JJHalans ‹› afterhours

Technology Review has a special report on 10 emerging technologies for 2008. One is Offline Web Applications, which I’m not going to talk about, it’s kind of obvious (Air, Gears, etc). Others are very “out there” (”Connectomics”, “NanoRadio”, “Probabilistic Chips” anyone…?). Another one though is pretty real: “Reality Mining“.

So what are they talking about? MIT Media Lab:

Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behaviour. Reality Mining measures information access and use in different contexts, recognizes social patterns in daily user activity, infers relationships, identifies socially significant locations, and models organizational rhythms.

It is emerging in a sense that it is only now that recent advances in mobile technology put the tools in people’s hands to actually aggregate large, realistic datasets of measurable information. In the last 6 to 12 months new mobile phone handsets are being combined with Wifi and GPS. The boundary between mobile phone (a phone to make, you know, phone calls and send text messages) and smart phone (a mobile phone with additional business related applications like email, office documents, multimedia) is blurring fast, and mobile data is getting faster and more affordable. But Reality Mining as an academic experiment at MIT has been happening for more than 5 years already (using Bluetooth) and they have collected over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behaviour (100 subjects at MIT - Sensing complex social systems - pdf).

Only recently several other Reality Mining experiments came to light, like Cityware’s Digital Footprint in the UK and bluetoothtracking.org in the Netherlands. The goal of Cityware is “to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape.” But in both projects participants are actually unaware that they are participating, in fact they are covertly being tracked without their consent in a technology experiment using Bluetooth scanners installed at secret locations in offices, campuses, streets and pubs to pinpoint people’s whereabouts. And they have been doing so for 3 years.

More than 1,000 scanners across the world at any time detect passing Bluetooth signals and send the data to Cityware’s central database. Those with access to the database admit they do not know precisely how many scanners have been created, but there are known to be scanners in San Diego, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Toronto and Berlin.

Although anonymous, most Bluetooth devices are given a personal name (Tom’s Blackberry), and the Bluetooth scanners can even pick up full names, email addresses, and address books from poorly configured devices.

Closer to our hearts (as it were), Yahoo! is experimenting with its MyBlogLog service:

MyBlogLog allows users to bind their Bluetooth address to their MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and find out if they have any shared interests. Meetspace [meat-space?] keeps track of time spent with others so they have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about.”

MyBlogLog uses a mobile Java applet to tie your Bluetooth device to your MyBlogLog account, then polls for new activity every two minutes. There are plenty of other services out there doing the same (Google Dodgeball).

But back to today’s future… and the iPhone. The iPhone for example offers assisted GPS which means you don’t even need a GPS signal for location aware services, cell-tower triangulation can be used, as well as Wifi AP triangulation (which by the way also works nicely on the iPod touch), as long as there are known access points around (known to Skyhook that is). And we happily use those services together with our social network apps. There are already countless social, location-aware apps available on the Apple App store like Exposure and Twinkle, and if our favourite social app doesn’t have a iPhone native app, we’ll happily connect to Brightkite or other Yahoo! Fire Eagle enable service and tell everyone (or only friends and family) where we are and what we do, and who we do it with…

Where previously thousands of Bluetooth enabled device where being scanned and tracked (unknowingly and unwillingly) by ten scanners spread around Bath, UK, now, at the same locations around Bath, or for that matter around the country, hundreds of thousands of users would be broadcasting their doings and location, and do so voluntarily. Though we might not know what is happening with that information. While we try to retain control of (and monetize) our Attention data on the web, will we be able to retain control (and monetize) our Lifestream data?

The mobile phone as a social artefact becomes more and more a personal black box, recording our every move (into the cloud), for later playback. Where we currently see governments worldwide implement retention policies for email, we might see, in a not so distant future, a retention policy on our lifestream. I do hope I’m wrong.

Have a look at this short video interview (4 min) on Reality Mining, with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT.

BTW, I love my iPhone, and I love location aware applications, but I always have Bluetooth disabled on my phone.

Wired’s Vanity Validator widget for iGoogle, found on the Julia Allison Wired article:

How famous are you online? Inspired by Chris Anderson’s best-selling book, The Long Tail, this gadget uses Google’s PageRank™ technology to give you a number based on how many good websites mention the name you enter.

Try for yourself:

What’s your score? (mine was 50 at this time, not quite famous or fabulous)

The iPhone 3G costs an arm and a leg…

The AP writes “Quirk in Belgian law drives iPhones near $1,000“. The article compares it to the AT&T locked in price of $299, which isn’t fair though. They should compare it to the unlocked price of about $550. Still a big difference, and 21% VAT doesn’t help either. The thing is, in Belgium it is not allowed to sell one service or device only linked to another service or device. Both services or devices need to be available separately. But the difference with other European countries, which offer similar consumer protection, is then that they can sell a device (at $1) linked to a service while also offering the device and service separately at full price. The full price of an unlocked 16GB iPhone in Australia would also be about $900 AUD.

Winter has arrived in Sydney. Well, that’s all still a bit relative though.
But it’s going to be an exiting month. We have an Adobe AIR camp (a day of AIR immersion), the Google Developer Day I’m looking forward to, and the opening of the large Apple store, plus a probable release of the iPhone 2 (ends up to be July 11). At the Apple dev conference in San Fran next week for sure, but possibly maybe also officially in Australia. Still, the question remains if we will be able to get our hands on one this month, or will we need to wait for another couple of months? And the releases of Opera 9.50 (June 11) and Firefox 3 on June 17.

There’s a huge community buzz around the Asus Eeepc, and I don’t think they saw that coming. They sold 350.000 of them in the last quarter of 2007, 50.000 more than anticipated. They are targetting the EeePC at first time PC users like kids to take to school and do some homework or students to take to class (’classmate’), or elderly as their main, cheap pc (although I think the screen would be too small, and the touchpad not suited) to keep in touch with family and friends. Or as a secondary pc for the wife, kids to browse the internet, read e-mails, chat. Or as a travel compagnion for on-the-go internet wherever there is wifi (’travelmate’). The eee stands for: Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play.

I have been holding out for a while (it was released on December 2nd, but sold out after 3 days), but couldn’t hold no longer, as they became available at OfficeWorks near our office. Initially exclusively available at Myer (RRP A$499), I guess this only was for 2007, as of now they are also available at Officeworks (A$488) and other stores.

Read on

I wanted to buy another ‘browse plus pack’ (A$10 for 20Mb), so logged into the Telstra site, and it’s no longer available for me to choose from a list of ‘plus packs’. I do notice some new plus packs, but no more browse pack? Are they really that annoying, or is it an oversight of a developer who removed the wrong thing?

I went to a Telstra store, and the guy didn’t even know what a browse plus pack was, until he opened the Telstra pre-pay brochure, which shows an overview. He asked me what phone it was (which I think is a totally irrelevant question), so I told him about the iPhone. He said that they were getting the iPhone, but couldn’t tell when. I also tried to order over SMS. You can send an SMS code (like BROWSEPLUS10) to topup your plus pack, and that did the job (although a confirmation back over SMS would have been nice, I had to check my online Telstra account). The brochure had $5/1MB, $8/3MB, $16/10MB, $29/70MB, $59/200MB, which is incredibly expensive. Although it might be out of date, as on the Telstra browse plus pack page it shows the prices I talked about (or is that page out of date?).

I have been looking for a reasonably priced, but full featured harddisk recorder since we came to Australia, as a replacement to what we had in Europe (the Philips one). Mind you, not that TV over here is so great, far from. We only have about 7 ‘freeview’ channels to choose from, and mostly it’s the usual commercial (though sometimes entertaining) crap. But sometimes you want to ‘tape’ something (Heroes, Lost,…) when you’re not home, or have better things to do. I already had a cheap digital settop box (because analog reception is really crap).

I started out buying a LG DVD-VHS combi drive which could record programs from the settop box. It could even do some timeshifting if I used the DVD-ram discs. And with the VCR we could copy old holiday tapes over to DVD* (again). The LG had a really nice interface, but as expected, you build up a pile of DVD’s, laying around.

I then bought an Elgato EyeTV Diversity, but that requires my MacBookPro to be on all the time (it doesn’t wake up from sleep) and having the Mac at home. And sometimes it does act up, not recording, or just bad reception (even with a dual tuner, it doesn’t seem to sync them both up). It is more useful for when I am at home, and watching television, while recording something else on the Mac. Additionally it can do HD too.

I also got me a Tevion TPVR1100 (Aldi) dual SD digital tuner pvr with 250Gb HDD. But it didn’t allow you to edit recordings, and it didn’t add markers to them (so you had to fastforward through a recording). It was also pretty noisy at times. And the remote sometimes unresponsive. But Aldi has a very good return policy, 60 days, no questions asked (well, actually they did).

So I was still looking. I was considering a Philips again, but I’m also quite a Sony fanboy, but found most of them too expensive, or lacking the right features. We don’t have a fancy TV (like a full HD LCD or plasma), just a plain old CRT. So an HD tuner for HD recording wasn’t on my list. It was also looking for a DVD recorder for archiving (with good DVD-r’s!). And it had to be a HDD with editing capabilities, to trim and edit out the ads. Apparently, you can’t find DVD recorders with an HD tuner anyway, as that would need downscaling. But I guess it’s just a matter of time before we see those.

So then came the Xmas sales. And Myer offered this very recent Sony RDR-HXD870 for an interesting $594 AUD in stead of the RRP $699. I grabbed my iPhone and Googled for some reviews. There were similar devices around from Samsung, Panasonic at about the same price, but none with HD upscaling though. The reviews looked all pretty good. It works nicely, though I’m a bit disappointed at the user interface, which is pretty bland and uninspiring. The LG had a much nicer interface, as did my old Philips (but that had a couple of bugs). Normally I would have done a bit more research before buying anything, but I was in need of some retail therapy. There you go…

Keep on reading.

Got a Meraki up and running. Pretty easy to set up and manage. I’ve got the outdoors variant, placed on the balcony. So I did a quick tour around the street, with my iPod Touch in my hand, to see how far I got. Actually that was a bit disappointing. Not as far as I had hoped for. There needs to be some line of sight. I was hoping to get right up to the water, but then I’m not in line of sight. So I need to find someone to set up a Meraki near the water’s edge…

For movies (and movie rental) DVDs are an obvious progression on VHS tapes: instant access, no winding back/forward, great picture quality. But recordable DVD’s as replacement for tape? Yes, same advantages, but they don’t last. Three years, stored in a dark, dry place, in its case, and they fail to play any longer. Yes, that is because of cheap DVD’s, but that’s the ones they sell in every supermarket or even decent video store. And I’m talking about memories of great holidays in far away places. Holiday movies, for which I spend countless hours editing (you know, bringing down 8 hours of film to a respectable 2 hours). Luckily, I do have a backup on tape (of some edited content and some raw material), which after all these years still works. Of course, I used some quality VHS tapes, not the cheapest ones. I also have the original DV tapes, and the 12Gb backups of those tapes on harddisk. So, look around for archieving disks. They’re more expensive, but you won’t regret it, as I do now.