Author: Richard MacManus

In the emerging Internet of Things, everyday objects are becoming networked. Clothing is no exception. It’s still early days for Web-enabled clothes – the best example so far is the Nike+ running shoe, which contains sensors that connect to the user’s iPod. But expect to see everything from your shirt to your underwear networked in the not too distant future.

In the following list of ten ‘smart clothing’ items, we showcase Internet pants, a proximity sensing shirt, a heart sensing bra, biosensor underwear, a "thought helmet", and more!

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Motion Detecting Pants

Now, we’re know what you’re thinking – it’s already pretty easy to detect ‘motion’ in pants isn’t it? Nevertheless, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg has developed a pair of pants "that detect movement and let a computer know your every move."

These smart pants work via a loom that helps sew the wires and fabric together. Sensors embedded in the fabric measure the speed, rotation and flexibility of the pants with every movement. Wireless signals are sent from the pants to a computer to display the activity. The scientists at Virginia Polytechnic don’t yet know why this activity would be useful (to a computer), but we’re sure that use cases will arise.

Proximity Sensing Shirt

The Locked ON Proximity Sensing T-Shirt is currently available at the ThinkGeek store. It features a "radar screen" on the shirt that scans for matching shirts. If you get within a few meters of your counterpart wearing the same shirt, the radar on your shirt "locks on" and detects the other. This could be useful for love or war – the video below shows the latter scenario.

Heart Sensing Bra

The Numetrex heart sensing bra uses electronic modules and silver coated electrodes to pick up a person’s heart rate and transmit the data to a watch worn on the wrist.

Says NuMetrex Marketing Director Meg Burich, “It’s a comfortable way to wear a heart rate monitor, because we knit flexible heart sensing fibers directly into the fabric of the garment. There’s no hard plastic belt to strap around your chest.”

Smart Running Shoes

Nike+ running shoes come with a sensor that tracks your run, then sends the data to your iPod. It even has its own social network and can automatically tweet and post a status report on Facebook.

See ReadWriteWeb’s review of the Nike+ shoes.

Networked Jacket

According to a report from GizmoWatch a couple of years ago, Lunar design’s BLU Jacket is a futuristic concept that could make walking billboards a reality.

Lunar Design used organic fabrics containing semiconductors in the BLU Jacket, in order to display your moods through signs and colors. This BLU Jacket also has a GPS module built into it. So if someone asks you directions, you could theoretically project a map onto your jacket’s sleeve through it’s flexible display. Or, asks GizmoWatch, "how about getting paid for displaying advertisements on your jacket?"

Next Page: Neuro Headset, Thought Helmet, Biosensor Underwear, iPod Watch, Nanofibers.

Recently we looked at the state of Linked Data in 2010, noting developments such as governments putting public data online and Thomson Reuters putting structure around commercial data using OpenCalais. In a follow-up post, we explained the distinction between Linked Data, Open Data and the Semantic Web.

Georgi Kobilarov, who runs a Linked Data startup from Germany called Uberblic Labs, recently issued an interesting challenge on his blog. He asked: if we had a Web of Data, what would you build? Not to steal Georgi’s thunder, but we think this is a great question to put to ReadWriteWeb readers too.

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Here’s Georgi’s idea:

"If we had a Web of Data, I would built an application for painless travel planning. It would integrate flight plans, train timetables, bus routes, car rental offers, etc. And the user would be able to just say: I want to go from A to B: Find me the best/cheapest/fastest routes. […] With a Web of Data, an application could do all that combining for me, the same way flight booking sites do that today for just flights."

Here’s my idea for an app that uses the Web of Data. I’d like a web site or app that allows me to discover the locations of original art works by my favorite artists, and then create travel itineraries for me to see some or all of those art works (most famous artists have their art works scattered around the world, in various museums and galleries). It’s possible that there is a web directory of artists somewhere that has some or even all of this data already, but if so I haven’t found it.

I ask for this because every now and then I search the Web for a painting that I saw in a book. A recent example was a Modigliani painting that I was attempting to create a copy of, for my beginners acrylic painting class. The original painting was called "Portrait of Madame Hanka Zborowska." One of the results from Google told me that the original painting is located at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, Italy.

I could potentially spend hours hunting down the locations of Modigliani’s paintings, using Google – and it’s likely that some of the data isn’t currently online. So it would be great if I could query one web site or app: tell me where all the originals of Modigliani’s paintings are in the world, and draw me an itinerary for visiting all or some of them. Heck, maybe even book my flights and hotels!

That’s my example of what I’d build from a Web of Data. Now tell us what site or app you would like built, if the data was available on the Web.

Discuss

Last month the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab ran an event at the Stanford Business School, called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere. The video of the event was recently put up on YouTube. We’ve embedded the entire hour-long video below, along with a 2-minute video snippet which we think budding entrepreneurs should take note of.

If you have time, the entire event is worth viewing. It delves into current successful use cases for Internet of Things. Panelists include representatives from HP’s sensor networks division, a medical software company, and a company which provides sensor-enabled products for vending machines.

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The first speaker was Michael Chui, a Senior Fellow at McKinsey Global Institute. He explained that the Internet of Things is about incorporating sensors and actuators into physical objects, which "make the physical world part of an information system."

Chui noted that the Internet of Things is ramping up for 3 main reasons: 1) sensors are getting better, faster, smaller, cheaper, more plentiful; 2) networks are everywhere (pervasive, if not quite ubiquitous yet); 3) our new ability to analyze data that these network sensors generate and being able to control the actuators. Chui then went over the report that McKinsey released last month (our summary and analysis).

We’ve excerpted a couple of minutes from the end of Chui’s presentation, when he talked about potential applications for Internet of Things. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, this is well worth watching.

The rest of the event focused on commercial solutions using Internet of Things. An example is vending machine software company Cantaloupe Systems. Co-founder Anant Agrawal said that for his company, "the Internet of Things eliminates the guesswork." Cataloupe Systems provides sensor-enabled software for vending machines, which gives vending machine companies hard data with which to run their businesses more efficiently.

Here’s the full video of the forum:

Hat-tip Ethan Bauley from HP Communications, who pointed to the video in a RWW comment.

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You know that a trend is ramping up when big companies begin to namecheck it. It’s happening now with the Internet of Things, a term for when real-world objects connect to the Internet. Senior executives from two major U.S. broadband and telecommunications companies – Verizon and AT&T – plus the CTO of the world’s biggest network systems provider Cisco, have recently discussed the Internet of Things.

As part of a patriotic statement about how the U.S. leads the world in Internet innovation, Verizon chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg said today that the "’Internet of Things’ will infuse intelligence into all our systems and present us with a whole new way to run a home, an enterprise, a community or an economy."

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Seidenberg said that "in a 4G world, wireless will connect everything" and that "there’s really no limit to the number of connections that can be part of the mobile grid: vehicles, appliances, buildings, roads, medical monitors."

AT&T have also been making noises about the Internet of Things. At the recent CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, AT&T announced a partnership with a company called American Security Logistics (ASL), to "wirelessly connect a series of location based tracking devices that can be used to help keep tabs on an array of valuables – from people to pets to pallets." The first product will be a cargo shipping tracking and monitoring application. Other products in the pipeline include pet tracking, child safety and Alzheimer’s patient monitoring.

Both Verizon and AT&T are positioning their wireless networks as key parts of the emerging Internet of Things.

Cisco is another company getting in on the trend. At CTIA, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said that by 2013, the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion – up from 500 million in 2007.

According to Warrior, "we’re heading into the Internet of Things."

Warrior sees high growth in the Internet of Things. "With more machine-to-machine connections and wireless sensors everywhere," she said, "the Internet is no longer just an information superhighway [but] a platform that will transform many industries."

These bigco utterings remind me of when the term ‘web 2.0’ first began to creep into corporate speak, about 2005. It’s still early days for the Internet of Things, but prepare yourself to hear a lot more of this new term.

ReadWriteWeb has been at the cutting edge of defining and explaining the nascent Internet of Things – see our extensive archives for more information. If you’re new to the topic, check out Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Internet of Things and Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009.

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Three years ago we reviewed Martha Stewart’s women’s lifestyle website, marthastewart.com. At that time, April 2007, the site had just undergone a web 2.0 facelift. Martha Stewart 2.0 included more videos, blogging and general community features such as recipe swap functionality and message boards. It planned to add further personalization and community features over 2007.

We thought it would be interesting to take another look at Martha Stewart’s website, to get an indication of how mainstream websites have evolved over the past 3 years.

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The design of marthastewart.com hasn’t changed much since we last checked. It has the same pastel green color scheme and is organized in much the same way, around lifestyle categories: Food, Entertaining, Holidays, Weddings, Crafts, Home & Garden, Pets, Whole Living, Community.

However if we look more closely, several things have taken more prominence on the site compared to 2007.

Martha’s Blog

The first is an increased focus on Martha’s personal blog. In 2010 Martha has a daily updated blog, called The Martha Blog, with the tagline "up close and personal." This marks a change from 2007, when the main blog was called Bluelines and was written by the editors of company magazine Blueprint. The Bluelines blog was shuttered in July 2008.

The Martha Blog was started in August 2007 and began to be regularly updated in October 2007. The content on the blog appears to be written by Martha herself, although one can never be sure with celebrities. Regardless, it showcases the power of blogging – which allows average people and celebrities alike to speak in a personal voice to the world.

There are other topic-focused blogs on marthastewart.com, including a light-hearted one authored by "Martha’s two adorable French bulldogs, Francesca and Sharkey."

Twitter & Facebook

Of course, it’s 2010 and so that means Martha has to have a Twitter account and Facebook Page.

Martha’s Twitter account has nearly 2 million followers (1,909,707 as of today, including this author now). She seems to be a regular Tweeter, which is great to see. Many of the tweets are promotions of her TV show, but then we’re all guilty of self-promotion (ahem). You can see that the tweets are genuine though, for example this one about a late guest on her show: "who could this person be?- so irresponsible when he/she knows the show is live at ten!!! it’s 9:39 we are all apprehensive!!!! oh my."

TV Show Promotion

Another change from 2007 that we noticed was an increased tie-in with Martha’s TV show. It is given prime real estate on the homepage of marthastewart.com, with previews of the latest show and links to the archive.

Despite the TV show being a big focus, the website doesn’t have a lot of multimedia content on it. The videos that are on the site are largely promotional.

This section includes ‘how-to’ articles that complement the TV show, for example this article on how to make a Tie-Dye-Effect Scarf (as featured on a recent TV episode).

Evolution of Martha’s Website

Martha Stewart’s website is clearly meant to be a complement to her main media businesses, the TV show and magazines. So you won’t find much ground-breaking use of the Internet – there’s little or no original video produced specifically for the website, for example.

There also wasn’t a lot of personalization, which was promised in 2007. The community functionality in 2010 seems much the same as in 2007: message boards and the blogs. Although, Twitter and Facebook are both being used to enhance community.

It’d be nice to see more Web native content and personalization. The Web isn’t Martha’s main media presence, so we can understand why those features are lacking. However traffic seems to be on the decline, so perhaps Martha’s web team should consider upgrading again.

2010 Martha Stewart website

2007 Martha Stewart website

2005 Martha Stewart website

Discuss

Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of "virtual reality" in the early 1980s and in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, he makes the case for a more humanistic approach to Internet technology. Lanier rails against web 2.0, which he calls at the start of the book "a torrent of petty designs" and "freedom […] more for machines than people."

Lanier’s main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the ‘hive mind’ over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."

Many new iPad owners might object that they’re a reduced person because of their new gadget. Nevertheless, Lanier offers an intriguing counterpoint to web 2.0 philosophies and so it’s worth exploring that.

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Lanier is of course just the latest in a long line of web 2.0 cynics. They range in quality from the sharp critiques of Nicholas Carr, to the sensationalistic rantings of Andrew Keen. Lanier is thankfully more akin to Carr, in that he’s thought provoking and brings something new to the table.

Lanier’s theories are intriguing and in some cases very compelling. However, ultimately I found his "manifesto" to be fragmentary and lacking a definitive conclusion. I was not entirely convinced by the end of the book – which is a problem, because a manifesto should ideally provoke further action from its readers.

Wikipedia: Mob Rule

Wikipedia comes in for the most criticism in the book, because the online encyclopedia is written by an army of mostly anonymous people. Therefore, Lanier claims, Wikipedia stifles individual expression. According to Lanier, Wikipedia is "intellectual mob rule" and "seeks to erase point of view entirely." He goes so far as to call the individual voice "the opposite of wikiness."

Although this is an extreme view of Wikipedia, and wikis in general, I did find one point to be particularly compelling: Wikipedia dominates search results and for that reason it is suppressing individual voices. As Lanier put it, "Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy" – by putting Wikipedia results at or near the top of search results for millions of topics.

Facebook: Multiple-Choice Identities

Other Web 2.0 stalwarts don’t escape Lanier’s withering gaze.

Facebook is criticized for encouraging people to create "standardized presences," due to its black and white categorizations of people. Later in the book Lanier writes that Facebook organizes people into "multiple-choice identities."

Blogs are also criticized, for their "standardized designs" that encourage "pseudonymity" in features like blog comments. Lanier doesn’t highlight though that the rise of blogs and other social media websites have given a voice to hundreds of thousands of people, who were previously excluded from the mainstream media landscape because they didn’t have access to an adequate publishing platform.

Lanier: Elitist?

This is where I found myself most in disagreement with Lanier. Here is a highly intelligent and successful software architect, who hangs out with scientists and Internet intellectuals. Is it any wonder then that he is so gung-ho on individual expression? The people he associates with on a daily basis are the intellectual elite!

In my opinion Lanier is a bit too quick to dismiss the content of blogs and Twitter, simply because the design of those publishing platforms are "standardized." The design may well be standardized, but many people have created original and compelling content using these web 2.0 platforms. Even Lanier recognizes that if you look past the first layer of Wikipedia results in Google, you’ll often find compelling individual voices.

The Network By Itself is Meaningless

Lanier’s argument that web 2.0 designs "actively demand that people define themselves downward" is a compelling one. I agree that Wikipedia and Facebook both have significant flaws and that both are indeed contributing to a middling, less creative culture. In particular I am sympathetic to the notion that individual expression is suffering – every time I see an anonymous comment on ReadWriteWeb that is critical of something, I wince and immediately place less value on it than if the comment had a real name attached to it.

So, Lanier’s concerns about the ‘hive mind’ and loss of individual expression are valid. He puts it rather poetically here:

"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful."

Beyond The Flaws of Web 2.0

However, I also think that Lanier glosses over the benefits of web 2.0 – that it gives everyone who has a computer (and nowadays a smart phone) a publishing platform with which to explore their creativity and have their say.

Regardless of what you think of the resulting content – whether it’s largely unoriginal, or the best of it gets lost in noise, or aggregators make "mush" of it – the fact that web 2.0 has democratized the publishing industry is something that should continue to be celebrated. Lanier’s book tends to dismiss this blossoming of new media as simply the product of web 2.0 "standardized designs" – and that comes across as elitist and pompous.

Overall, You Are Not a Gadget is a thought provoking and compelling book. If, like me, you find yourself iPad-less this weekend, then I’d encourage you to spend some time consuming this book.

Discuss

Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about the crossover. To add to the confusion, there is a term called ‘Open Data’ that is being bandied around too. This commonly describes data that has been uploaded to the Web and is accessible to all, but isn’t necessarily "linked" to other data sets.

So what’s the beef with all of these terms? In this post we seek clarity!

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The Difference Between Open Data and Linked Data

In the discussion over yesterday’s post, a few people tweeted that the U.K. government’s public data website Data.gov.uk is mostly populated with ‘Open Data’ and not ‘Linked Data.’ But what does that mean? It means that much of the data on the site is available to the public, but it doesn’t link to other data sources on the Web. It could be data that has been uploaded in CSV format (i.e. spreadsheet data), which Sir Tim Berners-Lee said in an interview with me last year is a common occurrence with government departments. Or it could be data in another non-Web format.

Screen from a Tim Berners-Lee presentation on Linked Data, circa 2008

Titti Cimmino put it nicely: Open Data is simply ‘data on the web,’ whereas Linked Data is a ‘web of data.’

However, the idea of Open Data is to turn it into Linked Data. As John S. Erickson pointed out, the first priority of Data.gov.uk (and its U.S. counterpart) is to publish lots of Open Data. The next step is to work towards linking it all up. This is already starting to happen. Answering a question I posed on Twitter, Kingsley Idehen confirmed that Data.gov.uk is currently a combination of Open Data and Linked Data.

Linked Data and The Semantic Web

So may we then suggest that the idea of Linked Data is to turn it into a Semantic Web? Or are they the same thing already?

Lorna Campbell from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland tackled those and other questions in an excellent post earlier this month. She started by warning of the potential for another "holy war" about terminology. I won’t delve into that in this post, however this excerpt from Campbell’s post gives you a flavor of the terminology angst:

"Some argue that RDF is integral to Linked Data, other suggest that while it may be desirable, use of RDF is optional rather than mandatory. Some reserve the capitalized term Linked Data for data that is based on RDF and SPARQL, preferring lower case “linked data”, or “linkable data”, for data that uses other technologies."

Even Wikipedia can’t define Semantic Web…

Campbell quotes from a number of other articles, in trying to come to a conclusion about how Linked Data and the Semantic Web relate. Perhaps the best definition she found was this one by Paul Walk:

1. data can be open, while not being linked
2. data can be linked, while not being open
3. data which is both open and linked is increasingly viable
4. the Semantic Web can only function with data which is both open and linked"

Why This Matters

So there you have it, Linked Data is NOT the same as the Semantic Web. It’s also not necessarily open, in other words accessible to developers.

Whatever the definitions, the key points about all of Open Data, Linked Data and the Semantic Web, are:

1. data is being uploaded to the Web that wasn’t online before (e.g. much of the data on Data.gov.uk).
2. structure is being added to the data using Linked Data and/or Semantic Web technologies.

The bottom line is that the more data we have on the Web that is linked and has defined meaning, the smarter our web applications will be. This is why these activities are so exciting, despite the terminology confusion!

Image credit: Semantic Web Rubik’s Cube, dullhunk

Discuss

In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data, an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" web applications.

At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast – evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data ‘cloud’ has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year.

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Governments Get on Board

The most high profile usage of Linked Data over the past year has come from two governments: the United States and United Kingdom.

The U.S. was first to open up some of its non-personal data for use by developers, with the May 2009 launch of Data.gov. In January 2010, the U.K. government announced Data.gov.uk – with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At launch, Data.gov.uk had nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. At the time it was more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offered.

Following on from the launch of Data.gov.uk, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a new British Institute for Web Science along with $45 million in government backing. The Institute will be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt. This was great news for Linked Data, because according to Prime Minister Brown, the Institute "will help place the U.K. at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies.”

Commercial Applications

There have been commercial success stories too, such as OpenCalais for media, MusicBrainz for music and GoodRelations for e-commerce. There are also many commercial sites tapping into the general knowledge data store at dbpedia.org.

However it’s relatively early days for commercial applications of Linked Data. We’re beginning to see smart people explore potential use cases, such as this list for news organizations, but much of the early implementation is being done by publicly funded entities such as the U.K.’s BBC.

The latest version of the Linking Open Data dataset cloud, as at July 2009, maintained by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch.

Just Get The Data Up There

To reiterate, Linked Data is data that has been marked up using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or RDFa (a simpler variation). Minus the acronyms, Linked Data is simply structured data.

However one of the reasons the Semantic Web hasn’t yet been widely adopted, at least commercially, is that it’s often difficult or time consuming to mark up data semantically. RDF in particular has a reputation for being painful to code. With that in mind, the past year has been as much about prompting governments and organizations to put their data up on the Web in whatever form they can.

Indeed when I interviewed Sir Tim Berners-Lee last July, he told me that he’d be happy if governments "just put data up in whatever form it’s available." He mentioned that "Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular." He’d be much more happier if it was semantically marked up data, using the likes of RDF, but conversion can happen after it’s been uploaded to the Web.

So overall, Linked Data is still early in its adoption curve. However it’s undeniably become a solid on-ramp to the wider Semantic Web and world of structured data.

For a good technical overview of the current state of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, see this presentation by Davide Palmisano.

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One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites, a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks, for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel’s techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities.

In Siegel’s latest book, Pull, he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards.

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Siegel’s definition of ‘Semantic Web’ is much broader than that of many technologists. So, just as many Web standards advocates derided Siegel’s version of web design back in the 90s, will they also cry foul of his version of the Semantic Web?

Pull is being positioned as a business guide to the emerging Semantic Web. It has similarities to Creating Killer Web Sites, which caught the wave of an emerging big trend of the mid-90s (web site design) and became a bestseller. Siegel is attempting to catch a second big online wave, with the Semantic Web in 2010.

Siegel explains the title in the introduction:

"This book describes the pull era, where customers pull everything to them on demand – products, services, information, knowledge, and advice. Much of the foundation for pulling is called the semantic web, a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will change business from a lead-push model to a pull-follow model of interacting with customers."

It’s hard to argue against the vision that the book outlines. However for many Semantic Web proponents, the foundational technologies are Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). These standards allow web publishers to encode meaning – semantics – into their sites.

David Siegel’s definition of Semantic Web is far broader. On the book’s accompanying website, The Power of Pull, there is a "Semantic Web Acid Test." It defines a semantic web business as one that has an "unambiguous" structure for its data. The book states that "some technologists feel that semantic web data must be expressed using a language called RDF," but Siegel disagrees. Instead, he believes that "simple, unambiguous formats are part of the semantic web."

The book is ultimately about how structured data will change how we do business. Frankly, the use of the term ‘Semantic Web’ in this book feels forced. Even so, I think it’s a very useful book and offers detailed scenarios of how structured data will improve business. For example, chapter 4 is about retailers and outlines the benefits of RFID tags in retail – including describing a visit Siegel made to forward-thinking German retailer Metro Group.

Overall Pull is a solid and well-researched book. It’s a good introduction for business people to structured data and the Semantic Web.

My one issue with the book is that Siegel’s appropriation of the term ‘Semantic Web’ leaves me feeling a little uneasy. On the home page of his personal website is a blog post (entitled ‘Why I Should be Apple’s Next CEO’), in which Siegel claims that he "started talking about the Semantic Web in 1998, before Tim Berners-Lee coined the term." Whether that’s true or not, it does beg the question: is Siegel’s definition of the Semantic Web the same as Tim Berners-Lee’s?

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Early bird registration for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 is almost over. You only have a few more days to get your tickets for just $295. Click here to get your ticket at this special price.

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications.

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As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the ‘unconference’ format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect complement to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful – we got a lot of great feedback about that.

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in my opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We’re using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

If you’re a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in helping sponsor this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can’t wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here, if you’re so inclined.

We hope to see you on May 7!

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We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future.

This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned.

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The report is divided into three parts.

PART 1:

The AR Market Defined – provides a succinct introduction to Augmented Reality (AR), its history, current size, how fast it is scaling and key players in the market.

PART 2:

AR Supplier Profiles – profiles 10 leading companies specializing in the development of Augmented Reality applications for their clients.

PART 3:

Summarizes results of a survey of AR developers providing insight on key controversies in the field, project requirements, cost categories and duration of development.

Survey of Experienced Developers

The survey of experienced developers included in the report has unearthed some information about AR implementations that you won’t be able to get anywhere else.

• How important is it for companies to use existing AR browsers as opposed to building their own stand-alone mobile AR apps?
• Hidden costs associated with AR app development.
• Developer experience requirements for AR app development.
• Timeline for development of AR apps.
• Total cost and cost break down for developing a Webcam AR project.
• When live video processing will be enabled on popular mobile phones? This is critical for the next stage of AR, because it will allow for apps that are responsive to what’s actually being looked at instead of just what’s expected to be in a given location.

Also check out our other ReadWriteWeb Premium Reports, which will give you a competitive advantage by enabling you to understand key Web trends such as The Real-Time Web and its Future, and The Guide to Online Community Management.

Keep an eye out for our next Premium report coming soon, which will cover best practices for location data acquisition and user privacy!

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Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government.

In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China – but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google’s court and Beijing won’t push the situation.

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History of Google in China

Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China.

In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google’s decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world’s population would be a greater loss than having censored results.

At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn’t have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn’t host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted.

Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn’t spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government.

In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography in its search results, and it went dark for a short time as a result.

There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at.

In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google claimed on its blog came from China. At that time Google also announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn’t believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time.

Kuo said that the challenge to Google’s business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google’s blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes.

Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January.

Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in the midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It’s impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works."

The Great Firewall

There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo.

The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It’s a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it’s fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs.

So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites.

Self-Discipline

The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practice what is termed "self-discipline."

Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up if a Chinese user visits pages with content offensive to the Chinese government.

Most Internet users in China don’t come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don’t use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China."

Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media sites, such as social networks and microblogging sites.

How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet

Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have – rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have.

The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don’t overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks.

Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It’s ad-hoc, reactive and informal – however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy – most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government.

Next Moves from Beijing and Google

Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google’s court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios – including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down.

The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China to Baidu.

The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked.

The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be if Google stopped censoring google.cn – but the service stays online.

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TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release. The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding.

TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.

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Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as "other" (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means.

The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie, which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator. Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or "other" (e.g. merger or private investment).

The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party).

TechStars attributes this success rate to its "mentorship driven approach." The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity.

TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, "I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It’s powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program."

I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it’s a city with plenty of vitality and smarts.

If you’re a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon.

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Digital activism is defined by the newly launched Meta-Activism Project as "the practice of using digital technology for political and social change." One of the leaders in the field of digital activism is Mary Joyce, the founder and executive director of the Meta-Activism Project. Joyce is among the most knowledgeable and experienced digital activists in the world. She also founded DigiActive.org in 2007, a volunteer organization for grassroots activists. In 2008, she was New Media Operations Manager for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism.

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RWW: You recently moved on from DigiActive in order to create a new organization for digital activism. Can you tell us more about what that will be?

MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field.  Today’s digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications.  We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world.

I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site – http://meta-activism.org – went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we’d like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism.

RWW: We’ve heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism?

MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes.  Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal.  However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism "success" – the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt – while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers. 

Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa

The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective.  Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures.  Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here.  In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures. 

RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren’t as aware of?

MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context.  That’s the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up. 

Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and "use neutrality."  Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. "Use neutrality" means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files.  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not. 

Mary at the Women’s Leadership and Technology Conference, Sharjah, UAE

RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools.

MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories.  I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic – NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria). 

In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization – Iran, Moldova, Egypt – without successful campaigns.

RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there – both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship, but we’re not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet? 

MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users.  This means both creating new circumvention tools – more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates – and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users.

RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project!

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The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are Facebook clones. Some of China’s Twitter clones have been closed down by the Chinese government, but some have survived. We take a look at both cases in this post. We also assess Twitter’s chances of success in China, should it ever be freed from the ‘Great Firewall of China.’

Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China.

However
all three – plus Twitter itself – were blocked by the Chinese government in July 2009, because of their usage during the uprisings in Ürümqi. According to an AFP article, Chinese authorities blamed online agitators for helping to stoke violence in that region.

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Prior to being shut down, Fanfou had been dubbed "China’s Twitter" and had almost reached 1 million registered users by the end of June 2009.

An October 2009 report by China Daily noted that Fanfou was founded in July 2007 by Wang Xing, a young entrepreneur who also founded China’s current most popular social network Renren (formally known as Xiaonei). Both Renren and Fanfou were almost carbon copies of their U.S. equivalent services – Facebook and Twitter respectively.

Weibo Rises to Take Fanfou’s Place

Since the closure of Twitter, Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu, other services have risen to take their place. Taotao (owned by the company that produces popular IM service QQ) and
Zuosa.com are two examples.

However it is
Weibo that has emerged to become the biggest micro-blogging service in China. Weibo is owned by Sina.com, a huge portal company in China, and is connected to Sina’s blogging platform.

Weibo is very much like Twitter, in that it allows users to post short messages 140 Chinese characters or less via the Web, SMS or MMS. Although according to Chinese Internet expert and Beijing resident Kaiser Kuo, in Chinese 140 characters can actually produce quite a long message.

The major difference between Weibo and Twitter, according to Kuo, is that Weibo is censored. Or in the parlance of Chinese Internet users, it is "harmonized."

Sina’s Weibo probably has a much greater chance of surviving than its counterparts like Twitter and Fanfou, because it knows how to self-censor. Meng Bo, deputy editor-in-chief of Sina.com and project manager of Sina Weibo, told China Daily in October that "Sina is playing by the rules as they are laid down, with strict word filtering in operation."

According to Meng, there are two teams of staff "keeping close watch to ensure there is no vulgar content or anything that violates the rules.”

Would Twitter Succeed in China Anyway?

China’s surviving micro-blogging services are tightly controlled by the censorship climate in China.

However even if Twitter became available again in China, would it take off with mainstream Chinese Internet users? Kaiser Kuo thinks that it wouldn’t, because of the popularity of currently operational services like Weibo and Taotao. He remarked that although there would be an uptake in the number of users on Twitter, if it was ever to be made available again, Weibo and others will have gained too much momentum by then.

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The leading social networking site in China, renren.com, started out as a blatant Facebook clone – but it now has tens of millions of users. Despite obvious similarities to Facebook, there is one significant difference from the U.S. in how Renren and other Chinese SNS are used. The bread and butter of these sites is social games using virtual items. Indeed, Farmville originated in China!

In this first post of a series, we outline the most popular social network sites in China. In follow-up posts, we’ll look at Twitter clones, online video, and censorship. This series is based on a discussion I had with Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on China’s Internet.

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Kaiser Kuo is a Chinese-American who lives in Beijing. He currently works for one of China’s leading online video services, Youku.com, as a consultant on International Business. Previously he was Group Director, Digital Strategy at Ogilvy & Mather China.

There are 3 social networking sites that are clearly in the lead in China, according to Kaiser Kuo.

Renren.com is the leading social network. It began as a Facebook clone called Xiaonei.com – which means ‘on campus’ in Chinese. In August 2009 it changed its name to Renren, which means ‘everybody.’ Renren had 70 million registered users at that point. The site is owned by Oak Pacific Interactive and has had over $400M pumped into it by investors Softbank.

The site was founded in December 2005, shortly after Facebook began to ramp up. Its founder Wang Xing later founded Fanfou, a popular Twitter clone (see our next post in this series).

Xiaonei.com was literally a Facebook clone when it started, sporting the same shade of blue and the same layout. ReadWriteWeb guest writer Gang Lu wrote on this blog in June 2008 that Xiaonei.com "was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched." He noted that it had "the same layout, same color scheme and even a very similar logo," which he said "made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook."

Kaixin001.com is another very popular social network. Kaiser said that its users are mostly "white collar middle class" and typically come from a "first tier city."

Kaiser noted that Kaixin001.com is extremely popular among people who work for multinational companies, ad agencies and other white collar companies. Accordingly, the site is valuable because of its relatively wealthy user base.

The third social network that is very popular in China is 51.com, which Kaiser said is mostly used by people who live in "lower tier cities" and even rural areas. He noted that it has a "lower brow offering."

Each of these three hugely popular social networks in China has its own niche; from the mainstream Renren, to the more prestigious Kaixin001, to the populist 51.com.

In our next post in this series, we check out China’s Twitter clones.

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Consulting firm McKinsey has just released a report on the Internet of Things, one of ReadWriteWeb’s top 5 trends of last year. The report, available for free if you sign up as a member of McKinsey Quarterly, focuses on the "new sensor-driven
business models" that Internet of Things brings.

McKinsey sees two categories for emerging applications: "information and analysis" and "automation and control." Many of the applications listed are for large companies or specialized industries (for example automobile manufacturers). But consumers should take note too, because there will be a lot more data about us flowing onto the Internet.

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McKinsey defines Internet of Things as "sensors and actuators
embedded in physical objects […]
linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same
Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet."

In the "information and analysis" category, McKinsey firstly lists tracking behavior. An example is insurance companies installing location sensors in customers’ cars, allowing them to base the price of policies on "how a car is driven as well
as where it travels." Another example is Tesco’s use of sensors to capture
shoppers’ profile data via membership cards. According to McKinsey, this "can help
close purchases by providing additional information or offering
discounts at the point of sale."

On the B2B side, McKinsey points to companies using sensors to track RFID tags placed on products moving through
supply chains. We’ve written before about IBM’s activities in this market.

The next information and analysis application is enhanced situational awareness.
This is when large numbers of sensors are deployed in infrastructure such
as roads and buildings, in order to report on real-time environmental conditions such as weather or temperature.

Sensor-driven decision analytics shows how revolutionary sensor technologies could be, without most consumers even realizing it! The report explains that some retailers are presently studying ways to gather and
process data from shoppers as they flow through
stores. Sensor readings and videos will be able to "note how long they linger at
individual displays and record what they ultimately buy," data which McKinsey says "will help to increase revenues by optimizing retail
layouts."

The second major category for Internet of Things apps in this report is "automation and control."
By this McKinsey means "converting
the data and analysis collected through the Internet of Things
into instructions that feed back through the network to actuators
that in turn modify processes."

The first class of apps listed under this category is process optimization, for example for chemical production and assembly lines.

Next is optimized resource consumption, for example power companies that provide so-called ‘smart meters’ so that customers can better manage their power expenditure. This is particularly useful for companies that use a lot of power every day, because they can "shift energy-intensive processes and
production away from high-priced periods of peak energy demand to
low-priced off-peak hours."

The third and final automation and control use case is complex autonomous systems, which McKinsey calls "the most demanding use of the Internet of Things" because it involves rapid,
real-time sensing of unpredictable conditions. For example the automobile industry is developing systems that can detect imminent
collisions and take evasive action.

The report ends by saying that the Internet of Things holds great promise, but there are many issues to resolve – including privacy, legal and cost of sensors and actuators. However McKinsey thinks that energy consumption efficiency and process
optimization are "good early targets" for businesses using Internet of Things.

Overall, this is an informative, useful report for companies who want to get their heads around the potential business opportunities of the Internet of Things. For ReadWriteWeb’s ongoing coverage and analysis of this important trend, check out our Internet of Things archive and subscribe to our RSS feed.

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