Four short links: 22 July 2009

Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches

1. ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
2. How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
3. Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector -- another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
4. Launchpad Opensourced -- Canonical's code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.

Four short links: 23 Apr 2009

Multitouch, visualizations, body hacks, and ubicomp:

1. Dell Demos Multitouch on the Studio One 19 (Engadget) -- the multitouch software on this baby is Fingertapps from the New Zealand company Unlimited Realities, whose founder was at Kiwi Foo Camp this year. Multitouch hits consumer PCs in a very mainstream way.
2. Circos -- open source Perl library to produce beautiful circular data displays. (via flowing data)
   
3. Brain Gain: The Underground World of “Neuroenhancing” Drugs (New Yorker) -- more on the body hacks theme of radical and literal self-improvement, as originally documented by Quinn Norton. What I found interesting was that when BoingBoing linked to it, they quoted the "Provigil might make us smarter" bit, and when MInd Hacks linked to it, they quoted the negative effects of amphetamine-based drugs.
4. Towards the Web of Things: Web Mashups for Embedded Devices -- slides and notes for a presentation given at MEM 2009. Basically saying that the Internet of Things should be built on JSON and REST, with demo. (via Freaklabs)

Four short links: 5 Feb 2009

Dearest Reader, for today's compendium of brief pointers to the writings of the world's greatest minds features language not suitable for children. So please stop reading this blog post to your child. Please. Think of the children.

1. Don't Work for Assholes (Derek Powazek) -- sound advice that we all have to learn, then relearn.
2. Broadband Stimulus Package Explained by Yochai Benkler -- understanding the state of the bills in House and Senate, what each proposes to spend, where, and why. I, like many, were surprised to learn that the House's bill gives half the money to the Secretary for Agriculture to spend. There is no sarcastic comment I can make about the Secretary of Agriculture that the Internets have now not already made. (via BoingBoing)
3. The Web In The World -- Slideshare presentation by Timo Arnall. Good intro to pervasive computing. "I think the hyperlink is a flawed model for physical interaction. (via Liz Goodman)
4. Offshoring, Does It Ever Work? -- very interesting responses to this question on Stack Overflow. As far as "does it EVER work" concerned: it does. It doesn't work well though. Most people can run, doesn't mean that most people can run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Four short links: 28 Jan 2009

Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today's four short links:

1. New Networks Take Nature's Pulse - an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed out that hobbyists are building low-cost versions with Arduinos. Sensor networks are part of the "Web meets World" change we're in, where the Web ceases to be something you sit down to interact with. Instead, our everyday life will inform and be informed by the Web in ways we won't realize.
2. Interactive Fiction Goes to Market - a company, Textfyre is readying new text adventure games ("interactive fiction") for the iPhone market. I dream of a day when the text adventure world becomes lucrative again (the tools like Inform are divine) but I can't help think that the iPhone is the wrong platform. The make-believe keyboard makes text entry such a chore that it would seem to count against text adventures. I hope and wish that I am proven wrong and some day the CEO of Textfyre buys the house next to me just so he can build a huge mansion and paint on the walls "Nat Torkington thought the iPhone was the wrong platform for text adventures".
3. You Know It's a Recession When More People Search for Coupons Than Britney Spears - interesting tidbit from Bo Cowgill, who runs Google's internal prediction market. His blog is full of fascinating pointers to prediction market research. Between him and David Pennock, my prediction market cup runneth over.
4. How To Write a Book - Steven Johnson writes, on BoingBoing, how he uses DevonThink to gather and organize his book thoughts and structure before actually sitting down to produce the words. I love reading about the act of literary creation (I have a long shelf of "how to write mystery novel" books that I can almost quote chapter and verse), the way it's so different for every author yet so the output is so similar.

Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of privacy, how expectations change over time, trust.salesforce.com, and more. The presentation is embedded below, and can be downloaded (CC-Attribution-ShareAlike) from Slideshare (I recommend expanding the preso to full-screen so you can read the notes, which contain the text of the talk).

Ubicomp and Web 2.0: Connecting the Dots

I've been saying for some time that the next stage of Web 2.0 is the application of collective intelligence techniques to sensor data, not just to data input directly by humans.

Two stories this weekend illustrate this point nicely. The New York Times published a story on Saturday entitled Billboards that Look Back, about a new generation of electronic billboards that use cameras to track who looks at the billboards, and a story yesterday on Techcrunch about Like.com's contextual ads triggered by Facebook photos.

Most people will immediately recognize the first story as a ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) story: a next generation display equipped with sensors bringing computing to an arena that was previously analog and uninstrumented. But connecting the dots between that story and the second one is really important.

Many of the most important breakthroughs in Web 2.0 have come through finding new meaning in data that already exists, often through statistical methods and related algorithms, not by gathering new data, or adding metadata and structure to existing data. (Pagerank is the canonical example.) If Like.com really is able to do a good job of matching ads to photos via clever algorithms, they've effectively turned a wealth of existing user-generated photos into sensors for their application, without having to deploy a single camera of their own.

In my talks, I've long argued, following Dan Bricklin's Cornucopia of the Commons, that there is a hierarchy in architectures of participation, with the most powerful literally building a system in which participation is automatic, and driven by the design of the system itself rather than any explicit request for user contribution. Methods for extracting additional layers of meaning from activities that users perform for their own self-interest fall into this category.

Thus, it's important to include in the category of sensor data richer interpretation of photos and audio/video streams. So for example, photosynth is a great example of an application that, after the fact, extracts additional data from user-contributed photos. Similarly, Last.fm's audioscrobbler turns your playlist into a sensor, and Wesabe is effectively turning the credit card into a collective intelligence sensor. (Disclosure: Wesabe is an OATV investment.)

Take away two messages:

1. Think about ubiquitous computing not just as the move from the computer to the cellphone and other mobile devices but the fact that those devices are becoming sensors for cloud applications harnessing collective intelligence

2. Remember that "data is the Intel Inside" of Web 2.0, and that databases driven by network effects and applications deriving meaning from that data via statistical methods will continue to be the key to competitive advantage in the ongoing network era.

P.S. I've been calling this trend ambient computing, because I like the sense of computing encountered while walking around, and because I found Peter Morville's Ambient Findability so thought-provoking, but ubiquitous computing or ubicomp seems to be the winning buzzword.