Google maps are great and they change the way we see information. They are more and more “localized”. Looking for a hotel and seeing a map along with it is just normal. Taking a photo and inserting it in an album to see it becoming part of a map is also a usual experience for people with a Mac and iPhoto.

Now, thanks to Livemapp, you can expect  to change your perception of the “map” once more.

The idea is simple, the result is catchy!

Everybody nowadays has a phone with a camera and more and more have an embedded GPS. That is the case of the people wandering around with the iPhone latest models.  The Livemapp app, so far only available on iPhones but soon to be on the Androids flocks as well, let you take a phone and post it on the web. It ends up on a map so that people looking at the map through Livemapp will see it.

It is a way to add on the map the sights (and I am pretty sure the sounds as well in a short while). You may take a look at the place you are in, or the ones your friends are at the moment, and see what’s up. You can also go back in time to see what was it some times ago. And you can elect to visualize only the most recent photos in those places where lot of people are shooting and posting.

The apps can be enriched with new functions, I suppose. Why not see only the photos posted by your friends, so that you can follow their wanderings. And similarly post your photos for the eyes of your friends only.

And what about a etcher going on vacation in Greece: she might take pictures of places she will be talking about in the new semester and add comments to them. Once back in the classroom she can enable her maps to her students to see and commit upon….

The real kick is the possibility of creating your interpretation of a space and share it with others. The future, I am convinced, will be more and more like this, each one of us an actor and a spectator, in some cases living the act as it unfolds.

Less than a month ago, on April 10th, I posted a news on the sharp decrease of sequencing the genome.

The number of genome sequenced is increasing exponentially

Now a brief article on Technology Review is reporting some estimate for the storage of all the human genome in the next decade, once, likely, every person will have her own genome sequenced.

A single genome consists of about 3.2 billion bases and since there are four of them (A-C-G-T) two bits are enough for representing abase. Hence, we could encode the complete genome with “just” 800 MB. No big deal. However, the sequencing machine usually introduces much more information and that may result in a 100 GB mass of data to be stored. Again, not a tremendous amount of data, we like have at home much more capacity that tis but if you multiply this amount by the number of people (7 billion) than it turns out that the storage required would compare to the one that was available on the planet in 2010!

Clearly, it is better to find some ways to squeeze the information in a smaller space. It turns out that our genome, not surprisingly, are very much alike. Therefore, scientists are studying the way to compress the data. The plan is to use a reference genome and to code only the specific differences from that genome. Some first calculations indicate that we can store all our personal genome in less than 4 MB of storage. Now, that is a real save!

We can expect by the next decade to have our genome always available (most likely in the cloud, but also in the electronic identity card or perhaps stored under your skin in an id tag that we will use as everyday password.

And the number of applications that will be generated to leverage that information is just mind boggling.

I posted just yesterday news on NinjaBlocks and how they have been funded through Kickstart. Now let me give you another example of an idea being funded through Kickstart that has reached almost 6 million $ in funding: Pebble. And they asked for just 100,000 $! The same observations I made on NinjaBlocks in terms of this new way (crowd sourcing financing I would call it) apply here.

But for Pebble I want to share some thoughts on what it means in terms of new ways of conceiving a product. But first take a look at Pebble so that you know what I am talking about:

Pebble will be sold at a 150$ price tag. That’s not peanuts for a plastic watch whose screen is made of eInk. What makes it worth the price (at least for the inventors and for the people funding it) is that it creates an open environment, an ecosystem, where people can create applications making it a continuously evolving device. Much more than a watch, as you have seen on the video! And what you see there is just a fraction of the many applications that will surely be invented if this watch is going to be a market success (the more successful, the more people will develop apps and in a never ending spiral the more successful it will become).

Pebble talks to iPhone and to Androids smart phones and makes use of the capabilities they have, like connecting to the web, detecting motion (through the gyroscope all smart phones have), detecting location and so on. This is the first “smart” new way of creating objects. Rather than packing features in the object let it discover what is available in its environment. This leads to cheaper objects that at the same time are reacher in functionality.

Secondly, rather than inventing all the features, Pebble comes with just a few of them. The crucial ones are those that let Pebble grow over time by getting apps created by anyone. It creates an ecosystem and leverages the strength of hundreds of thousands of developers (that over time will become millions…) and their creative genius.

Thirdly, Pebble is one of the first objects to embed communications and processing capabilities “just in case”, that is for supporting communication with the ambient and features that have not been conceived at its design time. In the future my bet is that many objects (the trends is towards “all” the objects) will be designed in this way. And as this happens we will see a new layer being created to make it possible the portability of apps across a variety of objects. This is an intermediation layer and I think it may become to Telecom Operators what today is the network, an important source of revenues.

It started a few years ago as a consequence of the abundance of data and the variety of sources. Google started to provide customized clustering of information, then the advent of the iPad stimulated the creation of apps that gave the feeling of providing us with a personalized newspaper (like FlipBoard, Newsy,…). Some applications focussed on specific content (customizing it) like Flud, others would let any kind of media to be clustered.

This is now a clear trend and I can easily see a Future where the personalized clustering will include television programs, movies, clips, tweets, blogs, as well as events, photos, and so on.

A new company, Wavii, has just started to propose an information aggregation service that is inspired to Facebook. It provides you with the same look and feel of the Facebook interface and transform producers of news into friends. Through that you get information about your preferred actress, your soccer team or your quantum physics focus. Interesting to see the process they used to spread the word about Wavii that is telling something about the viral nature of the Web.

And I feel this is just the beginning of a process that is transforming the way we connect to information. It is about filtering the huge mass of information, now it is starting to be the shaping of the information presentation (in form of a personalized magazine, in form of a Facebook cluster of friends, Google circles…) next it might be about creating meta information by synthesizing several news into one, then it will be about assessing the validity of news by automatic comparison and crow-review, then it will be about contextualizing the information to the here and now, and then to the expectation (what I will need to know in the next hour….), then it might be mood based information and so on.

It is likely a never ending evolution where technology plays as an enabler and as a fuel since at the same time it lets people interact and therefore the boundary separating the reader from the writer fade away.

Take a look at what Wavii does, and then start to use it!

Some days ago I’ve found an interesting website called “M2M APPS” that is a platform for the global machine-to-machine communication value chain.

The goal is to aggregate companies in the M2M market and share info to create new ideas and business opportunities.

I knew other websites where companies inside the same market can register to promote themselves, for example the Green Economy Network website promoted by Assolombarda. In this case every company can declare their activities and business in the value chain but at the end it’s just a repository 1.0.

In the M2MAPPS portal, instead, I’ve found 2.0 concepts because there is also the opportunity to share ideas, to communicate and so to develop the borning business of M2M and related Applications and Services. Using social media channels and functionalities, blogs, and forums everyone can engage in professional discussions, Q&A sessions and polls, get in touch with leading M2M experts and keep ears to the ground of the global M2M industry.

Sharing info and ideas  is the best way to enhance and develop business.

I already posted several thoughts on this theme, and the reason is I think our perception of the world will change dramatically in the coming years because of the proliferation of screens. The good thing is we are going to have the time to adapt and the transition will be subliminal. Only when we will be looking back from 2020 to this time we will appreciate the difference and will ask ourselves how were we able to do what we did without using screens.

Have you seen the Idea Flight App for the iPad. If not take a look at it. And more important, think about it.

[vimeo 22901875]

The concept is to have one person, the pilot, sharing his presentation (a pdf file) to passengers (up to 15 of them). Once you board the flight (every passenger has an iPhone connected on the same WiFi network) the pilot synch the presentation on all iPad and start it by manipulating his iPad. Whatever is being done is replicated on the passengers’ iPad. Everyone is in synch and there is even the possibility to have passengers have their saying by annotating and sharing comments.

Now, go beyond this app and think about a world where there are plenty of screens and the possibility to link some of them through a cloud. You can detect your passengers location wherever they are and associate to each a screen. Then you are in business. Since everything is in the cloud passengers will be able to change the screen and use different screens at later time to re access the presentation. The world of communications will become ever more image based and will require more and more bandwidth and virtualization of location. The cloud is the immanent infrastructure for communications.

I can see this kind of thing happening in schools, in meetings in the home to connect with friends. What I do not see anymore is a keypad with numbers to dial…

Another news from South Korea. Those of you who had the opportunity of taking the subway in Seoul have surely appreciated the cleanliness and effectiveness of the underground transportation system.

Selecting your grocery for the day in the Seoul subway

Now there is a new feature waiting for you as you wait for the next train. The wall along the platform displays the products available from Tesco, a major supermarket chain in South Korea, each with a QR code attached.

Using your cell phone and a special app pick up the QR code identity and that goes immediately in your virtual shopping cart. Select the quantity and move on to select the next product. Once you are done check out with your phone (that automatically charges your credit card) and go to work.

In the evening you’ll find on your home doorsteps the bag with the groceries you ordered in the morning.

This service has just been launched and has already won 10,000 customers.

Indeed, it provides a glimpse on the future of retail! I will surely go for it.

There is so much wealth is apps stores (the Apple iTunes has just passed the 400,000 apps mark with over 10 billions downloaded) that thinking about their disappearance seems impossible. Like thinking that the mighty Roman Empire in the first century could ever disappear. It did. But it took 4 more centuries. We are not interested in what may happen in 2400 of course but the clock is ticking so much faster today than 400 years, 2000 years ago, may compare to less than 10 years today. And 2020 is within our range.

Angry birds as a web app

Take a look at the interesting ideas put forward by Brian Kennish.

Basically he is claiming that there are 2 billion web users vs 50 (I would say 100) million IOS users. The volume is clearly favoring web apps rather than apps stores. And this goes for any store, Androids, Windows, RIM. and of course Telecom Operators’ ones.

Then there is the biz model. Apps store are there to sell apps, and they charge 30% or so to distribute the app. Google, on the other hand, is mostly in the biz of ads and for distributing an app through the web takes something like 5%. Add to this that an app for the web can run on any device and you have a strong incentive for developers to do that.

The vision is compelling but I am not in synch. Personally, at least today, apps developed for a specific device are usually much better, in terms of user experience, than the ones developed for a browser. Add to this the fact that in this market the pricing is usually below the thresholds of perception (does it really bother you paying 1.99$?) and you see that there is a strong motivation to meet this market.

On the other hand, one has to acknowledge that web apps and apps are more and more stand alone, i.e. they can run when the device is not connected to the network. This applies to news as well. Your device can download the latest news once it has a connection handy and keep them in its storage for you to use at a later time. This, on our network, translate into bulk download and commoditized connectivity.

Personally, I see a future that, from a user point of view, will have information and apps (is there any difference, by the way?) local. The network disappears most of the time. If I do not have an information it i most likely that my device can find it on another devices in the vicinity and pick it up from that one. From time to time connection with data buoys (real or virtual) will update my device local storage and I will be in synch with the world.

Augmented Reality has been created by the military to enhance responsiveness of soldiers, providing them with more information ob the world around them. It then moved to specific industrial area and to surgery.

In the last decade it has started to spread in video games and more recently has leveraged on the features offered by smart phones to hit the mass market. The problem was that the applications available on smart phones were good to create a WOW reaction (because it was something new and surprising) but then there was no practical and seamless use for them.

The situation is rapidly changing and according to the latest report on Augmented Reality published by Forrester, “Mobile Augmented Reality: beyond the Hyphe, a glimpse into the mobile future”

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/mobile_augmented_reality/q/id/58142/t/2

This year there are going to be a number of applications that will change our perception of Augmented Reality, transforming it from a WOW to “I don’t even think about it, I just use it!”.

Look at a sign in New York and get it translation overlapping it

Take as an example the App Word Lens, made available last December on the Apple Store.  You point your cell phone to a sign on the road and looking through your cell phone screen you see the same image but with the wording on the sign translated to your language: cool!

What impress me is not the “cool” part but the seamless sensation. After using it for just a few times it gets part of your habit. Unfortunately, so far, it only provides translation between English and Spanish but I see no reason to have a Chinese or Japanese translation available. And the I would run for it!

Christmas time, at least in Italy, is an occasion for celebrating with traditional food, both at home (mostly) and in restaurant. This is why, having had so many nice dishes, I recalled of an apps that appeared in August last year on the AppleStore, Foodspotting. Actually I was reminded of it because it is appearing in these days on the Android store as well. I went on YouTube, and, of course, there it was its description, take a look:

Saw it? Well, I had two kind of reactions seeing it, both of amazement!

1. Amazing to see a kid, not much older than ten I suppose, providing a review of this app. The quality of the video is not particularly good but it is very spontaneous, you can tell it is him doing this and for the pleasure of doing it. I do not know how he got hold of Steve Wozniak to get the introduction but he is surely proud of it (and of course he should). Could you imagine just 15 years ago that a kid could reach a worldwide audience from his bedroom?

2. Amazing to see how Social Networks can be leveraged in any field, including food. I checked just now Foodspotting on my iPad. After having asked for permission to get my position it started to show me a number of places within a mile of my home with photos of food being recommended by various people. It is just another example of how much people like to become actors, provide the with the right tool and they will provide their two cents just to be social. There is a tremendous wealth that can be created and exploited and indeed a number of start ups are doing just that. Of course, by having someone telling you that he is in a certain spot and has liked a certain food you get a worthy information to send him more suggestions (read ads) about food in that area. And, I guess, you can release this growing data base to let others invent new services. It is an infinite, ever growing stack where every layer reaches a certain spot in the long tail and creates a tiny bit of additional value.