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Posts Tagged ‘Social Interaction’

Microsoft rumored to be working on integrating Xbox Live and Windows Mobile

Bill Gates promised years ago that you would be able to enjoy shared experiences between Xbox Live online games, Windows PC games, and Windows Mobile phones. Xbox Live and Windows games were integrated into games such as Shadowrun in 2007

But the Windows Mobile part never happened. Now it looks like Microsoft is moving forward with the integration of Xbox Live into Windows Mobile cell phone software. A job posting confirms that the company is seeking a principal program manager who would be responsible for bringing “Xbox Live enabled games to Windows Mobile.”

The posting suggests that Microsoft wants to integrate avatars, the cartoon-like characters that users can create to represent themselves on Xbox Live. Integrating social interaction and multiscreen experiences are also on the list. Another tipster tells us that you will be able to sign into an Xbox Live account from a Windows Mobile phone, send or receive messages from friends on the Xbox Live service, send Tweets or Facebook status updates, view and buy things on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and view all of your gaming achievements.

Clearly, Microsoft has to do something. Through its own inaction, it has allowed both Apple and Google to race ahead of it in mobile phones. Windows Mobile 6.5 launched in October, but it didn’t seem to gain Microsoft any new friends in the mobile space. Next year, Windows Mobile 7 is expected to be a better contender with Apple’s iPhone/AppStore juggernaut.

Xbox Live, which has tens of millions of subscribers thanks to the success of multiplayer gaming on the Xbox 360, is Microsoft’s strongest service in games. It’s only logical that the company leverages that strength to help improve the struggling Windows Mobile platform. Microsoft has said tha tit will show off the Windows Mobile 7.0 platform to developers at its Mix conference in mid-March. We’ll see if Microsoft discloses anything new on the subject at CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Shows on Wednesday.

[photo illustration credit: Engadget]

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Social Media? No Way. Social Middleware? Oh, Yes

In the world of IT, social buzz words can be a real way to kill any interest in adopting applications that give the enterprise access to the consumer Web.

You have to speak their language. Social media? No way. Social middleware? Oh, yeah – now we are talking!

Socialware talks in language that IT can understand. The company is offering social middleware products that help companies integrate social networks with a level of control that makes them comfortable that the access is compliant with government regulations and IT policies.

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In many ways, companies have set up their own iron curtains to keep social interaction to a minimum.

It’s also fair to say that many companies are eager to let their employees engage with the social web. But they want the risk managed, especially when it comes to interacting with social networks.

Socialware believes the missing component for the enterprise is a bridge layer that helps companies connect its people, processes and systems with the open, social web.

Socialware offers feature access control to social networks. An admin panel allows the IT manager to block access to different features on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

For example, users may access LinkedIn but there may be features that the employee is not permitted to access. The feature is flagged with a message that tells the user they do not have permission to use it.

Socialware provides the security layers and controls that give corporate IT the comfort that the risk in exposing social networks can be managed with rules that reflect the policies of the organization.

Socialware is funded by Mike Maples, Jr., who is an investor in Twitter. They are also funded by Silverton Partners and G51. The management team have backgrounds in Web 2.0 and the enterprise.

That’s a mix which can make for a winning combination in the enterprise space. Socialware’s technology is reflective of that experience. We’ll be interested in seeing how the company develops in the year ahead.

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Augmented reality startup Tonchidot raises $4 million, will use virtual goods for revenue

Finally, a decent fundraising round size for an augmented reality startup.

Tonchidot, the Japanese startup behind the augmented reality browser Sekai Camera, raised $4 million from DCM and existing investor ITOCHU Technology Ventures. Augmented reality is a young field that allows you superimpose data and graphics over the real world in a camera viewfinder.

There are two things that are interesting about this round — Tonchidot becomes the second of several augmented reality startups to raise a venture-backed round this year. It’s a decent size for a first round, and four times what Dutch competitor Layar raised this fall. Although a number of startups have launched products this year on the iPhone and Android-based phones, few venture capital firms had gotten their feet wet in the space. That seems to be changing now.

The second thing to note is that Tonchidot sounds like it will take a very different route to monetization than all of its competitors. It will use its augmented reality browser for more game play. Other competitors like Layar and Wikitude will take the advertising route, letting businesses pay for augmented reality tags or ads or sponsor layers in the browser that point to nearby places like fast-food locations or coffee shops.

Like many other mobile technologies, augmented reality will probably evolve very differently in Japan. Users can tag locations with data and comments in the browser that other people can pick up later if they use Sekai Camera in the same place. Ken Inoue, Tonchidot’s CFO, suggests that there might be special virtual goods that users pay to leave in different places.

“We think augmented reality provides a really interesting user interface, and a place to combine social interaction, marketing and content creation,” said Osuke Honda, a principal at DCM. Specifically, Honda says Tonchidot’s technology could be used to stage game play in the real world. For example, you could have robots battle each other through your phone on a real physical location like a playing field. Or it could be used in cosplay, a type of performance art popular in China and Japan where people wear elaborate costumes.

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Getting More Out of the Conversation: The Real Real-Time Challenge

It has been a few weeks since the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit. Workshops ran the gamut of real-time Web applications and services. They addressed the impact of the real-time Web on search, feeds, aggregation and even branding and marketing. But several topics and terms were not discussed as much as one might have expected: “social,” “interaction,” and “communication.” Perhaps they were assumed. But their absence from discussion spoke of something bigger; namely, our tendency to still view Web content, even real-time content, as information.

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This guest post was written by Adrian Chan.

Of course, communication involves information. Information access and distribution are part of what makes social media interesting. Information is also an attribute of social relationships — which are another good reason to respect social media. But the tools and practices of our “status culture” are also a means of communication; communication that uses social media in personal, social and public ways and that combines both system messaging and user messages in ways that are conversational.

Making Meta From Conversational Media

This “conversational” content may look like information. But when it is the product of mediated conversation, content conceals dynamics and relationships: social forces that are by their nature implicit and tacit.

The real-time Web industry is poised to go “meta” and to extract and extend greater value from the information captured, mined and repurposed in real time. But for this to occur, the implicit of social interaction and communication will need to become explicit.

Consider what we can already observe and infer from content and information produced on the real-time Web: influence, social capital, attention, relationships, trending topics. We accomplish this by means of algorithms and analyses based on incomplete social information. The real-time Web doesn’t yet furnish much social meta data. Could it be restored after the fact — from interactions, relationships and social meanings read between the lines?

The real-time Web’s conversational content is produced through uncoupled, or at best loosely coupled, posts. Can dialog, relationships and social structures be detected amidst monological posts?

The Content Is People. Long Live the Content!

Social media are the new means of production. We are no longer in the information age, but are now in the age of communication. And in this age, the attention economy may explain the disruptive impact of social media on established industries; industries, not coincidentally, built around the production and distribution of information — as well as control over its consumption.

Content is king. The content of the real-time Web is people. And yet the socialized Web is much more than a Web of, by and for the people. The social world is not flat, open and transparent. It has distinctions, boundaries, biases and preferences. It is also about who chooses, what is chosen, who is chosen, who replies and why.

Social Value Add

“People” content produces social information, and it is relevant because it reflects the social preferences, tastes and interests of individuals, groups and communities. Communication is how we produce this information; attention is how we consume it.

Real-time Web analytics and metrics already understand this. Influencer metrics count who chooses whom as well as what. Influence is contingent on the ongoing attention paid by an audience. It is not a quality owned or possessed by the influencer. It’s a relation between influencer and an “audience” willing to pay attention and help pass it forward. This is the medium’s power. That power is as much in social relations as it is in information and content.

Understanding what interests a user, by means of their contributions and activities but also by means of their relationships and social interactions, is at the heart of the value that the real-time social Web holds for brands and businesses (as well as the value that the user adds to their reputation and visibility). Attention spent in communicating reproduces brand value by redistributing it socially (and free of charge).

Social Context

The real-time Web is built on uncoupled posts. But many online social interactions are at least loosely if not densely coupled. This coupling restores some degree of social context (social information). It may reveal social relationships (relational information). The speed, reach and redistribution of tweets and updates expose social organization (attention information). And when observed and analyzed over time, changes in this activity can reveal persistent interests and relationships, as well as those that are changing (historical trends and predictive information).

Social contexts can be partially reconstructed out of other communication forms: chains, loops and circuits, clusters, clumps (and more). Satellite “conversations” fashioned from re-aggregated comments (see PubSubHubbub, Dave Winer’s RSSCloud and the new salmon protocol) will spark innovation in contextual analyses.

But all the social analytics in the world won’t work unless the architectural and data models can capture communication. If tools and applications can increasingly provide ways to communicate in ways that also expose social context, and if data-mining efforts are enhanced with models of social action, then the world of real-time social interaction will surface immensely valuable information indeed — at which point we may be able to say that in the midst of all this information, we are also better informed.

Adrian Chan is a social interaction design specialist and SNCR Sr Fellow. You can find him on Twitter @gravity7 and on his blog.

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Connecting Cognos and Lotus With Data, Mashups and Social Interaction

At the IBM Information on Demand conference, we asked Robert Ashe to sketch how he sees integration between the company’s business intelligence and collaboration technologies. What he shows is how business intelligence applications and Lotus products could connect business users through mashups and social interactions.

Ashe is a general manager at IBM who leads the company’s Business Intelligence and Performance Management efforts. He was CEO at Cognos before the company was acquired by IBM in 2007.

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[Disclosure: IBM paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the IBM Information On Demand Conference.]

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Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That’s Everywhere

Fifty years after its invention by the British Royal Navy for use by fighter pilots, the technology of layering information on top of our naked view of the world may cross over the line between science fiction and mass consumer experience as soon as next month. It’s widely believed that the operating system for the iPhone 3Gs will be updated this Fall, possibly in September, to allow developers to use the phone’s location awareness and internal compass to orient displays of information and imagery placed on top of the view through the camera.

“The internet smeared all over everything.” An “enchanted window” that turns contextual information hidden all around us inside out. A platform that will be bigger than the Web. Those are the kinds of phrases being used to describe the future of what’s called Augmented Reality (AR), by specialists developing the technology to enable it. Big questions remain unanswered, though, about the viability of what could be a radical next step in humanity’s use of computers.

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Let’s set aside for now questions about the desirability of Augmented Reality. Some people will be warry of its consequences for social interaction – even for spiritual practices already based on engaging with other layers of the world around us. Those questions deserve exploration, but the potential of AR is exciting enough that obstacles are worth discussing aside from objections. Augmented Reality is in some ways just another version of the Web; a web applied, through novel interfaces, in reference to the physical world, instead of floating documents tied only to eachother as the web is today.

Early Examples

Early examples that Google Android phone owners owners can use now and that all iPhone 3Gs owners will probably be able to use very soon include:

• Layar, a browser for layers of information about things like restaurant reviews and Wikipedia entries and Brightkite social network entries for places you point your phone at. Here’s the list so far.
• Wikitude, an AR wiki that displays collaboratively edited information about locations when you point your phone’s camera at a place.
  
• Acrossair’s Nearest Subway App

Not all work in Augmented Reality is going on in mobile phones, there are webcam marker-based implementations like ARSights and projector-powered experiments as well, but when AR comes to the iPhone that’s going to be a key turning point in popularizing the technology.

It’s very exciting to think about, but it might not work. Here are five of the challenges faced by the small but fast-growing industry of Augmented Reality.

Spam and Security

Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling gave a keynote talk at this Layar’s global launch event this month. His hour-long discussion of potential and pitfalls included in-depth warnings that security and spam will be major issues. Imagine being drowned in swarming icons for porn or pharmaceuticals! Imagine having your view of reality not just augmented but hacked and controlled by ill-intentioned people.

Sterling says it’s not a matter of if, but of when. If AR companies don’t prepare for this, they will be caught unaware and users will be turned off in a big way.

Social and Real-Time vs. Solitary and Cached

If AR experiences can be designed for people to experience them together, and if people in different places can touch each others’ experinces in real time – then AR is going to be a whole lot stickier. That presents serious technical challenges.

So will being able to show users rich information about things they point their phones at. Visions of rich AR are tempered by imagining the buffer time whenever a widely-used AR app is launched.

UX

The User Experience (UX) of AR presents no end of challenges as well. Social conventions are one factor. Why are you pointing your phone at me while we’re talking? “Because I want to see if a link to your Twitter profile will hover above your head.” Maybe not.

Joe Lamantia wrote a long post about UX design considerations for the future of AR and argues that the two primary questions at had are: what information will we turn inside-out from hidden context to presented interface layer? And can we find any better interfaces for viewing that information than we have today in the models that are available so far?

Interoperability

Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you’re looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like the 1990’s. It may not be obvious, it may not even be true, that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser.

Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)

Layar, the most high-profile AR consumer company on the market, says it’s in full support of interoperability. It has published its documentation publicly and co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald told us the following by phone today:

“I think it’s going to be very important. We’re open to talking to anybody and see what we can make happen. Anyone who creates a service on our platform can publish elsewhere. Our reach will be in installations and the content and that other parties are on there. We don’t do negative things. The lockins and exclusivity won’t work. Openness and interoperability are where it’s going, we’re going to discover how exactly with other people. I used to work with VRM and Doc Searls. That’s where it’s going, control to the user.”

Those are encouraging words, but Lens-FitzGerald says that no legal work has been done by his company to encourage an open development standard free of legal fears for developers.

Openess

The most exciting AR programs will be platforms that encourage other people to develop layers of content they then display. That’s the Layar model. Hundreds of companies are developing layers for that system on the Android mobile phone. Layar has said that content developers will be able to sell layers to users in the future – a Lonely Planet layer is something travelers might buy, for example.

What kind of standards will AR platforms have in deciding what layers their users can see? Is that the right question? Will we have Augmented Reality Neutrality? Or will will we have an AR version of the fickle, anachronistic, tiny despots of the iPhone App Store? I have a right to Augment my Reality with whatever information I want! “Not while you’re using our AR browser/network/handset etc.!” It’s not hard to imagine the coming of a Firefox for AR.

Layar says it will be that open platform. It may not remain the leader of this very young market, though.

Added value, social experiences, real-time information delivery, user experience, interoperability and openness – those are the problems of the web! So too goes the development of Augmented Reality, the web of everywhere.

It’s a lot of Wow and skepticism right now, but in the future it could be a thriving ecosystem of rich information about the world around us. Or it could be a closed, proprietary (literal) lense we view the world through – unable to change the way we view that world or see it as others do because our accumulated knowledge is trapped inside one platform and inaccesible from others. Or there could be a plague of spam that overwhelms our view-finder into our physical surroundings.

The future is being built now and smart people are tackling these problems.

This post is heavily indebted to GamesAlfresco, a great blog we just discovered that’s closely tracking AR. That’s where we found the title image, many of the links here and several of the videos. Big thanks to site authors Ori Inbar and Rouli Nir.

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