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?).

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.

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!

After the earthquake in Haiti which happened in January 2010, as the phone line collapsed, Haitians tried to discover the fate of their family or relatives by using web and social networks. The major tools are Emailing and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

After that, an integrated mash-up website “Ushahidi” (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/) has been built to provide proper information about missing people, structural risk, lack of water and food, and also contains Twitter, photo tagging, person finder to exchange and provide information. The mapping system contains all the integrated information of the certain area such as Google maps.

Ushahidi made an agreement with local mobile phone operator Digicel and created a short code to which people could text their message. That message is received by “situation rooms” set up in Boston and Washington. A third one will be set up in Geneva to provide 24-hour cover. About 10,000 Haitians have volunteered to translate messages from Creole to English and ask for more information if needed. Other volunteers and experts try to verify the information and put it into the map.

Just browsing the web I found some interesting research on “how” will be or should be the future of “paper”.

“Paper continues to exist in large volumes in spite of futuristic predictions of a ‘paperless world’. It persists along the edges of a digital organization – in communication between organizations and between organizations and their customers. The affable nature of paper makes it widely accepted, highly affordable, technology agnostic and unplugged. However, the disconnect between paper and digital systems leads to inefficiencies in large enterprises.”  (from HP labs, Bangalore).

How could the connection be between paper and digital System?  Do we need a new set of technologies to enable to enable seamless co-existence of paper in a digital enterprise?

I think so: we need new technologies, and, for my project, the core technology concepts include the mash ups of information coming from several sources and (of course) connectable to paper elements. The static elements of a paper document could be a seed for a mash up, and it will be synchronized with electronic content and somehow with an electronic counterpart (files, pictures, images, whatever…), that hopefully could enhance the static content and make it more readable and rich of information!

Do you think it’s a strange idea?

Communication infrastructures should be able to provide ubiquitous connectivity in presence of a significantly increased traffic load and should be very efficient to decrease the cost per bit.

Network architectures will probably need to adapt and transform from a point to point communication and point multipoint to multipoint to point communication. Replication of data and service delivery may be necessary to distribute traffic load and to cut delays.

Control of ownership and of what information and services are overlaid on an object, to share revenues (and responsibilities) is a crucial factor that may hamper the success of the Internet with Things.

Technologies and architectures for mash ups are important to enable the business. Openness of platforms and of the application layer of objects embedding computers can stimulate the creation of offer by third parties. Clearly security needs to be assured. 
This requires a different approach to the design of objects (from dishwasher to television, from cars to trains….) to transform them in platforms supporting third parties’ services. Companies that can deliver this kind of “product-platform” will benefit from the increased product value derived from third parties investment.

Socially there is a need of moving from the idea of product to the one of services, and along with that the acceptance of different pricing models.

The concept of Mash Ups is the crucial business enabler when considering the Internet with Objects. A dress can be mashed up with offers of necklaces or wrist cuffs, purses or backpack, watches, coiffeur, gym (if I am selecting some sporting outfit). It may generate suggestions of dancing schools, travel agencies.

Social retail will also be in full swing. As I fit a dress I might want to involve some of my friends to take a look and provide advice. The same mirror that reflects my image is also visible on my friends’ device, be it a television, if they are at home or in a hotel room, or on a cell phone, or a navigator screen. I can engage in conversation and, being the dress an addressable entity, my friend could even try it up (virtually) on them, or choose a different cloth from the store inventory, see how it fits and how it looks if we were to walk together to a party.

Social retailing has taken a crucial importance in brick and mortar retail, since they transformed themselves into gathering places, watering holes for people to have fun. The Internet with Things has add a nice twist to the social retailing experience.

Education and health care also benefited from it. The opportunity to learn about an object and tailor information to my context is crucial in these two areas. It is easier to learn by manipulating and witnessing things and when learning is relevant to my situation. Is this ok with my diet or ailment? Does it mix well with the medicine I am taking? How does this relate to the things I already know?

The Internet of  things has been announced in the nineties and it is now coming to pass. The Machine to Machine communication (M2M) is already involving million of objects and Europe is at the forefront of this evolution. The deployment of sensors in many objects and in the environment is going to accelerate in the next few years so we might expect to have hundreds of millions of objects connected to the internet and talking one another and with management systems (just the power meters for homes in Europe that are progressively being transformed in electronic meter providing information on power utilization for billing and power line balancing total over 300 million pieces).

The Internet of things is therefore here and expanding. Are Telecom Operators making significant money out of that. Not quite. The transmission of information packets usually piggy back on existing lines, sensors are likely to form a local area network with one point acting as gateway. In many instances communications take place via wireless (GSM-GPRS or later generation), again with little impact on the balance sheet of Operators that in some instances are shy in moving in supporting M2M seein more costs than revenues.

The gloomin this area is actually unfair since some revenues are flowing in and more will do so in the future.

But what about the Internet with Things? This concept involves, as with the Internet of Things, objects but these objects communicate with people, not with other objects or management systems.

This is interesting from the point of view of business since objects do not have a purse, people do. Objects do not get excited and fall prey of impulse buying, people do.

So, what is the idea? Well, let’s suppose there is a way to mirror an object, any object, in the web, courtesy of the producer, of an institution, of an individual and then let’s suppose that it is possible by interacting with the object getting the pointer to that mirror.

Once we have these hypotheses fulfilled everything becomes possible. We can work on the mirror image to piggy back information and services, mash ups can let a variety of providers to aggregate their offer on the object.

Every object, in this way, becomes a distribution chain, a tool to let people interacting with the object access information and services.

This is the long term objcetive of Google, when they say you will be able to ask where you left your keys and get the answer from them.