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.

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.

Scaling is a hot topic in businesses, especially with startups that expect to become Slashdotted or Digged anytime soon. Google recently announced they would increase the speed at which their Gmail would gain storage capacity, mainly in response to Yahoo! and Microsoft recently upgrading and surpassing Google’s storage offerings.

Reason 1: Scaling is good for consumers

Google promised a continued increase of storage for Gmail but not for Picasa. The increase in storage for Gmail is a good thing as there is much more value in the promise of a service scaling with you, than a service that doesn’t make any clear plans. In time, we all collect more and more data and therefore need more and more storage. This doesn’t mean that our habits change, but just that it generates some nicely accumulated data.

Picasa doesn’t scale yet though, which generates some serious issues in scalability to users. For example, here is a simple graph showing a fanatic Picasa Web Albums user that (on average) uploads 4.3GB of photos per year, set over 5 years. It uses the current prices which might in time change, but at the moment it shows that a non scaling service could seriously affect your yearly costs.

As you can see, limited storage where the price doesn’t scale in time is seriously not a good deal for the consumers. In the beginning, 10GB of photo storage on Picasa will cost you $20 a year, but as you cross that limit you will have to go to $75 a year for 40GB. Although 10GB is a lot, my hypothetic user and many other users will inevitably cross this limit in time, meaning that would suddenly have to pay almost 4 times the price for the same behavior!

Note: Although Google promised a continued increase of storage, the speed might be a bit slow for some users, meaning that these services are still limited. Unlimited storage is often a good deal, but the best deal for any user is clearly highly dependent on the habits of the user.

Reason 2: Scaling is good for business

Scaling online storage is also good for (some) businesses, which is why Flickr decided to go for their model of unlimited storage. Flickr’s business model thrives on their community, and therefore getting an active community is important. Making their pro-accounts unlimited was a good thing for their customers as they got a better deal the more they uploaded. At the same time it was a good deal for Flickr as all those people uploading, tagging, commenting, and generally socializing around those photos made their business more valuable.

Obviously this doesn’t necessarily work for services where uploading more doesn’t directly add value to the product, but you would be surprised in how many cases it does make sense. In Gmail for example, the best reason for Google to add unlimited (or scalable) storage is that to them information equals money. If a lot of people start throwing away some of their “unimportant” emails because they don’t have any space left, Google loses information about us that they would love to use for showing us advertisements.

Conclusion

In short, if you ever want to offer some online storage, scalability is a good thing to think about for both consumers and business. If unlimited storage isn’t possible, making clear plans for the future of the storage adds some very nice incentive for customers to use your product over others.

In the Summer we had done a small series of OpenBeer events on Friday afternoons. Now that Winter is approaching we thought we would resume the series in Delft with official OpenCoffee meetings.

The idea for now is to have biweekly meetings on Tuesday mornings at 09:30 somewhere in Delft. The next meeting is October 9th at 09:30 at Bacinol (Wateringsevest 38) at the office of Jeroen Visser.

Join us webprofessionals in the Delft area to have some coffee and discuss business and events.

We have an upcoming event and a Google Group you can subscribe to if you want updates on the event.

See you guys October 9th.

The holidays have been over for a while now and life has picked up again with a ruthless schedule. Here’s a quick schedule update from us to tell you what is keeping us busy at the moment and where you can expect us the coming year. If I forget something, I’m sure that the rest will add it themselves.

Reinier

Reinier is currently finalizing all arrangements to be able to launch his startup Tipit.to. To say that this consumes a lot of his time is an understatement.

Cristiano

Cristiano used to be our top blogger but he is currently directing more time to his studies. He is currently busy writing academic prose with the hopes of graduating sometime in the future.

Martijn

Martijn has also focused a lot of his attention back to his studies but he (and we) also came to the realization that blogging is not his thing. That is why we decided to part on amicable terms. We wish Martijn well for the future.

Eelke

Eelke has settled into Berlin and is feeling quite at home from what I understand. He has produced some great movie clips on his own blog in the past days. Eelke is pursuing work in the Berlin area, so if you want to hire a great designer there, you should look him up (his new professional site should be up soon).

Alper

I am undergoing numerous changes in my life with a graduation due this Friday, a change of jobs and a new house. In this new life a lot of my time is spent working on experience and promotion for Tipit.to or doing web projects for Boost Company. I do have more bandwidth available and will be putting up a professional site soon.

Events

And to finish this update here is a slightly annotated event schedule for the rest of this year. You can always track us on Upcoming, browse through my contacts for the other Four Starters members. You should be able to find most of us on Dopplr as well (my profile).

PICNIC (25/9 — 28/9) is going on right now. Something of an overhyped event it is hard not to be influenced by it. Reinier is going tomorrow to take a masterclass in pitching from Boris and then onto pitch for a jury. This Friday is a meeting on portable social networks (upcoming) which I’m debating not going to.

FOWA (upcoming) Ryan Carson’s visit to Amsterdam was a great appetizer for the real event in London next month. Cristiano will attend the event and report back for us.

The future of GOOGLE (upcoming) This event should at least be interesting where Dutch ‘pundits’ are going to ruminate about the future of Google. I am positively influenced because it is at Info.nl.

Wikimedia (upcoming) The Dutch Wikimedia conference should be interesting and I plan to attend.

Barcamp Berlin (upcoming) Barcamps are among my favorite events and this promises to be a great one. Because of the subsequent Web2.0Expo event international attendance should be at a peak level. Now just to hope that the venue is big enough to hold all of us. This should be no problem in Berlin, right? Eelke and myself will definitely attend this.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin (upcoming) Big multi-day conference for everybody into the web scene in Europe. This promises to be jam packed and very interesting with the barcamp preceding it and the web2open event at the same time. Reinier and myself will attend.

BrightLive (upcoming) Obligatory Dutch technojam event. I hope this year sports an improvement with some less commerce and some more substance but still I will probably go.

LeWeb3 (upcoming) is always controversial but I don’t really know if it’s worth attending.

Chaos Communication Congres (site) always looks like a great event to close off the year.

What do you think about these events, any of them must see or must avoid? If you happen to visit any of these events and we’re there drop by and say hello.