Tags are a most powerful way to organise things and to enable service creation.

I was using Shoutcast recently, an application on the iTouch/iPhone, giving you access to 25,000 radios on the Internet. It also let you search for the stations that are broadcasting in that moment a specific singer or a specific song. This is made possible by the tags associated to each song being broadcasted.

Now, it shouldn’t be difficult to create an application letting me list the songs, singers, I am in the mood to listen to on this particular day, and the program automatically scans radio stations and plays the songs in the list as they are broadcasted.

This is not bad for broadcasters either, since it provides them with a “market of one” audience and let them reach me, even if I do not know of them and therefore I would have never tuned them in.

Radio on Internet is a widespread reality, over 25,000 channels are available today, 24 hours a day. Television on Internet is much smaller, http://broadcast-live.com/television/ , but we are still talking of hundreds of channels and it is a sure bet to say there will be many more available in the next decade.

YouTube is a gigantic, and growing, repository of video clips, Social Networks will provide many more video feeds in the future, thanks to consumer electronic digital cameras that are enabling the mass market to create clips in HD quality and to a growing availability of bandwidth.

MPEG 4 allows the tagging of individual frames and objects within a frame. This, in turns, will enable applications to serach for specific objects, those I am dreaming of.

Tagging technology is making significant progress and automatic tagging is just arond the corner.

Tagging our wishes is not too far either. Our cell phones will be able to tag automatically objects, places and words/sentences by capturing the emotions we feel. Works in this area is going on in several universities and results are already visible. Affective computing is the name of this technology, http://broadcast-live.com/television/.

The crucial point is not technology enabling tagging and tagging exploitation, rather how to maintain control of my tags since they represent on the one hand my “dreams” that to be fulfilled have to be socialised but on the other hand they represent a part of myself, that is precious and private. Striking a balance is key for me and for the business that can be developed on this.

We have already discussed about the increasing convergence between still pictures and motion pictures or, if you prefer, between photo and video. Many premium digital cameras — compact, bridge and DSLR — can now shoot full resolution pictures AND full high definition movies. Canon EOS 5D is probably one of the most powerful cameras with this functionality.

The following impressive videoclip has been shot by a team of Italian professionals involved in the digital imaging industry.

[vimeo 2778875]

Photographer and film maker Vincent Laforet gained popularity by shooting Reverie, the first full HD short clip for Canon Digital Learning. You can watch the video here.

Two different examples and the same approach: the evidence thta the convergence of photo and video is close to be complete. It’s not only a matter of technical capability. Video (and HD) will become more and more popular on the web in the next months because:

1. Internet connections’ bandwidth will continue to increase, enabling the delivery of HD content over copper infrastructure
2. people are getting used to consume video content on the web rather still pictures, and the demand will grow.

2009 looks like a good year for mini, micro and nano projection, as you can see in my previous post on picoprojectors.

Still prototypes until mid 2008, now these small, trendy gadgets are being launched on the market with more and more powerful features in terms of luminance, resolution, weight. One of the last products, Wired reports, is the Syba RCG, a small device which can be plugged to a laptop or DVD player. It sports a VGA resolution and the optimal projection size is about 25″.

Unfortunately, you have to drop 500$ to get one of these guys: compare it with the 100 bucks EyeClops, and you figure it out. By the way, the Syba is not even the smallest things money can buy.

But that’s not the point: what amazes me is that an increasing number of small, tiny projectors are being launched on the market with different purposes (from laptop to MP4 players); plus, it is now possible to integrate a picoprojection engine inside a small multimedia device like a PMP or a mobile phone.

A very common external accessory for a long time, VGA webcams are becoming a standard integrated feature in many laptops and netbooks: they enable users to make videocalls with Skype or shoot low quality pictures. But as microprojectors’ price and size decrease, they could become one of the features of tomorrow’s netbooks and smart phones, driving and encouraging multimedia content consumption and social sharing.

I believe that broadband carriers could take advantage of picoprojection not as itself but as a means to encourage a new set of ubiquitous, social, fashionable multimedia consumption.

With the new Google feature, Google Latitude, a user can see where his friends are, contact them with SMS, IM (Gtalk), or a phone call and check on their location. Only a deep trust relationship between a user and his service provider can enable this location capability.

Another forward looking and, in my opinion, wise strategy of Google has been to propose Latitude non integrated with the Gmail contact list but as a separated and independent service, with a specific location enabled buddy list. The user has total control of his privacy and he can share, set, or hide his location and even turn off Google Latitude from the privacy menu. User can also hide his location or share only a city-level location. User can set different privacy policy for every single friend.

Google pays much attention to his users’ awareness on trust and privacy information, because the real value is in his community: can a Telco Operator mimic this approach?

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Milan Science Museum on the morphing of cell phones and services into a complex ecosystem in the next decade. The occasion was the presentation of results of a European Project, http://www.angel-ist.eu/news.php , on the theme Light and Well-being.

What surprised me were the talks given by architects, by Philips and by bTicino that emphasised a new world based on ecosystem. Everything is connected, no one can play the game alone. bTicino said that they used to look at their competitors, sometimes they partnered with them to work out standards. Now they have to look to other constituencies to understand what to do and if what they are doing will be in synch with the overall evolution.

The value is shifting from the single object, service, to the context. In turns, this context is the result of the ecosystem evolution.

Light has been marked as a way to create ambients within an ambient, but that cannot be done in isolation, independently of what is inside and what will be inside that ambient. A television with an aura created by a lightning around its frame needs to interact with the lights in that ambient and change accordingly. As it is changing, it changes the ambient and this one will react. The presence of a specific person leads to a specific lightning. It was even mentioned that (medical) doctors may have a saying on the lightning since blue light lowers blood pressure…

Actually I didn’t want to write some stuff about the new release of Amazon Kindle — I already spent a couple words on this blog some weeks ago.

Thus, whatever and wherever I read I find something related to the Amazon’s coolest gadget of the moment. By the way, Cnet reviews the product and admits that, even it’s still too expensive, it has a lot of great features and functionalities. Wired.com publishes a hilarious comic which unveils Kindle’s real nature.

Well, probably it’s not the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy nor knows all the answers to your question: but no doubt Amazon managed to create an innovative ecosystem of content, hardware, connectivity, and services. Differently from many other gadgets (MP3 players, digital cameras) Kindle actually doesn’t any computer to get or manage content; the bundled access to Wikipedia makes it possible to access relevant information while reading a book — which means no time and GPRS traffic wasted on Facebook and YouTube.

Many say that both the gadget and the books are still pricy. I agree: 360$ for the ‘”cover” and 10 bucks for an e-book which normally sells at 13$ in a bookshop are not what I call cheap. But we also spend 300$ for a cell phone which is regularly replaced every 18 months: will the price slow down this device or will we change our habits? If million consumers stopped buying LPs and CDs and moved to iTunes (which is an ecosystem, btw), we can suppose that Kindle can have more than a chance.

Today, people swarm in cell phones’ stores, look around for the latest model, search the one their friend just got, wonder about the color, and … buy.

I won’t be surprised if in the future we will see some customers proceeding directly to the counter, handing out a sheet of paper and tell the clerk: “this is the prescription for the cell phone my doctor wrote me. Is it covered by the health insurance?”

Don’t laugh. The fact is that progress in the sensors’ area is bringing new features to the cell phone.

Here’s the idea. You use the SD card slot to pug in an array of sensors that will transform your cell phone in a medical tool. LG already put on the market in 2007 cell phones (LG-SD410, LG-KP4100, LG-LP4100) able to detect alcohol in your breath displaying the percentage in your blood on the screen. They sold over 200,000 phones in the first 4 months.

More recently, the Institute for Alternative Futures has proposed (www.wfs.org/bezold.pdf ) a lung cancer detector based on an array of sensors that eventually might be included in a cell phone to spot early presence of cancerous cell in lungs by analyzing the breath as we make a conversation on the phone. Such sensors are already in the labs and a number of cell phones companies are working on them.

This evolution trend is going to continue in the next years, bringing more and more sensors on board. Actually, there is going to be so many sensors that we will have (or our doctor will have) to decide the ones to plug in.

Another example of sensors that might find a place in our cell phones are pollution detector sensors.

The advantage of having them in a cell phone is that, as you move around, the cell phone can detect pollutant and mark them with the location of the cell. You don’t need very accurate measurement, since there are many measurement being taken by hundreds of cell phones. All of them can be analysed and measures averaged out to get a fairly accurate measure.

It is interesting to leverage on this evolution and speculate what would it be like to open these hundreds of thousands of detections. Would enterprises spring up to analyse it, to create new services, will institutions regulate sensors in cell phones, mandate their use?

On March the 3rd the PMA 09 will open at Las Vegas Convention Centre. The convention is one of the most important events for the professionals involved in the digital imaging industry. DPReview provides an upadated show preview. PMA blog and Flickr group are regurarly updated with the last news, pictures, comments and digests.

According to PMA webiste,

The leading annual photo imaging event, PMA 09 hosts retail entrepreneurial memory makers from around the world, including photo retailers, professional photographers, mass merchandisers, professional labs, custom picture framers and scrapbook retailers.

The description, far from being complete, includes most of the players involved in the digital imaging ecosystems. Thus, there’s not an ecosystem approach: every player, from the manufacturer to the retailer, seems to play alone the big game of the digital photography. As a consequence, the DP system is still disaggregated and, probably, less efficient and profitable than it could be if the players worked together to provide a

A couple days ago, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Nikon announced new budget and premium digital cameras, loaded with advanced features and functionalities; nevertheless I couldn’t see any example of an effective, integrated ecosystem, like the alliance between Sony and AT&T for the deployment of the pictures wireless upload service presented during the last CES.

What if the manifacturers, the on line service providers and the TLC carriers started collaborating to deploy new sets of innovative, fully integrated digital imaging products services? We believe that the consequence of this ecosystemic approach could help all the players to make more money and attract more customers.

We’re still at a very early stage with a few examples of integrated digital imaging functionalities available, but an efficient, ecosystemic approach seems to be on its way.

How powerful and pervasive can the social relations information be? A possible goal of recording all the digital life of an individual is to understand people in the context of their social networks (online and offline) rather than viewing them as isolated individuals.

Nowadays, technical advances in integrated digital sensors and wireless communications have made it possible to observe every day human behavior and to map the behaviour of large number of people. In a  family, a group of friends or colleagues, and an entire organization, the pattern of signals within the social network influences the actions of the individuals by their roles.

If we can analyze voice call logs of a user or his sms and e-mail networks we can understand his behaviour, preferences and his role (as a node of the network). Not only the log of sender and receiver, but the location and the context of the communication.

For every individual it is now possible to understand his social context relations network.

I said in a previous post that after the “integration” and then “convergence” mantras the new one would likely be “ecosystems”. Unfortunately, this is becoming true at an incredibly fast pace. Probably the “convergence” has run its time, it has not brought the benefits most people expected and something new, and intriguing, has to be found. The sooner, the better.

I was looking on the web the concept of cloud computing, that some people mistake as a different name for “grid computing” whilst it is a much broader concept.

To explain the “reach” of the concept one paper, http://infreemation.net/cloud-computing-linear-utility-or-complex-ecosystem/, and several others, made reference to “processing” in an ecosystem. Here we go with the new word.

I am not going to dispute if cloud computing is an ecosystem in itself, if it finds its value within an ecosystem, if it creates an ecosystem or if it is better understood, modeled in terms of ecosystem (although I would love you, readers, to start commenting on what relation may exist between the concept of cloud computing and the one of ecosystem).

The point I am making is twofold:

One, ecosystem is now mainstream and it seems good to relate anything to an ecosystem

Two, today’s business, technology, enterprises are developing, fighting for the market success in an environment that it is not just complex, it has very diverse players, constituencies, relations and this whole seems to be better described using the ecosystem paradigm.

Probably, it is a bit of the two. From my point of view, I would forget the former, and focus on the latter. Once you do that, however, it is not sufficient to state that “cloud computing” is …an ecosystem. You need to explain why. And I feel that it is in this explanation that lies the value of the ecosystem approach.