Entrepreneur, philosopher, thinker, game designer, software developer, actor, writer. "My purpose in life is to entertain people, to allow them to have fun, laugh and enjoy life."
The Straits Times here in Singapore wrote a story about deskphones being phased out.
Office workers will no longer be familiar with a desk phone. And why so? People aren't at their desks often. I'm hardly at my desk. And when I am, I don't like being chained to the desk line if I want to walk out and discuss a matter if it becomes sensitive. At home, I don't have a residential line. There's no need for it.
I see a need here then. People will need multi-number phones. With one SIM card, they can be contacted using more than one number. That way they can receive calls from both the office and home.
Alternatively, there can be virtual numbers. A telco like Starhub can sell office lines without a physical line. Rather, the office lines merely redirect to the users mobile phone.
Having a multinumber SIM would be useful too if the telco agrees to allow foreign SIMs. If for example, I commute between Thailand and Singapore often, I would want to have a local number in each country each calling me on my single mobile phone. Having two phones is an inconvenience to maintain. A business model could be negotiated between an alliance of telcos or so where a subscriber can subscribe to multiple phone lines between partner telcos.
Google has an ideas submission contest called Project 10 to the 100th which calls for ideas that can help mankind. There are no prizes for it. However since idea generation is one of my strengths and I love contests, the following is my idea (which I thought of today. O how deadlines does wonders to our thinking!):
Title: Teleportation... or as close as we can get to it.
A live high resolution display feed of another city is projected live 24 hours a day into 360 viewing room or pods in another city and vice versa. This allows people regardless of economic background to visit another city without flying or travelling there. By allowing a window into another world, different cultures can interact with one another; viewing and talking with people in an actual live environment. For example, a pod placed in Picadilly Circus, London could exchange feeds with Times Square, New York. These pods are open to the public to walk in, stroll, soak in the atmosphere or talk to whoever is on the other side.
With three more more pods, the projected environments could be switched to other locations: Tokyo, Rio, Moscow, Afghanistan, Iraq. Imagine, New Yorkers walking into the pod and be transported to the middle of Red Square and talk to Russians on Monday, and the next day be transported to Baghdad, Iraq. Or pods in Tel Aviv and Riyadh allowing Israelis to talk with Arabs and vice versa. Or inhabitants of Johannesburg to travel to Tianenmen Square, Beijing. These pods could also be used to transport the people to sporting events like the Olympics or New Year's countdown in Times Square.
Technology wise, high tech 360 immersive environment technology is already available or can be cheapened and scaled down to using HD cameras and LCD Panels. The idea is also scalable only needing two cities to agree to pilot the idea and adding more in later. In terms of commercial viability, the pods can be sponsored by telecoms companies or through advertising, or even be booked by companies wishing to use as tele-conference facilities.
Many people over the world are restricted in travelling due to economic or political constraints. Cultural and ideological barriers, gaps and conflicts abound, Arab-Israeli, East and West, 1st World and 3rd World, etc. A lot of these conflicts are due to misunderstandings or skewed perceptions of people of one culture with another; perhaps due to media restrictions, censorship, or just plain ignorance. By having these virtual pods, people from different cultures and diverse geographic locations can view for themselves other countries firsthand. A person can see what Gaza Strip or Times Square looks like. Are the residents really terrorists or children of Satan as demonised? It also allows people to have a nice virtual holiday break. Imagine walking down from your office in San Francisco and having lunch in Paris!
Mankind would benefit through closing the gap of understanding between people of different cultures. The people who would benefit would be people of all sorts of walks and cultures in the cities where the pods are placed. It would especially help the poor who are restricted in their opportunities to travel or pay for telecommunication devices and services.
First steps would be to identify two pilot cities to agree to this experiment, and locations for the pods and to find the right technology that could be used to create this live feed of environments. There is already technology available to create an immersive 360 degree environment but it may be too expensive or specialized and it can be dumbed down to just HD cameras and LCD panels. A steady telecommunications link using high-speed data links would enable the pods to function. The initial set up does not need pods, even walls on the side of a building will be good enough. To prevent noise pollution, hypersonic speakers will allow users to hear the sounds without disturbing other people around.
If the pilot is successful, almost every major city (and even minor city) could have these pods or virtual environments scattered all over the city. It would be considered a cool thing for a city to have these pods, residents clamoring for them as a badge of interconnectedness, just as having a museum is a sign of cultural richness. And just as Wikipedia has created a free encyclopaedia, these pods would be used as a free communications tool for people to talk and interact with others.
This is one of the most amazing demos of the future of motion capture (mocap). The above video is of a computer simulation. It is not a real person!
Instead of sticking tiny reflective stickers on a persons face, a simple video capture is used and then analyzed.
The movements are then mapped onto your computer simulated model.
Reminds me of the movie S1m0ne that starred Al Pacino. But even darker, we can think of Wag the Dog and Johnny Mnemonic where computer simulations are used to trick people.
The technology will not replace actors entirely, but more likely good-looking bad actors. You still need a good actor who can emote with facial expression well, but he needn't be just the right face.
What Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger.com really is, is that you are creating a presence for yourself, an extension of you that people can access online.
Marshall McLuhan's seminal book, "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" puts forth that mans inventions are extensions of himself.
The phone is an extension of the ear and mouth.
The car is an extension of the feet.
The TV is an extension of the eyes.
Using this metaphor, we can generate an infinite flow of ideas on how we can create services and ideas for internet business startups. (Though success may not necessarily follow.)
Facebook is an extension of our need to express our current feelings, our emotional moods and state which we need to express to our fellow man.
Flickr is like this virtual photo album which we would like show the whole world.
Just go through your day, and jot down the things you do, everything from waking up to talking to people. Which of these activities do you think would be made more efficient or better by web-enabling it?
Yes, rephrasing of Sun's "The Network is the Computer" tagline.
But it is clear from mashups, web services, social networking applications (like Facebook), that the whole network of computers on the Internet forms a computer in itself.
Using public API's, like Facebook, Yahoo! Pipes, Google Maps, what developers are building on are functionalities that combine everything together. Mashups as they call them.
What I think is the next step is "The Mobile/Internet is The Computer" where everything is linked together. What needs to be done is an API that allows developers to connect mobile users together.
If you haven't heard, Microsoft just unveiled Surface, the new face of computing of the future.
It utilizes multi-touch sensing technology, combined with projectors, etc.
If you saw Minority Report, you may remember Tom Cruise donning a glove to manipulate images on a screen. Or if you saw The Island, starring Ewan McGregor, you may have noticed the display table the antagonist used.
The technology is available now, and you may see it soon by the end of this year!
These screens are only the beginning. Every surface can be interactive and can be used to manipulate or display data.
No more USB ports and syncing to your PC. (My pictures from my Europe trip could be uploaded faster by just dragging directly from my phone to the Flickr website.)
I could download a file directly into my thumbdrive by just touching the screen.
You could have board games with interactive boards rather than cardboard ones, play pong, or even something akin to the chess we saw Star Wars. (They have to invent 3D hologram displays next.)
Several interesting quotes from this book. In a nutshell, the medium is an extension of the human being. The medium envelopes us, it feeds us. Therefore it shapes our perspectives. 2 different mediums give different messages. The width of the size of a newspaper article versus the bite sized 1-minute news review sends different signals to us.
"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."—J. Robert Oppenheimer
The poet, the artist, the sleuth--whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's New Clothes." "Well-adjusted" courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor "ain't got nothin' on." The new environment was clearly visible to him.
Media, by altering the environment, evokes in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act--the way we perceive the world. When the ratios change, men change.
Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western Civilization.
The main causes for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics to view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology. Critics of television have failed to realize that the motion pictures they are lionizing would prove unacceptable as mass audience films if the audience had not been preconditioned by television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts.
Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media--under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front--a surround--involving everybody--all the time--everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies. These wars are happenings, tragic games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history's exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence.
The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favourite team is playing.
The pragmatic programmer is an excellent book for those who want to become better software engineers. About 320 pages long it's filled with bite sized tips on how to improve yourself. It provides a list of 70 tips for programmers to apply in their software discipline. The first 10 tips are not just excellent tips for software developers but can also be applied to almost any field and endeavour.
Care about your craft. Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?
Think! About your work. Turn off the autopilot and take control. Constantly critique and appraise your work.
Provide options, don't make lame excuses. Instead of excuses, provide options. Don't say it can't be done; explain what can be done.
Don't live with broken windows. Fix bad designs, wrong decisions, and poor code when you see them.
Be a catalyst for change. You can't force change on people. Instead, show them how the future might be and help them participate in creating it.
Remember the "soup stone" parable? That's how you get people to give you things.
Remember the big picture. Don't get so engrossed in the details that you forget to check what's happening around you.
Make quality a requirements issue. Involve your users in determining the project's real quality requirements. When you involve your users, it is easier for them to accept the quality because they had to make the choice themselves. Ask them how good the want it to be.
Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio. Make learning a habit.
Critically analyze what you read and hear. Don't be swayed by vendors, media hype, or dogma. Analyze information in terms of you and your project.
It's both what you say and the way you say it. There's no point in having greadt ideas if you don't communicate them effectively.
As more and more phones have Bluetooth and Java's Bluetooth API (JSR 82) becomes more common, we will have more Bluetooth games coming up in the next few months.
Expect multiplayer games you can play with your neighbour in the MRT as well as peer-to-peer and viral networking methods of distributing data like images, video, etc.
Once it reaches mainstay, you'll find Bluetooth outlets or kiosks that may dispense other types of information or virtual goods like tickets, etc. that act as authenticators when combined with authentication methods like the Liberty Alliance, smart wallets, etc.
Updated:
You can order your e-ink prototype kit from www.eink.com. Any aspiring 17 year old future Bill Gates should order theirs one now! Well to do schools or polytechnics should order one for their student labs. Only US$3000.
Mobile is still the technology to go for. With more and more wireless and mobile applications, a foldable and lightweight technology will bring even more flexibility and new ideas to the market place.
Mobile is the next Internet frontier.
Imagine, picture frames holding updatable images. You could have the Mona Lisa on it one day, Van Gogh's Sunflowers the next, or a live cam view of the Eiffel Tower the next.
Or even bigger, things like dynamic wallpapers on your home.
Since it is bendable, how about camouflage or stealth vehicles that can actually change colour as and when needed. A chameleon vehicle as you may call it.
What about fashion accessories? Watch straps or clothes that change pattern?
The great thing about it is that the pattern holds even when power is turned off.
Live Life With No Regrets!
