NESTA invited me along to the launch of a report on User-Led Innovation (ULI) by the University of Brighton’s CENTRIM and University of Sussex’s SPRU research centres.

The insightful, and timely, report focuses on how users, at individual and community levels, are changing the rules of innovation.  Though user-led innovation is nothing new, proliferating digital technologies and networks are serving as tools for users to power further innovations, and to connect with each other to share tools, techniques, ideas and feedback, to an unprecedented degree.

Focusing on video games, music, social networking and music software industries, the researchers have explored case study firms that are harnessing ULI through close and collaborative relationships with extensive user communities, such as music notation software company Sibelius, or that have emerged directly from communities of user innovators, such as games developers Splash Damage.

With companies based on ULI, such as Bebo and Last.fm, being sold on for millions just a few years after their creation, it’s hard to argue against the commercial value that ULI can potentially generate, and the social and public value of ULI is pretty easy to grasp too. However, the report’s authors go on to argue that policy-makers remain somewhat sceptical about the importance of ULI, noting that UK policy still suffers from a linear model of formal R&D ‘hangover’ and has only just begun to recognise the importance of users in innovation.

Realising the extent of user creativity and invention can perhaps only begin by adopting a policy of promoting ULI or, at the very least, thinking creatively around issues such as copyright law that currently serve as barriers to its take up.

Download the report here.

On Saturday, Andy and I headed up to Alexandra Palace to attend Mashed - a two day hack-o-thon, sponsored and organised by BBC Backstage.

The day started with a whole suite of talks. We saw presentations about Yahoo!’s YUI, SearchMonkey, and FireEagle, as well as BBC Research’s Kamaelia project (which allegedly makes writing concurrent applications ‘as easy as building lego’). There was also a talk from Lonely Planet (prop. BBC Worldwide) about how they are opening up their APIs. However, the most interesting, if the most speculative, talk came from a NASA employee about how they are planning to create autonomous self-organising nanobots to explore space and other planets!

Then, after a quick lunch, it was over to the core business of hacking. For our project, Andy and I reworked the Journey On GPS Doodle codebase to create a game of realworld Tron. For this, I hooked up a laptop displaying Google Earth’s view of Ally Pally to the massive screen, and then sent two GPS-enabled volunteers out roaming the grounds while their teammates directed them using walkie-talkies lent to us by Matt Cashmore. Their paths were then projected onto the view of the surroundings, and they had to run around trying to avoid bumping into their wakes (we wanted to add a Sketchup lightcycle to each runner as a marker, but couldn’t get that working in time).

Unfortunately, we had to leave early, so missed the all-night-hackothon, Ant Miller’s rocket, and the project presentations the next day, but I did manage to talk to a few people and spot the following inventive projects:

• Carbon Goggles
  Created by Jim Purbrick and a host of others, this sees Second Life mashed with AMEE to create a heads-up display of the carbon footprint of real-life objects that have been placed in Second Life. Click on the screenshot below to see a video.
• SocialFlightSim
  A fake wooden plane that you can sit in and control using an arcade joystick, while views of the (Google) Earth pass by on various screens, and its location is twittered to all who care to listen. Click on the photo below to see a video.

All in all, it was a fantastic event that had been very well organised. I’m hoping I’ll see some of the people again at BarCamp 3.

Update 27/6/08: I’ve just been having a look at the presentation videos, and saw that the overall winner was this great project which uses networked CurrentCost meters to play a game with your electricity consumption.

Also see:

• Other blog posts
• Flickr photos
• YouTube videos
• Footage from BBC Click

WWDC is over. And my head hurts. Just so much information packed into such a short space of time. They certainly know how to put on a bash; each and every session was presented in super slick Apple stylee, great venue, great food, great city. The speakers were fantastic, engaging and knowledgeable. As Neo would say…”I. Know. iPhone”

Though the focus was heavily iPhone, there was also a ton of other good stuff. Getting up to speed with Core Animation was a highlight, as well as seeing what Apple have in store for the future, both on the Desktop and in the web browser.

The icing on cake though, was getting an email from Apple whilst out there, saying that Cogapp are now official iPhone developers, so we can start testing our apps on actual hardware. More of which later…..

So I survived the queues and the frenzied Mac fanboys, and got into the World Wide Developer Conference keynote. If you haven’t witnessed one of these events, they are a proper whoop-fest, with every utterance greeted with rapturous applause and celebration, like a massive high-five between Apple and its developer community. Jolly good fun had by all.

So the big announcements this year were:

A new iPhone

No surprises here. It’s a new 3G model (running 2.8x faster than Edge, and 36% faster than a Nokia N95), slightly thinner, a flush headphone socket (we are not worthy of such luxury, a headphone socket you can plug headphones into), same sized screen, black back, increased battery life. Bigger suprise was the price: $199 for the 8GB model, which apparantly is going to stay the same across all countries. So 100 quid, for a faster iPhone. Nice!

Oh and it’s got built in GPS. Out July 11th.

iPhone firmware upgrade

No secret this was coming, adding the App Store, lots of stuff for “the Enterprise” (not the spaceship disappointingly), Parental controls etc. But we now have a released timeframe, early July. Free upgrade for existing iPhones, $10 for iPod touches.

Other snippets in regard to the App Store: Enterprise users can deploy apps outside of the App Store to its phones. The app is downloaded to the end users desktop machine, and then synced onto their authorised phone via iTunes. On a similiar note, is Ad Hoc mode, which lets developers authorise up to 100 iPhones, and distribute the app to them for free. Again they sync via iTunes.

Any apps on App Store under 10MB can be downloaded over Edge, anything over this limit is Wifi/iTunes only.

Also there is now support for Apple iWork documents (Keynote etc.) and they have completed support for the full Microsoft Office suite, with Powerpoint now added.

And lastly of note, were the Push Notifications. This is to solve the problem of apps needed to be kept updated, even when they are not running. Take for example an Instant Messaging (IM) app; it needs to display to the user a new message has come in but were it running constantly to check for these, battery life and general performance would suffer. Enter Push Notifications. This is basically a system whereby your server can send notifications to applications via an Apple gateway. The gateway maintains an IP link to your phone, sends the notifications through, and the phone then acts on them. So to reuse the IM example, a badge could be placed over the app icon, displaying 1 message ready to read, and the user could then open the app.

Mobile Me

One that slipped under the radar. Dubbed “Exchange for the rest of us”, Mobile Me is basically a way of syncing all of your Email/Contacts/Photos/Calendars and files between all of your computers, friends and family. Your data lives up in “the cloud” (i.e. on a server somewhere), and is kept perfectly synced at all times. Add a contact on your laptop, and it gets synced to the cloud and your iPhone. Add a picture from your iPhone, and the gallery that you have shared with your family gets the photo instantly.

All this is tied together with a super-slick web based system that looks and behaves like Apple’s own Desktop apps. All for $99/year.

I’ve no doubt missed loads. The most interesting for me has to be the new price for the 3G iPhone, as when we at Cogapp start pushing out iPhone apps (which is the whole point of me being here), the bigger the audience the better.

Last week I attended a half-day workshop on using RFID readers with Arduino boards, organised by Tinker. The workshop was part of a two day focus on ‘do it yourself media’ created by the Takeaway Festival, and hosted at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre.

After an introductory talk, we divided into small groups, and had four hours to create a project. I was all set to create an RFID theremin, but it turned out that the MIFARE boards we were using didn’t provide signal strength information (unlike those used in the active RFID projects I mentioned in my last post).

Instead, our group settled on the plan of creating a sound recording system: users would place different RFID-tagged objects on the reader, and if it was the first time it had seen it, it would record a sound clip through the computer’s microphone. The second time you presented the object, it would play back the sound (with a bit of serendipitous echoing feedback, to create that big stadium feel). So, by constantly swapping objects, you can create your own sound effects library and make up songs as you go along. A bit like a cobbled-together version of Zoundz.

Technically, we achieved this by a very simple bit of Arduino code, coupled with a Processing script (with the Ess library) to handle recording and playback. If you’d like a copy of the source code, get in touch.

Once the 4 hours were up, it was time to present to the other groups, and to see what everyone else had done. There were lots of inventive projects, such as:

• ‘oyster spy‘
  you’d swipe your oyster card to see a pretty animation, but then the moment you turned the corner, you’d be presented with a photo of yourself that you had unwittingly triggered
• ‘body explorer‘
  this group turned the card and reader idea on its head, by concealing cards in their clothes, and having you scan them using the reader to reveal photos of various parts of their body
• ‘distorted photo booth‘
  poke your head through the hole, then swipe cards to transform your image using hall-of-mirror style effects
  ‘cheating computer‘
  roll an (RFID-tagged) dice and play against the computer, which strangely seems to win every time…

Finally, we all went down to the bar area to present our projects to a wider audience, and to watch a great performance by Sputniko and her wiimote-enabled armpit monster. All in all, it was a great day - with lots of interesting tech and lots of interesting people.

Also see:

• Takeaway Festival site
• Example code and datasheets from Tinker
• Photos on flickr

Journey On is a fantastic local transport website for Brighton and Hove. The site has been around for a year, and last week relaunched with a raft of new features and a new look.

To celebrate the launch of the new website Cogapp created a ‘dynamic doodle’ stretching between the east and west extremes of the city. Two cyclists spelled out the letters J O U R N E Y O N in real time by travelling a carefully mapped route, with their progress tracked by GPS and visualised at a special launch event at Brighton Station.

Tristan wrote a small application in Python to run on a Nokia Series 60 mobile phone, which communicated with an external bluetooth GPS device to find out the exact position of the cyclist. The application then relayed this position every 4 seconds to a webserver, which in turn plotted the phone position onto Google Earth in the form of a line and a giant yellow pencil. To see a video of the doodle click here or here.

To give the launch some visual impact a large pencil was transported across the city by one of the cyclists.

Cogapp also helped promote the event by coming up with some exciting designs for the event and by running a competition to encourage people to walk parts of the route and text in.

What would happen if you knew where everything was? Or if even the most insignificant items were gifted with rudimentary communication skills? Or if the history of everything was logged and stored in a way you could access from anywhere in the world?

These were some of the questions that I’ve been pondering over the past week, ever since I found out that there are several projects out there that could help make these things happen. More about them in a second, but first, and explanation of how I got there.

It all started back at the Over the Air conference. Chatting to some of the other delegates, we were imagining what a ’smart’ name badge would do, and I envisioned it changing colour or displaying a message as you approached other delegates based on how your interests synced. As to how it would do it, I thought of using an embedded computing device such as the Arduino, plus wireless communication via Bluetooth.

Now this is all very plausible, but has the huge downside of cost: a setup like that would cost well over £50 per person, which, if you had hundreds of delegates, could get very very expensive. Then somebody told me about the OpenBeacon project, and I realised I’d got it all wrong.

OpenBeacon turns this idea on its head: the name badge itself does not do any computation: all it is is an RFID tag, with simple input and output (a button, a buzzer and an LED). Unlike your simple Oyster-card -style RFID, the OpenBeacon variety is ‘active’: this means that battery-power can boost the range at which it can be detected to tens of metres. Once this is coupled with lots of base-stations to detect the tags, you can use triangulation to pin-point the exact position of every person.

This has been used successfully at the Chaos Communication Congress as you can see from these videos.

So there you have it. The objects are still dumb, but they are no longer mute. You can then process and display the information on any device you like: consult your mobile phone or your laptop during an event to physically locate all the people with similar interests, for example.

If all of this sounds a bit Orwellian: you’re right. However, it all depends on who has access to the information, and how much you choose to disclose. If you yourself can get at the data, then I can imagine it being very useful. For example, you could ask the system ‘give me a list of all the people I talked to at that conference I went to two years ago’. (in practice, the exact query would have to be more like ‘get me a list of all the people who remained within a two metre radius of me for more than 5 consecutive minutes’, but you get the idea).

Equally, and potentially more relevant to the museum world, you could lend each visitor to your gallery an OpenBeacon badge, and then they could use their mobile to read extra information about the object they are standing next to without having to type in any IDs nor scan QR codes. You could also use their location data to build up a list of all the works they visited (which they could later see on a personalised website, for example), or even get them to ‘bookmark’ particular items by pressing a button when they are in front of them.

With large scale data like this, you also start entering the realm of scientists who look at bee pollination behaviour (or, more prosaically, marketers who look at web site usage statistics): individual events are not particularly significant, but when they are aggregated you can start to infer useful conclusions.

I also found some other projects with similar goals (mainly thanks to Tinker.it’s blog). The Roomware project includes open source code to track items using RFID or Bluetooth, and TimeLines is a company that specifically uses technology like this to allow participants to interact during and after events.

Meanwhile, the Pachube project takes things a whole step further, by aiming to monitor any type of object, in any location. Pachube (pronounced ‘patch bay’ apparently), is the brainchild of ambient artist Usman Haque, and allows objects to upload information about themselves to a central location using Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML). Read more about it at www.pachube.com.

Once you’ve got a client-server architecture like this, the sky’s the limit. You can have your house communicate with you via twitter, or check your energy usage from anywhere.

And so, finally, we get to the idea of a Spime, which is a neologism coined by Bruce Sterling. According to his speech at SIGGRAPH 2004:

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.

They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.

Sound familiar? All of the things mentioned above seem like proto-spimes to me. And monitoring and logging projects like Pachube, SENSEI and OpenSpime are taking us a step closer.

Bring it on.

P.S. If you’re interested in the technology to get up and running with your proto-spimes, there is a free RFID and Arduino workshop as part of the mini Takeaway Festival at the Science Museum’s Dana centre next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Ben, Rachael, Colin and myself hopped over to Montreal last week to Museums and the Web 2008. Here are a couple of the sessions I found the most interesting.

Peter Samis of SFMOMA gave a session called [deep breath], “Who Has The Responsibility For Saying What We See? Mashing up Museum, Artist, and Visitor Voices, On-site and On-line.” He talked about the museum’s experience in creating a microsite for Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson (best known over here as ‘that bloke wot did the sun in the Tate‘). Eliasson’s latest works are concerned less with the actual objects or installations the artist creates, and more to do with the way the viewer experiences his works. He ruffles curators feathers everywhere by saying things like: “Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making use of that object…” and declares to the visitor, “I don’t think my work is about my work. I think my work is about you.”

From the paper Abstract: “the SFMOMA Interactive Educational Technologies (IET) team produced an interactive kiosk / Web site that offered background commentary and footage of the artist discussing his philosophy and studio practice, but stopped short of describing individual works in detail”. This took the form of blog comments. Visitors were encouraged to describe their experiences and opinions on the works, and in effect extend the scope of the installations in the virtual world. Peter talked of the process of setting up such a ‘hands off’ forum, and gave examples of the range of comments they received.

Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr, (whose job title is Hackr) gave a session where he talked about the importance of computer programming in the medium of online artworks and ideas. He made the comparison between printmaking and the Internet, arguing that just as printmakers embraced the “craft” of chemical engineering in order to create their plates, so people wishing to create online need to recognise the necessity of programming.

He made the point that it is essential for large cultural organisations to have coders on their in-house teams, and for them to be involved in the creative process from the very beginning. Which is a sentiment we at Cogapp would wholeheartedly agree with.

Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

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On Monday, Joe and I attended the Museum Association’s event, Senses Working Overtime: Optimising interactive exhibits, which was held at the Churchill Museum in London.

It was a great day; we both met and talked to lots of interesting people. And of the many issues that came out of the various lectures and discussions my top two were:
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