The Singularity is Near

1. Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us (at TED January 12, 2007)

2. 'Building Gods', a film by Ken Gumbs

YouTube - Did You Know 4.0

Economics of 'Free': 'Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job' - SPIEGEL

In a SPIEGEL interview, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of US technology and culture magazine Wired discusses the Internet's challenge to the traditional press, new business models on the Web and why he would rather read Twitter than a daily newspaper.

• I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier.
• More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers.
• The problem is not that the traditional way of writing articles isn't valuable anymore. The problem is that this is now in the minority.
• The problem is not that there isn't money to be made online, it's just that our costs are too high.
• Advertisers spend $22 to reach 1,000 people on wired.com -- and $100 at the magazine. I don't think we have discovered the perfect online advertising vehicle yet.
• It's all about attention. That is the most valuable commodity. If you have attention and reputation, you can figure out how to monetize it. However, money is not the No. 1 factor anymore.
• Free is the force of gravity.
• What is left for mass media -- it's the kind of stuff that niches don't do well. Politics, war, disaster, scandals, etcetera. You can't charge for it and advertisers don't like it.

Microsoft Research TechFest 2009 Virtual Event Room

In existing online-advertisement platforms, the relevance between advertisers and users is decided largely by advanced keyword matching. Typically, in a pay-per-click model, advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user enters a search query, browses a Web page, or interacts with text, the advertisement platform will select and show relevant ads based on the text content in the query or the page. Though other context, such as location, time, and user profile, can be taken into consideration, text understanding remains the main technology.

We will present an image-centric advertisement platform in which advertisers bid on images instead of keywords. For example, a toy seller could bid on the image of a related movie poster, while a restaurant could bid on the image of a cooking-magazine cover. Users would receive ads based on the content of images they recently browsed or used. Components of this platform include an advertisement editorial tool and image-content-understanding, imagematching, and user-understanding.

 Download the electronic version of 'Research Gallery Project Details'.

Asian Publishing Convention

The Consumer is control and ignores standard Advertising. He spends most of his time online and the online populations in Asia are exploding. Advertisers are trying to keep up and struggling with finding the right way to reach and engage them in a meaningful manner.
Measuring this engagement is another challenge. The presentation highlights key consumer trends, their online behavior and illustrate a way forward.

Presented at the APC on 17.07.09 in Manila, Philippines by Chris Schaumann:

Winning Teams Join to Qualify for $1 Million Netflix Prize | Epicenter | Wired.com

In a very shrewd move, Netflix created a contest more than 3 years ago to award $1 million to anybody that could create an algorithm more than 10% more accurate than theirs. Now, a team has finally done it.

The two front-running teams, distressingly named Team Pragmatic Theory and Team Bellkor in Chaos, joined forces and have submitted an algorithm that is 10.05% more accurate than Netflix's. Now, the other contestants (it's a field of thousands) have 30 days to beat that score, and if nobody can (and no rules have been broken), Netflix will award the superteam a cool million.

This is a smart move for Netflix—improving their algorithm by that much would have been incredibly expensive anyway, and Netflix has said that the $1 million prize is actually a great bargain.

Speaker Presentation at ad:tech, Singapore 10.06.09

In an increasingly fragmented media environment and in an age of accountability, marketers are faced with the complex task of reaching customers in a huge number of different destinations and platforms and converting them. Traditional media buying approaches and processes are inefficient and out-dated. Ad networks and exchanges are promising to streamline media buying and delivery on a pay-per-performance basis.

Nothing but the Net - J. P. Morgan

Collective Media - Ad Network Study 2009

Final Beta Version

Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 - istartedsomething

At the Wharton Business Technology Conference, Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop unveiled the latest production from Microsoft Office Labs called “2019″, starring stock photo men, women and children playing with the next-generation of communication, collaboration and production technologies.

 Download the electronic version of 'Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019' Presentation

Ad Text Writer: Content Analysis: adCenter Labs

This tool generates possible ads for a web site entered by a user, based on the keywords that are most representative of content on that web site. This tool is useful to automatically generate multiple ads for large web sites that have many keywords.

Enter a URL to automatically generate text ads for that web site.

Video & Interactive Media: adCenter Labs

This interactive video tool provides more information about objects in a video when a user clicks on them. For example, as the video plays, you can move the mouse over the product to see where more information is available. Then you can click the summary information to go to a merchant web site for details.

The Kelsey Group

The global advertising market grew to just over $600 bln in 2007, according to The Kelsey Group. The firm expects global ad revenues to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.7% and reach $707 bln in 2012.

Interactive advertising revenues will increase significantly from $45 bln in 2007 to $147 bln globally in 2012, representing a 23.4% CAGR. Interactive advertising, which comprises search (including local search), display advertising, classifieds and other interactive ad products, grew its share of global advertising revenues from 6.1% in 2006 to 7.4% in 2007. By 2012 Kelsey Group analysts expect the interactive share of global ad spending will reach 21%.

During the forecast period (2007-2012), the United States will see interactive advertising revenues grow from $22.5 bln to $62.4 bln (22.6% CAGR), with interactive revenues in Canada increasing from $1.3 bln to $3.3 bln (21.3% CAGR).

BBC NEWS | Technology

Video games are poised to "eclipse" all other forms of entertainment, according to games studio boss Mike Griffith of Activision. Social gaming, more interactivity and better technology would help gaming dominate the entertainment landscape in future.

He quoted US market statistics which showed that between 2003 and 2007 sales of movie tickets fell by 6%; the number of hours of TV watched dropped by 6%, sales of recorded music slumped 12% and purchases of DVDs remained flat. Over the same four-year period, said Mr Griffith, the video game industry grew by 40%.

He quoted Nielsen SoundScan data which showed that artists whose music featured on Guitar Hero had seen a rise in download sales of 15-843%.

"Games are no longer pre-set trips through linear mazes," said Mr Griffith. "They are becoming a legitimate story-telling medium that rivals feature films."

He cited the video game of the latest James Bond film Quantum of Solace (QoS) as an example of how games were taking over.

"The moviegoer is passive whereas the gamer is active and part of the game itself," he said, adding that anyone who played QoS would spend more than 50 hours in the company of James Bond compared to only 106 minutes if they watched the movie.

Information Architects » Blog Archive » Web Trend Map 3

The map pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites to the greater Tokyo area train map. Different train lines correspond to different web trends such as innovation, news, social networks, and so on.

 Download the electronic version of 'Web Trend Map 3' A3 Poster.

Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology described as, “a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.”

Educational Endeavors

Abundant Computing: The Next Ten Years

The Institute for the Future’s Abundant Computing Map is an introduction to the technologies and applications that will shape a world of digital abundance. Because the landscape will be shaped not just by new technological innovations but also by innovative uses of existing technologies, a comprehensive list of every future application would be simply impossible to create. What we present instead is a guide that will serve as an outline of key directions of the evolution. Since so much of the future of abundant computing will be immersive and use all of our senses, we’ve created this video guide to the map using clips from our Spring Exchange at UCSD’s Calit2 and other future-forward tools and technologies.

 Download the electronic version of 'Abundant Computing' Report.

A Model World: Simulation and the Future of Virtuality

A new language is emerging that will transform how we conduct business, make life decisions, and interact with our world over the next decade: it is the language of simulation. In the next decade, the best simulations won’t be judged by how realistic they are but how real they are. They will become real in the way that the Internet has become real over the last decade—not only as a platform for learning or academic science, but also as a platform for providing human social interaction and commerce; as a platform for designing the world in real time; and as a platform for inventing and reinventing our individual lives.  Some simulations will even play out at the intersection of the virtual and real worlds, enabling us to bring a sense of physicality to our digital data.

 Download the electronic version of 'A Model World' Report.

Industry Compass 2.0: A Visual Guide to an Uncertain Tomorrow

Industry Compass 2.0 is a visual guide designed to help you think about, plan for and navigate the future in an engaging and constructive way. It supports strategic analysis and planning around the puzzling grid of potential trends and issues confronting life sciences companies, health care providers, health plans and other stakeholders in the coming decade. The major elements of the Compass map—Drivers, Impact Zones, Trends, Signals, Hurdles, Landmarks and Artifacts—provide a framework for discussing how the elements might interact and how your organization might navigate the future.

 Download the electronic version of 'Industry Compass 2.0' Report.

Technology Review

Researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management hope to make websites better at selling products by making them adapt automatically to each visitor, presenting information in a way that complements that person's style of thinking.

Within about 10 clicks, the system makes a guess at the user's cognitive style and morphs to fit.

 Download the electronic version of 'Website Morphing' Paper.

CNN.com

The Emotiv EPOC headset - the first Brain Computer Interface (BCI) device for the gaming market is the technology behind the revolution -- and the company claims to have already mastered thought control.

The EPOC detects and processes real time brain activity patterns (small voltage changes in the brain caused by the firing of neurons) using a device that measures electric activity in the brain. In total, it picks up over 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.

Official Google Blog

Modes
In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few.

Media
We’ve barely scratched the surface with universal search, but it’s an important first step to exploring the full range of what we can do with rich media.

Personalization
Search engines of the future will be better in part because they will understand more about you, the individual user.
Location
Since location is relevant to a lot of searches, incorporating user location and context will be pivotal in increasing the relevance and ease of search in the future.
Social
There’s a lot of expertise, knowledge, and context in users’ social graphs, so putting tools in place to make “friend-augmented" search easy could make search more efficient and more relevant.

Language
The basic concept is – if the answer exists online anywhere in any language, we’ll go get it for you, translate it and bring it back in your native tongue.

Conclusion
We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work.
Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades.

The ideal search engine
Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.

Digital Branding

Download the electronic version of Digital Branding Presentation free of charge.