Representing ourselves and creating avatars
A teenage girl’s video clip on YouTube about her breakup with her boyfriend has been viewed over 155,000 times in the last five days, primarily because she was playing with features on Logitech web cameras that allow her to change her appearance. The features available on the cameras include adding glasses to a person’s face, changing their eyes, or an entire range of complete characters, such as an alien, gingerbread man, or bulldog. The software tracks movements in the person’s face to keep the modifications aligned with their image. While the features are fairly basic, they still look good, are included with a $100 web camera, and the quality will quickly improve.
An avatar (from the Sanskrit, originally meaning a manifestation of a deity on earth) is a person’s representation in a virtual environment. Any multi-player game involves avatars that players use to play their roles. The Logitech features are an important step to blurring the boundaries between video calling, and taking on a completely different visual representation online. This starts to answer the question of how we will deal with video calls when we don’t always look our best. We are on the verge of being able to look perfectly coiffed and groomed in a video call, irrespective of how we look in real life. Just as we can get a “voice lift” to surgically make us sound younger, we can modulate our digital voices too. Starting from around now, we cannot know if the image we are seeing, even in a live video call, is actually showing a person, or a digitally manipulated image of them. So how do YOU want to look and sound?
10 Trends for 2006+
Future Exploration Network Chief Futurist Richard Watson, within our sister organization NowandNext, has just come out with what will be an annual report. 2006+ 10 Trends: Predictions & Provocations is through Richard’s generosity available here as a free download (usually £35), and Richard is allowing any use of his material with acknowledgement. The ten trends Richard explores in the report are:
1. Anxiety
2. Connectedness
3. Speeding-up
4. Mobility
5. Convergence
6. Privacy
7. Nostalgia
8. Localisation
9. Authenticity
10. Happiness
He then goes on to explore specific sector trends, including society & culture, government & politics, media & communications, money & finance, healthcare & well-being, travel & tourism, and far more.
Just a tiny smattering of the juicy tidbits from the 64-page report:
* In the UK the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) now has more members than the three main political parties combined.
* Reason magazine recently sent out 40,000 personalized copies of its magazine, each with a circled aerial photograph of the subscriber’s house on the cover, and detailed information about that subsciber’s neighbors.
* 42% of the US workforce is unmarried.
* More young people voted on American Pop Idol than in the last US Federal election. But politicians in Lithuania gave away drinks at polling stations, to help increase voting from 23% to 65%.
* At Harvard University, 75% of students support the armed forces, compared to 20% in 1975.
* 36% of high-school students believe the US government should approve news stories prior to publication.
* In 1900 Americans slept 9.0 hours per night, today they sleep 6.9 hours a night.
* It took 30 years for Japan to build to 17 million outbound trips a year, but only 5 years for China. There are 800 million internal trips in China each year, similar to the number on the rest of the planet combined.
* The MTV Starzine magazine, produced by MTV and Nokia, consists entirely of text and photo submission by mobile phones from readers.
Stacks more insights, trends, predictions, and observations in the report.
The state of news media
A great report just out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on The State of the News Media 2006, focusing on the US news industry. It provides detailed analysis across all news media, including newspapers, online, TV, radio, alternative and more. The new major emerging trends they picked out this year are:
* The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.
* The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century.
* At many media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over.
* That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation – finally.
* The new challenge to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time.
* The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if will ever be as big as print or television.
Underlying these trends is the game being played between traditional media and new media organizations, with a large convergent space in the middle, and possibly the beginnings of hardball tactics as we have seen in the music industry over the last years.
Peer-to-peer banking
A new peer-to-peer bank, Prosper.com, is launching in the US, attracting articles in both the New York Times and BusinessWeek, with the latter titling the story “The eBay of Loans”. The principle is simple – you lend to individuals at interest rates based on their credit rating, and since you’re cutting out the bank as middleman, both lender and depositer get more attractive interest rates than they can get commercially. This is not a new idea – UK-based Zopa has been running for almost a year with essentially the same business model. Anecdotally Zopa is doing well, and intends to set up in the US soon. One of the differences is that Prosper.com focuses on groups that know each other or have common interests. It also has a more evolved bidding model so lenders bid to have the lowest (and thus winning) interest rate for a particular lender.
Banks are the archetypical intermediary, in this case between depositers and lenders. They get a very hefty spread for lending to individuals, however they do some things to create that value, including insurance (by pooling loans), risk assessment (making independent and accurate assessment of creditworthiness), and convenience (at their best!). Prosper.com allows lenders to split their loans across many borrowers, giving some loan pooling and security against default. Certainly, an online marketplace cuts out the middleman and the spread it charges – all part of e-commerce 101. However rhe really interesting part of this model is the risk assessment. In the first instance, people can find out about someone as an individual and make a personal assessment on their default risk. The next phase is when more sophisticated models are used to assess credit risk, aggregating a wide range of perspectives. This is not possible by a financial institution. However, with a borrower willing to disclose information, arguably more accurate credit assessment is possible. If some kind of effective deposit insurance through pooling or other mechanisms is put in place, in addition to superior credit assessment (not difficult given the paucity of the bank’s data and models), then there is no reason peer-to-peer banking will not over time become a competitive issue for mainstream banks.
Mashups and Edgeio give power to the edge
In web parlance, a “mashup” is a computer application that brings together elements of other applications. One of the key concepts behind it is that of APIs (application program interfaces), a term that is increasingly hard to avoid seeing. An API basically defines how other programmers can access a particular application. When Google first published its APIs, it was big news, as it allowed people to take specific data from Google and use it in their own applications. This helped set a trend, and now the whole much vaunted “Web 2.0” phenomenon is based on most new web applications having APIs that others can use to create new applications. For example MashupFeed compiles all the new mashups, that are appearing at a rate of around 2.5 per day. The just completed Mashup Camp conference was centered on mashups, including the economic models as well as the technology and emerging applications. Arguably the majority of the innovation and creative intent on the Internet now centers in this space.
One of the hottest applications in this space is the soon-to-be launched Edgeio (which comes from “edge” – where all the interesting activity happens on the web, and “input/ output”). In a nutshell, it allows people to post classifieds listings on their own blog, and for these to be taken and presented in one place, with links back to that person’s blog. It can also be used for any other content. In principle, this could challenge eBay and other classifieds giants – instead of posting a listing to sell something on eBay, you put the relevant information on your own blog or website, and anyone else can find it and compare it to all other offerings on the Internet. A good overview is given by the very first report on Edgeio on BusinessWeek’s tech blog. Some worry that Edgeio is too cognitively complex for people to understand. However I think the basic concept isn’t too hard. If you have a blog, you have power. You can do what you want there, and automatically participate in the collective space of all interactions. Why work by the rules others create?
