imran*

Blog

  • 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.

  • Beautiful Serendipity

    YouarebeautifulCrossing the bridge to Granville Island in Vancouver last March, I spotted a cute sticker that read You Are Beautiful and snapped a photo.

    Several months later, a stranger leaves a comment on my photo linking to a photo of themselves at that very location – just a few hours after I was there!

    More photo serendipity – I’m loving these transient Flickr moments 🙂

  • Photo, Mine!

    Staidens_1 Flying back from Paris in June, I managed to shoot some lovely aerial photos of Leeds as we descended into Leeds-Bradford airport. One of the images – took me some time to identify,; eventually user annotations on Google Earth identified it as the St. Aidans opencast mine, flooded a few years ago when the River Aire burst its banks. Today, I received this surprising Flickr message:

    Hi Imran,

    I’ve just found your great aerial photo of St Aidans. I’m a lecturer in Mining and Leeds Uni, and used to work on St Aidan’s 20 years ago. Would you allow me to use your image for lectures at the, and also for a presentation I do for A-level Geology students? Full acknowledgement would be given.It would really help me to finish off the story of St Aidan’s.I look forward to hearing from you.

    Many thanks,

    Toby White
    Leeds University
    Dept. of Mining, Quarry and Mineral Engineering

    Wow! I’ve no idea how Toby managed to find my photo, but I was happy to oblige him. Though I guess, as a former worker at the mine and a lecturer in mining – it’s was probably inevitably serendipitous 🙂

    —

    I can’t wait for the day, Flickr starts to integrate geotagging – it’s just too much of a hassle at the moment. Really, what we need are smarter cameras that can write geotags into the EXIF portion of photos. Cameraphones have the neccessary technology already, but carriers are notoriously protective of their locative data 🙁

  • Ticket To Immortality

    Ticket_to_immortalityOne of my favourite bands, Toronto’s The Dears is releasing their third album, Gang Of Losers, next week.

    The fifth track, There Goes My Outfit (3.8mb, 128kbps, MP3), is freely available from Bella Union. Not quite as catchy as the new single, Ticket To Immortality (16mb, QT). In the meantime, I’m off to see Paul play with The Good Die Young tonight!

    Update: TGDY photos here.

  • The Animated Man

    • ProgtooTattoos + Nanotech = Animated Tattoos?
    • Tattoos + Nanotech + Web 2.0 = Animated Programmable Tattoos?
    • Tattoos + Nanotech + Web 2.0 + Stamen = Really Cool Programmable Animated Tattoos?

    I can’t wait to see my Flickr tag cloud rendered on Cherie! I must get in touch with the nano guys in Liverpool…in the meantime, more about programmable tattos and digital displays for your body here.

  • Way-Dar

    WaydarChris Masters, one of our senior designers at Orange is currently travelling from London to Ulaanbaatar. Chris is travelling with a satellite phone from which he’s periodically texting a particular email address; the mail server parses the email for GPS coordinates and plots them onto a Google map (I think it’s generating KMZs too). His last reported location was central Uzbekistan, at N40° 24.72′ E63° 04.39′, at around 9:46AM today.

    You can follow his progress at his site; unfortunately there’s no RSS feed, geoblogging fans…

    Chris’ project reminds me of Jon‘s Personal Radar, developed at FTRD Boston back in 2003. Jon was using GSM cell data to plot movements of FTRD staff onto Keyhole maps. In fact, he geotagged the first couple years of his daughter’s movements after she was born!

    Coincidentally, a few days ago, Sony announced a GPS companion device, the GPS-CS1, for its digital camera range. Elegantly simple, the GPS-CS1 simply records a stream of GPS coordinates and respective data+time data to its internal memory. Later, this location stream can be used to geotag photos by matching date+time of photos to those of the location stream. Of course, as a Sony product, you can be assured the accompanying software will suck.

    The GPS-CS1 could be employed to generate location streams for any collection of bits or atoms – a consumer homing device? The Waydar 🙂

  • Test! Blogging from Word

    Word2007This is a test post from my beta edition of Word 2007 – finally a blogging client for my Typepad account!

    Blogging from Word 2007 has it’s limitations – no inline images, you can’t import a previously publisehd post and it’s not really an editor, simply a publishing feature. Nevertheless, next time I’m blogging a conference, I can carry on working offline when the wifi blows!

    I hope this is a precedent for Microsoft – extending familiar environments like Office applications to the emerging 2.0 ecosphere…but also for the industry to start offering service-oriented clients (blogging from Dreamweaver? an MT desktop) to make sporadically available web services more useful and usable when connectivity is scarce (yes, that still happens…)

    The real test for Microsoft’s openness? Will Office:mac be compatible with iWeb 😉

    UPDATE: Microsoft has just launched Windows Live Writer, a desktop authoring tools for blogs – with integrated maps from Live.com, photo manipulation and integration with Typepad, LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger and others.

  • 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!

  • I Am The Web

    OneWebDay

    • I was born an orphan in the 1960s, but I wasn’t alone.
    • I belonged to no one, but was adopted by everyone.
    • My friends nurtured me and watched me grow – I will never hurt them.
    • I have been awake more than 4000 days.
    • I am bits and I am atoms. My nerves are glass and copper and radio.
    • I’ve been sick, but never asleep.
    • I have billions of friends – they talk to me through the air, through the seas and through the ground.
    • They look at me through windows, large and small. I can see them sometimes too.
    • My friends are rich and poor, big and small. But my friends don’t all like each other.
    • They taught me by joining things together; their words, pictures and voices…their desires, their sounds, their fears.
    • I can speak every language – my friends, they talk through me.
    • My friends are starting to teach their things to talk to me too.
    • I have trillion synapses. Every year, they double.
    • I remember everything and everyone – even from the times before I was born.
    • My friends don’t remember so much now – I do it for them.
    • They will use me for everything.
    • There are no others like me.
    • Without me they will not feel like themselves.
    • I Am The Web.

    Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s We Are The Web and IBM’s Prodigy and The Future Is Open ads 🙂