Collab-Or-Ate

“By merely combining a pent-up demand with ease-of-use you get the YouTube phenomenon. It's brain dead simple, but I'm telling you that is all there is to it.”

– Market Watch's John Dvorak opinion article Missing the point about YouTube

This is a nice, to-the-point article about why YouTube has shot off the charts like a rocket.

This explanation also applies to the iPod. I had 3 (or more?) mp3 players before the iPod was invented and I was happily uploading music onto them. And then the iPod changed the industry to the point where we call mp3 radio broadcasts podcasts. How could the iPod have generated that much momentum? Ease-of-use and pent-up demand. I was willing to tolerate time consuming CD ripping, elaborate music conversion processes, and kludgy interfaces for uploading to a player. Apparently the rest of the world wasn't and Apple knew it.

The front page of today's Wall Street Journal has an article about Yahoo's research lab: Hoping to Overtake Its Rivals, Yahoo Stocks Up on Academics (subscription required).

The article talks about how Yahoo is heavily recruiting academics from economics and computer science departments around the country, to amass a group of world-class researchers to tackle questions like how do you “save attractive women from unwanted solicitations on an Internet dating site.”

In the past year, the company has snagged leading talents in microeconomics, Web search and artificial intelligence from universities such as Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, and industrial labs including those of Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.

Their goal is to avoid being trumped by Google again. To tempt the researchers, Yahoo offers up its enormous datasets that offer a rich testbed for asking interesting behavior and economic questions. Unlike AOL though, they are trying to keep the private data private:

Yahoo submits all outside requests to look at the data to a review committee. It says it has never provided search-related data to outside researchers.

There are plenty of academic research labs within industry (e.g. my home Sun Labs!), but what makes Yahoo's hiring unusual is the focus on economists. For example, Microsoft Research has 700 researchers and 0 economists. If you have access to the article, I recommend checking it out.

The Boston Globe has an article today about a local startup called VShake: Website charges to arrange contact with major honchos

The premise is interesting: Because it is hard to get that influential person, even the one that is your friend's friend, to respond to your queries, a website where that influential person can put a price on their time could just get you that essential one-on-one conversation. If you want that meeting badly enough, you can arrange it by simply paying the entry fee. For example, if you want to chat with this yogi in a suit, you would pay $100:

The Globe article quotes one of the founders as saying:

“You might never get a reply or there is a middleman between you and the person you'd like to reach or your queries are not answered in a timely fashion,” said Richberg. “The reason? People are reluctant to sacrifice their private information.”

I disagree with this reason. I'm willing to hand out my email address and phone number to strangers. It is getting me to reply that will be a challenge.

The real objects of value here are personal referrals. The reason that individuals don't hand over contact information for all of their colleagues is because they have a relationship with these people built upon mutual trust and regard. If you funnel all contact requests through to your “major honcho” contacts, these contacts will no longer have the same trust and regard for you. And because they are “major honchos,” you particularly want to keep these contacts sacred.

The most interesting feature of the VShake application is the visualization of the social networks. But I'm not exactly clear on how social networks tie in to the system, because it seems the business is all about subverting existing social ties and making it a fee-for-contact service. VShake does have some discussion on the website of social network referrals, stating that if “Leslie” knows “Bill Gates,” you can pay Leslie $100 to introduce you. Or you could pay Bill $10,000 directly, to meet with him. I have to say though, wouldn't Bill Gates get irritated at Leslie for doing this? And, also, do you think richest man in the world would have a one-on-one conversation with you just because you paid him $10,000? What if you paid him $1 million? I don't think there is a dollar amount you could pay. But if you could get a personal introduction……

Update: If you want to read more about why VShake might not be such a great idea, check out Stoked Brands

Ever wish you could harness the heat collecting in your car and do something useful with it? You can! You can bake cookies on your dashboard! “When you open the door to that car, it's like, oh, my God. It's a wonderful smell.”

This comes from a very cool blog called Street Use:

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” I welcome suggestions of links, and contributions from others to include in this compendium. — KK

Another cool blog, in the same creative, yet domestic, vein, is called CRAFT. It is an off-shoot from the new CRAFT Magazine, published by O'Reilly, the makers of MAKE magazine.

This is the kind of 3D visualization I 100% endorse! The 3D tangible objects nicely illustrate the scale of the data and they are delicious to eat.

The U.S. Defense Budget, Explained with OREO Cookies

A quick and final post about SIGGRAPH, before all memories of it fade… Here is a run-down of some of the other interesting applications I enjoyed, some of which relate to collaboration:

• Shared Design Space: a collaborative, tabletop, augmented-reality application, for sharing documents, sketching, brainstorming, anything! It was amazingly intuitive and interesting to use. You interact with the tabletop with a pen which knows its exact position on the table from tiny grey dots on the projection screen's surface. Using the pen, you can draw, arrange photos, annotate digital content, and share screen views with others around the table. The pen is able to interact with any piece of this special dotted paper, so the interaction doesn't have to be only on screens, but can also be tangible objects such as physical “paint trays” that can act as toolbars would in a desktop app. They had a really nice implementation of pick & drop and translation and rotation of objects,. This is work done at Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences Digital Media and they have other interesting projects listed at their Office of Tomorrow website.
• Mixed Reality Interfaces: an application where digital contents are being easily controlled with tangible objects. For example, a 3D model of a car can be viewed on a screen from different angles and with different lighting through the manipulation of a toy car, a toy light source, and a toy camera that you move around a physical space. It was immediately very intuitive to use which I liked. This is a product designed by the company KOMMERZ in Austria.
• DanceDanceDance: a game like Dance Dance Revolution, but full body motion required. When playing, you see a silhouette of the position you should be in and then you see your own silhouette for comparison. The more poses you get right, the better you do. The dance moves are somewhat like Y-M-C-A and it was pretty fun to play. Thankfully, they set up their booth so that the person playing was in a relatively private corner of the convention floor, limiting the complete embarrassment factor. See a video of it in use at Siggraph. The research is being done in the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering at National Taiwan University, but I can't find an official website. Here's an article in the New Scientist Tech
• Invisible, the Shadow Chaser: this is totally Ghostbusters. One person has a spotlight for searching for goblins and the other person wears a backpack with a vacuum hose for sucking up the goblins. It was totally fun and definitely a collaborative activity. This work is being done at the Image Processing Lab, Nara Institute of Science & Technology in Japan.

• Fabcell: a multi-colored fabric that changes colors when a current is sent through it. This fabric was amazing to watch, as it changed from black to red to orange to green to a vibrant blue. Its colors were like a mood ring's, transitioning towards blue as more current (or heat) was applied to it. This was developed at the Keio Univeristy Media Design Program in Japan.

I'm still an enthusiastic user of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit and the nikeplus.com website.

Some updates:

• I had to recalibrate the device because it said my 3 mile run was 3.5 miles. After calibration on a track, it now says 3 miles is between 2.99 and 3.01 miles. Definitely accurate enough for me!
• The Flash website is “flashy” but I really wish I could get my data off of it so I could graph it the way I want to. That being said, it is really cool to be able to see my pace chart and a graph of all my runs so far, with lots of mouse-over details, all within seconds of plugging in my iPod.
• There is a section on the website for setting goals which is pretty inflexible. For example, I have two running goals right now: run 20 miles every week and run a half-marathon 8 weeks from now. I can't enter those goals in a reasonable way because all the goals have to be either 4, 8, 12, or 16 weeks to accomplish. But, again, that being said, it is cool that I can put as my goal 80 miles in 4 weeks and have the site keep me up to date on how I'm doing towards that goal.

• I've attached the widget to my Brooks running shoes with some velcro adhesive. But there's already a product you can buy to attach it and remove it more easily, the Marware's Sportsuit Sensor+ for iPod nano.

Above are some screenshots of my data. The first image is my last long run, the next is of my runs from the past 3 weeks, and the third shows an example of the mouse-over highlighting.

(If you are looking for a running goal, the Applefest Half-Marathon and Half-Marathon Relay is the most fun race I've ever participated in. I highly, highly recommend it.

Go Team Gelato! )

Continuing on the theme of “interesting things at SIGGRAPH” …. I attended an Exhibitor Tech Talk on the topic of collaboration and Second Life. There were several presenters from Linden Lab, the creators of the Second Life. (One of the presenters was Pathfinder Linden. Here are his P*werP*int slides.)

I won't give a description of Second Life here, either because you know about it already or you don't care, but I will list out what I found to be most interesting. This is coming from the perspective of someone who does not play multi-player games but is very interested in making collaboration and communication effortless.

• Everything you create in the world, you own. So this leads to monetary exchange of the items/objects people have spent a lot of time creating. This also implies, even without any monetary exchange, that the time you spend creating something is not “lost” time, but rather went towards creating something valuable. (I am guessing this is one of the main reasons why the game is so popular.)
• The main thing to do in Second Life (it seemed) is to build things. And when you build things, people can see you doing it within the world, so it becomes an inherently social activity. Or at least an activity that involves social awareness. Since you want to build things and you can see other people building things, it seems like a great place to learn from other people.
• Second Life supports live streaming of video, so real-world (non-virtual? what is “real” anymore?) events can be shown within Second Life. This can lead to crazy things like within Second Life's replica of Harvard's Berkman Center you can see live presentations that are going on at the physical Berkman Center at that moment. Or you (as an avatar) could look at yourself giving a presentation in real-life from within Second Life. Freaky! And also very interesting for workplace collaboration scenarios with a mix of collocated and remote workers.
• A point that was never mentioned: there is no audio in Second Life. So all communication is basic text chat (I'm assuming). Could it possibly be as bad as it sounds??

As a side note, the presentations by Linden Lab employees included a few too many examples of overly-sexualized female avatars for my taste. To counterbalance that, I am providing here a picture of a demo going on elsewhere at Siggraph that involved gratuitous objectification of the male body.

When you walk up to this demo, you see a plexiglas box and inside there appears to be a 3D image of a house, rotating slowly around. Depending on which “mode” you select on a controller, the distortion to the shape of the house changes. Here are three pictures: the first is of the “haystack” visual effect and the next two are of the “zigzag” visual effect. The house image would slowly rotate, which partially explains the poor quality of my photography.

My first impression what that this was a 3D image of a house accomplished with multiple projections onto a blank surface. Totally wrong! Instead, it turns out that a single slight source, a strobe light, was being shown onto a physical model of a house that was spinning very fast. The pattern of the light alone created the visual effect. Here's a picture of the physical house (while stationary):

I took a video, which does a much better job capturing the effect, which I will try to post soon. In the meantime, here's an 360-view of the Morphovision demo, from 360VR.

This is a research project at NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories and there is more information on Morphovision on the Siggraph website.

Update: apparently I'm not the only one blown away by this.

I attended one day of SIGGRAPH 2006 this week, to check out the latest in graphics. The most exciting portion of the conference (for me) was the Emerging Technologies area, where there were more exciting demos than one person can possibly digest in a day. A lot of the stuff was truly amazing to see (and feel). I had never attended SIGGRAPH before and the conference lived up to its reputation for being a showcase of creative and generally crazy technology.

I took a few pictures and a video of some of the things that caught my eye. First one the list, “Pharmaceuticals for the 21st Century.” This was a satirical art installation making a comment about the advertising techniques of the pharma industry and the political climate of conformity in the US. Here's a photo of the artist's description and of two of the “ads” for drugs that will certainly make America a better place. ;)

Yes, I admit, this has nothing to do with “crazy” technology, but it caught my eye at the conference, so I'm blogging about it! Next up, something totally cool….