At the time that the news came out about Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR, I was in Boston (for work), the weather was biting cold, the days long and jet lag dulled my curiosity; so this post came along later than I would have liked.
The first thing that struck me was how much of the content that I had posted about the Facebook IPO and the recent WhatsApp acquisition seem to fit the Oculus acquisition as well.
How it fits into the the broader Facebook acquisition pattern
When looking at the Facebook IPO I commented that Facebook needed to look at other markets beyond online advertising whilst leveraging its existing customer base. I also made the comparison of Facebook and Xerox; in terms of its existing form being a cash generator to fund some future big bet:
I personally think that if you buy into Facebook’s future promise, Facebook looks more like Xerox. In the 1950s, the Northeastern US was the Silicon Valley of its day; with engineering and chemical factories around New Jersey and the Boston corridor through to New York being the home of the infant computer industry. Xerox was founded as a photographic supplies company that made equipment to develop photographic film, it eventually incubated its killer product – xerography which begat photocopiers and fax machines after a decades worth of work. Later on in the development period, the company invested in an insurance company to provide cash flow for future model developments. If you believe that Facebook has a bright future ahead of it, then by implication, it’s current and immediate future products like premium ads in the news feed look more like cash generative businesses to fund ‘project X’ whatever that turns out to be.
What Oculus VR, Whatsapp and Instagram represent is a spread bet on what the future is likely to be based on a few different approaches; mobile devices are important, as are lean bandwidth applications that perform well on less developed mobile networks and finally that the immersive experiences promised us by cyberpunk literature will happen .
Given that Facebook has about 100 billion dollars or so to play with it could do another two dozen such bets on the future. Oculus VR technology isn’t likely to win out when Chinese, Korean and Japanese consumer electronics brands invade the sector and bring the kind of hyper-competition that translates into razor-thin hardware margins; so the model must have some licensibility in the business model.
Google Glass is not the glasses that you are looking for
The second thing that struck me was that Facebook’s endorsement of Oculus could be viewed as a tacit acknowledgement by Facebook that Google Glass is going in the wrong direction at the moment. Oculus Rift provides an ‘in the line of sight’ view of content rather than a ‘glance up’ orientation. However Sony’s Smarteyeglass seem to be ahead of the curve on this. There is more speculation that Facebook want’s to roll out a cyberspace view of the internet promised in cyberpunk literature; however there would be a lot of work that would be needed to be done on standards and conceptual web design in order to move this idea forwards significantly.
A break in faith
The outpouring of outrage by Kickstarter fans who helped fund Oculus VR is perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this. Early adopters are often upset when their little secret becomes mainstream. It is familiar to me from club culture.
Ibiza is not like it used to be… The atmosphere went when moved from to and the crowd changed…
The implication for Kickstarter is that it will be much harder to get funding for seriously innovative tech-related projects and Oculus will have poisoned the well. Kickstarter will still work for artists looking to release albums or small short film projects and will do so very well, but it will have had its potential clipped.
How the NSA Can Use Metadata to Predict Your Personality | DefenceOne – Despite assurances that metadata is free of content, new research shows that it can be highly personal. This debate on metadata reminds me of three examples. The first one was by AOL Research, which back then was headed by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury. AOL Research released a compressed text file on one of its websites containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period intended for research purposes. The New York Times was able to locate an individual from the released and anonymized search records by cross referencing them with phonebook listing. The second is research done on library metadata by UCL researcher Anne Welsh. Finally, cipher operators used to be able to recognise each other by their morse code style: a form of analogue metadata. More related content here.
Back in the mid-1990s, middleware was a way of describing how layers of software were connected together in enterprises to provide functions and tailored outcomes.
At around the same time, Microsoft was at its most dominant and almost missed out on the web as a nascent platform. In fact the first edition of The Road Ahead that Bill Gates wrote alongside Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson saw the Internet as one of the “important precursors of the information highway…suggestive of [its] future” (p. 89); he noted that the “popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981” (p. 91) but “today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway“, the information highway he envisioned would be as different from the Internet as the Oregon Trail was to Interstate 84.
One reviewer noted that
World Wide Web receives just four index citations and is treated as a functional appendage of the Internet (rather than its driving force)
And for a while Netscape had a clear run at the browser market, building up to one of the largest IPOs ever. One of the things that made Netscape so dangerous was that the browser became the gateway to applications like sales orders, email or looking up a database, it was an app facilitator and the browser became an operating system substitute. It no longer mattered so much if you had a Mac or a PC. The browser and web effectively became middleware.
I realised last year that messaging services like KakaoTalk, WeChat and LINE were moving beyond messaging to becoming something more. By becoming platforms they could provide a richer experience to users, the integrate:
Gaming
A blogging-type platform
Payments
Social commerce
Travel information
This looks eerily close to Netscape’s web of middleware positioning in the mid-1990s. Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik outlined just this scenario in an article on the messaging landscape for Techcrunch last week.
Where this gets interesting is when think about what this means for the likes of Google’s Android operating system or Microsoft Windows phone, where the raison d’être of these operating systems is as a gateway to web services (and an audience for mobile advertising). The more functionality that happens inside the messaging application, the less opportunity there is for the likes of Google and Microsoft to direct the consumer towards their advertising inventory.
It corrodes the very reach Google tried to achieve by having its own smartphone operating system and competing with Apple. Google is already under assault in the operating system itself as Chinese vendors like Xiaomi and Oppo alongside Amazon have customised their own operating systems based on Android. Google services are not provides on a third of Android devices sold already, messaging applications as a platform exasperate the situation further.
The web as we know it was built on a set of underlying technologies which enable information transport. Not all information is meant to reside in a website to be surfed or queried. Instead much of the information we need relies on context like location, weather or the contents of your fridge. Web technologies provided an lingua franca for these contextual settings and like most technological changes had been a long time in coming.
You could probably trace their origins back to the mid-1990s or earlier, for instance the Weather Underground published Blue Skies; a gopher-based graphical client to run on the Mac for the online weather service back in 1995. At this time Apple were working on a way of syndicating content called MCF (Meta Content Framework) which was used in an early web application called Hot Sauce.
Hot Sauce was a web application that tendered a website’s site map in a crude 3D representation.
A year later PointCast launched its first product which pushed real-time news from a variety of publications to a screen saver that ran on a desktop computer.
The key thing about PointCast was it’s push technology, covered in this edition of the Computer Chronicles
The same year that PointCast launched saw the launch of the XML standard: markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. This meant that there was a template to provide documents and stream information over the web.
Some of the Apple team responsible for MCF had moved to Netscape and worked on ways of importing content from various media outlets into the my.netscape.com portal; they created the first version of RSS (then called RDF) in 1999. The same year, Darcy DiNucci coined the term web 2.0; whilst this is associated with the rise of social networks, it is as much about the knitting of websites: the provision of services online, integration between websites taking data from one source and melding it with another using a web API formatted in an XML type format or JSON – which does the same job.
By the early noughties applications like Konfabulator (later Yahoo! Widgets) launched their first application to ‘put a skin on any information that you want’.
Major web properties started to license their content through APIs, one of the critical ideas that Flickr popularised was that attribution of the data source had its own value in content licensing. It was was happy to share photos hosted on the service for widgets and gizmos so long as users could go back through the content to the Flickr site. This ability to monetise attribution is the reason why you have Google Maps on the smartphone.
So you had data that could be useful and the mechanism to provide it in real time. What it didn’t have so far was contextual data to shape that stream and a way of interfacing with the real world. In parallel to what was being driven out of the US on the web, was mobile development in Europe and Asia. It is hard to understand now, but SMS based services and ringtones delivered over-the-air to handsets were the big consumer digital businesses of their day. Jamba! and their Crazy Frog character were consumer household names in the mid noughties. It was in Europe were a number of the ingredients for the next stages were being created in meaningful consumer products. The first smartphones had been created more as phones with PDAs attached and quicker networks speeds allowed them to be more than glorified personal information managers.
The first phone that pulled all the requisite ingredients together was Nokia’s N95 in early 2007, it had:
A good enough camera that could interact with QRcodes and other things in the real world
Powerful enough hardware to run complex software applications and interact with server-side applications
A small but legible colour screen
3G and wi-fi chipsets which was important because 3G networks weren’t that great (they still arent) and a minimum amount of data network performance is required
A built-in GPS unit, so the phone ‘knew’ where it was. Where you are allows for a lot of contextual information to be overlaid for the consumer: weather, interesting things nearby, sales offers at local stores etc
All of these ingredients had been available separately in other phones, but they had never been put together before in a well-designed package. Nokia sold over 10 million N95s in the space of a year. Unfortunately for Nokia, Apple came out with the iPhone the following autumn and changed the game.
It is a matter of debate, but the computing power inside the original iPhone was broadly comparable to having a 1998 vintage desktop PC with a decent graphics card in the palm of your hand. These two devices set the tone for mobile computing moving forwards; MEMs like accelerometers and GPS units gave mobile devices context about their immediate surroundings: location, direction, speed. And the large touch screen provided the canvas for applications.
Locative media was something that was talked about publicly since 2004 by companies like Nokia, at first it was done using laptops and GPS units, its history in art and media circles goes back further; for instance Kate Armstrong’s essay Data and Narrative: Location Aware Fiction was published on October 31, 2003 presumably as a result of considerable prior debate. By 2007 William Gibson’s novel Spook Country explored the idea that cyberspace was everting: it was being integrated into the real-world rather than separate from it, and that cyberspace had become an indistinguishable element of our physical space.
As all of these things were happening around me I was asked to speak with digital marketers in Spain about the future of digital at the end of 2008 when I was thinking about all these things. Charlene Li had described social networks as becoming like air in terms of their pervasive nature and was echoed in her book Groundswell.
Looking back on it, I am sure that Li’s quote partly inspired me to look to Bruce Lee when thinking about the future of digital, in particular his quote on water got me thinking about the kind of contextual data that we’ve discussed in this post:
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Lee wrote these words about his martial arts for a TV series called Longstreet where he played Li Tsung – a martial arts instructor to the main character. Inspired by this I talked about the web-of-no-web inspired by Lee’s Jeet Kune Do of ‘using no way as way‘.
In the the slide I highlighted the then new points of interaction between web technologies and platforms with the real world including smartphones, Twitter’s real-world meet-ups, the Wii-controller and QRcodes.
A big part of that context was around location aware applications for instance:
Foursquare-esque bar and shop recommendations
Parcel tracking
Location based special offers
Pay-per-mile car insurance
Congestion charging
Location-based social networking (or real-world avoidance a la Incognito)
Mobile phone tour guides
And that was all things being done six years ago, with more data sets being integrated the possibilities and societal implications become much bigger. A utopian vision of this world was portrayed in Wired magazine’s Welcome To The Programmable World; where real-world things like getting your regular coffee order ready happen as if by magic, in reality triggered by smartphone-like devices interacting with the coffee shop’s online systems, overlaid with mapping data, information on distances and walking or travel times and algorithms.
What hasn’t been done too well so far has been the interface to the human. Touch screen smartphones have been useful but there are limitations to the pictures under glass metaphor. Whilst wearable computing has been experimented with since the early 1970s and helped in the development of military HUDs (head-up diplays) and interactive voice systems, it hasn’t been that successful in terms of providing a compelling experience. The reasons for this are many fold:
Battery technology lags semiconductor technology; Google Glass lasts about 45 minutes
The owner needs to be mindful of the device: smartphone users worry about the screen, Nike Fuelband wearers have to remember to take them off before going and having a swim or a shower
Designs haven’t considered social factors adequately; devices like Google Glass are best matched for providing ‘sneak information’ just-in-time snippets unobtrusively, yet users disengage eye contact interrupting social interaction. Secondly Google device doubles as a surveillance device antagonising other people
Many of the applications don’t play to the devices strengths or aren’t worth the hassle of using the device – they lack utility and merit
That doesn’t mean that they won’t be a category killer wearable device or application but that they haven’t been put on the market yet.
Bassline: The UK Dance Scene That Was Killed by the Police | VICE United Kingdom – Bassline was a Sheffield-specific scene. Sheffield has had a history of birthing electronic music genres. The most notable one for me was the bleep techno scene from the late 1980s. Bassline built on the trends that came before it. It has a more driving 4:4 beat than speed garage, lush burbling analogue synths for the techno and acid house heritage of the city. Finally some of the bassline tracks had some string stabs that brought to mind the early Chicago house and detroit technology a la Rhythm is Rhythm and OctaveOne.
The policing policies of the early 2000s were an extension of the top down culture war against youth culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. We missed out on an interesting time in dance music with bassline. Who knows where it might have taken things, could bassline have led to a less sterile EDM sound?
Alibaba bets on Taobao mobile app to boost sales | WantChinaTimes – Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group launched the 24-hour sale “Mobile Taobao 3.8 Life Festival” on March 8 in a bid to boost transactions made via mobile devices and drive mobile app adoption
