Ian On The Red Dot

The i.Jam co-spaces event was yesterday. I only arrived in time to hear the pitches from startups looking for funding so I can’t comment on what was said about the co-spaces initiative. I’ll just used what was put on SgEntrepreneurs:

As technology advances towards digitization, we see an increasing coexistence of physical places with dynamic virtual environments. IDM’s new initiative centers on Co-Spaces, the nexus of the physical and virtual worlds, where physical spaces are virtually enhanced with information, and virtual spaces which allow users to process and manipulate real-time, real-world information.

After hearing the last pitch titled ‘Mobile World’, based on what I could understand from it, I was wondering why anyone would want to replicate the real world in the virtual with 3D-technology and allow it to be accessible via a mobile phone. The idea reminded me of the type of websites that were built when the Internet first hit mainstream – people were trying to present the world online the same way they see it in the physical. Take for example a website about books – the website would use an image of a bookshelf with images of books stacked on it. As we became more familiar with the Internet, we learned how to describe a set of books with just the images of their covers and their titles arranged in a list – we didn’t need to use the bookshelf metaphor.

Trying to build a virtual world that looks like the real world and map it directly to physical locations sounds a lot like what happened in the beginning with the World Wide Web. If you are already physically at a location, I’m sure there are other ways to map and visualize data tied to the location.

“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well”

The quote above is from the site REAL TIME ROME and sort of explains why I question the idea behind ‘Mobile World’. The project REAL TIME ROME used data from cellphones and other sources to understand the urban dynamics of Rome in real time. On a side note, I think it would be beneficial to Singapore if we embarked on a similar project before we start the overhaul of our transport system.

The project was done by MIT’s SENSEable City lab. Similar to the projects that SENSEable City lab is doing is this project MIT Media Lab did where cellphone usage provided data to understand the complex interactions between individuals in social networks. Technology Review has an interview with Alex (Sandy) Pentland about the project.

The scary thing is the models created with the data from the cellphones could understand the social networks better than the individuals in them because the data provided was raw unfiltered information while individuals provided information that were susceptible to distortions.

The above labs are involved in projects in the field of ‘reality mining’.

It’s about making the “dumb” information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can’t put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you’re near them, and just to help you live your life.

The company IMMI working in this field has developed technology that can help measure outdoor ad effectiveness without the consumer needing to ‘type stuff in’.

The field of reality mining is made possible by the availability of improved sensors to collect data, improved ability to track physical objects and ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet. The social and commercial implications based on our understanding of data derived from reality mining is enormous.

An example of the social implication from the above mentioned interview with Professor Pentland:

With reality mining, you can actually see social integration, as it happens or doesn’t happen. Once everyone can see it, then you can start to have transparent political discussions.

I think if any of our startups from Singapore would like to move into this space as part of the co-spaces initiative, there are 3 areas they could work on:

1. Improving tools and processes for the collection and aggregation for certain sets of real world data.

2. Improving the tools to understand and visualize the data.

And the last one, which is the one that I’m most concerned with since reading ‘1984′, implementing a technological and regulatory framework where the collection, aggregation and use of such data respects an individual’s privacy (which of course is arguably a myth in our current society).

Link: Nicholas Carr’s post on ‘Reality Mining’. He does a much better job at explaining stuff.