I had a talk with a journalist some days ago on the Internet of Things and then she followed up with a list of questions I just replied to few minutes ago. I’d like to share them with you and see if you would beg differently.

The BMW keys and cars communicate one another

The IoT is already here, just look at Cosm (https://cosm.com), or think about the car keys talking to the car systems (BMW cars use the car keys to store info on the car systems for maintenance purposes…). There are hundreds of other examples…

Moving towards crowd-movies…

A new app is ready for you on the Apple Store. It is Vyclone, an app that takes advantage of the location and time information  attached to shootings you take with your iPhone.

Suppose you are watching a sport game and shooting. As you, there may b tens, hundreds of other spectators shooting the same event, although each one from a different position. Here comes Vyclone.

You can ask Vyclone to mash ups, in a completely automated way, your shooting with those of three other people that were filming at your same time. It can be done instantly, provided you and the others have an Internet connection, like a WiFi, and are on Vyclone as well, or it can be done the next day or the next year. Vyclone checks the location and time stamp on your video and looks for identical data in other video.

Then it mashes up the clips together providing a movies resulting from a multi camera shoot. It keeps one of the sound tracks so that you don’t get a confusing audio.

The effect is really nice, as you can see in the video below. Of course, once created, you can post the video to your social network, YouTube and the likes.

The present limitation of mashing up a maximum of four movies is going to be relaxed in the future, according to Joe Summer, one of the founder of Vyclone, who is also the Chief Creative Officer (CCO, I like the new acronym), and the system can scale up to accommodate several more cameras.

What I like is this idea of social shooting and the possibility to create something through crowd sourcing. It makes the world so much more connected and let eat of us see it with some others’ eyes. Also, I can imagine in the future that the mash ups will actually be producing as many layers as there are movies so that when you watch it you can decide to take the images from a different camera. Of course that would make the resulting film much bigger in terms of Bytes (but who cares tray about a file size?) and also much more demanding in terms of bandwidth if you are planning to stream it (but who’s gonna care about bandwidth in a few years time?).

By 2050 the Digital World will be as real and as important as the physical world.

Manufacturers will create for any of their product a mirror image of it that will be present in the digital space. This digital copy will be instantiated and associated to the actual buyer of the product (and to the user). This will create a market space for third parties to generate services and adds on to the product.

The digital instance will keep growing and transforming as time goes by, reflecting its use, its transformations and the interaction with the ambient. Along with that a web of relations is formed connecting whoever and what ever use or has exposure with the product.

In this digital space there will be basically no difference between objects, information, services and people. Each of this is a digital set that keeps transforming reflecting the transformation in the physical world. Each object (person, service, information…) will therefore have an associated digital shadow that in many cases can be used to “patch” the physical object.

Additionally, the digital existence can be mashed on the physical existence so that a physical object can be perceived as a single whole composed by its atoms and the overlaid bits. The key to the success is twofold:

- it should provide a seamless experience where actually bits and atoms are smoothly intertwined

- there is the possibility to select (again seamlessly) the amount of overlay (if any) desired.

Down the road we can imagine holograms and holographic video, we can dream of surfaces that double up as screens, ultra high resolution screens and so on as the “medium” to support future media.

However, I think that all the component for future media tea already available and they form a quilt that immerse us today in the future media. An example comes from Al Jazeera. In its show “The Stream” Al Jazeera mixes the content with Social Media, Twitter and Facebook, of course but also Reddit to choose story ideas to propose (Reddit publishes news and rank them based on the votes from its viewers), Pinterest ( a sort of pinboard where people post their images creating trails with comments from other viewers) for sharing photo and images connected to the show, Google+ Hangouts for group interviews or Skype, and Storify for shaping up the story through the involvement of its viewers.

In the future information will be provided in many different forms, at the same time, and there will be means to present most of it in an ensamble that can be captured at a glance.

Mixing news, content with social network creates an immediate connection with people, most of them unknown to you but who share a part of your feelings/taste since they connect to the same information you connect to.

The tricky part is how to create a seamless connection. So far it is just a set of links that force you to decide where to look and what to do. It is not a real seamless mixing. We are already experiencing some sort of seamless mixing in Newsy and FlipBoard where you get the impression of reading a magazine even though it is the result of mixing news from several sources, and that magazine is somehow reflecting your taste, since it adapts to your taste and keep reshaping the way it presents the news.

The current smart phones are more than just a modern wallet. They carry both your personal and professional details, and all this information, at best, is now just an easy-crackable password away from intruders.

At worst, losing those devices can “release”products beforehand. But having your personal information stolen is more worrisome, since more and more people are using mobile banking features. According to a study by TowerGroup, this has been used by nearly 18 million users last year and its usage is expected to reach 27.4 million users this year and more than 53 million next year.

Use of NFC in Japan is an everyday experience

With the introduction of new devices with NFC (Near Field Communication) embedded, the Nexus S for example, payments will be even easier for users of such devices.

In Japan NFC is now present in over 10 million cel phones and it is being used in supermarket, newsstand and transportation. According to AdaptiveMobile, an
international company specialized in mobile security, attacks on Google’s Android smartphones quadrupled and attacks on Java based phones increased by 45%.

Mobile payment through cell phones is the natural evolution to be expected in the coming years. This is opening up new opportunities for Operators not as much in the area of taking share out of the transaction but in the opportunity of creating a personal story. Managing the data of a person for that person is a great service that can be monetized.

However, what is most interesting for n Operator in this area is the opportunity to add value in the payment transaction, beyond guaranteeing its security and easiness. When you pay your cell phone can get the information on the product you are buying and keep this information available for you at a later time when you may need it. Bought a product at the grocery store and once home you wonder how to cook it? Just browse your phone for the item and ask for the information. Got a television few months ago that now is not working properly? No need to look for the warranty and support centre: just browse the phone and click on the services associated to the item to be put in touch with the support centre having them seamlessly receive the info on the product you have problem with…

It is really a new area opening up for Telecom Operators.

I guess most of you have already played with Google Body, http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/.

A screenshot of Google Body Browser

Clearly it is fun to explore and see beneath the skin. Many structures are displayed and tagged so that with a click you can jump to Wikipedia and get as much information as you like on that particular detail.

What is, however, most interesting to me is the fact that Google, once again, has created an open platform to let other people and company to mash ups their information and services.

So let’s look into the future and into what may happen.

Imagine you go to your doctor and you get a Magnetic Resonance prescribed to look in detail to that tendons that is aching. The result of the exam is…a picture and you may want to upload it to the Google Body, to your instance of Google Body.  It gets overlaid on the generic body and as time goes by you’ll find your specific instance of your body enriched with all the exams results. Every time you look at it you are going to see exactly how your (inner) body looks like.

Google is already providing you with the opportunity of storing your clinical record and to share it with your doctor or with the Health care system.

But as time goes by, and technology evolves it gets more interesting. In a few years many of us will have some sensors in dresses (some with specific pathologies will get sensors implanted) and in our cell phones. All this data can be mapped by some applications and mashed up onto our instance of Google Body.

Imagine sitting in front of your body and as you look beneath the skin you start to see your heart beating, in synch with your heart since the two are virtually connected!

Science Fiction? No more. All the basic pieces are already available and with the Google Body Open Platform it will take very little time to connect the dots!

I was surfing the net when I came across a really nice video about the Coca-Cola Village, a summer activity for teenagers located in Israel. Well, this year the theme park became more social than ever! Each guest received an ID bracelet, which contained his Facebook user name and password, capable to transmit an RFID signal. Through these bracelets guests “liked” the various attractions in the village as if they were on Facebook, updating their status in real-time. How? By simply placing the bracelet to the readable RFID device next to every Coca Cola Village facility, a chip capable of collecting the users’ data and sending them directly back to Facebook. Moreover, to create a complete sharing experience, just by “touching” the official photographer you had your pictures tagged and uploaded on Facebook. Publicis E-dologic, the firm behind this event, nicknamed this pretty awesome solution “The like machine”. Aside from the obvious security problems that such a technology implies, I imagine it integrated into the supermarket shelves, with the possibility of extending the “likes it” on the products we want to buy by placing our phone beside them… And I do not think it will take a long time for this to happen.

I mentioned yesterday the Badoku app. letting you read the bar code of a product and get/provide information about it in a Social Network. Today I did some homework on the blogosphere and discovered several others that are really creating a “quilt” that is going to reshape the future of retail. As an example take a look at this article:

http://regator.com/p/244178336/barcode_hero_attacks_in-store_shopping_with_an_addictive/

In a previous post we have talked about FourSquare, a start up that has created a model for engaging people visiting places, including shops. The basic idea is that the more you become a “habitue” of a place the more you know about it and the more you can be considered as an expert. This idea is now being exploited in the shopping area by other companies like Kima Labs and their application Barcode Hero (not available so far in Europe, you need to have a registered account in the USA on the iTunes Store to download it).

Attaching your bits to objects....

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post it is getting easier and easier to decode a bar code using your cell phone and associate your own comments to them (as an example, take a look at StickyBits, http://stickybits.com , an apps that let you post your comments on a message board tagging them with the barcode identity).

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/08/stickybits-barcodes-message-boards/

I like the new twists made possible by using the cell phone in any day activities. With these sort of applications the ideas that we have been putting forward at the Future Centre on mashing up informaiton on objects and bridging atoms with bits are turning into reality and sooner than we expected, As this happens it changes the way we look at objects and new business opportunties opens up.

Public Data Explorer are huge datasets that users can explore and use to  create mash ups. For example interactive graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble  charts, of course embedded in Web pages. Here a nice link to the service.

Everything is dynamic, so it is possible to watch the bubble or graphs  changing over time.
This service includes information even from the World Bank, such as  population data for every region in the world: public agencies, non-profits  and other organizations are trying to open their data and let a worldwide  global access to this kind of information.

An approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics datasets are:
1. School comparisons
2. Unemployment
3. Population
4. Sales tax
5. Salaries
6. Exchange rates
7. Crime statistics
8. Health statistics (health conditions)
9. Disaster statistics
10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
11. Last names
12. Poverty
13. Oil price
14. Minimum wage
15. Consumer price index, inflation
16. Mortality
17. Cost of living
18. Election results
19. First names
20. Accidents, traffic violations

It is clear that people are interested in a variety of data and statistics,  but the value of information is only perceived and exploited when it’s easy to access and share it.  Google believes in Public Data and so it created a tool to help people to  mash up these data using maps, lines and bubble charts.
As they say: “Animated charts can bring data to life”.

Google wants to demonstrate the public demand for more data and the potential  for new applications based on data.
This is but another fragment of our common digital life and we will learn to embed our digital life in the society digital life and exploit both.

It is really interesting that companies like Starbucks (www.starbucks.com) are now trying to leveraging on social media to create value for its business. For example, nowadays Starbucks has over 700,000 followers on twitter and over 5,500,000 fans on Facebook. Starbucks’s social media strategy across the Web can be summarized in these points.

First of all Starbucks on Twitter (twitter.com/starbucks) where they build a relationship and an open communication channel with their customers, answer questions, and talk about the brand.
Second, Starbucks on Facebook (www.facebook.com/Starbucks) where they upload Videos, blog, posts, photos to Facebook: a place where the company can invite fans and people to events.
Third, Starbucks on YouTube (www.youtube.com/starbucks) where they post commercials and informational videos explaning the origins of the different coffee beans, the history of the brand and provide other nice tips.
Finally, “My Starbucks Idea” (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com) that is a kind of social network where customers may share ideas to improve Starbucks’ service and users can see what others suggested, vote and feel part of the Brand. Their slogan is: “You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple – we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started”

In Starbucks social media strategy Users have an active role, so they become fans: there is a real dialogue with customers with lots of feedbacks and comments. In the Digital Life not only metadata are a great business: being able to manage digital thoughts, dreams, comments, motivation and attention of individuals can be a real driver to make customers faithful and create value