Privacy: AOL and Google...tid bits

Reading in TC about AOL's move to help the RIAA track down private users that transfer "illegal" content through their AOL accounts reminded me of the lengths that some of these big boys will go to in order to continue in their losing DRM battle. On a slightly similar note here is an interesting "Google conspiracy" clip that i found at Go2Web2 - a worth while web2.0 blog by fellow blogger and Israeli Orly Yakuel

MC

Microsoft Surface vs. SapceTime - real implementation of 'cool" UI

So there is quite a lot of buzz around the unveiling of several new UI related products - the MS Surface computer and the new SpaceTime 3D search engine/browser (see the links to TechCrunch posts). As far as UI goes the concept of enhancing the GUI with 3D graphics and intuitive interfaces has been around for quite a while. Take a look at BumpTop or the great UI in the Moxi set-top-box. Not surprisingly MS Research had a long time 3D desktop project which was probably the pre cursor to some of the new stuff. As I said in the past - cool 3D UI is limited in its usability due to I/O issues - this is what will make the difference between really useful products and eye candy. With all the deep rooted "issues" we all have with MS - the surface computer is a real breakthrough in the paradigm as it combines 3D with natural input techniques to render (what looks like) a superior UX. I wonder if there are any plans to incorporate more 3D input beyond the multi touch screen. Something like a 3D pen (see Epos) could add depth to the experience...



MC

Vertical model of VW?

So I'd like to share some thoughts about how I imagine the vertical of VW might evolve from its current fragmented form. Right now it seems that most VW (I am talking about "free from" VW and not WoW style) have adapted the following structure:

• Endusers – like in everyday life people consume services and goods in the form of entertainment, education, shopping, leisure etc. They also interact socially.


• Infrastructure and service providers – these could be stores, data centers, media outlets, financial services, project integrators (like ESC), marketers (like Centric ) retailers etc. Out of these some are extensions of larger RW brands and some are local "in world".


• World "owners" – these are the entities making the rules and deciding upon the theme, content and so on. At this point in time they are key players that drive the industry forward with new ideas and concepts.


• Platforms - providers of the basic engines behind the experience (like Forterra, SL, BigWorld and so on)

Obviously some of the current VW have a few of these functions merged (i.e. – SL is both platform and world owner and as such didn’t need someone to build their world at day one). As this is an emerging vertical there is still very little clarity as to where it might go. This will also depend on VW going towards Metaverse style models that are all inclusive environments or limited functionality theme specific outlets (like MTV Virtual Laguna Beach).

After several talks to people in the industry my current thoughts are somewhere along these lines:

• Platforms are the most challenging technically and suffer the most form lack of interoperability. They take a long time to develop, witching costs are high and are investment intensive. For these reasons I foresee this as one of the places more likely to see the big names (Google, MS) so future consolidation and/or standardization is a probable outcome. With that in mind it is safe to assume that better tools for rapid deployment will lower the technical barriers to creating VW in the future.


• Service and infrastructure - right now this is a really segmented area, with some businesses just small time and others large brands. This sector could split up into two where the bottom is basic infrastructure (financial, V real estate, security, IT and so on) and on top of it a myriad of retail or consumer businesses. At the end of the day if these worlds are going to scale up most of the basic service providers need to consolidate and be big names that can support large scale operations. Moreover, leveraging their RW brand trust (say like banks or insurance) will make it easier to attract heavy clients in VW as well.


• Integrators - integrators and world builders today thrive on the fact that platforms are not easy to use and thus this function is critical for players who are not technology companies (MTV, BBC, WalMart). They make much less sense in a world where big players offer wide range services, interoperability is better and platforms are more ubiquitous. Current vertical players (like ESC or Chung) will either consolidate or shrink.
  
• World owners - right now they are the driving force (have the crazy ideas) in a wider perspective there is a very strong survivability bias - some will be big and others disappear or remain niche players. Here again big names might come up.
  

In moving from niche to global mass market VW will need to adapt their verticals to be coherent within the larger scheme of things and within RW sensibility.

MC

Ultimate frisbee, Net Generation and alternative forms of governance

Hokay
So as part of my never ending ultimate frisbee political endeavors I have been part of an ongoing discussion about the future of the sport in Israel (as board member of Flow -Israeli Flying Disc Association). Part of my ongoing struggle is transforming the way the sport here is played and viewed by its own participants. I wont delve into that too much just to say that one emerging theme has been that of how the sport is governed. For those unfamiliar with the sport (shame on you!) one of the main cornerstones around which proponents focus is Spirit Of The Game - which basically means that people take it upon themselves to treat each other fairly and respectfully and thus the rules are built around self refereeing. This has created a sort of "outcast" or "alternative" feel to the community. So when governance is talked about there is always the conflict between the "power to the people" crowd who don't want structure and want to leave the players responsible for everything - and the classic hierarchical structures that most of us (yours truly amongst them) feel are critical for advancing forward.
So...well I have started to think and look around and see what other forms of governance are available apart from classical delegative hierarchical democracy.
Thinking about the current trends in the business arena, especially the internet and new media one starts to think how the principles of coopetition and distributed co creation could impact how we do things here. Most of the material that I have come across deal either with commercial coopetition in which business entities have a vested interest in gaining traction for new technology, breaking some R&D barrier or pushing standards. In these cases they usually create a consortium or NPO or even a JV and usually declare their IPR to others, reveal some of their future plans and so on. Other instances of non classical structures often occur in international relations context (like the UN, EPI and others) some interesting thoughts on this type of interaction can be found here. In these instances national entities (which are hierarchical in and of themselves) interact as peers to try and govern hypernational issues.
Another interesting example is TakingItGlobal - a youth founded and centred NPO that encourages youth participation in political, social and environmental issues. TIG works through education programs created by its members in cooperation with partner organizations and has a heavy emphasis on web based participation.
It would seem that most of these forms of peer cooperation examples put an emphasis on deliberative process as opposed to a bargaining one. That is - instead of a bunch of disparate entities bargaining over the outcome as viewed from their perspectives, deliberation requires that prior to decision making the problems are well understood and articulated and clear metrics for the success of the process are put forth and agreed upon by the parties. This is in line with current thought regarding win/win or integrative negotiations as opposed to distributive negotiations.
What can be learned? Well it seems that no one has come up with a complete alternative to some sort of power delegation. This might have to do with the fact that deliberative processes are by their nature long. They lend themselves to important non urgent issues but fail with urgent matters need to be dealt with (think "in battle" or "in game" situations).

I would argue that the advent of connectivity and IT has not really changed the basic premise of governance - sometimes a decision needs to be made quickly and this means that very few people can be involved. Technology will however narrow the gap of applicable situations for using collaborative processes. Employing technologies like web polls, wiki's, forums and such will allow us to manage the collaboration across a wide audience and with shorter cycle times. Take a look at what the UPA is doing with the Ultimate Revolution - a strategic planning process with a heavy emphasis on member participation based on web enabled forums and data collections, as well as conventional meetings. The process chart lets you see how they have chosen to mix traditional with new.
So can we manage things differently? I believe there is much room for inclusion of new approaches into current thinking and mitigate some of the principal-agent issues that classic governance suffers from.

This needs to be done with caution - not every aspect can be freely translated into these type of processes and some aspects will not stand much to gain. The most probable areas for incorporating collaboration are:

• Strategic planning
• Rule evolution
• Fund raising
• Event planning
• League moderation
• Knowledge base creation
• Community reach out

One caveat that needs to be dealt with is the loss of "experts". Many times in collaborative processes there is equal weight put on each contributor. This means that more often than not popular views get acknowledged rather than views based on hardcore expertise (this problem arises with search engines like Google that rank according to popularity...). The UPA took care of this by manually putting in various expert groups and or decision milestones where management will be involved. This works well for a strategic issue that deserves detailed attention and planning. If we want to move a step further and create many other semi self governed processes we will need to devise an expert ranking system that will moderate the process effectively while still allowing the man on the street to push change ahead.
I will try to followup on this issue with David Barkan - who has been consulting the UPA in their process (as well as being a long time player/coach/prophet and friend of Flow...)
MC

3D I/O as VW enabler

For the past couple of months I have been pondering the issue of VW mainstream penetration as a 3D extension or hull of the WWW.

In the recent VW2007 in NYC, IBM rep was talking extensively about the 3Dnet - what he/they see as the future metaverse like internet.

So beyond the SF connotations what is really the key issue that might drive this development? Personally I feel that I/O devices are THE critical missing link in our 3D experience (of course things like BW, MIPS interop and so on are also not there yet). These devices were basically not even touched upon at VW and in a local gaming conference I attended, and are only lightly touched upon in the blogging community as far as I can see.

The 3D information revolution is mainly based on the premise that our brain processes 3D data faster and more efficiently than 2D as it has honed these skills over many years of evolution(very similar to the way color adds a lot to our image processing abilities such as depth perception, object recognition and so forth). That basically means that the optimal pre-processing of visual information requires that it be rendered in REAL 3D.
The problem is that the current 3D is a mere 2D projection of 3D objects and does not allow our brain to use the information in its fullest (e.g. - two eyes don't really have different perspectives, small head movements do not change the point of view and so on). I argue that when devices allowing REAL3D experience become more wide spread we will be able to harness the power of this revolution. I am talking about devices like haptic gloves and VR goggles and in the future probably brain implants.
The current state of such devices is that they are not there yet as far as price point, performance and usability (some early examples: PureDepth, Icuiti). They will undoubtedly debut in medical/military/research applications or in high end gaming platforms - but as the price/performance mix changes such offerings will become household favorites (just like WiFi, broadband, MP3's and cellphones). A recent article in SciAm featured two extreme high end devices aimed and the radiology field (read $50K a pop!) but it is not far reaching to think that at the rate we are going now we will have such CE devices gaining popular acceptability within the next ten years.

Most skeptics usually point to the fact that text comprehension and searching does not lend itself to 3D....I beg to differ!
Text is not only about reading. Most of what we do with text is search and arrange textual items within various contexts - like lookup something, schedule an appointment, edit a post and so on. To that end it is quite probably that 3D interfaces will drastically change the way we go about these tasks. just look at MSresearch demo to think about what could be next (and there are many others.
The reason that text is such is that it is the only form of information that is formally learned and not hardwired into our brain like say - recognizing faces. Thus text evolved together with the technology that we invented to make it (chisel - feather - fountain pen - ballpen - printing press -writing machine - computer - T9...).One has to wonder what type of text abstraction could be formed when 3D reading and writing is freely available....could we invent a new way to write and read that utilizes 3D?
MC

Overfeaturing

So over featuring has been dubbed one of the big nono's or failure factors of many startups and is a talked about issue with current product evolution in CE and consumer SW. Just a funny article/concept that reminded me of that and how bad things taken to extreme could be funny. Case in point is the Swiss Army Knife $1200 godzilla. Read a funny user report.

MC

DRM - knowledge as an economic good and hierarchies in media PART ONE

So this post started as something about DRM and intellectual property a week ago but became too long...so I decided to break it down into two parts. Here is the first:
Last week there was some uproar at Digg concerning the BluRay crack code (part of the DRM scheme they are using) and the site's moderation and deletion of posts and user accounts of people who posted it. Many of the threads concerned take the F-U approach towards the RIAA and corporate America.
One more interesting and balanced post that touched upon the issue of laws as part of the underpinnings of our society and also called for proactive approaches and for people to try and suggest solutions for the issues.
Obviously this issue revolves around two critical themes - freedom of speech and intellectual property rights. Though most people tend to focus on the first i would like to look a little of the IPR issue (an easy overview of IPR can be found .
So essentially what is the big deal with IPR? Well it turns out that the crux here is the fact that ideas or knowledge are a special case of "good" in the economic sense. Why are they special - well mostly due to the fact that they can be copied without end, and if i give you my IPR i am not left with less, and also that once you expose someone to your IPR you cannot take it back. This creates a situation where (at least according to common schools of thought) if an open economy is left to its own accord there will be very little incentive for people to create any new knowledge since they spend huge resources on creating them but cannot reap the rewards.
so the classical view was to give the creators some sort of limited monopoly for using the idea and keeping other people from using it (hence patents, copy rights and trade marks).
The main problem is that the rate at which the law and big corporations have been able to adapt to the new digital economy and information age is too slow. The result is that some entities receive unreasonable IP rights that grant them say patents over doing square roots, while others (especially so in the media industry) are helpless against piracy and digital redistribution of their material.
So to the point at hand - media. Let's review the issue again. some people seem to feel that no matter what type of media we are talking about - the solution should basically be scrap DRM and let all digicontent be free...hmm. So what would be the incentive to create it in the first place?
Some more advanced ideas talk about empowering the artists by cutting the publishers out of the loop. This is already being done by some sites offering direct PayPal donations to artists. one of the things people are missing here (IMHO) is the fact if we have learned anything form the web2.0 revolution is that quality content is hard to come by and difficult to create. Taking an idea from Wikinomics: the three cornerstones of p2p, non-hierarchical co creation are:

• Object of creation is information or culture - puts low threshold on participation
• Work needs to be divisible into small chunks - so people can contribute with small effort
• Cost of re-assembly and editing needs to be low

So how does this apply here? Well obviously not all media is the same! I shuffled these ideas around a bit and suggest looking at the problem using the following filters (this approach is by no means perfect - but I will see how this pans out):

• ease of creation (what equipment is needed, how deep is the skill set, funds, need of concurrent effort vs. time deferred effort, division of labor and editing)
• criticallity of the human brain in analyzing the media (sensory inputs, cognitive vs. visceral digestion, sensitivity to distortion)
• ease of distribution (bandwidth, QoS, device and system requirements)

[ I borrow here the terminology of visceral from cognitive sciences. Namely from Donald Norman's Emotional Design]

What is the outcome? Well considering that IPR is worth the effort only when the creation is of high quality (read: not MySpace junk, not just funny flicks on YouTube or silly photos on Flicker) here is my take on it:

Text:

• Creation -written media is the easiest kind to create. It requires only thought and research (this can take years of course), but the tools of production are these days basically a simple laptop. And owing to the nature of the effort there is no real need for concurrency (e.g. - no need for 20 people to be in the same room to do this). Granted editorial effort is needed here - but at the end of the day all you need is a wiki SW or some other text editor and time - the general scope of the creation can be agreed upon and every person can be allocated a part of the work.
• Brain -our understating of written language is 100% cognitive (it requires higher brain functions to interpret the symbols and create the meaning) we are very insensitive to distortion. as an example think of the following: I can very easily read text in any font, probably in font sizes 6-50, in two languages (that's all I know), on the laptop, newspaper, small paperback, billboard, piece of paper and so on.
• Distribution -The distribution of such media is very easy - in compresses well and can be sent in small installments and easily recombined. It is mostly device agnostic

The end result is that media in the form of text lends itself to low cost creation and distribution schemes and as such will tolerate considerable distortion and changes along the way. This is evident in the fact that some blogs or community based projects are gaining respectability as a real information source (whether news, literary or analysis).

Photos and graphic art:

• Creation - high quality media of this kind requires usually more sophisticated equipment (say good quality camera, high end computer, knowledge of art, sophisticated SW, maybe lighting equipment etc.) It might also require you use a model, travel places, test out stuff and spend resources. To effectively collaborate on such a project is also quite more difficult - it is hard to create a common understanding of the general scope and look and feel of the output (the equivalent of table of content) and all people involved need to have all their technical tid bits solved (compatible SW, same viewing settings and so on). The editor of such an effort is not just changing wording and cut'n'pasting - he is literally changing your art! Concurrency might be an issue what with models, assistants, props and so forth
• Brain - our brain is much more critical in analyzing photos - we very quickly discern poor technical quality, loss of resolution, digitization artifacts and the limits of our I/O devices in contrast and color saturation and so on. Also images are not processed completely within our cognitive brain. Some of the information goes through a complicated (and yet not fully understood) mechanism that is not completely conscious - we react on this visceral level to various types of stimuli like symbols, colors, faces, general tone and so on. This part of the experience is sensitive to small changes and to the creators ability to master these facets.
• Distribution - such media requires high storage capacities, more robust transmission schemes and are somewhat device dependant (e.g. cellphone vs. TV).

So there are less large scale digital creations in this space than in text based media - thus far.

Music - well this is probably the media that started it all (with Napster). Lets look at the details:

• Creation - high quality music usually requires some special SW and/or HW (music editing SW, musical instruments, microphones, studio and so on). It also necessitates deep fundamental knowledge on how to create music. Again it is not as easy to form a skeletal structure that collaborators can use to understand how the piece should sound - so chopping up the creation is not as easily achieved. Many times concurrency of several people is needed (sound engineer, musicians)
• Brain - we interpret music very much at a subconscious level. This means that subtle differences in the music itself change the way we listen to it drastically. Also production quality (noise, balance, distortions, jitter and other artifacts) can disturb the listener in a big way.
• Distribution - serious disc space is needed, high quality compression schemes (that means R&D effort), good bandwidth and quality of service for streaming applications.

So yeah - co-created free music is possible (mainly electronic/remix), but has limits and will usually suffer form lack of resources

Video/Multimedia/Gaming - well this is no doubt the holy grail! It is basically the Photo/graphic arts/music multiplied by say 200,000 (the number of frames in a feature length film?):

• Creation - high quality requires not only serious SW and HW but also deep knowledge of all aspects of film creation since every frame counts and any problems with directing, continuity, lighting, sound or whatever are difficult to control or edit out in post processing. One usually needs tens of people concurrently to manage such a task. Although division of labor is possible it usually works within closely knit units that have deep understanding of the need and the technicalities. Over all a lengthy and extremely costly endeavor. Just to think of this in real world examples - most high quality feature films that we have learned to expect cost hundreds of millions of dollars - most of which is CGI time! World class games like WoW cost tens of millions of dollars to create!
• Brain - obviously this is the most sensitive form of media since it not only encompasses all the others but the sheer size of the data and the interconnectedness nature make these creations very sensitive to distortion and quality issues (notice how easy it is to realize you are watching a B movie just from seeing a couple of seconds...)
• Distribution - high capacity, high BW, jitter and timing issues - what more could you ask for?

Just to get everyone on the same page here - the first feature length film (I know of) to be produced and marketed virally is FourEyedMonsters which, although is highly credited and interesting is hardly at the level one expects from a tier one blockbuster.

So what is the conclusion i draw from this? Despite the advent of web2.0 and advancements in easy to use and accessible tools for collaboration and creation of media genuine high quality creations become increasingly difficult to produce as the media is more complex. IMHO any way you dice it Mission Impossible III level films cannot be made with low budgets and by sparse teams of loosely coupled individuals, and this will probably remain true for quite some time to come. So why is a large and loud group of people so disrespectful to the need of the creators to recoup their development effort and funds by exercising their legitimate right to protect their IPR (whether through DRM or other means)?

MC