imran*

Blog

  • The Next Billion

    SharedphoneWhen considering social software, we tend to conceive of software that is a filtered aggregation of individuated and personalised experiences.

    Nokia’s Jan Chipchase and Indri Tulusan reframe this perception by asking what happens when people share an object that is inherently designed for personal use?

    There’s a lotta talk about the ‘next billion’ mobile customers, largely from the developing world, but very little real empirical study of what those users might need. Contrast Doom-playing OLPCs with the work of The Fonly Institute…

    Chipchase and Tulusan’s field study of Ugandan mobile, this past July, documents some very revealing observations…

    • Phone borrowing is is driven by cost and price sensitivity.
    • Phone lending is driven by hospitality, personal relationships and community well-being.
    • The notion of ‘sente’, using prepay airtime as a form of cheap, secure and convenient banking.
    • Employing missed calls – ‘beeping and flashing’ – as a form of free messaging.
    • Phones as community ATMs.
    • Pooling prepay credit between customers when sufficiently small prepay denominations are available.
    • Mediated Calls – where literacy becomes a barrier to participation.
    • Community address books to encourage repeat business and conveniently recall commonly dialled numbers.
    • Step messaging – physically carrying a phone containing a message to its recipient…

    Chipchase and Tulusan conclude that sharing is driven by cost, but that low costs lowers the propensity to share; with initial experiences governed by sharing, they also conclude that this may shape future usage. It’ll be interesting to see how individual ownership might affect social cohesion and mobile usage in the very same communities.

    What’s striking about the research is that all the observed innovations in shared usage are a result of user inventiveness, rather than handset design or network services; a case of user-generated services that really serve the needs of the consumer…if the mobile industry paid closer attention to such innovation, it might provide that ‘next billion’ users with the tools they actually need.

    —

    BTW, during a vacation in Pakistan this year, I noticed that a lot of people carried 2-3 handsets and SIMs as tools to mediate their friendships, family and professional availabilty…

  • Meta Kitchen

    KitchenWe’re currently in the midst of constructing a two-storey extension and I thought I’d get some kitchen ideas from budget DIY icons, MFI.

    Using MFI’s online planning tool, I only needed to enter some basic room dimensions, indicate positions of doors and windows and select some appliances…the software then filled in the remaining spaces with wall and floor units. Twenty minutes later, I was presented with a bunch of elevations, a floor plan, parts list and a number of very cool 3D visualisations; here are the results.

    Designed by Planit.com, the Shockwave based planning wizard is a little clunky, but the results are actually pretty good and help take a lotta pain out of designing your kitchen as well as giving you some idea of its cost and complexity. Unfortunately, the bathroom designer didn’t fare as well. This may my own fault, in trying to squeeze a toilet and sink into a 0.95 x 1.6m space…

    What’d be really interesting is a participatory layer…

    • Could user’s share and geolocate their creations for others with similar home layouts?
    • Is there potential here for some value of shared value and revenue generation?
    • Ten years after a user submits and purchases a design, approach them again with a suggested overhaul.
    • Market to customers with a portfolio of designs illustrating how your home could look…

    Next step? A Second Life showroom 😉

  • Prototypes – Je Ne Te Connais Pas

    PrototypesApple’s Put Some Music On TV spot for the latest iPod shuffle gives a shout out to Who’s Gonna Sing from the Prototypes, label mates with one of my favorite bands, The Cardigans and a band that reminds me of Kenicke and The B-52s 🙂

    You can download the Je Ne Te Connais Pas EP from Minty Fresh here (22mb ZIP archive, 192kbps MP3s) and the single here.

    BTW, the Minty Fresh site is worth a visit – some lovely Flash UIs 🙂

  • Crunched

    Sadly, the chain of events which led to Sam’s dismissal from TechCrunch UK continued to have repercussions that unfortunately overshadowed the conference itself…

    • Michael Arrington, proprietor of the CrunchNetwork decided to put TCUK on hold, locking out Sam, Mike Butcher and contributors like myself without any warning…though I later managed to recover my password, I figured it was impolite to continue posting!
    • Michael later posted his perspective on the events leading up to the dismissal and closure.
    • A few days later Mike butcher resigned as co-editor of TCUK.
    • Over the weekend, Loïc Le Meur posted his recollection of events and his response to criticisms of Le Web.
    • Yesterday, Natali Del Conti resigned from TechCrunch, partially due to the abusive comments surrounding these events.

    I have sympathy for Sam, Mike A and Mike B’s positions, more so for Natali…each seemed to face unfortunate choices. Le Meur however conducted himself appallingly; I’ve read reacted similarly to criticism last year too. This is a shame, he’s someone who appears to be quite likable and has great enthusiasm and energy – there was no need for his outburst; Sam was justified in his criticisms.

    In just three-and-a-half months, Sam and Mike B lifted TCUK from a standing start and located it at the centre of the UK tech scene. Those of us at the periphery, as contributors and writers, were planning to extend coverage and events around the UK, energising entrepreneurs and innovators wherever they existed. TCUK was doing good work and pretty much for free!

    TCUK was more than a brand and a blog, it was the sum total of relationships and trust developed by its contributors; that won’t dissipate…it’ll follow Sam and Mike to whatever they plan to do next. I hope TCUK will relaunch soon as well as Sam and Mike’s new venture – a competitive news landscape for the tech industry is healthy and neccessary.

    —

    UPDATE: Sam and Mike are back on the air as Vecosys, tracking European statups…great news and I wish ’em both the best of luck. Unfortunately, the spat between Sam and Michael Arrington appears to be getting uglier and distracting from real industry news.

  • Le Web 3 – Day Two

    Moshe_shimon_and_locLike day one, Day Two appeared to be just as underwhelming – honestly, the programme seemed forgettable, but again there were some highlights, notably those segments with a political bent to the day…

    • Shimon Peres, Israel’s noted statesman and Deputy Prime Minister spoke eloquently of the intersection of globalism, technology and politics. Though uplifting and poetic, Peres conveniently glossed over Israel’s strangulation of the Palestinian people and suggested the use of nano-weapons in future conflict! I really wanted to ask how he’d seen technology alter Israeli society with regard to its role in the region, but the audience was limited to just three questions. Loïc Le Meur ended the session by suggesting to Peres that the audience was one of the most influential in the world and the basis for a global movement. A nice Utopian sentiment, but let’s not forget that Peres represents a state that utilises its military to brutalise other nations.
    • David Weinberger’s segment on Blogging Our Way to Democracy was phenomenal. Though I was familiar with the intricacies of the web-driven grassroots Dean campaign in 2004, Weinberger is a great storyteller and provided a whirlwind tour of the Deaniac movement for those less familiar with the US campaign…though I suspect too late in the day to influence next year’s French presidential race.
    • Interior Minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy made a keynote speech that didn’t endear himself to the audience…and further antagonised the predominantly non-French audience by addressing them in French…translation was available, but this is kinda rude. A great many of the delegates left the auditorium out of sheer boredom whilst others were infuriated to be ‘campaigned at’ by an uninteresting politician…who has recently been endorsed by Loïc Le Meur.
    • The panel session on Mobility 2.0 was disappointing – the discussion focused on stress ting the entrenched, absolutist positions of the incumbents –  telcos, handset manufacture res and service developers – without attempting to explore wider questions of openness across the mobile sector. Counterposing the development of the fixed web with the mobile web would have been a useful starting point.
    • I caught Patrick de Laive from The Next Web and Fleck.com in one of the breaks. We exchanged some ideas about next year’s event in Amsterdam…I hope I can get involved in the planning…we’re also planning to buy a slot for mee:view 🙂
    • I managed to say my Orange farewells to many of my colleagues from FT R&D San Francisco (Georges Nahon, Virginie De Bel Air, Celine Decoux) as well as Patrice and David from NExT. Also, Asha and I managed to say hi for just a few minutes as I left the conference. I’ll really miss working with her 🙁
    • Unfortunately, I had to leave for the airport just as Iranian blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, began his speech on the censorship of blogs and web content in Iran.
    • After the conference, instead of walking to Corentin Celtin, I tried to hitch a cab ride to the airport from the nearby Sofitel. I ended up waiting for a cab with Mena Trott and finally split a cab to CDG with Heiko Hebig and Rupert Schäfer from Burda…we have a great conversation and they’ve invited me to the DLD conference in Munich next month.

  • How Much Is My Blog Worth…

    Blogworth_1 …£ 5505! That’s more that I would’ve thought! So what’s the valuation on all those other blogs that I’ve written for…

    The figure for TCUK sounds pretty accurate – accounting for two co-editors as well as some overheads and expenses. You can find out more about the methodology here – calculated from Technorati data.

  • Pixel(un)box-ed

    Pixelbox2006_1Even though we stopped writing in July, I’m still a little sad that I’m closing up Pixelbox this evening, after two years, 500-odd posts and a modest 75’000 page views, averaging about 100/day. Pixelbox also ranked 611’863rd on Technorati.

    Pixelbox was France Telecom’s first public, corporate blog and a collaboration between Wanadoo’s Technology Research and Design departments. A team of fifteen design and innovation professionals chronicled their observations of the design industry, technological developments and the work of inspirational artists and design practitioners; kinda like a mini-Boing Boing for designers 🙂

    From Eddy’s long, serious political observations to Key’s perma-stream of microposts, it was a lotta fun seeing everyone trying to find their voice. Indeed, some contributor’s bonusses were tied to how much they posted. I’ve just spend the best part of a day, republishing my own contributions to my personal blog…I was just behind Rich and Key in volume of posts!

    Most of the team have moved on to launch po-bo, to bring together designers from what was Wanadoo and the existing mobile teams in Orange UK. Me? I’ll be leaving Orange in three days time – yay!

    Pixelbox is dead; long live po-bo!

  • Le Web 3 – Day One

    Leweb3Le Web 3 has been disappointing – though I’m not sure, whether this is due to an underwhelming programme or simply that general debate on 2.0 has not progressed much lately; I had a similar feeling after this year’s ETech…but that maybe because my expectations increase with each year 🙂

    The underlying tone of Le Web seemed to assume that delegates knew little of 2.0 and had been just waiting to be told…the general message was that ‘Web 2.0 was a great idea’, ‘open source is cool’ and ‘user-generated content was important‘ – we sorta knew this already…

    There was also a disappointing deference to speakers’ positions – a panel session including representatives of Microsoft, Orange, Nokia and Yahoo should have hauled some of the representatives over the coals. Instead, we heard lazy reiterations of each company’s position. Yes, Nokia is connecting people, Orange is converging and Microsoft is Live…

    Earlier this year, The Next Web, put together a compelling, tight, one-day programme that didn’t parrot the memes of Web 2.0 but gave Kevin Kelly space to speculate on the distant future history of the web and Steven Pemberton the chance to share his vision of the future structure of the web. They also managed to maintain a European focus by getting European VCs to talk about where they were betting their money.

    Despite today’s snoozely content, there were some highlights…

    • Feeling smug that I’m employed by both of the two key sponsors, Orange and TechCrunch.
    • Hans Rosling‘s session on The Real World & Why It Matters was an engaging and insightful tour of various human development trends. This is the data that’d driving 2.0 yet is often overlooked in the fetishisation of technological developments.
    • Catchin’ up with Jeanette Moskivitz at lunch. She’s now CEO of AutoQuake, a company that helps customers eBay their old cars. We last met at dinner with Marc Canter in Summer 2005.
    • Meeting the lovely Amanda Lorenzani, editor of Excite’s WebTwitcher blog.
    • Adding another O’Reillian to my collection – Nikolaj Nyholm. I’m constantly amazed by Tim O’Reilly’s ability to find super-smart people who are really approachable and laid back. Marc, Rael, Nat, Jon, Lorrie, Mike – they’re some of the nicest and smartest people I know 🙂
    • Picking up a free La Fonera wifi router from FON.
    • Loïc’s surprise announcement that Shimon Peres had called that very morning to request a speaking slot on Tuesday…now I really regret not packing my Kaffiyeh.
    • Hearing about Sam’s ideas for Startup! and discussing our plans for a TCUK event in Leeds.
    • Seeing Lee Bryant passionately shoot down the naive characterisation of Enterprise 2.0 as ‘distributed capitalism’. Also discovering that Lee’s a fellow Northerner from Harrogate, used to work for the heroic Haris Silajdžić and is an advisor to the board of the Muslim Heritage project! I now like Lee a lot 🙂
    • Bumping into FTRD’s Benoit Lelong on the Métro at Corentin Celton. I assisted Benoit on FT’s Usage Trends Observatory in 2005.

    Sadly, the sessions, keynoters and panel sessions were kinda forgettable; doubly ironic as turnout was over a thousand delegates and the list of speakers was, on paper, pretty stellar. The conference was however a great networking event; I wonder if workshops, how-tos and smaller more intimate sessions could have worked better for the delegates, giving more space to meet each other in more managable sessions.

    David Sifry at Le Web 3

    However, without a guiding theme or framework, like ETech’s Remix, Magic and Attention or The Next Web’s infectious futurism, Le Web currently lacks a voice that’s unique.

    UPDATE – Sadly, Sam’s quite reasonable and balanced impressions of Le Web, have led to an unfortunately public exchange with Loïc and resulted in unpleasant consequences.

  • Such A Pidy…

    Nice. A widget to display my digital IDs, from the newly launched Internet Address Book…though it lacks Opinity‘s verification mechanisms, ensuring that the IDs you claim, are actually yours. This is particularly important to assert a digital reputation, such as an eBay identity. Still it’s good to finally see a few companies starting to attack the problem…it’s still difficult to see the business models right now, but there’s certainly a space for the infra providers of Web 2.0.

  • Musharrafadama – Separated At Birth?

    MusharrafadamaIt’s not just the moustache and glasses, President Pervez Musharraf and Admiral William Adama have quite a few things in common…

    —

    • Both led coup attempts against their civilian governments.
    • Both men arrested and imprisoned their presidents, later granting them amnesty.
    • Each has an uneasy alliance with an perceived enemy.
    • Both are sceptical of religious leaders.
    • Both have led daring military raids.
    • Both have been the subject of assasination attempts, from within their inner circle.
    • Both have been involved in nuclear proliferation.
    • Both exist in societies where the military holds the keys to power.
    • One was created by a man called Ronald, the other fought in a war created by a man called Ronald.

    And of course, both have great dialogue, written by talented American speechwriters 😉