From Rudy De Waele, via ReadWriteWeb:

Sensoring
Biometrics
Transactions
Lifestreaming
Recommendation
Image Recognition
Augmented Reality
Mobile Connected Games
Location-based Social Media
Retail Proximity Media Consumption

In a move that further realizes the place-ness of popular immersive worlds, players of Grand Theft Auto 4 will be able to use their cell phone to mark songs they hear in the game world, then recieve info and a link to buy the song on Amazon. I like this feature since it acknowledges the increasing continuity across real life and game worlds but I think the implementation falls short of being really compelling. The game should automatically provide heads-up info on the song and artist, and I should be able to make a purchase in-game that saves a file to my console, to my mobile, and/or puts it in my Amazon or iTunes shopping cart for later download. And what about having an in-game music player I can fill with songs?

If you hear a song you like as you’re tooling around the streets, you can “mark” it by calling ZIT-555-0100 on your cell phone, and soon receive a text message with the song and artist names. If you also happen to be a member of the Rockstar Games Social Club, Rockstar’s community site for GTA IV and all future titles, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the song from Amazon for less than a buck.

Though I assume they mean you use your real-world cell phone it’s not totally clear. Shouldn’t my game character have a cell phone that can place calls/sms to other gamers in-world, across games to other worlds, and out to real-world lines?

[UPDATE: the cell phone will be Nico’s in-game mobile.]

QR Code is a a UPC-like image code very popular in Japanese cities. Codes are in magazines, on fliers, on storefronts, and on products. When a person takes a picture of the QR Code with their cellphone the code is parsed for an url embed which launches the mobile web browser that takes the user to a website. Now, QR Codes will be tested in San Francisco in the first US pilot program.

“More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows. People who have special software from Scanbuy Inc. loaded on their cell phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page.”

This is an interesting step towards smart objects where things begin to have their own websites. I suspect this is just a step along the way towards using an embedded RFID-type chip that will transmit stored information to mobiles while users pass by the tags. I can imagine a time when all consumables and media contain an alter-profile of data and cloud-aware links and can communicate these to each-other, to users/consumers, and to supply-chains…

[insane-o vids must be seen] This will totally melt your brain.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Here are a couple of interesting projects/movements I just ran across. These are both great examples of how people can organize and use their collective power to modify industry.

Slow Food is a movement designed to counter fast food and hi-impact susperscaling of food production. SciFi futurist Bruce Sterling has a great write-up of Slow Food in Metropolis. From the article:

Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

Carrot Mob is another democratizing and locally-empowering group that “organizes consumers to make purchases, rewarding companies who make environmentally friendly choices”. From their website:

On Saturday, March 29th, at 1pm, come to K & D Market… and buy whatever you want. Buy a lot. We’re going to be tracking everyone’s purchases and then calculating how much revenue we brought to the store. K & D has committed to spending 22% of all the revenue we bring in on energy-saving measures identified by an SF Energy Watch audit, in order to make their store more environmentally friendly! This was the result of a bidding war, which they won, prevailing as the store most committed to environmental improvement among its competitors.

This movement of group financial empowerment is going to see a lot of traction as communities (local and networked) leverage mobile and social tools to become more organized around shared interests. FWIW, Andrea and I were discussing how groups might gather funds under political/ecological/social platforms that candidates could then pledge for (IE democratizing PAC’s). See also Larry Lessig’s newest reform project Change Congress.

To briefly elaborate on an earlier post about Second Life… And specifically, ways in which I believe a modern 3d immersive world can leverage the new wave of cloud tech and create a truly compelling experience:

I want downtown billboards streaming Twitter feeds, rich dataviz, global network traffic, weather patterns, Flickr streams, and cycling media channels. I want to Dj from Traktor directly into a virtual club. I want interactive music and video remix tools that include the world as a substrate. I want to endow my avatar with metadata callouts, grouped in trust profiles, that display my affinities, affiliations, tag cloud, LinkedIn profile, sms number, twitter id, and credit accounts as appropriate to those I meet. I want to be free to re-purpose 3D assets from 3DSM, Maya, and Sketchup into my worldspace. I want a beautiful living homeworld that gathers the populace and inspires users and developers to create their own content elsewhere on distributed servers. I want to join friends on a virtual hilltop and watch the clouds drift past, watch the sun set, and the moons rise. I want to get lost in emergent behaviors, intelligent agents, and the beauty of physical dynamics. I want to easily find friends across multiple servers, across social nets, and out into mobile, gsm, and phone networks. I want an open-standard, opt-in, cloakable virtual ID that can be searched for and found across all dominant gaming and immersive networked worldspaces - and then when I find my friend I want to be able to join them wherever they are. I want peer-to-peer drop-boxes and back-channels that can address files to dominant industry and open-source applications, then back to in-world interfaces. I want an in-world, heads-up fly-out phone/sms/notepad/web-browser overlay that’s data synched to my mobile phone. I want to stumble into sinuous plotlines that sweep me away to distant parts of the virtual world. And yes, I want an SDK that allows EA to stick the Tony Hawk trick and physics model into a nice binary that can be purchased and installed into my client so I can skate around the place. And yes, I will try to grind your avatar if you have any linear edges sticking out.

I’m totally dreaming, I know. But dreams are what the future is built upon.

I’ve been enjoying the playful edge of the bleeding digital arts scene vicariously through we make money not art for some time now, but I have to give them renewed props for their site design. Love the aesthetic!

Alterculturalist, sonic datamasher, and cat lover, Wes Unruh has posted his latest work in the Philip K. Nixon project. Logosagogo! The Hyperstition of Philip K. Nixon is a Matrix-meets-machine-elf aural memescape that slices and dices the zeitgeist like television chopped into glass & oil. Somebody in Hollywood needs to hire this guy as an SFX developer…

The great century ahead of us will be dominated by the digital democratization of the individual. For the first time in history it’s possible - even simple - to collate vast amounts of data extracted through the API’s of social networks. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. All of these sites track and record the data communicated by millions and millions (billions?) of users. Instead of crufty old Gallup polls that attempt to extrapolate the zeitgeist of a nation based on a minuscule sample of a few thousand sources, social nets across the web yield precise and voluminous data about large populations of the global citizenry.

Twitter is a great example. Spend a few minutes on Twittervision and you get a feel for the amount of data traveling across the Twitternet. It’s pretty much a constant stream of tweets, each and evry one being logged and recorded. Now head over to Politweets and you can see the power of the Twitter API in action. Politweets grabs the Twitter stream, searches it for candidate names (eg Obama, McCain) and then posts the matching tweets to it’s output stream. On the left column you have the Blue tweets and on the right you have the Red. Of note, the Blue tweets are mostly positive notes on Obama, while the Red column is mostly negative tweets about McCain. And as of 6pm PST 3.20 Twitter is breaking the Obama passport scandal with the media scrambling to catch up.

All of the social networks mentioned above have deputized their users to generate the content and participate in a ranking selection that naturally brings the important bits to the top. Items of great interest stay on the radar longer while the fringe drifts off the chart. But everything stays in the database. Every post, comment, chat, tweet, vote, etc… It’s all there in beautiful, incorruptible binary ready for any savvy programmer to break open the public API and build a new tool to pull out trends and patterns. Obviously, this is a radical evolution of the community of conversation. What was once personal is now overtly and proudly public.

Social, cultural, and political trends can all be extracted from these vast living datastructures. Mike Elgen wrote about this yesterday in a post called Has Digg Already Picked the President? He talks about how the major social sites end up endorsing candidates just by the measure of their post demographics. For example:

…every link with significant popularity on Digg about John McCain that has an “opinion” is negative, every one about Hillary Clinton is also negative, and every one about Barack Obama is positive. The preference by the Digg community for Obama is very clear.

On MySpace, you can gauge candidate support by searching Google for mentions and counting them, as most mentions tend to be expressions of support. Searches for “John McCain” gets 56,800 Google links; “Hillary Clinton” 120,000; and “Barack Obama” 161,000.

You can see a similar trend in the wildly popular user billboards for Obama and Clinton. Hillary is almost always negative while Barack is everyone’s best friend.

Elgen goes on to wonder how well these sites reflect the actual democracy of our country. Is there parity? Are they more accurate than the mainstream media? Is the online world inherently skewed in some fashion? Then, in the most suggestive and compelling inevitability of the modern digital age, he offers:

After all, the very definition of a Web 2.0 site is one that derives its value from the actions of users. Users are voters, and if these user-voters choose a candidate, shouldn’t that candidate win democratic elections?

And this is the final crux; the salvation of our wavering and beleagured democracy. The digital paths increasingly worn by all of us as we move deeper and deeper into the datasphere are totally traceable. Transparency is growing and it won’t be long before all of the actions that a candidate engages in - the record of their public lives, their opinions, voting history, political and fiscal affiliations, campaign promises and campaign donations - will all be a matter of public record.

New media and digital democracy is empowering everyone and simultaneously laying our lives open for all eyes. We’ve never seen anything like it.

Props to Joe Rogan who is so vastly cooler than his Fear Factor persona might betray. You can also see him ranting about DMT here.

The tank makes me see how we often live our lives on the momentum of the past, constantly defining ourselves by how we have already behaved, constantly cycling through a pattern of pre-determined thoughts moving around on these pre-arranged tracks, instead of running our time on this planet through a well considered, best-case scenario approach.

“I want to live my life in a way that, were I not me, and I saw that behavior, it would inspire me to be a better person.”

…The human systems go in a pretty predictable pattern that starts with my personality, and then connects to the various people I come into contact with in my life, and as I pass over that, I eventually branch out to an overview of people in general; egos, relationships, self discipline, then it starts to drift away from individuals, and go to examining cultures, human motivation, symbiotic life, universal consciousness, then slowly but surely it gets to “the place.”
“The place” is the ultimate goal - a state of consciousness at the center of it all where your “mind” doesn’t exist. It’s a place where the ego is temporarily forgotten, and where in the complete absence of sensory input you converge into “everything.” The more I get in the tank and go through the process, the deeper I can go, and the freaky thing is, it doesn’t seem like this experience has an end point. Every single time I get into the tank I get a little bit further, and a little bit closer to the source.

Ars Technica notes the power of brand logos to influence behavior.

Now, a new study… suggests that the vaunted Reality Distortion Field may be grounded in reality… not only do consumers consider Apple creative, but the subliminal display of an Apple logo is enough to motivate them to be more creative.

To test this, the authors compared the role of two brands in motivating student performances: Apple and IBM. Both were rated equally positively by the students, but they had distinct brand personalities, with only Apple being assigned the quality of “creativity.”

…exposure to the Apple brand, even subliminally, primed the students to greater creativity.

They then used a brand associated with honesty—the Disney Channel—and registered the students’ choices in situations that balanced honesty with social niceties (”does this dress make me look fat” type questions). Those motivated to improve their honesty through the survey emphasized it after exposure to the Disney brand. Those exposed to a different brand or who felt satisfied through a remembrance of past incidents of honesty did not.

…the authors conclude that “exposure to brands may well have a profound influence on social behavior in everyday life.”

“These experiments demonstrate that most any brand that has strong associations with particular traits could have the capacity to influence how we act,” said Tanya Chartrand, one of the study’s authors.

[vid] This is magic. This is life.

Second Life creator and CEO Philip Rosedale announced he will cease his role as CEO of Linden Lab. He states that he will replace Mitch Kapor as chairman and stay committed to SL full-time as it’s primary visionary. No word on Kapor’s alignment.

Rosedale is definitely more suited to the new role as Second Life has failed thus far to capitalize on their hype and advance their platform. The world is dated and has been unable to realize it’s own visionary goals. They’ve generated a decent amount of revenues but have not used the income to grow the platform in any truly compelling way. Their fundamental model - which is a grave failing point for many people eager to move their endeavors into 3D - assumes that people would rather do everything in an immersive world. But the simple fact is that chat, business meetings, online learning, and ecommerce are all far more functional in the flat 2d web. Even advertising loses it’s appeal when your virtual world only supports 100 or so avatars in any one space at a time.

For SL to succeed I believe they need to do the following:

1) Completely re-engineer the scenegraph to catch up with the immersion and realism of modern gaming platforms
2) Hire content developers whose sole task is to create a rich, detailed and compelling world.
3) Rewrite the entire UI, highlighting basic navigation, rich user profiles, and social affordances
4) Focus on user affordances. An avatar should essentially be a living MySpace/Facebook/LinkedIn object.
5) Create engaging narratives that users can easily and unexpectedly slip into. Imagine ARG’s being played out in SL.
6) Break the walls of the Second Life by wiring it up to the First. Avatars should be able to easily send and respond to sms and email. If I buy a new jacket at G-Star, I should also get a virtual copy for my avatar. Cross-channel communication and cross-promotional opportunities.
7) Scale down the virtual economy. The WoW economy is an emergent property of life in the Warcraft world. It should be the same for SL, not the primary business model.

The most compelling possibilities of immersive worlds are socialization, narrative, and realism, not trade and property ownership. Linden has sacrificed the former for the latter, in my opinion.

Of course, the obvious move will be for Google to buy SL and port it into Google Earth. This may be exactly what the Linden investors are hoping for by bringing in a new CEO. Or more likely, they will move further down the road of monetization through in-world advertising.

[Update] One of the primary 3rd party developers for SL, Electric Sheep, has laid off 22 of it’s SL content creators. Blood in the water?

Penned as 12 future apps for your iPhone, this ReadWriteWeb list could be a general wish-list roadmap for the near-future of mobile computing. Here are the top-level items. Click through to read the details.

1. Reality Tagging
2. People Tagging
3. Reality Recognition
4. Physical Social Networks
5. Personalized Travel Guides
6. Digital and Physical Treasure Hunt
7. Distributed Mobile Games
8. Credit Card and Biometrics as Software
9. Paperless Receipts & Digital Business Cards
10. Medical records as Software
11. Physical Browsing & Digital Shopping
12. Location/time-based deals

Urbeingrecorded would like to extend our full support to the ongoing struggle of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf against the mighty imperialist running dogs of the west and of The Disney and against the unfit hordes of Oberzoegersdorf.

Solidarity, comrades!