broadstuff

Today the UK ICO gave it's approval to Google snapping the country's streets - sez the Grauniad:

...the Information Commissioner's Office, which had been investigating complaints, said in a statement: "We are satisfied that Google is putting in place adequate safeguards to avoid any risk to the privacy or safety of individuals, including the blurring of vehicle registration marks and the faces of anyone included in Street View images. Although it is possible that in certain limited circumstances an image may allow identification of an individual, it is clear that Google are keen to capture images of streets and not individuals."

The commissioner's office said it was satisfied with Google's online reporting mechanism, which lets people concerned about their privacy ask to have their images removed from the system.

I think the ICO is letting this one off a bit too lightly. Google's strategy is plainer in the way it is dealing with some people in Pennsylvania who objected to having their property photographed:

Arguing that technology has ensured that "complete privacy does not exist," Google contends that a Pennsylvania family has no legal grounds to sue the search giant for publishing photos of their home on its popular "Street View" mapping feature. Responding to an invasion of privacy lawsuit filed by Aaron and Christine Boring, Google has countered that the couple "live in a residential community in the twenty-first-century United States, where every step upon private property is not deemed by law to be an actionable trespass." In a motion to dismiss the Borings's federal complaint, Google's six-lawyer team asserts that, "Today's satellite-image technology means that even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist.

In other words, your privacy can now only be asserted by your own 6-person legal team. That's a fairly strong-armed response for a supposedly benign service provider - its more usually the sort of things large evil corporates do when serious money, or music piracy, is involved. As El Reg notes, in a sharper-edged piece than the Grauniad's:

The ICO's statement makes no mention of what Google itself might do with the reams of data it is collecting.

Not everyone's concerned by Street View has had the pleasure of Google's soothing words. Privacy International, the London-based privacy pressure group was among the first to raise public concerns about the image mapping project hitting the UK, and wrote to Google with a series of questions. It has been ignored by the firm.

Privacy International spokesman Simon Davies said Street View's lack of transparency is its fundamental problem. "We've asked for details of the [blurring] technology and Google will not yield it... Google is claiming commercial secrecy, but they won't even show us how effective it is," he said. "The ICO is of course entitled to form its opinion but we'll continue to press Google."

Privacy International also asked the firm to explain if and how it consulted with the UK public on its plans, but has again been stonewalled.

One wonders what better information the ICO has to inform its decision that Privacy International clearly was not trusted to have.....

Taking pictures of your house from space, at a distance, is one thing, broadcasting it close up in precise co-ordinates to the rest of the planet is quite another. Are we the one of "the few" who think the public need to have more of a say in this?

I was reading Chris Anderson's article on the size of the FreeConomics market (of which another post later) when I came across his other blog - for amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV, or Drones) design and lost a happy hour there. Chris is thinking of setting up competitions for amateur UAV builders.

UAV's combine the Geek Triathlon of mechatronics/robotics, complex computer systems (for autopilots etc) and aeronautics (there is a parallel strain with sailing vessels) coupled with model building - who could resist?

There is some great stuff on the site about converting ordinary shop bought models - planes, choppers, blimps - to UAV usage. But this small, flapping UAV - with camera inserted - from the University of Delft takes the prize.



(Amateur UAVs have already crossed the Atlantic - see here)

(Disclosure - at Uni yours truly initially studied Aero Eng and has designed and even flown - without immediately crashing - a number of R/C model aircraft, and final year BSc design project was a 6 axis robot - I was only seduced by the Internetz for an MSc. Hence the odd article on mobile robotics on this blog

TechCrunch's Mike Butcher is calling for a London TechHub after visiting the Dublin one:

The Digital Hub is a community of people – artists, researchers, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs and consumers, all working together to create innovative and successful digital media products and services which support their future. The Digital Hub is an Irish Government initiative to create an international centre of excellence for knowledge, innovation and creativity focused on digital content and technology enterprises. The core development of nine acres is located a ten minute walk from the city centre within the historic Liberties area of Ireland’s capital city, Dublin.

Now, I actually think its a very good idea - but keep your eye on those words "Government Initiative" though - we looked at a plan for a "Virtual Incubator" for London about 3 years ago, but the economics required subsidies or else the prices look the same as any of the other for-profit managed drop in locations in London - which is of course why nearly all the action is happening ad-hoc in pubs and cafes with free WiFi, or in institutions such as the New Media Knowledge centre which is a University property.

In fact, in this virtual age, isn't there an argument that this industry should drink (or at least log into) its own Kool-aid? Ian Forrester certainly thinks so.

Anyway, one of the issues raised is Location - which tallies with another post showing the Old St area is becoming a Digital Roundabout, according to the FT (thanks to Drew Benvie for the link):

Previously known as the busy junction where London’s Old Street meets City Road, Silicon Roundabout is not the most salubrious of locations for budding entrepreneurs. But a coalescence of young web and tech companies in EC1 dates back to dotcom days. Alongside cheaper rents and a surfeit of bars, tapping into that experience is part of the area’s appeal for many of its newer residents.

Many will be hoping to follow the example of local hero Last.fm. The online music community was bought by CBS for $280m (£140m) last year, one of the largest UK web company buyouts of recent years.

“Old Street was a seemingly unlikely place to build a web company when we came here six years ago, but there’s no doubt it’s now becoming a hive of tech activity,” says Martin Stiksel, Last.fm’s co-founder. “The noise, vibrancy, and underground attitude of East London certainly rubs off on you, and inspires fresh perspectives – something I think all these start-ups share. It’s a million miles from sterile, air-conditioned Silicon Alley, literally and metaphorically.”

As with all overnight successes, its been true a long time - Web Hoster Globix built a major presence there in 2001 (because of the rents and nearby customer base), and yours truly ran a software company 2 blocks away in the tech doldrum days of the early 'Noughties.

Nonetheless, rents are lower there than in more salubrious places in London, and it is becoming a bit of a cool tech cluster again (though the meedje creatives still tend to be in Soho) so if one was to set up a TechHub, thats not a bad place to be.

Just preferably not on the Roundabout

Update - very good piece here on the complexities by Matt Locke, I never had time to put all this down...but here it is!

Update 2 - the zeitgeist in Internet Time - now the Evening Standard is at it. I wasn't this fashionable in 2005....

So, search startup Cuil is reaping the publicity reward of its well engineered PR launch - or not. If Twitter, Friendfeed, Slashdot, the comments on our blog's review of Cuil, a search of Google Blogs or Technorati, or any myriad of ways of looking at the opinions of the Vox Digerati are used, they are harvesting the grapes of wrath.

Even the blogs they assiduously courted and got to write glowing copy pre-test are now biting the hands that fed them the PR releases.

Maybe it was the demi-gaelic name that gave them a touch of the blarney, maybe it was the advice of a previous generation of famous Irishmen:

- There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary - Brendan Behan

- There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. - Oscar Wilde

The idea being that the name recognition was far more likely to echo far and wide than the (mis)deed. But is this true on the Internet, where 2 other things happen:

(i) Persistent commenting - in the old days, the access to media was limited - a few nasty articles in the papers and on TV and it was usually over. Now, owing to the low transaction costs and low distribution costs of writing in the new media, a salacious story gets picked over, rehashed, examined etc by some fraction of 70 million bloggers, twitterers, friendfeeders etc. It doesn't die nearly as quickly.

(ii) Persistence - lets say that Cuil get it right and do great things in future - still, every time you search for them, long into the future, this perfect blogstorm of criticism will be out there, chained to their name via a million strong links. My bet is that they will have to change their name (hey - maybe another launch )

Perhaps the advice of another famous Irishman is better suited to PR in the Age of the Internetz:

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America - James Joyce

In other words, they key is to be the one that is remembered for doing it right, not doing it early.

One tries so hard to not give in to gnawing skepticism and a general feeling that the whole tech scene is just a bit overhyped But I Just had to comment on the reverse logic re the SoCal earthquake and Twitter being the first place it was picked up.

Its extremely hard to believe that:

(i) Twitterers were the only people sending messages out
(ii) Twitterers were the first people sending messages out.

In other words Twitter cannot get data any earlier than all the other destinations.

I recall reading similar such about forest fires awhile ago, I noted I first saw that in an email - because I happened to be on email at the time. Of course no self respecting social mediahead would ever admit to being on email, so they must have seen it on Twitter

I'd suggest a far more likely scenario is that Twitter is the first place that bloggers and other chatterati first saw it, and as they are the ones who tend to talk about it in the blogosphere echo system which consumes nearly all their attention, that's clearly where they perceive it was first reported.....

The poor old mainstream media of course are hobbled by totally unreasonable requirements such as checking and confirming facts before its broadcast, unlike a social network.

It would be interesting, however, to see when they got the first incoming. I'd be willing to bet it was at very similar times to Twitter and everyone else receiving the first texts.

Update - This is too sublime - from Valleywag the story of the lady who just had to Twitter that the earth moved for her even while her gynaecologist was prodding around. We salute her for sheer dedication to the cause, this is the Right Stuff alright!.

Tracking a meme I first saw on Confused of Calcutta a few days ago about the "Real A List" and then this article on the "decline of the A list" on Techmeme's Leaderboard:

Sadly, its not to make way for new talent, its to make way for Old Media. So who shall champion the plethora of well written "Small Cap" blogs, as Confused of Calcutta puts it!

Incidentally, the Industry Standard (yeah, I thought they were dead too) has chosen 25 "small cap" blogs to run with - over here..

Kudos to Umair Haque, Bruce Schneier, Zoli Erdos and Redeye VC who we read regualr like - and the others look good too.

And now..... a shameless plug!

While on this subject, we have been nominated for a possible gong by Computer Weekly - see that big red button on the side of the blog - so we would love you to VOTE FOR BROADSTUFF

On the button, or Over Here in the Business/Web 2.0 Section

Says the Financial Times (pointing to BT's own Press Release):

BT today announced it has acquired Ribbit Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based 'Telco 2.0' platform company, for $105 million in cash, on a cash-free, debt-free basis. The acquisition will accelerate BT's strategy to transform itself into a next- generation, platform-based, software-driven services company.

Looks like Confused of Calcutta wasn't that confused on this one....

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, said: 'Silicon Valley is emerging as a hotbed of telecommunications innovation. With Ribbit, not only do we extend our presence in the Valley, but we also gain a groundbreaking platform, a growing community of developers and a world-class team that share a common vision. Buying Ribbit lets us accelerate that vision.'

This makes sense in a number of ways for BT - as well as adding to the "what services can we offer on a 21st century network" portfolio, getting another finger into the US pie never hurts.

I'm sure the guys at STL Partners (who we work with quite a bit) will be heartened by the description of it as a "Telco 2.0" play given their hard work in promoting the concept

I have more thoughts on this but limited time right now - so this is a marker (to GigaOm) for when I can get back to it.

OK, time for more thoughts over afternoon tea. Firstly, though, a disclosure - we have been working with a number of Telcos to look at the services that are possible on top of 21st century-like networks, and have worked with the Telco 2.0 guys over the years on a number of areas. So we both know of what we speak, but may be funnelled by our previous experience.

The strategic thing is this - once you have a huge pipe that runs packets very fast and very reliably, a whole lot of things in the layers above above it fall into the "You wouldn't build it this way if you started from here" department.

This starts with datacentre architecture layer - the network truly can be the computer, and the storage facility, and the firewall, and a whole host of Web Hosting things which now literally can be hosted on the web. Call it the Grid, the Cloud, the whatever - it becomes the sort of thing a Telco can easily run as a utility, especially if you are trying to manage multi-media (fixed, mobile, voice, data etc).

Next up is the transaction/messaging layer - right now this is split between the telco, the application, and your computer. But in theory you can break up applications and put them all over the Web. You can break up the functions in your computer and do likewie (run apps from here, store data there etc)

This clearly radically changes the way you would design software, web services, and end user devices. And how you would run directories, social graphs, blog commenting systems and other "common" systems that today live in walled gardens ad infinitum.

This then has an impact on how you can operate the trust/identity/presence/security subsystems required - and when push comes to shove. most (ie non early adopter) users still trust Telcos a lot more than startups and for-profit ITC corporates to run these better and with more integrity (according to all the market research we have seen, anyway)

The issue of course is this is early days, and despite the hyperbole in some quarters you have to build this step by step as nothing works less well than early failure - as the continued waxing and waning of the "network PC" play has shown over 20 years.

A reasonable first step is to combine Voice functions with web services. A good way to do that is to buy something that looks like its succeeding, and its at a reasonable price (Ribbit may be a 2006 company but the guys have been building a Big Soft Switch for a long time) owing to the £/$ exchange rate (assuming that "cash free" here implies BT will actually pay for it* )

Will it work? Telcos are notoriously bad at initial execution (though they usually eventually get it right) but right now 60% on GigaOm's poll reckon its the best approach for BT

* Cash Free, Debt Free means BT grabs the remaining cash and assumes the debts and pays $105 m on top of that

Read Write Web echoes my thoughts on the real lessons of Cuil's launch yesterday:

I still don't get it though - how come this startup got blanket coverage from tech news heavyweights, some of whom should know better than to buy into the hype? Did any of those publications actually test Cuil before writing up its greatness?

Especially as:

Some of the initial blog coverage of this story extended the hype. I must applaud Cuil's PR people for managing to get such overwhelming launch coverage, initially positive - although after bloggers actually started using the product the tone of the coverage changed accordingly.

The fact is, Cuil is a very ordinary product right now. In my own tests last night, I was left underwhelmed. Our official post today summed up our views: this is an average product that does not live up to its own hype, the NYT's hype, or the hype bestowed upon it by noted bloggers and those who thought they got a "scoop".

I was also interested in the whys and wherefores....being fact based analytical types we tend to make our own decisions on "stuff" (see our review of Cuil here) but it was instructive to follow the feeding frenzy of the tech blog echo chamber (or is it an eco-chamber, as they are all chasing precious traffic and Ad revenues) and watch the story go from hype to gripe as it became clear that (i) there was less to this than met the eye but (ii) some of the big tech bloggers were copying and pasting pre-digested hyped impressions without actually testing the thing themselves.

Ah, the "wisdom" of In-Crowds

This observation also led to my other thought this morning - choose your news sources wisely, you are what you read!

Interesting post by Hutch Carpenter asking "who is your information filter" - especially pertinent as this morning (UK time) Techmeme seems to be down. This is quite an interesting question, on 2 levels:

Firstly, who is your filter - ie how do you filter data today - and secondly, what are the systemic effects of your choices.

How do you filter?

Techmeme was down this morning, UK time, and it made me reflect on how my filtering habits have shifted. A few years back, I had feeds up the wazoo coming into my reader and eventually got so fed up that I declared "RSS bankruptcy" and turned most off. Aggregation services like Techmeme, digg, Technorati etc became a far more effective way of finding the zeitgeist (the last 2 less so now). Since then I've added Twitter and Friendfeed to the mix - not because of them per se, but because a lot of the people in the tech space / London social media space are on these platforms. When these people move on, I'll connect to new platforms.

The Systemic Effects

Hutch notes in his article that over the last decade or so there has been a steady drift towards news aggregation/filtering sites/services (Letterman, Drudge Report) that have a number of common characteristics:

- They don’t actually find and report news (for the most part)
- They only present what they find interesting
- They have shrewd judgment as to what audiences will like
- Their personalities are part of their effectiveness as news filters - people trust them

In other words the "dumbing down" of information by presenting it as entertainment and stripping out the hard bits. As Hutch notes, in a time constrained world its hard to persuade people to take on information that they don't like (but may be good for you). NBC's Bryan Williams calls this the "eat your peas" element of being an informed citizen.

Once it was religion, then TV - now will online "bubblegum media" be the new opiate of the masses.

These sites are deliberately doing this, ie you know what you get. More pernicious perhaps is limiting yourself to "wisdom of crowds" aggregators like the Techmeme's, Friendfeeds etc - by definition you are getting what a subset finds important - not so much dumbing down as dumbing narrow.

(In)Conclusion

When it comes to consuming media, you are what you eat - or read, listen to etc.

The risk of relying only on "wisdom of crowd" filtering is that, whether "innocently" or intentionally, we start to miss the correct picture and over time dumb ourselves down. Seems to me two functions need to be set into a good aggregation service to mitigate this:

(i) Serendipity switches - find stuff your mainstream is missing
(ii) Eat your Greens functions - adding in undesired but necessary data to the feed.

You almost want a forced "Renaissance Man" function, to balance the tendency to only consume what you like.

Thoughts on how to execute welcome......

TechCrunch reports that the Post is using Predictify to set up a Prediction Market:

...that allows readers to vote on possible outcomes for selected stories. Users will be able to leave their predictions and discuss their beliefs on an integrated comment thread, with the most accurate participants appearing on a leaderboard.

...While there isn’t currently a way to weight one question more than another, the site’s algorithm does take into account the type of question and the accuracy rate of participants. Besides the Washington Post, Predictify is also found on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle’s sites.

To offer an incentive for users to take part in the polls, the site has also implemented a premium program that allows companies to sponsor a poll and reward the most accurate participants with cash. In return, these sponsors are entitled to the demographics data that the service asks for with each vote.

Allowing us to predict that the next thing any user will get is messages from those sponsors . What do you think the probability of that is then?