Ebooks can be more than digital copies of paper books

The rapid growth of ebooks and ebook readers offers exciting opportunities to improve the book as a product. Publishers can enhance books with additional multimedia and background material of interest since the marginal cost of additional bytes is low relative to more printed pages. With ebooks the possibility exists to offer many more versions of the book, which cost prohibits in a print run. Authors or publishers can include things like maps and reference material. MacMillan announced they will sell a premium ebook version that includes extras that add value and context such as author interviews and reading guides.

"Macmillan, one of the nation's largest publishers, said it will issue books it expects to be best sellers in an enhanced electronic-book format, starting in the first quarter of 2010. The special editions, which will include author interviews and other material, such as reading guides, will carry a list price slightly higher than the hardcover edition. (Hardcover books typically list for at least $25, while e-book versions of best sellers can go for as little as $9.99.) The new e-books will go on sale on the same day as the hardcover. After 90 days, the special edition will be replaced by a standard e-book. ... "Our goal is to give the consumer what they want, when they want it, at a fair price," said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, whose imprints include St. Martin's Press; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Tor and Henry Holt & Co. Mr. Sargent said the company, working with its authors, will adjust the number of special editions it publishes based on market response." - from WSJ

Ibiograph does the same with our DayLife personal memory books - automatically adding valuable content that would be prohibitively costly in time or money in the print world. Once produced, your custom Ibio books can be printed, shared, or saved.

Text messaging on The Simpsons: Pop culture pervasiveness

DayLife : Instantly preserve your experiences with text messaging

As the world's most popular communications platform, mobile phone text messaging offers the best way to catalog your life. Ibiograph's interactive dialogues help you keep the fun, everyday experiences of your life. No work required on your part; just have fun answering the questions. If other people are with you, the pictures you take automatically go to them as well. Ibiograph's DayLife service automatically produces an ebook of your photos and text messages – continually adding to it until you are ready to download the book.

Don't lose photos when you change phones

With all the exciting new phones available, one of the impediments to upgrading is the difficulty and time required to preserve the photos that have built up on your existing device. A family member of mine explicitly stated she needs to do something with her photos before she can get a new phone. Despite the fact the existing phone at this point no longer functions consistently.

First, to solve the immediate problem, send your photos on you old phone to mms@ibiograph.com and our Day in the Life service will auto-assemble them into a pdf book and maintain a simple timeline of your photos and moments.

Secondly, going forward, send all your photos to mms@ibiograph.com as you take them - this avoids future problems when hundreds of photos build up. At that point "the old shoebox" syndrome sets in; the costs of organizing the photos becomes prohibitive. Do something more meaningful with the photos you take with your mobile. Day in the Life by Ibiograph creates narrative ebooks for you out of your mobile phone photos.

Preserving memories a fundamental human need

I'm reminded again that preservation of memories and narrative biography are fundamental to the human condition. Demand for memory preservation will always exist. Now with services such as Ibiograph's Day in the Life, the costs have fallen and the ease of use increased to make it feasible for people to rapidly preserve the memories of their lives on a much larger scale.

The Verneys' were an English family that lived through significant historical events of the 17th century but were not themselves particularly significant. They were present, but not the drivers of events. However, they saved almost all of their daily correspondence for over 100 years. The following excerpt from a book review of Adrian Tinniswood's biography The Verneys

"The documents that offer an entrée into the Verneys' world are themselves a
reminder of its unfamiliarity. Without telephones or email, friends and
relatives could communicate only with paper and ink, whether a scribbled note to
a neighbour, a letter entrusted to one of the recently established postal routes
in and out of London, or a packet confided to friendly hands for the arduous and
unreliable journey overseas. (So unreliable that Jack Verney, apprenticed to a
merchant trading out of the Turkish port of Iskenderun, near Aleppo, twice went
more than two years without hearing from his family, and was reduced to sending
dejected respects to "those of my relations that have not forgotten
me".)

Luckily for us, Jack's father, Sir Ralph Verney, never knowingly
discarded a piece of correspondence. Thanks to his meticulous filing and the
benign neglect of his descendants, an extraordinary trove of 30,000 letters
written by and to the 17th-century Verneys was found in the 1830s at the
family's crumbling country pile."

The Verneys example demonstrates the individual need to preserve memories and the greater significance for human history. Ibiograph Day in the Life, use messaging from your mobile phone to preserve your memories. Ibiograph automatically creates personal ebooks of your memories to save or share.

Reduce clutter with Ibiograph Day in the Life

Take pictures of memories so you don't have to keep clutter around! Wall Street Journal House Talk columnist June Fletcher recommends a picture instead of the original as a de-cluttering tactic. Interestingly, Ibiograph's first alpha testers used Day in the Life service to take a picture of their children's artwork and other keepsakes so they didn't have to be kept in the attic. Each day when your son or daughter arrives home from school with their latest masterpiece, mom or dad snaps a picture with their cell phone and sends it to mms@ibiograph.com. A timeline and ebook of their art will always be available, allowing you to toss the original rather than fill up your attic. Of course some people will want to keep a few “special” pieces but you can free your home from daily clutter. By answering the Day in Life question, What is the subject or theme? With the answer “art” as time goes on you'll be able to see their art's evolution over time. This holds true for any keepsake - place it in your Day in the Life Archive.

Digital photo books without the work and time

People like sitting on a beach on a tropical island. They don't like waiting airport security lines and jamming into airplane seats.
A fun post about about setting more realistic and enjoyable expectations from NYT domestic disturbances blog.
"If I had more time could exercise and put together all those photo albums...

I’ve been meaning for so long to make photo albums,” I said guiltily. “At least for five years.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she said, folding her hands. “I’ve been waiting 50 years.”
"Nobody makes photo books."

But they would like them (just like they'd like to be on the beach). Ibiograph Day in the Life service eliminates the time and effort required to organize and make photo books. Do more without doing more! Look like a hero, while living your life. Get to the tropical island without the connecting flights.

People embrace digital books or ebooks

A noticeable increase in the offerings (Kindle announcements), consumer awareness and the perceived value of digital books or ebooks suggests that the time of the ebook is upon us.

• Last week Amazon purchased an Iphone app for reading digital books
• According to some O'reilly analysis and interpreted by ReadWriteWeb, Ebooks are one of the fastest growing iphone apps.
• Wall Street Journal published a special report on the implications of ebooks for reading and writing.
• Anecdotally, I saw a grandmother on a ferry in Maine reading her Kindle on a recent weekend (not the stereotypical early adopter techno-geek).

A couple of interesting points for reflection brought up in the WSJ review:
1. E-book change the way we read and write.
"Search (engine optimization) will change how books/prose are written."
2. Establishing more digital content worth paying for and setting consumer expectations appropriately.
"Yet that modular pricing system will have one interesting, and laudable, side effect: The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text."

Ibiograph Day in the Life is a service that helps people create personal ebooks of their memories from their mobile phone using text messaging. Since Ibiograph does all the work of generating the ebooks, all people need do is send pictures and text from their phone to get a powerful memory archive.

How do I get the pictures from my camera phone when I switch phones?

A true story recently told at a cocktail party. When a teenage girl was getting a new cell phone, she wanted to save the pictures from the phone. Her mother, lacking a more intuitive option, took the phone to the local Verizon outlet to have them deal with the issue.

There are multiple solutions to this problem and services that let you upload photos from your camera phone. Ibiograph Day in the Life service is easy and works with any camera phone. Beneath this universal simplicity lies an advanced service that puts the pictures of your life into a context that brings immediate enjoyment and creates a lasting autobiography. Send pictures, get a digital book.

Develop once for any mobile phone

About 18 months ago when we started the Ibiograph project we had to decide whether to focus on developing client software for a Mobile OS or developing the functionality we wanted independent of the phone OS. As developers and entrpreneurs focused on mobile we've spent many years evaluating the business case and technology options (Believe it or not on a project in 2001, the decision was whether to focus our UI on color or monochrome screens. Many industry analysts were arguing that monochrome would remain dominant for phones because the marginal utility for color on such a small screen was limited. We chose color). In our last endeavor we developed, maintained, and migrated from Symbian 6.1, 7.0, 8.0 while constantly evaluating Windows, Java, and Linux (phone OS). This time we chose standards, web and messaging as the best way for Ibiograph, the service for making instant pdf photo books from your mobile phone, to help people take advantage of their camera phone.

Jason Grigsby posted a useful slideshow summarizing the tradeoffs and the opportunity for developing at the web interface layer rather than OS.

Native vs. Web vs. Hybrid: Mobile Development Choices

View more presentations from grigs.

People want to do more with their mobile phone, focus of industry gathering

Finally consumer demand drives the delivery of broader software and services through the mobile phone. For years, the mobile industry has promised the value of services beyond voice and messaging. The WSJ published a brief article today about the shifting focus of the CTIA trade show this year to emphasize software and services for mobile phones over hardware. One interpretation is that with Global Economic slowdown handset replacement will slow, so the industry has to talk about something. The more positive interpretation is that people are clamoring to do more with their mobile as hardware, network, and interface have improved. People now have awareness and demand social networking connectivity, maps and location services, advanced productivity tools, and photo preservation and narrative services accessible from their mobile.

I'd argue Apple's greatest contribution to the mobile industry is expanding the expectations of mass consumers regarding what they should be able to accomplish with their mobile phone(in the U.S. Particularly). By educating consumers through mass consumer marketing Apple has shifted the expectations of the average consumer.

Mass market consumers starting to avoid stand-alone cameras

Why carry multiple consumer electronics devices when one will do? The mobile handset industry operated on this assumption for years. Today an article in WSJ features general consumers (not early adopters or "techies") experiencing the value of smartphones with 2 - 8 megapixel cameras. People don't need a dedicated camera when the camera on their phone achieves a certain level of quality.

"Why would you want to carry around so many devices? I have everything I need in one device," Mr. Vargas says, adding that he now hardly ever uses his stand-alone digital camera.

Earlier this month, he also took pictures of his baby son using the E71's camera and printed them at a local shop; he says his family couldn't tell the difference between those photos and ones taken on his Canon Inc. digital camera.

With a camera with them all the time and a compelling reason to do so (ibiograph and autobiography), people will expand their concept of what to record. Everyday, seemingly mundane experiences may prove ex post significant or at least a fun forgotten memory.

Photo albums abandoned because too difficult

Research from InfoTrends released in conjunction with the Photo Marketing Association show indicates that the market for preserving memories and photo books will grow from $910 million to $1.5 billion in 2013. But amazingly, 70-80% of people abandon the process of creating a photo book in the middle. The analysts chalk this abandonment rate up to inadequate web services and software for producing. While I agree with that assessment, the broader point remains that people want the enjoyment of photo and memory books but don’t want to undertake the time and work required to assemble the books.

Ibiograph (www.ibiograph.com) and its Day in the Life service solves the problem no matter the root cause. Customers of Ibiograph service simply take pictures with their camera phone and send them via picture message to mms@ibiograph.com and the Day in the Life service automatically assembles and produces a PDF photo book for the customer to download at their convenience.

Learning lessons from family stories

Interesting column from Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal about the significance of family stories in developing children’s character and providing a bank of life lessons to draw on.

"An Emory University study of 65 families with children ages 14 to 16 found kids' ability to retell parents' stories was linked to a lower rate of depression and anxiety and less acting-out of frustration or anger, says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor. Knowing family stories "helps children put their own experience in perspective," Dr. Fivush says."

The parents in the article were universally surprised by the degree to which their children absorbed and identified with the old family stories.

Understanding the ups and downs and perseverance of your own family history has greater impact than a more general history. Certainly some of the value highlighted in this article includes the bonding that happens from the shared, repetitive retelling of the stories. But the narratives themselves offer the guidance. Increasing the breadth of people with an autobiography and depth of the individual's autobiography will increase the reservoir of family stories available to tap.

Kindle, Google and the significance of context in understanding (historical) meaning

An interesting post by Jim Stogdill on the Radar O'reilly blog highlights the current limitations of the Google age (wondrous as it is). He started thinking about the implications of the Bezos comment from the Kindle announcement, “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”

"The problem is that old books reference people and other stuff that a contemporary reader would have known immediately, but that are a mystery to me today - a mystery that needs solving if I want to understand what the author is trying to say, and to get that sense of how they saw the world. If you want to see what I mean, try reading Winston Churchill's Second World War series."

Even going forward in a digitized world this problem remains. What precisely is the meaning? – without it being filtered and recast by well-meaning Wikipedia editors. Ultimately, time as a dimension is important to meaning. Time, meaning, and by definition context, constantly change. Even efforts to hyperlink usage and meaning in digital need to address this element, otherwise the problem persists of needing to go to the research library to get unvarnished understanding of the author’s contemporary meaning.

Recommendation engines need context and personalization

A post from ReadWriteWeb about recommendation engines featuring Baynote, a software as a service company that helps sites target their recommendations, covered some interesting ground. Baynote argues recommendations based on current context produces superior results than those based on historical actions. The post cites Amazon as the leader for the opposing approach of recommendations based on historical views and transactions. Since I've had “bubble bath” recommended to me by Amazon, I understand historical data can lead to offers wide of the mark. (I’d made a 1-time purchase of Soap products as a gift for my mother).

The ideal employs both methods. An understanding of historical patterns and current context and intent will deliver more precise recommendations than either method. To return to my bubble bath example, for 330 days of the year showing me bubble bath is ridiculous. But, approximately one year after my original purchase and knowing it shipped to someone else, an offer of bubble bath related items might work.

Going forward a broader definition of user context than Baynote offers will improve recommendation engines. Context seems to be limited by onsite behavior. Other inputs like current real world activity, location, and friends interests all improve the results. Read Write Web astutely points out that room exists for multiple approaches in the marketplace.

Mobile phone helps people in the kitchen

A New York Times article about the mobile phone helping people in the kitchen demonstrates the opportunity the mobile platform provides to help people accomplish tasks. For service providers and developers we still have just begun to scratch the surface conceptually of how to maximize the value of this platform. The following quote from chef Chris Cosentino summarizes part of the uniqueness of the mobile phone as a practical tool.

“You’re never going to get a chef to sit at a desk or a computer screen all day,” he said. “But I can take this to the farmers’ market, I can take it to Italy, use it as a camera, look up the history of dishes so I can brief my servers, and make voice notes while I’m cooking,” he said.

For me, this utility underscores some of the core propositions we’ve embraced with Ibiograph:

1. Save people time and effort
2. Intersect productively the mobile phone and
the real world
3. Accomplish tasks for people

Ibiograph sees these ideas as a core mission of its service. Save me time; accomplish real tasks on my behalf. I want my memories preserved in a life narrative. I want a meaningful way to save the pictures from my mobile phone. I want to quickly find and assemble aspects of my life into a medium for reviewing, saving, and sharing. I just don’t have the time to do it all myself. If a service does these tasks for me and offers me the results I'm happy.

WWII Bombing of London and Networked biography’s implications for the study of History

At Radar Oreilly Nat Torkington links through to a map of the German rocket strikes of Greater London in WWII. Fantastic work assembling this from historical sources, interviews with people, and Google maps. This effort demonstrates the value of combining digital tools (mapping) and historical information from multiple sources.

The element of time and its constant change struck me when viewing the map. When looking at modern day satellite images of coordinates that were struck by Hitler’s V2 rockets, many of the sites are still noticeable for their lack of old trees and many are now parking lots. The results of the rocket strikes underscores, albeit starkly, a point we’ve incorporated in Ibiograph: Over time just geo coordinates provide insufficient context. Today’s parking lot a generation ago, prior to the Vengeance-2 rockets, was a family home. In addition to geo coordinates Ibiograph gathers the individual’s understanding of context (e.g., home, backyard, office)

The example of the London rocket strikes map demonstrates why we think ongoing, mass biography will revolutionize how history is recorded and interpreted.

1. More information - far richer detail and data than previously available
2. Dimension of Time - changes over time and evolution of meaning
3. Save time - historians and history buffs gain from exponential reduction in work and costs required to find and reconstruct information

More on mass biography and human history in the future as we believe this is a "big" idea related to the Ibiograph service.

Rise of the cloud agent, the next big thing

A post on readwriteweb via the New York Times touches on a “big” idea: digital agents working on behalf of individuals to accomplish tasks.

As we’ve posited before, the agent model represents one of the next big things for internetworked digital communication and services both on the Internet and using mobile phones. Using text messaging to execute commands on an individual’s behalf creates significant value. A problem arises when services proliferate each with their own centrally mandated codes. People will find it difficult to remember codes for each service. The agent that translates the individual’s meaning to other parties provides a key link in the value chain. The cloud agent concept requires a dedicated agent acting on behalf of the individual to automatically interact with these other agents to make the market work efficiently and unlock significant value.