The latest step in this direction is the release of Microsoft Kinect, one of the most brilliant pieces of engineering in my recent memory. Like something straight out of Minority Report, it turns your body into human computer controller – it recognizes your face for security, accepts voice commands and captures your body movements allowing you to navigate the screens by waving your hands.  And while the technology is still new and the games choice limited  (dance game being the best), it is easy to see the endless possibilities it offers to creative developers. Microsoft left the device open to external uses via USB port and recently released the SDK for developers. MIT Engineers already created several projects – one mimicking Minority Report navigation, other using Kinect as a sensor for the robot.

It is too early to predict all possible future uses of this technology, but at least I can say that gaming industry has finally given us a new, revolutionary form of Human-Computer Interaction. Get it if you want to peek into the future!

But with the introduction of iPhone, iPad and the App Store and now Google’s own Android and Windows 7  Phone, the landscape is changing. Now, when looking for information,  instead of powering up a heavy, questionably portable device, designed to do everything from scientific work to web browsing,  you have a truly portable device that is always on, knows where you are and with the touch of the thumb can give you all the information you need, where you need it.

If you exclude aimless web browsing (which is in decline, based on latest stats), there are surprisingly limited number of things you NEED on a regular basis. Limited enough that they can fit on a scrollable screen of a portable device: Flixter for movies, Yelp for restaurants, WagJag for deals, News app for your favorite paper…

Google as a search engine is everything to everyone and will never offer the experience of the specialized recipe or movie app – while the open, chaotic web is Google friendly, mobile space, highly tuned to utility and everyday use, is brand friendly. Device applications are breathing new life into traditional brand marketing. Whichever brand makes it to users limited screen space on a mobile device will get the most of the users eyeballs. Google will be there for the rest of obscure searches. Google understands that and is actively playing in the space. Unfortunately, licensing agreements under which they distribute Android will not give them the same monopoly they enjoyed on the open web.

That is where I see the paradigm shift and disruption happening, between multi-purpose computers (devices of the past) and the new, utility tuned devices. What effect it will have on the online world, we will have to wait and see…

To be clear, I am talking about the beginning of the end of the  generic multi-purpose computer (desktop or laptop – with OS, hdd, keyboard, mouse, AntiVirus, Disk Defragmenter etc.) as the main consumer information device.  In the past, there was a reason to combine all computing activities into one generic device (high cost of computing devices, constant race in capabilities and speed, need to have data, app logic and presentation in one place etc.). But that reason is disappearing quickly. Computing power needed for the client is cheap and data and heavy duty applications are moving to the cloud – allowing lightweight client to move closer and follow the consumer and his habits, not vice versa.

And that may be the key differentiator between computers and consumer appliances: I don’t have to be where the computer is and learn its behavior – the device follows me and is tailored to fit my habits, depending where I am.

Real eye opener came to me one evening as I was working on the computer and decided to make a break and go to see a movie. Without thinking, although I had internet right in front of me on the screen, I got up, went to another room took my iPhone and fired up Flixter to see what is playing nearby. It was just easier – with two touches of a thumb, my mobile appliance showed me theaters near me, movies playing, with reviews from users and several magazines; even had a button to buy the ticket right there. And walking back from the theater I used the same app to review and rate the movie and share the post on Facebook. All packaged and tailored to the specific need of a moviegoer. Compare that to: opening a browser – Start, Program Files,  Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, typing http://… I don’t even want to think about it.

So while all devices consumers will be using in the future will be some sort of computers, none will be called the COMPUTER (excluding, of course most, but not all, devices used at workplace).  In addition to iPhone/iPad as reading/navigation devices and the movie case above, best place to display the recipe is not on the computer, but on the LCD of the stove itself. And while we’re at it – why not let the recipe to control the temperature and cooking time .  The cloud of information will continue to grow but so will the number of channels for consuming the data.

With all the (deserved) hype, iPad is leading the way and continuing where the iPhone started, but the stakes are high and this is just the beginning. Google and Microsoft are not going to sit still and advancement of HTML5 will level the playing field for any touch screen device, regardless of brand. Exciting times are ahead…

Twitter is still growing strong, to my surprise – I thought it would have flattened by now as the new cool thing would show up for new media gurus to jump on. But the mainstream always lags behind pioneers by couple of years. That explains why Facebook is seeing biggest growth this year (2 years after it exploded in Toronto and about a year after I stopped using it on a daily basis), despite lack of any new groundbreaking features except for Facebook Connect. And while Facebook will continue to grow and be part of every household, like email, my jury on Twitter is still out , despite the fact that you cannot engage into conversation about Internet or media without the mention of it. I am still not convinced – I may be wrong but sometimes taking bold predictions and being dead wrong is also fun.

Social Media Everything… I’ll dedicate one line to it, because there are some good things and lot of crap and it’s a separate topic anyways.

Cloud computing continued to grow this year, although the mainstream penetration and adoption is slower than expected. Azure, Amazon and Rackspace have added features (Google Apps has been quiet this year). Cloud based productivity apps were growing as expected but it will be years before businesses start relying on cloud for their core business infrastructure.

Apple – continued to deliver stylish products, but no revolutionary things this year,  iPhone is a hard act to follow, unless next year they finally release device I’ve been waiting for over a year now (see last year’s post) – iPad

Microsoft – finally has a decent OS – Win7, active cloud development  Azure and new versions of Office, SharePoint and .NET 4 in the works, slated for next year. None of these should be reason for celebration as they are existing MS revenue sources and won’t take MS into the next decade as a leader. But MS did manage to make big splash in the news with its new promising search engine:

Bing made a little scare in the Google world this year as it was, to everyone’s surprise, actually decent product. This immediately started talks about challenge to Google etc. I think they are still light years behind in terms of mind share and the know how (not so technologically, but  in the knowledge you constantly acquire and evolve by serving 70% of worlds searches). But with acquisition of Yahoo search, Bing will gain more of the market share and the insight into the large volume search data, that will potentially help them improve the engine further. All of this is good, since it will force Google to innovate again (last year I compared Google to IE6 – not having any serious competition, their search innovation almost stopped). Heating up of competition is particularly good since last year’s promising search technologies, like semantic search, failed to make any mayor impact this year.

Google – almost always warrants a post of its own, but I’ll squeeze couple of thoughts in a paragraph:

Active and innovating, as usual, providing mix of:

Good new or improved services:Google Docs and Google Sites have improved greatly and will become significant player in corporate arena soon, Android, first legitimate competitor to iPhone – at least in feature by feature comparison, way behind in everything else. It will still heat up the mobile race.

And a couple of not so great starts, that nevertheless received raves from tech trend followers and guru wannabes, just because they came out of Google:

Chrome OS – I love Chrome Browser and use it all the time. And I use cloud service for everything good enough for my needs, not by comparing them feature by feature with desktop products. But I will move to the cloud when the services are ready, not when the browser/os limits my other choices. Linux is free and has a free browser that can access all features that Chrome OS can, yet consumers didnt flock to it, because they still need the polish/responsiveness offered by commercial OS-es – Win7 and Mac OSX. When web apps catch up, people will move to the cloud and the browser, with or without Chrome OS. Stripped down Linux limited with single browser will certainly not be the driver.

Google Wave – something is wrong when many people desperately ask questions like “Tell me why this awesome new Google product is so awesome. I am obviously stupid, since I don’t get it’s usefulness and greatness and how it is making my life better”. Emperor’s new clothes, someone?

This is all I can think of in terms of technology in 09 – maybe I was too focused and immersed in my current job – (building organization and the product around our hosted CMS product for large media companies – http://www.topscms.com), and maybe I missed some things. But based on the above, I’d have to say that Twitter was the clear winner in terms of mind share and activity around it as well as based on the influence it’s making not only to other technologies but media in general. Contrary to my predictions (for now), but I have to acknowledge the facts

L8r

d.

So I did what I usually do when I cannot find something on any Microsoft site – I went to Google, typed “twitter bing” and the first result that came up was bing.com/twitter – the page I was looking for: with full, real time twitter search and very innovative interface that combines twitter trending topics, tweets and pages that tweets refer to via short URLs.

How embarrassing is this to Microsoft? What is the point of all good work that Bing engineers did if the new great feature you are talking about CANNOT BE FOUND ON YOUR OWN SEARCH ENGINE?? I had to go to Google to find it! It’s less the question about technology, and more about philosophy – Google is the search company at the core – they think like the consumer – finding things quickly and reliably is essential. Microsoft is the old school technology company – for them launching a feature is the goal – they’ll rely on their Marketing department to communicate to users where to find (or download) the feature.

So, I’ll take on the challenge by offering my 2c on Twitter: Last year I was jokingly predicting the demise of Twitter in favor of the next big thing called “nanoblogging” – single character status update platform, more to illustrate the volatility of current trends than to point to any new one.  I was obviously wrong about Twitter (for now), so this may be the opportunity to expand more seriously on why I think it’s position is volatile:

Unlike Facebook, which permanently stores lot of useful historic data about the users and their friends and serves as a sort of address book/social diary on steroids, Twitter is exclusively about now – even a six hour old tweet is outdated and almost unintelligible without context. As such, twitter is completely dependent on people using it all the time. It works well for now, as it is the fashion of the day. But inevitably new fashions will come and the “in” people will move on to the next big thing – there’s only so much you can do on the web at the same time. And while Facebook will contain useful info even after periods of inactivity (birthdays, wedding photos, friend’s contact info),  silence of users is the death sentence for Twitter.  So unless Twitter transforms into some kind of automated updates of people’s web activity across services, I simpy cannot see the entire world glued to it forever on a daily basis in order to keep it alive.

Although the title of this post is about Social Media, I’ve only touched briefly on Twitter. I’d love to expand on other services, but I just don’t have the time (nor the attention span) – blogging is so 2006, I’m off to Twitter now .

Year from now I’ll look back at this post and either confirm the predictions or analyze where I went wrong – I’ll enjoy both equally, as in the end – it’s the discovery and learning that matters

l8r

d.

Given that I work in Interactive Media, my focus will be on the technologies affecting that field. So, here is the list:

Touch Screen, large display mobile devices will replace computers as primary Internet information retrieval devices within 2-3 years:

iPhone was the killer app and with with wi-fi coverage and 3G adoption growing, and iPhone clones popping up every day(BlackBerry, Android, Palm,  Symbian, Windows Mobile?), large touch screens will become mainstream and this post-desktop/laptop interactive world will explode like Facebook did 2 years ago.

Users will adopt them quickly and happily – there’s not much learning curve in switching from using 10 fingers and a mouse on a 6lb brick to using a thumb on a pocket device. In fact, I believe there is high probability that mobile OS-es like iPhone and Android will start showing up as an option on consumer laptops.

All the information you need will now really be at your fingertip and advertisers will have to adopt as it will be much more difficult to squeeze in all those display ads from regular browser pages.

Single Login:

Users don’t want separate user id, password and profile pic for every site they need to register on, but they also don’t want the same id for job searching as for sharing party photos with friends.

There have been several false starts in this area – Microsoft’s Passport (in retrospect, visionary) 10 years ago and Sun’s response to it (Liberty Alliance). Most recently OpenID – despite endorsements by all big players OpenID’s adoption has been disappointing – partly because it’s still complicated, people don’t understand it, and partly because it only offers single id and password. What about friends, activities, notifications etc. There’s just not enough perceived value in it.

But recent launch of Facebook Connect convinced me that the next year will be the year of id consolidation, not necessarily into one, but several IDs that the user will use depending on the context. FB Connect is simple and very useful: you can use your FB login, profile pic, social graph and you can broadcast your activities from associated sites onto your FB wall. Most importantly, it’s easy to understand, implement and it works!

Of course FB will not be alone here – Google is already offering competing product Friend Connect (although not nearly as polished) and  big players like Microsoft with LiveID, Yahoo with YahooID will be following soon with similar offerings.

In any case, consolidation will happen – killer app in this area has emerged (FB Connect) and the competition is heating up – it will be up to busnesses to choose from the available options: overly complicated OpenID, too proprietary and personal Facebook ID…

There is one obstacle to this id consolidation: willingness of  sites to share their user databases. They may not have a choice if the users overwhelmingly adopt these services.

Social Activity Aggregation

Consolidation will inevitably happen in social media, but there will still be several major services people will use in parallel, so there is a need for consolidated feed of activities across them. Whether FriendFeed grows or Facebok or MS Live, Google or Yahoo adopt their aggregation functionality remains to be seen.

Search:

I actually have no facts to support the claim that anything will change here: semantic search engines have been a big buzzword, but apps haven’t lived up to the hype so far – still many questions need to be answered: RDF or Microformats…

Will people bother to invest to change sites when Google is just good enough and there is no big semantic search engine that can impact their revenue?  I deliberately didn’t list semantic search as a separate item for next year as impact is unclear to me unless a breakthrough happens.

Google Search has become Internet Explorer 6! They have no competition at the moment, so very little motivation to innovate or change – it’s become boring and it’s time for it to become disrupted with something. But I don’t know what…

Cloud

Big word that means a lot of things, and while infrastructure part is slowly becoming mainstream, next level services are showing promise in accelerating application development and reuse (data, queue services etc.) from Azure and Amazon. It’s still in the infancy and as long as it’s easier to build an app with your desktop version of Ruby on Rails than using cloud services, there is no incentive to use them. But they will get there, although 09 sounds overly optimistic.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon will likely continue to be main players.

Hosted Productivity Apps

I mentioned them already in my post about 2008, but this year they will become mainstream: Google Docs and Zoho Apps are already , MS Office online and Hosted Exchange are coming soon. All of which means that the competition will really heat up and the products will become better.

Flash Intros will make a big comeback!

This time around with even more sizzle and options: site owners will be able to build useless 10 second animation in Flash OR Silverlight.

Nanoblogging

Twitter will become thing of the past as users will realize that 140 character limit is too large to express a meaningful and coherent thought. The new  way of expression will develop: nanoblogging, with character limit of 1, users will hit random characters on keyborad to instantly express their thoughts and opinions and react to current events. O!

Well, that’s my list for now -I’m sure there will be new surprises and changes, but without them, where would the fun be? By the way, in case you didn’t notice, last two entries were a joke

L8R

D.

It’s been exactly 30 years since I first heard Highway to Hell.
I was in elementary school and more of a punk than a metal fan. The Clash and Talking Heads were my idols at the time – new sound, progressive lyrics – for young, aspiring intellectual  Yet thunderous sound from Down Under was just hard to ignore. You could simply not live in that time and not know Rosie, Highway to Hell, T.N.T…

AC/DC Rogers Centre Toronto

I didn’t think (know) they were great then – as the matter of fact I didn’t think that for the long time, until some 10 years later, when Thunderstruck struck the world with the same intensity that marked their beginnings. Only then I began to realize there was something there that will defy time.

AC/DC Runaway Train

I am not a musician, to judge whether they are great from “musical” point of view (does it matter?), but fast-forwarding another 20 years and seeing them touring with another great album and a huge new hit – Runaway Train, holding 50K people on their feet for 2 hours and energy in the air that is hard to describe, there is no question in my mind that they are GREAT, regardless of category or criteria.

It is fascinating and liberating to see people do for 30 years what they believe in, with such a conviction and passion, with time working for them, not against them as they slowly become living legends. It is an inspiration for anyone, in any profession or in life.

AC/DC Toronto

I just hope the video I did can catch even a glimpse of magic they created for 50+ thousand people at Rogers Centre in Toronto January 9th 09.

Let there be Rock!

I guess my not so appropriate point is about importance of understanding the culture of the place you are visiting. Unlike Elton, I do speak Spanish and whenever I go to a Latin country I try to make most of it, talking to people, understanding their way of life.

Here is the link to some of my Santiago pics on Flickr.

Cuba is a very special place to me for many reasons:

- rich history: pre-colonial, of which unfortunately not much is left,  colonial, post 1511 Velazquez invasion with typical colonial architecture everywhere, independence wars and finaly the last 50 years that most people identify Cuban history with.

- beautiful beaches, still unspoiled with horrendous commercialism of Cancun (but equally beautiful)

- and above all, great culture and music, with open, friendly and educated people.

Plaza de la Revolucion

El Morro

There are also many problems in Cuba, failing to mention them here would be hypocritical and unfair to the people living there and coping with day to day problems. But let’s face it, their neighbors: Jamaica, Dominican, Haiti aren’t exactly heaven on earth either, so anyone thinking the ideology is the only problem should think again.

I’ve visited other parts of Cuba many times, but this was my first trip to the far south. With much bigger African influence and distance from the capital, Santiago has developed a very distinct culture: although much smaller than Havana (but equally crowded and polluted), it’s more intimate and seems to pack more vibe.

If you are looking for a beach vacation, this is not a place to go (better to stay at one of the resorts way out of the city)  – it will take you 30min to get to the first beach, if you can catch a transportation. Rent a car is ridiculously expensive (~$100/day), mopeds are affordable, if you can get one – I waited for a week with no luck. If you want to venture out of the city, and there is much to see, best bet is to negotiate whole day price with one of the private cab drivers. Siboney – modest, mostly local Cuban hangout and impressive national park Baconao are beach destinations to visit. La Gran Piedra is the 1.2 Km high rock in Sierra Maestra overseeing the entire bay. El Cobre is the small town with pilgrimage site – Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Cobre and also the home of the old infamous copper mine where many slaves lost their lives – there’s a monument here commemorating their struggle.

However, if you prefer to stay in Santiago and like the hot, humming Latin city that comes alive at night , there is much to experience. Santiago is definitelly the music capital of Cuba. In the evenings, every little bar becomes a live music set (son, bolero, salsa – some of them originating from here). There are way too many places to mention here, and I didn’t even get a chance to visit the majority, but the ones I visited i would recommend: Casa de la Trova – great venue with great music and balcony overseeing the streets of old town. Artex – small venue where I saw some amazing bands. Cafe Madrugales, my favorite – small, local venue hidden next to Baccardi museum. And Casa de la Musica – same as in Havana – good music but pretty touristy spot. Most of these places are located in historic old town and are all within a walking distance of narrow, half lit old and beautiful streets around Parque Cespedes.

The whole place is a little bit rough and you have to put up with annoying jineteros/as (street hustlers) especially on main squares, but it’s generally safe and within days you’ll know everyone.

Provided, of course you know one or two words in Spanish

La Noche Buena

Parque Cespedes

The purpose of this post wasn’t to be a turist guide anyways, but to record couple of thoughts and share some of the pictures and videos from this unique jewel hidden deep in the south of Cuba, close to infamous Guantanamo Bay.

Una cosa mas: queria escribir todo este articulo en Espanol, pero creo que tengo que practicar un poco mas. Quando estoy ablando con la gente en las calles, me dicen que hablo perfecto, sin un accento. Pero escribir es una otra cosa, no lo he hecho hace, probablemente diez anos. Entonces, voy a practicar y mi proximo articulo sobre una tema Latina estare escrito en Espanol.

Hasta luego.

Daniel, El Blanco

Santiago por la noche

For me, 2007 was an easy year to determine winners: 3 different products/technologies stood head and shoulders above everything else and redefined the way we interact with technology/each-other. And in all 3 cases it wasn’t the technology itself that was revolutionary but it’s impact on our habits and established paradigms:

Explosion of Facebook redefined the way we keep in touch with close (and less close) friends.

iPhone finally made mobile computing a reality – no more poor substitutes for a laptop, this baby surpasses laptop in many cases (and makes it obsolete in some)

Guitar Hero – in times when music industry is struggling, here is a potential savior. Labels may have trouble selling DRM music, but GH enabled song packs seem to be selling well… Participation is the main theme of Web 2.0 and I cannot think of more creative way to implement it than have people participate while listening to music – way more satisfying than air guitar in front of the mirror.

This was 2007. It’s a hard act to follow, and the title of the post is 2008, so I got off the topic a bit…

For 2008, no clear winner comes to mind at the moment but here are some technologies/products that I think impacted user behavior:

Free hosted productivity apps
Although not yet mainstream, Google Docs, Zoho, Basecamp, Mint etc. are slowly gaining ground and changing the way we think of computers and data – information is not tied to our computer anymore – it’s out there for us to use from anywhere.

Absolute explosion of social apps with questionable business models
There are some (unclear) winners in this race, like twitter, last.fm, Ning, but I don’t want to waste another word on them until massive consolidation happens. There are at least 20 social music apps that I know of with no signifficant differentiating reason to exist. How many can the market handle? Economic downturn is sometimes a good thing, it will accelerate consolidation and weed out garbage sooner.

Online streaming video
While YouTube started it with UGC (and unlicensed copyrighted content), it is Hulu and NetFlix that are targeting the mainstream with network TV shows and Movies. NetFlix download rental is already available on XBox, Hulu has all TV shows from it’s parent networks available online for viewing and now YouTube is negotiating the similar deal. This is just the beginning and full effect, similar to the one music industry experienced, will likely be felt in couple of years.

Cloud Computing
It’s a big buzz word now and we are seeing only the first generation of it where only the base infrastructure is abstracted. But the potential is much higher with exposing higher level of services. More of that in predictions for 2009

There must have been more interesting things this year, but 2009 is approaching and I have to start thinking about the future, so that’s all for now.