You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users.

This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop.

The problem is that it's not particularly clear at what point a disruptive innovation becomes a utility. As innovators it's important that we recognize that this point will arrive and prepare for it. I believe that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the technologies we create, and to take responsibility for protecting people who come to rely on those technologies to live their daily lives. When we fail to do that, we may find ourselves being cast as either fools or villains who must be regulated and controlled.

Ultimately, I think we will evolve a set of safety standards very similar to building codes. For instance, it appears that a multi-datacenter strategy would have prevented the GrandCentral outage. (As I've said many times before: Datacenters are a Single Point of Failure!)

Cofounder Craig Walker writes: "I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service."

Will better industry standards, best-practices, and independent certifying authorities emerge for these new utilities without innovation-stifling regulation? I hope so.

(continue reading)

Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk

At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted:

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And now you can see and hear it, too:

The brain she's holding there is a real one, by the way.

We'll alert you to the other two classics when they're published.

DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote

If you will be missing Jeff Hahn's presentation at Etech next week, you can still make your own multitouch display thanks to Johnny Chung Lee and the Wiimote. Johnny has a number of sensor hacks on his blog, and just announced that EA Games has incorporated his Wii head tracking hack into an upcoming release.

(continue reading)

Mainstream acceptance of Twitter for disaster communication...

I'm stuck at San Francisco Airport due to delays from the big storm yesterday. A few minutes ago a plane was struck by lightning at the gate which caused quite a bit of excitement. Planes are designed to take a lightning strike and apparently it happens all the time. They took off after a quick check by the pilot and ground crew. (I hope the rest of their flight is otherwise uneventful!)

I wanted to pass on a few disaster preparedness tips from fellow Emergency Manager W. David Stephenson (earlier Radar post). David is working to educate the mainstream public about using services like Twitter during disasters with a series of YouTube videos like this one:

I have many thoughts about this, but they just started boarding my flight (24 hours late!)... more to come.

WikiPediaVision: Watch Realtime Wikipedia Edits

With WikiPediaVision you can watch realtime English Wikipedia edits on a Google Map. It was inspired by Twittervision and Flickrvision (Radar post). The site combines Wikipedia's Recent Changes page with "Google Maps API, hostip.info and GoNew's IP to country service." You can learn more about the service on its FAQ. It was built by László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology.

[via Justin Hall via Duncan Gough]

3D WorldViewer Everyscape Launches

Everyscape is a new service that takes 2D photos and 3D-fies them to create an immersive street-side experience (Radar post). Today they are launching their service with four cities (Boston, New York, Miami, and Aspen). Their technology will allow anyone with a decent camera and GPS can contribute; they're another example of crowdsourcing for geo data. The cities that Boston-based startup is launching with were primarily done by their employees, but that will not always be the case in the future.

Map pages of the site show a 3D'd streetside view in a Flash player that is in sync with a normal street map (See the image above). You can use either map to navigate a city. In the street-side views you move by clicking arrows and you zoom through the picture. In many of the 3D-ified images you can view 360 degrees. When you see a large orange marker (like a chess pawn) that denotes additional information is available about a location. The service has categorized business listings that are browse-able and searchable for each city. Once you find a business you can locate them on the maps -- handy if you aren't sure exactly where a store is. In time they will make money from businesses loading their buildings into the service and from ads. My biggest two biggest requests are KML import/export of the imagery (let me overlay my own data in the service and let me view some of their imagery on others) and bigger 3D'd images -- the pages should dominate the page, it is after all the cornerstone of their service (they are working on this).

The above image on the left is from Aspen Mountain and the image on the right is a custom map. There are other examples on the site where they have gone in buildings and show the floor plans as the secondary map. Being able to take in a custom map and rich imagery and show it in a useable way is powerful. Where Everyscape shines is when they go off the beaten path and let us tour small towns, buildings and other places that are uneconomical for many geo-data companies to do.

After the jump is a video of the service.

(continue reading)

Virtual Earth: Birds-Eye in 3D

Virtual Earth is going to be releasing an update soon and they've published a preview on their blog. The low-res movie above shows Bird-Eye in 3D. They're using aerial imagery (Birds Eye) taken from 4 different angles and, like Live Labs Photosynth (Radar post), they have stitched them together to create a 3D world (only available on Windows). They give a brief description of the work that they put into it:

For background, its important to understand the challenges of visualizing our Birds eye imagery in a seamless mosaic the way we are all used to looking at satellite imagery that looks straight down at earth. Since all of the images are shot from the same point of view, it's relatively easy to stitch them together in a convincing tapestry. There's still challenges like doing good color balancing across images and rectifying so that buildings in tall cities don't appear to butt heads, but these are pretty well understood problems. Birds eye images are a different story. because of the way they are captured, there is no easy way to stitch them at their edges without introducing nasty distortions. The result is that Birds eye imagery is viewed as discrete 'scenes' instead of 1 giant tapestry. when you navigate to the edge of the current scene, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined, then displayed. Since Birds eye imagery is captured from 4 angles, we have North, South, East and west views of each point on earth adding another dimension of complexity to navigation.

I'll be talking with Erik Jorgensen, GM of Virtual Earth, at Web 2.0 Summit about their new release and their future plans.

Dash, The Internet-Connected GPS

The Dash Express is an internet-connected GPS for your car. The image above shows off the results of their redesign. It is going to be coming out later this year (sorry, initially US-only).

The GPS unit has generated excitement due to its internet-based features. With it you can search Yahoo! Local from the road, send the unit an address from the browser, and get alternate routes based on other Dash user's traffic experiences. Dash showed the original device at Where 2.0 and have since re-designed the unit making it smaller, lighter, and with a 2-hour battery life. They also added a larger screen, removed the side buttons, added new map views and an improved menu system.

At the beginning of the summer they gave out 2000 units in a large hardware Beta (Radar post). On Sunday they announced the results of the Beta and some of the learnings.

Device usage
1,229,598 miles driven by testers*; 43,000 hours logged*
80% of testers turn on their Dash device every time they get in the car**
Yahoo Local! search
More than 119,000 searches conducted*
Active testers average 1.62 searches per day*
Most popular searches –food and retail locations by far
Send to Car
Nearly 10,000 Send to Cars conducted*
Real-time traffic
Nearly 2/3 of testers said they check traffic conditions every or most of the time before they drive

(All numbers as of 9/11/07)

I've been using one for a while and though I cannot comment about it specifically I will say that I can't wait for the final device to come out. The numbers above definitely reflect my own usage. If I was leaving my neighborhood I would turn it on. I generally conducted a search or two per trip and I sent a ton of addresses The Dash made it easier to react to traffic backup or a hotel being full. Having internet-access in the car is something that I have wanted for a while and I am looking forward to the new device.

Burning Man Time Lapse Video

Burning Man, the Nevada art festival, is in an amazing, flat desert. The video above is a time lapse of the week. It's impressive to watch the city grow and then burn. Here's Phil "pEEf" Sadow's , the creator, description of his work:

I was originally asked by Tom Price to do this timelapse, and I thought it was an awesome idea. It's been done before by the Folding-Time guys, but they didn't set up this year. The images were captured by a Canon G3 mounted in a weatherproof housing of my own design up on a 20 foot pole next to the Powertainer. There were 18,486 images shot at 2272x1704 which is almost 4 megapixels each. Some of the full-size stills are stunning! The camera was controlled by a custom Daemon I wrote using the Gphoto library, which ran on the Powertainer's Slackware linux system and the images were stored full-size on a hard drive. After the event, I ran another piece of code that downsampled the images to 640x480 then composed them at 30fps into a MPEG-4 video.

To see an amazing aerial image of Burning Man check out Pict'Earth's map.

Ignite Seattle 4: Startup Talks

At Ignite Seattle 4 we had fifteen great talks (all available on YouTube). As usual the talks were on topics that we felt geeks would appreciate. Two in particular contain sage advice for an entrepreneur. The first video is Leo Dirac's explanation of Venture Capital Term Sheets. The second is Dave McClure's talk on Startup Metrics (after the jump). Both five-minute talks were selected to do a reprise at Gnomedex.

In twenty slides, Leo concisely explains the role of VCs in the creation of a startup (they put in money to make an idea a company), why VCs want preferential stock (how the VCs protect their money) and the importance of the Liquidation Preference Mulitplier (how VCs guarantee they get money back first). Leo previously gave an Ignite talk on the Robot Revolution. (Get the Term Sheet slides)

(continue reading)

Post Secret Shares a Video

Frank Warren dropped us a line letting us know that he has made the first Post Secret video. On Post Secret Frank posts images of anonymous postcards that have secrets on them. He's made a beautiful four minute film that shows some striking images and gets into some of his thinking. It reminds me of the great Post Secret books that I have in my home.

Botanicalls on Good Morning America!

Botanicalls is a system that allows plants to call their owner when they need more (or less) sunlight or water. It works by placing moisture and light sensors in plants and then wiring them to an Asterisk (OS phone system) backend. Kati London, one of the creators and a member of the 2008 ETech program committee, was on Good Morning America today showing off the system (see the video above). Both Kati and Kate Harman showed off the system during the Emerging Telephony Faire.

Apparently they are making DIY kits for your home plants! If you can't wait to try it call 212.202.8348 to test out the system.

Recent Posts

• ASC: Using LADAR Captured Images To Create 3D Model | by Brady Forrest on August 8, 2007
• Wii for Second Life | by Brady Forrest on July 27, 2007
• Animations Using Open Street Map Data | by Brady Forrest on July 18, 2007
• Ant Simulation in Second Life | by Brady Forrest on June 30, 2007
• Everyscape: A 3D Worldviewer Made From 2D Photos | by Brady Forrest on June 13, 2007
• Are You Blogging This? A Web 2.0 Song. | by Tim O'Reilly on June 8, 2007
• Where 2.0: Outside.in's New Features and the Ghost Map | by Brady Forrest on June 7, 2007
• Google Developer Day Videos Posted | by Brady Forrest on June 1, 2007
• Supermarket 2.0 Video | by Brady Forrest on April 2, 2007
• The Video Library of Alexandria | by Marc Hedlund on February 11, 2007
• Video Definition of Web 2.0 | by Brady Forrest on February 5, 2007
• WoW and Cottage Industries | by Brady Forrest on December 4, 2006