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November 16, 2008

PICNIC '08, part six: From Crowdsourcing to Collaborative Creation

Editor's Note: Daniël van Gool, an administrator at the Unfiction forums, was on the scene at PICNIC '08 on behalf of ARGNet. We were impressed with Daniël's work covering PICNIC '07 and, as media partners of the annual cross-media festival, were invited to a number of special events in addition to the speaker sessions. This is the sixth and final part of Daniël's comprehensive look at this year's event in which he outlines the highlights of day three of PICNIC '08. All pictures are courtesy of Daniël as well.

I arrived at PICNIC early on Friday the 26th. When I arrived, the main conference hall was mostly empty, but it was filled with the ambient noises one would expect at a picnic -- crickets, a flowing creek, and the occasional buzzing fly. This is why I love PICNIC so much! The smell of fresh coffee slowly filled the building, even though PICNIC's Espresso Factory was closed for the morning, and life was good.

The focus of day 3 of PICNIC '08 was on the collaboration within the creative industry, which mean that there would be a ton of showcases by different entrepreneurs that are developing several innovative concepts that provide means for creativity and/or collaboration. Before this 'parade' of mostly very ingenious commercial concepts, Matt Costello gave a speech presenting his thoughts and ideas on creativity in games in a highly entertaining form. Costello is mostly known as a games-designer, having worked on The 7th Guest and Doom 3, and on several novels and games for TV (PBS, BCC, the SciFi channel). He introduced himself as somewhat of a cross media schizophrenic.

He started out by talking for a bit about the concept of Story, by telling a tale about a personal encounter with a shark that he had while diving. He then read a passage from a novel he co-wrote that used that personal experience to base the storyline upon and engaged the audience in a conversation about the differences.

He stated that the audience often knows something that the protagonist in a story doesn't know, a point he illustrated by bringing two members of the audience on stage. His point was that a good story creates the illusion that something is going to happen, but then causes something else to happen, making the audience the surprised party instead of the protagonist. The unexpected and the unknown are two important factors in storytelling, interactivity and games.

Costello went on to demonstrate a lot of his other points by having members of the audience perform several tasks. Again, it is very hard to convey his points by merely describing what happened. During his address, I was chatting with people on IRC following along through PICNIC's live feed, and I said the following:

<Gisk> yeah, Matt Costello is a fun guy
<Gisk> very good points he made about storytelling and gameplay
<Gisk> unfortunately, almost impossible to write up... you need to see his interaction with the audience and the creation of illusion to convey what he was talking about
<Gisk> which is exactly his point
<Gisk> so, figures :)

I guess this is the best summary I can give, so I'm afraid it'll have to do.

Matt Hanson followed Costello, talking about collaborative creativity in an actual creative field: movie making. Hanson is working on an open source movie project called Swarm of Angels. It's an experiment to see what works and what doesn't when it comes to working together on an actual creative product and is based on the premise of "audience as author."

Using crowdsourcing has been done for open source technology, but should also be possible with actual content. Crowdsourcing in this case means creator-led and member-powered. There's a feedback mechanism in place that is in essence what helps shape the production: members post on the project's forum continuously, contributing concept art, bits of script, developing visuals or other production ideas.

The best example of what Hanson expects Swarm of Angels to be capable of producing is a movie called Unfold. A member posted a piece of visually rather impressive concept art, so Hanson asked on the forum what people would come up with in relation to those visuals, and in a short while there was a script, movie posters and an actual movie. Hanson is confident that he will be able to reach great levels of creativity, because, again, creativity works much better as a collaborative result.

Up next, a highly commercial and successful application of crowdsourcing, or rather, in this case, crowdfunding. Pim Betist is co-founder of Sellaband, which is now one of the most copied business models on the internet. Sellaband allows unsigned artists to produce an album financed by their fans: if people believe in the music from a band that's promoted on the website, they can chip in, and when the artist reaches €50,000, they can produce an album, the returns of which go to them and their "investors".

The idea is that no longer is it only a small group of people at a record label deciding for millions of people which music gets produced, but potentially millions of people decide! Betist introduced the music of Julia Marcell, a Polish singer/songwriter who is one of the most successful artist signed through Sellaband so far.

Katarina Skoberne then elaborated on the idea behind her company OpenAd, "the world's biggest creative department." OpenAd provides professionally managed crowdsourcing: basically, you can outsource the development of creative advertising ideas to OpenAd, which in turn crowdsources this to everyone connected to their network. This provides a few interesting positives for companies: they do not pay for production costs of said creative ideas, yet you pay for the creative license to use the final material. Also, you can potentially get hundreds of ideas and proposals instead of just a few.

Another great innovation, one that has been around for a while now, is Blurb, the online publishing company. Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO, explained how the idea for Blurb started out when she wanted to release her photographic portfolio and couldn't find a publisher willing to take on that project. Her take on books and reading is that they will not become superfluous because of the internet, but rather that the internet will enable more people than ever to create and publish their own books.

Last up in this parade of business ventures was Ton Rozendaal, founder of Blender, which develops tools for open source content creation. Blender made the animation movie Big Buck Bunny, created entirely with a cross-platform suite of tools for 3D creation, which offers freedom to use, distribute, study and change the platform to all of its users. Check out the wealth of other impressive movies produced by using Blender's tools on their website.

Once more PICNIC returned to the subject of data visualization on the afternoon's panel titled Can You See What I Know.

First off was Ben Cerveny who spoke on "The Alchemy of Understanding," designating the CPU is the modern "philosophers stone." Unfortunately, this comparison was dragged out over several hardly intelligible slides of presentation, which made me instantly forget approximately 90% of the points he was making. What I did pick up came from some of the examples he showed at the end of his rather tedious talk, from a company called Stamen Design, one of which particularly impressed me, a concept called Condensation that visualizes the news stories that users of Digg post. You can check it out at http://labs.digg.com/swarm/.

It's weird, but I can look at that pages for hours. I've had it running in a browser tab almost continuously since PICNIC, making me return to it every once in a while, just to check out what was going on. It's such a novel way of making a website "come alive" as it were. Other examples of can be found at Stamen's website.

Jose Luiz de Vicente, director of the Visualizar project from Medialab Prado in Madrid followed the presentation by Cerveny with some more examples of how visualization can be used as a means of communication. Interestingly, Fernanda Vigas is a colleague of De Vicente, and while her name isn't particularly well-known, the system she developed to display the content of blogs or websites in the form of a 'word cloud' certainly is. One of the examples De Vicente highlighted was Cascade on Wheels which visualizes use of the average numbers of cars passing through streets in Madrid, trying to provide more insight into city development needs.

Finishing this section of the conference was Loic LeMeur, founder of Seesmic, which is a video microblogging service which he demonstrated to the audience, expressing the ambition that the internet would become the modern-day's campfire.

Injecting some much-need spice into the conference, which was slowing down a little at this point, Michael Tchong from Ubercool spoke in a rather energized fashion about five of the ten 'ubertrends' he is seeing today. Summing up, these trends are:

• Unwired: this generation is becoming the unhooked generation: wireless means freedom. DWT (Driving While Texting) is becoming the new DUI. Smartphones are becoming Crackberries, and we're becoming addicts.
• The Digital Lifestyle: LG is developing mobile phones with the touch of human skin, people call their laptop "their lappy." Technology is literally becoming personal.
• Time Compression: time is accelerating. Pictures are now instantaneous, and there's more and more focus on instant gratification. We're sleeping less -- 2 hours less compared to 50 years ago!
• We already have working vacations, now we see the concept of working dates emerging.
• Gift-card economy: time is becoming more valuable than money.
• Generation X-tasy: the experience economy is uprising. You don't want to go to a party, you want to go to an experience. There are cruise ships with amphitheaters on board, the gaming industry has become bigger than Hollywood.

While a lot of people commented afterwards that Tchong's so-called predictions were rather easy and recognizable trends that everyone already knows about, I though that the way he connected some of these trends to shifting trends in social interaction was pretty insightful and the whirlwind-style in which Tchong delivered his presentation was highly entertaining.

It was a good thing that the audience got an injection of energy before the next talk, that of Gisele Hiscock, Google's EMEA Director for New Business Development. Her talk, titled "What Will Google Do?" reminded me a lot of how Lorraine Twohill's (then Google's European Marketing Director) presentation went at PICNIC'06: bland and highly predictable. It's weird that a company that has such a reputation for creativity and innovation cannot find an inspiring speaker to address the very subject of creativity in a way that can capture an audience such as that of PICNIC.

She assured the audience that Google doesn't want to adopt the "Mothership" model, in that one headquarters develops products and when a successful product is created, it will be spread out across the world from that one geographic location. Rather, Google wants to innovate globally. A starting point for such a strategy is a mission that can withstand time, and all of the rest of her talk comprised of elaborating on Google's nine-point mission statement, that's full of predictability and "audience-friendly' one-liners like "Everybody can participate" and "Focus on users, the rest will come later". A missed opportunity to actually give some insight into the world of Google if you ask me.

Allowed to wrap up PICNIC'08 was Werner Vogels who is CTO of Amazon and somewhat of a Dutch hero in the world of the Net. He was given the chance to talk at length about several service Amazon provides, mostly based around providing computational power and/or server space on demand. I was a put off a bit by the fact that his talk was basically a 45 minute Amazon commercial, but Vogels was still able to show that the impact of these service were rather significant: it provides start-ups with a much easier means of expansion.

Whereas in the past, CAPEX (Capital Expense) was the most important part of the business model of a start-up aimed at providing technological services, you can now start such a business owning no servers of your own, being completely reliant on the services provided by the likes of Amazon. This means there's a shift from CAPEX to OPEX (Operational Expense), which is all variable. This means that you can scale up your activities simply by upscaling your Amazon service package. No upfront investment is needed, and the fee you pay if fully variable.

Vogels went on to demonstrate the practicality of this concept by a couple of showcases, the most telling I thought was the example of the Indy500 corporation. They have fifty servers operating throughout the year, handling web traffic and various computational tasks. This is more than enough under normal circumstances, but during large events, they suddenly need thousands of servers, so they source their peak capacity at Amazon. It is infrastructure on demand, and it will most likely radically change the way business will be able to emerge.

That was it -- with Vogels' talk, PICNIC was over! Those three days have inspired me, provided insight into what is happening right now and in the distant future in both online and offline worlds. It was fun to hear alternate reality games being mentioned in one of the keynotes, and the theme of online collaboration and communities was one that has close ties to the ARG community as well. It was fun to be able to see and hear some very insightful people speak on a wide range of topics and to have gained some more insight into what trends will rise and how they will influence our daily life. Once more, a great success!

Thanks again, Daniël. We're looking forward to PICNIC '09!

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 8:56 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2008

PICNIC '08, part five: Virtual things in a virtual world are so passé!

Editor's Note: Daniël van Gool, an administrator at the Unfiction forums, was on the scene at PICNIC '08 on behalf of ARGNet. We were impressed with Daniël's work covering PICNIC '07 and, as media partners of the annual cross-media festival, were invited to a number of special events in addition to the speaker sessions. This is the fifth part of Daniël's comprehensive look at this year's event, a continuation of his analysis of day two of the event. All pictures are courtesy of Daniël as well.

Another very interesting talk followed, titled Commercial Collaborations: Tools, Things and Toys by Michael Tchao from Nike. This talk expanded some more on the theme of connecting the physical and online worlds and even a little bit on data visualization by addressing one of Nike's most successful ventures of the past years: Nike+

In short, Nike was looking for a way to connect the physical activity of running to a digital community, creating a buzz around their brand by creating indispensable tools that connect consumers to each other and the Nike brand ()

Looking at runners, there's only a small group of people that is actually self-motivated. A lot of runners need motivation though, and this is were Nike+ proved to be a valuable addition to the concept of running: digital technology can now provide data, such as distance ran, pace, and how many calories burned.

Another trend is that music is growing rapidly as an important factor when it comes to running. Forty percent of people say they would not run without music and participation by people who run with music shifted from 25% to 75% in a few years time. Also, fifty percent of iPod owners say that they use their devices in some form or other for sports. This is why Nike teamed up with Apple to develop Nike+, which builds a digital set of information around the iPod functionality: a website that collects statistics and has you set goals for yourself. In short, it provides motivation.

Upon request from its users, a Challenge function was implemented, so people could challenge themselves or others to reach certain goals and keep track of progress. People have met through this community, challenging each other online, but also making friends in real life. The community has taken on the challenge ability to make very interesting challenges (for example, Europe vs Japan, Cat lovers vs. Dog Lovers, Simpsons fans vs. South Park fans, etc.)

Expansion of the community element is still going on: Nike launched a web store, which sold selected T-shirts, available only for people who reached a certain milestone -- the 100 Mile Club, for example. Also, you can now create an avatar that you can plug into Facebook to communicate your running progress to your friend and that will motivate you to run if you didn't.

All in all, Nike+ is a great example of a very successful way of using a community in a commercial setting, which should tell other companies something about possibilities.

Expanding even further on the idea of connecting the digital world with physical objects was Rafi Haladjian, Chairman of Violet, a company intent on developing new concepts that bridge the rift between the two worlds. In his opening statement, Haladjian stated that virtual things in a virtual world are so passé! Violet developed several ideas that uses virtual input in the physical world, or the other way around. One example is the DAL Lamp, which is connected to the internet and changes color based on data input from several online sources.

The second concept Violet created is Nabaztag, the first internet connected Rabbit, which follows Violet's business strategy of:

Step 1) Connect rabbits
Step 2) Connect everything else

The Nabaztag offers fun ways to interact with a toy rabbit that has several means of input -- sound, touch, "smell" (in the form of an RFID-receiver in its nose) -- which then translates the input to an online environment or to other Nabaztags.

Violet's drive comes from the analogy of the clock tower: in the past, the clock tower was the primary means for knowing the time, but over the course of history, the ability to keep track of the hour came into your home. At first, this meant having a huge clock in the house, which then evolved to smaller models, becoming more personal. In the end, the clock ended up becoming portable and ultimately pervasive: every product can now tell you the time (microwaves, ovens, a VCR, etc.)

Violet wants to further this pervasiveness of functions. A product they are working on right now is a toaster that gets random images from the web and "prints" them onto your toast in the morning.

In the 90s, the job was to connect computers. We are now connecting mobile phones, but tomorrow is about connecting everything else -- clothes, shoes, and everything else you can think of. An interesting notion.

A talk on a whole other subject came from Bas Kennis, a musician that plays in one of the most popular Dutch bands of this time: Blof.

Kennis spoke at length (again, a little too long if you ask me) about the innovative aspects of their latest two albums, Umoja and Oktober, trying to make an album more attractive than "just a collection of songs." Granted, Blof have been quite successful in showing rather impressive growths of album-sales in a market that's shrinking, but personally I think their attempts of turning their albums into "experiences" aren't as innovative or impressive as they themselves might think. It has to be said though, Oktober's choice to allow public access to their live recording sessions, capturing the atmosphere of the Irish Guinness mansion where they recorded their album, does provide for some interesting and compelling content.

Adam Greenfield was next, talking about The Long Here, The Big Now, and other tales of the networked city, which was essentially Greenfield dreaming out loud about the future of urban life. Greenfield is the head of design at Nokia, and author of "Everyware - the dawning age of ubiquitous computing." He entertained the audience with a couple of examples of how computing starts to be everywhere around us, slowly creeping towards the concept of u-Cities ("u" standing for "ubiquitous"). The best example of this concept is the idea of the Korean city New Songdo, which is to be built from the ground up with everything digitized, so that it becomes a "networked city".

The posed problem of such a project is that they start with technology, rather than an actual understanding of human desire. Would you want to have an RFID tag on your soda can so the trash dispenser knows how to recycle it? How does it feel to live in a networked city?

Questions like that should be answered first, before actually creating environments of which we aren't sure they will actually provide solutions for social dilemmas. A trend seen more and more is that the physical constraints of the world are no longer the real constraints of our actions, yet they are overlaid on to each other. This is the concept of "The Big Now" - looking at a Twitter feed on a Saturday from all of your friends in New York City gives you sort of an image of all the superimposed possibilities the city has to offer: the "possibility space" of NYC.

Objects are now also "broadcasting" to Twitter -- for example, the Tower Bridge in London Twitters about its current state and activities. There is a ton of information available online, but it only actually becomes useful and offering potential if it's available on demand at relevant moments. It should not become the idea of Minority Report's electronic billboards that provide 'personal' content, because this is still mass-communication. Here, again, it is a question of researching what people actually want, and not running with the technological possibilities.

A little bit more back down to earth was Euro Beinat, who works for Geodan which is developing a project called The Visible City. As has been the case with many presentations, this has much to do with data visualization.

A rather fun example shown was the plotting of data from Dutch mobile operator KPN on a satellite image of Amsterdam to see the dynamics of text messages sent throughout the city. By visualizing that data in several fashions, patterns can be recognized, like the Queensday celebration on Dam square, or the huge spike in cell phone data during New Year's Eve. Take a look at the video of said data representation.

Signatures can be found in this data by plotting it in different ways -- on a time line graph for example -- and people can find out about social footprints of different areas by comparing these graphs For example, the cell phone data from Amsterdam central station has a completely different footprint from the World Trade Center area.

The last part of Daniël's report -- day three of PICNIC '08 -- comes this weekend.

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2008

PICNIC '08, part four: Clay Shirkey - Here Comes Everybody

Editor's Note: Daniël van Gool, an administrator at the Unfiction forums, was on the scene at PICNIC '08 on behalf of ARGNet. We were impressed with Daniël's work covering PICNIC '07 and, as media partners of the annual cross-media festival, were invited to a number of special events in addition to the speaker sessions. This is the fourth part of Daniël's comprehensive look at this year's event, a look at the beginning of day two of the event. All pictures are courtesy of Daniël as well.

Kicking off the second day of the conference was a hugely interesting keynote address by Clay Shirky, famed author of Here Comes Everybody, a highly recommended read documenting the way society is rapidly being changed by emerging social tools.

The theme of Here Comes Everybody is "Group Action Just Became Easier" and Shirky gives 4½ examples of this:

1. The social dynamics behind Flickr

Not too long ago, a Flickr pool on high-dynamic range photography (HDR) was created. What followed was a conversation in the photos' comments about who uses what software to create HDR material. People found out that it was possible to insert pictures into the comments and kept exchanging ideas on how to improve techniques. The stream of comments slowly turned into a "lecture" on HDR photography, making it a "social object" that attracted a community. It is the process of a social gathering in reverse: instead of starting by getting people with the same interests together into a large group, the social object acts as a catalyst which slowly gathers interested people around itself.

In the past, this would have taken years: a photo shows up, people document it in magazines, it gets picked up by amateurs, people get together in meetings discussing the topic, etc. The HDR on Flickr phenomenon happened within three months and became a vital part of the rapid progression of HDR photography techniques -- much faster than would have ever been possible in the past.

There's was another example illustrated which shows the downside of the same mechanic and it's also Flickr-based. A separate photo pool exists called the Black & White Maniacs. The name is pretty self-explanatory, and the pool has rules on posting and commenting on black and white photos. The most important rule is that in order to post a picture, you had to comment on the previous two pictures in the pool. It turned out that people either ignored the rule, or found ways around it by just leaving a simple, non-descriptive comment like "nice." This lead to an expansion of the rule set that was meant to be really simple, which prompted some big fights between moderators and users who just wanted to show the world their pictures.

The bottomline: Flickr has introduced a service of sharing photos, but creates a whole new dilemma on the social dynamics behind the actual sharing. Shirky's firm statement was that you cannot solve such a dilemma, you can only optimize it. The new design challenge seems to be in how the social organization takes place.

2. The Bronze Beta discussion board

When Time Warner sold Buffy to UPN, the television network didn't want the existing discussion board to continue. At the time, they announced that they would be looking into a new means of discussion in the future, but for that moment, the forum would be closed down. What they failed to take into account was that the users of said forum didn't hang out there for the board per se, and it wasn't the necessarily the topic of Buffy that had initially brought them together. The users maintained their presence on the forums because of "eachother," the community.

After hearing about the forum closure, the community took action and asked a number of programmers to make a custom bit of software which would allow them to keep on with their discussions. They went so far as to explicitly ask the coders not to add any features. This request spawned a one-page website, Bronze Beta. It's a weird development when the simple social tools gain wider acceptance over the complicated tools in terms of mass use, but this is fairly easily explained though -- if the tool is social, it matters a lot to its users how it gets used, and thus the demand gravitates towards the simplest possible tool.

A funny aspect of Bronze Beta is the Rules page: there are ten times as many rules as there are features. An example of a rule is that there is to be no changing of text color, which can be read as, "it is unfair to attract more attention to yourself than others." Rules like this are caused by social dilemmas, and those do net get solved by features or structures.

3. The Wikipedia article on Pluto

The Wikipedia article on Pluto is special in several ways. This has much to do with the fact that Pluto got "kicked out of the planet club" recently. Following that event, there was an enormous amount of editing and revision of its Wikipedia entry, and because of that, it got a disproportionate amount of attention and was expanded on and corrected over and over and is now an example of one of the best articles on Wikipedia.

Shirky's point on this is that Wikipedia doesn't get better because everyone agrees with each other, it gets better because of unending disagreement and discussion. He proceeded to show some interesting data on the Pluto article. A graph of edits showed that the editors of the article were comprised of a small group of people who care a lot and a lot of passersby that contributed almost nothing.

If you would apply the classic 80-20 managerial rule set, you'd cut off the tail and keep only the committed people, but this is where emerging social networks show that this rule set is far from universal. In instances such as this one, an ecosystem is created where a lot of people can contribute a little, and some people can contribute a lot, and this in turn helps with the quality and the thriving. It's not the rule set that was right all the time, it was the social environment that was wrong!

Shirky likes to balance out his examples, and used the Wikipedia article on Galileo Galilei as a contrast to the theory that an ecosystem based on collaboration will result in quality content. The Galileo article is one of the very rare locked articles on Wikipedia, as the administration is protecting it from edits or removal of references to the catholic church. It's essentially a 500 year-old flamewar! ;)

In this case, almost all of the "threat" comes from the tail of the graph, and all of the "defensive action" comes from the small group of committed people. Defensive features (the lock) help the people on the left-hand side of the graph stay protected from unwanted actions from the people on the right-hand side. It's yet another social dilemma.

3.5. 10,000 cents revisited

Shirky referenced Aaron Koblin's 10,000 cents project briefly, in that it is very interesting to take a look at the table of contributors that Koblin published on his website.

There were a lot of casual contributors, quickly leaving the site again after (minimally) contributing, because they did not have any real motivation for contributing other than killing time or trying to find out what was going on. There are also some interesting numbers regarding countries like China or Egypt though -- some people did have the reward of 1 cent in mind as a motivation of recreating the pieces. Division of labor is being done spontaneously, and so is the division of motivation. The 'weather report' on creative collaboration could be seen as "Cloudy, with a chance of collaboration".

4. HSBC's penalty free checking account

"Sharing is easy, collective action is harder: its where a group of people collectively succeed or fail."

A few months after HSBC launched a 'penalty-checking account', mostly aimed at students, the banking firm changed their minds and said that they would charge £140 in the case of overdraft. They gave their clients -- again, mostly students -- thirty days to change their contract.

Shortly thereafter, someone started a Facebook page that described how to move from HSBC to another bank, and people started to write documentation "for the greater good." Soon, a protest was scheduled, but it never happened because HSBC caved in and changed their plans.

So, how should people interpret HSBC's reaction to what happened? One theory is that HSBC didn't cave simply because people were angry, but instead, they reconsidered their policy change because people were angry and organized. Social networks provide resources which create many more opportunities for people to easily organize themselves.

This concluded Shirky's talk, which easily was one of the most compelling and intriguing addresses I've witnessed so far. Shirky seems to really hit the nail on the head when it comes to community dynamics. Impressive.

Following Shirky was Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and executive at Intel, for which she started out apologizing. The title of her talk was Secrets & Lies, and she started by stating that lying is everywhere -- movies, commercials, television shows, music, advertisements and even religions, which all have their specific rule sets about lying.

And, surprise surprise, we've taken all of this lying online. People lie online all the time, mostly about appearance and identity (100% of online daters lie, or so current research has apparently found out). The internet also provides for weird privacy/deception services, like an alibi-agency that creates an alibi with tangible evidence (such as a conference package from PICNIC even though you didn't attend) for you.

Newer generations of technologies have the potential to tell the "truth" unbidden, yet
our intents and our "intents" of our devices aren't always aligned. It's interesting to ask yourself what this means for certain online services: what does it mean for "e-government" if people do not want to tell the truth, how does this impact notions of national security, social networking sites, and so on. These are questions that should be looked into before taking online services to the next level!

Following this mildly unsettling talk was an on-stage discussion called The Future of Television, between Mike T. Fries, CEO of Liberty Global, and a rather sharp Kara Swisher from AllThingsD. It was mostly a debate on whether or not TV is dying, and if there are ways to prevent its doom. Fries thinks it's going to be all about trying to get relevant content to people. Linear television is dying, but random access is going to stay. Also, the Internet doesn't have the bandwidth for high quality video distribution, a statement that I personally thought he came away with easily, because this is a problem that's generally believed to be solved in the next few years.

More on Day Two of PICNIC '08 later this week!

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 9:00 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2008

PICNIC '08, part three: Social network fatigue and visual asset collections

Editor's Note: Daniël van Gool, an administrator at the Unfiction forums, was on the scene at PICNIC '08 on behalf of ARGNet. We were impressed with Daniël's work covering PICNIC '07 and, as media partners of the annual cross-media festival, were invited to a number of special events in addition to the speaker sessions. This is the third part of Daniël's comprehensive look at this year's event, still focused on the first day of conference speakers (the first part is here and the second part here). All pictures are courtesy of Daniël as well.

Next up on the first day's schedule was Stefan Agamanolis, formerly of MIT, now working at Distance Lab, devising creative ways to deal with distance, giving a talk called Duelling the Distance. His rather bizarre but interesting address concerned itself with the communication analogy of fast-food versus slow-food: it's efficiency versus quality, generic versus personalized, and so on. A mobile phone has the same 'design mentality' as fast food, meaning it facilitates 'anywhere, anytime' versus specific communication, it's generic, and it's the same device for any type of situation.

So Stefan and his colleagues had been thinking about what 'slow communication' would be like and tried to build a system based on those design principles. It would have to be free of distractions, like the concept of a phone booth pushed to an extreme.

What they ended up with were two people, submerged in two different swimming pools, each one's head encased in a helmet that completely blocked their vision, taste and smell, while the water they floated in diminished their sense of touch. At the same time, their helmet, fitted with ultra-high-quality speakers and a microphone so the two test-subjects could communicate, was attached to three flotation devices so that they wouldn't have to put effort into staying afloat. They called this concept the iso-phone. The experiment resulted in a lot of gestures under water by people who completely lost track of time.

This is a rather non-practical concept, of course, but it does provide insight into different aspects of the fast vs. slow analogy. We use the same communication device to call our lover as we do to talk to our lawyer or the pizza delivery guy, and this brings up the topic of intimacy. Another setup devised by Distance Lab tried to tackle this topic: a subject wears a ring on their finger that is detected by an overhead camera, which makes you able to draw in the air. The drawings are then communicated through projections of colored light onto someone else, creating an intimate way of communicating. Check out more about this project, dubbed Mutsogoto, on Distance Lab's website.

Another few less intriguing objects were discussed before Agamanolis finished with a project called Remote Impact, which was described as a 'boxing interface' that lets you hit a mattress that's mounted on a wall, where a silhouette of your opponent (potentially across the world) is projected. This setup proved especially popular on several games-related conferences over the past few months.

Following Agamanolis was a panel on The Emerging Real-Time Social Web, lead by Linda Stone (a former executive at Apple and Microsoft and now an independent consultant), which was kicked off with a YouTube video showing the very funny UK comedic ensemble Idiots of Ants' parody on Facebook.

This panel consisted of a couple of different speakers talking briefly on their take on social networks, outlining some examples. First off was Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku, a social phone book, talking about how he thinks social objects are the way to connect. The question that gets asked more and more these days is, "Is there a little fatigue with social networks?"

The answer seems to be that people don't connect randomly. You cannot force a community into existence -- to create one, there has to be a need to do so. One way communities are formed is around social objects, as Engeström explained through a couple of examples: SoundCloud is an example of a social network like Pandora or last.fm for professional composers to share music they create, while also enabling others to elaborate on it. On a related tip, sites like Flickr, Picasa and Facebook grew when mobile phones got cameras: objects are interesting, and comments on a site like Flickr are interesting in defining these objects.

In the short time Engeström spoke, he briefly addressed pattern recognition as a future development -- triggering 'nodes' in your social network based on the location where you are or are going to, guiding you to things that are relevant near you or in your social network, or are relevant for others in your network. He recommended reading Leinad Zeraus'/Daniel Suarez' sci-fi novel The Daemon, because it illustrates where the world might be going in his eyes.

Next on the panel was Matt Jones who created a business based on social objects, DOPPLR. Jones expanded some more on the "social network fatigue" problem that has come up lately, hailing a quote from Merlin Mann: "if you need to appear on a list on the internet to make sure you have friends, you might have problems the internet cannot solve." Friendfeed used to have a feature called FakeFollowing, which was to pretend to follow someone on the internet to prevent hurting their feelings.

It seems the online world needs to be reminded of the fact that "friend" is not the only social role we play. This is the reason Dopplr doesn't talk about friends, yet it's about sharing items of information (on traveling) with someone you trust. Sharing travel intentions with people you trust is designed to maximize the serendipity around you.

Picking up after Jones was Addy Feuerstein talking for a bit about AllOfMe, a "social network recorder" or "aggregator" if you will, letting you put together a 'visual asset collection' of your stuff. It works by hooking it up to a social service you use, like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook, and adding assets to your "timeline". Once it's done aggregating, you can view your timeline against that of your friends, family or other (predefined) timelines, like US history, The Simpsons or the World Series timeline.

If an event from any of the timelines you encounter is related to your life you can add it to your personal timeline. You can then navigate through time similar to how you can navigate Google Earth, zooming in or out and panning through time. You can also visualize your timeline ("your life") in various way, much like a TV show or a video, in all sorts of fun ways. I was chatting with Unfiction's SpaceBass on IRC while Feuerstein was doing his presentation, and he remarked that AllOfMe could potentially be an ideal way of displaying assets of ARGs in a very visual and intuitive way.

AllOfMe is currently still in beta, but at the end of his presentation, Feuerstein gave away 100 free beta accounts, of which I was able to pick one up. This now enables me to give away five more invitations, so anyone interested in receiving an invite, contact me and we'll sort something out!

Last on this panel was Philip Rosedale, of Second Life and Burning Man fame. He talked for a bit about increasingly creative ways people are expressing themselves in virtual worlds, hailing BurningLife as an example: a virtual festival in Second Life recreating Burning Man.

Concluding the first day of PICNIC was Itay Talgam, a world-renowned Israeli conductor who has spent time researching how orchestras work together -- what roles the conductor, the musicians and the audience play and how these insights relate to leadership and management processes. Al Gore recently hailed Talgam's talk at the Google Symposium as one of the best talks on management he'd ever witnessed.

An orchestra is a great example of collaborative creativity, where a large group of people are creating something together. It gives the conductor an opportunity to create an organized sound with one gesture, and everything is about nuance. Talgam showed what nuance can do by showing various conductors and their techniques, asking the audience questions like, "How are they exerting leadership?" and, "How come they are accepted as leaders?"

It's really hard to convey Talgam's address in writing. There's no footage from Talgam's talk at PICNIC online yet, but his very similar talk at the Google Symposium is well worth watching. One of Talgam's interesting closing quotes that stuck with me was, "It has become so easy to create media, the challenge has now shifted to how to get people to pay attention to it." He was greeted with a standing ovation when he was done, a PICNIC first and very well-deserved.

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 10:30 PM | Comments (1)

October 13, 2008

PICNIC '08, part two: Aaron Koblin and the importance of data visualization

Editor's Note: Daniël van Gool, an administrator at the Unfiction forums, was on the scene at PICNIC '08 on behalf of ARGNet. We were impressed with Daniël's work covering PICNIC '07 and, as media partners of the annual cross-media festival, were invited to a number of special events in addition to the speaker sessions. This is the second part of Daniël's comprehensive look at this year's event, still focused on the first day of conference speakers (the first part is here). All pictures are courtesy of Daniël as well.

Next up was Aaron Koblin, a software developer and artist who works for Google's Creative Labs and whose work is internationally renowned. He specializes in data visualization, which was another recurring theme through PICNIC'08.

There's a revolution going on in data visualization, departing from pie-charts and graphs and taking on quite a different, creative route. It took a while for me to figure out why this topic, while interesting, was featured so prominently at a conference like PICNIC, but the theme became apparent after several speakers made it clear that one of the biggest trends on the internet nowadays is the connection between the digital and the physical worlds. Manipulating "virtual objects" online is a thing of the past: interacting with real objects and real data and input from the real world is what's becoming big. And this is why data visualization is rapidly becoming a hot topic.

Koblin showed us several examples of interesting ways to portray data, including a display of oil production in the form of oil blobs crawling on a map and a very cool graphical representation which illustrated which portions of New York City were communicating via email with recipients around the world. I could write about these demonstrations for a long time, but I realize that, apart from hardly being interesting, they do Koblin's work no justice, so if you're interested, visit his website and check out some of his work.

He later made the connection between his line of work and creative collaboration by telling the audience about his project "The Sheep Market". Basically, he was inspired by Amazon's service Mechanical Turk, a platform used to crowdsource rather simple and often repetitive tasks that you cannot presently have a computer do for you, such as transcription of text or identifying products with damaged barcodes. Koblin jokingly called this "Artificial Artificial Intelligence".

His idea was to create a work of art through Mechanical Turk by giving the users a less mundane task, namely "draw a sheep facing left", and paying them two cents per task for their services. This resulted in The Sheep Market (http://www.thesheepmarket.com/), a website displaying and selling both the drawings and the animations of people drawing the sheep. That last part is especially interesting, since it lets you see the effort people did or did not put into completing this two cent task.

Some data: 10,000 sheep were drawn, the users drawing the sheep came from 7,599 unique ip's, and only one person submitted written text ("why, why are you doing this??").

Koblin's motivation for choosing sheep: apart from a sheep being an internationally recognized symbol for 'follower', the idea sprang from the French children's story, Le Petit Prince. In the tale, one of the characters asked another to draw a sheep, and while he kept trying to draw a sheep, he was never satisfied with the result. In the end, he ended up drawing a box saying, "the sheep is in the box, use your imagination."

An even more ambitious and similar project that followed was 10,000 cents: a 100 dollar bill was divided into 10,000 pieces (a cent, in monetary terms), and each piece was put on Mechanical Turk with the request to reproduce it in drawing, for a reward of one cent. When 10,000 contributions were submitted, it had cost exactly 100 dollars to reproduce a $100 bill. The result can be seen at the project's website along with the animation of each separate piece. Interesting to note: at the site, you can also take a closer look to some of the more... rebellious contributions.

Koblin went on to talk for a bit on his work on the Radiohead music video "House of Cards", which was put together by digitizing the band members in various settings. At Koblin's website is a portion dedicated to that video which allows visitors to manipulate aspects of the video.

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2008

PICNIC '08, part one: A healthy dose of cross-media inspiration

Editor's Note: Daniël van Gool, an administrator at the Unfiction forums, was on the scene at PICNIC '08 on behalf of ARGNet. We were impressed with Daniël's work covering PICNIC '07 and, as media partners of the annual cross-media festival, were invited to a number of special events in addition to the speaker sessions. This is the first part of Daniël's comprehensive look at this year's event. All pictures are courtesy of Daniël as well.

The morning of the 24th of September marked the third year I walked up to the intriguing Westergasfabriek area in the West of Amsterdam to attend PICNIC on behalf of ARGNet. In my report on PICNIC '07 I tried to describe why this area is perfect for a conference that is all about creativity, innovation and inspiration: the Westergasfabriek area just breathes all those things. If you want to try and get an idea how PICNIC looked and felt in 2008, check out the set of rather nice 360-degree pictures made by C360.

PICNIC's ambition is still growing, and they have taken things another step further this year, welcoming an even larger audience in attendance and hosting even more events before, during and after the main conference in comparison to the previous two years. The PICNIC Club, the central lounging and networking area, was moved to the Gashouder building this year. Previously a huge silo used to store natural gas, during PICNIC it was fitted with large patches of grass, rows of picnic tables, a stage with some impressive lightning, a couple of huge displays of hundreds of images of sheep (I will come to this later) and various booths and domes where demonstrations were held and books and picnic-baskets were sold.

Around 1:00pm. Bas Verhart and Marleen Stikker, founders of the Crossmedia Foundation and PICNIC, opened the event and announced that over 5000 people had registered this year for the main conference and all the partner events. The main theme of this year's conference was Collaborative Creativity, a subject that has a couple of interesting parallels with the world of ARGs.

To kick off the main conference and get it firmly started on said theme, Charles Leadbeater gave the day's keynote address titled The Power of Mass Creativity. He started out by introducing himself and, naturally, talked for a bit about his book, We-Think, referring to a 4 minute YouTube video that summarizes it.

Apart from being a not particularly well-disguised plug for his book, it was also a setup for his first point: after the video went live, people started commenting, and while he wasn't too happy with some of the more rude comments that were made, he soon realized that by putting that video out there, he had reached a wider and broader audience than he ever could have done before with any other means of publishing.

He asked the audience to imagine a twelve-year old boy walking into a TV studio, let's say that of the BBC, and asking the lead producer if he could use their studio and their airtime to produce and air a five minute video of himself playing his guitar, and that his target audience was about 50 million viewers. Not so long ago, they would have probably first laughed at him, then removed him from the premises, but this is still what happened to this rather famous YouTube video.

This is, of course, a trend that has been going on for a while now, and the trends presently show movement from individual 'production' to collaborative. Leadbeater's metaphor for the current media landscape is a beach with boulders: in the past, boulders were getting bigger and bigger, conglomerating more and more. His prediction however, is that in ten years time, those boulders will erode and break apart, leaving the beach filled with pebbles -- and so, everyone who blogs or uploads a video to YouTube drops a pebble on the beach. Leadbeater dubbed this the ProAm (Professional-Amateur) revolution.

The 'problem' that remains with that situation is that these pebbles aren't interconnected: they do not necessarily add up to much. The question will be if we're going to be able to make things out of these pebbles in the future -- durable products, encyclopedias, games, and so on -- thereby achieving this required collaboration.

Quite to my surprise, Leadbeater then introduced ilovebees as one of the prominent examples of creative collaboration and the start of 'pebbles' becoming interconnected. In the game, players around the world collaborated on piecing together the back story narrative and discovered creative ways to help each other. A notable quote from this part of the presentation: "Creativity does not come from an individual most of the time, but from people blending and mixing ideas together."

It's pretty cool to attend an event like PICNIC and hear people discuss the aspect of ARG's that I personally think is most their attractive: collaboration! Leadbeater went on to give 42 Entertainment (creators of I Love Bees, if you didn't know) quite a bit of praise for their achievements, even comparing them to "the Linus Thorvalds of modern gaming".

I'm not sure if it was because I was still silently raving over the fact that an ARG was featured so prominently in this keynote, but I thought Leadbeater was given a little too much time to say what he wanted to say, because his speech started to drag a little. He did make some other interesting points, although you had to stay focused through the less engaging bits of his talk.

A note on communities working collaboration: the rule set that governs them tends to be built from a complicated mix of subsets: one part anarchy (anyone can do anything), one part meritocracy (people trust those who have proven themselves in the past), one part democracy (if there's a dispute, there's usually a democratic way to solve it), one part aristocracy (when you're around longer, you tend to have more influence) and one part monarchy (there are often a few "crowned" people around as well). Because of this, it is sometimes complicated to understand the rules to contribute.

Stay tuned for part two of Daniël's report coming tomorrow!

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2007

Part Three - PICNIC '07 - Three days of cross-media madness in Amsterdam

Editor's Note: Daniel is an administrator at the Unfiction forums and was part of the team that created the Project MU Archive Book. He was on the scene at PICNIC '07 as a representative of the ARG community and was kind enough to submit a report on his experiences. This is part three of the report. We thank Daniel for his support of ARGNet and his wonderful report and pictures.

On to the Friday then, which, like last year, was divided into three separate ‘tracks’: Feel, Make and Play. Being on a mission to report on PICNIC for ARGNet, and not having encountered a lot of ARG-related topics yet, I naturally chose the Play track. It kicked off with a keynote address by Katie Salen, who is, among other things, executive director of the Gamelab Institute of Play. If you listened to episode 37 of the ARG Netcast series, you might have heard that the panelists were all especially looking forward to this presentation. Maybe this raised the bar a little too high, because I was fairly disappointed in Salen’s talk, but I think this had a lot to do with its length: it was only 30 minutes, which was just enough time to put forward some interesting notions, but not nearly enough to give an in-depth look at them. However, here are a couple of the things that stuck with me:

• When designing a game, keep asking yourself, “What does the game want?” i.e. what does it desire or require from the player? Sometimes a game might surprise you in this area. Just as poker is a game that requires lying (bluffing), other games require collaboration. Keep in mind what you want your game to require and make sure that what you add to the game fits with how you expect the players to behave.
• There’s the aspect of lusory (playful) attitude. If a game encourages players to take on an active attitude, you do not necessarily need to design or create as much yourself, as players will bring a lot to the game already. It is important, however, to keep in mind that this works best when there’s a transactional relationship between the game and its players: the players give to the game, but it they should also receive something back from the game in exchange for their input.

Salen ended her presentation with a nice example that demonstrated all the theoretical points she addressed: Karaoke Ice. It’s a project she did in the past which features a person in a giant squirrel suit driving around in an ice-cream truck which doubles as a karaoke bar. At first, onlookers were given free popsicles, but then they were invited to get into the back of the truck to do some karaoke. Against the expectations of most, people turned out to be more than willing to perform a few songs. One of Salen’s conclusions was that players of a game are generally willing to go along with, say, an alternate reality, if they understand that the point is that they are part of an experience.

This example was followed by some closing remarks regarding interactivity in play -- interactivity only works when it’s meaningful, core interaction must be fun and audience/player expertise should be rewarded. I think these are some excellent points that easily apply to the ARG universe. Interaction for the sake of interaction is meaningless and therefore completely uninteresting. Interaction only enhances play if it’s actually fun and serves a purpose!

Following Salen came a series of speakers on the subject of The Near Future of Pervasive Media experiences, hosted by Julian Bleecker, who’s a professor of interactive media at USC. All of the speakers in this session were in one way or another involved with Bleecker on different projects. Bleecker himself also spoke briefly on the main subject of this session. More info on him and his endeavors can be found on his website.

First up was Fabian Girardin, a researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, who spoke shortly on the impact of technology on pervasive media, especially when that technology fails us. He gave an insightful account on how heavily we rely on technology and how much more we will in the future.

Following Girardin was Nicholas Nova, a Swiss researcher for the Media and Design Lab at SIT. When it comes to an original take on gaming and media in general, Nova is your guy. He has been working on observing what happens when non-human beings interact with the digital world. A couple of the examples he touched on:

• The infamous ‘Poultry Internet’ project done by Singaporean researchers, which enables you to touch a chicken through the internet
• Having a real life dog play a digital pet in the MMORPG World of Warcraft
• Developing a Twitter-application for a cat, which enables him to make a blog post by scratching a device around his neck

Ultimately, what Nova wants to be able to do is to create a more holistic gaming experience by introducing random aspects of real life into a gaming environment, such as animal behaviour or even the weather.

The third speaker was Dennis Crowley, who you might know from Dodgeball fame, or more recently from joining area/code, a company focused on producing urban games. Projects he worked on and talked about are PacManhattan and ConQwest and more recently Plundr which is about discovering and marking wifi hotspots in major cities, and Crossroads, which is about ‘capturing’ intersections in a city block by running around with two teams competing against each other.

Each speaker is a frontrunner in his respective area and it was great to be able to have a look inside their worlds. After watching them collectively answer some questions from the audience during an intimate panel discussion, which they held sitting on the grass of the podium of the smaller Transformation Room where the ‘Play’ track was hosted, it was time to move back to the main conference hall for bits of the ‘Feel’ track, which hosted a session on Augmented Reality for Advertisers that sounded really promising.

As it turns out, the word 'promising' didn’t even begin to describe this session: the technology and the practical applications thereof that were demonstrated by three different industry leaders in the field, Eduardo Dias (YDreams), David Polinchock (Brand Experience Lab) and Jeroen Mol (Total Immersion) blew me away.

Dias and Polinchock are both involved in designing interactive experiences using augmented reality. Two things stood out: first, a movie-theatre commercial for Dove soap, made by YDreams, currently being shown in selected US theatres, consisting of displaying a video-feed of the audience with soap bubbles floating across the screen. People in the audience can actually interact with the bubbles by standing up and waving their arms and thereby ‘hitting’ or touching the bubbles: this moves them around or makes them pop. I was mostly amazed by the fact that this hardly takes any modern technology: all you need is a camera, a simple computer and some fairly basic software.

The second eye-catching demonstration was an Arkanoid clone developed by Polinchock’s company for NBC, where the audience controls the paddle by collectively leaning to the left or right. This too makes use of only standard hardware, and a live demo with the PICNIC audience proved that it worked remarkably well.

Now, while the demonstrations by Dias and Polinchock were quite amazing and a lot of fun, Jeroen Mol’s presentation was in an entirely different league. His company has developed a way of creating real-time digital modification of live images. It uses a setup where a camera and a monitor/TV work as a ‘mirror’. When certain items are held in front of this mirror, they become digitally enhanced on-screen.

Mol showed several practical applications for this technique, like displaying a 3D model of a car on top of a brochure. By tapping different parts of the brochure, the angle, color and various other aspects of the image could be changed. Another example was a box of LEGO: when holding it in front of the camera, a 3D model of appeared showing how it would look when assembled. He went on to demonstrate increasingly impressive stuff being projected over the footage of his own body, starting with glasses, a hat and quickly moving on to complete costumes and Stormtrooper masks, all moving completely in sync with his own (live!) movement.

I’m finding it quite hard to describe exactly how this looked, but I can tell you it was almost literally breathtaking. You can watch the session on augmented reality on the PICNIC website -- Mol’s demonstration starts a little over halfway in.

After this visually stunning session of demos, we were treated to another great presentation, as Dick Hardt was given forty minutes to lay out his ideas on Identity 2.0. Hardt, renowned Canadian entrepreneur who is currently the CEO of his own company, Sxip Identity, has been giving talks on this subject for over two years now, and his style and humor have made him a much praised and sought-after speaker at conferences all over the world.

The idea behind Identity 2.0 is trying to create something in the digital world that is parallel to how identification works in the real world, which is typically asymmetrical. Going into a liquor store and showing ID to be able to buy a bottle of liquor (Vanilla Stoli if you want the literal example) is possible because of certain premises we take for granted: the relying party (the liquor store) implicitly trusts the issuing party of the ID in question (in Hardt’s example his driver's license, issued by the province of British Columbia) and thus it can be used to confirm that the carrier is over 21. There is no contact needed between the relying party and the issuer to verify the validity of the ID.

On the internet however, this all works rather differently. Most of the time, when you need to identify yourself with a certain website or service, what you actually do is authenticate yourself by logging in, which you do with an account that was issued by the very party you want to identify yourself to. This is all good and well, except that this does not provide for any real digital identity: it’s not portable, it’s site-centric instead of user-centric, and it is not portable. You cannot, for example, take the reputation you built up as a seller on Ebay over to Craigslist. Hardt and his company are working towards ways of creating a portable, asymmetrical digital identity, Identity 2.0.

I advise you, nay, urge you to go take a look at Hardt’s presentation, which is fast-paced, humorous and very insightful. It’s on the PICNIC site, you just have to skip past the first 20 minutes as they attached it to the registration of a rather uninteresting talk from one of PICNIC’s sponsors, KLM. Read more about Dick Hardt and his ideas on his professional blog.

Rounding up the day and the conference was Dr. Neil Gershenfeld from MIT, who is also director of the Center for Bits and Atoms. Gershenfeld talked at length about how the idea of the Fab Labs, digital fabrication laboratories, was ‘accidentally’ born after he gave a lecture titled ‘How to make (almost) anything’. Digital fabrication is essentially the concept behind Star Trek’s replicator: creating stuff by arranging all the atoms in just the right way. Crude versions of such an apparatus are called 3D printers, which is one of the things the Fab Labs (set up all over the world, from Ghana to Barcelona) are working on. Actually, as a demonstration of how (relatively) easy such a device can be made, a mini Fab Lab was set up in the lobby of the PICNIC Club for the duration of the conference, working on assembling a 3D printer out of just $2000 worth of parts.

While not having a broad spectrum of practical applications yet, there already have been successful experiments with 3D printers, like printing a working flashlight, which shows that this technology could become practical and applicable to industrial production processes in the near(ish) future. It blows your mind!

Those last four words are probably a good way to conclude this report. PICNIC has been an immensely impressive and inspiring event in many ways and I am already looking forward to next year’s edition. Thanks for bearing with me through this long-winded account of my three days in Amsterdam, I hope you enjoyed it and I can heartily recommend coming to Amsterdam next year for PICNIC’08!

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 7:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2007

Part Two – PICNIC ’07 – Three days of cross-media madness in Amsterdam

Editor's Note: Daniel is an administrator at the Unfiction forums and was part of the team that created the Project MU Archive Book. He was on the scene at PICNIC '07 as a representative of the ARG community and was kind enough to submit a report on his experiences. This is part two of the report. We thank Daniel for his support of ARGNet and his wonderful report and pictures.

The next day started out with a discussion between two people who are both known as quite visionaries when it comes to the Internet. The first was David Weinberger, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, is a prominent commentator on internet marketing strategies, and is the author of the book Everything is Miscellaneous. The second was Andrew Keen, a digital pioneer, author of the book Cult of the Amateur and a leading contemporary critic of recent developments regarding the Internet.

This set up a really interesting debate, between a Web 2.0 fanatic and one of its most prominent critics. Weinberger gave a compelling presentation of his views on the Internet, that it was made for one purpose -- to organize messiness. Hyperlinking as a concept was invented so that content could be offered in multiple places, just by linking to it. Having user generated content, with Wikipedia as the main example, creates more content and complexity in that content than could otherwise have been achieved, which is A Good Thing.

Keen, however, fundamentally disagrees with this view, condensing his own take on this as “complexity bad, simplicity good” and stating that the media and the Internet should try and reflect the world, rather than trivialize it. Nowadays, the Internet ‘complexifies’ the world and a lot of the information that is being offered is wrong or corrupt. He kept arguing that Weinberger’s approach was much too philosophical and that he needed to be more practical. One of his better examples was the Wikipedia entry for ‘truthiness’, a term coined by Stephen Colbert. Its word count is almost exactly the same as the entry for truth, demonstrating that Wikipedia has no context and that there’s nothing there to tell us what’s important and not.

Weinberger countered this by arguing that incidents like the 'truthiness' entry will automatically be dealt with by the community, which is an argument I also tend to rely on a lot. Overall, I thought Keen was coming off as being rather sour and negative, while Weinberger seems to be more of a visionary and has much more of a pioneering spirit. I know one thing for sure -- I will definitely go and read Weinberger's book. Oh, and here’s a funny little fact -- Amazon lists Keen’s book as a ‘Perfect Partner’ for Weinberger’s. :)

After this compelling discussion, we moved on to yet another multi-speaker session aimed at technology. First off, there was Pablo Holman, more widely known as ‘Pablos’. He’s a hacker, and was introduced as someone with no role in creating technology, but a big role in taking it apart. He gave us a really funny take on the vulnerabilities of technology. Some highlights included him organizing the Wearable Tech Fashion Show, which he characterized as a unique opportunity to get people to send you all kinds of cool tech stuff, slap it on some hot babes and then keep it afterwards, which apparently is a very worthwhile scheme when you’re low on cash and have a great need for cutting edge wearable technology.

One of Pablos' better quotes was “Hackers don’t ask ‘what does this do?’, hackers ask ‘what can I make this do?’”. He then demonstrated some of the cooler things you can do when you know just a little bit more about simple technology than the average person -- hacking into the TV-network in your hotel room, hacking into someone’s cell phone voicemail and changing the greeting message (which he demonstrated live on stage by doing it to Cory Doctorow’s voicemail, who was actually sitting in the audience) and spoofing identities by scanning RFID tags and using the info on them to do all sorts of freaky stuff. His most applauded feat was a remake of the famous ‘Samy is my hero’ code that was released on MySpace, which added those four words to every profile that came in contact with the original profile which contained the code. Pablos pointed us all to the PICNIC Network site, where, to everyone’s amazement, the words ‘Pablos is our hero’ had been added to a couple of profiles, Cory Doctorow’s being one of them. All in all, this made for an oftentimes hilarious and very enjoyable presentation.

Next up was Nikolaj Nyholm, founder and CEO of the Danish company Polar Rose, which produces software that can recognize faces from images, whether they are single 2d images or a video feed. The software works by recognizing over 140 different vectors in a face and could, while still in development, already determine with a 98.2% accuracy if a face is male or female. This made for another impressive demonstration: If you run the software on your PC and you are, for example, browsing on Flickr, every picture that the software recognizes as having a face in it is highlighted with a little rose icon. If you then click the rose, you can identify the person in the picture and thus help by adding to the Polar Rose database of metadata.

You can then use the software to go to a website or into your own collection of pictures and say “show me only photos with person A and B, but not person C in them” and it will search all the pictures for you. A neat and funny little thing he assured us was becoming practical with the current version already was the ability to ask it to “crawl match.com for me and show me all profiles of people looking x% like the person in this photo”.

Two less elaborate, but still pretty interesting presentations followed: Alexander Straub from Pixsta, presented their image-browsing software that shows some innovative ways of ordering and browsing items visually, for example in a webshop. Arnold Smeulders, from MultimediaN, talked about a few new and original ways of searching different parts of the web that his company was working on, the most interesting being Moodspotter, which crawls Livejournal and finds relations between content and the mood people say they were in while typing that entry. By graphically showing the mood-distribution over the course of a day, he was able to assert that there is a very steady pattern for distribution of the mood ‘excited’ (with the height of excitement always being in the middle of the day). Only really major events like the release of the last Harry Potter showed a distortion of the common pattern, which was pretty cool.

Ending the morning session was Dr. Sugata Mitra from Newcastle University, who has a background in educational technology. During the first few minutes of his presentation, I had some doubts about where his talk was going, but soon, his story started to really impress me. The research project he has been working on for the past eight years is called ‘Hole in the Wall’ and is basically about trying to see if children can educate themselves on how to use a computer without any outside help or prior knowledge.

To study this, he developed a way to place a complete computer, built into a concrete little bunker, in little villages all over the rural areas of India. The results were truly amazing: not only can children easily learn how to use a computer, they will also rapidly teach other children how to do it. They did this in such a way that between 200 and 300 children on ONE computer could learn how to operate it in less than four months! They learn adaptively and by all sorts of interesting group processes. He is now on a mission is to use this information to demonstrate that $30 per child over a three year period would be enough to make a radical change in development in severely under-developed regions of the world. This is a truly impressive story, for which Dr. Mitra received a thunderous standing ovation.

Moving back to creativity for the post-lunch program, and this time focusing more on the people who use technology for creation, the next keynote speech was given by Michael Johnson, COO of Pixar. Johnson gave an excellent talk on the process of going from an idea to a product, by walking us through how The Incredibles came to life. This time, he talked about the process of creation in much the same way, now with Ratatouille as the example at hand. His four essential steps in creating a virtual world were as follows:

1) Create an interesting world
2) Design engaging characters
3) Tell a compelling story

Now, at this point you will be confronted with the flaws in your world and your characters: Whenever you try to tell a compelling story, you will find that you need to change things to make it work. This brings forth the fourth point:

4) Research, research, research

And by this, he does not necessarily mean do background research, but rather, play around with your characters. Put them in different positions and ‘see what they do’. If you have thought them out well enough, they will go in certain directions seemingly naturally, and may even surprise you.

To give an example of how this can work out, he told us that he was once challenged by a biologist, who criticized the movie Antz by saying that he thought it was ridiculous that the ants in that movie didn’t have six appendages, but rather, four, and that he was very curious about what had been the reasoning behind that decision. Johnson first told him the ‘long answer’, being that from a character standpoint, the extra appendages didn’t really add anything and even made the ants look a little more alien than they had wanted, so they decided against it. Then he also gave him the short answer: “Ants don’t talk”.

I’m especially fond of what he concluded from this: Reality is a convenient measure of complexity. It sets a bar for what you might aim at.

His presentation ended with another example taken from The Incredibles. He showed how the character Edna, the Italian/Japanese superhero-clothes designer, had come to life. First, the creative team designed the character, then they designed her over and over and over until it felt right. Then, they had her walk around the world of The Incredibles, hoping that that would give them an idea as to how she would interact with that world. From that came the basic idea of how she lived, how she talked, and how she acted. This was a fascinating look inside the creative process of a very creative company.

Following Johnson were presentations from several people who have all been credited as being very creative innovators:

• Peter Frankfurt from Imaginary Forces, a company dealing with design, communication and entertainment, and which is well-known for its very visual and high-impact imagery showed some of their work. The examples included the ‘logo trailer’ for the Transformers movie (http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=wFvUdt9BQhU) which Michael Bay supposedly classified as ‘ cool’
• Paul Pope, a graphic artist heavily inspired by classical comics and known for his work on recent Batman comic books gave us a private tour of his creative process: how he develops concepts and then lets them involve into a final product
• Danny Yount, creative director of Prologue Films, showed us several title sequences his company has done for major Hollywood productions like Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, The Reaping, and The Invasion. They also made the hilarious short film Raymond which I urge you to go see on YouTube because it is just too funny
• Steven Sagmeister, an Austrian graphic designer who has done some major ad campaigns that are known for their ‘alternative’ and surprising look and basically showed a ton of examples of the work he did so far

After a rather tedious and way too technical presentation on 4k Digital Cinema, which is supposedly going to radically change our lives sometime in the near-ish future (although I still have no clue how or why, exactly) Stefana Broadbent, who is a social scientist with Swisscom Innovations, took over and gave a talk on how technology impacts our daily lives, during which she put forward some really interesting eye-openers.

For example, she started out by debunking some popular myths, like “(local) radio is dead because of the iPod”. Actually, only about 10% of the people in the US listen less to radio than they did before, and 70% still never even listen to MP3s at all.

Here’s another myth that she challenged: “People who have digital TV watch no more commercials”. This also is apparently not true, as it has been determined that the average attention span of people watching TV is about 30 minutes. Apparently we need commercials to provide a much-needed break.

And a third myth: “Newspapers are dead”. Again, this is not true. Paid newspapers are experiencing decreasing circulation, while free newspapers are seeing massive increases. And not only are these newspapers free, they are also available at or near the point of consumption.

So, apparently, new forms of media and outlets have constantly been added over the past 40 years (radio, television, more TVs per household, PCs, mp3, digital TV, etc.) but almost nothing is disappearing. Her answer to this seeming paradox is that everything moves into the background. Everything is becoming wallpaper, and no longer do we focus on just one thing, but rather we are now constantly consuming media running in the background. Instant messaging and e-mail are nice examples of this, because they are even literally running in the background.

This means some things are becoming routine: Listening to the radio station you are used to listen to during breakfast, listening to music while exercising, etc. Ultimately, Broadbent turned this into an argument against personalization: “users can only multitask if we don’t ask them for ALL of their attention”, and when we increase personalization, we ask more and more of a user, which requires them to make choices, which a user does not want to do. A surprising twist after an interesting analysis…

This concluded Thursday’s program for PICNIC, although inside the PICNIC Club, discussion continued for a while longer during various round-table sessions with a varying selection of that day’s speakers. Unfortunately, I had to leave 20 minutes in, just as discussion between Andrew Keen and David Weinberger was heating up again. That session also included Dr. Sugata Mitra, and I really liked how the moderators, combining the ideas of Weinberger and Mitra, steered the debate on to the question wether or not the internet could replace teachers in the future. Keen, making a point of stating that he gained most of his support from teachers, certainly had a strong opinion on this question.

This is another thing that I really like about PICNIC and kept impressing me: you constantly have the idea that you are listening to people who are actually deciding how the internet and media landscape will look in five or ten years time. I guess that that’s probably because they actually are… visionary people like Weinberger, Keen, Mitra and a lot of other people who were present at PICNIC ultimately have a big influence on what’s going on in crossmedia land.

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 8:38 AM | Comments (0)

October 8, 2007

Part One – PICNIC ’07 – Three days of cross-media madness in Amsterdam

Editor's Note: Daniël is an administrator at the Unfiction forums and was part of the team that created the Project MU Archive Book. He was on the scene at PICNIC '07 as a representative of the ARG community and was kind enough to submit a report on his experiences, which we will release in parts over the course of the next few days. We thank Daniel for his support of ARGNet and his wonderful report and pictures.

For the second year in a row, I was able to attend PICNIC, the Crossmediaweek Foundation’s conference on media, internet, technology and creativity in Amsterdam. Once again, I went courtesy of ARGNet, and like last year, it was a blast! The past few days really flew by… I’ve been to my share of conferences, and the thing with PICNIC is, the moment you walk onto the Westergasfabriek site, where the conference is held, the atmosphere just grabs you.

The site is a rather peculiar place, or at the very least not the typical conference environment. The area consists of about fifteen small and large brick buildings, originally part of a natural gas processing plant, but now built to suit anything from dance parties to exhibitions and conferences. The first thing you notice when walking around is the high production value of the whole event -- every area and room features a patch of grass, paths laid out with wood chips, plants and flowers everywhere, wooden picnic tables and of course the obligatory red and white checkered tablecloths.

There is also the PICNIC Club, the main lounging area where demos are being held, at which several sponsors have set up their booths, including artists showcasing their creations and a lot of other interactive stuff. Then there’s the Extraction Hall, the main conference hall, where the stage is actually a garden, complete with flower beds and 50-foot high banners hanging down from the ceiling, lighted in such a way it looks like see ants and other bugs are crawling around, to give you the real outdoorsy feeling. Very impressive.

For those of you not quite familiar with PICNIC, this is the second time the Dutch Crossmediaweek Foundation has organized a massive conference on cross-media and everything related to it. A lot of very interesting people attend, including many pioneers in media, technology, the Internet, and also (pervasive) gaming. This year, in addition to the three-day conference, there were many affiliated events planned as well. Take for example PICNIC JR, an attempt to get younger people interested in media and creativity, or the PICNIC Academy, a mini-conference intended for students. There was also the first Dutch edition of Come Out And Play festival, which turned the city of Amsterdam into a giant interactive playground. For more details about PICNIC and all these partner events, head over to the PICNIC website (http://www.picnicnetwork.org/).

Unfortunately, my time was a bit limited, so my visit to PICNIC was confined to the main conference, which started Wednesday September 26th in the afternoon.

PICNIC focuses a lot on creativity in many forms. In putting together this year’s conference, they wanted to make sure that they would not just be letting designers, artists, and creators speak on creativity, but also the people who are creating the new tools that enable new forms of creativity. Therefore, the program for the first day was focused on technology, and the first keynote speech was given by Dr. Emile Aarts, Vice-president of Philips Research Laboratories.

Now, I heard Dr. Aarts speak at PICNIC last year, when his presentation was part of the ‘technology’ track and was given to just a small audience. Nevertheless, he impressed me back then with a lot of surprising stuff Philips was working on, and he gave an updated and extended version of the same presentation this year, this time for the full audience, and it was even more intriguing than it was last year.

Philips was founded well over a hundred years ago as a company which mass-produced light bulbs, and Aarts took the development of the light bulb as an example of a driver for innovation in technology: Ultimately, the light bulb was invented so people could read and write when it was dark, and be more productive this way. For some innovations, basic social need is still an important driver. Aarts showed some examples of products that Philips have been working on, like a light bulb that can be charged using solar power for countries with a less-than-reliable power grid, or special high-tech wood stoves for post-disaster areas that prevents the emission of poisonous gasses while burning wood.

However, one of the more successful recent innovations wasn’t driven out of a social need, or any other existing demand. It was the result of a creative brainstorm -- the Ambilight-technology. This is a way of extracting image data out of a video feed in real time, and using it to control lighting. Commercially, Philips have applied this to flat panel TVs, resulting in a TV that colors the wall behind the display according to what is shown on-screen, creating a richer viewing experience. By selling over a million Ambilight TVs already, Philips has successfully added value to an already saturated market. The next step will be creating ‘surround light’, which will be much like the concept of surround sound. This will be a neat way to enrich the experience of watching a movie, but there’s a lot more potential for it in the gaming industry -- just think of being immersed in lighting and light-effects!

Other recent innovations Aarts highlighted were things like photonic cloth, a cotton-like material with lighting fibres integrated into it so that you can light all sorts of textiles, and multi-touch screens. These screens will be ideal for digital board games, card games and multi-user interfaces for computers.

Aarts concluded with five remarks on the process of creativity:
1. Lack of freedom is the enemy – when you want innovation, you should relieve the stress of continuous performance, and creative minds should be given the freedom to pursue ideas without pressure
2. You shouldn’t try to manage creativity by directives, but rather by joint objectives
3. Exciting things often happen at the crossroads of existing areas or ideas
4. Creative solutions should fulfill unmet needs
5. Live your own future (experience it yourself rather than having it dictated to you)

Immediately following Emile Aarts was Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who is a mathematician and architect, the founder of Seadragon and creator of Photosynth (http://labs.live.com/photosynth/), an imaging software package recently acquired by Microsoft. He gave a very intriguing tech-demo showing what sorts of things Photosynth, which is built upon a new way of handling pictures, can be used for.

First and foremost, Photosynth is about organizing pictures, arranging them in a way independent of resolution, and making them scalable in a few different ways. Because the mapping application within Photosynth was written in such a way that it can make full use of a computer’s resources (“real code, not web browser code”), like graphics acceleration, which hardly gets used outside the world of gaming, it can do all sorts of nifty stuff like natural zooming and organizing pictures on curved surfaces while retaining full resolution.

Until Microsoft acquired Photosynth, there was no really practical application for the software. Joining Microsoft Live Labs changed that, though. They already had a project running that dealt with using computer vision techniques to geographically arrange photos, and Photosynth fit this niche perfectly. By combining the two, Photosynth has been made into an application that can infer relationships between pictures just by analyzing the pictures themselves. This part is rather technical, so the best thing to do if you want to know more about this is go and watch the excellent demo from Microsoft . Here, they take a series of pictures from the San Marco square in Venice, and have Photosynth analyze how they are related. This creates a 3D version of the square and enables you to navigate it in several different ways.

Photosynth’s power was also demonstrated by taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the Notre Dame off Flickr, and using them to create a 3D model of the cathedral that is scalable, zoomable and explorable in different ways. Seeing all this happen on the screen before my eyes was really impressive! Aguera commented that the web, which essentially started out as a simple idea to share documents, has a strongly underdeveloped visual and spatial aspect, and he is determined to change this. It will be interesting to see what the future will bring in this respect.

This was all I was able to see on the first day, which meant that unfortunately, I missed David Silverman, producer of The Simpsons, giving an insiders’ look at creating The Simpsons Movie, which kicked off with him emerging from the audience, playing the Simpsons tune on a tuba... must have been quite a sight. This seems as good a time as any to point out to you that almost all the presentations that were given during PICNIC can be watched and downloaded online, on the PICNIC website, so if you’re curious about Silverman’s talk, by all means go and watch it for yourself.

Watch for the next part of Daniel's report, which will be coming your way soon!

Posted by Daniël van Gool at 2:44 PM | Comments (0)