All LIFE magazine pics online

All of their photographs ever taken now online and easily searched - notice the original resolution and clarity/quality of the pics. Really kewl ;-) One more wish; geo tag all the pics and render as a Google Earth KML...please? :)

Google Wave and the enterprise

The following graphics are the best I've found re Google Wave from Dion Hinchcliffe who I've been following for years now (my favourite blog) - check these out:

Simple dissection of the "wave";

"Enterprise Wave" integration dissection;

Love it ;-)

Physical versus Digital music sales

2008 performance

"Despite global digital sales growing 24.1 % to $3.78bn and performance income by 16.2% last year, total sales still finished down 8.3% at $18.4bn after a 15.4% collapse in physical sales"

Europe:

Sales of $7,3bn - down 6,3%

Digital $750m - up 36,1%

Physical $5,8bn - down 11,3%

USA:

Sales of $4,9bn - down 18,6%

Digital $1,78bn - up 16,5%

Physical down $1 BILLION - largest drop seen and largest in the world

Performance income up 133%

The recorded music industry generates a greater proportion of its revenues through digital sales than the film, magazine and newspaper industries combined.

Single track downloads, up 24 per cent in 2008 to 1.4 billion units globally, continue to drive the online market, but digital albums are also growing steadily (up 37%). The top selling single of 2008 was Lil Wayne’s Lollipop

The US is the world leader in digital music sales, accounting for some 50 per cent of the global digital music market value. Single track downloads crossed the one billion mark for the first time in 2008, totalling 1.1 billion, up 27 per cent on 2007. Digital album sales totalled 66 million, an increase of 32 per cent (Nielsen SoundScan)

The UK saw the biggest increase in digital sales in the first half of 2008 among the top markets, with sales up by 45 per cent. 110 million single tracks were downloaded in 2008, up 42 per cent on 2007. Digital album sales also rose sharply, by 65 per cent to 10.3 million now accounting for 7.7 per cent of the albums market (OCC/BPI)

Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates more than 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.

Interesting note : 75% of global sales are still physical, against just 4% digital

Golfing baby...

Shank-a-potamus...LOL! Craig, this take made me think of you baby ;-)

Tip: watch the clip in high def and notice the computer screen says "Shankshire Hills"...too much!

SIXTHSENSE : The Coolest technology ever...?

Take wearable computing and mash it up with natural surface interface technologies and sprinkle in some Minority Report movie magic...then you get the coolest piece of tech I have ever seen; SIXTHSENSE

"SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information... SixthSense attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer."

Pattie Maes heads up the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT labs. Pranav Mistry is the student lead for the project and a pretty interesting guy... Their projects are really ground breaking but this Sixthsense project is jawdropping...I want one ;-)

Official MIT linked project website
Pranav's project website
Pranav's personal website - also so cool ;-)
Wired article on Sixthsense

Two comments on the article I found funny;

Posted by: hell yeah! | 02/5/09 | 5:16 pm
Now I can project porn onto anyone I don’t find at least mildly amusing!
“What’s that? Of course I want to hear about the specifics of your 401k.”

Posted by: Aswan | 02/5/09 | 6:38 pm
What do you need the human for?

Bill Joy: What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about

Bill did this talk in November 2008 - notice his posits re pandemics and flu viruses...interesting!

Bill Joy profile
His famous Wired Magazine article; Why the future doesn't need us

The future of social networks?

[Disclaimer: It's 2:30am right now. We got home pretty late after a last minute dinner invite; The restaurant, dinner and company was awesome and about to type the following completely freestyle...]

Social networks should focus less on advertising and more on transactions! Their revenue generating strategy(ies) should be more about replicating Amazon.com's model versus Google's advertising monetization methods.

In future could we be the proud owners of Facebook credit cards and/or bank accounts? Mmmmm

Transparent Real Time Transactional Enablement (TRTTE) is what social networking needs...not only ad injection in API reference streams and social graphs!

Why do I refer to Amazon.com? Well, remember the "1-Click" purchase patent?

I remember arguing Amazon's business model with Dave Nelson in the Novell cafeteria on a snowy day in Utah, Provo! (Dave was all on about Yahoo!...blah blah) The premise was that the business you're in is not necessarily the business you will be in tomorrow....the bases of this rationale is today modularizing re-usable components of your business... Reusable by all and not just you...

Refer back to Amazon; When they started they were an online bookstore...but that merely became a service executing upon a commerce engine...they enabled other distinct and variable services to execute upon this engine in a similar manner (aka Z-Shops)...

Why did I keep going back to Amazon? Barnes and Noble also launched their website and they had the offline ability in addition...ie buy the book online and get it at your local BAM BnN store... Why did Amazon win?? They won because of their "1-Click" purchase button...

Amazon made the acquisition of goods online seamless, transparent and instantaneous... AMAZON REMOVED THE NOTION OF A SHOPPING CART BEFORE OTHERS HAD EVEN INTRODUCED PURCHASING CAPABILITIES ONTO THEIR WEBSITES. See this overview of 1-Click and the motivation Jeff Bezos and crew had (very interesting!)

Note: remember the big Barnes and Noble versus Amazon lawsuit? Amazon attacked BnN when they introduced a derivitive of 1-Click capabilities...based upon their filed patent...settlement was out of court....

FYI: Amazon licenses 1-Click to Apple for usage in their iTunes store - happened back in 2000

The ability to transact and acquire products/services online still remains a dilemma... The notion of the abandoned shopping cart stat is one we've seen since the late nineties....

Flick back to social networks today... Not one of them are making any profits! Twitter is burning cash and people utilizing the twitter stream are making money before them! Everyone seems to be focused on advertising as the main source of revenue... Everyone seems interested in introducing the Google advertiser business model into their social walled gardens...

Note: Facebook's main revenue....and only revenue will be coming from their homepage ads...not the ads seen on the right hand side of the screen on your facebook profile or apps pages (yip, those are ads...fyi: most people don't event notice they're there. Btw, in terms of screen eyeball heatmap studies done by Google...the least clicked upon ads are the ones on the right hand side of the search resultant landing page...the most coveted positioning are those three sponsored links located just below the search field and just above the natural search resultant link listings)

Social networks are hard to advertise relevantly within... Advertising to a user is evolving into advertising for a user... Ads are becoming a part of contextual and relevant information at that moment/instant of relevance versus the shotgun billboard next to highway model or tv ad. Search is the perfect medium/platform for the delivery of this "information" in that manner...social networking is not! It is too general purpose and usually stuff finds me, not the other way around... Relevance, timing, geo location, device usage, circumstance and context are attributes extremely difficult to correlate to deliver great ad quality scores... It becomes worse when you open up the platform for 3rd party development and more general purchase data/app delivery... Relevant and effective adverts with high click through rates aren't going to happen soon... So how are these guys going to make it?

I wish to posit that sustainable social networks...no wait...I wish to posit that the online social holy grail is the transactional enablement of all content, apps, services and all else relevant throughout a social graph... Imagine the 1-Click purchase enablement of anything and all things within social networks?

Yip, that means the future of social networks may lay in being the platforms/NOS's enabling mania and innovation around individual/group social graphs...yet focusing on revenue via actually being the couriers for seamless payment/transactions/purchasing for all things above... Yes, a complete replica of Amazon...

Amazon built their business on being open...but their key component that kicked everyone's butt was that "1-Click purchase button...not just ease of use but same look and feel enabled throughout the site...whether you're buying a new book, the latest DRM free MP3, or a garden hose...just click that button and we'll take care of the rest...

I want that in my facebook account, in my orkut account...and wherever else I wish to take my social graph. Fyi: Myspace tried this within their social container but the complexity/limitations/single application is too much for the consumers to ensure broad purchase enablement... i.e. their partnerships with the big record label companies for music sales via myspace... Those are silo attempts at what I'm trying to outline here...

Why would I describe the [social graph enabled "1-Click" purchase button] as the holy grail? Well, just think of all the applications and appeal to any financial institute if a user can buy things within their walled garden, draw others into buying...imagine mass purchasing capabilities...and now with Facebook connect and the new Facebook stream api...the user would have the ability to take their entire social graphs wherever they wanted online...to peruse, comment, and finally....transact ;)

Then the question about making money via advertising is less of a focus... Give the user and their social graph the ability to leave home but buy with daddy's credit card :-) ....which would actually be their own...

Hey, maybe step one is the introduction of a social networking virtual currency standard...? ie paypal for all social networks? Similar to the SecondLife Linden Dollar? Nah, don't think so :-)

Anyway, I do believe If a social network cracked this one they would become one of the largest financial institutes in the world...providing all facilities necessary for transactions... Imagine the facebook credit card...pretty cool me thinks... Imagine browsing through stocktwits.com and when you like what people are tweating about re CSCO, you just simply select purchase 1000 Cisco shares and then clicking on the "1-Click" purchase button which is connected with your facebook account? The various applications, evolutions and derivitives of this can be opined about all day...

The architecture of this model is simple... Focus and wrap the same open standards and interoperability frameworks (eg opensocial for transactions/payment) around "buy now with 1-Click"...

Social networks may become the authoratative stores for our identities, bank accounts and manner of ecommerce...apart from ensuring non-repudiation and all the security/governance/compliance "stuff"....

So, what do you think? Is it really as simple as just social network enabling of Amazon's "1-Click" purchase button? Can social networks evolve to become our social wallets? Will we in future have facebook, myspace, orkut or twitter bank accounts? Or the facebook dollar?

I'm not sure...but...I do believe that the holy grail is commerce enablement of social graphs...not adverts injected into every aspect of online social innovation!

Gudnite!

Crowdsourcing...offline!!

"Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call." - source; Wikipedia.

I periodically "pop into" the ITP Tisch website to see what the students are up to...very very cool and quirky stuff! Here's how they describe themselves; "ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible". Check out some of their projects - click here

Kacie Kinzer is a student at the institute and working on a really cute and interesting project; Tweenbots

The concept is pretty simple; build a robot (as above) and then send it out into the public with no navigation capabilities, a particular destination as the objective and rely on people (the crowd) to help it along...i.e. source the crowd or "crowdsourcing". What Kacie is demonstrating is an in-person-real life-real time outsource-positioning-and-tracking-program...simply consisting of and relying upon willing project participants to repair directional error and reprogram positioning of the object...physically!

This is no different from the technological/electronic manner in which people participate to create software (open source) or aggregate knowledge (wikipedia)... Wikipedia describes "crowdsourcing" in a very technical manner...perhaps it needs some appending because Kacie is demonstrating it the offline biological world...

Kacie is going further, developing more robots and gathering associated data - check it out here - you can also be kept posted by sending a blank email to tweenbotinfo@gmail.com

So kewl ;-)

P.S. Click here to see some good reads on Amazon.com re crowdsourcing.

What am I up to...?

Received a few emails recently asking me what I'm up to...and what I'll be doing next... Well, doing a great deal but nothing to announce on the professional side of things ;) I must be honest, this time off has been extremely liberating and probably something I should have done some time ago. Here's a list of top 10 of what's happened and happening on the fun/personal end - there are some bucket list items here...figured I'd get them done whilst I have the time;

1. Get out there - Diving - do a great deal of diving at present. Just returned from Mauritius and was absolutely wow'd by the marine life. You don't even have to dive...snorkeling is enough!

2. Travel - quite a large crowd heading back to Mauritius this week - diving around more of the islands and the east coast with the kids this time.

3. Concerts - couple of longtime friends (school buddies) have bought tickets and flights to see Simply Red in Italy in May - was supposed to be a birthday gift surprise but Chivon just couldn't keep it silent...3 glasses of wine later %¬)

4. Musical instrument - Mike Stopforth is organizing a new guitar teacher for me - started this a few months ago but the wheels came off. Mike's getting someone that'll show up at home, flexible on time and does not arrive intoxicated ;-) Thanks to Mike's tweating I discovered that he plays in a band...

5. Fly more - doing a week long Microlite excursion in the Kalahari in May - flew again this week and the magic is still there Roberto... (I won't even mention your predictions here)

6. Literature - finished biography of Martin Luther King Jr and The History of Coal...finally! (I HIGHLY recommend The History of Coal - I really do... !!) Bought the autobiography of Winston Churchhill and Barak Obama (both editions) and started reading over the weekend

7. Health - back into swimming again and back into the 4 day, one hour per session, 80-100 laps routine...feels great at the moment and hoping I can just keep it up...5am in winter in the pool, even though heated, is going to be tough!

8. Pets - kids and I doing the Obama canine search thing ;) We've scouted pet shops today and did some online searching...we're just not sure yet...(Can't believe the price of some of these puppies! The price of two equals what a brand new car cost when my dad bought one in the 80's)

9. Crazy - Tracy and Craig are part of a local Red Bull base jumping crew - I'm heading out there next week Friday for lesson 1... ;-(

10. Mundane - I shouldn't categorise this just yet but after an interesting dinner a couple days ago a group of us have decided to attend professional chef directed cooking classes... We start next week and I'll report back with pics asap ;-) We're doing the Japanese, Thai and Indian themes over the next couple months... More nervous about this versus base jumping!!

P.S. On the side - Figuring out how I can get my hands on the Amazon.com Kindle...Argh, I want one of these so badly!

GEO tracking Swine Flu outbreak

Click on pic above for the GEO tagged swineflu news reports annotated on a Google map

Also check out this flu trends website that was launched some time ago - co/op between Google.org and the USA's CDC.

(Something tells me I should be tweating this versus blogging about it... The dilemma of micro-blogging versus blogging like this is still exactly that for me... Anyway, I'll get with it soon)