Chris Kenyon

Human computation

There are things that humans do well that computers do poorly.  Harnessing all those 'human computing cycles' is an extraordinary challenge and opportunity. 

I came across this talk by Luis von Ahn, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon  a year ago and it was one of the most interesting and thought provoking I had seen in years. 

Having enjoyed it so much,  I was ecstatic to see recently that the the task of digitising the world's books is being helped by the reCaptcha programme.

An image resizing revolution

In a previous team,  thinking about how to manage the resizing of thousands of photos automatically and intelligent was central to what we did. Of course if you automatically resize, you basically can only set a target for one dimension and have to exclude images whose aspect ratio will not fit into your target template.

This video represents an extraordinary breakthrough in that area and one that I have no doubt will be part of Photoshop / Picasa and hopefully GIMP in no time at all.  This is great innovation and we will all be printing off holiday photos using this in the next couple of years.

As for the early and easy ability to erase objects from photos - amazing if not a little scary.  See for yourself at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc.

Ubuntu and email on on the road

I use an Lenovo Thinkpad X60S with Ubuntu 6.10 extensively while travelling.  The following are some tips that have worked for me when using Ubuntu / Thunderbird on the road:

• Sync on Arrival plug-in - I regularly just grab the laptop and leave home or the office.  Sync-on-Arrival synchonises every email as it arrives, no need to close down properly OR click 'sychronise-now'. Link

• Nostalgy - I used to use Quickfile but wanted an extension that could either learn or have filters set.  The solution to this problem is Nostalgy by Alain Frisch.  This outstanding extension makes filing email x10 faster. 

• Start off-line / on-line - I find that Thunderbird can stutter on starting when I am offline.  I force the work online / offline dialog to come up on every login.  (This is set under Account Preference / Off-line & Disc settings)

• Network Manager - Network manager works excellently on my machine showing all available networks, strength and security setting.  My only gripe is that on car journeys the application seems to accumulate new networks endlessly and not realise it has lost some. 

Great tools for small and medium size organisations

If you have to work collaboratively on small projects with freelancers and you want to improve communication,  I really like this tool - http://www.basecamphq.com/

The same company produce a tool for personal productivity app that I think is great-  http://www.backpackit.com/.

Another service that you might want to look at for invoicing is http://www.blinksale.com/.  Simply takes the pain out of sending out, monitoring and reporting on invoicing.

2005 the tech year in review

1 The rise of the blogs

The rise of the 'blogs' online diaries driven by simple content management systems has been unstoppable.  If has not been 'blogged'  it doesn't count. Be they corporate , political , employee , professional http://www.roughtype.com/ or personal - blogs are represent the opening up of publishing on the web will grow and grow.

 

Blogs are interesting because a) the diversity of content is significantly greater than general websites b) they facilitate people posting content regularly and c) they allow visitors to comment on posts

 

Richard Scoble, Microsoft leading Tech evangelist only has to post a comment on his blog Scoblelizer that he will be in London and you'll be surprised who will turn up.

 

 

2 RSS - Really simple syndication

As question frequently heard in the corridors walked by the Digerati this year has been 'How can I check my favourite  100 blogs before breakfast?  As the numbers of web pages continues to grow and newsletters start to clutter your inbox, the the only way to keep up-to-date is with an RSS reader. 

 

RSS - Really Simple Syndication is a format that allows applications or websites to check quickly whether new content has been added to a website.  A reader allows you to peruse headlines from your selection of sources and decide what you want to read rather than laboriously go through each site.   If you don't already have a reader, consider -  http://www.sharpreader.net/ or  http://www.newsgator.com/

 

 

MustTryOmeter: 4/5

 

3 Pay per click advertising

In 2004, online advertising overtook cinema advertising spend, in 2005 it overtook radio spend and in 2006 its going to keep on growing.  Pay per click is relevant targeted, has low cost to entry, is measurable and with broadband users spending so much time online this advertising medium should be in every marketers armoury. 

 

October 2005 saw the first wedding proposal via search engine advertising - a obvious candidate for the  - 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should' Award

 

The rise of online spending is as fast as it is effective and Google and Overture have trail blazed the way.    If you haven't run a PPC pilot do - you'll see localised PPC where ads are only served to customers within X miles of a zip code/postcode really take off this year.

 

4 Podcasting

Podcasting, the recording of audio files and then making them available for download (especially to MP3 player) is in very early adopter days but looks set to grow.  Homemade recordings and the ability to download and listen to content on demand are going to allow niche audiences to form around specific topics - this is radio for the Long Tail.  If you are interested in experimenting, Ricky Gervais http://www.guardian.co.uk/rickygervais/ on the Guardian's Unlimited or This Week in Tech (TWIT) http://thisweekintech.com/ are good examples.

 

MustTryOmeter: 3/5

 

5 The Long Tail

 

Chris Anderson's seminal Wired article argues that products in low demand or with low sales volumes can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters.   The average Barnes and Noble store carries 130,000 titles in the US yet Amazon sells more than half of its sales from outside the top 130,000 titles!  Be it music, books, films or software, the long tail and its explanation of the effect of the internet on markets is bug news is going to effect more and more markets.  Watch out for Chris Anderson's book on the Long Tail due in May 2006. 

 

 

6 Wikipedia

 

Wikipedia - the free, multilingual, encyclopaedia written collaboratively by contributors hit new highs and lows this year.  The fact that anybody can edit and add to an article is both it's strength and it's weakness.  Multiple contributors sometimes fight it out over controversial topics and vandalism http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results.htm and malicious posts http://news.com.com/Is+Wikipedia+safe+from+libel+liability/2100-1025_3-5984880.html are raised as issues by detractors.   

 

Wikipedia's huge strengths lie in the breadth of articles contained in it and the fact it is well.. free.

 

Wikipedia's growth to the 2.5 billion page views a month: 

 

Source: Google Zeitgeist 2005 http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html

 

MustTryOmeter: 4/5 -Often a much fastest way to a fact or summary of an issue than simply surfing through sites returned by Google 

 

P.S - Brands should review and update their own entries on Wikipedia for factual accuracy. 

7 Geographical applications

2005 was a massive year for online and web-enabled geographic (mapping )applications.  Google shook up the market place with the launch of its elegant and fast google maps. 

• Microsoft responded with Virtual earth.com and then local.live.com
• Yahoo maps 
• Amazon's A9 block view service  http://www.amazon.com/gp/yp/B00035S0NQ/103-0260682-4441458?v=ypglance&n=3999141  all showed innovation in this area

It's worth clicking on the links above!

 

But perhaps the most exciting application was Google Earth http://earth.google.com/ - the desktop application that allows you to fly around the world using elevation data and satellite imagery at a level previously only available to intelligence services (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/28/google_buys_keyhole/).

 

Geographic web service which lend themselves to "Mash-ups"  - produced some outstandingly inventive sites: My favourite is Housing -  http://www.housingmaps.com/  followed by Chicago Crime http://www.chicagocrime.org/types/attempted_motor_vehicle_theft/67/

 

MustTryOmeter: 5/5

 

8 VOIP

Internet telephony went from low awareness to high visibility with eBay's £4 bn acquisition of four year old start-up Skype,  Free calls between computers, increasing bandwidth and increasing call quality have driven awareness and usage.  Incumbent long distance providers in some markets are fighting back and there are still many reasons why normal phones will be around for a while.  For 2006 keep an eye out for  a fight between Skype's proprietary format and the open SIP format that others, like Google and others are backing.

 

MustTryOmeter: 3/5 - Depends how much you use you PC and if you have a large international phone bill every month

 

9 Ajax, Betas and Web 2.0 Start-ups

There's a revolution going on and whether you call it Web 2.0 or AJAX hype - Since GMail and Flickr rediscovered the power of AJAX and we have been awash with Web 2.0 start ups. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html  My top 5 for 2005 were year were:

1.  Writely (Online word processing),  
2.  Flickr (Picture sharing),  
3.  Pandora (Free Music service),  
4.  Google Maps
5. TaDa (Online to do lists).   

 All worth having a play with! 

 

MustTryOmeter: 4/5 - Flickr is a must if you have not already, Writely is a must if you collaborate on Office documents!

10 - iTunes, ipod and all things Apple

With a 70% share of the digital music player market  - Apple position as Gorilla of online music was consolidated with the launch of Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod video.  iTunes, now a top 10 music retailer in the US is mirroring this growth across Europe. 

 

MustTryOmeter: 5/5 - What is a CD anyway?

11 - Console wars

Sony launched the incredibly sexy PSP and Microsoft launched Console War III with the X-box 360 - Nintendo launched the less than attractive DS.

 

With games sales a larger business than movies in the US the battle will be fought on many fronts. Support for High Definition TV and the provision of home entertainment networks allowing you to play music anywhere in your house will be driven by this new battle of the giants.   

12 - Decentralisation

Bit Torrent is responsible for an astonishing 35% of internet traffic!  Bit Torrent's peer to peer file swapping model allows for file downloads without using a central server  and is being used by early adopters to watch films and TV shows on demand .   

 

Aside from the panic this is causing in Hollywood - watch out for: the BBC making huge amounts of its archive available on a Bit Torrent like technology (UK only) , Google Video challenging TV stations, YouTube being bought by MSN and studios supporting P2P movie launches.

Of course, nothing dates faster than predictions about the future - I look forward to reviewing this in 12 months time!

Adios Adobe! - Fed up with slow loading of PDF files

Adobe Acrobat appears to get slower and slower by the release and keeps trying to force me into downloading 'other' software.

Great to find Foxit - a clean, fast, right-sized PDF viewer.  Thanks to Omar  - nice to see that I was not the only one getting the hump.

Why Gmail (Google Mail) needs an upgrade

Gmail's email service  - a joy of 'Ajaxian' implementation has set the standard in webmail for storage, speed of use and ease of use.  POP3 integration, contact importing and exporting and the enourmous storage limits have revitialised what appeared to be a moribund area of the web infrastrucutre.

Personally I am also a fan of the Adword  structure that fund's my email - I far prefer to have ads for tickets to the Arsenal on my screen than yet another singles or ringtone ad.

But Google's leaderhip in this field is about to be tested by the ongoing roll out of Yahoo mail's outstanding BETA and the imminent launch of Kahuna - Hotmail's new service (see Channel9 for a demo).  Both applications look like they will help redefine what people think it is possible to do with a web application. Does this mean that I should abandon GMail?

The basic answer on that is still a wait and see - indeed I have a sneeking suspicion that the simple elegance of the present Gmail interface linked to the search and other tools like forwarding may keep me on the side of Google.  But if I were erring on leaving there is a area of functionality that I would love to see - GCal - a calender from Google.

I would love to have a Calender that at the the end of my day was able to suggest both geographically and date constrained options to me.  If my appointment were from 5-6 in WC1n then the suggestions would be for a restaurant, theatre or cinema that was local to the area and already sorted by what was on that night.   

If I typed in restautrant into a appointment - GCal would add a 'Smart Tag'-like line to appear and a click on it woud return in Ajax speed a list of Restaurants (Pizza Express (1 mile), Spiga (1.1 miles), etc).  So here is a hope that GCal is not too far in the distance!

Office online

With the umm and erring around whether Google and Sun will put out an AJAX versions of Staroffice it easy to overlook the progress being made on web enabled versions of standard productivity software.  Here are just a few that are looking at (Thanks to Nick!.)

• Spreadsheet -http://numsum.com/
• Calendar -http://www.kiko.com/
• Powerpoint -http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
• Note taker -http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/

Personally  - I prefer www.writely.com over the aygwip app but there you go.

Noderierty - defined

Noderierty - The state of being known via rss feeds and Blogs and link pimping.

Google Films UK launches

Google's excellent film search capability is now available in the UK.  No more fighting through the UI of Odeon's site!

Just some of the features you should be aware of Films in your area by cinema, Film reviews, Cinemas showing specific films

You can access this simply by typing in film in your Google search bar and you can also search by actors and more.  It does raise the questions of when we will see Google launch search for other specific types of inventory.