Live Stream of MSR's Social Computing Symposium

Microsoft Research is holding their annual Social Computing Symposium for the next two days. During the event their will be a number of speakers and discussion groups. The goal of the event is to bring together people from industry and academia. The four areas that are being discussed this year are Location (Monday morning), Boundaries (Monday afternoon), Play (Tuesday morning), and Social Objects (Tuesday afternoon). I've embedded the Live Stream above.

Here are the speakers:

Location (Monday morning, 10:30 - 11:30 AM)

• Brady Forrest
• Tom Carden (Stamen)
• Felix Peterson (Plazes/Nokia)
• Mary Hodder (Apisphere)
• Tom Coates (Yahoo! Fire Eagle)

Boundaries/Context (Monday afternoon, 1:30 -2:30 PM)

• Liz Lawley (RIT)
• Lili Cheng (MSR)
• Molly Steenson (Princeton)
• Kevin Marks (Google)

Play (Tuesday Morning, 10:30 - 11:30 AM)

• Elan Lee (Fourth Wall Studios)
• Jesse Alexander (Heroes/NBC)
• Paolo Malabuyo (Microsoft)
• Merci Victoria Grace (GameLayers)

Social Objects (Tuesday afternoon, 1:30 -2:30 PM)

• Jyri Engestrom (Google)
• Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb)
• Kati London (Botanicalls)
• Rob Faludi (ITP)

Updated: Corrected some speakers

Tim In The LA Times On Getting Serious

As Tim mentioned earlier this week during tough times it's important to work on things that matter. The LA Times dives into Tim's thinking with a piece published yesterday. From the story:

O'Reilly argues that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas." Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs have cocooned in a "reality bubble," insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping the planet. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters."

Over 300 iPhone Apps Use Location Look-Ups

According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% -- far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix).

The Social Networking, Local Search and Navigation Categories represent over 50% of the apps. Social Networking includes Twitter clients and friend finders like Whrrl and Pelago. Once Apple adds background location updating (I hope -- Radar post) I expect the Sports category to bloom with pedometers, life-trackers and faux-GPSs.

Skyhook knows this because all of those apps use their service to determine a location. They've been tracking the apps as they've come out. Skyhook cannot publicly reveal the number of look-ups from location apps, but it's a lot. Right now the look-ups are evenly split between using the iPhone's GPS, WiFI (Skyhook's WPS), and Hybrid (Skyhook's XPS product can use Wifi, celltowers and GPS for a faster, more accurate lookup).

Skyhook has been making this data available for a while. You can find more on their site. All slides courtesy of Skyhook and posted with permission (regardless of what the Confidential footer may say).

I'll be discussing location-aware apps with Skyhook Wireless CEO TEd Morgan (along with Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks), April Allderdice (MicroEnergy Credits), and Rich Miner (Google) ) at the Web 2.0 Summit. If you have any questions for them let me know in the comments.

(continue reading)

Radar Report on Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web

The amount of geocontent on the web is expanding. With it has come an increased ability to use this data to sell location-based services that are tied to the web. Andrew Turner and I cover this shift in our new report "Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web".

In the 55 page report we examine:

• How Web 2.0 is empowering millions to publish and contribute geocontent to open services
• How both community and public geodata are becoming available and freely disseminated
• How mobile devices (like the iPhone and soon via Android) are becoming location-aware and leading to new privacy and data access concerns.
• Open formats are leading the way for open data
• How the net has caused the rise of immersive imagery and the use of
• How crowdsourcing is being used to build up mapping data and imagery
• How location-based gaming platforms are on the rise, but are still looking for the category-killing game

The report ends with a directory of the most significant companies in the Where 2.0 space. For 15 of the largest companies we include acquisitions, products and key public employees.

If you're a regular reader of my geo/mapping/location posts or an attendee of Where 2.0 then this won't be anything new to you. However, it will collect a lot of the key information, products and companies into one document.

My co-author Andrew Turner has also written a post on the report's release. We've made the first 15 pages available on Scribd.

Web 2.0 Expo CFP Extended One-Day; Now Closes 10/9

Because of the emails, IMs, and phone calls asking about late submissions to Web 2.0 Expo SF we've decided to leave the CFP open an extra day. So if you wish to speak you'll be glad to know that the CFP for Web 2.0 Expo SF will be open until October 9th.

We use this Call For Participation to find speakers for our sessions and tutorials. With the of help our committee, my co-chair Jen Pahlka and I select the content that will best service the attendees. Your submission should clearly answer the following questions: "How will this session will benefit the attendee?", "What will they learn?" and "Why are you the person to speak on it?". Including a brief outline of your talk shows us you've thought this through. These are the tracks we are trying to fill (with an abbreviated set of questions):

Main Conference Tracks (approximately 13 sessions each)

• Strategy & Business Models
  What are the critical and key strategies for building Web 2.0 businesses, platforms and business models? What should attendees be preparing for during the downturn? How can they compete in Asia and European markets?
• Marketing & Community How can a company best use its web marketing dollars? What's the best and most manageable way of using social media to interact with your customers? What's the latest magic behind SEO and SEM? How can you protect your brand online?
• Design & User Experience
  How do we bring the skills that have served us well for the past several years to mobile devices? How do the expectations of your users change when they're interacting with you on the go? How do you meet -- if not exceed them? This track looks at the technical concepts, process innovations, design patterns, and frameworks that inform today's web applications, from the perspective of user experience and interaction design.
• Fundamentals
  We'll discuss the state of the art and the relevant open questions around the building blocks of Web 2.0: user-generated content, tagging, collective intelligence, co-development with your users, licensing, policy, identity, trust, transparency and data ownership and access. This track is designed to help those newer to the Web 2.0 understand how to bring the core concepts of Web 2.0 together to deliver a great web application.
• Development
  The Web has shown us a new way of building and releasing software. Moving at lightspeed is expected. Lightweight frameworks with support for standards and interactivity are the chosen weapons of the day. This track is for experienced programmers looking to improve their understanding of the technical ecosystem --what's baked now and what's lurking below the radar.

Focus Tracks (approximately 5 sessions each))

• Web Operations
  Web Operations are critical to every organization that depends on the web for revenue. Sessions will cover infrastructure automation, scaling Rails and LAMP stacks, virtualization and cloud computing, caching, load balancing, monitoring, and more.
• Mobile
  The mobile web has been been undergoing a dramatic evolution, with the prevalence of the iPhone, Android and forthcoming Blackberry platforms. This track looks at the technical, business, design and marketing aspects of mobile web applications.
• Security
  It should be no surprise that as Web 2.0 hits the mainstream, security issues move into the spotlight. This track looks at technical, design and business aspects of security, from the assumption that true security is not a question of code alone.
• Entertainment
  Games, videos, and other digital content are finding forms of expression as media mash up, brands become content providers, and the social web looks more and more like a big game every day. With unparalleled engagement and monetization metrics, what do other Web 2.0 developers have to learn from the innovators in the online entertainment space?

Looking for other way's to participate? This year's Expo we will be reprising the Web2Open (our onsite unconference) and Launchpad (a startup judging contest). More details for each program will come later.

DonorsChoose Giving Campaign Technology & Learning

DonorsChoose is having their annual Blogger Challenge. O'Reilly's blog network hat is in the Technology Blog category along with Fred Wilson, AllThingsD, BoingBoing and Techcrunch. Let's see whose readers will bring more donations in. Donate here.

I personally just donated to help a kindergarten class get WiFi. We've selected other technology-oriented requests for us to assist. Join me in helping to bring technology to the classroom.

In a time of financial crisis it's good to never lose sight of how important education is to our collective future.

Technorati Tags: donorschoose

Apple Drops iPhone NDA

Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message.

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

This is great news. I look forward to the many online tutorials, events (like our own iPhoneLive) and books (like the Prag's) that will bloom.

I am sure that the developer excitement around open-source and not-NDA'd Android was a factor in the decision making. Hopefully, Apple will listen to more constructive feedback (such as the latest Engadget Cares essay) and start letting apps of all type, even those that compete with their own, be released on the iPhone platform.

(Image courtesy of Jonathan Roher)

Tele Atlas Customers Get Tomtom Data; Let the Crowdsourcing Begin

Tele Atlas is going to start selling Tomtom speed profile data. This is the first sign of the acquisition having an impact on customers and potentially the geo-data market. The speed profile data is quite impressive, as described in a press release:

The speed profiles database is derived from almost half a trillion speed measurements that TomTom customers in 25 countries have been sharing with the company over the past two years, making it unique in terms of both size and richness. Today this speed profile database already provides highly accurate information about actual average speeds for every five minutes of the day on any day of the week on all of the roads in 23 European countries and 90 percent of the roads in the United States. To achieve this kind of accuracy, those 18 million kilometers of roads had to be driven and measured on average more than 2,000 times at different times of the day and during different days of the week.

This data should give companies an edge when routing their customers (it already assists Tomtom consumers).

This is just the beginning of the collaboration between the two companies. As mentioned here previously the acquisition makes the most sense when Tomtom's devices are able to updates Tele Atlas' data stores. The same holds true for the Nokia-NAVTEQ acquisition. The crowdsourcing of geodata is going to be a very common business practice in the future.

NikePlus: From Sonar to Virtual Marathons

Yesterday at PICNIC Nike Techlab's Michael Tchao gave a great talk on their history of integrating technology and sports. Right now Nike (and Michael) is leading the exercise industry with its NikePlus product.

The first technology-running product was a bit awkward. As described in a 1987 article by the Seattle-PI

One of the newest units is the Monitor, introduced by Nike just last month.

Not yet tested by consumer or user groups, the Monitor is a $225 investment that wires chest-strap heart sensors to a waist unit that uses ultra-sound burglar-alarm technology to track pace and mileage.

Indeed, the Monitor is first a distance pacer - a fancy pedometer. The heart-rate sensor comes extra. Pay $200 for the pacer alone, or add $25 for the chest strap. It uses a female voice to communicate data through stereo headphones.

We've come along way if we are now using accelerometers instead of sonar to measure distance.

In fact the product has come along so far that their are now virtual races happening across the world -- all facilitated by the NikePlus system. The NikePlus combines a Nike accelerometer (no heart-rate monitor) with an iPod for feedback and data storage. The feedback comes in the form of stats (speed, distance, and estimated calories) and music (to help you meet your goals via Power Songs or encouragement via recordings of Lance Armstrong). After the run all of this data is uploaded to the NikePlus community site.

Once uploaded the data can be shared. In the NikePlus system users are able to bet on each other's goals or participate in virtual races. The virtual races were an offshoot of community events Nike holds across the world. Not all community member could attend so Nike would let them participate via the website - sometimes for a fee. Nike held a real-world marathon just for women (designed by women) that ended with a fireman in a tuxedo handing out necklaces at the finishing line. NikePlus-owning women who missed the actual event could pay $40, run a half-marathon and get a Tiffany bracelet for their trouble.

I had been unaware of the gaming aspect of NikePlus before this talk. Now I wish they would extend it beyond running (and of course add location to the app).

Update: As mentioned in the comments, location is a part of the app. You can share maps of your runs. Here is an image of the Nike Monitor, courtesy of MIchael Tchao:

Violet's Mirr:or: Internet of Things Via RFID

Today at PICNIC, Violet announced that it is releasing a mass-market RFID reader. The Mir:ror will connect to your computer via USB. It will read RFID tags placed near it and can perform actions based on them. I am not sure that the mass-market is ready for an RFID reader, but I think this will one will make headway in the geek community.

Via the Mir:ror any RFID tag can be used to trigger information retrieval, an application to load or a file to open. For example a metro card can bring up traffic conditions to help you decide how to get to work in the morning -- or anything else you assign it to do. Based on the screenshots there are a lot of actions that will be available at launch.

For objects that don't have RFIDs (known within Violet as Nobjects) there are Violet supplied stamps (I think that we have found a razor-blades revenue model). Two examples used in the presentation were: apply a stamp to your umbrella and you could bring up the weather or apply a stamp to a bottle of prescription medicine and you can track when you take your meds. I might use it with my passport to bring up my future travel schedule. In an ideal world I could use it to inventory my bag before, during and after travel to make sure no gadget is left behind. Violet will also be partnering with companies so that their products are pre-configured (the example in the talk was a children's book that could start an audio track).

The talk was high-concept, but from what I could tell upon reading an RFID tag client software will perform the requested action. It seemed however that most of the configuration would happen on the web. Like the Nabaztag, the Mir:ror will be a dumb-device and all the smarts will be on the computer. The Mir:ror will have an API (from what I could tell from the talk).

Violet is the company known for releasing the Nabaztag, the first-ever internet-connected Rabbit. The company strategy for connecting objects to the internet is simple:
* One: connect the Rabbits.
* Two: connect everything else.
Profit! is an unstated third part of the strategy. The Mir:ror is definitely a step towards completing this strategy.

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