Did you know that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated in the world, behind China and India? And did you know that one-third of women aged 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up, even before going to the bathroom?

I didn’t know about that and much more before reading an interesting work made by Marta Kagan, Managing Director for Espresso, a marketing agency specialized in “brand infiltration”.

Below, in a nutshell, a few numbers taken from “What is social media now?”.

• 500 billion: the number of minutes spent on Facebook per month (last year it was 150 billion);
• 500 billion: the number of peer influence impressions Americans generate per year via social media (62 percent of those impressions come from Facebook);
• 25 billion: the amount of content shared each month on Facebook (more than 6x last year’s volume);
• 4 billion: the number of images hosted on Flickr (13x more than the Library of Congress);
• 2 billion: the number of YouTube videos viewed per day (2x last year’s volume);
• 27 million: the average number of “tweets” per day on Twitter (8x last year’s volume)
• 24 hours: the amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute (more than 2x last year’s volume);
• 7 hours: the time it took for LeBron James to amass his first 150,000 Twitter followers.

Is there still someone who believes that social networking is a fad?

Costumers are in the center and in control: the democratization of the Internet.

Before of the debut of the Ford Fiesta in the US, Ford kicked off the social media campaign named “The Fiesta Movement” where they handed 100 young influencers a Fiesta, asking them to document and share their activities via social media. The result was thousands of original contents and tens of millions of media impressions and an unthinkable goal: making 60% of the public aware of the car, without spending a dime on traditional media.

Forget your brand, it’s up to the public.

After that Greenpeace launched a social media campaign against Nestle for its use of palm oil related to the rainforest destruction, the food giant announced to eliminate from its supply chain every single ring involved in the destruction of the rainforests.

New Marketers in the New Media Era.

Shoes of Prey, an interesting company I wrote about in a post, hired a seexteen-year-old YouTuber to promote its design-your-own-shoes website. Soon the video became the #1 most commented and #5 most viewed on YouTube.

Ozmo, http://www.ozmodevices.com/, has announced the availability of a chip, Ozmo 2000, that transforms any WiFi enabled device into a newtork node.  The chip implements the WiFi Direct  standard (not yet consolidated) allowing a direct communications among WiFi devices with no need for a base station, just like Bluetooth. It should be available in devices early next year.

WPAN: Wireless Personal Area Network

http://www.ozmodevices.com/the_ozmo_solution.php

This is an interesting evolution: cell phones having WiFi, as it is the case for most smart phones, will be able to talk one another, axchanging data, without having to go through the wireless network.

These networks-less networks have been studied by researchers and a particular form of them has been called viral networks. A viral network is made by terminals able to connect one another and through another creating dynamic networks. Imagine having one cell phone embedded in each car (not difficult to do!) and creating a viral network. A city can be completely covered by this network and people could send messages and data from one car to the next one or to the one at the other side of the town using this network. No need for a wireless network operated by a specific Operator.

Sending voice over this network may be much more problematic since every “hop” would introduce a delay and they will add up to the point that the quality degrades rapidly. However, for most data transmission this would be irrelevant.

Actually, some cars, most of them may be, may also store information and they can distribute this information on request. A completely different sort of communication paradigm can emerge: a network where the more users the more capacity is provided.

 

 

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) published this week the paper “Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain” reporting interesting results (achieved by IBM) about reverse-engineering the Macaque monkey brain. Specifically, the research claims the mapping of the long-distance network of the monkey brain, structure which is essential for understanding brain’s behavior and dynamics.

Long-distance brain connections are like highways crossing the brain’s white matter, while short-distance gray matter connections (based on neurons) are like “local roads” within a brain region.  

The brain network they found shows a “tightly integrated inner core that might be at the heart of higher cognition and even consciousness” capabilities. This core spans parts of premotor cortex, prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, thalamus, basal ganglia, cingulate cortex, insula, and visual cortex. Amazingly, by ranking brain regions, they found also that the prefrontal cortex (physically located in the front of the brain) is a functionally central part of the brain that might act as an integrator and distributor of information.

The long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain showing 6,602 long-distance connections between 383 brain regions (PNAS)

Learning how brain’s network works is indispensable for progressing in several research avenues of neurosciences, including computational neuroscience. At the same time, if we imagine future networks as a global environment of dynamically interconnected nodes (including terminals, sensors, smart things, etc.) these researches might also be valuable to understand and manage the bottom-up emergence of future computing and networking distributed networks.

Here at Future Centre it’s time that we observe how innovation 2.0, the applications to be clear, is revolutionizing the tourism sector. Days ago I was reading an article about an interesting application dedicated to in-flight mobile usage, developed by SITA Lab and recently showed at the SITA Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels. The app enables passengers on special all-business class flights from London City Airport to New York JFK to access local information on events, check their destination weather and traffic, track their flight progress while reading live sports news, book chauffeur services (provided by Quintessentially) and receive one-on-one response from a concierge based in either London or New York. The in-flight connectivity service is provided by OnAir, a leading provider of in-flight communications solutions, that has chosen British Airlines as the launch customer for its wireless Internet portal “Club Mobile”. The service is available once the airplane has reached ten thousand feet. As soon as passengers are connected they receive a welcome SMS with a link to the portal. Users need a mobile internet account and are billed through their network provider. The airline does not allow voice-calls, not only in respect of other passengers, but also to maximise the bandwidth for all users.

Below the demo of the Club Mobile service.

Similarly, Cathay Pacific has launched its CX Mobile application for the iPad. In addition, the Hong Kong’s home airline has announced its plan to develop an in-flight entertainment portal which passengers can access via their mobile devices or via the seatback screen. As reported in the Media Centre Section of the company’s website, the portal “will include a range of content updated during the flight, access to airline and partner sites, e-commerce, airline-specific advertising, and live television with a unique pay-per-view capability for special events”.

Three years ago Global Motion Media released EveryTrail, www.everytrail.com, an application running on cell phones (first was on iPhone, now you can use it on RIM and Android as well), letting people track their whereabouts as simply as pushing a button. They could record where they went, how long time it took, where they stopped and so on. In a short time hundreds of thousands of trails were created and more are being created every day.

The recording of your whereabouts obtained by the GPS could be extended by including photos you took on the way and comments. In addition Google maps is glued under the path to show exactly where you went and addditional information on sights and commercial enterprises could be added.

All this information could be used as personal diary or iit could be shared freely letting other people browse you trail and make use of your experiences. Most people choose to shase. All together they created, and are creating, a wealth of information. It is crowdsourcing at its best.

Now Everytrail has announced the availability of guides you can buy. They are a collection of information and trails provided by users and each one has been revised and ranked. There are guides for every parts of the world, a mapping much more detailed than the one you can find on Lonely Planet and much more accurate since it is likely to find something that has been created in the last month and possibly just few days before. The nice thing is that you can look for and download trails where you are, on the spot, asking for trails in that area. It is instant gratification and I am sure there will be enhancement letting people to filter trails based o their profile.

Now Every trail is really on business and by making money it is providing a service to all of its users, starting with the ones that contribute informaiton. In fact, every time you contribute information you get points that can be redeemed to download maps on your phone.

I was thinking of a title to introduce the topic of today, and I was reminded of the ironic phrase of the baseball player Yogi Berra. It’s certainly a challenge to imagine what’s to happen down the road, but there are those who try. Every day a number of journalists, marketers, researchers and analysts is working for foretelling us what is to come, seeking to describe the outlook of the future through predictions about economic and social trends that affect us all. Their daily job consists in aggregating and organizing past and present happenings as a network of data linked to the topic, in order to predict the future scenario of anything. The predictive analysis, this is the name of such activity, refers to a set of techniques which belongs to disciplines such as statistics and game theory, through which you can better manage past and current data, to arrive at plausible estimates of future events. In particular, this technique is employed to give future observations and predict the trend of development of particular entities in different areas such as economy, finance, marketing, society, insurance, etc.
Now users have their toy for open source intelligence analysis. It’s a browser-based temporal analytics tool developed by a team of computer scientists, statisticians and linguists for the analysis of large amounts of time-based data from around the web: people, markets, locations and whatever. Recorded Future, a data analytics company headquartered out of Boston, is the interesting start-up that received, a few months ago, investments from Google Ventures for developing this project. Yes, there was still something unknowable for Google, the future. Just over a year ago, in fact, Google was far away from predicting it. However the Big G claimed to predict the present through Google Trends, which as you know provides, together with Google Insights for Search, a daily insight into what the Google users are searching for, by showing the relative volume of search traffic in Google for any search query. An understanding of web search queries offers interesting ramifications for advertisers, marketers, economists, scholars, and anyone else interested in knowing more about his object of study. Obviously some search queries and categories have trends that are quite seasonal, with repeated patterns. See the search trends for “gift” during the Christmas time. Many other search trends, however, are quite irregular and hard to predict. See the search trends for “Facebook”. In the 2009 landmark study Predicting the Presents with Google Trends, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, and Hyunyoung Choi describe the forecasting models that learn basic seasonality and general trend, showing how aggregated search trends of Google Categories can be used as extra indicators and effectively leverage several US econometrics prediction models. In the paper they use the frequency of certain search terms to forecast retail, automotive and home sales, as well as travel behavior. We are talking about a gain ranging from a few percent to 18 percent in the “Motor Vehicles and Parts” case.
A small digression, back to Recorded Future. How this engine works is very simple. By continually scanning, through sampling methods and data mining algorithms, thousands of web sources (blogs, reviews, government sites, etc.) for the nature and frequency of references to a certain occurrence, the system computes what they call a “momentum value” for each entity in the database. This means to extract information from text including events, entities and the time when they occur, measuring momentum for each item in the index, as well as sentiment.
All these aspects could be useful for example for the web manager to identify recurring patterns in the accesses or requests for certain pages, delivering useful information about their future trends and getting answers in real time. But also for counterterrorism analysis, and this is already happening, since the system extracts terrorism related events from the public web, as well as info from structured sources like the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups.

A Tablet for 35$.

Of course you remember the Nicholas Negroponte initiative to create a 100 $ computer that could be used by kids in developing country. The idea has grown into a product (actually in two since there is now a new generation of it) but the price is still slightly above the target.
Now the Indian Institute of Technology has announced a prototype of a tablet whose target price is 35$. This is part of a global design annouced in New Delhi by the Ministry of Education to give every student in the 22,000 colleges in India a computer as the new tool to improve education and decrease cost. The Ministry will provide broadband connectivity to all these schools. The first step is to provide university students with a computer.
The tablet demonstrated runs on solar power, has a Linux operating systems, internet connectivity and video conferencing capabilities.

The present cost is around 35$ and the Government will subsidize 50% of that cost to reduce the cost for the students. Eventually, this is the hope, the price should go down to 10$.

http://www.physorg.com/news199083092.html
I don’t know if this price tag will be reached within the next few years but the fact that the target now is no longer 100$ but 35$ is telling me that it should not be beyond the realm of possibilities.
What is even more interesting to me is the fact that screen interfaces will become a common presence in any ambient and that will dramatically change our perception of the way we can interact with the world.
It also means, it asks for, we will have plenty of bandwidth, pervasive and basically an integral part of the ambient, of any ambient. THis is both an opportunity and a problem for Telecom Infrastructures Providers. Demand is going to be there. Will this demand be matched by an equivalent willngness to pay for it?

eBook readers are experiencing a growing success. The debate is on to get a Kindle like device having a black and white reflective screen you can easily use on the sundeck or to get an iPad like device sporting great colours through a back illuminated LCD that looks great in the shadow but becomes useless in the sun. Clearly the solution to appease everyone is to have a colour reflective screen! There are, as a matter of fact several prototypes but the result is not as good as one would wish. The problem is that the colour dots on a reflective screens are only as good as the light reflected is. You get good colours but you have to sit on the sundeck, no shadow please.
That’s not convenient. Now, researchers from HP have created a new material that promise to meet the challenge. This material comes in different flavour; one is able to convert blue and green light into red, another converts blue light into green. Each pixel (made with this material) is covered by a fast switching liquid crystal shutter letting in or blocking out the light. Mirrors placed below each pixel let the light escape when no reflection is desired.
As it can be grasped by this sketchy representation of the structure of the screen the mechanism is quite complex and that means, today, low resolution and high production cost. But everyone remembers how costly was that flat screen television that is now living in our kitchen! So let’s wait and see. The fact that researchers are still looking into alternative ways to develop screens is showing that we have not reached the point where everything is done….

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25809/?nlid=3247

Well, it looks highly unlikely. You need roads to travel, you need wires and towers to communicate.

Suppose you have a real good off-road SUV, one of those behemoth that can also cross rivers. May be you caould go from A to B without having to use a road.

Ah! I hear you saying. You might be able to do so but it would take much more than using a nice paved road and it will cost you a fortune in gasoline. Right. But what if you are in the middle of nowhere, let’s say in the Australian outback. What would be quicker AND cheaper: get the behemoth or build a road?

I guess I made my point. By having a sufficiently smart and flexible car you can make do without the road infrastructure.

Let’s turn to communications. The very first telephones were sold without any infrastructure to plug them on. You would buy a (pair of) phone and you would ask somebody to lay a wire (actually 4 of them) to establish the connection. Luckily a full blown infrastructure was put in place, with a lot of investment and over a long period of time, and today we can easily connect our phones. Then cell phones were invented and the connectivity perception moved away from the users since the last part was via “air” and most of the times the towers were hidden to the user’s sight.

Nowadays, and more so tomorrow, terminals, like cell phones, are very powerful devices that can morph into a network node. In perspective they can become the network. Clearly I am not thinking that the big backbone will disappear. On the contrary, They will become even more capacious and will extend to metropolitan areas to what today we call the backhauling. But the distribution network may fade away under the pressure on the one side of the extended backbone and on the other side on the take over by terminals.

Terminals may communicate one another whenever they are sufficiently close, and for data communications. From an energy standpoint it is cheaper to compute than to transmit and energy dissipation grows at least with the square of the distance. So if two terminals are closer one another than they are close to the antenna connected to the backbone it makes more “energy wise” sense to communicate with one another, one acting as a bridge towards another terminal (and so on) or towards the backbone antenna.

In this perspective the future network will be a composite of dynamically connected nodes and such a network will also be a set of connected information. Quite a different view from today hierarchical structure. It will be much more like a “natural creation” rather than an engineered one.

In order to make it happen we need a lot of research (and it is going on today) and the vision to let the market evolve.

What is LightSquared from LightSquared on Vimeo.

I should say that this post was prompted by looking at Lightsquare, a 7B$ initiative by Harbinger aiming at creating a wireless coverage in the US deploying 40,000 antennas as access point. I would consider this as a first step towards the flat network of terminals I am suggesting. It seems to me that 40,000 access point can really sustain a US wide network only once terminals will play also the rle of network nodes, extending the reach of each access point.

http://www.servalproject.org/

being deployed in Australia where cell phones play the role of towers to provide connectivity to areas not covever, creaitng a network by themselves with one (or more) cell phone acting as gateway when it happens to be within coverage of a network access. 

As electronics energy requirements decrease in some areas (like sensors) it becomes possible to power these chips in more inovative ways.

The WISP Initiative of Intel

The WISP, Wireless Identification and Sensor Platform, that I mentioned before in some of my posts is progressing and some interesting results have been achieved. One for sure is in the area of using the electromagnetic field present all around us, generated by radio, television, telecommunications antennas to power sensors.  http://seattle.intel-research.net/wisp/ 

At Intel, researchers are now able to harvest radiowave energy producing a 50 microW output, enough to power several types of sensors. To put this into perspective a pocket calulator runs on 5 microW.

A nice application of this technology is a hat, developed by a professor of the Duke University, Matt Reynolds, that embeds a sensor to detect danger in a construction site (like approaching bulldozers) and triggers the emission of a beep to alert the wearer. It is powered by the electromagnetic field created by electrical equipment in the area.

http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/university-professor-creates-hard-hat-to-alert-wearer-of-danger-close-by/

Wireless powered safety helmet

I can envisage ambient ecosystems created by hundreds of sensors (and identification tags, RFID) powered by radiowaves, thus avoiding the problems of powering, that will completely transform the way we are relating to the environment. More than that, I am using the word ecosystem because these sensors create a platform that can be used by many parties to get data and deliver services.