Technology Blog

Videos of 19 of the 20+ talks from Aula 2006 - Movement are now available on Blip.tv. The appearances include:


- Jochi Ito’s keynote on MMORPGs


- Martin Varsavsky’s keynote on Fon


… and 8-minute lightning speeches, including


- Joshua Ramo on Personal Velocity


- Saul Griffith on People Making Stuff


- Arwen O’Reilly on the DIY Renaissance


- Danah Boyd on MySpace


- Matt Jones and Matt Webb on Digital Parkour


… and many more beautiful acts. Enjoy!

A huge thanks to Merci Hammon and Justin Hall for the camerawork and production.

Last but not least: if you watch only one thing, make it Cory Doctorow’s brilliant closing speech, captured Loic Lemeur.

Here are the transcript and slides of my 8-minute DLD talk, titled "Internet Services and Mobile Devices: What the Future Holds." Three startups presented in the session: Socialite, Area/Code, and Plazes. A video is available for download on the DLD site.

Note: I’m kind of at a loss when it comes to posting presentations online. Is this slide+transcript a good format? Most photos are ripped from Google image search and some of them are probably copyrighted (UPDATE: I dropped one slide that contained a copyrighted photo of Bob Dylan).

Although this talk is about the future, I’m going to start with a dead person. He’s kind of a hero of mine.

His name is Pierre Bourdieu. He was a French philosopher and sociologist. When he was still alive some said he was the ‘grand old’ French sociologist.

Like many French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu didn’t exactly suffer from a lack of things to say. Indeed he said a great many things and wrote many books. And there is one thing in particular that he said that I think is relevant to this panel today.

Bourdieu said that human life is essentially about a sense of individuality. Distinguishing ourselves from other people.

That as a person, I am unique…

…and stand out from the masses. But, Bourdieu noted, the search for distinction is paradoxical. It’s self-contradictory.

For even as we strive to differ from one group of people, we search for acceptance by associating with others who are the same as us.

The cycle of distinction and association never stops. It’s a yin-yan kind of movement. And this movement, Bourdieu thought, drives social life as a whole.

Now, we’re starting to approach where all this leads: People as such aren’t enough, because the cycle of distinction works through objects.

The object can be a band (as on MySpace and Last.fm, for instance)…

Or a celebrity / fashion item, as on Paperdoll Heaven…

Or a place where people hang out (as on 43Places, Plazes, and Socialite)…

It can be a book we read (as on Allconsuming and Amazon)…

It could also be the cuisine we prepare or consume (as on food-related Flickr groups)…

Or a movie (as on Filmtipset, the Swedish movie recommendation service)…

Or indeed an event we go to (as on Upcoming)…

These emerging new online services are so powerful because they super-charge some of the oldest processes of object-centered social distinction, like
- demonstrating your taste by showing your favorite objects;
- forming groups around objects; and
- teaching taste to others by making recommendations about good and bad objects.

When we use these services, we participate in a giant global swarm.

But if we think truly global…

I’m afraid the laptop computer simply won’t do. Something more natural is needed. Something that fits into our hand, and doesn’t require the level of literacy and technical skills that are needed to operate a PC.

I know what you think I’m thinking: the mobile phone, right? Well, I want to challenge that. The ecosystem of mobile telephony is structurally so centralized that it simply doesn’t allow the kind of distributed innovation that is taking place on the internet.

(Dylan slide)

I believe that things are finally changing. Like in the Dylan song, only for mobile tech. There are signs that change is afoot.

The reason I’m excited is that for the first time, two critical enabling factors are falling in place, that didn’t exist before: 1) an open-source, hackable operating system; and 2) wireless networks that don’t require a license, meaning anybody - a company, a municipality, or a private individual - can set up an access point, and choose to charge a fee for the connection, or offer it for free.

I hope we’ll remember last year 2005 as the year when it all started, because last year the first handsets that are based on these open architectures started shipping. They’re still pretty geeky and not for the mass market, but when you look under the hood, there is fairly good reason to be excited.

The reason is that we can finally develop our services for mobile handhelds freely, just like we do on the internet today.  In the long run, this could result in a richer, more globally accessible online conversation that we’ve yet dared to imagine. And I hope that if he was still alive, old man Pierre Bourdeu would be nodding his head in agreement.

Two very cool projects at this weekend’s Ultrasound festival: Kick-Ass Kung-Fu (by Animaatiokone) and Tiletoy (by Tuomo Tammenpää and Daniel Blackburn). I walked away a convert. Tangibility is so the future of electronic gaming.

I’ve recently had conversations with politicians and public officials about social software in the context of their efforts to stimulate ‘creative’ cities in various parts of the world. I’ll try to sum up here my observations about how the municipal administration’s approach to technology affects the capacity of a city to function as a platform for creativity.

First, I want to touch on the definition of creativity. I believe that it is more useful to approach creativity as cultural remixing that all kinds of people can do, than it is to label some professions as a ‘creative class’. Culture evolves through the recombination of existing elements into new, meaningful outcomes. Cities, who define creativity in terms of a specific class of professionals, risk turning a blind eye to the creative potential of, for instance, local hobbyists and teenagers, who are especially important creators of new culture.

The creative city discussion could also benefit from a deeper appreciation of the role of technology. During the course of the last decade, computers have become the most important platform for remixing culture. It is likely that computer-based creativity will flourish in places where the ability to remix is supported by 1) a political climate that embraces online conversation; 2) cheap wireless access to the internet; and 3) regulation that sides with the new innovators against the interests of the established corporate elite. City officials can play an important role by launching creativity-enabling initiatives on the political, the technical, and the legal front.

On the political front, cities can start to actively participate in the growing online conversation by establishing weblogs and engaging in dialogue with bloggers. Mayors like Jerry Brown of Oakland, California, are blogging, and there are plenty of local blogs maintained by citizens around the world. For instance, I follow local talk on a blog named Kallioblogi, which focuses on the area where I live in Helsinki, and periodically check the Metroblogs of my other favorite cities. In France, the newspaper Libération recently ran a cover story on how a blogger’s intervention exposed one town’s corrupt local politics. By establishing personal and project-related blogs, city officials could greatly enhance the transparency of local government and perhaps also find new ways to engage with the public. For example, the public officials in the U.S. city of Northfield, Minnesota, have made a joint effort to keep blogs, and discuss their experiences at j-newvoices.org.

On the technical front, cities can promote open access to the internet over Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), also known as the wireless local area network (WLAN) and in technical articles referred to as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ standard IEEE 802.11. There are at least three ways to create public Wi-Fi hotspots in the city, and a wise municipal strategist would probably combine elements from all of these:

- The first option is to activate commercial operators to establish affordable Wi-Fi networks that cover not only the hotels and airports frequented by visiting businesspeople, but also the places where regular inhabitants spend their time. For instance in Tokyo, the Livedoor company has announced it will begin to offer basic access for less than 5 Euros’ monthly fee in central locations around the city.

- The second option is to treat wireless access as a basic resource just like electricity and water, and set up a municipal Wi-Fi network that covers also the areas that aren’t profitable for commercial operators. The ambitious municipal Wi-Fi strategies of some very large cities, such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, have been met with controversy in the U.S. (For an anti-muni argument, it’s worth reading columnist Larry Seltzer’s article on eWeek.com. For pro-muni viewpoints, see the entries on Harvard Fellow David Weinberger’s blog and investor Joichi Ito’s blog). Here in Finland, on my count at least ten cities have already rolled out muni Wi-Fi networks. Hopefully Helsinki will also join the list soon.

- A third approach is to smooth the progress of a more organic spreading of Wi-Fi by encouraging private residents and businesses to set up their own public hotspots. For instance, in the U.K. the Wireless London initiative is providing information about the city’s free hotspots, and developing free software to keep publicly accessible hotspots secure. The Île Sans Fil group in Montréal, and NYCWireless in New York, are doing similar volunteer work.

Cities also already produce a wealth of information about local news and events online. This information can reach a broader audience if administrators require contractors to build in support for standards like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and open up the application programming interfaces (APIs) of the databases. Open interfaces allow other web sites, including ‘social event-marking services’ like the non-profit Evnt.org and Upcoming.org, and commercial ones like 43 Places and the Events and Venues Database, to pull out information from a city’s database and offer internet users around the world the means to add socially meaningful metadata, such as tags, comments, and recommendations, to the local places and events. Although this may sound complicated, the investments required are not large when the databases already exist (in Europe, some have been created with EU funding: for instance the KuhuMinna event database in Tallinn, and the Kulttuuri.net information and ticketing service in Helsinki). Cities can also support the innovation of new location-based services by making map and traffic data freely available in both human and machine-readable formats online.

On the legal front, cities can promote the accumulation of an open library of locally produced stories, images, songs, and movies by supporting the licensing of cultural creations under the Creative Commons license. Brazil, for instance, has adopted Creative Commons as a way to promote the independence of its rich musical culture, which has historically been dominated by the commercial interests of the U.S. music industry.

The next few years will be important in defining where the global creative balance shifts, and open technical platforms will play a major role in the process. Cities, who understand how to leverage these technologies, may discover a community of creative practitioners surprisingly close to home. Such cities are also likely to have better success in attracting foreign creative people, who have grown tired of ignorant officials and politicians that in the worst possible case try to mislabel them as criminals.

As for myself, I’m on the lookout for a creative city where to live next!

The telecommunications industry is heading towards a disruption by non-cellular wireless internet devices. Here are my two cents’ worth on the matter:

How severe the disruption will be depends on the players’ next strategic moves. It’s telecoms that’s getting disrupted by the internet and not vice versa because the telecoms industry has not proven to be nearly as innovative as its bubble-prone internet counterpart. Bluntly put, this is so because it is structured as a closed world, which is dominated by the operators. It is a royal court that goes on with its internal power struggles. But outside, legions of geeks have been quietly chipping at the walls for quite some time already, and the first bands of pioneering insurgents (led by Skype) are now storming the bastille.

Perhaps the world is ready for a new mobile device that will become the icon of the real mobile internet revolution. Most likely this new little jewel would work first in wifi hotspots, connecting from further afield as 802.11 and its siblings become more ubiquitous. It will probably do VoIP and IM exceedingly well. It’ll possibly also do email, RSS, and music. All these we can pretty much take for granted. More interestingly, it may start doing completely different things. Its ability to go where laptops can’t go, and do things that mobile phones can’t do, will create new needs and new opportunities, which make people write new apps. It might be used to access place and event information in the form of annotated maps for instance. Or it might be used to download and watch TV shows. Or make them in the spirit of podcasting and guerrilla TV. When high bandwidth mobile data becomes free, some of those old mobile service ideas that history left for dead might suddenly begin to make a lot more sense. The fact is, we don’t know what the device will be used for. That’s why the code base has to be kept open.

And what might the device look like? It would need to be small and afford effortless one-handed use, incorporating the best learnings from over two decades of mobile phone design. This points to a Blackberry-style roller wheel to scroll up and down the buddy list, the email inbox, and the RSS feeds. However, it would also need to have a QWERTY keyboard or some radical new key layout if it’s going to do text input well. The large footprint of a full keyboard suggests a flip design of some sort. But it would have to be extremely slim.

Here are a few sketches.

On the software side, the limited screen real estate requires that the active application must occupy the full screen. IM would probably be the default active app because the presence status of buddies has to be visible at a glance. Switching between apps would need to be extremely simple and smooth, like control-tab on the PC. Perhaps quick switching is important enough to warrant a dedicated button on the side of the device. Click! From IM to email. Click! From email to RSS. And so on.

Here’s a sketch about the ‘full-context switching’ between apps (it was Chris who introduced me to this term)