At first glance, it would seem the service has to violate copyright. Aereo is grabbing TV content without paying for it and then passing it along to Aereo’s paying subscribers.

So how is Aereo pulling it off? Over at Ars Technica, Timothy B. Lee deconstructs the service’s blend of tech and legal precedent:

Aereo’s technology was designed from the ground up to take advantage of a landmark 2008 ruling holding that a “remote” DVR product offered by Cablevision was consistent with copyright law. Key to that ruling was Cablevision’s decision to create a separate copy of recorded TV programs for each user. While creating thousands of redundant copies makes little sense from a technical perspective, it turned out to be crucial from a legal point of view …

… When a user wants to view or record a television program, Aereo assigns him an antenna exclusively for his own use. And like Cablevision, when 1,000 users record the same program, Aereo creates 1,000 redundant copies. [Links included in original text; emphasis added.]

Creating lots of copies of the exact same content is inefficient. No one can argue that point. But if you can get past the absurdity, you have to admit Aereo’s architecture is quite clever. Take thousands of tiny antennas, combine them with abundant storage, and now you’ve got a disruptive service that might survive the onslaught of litigation.

Note: Aereo’s recent win only applies to a request for a preliminary injunction. Further court proceedings are likely, and you can bet there will be a long and winding appeals process.

Stranger: “Where do you work?”

Me: “O’Reilly Media.”

Stranger: “O’Reilly …”

[Long pause while he or she works through the various "O'Reilly" outlets — the TV guy, the auto parts company.]

Me: “You know the books with the animals on the covers?”

Stranger: “Oh yeah!”

And off we go. Those covers are tremendous ice breakers.

The story behind those covers is also notable. Our colleague Edie Freedman, O’Reilly’s creative director and the person who first made the connection between animal engravings and programming languages, has written a short piece about the genesis of the O’Reilly animals. If you’ve ever wondered where those animals came from, her post is worth a read.

(Something I learned from Edie’s post: the covers that get the best response feature 1. animals with recognizable faces and 2. animals that are looking directly at the reader.)

Edie’s “Short history of the O’Reilly Animals” is part of a larger effort to raise awareness for the plight of the O’Reilly animals, many of which are critically endangered. You can learn more about the O’Reilly Animals project here.

“It’s quite simply a tenancy fee. A licensing fee that the marketer pays every single month. It’s based on a minimum of a six-month commitment. There’s two different tiers, a $50,000-per-month level and a $75,000-per-month level.” [Discussed at the 4:12 mark.]

Take a look at some of the views BrandVoice companies are getting. You can see why marketers would be interested.

An arrangement like this always leads to big questions: Does pay-to-play content erode trust? Is this a short-term gain that undermines long-term editorial value?

Those are reasonable things to ask, but I have a different take. When I look at BrandVoice posts like this and this, I’m indifferent toward the whole thing — the posts, the partnerships, all of it.

In my mind, these posts don’t reveal a gaping crack in The Foundation of Journalism. Nor do I have an issue with Forbes opening up new revenue streams through its digital platform. Rather, this is just more content vying for attention. It’s material that’s absorbed into the white noise of online engagement.

Now, if a piece of content earns attention — if it has real novelty or insight — that would change my view (I’m using the word “would” because this is all theoretical). I’d still need to know the source and be able to trust the information, and see clear and obvious warnings when content is published outside of traditional edit norms. But if all of those must-haves are present, is there anything wrong with interesting content that comes through a pay-to-play channel?

Heck, TV advertisers pay to spread messages through broadcast platforms, and from time to time those ads are entertaining and maybe even a little useful. Is that any different?

I’ve been neck-deep in media and marketing for years, and it’s possible my perspective is obscured by saturation. That’s why I’d like to hear other viewpoints on these media-marketing arrangements. Please chime in through the comments if you have an opinion.

Disclosure: O’Reilly Media has a blog on Forbes. It’s not part of the BrandVoices program, and there’s no financial arrangement.

But read carefully, and you’ll find hope.

For example, Pew says the embrace of paywalls might improve the quality of the content:

“The rise of digital paid content could also have a positive impact on the quality of journalism as news organizations strive to produce unique and high-quality content that the public believes is worth paying for.”

I used to criticize paywalls. I thought they could only work for specialized content or material that’s attached to a desired outcome (i.e. subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, use the insights to make money).

My concern was that publishers would slam walls around their existing content and ask people to pay for an experience that had once been free. That made no sense. Who wants to pay for slideshows and link bait and general news?

But content that’s “worth paying for” is a different thing altogether. Publishers who go this route are acknowledging that a price tag requires justification.

Will it work? Maybe. What I might pay is different than what you might pay. There’s that pesky return-on-investment thing to consider as well.

However, my bigger takeaway — and this is why I’m changing my tune on paywalls — is that value is now part of the paywall equation. That’s a good start.

Finding those good ones is the tricky part. I queried O’Reilly colleagues to find out what they use and why, and that process offered a decent starting point. We put all our notes together into this public Hackpad — feel free to add to it. I also went through and plucked out some of the top choices. Those are posted below.

But I know I’m missing some good ones and that’s why I’m throwing this open for public discussion. Here’s what I want to know:

• What are the information gathering, curation and publishing tools you use every week?
• What do you like about these tools?
• What would your ideal curation/publishing tool offer? How would it work?

Please weigh in through the comments.

A few picks from O’Reilly staff

Evernote — Notable features include collaborative editing on shared notebooks (in the premium version) and a Chrome extension that expands web searches to your Evernote archive.

News.me — This daily email selects top stories from your Twitter and Facebook networks. The kicker is that it really works. This is one of the few newsletters I always open. I usually click on something, too.

Spundge — “This feels like a tool for professionals,” noted Renee DiResta of OATV. “I can see this being very useful for diligence projects, especially for those I return to several months later and want to refresh.” Joe Wikert of TOC is also a fan.

With that as a backdrop, Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) used his presentation at the recent Minds + Machines event to urge the industrial Internet’s architects to apply three key lessons from the Internet’s evolution. These three characteristics gave the Internet its ability to be open, to scale and to adapt — and if these same attributes are applied to the industrial Internet, O’Reilly believes this growing domain has the ability to “change who we are.”

Full video and slides from O’Reilly’s talk are embedded at the end of this piece. You’ll find a handful of insights from the presentation outlined below.

Lesson 1: Simplicity

“Standardize as little as possible, but as much as is needed so the system is able to evolve,” O’Reilly said.

To illustrate this point, O’Reilly drew a line between the simplicity and openness of TCP/IP, the creation and growth of the World Wide Web, and the emergence of Google.

“The Internet is fundamentally permission-less,” O’Reilly said. “Those of us who were early pioneers on the web, all we had to do was download the software and start playing. That’s how the web grew organically. So much more came from that.”

A nice side-effect of this model is that you can easily determine its success. “A new platform can be said to succeed when your customers and partners build new features before you do,” O’Reilly noted.

“The IP protocol did the smallest, necessary thing: it specified the format of the data that would be exchanged between machines. Everything else could vary, from the transport protocols and transport medium all the way to the kinds of applications and services that were exchanging that data. Jonathan Zittrain refers to this as the ‘hourglass architecture’ of the Internet.”
— Tim O’Reilly, “Lessons for the Industrial Internet,” slide 6

(The “simplicity” segment begins at the 1:43 mark in the accompanying video.)

Lesson 2: Generativity

“Create an architecture of participation that leads to unexpected innovations and discoveries, and builds a new ecosystem of companies that add value to the network,” O’Reilly explained.

O’Reilly pointed to two examples relevant to this lesson:

1. Google Maps — Online mapping services were already common when Google launched its Maps service in 2005. So how did Google push to the front of the line? When hackers started mashing up Maps data with external sources, Google embraced those efforts and launched APIs. The result is a mapping platform that’s achieved ubiquity through accessibility. It’s unlikely anyone within Google could have anticipated the innovations that would come once the doors were thrown open.
2. Apple’s App Store / the rise of Android — The first iPhone didn’t launch with an App Store. Third-party development at that point was limited to web apps. But Apple plotted a new course when it saw jailbreaking grow, and the company now oversees a marketplace with more than 700,000 applications. However, O’Reilly pointed to the rise of Android as evidence that Apple didn’t completely embrace a participatory architecture. “Apple didn’t learn the lesson well enough,” he said.

O’Reilly also noted that the industrial Internet’s considerable upside makes the need for participatory architecture vital. “I think this industrial Internet idea is so powerful and so right, that everybody is going to want to get on board. It’s going to be really important to figure out how you create an open systems approach to this. That doesn’t mean you can’t create enormous value for yourselves, but it’s super important to think about that aspect of it.”

“When Paul Rademacher reverse-engineered the format of Google’s new mapping app to create the first map mashup, HousingMaps.com, Google could have branded him a ‘hacker’ and tried to shut him down. Instead, they responded by opening up free APIs for developers. Other, more closed platforms were left in the dust, and Google Maps became the preferred mapping platform for the web.”
— Tim O’Reilly, “Lessons for the Industrial Internet,” slide 11

(This “generativity” segment begins at the 3:01 mark in the accompanying video.)

Lesson 3: Robustness

Build “the ability to tolerate failure and degrade gracefully rather than catastrophically,” O’Reilly said.

“Graceful failure” may sound like an excuse a parent uses to soothe a child’s bruised ego, but it’s actually a fundamental building block of the Internet.

As an example, O’Reilly said that one of the key innovations Tim Berners-Lee constructed when he developed the World Wide Web was the ability for anyone to create a hypertext link that didn’t resolve. A user would bump up against a 404 message if a link hit a dead end, yet everything would still function and the user could flow around the obstacle without the entire system crumbling.

Now, you may think an innocuous 404 failure is a far cry from the failure of a massive chunk of industrial machinery. That’s not necessarily the case. O’Reilly told the story of a Boeing engineer who addressed catastrophic metal fatigue in airplanes through a form of graceful failure. “The right answer wasn’t to eliminate all the cracks,” O’Reilly said. “You had to figure out how to live with them.”

Bottom line: Whether we’re talking about hypertext or airliner materials, an embrace of robustness and graceful failure expands a domain’s possibilities. “One of the big lessons from the Internet is if you don’t know how to fail, you’ll never be able to scale,” O’Reilly said.

“While it may seem that this philosophy of the Internet is inappropriate for the highly engineered systems of the industrial Internet, I’ll remind you of the failure of de Havilland’s Comet in 1954 and the rise of Boeing as the dominant provider of commercial aircraft. Over the course of three years, three Comets fell out of the sky for initially unexplained reasons. It eventually became clear that the problem was metal fatigue. De Havilland tried to eliminate all cracks; Boeing learned to live with them.”
— Tim O’Reilly, “Lessons for the Industrial Internet,” slide 18

(This “robustness” segment begins at the 6:40 mark in the accompanying video.)

Full video: “Minds + Machines 2012: ‘Closing the Loop’ – Lessons of Data for the Industrial Internet”

Additional insights and discussion are contained in this video. The first 13 minutes features O’Reilly’s presentation, which is then followed by a panel discussion between O’Reilly, Paul Maritz of EMC, DJ Patil of Greylock Partners, Hilary Mason of bitly, and Matt Reilly of Accenture Management Consulting.

Slides: “Lessons for the Industrial Internet”

This is a post in our industrial Internet series, an ongoing exploration of big machines and big data. The series is produced as part of a collaboration between O’Reilly and GE.

Related industrial Internet coverage

• What’s interesting isn’t software as a thing in itself, but software as a component of some larger system
• Software that keeps an eye on Grandma
• Two crucial questions for the smart grid
• Listening for tired machinery
• Investigating the industrial Internet

Yet, in a recent conversation between Tim O’Reilly and Roger Magoulas it became evident that we’re approaching an unparalleled opportunity for health care change. O’Reilly and Magoulas explained how the convergence of data access, changing perspectives on privacy, and the enormous expense of care are pushing the health space toward disruption.

As always, the primary catalyst is money. The United States is facing what Magoulas called an “existential crisis in health care costs” [discussed at the 3:43 mark]. Everyone can see that the current model is unsustainable. It simply doesn’t scale. And that means we’ve arrived at a place where party lines are irrelevant and tough solutions are the only options.

“Who is it that said change happens when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing?” O’Reilly asked. “We’re now reaching that point.” [3:55]

(Note: The source of that quote is hard to pin down, but the sentiment certainly applies.)

This willingness to change is shifting perspectives on health data. Some patients are making their personal data available so they and others can benefit. Magoulas noted that even health companies, which have long guarded their data, are warming to collaboration.

At the same time there’s a growing understanding that health data must be contextualized. Simply having genomic information and patient histories isn’t good enough. True insight — the kind that can improve quality of life — is only possible when datasets are combined.

“Genes aren’t destiny,” Magoulas said. “It’s how they interact with other things. I think people are starting to see that. It’s the same with the EHR [Electronic Health Record]. The EHR doesn’t solve anything. It’s part of a puzzle.” [4:13]

And here’s where the opportunity lies. Extracting meaning from datasets is a process data scientists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have already refined. That means the same skills that improve mindless ad-click rates can now be applied to something profound.

“There’s this huge opportunity for those people with those talents, with that experience, to come and start working on stuff that really matters,” O’Reilly said. “They can save lives and they can save money in one of the biggest and most critical industries of the future.” [5:20]

The language O’Reilly and Magoulas used throughout their conversation was telling. “Save lives,” “work on stuff that matters,” “huge opportunity” — these aren’t frivolous phrases. The health care disruption they discussed will touch everyone, which is why it’s imperative the best minds come together to shape these changes.

The full conversation between O’Reilly and Magoulas is available in the following video.

Here are key points with direct links to those segments:

• Internet companies used data to solve John Wanamaker’s advertising dilemma (“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”). Similar methods can apply to health care. [17 seconds in]
• The “quasi-market system” of health care makes it harder to disrupt than other industries. [3:15]
• The U.S. is facing an existential crisis around health care costs. “This is bigger than one company.” [3:43]
• We can benefit from the multiple data types coming “on stream” at the same time. These include electronic medical records, inexpensive gene sequencing, and personal sensor data. [4:28]
• The availability of different datasets presents an opportunity for Silicon Valley because data scientists and technologists already have the skills to manage the data. Important results can be found when this data is correlated: “The great thing is we know it can work.” [5:20]
• Personal data donation is a trend to watch. [6:40]
• Disruption is often associated with trivial additions to the consumer Internet. With an undisrupted market like health care, technical skills can create real change. [7:04]
• “There’s no question this is going to be a huge field.” [8:15]

If the disruption of health care and associated opportunities interests you, O’Reilly has more to offer. Check out our interviews, ongoing coverage, our recent report, “Solving the Wanamaker problem for health care,” and the upcoming Strata Rx conference in San Francisco.

This post was originally published on strata.oreilly.com.

The subject came up during our interview at Foo Camp 2012 — part of our ongoing foo interview series — in which Smith argued that our brains and innate responses don’t always map to the safety of our modern world:

“We’re in a place where it’s fundamentally almost impossible to die. I could literally — there’s a table in front of me made of glass — I could throw myself onto the table. I could attempt to even cut myself in the face or the throat, and before I did that, all these things would stop me. You would find a way to stop me. It’s impossible for me to die.”

[Discussed at the 5:16 mark in the associated video interview.]

Smith didn’t test his theory, but he makes a good point. The way we respond to the world often doesn’t correspond with the world’s true state. And he’s right about that not-letting-him-die thing; myself and the other people in the room would have jumped in had he crashed through a pane of glass. He would have then gone to an emergency room where the doctors and nurses would usher him through a life-saving process. The whole thing is set up to keep him among the living.

Acknowledging the safety of an environment isn’t something most people do by default. Perhaps we don’t want to tempt fate. Or maybe we’re wired to identify threats even when they’re not present. This disconnect between our ancient physical responses and our modern environments is one of the things Smith explores in his book The Flinch.

“Your body, all that it wants from you is to reproduce as often as possible and die,” Smith said during our interview. “It doesn’t care about anything else. It doesn’t want you to write a book. It doesn’t want you to change the world. It doesn’t even want you to live that long. It doesn’t care … Our brains are running on what a friend of mine would call ‘jungle surplus hardware.’ We want to do things that are totally counter and against what our jungle surplus hardware wants.” [Discussed at 2:00]

In his book, Smith says a flinch is an appropriate and important response to fights and car crashes and those sorts of things. But flinches also bubble up when we’re starting a new business, getting into a relationship and considering other risky non-life-threatening events. According to Smith, these are the flinches that hold people back.

“Your world has a safety net,” Smith writes in the book. “You aren’t in free fall, and you never will be. You treat mistakes as final, but they almost never are. Pain and scars are a part of the path, but so is getting back up, and getting up is easier than ever.”

There are many people in the world who face daily danger and the prospect of catastrophic outcomes. For them, flinches are essential survival tools. But there are also people who are surrounded by safety and opportunity. As hard as it is for a worrier like me to admit it (I’m writing this on an airplane, so fingers crossed), I’m one of them. A fight-or-flight response would be an overreaction to 99% of the things I encounter on a daily basis.

Now, I’m not about to start a local chapter of anti-flinchers, but I do think Smith has a legitimate point that deserves real consideration. Namely, gut reactions can be wrong.

Real danger and compromised thinking

To be clear, Smith isn’t suggesting we blithely ignore those little voices in the backs of our heads when a real threat is brewing.

“You can’t assume that you’re wrong, and you can’t assume that you’re right,” he said, relaying advice he received from a security expert. “You can just assume that you’re unable to process this decision properly, so step away from it and then decide from another vantage point. If you can do that, you’re fundamentally, every day, going to make better decisions.” [Discussed at 4:10]

I was surprised by this answer. I figured a guy who wrote a book about the detriments of flinches would compare threatening circumstances with other unlikely events, like lightning strikes and lottery wins. But Smith is doing something more thoughtful than rejecting fear outright. He’s working within a framework that challenges assumptions about our physical and mental processes. You can’t trust your brain or your body if you’re incapable of processing the threat. The success of your survival method, whatever it may be, depends on your capabilities. So, what you have to do is know when you’re compromised, get out of there, and then give yourself the opportunity to assess under better circumstances.

Other things from the interview

At the end of the interview I asked Smith about the people and projects he follows. He pointed toward Peter Thiel because he admires people who see different versions of the future. Smith also tracks the audacious moves made by startups, and he looks for ways those same actions and perspectives can be applied in non-startup environments. The goal is to to “see if we come up with a better society or a better individual as a result.”

You can see the full interview from Foo Camp in the following video:

Associated photo on home and category pages: Broken Glass on Concrete by shaire productions, on Flickr

Related:

• Foo interview series
• Ten years of Foo Camp

Heavy data and architectural convergence
Imagine a future where large clusters of like machines dynamically adapt between programming paradigms depending on a combination of the resident data and the required processing.

Open source community collaboration strategies for the enterprise
This report examines the strategies and caveats businesses must consider before adopting open source software, including: the layers and needs of open source communities, the relationship between transparency and privacy, the problems with “open core,” and why control should be traded for influence.

A lever is always better than a lone coder
If we accept that software development is a team activity (it is), the importance of collaboration and communication becomes clear. Team Geek authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman discuss the nuances of modern programming in this interview.

Faster and stronger: Looking back on Velocity 2012
Mike Loukides highlights talks from Velocity 2012, including: Bryan McQuade on the importance of understanding the full stack, Dr. Richard Cook on failures and complex systems, Mike Christian on redundant data centers, and John Rauser on the value of outliers.

From smartphones and continuous data comes the social MRI
An MIT study that aggregated and examined a continuous stream of smartphone data has evolved into an open source toolkit. In this interview, study leader Dr. Nadav Aharony discusses his “social MRI” project and its potential applications.

OSCON 2012 — Join the world’s open source pioneers, builders, and innovators July 16-20 in Portland, Oregon. Learn about open development, challenge your assumptions, and fire up your brain. Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR.

Dr. Nadav Aharony (@nadavaha) tapped into this mix when he was working on a “social MRI” study in MIT’s Media Lab. Aharony, who recently joined us as part of our ongoing foo interview series, described his vision of the social MRI:

“If you think about it, the three things you take with you when you go out of your home are your keys, your wallet and your phone, so our phones are always with us. In aggregate, we can use the phones in many people’s pockets as a virtual imaging chamber. So, one aspect of the social MRI is this virtual imaging chamber that is collecting tens or hundreds of signals at the same time from members of the community.” [Discussed at 1:16]

Aharony’s work focused on 150 participants (about 75 families) that were given phones for 15 months. During that time, more than one million hours of “continuous sensing data” was gathered with the participants’ consent. The data was acquired and scrubbed under MIT’s ethics guidelines, and for extra measure, Aharony included his own data in the dataset.

Collecting the data was just the beginning. Parsing that information and creating experiments based on emerging signals is where the applications of a social MRI became significant.

For example:

• The phones can reveal the many online and offline networks people belong to via examination of online use, call logs, and even face-to-face interactions picked up by the phones’ built-in sensors. “You can construct multiple levels of networks for the same people and actually see how information flows, how friendships are made, how decisions are made in that community,” Aharony said. [Discussed at 2:30.]
• The study revealed and filled participants’ memory gaps by combining automatic phone-generated data and manual surveys. “It’s interesting that people’s perception is not as effective as what you sense from the phone,” Aharony said. “If you ask people who they met this week, they probably won’t remember because our memories are a bit skewed. But the phone can remember who they saw around them during that week very accurately.” [Discussed at 4:56.]
• And here’s an experiment marketers dream about: Aharony and his team wanted to see if there’s a relationship between social networks and app installations. Turns out there is, but it isn’t what you’d expect. There was no correlation between the apps people install on their phones and their self-reported networks. But there was a high correlation between the apps a person owns and the apps installed by people they’re around a lot (co-workers, parents gathering at a park while watching their kids, etc.). Proximity was the key. “It could be that 10 strangers might influence me more than my best friend,” Aharony explained. [Discussed at 5:16.]

The implications of Aharony’s study became clear to me when he drew a comparison to the long-running Framingham Heart Study, which surveys and examines participants every two years. “Think if you did this for 50 years with continuous data collection,” Aharony said. “Think about if you looked at who they spent time with, who they eat with, who they go out with, how these change over time, how your life changes when you have a baby … You can actually capture that.” [Discussed at 6:40.]

You know you’re on to something when you can make a legitimate comparison to one of the most important studies ever conducted. Yet, Aharony isn’t boasting, nor does he see his methodology as the end-all be-all for this type of data analysis. His enthusiasm and belief in the potential for this data is evident in the video interview — he zips through applications in research, medicine, personal health, city planning, disaster response and other domains.

What Aharony wants to do is create a framework based on the social MRI experiment that others can tap for their own needs. Toward that end, he’s teamed up with fellow MIT Media Lab members Alan Gardner and Cody Sumter to launch a startup called Behavio, which is producing an open source Android platform and toolkit that lets anyone track their own behaviors and potentially explore community-wide trends. “We want to build a platform to empower anyone to tap into, and take control of, their own data, and give them tools that help them use it to make their lives better and more productive,” Aharony wrote in a follow-up interview via email.

Behavio isn’t some side project that’s big on ideas but short on resources. It was recently awarded $355,000 from the Knight News Challenge.

Why this matters

Aharony and I chatted back in June, and since then, there have been two takeaways from the interview that keep bouncing around my head.

First, think about what it would take to conduct a study like this without smartphones. You’d have to goad participants into wearing sensors or keeping detailed journals or submitting to 24-hour surveillance. And even then, you still wouldn’t be able to gather the sheer amount of data that flows through a smartphone. Aharony stressed this point in our follow-up email:

“It is also important to note that this is not purely about the time collected; it is also about the number of signals, or dimensions, that were collected. It is one thing to collect a single signal — say, location — over those one million hours, but we were able to collect several dozen different signals for that same duration.”

A project like Aharony’s — something that harnesses this massive network — makes me see that I’ve been underestimating the mobile revolution. I don’t think I’m alone in that underestimation, either. Sometimes the mobile shift is simply too big to fully comprehend.

Second, smartphone adoption has created an ever-growing net of communication and the potential for a database that could eclipse all other databases. If the social MRI study, Behavio and other projects can responsibly capture and tap this data for the greater good (and economic gain … let’s not forget that part), we’ll shorten the distance between questions and answers.

We’ve already reached this point in a general-knowledge sense: Where’s the best local pizza place? Check Yelp. What’s the worldwide chicken population? Visit Wikipedia. How do I get from here to there? Fire up Google Maps. But if we have the ability to safely and easily acquire data at the personal, group and community levels, the questions we can answer become much more targeted and important: How do my current sleep patterns compare to a year ago? What factors influence my community’s decisions? Maybe even: Where can I get the help I need right now? All of this feels big.

Other things from the interview …

At the end of the interview, I asked Aharony about the people and projects he’s following. His interest in democratization and personal empowerment was evident in his choices. He pointed to the Quantified Self community — a movement Behavio clearly fits within — and the Open Source Satellite Initiative, which is looking to kick-start a wave of DIY satellites.

You can see the full interview from Foo Camp in the following video:

Associated photo on home and category pages: Big MRI by Muffet, on Flickr

Related:

• Quantified me: Tracking health data to maintain awareness and intention
• Data and a sense of self
• Healthier living through mobile location data
• If you can quantify the self, can you also program it?
• Ten years of Foo Camp