I spent the morning in an event closing the 100 years since the birth of Mc Luhan (he was born on July 21st, 1911) and I presented some thoughts on the impact of technology in our life. I wish to share them on this blog as well.

Technology has become a sort of metronome pacing the rhythm of our life and shaping our habits. In a way it has always been the case but in these last hundred years its continuous and quick evolution has influenced even more social changes and emphasized even more the gap among generations.

It has been estimated that the amount of information produced by human kind since Homo Habilis over a million hers ago and 2003 could be stored in 5EB, 5 billion billion bytes. Well, in 2010, we have produced 5EB every 2 days and the forecast is that next year, in 2013, we will be producing 5EB every 10 minutes.

This is made possible by technology but it really happens because each of us has internalized technology that now has become a sort of prosthetics for our communication capabilities. These EB are by far the result of the production and communications of each one of us, taken all together. The magic of Internet is the capability to transform that individual local communications into a global communications.

All of this happens in background. As a matter of fact each of us think to  perceive technology but we perceive technology evolution, sometimes with awe sometimes with concern. Most of the time we use technology without perceiving it. And this is the technology that really impacts our Society and our life because it has become entrenched in our way of living, is an integral part of our context.

That is why technologies like the conversion of the voice in electrical signals, the telephone, that at their birth were strangers to us became over time part of our world, and we absorb them completely as the way of life. Hence, when in the 70ies a new technology allowed video communication through the phone people did not like it at all. Communications was something that go through the handset, not through a video. This latter felt weird! And this in spite of the fact that our animal communications is visual as well as based on voice, inflections, tone, volume.

For the youngster, that were born with multimedia communications this latter  is to be the “natural” one.

What does technology offer? It offers the possibility to create a correspondence between the physical world mad of atoms with the virtual world made of bits. This correspondence is achieved through sensors, like videocamera, accelerometers, microphone,…All of them can capture our communications, our wandering on the web, images of ourselves and our social networks, our experiences and our emotions. And our cell phone is probably one of the most important tool for creating this correspondence.

These technologies are on the way towards disappearance from our perception and hence they start to affect our way of perceiving reality and the way we interact with it.

There are new technologies appearing but they too will follow the path towards disappearance: augmented reality, tactile interaction both physical and virtual (this latter refers to the possibility of mimicking texture on a vibrating screen), the aggregation of social networks on a point in space, on an object or on a point in time…

They are still in research labs but within a few years they will get out to become curiosity and gadgets  and later on part of them will become part of reality.

Technology, however, really changes the world because it decreases cost and free our time.

Buying a banana today means paying 20-50c, in spite of the fact that such banana in our hand is the result of a value chain started by a farmer who tilled the tree, harvest the banana and loaded it on a truck. The truck took it to a ship that traveled thousands of miles to deliver it to another truck for delivering it to a grocery store where somebody placed it on  a shelf for us to pick it up. And all of that is part of the 20-50c price! This magic happens because of the huge amount of technology, including information and communications technologies.

Technologies frees our time from chores. Lighting a room for one hour in Babilonia required sesame oil in a lamp and that implied over 50 hours of work. Lighting a room for a hour in the seventeen century with a tallow candle required 6 hours of work but lighting a room with a kerosene lamp in the XIX century required only 15 minutes of work. And today? Lighting a room or a hour with a light bulb requires about 0,5 seconds of work.

It is clear that the availability of a huge set of affordable goods and the availability of more time to dedicate to other activities expand our possibility to live in a digital world. And this is a virtuous circle. As more people connects to the digital world, the more market for that digital world will expand its capabilities and decrease it cost making it affordable to more and more people.

The digitalization of the “person” falls into this framework and today we have already moved beyond the imagination of McLuhan futures. We already have services that create a partial clone of a person in the digital world (if you think about it the gramophone was in a way a first example of extending the life of a singer by recording his voice and playing it beyond his physical life). Artificial intelligence is now brushing close to the Turing challenge and it is bound to beat it soon, thus resulting in a digital person that can live its own life departing from the one that mirrored at the time it was created. Read the book “Mind’s I” to see what I mean.

Do we want these evolutions? Surely NO. We live, culturally, in the past. However, the new generation, the young people 10 years old, are living in what, for us, is the future but for them it is the present, it is every day life.

Sure, they will get older and will look with some concern at the future, but for them too there will be a new generation more than willing to live such a future.

The Logo of ADay.Org

It started many years ago when taking a picture was all about “film”. 100 photographers in the USA were asked to take pictures in each State during a week. That is why it was called USA 24/7: photos taken at any hour during 7 weeks.

Then Internet and digital photography became mass market and America 24/7 was opened up to the public. Anyone could take pictures over that specific week and send them to a central place where theory were analyzed and a few selected to be published in a book. In the week of May 12-18, 2003, tens of thousands of Americans took shots of what they considered highlights of daily life and generated some 2 TB of pictures. An amazing volume of storage at that time, and an amazing amount of transmission over the Internet.

Out of that a book was created and you can still get it on Amazon.

Now it is ADay in the world, a testimony of the spread of Internet and digital cameras all over the world.

Capture daily life on May 15th 2012

On this one single day we ask you to pick up your camera and help us photograph daily life. What is close to you? What matters to you? We will connect your images to images from all around the world, creating a unique online experience where photographs will be shared, compared and explored. Your view on life will be preserved to inspire generations to come.

On May 15th, as you see on the clip I cut from the ADay website, you can take a picture with your camera and send it to the organizers. How many people will do that? A million? I think it will be more, will see what the statistics will be on May 16th.
However, even a million snapshots makes for  some 5TB, considering a mix of photos taken with a reflex camera, more likely to be used by people that aim for nice pictures…, and pictures taken with cell phones. By the way, I hope the organizers will publish also the statistics about the “tool” chosen for taking the pictures.

What is of interest to me is the possibility to cluster and involve all people of the world in a task. Communications and the Web have changed our social relationships, as I mentioned two days ago they have warped space and time.

Studies on collective intelligence as well as those on autonomic systems are pointing to a yet to be explored wold of knowledge and possibilities. The GAIA paradigm so far applied to ecology will be extended to include the GAIA of minds and I find this particularly fascinating.

Lifebrowser, creating a timeline of your life bits

Microsoft is working of Lifebrowser, an application that access all information on your computer and your connection to the web, analyzing photos, e-mails, search history and more to identify what can be landmark events. Basically, and this is what Eric Horvitz a distinguished scientist at Microsoft and creator of Lifebrouser say, the application is a personal data miner focussing on you and visualizing the timeline of your life, easing your navigation through your life content.

This is a step forward in the path of My-Life-Bits, the other MS project that set the foundation to store all of your life bits into a computer.

Facebook provides you with the possibility of creating a timeline, but the burden is onto you. With Lifebrowser this happens automatically, and it visualize only those events it feels really matters. This is done using some artificial intelligence but you can control the depth of relevance to make some events pass the thresholds of visibility.

Searching can identify events and cluster them around a landmark. Obviously you can manipulate the landmarks automatically generated by adding some new and deleting others but the application is pretty good in coming up with something reasonable.It is also pretty good in analyzing photos, detecting how many people are there, correlating faces from one photo to another and hence creating relationships. Photos with the associated EXIF (the information about the photo at the time it was taken provided by the camera) are rich information sources allowing to timeline our relationship with other people.

It all depends on the volume and range of data it can mine, of course. Up to few years ago we used to delete (or just lose) data but with storage getting cheaper and cheaper and an easy transfer of data from the old computer to the new one it is more likely that data will keep growing over time. In perspectives, we will be synchronizing data in the cloud and (as Google said several years ago) we will never need to delete data anymore. That will really create a digital shadow of our life and applications like Lifebrowser will come handy.  If you like to try one of these applications, try MUSE. It will look into your email and highlight the ups and down in your life, pop up some forgotten acquaintances, and identify patterns in your communications.

It is really amazing what can be done once you have a huge collection of data, and we have just begun.

I am at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorming in London and I am pleased to see that concepts we have started to discuss two years ago with the Life and Lives in Bits are now turning into concrete actions. Nokia Siemens and Orange presented their views on how to leverage the wealth tied to customers data. And the starting point they propose is the person identity.
Although they naturally start with their customer base the personal data service concept is independent of a SIM or a twisted pair and therefore does not have to correspond to one of their customer. Actually, an Operator gets one customer per family in terms of fixed line connection but each person in the family is “a customer” in terms of data management.

By focussing on the identity and creating a set of protective shells that each person may choose to have the personal data services try to solve the issue of privacy.

The World Economic Forum has started a project on Rethinking Personal Data, a 3 years planning that is now focussing on Opportunity and Risk Assessment, Building a Community and then moving on in 2011 to test and learn on some specific areas and create awareness to Policy Makers to arrive in 2012 with a guideline document for Implementations.

What part of you should live ... forever?

What sort of amazed me was an example presented, the WebWill company, www.webwill.com . This is a Swedish Company that offer a service of managing personal data once that person passed away.

You are part of Facebook, you tweet, you share ideas with your blog… What do you want to happen to this digital image of yourself once you die? Clearly, I would expect most people saying that once the game is over,… it is ver so why caring about that.
At the same time we run every day into marble statue of people long gone that remain there to remember us of what they did, their ideas… In the past only if one was a “celebrity” his image would be passed on to later generation. But today, with the limitless space offered by the web and the growing digital shadow that each of us is creating every single day it would be possible to maintain that shadow for future generations.

Thinking about this extreme situation clearly makes one think even more to the importance of the digital shadow that we create every day and to the potential business related to that.

Facebook is going Places, Twitter can get me localized, even my favourite newspaper is localizing me.

Apparently more and more actions I am taking on the web are suggesting in some subtle (or less subtle) ways that if I share my location I can get some benefits.

A screenshot showing pictorially my day

So, it does not come as a surprise a new application letting me to share my every movements, associated with pictures and comments, to my friends.

It is an interesting one, and you might want to take a look at it:

http://deepvue.com/alpha

Also, the person who wrote this app and who I had the pleasure of meeting some times ago may be willing to share with you some of the background ideas: Alessandro Valli [av@naturalinteraction.org]

He has been working in the area of natural interactions and this shows in the app.

Personally I am intrigued to see what will happen: are we going to share a significant portion of our lives? Probably yes, and then where is this going to take us?

iRes is an American company specialising in security products (security video camera, video recorder…). Now they have announced a mass market product, the uCorder, that has been designed for a completely different purpose: to record your own life.

The uCoder at work in the shirt pocket

The uCorder, http://www.ucorder.com ,is a micro video camera and recorder, able to store up to 7 hours of video at VGA definition, that you can wear like a ball pen in the pocket of your shirt. It has a clip and the lens is part of the clip. When you feel like recording what’s going on in front of view just hit the button (it has only one button…) and it will start recording. Press it again and it will stop.

The cost (does not include the SD card) is 80$ for the 1 GB internal memory and 100$ for the 2 GB (that would give you 36 or 72 minutes of video recording respectively).

Connect it to your PC and you can download the video and then upload it to YouTube or send it to your friends.

The idea is to have the possibility of documenting your life (or the parts you want to). I can easily see this evolving in a Twitter like service and I wonder if we won’t find ourselves immersed in a video environment where it will be possible to explore the world by connecting with some person wearing this sort of device. Obviously it is open to question if people will be willing to provide access to their “view of the world” but if what we see happening on Twitter and Facebook is any indication I bet there will be many sharing their visual world.

Clearly the digital life gets a boost from the possibility of easily gather video information through the day. It is also quite clear that this kind of data will stimulate companies to develop services for easing the access to this growing video world. We have just started. The fun is around the corner.

Live Cams (http://livecams-iphone.com) is an interesting and curious application for the iPhone. You can explore the world through public webcams or even see the security cameras directly on your iPhone: the new dimension for virtual voyeurs.

When you open the Live Cams client, you find a 3 × 4 grid of live cams and you can control many of the webcams with zoom in and out or panning around.
If you see something particularly interesting in one of the cameras, you can take a snapshot of the camera feed by tapping a small icon on the screen.

Live Cams has more than 3500 webcam links pre-loaded with new ones being added all the time. Many of these are looking at beaches, strange places, animals and traffic. You can also do a custom search by entering in search terms. You can also make streaming of your cam and see what happens in your home wherever you are: Live Cams connects to your camera by an IP address.

This scenario opens up a world of new content where every individual can connect his cam and share his video live wherever he is. I think this service is another tile of our digital life and environment that some players can exploit and mash up with innovative ideas and services regarding real time video traffic, weather, pollution, security, dating…

Today I want to talk about a service improving your digital memory. It is a simple but effective solution and it is simple to use. I think in the near future people will become addicted to services like this.
ReQall (www.reqall.com) is a voice-enabled memory aid that seamlessly integrates your mobile phone, email, text messaging, IM and News Feed into an organizer, reminder system and “productivity assistant”. This service helps you to capture your ideas, tasks and commitments, and proactively it advises you. If you want to make sure you get your reminders reQall sends reminders to you.

ReQall has different ways to help your digital memory, because it analyzes your situation, looking at the current time, your location and the upcoming items on your calendar and automatically delivers important memory assistance.

You can choose to use email, text messages and instant messages to aid your memory and reQall sends you a notice when you add something via the phone and it can send you reminders. You may also get a daily memory to-do list.

It is possible to integrate reQall with the devices and programs that you are already using:  You can use reQall from any phone (iPhones, BlackBerry, smartphones), web browser, AIM, Jabber, Google Talk and Yahoo IM, Outlook Canlendar, Google Canlendar, Email, Evernote.

For example reQall for iPhone is a free application that you can download from Apple App Store and this client makes your iPhone a hub of your digital life because it captures tasks and ideas using your voice and automatically it organizes your information, integrates with your Outlook or Google Calendar, shares reminders with others and provides proactive memory assistance.

You speak or type your reminders into your iPhone; reQall will convert what you say to text and get your items organized automatically. It recognizes dates and times, location (you can see a map of what you need to do nearby) and certain keywords: “buy,” “meet”, “note”, “at home” and “at work” in your speech or text. You will receive timely reminders via email or IM and you can share these reminders with your friends, family and co-workers, using your iPhone’s contact list. I found very nice that if you shake your iPhone  reQall shows you “something you forgot”…
In the plus version you can add items by voice or text directly to your Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar and Tasks. You can even bring your iPhone to your ear and it will automatically start recording

So the real vision about a service to help you to increase your memory is to give a user a new experience about the value of keeping a digital diary, a place where to put all your digital Life: now there is a value only about reminders-organizer, but in the future, why not, even about health, entertainment, security… Who will be the winning players in this new business?

I know it is definitely not a good term to use, but some people who are tired of their life commit suicide to let them free from the troubles and complexities which they used to have in their life… However, it seems like this is not only for the real life, but also applicable for the “digital life”… Maybe some people are already fed up with dealing with social networks spending so many hours everyday to do something meaningless, or simply tired of this kind of unreal world and prefer going back to real society… You can of course just close your account temporary or permanently. But if you want to eliminate all information you have on your several social networks at the same time, it will mean that if you completely want to get out from your digital life, the only solution will be to commit suicide from the digital life… But there is a question, how? Do I have to make elimination processes one by one? Or does somebody do it for me?

Actually, there is a website called “web 2.0 suicide machine” (http://suicidemachine.org/). It seems like very easy to use. You just put your username and password of the social networks which you want to eliminate forever (at the moment it applicable for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter) and the system will eliminate all of your information, history, data, everything you have on that social networks and you will never be able to recover it. It will be taken away forever. Once you start the process, you cannot stop the progress and neither the system can do that… So, I strongly recommend you to think a lot about your digital life, social network friends, and all of your information you have put, such as photos, videos, communication, etc. before you commit “digital suicide”…

Few days ago, I run onto an interesting interview to Lee Dryburg, the founder of the Emerging Communications Conference, published on the Skype Journal:

http://skypejournal.com/2009/06/dryburgh-what-after-skype-intent.html

Even though one has to take into account that the “pro Skype” statements may result from the context where the interview took place, there remains several interesting points being made that, I am afraid, I resonate with.

“First you’ve got the telephony application itself. Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it. However because it’s substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.”

Software is going to be the basic infrastructure enabling communications. Clearly, physical transportation of bits is required but all processing is no longer part of the “wiring infrastructure”, it lays at the edges, in terminal and in data centres. Furthermore communications is not focussing on people only but on any combination of people and things.”

“Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale.”

I found this statement interesting because it moves the focus from “cheap communications” enabled by Skype to the issue of what is needed to enable communciations, sealing the fate of the switching and control points that have played a central role in telecommunication evolution. Skype, according to Lee, represents just the first tiny step. What’s next is more related to user behaviour and economic models than to technology. Again, there is no downplaying  the importance of technology, its continuous evolution is making the shift possible.  The point is that the importance moves from technology to its impact.

“Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium as opposed to dedicated circuits, specialist hardware and personnel. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted; ringing, call queues, voice mail boxes, IVR trees, repetitious verbal transfer of static information such as credit card numbers, call transfers and such like. And that’s just a quick C2B example. C2C has similar lunacy, for example needing to place a telephone call to request a single piece of discrete information or the other person’s location. The economic crisis experienced worldwide is likely to highlight such sources of great inefficiency. Here is another angle to get you thinking, more and more calls originate from a number noted on a Website and yet when the call is placed, no information is passed with the call about what the context of the call. It’s lost, so each end has to orally work more at the beginning that would otherwise be necessary. Billions of minutes are needlessly wasted on a every day globally.”

“Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone). Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behavour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.”

These concepts of personalization and use of our own information, with a sort of trading between privacy and convenience/service are interesting. They are our motivation at the Future Centre to study issues created by our Digital Life. Let me close this blog by inviting you to read the full interview and come up with your comments. I wish to close with the last statement Lee made in his interview:

“You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of increasing communication modalities. Now underpin that attention and intention based economics. Now dream a little”.