Japanese cell phone novels demonstrate expanded possibilities

This New Yorker story details the emergence in Japan of “novels” authored entirely by mobile phone in text messaging sized installments. While heavy on the implications for and debate about what constitutes literature, the article provides an example of the how mobile devices expand people’s concept of how to do things. These novels authored on mobile phones also sell as old-fashioned hardcover and paperback books. We remain near the beginning of innovative uses of and services for mobile devices.

Of broader significance, the mobile phone enables new ways of meeting individual needs and wants and interacting with the world.

For the first time Networked biography is feasible for the masses

For the first time the combination of mobile phone, camera, data networking, and software make possible a networked biography. Record life narratives that include your own memories as well as those other people share with you of the same moments. In a given week you might have submissions in your biography from 2,3, even 7 people. Multiple contributors significantly increase the impact of individual stories and memories. Individual stories and narratives gain richness as more people add context and details to shared moments.

A person might possess an entire book of personal memories they didn’t know existed, based on others working on their behalf.

Narrative resonates with people

Humans understand and absorb information more fully through narrative. The events and memories of our life are no exception. Nearly all photo sharing and assembly services are very good at displaying and sharing the individual media. However their outputs lack a broader context and narrative. As a result the photos remain out of context since people seldom afford the time and labor to manually turn their memories into a story.

Ibiograph delivers people the benefits of narrative and context by automatically assembling pictures and text into a story. Ibio takes discrete data points from the individual: pictures, location, actions, concerns, people around them, objects; and weaves them into a time-series narrative.

Ibiograph provides its customers the tools to instantly construct and reformulate narratives from their lives. Using the Ibio tools people can generate full biographical stories or narratives focused solely on subsets of their lives. For example instantly generate a story of a child’s sports team, a building project, a lifetime of birthdays, days it snowed. Any subset of a person's life can instantly be assembled into a narrative pdf memory book.

Mobile IS different

Take photos as an example. On the roughly 3 billion phones in the market rest billions of pictures trapped due to a lack of compelling service. Furthermore, many untold billions have not been taken because people still think of the costs imposed by digital cameras to PCs or even film. For the first time in human history it is inexpensive, easy, and fast to chronicle your life in a comprehensive, meaningful, narrative way. It now makes sense to record mundane, everyday experiences. Often times these everyday memories when preserved provide the greatest joy and information. Our brain tends to remember the “big” events. In the Kodak era we reserved our pictures for the predetermined, biggest events, but today all memories should be preserved. When looking back it’s the everyday impressions and memories that enrich; not just the momentous events.

Ibiograph
Combine camera phones with a service that automates assembly, creates a narrative, and publishes the story and for the first time in human history, widespread, detailed, ongoing biography is possible. Such a service provides individuals with entertainment and memory benefits and implies a rich historical record will be available to future generations, furthering the knowledge base of humanity. www.ibiograph.com.

Welcome to the party Tim O'Reilly!

We jest with the flippant title. Ibiograph is thrilled that Tim O’Reilly, a major influencer and visionary thinker in the tech world, reached an epiphany about the significance of the mobile phone as a unique and PRIMARY development platform, or channel for consuming services (depending on your whether you are on the “sell” or “buy” side of the specific transaction).

Ibiograph has applied this thinking for the last 2 years as we’ve developed the Ibiograph, our service for chronicling life using the mobile phone. Tim makes the point that the mobile phone is a completely different environment and channel than the PC. To fully realize the value of the channel, the mobile phone’s multipurpose functionalities and function must be integrated from the design stage of service development, not added on as an extension of an existing service. Much like the “search” paradigm constrains the thinking about mobile apps, the entire PC centric conception of the web proves limiting.

Tim argues the combination of the uniqueness (i.e., personal, ubiquitous, sensor filled, communication device) of mobile phones with the power of the cloud holds tremendous value; we agree. We also believe that the discipline of designing and developing for the mobile phone and the information efficiency required offer the opportunity to provide value creating new services for people.

This information efficiency requirement is very different than coding for the Web 2.0 PC environment and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Everyone acknowledges the bandwidth, processing power, and form factor constraints of the mobile platform. Over time Moore's law will alleviate these - in fact this is starting to happen now. But a good portion of the value people receive from an information efficient service will continue in perpetuity because of the human and environmental constraints; namely when using a mobile people are often on the go, so time and effort are at a premium. If a task taking 1 minute and 150 kilobytes using a Web 2.0 PC-first oriented service extended to the mobile can be accomplished in 8 bytes and 10 seconds, most of the time in mobile the latter wins.

An example of this thinking and development framework put into practical application is the Ibiograph's (www.ibiograph.com) service for automatically publishing networked, personal memory books (PDF), completely "authored" using simple text and picture messaging from the mobile.

Future of the web from Demo08

Thanks to Greg Linden’s post, I watched portions of the video from the Future of the Web panel from Demo08. A number of significant points were discussed. Some of them intersect with what we at Ibiograph think about, work on, and solve.

1. Better understanding of language and meaning
Peter Norvig – Google “ better understanding of language and meaning, what people mean, better statistics, algorithms. Better communities ”

Ibiograph Approach and Solution: We agree with the problem but attack the solution from a different perspective. Ibio starts at the individual level with an understanding of personal meaning of language in context and over time.

2. People don’t want to search they want to accomplish tasks.
Prabhakar Raghavan-Yahoo “Divining intent, people want to run their lives., Retrieval engine is limiting paradigm. Task fulfillment is key, people don’t want to search, they want to accomplish tasks”

Ibio Approach and Solution: We agree, search as a paradigm is currently bloated (like financial services and auto industries); see earlier post. Ibio example of accomplishing tasks- People don’t want to tag, organize pictures, text, audio, and video. People want to preserve and share memories in an indexable, narrative way. Ibio’s memory agent automatically organizes and tells people’s story using their personal lexicon. Ibio Memory books automatically publish in PDF and deliver to people. View memories and create stories on the fly by using the words in your Lexicon to instantly create books of all moments described by that word.

3. Wish fulfillment
Howard Bloom (futurist,author of The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century )– genie in bottle, do everything I want it to, long term goals, wish fulfillment mechanism, accomplish almost anything (user agent). Outboard memory – remember names. “read my mind” extension of my own intelligence.

Ibio Approach: A user agent, suggesting helpful actions based on the time, context, historical knowledge of real life, and relationships to people close to you.

The “future of the web” focuses on solving a wider range of daily, real world problems that won’t necessarily be thought of as “the web”. Ibiograph offers technology, innovation, and services that deliver value to people by saving them time and acting as an agent to accomplish tasks on their behalf. The services available today through the Ibio agent are memory archiving, automatic PDF memory book publishing, with translation services and enhanced search using your personal lexicon currently being tested.

Creation, meaning, and evolution of language

All words got their start with one individual. Subsequently, through communication, mutual agreement, and understanding the word filters into a language. At a given moment in time agreement exists between people as to the meaning of a word. Many words change meaning and usage over time. Famously, the word “gay” once predominantly meant “happy”. While this meaning still exists today it has been superseded by the definition “homosexual”.

Ibiograph embedded a time element in its service that tracks the changes to specific word meanings in an individual's lexicon. The Ibiograph system tracks changes and attributes them to the individual. Over time this archive becomes significant and rivals the Oxford English Dictionary for defining and tracking the use of words in the English Language, or any other language. Ibiograph aggregates the knowledge from across all individuals using its service and doesn’t rely on the knowledge possessed by a limited number of “wise” men.

Semantic web firm Siri sparse on details but “user agent” model is right

This week Semantic web startup Siri did a little PR, at least that’s my interpretation of CNET article and TechCrunch mention. More of a teaser tactic, similar to the Segway gameplan. Talk up a revolutionary technology in an intentionally vague manner but drop hints about the gold plated pedigrees (e.g., result of Darpa funding, Dean Kamen’s latest).

However, Siri (or whatever it will be named) correctly understands the next generation of value creation for the internet and digital life involves personal “agents” acting on people’s behalf. The innovative firms that participate in making this happen will create and capture significant value. The agent model offers its highest value when accessed via mobile phone in an active environment.

More insight on the Siri vision can be found on insider Tom Gruber’s website.

Mobile phone is the optimal life biography tool

The mobile phone is a personal, always with you, multimedia, and communication device. Much of the planet uses one. These characteristics make the mobile phone the optimal tool for recording your life in a biographical narrative while you live it. People can’t always determine in advance when something significant will happen. Some events only prove significant in hindsight. Using your mobile phone to capture your life narrative and memories solves these issues.

Andy Rubin recently wrote an entry for the Google 10th anniversary blog about the unprecedented success of the mobile phone as a consumer device. He covers the usual points about the market size (about 3.2 billion) and ubiquity, while also highlighting one of our favorite talking points; the device you carry in your pocket today is more powerful than the computer you used in 1999. For perspective, this is likely the computer on which you first surfed the web and were using during the internet and tech bubble! He lists some of his thoughts on how people will use the mobile phone over the next 10 years. These thoughts include smart alerts, crowd sourcing, and augmented reality. I’d add a version of the title of this post, “Life biography and memory recording tool” as a bullet point to Mr. Rubin’s list of what people will use their mobile for in the future.

Personal ongoing biography complements M. Rubin’s ideas of crowd sourcing and smart alerts. For example, aggregated networked biography enables crowd sourcing the historic record, opening rich new vistas for future historians’ analysis and reshaping the way history is written.

In Mobile, to search is too late

Call me contrarian but I’m skeptical of the value proposition for mobile search. Don’t get me wrong, “search” has exponentially lowered the cost for finding valuable information (search costs). However, the act of searching lends itself to a person parked in front of a computer in a “working” environment. Libraries try to minimize the noise and distractions for a reason; people need focus to effectively research. So while search will remain paramount as an entry point for the PC, I doubt that it quite hits the sweet spot in mobile. The utility of search will be far narrower.

When using a mobile device in most instances time and attention are scarce. Mobile search will only occur with a great and pressing need. Search requires an interruption to the “mobile” person. That means an opportunity exists for an “agent” of the individual to help people before they search.

Rather than search, in a mobile environment we must strive for anticipation. When in a primarily mobile environment, if forced to search, it is too late.

I’d previously written this post and with a related post by Mark Hendrickson on TechCrunch yesterday it seemed timely to publish. Mark’s post, Is Search the Best Interface for Mobile?, makes quality, specific points about the weaknesses of “search” when mobile and using mobile devices. First, he raises the difficulty of typing out a search string on a mobile when mobile. Second, hundreds or thousands of results (in fact more than 3-5 results) to a query are unhelpful.

Semantic Web buzz building momentum

An increase in the frequency of Semantic Web articles over the last 7 to 14 days suggests in the next 12 months this topic may capture the buzz in the tech world. Semantic web development previously garnered some coverage, but I notice an uptick.

Times Online offers an interview with Tim Berners-Lee in which he makes the point that the Semantic web potentially minimizes Google. I agree that translating the Semantic Web vision to usable and widely disseminated service returns search from the primary entry point to its role as a reference librarian. In other words ,not for use when looking for everyday things but rather specified knowledge that exists beyond the individual's expertise. A much narrower scope than entry point to the entire web.

This possibility of disintermediating Google turned into a headline by Drudge, increasing its exposure. Other articles, including this one on CNET soon pushed off of the sematic web displaces Google hypothesis. Interestingly, they pulled somewhat dated (2006) quotes from Google director of research Peter Norvig. Perhaps the Googleplex still has a de facto ban on talking to CNET/News.com. Peter raises a number of interesting points, not least of which is the lack of incentive for competitors, particularly market leaders, to participate in a standardized system.

And finally the most in-depth and contextual piece of the 3 in the Financial Times.

New York Times on Text Messaging

Article views text messaging through the prism of a "generation" gap. Although when reading the article, youth leading the market seems a more precise interpretation . Parents and adults also embrace the medium, which fundamentally differs from a complete disconnect (which I think of as classically illustrated by the initial release of rock & roll music).

To me the most interesting and significant aspects from the people interviewed revolve around the value and uniqueness of mobile text messaging as a medium. They described it as "personal", and something in-between an email and a phone call. Text messaging is asyncrohonous yet immediate. Informal and concise. Coded abbreviations are the norm. This means all parties to a communication must have the code book. But it also means high efficiency of communication.

The fact that text messaging was not originally envisioned as a key consumer technology but rather as a method for the phone companies to send service messages, lends further credibility to its claim as an important medium.

As I've written before, we remain early in the innovation cycle for this humble yet powerful medium.

Difficulty of keeping a daily journal

Keeping a daily journal has become very difficult given the typical pace of life for most people. One cost preventing a brief, daily journal comes from the difficulty of fitting it into these busy days. Once time becomes available, most people allocate their respite to entertainment or unwinding.

In the context of this post I categorize a “blog” differently for two reasons. One, creating and maintaining a blog requires more effort and steps than are conducive to jotting down quick thoughts and entries. The classical journal accommodates both equally well. Second, today most writers blog for public consumption and orient towards a subject.

Even brief journal entries accrue significant historical benefits in the aggregate. For example in the reconstruction of the huge, effusive volcanic eruption in Laki, Iceland, 1783.

“What happened next can be recreated in great detail because in the late 18th century diaries were fashionable among the newly literate middle classes and the circulation of newspapers was rising even in small towns; there was also growing scientific interest in the natural world, with educated amateurs keeping detailed notes of natural phenomena. From such records, one can track the course of the Laki cloud literally day by day (see map).”

“18th-century Climate change.”The Economist. December 22, 2007. www.economist.com

LifeCasting and Social Networking, What is the value?

Of course today is a fitting day for the perfunctory review of 2007. Unlike the trend to increasingly produce a review with still 1/12th of the year to go, I wait until the last day passed. According to the volume of articles and coverage in both technology and general interest news, Social Networking and its close cousin LifeCasting (e.g., Twitter, Kyte.tv) emerged as mass market phenomenons in 2007. These services exist first and foremost to entertain. As such they should be analyzed in the competitive market for entertainment. Right now these services are highly successful forms of entertainment. This also means that they are subject to fads, fickleness, and the next “hot” thing. They don’t deliver much direct value to the individual (marginal efficiencies in keeping in touch with friends). The benefits are outweighed by the costs of information overload and friend inflation.