Last Friday we had an unconference style workshop afternoon at our office (liveblog in Dutch, as was most of the content). Come one come all, and quite a bit of people did show up ((Not to mention the number of people who flaked.)). We had a very varied program and we got the impression that it was valuable and inspiring for most people, not to mention a lot of fun.

The format was focused on sharing knowledge and talking about cool stuff that you had recently done. Twenty minutes per presentation, sort of like TED.

Besides the knowledge intensive keynotes, there were also some more active workshops, one on improvisational dance and another one on BMX biking. During a more geeky unconference the physical stuff is mostly neglected about as much as geeks tend to neglect their bodies. These two activities proved to be big hits with this crowd. I’ll let the pictures of the BMX workshop testify, and maybe it’s just as well that there aren’t any pictures from the improdance workshop.

Reports and video of every workshop will be posted (in Dutch) to the Studio4Stagioni site and we will definitely repeat an event like this somewhere in the fall.

Next Friday we’re holding an unconference style workshop afternoon in our office (Dutch event description). We’d thought this a nice idea to share knowledge between ourselves, but thought, why not make it open to our friends and acquaintances as well.

There’s a video promoting the event:

Workshop 13 juni from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

Interactive sessions of 20-30 minutes from 1:30 till end of day concluded with a barbecue. We think this could be fun and if you think the same, come join us.

Geekyoto

Last week I attended Geekyoto in London (and visited some friends). I just had time to typeout my notes of the day with short blurbs on each presentation and pointers where I can find them. Great event where I learned a lot and took away quite a bit of inspiration.

Video’s of each presentation should become available in the near future and I would recommend watching it.

Christian Nold

Nold did a talk on local experience maps to visualize the impact of the environment on people. One very cool demo where he would map the galvanic skin response people have over locations on isomaps.

Alex Haw - Atmoss

Surveillance as an anti-architectural tool and surveillance as it relates to the body.

They made a map of all the area in a space which was covered by security cams and then got rid of all the rest (because that obviously does not matter). Showed some stuff about work space positions and efficient use of space. Also tackled domesticity and the dilemma between exhibition and privacy. Privacy could just as well be served not by building opaque walls but by putting shields in front of people’s eyes where you control up to what resolution you are visible to whom.

Also showed some work visualizing database cells into physical locations, one for the Deutsche Borse. And another one for a faculty of architecture where activity within the building would be mapped to a lightscape in a central space with fiberoptic lamps (this blogpost has pictures).

Moixa

Efficient re-usable energy. Green energy is not yet mass market. The battle between AC and DC. Pretty much everything you use locally uses a small DC current but we need to generate large amounts of AC to transport over long distances. Not efficient.

Demo of the USBcell battery which is a battery form factor chargable from a powered USB port on any pc. That way you don’t need to mess around with chargers anymore and most people have a charger device handy most of the time.

Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman

компютри втора употреба

During sabbath Jewish people need to observe some strange rules. They cannot change the state of anything electrical. So to work around this they have timer lights and water reboilers. Sabbath is a time when people come together and they are more focused on

They checked what the environmental impact of the sabbath is and found out that it actually saves energy. You could observe an environmentally friendly sabbath by inviting friends over, no TV, no phones, no computers, just chat and walk.

Gavin Starks - AMEE

What if all the energy data of the world was available? AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform where they collect the energy footprint of everything in the world.

Mentions this blessay by Stephen Fry.

75% of change does not require new technology
25% of change has no cost

Vincenzo diMaria - Saint Martins ID

Showed a design prototype of a trinacria box for sun dried tomatoes from Sicily for some sort of agro-tourism.

Bruno Taylor - Saint Martins ID

Talked about the nature of play in a changing public realm and why there is no play on streets right now and adult supervision most of the time. Are we creating a future of socially inept individuals? The YouTube video with the bus stop swing he mentioned.

There’s a tension between vandalism and playful behaviour. Children come at the bottom of the user hierarchy on the street level while they should be considered first.

Richard Sandford - Futurelab

Picture by Rachel Clarke

Beyondcurrenthorions.org.uk

How do we make better futures? Challenged us to think about alternative futures and to believe that we can make a difference in it. What we imagine is what gets built. Events are not predestined and an uncertain future may be a good one because we get to change things. Future literacy consists of knowledge, awareness and confidence and it should be embedded at the school level.

He also mentioned the notion of the extended present of about 200 years which stretches out from your grand parents to you and then from you on to your grand children.

Wattson

Picture by Mark Simpkins

Also saw a design demo of the Wattson device and Holmes web interface from DIY Kyoto. (explanation). It was more or less a product pitch but for a very relevant and well designed product.

Edward Scotcher

The image of Africa as tremendously behind is no longer accurate. It is a place where mobile phones, internet cafés and WiFi are all around. Traditional forms of media are not trusted and web2.0’s market for information has a large potential to create transparency.

Personal site is Moamba.net
He mentions White African blog article.

Ushahidi and Sokwanele are two Google Maps initiatives to map actual events and increase awareness in regions in Africa. As time goes on only more people will have access.

Bryony Worthington - Sandbag

Politics broke the system of emissions trading and she wants to fix it. The system has removed the individual’s ability to make a difference. She wants to remove permits from the system, destroy unused ones and lower caps alltogether.

Sandbag.org.uk is an initiative to bring emissions trading into the pubblic domain

James Smith

Can software save the planet? He makes socially responsible software like Carbon Diet and Do the green thing.

Jeremy Gould and Mitch Sava

Government Barcamp crossovers. Break up policy issues into Symptoms, Actions, Objectives, Issues, Outcomes and invite collaboration.

Mentions Polywonk

How do we show support to let politicians make the right decisions with confidence?

Ben Saunders

Final talk by Ben Saunders about arctic expeditions very inspiring with great stories and pictures illustrating some of the most difficult conditions on the planet.

“Nobody else is the authority on your potential.”

Picture by kokeshi

(Thanks Cristiano for your tireless photography.)

Image via Wikipedia

So, there has been quite a bit of rumours going around about the iPhone 3G and whatever else Steve Jobs might pull out of his hat at WWDC2008. I heard so many stupid and ridiculous predictions that I felt the need to write my own thoughts out and do my own predictions for you to criticise in return.

Phone 3G

I think we can be sure of the iPhone 3G launch, although I doubt the name will be the “iPhone 3G”. The 3G name focusses a bit too much on the lack of 3G in the current model and doesn’t encompass all the new features I bet they will introduce next to the speed bump. What other new features they will exactly introduce is hard to say, but one thing is pretty clear to me: there won’t just be one iPhone model anymore. This might happen this year, or next year, but the iPhone won’t stay a lonely child.

iPhone Line

Like with the Mac and the iPod, Apple has always started with one, or a few, very strong products. The limited choice introduced in these products made it clear where these products were to be placed in the market, and in return people embraced these products for there apparant simplicity, which was to me enforced by the limited choice. In time though, the strategy Apple has had was to slowly expand a product into a line, adding more models that fit into the needs of certain focus groups of customers. See the iMac which in return spawned a few more generations of iMacs but also the Mac mini. But probably more prominent is the history of the iPod (now the iPod classic) and the introduction of the iPod Mini, Nano, Shuffle, Photo, Video, Touch, and eventually the iPhone.

For the iPhone I can really see Apple adopt the same strategy. They clearly have already committed to bring the next generation iPhone to more telcos in the rumours that have been going around, and the next step is to get those people who bought a first generation iPhone to eventually upgrade to something 2nd or 3rd gen that better fits their own personal needs. This might be a iPhone Pro that has GPS, 3G, bigger screen, and all business features any CEO might wish for, or it could just as well be a iPhone Nano that is a very simplified iPhone (no wifi, smaller screen) but only a fraction of the price.

Why it took so long to make the SDK

When you actually come to think of the iPhone as a line of products, it starts to make sense why it took Apple so long to make their iPhone SDK. I don’t think they spend all that time and all that effort into making sure all their future 3rd party apps will work fine on just 1 device. I think the SDK includes a lot off little magic bits that make sure that their apps can run on any of their short-term to-be-released devices, without any issues. I don’t know for sure, but it would make sense even for the SDK to have some integrated resolution independence to solve the problems of multiple devices with multiple resolutions like you get with mobile Java Apps.

Tablet

Once you consider a iPhone line and the possibility of an iPhone Pro, you might come to think of Apple releasing an Apple Tablet. As far as I’m concerned, one thing is clear: Apple won’t release a Tablet with plain OSX on it. With their history of the Newton, iPhone, and iPod Touch they have proven that touchscreen, handheld, portable devices require a different kind of user interaction to succeed. For exactly this reason the iPhone sports a nice “big-button”-userinterface and not something that requires a stylus.

So if we would see a tablet, would it use the iPhone OSX? I don’t know, but again it makes sense in retrospect to the long development time they have had on the iPhone SDK. Another question is: would it be equipped with a “slide out” keyboard?

Keyboard

Now the addition of a “real” keyboard is one thing I have heard quite a few times, especially in combination of the rumours of a “bigger” or “pro” iPhone. it is fairly simple to destroy this rumour with 1 fact: Apple doesn’t consider a real keyboard to be better. They said so at Macworld 2007 and the current iPhone sales figures have proven to them that they were right. Adding a keyboard to an iPhone Pro or a Tablet would be like they admitted that a keyboard was a pro feature. It isn’t. so it won’t be introduced in the iPhone line any time soon.

GPS

The final little rumour that has been going around is the GPS feature. Honestly I don’t know what Apple will do about this, because although it is obvious that having the option would be preferred, it has some caveats. The first option is to have an internal GPS as this will give the most integrated experience. Obviously the issue there would be the demise of the iPhone’s battery life, as GPS uses shitloads of power to run, let alone run constantly. The alternative would be to have a nice external Apple bluetooth GPS receiver, or possibly even support for 3rd party GPS receivers. I say possibly, as the reason I would see Apple make their own external dongle is because they can be a pain to set up to work with a phone. So if Apple controls all the pieces of the puzzle (as they like to) they might be able to make the experience more enjoyable.

Conclusion

There has been loads of speculations going around and I think I highlighted some of the few that annoyed me the most, and I hope I’ve been able to explain why I think they were utter bullshit. Obviously we will have to wait until the end of the keynote on the 9th of June to see if was even remotely close. Until then, let me know if you agree or totally disagree.

Kars Alfrink - Play in public space

Play in the city

‘the street finds its own uses for things’
-William Gibson

Skateboarding started in empty pools

Flash mobs are mass gatherings coordinated by internet en cell phones. Friction between players and outsiders is fun.

Play is a widespread cultural phenomenon. Play is a generative process which is the foundation of creative processes.

LED throwies concept. non destructive grafiti. play with the object you have with you.
instructables for mario question blocks. and photographs of the blocks in the street.

processing power changes games.
data intensity vs. processing intensity
processing intensity is better

explore the model and possibility space of a game, the exploration is fun

games can communicate arguments just like other media. procedural rhetoric arguments.
September 12. news game.

introduction of processing power will introduce procedural rhetoric to street games

ufo findings of 1967 in england

make a possible future feelable

goes on to very nicely visualize a game based on camera surveillance in the public space.

Jyri Engeström - Nodal Points

(My notes in parentheses, as always.)

How mobility is changing the social web

1. Social objects
2. Social peripheral vision
3. Nodal points

Is there something more meaningful than one-dimensional pseudo-apps poking.

Social network theory does not explain what connects some particular people and not others.
Another tradition of theory explains why so many YASNS fail.
Knorr-Cetina etc. academic literature on sociality.

Same talk about social objects which shoudl be the foundation of your social network. A common thing to gather around which is of interest to multiple people.

Good webservices allow people to create social objects that add value.

Mobil edevices make it possible to caputre slices of reality that people couldn’t capture before. Flickr has solved the cain of pain in photgraphy. Mobile phones and mobile camera’s and text messages have greatly decreased the friction for people to participate. Video phones are doing hte same thing for video.

iPhone 2.0 has the same potential as the microscope had on the natural sciences. A new species and a new world which people were not aware existed before. Really usable and really programmable mobile devices may cause a similar breakthrough.
Barcodes and RFIDS enable connecting physical objects.

Define your verbs as a site and claim the interaction that way.
Person x verb x object
Assess new sites with new startups and new objects.

Theories:
Actions - Alexei N .Leontiev
Speech acts - John R. Searle
Communicatve acts - Jürgen Habermas
Utterances - Conversation Analysis

How to use this social theory in designing services.

Actions leave traces on the web. Som eactions are voluntary, others are auat-generated. Facebook newsfeed is a social peripheral vision.
Seeing what will happen next.

(e.g. Facebook friends feed: you see a picture at a certain party and next you see that two of your friends have broken up.)

No awareness of other people’s intentions make for bad decisions.
Gaming and 3D worlds have taken SPV to a much higher level out of necessity.
Kids growing up with these games are going to expect the same UI conventions while they are doing the same work they do.
Object lockers and activity aggregators.
Google has a tremendous scaleof aggregation. Exposes new questions.

Pattern recognition. There are lot of patterns in the information. Nodal points is from Idoru. Getting all data on somebody and being able to detect somebody’s future.
Q: What shoudl i be aware of that’s happening around me?
Feeding content back to you on mobile. How do we know which information to give back at what time? Minimize disturbanec, maximize utility.

Portals move from Pagerank to ‘Facerank’. Your proximity towards others with social proximity, physical proximity, shared taste, shared objects. Ultimate personal attunement. How is this algorithm going to work?
Algorithmize: social capital, want, need, know, talk.

1. What is your object?
2. What are your verbs?
3. What are your nodal points?

Q: How do you evade the need for commercial parties to control your experience, keep you in and squeeze you.
Users should be able to hack ontop of the data. Customize their view and be able to take their content and do with it whatever they want. And also federated models for interop.
(Horror scenario: When Google applies the interaction design of Las Vegas to our social experience.)

Q: Are activity streams the nodal points?
We.re getting infromation overflow. (LIke Friendfeed etc.) A nodeal point serves out the stuff relevant right then.

Q: What is Jaiku doing right now?
Jaiku in Death Valley. Developing Jaiku on App Engine port tok priority and after that new exciting features will be rolled out. And also working on real social features in Google.

Adam Greenfield - The city is here for you to use

(Live blogged notes. My notes in parentheses.)

North American cities are broken. Web development user experience is algorithmic. Wants to have better experiences for ubiquitous computing.

Influences:
?
Christopher Alexander
Bernard Rudofsky

The city arises from the bottom up. Worried about the city disappearing in large scale urban development. The repeating module of doom. Franchise cookie cutter city organization.

Junk space, privatized commons and non place. No order, no logic. Privatized commons.

Public spaces get wrapped up in commerciality and private law applies. No freedom of speech and assembly.

Public space is deliberately being made unpleasant. Stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly, and jittery. Surveillance, hard to get there, hard to stay there.

People withdraw from the city into their mobile devices. Technology gets blamed for it but they afordit but the environemnt itself sends us into the warm embrace of personal devices.

We’ve lost something and everybody feels it. Nostalgia is for suckers. Do not lamment about how things used to be better.

Rediscover the city in all its fun, organic ways relevant to the current age.

Ubiquitous: embedded, wireless, imperceeptible, multiple, postGUIU, depolyed in everyday life, vastly expanded user base

These technologies are going to engage literally everybody. Massive effects for interfaces and for scalabality. Everywary is already affecting the way that the city works.

Networked processors show up at every scale. At the scale of the body, at the scale of the room, street, city. biotelemetry transported from your body is captured and it becomes a social object. It has a lot to do with representation, and how we are in the world, a lot to do with culture and fashion.

(Body media)

Networked processors in the street. Traffic light countdown. Next tram coming up. Simple additions which improve the quality of life in the city for many many people.

Information about the city can e visualized differently. Sociality, poltiics and class can be visualized from transportation and other map represetations. Th einformation can be made available on demand. Why doesn’t TomTom do more of this?

Information processing dissolves in behaviour. The octopus in Hong Kong people found out that you do not need to touch your RFID card. You can put your bag over it in any way you want. Discovered interaction collectively by the people. THe complete transaction happens in a third of a second. A stations throughput can be increased tremendously and by extension the city.

Outputs at the building envelope in response to data. Architecture that is impossible without computation. Circulation and public trasnportation can be regulated based on real time demands. Mobility is a utiltiy. Cities which understand this are cities which are going to gain immensely.

(How to sell this? Dependent on computational sensing.)

Quaryable objects and objects in the city having open APIs. Build mashups from the information.

A city that responds to the bhaviour of its residents and other users in something like real time.

(Build Arduino sensers and actuators on an XMPP server.)

Constantly evolving and opens up the social space again.

Metropolitan life.
What is mapped is what can be sensed and sensed cheaply. (Important if you want to play with it yourself.) Sense of time and place which are different much longer and wider than would be possible without mobile communication.
The Big Now, to see what is happening everywhere right now.
The Long Here, objcets have a history, antecedents and a provenance
Differntial permissioning without effective recourse in real time. What do you do when access is denied? Code is law.
Rights of use and enjoyment. THese rights are an artefact of when it was impractical to track this use accurately. Under the new circumstances you can be billed for your actual use.
Technology is tailored to each city with its history and geography. Thre aren’t one sie fits all solutions. Congestion charge works well.

(Congestion charge is not in effect yet in NL because of widespread stupidity.)

How do you cope with exploits and attacks of the system. emergent behaviour which is unpredictable.

a HOWTO for the real-time city:
need a practicle, livable, humane and possible city

1. build beautiful seams with apis in hardware and software
2. underspecify as designers, cannot predict everything, otherwise they will be brittle and won’t be an utility
3. You should go from flâneur to consumer to user, somebody who engages and makes his own personal experience of the city.

Ambient informatics will help us make better choices but awareness cuts both ways. Entirely new behaviours will emerge. (Little Brother style subversion.) Are we going to get passive consumerism, or genuine read write urbanism?

The answer is up to us as designers, consumers and citizens.

This weekend the Amsterdam Software Social will organize a summer barbecue to socialize and celebrate. Tipit.to and friends are sponsoring the drinks, so this should be a very fun event.

Register at the site and have fun. I myself unfortunately won’t make it but many of the other usual suspects (and I hope some new faces) will be present.

This job as cultural attachéfurniture Videnovfurniture Elhovomebelimebeli to Brian Grazer seems like a dream to me. Anyway until I am in the position to hire such a person for myself.

It seems the position is already filled by people probably more qualified than myself, but maybe some other notable person is looking for a similar curator.

What makes me think I’m qualified? I’m curious and I read voraciously, I speak a smattering of languages, have competencies and interests in the alpha, beta and gamma sciences, can learn complicated stuff and explain it simply and clearly, am quite capable with a computer and most new media and I don’t mind going out and getting physically into people’s faces for that contact or deal.

Per assignment contract also negotiable. Interested parties can contact me on alper at this domain.

If you aren’t aware of a recent bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, this article certainly wasn’t meant for you. However, if you have, you may also know that Microsoft pulled its offer last weekend.

Some speculate that Microsoft will try to install a more take-over friendly board in June. Some speculate that Microsoft is letting Yahoo’ stock fall so they can retry later at a better price.

Both of these are incomplete speculations; after all, if the offer is off the table, how does microsoft install a new board? And how does a dip in yahoo’s stock price help microsoft? After all, if they put the offer back on the table, the stock prices will immediately rise again.

The answer to both of those questions might be the following idea, which so far I haven’t seen on any blogs:

In the movies, the CIA sometimes has ‘front companies’ - companies secretly owned by the CIA through a long line of other front companies and individuals, for business. The idea is not totally unheard of; plenty of corporations are actually conglomerates of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of smaller (but very real) companies. if you were to map out the ownership of all those subcompanies it would make quite a picture.

Microsoft can have many front companies if it wants. And those front companies can buy yahoo stock. At its current lowered price. Microsoft is also rumoured to be behind SCO’s attack on Linux; its far less of a leap to consider microsoft leaning on friendly companies to buy some yahoo stock as well.

Because at the end of the day, buying yahoo is all about controlling some stock. The more stock microsoft controls (either through front companies or through friends), the less of a percentage of the rest of the yahoo-stock-owning world needs to be convinced that microsoft is the future for Yahoo. The stock holders decide the board. For hostile takeovers, Microsoft needs to control more than 50% of the stock. That’s a lot easier to get to if 25% of all yahoo stock is already under your control.

I’m not streetwise enough in the finance sector to actually figure out if microsoft has front companies and if those are buying yahoo stock right now. However, if you have a vested interest in the Microhoo future, that’s where I’d look to see if Microsoft threw in the towel or if its just switching tactics.