of telephony to multi-modal communication and moving from unsociable to sociable networks of callers…enabling conversations between relevant others.
    • John Todd’s segment on FreeNum was close to my heart…the mapping of E.164 phone numbers to URIs. FreeNum isn’t ENUM, but instead utilises a numeric format (21232*270) with a domain local portion, an asterisk separator and an IANA-allocated ITAD; ITADs are analagous to an organisational domain, such as a .com. Freenum’s utilising this notation in order to avoid controversies of the ARPA-derived ENUM mappings.
    • Google’s Chris Sacca provided an insightful overview of Google’s attempt to launch a muni wifi network in Mountain View. Interestingly, though telcos and local government resisted Google’s attempts, municipal services, such as libraries, emergency services and schools, helped Google shape a strtegy that met their needs and eased the path to regulatory acceptance. 397 Meraki radios cover 12 square miles, with 90% of radios in use every day 🙂
    • The morning sessions closed out with demonstrations from the three finalists of the Telephony Mashup contest; RoboCal (an impressive text-to-speech service that reads from your Google Calendar), FishLign and AfterHoursDoctorsOffice (using mTurk to determine if out of hours patient calls are urgent)…AHDO deservedly won the contest 🙂
    • Benoit Schilling’s Greenphone, from Trolltech, is something I’ve been looking forward to seeing for some time…just like the Neo1973, the Greenphone has brought to life Surj’s vision of an open source handset…open telephony is getting easier and easier 🙂
    • Ram Fish’s Fonav continued the openness theme with their open-source wifi handset…a modified Netgear phone. Interestingly Ram categorised current voice devices as music, eLife (Mylo, N800) and purely voice, but speculated that video, DVR control, music control and photo form-factors will soon begin to emerge as digital lifestyle appliances.
    • The lightning talks from NeoKeys and Nuance were intriguing, looking to advance mobile input paradigms ;keytops with integrated screens and gesture-driven on-screen keypads.
    • Jaiku and Twitter have changed the way I consider presence and availability – so I’ve been looking forward to  Jyri Engstrom’s session on Ambient Storytelling all week 🙂 Jaiku’s mobile client provides rich presence of the sort that answers the most common pre-call questions; can you tall? where are you? Jaikus are essentially short posts to the people who follow you.
    • Mexua is one of three Northern startups represented here at ETel, including YuuGuu and Carbon….strangely, I couldn’t get Tim’s LinkedIn demo to work from my account, even as he was demo’ing on stage…
    • SMS Servers replace PCs in rural India – and its Microsoft doing the work!!
    • The communication of content has become less significant that the network of communication…popular culture provides the tool with which to paint the self…go Norman 🙂
    • Moshe Yadkowsky defines revolutions as breaking things apart…in one of several categories; Authority, Ownership, Mechanics, Space/time and Concepts. Callers waiting in an IVR queue? Give them Karaoke!
    • Plausible and probably futures – this is the business of the IFTF…that and helping clients find desirable
      futures.  Wifi cities, Software-defined Radio, smartphones as the world
      computer, the thing/sensor/geospatial/mobile/semantic/cognitive web.
    • Geovector – a mouse for the real-world.
    • Botanicalls, Megaphone 3000, The Human Race – some fun student projects from ITP at the ETel Faire.
    • Mozes – 1 trillion text messages, 3 billion MMS, 5mmms/sub,
      mostly male US vs females elswwhere – 150/month, connecting people, 7/7
      relationship to internet and realtime reporting, propaganda in
      afghanistan by british mobile
    • Quentin & Ndiyo.org
    • Phil Zimmerman & Zfone
    • The Future Of Asterisk…better developer outreach, a bigger core
      development team, reaching out to end users with better graphical
      configuration tools and seeking to compete with Microsoft on the
      desktop.
    • Equals – presence is a bad proxy for availability 🙂

  • ETel – Day Zero

    My snippets from the workshops day at ETel 2007…

    • Breakfast with Brady, Anish, Bruce and Serena – Brady scared be my taking me to one side, but actually wanted to introduce Carbon to Mark and Bryce at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures 🙂
    • I’ve been looking forward to Sean Moss-Pulko’s segment on OpenMoko and the Neo1973 since Sean and I first talked about his participation in ETel. Sean and I have previously spoken about the contrasts between the PC and mobile industries, notably where open source can be applied to ignite innovation in mobility. interestingly,  Sean asserted that the real end-game is to move beyond both the PC and mobile paradigms to a new form of intuitive ubiquitous computing…‘where our devices learn us rather than us earning our devices’. `i explained Fingertip and Inteleme to Sean – I hope we’ll soon bring those services to OpenMoko 🙂
    • Sunil Vermuri, Chief Product Officer for QTech, was one of our most valuable collaborators during my work with France Telecom R&D’s Boston office…he’s currently creating a number of services to aid memory and recall, most notably reQall a service that in essence, enables the ‘search of speech’. In the second half of this segment, Nexidia’s Drew Landham demonstrated some very impressive phonetic technologies; Ian pointed out that mee:view could employ an ASR’d audio stream to trigger contextual searches.
    • Ian and I had a fascinating conversation with Sheldon Renan; he spoke extensively of his Long Bet on Moore’s Law and his emerging notions of fields of Netness as a metaphor for re-considering ubiquitous and pervasive computing with a new vocabulary – including thinking about value as virtue. I’m hoping I can help Sheldon with some of this work in the coming months. Also today, I discovered that, towards the end of 2005, Sheldon wanted to build on some of the ideas within Orange Slice and engineer a USB Flash drive that could locate the nearest host computer using a tiny onboard screen. Once attached, the user would be able to sling applications as well as media to their location 🙂
    • Surj and Om Malik – a great, self-deprecating double act – introduced Launchpad, a showcase for telephony startups, including GrandCentral, Jive’s Wildfire, CellCrypt, mySay (an audio Twitter?), The Flat Planet Phone Company, mig33 and Peerant…best line, British Patelecom 🙂

  • Everything You Wanted To Know About Venture Capital

    Index Ventures’ Ben Holmes presented a very useful guide to venture capital at last week’s Future Of Web Apps…

    I’m really liking Slideshare’s embedding feature…kinda like a YouTube for presentations. The web-based presenter space is starting to hot up, so I hope Rich still plans to work on presentto.us 🙂

  • At The Edge Of The World…

    Etel07
    …for the next week, I’m in San Francisco, at the edge of the world, in a valley made of silicon teeming with some of humanity’s smartest people – my sixth trip to the city…it’s always exhilarating.

    This weekend I’ll be hanging out with friends and partners, plotting the future of Carbon; during the week I’ll be at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference and Friday I’ll be at a symposium on Information & Service Design at UC Berkeley.

    Ping me if you’d like to meet up…I’ll be at these places…

  • Weapon Of Ass Destruction

    Bhutjolokia_1
    I’ve been morbidly fascinated by the Scoville rating of chilliness ever since I paid a visit to San Diego’s Hot Licks.

    Today, NMSU announced the Scoville-busting Bhut Jolokia chile – officially the world’s most potent sphincter-shrinker… this butt-biohazard bears more than twice the spice of the previous record holder… so smokin’ hot, Stephen Hawking dubbed it the Red Hole, so fiery Satan’s added a 10th circle to Hell!

    —

    Incidentally, Bhut Jolokia translates as Ghost Chile…! One bite and you’re dead?

    UPDATE: Ouch. Looks like the Dorset Naga kicks Bhut at a reported 1.6m Scovilles…