Quick Test

Planning on refreshing and relaunching the Futurilla site very soon. Testing posting from iPhone. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

AOL

Edwin Aoki of AOL has just left the FOWA2 stage, and he was very eloquent about the nature of community, its roots online, and the opportunities and responsibilities we face as technologists. Again, unedited notes:

Edwin Aoki, AOL
The Changing Face of Online Communities and Communications
Community a key promise of the web since the beginning. Webmail is the leading driver of page views. Chat & IM moving rapidly online. Obvious community applications, but also others like eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon are based on communities of interest. Industry trends - disaggregation and syndication. Users seek out the the experiences and communities they're interested in. The Long Tail. Loss of control of context. A challenge for content and application providers. Think about embedding of YouTube videos. Web Apps too will become syndicated. Mashups. Interactions increasingly taking place in situ rather than in dedicated destinations. Community goes mobile, increasingly following users. Time online increasing, blurring between real and virtual - Second Life, WoW. Shared responsibility of technologists. Safety of tools, security/privacy, social effects. Bridging the digital divide, accessibility, age, socio-economic backgrounds. The Future is in the Balance - power/ease of use, social/commercial, online/offline.

Technorati Tags: Communications, Conferences, fowalondon07, futureofwebapps, Internet, Networks, technology

Tech Crunch

Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch is onstage at FOWA2 and talking in some detail about what it takes to get a good Web 2.0 startup going. Here's my notes, unedited:
Mike Arrington, Tech Crunch

2006 was not a bubble. The hurdle to become public is much greater. $600m vc invested in Web 2.0 startups. Context of cheaper startups. YouTube bought for 3x the vc investment. MySpace $25m/month ad revenue. Companies failing - good sign. The best is yet to come. 1. Have a good idea - invent, destroy, remove friction. 2. Have a business plan (though some of the best had none). 3. Have a revenue model. 4. Build it cheap, test the waters. 5. Avoid a high burn rate. Amie Street music market. Jingle Networks free business information. The Buzz Factor: Solve a real problem, Don't be the 200th video sharing platform, Have a blog, If buzz isn't happening rethink the product. Opportunities: Apollo offline/online platform. DRM and movies/music/tv. Portability of data and services (pipes, ning, teqlo). Mobile (iPhone)

Technorati Tags: Business, Conferences, futureofwebapps, fowalondon07, Web

e-Science Day III part 1

I'm taking over blogging the first session at today's e-Science workshop as Robert Sharl will be doing the first presentation. Normal service will be resumed shortly, so in the mean time apologies for spelling, typo, and grammatical mistakes. Gregory Sporton introduces The Accessible grid is this week's theme The story so far week one the oportunities. looking at frameworks and environments week 2 was looking at methodologies in practice and collaboration demo. The Accessible Grid Is there a challenge in e-Science. Can we identify what data is being sent and distinguish what is being sent. Firewalls can be an issue in e-Science. Robert Sharl Digital tools/Digital spaces Nature of computer in the digital process and how the computer is seen as part of the creative process Revisit paper from prague but within the context of e-Science Concentrating on Creative Practice & technology and on Ultra parallelism and the VRU useful lessons from what happened at the VRU Digitising the analogue 50 years translating and reproducing the world around us increasing effective badnwidth - accumalitive doublings storage & data processing and the halvings of cost - moore's law Allows digital tech to represent different things from instruction sets through over time to media & genetics Resolution moved from aproximate detail to where it is a perfect version to where we have excess capacity - we start to see metadata in photography the image is only part of the data set e.g geolocational data forms part of the process Performative increases tendencies - the computer is a tool - a digital powerful paintbrush requiring the control of an expoerienced practitioner. there is a move to the desktop - the user becomes the person in control of the process the machine age for ideas metrics of production digital tech - a heavy lifting gear for the processing of ideas equivalent to the steam age for manufacture. metrics are thos of production. any sufficient advance in tech is indistiguishable from magic. Moore's law allows artists to do thing not dreampt of before. belief in A&D is that tech is just a performance gain. Aquisition of tech is done in this was that it is an appliance within a process and faster. Creative play moves from just performance to transformative The singularity is where we are heading. As we head there we cannot see the exponential growth from close up The acceleration of everything Ultra parallelism - a model for virtualised creative research. principles of supercomputing applied to creativity Tools vs. environment tools are discreet and fit into a work flow, deploy them and they work on a batch model - one process at a time. Environments are dispersed, configured around a problem domain and use design patterns they are populated and use a time share model The network is where power is located creative supercomputing not just the physical hardware & software, but the organisational structures and the social structures - the whole network of people and ideas institutionalised tech monoculture normally. tried to look at tech as a matrix of interconnected focused around standards and glue technologies. the techs themselves help to speed up the process. looking for harmonics and synergies The future of creativity looking at tools in a network sense will provide near perfect information, the collapse of distance and the zero-scarcity of processin in 20 years Harnessing transformative effects looking at something that surrounds the whole creative process. turning the tech from lots of units to an environment. dramatic transformative effects Implication for eSciences in the arts The network is the computers new language - eArts rather external ref Tune the tech matrix look for conections harmonies standards synergies Don't deploy getting the tech out of the box, look at the network and the interesting place is the spaces in between Cede control - give up the control we don't get to see the effects of the spaces in between. Dr. Andy Pryke CERCIA, Birmingham University The 3 categories of the grid - data, computational & social Jargonism a lot of it when looking up the term of grid What does it mean rather than the tech technology focused and is possibly a bit confusing what it really is rather than tech sense The grid is a tool it's not the tools it's what you do with them Have to think of ways use this tool Flickr and the grid of access to everyone's images 4 cats actually. the equipment grid is the extra category. control of remote instruments or sensors. Social, Data and computing are the other main cats. The Data Grid 2 terms. Late 90's very specific definition which is part of eScience the wider grid concept goes further back in time Speech - 200,00B.C. through to oral tradition, accounting, cuniform writing, to printing to the Web The modern grid uniform access to data, and can be massive amount. Intelligent data and semantics of data to discern meaning within data currently very large amount of specific data generated and stored Computational Grid from history Abstract thought - speech - accountants - abacus - mechanical calculators through to digital computers The grid computer - the vision you won't need to know about the computer - invisible computing - access to massive amounts of computing power. currently lots of separate grids/clusters. specialised programming and scientific data. calculations need to be parallelised. Now batch processing but needs to be real-time for use by artists. Social Grid - history direct - primative life communicated in a social grid, social interaction, speech again communication physical but at distance e.g. through painting, writing, postal service (networked fashion) and printing (mass communication). communication in a virtual way through telecommunications, instantly at a distance. through recording Social grid the vision - equal communication and abolishing their location - virtual presence. Currently have Access Grid nodes - high tech video conferencing, standard ones such as Skype. MMOG such as Second life closest to virtual reality opportunity to use in ways not planned. Distributed genius collaborative creation over the grid time and tech should be invisible. e.g. Wikipedia, Flickr, B3TA, mash-ups, photoshop tennis - people can add things to a picture. Work using the grid - an example form Michael Takeo Magruder. Working in the Grid example of the Susanne Vega concert in second life. many people creating guitars and clothes in the virtual space and creating the items in the space. The Grid and the Arts? \How do we use it? e.g. as a research tool, for new-media artists?, for traditional practice? Artists in the Lab projects? Precursors to the Grid existed in history. Discussion Tools vs. Environment

e-Science Day II

I'm at the second day of the VRU's e-Science for the Visual Arts workshops, and again I'll be contributing notes here, as they happen. Real-time Datascapes: Real-time Histories. Michael Takeo Magruder. Michael is an ex-scientist practicing as an artist, His work blurs the boundaries between content, culture, art and technology. He's fascinated with real-time history, the process by which the capturing, reporting, mediation, dissemination and feedback loop has become compressed and instantaneously reflexive. Notes: Much of Michael's work is now algorithmic, his interest lies in the lack of direct control upon the datascapes which he creates (themselves snapshots or samples of the broader datascape which we inhabit). This notion of the artist 'giving up control' is less straightforward than Michael would have us believe; the mediascape that we live in already mashes things up contextually, already strips crucial information out (sometimes as a result of overload) and forces us to interpret things in our own contexts. We might wonder less about what a scientist brings to art here than what art has to contribute to the regular processes by which we absorb and interpret information from the datascape. Engaging with Digital Technology. Panel Matt Gough, Dancer and programmer. Matt's doing some fascinating work on computer-based notation systems for generating dance, looking at internal physiological aspects as much as external effects, and thereby solving some of the inherent problems with using inverse kinematics in dance simulation. Matt speaks very fluently about the difficulties in bringing the worlds of science and dance together, and the challenges to such a reductionist approach. Jean ? Textile designer utilising CAD systems, digital textile printers, digitally manipulated paintings as source material for fabric design. Tactile aspects of traditional practice and initial resistance to digital technology. Notes: There's really too much here to encompass in note form, and if the VRU can get the podcast up soon then I'll link to it directly. Insert something here about this debate on the role of technology for the artist. The Networked VJ. Workshop - Keir Williams & Jonathan Green. Keir and Jonathan are working with MaxMSP/Jitter, Modul8, and Java, and interfaces to iSight cameras and web-based interaction to drive visual effects and real-time synthesised audio on video projectors. They have a live dancer whose movement is triggering a range of visuals and sounds. Keir and Jonathan are manipulating these using a digital mixing desk and a USB gamepad. I'll link to their Keynote presentation directly. Notes: e-Science models & practice: artists in changing media. Discussion. Notes:

Technorati Tags: Art, Birmingham UK, Computing, Conferences, Creativity, Design, Future, Networks, Open Source, Science, Software, technology, Transformative

Foil Disk Storage

The future of disk drives just got interesting again: Cringley's new company:

Who needs flash in general as a mass storage technology? Our 10-gigabyte 0.85-inch drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again, all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash while being just as resistant to shock damage and more resistant to heat. That 10-gig drive will cost $24 compared to $240 for 10 gigs of flash, so we expect that our technology will be used for any application requiring more than 2-gigs of storage. The obvious market here is mobile phones, which will become media storage devices.

Technorati Tags: Future, Futurilla, iPod, phones, puppy, technology, Transformative

e-Science for the Visual Arts

I'm attending the first day of the e-Science for the Visual Arts series hosted by BIAD's Visualisation Research Unit. I'm especially interested in how the development in e-science might impact the broader space for collaboration and the use of high-performance computing: What kind of things become possible when computing power is essentially limitless, all information is everywhere, and all tools are connected? The venue promises open WiFi, so I'll try to update this as the day progresses. e-Science in the Visual Arts. Dr. Gregory Sporton (UCE Birmingham): Gregory is the director of the VRU, and kicked off the day with a broad discussion of the day's agenda, and the relationship between e-science and the visual arts. Notes: Convergence between e-science practices and IT use in the visual arts. The role of Universities in developing an infrastructure for arts, and access to technologies for artists. e-Science as a term is a political tool used to release funding for large computing infrastructure: Over-supply of processing power driving a search for new customers in visual arts. The technology dominates the discussion, but it is clear that people and collaboration is at the core of this. Culture of e-Science.. needs to move away from the culture of experts which has dominated (we can learn from Post-modernism here). Moving the arts culture away from what we see to what is possible. Who owns technology? How do you develop it? How do people access it (role of Universities here and questions about how they make their infrastructure accessible)? New forms of creativity? Collaborative practice? Interactivity? Art that is unfinishable (successive approximations)? Theory running ahead of practice ("what would Marx do with this?"). Create an infrastructure–what would a useful infrastructure look like? How to link technology and creativity? Re-interpretation of training/practice. What is it to be 'creative'? What is e-Science? Dr. Thorsten Schnier (CERCIA): Thorsten is a computer scientist and engineer from Birmingham University. In his talk he focused on what actually constitutes e-Science, the problems in defining this, and what we already know. Notes: e-Science is being made up as we go along, even within the core of the field. What do we know? It constitutes infrastructure - Computing resources, networking, auxiliary services - but the 'Grid' constitutes this plus services, brokers, markets, and middleware. Example of the Se3d program from HP. New markets emerging to provide services to animators and visual creatives, rendering, with organisations like CERCIA owning software licenses and providing services, developing and driving the market. e-Science=Grid+Research? Is it more than this? Is it demand-driven or technology driven? Example projects include sharing databases, joined simulations, CPU-intensive models, multi-discipline work and data-rich experiments. Challenges and problems: Data/Software compatibility, Security/Confidentiality/Trust, Interfaces. e-collaboration. Usability of e-Science Dr. Russell Beale (CERCIA): Russell is from the Advanced Interactivity Group at Birmingham University. The problem with e-Science: It means a different thing to everyone involved, and these definitions are changing, and more being added. Notes: Different views: "only connected HPC", "mainly distributed astronomy", "Science, but on the Internet", "existing science, but with more computers", "simply a bandwagon". Bandwagons can be useful as a source of funding. Move from Single users/systems to Multiple users and single systems to Multiple users and multiple systems. Myriad influences upon Users and Systems which need to be considered (complex systems). Additionally Science itself is changing from looking for patterns to looking for anomalies? This is true also of Art. Usable design is about taking all these contextual elements into consideration (example of security with human user being the most easily hackable part of the system). Little Science, Big Science: enabling widespread data collection and assimilation. Example of bug survey from number plates/headlights across the UK. Non-scientists as sources of data: need appropriate systems with appropriate usability. Need and duty for feedback and keeping people involved, in an ethically-responsible manner. Design and Usability - the aim of design is not just usability. Slanty design - purposefully reduces functionality eg iPod shuffle. Make it simple to do simple things, hard to do unwanted things. Example of Gmail and deleting messages. Clean usability that reduces side-effects of doing things by limiting functionality. What is required for a Creative e-Workspace? Workshop - Mike Priddy: Mike's intention is to open this up to the room now - looking for examples of such spaces. Notes: Creative e-Workspaces - What are they? What do they need? Sharing and social networking sites - Flickr, YouTube etc. - how are these being used? What are the relative merits of closed environments versus open communities? Transformative Technologies or Performative gains? Michael Takeo posits that all systems entail control over possibility and that this is necessary and positive. Gregory Sporton suggests that this is well-understood but is a conscious choice on the part of the artist/originator, and that other ways are possible. Robert Sharl suggests Second Life as an example of a more open-ended environment or platform. Michael Takeo disagrees that this is a fundamental difference between code and art - that code is present in both and constitutes law and limits. TS disagrees and RB develops the idea that while code and standards are controlled, the soft layers on top (people) are dynamic and messy. The Internet is now the real world, and the distinctions are much fuzzier. Dennie Wilson brings this back to the core notion or a space for collaboration and production (as in SL this can also be the space for the work itself, or the work can extend the space). Analogies and modeling the physical world.. do we need the consistency of constraints lifted from the physical world? Julie Tolmie cites her own work as an example in which an entirely abstract mathematical concept was only in retrospect layered with terminology that grounds it in a physical, analogue world. Building the Wireframe. Discussion: Notes:

Technorati Tags: Birmingham UK, Computing, Conferences, Creativity, Future, Internet, Networks, Science, technology, Transformative, Web