This took a look at the digital economy, and how creative economic activities can evolve, be supported and help promote this area. There was of course some focus and mention of the recent publication of the government report "Digital Britain", mainly in the negative sense.
This session was delivered by several speakers and was structured in a manner to build from hardware > software and technology to use and influence (roughly).
"Next Generation Broadband – a disruptive technology" – Shaun Fensom, Manchester Digital
Shaun Fensom chairs ‘Manchester Digital’ and ‘Community Broadband Network’.
He took a look at the way technological change impact and effects things. Typically it’s commonplace to say "It’s not about the technology but the things it can do, or how people interact with it." However, this is an area where Shaun disagrees, technology can be disruptive and provides a massive impetus for change (behavioural and socially).
He provided several examples of disruptive technologies impacting on social behaviour and norms.
Example #1 – Disruptive technology/interfaces the modem:- allowed businesses and individuals to take advantage of computer to computer communications. The minitel in France, provided a whole different interface for telephony direction lookups and information, unfortunately they weren’t able to take that forward and shape the next technological evolution.
Example #2 – Disruptive communication and collaboration:- World wide web (hyperlinks and graphics), this needed ‘echo cancelling modems’ to be fast enough to deliver that type of web.
Example #3 – Disruptive access:- ADSL ‘broadband 1.0′ from late 1990’s, always on, via DSL and DSLAM into the ISP. Explosion of e-commerce and the .com boom. E-commerce didn’t really materialise and It died off because broadband wasn’t ready or sufficient to sustain it. Since then e-commerce has grown to be of that imagined scale – Amazon.
Example #4 – Disruptive sites:- Wikipedia, and Youtube – via broadband and the 1st global user generated content sites, the democratisation of media took place and really changed the manner of how people share/publish information and retrieve it.
Example #5 -Disruptive media:- digital coping and widely available standard electronic formats for media. Made traditional copyrighting and content management rights of publishing industry virtually unsustainable in the age of the Internet generation. An example of technology being disruptive to existing business models.
He also mentioned other examples:- microcomputer in 1980s. industrial revolutions – steam engines and cotton industry advances. – 1st generation shifts of technology.
Next generation broadband will mean fibre connections (light bearing data streams) to every home and business. Next generation broadband will help enable services like Cisco’s telepresence (currently confined to high cost enterprise networks), to become more obtainable by consumers. This is one example Shaun gave of the potential for next generation broadband to be disruptive.
There were obviously questions about how to go about building fibre, especially in the light of the ‘Digital Britain’ report (very low ambition for average broadband speed across the UK). Shaun said that at the moment, the major industry players such as BT and Virgin don’t have a great incentive to install fibre. However, one approach that the ‘Community broadband network’ is advocating is the construction of patch-work-quilt network coverage, where local initiatives, look after small regional areas and seek to join together to across the UK.
Wimax – etc. (comparison to ‘light’ bearing data – electro magnetic waves/copper all diminished in comparison)
Shaun concluded by saying, it was very difficult to predict how a new form technology will impact, and therefore what it will allow to people & businesses to do with it.
"Digital Convergence" – Enda Carey, Northwest Vision & Media (Games and Digital &Public Sector Support)
Enda Carey spoke about the initiatives of Northwest Vision & Media and their aims to create a world class digital and creative economy in the Northwest of England. He spoke around the following sub-titles.
RCO – Regional Cluster Organisation
The purpose of the RCO, in terms of providing funds and supporting for businesses and individuals, is meant to make things simpler and more straightforward to access these services. The RCO also helps these agencies to drive convergence agenda. At the moment RCO’s already exist for automotive and aerospace industry verticals, this particular RCO is the 1st in the digital arena.
Northern Net
This is a high performance symmetrical network infrastructure to span across the north of England. It will consist of 25-30 connection hubs, and will be a service point linking content creators across the north back to Media city. (TV.Film, Art, Games, Digital Content, cutting rooms, and video conferencing rooms).
Media city
Enda, introduced this as the biggest construction project in the UK at the moment. This is going to be in Salford Quays area and active from around, 2011 to 2012. The purpose of NWV&M is to help people and businesses take advantage of this advent of Media city and supporting cross organisational collaboration.
Proactive vs Reactive – Public Sector Support
Previously much of the work from the public sector area was reactive to industry trends, and now NWV&M is trying to be proactive and affective at bringing a convergence agenda to the NW.
He concluded the talk by giving a few examples of case studies of where NWV&M had provided support into the region.
"Why we must use Games for Good" – Philip Trippenbach, BBC current affairs
This was an extremely interesting talk on how gaming technology can provide significant impact to businesses and individuals outside of the traditional realm of gaming. Philip outlined that the advent of ubiquitous high-speed broadband, will allow us to take advantage communications technology so powerful that people forget or forego the need to eat or sleep. (see link)
Philip said the nature of ‘fun’ within video games is categorically educational. The essence of games are the ‘challenges’ and most fun and satisfaction in video games is found in (problem-)solving the challenges presented. Key game moments (points of heighten emotion and state) are the feeling of achievement found through succeeding in the process of learning how to solve these problems.
There are limitations of the technology however, the games sector is renown for aggressively advancing capability and features delivered via the user interface. In the main the challenge of a game is making the ‘reality’ of game as closely matching to our physical reality by mapping and calculating the vector based algorithms to render the game graphics.
The main reason we don’t take games as seriously we may be should do, is that games are almost always in the entrainment section. But games are not just toys. Bear in mind how often do (war)video/games get descried and taken off the shelves and TV/film series on the same subject are accepted . For example Insurgency, a close combat game. coded and played by veterans, active service men and cadets. Here is perhaps the closest reality to that type of close combat outside of the real warzone and explains why it attracts military types to experience it, and prepare and train in it.
Other games offer some facet of training or education via their intuitive graphic interfaces e.g.
- Fiscal Budget games – US and UK BBC or ABC/Fox etc.
- ARG – Alternative Reality Games.
The continuing evolution of games complexity and potential for significance will be something we ignore at our peril.
Finally Philip offered some insight into the changing role of the journalist. With the advent of mass-media, now as almost real-time as it gets (see recently Twitter and Iran). With so many streams of data from alternative sources, perhaps the role will evolve to one of ‘community management’ or social producers and an interactive collaborative story tellers.
Incidentally there were 25 different sources/streams going out via mass media for this talk alone.
"Connected Worlds and Playfulness." -Toby Barnes, Mudlark (previously – MTV2)
Toby Barnes also followed this up with a further dialogue on the absence of the mention of ‘games’ from the digital Britain report.
He also discussed the value of games…
Games are useful ways of creating mental models this can be done through a game or virtual worlds, from it we can learn, understand and benefit. Using mental models are the best way for us to learns and develop new ways of doing things, and placing those mental models into a game platform is an almost unique way in which we can allow others to share that experience, safely change parameters and inputs and experience the output.
Game console – ethernet connections wireless – connection of social interaction of games – fundamentally different.
The mobilisation of the gaming platform iphones, and Sony PSP, Nintendo DS etc. Are bringing new social interaction to the nature of gaming and how people collaborate through the games and the platforms.
Obviously up till now game development is very expensive. Technology is changing this, indy games (e.g. Braid) are becoming a reality. In the same manner as the proliferation of iphones apps, we will see this on the preferred gaming platforms.
Finally Toby described the advent of reality of real-world data-sets and assets being incorporated into game environments.
For example :-
Nike + – from the shoe to a social interactive community
Bodybug – gps trackable clothing, temp, heart rate.
Chromaroma –from Mudlark using ambient data collection – social gaming through travel cards, becoming part of your regular way of life within a game layer.
Today, I’m in the Chorley office. My 1st visit for a few weeks.
(generic open plan office image)
I’ll be meeting with @stevecogan (IBM) to hear more about their next release of Lotus Connections v2.5
As well as catching with other colleagues in the office.
This was the opening keynote speech from @stoweboyd, looking at the evolution and impact of ’social tools’ on the connections, communities and constructs used by society and the manner how that could effect social interactions in the future.
It was part of the Digital Futures strand of the social technologies summit @futuresonic covers the exploration of how we embrace new collaborative, transactional and communicative modes and their transformational impact on the digital economy and society.
@stoweboyd began by outlining that the Web is the most valuable human artifact ever created. As foil to the obvious and accepted value of the web, there isn’t as yet an accurate measure of the cost of sustaining this entity. That no one knows the cost, does that mean no one seems to care? Apart from the basic resource costs, what about the cultural costs? Though many of those will only be recognised in hind sight.
In the future history will view the current generation through the lens and subsequent effects of the Internet or the web. And by the ‘web’ is not the props – databases, servers, network etc. But more much important and of value is the interactions that comes from it.
“We’ve made the web to ‘happen’ to us.”
He went on to describe the efficacy concepts behind ’social tools’.
Social tools become valuable as a measure of the ‘connectedness’ not the efficiencies provided by them. Many people need to use them, to input into and to get value, getting to point of the ‘Super Majority’ [the state of constant and ongoing, continuous interaction and participation within the environment by many individuals; providing a cumulative whole that is different yet in an atomic sense the sum of the parts.] Other tools/software are designed to provide efficiencies/productivity, for example people don’t value MS Excel by virtue of ‘connectedness’ or the community evolved from it.
In an example of social tool, he described, IM systems. For these to become reliable, requires a cultural shift of the organisation so that everyone uses it (almost all of the time), and publishes info about their status or location.
On anecdotal level, Lotus Sametime became prevalent within CSC through the viral spread of use, and peer to peer advocacy. Interestingly a ’social tool’ I am struggling to see the value of is Yammer in this context, people are joining, but whether there is a niche of conversation between Sametime and Twitter remains to be seen – people are ‘there’ but there’s almost no participation.
In researching new behaviours patterns connected to social tools. @stoweboyd found that people are more willingly to trade personal productivity for connectedness to the benefit of the whole rather than the individuals.
@stoweboyd also coined “Edglings” term. Describing a movement away from centralised controls of the traditional mass media and intuitions of the industrial era. “Edglings” the people making choices to redistribute the ‘control’ or ‘influence’ of centralised large organisations (media, political, religious etc) to lie with the individual and the people. Where an individual’s network of connections to trusted sources, becomes far more valuable and influential than any processed centralised commodity, and they recognise that – ‘I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are they.’
This flowed into a description of the democratisation of mass-media by the social media revolution providing tools that are easy to use, and with a low barrier of participation and costs. This is taking society back to a pre-industrial social scale, more egalitarian society – where everyone has the chance to relate to each other as individuals. However, it does not mean that there is equality because there are plenty of ways to measure rank or relevance or reputation ‘values’ through these new social tools.
The demise of traditional mass media and in particular the collapse of local media or publications is real and current. A real shift of how individuals decide by whom and through whom they are informed ( by their contacts on the web), and also how they should spend their time on particular stories/memes/topics. The power of the editor is broken and irrevocably.
In this shift away from mass media, where the primary mechanism for getting information stems from most trusted social connections on the web. These are now providing a more ‘village’ like spectrum of social relationships, rather than the mass media top-down information flow.
He returned to the discussing the impact of social tools by relating to the tempo of communication that inherently characterises these modes of communication.
Micro-blogging is a fully public model, IM chat is private and email is secret.
| CHAT | MICROBLOG | ||
| TEMPO | Asynchronous | Synchronous | Synchronous |
| ACCESS | Secret | Private | Public |
| CONTEXT | Inbox | Room | Stream |
While these co-exist at the moment, there is good evidence to suggest that email will die out with the next generation(s). Look at the communication behaviours of teenagers etc. What people are doing things in the ‘open’ and ‘transparent’, will now and in future have greater impact and consequence that what was done in ‘private’ or ’secret’. “You can’t underestimate the future potential of doing things in the open now.”
The impact of the spectrum of social tools from IM, location based tools, social networks -facebook, social TV, will influence and form society. People will be shaped by it as rocks are shaped by water over the course of time.
Move from the centroids to the edglings the table is from Stowe’s post
Describing the evolution of individuals from centroids to edglings through the advent of social connectedness on the web. Bringing about a greater awareness of the local, individual identity as it relates to others and our cultural identity, and how we as a society approach the value of the environment, happiness and contentment.
| Centroids | Edglings | |
| Work & Politics | Top Down, Authoritarian |
Bottom Up, Egalitarian |
| Point of View | Objective, Impartial | Subjective, Partial |
| Belonging | Hierarchies | Networks |
| Family | Nuclear | Post-nuclear (tribal) |
| Political Scope | Nationalism | Glocalism |
| Media | Mainstream | Participative |
| Environment | Exploitative, Unsustainable | Restorative, Sustainable |
| Spirituality | Centralised, Dogmatic | Decentralised, Enigmatic |
However, not all shifts are quick and easy or will be all sunshine and flowers. We will discover there will be other restrictions and constraints of liberty. And the centralised institutions will not let go quietly. An example of this interference and constraint is the AOL restriction on advancing their IM product (AIM) at the time it was a market leader by introducing voice/video features. The Department of Justice prevented AOL from doing this feature set advancement allowing Yahoo and MS to catch up in the IM consumer market space. The D.o.J. also missed an opportunity here to mandate interoperability across IM platforms!
In summing up Stowe referred to Claude Levi-Strauss as in that post above.
“A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.”
Social media, and the democratisation of mass-media brings with it an opportunity to re-instate the approaches of society and culture that existed in our pre-industrial world.
Questions
There were some questions – mainly around the inequal access and awareness of the power internet and the tools available. To which Stowe quoted the author, William Gibson “future is here, just not equally distributed.”
At the moment it is clear that in the main asymmetrical connections are inbuilt at the moment (apart from Korea – where a gigabit symmetrical service will be a reality by 2012).
Also he was questioned on the impact of social media on politics. He answered that political parties are inextricably linked to traditional mass media, their constructs have been designed around the use of mass-media to engage with the populous. There is likely to be change and a shift in mechanisms of party politics in future, but this will take time 20 – 25 years or so.
TechCrunch blogger MG Seigler recently blogged on Google Reader: “Google-reader-still-trying-to-figure-out-this-whole-social-thing-still-failing“
I use Google Reader, but not as a social platform, purely as the back-end service that collects feeds that I subscribe to, and connects to various end-points I use to access the feeds. In fact I don’t even use it as a the UI presentation layer to read the feeds. For the web front-end I use Feedly as I’ve blogged here previously : – Blog post about Feedly For my mobile interface I use Viigo, and therefore Google Reader provides the sync and glue between my primary end-points.
Again the author’s point about the lack of social features, isn’t incorrect. But the primarily function of ‘feed reader’ is to provide a good feed and feed management interface; not to become a social networking tool.
I just wonder if that is truly the direction that Google wants to take the product? Not that the sharing isn’t valuable, but I think Google will want to be the primary RSS reader/aggregation service 1st and foremost because that will be of closest affinity to its search products – i.e. why they bought Feedburner. Google will also be well aware of competitor social & real time products that do the ’social’ part much more effectively; if they bought Feedburner, it makes sense they will acquire what they need when they think it’s time to do so.
This was followed up by another TechCrunch blogger Steve Gilmour blogging on the demise of RSS : “Rest-in-peace-RSS“. I think he’s over egging the cake here.
Fair point in the world of real time, RSS is a not in the race. But that’s a function of search and speed not what RSS was designed or to meant to do.
However, it’s definitely not the time to switch it off/or turn away from it completely. Perhaps in Steve’s case it no longer satisfies the ’speed and delivery’ stakes in comparison to Twitter and the rest of the cohorts on the social media wave. But Steve’s role is out there at the very edge of it all and he needs his tools to stay in that position.
I think for most ‘ordinary Joe’s’ the eclipse of RSS by Twitter and real time search services is not a reason to move away from RSS, but rather to decide on what tools or functions provides a useful balance of both going forward.
This Techjam for System Integrators had a packed agenda covering the latest and greatest news from the IBM Lotus Brand.
In the month of the LCTY events in the UK, this was a great primer for those events.
The agenda for the day was as follows:
Introduction and welcome message
Jamie Goodhead – Business Unit Executive, Lotus Software
A welcome message from Jamie to introduce the team and give a brief overview of the event.
Lotus strategy update
Brendan Tutt – Portal & Social Networking Business Leader UK & Ireland
An overview of Portals and Social Networking discussing the current software offerings and planned releases.
My Notes:
Brendan gave a summary of the Lotus product portfolio and their focus on the themes of ‘collaboration in context’ and the breadth of integration and delivery mechanisms available through the Lotus software stack. He highlighted the continuing interest for customers to explore and take advantage of more social and community based collaboration tools while leveraging their existing data sets and business processes.
He made reference to the current Lotus Connections 2.5 beta programme, estimated for gold release around Q3. In particular the continued evolution of services that Connections will offer. And of course to the launch of LotusLive Engage the Lotus SaaS collaboration offering, which currently includes elements of Connections and Quickr and in future will incorporate more of the IBM Lotus product set.
Lotus Domino XPages
Chris Moore – Technical Professional
Creating XPages to bring Domino Web Applications into the Web2.0 arena. A deep dive into what XPages are and how this will impact customers.
My Notes:
Chris gave an excellent overview of the advances in web application UI and design efficiencies provided by Lotus Domino XPages technology. XPages is a web application feature bundled in the Lotus Domino 8.5 server release and equivalent development tools provided through the Lotus Notes 8.5 designer IDE client. XPages allows the rapid design and deployment of a modern Web2.0 UI (look & feel) to Domino Web applications, with extensive re-use and leverage of existing design elements and techniques but without requiring extensive training or additional knowledge for Domino application developers.
The Lotus Domino server now comes with XPages and dojo options available for selection through the server set up wizard. The Lotus Notes 8.5 designer client, is a full eclipse based IDE (still only available on Windows – more platforms to be released). The designer client provides all the tools and elements to create the XPages design elements within the Lotus Domino database.
Relative to traditional methods of delivering a web application XPages demonstrated how easy to was to take existing design elements (fields, forms & views) and create new presentation elements, and methods and events linking those together. Within 10 minutes, Chris showed a simple workflow of adding documents to a view through an XPages form, and the options to select and delete documents through the view all via XPages elements in a web browser.
In future releases we should see elements of XPages extended to other Lotus products for rapid UI customisation and development.
A reference to Declan Lynch can’t be missed when discussing XPages for more information look here: Declan Lynch’s Blog
Lotus Connections
Stuart McIntyre – Collaboration matters
Stuart will provide valuable insight into how customers have implemented Lotus Connections.
My Notes:
Stuart gave an excellent presentation of experiences of Lotus Connections implementations. He provided a good overview of how the need for organisations to evolve into a more collaborative culture could be supported and enabled through the use of software such as Lotus Connections. He described clearly how each facet or service of Lotus Connections played a key part in enabling a particular area of collaborative working; and introduced how other elements of Lotus portfolio such as Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime played a vital role in supporting collaboration.
He often referred to use cases, where a single service or couple of Lotus Connections services was of primary importance to that particular client. As well as how that service had then enabled that organisation to evolve it’s method of working or overcome business challenges to increase time to market or introduce a more innovative business culture.
He also shared that how important it was to try and get as much data and content as possible into the Lotus Connections Profiles service as possible, even for pilots or POCs. Pre-populating that service though the use of TDI is a vital booster to aiding user adoption and participation within the environment.
Apart from a great technical overview, Stuart also stressed the importance of user training, and helping clients progress through the necessary cultural changes to enable a successful implementation. Much of the user training focusing on the why and value of participation rather than the how to do it.
For those wanting to know about Stuart and his excellent work check out : http://collaboratewith.me/
Lotus portal
Rob Enright – Technical Sales specialist
Rob will provide an in-depth discussion on Lotus Websphere Portal and how portal can surface valuable data in Lotus Domino and Lotus Connections and the new features of WCM.
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Aggregation – bringing separate applications together a single presentation layer, combining tailored user access through the use of role based security and personalisation.
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Integration – using portlet technology and client-side aggregation to wire-link together different applications to provided contextually relevant data to the user. e.g. a financial and CRM applications delivering information about the same customer within the portal to the user (financial – invoices, dates, amounts, CRM – contact details, last interaction)
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Innovation – the use of mashups & widget technology such as ‘live text’ to provide a technology platform to enable a more innovative culture (accessing social software application, Google widget data), and allowing Line of Business to make situational relevant applications; without the burden and overhead of working through the IT organisation as well.
My Notes:
Rob gave a good summary of evolution of use cases and technology of IBM WebSphere Portal. Citing the main stages of Portal use:
Lotus Foundations
Ray Davies – Technical Sales specialist
Lotus Foundations 1.1 was released last week. This in-depth session will discuss Lotus Foundations.
My Notes:
Ray gave a fantastic and insightful introduction and overview to the recently released class of autonomic and appliance based Lotus product called Lotus Foundations.
He outlined the various options that are currently available, especially focusing on the Branch office version. Describing the phenomenal about of technology crammed into such a small, robust and self-contained device. Particularly interesting elements being the autonomic features, centralised configuration and management, extremely rugged & robust, deployment, back-up, self-heal and upgrade processes. Another feature of interest being the appliance has the potential to receive customised application packages that once delivered, are included into automatic deployment and configurations processes; so that end-users literally receive new application features or elements in a transparent manner.
Lotus Foundations devices are specifically designed to serve business processes in the field where reach and reliability of network or power can compromise business processes, interactions or revenue streams. But where on premise skill sets are not IT orientated and therefore deployment, and operational support activities need to minimised & simplified in the extreme. These appliances can become the ultimate field end point, providing a reliable service point to that location without the burden or overhead local delivery of IT administration and support, and with a truly robust remote configuration management and self management features.
For more about Lotus Foundations visit: Lotus Foundations
Conclusion: It was a great opportunity to meet up with some of IBM Lotus innovators and discuss the products and the business challenges they helped to solve.
Disclaimer: Elements of this blog post relating to Lotus products features current or future, are subject to change at the discretion of IBM and should not relied upon. For further information about these products, please contact your relevant IBM representative.
If you use Firefox (or derivatives) as a browser and Google Reader as a feed store; then I would highly recommend you consider using Feedly as feed reader.
Why do I use it? I use for the following reasons:
1. The UI
The magazine format really works for me. Simple easy to read and easy to navigate. It comes in the following formats:
The cover page
As the above picture shows, a quick splash of images, headlines and latest news from each your feed categories. Easy options to configure settings to show more or less, or how many days it should retrieve from etc.
The Digest
This is my browser home page….
This provides a quick snap shot of which feeds to read, placing a couple of articles in a prominent position at the top, based on which feeds I’ve marked as favourites The right hand column shows all feeds in their categories with the number of unread articles. It shows hot topics on Twitter and the people you are following in Google reader, so you can quickly access their shared items.
Part way down is the video gallery, showing articles containing video media content.
As in browser based reader, the images and rich media content are just so well crafted into the lay out of the reader; for instance video media content plays seamlessly inside the blog article surrounded by the author content as they intended it to be.
Reading each Article
Here’s an article from Graham Chastney’s blog: Where’s the Whiteboard?
This is minimised/’digest’ view showing:
- Title and first part of content of the article
- Any image or rich media content in the article
- The date published
- Actions to share, star(save), mark as read/hide
By clicking on the ‘title’ portion you get the full expanded article and Feedly also shows:
- More info on published date and author
- Actions to share, star(save), mark as read/hide
- Action to tweet, email, share with a note, share on facebook, bookmark on del.icio.us, keep unread, use the calais overlay, preview the article in full as intended by the blog within Feedly or copy the link URL to the clipboard
- Clear action bars at the top and bottom of the article to minimize it again
- Access to comments posted against the article, to be views in line
Keyboard Controls
Feedly has a good set of keyboard controls that I need to become more accustomed with. This make navigating through feeds and articles much easier.
2. Integration
This is something that impresses me every time I use Feedly. Obliviously it integrates or builds upon Google Reader, so where you interact with articles or feeds in Feedly they automatically update back to Google Reader. Which is great for other readers which also use Google Reader as the feed source, I use Viigo as my mobile feed reader which integrates well with Google Reader too and supplies a good range of additional services.
Search Integration services
When using Feedly to view information or explore for more information on a topic this is where it comes in really handy.
This is search result returned for ‘comic relief‘ by Feedly.
The search results come from:
Twitter, Amazon, YouTube, your feed sources, news sources, other web sources, del.icio.us and Flickr… how’s that for bringing multiple sources into a single pane on a browser!
This is how Feedly interacts with regular searches in Google, popping in relevant links from your feeds into the search page.
Browser Integration – adding Feeds
Adding feeds into the reader is easy:- the ‘+f’ icon appears when a feed is available in the address bar.
The Feedly Mini
The feedly mini is a great thing have available as you surf the web.
“It will try to provide you, in real-time, interesting metadata related to that page and offer you in context a set of sharing tools to help you spread more easily the content you find interesting.”
Here it is appearing on the bottom right-hand corner of the page while I browse the BBC Home page.
Calais Integration
Calais is a Thomson Reuters initiative to bring semantics into web use.
“Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.”
As you read an article with the calais overlay active you can easily find out more on key words or terms that are referenced through calais. When you click on those links, again Feedly will display results from all relevant sources.
Annotating Articles
The last thing I want to mention is annotating, not because it’s a poor feature, but it’s not one I’ve used much.
However, to do it, just select some text, right click and annotate.
You can quickly find any articles you’ve annotated and re-visit as you need.
So that’s my round-up of why I think Feedly is a great feed reader, if you use Google reader and Firefox and aren’t using Feedly what your excuse/reason not to?
One of the great things about smart phones is that one way or another they can be tethered up to your laptop or PC to move, copy or sync data between your devices.
Obviously the most important parts to sync between the smart phone and your work device is going to be your calendar and contacts.
Now for some the out of the box software that comes with either devices isn’t quite sufficient to cut the mustard.
For example some tweets from some good folks finding things not so as straight forward as it should be:
“david_hay Fellow Maccies, what do YOU use to sync your BlackBerry with your Mac or, better still, Lotus Notes, as I’m not loving PocketMac SyncManager”
“pmooneynet @david_hay Dave – avoid companion link like the plague… Nothing seems to do it correctly. If you find something – please blog it”
Well I use Lotus Notes as an email client, and though the blackberry desktop manager software supports a variety of synchronisation profiles (calendars, contacts, messages, tasks etc.) via the intellisync software, which comes bundled with the software. I don’t need to run the software to sync as the sync is already managed wirelessly, Yah!
This will need some configuration between the Lotus Domino and Blackberry Enterprise Servers, but its a fantastic feature to deliver seamlessly OTA to users.
The user does need to be aware that they should be regularly updating their personal contacts, and journal with their DWA (Domino Web Access) aspect of their mail file. This is Lotus Notes template functionality that allows contacts from the personal names and address book, and a journal database, which are separate databases on the rich client to appear within the DWA browser experience by bundling this info into the mail file.
The mechanism for updating is found through the actions menu on the mail file:
Once these actions are run, the address book (contacts) and journal (notes) will automatically sync with the blackberry device OTA.
One thing I find very useful about synchronising a journal with my Blackberry (notes) is for e-ticket reference numbers, and assembling a travel itinerary for quick reference on the go. For example:
Journey 1: Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston xx/xx/2009 Depart xx:xx
Collection Reference Number XXXXXX. You need this number to collect your tickets from the Self-service Ticket machine.
As so much of this information originates in email form, but inevitably gets lost in the email stream, by placing it a notes helps it to be easily retrieved. Particularly with the useful smart selection type a-head on the blackberry which cuts down the available notes to select based on the characters typed that match the same sequence in their titles.
So that’s the address book (contacts) and journal (notes), and basic calendar part dealt with…
But what about all those contacts and diary/calendar events that cover other aspects of our lives? Come now, if you have a smart phone you know it’s not like a work PC which you turn off on Friday afternoon and not turn until Monday morning. A smart phone brings work to you, but you can also use it help have a positive life balance influence.
So in my life I have a gmail and google calendar. I use google mobile apps for blackberry (they do other phones of course).
What I’ve found particularly useful is google sync. At first I was concerned about the security elements of sharing contact and calendar info with google. But fortunately it comes with a good set of options, allowing you configure what you wish to sync and in what direction. Therefore you easily pull in from google without necessarily sending data back to google as part of the transaction. This is also wireless/OTA synchronisation too, and it’s a secure network transfer using SSL.
If you want to sync contacts, you can now have a single consolidated version of your contacts. The Google contacts also allows you to merge contacts and consolidate multiple entries for single contact into a single entry, which I don’t think Lotus Notes can do that quite so easily.
What I have found particularly powerful is the Google calendar sync, though I know that with Lotus Notes 8.5 you can overlay the google calendar in the Lotus Notes client. That is good, but you can’t take it with you on your smart phone.
I am an avid fan of Rememberthemilk
For each of my task lists in RTM I have imported that list as a separate calendar into Google calendar.
Take the iCalendar (events) URL for each calendar you want to import.
I’ve added them to ‘other calendars’ section in Google Calendar:
So through Google sync I can select which calendars by their title to sync down to my Blackberry and into my Lotus Notes calendar.
Google sync is also smart in a couple of ways. It’s aware of when other sync’s or replications are active on the blackberry; it doesn’t interfere and tells you to try again later. It knows when some calendars entries are updated by other applications (Lotus Notes)it doesn’t interfere with those either. It allows you set how far in advance you want to sync in entries and how long to keep them. I particularly like this limit to keeping entries as a clean up feature. Calendar stuff is normally transitory stuff and I don’t wish it to clog up my mail file. Also using events linked to RTM mean updates to them in RTM make them move around or disappear from the calendar as required.
All in all I think this is very smart solution to synchronisation!
To find out more please read: Google mobile help
Everyone is familiar with the picture of people walking or driving about with these devices hanging off one side of their heads. They’ve got their mobile phone in their pocket or on the hands free bracket in the car and they can control calls from a simple set of interactions with the multi function button on the headset.
Having had a Nokia device come with my phone, and having used it on several occasions, either for hands-free calling while driving or as a headset for conf calls while at home. My experience of them has been of a fair amount of discomfort after a short period of time. No matter how I try to adjust the angle of the headset it causes annoying painful discomfort across the whole ear. The sound quality is acceptable but as it is a mono device it is not always the best way to concentrate on a conversation in a noisy environment.
Also many phones second as a very able portable music player, however, many of these headsets are not able to carry that particular audio signal from the media player on the device. Therefore the users needs to resort to a traditional wired headphones, directly connected to the device via the audio jack.
It seems to me that this has demoted making the delivery of calls via a wireless bluetooth head set to a secondary option or afterthought rather than the main conduit for interaction with a multi-interfaced smartphone.
Fed up with the lack of comfort and the inadequate functionality of these traditional bluetooth headsets, I did a little research and purchased a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS980 stereo bluetooth headset.
It functional spec covers many of the gaps from the basic sets:
What I found:
Though this is a Sony Ericsson device several alternative mobile manufacturer devices are supported… HBH-DS980 including the Blackberry Curve 8300 series.
I was able to successful pair with both my Vista Laptop and my Blackberry Curve. However, the multipoint functionality wasn’t very slick; possibly as a result of not the full AD2P bluetooth profile support on both my devices. So I’ve kept it simple and just paired to the Blackberry.
For me this is a fantastic solution, the device is very light (27g), so on the neck loop sits very comfortably, the in-ear headphone buds are comfortable [I know that in-ear is not to everyone's taste] and provide good noise cancellation.
The functionality of the headset with the phone is slick and responsive, I can easily access the contact list, call log, and operate the media player control for the function control on the headset or the call control button. The display shows the contact details and call log details which is a nice feature when the phone is in it’s carry case in your pocket etc. Also as it’s not directly attached the device I hope that it will be a little longer lasting than it’s wired counterparts which have to contend with a lot of wear and tear from the jerks and jostling of motion.
Google Latitude is certainly sparking a debate as who will champion & dominate the location based micro-blogging and connectivity services. It is also an interesting service launch from the Mountain View co. in the light of its recent service cut backs and closures – Google trims down. No doubt this could be viewed as a resource alignment from the ever ambitious Google in the light of the current economic climate to focus on more valued products and services.
Google Latitude
Chris Miller has done some great work outlining the current standings of the market leader Brightkite and Google Latitude.
Google-latitude-all-the-attitude
Google-latitude-vesus-brightkite
And to a great extent I agree with Chris that Brightkite is a certainly miles in front of Latitude in terms of integration with other services, overall feature set, accessibility and usability. But it’s had a head start!
I also agree with Chris Brogan – Google Latitude is a Marker to Consider
This is a turning point that Brightkite and others like them can’t ignore. So it’s true Latitude remains immature in reach as yet no iphone client, and users need to have a Google ID. But I think Google is on to something sharp here.
Up till now Microsoft has not significantly advanced it’s mobile services for Windows Live mobile users
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/feb07/02-11WindowsLiveMobilePR.mspx
though there are clients for both blackberries and iphones, apart from the preferred Windows Mobile devices.
Yahoo is in a major re-shuffle after the struggles of last year, and its unlikely to build or advance their Fireeagle service.
http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=327836
It remains a well defined back office location service for a variety of smaller service companies to build a mobile location service upon.
Here’s what I think Google Latitude could achieve in a relatively short time scale provided they managed it well.
Imagine a sports’ team has finished it’s practice and are going out for some food.
Google Local would be able to provide them with a recommendation on the most convenient place to eat.
With a little participation on behalf of the team and some extensions to Latitude, they may have bookmarked their favourites places, or be able to share their preferred cuisine type via Google Latitude.
This feeding into Google local would then aggregate this information to show the best place based on recommendations or shared preferences.
What would be would really be a neat thing for Google to do, is to offer a booking service on top of that. Therefore opening them up for revenue stream and service provider role, once a preference was made a booking could be forwarded to the restaurant and the confirmation returned to the individuals involved within that Google Latitude network. In the same way Google takes a service cut for clicks on Adwords, then they could make a small charge for delivering a booking to a venue.
Google definitely has the resources, and the user base to make this happen; and this is possibly the type of service that will bring mobile location services to the masses and make Google a de facto service provider.
Today I have tried the using speech recognition software, that comes with Windows Vista.
For the home worker, who is normally working in a quiet and undisturbed environment. There is the opportunity for the use of voice control software to manipulate and drive the interaction between the user and their device. This would not be possible in office environment where the background noise and other activities would make speech recognition almost impossible.
Through the use of a microphone and speech recognition software, which comes as part of the accessibility feature set. Users can train their device software to recognise voice given instruction. While at first there are obvious advantages to controlling and authoring content via speech recognition software, it is a frustrating and tedious task to achieve.
The Advantages:
- Resting of the hands
The Disadvantages:
- Poor control
- Lack of recognised menu options
- Time to train both users and computer
I hope this improves because this singular advantage has really been noticed, it could alleviate common discomfort and stress related injuries caused by extensive computer use.
This all blog entry was typed through the use of Speech Recognition software. It was really hard work!
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