Augmented Reality has become more than a buzzword. It represents the next step in human/computer interaction. Interfaces that were once solid have become liquid. With the iPhone, we have the ability to download software from the air. With augmented reality, the interface evaporates from the liquid state into the air as well. Bruce Sterling’s keynote at Layar is a helpful introduction to this field.

There have been a number of applications developed by various companies and individuals, but what’s being done in Portland? As it turns out, quite a lot. I’ve been running an unadvertised Augmented Reality meetup for the past few months (if you’re a developer or Interaction Designer interested in attending this group, comment below), and have found the Portland tech community to be a fertile ground or AR development.

Mobile Portland brings Augmented Reality to you

Starting Monday, you can learn more about what’s going on in Portland AR as well. There will be a meetup at AboutUs.org with two of Portland top AR developers. They’re great people and I highly recommend meeting them. The meeting starts at 6pm at AboutUs.org.

Event Overview

Imagine being able to use your phone to see what that IKEA couch you’ve been considering will look like in your living room. A far-fetched science fiction scenario? No, IKEA has already released an application like that in Europe.

Augmented reality is an exciting and emerging technology. Augmented reality take real life information–typically the video display of a phone–and overlays it with computer information. Augmented reality is something that is completely unique to mobile.

This month at Mobile Portland, we’re lucky to have two speakers who are early innovators in augmented reality. P. Mark Anderson is platform architect for Spot Metrix which provides an augmented reality library for iPhone called 3DAR. Tim Sears created Robotvision, one of the first augmented reality applications for iPhone.

Mark and Tim will share how people are using augmented reality, their experiences using augmented reality, and what the future holds for this new technology.

About the Speakers

P. Mark Anderson

P. Mark Anderson has 13 years experience developing interactive applications. After receiving a degree in Computer Science from University of Colorado in 1999 he started his career as a developer for Sun Microsystems.

In addition to creating several iPhone applications, Mr. Anderson moderates the Helpful iPhone Utilities open source project, as well as My Maps, an augmented reality iPhone app built on top of Google’s personalized mapping system.

Mr. Anderson is platform architect for the 3DAR augmented reality SDK. He enjoys working with both artists and developers, and occupies his spare time with watercolor painting, mountain biking, disc golf and mentoring.

Tim Sears

Tim Sears is a software engineer who works for PR firm Waggener Edstrom by day building web applications, by night creating location-based augmented reality experiences for the iPhone. He created Robotvision, a popular augmented reality browser, for the iPhone in 2009 and currently works with clients to build out mobile geolocation experiences in augmented reality.

His work in augmented reality and social media analytics has been featured in major publications such as ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and CNET, and has won several awards, including the International Business Awards Best New Product/Service of 2009 for twendz, a real-time Twitter sentiment analysis application.

Date

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 6:00pm

Location

AboutUs Offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520,
Portland, Oregon 97214

RSVP on Upcoming.org

Mobile Portland: Augmented Reality on Upcoming.org

Website:

MobilePortland.com

The last Portland Data Visualization Meetup occurred way back in March 2009. That’s way too long to go without a good data viz meetup, so there’s going to be another one. We’ll have five 10 minute presentations and a bunch of networking time. Webtrends will again graciously host us on their top floor.

The event is open to everyone interested in or working in the field of data visualization. This means designers, programmers, information architects, data miners, anthropologists, ect. We’re expecting a similar amount of people to last time, but the presentations will be limited to 10 minutes each or less.

Bring business cards and an excitement to connect with others in this field.

The second Portland Data Visualization Group will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 from 7:30Pm-9:00Pm at Webtrends.

851 SW 6th Ave.
Portland OR 97204
(map)

RSVP on Upcoming or view this event on Calagator.

Agenda:

The second meeeting of the Portland Data Visualization Group will serve as an introduction to what’s going on in the world of data viz. There will be five presentations of 10 minutes each. There are three openings left, so if you would like to demonstrate something you’re working on, please E-mail me or comment below.

If you’re interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event.

Google Group:

Ed Borasky started a Google group called pdx-visualization. As the name implies, it is a group for Portland-area people interested in languages and techniques for visualization of data. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization

Flickr Photos:

I’ve been collecting interesting data viz photos for a while now and posting them to Flickr. They’re all accessible on my Flickr account in this set. Most pictures contain descriptions and links to the viz sources.

I hope to see you all there!
——

About

Amber Case, (@caseorganic is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way we think, act, and understand the world around us.

If there’s a Portland conference this summer that you don’t want to miss, it’s Portland’s Internet Strategy Forum. Where else will you be able to meet top-level experts and analysts like Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research, or Katherine Durham, VP of Marketing at Hewlett-Packard?

For less than $200, you gain access to a class of experts that will only be in Portland for a day.

Event Tracking with StreamGraphs

Last year, I used StreamGraphs to visually track buzz around Internet Strategy Forum 2008. This method allowed me to see which speakers had the most audience support and interest. This year, I’ll be doing the same thing, and my results will be made available two days after the conference (check back here for a complete report).

Follow the Visualization

If you want to follow my progress as I track and visualize the conference, feel free to follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or subscribe to Hazelnut Tech Talk by RSS.

Event Details

The conference occurs on Friday, July 24th from 8:30Am - 5:00 Pm, and check-in begins at 8:15 Am. If you don’t yet have a ticket, you can get one at the Internet Strategy Forum website. The conference will be located at the Governor Hotel, which is at 614 SW 11th Ave., Portland, OR 97205.

Out of Town?

You can attend Internet Strategy Forum remotely too, and the cost is just $175.00.

Need More Information?

For more information, call 971-223-3838 or E-mail events@internetstrategyforum.org

Speaker Bio - Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah Owyang is a leading research analyst in the social computing industry and is the author of the influential Web Strategist blog. He ranks #2 on the Twitter Power 150 list.

TOPIC: The Future of the Social Web (based on new Forrester report)
Although social networks have caught the attention of brands and consumers, today’s social landscape is a primitive series of unconnected islands. Expect new technologies to emerge that connect all systems and communities together –that allow communities to spread and share from one another. This simple technology changes the web landscape as consumers rely on their peers to make decisions, any web experience can now be personalized, and social networks become as powerful as CRM systems. Marketers must be ready for the drastic changes to come as power shifts to micro-celebrities, communities, and social networks –not traditional marketing. Jeremiah’s presentation will cover these changes in detail.

Speaker Bio - Katherine Durham

Katherine Durham is the IPG-A Vice President of Marketing. In this role she is responsible for building the HP brand and driving demand for imaging and printing products with Consumer, SMB, Enterprise and Public Sector segments across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. In addition she is responsible for Environmental Leadership — compliance, sales support and marketing — across the Americas.

Since joining HP in 2000, Durham has held a number of positions in the Americas marketing organization. From 2005-2007 Durham was the Director of Business Planning, Market Insight and Operations where she re-architected the market insight team to deliver more differentiated customer insights, established TALC (technology adoption lifecycle) for the region and built a global delivery team in India. Before that Durham was the Director of Communications for IPG’s consumer and commercial business as well as the PSG’s consumer businesses, responsible for advertising, in-store execution, on-line communications, events and more. Durham also held roles as the e-marketing manager and NA brand manager for IPG-A Marketing.

Kent Lewis recently interviewed Katherine Durham about her keynote at Internet Strategy Forum.

Credits

Photo of Jeremiah Owyang courtesy of brad_crooks.

You can register for Internet Strategy Forum 2009, or learn more at the Internet Strategy Forum website.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant based in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter or Contact her at caseorganic at gmail dot com. She wrote her thesis on how mobile phones and their growing role in human interaction. Read The Cell Phone and Its Technosocial Sites of Engagement.

Prior to network culture, traditional news outlets were the first reliable source for news concerning major events. This was because traditional news media outlets have established reputations for providing a certain level of credibility and reliability.

In a global, ever-connected economy, it is finally possible to rely on citizen media outlets to receive news almost as soon as it happens, however, people often have a limited basis on which to determine validity. Online, time and space for information gathering is compressed. This also means that time and space for decision making is also reduced. This is why online social networks try to use online metrics to establish validity in as short amount of time as possible.

Take, for example, critical situations like wars, attacks, accidents or natural disasters:

• In emergency situations, traditional media sources are often too slow in providing clear, relevant information.

• In delicate political environments, standard news outlets are often blocked from transmitting relevant information.

These situations call for non-traditional data points. These data points exist in the form of social nodes in networks. The wired, network of the online world allows anyone close to the news source to have the same power as ones with bigger budgets, bigger political power or better transmission equipments like a traditional news source. Reputation in critical moments like these (such as earthquake reporting, or terrorist attack information and safety instructions) must be negotiated almost instantaneously. Unlike traditional offline news identities, there are no presuppositions of identity.

In a space where news sources are both distributed (in both sense of the word: “distribution of power” and “fragmentation”) and largely anonymous, reputation becomes the sole metric for validity. This is the problem that this paper tries to address.

Reputation is extremely complex. There is no single way to define it:

• It can take the form of a hyperlink between two places, abilities, or powers. In other words, reputation is a way of describing the link between two entities.

• It can be transitory, especially online, where reputation serves as a social construction only as long as it’s needed, depending on data flows, proximity to events, or distance between individuals. In other words, reputation is a dynamic system of situated knowledge that sorts social interactions.

• It can be a handshake, in a sense that both parties must agree to open up and exchange something valuable for a trust-relationship to happen. In the business realm, for instance, this action has been formalized in the act of exchanging business cards.

• It can be measured or tracked as an overlay on a series of data points showing relations and trust.

• It can be measured or tracked as factors that individuals share in common. More shared things will lead to more shared beliefs, value systems and judgment, and generally could better reputation.

Measuring Reputation

A new metric is thus needed in order to quickly determine credibility and reputation in the event of a crisis. Note that this paper does not aim to search for and establish the most accurate metric, but rather, one that provides the user with an idea about the situation, then leaves the ultimate value judgment in her hand. In other words, to be both economically and timely achievable, the metric has to have enough ‘fuzziness.’

“What you want is a durable perception of person”, says programmer Anselm Hook, “one that allows one to quickly understand whether a piece of information from a source is reputable or not in the fastest way possible”. One way is to wait for a backup vote. Robert’s Rules of Order say that a statement must be seconded before it can be voted on by many. But in some cases, waiting for a second is difficult, because there may be only one person next to a data source or event that is capable of reporting it.

In order to determine a valid metric, one must define a few key elements of the online experience:

Interest and Power

Power is created by interest. This is the most easily observed in online environments, where the creation of value and interest is most fluid. The fluidity of value creation and exchange.

Interest Groups

One could call an interest group a demographic. Demographics are those with specific lifestyles that influence interest, and also support those who create products or services that fulfill these interests.

Crises and Social Networks

During a crisis, interest groups tend to converge upon a single topic or news source. The creation of validity in a news source in an online social network is often very fast, and generally not a traditional news source. Network users who were formerly low-level nodes can suddenly become major nodes of traffic if they begin to provide data that has proxemic, relational, or newsworthy value.

Those nodes that can provide the fastest information have tremendous power over those who have recently turned to follow them.

Point A marks the status of normal social network conditions and interest groups.

B marks the first appearance of crisis in the social network.

C signals the ramp-up of information awareness among social groups not in the social interest group of the initial reformers.

At point D, the crisis becomes a topic of collective interest. Networks of trust re-broadcast the news to un-informed groups until the network is saturated with information from all groups capable of absorbing the information.

At E, the discussion of crisis decreases due to crisis resolution of exhaustion of topic. The crisis falls out of common interest and formerly melded interest groups diverge once again.

F marks the final resolution or disappearance of the crisis. The crisis falls almost completely out of social network conversation.

One of the problems with social networks during crises is quickly finding the nodes with the most valuable information a voice in an efficient way, and promoting them to the top of a social network so that all that need that information can find it.

Micromeasurement

On May 11th, 2008, a earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale hit China. Several of those who experienced the earthquake Twitter user @dtan Tech Reporter Robert Scoble was able to rebroadcast the message to (at the time) approximately 40,000 followers.

But how did Robert Scoble know that @dtan’s Tweets were valid?

Was it the architecture of Twitter? A trust economy, established by the rapid exchange of everyday data on Twitter helped to. But Scoble’s reputation process takes a while.He has to first follow @dtan and through direct or indirect exchange determine the user’s reputation to report on an emergency.Of course, later on, additional reports from other people in China who also experienced the quake arrived. But it took CNN hours later to report on the event. This demonstrates the agility, relevancy and accuracy of non-traditional nodes as news sources.

As an aside, tools such as Google’s translation engine allowed @dtan’s Tweets, which were written almost entirely in Chinese, to be translated into English, and passed on to a more global

Improving Data Flows in Crisis

All individuals have social bases. There are an increasing number of individuals who use social networks as social bases. However, these bases are not necessarily the same. Social networks record relationships in different ways.One who uses the photo-sharing website Flickr as a social base interacts with data differently than a Facebook or Twitter user. Robert Scoble was able to transfer authority and power to @dtan very quickly, but rapid, local news of the earthquake was constrained to Twitter.

There was no system that looked at Twitter as a database and pulled out information. Neither was there a system that added Twitter’s earthquake updates to other relevant information coming out of mainstream news sources and other social networks.

To improve data flows in crisis, there is a clear opportunity to transcend data silos and aggregating data streams into a more accessible and unified databases, so that users of different social networks, or limited social networks, can quickly access relevant information.

This calls for either:

• The establishment of an open standard for disaster reporting across networks.

• The use and appropriation of existing open standards for reporting.

For instance: the DiSo project is an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web.

Another other alternative (besides traditional media) is to rely on many ‘Scoble’s’ on each social network who talk to and inform each other on current happening at all times. This is highly impractical and very costly.

——————————

Additional Sources:

For more information and a full analysis of the Twitter Earthquake reporting, please visit: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/05/12/twitter-and-the-chinese-earthquake/

Search Engine Reputation Management

——

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Consultant from Portland, Oregon. She studies the effects of technology on the ways in which communities are built both off and online. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

I’ve been interested in data visualization for a very long time — it intersects with a lot of very interesting things that are going on in the world, and thus is definitely worth studying. Happily enough, we now have whole boatloads of data — because the Internet has given this to us.

We have free tools and programming skills to mess with the data so that we can relatively easily turn it into something useful or interesting without puling teeth or renting computer time from 3-6 in the morning an hour’s drive away at the nearest State University.

It is because of all of these things, and what I feel is becoming an essential next step in the development of trend prediction and the very useful implementation of data and information, that we’ve decided to start having some meetings around this sort of thing.

The first Portland Data Visualization Group will be held on Monday, March 23, 2009 from 6–8pm at Webtrends.

851 SW 6th Ave.
Portland OR 97204
(map)

View the event on Calagator, Portland’s Tech Event Calendar.

Event Description

Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

Using his 20% time, a Google employee discovered that during flu season, many ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors. When he mapped this data, he was able to discover where flu outbreaks would strike up to two weeks before traditional news sources were able to report them.

This is an example of a time when merging a specific type of data to its geographical coordinates resulted in a unique insight. However, there is much more to do with data and visualization. What was found at Google is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Now that we have access to so much data on the web, we’re going to see an increasing need to understand and present that data.

Agenda:

The first meeeting of the Portland Data Visualization Group will serve as an introduction to what’s going on in the world of data viz. It will be freeform, so if you would like to demonstrate something you’re working on, please be prepared to do so. Micah Elliott will be showing uGraph and Ed Borasky will do a GGobi demo. I’ll be covering what already exists in the ecosystem and what might become useful in the future. We’re dealing with a rapid communication method here. Something that, if done well, compresses the time and space it takes for us to understand something.

If you’re interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event. It will be the first Portland Tech Event at WebTrends besides Web Analytics Wednesday. It’s our chance to try out the space and see if it is a good fit for this group or potentially for other groups in the future.

Google Group:

Ed Borasky recently started a Google group called pdx-visualization. As the name implies, it is a group for Portland-area people interested in languages and techniques for visualization of data. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization

Flickr Photos:

I’ve been collecting interesting data viz photos for a while now and posting them to Flickr. They’re all accessible on my Flickr account in this set. Most pictures contain descriptions and links to the viz sources.

I hope to see you all there!
——

About

Amber Case, (@caseorganic is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way we think, act, and understand the world around us.

Originally posted on Calagator, Portland’s Tech Event Calendar.

The Internet Age

There are strong indications that the Internet has already become the most pervasive factor in human life. By doing so, the first part of the 21st Century deserves to be named The Internet Age so it can be compared with other periods that have radically transformed human life such as the Agrarian Age and the Industrial Age.

The Internet has been called the Information Super Highway because it transmits billions of documents daily. It is the Internet as a super highway and how it competes with other forms of transportation that will be discussed in this article.

The Internet as Transportation

To get a better understanding of why the Internet is a form of transportation, consider the history of the Pony Express. It started in April 1860 to provide a fast mail service between the east and west coasts of the United States. It took about ten days to deliver its mail. The Pony Express announced its closure 18 months later in October 1861 just two days after the new Transcontinental Telegraph reached Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Pony Express came to an end because the telegraph was a new form of transportation that could deliver messages much faster (in just few minutes) and much cheaper.

Since the Pony Express and the telegraph both delivered messages, even though they did it in very different ways, both of them can be seen as competing forms of transportation.

Once it’s recognized that the telegraph is a form of transportation, it’s easy to see that the Internet is also a form of transportation. It delivers billions of messages, mail, documents, music, pictures and videos worldwide as fast as lightning wherever there are Internet connections, and it does it much cheaper than its slow moving competition—trucks, trains and planes. The Internet moves only digital information, but the problem is that this used to be non-digital information, which was moved by trucks, trains and planes. The Internet is in direct competition with them. The more digital media the Internet transports, the less non-digital media the others transport.

Print Media

eBooks

The promise of digital books, e Books as they are called, is that they can be delivered faster and cheaper and sold for significantly lower prices because they aren’t printed on expensive paper, stored in expensive warehouses and transported by gas guzzling trucks. Millions of acres of trees no longer have to be cut down to make paper. Millions of gallons of toxic ink no longer have to be manufactured to make printed documents. Millions of gallons of gas no longer have to be consumed to transport logs, paper and printed documents. Millions of tons of acid paper no longer need be dumped in landfills. Besides being much cheaper to produce and ship, eBooks are environmentally friendly.

The challenge of eBooks is that the industries that rely on the printed book will have to close their doors. Tens of thousands of print workers—booksellers, printers and truck drivers will lose their jobs and have to switch to other professions.

Some industry analysts believe that most bookstores will be out of business within five years.

Newspapers

Printed newspapers have all of the problems printed books have except they can go to press faster than books. Newspapers, however, have a big problem that books don’t have. Newspapers depend on getting a large part of their revenue from the advertising they print. As newspapers receive competition from TV, radio, blogs, twitters and online news, their advertising sales have declined but their costs have increased. Income from classified ads, once a major source of income for newspapers, has continued to decline as online companies take them over such as monster.com for jobs and eBay for products. Apartment rentals and real estate listings are increasingly be taking over by online companies that also have no newspaper affiliations. In the face of mounting print advertising costs, advertisers are taking advantage of the new online ad opportunities, an option they didn’t have before. They are finding that online advertising is not only cheaper but more successful.

The future of print newspapers is bleak. If newspapers are to survive, their only option is to develop a successful online operation as soon as possible so they can dump everything that involves printing newspapers—paper, ink, printing presses, employees who work with print media, delivery trucks, warehouses, etc. To survive online, newspapers must find a way to obtain enough ad revenues or they won’t be able to survive. The chance of finding enough online ad revenue is not encouraging. Those who hold out and try to make a go of it as a print operation will not survive. Most newspapers will be gone within five years.

Magazines and Journals

Magazines and Journals have all of the problems newspapers have except their article lead times are longer. They will continue to lose advertising revenue. Their choice is the same: switch to an online operation or go out of business. Unless they can carry over their print advertising in a downsized online publishing operation, they too are unlikely to survive.

Music, Pictures, Videos and Software—the Other Digital Media

Everything that applies to digital books applies to digital music, pictures and videos. Recorded music on CDs is coming to an end. Digital pictures have already replaced film prints. Videos can be downloaded from the Internet, and this trend will continue. Eventually Internet videos will replace video DVDs.

Software will become primarily available as Internet downloads.

The Internet as Teleportation

Just as the Internet is a form of transportation that threatens traditional transport companies, it’s also a form of teleportation that threatens many other traditional businesses.

The Internet has not yet reached the “Beam me up, Scottie” type of teleportation where humans are digitized, transported through space and reconstituted. Instead, live images of people are digitized and transported to some Internet cloud where they can transact in real time with other people’s digitized images. This is called videoconferencing. Cisco’s WebEx is one of many software packages that make online sales presentations and conferences possible.

The promise of Internet “teleportation” is that it means the millions of outside sales reps will be taken off the road so they can make online sales calls from offices and home. As online reps they will be able to make extra calls each day because they won’t have to spend time traveling between accounts. The geographical location of their accounts no longer matters because it’s just as easy to make sales calls in New York in the morning and San Francisco in the afternoon as it is to make several calls in the same city the same day.

This will take a million cars off the road and reduce gas consumption by millions of gallons a year. Companies will be able to reduce their sales expenses by tens of thousands of dollars per sales rep. Expensive weeklong semiannual conferences in major cities will be canceled because they can be replaced by inexpensive online video conferences where reps can attend from their offices and their homes.

The challenge of converting outside reps to online reps is that it will have a huge impact on world economies. These sales reps will no longer need company cars, airline tickets and car rentals. They will no longer stay in hotels and motels and eat at restaurants. All of these industries will be forced to downsize and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers as reps are taken off the road.

Virtual Visits

Free Internet phone calls such as those offered by SKYPE allow individuals to visit each other using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) no matter where they may be. This is just the beginning. As video conferencing systems come down in price, instead of getting in the family car to visit relatives and friends, many of these visits will take place over the Internet because they will be easier to make, cheaper and save time.

Virtual Vacations

If you want to see lions in Africa or Kodiak bears in Alaska, you can spend thousands of dollars to go there in person with the hope of encountering them, but if you choose to call up a video on the Internet, chances are you’ll see more animals and learn more about them because the photographers who prepare these videos often spend months and even years taking their pictures. It’s still more exciting to see these animals in person, but it’s likely that more and more people will see them over the Internet because it’s so much less expensive. You can expect to see a reduction in vacation travel because of this.

Telecommuting

As more people work at home by telecommuting, more two car families will become one car families as telecommuting families find they can get by with just one car. There will be less traffic on the road, and less office space will be required. People who work as telecommuters can live anyplace where they can get an Internet connection. Many of those who can afford it will leave the congested, expensive cities to live in cleaner, less crime ridden smaller communities.

Online Education

As education costs skyrocket, there is no choice but to develop an inexpensive system of online education to grant degrees and offer retraining to the millions of people who will find themselves unemployed as the Internet eliminates jobs in competitive industries.

Schools such as MIT and Stanford have already put most of their classes online where anyone can read the lectures and study materials. Online schools such as the University of Phoenix have offered online degrees for several years. Now, Stanford and several other universities are offering online master’s degree programs that they claim match the quality of education found on their campuses. It’s only a matter of time before more universities offer similar online degrees.

With technology changing our world so rapidly, most people will have to receive constant Internet training to update their skills so they can keep their current jobs or switch to new professions. From now on, continuing education will be a lifelong activity. Our current campus based educational system simply cannot handle this increased volume of educational traffic.

The Age of the Automobile Is No More

Even though cars, trucks and planes will continue to be an important part of our lives for the foreseeable future, their role will be diminished as billions of digital products are shipped via the Internet instead of by FedEx, UPS and USPS and as millions of workers no longer need cars for their jobs. To survive, the auto industry will have to downsize. There is simply no way that the auto industry can regain the sales of yesterday. The Age of the Automobile is over.

We Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet

Artificial Intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil suggests that towards the end of the 21st Century it will be possible to create digital copies of human beings and upload them onto a computer. Once this happens, people will be able to live virtual lives that they will not be able to distinguish from life in the physical world. After people are converted to digital entities, it will eventually be possible to create android and “blank” human bodies that can receive the digital copies so that people can move between virtual and real life existences indefinitely.

There are quite a few advantages in having a system like this.

Space Exploration Instead of the huge cost of transporting human bodies through space and keeping them alive in some form of stasis for hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years, it will be much cheaper and more efficient to put copies of people onto a computer, turn off the power for the length of the trip and turn it on when the spaceship lands on a planet suitable for human habitation. Once landed, robots can reconstitute the people in physical bodies, perhaps android bodies to start with, so they can populate it. Since space travel is very dangerous, only copies of living people need be sent into space. The originals can remain at home where they can live normal lives—whatever “normal” might be one hundred years from now.

Once people are copied onto a computer, their digital folders can be sent over the Internet to places on earth as well as to locations in near space such as the moon’s spacecraft launching station. When this happens, it will be a real form of teleportation. Once a new planet has been colonized by the first spaceship, the fastest way to transport more colonists to that planet will, of course, be over the Internet.

Prison Reform Rather than maintain prisons where it costs five to ten times as much to house a prisoner as it does to send a child to public school, governments can use tax dollars more effectively by sentencing people who are convicted of crimes to virtual lives where they can serve out their sentences in inexpensive-to-maintain virtual worlds. For those whose sentences are not for life, they can be reconstituted in physical bodies at the end of their sentences and allowed to live in the real world again. Some prisoners, however, may prefer to remain in their new virtual world where they will have freedom to do things they could never do in the real world.

War and Other Dangerous Occupations Rather than send people to war as soldiers or put them in a dangerous environment, it will be easier to make physical copies of each person loaded into androids so that if the physical copy is destroyed, the original person will remain unharmed. Since the experience gained performing dangerous occupations can provide people with valuable professional experience, at the end of these assignments, these experiences can be merged electronically with their originals so the originals can continue to advance in their careers.

No Turning Back

There is no turning back. If we choose to return to the “good old days” by getting rid of the Internet, we shall simply empower other countries to develop superior technologies that they will use to compete against us. A refusal to utilize new technologies can only lead to greater unemployment and economic hardship.

The Internet is in some ways like Pandora’s Box. Even though it brings wonderful gifts to the human race, it does so at the cost by depriving millions of people of the old jobs that were created during the Industrial and Post-Industrial Ages. This will create poverty and major economic problems unless nations prepare proactively to provide top quality, inexpensive education so the unemployed can begin new careers. To solve the problems created by technology and to reap the benefits it brings, we have no choice but to use technology to facilitate our transition to a new, more environmentally friendly world.

The Internet is already making revolutionary changes in our lives. It is dominant technology of our time. In recognition of these changes, this era should be called the Internet Age.

—–

About

This article was written by Russell Dauterman. His career has covered teaching (philosophy with a specialty in logic), publishing (working for bookstores, book wholesalers and publishers) and computers (retailing and database design). He is also Caseorganic’s Uncle.

Russell Dauterman can be reached at dbtrees at gmail dot com.

I wanted to write about this before, but I had to wait until everything was secured and verified.

In September, Steve Gehlen invited me to speak about Cyborg Anthropology at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference on September 5th of this year. The conference was a refreshing and entertaining look at where entertainment, art, culture, business, and social media are going. The keynote was Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium.

After Inverge, Joshua and I compared theorists and research, and had a great time socializing along with all of the other conference attendees and speakers. A month later, Joshua informed me of a conference at MIT called the Futures of Entertainment, and wondered if I would be interested in being on a panel on social media. He said that my analysis and understanding of both the academic and corporate world would provide a useful bridge between two separate fields.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

I very carefully prepared two forms of submission — one on Cyborg Anthropology from the academic perspective, and another from the business perspective.

However, I feel that what I am doing pales in comparison to the accomplishments of those whom I will be participating with. I am both honored and overwhelmed by this opportunity. I hope to be able to add value to some aspect of the conference.

I’ll be participating on the social media panel, which is described as follows:

“Moving lives online, creating conversations across geography, connecting with consumers - how is social media defining the current entertainment landscape? As people not only put more content online, but conduct more of their daily lives in networked spaces and via social networking sites, how are social media influencing how we think of audiences? Video-sharing platforms have changed how we think of production and distribution, and Facebook gifts point to the value of virtual properties, how are these sites enabling other processes of production or distribution practices. Spaces where commercial and community purposes intertwine, what are the implications for privacy, content management, and identity construction of social media? How have they impacted notions of civic engagement?”

Conference Attendees

Kim Moses - Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, Lost, Medium, Yochai Benkler - Harvard Law School, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press), Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Alex McDowell - Production Designer, The Watchmen, Kevin Slavin - Area/Code, Sabrina Caluori - Director, Marketing and Promotions, HBO Online, Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press), Donald K Ranvaud - Buena Onda Films, Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), Gail De Kosknik - UC Berkeley, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre, Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com, Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting, Mauricio Mota - New Content (Brazil), Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing)….more.

Steve Gehlen, Paige Saez (on a grant from PNCA) and Kris Krug will be flying out to join me at the conference. In case you’re in the area too, the conference information is as follows:

MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3

Friday, Nov 21 8:30a to Saturday, Nov 22 8:30a
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Wong Auditorium, Cambridge, MA

Thanks

A great big thank you to everyone in the Portland Tech community for being supportive and welcoming of interdisciplinary thought. Special thanks to Joshua Green and Steve Gehlen.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Note: Dates and venues are pretty much set for CyborgCamp!

You can now:

• RSVP for CyborgCamp Portland
• RSVP CyborgCamp Vancouver

I never saw it coming

CyborgCamp occured at around 10Am from a shoutout by Kris Krug and Dave Olson of RainCityStudios. I met them both at Gnomedex and we got along really well.

The only problem was that they both lived in Vancouver B.C., and I live in Portland, Oregon. Normally, it is difficult for me to travel unless there is a conference. So I told them that.

To which Dave replied “just have a Cyborg Camp!”.

And CyborgCamp was born.

Once Kris Krug retweeted the news, 30 or so people immediately jumped into high gear. Nate Angell built a Wiki with all sorts of capabilities, and more people got on board to discuss all aspects of Cyborgs.

Meanwhile, the Twitterverse was coming up with all sorts of speaker and venue suggestions, and by 6Pm that night, the first planning meeting for CyborgCamp 2008 occured as an offshoot of an Android Developers meeting at the Lucky Lab Pub SE.

…Whew.

That was only two days ago. Now we have a venue, a sponsor, and some potential speakers. Also a @cyborgcamp Twitter account, which Bram Pitoyo has been handling amazingly, as well as a preliminary poster design.

Now what?

If you think this sounds like something you might be interested in, Sign up —> CyborgCamp2008 for Wiki access. Or follow the @cyborgcamp Twitter account for updates, general inquiries, speaker suggestions and sponsor ideas. Or you can directly E-mail caseorganic if you don’t use Wikis or Twitter.

What is a cyborg?

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine. Join in our pre-conference discussion about what is a cyborg?

What is CyborgCamp?

An unconference dedicated to exploring cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

Who should come to CyborgCamp?

Cyborgs, hybrids, androids, robots, and the people who love them!

When is CyborgCamp?

Nov. 21-22 2008

Proposed Topics

• Space and Time Compression
• Cybernetic Organisms - The emergence of technological systems, control and feedback in biological life
• Online Presence and Boundary Extensions
• What is Cybernetics?
• The Future of Mobile Technology
• Artifical Intelligence
• Technology and Culture
• A Brief History of Cybernetics
• Cyborgs Around & Within - How humankind takes for granted our lives as, and among Cyborgs
• Top 10 Modifications you can make to be a better Cyborg
• Cybernetics and Morality
• Wetware Hacking
• Pimp My Avatar

Hyperorganization

This should be an interesting event. It needs a lot of film and audio coverage, as well as live casting and projection screens. As many channels as possible so we can exist in as many places at one time. Our minds can supply the rest.

You can follow along at CyborgCamp.org or on Twitter by following @cyborgcamp.

The lead users of a product are those who use it the most. They are also the first to ‘break’ the product, or find limitations in it. Increasingly, they’re more likely to blog about those weaknesses or limitations, and even fix some of them.

It has never been easier to be near those who will adopt your product. Using some simple techniques borrowed from Anthropology, you can find out exactly what your consumer needs, and how to implement it. All you need to do is find the earliest adopters and lead users of a product in your niche and observe what they are saying about the product. Once you’ve developed a product from their advice, you’ll find a lot of other consumers adopting that product as well.

Why does this happen? The needs of lead users are the future needs of mass consumers in a given niche.

The key is to follow the advice of the most voracious adopters first. Bring your product to a shared work location like Portland’s Cubespace, where dozens of supporters will be poised and ready to give constructive feedback and advice. Ask this group of people what they find themselves frustrated with. What current limitations do they face in technology? Follow them around for a day, and, with their permission write down what they do. What is efficient? What is not? What products do they keep coming back to again and again?

Then, pick a problem and engineer a solution. Market that solution, and test it with the lead users. If it fails, it’s probably not going to move to the next stage of early adopters and routine users. Who were the lead users of Twitter? Why did they find Twitter to be useful? Did it help them communicate during their travels to tech conferences around the world?

Product development is about asking a lot of questions, and engaging yourself with your consumer’s needs. You can’t just get a group of geniuses together in a conference room and tell them “lets develop a product!”  I’ve done that countless times, and it is really fun, but creating a product seperately from the consumer’s input is generally a hit-or-miss process that often ends up in tears.

Embed yourself in your target market. Invest your time researching the consumer’s needs. This product is for them, not you. The more you make it for them, the more they will like you. Product development is engineering success by engagement and inference.

One of the problems of this information-chocked world is that answer-seeking becomes too quick to be well-refined. Artificial Intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon explains this problem very well with his term “Satisfice”.

Satisfice: a hybrid word formed from satisfy and suffice, referring to the tendency of time-starved, information-overloaded users to select the first good-enough solution that crosses their path. Users often use satsificing as a triage strategy, based on the time and effort a more comprehensive search might entail.

How does one avoid making mediocre choices due to last-minute information needs? The solution is to predict what future information will be needed, and then create networks of experts based on those future needs.

Where to start?

• A good place is Linkedin.com Answers (when people you don’t know answer your questions well, add them to your network).
• Facebook notes (tag friends in a note and ask for experts, blog reccommendations, and books).

In this way, your network researches for you en masse, and you can simply wait for the information to return. In the future, your network may rely on you for your specific expertise in order to avoid their own Satisfice on the subject.

Definition of Satisfice taken from Bob Goodman’s Usability Glossary.