imran*

Blog

  • Divine Direction

    DandellaElegant. Gizmodo’s covering a GPS navigator that’s as simple as a stalk that bends towards your destination…pair ’em up and you can keep track of a friend ๐Ÿ™‚

    Dandella is the winning concept from the Japan Design Foundation’s International Design Competition…woulda been cute to see the two winners finding each other with a pair of Dandellas. It’s a lovely example of tangible media and playful, emotional design…I love that it lives in a Charging Vase! Perhaps we’ll see cellphones that pull you towards your next meeting ๐Ÿ˜‰

    The other finalists are largely robotic concepts – perhaps typical of Japanese research – that illustrate the fascinating edge concepts of modern industrial design in Japan.

  • Awesome…

    …twelve minutes at last night’s Superbowl XLI half-time show took me back to July 1990, seeing Prince play at Wembley Arena with my schoolbuddy Ashish – we were both sixteen and in awe of our musical hero…seventeen years later, da boy’s still gottit ๐Ÿ™‚

    Watch out for covers of All Along The Watchtower, We Will Rock You, Foo Fighters’ Best of You (6:30) – woooo! – and some krazy Spanish commentary.

    I wonder if Prince’ll see an uptick on various digital service – today’s he’s #5 on Technorati and #264 at Last.FM – I’ll check back in a week…

  • Isn’t that cute ๐Ÿ™‚

    Bilals_villageMy cousin Bilal was beavering away on my VAIO, in the corner of the lounge this evening, while we checked out some photos.

    He started out looking up dinosaurs for some school work, but ended up building a SimCity style model village using Bekonscot Model Village’s Virtual Village app. This is what he came up with…cue huh?

    I’m going to give him my old copy of Sim City 3000 and line up some LEGO for his next birthday

  • 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 ๐Ÿ˜‰
    • 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 ๐Ÿ™‚

    —

    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?

  • President Iraq Hussein Osama

    …ahem, I mean President Barack Hussein Obama…he’s running.

  • That’s Me In The Corner

    Geni_1 When I was around sixteen, I started to map out my extended family and try trace back my ancestry as far as I could from elderly relatives…after a few weeks research, I ended up with a huge A2 pencil drawn family tree.

    At that time, I counted around 80-90 people across five generations. Asian families can have convoluted structures; people have lots of kids (a very horizontal tree) and there’re quite a few marriages between cousins; (very horizontal and um, loops?).

    Around 1992, using my beloved Amiga 1200, I transcribed the tree into an AmigaGuide hypertext document, with some simple profiles of each family member…and there it languished for almost fifteen years…a dead document of my family, frozen in time and awaiting the advent of HTML and the Web ๐Ÿ™‚

    Recently with my work in social networking platforms and technologies, I began to think about re-inventing my family tree as a network of relationships that could be visualised in many different ways – trees, maps, graphs etc. – and where each family member would maintain their own profile and relationships. Maybe this could be a service that other people could use too and connect their various family trees together.

    Well today, my erstwhile employers covered the launch of David Sack’s Geni – a very cool online family tree service. Within fifteen minutes I’d sketched out five generations and a couple dozen family members; Geni even let me use the service without signing up, but actually completing my registration as I used the tools.

    It’s still missing a few of the specific tools I’d need, but I think it’s time for me to revisit my tree and turn it into a living digital document of my ุฎู†ุฏุงู†. Geni allows you to invite the relatives you’ve added and help build out their part of the tree and their personal profiles.

    In case you’re wondering about the screengrab, that’s me in the corner.

  • The Man Who Fell To Google

    Foocamp_1As promised, at around noon on Saturday 26th August 2006, Google chartered a plane to overfly Foo Camp at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol campus and photograph the event for Maps and Earth. Here you can see a cute banner on the grass, the camp site, some people splayed out for the cameras and – most significantly – the lunch queue ๐Ÿ™‚

    I’m gutted. I was having so much fun inside, that I forgot to go outside. If you’d like a closer look, download the KMZ location for Google Earth here…

    UPDATE: The full set of photos includes a Cylon Raider and some space invader images…more from Tom Coates ๐Ÿ™‚

  • Love Being

    LovebeingTDR go from irony to optimistic semi-psychedelia with their Love Being video for Citizen Bird’s Joy…you can download it from Coke’s The m5 design project.

    The Coke collaboration is intra-ironic, given TDR’s earlier Work Buy Consume Die pastiche of the Pepsi logo. The m5 project also includes contributions from LOBO, MK12, Caviar and Tennant McKay/REX.

    NightmodeTDR’s also designed a very cool limited edition ‘M5′ bottle along with tees, posters, figurines and an iPod shuffle case…’when retro is done right, it looks more modern than the moment from which it was created’.

    Wow – I’d almost forgotten how much I loved TDR’s work…one day I’ll get me one of those screen prints ๐Ÿ™‚

  • This Better Be Good…

    Welcome2007 …’cos papa needs a brand new phone (and a laptop).

  • My 7-Year Itch

    GoodbyeUhuh, itโ€™s true. After seven years in a relationship, itโ€™s usually time to see other people ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Last Thursday , I became a civilian again, returning to a world where people pay for cellphones, where flights, trains and hotels cost money, laptops arenโ€™t free and the English language rules ๐Ÿ˜‰

    I came to Freeserve in 1999 with four other colleagues, when we were a startup in the midst of the first dotcom boom. One IPO, two CEOs and three brands later Iโ€™m leaving to join the second era of the web and return to my startup roots. It was fun, inspiring and exhilarating being part of the first generation of our companyโ€ฆand a privilege to work alongside some of France Telecomโ€™s brightest minds from Boston and San Francisco to London and Paris, but most memorably, in Leeds ๐Ÿ™‚

    As corporate R&D becomes eclipsed by garage entrepreneurs and technologists, most of our team is also heading for greener fields; Mark Taylor is joining Eircom as head of content, Ian Pringle will be heading up telephony startup Intelleme and collectively weโ€™ll be launching a think-tank for emerging technologies – Carbon Imagineering – a vehicle for our startups, consultancy and publishing projects, operating in the US and UK. Funny, I always seem to leave as part of an exodus…

    Thank you to everyone, inside and outside FT, who has supported our research, been an audience to our ideas and sought our insights. Iโ€™ll miss you.

    Itโ€™s easy to overlook the impact that Freeserve, Wanadoo UK and Orange have had. We were there – right there – at the birth of the Web. We weaved its nerves from copper, glass, radio, pixels and code, enabling others to create โ€˜a new mind for an old speciesโ€™…

    The futureโ€™s even brighter ๐Ÿ™‚

    _________________________________________________

    Imran Ali โ€ข Acting Director of Technology Research
    Orange Home UK plc
    The Malthouse โ€ข Chadwick Street โ€ข Leeds โ€ข LS10 1LJ
    +44 7808 786814