IPTV - open or closed?

While some companies, such as T-Online rely on Microsoft's IPTV platform, the foundation of the OpenIPTV forum, whose founding members are AT&T Inc., Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens Networks, Sony, and Telecom Italia was announced last Monday. An excerpt of the pres release reads:

The forum (...) will focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies

Well, I'm sure that all participating companies have their own interests, so I hope that there will be a common goal (a bit more precise than what we read here). One thing seems sure to me though: IPTV has to offer an added value compared to "ordinary" television - e. g. contextual delivery of visual content on both fixed and mobile devices, and all that at affordable costs. Which means that advertisements will play a major role, perhaps dependent on how much end users are willing to invest.

The Open IPTV Forum plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications as well as protocol specifications later in 2007.

This could well be December 2007 - if taken by the word. However, I hope we'll hear something more concrete and official a bit earlier. My guess is that live broadcasting will be reduced to events where time context is crucial (e. g. sports, news). For other programs, IPTV will be more like a filtered access to archived programs (movies, documentations etc.). At least this would be an advantage for me to have the choice to watch a program depending on whether I have the time to do so - or else, leave it for later. But hey, that's only my very personal opinion.

David vs. Google

There's some exciting news on search engines. Powerset is a startup whose focus is on natural language search technology and associated with Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. (PARC). Its founder, Dr. Barney Pell, managed to get together a team of excellent scientists that try to break Google's dominance by allowing users to type in whole sentences (as you would ask questions) that are supposed to lead to much better results if comparing this to pure keyword searches. Some more background on the deal with PARC can be found over there.

Seems like a lot of hype going on right now, and whether this is really a breakthrough or not I do not know. They're not the first to try out natural language technology, this is for sure. Assuming that the product really fits its expectations, the next step may be to combine this search engine with voice recognition in order to enable mobile search that really works.

One collaborative scenario that comes to mind is the search for persons of interest beyond the limits of a pre-defined user community. There sure is a large potential, since most anyone has got its own homepage, or weblog somewhere.

Trust in Social Networks

Many so-called collaborative services rely on networks of users, sharing the same interests or goals, that contribute on a shared platform. By adding other users (and / or their respective sites) to one's own network, it is possible to find related users, following the friend of a friend principle.

As the number of "friends" expands, linking to other users does not seem enough, as it is not expressive enough. If one models the relations to other users as edges between nodes, it is desirable to be able to assign meaning to these relations. A straightforward way to achieve this is by assigning trust levels to other users. As this trust is related to some context (i. e. I might trust someone to give me good recommendations on where to go out, but I might not trust this person as much when it comes to good movies), this concept of trusts needs semantic indexing, which can be done via tags.

Thus, by expanding the notion of so-called social networks with weighted semantics, communities in the virtual world become much more helpful, as it is possible to find users not only on the basis of what they say about themselves, but also related how other users perceive them. By aggregating the typed relations for a given user, it is then possible to express how this user is perceived in a given community of many participants.

I am interested in sharing thoughts and ideas about this topic, as it seems very relevant both in personal as well in professional networks.

YouTube and TV

When comparing the usage of (traditional) TV and YouTube, Harris Interactive observes that one third of frequent YouTube users are watching less TV to watch videos online. On the other hand, digital video recording, combined with harddisk storage, allows end users to become more and more time-independent when it comes to broadcast programs. Personalization of electronic program guides and online video recording as well as IPTV and triple play offers will finally lead to internet and broadcast services to merge. Time dependency seems to be only relevant for events captured live and, perhaps, news.

There is still some distinction between the type of content YouTube has to offer (mostly user generated content) and the broadcast and video world. However, as Google is expanding their collaboration with music labels and broadcasting companies (involving a share of ad revenues), we may see a further decline in TV usage among younger users.

Interestingly enough, users seem to strongly vote against the idea of airing ads before the actual video. As YouTube usage is greatest among the group hardest to reach through TV advertising, the question is how to monetize video display in the long run.

On the other hand, TV channels are expanding on delivering content online that had been broadcasted previously in an attempt to reach that part of the population that is likely not to spend their free time watching TV. I am curious who will win in the long run when it comes to collaboration between online services, telecommunication providers and content producers.

Twitter - who needs that?

Sending SMS to friends is ok, but who would want to send to Twitter what they're doing currently (limited to 160 characters)? This seems like one of the craziest collaborative services that I found recently. Or maybe I'm getting old.

Instead, I just signed up for beta-testing Joost, a client-based P2P entertainment service. Formerly, it was called The Venice Project. Not after the italian city of that name, but named after the conference room where the idea for this service was born.

COMPASS as a multimodal tourist guide

Many contextual services (and this means mobile as well) seem to be the result of research projects. One example is COMPASS 2008 aiming to support the non-Chinese speaking tourists that come to see the Olympic Games in Beijing. Core ideas seem to be profile-based recommendations and on-the-fly translation on a mobile device. According to Professor Wolfgang Wahlster from the German Research Center on Artificial Intelligence (from one of his presentations, a core requirement is that

human users should not be forced to adopt to the language of technology,
but the technology should adopt the language of their human users.

Sounds ok to me. But do we really need machine translation for that? If I assume that, as a tourist, I need a couple of typical phrases in order to get around, I might as well buy a phrase book and get around well.

Other question is whether these prototypes are really easy to use for anyone. For instance, how much effort is involved in creating personal profiles? Another question would be who is taking care of managing these multilingual ontologies? And what is the business model behind this? How about latency time (between a user query and a response)? Was there a field test conducted with average users under real-world conditions? How about end user acceptance?

These are just a couple of straightforward questions that need to be asked when considering a real-world use. Can all these wonderful ideas stand the test of reality?

If this sounds like me being skeptical about artificial intelligence, you may be right ...

What will be the future of news?

Lots of people are blogging about Daylife with mixed interpretations. As news aggregation seems to be a somewhat hot topic, while on the other side I see lttle media convergence here, it might be worth taking a step back and re-thinking what an innovative news brokering service might be like. Let me start by a few observations.

• News are fast (as the name already shows). Old news is an anachronism, so one requirement to deduce is that the brokerage should be fast, reaching the potentially interested reader without delay
  
• Content creation has changed from a world of identified news creators / authors (working for newspapers, magazines, TV stations etc.) to almost anyone commenting on most anything nowadays. This raises the question of who will judge the quality of a news contribution. In the old days this was identifiable by a news brand (e. g. USA Today, or Washington Post, or BBC) - on the Web this is not clear at all.
  
• With a multiplication of news contributions from all over the world (including their visibility) on almost anything you could think of, the need of filtering arises. The easiest way is to combine a news aggregation with search technology.
  
• How to reach the masses. A lot of news services have some technology- or economy-oriented focus, as they are more likely to quickly gain a large readership that is likely to use Web sources as their first approach to news (instead of buying newspapers or magazines).
  
• Expansion of news publishers from print into other forms. Most news publishers started early to also post a selection of the news articles that would appear in their publications in online form. In parallel, an expansion into online journalism was started so some news contribution only appear in online format. Last, the brand was also expanded into television, so many news contributors also produce their own magazines, focusing on specific topics that are of interest. So, we see a media diversification, but not necessariliy a media convergence.
  

Most of the news aggregators are into filtering, but not really into personalization. Thus, in the following, I would just like to list a few requirements that I consider important for the world of news in mixed formats.

• Double localization. As a reader, I most likely have a relatively static location, i. e. where I live (and work). On the other hand, I may change my location (business or holiday trip). Thus, I not only have the need to be informed what is going on where I live, but also where I currently am.
  
• Focus on specific topics require intelligent filtering, involving context. Topics that are of interest to me evolve in a mostly linear manner. New topics related to older ones that are of interested to me will be added, others that are of temporal interest only will fade away. One strong benefit that the online world can provide is that it puts news articles into personal context by considering what I have read in the past (related to topic, sources etc.)
  
• Communities are important. If I know what other people I know are interested in, I am able to suggest them articles that I read. Likewise, recommendations from other readers connected to me can be valuable. Thus, adding a people networking service to news aggregation is valuable - if semantic indexing of relations is available (e. g. person X I am related to is known to give good pointers to sports-related news. Also, rating mechanisms might be valuable.
  
• Aggregation of news for an overview on a topic. If I start to get interested in a topic, I might be interested in reading a number of more general articles first, before reading specialized articles later. Aggregation of articles sharing the same topic plus filtering and linear ordering, combined with an editorial selection of articles to be showcased, may be an additional value.
  
• RSS for specific topics. While this is mostly related to a single site where headlines are aggregated, for some topics that are more specific, it might be worth getting informed (e. g. via email) in a kind of personal newsletter.
  

I am not sure if annotation is the right thing for news services. First, it is common to blog on topics that raise interest (as I am doing now), which involves the possibility to annotate them. Second, reading annotations for contributions is certainly interesting to see what others have to say, but it is time consuming. Thus, I am leaving out this issue for now and welcome any feedback on the ideas mentioned above.

Newstube

Just found out about a new collaborative service named newstube, which appears to be some kind of digg clone. The idea is to contribute links to news articles related to IT with a short comment. These are first added to a queue, which they exit as soon as there are at least five favourable votes, to be shown on the frontpage.

Sounds like a pretty decent idea in order to avoid junk messages to flood the officially displayed news. But I am wondering who would take the time to actually rate news they read? Usually when I find something interesting, I will take some time to write a post for my weblog, which is first of all like a way to remember interesting things. If other people stumble accross that and benefit from what I write, even better.

The other problem is that just anything which can be referenced via a link and has to do with computers (well, most anything nowadays has to do with computers) could be considered news. Is there anyone who will check if the contributed links are really news or not? Hopefully yes, but until then let's wait and see.

And of course, they're not the first to come up with such a service, not even in the german-speaking market - yigg has been around for somewhat longer. Time will tell whether they're going to make it or not.

My personal opinion is that Google will try to expand their news gathering service with enhanced aggregation and personalization features, either on their own or by continuing to buy innovative service platforms.

Social platforms: Xing and LinkedIn

These past days, there's been quite some discussion in the German news and blogosphere about Xing's going public. For Lars Hinrich, founder of the company that runs the social platform, it is not the first company, with his prior companies having proved rather unsuccessful. When looking at LinkedIn that is planning a German version of its socializing platform until March 2007 (with a possible IPO in the near future), a competitor that should be seriously considered is close. The main difference between the two platforms is that Premium Xing accounts cost 5,95 € a month, while LinkedIn ist (still?) free of charge for many functions. On the other hand, LinkedIn offers at least four different premium account types, ranging from $60 / year to $200 / month. However, I am not aware of how many users actually have a Pro account. As only about 13% of Xing users a willing to pay for a premium account, question is whether LinkedIn will be successful in reaching an equal share of users until the end of 2007. That's what LinkedIn's co-founder, Konstantin Guericke, announced, who recently gave several interviews (in German) related to the potential of socializing platforms. Of course this is biased, and time will tell whether Xing will remain as successful as it is now. What could be a potential added value to Xing to make a real difference?

Zweitgeist - your alter ego on the web

Just today I became aware of a new social service that may bridge the gap between surfing the web and communicating, called zweitgeist an artificial word meaning something like your virtual alter ego or second spirit. It is based on a piece of software that needs to be downloaded as a client closely associated with your web browser. A Firefox extension is also available.

After registration, you basically start by filling out your profile, most importantly a picture representing yourself (can be selected from a large variety of characters). While the animated characters seem a bit boring at first sight, the fun starts when executing actions with them (such as waving hands, sitting down, walking etc.). That is a great extension of the speech bubbles which serve to exchange textual messages - a good approximation to non-verbal communication.

Some more information about this can be found here and there. If you want to know more about what you can do with your alter ego beyond chatting, you might want to have a look over there.

Of course while the user base is limited, you'll find most zweitgeisters on sites like google, amazon, spiegel.de or other popular pages. Thus, you might not really know whether it is worth starting a chat or not. But since I'm not the only one to find it fun to use, I suppose that there'll be more users as time goes on.

While your base account is free, there are numerous options (such as having an animated character, or multiple characters to choose from), which cost a monthly fee, expressed in a virtual currency, called kala (=stone). This fee depends on the user's reputation (and I suppose this means how excessively he's using zweitgeist). The more you invest, the more you get.

Let's see how this will be accepted in the long run. At first sight, it is fun to use, indeed.

The Venice Project

What a name for a new project from the founders of KaZaa and Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Fries. Seems to be a P2P streaming platform for TV content, removing the constraints of time-dependent (ordinary) television, according to GigaOm. It's currently in beta, allowing anyone to sign up, and I'm definitely curious to see what's it all about.

No more (Google) answers

First of all, I have to admit that I never used Google Answers, which is about to shut down. I really like the idea behind it, being able to ask so-called knowledge questions for 50 cents a piece (a non-refundable fee) with an optional donation of something between 2 and 200 US dollars (that is, you as the person needing the answer set the price). That seems to be what the folks at Yahoo! thought, too - the main difference being that theirs is a free service (for the end user, at least - involving a points and levels system to non-monetarily reward users). And they are not alone, as Microsoft recently launched their Windows Live QnA service. Difficult to say whether an alternative to these more commercially-oriented services is in sight.

While this may seem like a drawback for Google at first sight, assuming that they're experimenting with lots of things (with some of their services such as Gmail that really take off), it's not that bad to close down an Internet service that does not receive sufficient attention, provided it does not affect the core business. And in Google's case, it doesn't.

On a side note, I do not really seem to understand what the difference between these services and good old newsgroups is. Perhaps this is also why these services (providing answers to questions) might not really work if they involve charging money. Or at least, there should be a difference between basic and premium Q&A services.

Peanut butter

As a kind of follow-up to the last post, it is interesting to read the so-called peanutbutter manifesto by Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo! senior vice president, where he says that the problem is to

want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone (..., being) separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other, (... lacking) a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy. (...) Our strategy (is being) described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

The problem, as it seems, is not only the lack of a shared vision, but also of an organizational nature. Sound familiar? I guess many (large) companies have this problem. And any reorganization is a hard task. Sometimes I get the impression that if reorganizations take place at a yearly pace (or even faster) this is done without a clear vision of what the focus really is - and without considering the employees doing the real work. We need more managers that know what they're doing - in terms of business, organization, service and technology.

By the way, I love peanut butter. Especially the crunchy kind.

Competition and user generated content

I somehow missed that one, but last Friday, it was in the news that Yahoo would be acquiring Bix.com, a portal for competitions of all kind. It's a 16-person startup company that basically seems to work by rating other people's content. Seems to be linked to MySpace, as there's the possibility to add a media item to one's MySpace account. So, what's the real difference between YouTube and this one? Not much, I suppose (and YouTube indeed does have user ratings as well), so I think that it's more about running after Google in order not to lose touch to what's currently hip. But what will Yahoo really do with this? What will Google do with YouTube? These questions seem not to have been answered yet. At least not really.

TinyTube

Although YouTube announced to offer their service for mobile devices sometime next year, the service is already there (even though it is offered by someone else) and can be accessed via http://tinytube.net. If enhanced by some collaboration features, this could even be more interesting. But it's nice to see that the service can be used with mobile as well as with ordinary browsers.

Virtual Stealing

The Web as it is, whether 1.0 or 2.0, is more or less an image of the real world, at least when it comes to content. The next logical step is to map real-world actions, and this is what many collaborative services are all about. The major difference is that there is more transparency, e. g. when it comes to managing your own social networks or looking at the networks of other users.

A next logical step is the virtualization of your real life by including virtual transactions, such as in Second Life. The latest development is CopyBot, a tool which allows a user to copy content from other users without their consent. As theft occurs in real life, so it does in its virtual counterpart as well. Of course this is not really a problem: since cut-at-paste has become so easy, plagiarism is a well-known problem at universities and colleges.

Thus, virtual services which deal with content and transactions need effective means of protecting their users against theft. Maybe this cannot expected to be a free service, but this may well be a crucial factor when it comes to platform acceptance and customer satisfaction.

Localization for Community platforms

Social platforms are great, but if they only work with manually created profiles, this is often too little to be of real use. For instance, while it is nice to have a profile in openBC / XING, this only shows a part of who I am and what I do. On the other hand, I would probably not hang around MySpace because it does not seem to have the kind of people I would be interested in, but I might as well be wrong. While it's certainly fun to get acquainted with people from all over the world, I suspect that localized services are more interesting, since they may offer a real-world association, either by location (such as google local), or by resources. One possible link to the real world are media - books, music and movies. When it comes to book communities, there are at least three of them that come to mind, namely LibraryThing, which is currently being localized, or Shelfari, and finally, buchpfade. A quick comparison reveals the following:

• Shelfari only connects to amazon.com, so it mainly focuses on books in English. This is cool for English-speaking communities abroad (and, of course, in the US and Canada). On a side note, it has a great interface and look & feel.
  
• LibraryThing not only has an interface in other languages than English, but you can also find non-English books. However, not all available metadata (e. g. ISBN number) seems to get imported. many books (incl. those that are out-of-print) cannot be found. As it is possible to internationally select different library catalogues where to search for, it should be possible to find almost anything that has ever been printed. There's lots of nice ideas related to socializing and community-building which are implemented there, so when it comes to diversity in functions, it's pretty cool.
  
• buchpfade, purely in German, does a great job in finding almost any book that was ever published in German, and also some other media (DVD and CD). Lots of room for improvement, and indeed you will find that as time goes, more and more functions are being added.
  

I think that it makes sense to stay local before expanding and focus on community functions that emphasize the link to local places. While it may be nice to expand from books to media, looking at the books someone has read or is currently reading is something that may tell you a great deal about a person - especially if you do not have the chance to see each other at once. A potential way to build friendships? Time will tell ...

Bottom point is: Localization is not only about translating web pages, but also offering content that is of local interest. However, this will only work in the long run if such a platform attracts enough users. At the same time, by doing so, community building functions will increasingly become more important. Stay tuned ...

Google acquires JotSpot

Google these days continues to buy interesting start-ups and Web 2.0 companies. These days, it's been JotSpot, and while it is sure that Google will integrate this in some form into their portfolio, the question is what we can expect.

Zoli Erdos starts thinking about who is going to win, and who is losing out. More interesting are his ideas of what Google might do with all their beta stuff, such as Google Groups, Docs & Spreadsheets. What it seems to come down to is that what JotSpots calls applications do not really match the expectations, so if it were possible to take the advantages of the wiki character from JotSpot and combine these with the loose ends to turn into something called Google Office, or Google Workplace. Something like a web based office suite, integrating the best from all the companies that Google has been buying lately. Or, perhaps, it might be about something like a collaborative project management suite. Or, simply call it Enterprise 2.0, whatever this may mean. And here's what Joe Kraus himself is saying about the deal.

What about Orkut?

These days, I am wondering what Google plans to do with Orkut, one of the older socializing platforms with about 30 million users worldwide. While about two thirds of the users seem to be located in Brazil (with about 9% of the country's population being registered), about 15% of the users are located in India, and only 10% of the users are from the US.

Related to the rising number of users are also attempts to create fake accounts, which may be a general problem with socializing platforms - as the issue of fictional identities is well-known. With the acquisition of YouTube and its much larger user base than Orkut, I am wondering if Google has any plans to merge both platforms, perhaps also including Dodgeball, which it had acquired in May of last year and is apparently integrating dodgeball accounts into their service portfolio.

With all those socializing services around, we seem to need a meta-integrator of user profiles. Which reminds me of Apple that received a patent for portable user accounts.

Nokia acquires smart2go

As announced yesterday, Nokia has just acquired smart2go, a company focusing on mobile navigation solutions. As I read in their milestones section, they built a location-based social networking portal as early as 2000. Their navigation software is included in Nokia's brand-new N95 device. What's even more interesting is that Nokia plans to continue to support multiple platforms for Gate5 products, including Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile and Palm. Combine this with personalization and social interaction and there you have your digital vade mecum.