This is very interesting picture that shows the difference between the opportunities for saving energy between Europe and the USA. I do not think there are many households in the Netherlands that do not use a programmeable thermostat, often even integrated with a outside temperature sensor. This is something we have to keep in mind when comparing research on energy saving between the USA and Europe.
who does not know the feeling of feeling utterly silly when sending an e-mail in which you say that you are enclosing an attachment after which you forget to include the attachment. I know it happens to me and most people around me. But Google is paying attention!
They now have a new function where Google scans the text of you e-mail and when it thinks you intended to include an attachment it gives you a reminder. I think this is a nice example of paying attention to your users and deliver services that are based on looking what people are really doing and what really goes wrong while doing it.
I understand from the google groups that discusses this that it does not really work very well at the moment (it misses a lot of cues when there should be an attachment) but let’s hope they will get it right. At least they are trying …
Some time ago I bought an iPhone and I must say I love the user interface. It all feels very slick, every function does what you think it should do and looks very nice.
However, I recently downloaded an iPhone app from the NOS that shows you teletekst directly on you iPhone. very convenient.
However, I was wondering myself that it is quite a remarkable that this application for the iPhone is that popular. It is a user interface designed for TV’s with minimal interaction and minimum use of graphics. Of course the original idea was that through this simple view and interface it was easy to use and easy on the hardware. All reasons that are completely not valid on the iPhone platform.
I wonder where the popularity comes from. Is it because people are used for so long to this interface or are minimal interfaces more powerful than we think anyhow? Amazing..
I recently came across this website that is dedicated to fact checking on political statements in the USA. If you listen to the candidates for US president it is often very hard to know if they are talking the truth, bending the truth in their direction or lying outright. Interesting to see that this website (and there are several other ones like this one) are increasing the transparancy a lot. It is shocking to see how much “distorted truths” are being told by these politicians.
The power of sites like these is that it will be getting harder and harder to stretch the truth once very white lie is monitored..
Last days I was present at the MobileHCI conference. I was involved in this conference as sponsor chair. This conference deals with how to design and use mobile devices and experiences. There have been two issues that I found remarkable.
The first is the fact that two research projects dealing with the design of user interfaces showed that people preferred to use the slower interface. In one example they had developed an interface with special icons to use in the address book of the phone, targeted at illiterate people. Research showed that although people were faster through the visual interface they still preferred the alphanumerical one. Maybe they just did not want to be branded illiterate?
The second project dealt with research on the amount of air pollution children are exposed to by their route to school. This Lancaster project gave GPS equipped phones to 12 year old children and had them make pictures and blog their route to school, through all seasons. These routes were compared to the known air pollution throughout the city. Also the children got asked questions on how they felt and on their health. Through this research they could show the children that they would have less air pollution by taking another route. But reality is much more complex than we think. Many of those routes were banned by their parents because they are thought not be safe (e.g. a route through the park).
Both projects show that reality is much more complex than we think when designing products and services. This complexity is I think growing with the digitization of our society.
This conference was also the formal start of the Amsterdam Living Lab, a large research program I am involved in where the focus is in helping designers design products that people really want, not the ones designers think they want. I will publish more on this soon.
A last example how reality can be unexpected also came from the Lancaster project. The children all came from a very poor neighborhood. It turned out that some of them could not recharge their phone during the evening because their parents had pre-paid electricity …
And a final fact during the conference in another presentation: more than 60% of the mobile searches are for adult content: why does it not surprise me anymore …
We all know we have to be very careful with energy due to the warming up of our planet, dependency on energy from areas in the world you do not want to be dependant on and other reasons. But we also know that it is very hard to find the incentives to stimulate people to save energy here and now. Problem is that there is too much of a time lag between the action to save energy and the advantages acquired.
Recently I held a key note presentation at the conference “Greening the enterprise 2.0“, focused on how to save energy in office environments. Especially in offices it is hard to stimulate people to save energy because they do not have to pay the energy bill themselves. Automatic systems are usually circumvented (people open windows in completely controlled buildings because the intelligent control mechanism for temperature is less intelligent than the maker thought) and therefore seldom delivers the result that we think of beforehand.
And people are lazy. The picture on this post is from my own re-chargers in my office. I once placed a switch there to switch of the electricity. But after two cases of dead batteries that I needed at that moment I always have it switched on.
Focus of my presentation was how to use social networking aspects to stimulate people to save energy. By sharing best practices but also by more direct feedback on individual actions and results (and some peer pressure maybe …).
Here are the sheets.
While scanning through some of the articles I missed during the holiday season (you really do not need a computer on a terras in Barcelona eating Tapas and drinking wine) I came across this Article from Nicholas Carr (Is Google making us stupid). Central them of the article is that due to jumpy way we read on the Internet (following another link after some paragraphs of reading) our way of thinking may be changing. More and more it is becoming difficult for a lot of people to concentrate on long texts, let alone long books like war and peace.
I do think this is a risk we are facing at the moment. In workplace research there is something that is called Attention Deficit Disorder. What it means is that people are so accustomed to browsing and wandering of a subject, checking mail all the time, reacting to chat and other disruptions that in the end they are not capable anymore of creating things that need concentration for a longer time. They are reacting instead of acting. I myself can sometimes feel this way: you have to force yourself to stay away from email and chat for several hours do finish something that you really have to think about.
A lot of our philosophical heritage is coming from people that were accustomed to do a lot of thinking without interruption. Of course, Plato and Socrates had little choice without broadband Internet available to them… What does this fragmented way of collecting information and maybe the resulting fragmented way of thinking lead us to in the future?
There definitely are positive aspects too. Now it is much easier to connect different information parts because they are all easy to find, or somebody else already connected them for you.
At the least this new way of reading and its consequences for our way of thinking is something we need to take into careful consideration when designing our new tools for the workplace.
Interesting read and food for thought. Do not forget to read the whole lengthy(?) article …
One of the most fascinating developments there are at the moment at the workplace is I think the use of social networking tools. What can ben seen in several reports is that the use of social networking tools (for example to find the right person for a task) is growing rapidly within companies (Funny thing is that in many cases this is happening completely below the radar of the IT department). The tools are used for example to find the right person with the right expertise as close by in your network as possible. Directly based on previous work done by people like reports they wrote, memberships of communities, questions they answered etc. Maybe even based on the emails you sent to specific people though in this respect there are of course issues on privacy that we have to deal with
IBM is developing some quite interesting applications around lotus connections dealing with social networking. Recently they have developed a tool called Atlas that is capable of showing you your network, how it relates to the subjects you are dealing, with and how to reach people. Important is that this information is also showed in relation to the company structure and (other) communities.
What I especially like about developments like these is that it gives the individuals in an organisation the power to create their own network besides the structure of the organisation. Links are being made that work instead of links that are made to control power (or am I being naive and will it still be used to do that?). I think due to the transparancy it will give the individual more power to reach his goals based on achievement instead of organisational position. People can create their own organisation that supports their work within the overall organisation. This leads to fascinating possibilities.
Of course their are lots of questions on how this will work. How do we deal with privacy, will the organisation not use the transparency to discipline people instead of giving them more freedom. What is the role of management in structures like these?
This morning I wrote about social networking and all the good things it may bring us. Stay in contact, meet old friends and things like that. After that I received this email from plaxo. One of my freinds, John will have his birthday on December 14th. Nice to get a reminder (I am terrible at reminding things like that) but where will this bring us? My first idea was: hey we could automate this and send the card by itsel so you will never forget another birthday. I can imagine being called by a friend: He Martijn, thanks for your card. Me: What card, what for?
I wonder where this will lead us …
And John, in case I forget: happy birthday …. 
One of the area’s of research from Telematica Instituut is using technology to determine the context of people. For example where you are, who you are with, what is your mood, what are you doing. This context is very usefull input for a lot of other things like recommendation (when you search for a restaurant to dine with you new girlfriend and value my opinion you do not want to use my recommendation of a restaurant I liked because it is so nice for the kids). So context is king for lots of new “social” applications.
For this we have created a new application called IYOUIT (meaning I, You and It). This is an application for mobile phones (Symbian S60) and constantly monitors your context and shares this with your friends. Recently this tool is made available to all. Have a look at it. It uses only the standard phone sensors (GSM signal, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS if available) to determine things like location, who is close and such.
One of the things this also shows is the power of “mashup programming”. The application uses all kinds of readily available applications. Google Maps of course but also weathersites. Why measure local temperature (and be dependent on extra hardware sensors) if you can find the local temperature based on your location data on a existing weather site?
It is amazing how fast social networking is growing. Every time I am giving a presentation I always ask my audience how many people use one or more social networking sites like Facebook, MySPace, Hyves, LindedIn or another. Since a year this percentage is growing from 20% to more than 70% nowadays. I think especially business oriented sites like LinkedIn made social networking more “salonfähig” than before.
Social networking is I think an area where the idea of “the rich get richer” is especially true. After all, once you have many customers you tend to have more people sending invitation and there is more chance that people send invitations to you. One would expect that only some big sites remain and that newcomers have a hard time growing.
Therefore it is surprising that a new one, Plaxo, is really flooding my e-mail box. Many contacts have send me an invitation. After 10 invitations I decided to take a look, make an account and start using it too. I was a bit weary for this since using lot’s of sites is awkward, I thought.
But I must say this is a sticky one. Firstly they are very easy to link to your existing social networking site like LinkedIn. Secondly they use something they call “pulse”. On plaxo you can fill in the blogs you write, the photo sites you use and all other exhibitionist’s methods and they are shown in a log to all your contacts. This resulted in several comments on the photo you see above, I did not realize that it would be shown to all (welcome to the world of total transparency). Before I wrote about small world networks. One of the effects I see by using Plaxo is that you can see that lots or your contacts make contact with people you also know (and since you see this in the “pulse” you immediately connect to them too …).
One of the interesting developments in social networking is OpenSocial from Google, used by Plaxo too. Google failed miserable with Orkut and other social tools they developed. So they decided to create an API that makes it possible to integrate all social sites in an easy way. And thereby minimizing the advantage you have by having lots of members since everything integrates easily. And thereby minimizing your disadvantage when you have failed miserably in creatign you own social site. You have to admire them…
I came acros this interesting article about the value of clicks on adds on the Internet. Since advertising is beginning to look (Seem) like the holy grail to keep the Internet free for use it is amazing how little data there is on how and why people click on adds and what the real effects are. The following result out of the study is interesting:
What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.
Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
Seems a lot of research is needed to really understand how the relation between audience, click rate and real economic effects will be clear.
I came across this article in the paper on Saturday about the fact that civil servants are adding and changing information on Wikipedia during working hours. Some time ago I blogged about the Wikiscanner and of course one can see more and more how important transparency is. There have been numerous cases where with the help of the wikiscanner people have been found out while trying to create their own truth …
However, the question is how are we going to deal with this transparency. Of course ciivil servants also use the Wikipedia during working hours and of course they sometimes also change information. Just like people in companies and people at home. Wherever we are we still remain individual human beings. One of the effects of Web 2.0 is that the different roles we have are more and more blending together. At all times of the day we are private person, employee, citizen, husband and father and can switch easily between all these roles.
Somehow we have to learn how to deal with this transparency. The fact that information came from a computer within a public department has nothing to do with the department. By locking the access to Wikipedia only image may be gained but civil servant will lose access to important information. We have to accept the fact that also aberrations are visible.
Before they existed also and we knew they did, now we can see they do.
I came across this post from David Cohn about crowdsourcing beat journalism. Local journalist of course normally have their network within the area they publish about. But how much more interesting might this become if you know how to make this network much more involved in the news and each other.
The same, in a way, counts for policemen. Especially community policeman need to have a strong social network in order to receive the subtle but important information on what is really going on in their district. But for quite some years it can be seen that policemen tend to have less social ties to the community they are serving. Most policemen do not live in the city they are working, are not member of the local football club and do not attend the local bar. Also the local policeman spends a lot of his time at the office.
Because of this we need to find new ways to connect the policeman to his local community. Social software has a great potential to deliver by connecting the policeman to a broad network of citizens that do have a intricate understanding of what is happening and have a strong interest in helping the police.
One of the ideas might be to let the local policeman write a blog. In this blog he can write about the major (public) issues he encounters and citizens can react by supplying extra information or commenting on it. This would be a way to actively help the local cop with information based on the priorities he states. You know the information matters and it gives a low threshold to supply it. In a way this looks a bit like a local cop in small town. Here the distance from the cop and the social community is small. In big cities this distance has grown but I think social software will lead to new strategies to cross that distance.
Connected cops …
Some times it surprises me in a way how little things have changed. This week we had our network event where many of our customers join us for dinner and some interesting conversations. This time we organized it in the museum of communication. Before the meeting they gave a short tour and showed us an old telephone switchboard. You know, where they had to connect phone calls by wiring connections by hand.
Funny thing is , there were two features that already existed for a long time: voicemail and teleconference. When somebody was not reachable you could leave a message at the operator who would call the person at a later time. Also creating a teleconference call was easy but just wiring the different connections together. Pretty impressive 
.
Other functions that caught my attention: they checked if a line was busy by touching the connection in the switchboard with a plug: when they saw a small spark the connection was busy. Connecting somebody from Groningen to Maastricht worked a bit like a router through gateways: they connected to the next switchboard, they connected to the next switch board etc. Pretty failsafe since switches could easily fall while other routes could still be used. Though it did take half an hour to setup this connection, more than 8 hours for a foreign connection…
Rogier sent me this link. Especially this part was kind of icky:
The man made a note, did some clicking. “You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail.”
Greg felt a spasm in his guts. “You’re looking at my searches and e-mail?” He hadn’t touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.
“Sir, calm down, please. No, I’m not looking at your searches,” the man said in a mocking whine. “That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching.
“We do not look at your searches but at the add”. Somehow this statement gives me the shivers.
PS This is the link to their site, this is the link how to contribute money, this is the link how to contribute money and energy and here they explain why you can be 100% sure that all money will end up for research.
Sometimes you do things that energize you. Sometimes you meet people that, through their drive and energy, lift you up and give you energy. Even wish you could do more.
As Telematica Instituut we are working together with the people from Alp D’huZes to improve the life of people with cancer. About two years ago some people, among them Coen van Veenendaal en Peter Kapitein, started to think about ways to improve the life of people with cancer. Peter has been diagnosed with cancer in 2005. Their goal is to become the largest sponsor of the KWF, the Dutch cancer fund. Their means: by cycling up and down the Alp D’huez paid for by sponsors. Not once but six times in a row. The first year they gathered € 350.000. The second year, 2007, they cycled up and down the Alp D’huez again with 140 people, 7 times in a row. I think something you can only do when you are really motivated through and through. This year they gathered more than one million euros for the KWF. The project we are setting up with them is to monitor and support people with cancer after treatment. Since cancer more and more becomes a chronic disease it is becoming important to support the people that live with cancer. Sport is a good way to feel better and stay active. Goal is to activate people by improving the communication between the patients and people treating them through, amongst others, virtual communities.
It is not just the fact that they are crazy enough to go up and down a considerable mountain but it is the drive and energy they have to accomplish their goal. On the mountain and towards the companies that sponsor them. Listening to their stories I think everybody feels compelled to contribute. The motto is “giving up is not an option”. Heroes…
All people are created equal, but some make a difference.
I read this post at salesforce:
Salesforce.com is considering bringing to market a new service enabling companies to share leads, opportunities and custom objects with each other (assuming both are using salesforce.com). What would you call this service?
If you have another name suggestion please post it in a comment.
This seems a rather interesting application of Web 2.0 sharing of information. Companies sharing leads in a network through their CRM system. There are of course a lot of questions like how do you protect your leads against competitors, how easy it is to create rules how to share and such. But still, the idea has a huge potential I think.
I am member of a guidance committee for Rathenau instituut in the Netherlands for a project about privacy. In this project we deal with the changing concept of privacy in our society. I talked about it some time ago in this post. It still amazes me how much people put on the net (including what I put on the Net, look at the sidebar of this Blog).
In this project a special website has been developed that invites people to comment on privacy, discuss and share all kind of ideas in a creative way around this subject (the website is www.privacyproject.nl). The information on the side ranges from exhibitionists to people putting an image of their passport on the web to people completely hiding how they look in real life. In the end a television documentary will be made out of it.
There is one item on the site that is I think very interesting. A colleague of mine, Rogier Brussee, has a conspiracy their for some time that Google is in fact a front for the NSA. Funny thing is if you look in the history of Google that they got quite large initial funding in order to pay for all the servers they needed to store all their data. Without it Google would not be able to show how good they are. But at this moment there really was not even a beginning of a business model. So his theory is that the NSA is the one that funded it (this is the organization with one of the largest budgets in the USA so funding 30 million dollar is mere noise to them). Their strong emphasis on “Don’t be Evil” of course fits nicely into this idea…
Just look at what Google knows of you:
An of course, items like google apps enhance the knowledge about you by knowing what you are writing (though you would have sent it out with Gmail so they would have known anyhow.
Looking at this amount of data they have about a lot of people must the the ultimate dream of the NSA. Looking at the video below it is clear that more people are beginning to be suspicious.
Though I must say that I am totally addicted to Googe: Gmail, Calendar, Apps, Psearch, Scholar, and probably lots of others I use but do not know they are Googles (I use a very nice ToDo app that for all I know may be a front for Google (who is a front for …). I use them all because I like how they work (Hey Google, when are you going to develop this ToDo application, and when you are at it, why can’t I synchronize with my phone through SyncML…. If you do that you also know who I am calling).
I just hope they are not Evil…..
When I start to work on something new the first thing you do is find a lot of information about the subject you are going to deal with. However, information only gets you started. In order to really understand a subject it is essential to talk to people that have dealt with it before. You can read a wall of books on how to cure diseases but there is no substitute for a talk with the real expert. In every field the amount of knowledge to make the right decisions is so vast, you simply can not write everything down.
In the past I did a project for bakery’s and my task was to write down how they make the bread. One of the issues was how we could describe the moment the dough is ready to be laid down to rest. Terms like stickiness, feel, elasticity and many others where mentioned but there was no way to get a good description to tell someone knew when it was OK. The only way to learn this was to work together with an expert and be shown how it was to be done.
(this reminds me of a story from Winnie the Pooh. Someone asks Winnie what he likes most in the world. And he thinks in his mind that honey of course is very nice. But the moment just before eating the honey, that was the best….. but he did not know the word for this moment.
For me this leads to the conclusion that we can not rely on written information to understand the complexities of real life. We need the knowledge and interpretation of experienced people to understand what it means.
There I think there are quite some risks in a project like “kindbeeld”, a government project in the Netherlands where all information regarding a child is stored in a system so it is easier to see when something goes wrong, even though the child has moved quite often (the idea is a nationwide implementation). When we all lived our lives in the same villages there was no need for such a system since people knew each other. But the risk with a system like this is that people using this information will give a totally different interpretation of what is meant.
In a project we did some time ago we did not provide people with the information itself but gave back the contact information of the people that wrote down this information. The idea is that it is better to call these people and really get their opinion than to misinterpret the written words.
People (and children …) are a lot more complex than making bread. We should be careful not to overestimate the power of information without context.
I think the most interesting new adaptations of technology are the ones that make clever combinations of the real and digital world. You might say the ones that live in symbiosis, where the digital world feeds on the physical world and vice versa.
Second Life I do not like since it merely involves the digital realm. Meeting somebody from a discussion group in real life creates great physical meetings and makes the discussion later on more interesting, knowing the other person also in real life.
At the moment I am talking to an organisation involved in the safety sector. Practice for them is extremely important. Problem for them is that practice in real life is difficult and expensive. Not all situations can be created in real life (too costly or physically so destructive that it can not be done). On the other hand practice in the digital world does not feel real. It is hard to substitute loud noise, a roaring fire and wind and many people putting pressure on you. In a game you also can get the adrenaline working but different …
The idea of the project is to set up an environment where digital and physical practice is completely intertwined. A group of policeman can be training in a special trainings village while their physical coordinates are transferred to a simulation environment. The commander can than command the real people who are training as well as digital troops. These two world you might say feed on one another, like the fish help the turtle to stay clean buy picking of the algae and getting a good meal by doing it.
I always love to look at people their bookcases when I visit them. It normally tells quite a lot about someone what books they have collected over the years (and read of course).
Therefore it is quite interesting to see how sites like LibraryThing try to connect people by collecting information about the books you have read and how you tag them. This information is than used to connect people, get recommendations based on others input and yours. And of course show of your library on you blog (you guessed right, look in the left lower corner 
.
I wonder what yo can conclude by looking at the latest books I have read.
In a post from “The long tail” a small movie director has written an interesting e-mail to Chris Anderson.
But the reality at this time for me and my company is that I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game. And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis. In short, I am a much smaller and more struggling version of the giants that have preceded me.
Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom. Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.
The general idea of the e-mail is that the long tail with niche content is nice for the consumer but that it is hard for the producer. Fundamentally there are only a few customers in the long tail so it is hard to make money for producers. Since when you produce it takes almost the same amount of time and money to make a blockbuster than to make a niche product. It is a great niche product when you have three really dedicated fans but how much money will you make.
Most of the success stories in the long tail are from distributors for whom it does not matter what item they sell since their business model is based on the total amounts of all products sold together (in the end they are all bits on a platter). And fact is that due to small world effects it is the big “hub-distributors” that are getting bigger and bigger. This might mean that in the end we end up with only a few and powerful distributors since they are the only one with a large enough audience to make your niche product profitable. Somehow that has a familiar smell to it…
Bill sent me this article that describes how voters have a systematic bias regarding some economic effects. The article questions the fact that voters in general have a bias for anti-market, anti-foreign, anti-efficiency loss of work and a pessimistic outlook. This systematic bias of course would lead to bad decisions since the errors do not even out. The stupidity of the crowds.
Though I think part of the bias is not completely false due the following reasons:
Not all companies are rational too. Look at some of the big mergers in the world where the merger is probably more driven by the ego of the winning CEO than by economical motives. Most large mergers fail
But still, there certainly is a tendency to underestimate the power of the unexpected. I recently have read a book called the Black Swan. A black swan is something that can not be predicted (expect the unexpected). The analogy is based on the fact that before Australia was discovered everybody (except the Aboriginals) thought that all swans are white. But the discoverers found to their amazement that in Australia there is a swan like bird that is black. In general people are not prepared for completely unexpected things to happen.
It is a bit like being a turkey. Everyday you get a nice meal so after some time you expect the future to be like all the previous days, however conspiracy driven turkey you are. So Christmas really comes as a surprise.
Crowds are often are bad at taking these unexpected events into consideration. But these unexpected events often create big changes in society. Of all the technology that is of major importance 20 years from now we only see about 50%. The other 50% we can not take into account since it does not yet show on our radar screen.
For the design of iCrowds this has big implications. On the one hand it shows that there is a limit to the intelligence of crowds and on the other hand how information sharing across the network is important.
A community of turkeys may find out that some of their cousins are mysteriously disappearing and will expect the unexpected …
