I’d like to write my last post of 2008 with a couple notes about the next CES I’m going to attend in January. As written yesterday, the main focus of my visit is the digital imaging. CES website reminds that Digital Imaging Products at CES are:

• Camera phones, digital cameras and digital camcorders
• Power, batteries and accessories
• Embedded technologies
• Storage media, Flash memory, memory cards and disc media
• Graphics and software editing
• Photo printers and consumables
• Photo printing, publishing and posting services
• Image and video software

Looking for news and predctions, I found some nice quotations:

Digital imaging remains an important technology segment for consumers, as total revenues from digital imaging products are forecasted to reach $6.8 billion in 2009, up from $6.5 billion in 2008 (EMSNow).

The main prediction is that due to the world economics there will be less new offerings this year at CES. This means most camera makers will concentrate on promoting their exciting line up instead of introducing new cameras.
The exceptions might be Olympus and Kodak that is known to release new products during the CES instead of during PMA where many of the other camera makers introduce their new cameras. Digitalcamerareview.com also speculate that Samsung will have something up their sleeve with maybe a new Full Frame sensor and / or a new micro system that will compete with micro Four Thirds (Digitalcamerareview)

Finally, at CES there are two interesting conference sessions whose topics are really very similar to the topics discussed during the conferences on Digital Photography held at Future Centre.

- Digital Imaging: Beyond the Megapixel – Digital cameras now have smile detection, high dynamic range, low light flexibility and even geocoding. Learn how manufacturers can market to, and connect with, the consumers who are now purchasing their second, third and fourth generation digital cameras.
- The Digital Shoebox: New Options for Consumers – With consumers snapping more photos than ever before, the problems of what to do with all of those images are beginning to spawn new options for manufacturers. What are the primary forms of digital storage, and what are the best options for protecting precious memories from hard drive crashes?

Everytime I fly to Vegas to visit CES — the big, messy, noisy Consumer Electronic Show — I have many expectations and questions about the near future of electronics and entertainment services.

Frankly speaking, a part from the noisy halls, the long lines to grab a sandwich and the crowded Vegas Monorail — a challenging experience also for trained New York commuters — if you want to understand something more about all the electronic stuff that matters, CES is still one of the most helpful events money can buy (even if the registration is free for the early birds like me). Plus, CES is the place where you can:

• understand if your idea or project makes sense
• meet the most respected professionals working for the most profitable or innovative (or both) companies
• foresee (or try to do that) the cutting edge trends in the entertainment industry — I strongly recommend to visit the show with a colleague in order to avoid to misunderstand the sense of a technology or product

In 2006 and 2007 I was working on IPTV projects and I was focused on video over IP technologies and services. This year I’ll attend CES (8-11 January) with a very specific interest: the digital imaging as a driver of communication based services.

As my project at Future Centre deals with digital photography, I’m currently writing down a list of questions and proposal which I’ll try to submit to the digital photography industry’s professionals — the guys working with Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Sony, Adobe to mention some.

How can we spoil digital imaging to design, enable and drive communication based services? How can a carrier provide its customers with digital pictures based services and make money? Which is the real future of the current digital photography parameters, such as resolution, speed, accuracy, face detection? Will digital cameras turn to intelligent devices with the ability to perform advanced, real time processing? Does 3d imaging have a commercial future outside research labs? What is there beyond 4k? Will motion pictures replace still pictures? Will HD video drive Next Generation Network and Ultra Wide Broadband? Will cameras have wireless interfaces?

I could go on for a while. These questions (and many more) can be considered as small pieces of a complex ecosystem — the digital photography ecosystem — where I have to find innovative ideas and new business opportnities. It’s not that easy. [Let's face it: the global financial crisis affected many industries, from the consumer electronic, to the entertainment industries to the telecoms. Generally, this means that companies have less money to spend in R&D and events, and consumers spend less money for gadgets and services.]

So, I will spend a couple hours more focussing on the most important questions and planning the visits to the manufacturers’ booths. I’ll fly to Vegas with a lot of questions; I hope to get back to this blog with some answers.

In the meantime, I suggest the following articles/stories/posts/predictions on the next CES:

• CNET’s CES blog 1
  
• CNET’s CES blog 2
• Digital Camera Review
• I4U a
• I4U b

The Digital Shadow is the set of information, the digital halo left by an individual through daily activities in or at the border of a digital environment.

Some data are voluntarily and intentionally created by a user (the digital footprint); some data are automatically generated without any user involvement during his daily activities (the digital mirror).

We can classify these two ways of digital shadow creation in: passive and active.

In the passive creation, user activities data are gathered without any explicit activation of a client software or a specific service. As an example, every purchase by credit card produces digital information about date, place, store, prize and what sort of goods; every SMS produces information about the sender and the receiver, the date and text.

In the active creation, personal data are voluntarily released by the user for the purpose of sharing personal information (self profiling): preferences, photos, videos, conversations, friends lists… It is the typical situation of social networks or personal blogs, where an individual puts online private details, religious and political preferences, besides personal data. Once online on the Internet, this information becomes public and is accessible to anyone.

The user’s digital environment comprises technologies enabling digitalization of his actions and information and related capture and storage of his data.

The main technologies enabling the user’s digital world are:

• Mobile phones
• Photo/video cams
• Memory cards
• Motion Sensors
• GPS
• Tag RFID
• Biometric Sensors

These technologies, used even in a functional bundle (eg photocam + GPS + sensors), make it possible to capture the actions of the users and the interactions among individuals, objects and environments.

A macro classification of the digital information is:

• SMS / MMS
• Voice/Video Calls
• Geo Localization (user tracking)
• Photo / Video (geolocalized and tagged)
• Biometric monitoring
• Electronic Documents
• E-mail, chat/messaging (history of conversations)
• Social network, Blog
• Browsing (history, click stream, search)
• Transactions and online purchasing
• Credit Cards purchasing
• Telepass
• Fidelity Cards

The digital video and photo community — be it professional or amateur — is quite excited for the release of Red‘s new products for digital video, the Epic and Scarlet series.

Actually, two terms of this statement can be modified: products and video.

Red is recognized as the manufacturer which managed to turn the ultra high definition (4K) videomaking to an affordable professional equipment. A big change: before Red One, only the big broadcast corporations and the footage providers could make and deliver professional video content with the highest quality  available; Red One cameras are enabling independent videomakers and producers to shoot and edit 4K rawflows with a cost efficient solution. Increasingly, Red is setting the rules for a new approach to the digital imaginig.

The first change is the paradigm shift from products to modules. The digital video equipment industry, thus often innovative, has always featured a very static approach based on products’ lifecycle: announcement, release, update, obsolescence of a product. And the announcement, release etc. again. Product after product. But manufacturers like Red are telling the industry that a modular approach may be more flexible and resistant to obsolescence. By selling separate modules (sensors, backs, CPUs, lenses and so on) and not complete products, Red makes it possible to increase the number of possibilities in videomaking according to the users’ needs.

Second, the Red equipment is one of the first professional examples of the end of the separation between still pictures and motion pictures, digital cameras and diital videocameras, photos and videos. Increasingly, video are becoming a sequence of full resolution pictures and photos are becoming single frames of a high definition movie. Also some consumer electronic manufacturers are following this choice.

Professionals and advanced amaeturs have now the ability to shoot full lenght, high definition movies with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, which is still sold as a high end digital camera but with exciting video capturing features. With that equipment the experienced photgrapher Vincent Laforet has recently released Reverie, a full HD short movie.

After the CES (January 2009), the amateur photographers will finally be able to put their hands on one of the most amazing gadgets in photo equipment, the Casio EX-F1. This compact, powerful bridge camera can shoot high resolution pictures at the impressive speed of up to 60 frames per second, which means that there aren’t differences between still and motion pictures anymore.

As high quality video shooting becomes a popular feature in consumer cameras, digital bodies will gradually become modules of a flexible system for digital imaging capture: photographers will choose pictures from a sequence of frames; video makers will shoot movies which are, basically, a long sequence of still pictures.

The current state of digital imaging products, services and technologies is still far from being consolidated. Every month a new idea or improvement comes out and contributes to slightly or radically modify the existing scenario. As a result, also our expectations and behaviors as consumers (or producers) change.

I think that a good — though personal — way to face and understand the current changes in digital photography is to start from one or two pints of view. By restricting the anlysis field, we’d probably have more chances to get in the big picture.

1. The technological perspective

Wether we are casual photographers with very poor technical know how or techno geeks plenty of high-end gadgets, in the last 7-8 years we have assisted to a race between consumer electronics manufacturers to improve the technical features and capabilities of their consumer grade and hi end grade equipment: a battle for higher sensor resolution and size, bigger memory, faster lenses, higher computational power.

Honestly, I have to admit that I used to look with suspicion at many announcements on megapixel increase in low end point-and-shoot cameras with small sensors and cheap lenses – more a marketing strategy to attract casual shooter than an actual progress in digital pictures quality. Long story short, 10 MP and scene detection are common features in budget cameras today.

While resolution may still be improved without dramatic impact on the final price, I think that the next challenge for camera manufacturers won’t be the number of MP of their models but the introduction of more and more advanced computational photography features. While face detection and scene detection are becoming popular in bridge models, I believe that in the next month some other exotic features will be available: for instance, the increasing convergence of still and motion pictures will enable photographers to rapidly shoot a huge number of pictures while pressing the release button in order to choose the picture that better describes the scene, and to delete the others.

Pictures will be considered as single frames of a movies and movies as a sequence of hi resolution pictures. I will be talk about other sci-fi capabilities in the next posts. In few words, this technological improvements are dramatically changing our idea of still picture as the memory of a moment.

In the next posts, I will probably spend a couple words on some great articles available on the Internet: The moment camera by Michael F. Cohen and Richard Szeliski and Computational Photography by Brian Hayes, to mention two of them. I think they can help in better understanding one of the possible futures of digital imaging.

2. Consumers turn (sometimes) to producers

The second shift in the digital imaging world is the overcome of the mere distinction between content producer and content consumer. The terrific role of the user generated content on the Internet is pretty consolidated and I won’t spend a word telling how cool is shooting a landscape, working with Photoshop, publishing on my Flickr account, waiting for comments from Flickr’s users. Old story.

I think that a more honest approach to this shift is brought by the paradigm of ecosystems – truth must be told, also “ecosystem” is rapidly turning to a buzzword in blogs and conferences.

While the old digital photography attitude can be considered as the mere action of shooting and consuming content, we are smoothly entering a new era of digital photography, an ecosystem populated by professional and amateur contributors, web applications providers, personal communication systems, social networks.

This disruptive change has a terrific impact not only in consumers’ behavoir but also on professionals photographers’ work and life; presently, college classes are plenty of young, creative amatuers with pro gear in their hands and a strong desire to see their names engraved on some “picture of month” web contest, who don’t even want a dime for their shots.

The quality of their work, even still far from being excellent, is generally quite high and, more important, almost for free. An earthquake for the professionals whose experienced work can be now replace by a college student portfolio at a discounted price.

Vincent Laforet, who is one of the most respected american photographer — he used to have a staff job at New York Times before resigning to start a career as a free lance shooter — shares his own two cents in The cloud is falling, a valuable article on the changes of the world as we knew it.

Of course, just two perspectives can’t tell all the story but — be patient — more thoughts are to come.

Stay tuned!

  Let’s discuss together the new world
  of business ecosystems

Back to the early days of the digital photography – and I’m referring to the very late 90s when digital cameras started to appear on mass market – the equipment available in stores was basically a replacement of low end film equipment for enthusiastic consumers and techno fan,s who were actually very proud to show their friends that the time of slow film processing, small prints and dust covered photo album was over.

One of the first advantages brought by digital photography was the ability to consume and share digital pictures immediately, a few minutes after the last shot: a remarkable change in consumers’ habits and in the photo market as well.

While the number of pictures shot with film cameras has been basically equal to the number of pictures printed for years – apart from invertible films which were usually projected and rarely printed – as a result of the increasing spread of digital cameras, the number of pictures shot was growing exponentially and the number of prints was on the way, for the first time, to progressively decrease. Or, more precisely, the ratio between shots and prints was growing fast.

Digitalized memories were being stored in computers and CDs, because the methods to share pictures  with friends were still at an early stage: email and instant messenger were consolidated tools but still not very effective. Designing and HTML programming skills were still required to handle authoring tools and publish low resolution, static pictures on the web.

Thus, digital pictures, cameras, storage devices, communication tools and the web were normally separated pieces, being activated only for transferring pictures from camera to PC or for sending a dozen vacation shots as an email attachment.

Today, the world of digital imaging is definitively different from the past. There have been so many technological shifts and improvements. The different, separated parts which used to contribute to the production and consumption of digital pictures are increasingly converging in a integrated ecosystem where the players’ number and roles are continuously evolving.

Popular web application services like Flickr or Panoramio or cutting edge technologies like multi-focus and computational photography are just some examples of the changes that we are facing in our habits as photo ametuers, professionals or consumers.

In the next weeks, I’ll posts my ideas about the evolution of digital photography towards a technological and business ecosystems on this blog whose name, properly, is Business ecosystems. Most ideas, suggestions and analysis published in Business ecosystems blog will be the output of my research and work at Telecom Italia Future Centre; additionally I’ll be glad to share also my personal opinions about the huge shifts which the industry of digital photography is living in the present days and, consequently, the future scenarios of digital imaging.

Plus, I’ll try to deliver some ideas (does service concepts sound better?) about the opportunity to set up communication based services driven – directly or indirectly – be it the use – be it production or distribution or consumption or whatever – of digital imaging.

Stay tuned!

The word “ecosystem” is more and more often borrowed from the biological world to be associated to the world of business providing the term Business Ecosystem.

Does it make sense? The set formed by customers, services, products, service providers, technologies can be defined an “ecosystem”?

With the mass diffusion of new technology, such as internet and mobile communications, the surface of contacts among people and market, service providers and resources, has grown so much to empower their connections capabilities and to create new relationships networks whose degree of capacity is so high that the understanding of their dynamics has become very complex. Similarly complex is the understanding of their behaviour and the forecasting of their evolution over time. So, we can consider each specific network as based on a set of markets with their services, products, technologies, customers and service providers, like an ecosystem that bases its life exchanging information, material, and energy among its parts.  As in living ecosystem its global behaviour is much more complex than the sum of the behaviours of its parts.

Looking at biz areas in terms of ecosystems requires a deep change on the way we observe and study the business.

If we want to comprehend an ecosystem behaviour in order to better understand how to enter, or to contribute to the development of the ecosystem , we must build a model that represents the ecosystem and enables the observation and the analisys of its evolution over the time.

Nowadays, the gathering of the entire digital memory of an individual is technically within reach. New technology and devices enable the recording of everywhere we are and everything see and hear. The whole life of an individual could be automatically stored and managed on line in large personal digital archives, where the user can search at later time for his digital memories: from photos to MMS, from documents to SMS.

In every day life each of us generates a shadow made of informations SMS, MMS, voice calls, browsing the Internet, using a credit card, GPS localization data. Several actors are involved in the gathering of information, sometimes with the explicit consent of the owner, sometimes without his awareness. Because of the plurality of gatherers and ways of storing there is no easy way to place the various fragments together. Would it be possible, and would it make sense the creation of  a business ecosystem of players? From user’s metadata it would be possible to create services based on information, customized user experiences, discount coupuns and behavioural targeted advertising.

We have to examine in depth business models and scenarios to create value to the individual owner of the data, to the Society and to the actors of the business ecosystem of the digital shadow.