Product idea: The ConferenceCaster

This one is worth a million bucks, but I’m giving it to you for free.

I was at a conference last week, and I noticed how commonplace it has become for people in the audience to use their digital cameras to take pictures of all the slides. Digital pictures are essentially free, so why not? At the same time, I noticed other people were holding up little digital audio recorders. Why not, it occurred to clever me, combine these two things into one convenient device? I’m picturing a small camera with a built-in microphone. Start the audio recorder going, then snap pictures as needed. At the end, you get to mix and match the desired results: a bunch of pictures, a high-quality audio recording, or a complete synchronized audio/image podcast of the talk ready to upload to an offshore server.

I have learned from listening to podcasts that: A) I really enjoy hearing talks from interesting conferences on technical topics and B) the slides mostly don’t matter, but occasionally you really want to see the one where everyone laughed for no discernible reason. Video of a distant talking head is pointless, but slides synchronized with the audio, that’s worth real money.

Okay, maybe it’s not worth a million bucks. But it’s better, as JMike has been known to say, than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And if a quick Google search reveals that five versions are already on the market, I’d rather live in the ignorant bliss of the optimistic faux inventor.

Falling in love with robots

Last week I went to the Media Lab’s h2.0 conference at MIT. “h2.0” stands for human 2.0; the conference centered on the surprisingly close relationship between using technology to cope with human disabilities and using technology to augment human capabilities. That is to say, people with disabilities are leading the way on human augmentation of any kind. The bionic man is already here, and he asks that you not pity him. He finds it tiresome, and it makes you look naive. This makes plenty of sense, but still it catches you by surprise to hear a double amputee say “Why would I want my old human knees back? I get to keep upgrading mine for the rest of my life.” As Aimee Mullins, a double-amputee sprinter, said during her talk “If I want to run fast, I don’t want prosthetic legs modeled after a human. I want legs like a cheetah.”

Anyway, one of the things that came up during the talks was the investment that the Media Lab is making in robots. This by itself is not surprising, but the next part is: The Media Lab is investing in robots for the purpose of connecting emotionally with humans. I met a guy who is making robotic diet coaches. The main purpose of the robot is to stare at you soulfully, blink blink, and ask that you truthfully relate your daily eating habits. And apparently this works. People trust robots and respond to robots much much more than they would to a screen-bound animation. These robots don’t need fancy arms and legs, because once you fall in love with them, you will do the legwork for them.

I was particularly reminded of all this when I came across Clive Thompson’s recent link to an article in the Washington Post: Bots on The Ground is about the growing emotional bond between soldiers and the machines that serve them. It’s a great article.

BASE Jumping: playing chicken with the Earth

These days everything gets extreme-a-fied rapidly, which I suppose suits the extremophiles out there.

Let’s say you jump off a building and live to tell about it. You talk to your friends. They all think you’re crazy and you get a reputation as a head-case, but that’s as far as it goes. Now suppose you do a nice video documentary of your jump. You post it to YouTube where millions of people will see it. Somebody sets it to some hard-driving electronica music. Now hundreds of susceptible extremophiles around the world will be infected. They’ll want to do you one better.

http://www.ifilm.com/efp

I came across this Ultimate BASE Jumping on ifilm.com, and it really took my breath away. The acronyn BASE in BASE Jumping stands for Building Antenna Span Earth. In other words, you get a parachute, but no airplane. In other words, if no one in their right mind would consider jumping off of it, parachute or no parachute, it’s a BASE jump. In this video, you see people “flying” extraordinarily close to the cliff face. At the same time I’m thinking “this can’t possibly be done,” I’m also thinking “so that’s what it looks like to plummet three thousand feet straight down next to a jagged cliff.” Nothing violent happens in this video, but as you can imagine people do occasionally die doing this.

A lot of these clips were taken from a peak in Norway called Kjerag, which is near the scenic hamlet of Lysebotn. Look for the dark glacial gash of a fjord to get an idea where the jumping is happening. Check out the official Kjerag photo gallery.

Rank your photos on HOT or NOT

Here’s some news you can use from the front lines of the modern dating scene: remember HOT or NOT, the tawdry-but-popular website dedicated to letting strangers rate your sexual allure? Here’s how it works: upload a picture of you (although of course you can’t be stopped from uploading a picture of someone else). Almost instantly, thousands of people around the world will rate your picture on a scale of one to ten. I first saw this site way back in 2000, so it’s a great-granddaddy of today’s Web 2.0 sites, and it has remarkable staying power. Even so, it’s a pretty tacky premise: grind people into numbers through the fickle calculus of aggregate sex appeal.

On the other hand, Hot or Not doesn’t rate people, it rates pictures of people. Reframe the site and it becomes a valuable service: “Hot or Not ranks photos quantitatively.” I have a friend who uses online dating services. He needs to know which of his pictures he should put on his “all about me” profile page. That is, which of, let’s say, twenty pictures is most likely to appeal to the opposite sex? Hot or Not can answer this question accurately and quickly. Suddenly a cheap-thrills voyeur/exhibitionist site is transmuted into a valuable (free!) web service that uncovers information that would be expensive to discover any other way. My friend submitted many pictures to Hot or Not, selected the one that rated highest for his eligible bachelor résumé, and immediately his traffic picked up. It’s easy to see how that’s worth real money.

The Onion News Network: Live from Haiti

I hadn’t realized that The Onion was creating so much video content. This Onion News Network report, Something Happening In Haiti, is well-produced and right on target. The news business has gotten so absurd these days that it’s hard to tell spoof from reality, but this clip does a good job of capturing the “always on/never thinking” nature of 24 hour news coverage.

Between Jon Stewart and The Onion, you have to recognize something is screwy when most of the population prefers a news parody to the news.

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/videoplayer/flvplayer.swf

ProveMyPoint: the research robot yes man

As greenhouse gases go, methane is one of the most ferocious. That’s why it was big news last year when some scientists reported that plants may be generating huge amounts of it. Was our role as polluter of the ecosystem overblown? According to Carl Zimmer’s latest post, this contrarian tidbit was picked up by pundits like Rush Limbaugh, who apparently remarked, “Well, hot damn. God is to blame for global warming.” Zimmer goes on to describe how the methane conclusion was recently debunked although, predictably, this time the news cycle didn’t care.

The whole episode got me thinking about how data gets put to work in the real world. Since the dawn of civilization, people have reached their conclusions first and looked for justifying data second (see “truthiness“). Very few of us are so virtuous as to observe and then conclude. Rush Limbaugh, for example, already knows in ample gut that global warming is nothing more than the sophistry of tree-hugging crybabies. When he sees a story that supports that belief, he reports it. Any story to the contrary simply slides by unnoticed. It’s just human nature.

provemypoint1.png

In this spirit I propose a web service called ProveMyPoint in which you draw the curve or trend you believe to be true, no matter how offbeat or absurd. Push a button and my automated web service goes and finds data to support your assertion. Suppose you want to prove to your local zoning board that cell phone towers are leading to more electrical storms because of the electricity that they put into the air. Sounds plausible, eh? On ProveMyPoint.com, you would sketch a quick curve going up and to the right against the two axes for cell phone towers and electrical storms. My righteous research bots would find respectable data sources to fill in your plot.

Here’s what the output might look like for a hypothetical case in which you’d like to assert that Saddam Hussein might be up to some mischief. Given little more than the notion that bushy moustaches are menacing, my site might create this nifty piece of infographic demagoguery.

provemypoint2.png

What do you think? Would you like to invest in my little venture? I’ve got some interesting data that suggests it’s very likely to pay off big…

Two hundred wet Dutch horses

Here’s one from my Mom: a video of two hundred horses escaping from an island in the Netherlands where they had been trapped by rising water.

Now I’m going to tell you exactly what happens in this video. You see seven minutes worth of poorly shot video with some melodramatic music glued onto it in which two hundred horses trot through through shoulder-deep water until they arrive on dry land. That’s all there is to it. But: I bet you watch the whole thing. I did. My busy busy wife did. My horse-loving niece sure did, and so did my Mom.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7208904950568913763&hl=en

Just why is it so compelling to watch? This is the thing that nobody saw coming with online user-created video. The camera work is shaky and often out of focus. The image quality is bad. The music is swabbed on with a thick drippy paintbrush. But those horses! Think of the horses and all is forgiven!

When you tire of happy horsies, watch the Old-Man-and-the-Sea action in this video: a six-foot hammerhead rips into a hundred-pound tarpon just as it’s about to be landed by some fishermen. Not a happy ending for the tarpon, but it’s just enough drama to make you sit still for three minutes and thirty nine seconds.

Production quality be damned. Big money television is screwed.

Addictive Tower Defense

I’m headed out of town for a few days, so I’ll leave you with yet another dangerously addictive game: Tower Defense. A friend of mine at work was spirited away by this game for a week. Each morning he would come in to work and explain to us his newest strategies for penetrating ever higher levels, enthusiastically diagramming his level designs at the white board. When he finally came out of his game-induced fugue state, he had no memory of the lost week. Just you consider that before you light-heartedly click that link.

Tower Defense was cited on TechCrunch, signifying its status as a genuine phenomenon. Naturally there is a collection of documentary YouTube videos where you can watch the pros at work.

I am fascinated by how sites like YouTube are quickly recruited by ad hoc communities to promote participation and set norms. A few months ago I saw a talk by instructables co-founder Eric Wilhelm on how that site supports the Knex gun community. That is to say, there is a group of people distributed across the world that specializes in making guns out of Knex toys. Want to see a Knex machine gun in action? Look at this video (YouTube, of course). And if you’re the kind of person who can be seduced by the idea of making Knex guns, you’ve now been infected.

Introducing the “Book”

If you haven’t seen this one yet, it’s definitely worth watching.

This juxtaposition of old and new makes me think of a recent post by Andrew McAfee on the flip:

One useful flip test consists of mentally switching the order of appearance of a new technology and an existing one… Let’s say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called ‘paper.’ It’s cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can’t write over it once it’s been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn’t that technology come to dominate the market?

In other words, novelty as such has a value all its own in our culture, but since novelty always fades, it pays to discount it. Take away novelty and what have you got? A bad version of the good old scroll, or a truly useful new thing called a book?