Christopher Herot's Weblog

QR Codes

Rob Walker had a piece in the Sunday New York Times Consumed column on some innovative use of QR Codes.   True to form, the Times did not see fit to provide any links in the column, perhaps figuring that most readers would be reading the Dead Tree Edition.  So here is some additional information to get you started.

The QR code is a two-dimensional bar code invented by Denso Wave Incorporated in Japan for tracking industrial parts.  It has now caught on in Japan as part of a mobile phone application that can read the bar codes from any object, such as a billboard or article of clothing.  The image can contain up to 2,953 bytes of binary data, although the usual use is to encode an alphanumeric string or a URL.

There is almost no limit on where a QR code can be displayed except that it needs to be on a light background.  An Add to Friends application for Facebook lets you order a T-Shirt or tote bag that when scanned by a cell phone gives the URL of your mobile Facebook page. TOCA ME GmbH in Munich runs emma cott which will do the same thing for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and nine other sites.  John Young makes needlepoint pillows.  Lendorff.Kaywa sells a scarf for £32.50 decorated with Space Invaders sprites and a bar code that reads "Insert coin for extra life."  There's even a Flickr stream of QR Codes in the wild.

Semapedia encourages people to print out stickers of Wikipedia URLs and apply them to relevant places in the real world.

There's lots of useful stuff on the Kaywa site, including a QR Reader (some phones such as the N95 are shipped with one) and a QR Generator so you can make your own codes.  Japan Marketing News found this TV ad from NTT DoCoMo illustrating a billboard application.

Qik

One thing you can do with your Nokia N95 that you can't do with the iPhone is to broadcast live video via Qik.  Pronounced "quick" and developed by Visivo Communications of Santa Clara and Moscow, this application does some clever buffering to do live streaming and then following up with more data to allow higher quality viewing of the stored stream.  The app is very simple to download, install, and run.  You just press the "stream" soft key and the video shows up on your Qik profile page or on any page where you embed the provided html, as you can see below.  You can also enable options to automatically notify your Twitter followers that you have started broadcasting and upload the resulting video to YouTube.

While you are broadcasting, viewers can type comments on the web page which are superimposed on the monitor window on the phone.  The most recent video is displayed on the Qik home page, so you are almost always guaranteed an audience.  For my admittedly banal video of my toaster I had 19 viewers, many of whom commented on the experience in real time.

I did two "toast" videos.  In the first I was connected via AT&T's HSDPA network, which doesn't work so well in my house.  After the first few seconds, Qik started buffering and the delay, which was displayed in large red letters, mounted to close to two minutes, which was how long I had been shooting.  I switched to my 802.11 network and the app seamlessly resumed uploading.  Unfortunately, the user messaging feature doesn't seem to work when connected via 802.11.  More on that later.

If it ever stops raining here I'll go out and shoot some more interesting videos.  In the meantime, check out the videos from Spring VON, Robert Scoble,  Steve Garfield, Robin Good or just click on the Browse button on the Qik home page.
 

VON?

March is always a big week for conferences.  The past four weeks alone have offered TED, ETech/GSP, SXSW, eComm and VON not to mention numerous smaller events.  Amidst all this plenty, several people have asked me what I found attractive about VON.  VON was started ten years ago around the almost subversive notion of sending voice over the internet instead of the telco monopolies.  As that goal was achieved, the conference became a large trade show with multiple tracks and a large exhibit floor, and it became harder to find the good parts, but they were still there.  The analogy I use os that VON used to be like Paris (well, ok, maybe Toulouse) where you could wander in any direction and find interesting architecture and an excellent meal.  Now it's more like L.A. where there is lots of good stuff but you had better have a destination in mind before you get into your car.

Some of my favorite "gems" from VON this year were VON Camp - an "un-conference" in an obscure corner of the convention center which seemed to attract all the people I had come to VON to hang out with and the session on Real-Time Social Communications, which included Loic LeMeur, Robert Scoble, Ramu Sunkara and other luminaries from the social media world.

As the rumors swirl that Pulvermedia and the VON conference it operates may be going out of business one hopes that these gems will live on in some new form.

Comcast & BitTorrent Working Together?

dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
                    -Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghost Busters

In what may be a direct result of last month's FCC hearing on network management, a.k.a. Network Neutrality,  Comcast and BitTorrent have announced their intention to collaborate.  Previous to that hearing, Comcast had been interfering with BitTorrent traffic bud had denied doing so.  Now it says that by the end of 2008 it will adopt a protocol-agnostic technique of managing network capacity.  For its part, BitTorrent has acknowledged the need for network management and will offer suggestions for better ways of doing so.

Part of the problem has been that while BitTorrent's protocol is peer-to-peer, the topology of most cable networks causes all traffic to flow through the head end, even if is intended for a nearby node, and BitTorrent's algorithms don't recognize traffic that could be local to a given cable operator but instead are likely to route such traffic over the Internet backbone.  As they develop better techniques, the parties say they intend to share them with the larger Internet community.

I expect Comcast is relieved to dodge the regulatory bullet and as the joint press release states work out the issues "through private business discussions without the need for government intervention" but somehow I don't think this would have happened without the public pressure in front of the FCC.

 

Facebook has introduced the long-awaited fine-grained privacy controls.  Now, if I can find it under "customize" I can share various parts of my profile information with my friends of friends.  If only my life was so interesting that I needed to hide things from the general public, or at least those members of the general public who aren't in the "network" defined by the part of the country in which I live.

Now we'll see if people really use this stuff.

Robert Scoble and Fan

Jeff Pulver Keynote at VON

Jeff Pulver's keynote at VON was entitled The Millennials Are Coming - Time to Get Ready.  He opened with a video of interviews with people in his son's generation about how they communicate with their parents (face to face; phone) and their peers (Facebook, IM, SMS).  He observed that as this generation matures and moves into positions of power that communication will change from land-line phones to more social-network based tools.  He also observed that social networking was not necessarily restricted to the Internet but could be used in low-tech face-to-face environments.  To that end, he invented his Social Media Toolkit, a low-tech collection of stickers and markers that he brings to breakfast meetings he's been hosting around the world.  People write personal "tags" on stickers which they affix to themselves and others.  In the same vein, one can post on another's "wall" by affixing a sticker.  He
found these simple measures to help people make contact and has filed for a patent on it.  I went to one of these and can testify that it was fun and productive.

In concluding, Jeff said we would be well advised to embrace the coming change instead of fighting it, and can start practicing early and easily.

Intel at VON

Anand Chandrasekher, GM of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group gave the first talk at VON.  He started with some useful facts:

• There will be 1.3 billion Internet Users by end of 2007.
• Google can be queried in 36 languages.
• The average person spends 32 hours per month online.
• 140 new applications added every day on Facebook.
• Social Netowrking is 25% of all internet traffic - surpassing porn for the first time.
• The average user spends 3B minutes/day  on Social Networks.

From Intel's perspective, the growth of the Internet has become more important than the growth of software to drive demand for faster processors.

Chandrasekher said that Intel saw a huge opportunity in the fragmented market for mobile devices, showing a graph demonstrating how there were more compatibility problems with devices that did not contain Intel processors.  He didn't explain how much of this was software vs. hardware, but did go on to describe a new Intel brand, Atom, which will include a line of processors designed from the ground up to be small and low in power consumption.   The first of these processors will be Menlow, released in 2008, followed by Moorestown, released on 2010.   Moorestown will enable building a complete PC and phone on a board the size of a credit card.

MIT Program on Virtual Worlds

Wed 03/12/2008 20:32

Video at http://alum.mit.edu/broadcasts

Nokia N95

Nokia has 40% of the worldwide mobile phone market, although most of their success has been outside the USA.  That's too bad, because while Apple has captured the attention of American consumers, Nokia has been selling a far larger quantity of feature-packed phones everywhere else.  I've been using one of them, the N95-3 for the past two weeks.  While it's not the ultimate phone (no QWERTY keypad or touch screen) it does have a lot of capabilities that the iPhone and others lack.  Some notable features:

• HSDPA - AT&T's 3G data network - 10x faster than the EDGE technology on the iPhone
• High quality camera with auto-focus and Carl Zeiss optics.
• GPS - the real thing, not some cell-tower imitation
• Multitasking - so programs can run in the background
• Video capture, video streaming, and video calls
• Laptop tethering
• Open platform

All of this is packed into a phone-sized form factor with a 240x320 color screen.  (The iPhone is 480x320).
The processor is an ARM 1136 which at 320 Mhz is half the speed of the iPhone's ARM 1176JZF, but the N95 also has a TI DSP and a graphics accelerator.  This architecture allows you to hold a high quality phone call while letting other programs run in the background.  For instance you can browse the Web or use Fring to receive your Twitter messages.  (The iPhone pretends to do multi-tasking by suggesting applications save their state when they suspend operation, but they aren't really running when you aren't using them.)

The camera is as good as many pocket cameras and infinitely better than most cell phones.  The following images illustrate the differences among the Palm Treo, the N95 and a Canon ELPH.  (Click on each image for a full-rez version).

Treo	N95	Canon

The Treo will serve as an emergency camera in case space aliens land in your back yard, but you wouldn't bring it with you on as your only camera if you anticipated taking pictures.  The N95, on the other hand, will service in all but the most demanding situations, e.g. available light candids.

The GPS is a pleasant surprise.  It offers quite detailed maps which it downloads on the fly as needed.  It is very fast as it can use the closest cell tower to help the GPS decide which satellites to track.

Perhaps the most promising aspect of the N95 is the complete openness of the platform.  Unlike the iPhone, which was completely closed until recently and now promises to allow applications "approved" by Apple, the N95 offers an completely open environment.  As a result, there are some really interesting applications, such as Fring which offers "over the top" VoIP, Qik, which provides live video streaming from the phone to the Web, and Seesmic which is like Twitter with video.  While the Seesmic application is still in Alpha, if illustrates the promise of an open platform, allowing subscribers to record, upload, and view short video clips.