Participatory Sensing - An Interview with Deborah Estrin

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 2

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While the iPhone doesn’t ship nearly as much as its humbler brethren - the iPhone opened up many minds about the potential of phones to do a whole lot more than talk. In that regard it is a peek into the future.

The iPhone is a rich portable computer with onboard sensors. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally-aware (digital compass) visually aware (camera being used to scan QA codes or serve as visual input), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. Every operative word in that sentence is deeply meaningful and rich with possibilities we have just begun to explore. The iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor. Its value lies just as much in sensing information as it does in displaying information.

While the iPhone has the richest set of onboard sensors even basic feature phones are allowing for some remarkable innovation (see my interview with April Allderdice of MicroEnergy Credits) This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but context-aware. It is a core theme behind Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s “Web Squared” definition that see concepts of Web 2.0 moving into the world.

This concept of “humans as sensors” was the subject of the Web 2.0 Summit panel led by Radar’s Brady Forrest last week. I caught up with panelist Deborah Estrin before to discuss her UCLA group’s work on participatory sensing. Deborah is building multiple applications to express the value of the phone as a sensing device; from large group projects to collect data on an area (such as www.whatsinvasive.com) to personal applications that blend GPS and accelerometer to constantly map your location in time and space then overlay valuable information upon it such as air quality and so on. In the case of air quality - this data might help inform your decisions about where you go jogging or take your baby for that morning stroll.

Twitter Users Most Followed by the Web 2.0 Summit Crowd

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 7

I took the set of users^† who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn't dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 50.) Regular Radar readers will be familiar with many of the users listed below: over 20 of the top 50 are based in the SF Bay Area. Of the over 700 users I identified, a third follow Tim:

UPDATE: Pete Warden has been doing similar analysis to help conference organizers and attendees. He goes a step further and monitors conversations (one twitter user mentioning another user, and vice-versa). Here is Pete's network graph of the recent Web 2.0 Summit.

(†) Data for this post was pulled on 10/27/2009. Using the Twitter search API, I was able to identify 1,500 relevant tweets and over 700 unique users responsible for those tweets. Given that I likely omitted earlier tweets, the results are at best an approximation of the true top 50 list.

Web 2.0 Summit Starts Today

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 1

Last year at Web 2.0 Summit, one prominent tech executive responded to our focus on "Web meets World" -- the way web technology is being used to attack the world's problems -- by saying "I don't come to this conference to learn how to do good. I come to learn about trends that are going to affect my business."

As it turns out, the "Web meets World" theme was in fact exactly on point with the trends that were going to affect his business. What Fred Wilson calls "the golden triangle" of Web meets World trends -- mobile, social, and real-time -- are at the heart of many of the cutting edge non-profit activities we showed last year, and they are very much at the heart of the for-profit companies following hard on their heels.

I've written a much longer paper on this subject - Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, and I won't repeat that there. But that's the theory. The practice is how entrepreneurs are taking advantage of these disruptive trends, how big companies are responding, and what kind of infrastructure changes we'll need to support the future that is coming at us.

This year at the Web 2.0 Summit, we'll be hearing how real-time, social, and mobile play out in the strategy of Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, News Corp, AOL, Comcast, Nokia, and even GE, but we'll also be hearing from entrepreneurs, and yes, even some more innovative hackers who are helping birth the future away from the commercial limelight.

The official sessions are great, but it's the hallway conversations that can really set your mind off in a new direction. For example, at a pre-Summit event last night, I had a fascinating conversation with Marc Pincus of Zynga last night about his belief that the third great internet business model has arrived. Fortunately, you don't need to bump into Marc to hear what he thinks: he's speaking this afternoon at 4:15. He's put his ideas about social selling into practice, with 129 million users playing Zynga games each month, spending millions of dollars on virtual goods. But what's most fascinating is how Marc sees the potential to apply social gaming principles to all of e-commerce. His riff on how what's he's learned applies to Amazon (and anyone else selling on the web) is worth the price of admission to the Summit.

I hope to see you at the Summit. John Battelle and I kick off the show with opening remarks at 2 pm at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco.

A Conversation with Dr. Walter Scott of DigitalGlobe

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 0

Dr Walter Scott founded Digital Globe - a company you are likely not familiar with though you probably interact with their satellite imagery on a regular basis via Google Maps, Bing and others.


It is only recently that mapping technology and production has been driven by mainly commercial interests especially in the area of satellite imagery. With this commercialization corporations and media have access to information that was once considered closely guarded state property.

The potential for social good - from assessing and responding to natural disasters, to exposing political issues such as prisoner camps, to finding out where Richard Serra is keeping his massive sculptures… is enormous. In this discussion we cover DigitalGlobe's business, the state of commercial satellite imagery and the advantage of commercial vs. government ownership of GIS data.

Dr Scott will be delivering a HighOrder Bit at the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit.

My Conversation with Austan Goolsbee at Web 2.0 Summit

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 8

He introduces himself as "another tall, skinny guy with big ears and a funny name." Economics adviser to Barack Obama during the campaign, and now a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Austan Goolsbee is a key figure in framing the economic thinking of the Obama administration. Perhaps most importantly for those of us in Silicon Valley, he's an economist clued in to the tech world. His economics papers cover such topics as the impact of taxes on technology diffusion, the impact of internet subsidies on public schools, and the economic impact of leisure time spent on the internet. He's worked closely with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of Nudge fame, and thinks a lot about the power of default options to shape behavior, a topic that any web developer should also know by heart.

I'll be interviewing Austan Goolsbee on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit. In preparation for our conversation next week, I spent an hour with him yesterday morning. He's a fascinating guy. To give you a taste of the kinds of things we'll be talking about, here's a short transcript of his response to my question about the economic impact of the internet:

Somehow, in my economist heart always lies the revealed preference thing, which is: People are investing tons of their time, tons of their money, tons of their energy into the internet; they wouldn't be doing this for no reason. Regardless of whether we have the data, our presumption ought to be that it's a big productivity improver. But I also think that the evidence on big general-purpose technologies like that is usually that when they're first invented, the impact takes a while to show up, but when it does, boy is it a big time thing, outside just the industry itself, across the board.

If you go back ten years, which isn't that long, the social landscape and the technological landscape are almost unrecognizable. And just that impact, at this early stage, is sufficiently big that you've got to think that twenty years from now, the internet is going to have humongous productivity implications.

Take the health sector. People say "not only does the health sector need to enter the 21st century, it needs to enter the 20th century!" The technology is sufficiently backwards in terms of the information processing - everything's on paper! If you start envisioning healthcare, energy, the government itself -- major league shares of the GDP -- and what the potential is of marrying that to the newest technologies...! Economic potential, historically speaking, tends to be a bit like water. Water will always get to the lowest point. If there's big potential somewhere, it may take a bit of time, but we always find a way to unlock it.

We'll be talking about what Goolsbee would recommend doing differently if we had a "do-over" on the economic stimulus, the importance of innovation to any future economic recovery, education and income inequality, financial services oversight, and President Obama's desire for "iPod government" (which Goolsbee describes as "making [government] simple and easy to use, so that people like it, rather than giving people the third degree and a lot of red tape.")

If you had a chance to sit one-on-one with one of President Obama's economic advisers, what would you ask him? Help me prep for the interview by making suggestions in the comments. It will be tough to do as good a job as Jon Stewart, but hopefully we can come up with some questions that get Austan going!

Google Analytics for the Real World: A Conversation with Sharon Biggar of Path Intelligence

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 5

In preparation for the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit I am posting a few conversations with attendees that embody the Web Squared Theme.

Path Intelligence uses sensor technology to understand shopping behavior in retail spaces by detecting and tracking the RF signals from mobile phones.

As Sharon Biggar, co-founder, succinctly puts it - “we are like Google Analytics for the real world” giving offline retailers the same visibility on shopping behavior that online retail has enjoyed for years.

While human observation has been put in the service of retail analysis for a long time, using machine based sensing and computation is different in a few fundamental ways. First, the quantity and efficiency with which data is gathered simply wouldn’t be possible using human observers. Second, the data is based on unbiased observation of people in their habitat and avoids a lot of the errors built into any research that relies on self-disclosure (I wandered around Victoria’s Secret for half an hour - I think not.)

Using sensors to understand and optimize retail flow is a logical first commercial step. This type of technology gets more interesting when it gets applied to other problems. As Sharon describes in the podcast there are opportunities to deploy the same techniques of mobile sensing in areas as wide ranging as counter-terrorism (locating phones that have been stationary for a long period of time is a potential indicator of phones being used as detonators for roadside bombs) and emergency services (using these sensors to gauge attendance and large events and scale services accordingly).

Sharon will be participating at the Summit in the panel, Humans as Sensors.

Disclosure: O’Reilly Alphatech ventures is an investor in Path Intelligence.