The future is already here, it’s just not worth distributing yet
In 1975 Kokak invented their first digital camera
In 1975, Steve Sasson of Kodak invented the first portable digital camera.
It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.
After taking a few pictures of the attendees at the meeting and displaying them on the TV set in the room, the questions started coming. Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach
They pitched it to the executives at Kodak as a “film-less camera”. Ouch. Talk about trying to sell the future of meteors to the dinosaurs. I’m sure many of you have been in that position before in your careers.
In any case, it took many many more years and advances in several other fields (personal computers, and most critically the consumer internet to share and display those pictures) before digital cameras could become a killer app.
The implication is that there could be lots of the future around us already. It’s just bottled up in variously ridiculous gadgets just awaiting a few more cycles of Moores Law and a few unexpected missing ingredients to become some future decade’s killer app. Imagining the future can sometimes be an exercise not in imagining inventions. The inventions could be here already. The leap is in imagining the catalysts, the future pains, the missing ingredients that will make those inventions fly.
This idea was at the heart of last year’s DemoCamp2019. It’s soon time to think about DemoCamp2020. Probably in November. So if you think you can think of the killer apps of 20 years hence, start thinking about it.
Why the hell don’t all cameras have SIM cards in them yet?
Camera makers still don't understand social media and the real-time web
It’s been half a decade or more since phones started getting cameras, and yet cameras still don’t have cell phone connections. WTF? To me this is classic case of industry disruption. An entrenched industry refuses to take seriously a disruptive new technology. Holding their noses high, no serious Photographer (with a capital P) would shoot on a “device” let alone share their pictures with the plebes before hours of painstaking processing back on the home PC.
Well obviously that’s not the way the world works anymore. Mobile devices still have tiny/crappy optics and whatnot, but they have rapidly become good enough for a large swath of the reasons people actually want to capture images. Mostly to share those images with other people, preferably right now when those images could be a lot more relevant that hours or days later. What the hell is wrong with Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus etc. for not doing some basic deals (aka Kindle, aka iPad) with some carriers and embedding 3G in every device.
I don’t think it’s an engineering problem. The baseband chips and electronics required are not that expensive. Put some 3G hardware in there, put some basic post-processing tools on the camera and get it done. What’s the hold up? Again, the smartphone makers have had it figured out for years.
When I leave the house I look a my lovely but beastly DSLR and think I bet I could take some lovely pictures with that. But in today’s world of in-the-moment social media, what’s the point if the DSLR has no way to post to twitter. Even Flickr now seems so 2006, like “hey everyone, come look at some stuff i was seeing a few weeks or years ago…”. I mean, beyond archiving and the artistry angle, what’s the point uploading old pictures?
I just don’t understand how the current generation of iPhones, Androids and Blackberries are not just going to steamroll the entire consumer segment of the camera industry.
photo credit: flowertrip
Teksavvy cable is *faster* than advertised
Teksavvy's new cable option rocks
You may remember my experiment a few weeks back with the worlds most desperate way to increase broadband speed while sticking with an indie ISP. (Previously: In Which Tom attempts to bond two DSL lines into single home internet pipe of great power like Voltron).
Well the folks fighting the good fight at Teksavvy (thanks Rocky) have finally been able to offer speeds faster than 5MBit in Ontario thanks to introducing a cable option. (Bell, fighting tooth and nail against regulations requiring them to share their network, has for years ghetoized Teksavvy and others to 5down 1up DSL service even while offering much faster speeds to their own retail customers).
For me the upside was to get 10Mb down, 1Mb up (with a healthy 200GB cap) service with ONE pipe, and ditch one extra dsm modem, one extra phone line, a whole mess of cabling and save about $30 a month.
So far I can say it’s a big success. In fact the connection is not even 10MBit, it’s faster!
Craziest thing I’ve ever heard of, an ISP that actually delivers faster than advertised speeds. We’ve come a long way.
Anyway, I thought you all should know this. And Teksavvy is cheap, $42/month for the 10/1/200GB plan. It’s also un-throttled or filtered.
Highly recommended. If you are currently on Teksavvy DSL, or any other basic broadband service, I’d recommend switching.
The only fatal flaw is the anemic 1MBit upload speed. I really wish more ISPs (looking at you Rogers) would get that shit sorted out so applications like cloud-based based storage, media sharing and computing would be vastly more practical. Right now your only decent option is Bells tempting but tightly capped and bracingly expensive fiber with the missing “r” service.
Apple related sentence of the day
Made me laugh anyway
In response to Apple become the world’s largest consumer of semiconductors (computer chips).
Apple, which already has a tendency to leapfrog competitors like a showboating amphibian, will overtake Samsung as a consumer of chips, Isuppli explained, as the fruit themed gadget flogger continues to order shedloads of them for its shiny offspring, the Ipad and Iphone.
LINK: Apple will gorge on semiconductors
See also all articles related to “fruit-themed toy maker…”
Augmented surveilance getting closer to reality
Billboards that check you out, ATMs that finger criminals
This week Toronto police proudly announced they would be using face recognition software to identify and catch G20 hooligans. In Tokyo this week, a company announced of new billboards that use cameras to recognize age/sex of passers by and serve-up demographically targeted advertisements. Having networked cameras passively watch us as we move through public spaces is certainly nothing new.
What is interesting to me about the Toronto police example is that they are tying together disparate image databases from both the public and private sector to personally identify suspects. Where you out there dancing on a smashed-up police cruiser in protest? Well certainly there’s going to be at least one high-res picture of you amongst the 89 thousand (!) #G20-tagged pictures uploaded to the internet (the 89k is just from flickr) or from one of the police’s own CCDTV cameras. And if you’ve, say crossed a border or used a bank machine any time in the last few years, your jig is up Mr. anarchist.
If we weren’t there already, we have reached that point where all electronic eyes are now belong to the government. In fact everytime we whip out our cell phone cameras, and everytime we check-in to some geolocative service, we are contributing to the cloud’s increasingly panoptical perspective of what’s going on in all places, all of the time. If connected, all the surveillance networks, all the checkpoints like border crossings and bank machines and all the self-volunteered social media activity can add up to one big all-seeing picture. From a civil liberties perspective you may have good or bad feelings about that.
But just imagine the marketing applications.
“hey there Jane! several public cameras noticed that you were window shopping for jeans at the mall last week, we recognized your face from your public facebook profile, how would you like this pop-up ad for Levis?”
I think, technically at least, Google could pull something off like that pretty easily.
Of course in Canada we have some pretty stern regulations on privacy. Except when required by law (ahem, see above) one cannot freely share/sell/trade personally identifiable information, not without express consent. But people being people, how many do you think would trade away some fundamental public privacy rights for that free slice of pizza, or great exciting (and eerily relevant) discount offers delivered anytime on demand to your mobile device?
photo credit: mdumlao98
Confessions of a tablet overly early adopter
A friend at lunch the other day showing off his iPad 3G brought back this wave of tender nostalgia.
For three years I too carried a tablet around. It was the tablet that time forgot (no not the newton), the original Microsoft full slate tablet PC. That’s me chewing on a tablet pc stylus in my longtime blog/twitter avatar.
The tablet was the ideal restaurant, couch or streetcar or meeting pc. Meetings or lectures with the tablet were a special case. Having a screen on your knee or flat on a table is a much less obtrusive way to have a screen open when someone is talking. Tablets reduce the social and physical investment required to use a computer, leading you to use a computer in more contexts, more of the time.
Despite hardware in some ways more advanced, there are some ways the old tablet didn’t come close to measuring up to the new iPad, the size and weight (3lbs, just a bit too heavy for comfort), the screen (same resolution but terrible contrast and viewing angles) and price. At the insane cost of ~$3000 it’s no wonder they didn’t sell like hotcakes. And, well, the app ecosystem.
You would have thought being able to run any windows app ever written would have been a good start. But the problem with MS Tablets was that they tried too hard to be seamless with desktop Windows without letting the tablet just try to it’s own, new thing. And that’s where the iPad really seems to shine in ways that Windows Tablet PC Edition never could be back in 2003. The iPad is a single purpose device. The iPad only tries to be what it is, a connected screen, a window on the cloud and a constellation of apps purpose-built for the form factor.
That’s not to say the MSTablet didn’t have some killer apps. Mostly thanks to it’s stylus (multitouch nearly 5 more years away). Photoshop and paint tools were unexpectedly a disaster. The poor screen quality made colors hard to judge while the slight parallax error of the stylus made sketching worse than it should have been. What did work amazingly well were mouse-intensive apps like powerpoint and excel. Without having to constantly switch from mouse to keyboard, laying out decks and whipping out excel models was a dream on a tablet. Try that on an iPad.
Microsoft Word, worked okay on a tablet but only in combination with voice recognition (the pen also making quick point and click corrections easy). For me this was important as I was getting over a nasty bout of RSI at the time. But as my arms improved, I found myself needing a “real” computer to get any real writing done.
The main risk I see of the iPad is the same problem I have with an iPhone vs a Blackberry. The screen-only-not-so-good-for-typing form factor risks turning us all in to predominantly consumers rather than creators of media. It’s no coincidence that soon after I started this blog, and a new business, that I inevitably ended my long experiment with tablets.
Inevitably, Michele and I will have to pick up an iPad. The question is whether we can hold out for the inevitably much improved v2 version next year. We’ll see how that goes.
You know, I do still have that old tablet pc kicking around someplace. It even sort of still boots up. Anyone out there wanna trade?
Where the heck is the ad-free “pro” version of streaming sports?
Listen broadcasters, I have money. I would willingly pay you money to shut off these ads.
Let me say this. I love being able to stream big events like the Olympics, the America’s cup or the world cup over the internet in HD. As someone who has dumped subscription cable years ago it is a godsend. Occasional glitches/hiccups notwithstanding, HD streaming is fantastic. And it feels like the future.
But omg the ads. This world cup is better than the olympics as the CBC has been at least reluctant to air ads while the match is in play. And inevitably, the same ads over and over again. Considering what possibly could they be earning in CPM of me. I am pretty sure that I’d be willing to pay 2 to 10 times that amount for the convenience of whatching the whole games or whole worldcup ad-free. And I think that amount would still be cheap.
Ads are an increasingly tough way to make money online. If they are going to survive, the broadcasters and content producers need to get on the ball of monetizing their viewers directly. Especially in cases where those viewers are literally brandishing their credit cards at the screen lamenting why won’t you bastards take my money?
Thomas Purves
is a technology designer, futurist and sometimes entrepreneur living in the great city of Toronto. Thomas not currently available for hire (though you are always welcome to try).
