People, places, technology, and such » technology

Landmark based navigation

albert — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:42:07 +0000

I was checking some locations on the Indian Yahoo Maps web site, and I realized that they have implemented landmark based directions.

For those that have never visited India, the concept may need some explanation: in Indian cities street names are almost useless: only some of the main roads have recognizable names, and even in those cases there are no signs displaying those names. Smaller streets do not have names, or if they have them, usually add to the confusion (there are whole neighborhoods full of numbered main and cross streets that do not seem to follow any predetermined pattern). If you add the fact that building numbers are almost inexistent, it is almost impossible to find a place only with the street name and number.

The solution is a landmark based address system. Basically, when you give somebody directions on how to get to some place, they are based on a series of landmarks, usually well known building, such as temples, official buildings, shopping centers, or any other specific street features that stand out. Any address is useless unless it includes the corresponding set of landmarks.

The consequence is that the mapping and directions applications that had been developed with the more regular American or European street systems in mind were useless for Indian cities, and they had to adapt to the specifics of Indian street systems and support landmarks. Yahoo Maps implementation is not perfect: it provides landmarks when giving directions from one place to another, but it does not allow you to include a landmark in an address (at least it has not worked for me…); but, with all its limitations, it is a step forward to adapt mapping and GIS systems to local needs

On one side, this is a clear example on how technological solutions have to adapt to local specific conditions, but this development also opens questions about the influence of technology on habits and attitudes: as GPS navigation, mapping software, and related technologies become more popular in countries such as India, will hey change the way addresses and directions are given?, does the inclusion of certain landmarks in a system such as Yahoo Maps say something about the relevance of that specific building?, who determines that a certain building and or site is a landmark?.

I can imagine, in the future, corporations, shopping malls, and other commercial sites paying for the inclusion of their corresponding locations as landmarks, and if that becomes a source of revenue for this type of services, is it possible that landmark based systems are also implemented in mapping services for other places?, and would that change the way we think and model our cities?…

Writing about India

albert — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 06:29:00 +0000

I’ve been back to Bangalore for a couple of weeks on a business trip.

I usually get quite a lot of questions about India when I get back from these trips. India is second only to China on attracting attention of business people and the public in general; but usually, the knowledge about the country and its economical, political, and social conditions is heavily mediated by the media news.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry from India about how western media usually approach the economic and social evolution of India in the last years, linked to the growth in IT and IT enabled services, and the stereotypes and cliches that are common in this type of analysis.

The authors description of a typical article about India seems to apply only to the English business oriented media. In Spain, in the last month and a half, there have been only two news bits about India in El País (my preferred local newspaper, and, discounting its political prefernces, a quite reliable source of information). One of them was quite a lengthly article about sati, the ancient practice of widow inmolation in the husband’s funeral pyre. The article headline talked about the survival of this practice in today’s India, and only when you got into the fine print you read that two cases have happened in the last couple of years and, in total, since independence in 1947, about 40 cases have been registered (remember that we are talking about a country with a population of more than 1 billion). The other was a short clip about the election of a woman as the country president, the first one to occupy the highest (but with very little real power) political position since the country independence in 1947.

The common thread of the stereotypical article about Indian economic growth and the Spanish generalist media coverage about India is the focus on what makes the country different, while downplaying any development that may approach it somehow, even if it is just a little bit, to the concept of developed countries.

However, those development and changes exist, and even if they are small steps, the huge size of the Indian population male them very relevant. For example, in terms of technology evolution, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones usage has open lots of possibilities for new applications and use models that very few companies seem to be tapping in (the major exception I know about is the work that Nokia is doing to understand mobile phone usage in developing countries and that Jan Chipchase captures in his blog).

A few years ago, C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Maybe we should also start talking about the Future Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid…

Everything 2.0

albert — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:10:00 +0000

Sometimes, when you learn something new, it seems that everybody and everything is suddenly arranged around that concept or idea; when you start reading about a specific topic and you try to apply to explain any situation or problem, regardless if the original idea has anything to do with it. This happens at the personal level, but it seems to be much worst in certain situations, specially in the corporate environment.

Working for a large corporation, I’ve been quite unlucky to go through several of those everybody is crazy about a topic. We’ve gone through the eras of Total Quality, Lean Enterprise, Crossing the Chasm, e-everything,…

And, of course, we are now in the 2.0 era.

Everything important has to have a version 2.0. There is, of course, web 2.0, but there is also school 2.0, home 2.0, work 2.0, There is love 2.0, and life 2.0. There is enterprise 2.0, organization 2.0, government 2.0, politics 2.0, war 2.0,…

It is very interesting to not that there are at least two concepts, that, up to my knowledge, have not been versioned yet: I haven’t found any information about peace 2.0 nor about sex 2.0!. There is no relevant site about crime 2.0, but I guess that the term politics 2.0 covers pretty well the concept….

It is obvious that there is a lot of marketing and media hype in all this 2.0 thing, but the question is whether d we really need all these new versions and, even in the case that we do, shouldn’t all of us be a little bit more original?…

This rumbling about 2.0 and the (quite stupid) idea of adding a version number to everything, was prompted by this funny video about a supermarket 2.0:

Castells, mobile communication, and the future

albert — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:00:00 +0000

I read yesterday, in the Spanish paper El País, an interview with Manuel Castells. The motivation for the interview is the publication of the Spanish translation of his latest book: Mobile Communication and Society.

As usual, Castells’ comments are thought provoking. I have specially found interesting his position against what could be called technological futurology, that he summarizes in this phrase (translatedd from the Spanish original text): “In reality, what most people calls future is the present, what happens is that they do not know it”.

He shows his point describing how mobile technologies are changing the way the world gets access to communication and services. There has been a lot of talk in the past years about the digital divide and how most part of the world population does not have access to computers and, consequently, data networks and services. There have been lots of initiatives to reduce the digital divide, usually focused on providing some kind of access to computers to the ‘disconnected’ populations (internet kiosks, internet community centers, OLPC…), but what is really giving the possibility to access on-line services to many groups that would, otherwise, remain disconnected are mobile technologies: more than half of the world’s population today has access to a mobile phone.

This concept of future is, precisely, what I want to refer to in the title of the blog. It is not about forecasting what is going to happen, and what the world is going to look like ten years from now. Lots of people have tried to do that with very little success. The possibilities of getting it wrong are much, much higher than guessing what is going to happen, so lets leave predictions to astrologers, chiromantics….

For me, taking about future is talking about what is happening today that is changing the way we do things, communicate, work, live…. Future is the path, not the destination, and when you want to follow a path that you do not know, you need to focus on the curves and slopes, the little changes, rather than trying to figure out what the destination is going to look like.

CCTVs and graffitis

albert — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:01:00 +0000

I have stayed for a few days in London, and one of the things that has surprised me is the large number of closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance signs that you can see in public places such as stores, the underground an even in the streets.

We have an image of the UK as one of the societies with a high level of concern on the protection of privacy. It is one of the few countries in Europe where there are no identity cards of any form issued by the government, and when, once in a while, an identity card initiative is proposed, it faces so much opposition that it gets dropped by politicians. The proliferation signs warning of CCTVs in operation is, at least superficially, opposite to this image.

Maybe the perception of the abundance of CCTVs was caused by the legal requirement to warn citizens of their existence, making CCTV signs quite ubiquitous in the London city landscape, but it certainly produced some estrange situations, like this CCTV sign besides a big graffiti (or street art?). Usually, the painting of street art such as this is somewhere in the fringes of legality, so the image makes you wonder what was first: the CCTV or the graffiti, and how those symbols of different lifestyles and attitudes ended up side by side in the street.

Beyond the curious image there is a whole reflection on how surveillance technology can change our habits and attitudes about the public space. Up to which extent do you change your behaviour when you know that CCTV is operating in a certain public space?, is the proliferation of surveillance warning signs going to trivialize it or, on the contrary, is it going to act to create social reaction to the technology?. And, of course, what happens when there is the possibility that some kind of surveillance is being done without any information signs?…

Panopticon or 1984, the fact is that surveillance based distopias are, today, part of our collective imaginary, so this is going to be an area of friction between technology capabilities and social expectations and concerns…

Web 3.0 (?)

albert — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:02:00 +0000

Web2.0 has become the big buzz word of the year.

Reading certain news and hearing some people talk, it seems that we are back in time to 1999, but with tagging and social networking substituting portal and e-commerce as the bright ideas that will change the world, and make (some of) us very rich. Web2.0 has its new heroes (the googles, the flickrs,…) and villains (guess who…). And obviously, there are the pundits that talk a lot about it and create all the hype, and in some cases make a lot of money out of it.

But, we cannot say that we did not learn our lessons: the Web2.0 bubble may explode as the .com bubble did a few years ago, so it is better that we have a new concept ready when this happens: an the term is, obviously, Web3.0.

Web3.0 is just a fancy name for a concept that has been lying around for a few years: the semantic web. I guess that the term semantic web sounds too geeky to attract venture capital, so somebody came up with the fancier Web3.0, and then, publications such as the MIT Technology Review have picked it up, so it is becoming mainstream in the internet and technology related circles. According to Nova Spivack, blogger and founder of one startup using semantic web technologies, there is even a Web4.0 waiting somewhere in the future…

But besides all the naming fireworks, there is a more subtle issue around the concept itself of an intelligent (as in artificial intelligence) network. I’ve already talked about the goods and bads of the collective intelligence that some of the new internet based technologies enable. The underlying question is how much intelligence are you ready to outsource to somebody else, be it some artificial intelligence search engine, be it the collective seating somewhere in cyberspace or, most probably, a combination of both.

It is obvious that any technology, and Web *.0 is not an exception, embodies in its design lots of cognitive and social assumptions and when adopting those technological artifacts we are, up to a certain extent, adopting those assumptions. And that is fine if you are aware of what are those underlying assumptions and what do they mean for you.

An example with serach engines: although Google’s page ranking algorithm is kept as the company’s major trade secret, it is well known that it is somehow based on the number of pages that link to a certain page, so, when I’m using Google as a search engine, I know that I’m actually looking, more or less, for the most popular pages about something, and hope that the most popular are also the best. But of course, that is not always the case, so it is nice to have other search engines that are based on other criteria and even a different search space (some of them provided by Google itself, like Google Scholar for research papers).

At the end, I end up using different search engines for different things, and I guess that the Web3.0 response to it would be building some kind of intelligent agent that can embody part of the criteria I use to select between the different criteria embodied in the different search engine options. The only problem I see is that somewhere in this chain of building intelligence on top of intelligence there must be some place left to personal, private, options and criteria.

I have to admit that I have not digged deep enough in the semantic web theories and technologies to understand how personal option and individual difference can be implemented in a way that is also easy to understand and use. But it is also true that I have not seen this issue addressed by any of the Web3.0 visions and predictions I have seen so far. So, at least for the time being, I will remain in the skeptic side about Web3.0 and I’ll be, at least, a little reluctant to outsource the small portion of intelligence I have left to some unknown agent…

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing U,

albert — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 10:08:00 +0000

It seems that Web2.0 is the buzzword of the moment. Everybody is talking about it, and, as usually, lots of nonsense is being said, as people try to seem smart and proof that they know better, specially when talking about how Web2.0 is changing all types of social relations (and how they know the best way of making money out of it…)

That is why I find this video interesting. It is well done, goes straight to the point and it is thought provoking. It does not try to define what Web2.0 is (I don’t think anybody really knows what it is…) but points out some of the changes that new web based technologies may bring and the controversies that they generate.

On being an ANT

albert — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:30:00 +0000

These days, I’m slowly progressing on the self-imposed task of reading Brumo Latour’s introduction to Actor-Network Theory: Reassembling the Social. Although Latour’s writing style is relatively light, at least compared to other sociology theorists such as Habermas or Bordieu, I still find quite difficult to grasp all the subtilities of actors, mediators, translation, oligopticons, plug-ins…My first experience with ANT was in a doctoral course about Technology, Economy and Society, where different theories about the interaction between technology and society, such as technological determinism or social construction of technology, were briefly described. What I found most interesting about ANT, and differentiating to other theories and frameworks, was the role it gives to non-human actors.

Society and Technology Studies have always struggled to accommodate the mechanisms in which technological artifacts and society interact and shape each other. The solution that ANT gives to this problem is quite simple and, at least apparently, neat: there is no technology and society as two separate realms that interact with each other: technological artifacts, and also science facts, are actors in the social network, that interact with other actors in a process of constant reshaping and reassembling.

This concept may sound strange at first, but if you look at it in more detail it starts to make, at least, some sense. It is quite obvious that technological artifacts, such as for example the Internet, on one side embody the values, concepts, ideas, cliches…. of the people, groups, and organizations that participate in their design and development (in their construction…); but they also reshape, reorganize, reassemble those other actors, be them humans or not.

ANT has also had its antagonists and it has been, and still is, subjected to very passionate debates (passionate, at least, for academics standards…), such as the Science Wars episode of the early nineties. Hard core positivists freak out whenever the concept of science being socially constructed is introduced. Latour addresses this topic in Reassembling the social with, I think, a good point: saying that science is constructed does not mean that scientific and technological knowledge is not true, but rather that there are lots of resources, interactions and relations between different actors (remember both human and not human) that have to be assembled to construct it.

However, the part I’ve found most interesting of the book is the section about how to do ANT research, how to write risky accounts in Latour’s terms. The author describes an ethnographic approach and a method to capture data about actors and associations, using four notebooks to ensure that both the actors’ own perceptions and the effect of the field data on the research and the researcher are logged.

Technorati Tags: actor-network, ANT, society and technology, ethnography, technology

Standard wars in the Internet age

albert — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 15:13:00 +0000

Standard wars are, probably, one of the better studied cases in technology and innovation management textbooks. There is no serious book in these areas that does not cite the VHS vs. Beta case, as a paradigm of how non technical issues play a key role in the evolution of technologies. This is a concept that is, very often, difficult to assume by pure techies that think that the best technology, best using some quantifiable measure such as speed, image quality,…, is the one that should win regardless of the environment. Market, society, culture… are concepts that are easier to describe than to measure (and, consequently, predict), so they should not appear in the engineer’s drawing board.

But standard wars are here to stay, as one of the modes in which conflicts of interests around technology definition and evolution are deployed and, in most of the cases, closed, with winners and losers.

And they are important: can anybody think that internet, as the network of networks, would have evolved to the Internet we know today if the ISO/OSI standards, and its underlying centralized model, had won over TCP/IP in the standards war over computer networking protocols in the 1980s?. Usually, there are high stakes in the game (benefit, control, power,…) and the winner takes it all.

And that’s why standards wars are fought with all the weapons available, and in the Internet age, that means, of course, the Internet itself. Standard wars are as much about perception than technology, and Internet is, today, one of the best mechanisms to build or destroy perceptions.

One of the standards wars that is very active these days is the one over standards for document file formats. It has been going on for a couple of years now, with different contenders and fronts: Microsoft with Open Office XML (OOXML) vs. IBM and OASIS with OpenDocument Format(ODF) on the office document front; Microsoft with XML Paper Specification (XPS) vs. Adobe with the Portable Document Format (PDF) on the fixed document front.

As in any standards war, different companies and interest groups are trying to push their standard as the one that better meets customer needs, which usually means the customer needs that can be met by their own standard. The difference is that, in this case, the battle is not only being fought in committee meetings, ballots over draft specs, or corporate alliances. Blogs and wikis have are the places where all the tricks (some of them clean, some of them dirty…) are being played, trying to change the perception of the different technologies at stake.

In this framework, the latest news about Microsoft paying somebody to change the contents of the wikipedia article on OOXML to make it sound more positive, and the reaction that it has caused shows how, for good or for bad, Internet has become an important medium to influence the shaping of technology.

For some this may sound positive: more democracy in the technology shaping process, while for others, it may sound really unsettling as more and more non technical issues will influence what gets designed and implemented. Welcome to the standards wars in the Internet age….

To be, or not to be….collective

albert — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 16:21:00 +0000

Collective production of information, content, and knowledge is one of the activities that has been facilitated by the growth of communication networks and the internet. Actually, internet itself could be viewed as the result of a collective construction, and historically, collective creation has been the rule rather than the exception, specially in the case of scientific and technical knowledge. It was not until the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment era that the inventor appears as the creator of a new technology or discoverer of a scientific fact.

However, what technologies such as wiki, and its best known incarnation: wikipedia, change is the size and characteristics of the collective: now anybody can participate in the content production. And, as usual, changes come with controversies: how this impacts the quality of the content, in the particular case of wikipedia, the information?.

Jaron Lanier has coined the term digital maoism to refer to the ‘appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise‘. Obviously the term has a critical connotation that is elaborated in Jaron’s assay and has been contested by other Yochai Blenker, Cory Doctorow or Larry Senger, one of the founders of wikipedia.

The whole controversy seems to be centered on the advantages or disadvantages of collective creation and production of content, or rather, the value that is given to the results of that collective creation, with the example of wikipedia to show the good and the bad. What I found surprising, and somehow disappointing, is that most of the arguments focus on the results rather than the process: it is true that, in many cases, the information collectively created for wikipedia does not meet the standards of a good encyclopedia or scientific paper, but it is precisely the process, discussions and negotiations that take place to create that content that can shed a lot of light on the underlying controversies. I usually find more interesting the wikipedia discussion pages than the actual entry, specially for highly disputed and controversial topics.

As part of my job, I have been trying to extend (proselytize?) the use of wiki based communication and documentation in our organization during the last few months, with, I have to admit, not an overwhelming success. I thought, and I still think, that the type of collective information sharing and the possibilities for knowledge creation and interaction that wiki provide were a perfect fit for the globally distributed environment in which we have to work.

For some reason (and I have some theories that I may discuss some day), things have not worked as I expected: although everybody praised the initiative its use is still marginal… I would consider a major success if some of the underlying controversies, technical and organizational, that we face were detected and addressed precisely in the process of collective creation, much as controversies are publicly highlighted in wikipedia. Unluckily, we are still too far to reach that point, so for the time being I’ll be happy if I can increase the use of our wiki just as an information repository…