Quiz

Global knowledge used locally, with a mobile app.

Today Maarten Lens-FitzGerald (whom I follow on Twitter) shared images of a mobile application ING Bank is launching built by his company (SPRXMobile) in collaboration with Wikitude. The application is called Wegwijzer ("signpost"). It helps you find ATMs where ever you are, with your Googlephone (G1). By turning the G1 to camera-mode and pointing the camera to the environment around you, an overlay on the screen will show you where the nearest ATMs are. A so-called location aware augmented reality mobile application, i.e. it augments the reality you see through the camera with an overlay projecting information on the image. This information can be virtually anything geo-tagged. The picture below demonstrates the augmented reality camera view of Wikitude Augmented Reality on a G1 phone from the Dam square in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The device displayed is a G1 Google phone, running Android.
Photo taken by: Maarten Lens-FitzGerald (SPRXmobile)

Wikitude is a mobile travel guide based on Wikipedia and Panoramio. Search landmarks in your surroundings and view them on a map, list, and on an Augmented Reality (AR) camera view: What you see is an annotated landscape, mountain names, landmark descriptions, and interesting stories.

Bear this in mind and read my previous post on the role of location based services in the enterprise. Or even better, contextual services. Contextual Services are more then just Location Based Services. Your context can also be a virtual presence like a chat room where you are talking. You share the context with the people you chat with, but have a different physical location. Zcapes is the first service that is contextual. Wait and see what Zcapes will bring.

Privacy?

The importance of failure

If at first you don't succeed from Ben Fry on Vimeo.

How people really use the iPhone

How people really use the iPhone

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: development interaction)

Cote d'Azur for business

This week I'll be travelling to Cannes. A city in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in southeastern France. It is one of the best-known cities of the French Riviera. It is a busy tourist destination and host of the annual Cannes Film Festival. The population was of 70,400 as of the 2007 census. Cannes is the home of numerous luxurious houses and mansions as well as many high-end gated communities. The city is also famous for its various luxury stores, fancy restaurants, and prestigious hotels.
I won't see any of it... After landing at Aéroport Nice Côte d'Azur, it will be taxi to business partner, meetings, taxi back to Aéroport Nice Côte d'Azur. In and out on a day. Like previous trips to the City, travelling with Blackberrying suits. For some it's business as usual, for me it's less usual still, but I'm getting used to it. It's fun really.

Effective Twitter usage... some insights

I found myself cogitating. Happens often really. While getting a grip on Yahoo! Pipes, I wondered what one could derive from Twitter time lines (feed from a Twitter account). Trying various options of ingesting RSS feeds, processing them and forwarding them again, I found myself on the Twitter track. Twitter is used both by people to stay in touch with their network of friends, and by commercial bloggers to announce new write-ups on their blog. Elaborate insights about Twitter usage were posted by Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist.
Twitterazzi with hundreds of followers are hardly able to know who is who among the crowd following them. Right? Or the one's following hundreds of others? Some balance between followed and following might be a measure for twitter usage. Let's consider the Twitterazzi sending shed loads of messages, are they merely garrulous or do they have a mission? Are they narrow casting? Might they be deity prophets? What if the balance between outbound and inbound traffic is 100:1? Last but not least, messages versus replies counting 1:100 might be interesting, 1 message out and a 100 replies to others, this might be a sign of a new Apollo at Delphi? Three measures found so far:

• Following : Followers
• Inbound : Outbound
• Messages : Replies
• Inner-circle : Outer-circle

In the meanwhile I managed to get Yahoo! Pipes working for me and even got Google Charts' API geared towards my needs of displaying numerical feeds. Visualising Twitter usage was just too far fetched in the time at hand. Guess what? Xefer.com managed to build the thing! Using Twitter timelines, Yahoo! Pipes and Google charts API. I must admit they even paid a lot of attention to the visualisation of data (Edward Tufte would probably approve of it).

Interpreting the charts leads to some understanding of the type of Twitterazzo you are looking at. Is it someone rambling all day long, hardly ever replying to others? Might it be someone knowledgeable answering questions? Someone getting messages from others within his own circle, or even from an outer-circle? I'm not finished analysing yet, but for now it's up to you!
Try the tool on your own Twitter profile and tell me what you think!

Multi-tool Twitter

Half a year ago I moved to Amsterdam. Great city, many interesting people, many cultural events, vast amount of bars, ... How to find your way around, how to meet great people, the right places to eat, the places to buy honest ingredients, ..? I put my money on Twitter and got lucky. Twitter got me in touch with new media researchers, promising entrepreneurs, social events, #blog08, ... it even got me interviewed in a large newspaper. Twitter is a multi-tool and I like it! 836 tweets in 3 months got me connected with 50-60 people. 15 of them I actually met in real life. NRC / nrc next journalist Marie-José Klaver interviewed me about the role of Twitter in organisations, specifically about its role as a knowledge management tool.

@blog08 on Friday 23 October

• Pete Cashmore, 10th blog of the world, Mashable.com
• Hugh MacLeod, well known cartoonist and blogger at Gapingvoid.com
• Boris van der Ham, member of Dutch parliament and blogger
• Scott Rafer, former-CEO of MyBlogLog currently CEO of Lookery
• Tim Overdiek, chief-editor of the Dutch broadcast news programme NOS Journaal and blog evangelist
• Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, well known Dutch internet entrepreneur
• Nalden, music blogger living of his experimental blog, Nalden.net
• GabeMac, videoblogger from Madrid
• Piet Bakker, scientist, Universiteit van Amsterdam

The role of Local 2.0 in Enterprise 2.0?

Last Friday I attended The Next Web Salon for the second time in a row. Got to meet interesting people and got triggered by the 10 minute presentation by Michael Bauer. Michael Bauer is a local internet expert and CEO of Koano. Michael's presentation, though very short but nevertheless good, was about the future of local. Local as in: Search, Mapping, Ontology, International, Social, Network.

Imagine a web app that allows me as a citizen of Amsterdam to find the kind of places I know and like in Amsterdam when I travel abroad. E.g. Vondelpark in Amsterdam, is similar to, Central Park in New York. A recommendation system based on things you know well near your 'home' to find things near your 'locus' (the place you are).

What would be the impact of such a mechanism in an enterprise context? In large organisations where it's beyond your possibilities to know everything, but you do know your thing. So, what if the coordinates are not geographic, but organisational. Your place in the value chain, business process, organogram, stakeholder network, ... In the pit of my gut I feel there is something good about this... (Photo taken by Anne Helmond)