design-and-ideas – Page 28 – Cubicgarden.com…

If this happens do this to my laptop…

I have already talked about IFTTT to death and how I liken it to some ideas and work I had around pipelining.

All the new movement in this area has been in the online space but I found this little app for Linux which operates in a similar fashion to the very old conduit (Conduit) but its focused around system events rather than webservices.

Cuttlefish is a tool which can execute various actions when specific events are triggered. For example, you can change the proxy mode depending on the currently connected wireless network, unlock your computer when a specific Bluetooth or USB device is connected or disconnected and so on.

I can easily see how webservices can be written into the application, although there is no roadmap yet.

Perceptive Media talks next quarter

I’m really happy to announce I’ll be talking at a few places in autumn (q3).

I have the pleasure of talking about Making your TV more engaging for TedXBristol. Pleasure because its great to have the opportunity to spend some time in my home city and learn about whats moving and shaking? If you look online, it seems like Bath (the lower rival to Bristol) is where things are happening in the south west of England. And frankly that worries me.

TEDxBristol takes place Saturday 20th September but there is a lottery system in place for those who want to go along. Its weird because its something we considered for BarCampLondon in the later days but never went through with.

I also have the pleasure of talking at the Oreilly Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt in October. I have a lot of respect for Oreilly conferences because there very well run and tend to attract the right people along but don’t cost the earth to go to. Its a shame Emerging Tech conference ended because I would have liked to have spoken there however, TOC (tools of change) is sounds like its filling in the space Etech left nicely.

I will be talking about Perceptive Media (still need to get my bio up, but you can see my picture) and should have some of the results from our breaking out audioplay.

Updated

I will also be taking over from Tony and talking at the NEM summit in Istanbul, Turkey (which will also be the furthest east I have ever been) in October 16-18th.

And another update

I will also be talking at Canvas Conf in Birmingham on the 7th September which is mainly a web developers event but I’ll hopefully stretch their imagination and single out the client side revolution which is starting to take hold. With a look at Perceptive Media. Maybe we’ll even be able to launch something there?

So its… now

Canvas Conf – 7th September
TedXBristol – 20th September
TOC Conference – 9th October
Nem Summit – 16-18th October

We’ve had quite a few offers to talk but its important we pick the right ones even if they are offering to pay for everything, as it takes me away from doing more research and development. We can’t have that, can we!

The killer application for distributed social networking?

How do we make things move along quicker in the area of distributed/federated technology? Things are moving very slowly although it seems most of the components are in place.

When I wrote the blog about Rebel mouse, I found some interesting links to some distributed solutions which could see the end of the likes of twitter and facebook.

OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates. The goal is to have a specification that allows different messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near-real-time. This spec took over from the OpenMicroBlogging spec of old.

I remember writing about wordpress’s distributed solution a while ago.

The weird thing is I logged into Diaspora again today and not only is it a ghost town (not like G+, but really like a ghost town) but it got me thinking whats different about Diaspora and G+? Now the hype died down, its time to see some very cool uses of Diaspora. What have they got to loose? Dare I say it, wheres the killer application? Wheres the thing which will make people sit up and take note once again? Heck whys no one doing cool stuff with the API?

So what is the killer application which will tip people over? I have some thoughts but what ever it is, please let it happen soon before we’re all forced to beg twitter, facebook, etc for our data back.

Selling the internet of things

Love what Alexandra does and writes but this certainly got me thinking about the internet of things and how you market it and sell it to others.

At the moment, anyone from IBM to Bosch is interested in making their products connect to the internet. This will have an impact on marketing only in as much as it will make communicating these emmerging products a real challenge. Youtube, & Vimeo are going to be a big part of the equation because explaining a thing that does something is better done through video. E-commerce and online PR will also lead the way for a really long time as the retail space tries to adjust to hybrid devices. Understanding where a connected lamp like GNL sits in John Lewis is a nightmare. Existing clients who have some new and kooky thing they’ve made might wish to take a leap of faith online before committing their supply chain to these experiments. These are all choices and a world that advertising can help navigate. It’s going to get very exciting.

Shes right and I remember Pyria and Alex’s experiential digital lifestyle store, Digital Wellbeing DWB. Even captured it on video in a few places (really need to port my stuff from Blip.tv to Youtube one day soon).

Perceptive Media presentation slides

Perceptive media from Ian Forrester

Its been less than 14 days since we launched our Perceptive Media prototype to the world and the feedback has been coming back thick and fast. As usual please keep it going and do pass it on to others who may have not heard it yet, even if they have no interest in the technology. Were as much interested in the general public view as technologists.

One of the unnoticed pieces which went up during the launch was our smc presentation for perceptive media.

Like most presentations I do, its low on text and you end up listening to what I say rather than reading the slides. This is great but not so good when you’ve not heard me (and Tony) talking.

So here’s a rough idea of what we talk about over the presentation…

This presentation is for the concept of perceptive media
You may not know but the BBC has a R&D department and they have been with the BBC right from the start. Actually a engineer was hired within the first 10 people to join the BBC. We do a whole load of research and development on questions the BBC faces in the near to long term future. We also feed into standard bodies such as W3C
We use broadcast technology and broadcast to everyone in the UK. We do this because its in our remit and we must reach everyone who pays the license fee. It also provides the best value for the license fee
Unfortunately Broadcast is one way communication and it can feel like your banging your head on a brick wall trying to reply or communicate back.
The best stories are enchanting and engaging but how does this tally up with broadcast communication?
I’ll like to take you back to the original story telling medium, before broadcast changed things… something like sitting around a campfire telling a ghost story. When telling that story, you would look at peoples faces and subconsciously change elements of the story.
What happened? Broadcast happened, and the ability to tell many more people the same story became the default
But in the move to broadcast (that one way medium) we forgot about context, body language, etc. These implicit actions and triggers which once would help form the narrative are no longer included.
Take the comedy conundrum, every comedian has to face
They choose to customise there sets with jokes and references to the local area
Note the word customise rather than personise. The comedian is still in control and fit it in when he or she feels it approbate. They will also work against the typical view of the location if it works with material in there mind
Variables are things which can change depending on other things in this case. But they each have rules, like maximum length. This is the same for narrative but the human mind can do the calculation so quickly on the fly
Currently the state of the art in perceptive like media is centres around internet virals like Take this Lollipop. But we feel there unsubtle and frankly bit simple with the two way pipe of the internet. Now if you could do this on a one way pipe, wouldn’t that be interesting
It needs to scale in a way which rivals Broadcast otherwise no one will take it seriously
We this is possible with the incredible power the client side now has compared to previously.
The power has been shifting to the user for many years with on-demand and other technologies
We created with a bunch of other peoples help a prototype called “Breaking Out” to prove it can be done
As you can see its not interactive, there is no feedback loops or anything like that. Its a customised experience
Because there is clear difference between explicit and implicit feedback. We feel storytellers would love to work off the implicit feedback rather than the explicit stuff. Thats the stuff which drives your ghost story
How? Well there is a ton of work and money going into adding sensors to your living room. From 3D cameras which see all to simple light sensors to adjust the picture brightness. We’re just talking about using that same data generated to customise a narrative
Of course this all fits with the trend around big data sets, something the BBC has a lot experience in with BBC Backstage
Back to the audience and narrative. Broadcasters have been losing the connection with the audiences. Lots of people have the TV on like the Radio. Its just on and if something picks up their ears, they will tune in or listen.
There is a concept called the attention economy which you may know about and it gets talked about a lot. One of my favor quotes related to the concept is from John Doe on the film Se7en. Most of the examples fit in the sledgehammer category while…
We feel we can achieve the same effect with little tickles here and there.
Were talking about highly relevant customisation of narrative
Which fit and run on the narrative rails setup by the author/storyteller
When I watched Vanilla Sky first time, there was a scene which stuck a cord with me. I couldn’t work out what it was till the end when it was revealed they had re-imagined points of Tom Cruises memories (I won’t spoil it further)
We feel we can strike a cord and reestablish that connection with our audiences which has been so badly missing
Thank you!

Its of course, a lot better when we present it together and add all the additional stuff you won’t get in the notes. Plus it usually throws up a million questions which we have answers for…

The History of File-Sharing

The Darknet is something I deep into for research purposes and to get an idea of whats emerging… However I keep having to defend the innovation, expertise and pure genius of the darknet. I use darknet in lei of a better word to describe the underground world of hackers. Crazy because theres so many examples out there.

Torrentfreak recently did a history of file-sharing which has plenty of examples of hackers and developers scratching there own itches.

BitTorrent has catapulted into a mainstream filesharing mechanism which is fast, efficient, and difficult to stop. Early versions of BitTorrent required centralized trackers to operate, but have later become able to utilize trackerless “torrents.” Increasingly BitTorrent users have grown concerned with their privacy. Indexes such as YouHaveDownloaded.com have been able to maintain logs of every file downloaded by IP, which has raised significant awareness to whether it is safe to download files through BitTorrent. In addition, many ISPs have been known to cap speeds when detecting BitTorrent downloads. As a result of these privacy concerns millions of BitTorrent users have signed up with Anonymous VPN services to mask their IP-addresses when downloading…

BBC Connected Studio/Social

I haven’t mentioned the BBC Connected Studio on my blog to date. However its about time…

So its a new (its been running since May) BBC project which is all about open innovation. Every month we put out a brief around a certain product area in the BBC. To date its been to redo the BBC.co.uk homepage, rethink the Weather and Travel services and this month its re-imagine services for the Cebeebies audience.

Every month theres one day of idea studio and the pitches at the end. The idea studio gives people a chance to come together and explore ideas against the brief. Of course you can just go into a corner and develop the idea with yourself or your pre-selected teammates. Its about what ever works to get the best ideas. I find people come with a rough idea and tend to combine the ideas together or build on each others ideas. Open innovation is the key here. After the ideas build up and you’ve had a chance to run through a series of workshops including a end user pitch (or not if you don’t want to). Your now working things up for the pitch to the commissioners and everyone else.

If everything goes well, you get selected and receive a email to say the commissioners would like to see it developed into a prototype. At which, about 2 weeks later, its build studio time.

The build studios are like hack days (our learning from hackdays, mashed and over the air) but they run over 2 days and the end presentation doesn’t receive some token prize, they receive a good daily amount for being there time while developing the prototype. However at the end there is the opportunity to pitch the prototype to the commissioners for more serious amounts of money.

The events take place in Manchester, Glasgow and London which means theres no reason not take part. And that applies to staff as well as externals. Actually theres something quite magically about seeing BBC staff collaborating directly with externals. I’ll be excited to see how things work when one such team go through to the later stages.

It sounds slightly complex but actually its pretty straight forward, and takes the best parts of Innovation labs and Hackdays on a ride.

The BBC is serious about Connected Studio and has pledged a million pounds behind the whole project.

Ralph director of Future Media talked about how he loved BBC Backstage and what we built back then. And to be honest theres a air of Backstage floating through the whole process. For example anyone can register there interest via the BBC Connected blog (no secret handshakes or secret buddy systems just apply). This means you have as much chance as those on the BBC’s official supplier list. Connected Studio has attracted SME’s, startups, hackers and early adopters. Unlike backstage were talking about things which are made for deployment on the live site, so generally theres shorter term innovation (aka less 2 years).

The majority of new BBC Online products are built according to long term product roadmaps and the published commissioning process. However, we believe there’s room here for more disruptive thinking – that is, more experimental ideas that can be pitched, built and delivered to audiences in a faster, smarter way. We would like to hear from agencies and individuals who have fresh, innovative ideas to bring to this event and to seek funding.

The process isn’t perfect (but what is?) but is adaptable and is always looking for feedback.

So whats my role in the connected studio?

Well thats still being worked out but I’ll have my R&D glasses on when watching the pitches and I’m very interested in the network of people who are doing innovative things and have been to a connected studio.

However, something I can talk about is BBC Connected Social, which are events linked to the BBC Connected studio process.

Like Connected Studio its still very early days and I’m expecting it to twist and change as it matures. But its a good chance for people external to the process because they can’t spare the time, never heard of it or didn’t make it into the process to learn more, network and pick up some really useful knowledge all at the same time. For those on the build studio, its a chance to take a break, network and consider a slightly different take on the prototype there building towards (if they wish).

The first one is Tuesday evening at Media City UK while future ones will also match the location of the Connected Studio (be it London, Glasgow or of course Manchester)

Its a chance to learn, debate and socialise on topics closely aligned to the BBC’s strategic themes.

The Build Studio for July is centered around CBeebies, and we are running a panel talking about building for the ages of under 13’s. With useful advice and tips from Mystic mobile & Lancaster’s Dr Paul Coulton, BBC’s Games grid Simon Lumb and BBC’s Children’s Jon Howard.

Hopefully we’ll see you at a BBC Connected Studio or Social soon… You know where to sign up and the next brief is around CBBC (Children’s BBC). Hopefully the next social will include a panel of young people talking about there media habits because that is always insightful.

Experience Perceptive Media yourself

Following up from my posts (here) (here) (here and also now here) about Perceptive Media… I’m very proud to announce Breaking Out, our BBC R&D experiment into new editorial formats.

The prototype requires performs best on Chrome using the new WebAudioAPI, but does work in Firefox, Opera and Safari through a fallback solution (this will eat your bandwidth as it uses WAV’s rather than compressed audio like Ogg Vorbis and Mpeg3). I would suggest keeping memory and cpu intensive applications shut while running the demo because there some serious calculations happening client side.

But most of all I’d urge everyone to leave feedback, no matter how bad or good it is… Then share it around for other people to hear and experience.

Massive thanks to everyone involved in the project…

Writer: Sarah Glenister
Harriet: Maeve Larkin
Lift operator: Anthony Churnside
Producers: Anthony Churnside and Ian Forrester
Media Engine code: Happy Worm
Jplayer Audio engine: Happy Worm
Website code: Yameen Rasul and Matthew Brooks
Illustrations: Angie Chan
With special thanks: Sharon Sephton, Henry R Swindell, Maxine Glancy, Usman Mullan, Elizabeth Valentine and the BBC Writers Room

I’m also happy to say we will be making the Media Engine code available under the Apache License for all you guys who want to hack around with the concept yourself.

Actually there might be some easter eggs in the audio drama to find for those not interested in getting all dirty in the actual code.

A Perceptive on storytelling

As most of you know BBC R&D have a demo of Perceptive Media which we’ve shown a few places including the EBU in Copenhagen. Its been a hidden gem for a long while and its been amazing to see what people have had to say about the concept of perceptive media. Specially liked the two Brits sitting on the sofa talking about it.

We’re really hoping as many people will enjoy it and give their honest feedback to us (good and bad). But its not just the individual feedback we would like to research, its the interconnected stories of how people tell others about it and how they explain it to each other…

How memes spread has always been high on my list of loves and to be honest should be high on the BBC’s research lists (if its not already?) In actual fact there is something about how memes spread and attribution which I think is very interesting and could be a new business model into the future.

Anyway… expect much more about Perceptive Media on the BBC R&D blog this month. In actual fact if you want to be first hear it and respond directly to people behind it like myself, the script writer, actress, coders, etc… Then you should make your way to the next Social Media Manchester.

I was reading about the domino effect on my Kindle via Instapaper the other day on the London Tube prompted after reading this tearjerker story. This bit really got into stuck in my throat, further proving that I’m just a sucker and massive romantic…

At the end was this bit…

Here’s the power of a story: someone hands me one, like a gift (I imagine it wrapped in shiny paper with the bow, the handmade letterpress card, the whole nine yards), and in that gift, I find parts of myself that have been missing, parts of our world that I never imagined, and aspects of this life that I’m challenged to further examine. Then—and this is the important part, the money shot, if you will—I take that gift and share it. In my own writing, sure, but the kind of sharing I’m talking about here is the domino effect: how I hear/watch/read a story, and then tell everybody and their mother about it, and then they tell everybody and their mother, and somewhere in that long line of people is someone who, at this exact point in their life, needed its message more than we’ll ever know.

The power of a story indeed…

You could look at this as a example of why Perceptive media isn’t going to work but actually I disagree. Someone (out there) has written a story which perfectly suits the medium but they don’t know it yet.

Thinking Digital 2012 my highlights

Another year and another Thinking Digital. This year the programme looked very strong, and thankfully I can say one of my highlights was from the BBC.

5 Years now and thinking digital is winning more even more new fans, Martin Bryant from the next web wrote his thoughts about the conference comparing it with TED. It seems crazy than over 5 years ago I heard Herb Kim talk about a TED like conference in the North East and I pulled him aside and said “are you for real?” So determined Herb was, I couldn’t help but offer support where ever possible. In actual case I’ve wrote about Thinking Digital every single year except 2010 when I had my bleed on the brain, and thanks to Herb I was there in spirit as such. Theres no doubt in my mind Thinking Digital is the english TED and it will go on to be something even better.

On the first day, it was the thinking digital university and there was some great courses to be involved in. In the end I went with the one which best fits my work. A Practical Guide to Predicting the Future by Magnus Lindkvist.

At one time or another, if not everyday, we are all called upon to try and spot trends and/or predict the future. It’s pretty tough to do well. Magnus Lindkvist is considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on trendspotting and is the author of Everything You Know is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected and When the Future Begins. In addition he is a wonderful speaker and workshop facilitator. As one person commented, “Listening to Magnus Lindkvist is like rejuvenating your brain.”

In this session, Magnus will share some of his insights on the pitfalls and practice of trendspotting and trying to predict what will happen next. It will be a fascinating and fun workshop that could change the arc of your organisation and maybe even your life.

In the area of trendspotting, theres a lot of different approaches and some are as good as throwing a ball into a pit. But Magnus did a good job breaking the task down. His spectrum of predictability gave some scale to the levels of predications and with Tennis Balls, Fingerprints and the Human Brain in mind off he went.

Pearls of wisdom? Well there was a lot of common sense including news is blinding and slow moving things no one notices because the human brain is crap at recognizing tiny changes. The human mind is crap at thinking about cultural changes, example? Why does the Jetsons still have woman as the housewifes? The best people who predict the future are generally loud and good at convincing people even when wrong.

His talk was equally good and different examples helped… Lets just say I’m now a follower on twitter.

So what was my highlights?

Pam Warhurst

Pam was like a lightening bolt, her no nonsense style and talk totally blew away the audience, she almost received a standing applause for everything she had done in Todmorden. Really got me thinking about the community I live in and should I be pushing much harder to achieve the community spirit she’s achieved. Incredible and also one of the great treasures Thinking Digital uncovers.

Peter Gregson

You got to hand it to Peter, lovely guy and after the failed attempt to demonstrate his computer assisted music sequencing system working on the first day, he came back on the 2nd day to a massive round of applause. Excellent music and great idea. Look forward to hearing and seeing more on the Space soon.

Mikko Hypponen

I had the pleasure of sitting next to Mikko during the speakers and VIP dinner. It was great talking to him and I didn’t know he was going to take the more personal security and privacy approach. We had a good chat about world security and social engineering. Mikkos talk was really good and I felt like he had much more to say but there was plenty to make people think. It wasn’t as scary as Paul Rogers talk at TedXBradford who I recommended to Mikko at dinner but plenty to take away. Another great talk and great to see Thinking Digital trying different types of talks.

Ken Segall

Didn’t really want to like Ken but I found his talk fascinating, maybe in the same way I would find Steve Jobs if I was to heard him live. Ken had some choice words including… Being simplicity isn’t simple, Why add complexity, think common sense. Simplicity isn’t a trend its forever, its burned into our wiring. However when Ken made the comment about Apple’s rivials creating 16+ types of machines to face up against Apple’s 4 types. I disagree with about choice being bad. The business models they are using is wrong in my view. Very good talk and great opener to the whole conference.

Adrian Hon

Adrian is a great guy and friend, always been loved what him and his brother have done from a early time. Great to hear what each of them are doing but Adrian really got me thinking about Kickstarter. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard so many stories about kickstarter but to hear about Zombies Run, well it got me really thinking about the possibility of using a store of ideas to see if any of them were worth pursuing or not. More details about that hopefully soon. But excellent talk and great to have Adrian’s deeper thoughs along side his current work. Credit to Adrian if things go the way of crowd funding.

Sugata Mitra

I had no idea who he was till he started talking about his great hole in the wall project. Then I was transported back to 2000 in the doors of perception 6 conference in Amsterdam. I remember hearing about the project and thinking wow, how amazing one person can make such a difference. I was a budding interaction design student with no real idea of how much these things would shape my life in the future.

I remember there was some discourse about how much the children had learned years later but its great to hear Sugata is still trying out different methods to educate some of the poorest people in the world. Granny Cloud sounds crazy but who knows in 12 years time, I might be saying how much of a impact that had. Seriously Amazing talk… Ended the first and long day on a total high.

Ralph Rivera

Now Ralph is my managers manager but since he joined the BBC replacing Erik Huggers I’ve had nothing but praise for him and his style of business. Seeing Ralph at Thinking Digital adlib with about 3 slides was captivating. He got the tone perfect and made it into one of the best talks of the second day. It was so good hearing what I thought of Ralph being said by others in the conference. There was even talk about Ralph for BBC Director General. I was so proud to be at the BBC after hearing ralph talk about his own background and why the BBC must pivot for the sake of the country and the industry.

Tom Scott

You have got to hand it to Tom, he is one of the gems of Thinking Digital. He has spoken at every single one and each time his portfolio of work increases and gets better. To have Tom end the conference was a great honor and a great move by Herb bringing balance to Peter Fitzgerald‘s talk from Google. Don’t get me wrong Peter was good but even the Google in me was getting a little twitchy. Tom shattered the utopian dream but only by putting a few holes in the corners.

Great to see Tom has calmed down a little, he’s really carving out a niche besides the likes of ZeFrank. Great talk and great presentation, hopefully he won’t be too big for next years Thinking Digital…

Jennifer Gardy

Jennifer’s presentation was special for me because my ex (Sarah) was also into Epidemiology. Not only that Sarah was the person responsible for the TB register in London and we would regularly talk about how TB was a massive killer and unfortunately no was talking it very seriously. A lot of the terms and methods Jennifer described were strangely common to me and I can only guess it comes from Sarah.

Jennifer did also make reference to the fact that she started a A-Z book of diseases which Tom Scott and a few others put together in this great animation in a matter of days.

Sebastian Seung

Every year theres one talk which gets me very excited about what were learning about ourselves. Last year it was eat to defeat, this year its the Connectome. Sebastian is uncovering how the brain is wired and with it how things like autism might be caused. The problem is the brain is just too dense and trying to track the connections is a very manual job. But if you can gamify and crowd source it, would it be a easier problem to crack? Well thats what Play.eyewire.org is all about. Sebastian is after better ways to make the game more fun and more interesting. I might be able to help.

Alan Moore

Between Alan and Magnus I was really getting the feeling my thoughts around disruption and future thinking are maybe much more relevant than I had imagined. Letting the legacy die was a theme through out…

Where Alan got me was the “putting economic value on every aspects of human existence is a very bad idea, deconstructing the human is not a good idea.” This ties nicely with my thoughts about online dating and trying to understand what is chemistry? I think this is also when I wrote in my evernote notes, that I’m going to put forward to Herb a epic look at online dating and love as a presentation for maybe next years Thinking Digital.

My manager Adrian, says its clearly not BBC when I talk about love/sex/dating but if you dig a little deeper. What I’m actually doing is trying to deconstruct these notions. Maybe I am deconstructing what it means to be human in a clumsy way when I do events like Relationships 2.0 (Thur 7th at FYG Deli). I know for a fact I’ve had arrangements with people about the events and my dating experiences and actually what there getting at is the deconstruction of human emotions?

Plenty to think about but Alan did leave these points to think about…

Change the pattern, the limits of our language is the limits of our world
Adaptive go beyond the conventional
The default setting is open, the world is open.
Participatory culture, not social media.
Craftsmanship. Is what we do good for us all?
Seek epic wins, transformational wins

Other notable speakers…Tom Chatfield, Zach Lieberman, Rosanne Bachman, Simona Francese, Peter Fitzgerald and Jessica Latshaw for some great music (love her deep smoky voice!)

Like the Future Everything conference, there is so much more I could write about and I have a lot of notes to follow up in my evernotes. It was an amazing conference and I’d say out of the 5 maybe one of the best by a little bit. Everything just gelled from the section tagslines to the application Gospalware created for the conference. Having the sponsors down in the tea and coffee area instead of the barber room.

My only gripe is not having the Dinner next door to each other like usual and not being able to ask questions. I also wished I could have gone to some more of the university events but had to choose one over the others.

If this event doesn’t put Thinking Digital on the map for conference goers in the UK, I don’t know what will!?!?

Here’s to Herb, Codeworks, the sponsors and everyone I met during the week… To the next 5 years!

Official photos and my own creative commons licenced photos

The #Futr of everything 2012

I was privileged to attend the Future Everything 2012 Festival this year. At the conference, there was really great talks and the line up was full of twists and turns. The best talks I’ve blogged about here, but its worth noting most of them were good.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a member of parliament of Althing, the Icelandic parliament, formerly representing the Citizens’ Movement, but now representing The Movement.

I didn’t actually see Birgitta talk but I was standing outside watching the #futr twitter feed. The discourse was fascinating as it seemed to blow up like a timed bomb. There was some pretty radical things been said and to be honest everyone was loving it. Certainly wish I had forced my way through the bodies and the heat into that keynote talk. Likewise I would have liked to have seen the Cooperative talk and Rufus Pollock as I’ve not seen him talk for the good part of a decade! Although it was great to have Rufus say hi as he did remember me even after all those years…

Interestingly there was quite a bit of corridor chatter about the changes in politics from the likes Loz Kaye who stood for the pirate party uk with my ex-flatmate (tim) and maria in the recent Manchester local elections. Theres a real feeling things are for the better.

Rohan Gunatillake presents one of the most original talks you are likely to see this year – on how people are using technology to reinvent Buddhism. Rohan was recently named in Wired Magazine’s The Smart List 2012: 50 People Who Will Change The World.

Conservative, dogmatic and authoritarian… religion is the final frontier for innovation. And even though Buddhism has been the world religion most comfortable with evolving into each new culture it meets, it too is struggling to be of service and maintain its integrity in the face of the rapid changes of digital culture.

Not realising, I already knew Rohan from previous meetings while in London, it was great to go out to dinner with him later that day and have a good old natter in the Northern Quarter restaurant

When I first heard about the talk I was rightly skeptical, but what it boiled down to a talk about wellbeing, health and spiritualism of modern digital life. What got me was when Rohan pointed out if you turn off your phone, its not actually off. Theres still this space in the mind which thinks about what calls, texts, tweets, etc you might missing. And thats where he got me. Notifications and distrations is already something I’ve written about and why I love Gnome shell (although I made changes to make it more operating system like – couldn’t live without seeing how much battery life I have in minutes for example).

Anyway back to Rohan, his app buddhifiy is miss leading and like the start of his talk, I was a little put off being a non-believer but by the end there was enough good stuff for anyone to take away. I would love to get Rohan and Bobby together at some point. Bobby can learn a lot from Rohan about light touch apps and Rohan a lot about wellbeing.

Animal Systems is a creative technology company. Their inspiration comes from nature – studying biological and social phenomena from an information-theoretic standpoint. They also build practical, accessible, large-scale applications, including a new platform to network many devices. At FutureEverything they demonstrate their system, explore the pre-history of computing and answer some important questions: for example, is a butterfly a barcode?

This talk was more interesting from a R&D point of view. The idea of using bird like chirps for machines to talk was actually quite interesting. Patrick even suggested it could be a way for the internet of things to communicate like how birds do. There was quite a lot questions about the secure nature of the communication to which patrick said, its wholy insecure but they might have ways to do security alongside the chirps.

Chirp.io was only one of the things they had come up with and he kept making references to how unique butterflies. I think looking at nature for answers to some of our more complex problems makes a lot of sense and Patrick and Animal systems might be someone to watch carefully in the future.

They tell us to share. To share information and data, to share personal thoughts and insights, our opinions and ambitions. By sharing we circumvent the digital barrier and reappear on the inside as one of those in the know. We share to such an extent that we are all co-contributors of an encyclopaedic data-cloud of unimaginable proportions.

We like to believe that this digital tome is protected in some way. That entries are kept safe and more to the point private. But it isn’t, quite the opposite. Now, more so than ever before in the digital age, we are at risk from attack. So how is it now that we are supposed to stay safe online and are we foolish to believe we can continue living, working and sharing in an open digital existence?

The Identity and Security panel was decent with a bunch of experts pushing systems which had a more friendly face than things I’ve seen in the past. There was a emphases that we’re skating on thin ice and it won’t be long before However nothing will beat TedXBradford where the air was literally sucked out of the room by the last speaker – Paul Rogers.

Likewise the panels about producing a living and net neutrality were also interesting and somewhat noteworthy

Catalyst from Lancaster University was interesting for introducing everyday people to new technologies. In actual fact what i found interesting was the notion of making people consider there geeky side and join the much talked about classes of the hackers. Fitted well with my thoughts around the internet of things, diybio and producing a living, etc. Tools of change was the strap-line and the speaker Juliana Rotich was a perfect compliment to the whole project.

Juliana is originally from Kenya where she spent her early life and schooling. She later moved to the US where she majored in IT and has worked in the industry for over ten years. She was named in the Guardian’s Top 100 Women in Technology in 2011.

She collaborated with the online community and co-founded Ushahidi, the Swahili word for testimony. Ushahidi is a web-based reporting system that utilises crowd-sourced data to formulate visual map information of a crisis on a real-time basis. In Kenya it was used to map out incidents of violence.

Ushahidi then grew to be an open source platform that has been used in various situations such as the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, the Palestine conflict crisis, and the heavy snow crisis in Washington. As a Program Director she manages projects and aids in the development and testing of the Ushahidi platform.

I was also lucky enough to go to dinner with her along with Rohan in the Northern Quarter one night which was great, didn’t quite get a chance to talk as much as I would have liked but there were so many great people at the table and not enough time.

One of the people around the table also was Bilal Randeree who was from Al Jazeera.

Bilal Randeree is Social Media and Online Producer for Al Jazeera English (AJE) based in Doha, Qatar. He works in the newsroom, using online tools and platforms for news-gathering stories from around the world.

He will be talking extensively about the Arab Spring and the role Al Jazeera played in documenting those events. He will also be looking forward into 2012, predicting what he hopes to see and what he envisages will actually happen both socially and politically in the Arab world.

Very good talk and reminder of the power of the stuff most of us are simply playing with right now.

Chris Jackson from Metabroadcast address the key arguments for expanding content delivery to new media platforms, and look at ways to bring online properties into more traditional broadcast formats.

In the Social broadcasting panel I dropped in a few hints at perceptive media, saying we can stop thinking about broadcasting being from glass to glass. It was good seeing Metabroadcast as I’ve not seen them in a while. Certainly need to make the effort to see them and talk perceptive media once I’m in London again (which looks to be the week of the 11th June by the way)

Farida Vis certainly got me thinking in regards my interest in data and algorithms.

Farida has recently developed an interest in open data and data driven journalism and some of this work (on the future of allotments in the UK) has been published on The Guardian Data Blog and elsewhere in the mainstream media. She is the co-author of the Data Journalism Handbook.

I remember tweeting something about my interest in dating data and learning more about the habits of people. Heck I started thinking maybe I should do a PhD in online dating… So much to say and discover with all that dark undiscovered linked data!

Carlo Ratti from MIT was wonderful as you’d expect. Sensing cities is a amazing project and has many things to say about sensing people in the home. It was a excellent end to a really good conference. Lots to take away…

The wireless for the conference was pretty ropey on the first few days but it became solid on the last day. I used my Samsung Tablet to do most of my communications, deciding not to bring my laptop at all. Might do the same for Thinking Digital in a week, however its such a shame because the new battery last 7-8hours without turning off most things. Seems a real waste…

On Saturday I attended Larkin About’s Future Everything play day. Interestingly it was on the same time as Blast Theory’s I’d hide you which is a shame because I would have liked to have given it ago. Although people did look a little crazy running up and down the northern quarter wearing strange gear and a camera.

The Saturday afternoon and evening games were really interesting, but the one which stood out for me was 7 candles.

7:Candles is played in the streets surrounding Contact and across Twitter. A photo-based treasure hunt involving teamwork, candles and interpretative tasks.

Ok yes our team won, but it was a really interesting game and there was some great interaction over twitter. Also reminded me of parts of we dream the city.

Pictures Under Glass and nothing else

Can’t believe I’ve not blogged about this epic rant about The Future Of Interaction Design.

Tony highlighted it to me and for once, we were in agreement… The future of interaction design is not glass interfaces and pictures/icons/pictograms under it…

Theres some great examples of why pictures under glass doesn’t work…

Okay then, how do we manipulate things? As it turns out, our fingers have an incredibly rich and expressive repertoire, and we improvise from it constantly without the slightest thought. In each of these pictures, pay attention to the positions of all the fingers, what’s applying pressure against what, and how the weight of the object is balanced:

Absolutely the amount of gestures, positions and repertoire fingers can perform is dazzling.

Remember the saying for tricks, the hand is quicker than the eye…

So what is the Future Of Interaction?

The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.

I could jump in with a rant about how certain companies are limiting choice but I won’t…

I believe that hands are our future…

Absolutely! 3 things pointing at the early future of the interaction…

Did I say I was going to Copenhagen, Denmark?

Oh I might have forgot to mention that… However I can’t talk about it except to say I will fill everyone in later. Hopefully I’ll have a enough room in my bag for my Nikon D40… Must remember to charge the battery!

Serendipity and the Creative Collision

Listening to Thor Muller on Triangulation

Thor Muller is Co-founder of Get Satisfaction, a startup delivering “people-powered customer service for absolutely everything.”

Fascinating discussion well worth listening to…

Thor at one point talked about creative serendipity or as he described creative collision. Leo or Tom mention some place where all the directors have to spend a certain amount of time together in a space. Then Thor talks about co-working type spaces as great places for creative collision.

In agreement, this is what I identified a while ago with my decision to work out of the Northern Quarter every Friday. Not always but most of the time, I’m slightly inspired by listening or watching people go about their own lives. Its a lot like watching certain people’s twitter streams. As Thor says its not directly applicable to work but in the end it points towards ideas and solutions.

Get lucky which is the title of Thor’s book actually fits very nicely with Derren Brown’s experiment last year.

The funny part of this all is, this is all about applicable to dating…

At the very end Thor talks about attraction and projection, how do we draw chance events to ourselves… Or how we draw our intentions to the world.

Am I saying dating is a creative process?

No or maybe not… but exactly, but the same factors can really help your career and confidence which changes the way you look at the world and the way the world sees you…

Kevin Rose interviews Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram

I assume this was recorded during or just before Facebook decided to buy Instagram?

Very interesting interview like most of the Foundation interviews.

Kevin Rose and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom sit down to chat about Systrom’s growing up with computers, his time spent at Stanford, and landing an internship at a startup destined to be worth billions. This ultimately led to launching his own startup which is now 15 million users strong and one of the fastest growing social networks on the planet!