You may have seen reported the ‘Sukey‘ app – an app that, with user support, collects information about potests and then channels it back ot the users. The idea is that they can then use this information to avoid being kettled by the police:
The idea for a specialist piece of software was sparked by kettling, a controversial police tactic to contain and demoralise protesters.
Sukey, taken from the nursery rhyme Polly Put the Kettle On, collects messages, tweets and photos from protesters and tries to make sense of what is going on. It then sends that data back to users of the app on the ground. The app provides an in-built compass which gives an indication of the best direction to move. A red marker on the compass could point towards a police cordon or kettle so a protester caught in trouble should follow the green direction to escape. By providing this data to those who need it, the team hoped that nobody would unwittingly be caught in a police kettle. “It’s a project to help people protesting stay safe, stay informed and stay mobile,” says Sam Gaus, co-founder of Sukey.org.
In many ways this is just a step towards levelling the playing-field between police and protesters. Prior to new technology such as mobiles, the police had radios, CCTV and choppers and so had access to a level of information and co-ordination that protesters did not. However the authorities in various countries have not stood still next to the advances in social media and are now responding, often in disturbing ways. This quote is from the Web 3.0 Lab, who are doing a good job of examining and documenting much of this area:
Now that regimes all over the world are aware of Social Media the balance of power has moved to their advantage. For a poorly policed site like Facebook the combination of Social Networks and a Terror State will quickly neutralize any democratic aspirations on the that Facebook might have fostered. We saw it first in Bahrain this development in Bahrain. Bahrain was one of the first regimes in the Arab world to take its battle against its own people to Twitter and Facebook. With Gaddafi joining the war on Social Media, Facebook is no longer a safe place for Arab reformers. Gaddafi is adding a new twisted strategy in their war on Facebook. Gaddafi supporters are identifying Libyans, many who live in the west, on Facebook pages and threatening them.
What is also interesting from the article is thier assesment of the role of Facebook in all this:
It is pretty clear that Facebook’s entire history is a series of unintended accidents. Its success has been more a combination of random factors than any strength of the product. And its role in Arab Revolts was also clearly an unintended accident. Sadly Facebook own blindness may soon have very serious negative consequences.
To me, this has echoes of John Naughton‘s recent discussion of how we all too often see services like Facebook and Twitter as neutral actors in the societal space, which they are not:
What’s going on, in other words, is that our media are treating Twitter and Facebook as if they were public utilities, like the open web. In fact it’s even worse than that, as Dave Winer, one of the web’s elder statesmen, pointed out last week. “The Library of Congress,” he writes, “which is part of the government, is subsidising Twitter by doing a complete archive of Twitter before making a serious attempt at archiving the web. This helps cement Twitter as the medium of record, which is ridiculous. The market is just getting started. How can you justify the government taking sides over other equivalent (or better) ways to communicate, that are not owned by a company (like the web, for example). If this isn’t against the law, to use taxpayer funds to help a company achieve dominance over competitors, it should be against the law.”
Spot on. The illusion that corporations like Facebook or Twitter are public utilities is not only naive, it’s positively pernicious because it enables them to get away with the pretence that they are solely forces for good, rather than single-minded corporations whose loyalties are ultimately to their shareholders, no matter how soothing their bedside manners are.
(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on P2P Foundation Blog.)
The iPhone turns 4 and is nearly on version 5 and has been a huge success financially for Apple which has re-defined the mobile space and make the smart phone new new digital frontier. But who saw that 4 years ago? Some did:
January 11, 2007
In a reactionary preview post-iPhone unveiling, David Pogue of The New York Times writes:What [Apple] does have, however, is a real shot at redefining the cellphone. How many millions of people are, at this moment, carrying around both an iPod and a cellphone? How many would love to carry a single combo device that imposes no feature or design penalties? Considering that the cellphone is many people’s most personal gadget, how many would leap at the chance to replace their current awkward models with something with the class, the looks and the effortlessness of an iPod?
And some notably the CEO of Microsoft now desperately trying to catch Apple up got it super wrong…
April 30, 2007
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaking to USA Today’s David Lieberman in an interview brings up market share and software saturation:There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”
Oh, the irony… Still at least Microsoft see where they missed the boat and are trying to catch up, as they did with the web. If its any consolation, Steve, the expert’s predictions a rarely right…
iPhone games
How Much Data We Generate Now…It’s in Zettabytes!
Web vs Mobile Content Consumption
How to Start a Games Development Studio – Part 2
Following on from my part 1, here is part 2 looking at the business side of starting a games studio.
If you are going to make a business of it then you need a vision for what sort of a games business you wish to run. There is an old adage that goes; cheap, quality, fast – pick two. I think it applies to a games studio too. You can make games quickly and for not much money, but they won’t be the best quality. You can make amazing quality games but they take many more resources to produce and so cost more. There is nothing wrong with playing the numbers game of trying to get lots of titles out there. The developer behind Angry Birds made 52 games before they had a huge hit. What is important is that all involved know what sort of a studio you are and what sort of a vision to have.
First of I should say, I’m a huge comic fan. I have been for years, starting out reading them as a kid and have kept the faith with the format ever since. So as a result I’m a sucker for all the comic-related films that come out. A couple of days ago I went to see Green Lantern and it was, well a bit meh. I’d seen X-Men: First Class before this and thought that was really good. What has interested me in the general apporoch that the two holding companies, Marvel and DC are taking. If you don’t know much about them DC is the older company and is home to major characters like Batman and Superman. Marvel is the younger of the two and owns X-Men, Iron Man and Hulk amongst others. Both clearly (and understandably) see films as one of the main ways to push forward given the decline in sales of comic books. They both own a huge roster of characters, each with a fan-base and with loads of stories that can be plundered for material.
Marvel have sencently taken much more direct control of thier characters and worlds. They been putting comic creatives deep into the process. The other big thing they have been doing is cross linking the films, making sure we get to see that all thier characters exist in the same universe; so in the trailer for the new Captain America film there is a reference to Tony Stark’s dad (Tony Stark is Iron Man). Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D pop up in both Iron Man films and in Thor. From a fan point of view it works great, it ties them together and makes it seem much more of a bigger story. By contrast DC do not seem to have been doing this. They seem to be a little further from the films creation that Marvel are and each character thus far seems isolated by comparision. They’ve also been struggling to make thier characters work; Batman being the only noticable exception. The Dark Knight was an amazing film and I’m looking forward to the next. But the Superman reboot did not work out well, Green Lantern is a bit meh and they’ve wasted what in my opinion is one of thier best characters, Constantine. DC has an inprint, Vertigo where the more mature comics were housed which is brimming with great characters and stories; but like the Marvel univerise, they work best when interconnected. Ironically I was more of a DC-fan as a kid that Marvel and overall I think many of DC’s characters are more powerful archetypes than Marvel. However that is only part of the creative battle and so far Marvel are winning.
from Kingdom Come, a DC classic
News has been filtering in about the problems that are besetting a virtual currently called Bitcoin. The day to day rumblings of its story are fascinating enough but it is the evolution of the underlying idea that I think is important. This is one of those events that we often miss at the time and look back on as ushering in a new epoch in its long-term implications for the world, as for example the printing press did it its day.
So what is Bitcoin? It’s a virtual currency that can be used to buy and sell with much as you can with a normal currency. The difference is that while virtually all other currencies on the planet are backed by a central bank and so a nation state, Bitcoin is backed only by its users. It is a peer-to-peer currency developed for the networked age.
The Bitcoin Image
Before I get much deeper into what Bicoin is, its also important to consider what it is not. Most of the other innovations around money we see have been in the form of transactional means; the ease of transferring money between people (such as PayPal) or the ease of making a payment, such as using a mobile phone to pay. There have also been innovations we seel less of, such as credit default swaps that play around at repackaging value and risk. But underlying all these is still a national currency. None of these are a new currencies but a means to assist in the flow of old money but in a new world. Bicoin is, to a degree, some of these things, it is a digital native after all. But is is also not dependent on an underlying currency, because it is a currency.
To better understand we do need to spend a little time looking at what a currency is. Now I’m in no way an economist, so any reading this who want to correct my definitions, please let me know! As I understand it, a currency is basically a means of representing wealth for ease of transaction. So the various means we humans developed for representing wealth have tended towards portable yet rare items; gold being one common example. Gold as a metal was not that useful (it is now in electronics but that is another story) except that it was uncommon and easy to craft into jewellery so as to allow the owner to show off their wealth. Thus materials like gold became a proxy for wealth where so long as everybody agreed that it was valuable; it was. Paper money is also in itself not valuable and unlike gold it is not a rare material (which is why it gets forged). But what paper money does have is each note has the promise of a national state to pay the owner goods to the value of that note. Its an I.O.U issued by a state and because states tend to be powerful enterprises next to us people, its a promise that carries the weight of gold.
Now value does not have to reside in currency alone, indeed many of our problems come from an obsession with falling for the lust for proxy value. Value comes from, as with gold, the belief that an object is valuable. For example diamonds are not particularly rare, but because there is a near monopoly on their supply combined with the perception of rarity and hence value can be created. This is the first fundamental problem any new currency needs to solve; either something big a powerful (like a nation state) needs to back its value or it needs to be perceived of as rare so holding its value. The digital, by contrast, is the opposite of both of these. Digital is ethereal and far from rare because it is in its nature to be copied. To resolve this, a Bitcoin is, like a bank note, not just any collection of data but is ‘watermarked’ to ensure its authenticity. In the case of Bitcoins, they are watermarked by a hugely complex algorithmic slew of data that is uniquely generated. So copying it is not an option. The coins can be generated, or mined, by using the Bitcoin software – this starts running the algorithmic process and will, in time generate you a new coin. Your computers processing power is being distilled into a discrete package of value: a Bitcoin.
Hang on, you may think, how can a currency be created out of thin air? The answer is central banks do this all the time. Remember most money in existence is not in a physical form. Central banks create ‘base money‘ to keep their currencies flowing. Its a bit of an esoteric process as if they create too much then deflation follows yet too little and the liquidity of the economy suffers. Bitcoin uses the ‘mining’ of its peers to create the ‘base money’, so the balance of getting its level of generation right is created not by top-down be-suited men in offices, but by the natural ebb and flow dictated by the number of peers in the system.
So far there is little to recommend Bitcoins to the population at large because its central feature; being outside the control of governments was until recently only really pursued by a minority of cyper-rights, libertarians and geeks. Then the Unique-Selling-Point of the Bitcoin currency came into play; that it is outside of government regulation. A website of sorts appeared caslled The Silk Road, which offered anonymous trading but only via Bitcoins. The Silk Road is like a backstreet eBay and was soon filled with people buying and selling illegal items; cracked xboxes, guns and in the main, drugs. Lots of drugs. Suddenly there is a value to Bitcoins; you can by illegal stuff with them. The value of the currency rockets as people rush to get them to get high (I was told to $30 per Bitcoin). Then the Silk Road is interrupted and people can no longer use their Bitcoins for naughty things and so the value drops to a fraction of its high (to around 50 cents per Bitcoin). At the time of writing the Silk Road was back up and the value of Bitcoins purchased on eBay was £12.50 for 1 Bitcoin. Bitcoins are also subject to predation and gaming that afflicts normal currencies; theft, hacking and the like. Bizarrely these influences severe to show the value of this fledging currency, after all you don’t bother to steal something that is worthless.
Screengrab from The Silk Road
So where is the printing-press epoch here? Before the printing press was developed, written knowledge was expensive. Books had to be copied by hand and as the skills to do this were also rare. As such there were limits on the knowledge and its transmission via the written word. It was predominately the realm of the rich and powerful. When the printing press came along all that changed. Copies could be easily made and so the control of the written word moved out of the hands of the rich and powerful and started its long journey of democratisation that is still ongoing today. Money is subject to the same facets. It is created and controlled by the rich and powerful and even in a democracy we have almost zero control over its form, value or function. With Bitcoin that changes as the ebb and flow of form is generated non-hierarchically by its peers. It can be assigned values (for good or ill) outside the nation state.
This is the start of the transfer of power for the mechanisms of wealth from the few to the many. Like the invention of the printing press it also means more than just the process of pressing ink; the opening up of the skills to read and write, of who can put ideas up for consideration and how how we can transmit those ideas to one another for learning beyond our immediate circle. What will be equivalent collateral changes with Bitcoins? One of the things I think really important is around the idea of currency regulation. Currently financial regulation rests with the nation state and its member organisations like the IMF. Whatever regulations that lawmakers may develop to control risk within such systems will always be gamed by clever speculators. The ability for the nation state to react to such predation is poor. However in a peer currency the response for such regualtion may also rest with the users. While this wont stop gaming and predation, it may be that afluid peer system is better able to react to such attacks to evolve a means to defend itself.
One thing is clear to me, however drawn from the parallel example of the printing press, which is that Bitcoins are will not be the final form of this journey, but they are only the start of the story. A story that has a long way to run, but like the printing press will echo into all sectors of humanity. Facing serious environmental challenges such as climate change and peak oil means the systems of wealth also need to change and I’m willing to bet, with Bitcoins 😉 that what is happening here will be a part of that much needed transformation…
Monday Morning Gamification: Correct My Text Up
This is another interesting use of Gamification; correcting text:
One more step, and a tiny creature will cross the bridge and get to safety. Just one more step – but letters do not match, the fragile structure blows up and the brown mole falls into a digital abyss. But as Juha Valtamo, a 21-year-old Finnish student, correctly types the next word that appears on the screen of his laptop, another mole happily reaches the destination.
Digitalkoot may sound like a typical online game – but there is more to it than just building bridges and saving moles. Every time players complete a level, they help with a real-life task – digitising huge archives of Finland’s National Library. Developed by Finnish start-up business Microtask, Digitalkoot – which means digital volunteers in Finnish – combines two very hot trends in today’s business world: gamification and crowdsourcing. Words that players need to type come from millions of pages of newspapers, magazines and journals, digitised by optical character recognition. But since machines are prone to make mistakes, a human eye is necessary to weed them out.
While playing, gamers inadvertently cross-check each other, thus ensuring complete accuracy of the word before it gets the final approval.
Great idea!
(Hat-tip to Edward for the link)
Part 1 of my op-ed for Gamezebo is now online;
Over the last few years a combination of the connectivity offered by the Internet, easily available development tools such as Flash or UDK, and a proliferation of new platforms such as iPhone and Android has meant that making and publishing games has never been easier. Stories abound of a handful of people who have made their fortunes from simple yet popular games ideas such as Angry Birds or Minecraft. It has been said that we all have at least one novel inside us – does that translate to games too? I am going to take a look at how we might extract those games ideas from your head into playable experiences you can share or sell.
Here’s the quote from Games Brief:
What struck me was the impressive revenue progression of Bigpoint, the browser-based games company that makes free-to-play games mainly aimed at core gamers.
Here are the numbers:
That’s pretty impressive stuff. Revenues have pretty well tripled every year since 2007. If they do it again, they’ll make half a billion euros in 2011.
Big Point make easy-to-play browser based games such as Dark Orbit. The idea is that you don’t need to install any software, just point your browser at the game and off you go…. Such games attract a big player base because often they are free, there is a low barrier to entry both in terms of gameplay and technology. These factors also go towards explaining the huge growth of the sector.
A Great Becoming... 