The increasing number of digital pictures upload everyday to the web from computers and mobile phones is a big opportunity to create a complete digital archive of our planet but is also creating some problems in finding the right pictures we are looking for.

Google has developed Similar Images, an effective beta service which enables people to find similar images starting from an image search. The search is related to the actual content of the image and not to the tag ore textual description. This feature helps users to find pictures of Paris before their vacation to France instead of some embarassing shots of Paris Hilton.

Nokia has released Point and Find,

an image recognition tool that allows users to capture an image with their mobile phone that will launch a site on your phone (*)

After shooting the picture, the application search in a databank and associate the picture to relevant information. It also has a GPS recognition which helps customers to recognize objects nearcby their position.

Take a look at the following video: a Nokia technician explains how the application works.

The broadband deployment, the upgrading of the network in order to enable the ultrabroadband is something considered essential for the economic growth.

But who will support the required investments?

Telcos operators, governaments, firms?

And if the answer would be….. Customers?

A new business model has been proposed as a new way to encourage broadband deployment: consumers purchase and own fiber connection, the “last mile” that run from their homes. This allows them to connect to a variety of service providers, including internet television, phone services, ultrabandwidth services.

Fiber would form part of the property right in the home

The proposal, called “Homes with tails” comes from Dedrek Stater , Policy Analist for Google, and Tim Wu  professor of Law at Columbia Law school in a working paper of the Wireless Future Program of the New America Foundation http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails

What do you think about?

If it is unlikely to see a digital camera able to output a 4k movie before 2012 it is not unreasonable to expect the possibility of creating 4k movies starting from still images. Many of today’s digital camera can create pictures with a resolution of 8Mpixel (and over). We already have mass market software that creates movies by animating still frames (e.g. Photodex Producer) with very good result. The output is in MPEG4 with an HD 1080p resolution but from a software standpoint there is no problem in coding at a 4k resolution. Clearly, the processing time increases significantly as well as the required storage but for amateur production this may be fine since a slide show may run for just a few minutes.

Producing a 4k 5 minutes output may therefore require 4 hours of processing time (much less with a top of the line PC) and 20 GB of storage.

In Japan we already have two monitors with a 4k resolution available on the market (LCD technology, 50” hence a resolution of 80 dot per inch, 240 coloured pixels per inch) and we can expect these televisions to become more popular in the next few years.

These televisions would be of interest to people with the hobby of photography and this is a potentially broad market. However, only a minority (a small one indeed) of people using a digital camera are ready to process their snapshot to produce video clips. It takes a good computer, some familiarity with production software and a significant amount of time.

Hence, for the next few years this is bound to remain a marginal market.

When it comes to 3D movies or video content, I’m always a bit skeptical: on one hand I can’t understand nor appreciate the value of 3D video content (even if it makes some sense for videogames) on the other it is known that 3DTV would require to redesign from scratch production, postproduction, storage and delivery chains and design new handsets and playback devices (*).

But I can’t ignore the fact that Hollywood studios and equipment manufacturers are investing money in developing 3D content and gear. By reading All3DTV and MarketSaw3D we learn that in 2009 a huge number of 3D movies will be released, even if most of them are cartoons which probably require more computer graphics than filmmaking and production.

On the hardware side, Panasonic is focussing on developing 3D equipment. In particular, the Japanese manufacturer has recently started developing a 3D production system consisting of a twin-lens P2 professional camera recorder and a 3D-compatible High Definition Plasma display; additionally, a 3D plasma display has been already presented by Panasonic during CES 2009.

A conceptual model of the proposed Panasonic P2 3D camera

Despite of these good news, I keep on being skkeptical. As long as I can’t watch a 3D movie (not a cartoon) without wearing weird glasses and comfortably sitting on our couch, I will perceive 3D content as a half-serious, electronic fair attraction, and nothing more.

I will start believing in the value of 3D content as soon as I will be able to enjoy it at home, not only in (a few) theatres.

(*) thanks to Mauro for his food for brain.

I explained in the previous post why promising technologies, surely offering better resolution, have failed to win the market, so far. The returns on revenues, the beacon for any entrepreneurial initiative, is simply insufficient. Older technologies that can still be bettered with limited investment provides better returns.

Clearly, the situation would change if someone would start to invest in this new technologies and hit the market with a better product. But again: what does better means for the market? Unless there is a clear user advantage better just means a lower price. And here proven technologies, benefiting from production process optimization and continuous fine tuning are winning the game.

Providing a clear user advantage in the area of displays means to be able to show content that looks superior on a screen adopting the new technology. Hence, it means to have a content that would look better with a higher resolution display.

Today’s content is targeted to the television broadcasting chain and to the distribution via DVD and Blue Ray Discs, that is with a  2Mpixel resolution.

Moving one step higher, to 4k standard or two steps higher to 8k requires a dramatic change in the overall production and distribution chain.

A 4k 2hour movie requires over 100 GB (closer to 200 GB actually) of storage space, it won’t fit on a Blue Ray disc (it may take up to 4 BR disc to store it). An 8k 2 hour movie would require close to 1TB of storage (or 20 BR discs!). Whilst we have today several 4k video cameras (the 4k is used in professional digital movie making) used by professionals and we can expect mass market 4k video cameras in the next decade, we do not have, and will likely not have for the next 10 years, 8k cameras. May be beyond 2020 we will start to see the first 8k cameras and movie production.

It is likely that users will favour an evolution towards immersive 3D (and be willing to pay for it) well before being willing to go for the 8k.

The 4k is somewhere in between. My pick is that we are going to see an increase of interest in the 4k area, thanks to the convergence of video cameras on digital still cameras. Here the 4k is already a reality (in terms of still image, since this correspond to an 8 Mpixel sensor) and it would just take an evolutionary step to move from current HD to 4k  Mind you, I am not saying this is an easy one: it requires the availability of a much faster digital processor (10 times the present one), a much bigger storage capacity (in the order of 1 TB) but these requirements are likely to be met early in the next decade.

Picture your MS Hotmail or GMAIL account being erased because of any technical reason. You may say that is impossible, considering that Microsoft and Google are trusted companies. Well, that is not what always happen.

Some users over the web have claimed that their Google account have been erased meaning that years of e-mail messages, contacts, agenda and even document files were simple gone.

The question is: to whom you should complain about? To the service provider that is actually fostering a free of charge solution? If you don’t pay for the service that means you cannot complain, can you?

In fact if you read the terms of agreement of these free content providers, that actually nobody do it, they do not disclaim responsibility for any problem that may occur.

It is very important to consider that Google does not disclose where are their data centers. Some IT analysts report that they are over more than 38 places around the globe (http://royal.pingdom.com). That is the essential strength and at the same time weakness of the Cloud Computing business model. Everything in the web? How much is going to cost you if you loose data?

There is a business gap today that no company is taking: provide a service to backup up all the customer data over the different service providers. Figure out these business offers:

1) $10,00 per month, daily backup and storage.
2) $30,00 per year, monthly backup and storage.
3) $20,00 for a bundle backup and storage.
4) $100,00 per year including daily backup, storage and all the backup data delivered in your home for Christmas.
5) Video call us to consult the recovery pricing table. (GMail only $5,00 etc.)

How much are you willing to pay for such a service? Remember: it will backup your e-mails, contacts, agenda, documents, photos, social network profiles etc.

I tryed to think “out of the box”, about mashup of things and …

What is Mashup TODAY ? All steps and components in virtual world.

1. Data capture (API’s, screen scraping, …)
2. Data processing (Datawarehouse with Business Intelligence, mashup editors, SOA Roadmap, programming …)
3. Data presentation (Computer Monitor, PDA, Mobile …)

What will be Mashup in the FUTURE ?

1. Data capture (QR Code, RFID, …) – People and things recognition, Atoms & Bits and/or Micro Machine goal.
2. Data processing (Datawarehouse with Business Intelligence, mashup editors, SOA Roadmap, programming …) – Nothing really new, just more organized. Exception: Web Semantics
3. Data presentation (Holography, 3D, flexible screens (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081002084217.htm), new projection technologies …) – New display types

Conclusion:

Mashup team must focus in “data presentation” and Web Semantics. Customers want to minimize devices and maximize screens to see all informations consolidated through mashups.

Do you agree? Please, help-me with comments.

While browsing the web, I find this interesting web site.

http://www.google.org/flutrends/ Did you know it? 

Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems: the power of the technology!!

They simply consider that every week, millions of users search for “online” health information. 

“As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. “

If you consider they are putting this result on the web this is a sort of mash up still based on maps.

It could be unbelievable that search queries (trends) provide a reliable model of real-world phenomena: if we consider that they found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms, not every people who search for “flu” is actually sick.

But a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are “added” together: this is the trick, the statistical approach.

Google compared their query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening.

“By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.” Google said. And their  results have been published in Nature.

Now: they work on searches, but what a Telco Operator could do considering, for instance, counting possible phone call to “well known” numbers (maybe coming from particular region)?  May we do some sort of “trends” or identify possible patterns? Furthermore: may we do some sort of business on this?

Explore flu trends across the U.S.

 Data current through: April 27, 2009

OLED has made the progress it promised in terms of production yield: it is now economically feasible to produce large OLED screen, up to 42” at a reasonable cost. OLED delivers much better colour quality, has lower energy consumption than a normal LDC (and Plasma) and it is much brighter. So why is it that we find OLED screens on some cell phones but very little in television screens?

The reason is similar to the failure of NED to reach the market. The explosion of flat screens has driven production cost down much more than expected (only 4 years ago the forecast was for a 40” LCD to have a market price around 3000$, now it is down to 1000 $); besides, several innovations have led to bettering of colour (by extensive use of software), better contrast and brightness and at the same time solutions to decrease power consumption are appearing. The new line of backlight illumination based on LEDs is driving energy consumption down since illumination is provide just where it is required (like in Plasma screens) and at the same time this delivers higher contrast.

The other advantage of OLED, a thinner screen, has also been met by conventional LCD screen. The new Sony is just 9.9 mm thick (if calling it thick still makes any sense…)-

There is simply very little incentive for a manufacturer to invest huge amount of money to deploy the infrastructure that would surely deliver a better product but may not lead to significantly greater revenues.  Infrastructures… sound familiar, doesn’t it?

There are also other technologies ready on the labs’ benches that can deliver better image quality and much better resolution. One is the quantum dot display. Here the colour of the pixel is given by the different size of the nano-particle (9nm for a red colour, compare this size with the 300,000 nm of an LCD pixel!  Notice however that we need several of this quantum dots to achieve a comparable brightness, still the gain in resolution is obvious…).

Electronic paper, on the contrary, is very far to compete with the other technologies for high resolution display. It is an interesting technology for reading eBooks on the beach, since it reflects the sun light and the more ambient light available the better the contrast and reading ease. It is not suited for providing a large colour gamut nor high resolution.

Yesterday I watched the presentation about the release of the iPhone OS 3.0. This release has a lot of new features that will enrich the Apple’s business ecosystem.

I will try to explain briefly the most interesting part of the main features of this new operating system:

1) With this new OS, it is possible to purchase content and services directly from the application. In this way, a company can manage directly all aspects of the transaction including process payment and can also provide the customer all the information regarding the purchase. This is managed by Itunes Store like a services provider.

2) The Apple Push service will be available not only for the email application but for all applications that needs it; this service has been designed in order to save energy.

3) APIs for the new OS will be released to connect every application with external HW either through the 30 pin connector or wirelessly with bluetooth; that means that a new developer of HW products and the connection of the iphone with real world can be done through sensors, machines, instruments, appliance, etc…

4) Applications can use the bluetooth in a very simple way, without pairing, to develop social network and facilitate smart messaging; not just games but also the possibility to bring the social network from the virtual world to the real world with a face-to-face interaction among people.

5) The option to use google maps like a tool inside the applications allows the development of information mash-ups.

6) The possibility for applications to use the contents of Itunes and perhaps, in the future, the use of  personal preferences can allow the development of personalized services.

I see a convergence between these new features of Iphone 3.0 and so do our researchers in Future Centre.

Points 1, 3, and 6 could enhance applications’ performance in the Micromachine and Market@One project.

Point 4 could be used in an application for the direct interaction among people who are in the same physical place according to their profile and tastes; it could be used by a services provider like Facebook or other social networks for a face-to-face interaction; Life and Lives project is studying this kind of scenario.

Finally, point 5 can facilitate the mash-ups for Iphone applications.

I think that it’s an amazing idea to give payments and process control tools to companies that want to improve and manage their business models; it means flexibility, true payment services with one click, no troubles to manage accounts.

Integration with mobile CRM can add value to these tools; in the presentation, Oracle has showed an application based on his mobile CRM.

Iphone, Ipod, Itunes, and Apple Store are becoming a business platform and it’s amazing that this platform can be used to improve services in different vertical markets. I think that it can be a good opportunity for Telco operators to improve ecosystems in different areas.

Apple is looking at the market and how to help companies to develop their business in different markets…and now it’s only the beginning of this new way to play in the business ecosystems.