moments, originally uploaded by alex*c.

even the memorable moments in your life pile up, when placed next to each other, like a stack of pictures … and of those, which moments really stand out?

Scrapblog had been TechCrunched before, but not like this: The Real Scrapblog is Here … Finally. Previously, either we were still open with the first version, or we had put on the "bubble wrap" as we prepared for launch.

Except, of course, we haven’t launched yet!

We had been handing out a preview URL (www.scrapblog.com/preview) to friends and previous users of Scrapblog, to help us kick the tires, adjust the mirrors and rev up the engine before we got on the highway.

Despite our plans, it didn’t quite work out that way and once TechCrunch posted URL, bloggers picked it up and word started to get out.

At this point, our advisors, including Shel, David and Tara, and our peers, including Jeremiah, Hyku, Douglas Karr, and Ryan Stewart pitched in with their respective megaphones to point out that we’re still tidying up around here

Lost in this excitement was a bit of heroism by our developers, who had already been pushed to the max. As  Tara and Ryan
describe, Omar and his team stepped up to the plate to collaborate with Adobe’s Apollo team, who wanted to demo a kick-ass application. Since Scrapblog is built in Flex, Omar downloaded the Apollo SDK and stitched together a demoable application for the platform.

With a bit more work, we can be ready for Apollo, which totally rocks. It’s a bit early, but it’ll be great to support mobile and wireless platforms, including laptops, and to be able to work on scrapblogs, presentations and slideshows on the browser, without being connected to the internet.

As a bonus, it runs on the laptop as well and now we can demo Scrapblog without being connected

,,, to be continued …

Technorati Tags: scrapblog, techcrunch, david parmet, shel israel, tara hunt, jeremiah owyang, hyku, douglas karr, ryan stewart

Recently I organized the Brazilian delegation’s participation at the 6th World Forum on e-Democracy, an event held by the French "high-tech Mayor" Andre Santini, at Issy-Les-Moulineaux, near Paris.

During the event, Monique Ciprut of Les Echos quoted me regarding the role of blogs in Brazil (pdf version note: copyright Les Echos). We spoke about the importance of participatory journalism in a democracy and how bloggers in Brazil were contributing to open up the debate. In particular, she picked up my reference to the popular blog by the right-wing politician Cesar Maia, who has been openly critical of the Lula administration. However, the blog has been ‘too" popular and was recently discontinued (on 30/9/2005) because it took too much of Maia’s "mental time," even though he had three assistants, each less than 25 years old. I expressed reservations about how open the conversation can be in countries were internet penetration was relatively low, were there were high levels of illiteracy, and where access to computers and the internet were reserved to the middle class and above. I believe the government has an important role in providing conditions for greater internet access, in providing lower-priced computers and in financing local municipalities to support them in e-government initiatives. 

Brazilian Delegation 
.

The Brazilian delegation, pictured left included Minister Carlos Velloso, President of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal and in charge of the country’s elections, Ana Cristina Hofmann, President of Petropolis-Tecnopolis and co-chair of the W2i (Wireless Internet Institute) Digital Cities Convention in Europe, held at the beginning of November 2005 in Bilbao, and Vagner Diniz, President of Instituto Conip and active proponent of mobile government (m-gov) in Brazil.

Special thanks to my partner on this project, Philippe Luce, Founder of Agora-Consultants. Thanks also to Yann Mauchamp, France Country Manager, OpenBC, who first saw the Les Echos article. Update: Thanks also to Jussara Nunes, Brazilian blogger in France, who lent us an important hand. We were glad to have you with us!

For more on the significance of the participatory, read-write web (Web 2.0), see Al Gore’s speech at the We Media Conference a couple of days ago in New York.

"We
must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all
citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose
the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they
use to connect to the Worldwide Web."

Technorati Tags: blogs, democracy, brazil, brasil, e-governement, e-democracy, wireless

Ok, the title to this post sounds arrogant and I don’t mean it to … read on.

Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn’s VP Marketing, announced at the Web 2.0 conference a deal with AOL to integrate presence service onto their profile, as per this citation from Forbes:

LinkedIn Corporation, operator of the world’s largest business network, today announced that it has signed an agreement with America Online, Inc. to integrate its AIM(R) service into LinkedIn to provide LinkedIn users with AIM presence information, so that they can easily see when their LinkedIn connections are online and available for real-time communications. This new capability for instant text, voice and video communication will give the more than 3.8 million LinkedIn users a new way to maintain and strengthen their relationships with relevant business contacts, such as clients, business partners and former co-workers.

Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn [says:]"By providing AIM presence information within LinkedIn, we provide our members with another vehicle for maintaining and strengthening existing business relationships."

For an example of a presence server, this blog (currently) indicates my Skype presence on the right sidebar. (As you read the blog, you know whether I’m connected on Skype or not, and whether I’m available for a call or away from the computer. In this sense, the blog acts as my extended, virtual self (my augmented presence), and the various postings are topics we may talk about or chat about at greater length, if any are of interest to you as well. Alternatively, you may leave me a comment, which is an asynchronous form of communication.) Likewise, my profile on LinkedIn will also indicate my AOL presence when the companies implement the announced partnership. LinkedIn profiles are "static" biographies which rarely get updated, while blogs are "dynamic" personalities that evolve continually, according to the author’s rhythm of posting.

The announced presence indicator starts to make communications more fluid on the notoriously "rigid" LinkedIn. To date, you could contact or connect with someone through the system, but would then have to continue communications off the LinkedIn platform, through e-mails. This is in contrast to many other social networks, including OpenBC, Ecademy, Orkut and particularly aSmallWorld, which has had a presence server and chat forum for a while now.

Also, as a participant on Vincent Wright’s very active 2,200+ member MyLinkedInPowerForum (MLPF), I’ve read and contributed to ongoing discussions on what leads people connect to each other. Many discussions center on Mark Granovetter "The strength of weak ties" theory, in which he argues that "weak ties, e.g. the connections between colleagues, acquaintances etc., are more important for personal advancement, such as getting good jobs, than the strong ties of family and friendship." (from Wikipedia). The point is, how do you meet these weak ties? 

• LinkedIn’s philosophy so far has been to favor linking with people you have met and maintain relationships with. As your network grows, you can start to identify and connect with people based on your direct connections’s recommendations and in theory, you are separated by anyone else on earth by just 6 people ("degrees") on average.

 

• An alternate philosophy, referred to as "object-centered sociality", maintains that you often meet people through shared interests. For instance, you might exchange cards and conduct business with someone at a professional conference, without identifying who you know in common. Much, if not most, of business occurs this way, as do other parts of social life. Although it’s possible to be a member of the same professional group on LinkedIn, it’s far from the preferred way of connecting with others. In fact, it has been easier to get to know people at MLPF and later connecting with them at LinkedIn. Through discussions on topics of common interest, we can establish a meaningful direct connection on LinkedIn, without bothering to figure out who can link us up. This activity occurs off the LinkedIn platform, unfortunately*.

As such, LinkedIn continues to be a better place to referring people to for an online resume and endorsements, rather than for strengthening your relationship with them by communicating with them. The AOL presence server will help in this respect as well, by suggesting a common platform on which to communicate. Although I prefer chatting on Skype, switching costs are virtually nonexistent, particularly when you use a multiple-chat client like Trillian, which supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC.

My profile on LinkedIn is here.

*Note: time and again people have connected with each other professionally and socially and have formed relationships with each other long before meeting in person (telegram, telephone, internet …) but it’s not always easy to identify prospective partners. On the other hand, LinkedIn has perhaps the most extensive and international network of professionals and executives, yet it has not been easy to communicate with them. Let’s hope for improved LinkedIn community areas (ie. "telecoms professionals", etc.) and LinkedIn Mobile (or LinkedIn Wireless), which shouldn’t be too far off as GoogleNet gets built in San Francisco, where 342,000 people maintain LinkedIn profiles.

Update: This fascinating post at Bubble Generation explains how combinatorial gains are superior to exponential gains:

More simply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies,
which realize mild exponential gains – your utility is bounded by the
number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network -
to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains:
your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you
can do on the network.

Technorati Tags : linkedin, aol, socialsoftware, socialnetwork, presence, im, chat

With open APIs all around, the future looks fun. And things sure move quickly

Asmallworld.net (ASW), the *exclusive* invitation-only social network, announced this week that key functionalities of their platform are available for browing on mobile phones.

Link: ASW goes mobile (the link may work for members only):

"Today (10 May ‘05) we proudly present our mobile platform. We don’t believe that you will be using this mobile platform in the same way as you use the site in general, but think it is important that you can reach certain parts of aSmallWorld, even when you are on the move. The size of files has been top priority to make download of pages as quick as possible. As most cell phones have regular browsers today we have built this in html, which means you can use the mobile platform in your regular browser. Could be good if you are on a slow connection. It works on all handhelds, Blackberry’s and most new phones. But this is not a wap application, and won’t work on the phones that only have wap-browsers."

The news of Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball this week and Nokia’s launch
of the Nokia Sensor understandably overshadowed ASW’s move to mobile social computing. The importance of the move shouldn’t be overlooked however, as ASW is reaching DLA nirvana with their partner Broadband Mechanics (French Netflix  Glowria.fr is another client) … (what’s DLA?):

"In many ways the final mile of getting digital data into and out of the
home may be solved by wireless technology. So mobile services could
also become our main artery onto the Internet and world of on-line
media.

It’s obvious that “anything, anytime, anywhere” means mobility is essential.

Mobile devices will soon be in the hands of over half the world’s
population. Integrating not only gateways, but also mobile driven
applications and services into DLAs, is going to be a key
differentiator moving forward.

So when you mix people and social networking, media and devices,
content, communications, and mobility—and add our magic sauce—then,
poof, it’s a DLA: value-added, revenue-generating, cost savings, products and services for our clients and their customers."

How long before other online social networks 1) go mobile and 2)  incorporate Dodgeball- or Sensor-like proximity features?

Nokia Sensor’s developers briefly mentioned in a lecture the synergies between central networks (such as LinkedIn or online dating sites) and proximity networks. Likewise, it seems to me Pleasurecards is an ideal complement to mobile social computing (I’m not a member / would like to be invited).

On another note, this year we’ve already seen a number of acquisitions, with IAC/InterActiveCorp –> AskJeeves –> Bloglines, Yahoo! –> Flickr, Google –> Dodgeball and Sabre –> LastMinute.com (for 577M pounds) … As Marc Canter says, who’s next?

Technorati Tags: socialnetworks, socialsoftware, nokia, google, dodgeball, asw

Sapago’s Art-FID is a handheld, multimedia information system for gallery artwork. Visitors
borrow the system at the door and then scan tags placed near the works
to get more details, including the artist’s biography, sound, video, the work’s price tag, and so on.

Link: Sapago Art-FID product pictures.

Most gallery visitors are not experts in art and are uncomfortable asking about the medium, artist or style for fear of looking unknowledgeable. It is frustrating for gallery owners and managers to know that a customer has questions but to get only a “just browsing” from them.

Further to my previous posts on Mobile MUSE and Spin-Off Tourism and Gaming Concepts and on Increased Interaction with your Environment, these systems could be further enhanced to allow for the user to provide his own feedback, comments, pictures, photos and so on about the artwork.

Via Engadget. Technorati Tags: rfid, wireless, tourism

"No matter how colorful you make it, content will never be king in a wireless world. It’s not the content that matters – it’s the contact" writes Douglas Rushkoff in his often-quoted article in The Feature.

This statement rings true based on my experience in mobile marketing and content companies. In fact, relevant, timely content can lead to viral distribution, which is about giving people the opportunity for social interaction (see "Social Currency"). Unfortunately, many large mobile phone operators and device manufacturers do not develop the contact aspect enough and prefer to seek new content (for instance, widespread consumer adoption of SMS came as a surprise).

This February I was kindly extended an invitation to visit the 3GSM congress in Cannes by Oberthur Card Systems. While there, I came across Eleksen, a company innovating with fabric sensor technology and was intrigued by their rollable tactile keyboard:

"Among our achievements within this sector are our Logitech and Orange fabric keyboards; providing a full QWERTY keyboard that can be rolled up when not in use, for people on the move. Our fabric keyboard for the Logitech M500 PDA range recently received the IDEA Business Week Gold Award for Innovation (2004)."

The pictured rollable fabric keyboard for mobile devices makes it significantly easier and more convenient to work as well as to establish contact with others
(for example, by making it easier to write e-mails, sms or even to chat … no more sore thumbs from texting!).

Today, I came across  Philips-Polymer Vision’s paper-thin rollable screen, which looks like something out of a science-fiction movie:

"In a world of powerful, ‘always connected’ wireless devices, Polymer Vision’s goal is to provide the leading technologies for large displays in small mobile devices. We’re enabling whole new design concepts in mobile products, opening up revolutionary possibilities in form and flexibility."

Besides being more pleasant to watch streaming video, images or text on a large screen, rollable displays also make it easier to share content with others. For instance, the picture below, from Polymer Vision’s site, shows two business people jointly viewing the screen on a mobile device.

Today, this situation might occur over a brochure, a laptop screen or the small screen of a mobile phone. Rollable screens multiply the types of information that can be displayed and create additional, compelling opportunities for social interaction.

These innovations are compelling technologies in their own right and hopefully mobile device manufacturers will soon incorporate them into new models. Together, they are sure to enhance your effectiveness not only in working, but also in developing business and social relationships … in other words, your ability to make and maintain contact.

Link: Samsung SCG-S260 Superimposing Cameraphone : Gizmodo.

Samsung’s SCG-S260 cell phone lets you dabble in compositing, allowing you to superimpose a handwritten note over another image. Just snap a shot of your note and your background image and let it work its magic.

Samsung’s technology partner has not been disclosed, but they might be partnering with French start-up RealEyes3D, whose Phone2Fun product family "allows camera phones users to send hand-written messages with text, drawings or pre-printed information".

In theory, this should make sending MMS more compelling … but in practice it’ll be an uphill battle:

• Currently, about 2 Billion SMS are being sent per month in France, compared to 25 Million MMS per year. Sending a picture is compelling enough reason to use an MMS and the real blockage is the cost of sending one, not the lack of fun features. Sending an SMS costs a fraction of what it costs to send an MMS.
• Besides high pricing, operators are equally notorious for poor marketing. Samsung cameraphones already sell well without this feature, which the user will perceive as a nice gimmick.
• Now, picture a salesman at a retail store doing a demo and selling this service as a key service (see picture above): "let’s find a piece of paper" … "where’s my pen" … "ok, now I’ll write something cute" … "I need to take a picture of what I just wrote" … "ok, now let me take a picture of you" … "smile" … "now, let’s combine your picture with the note I scribbled" … "see how easy that was?!"

  Not! How many such demos do you think a salesman will do before he stops telling prospects about the nifty feature? 

More promising is RealEyes3D’s new Digitizer3 (“Digitizer cubed”) product, a camera phone document scanner
service for business users.

Update 7/3/05:

Samsung’s partner is indeed RealEyes3d, according to this press statement released the day following my post:

Realeyes3D, the pioneer in handwritten messaging and other embedded applications and content services for camera phones, today announced the world-premiere availability of handwritten messaging on Samsung’s SCH-S260 handset, released in Korea. This launch follows the signing of an extensive global agreement, under which Samsung has licensed Realeyes3D’s w-Postcard™ and Digitizer™ handwritten messaging applications for integration as standard features in its camera phones.

That’s great news for RealEyes3D. To appreciate the context of adding such features to MMS, The Feature published an article last year regarding the lack of success of WAP and MMS. According to the article:

"WAP and MMS failed to meet expectations because services were designed by … ‘default thinking,’ a clichéd and unquestioned mindset
that combines "a weak collection of axioms of design, broad market
visions, or rules of execution that aren’t clearly articulated. This
collection exists in the background, much like the assumption that
gravity exists ….

It is possible to create quite a complex MMS, one that includes not
only a picture but sound and text as well. This has clear value as a
gift. There could be a small study in the gift giving groups to see
how they would respond to photos as gifts…"

In other words, the innovative w-Postcard application from RealEyes3D adds a more compelling context to send photos by MMS. Admittedly, it is not touted as a killer application meant to boost MMS messages. Nevertheless, whether w-Postcard is compelling enough for people to use under current high MMS pricing by operators remains to be seen.

Full disclosure:

I interviewed with RealEyes3D in October 2004.

Technorati Tags: cameraphone, samsung,

Looking for a wireless hotspot to get online while on the go? Have a look at The Hotspot Heaven, tracking over 26,000 hotspots worldwide (US, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Asia, South Pacific and Australia). You can search by Zip code, by wireless provider or by type of facility: airport, hotel, cafe or bookstore. Great service … I found a couple of hotspots near me I didn’t know existed.

The SLIN-expo at the La Defense CNIT costs 10 Euros to get in, but you can get your money’s worth if you opt for some of the good deals on offer by the exhibitors. For instance, Kyocera’s digital cameras are on promotion and
SixApart, creators of Typepad, are offering 3 months free trial to new bloggers.
There’s also a large games area with lots of consoles where you can try the latest from
X-box, Playstation and Sega.

Read more

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