Broadband advocates, civil rights activists, and FCC officials described high-speed Internet service as a "civil right" during an FCC public hearing Monday night in Memphis focused on the digital divide. "Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right...[even though] not many people have talked about it that way," Commissioner Michael Copps said. The event was one in a series as the FCC works to craft a national broadband plan by February.
Panelists described a digital gap in which rural, minority, and low-income Americans subscribe to broadband at lower rates than the general population. Non-users face educational challenges, difficulty applying for jobs, and limited access to government services in a world where many of these functions have moved online, panelists said.
"Broadband is becoming a basic necessity," Benjamin Hooks, the first black FCC commissioner and a former NAACP executive director, said. Panelists noted that affordability and a lack of education about broadband's benefits are key barriers to universal adoption. Increased access at community centers could serve as a "first step" in informing these groups about the need to adopt broadband, Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association Vice President Dianne Polly said. (...)
More impressively, Microsoft also launched a new beta mapping site Wednesday powered by its Adobe-Flash-like Silverlight technology, rather than HTML and JavaScript.
It gracefully renders cities in 3-D views using 45-degree aerial photos, paired with traditional satellite and street-based photography.
The Silverlight tech makes moving through the city very smooth, losing the jarring changes that are common as you move around various street views in products like Google Maps.
Users can then drop into photosynths — geo-located collections of photos created by users — by dropping their little map onto geo markers, say for example the large collection of photos documenting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Additionally, users can quickly see what places are nearby other places on the map. For instance, you could see what restaurants are near the MOMA, see which ones are best-rated on the web, and then zoom in to see the restaurant.
Finally, the new Silverlight-powered mapping site adds “apps” that let people check out newspaper headlines around the world, see roadside attractions across the United States and map local blog posts onto a city. Another app uses Twitter’s new geo-location features to see Twitter posts as bubbles on the map.
In this information environment, seconds matter |"In the early days of Google, we used to crawl (the Web for) information every month, then put up new index," a process called the Google dance, Singhal said. "A month was not fast enough. Then we were crawling the Web every few days, then every day, then every few hours. Now we can crawl every few minutes."|"In today's world that's not fast enough," Singhal said. "In this information environment, seconds matter."
Gundotra said the future of search on phones involves search using microphones as the ears, the camera as eyes, the GPS chip as the location, and the speaker as a voice. (...)
Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world's information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.
That's why today, at the Computer History Museum, we're excited to share a few new innovations in the areas of real-time, mobile and social search that we feel are important steps in the evolution of information access.
First, we're introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.
Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it's an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it's published on the web.
(...) Click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only "Updates" from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you're in line to buy tickets.
And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.
(...) The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English. You can try them out today by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a "hot topic," which in most cases will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.
(...) We have also made some new strides with mobile search. Today's sensor-rich smartphones are redefining what "query" means. Beyond text, you can now search by a number of new modes including voice, location and sight — all from a mobile device. So we've been working to improve technology that takes advantage of these capabilities.
"In the early days of Google, we used to crawl (the Web for) information every month, then put up new index," a process called the Google dance, Singhal said. "A month was not fast enough. Then we were crawling the Web every few days, then every day, then every few hours. Now we can crawl every few minutes."
"In today's world that's not fast enough," Singhal said. "In this information environment, seconds matter."
2
Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.
Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "We are here today to announce Google real-time search," Singhal said, calling it "Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web."
Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time. "Relevance is the foundation of this product," Singhal said. "It's relevance, relevance, relevance."
Google will build a section called "latest results" into the regular Google search results page that automatically refreshes Internet content from sources like Twitter.
3
Those who don't yet see the service can get to a version of it using the Google Trends site, which just emerged from beta testing.
The "hot topics" area that shows items of high search interest at the moment, and clicking on one of the results shows search results with the scrolling real-time feed of information.
Microsoft already displays Twitter results for queries placed on its Bing search engine, although they are displayed on a separate page that is not directly integrated into the main search results.
Google on Monday unveiled its real-time search capability, the latest salvo in its ongoing feature war with Bing. Microsoft's search engine already ...
7 Dec 2009 ... And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people ... googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/.../relevance-meets-real-time-web.html - Cached -
7 Dec 2009 ...Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web: live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages stream in on ... mashable.com/2009/12/07/google-real-time-search/ - United States - Cached -
9 Dec 2009 ...Google has started rolling out real time search, which has lots of potential implications for brand reputation and SEO, as well as paid ... econsultancy.com/.../5091-google-real-time-search-the-experts-view - Cached -
12 May 2009 ...Google has just launched a new search options feature on its main search page. When you click on Search options you can filter ... www.techcrunch.com/.../google-launches-search-options-declares-real-time-search-biggest-challenge/ - Cached -
7 Dec 2009 ...Google launched a real-time search service that that aggregates recent news articles, blog posts and messages from Twitter, FriendFeed, ... googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-real-time-search.html - Cached -
7 Dec 2009 ... MOUNTAIN VIEW, California -- Google said Monday it will begin indexing much of the web in real time, and marry those results with its ... www.wired.com/.../google-introduces-real-time-search-google-goggles/ - Cached -
13 Sep 2009 ...Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the. www.readwriteweb.com/.../make_google_search_real-time_with_this_url_hack.php - Cached -
12 May 2009 ... Searchology Google has rolled out its answer to Twitter's much-discussed real-time search. Beginning today, the world's largest search... www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/12/google_on_search/ - Cached - Similar -
8 Dec 2009 ...Google has announced that real-time news from Twitter and other information from the Internet will start appearing in its search results. www.telegraph.co.uk/.../google/.../Google-real-time-search-to-feature-Twitter-updates.html -
For me it puts the emphasis right back on brands, just as Eric Schmidt said would be the case 12+ months ago. With the inclusion of live Twitter (et al) streams in the natural SERPs, social media, and in particular brand reputation has never been so important. Those brands that dismiss the need to monitor their online sentiment or are just not well equipped to do so will suffer.
In terms of what it does for brands, it makes constant monitoring for potential reputation issues more important than ever. If I slag off a brand, and that starts showing at number one on Google, that's something a brand needs to know about and be prepared to respond to.
This move really does cement Social Media at the centre of search. Before now, people would use Twitter, for example, to do their ‘emotional research’ and trust Google to deliver the factual side, the best deals, information and so on.
Now, Google is more fully addressing those emotional needs, and brands are going to have to get serious about social media very quickly. If somebody does a branded search for a product and finds less-than-favourable messages from Twitter or a blog, this will have an effect on their purchase choices.
With the proliferation of mobile internet, consumers will no longer wait to get home to rave, or complain, about the new restaurant they just visited, they'll do it straight away, and these reviews will instantly appear within search results.
I predict a number of big brands will experience brand protection issues during 2010; and these issues will break out of Twitter into everyone's browser. Results are not only going to appear for 'Big Brand Name & Product Fault', but for 'Big Brand' by itself. Consumers who are just Googling for a brand are soon going to know all about the current hot issue for that company.
Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the "search options" link on every page, but one startup company CEO discovered today that searches can also be limited to results indexed minutes or seconds ago by making a simple change to the search results page URL.
Startup search engine Omgili's CEO Ran Geva wrote on his company blog today that time-limited search results pages include a parameter called QDR - perhaps standing for Query Date Range. You can change the number following the letters qdr and change the timeframe for your search.
By default when you click on "search options" and limit a search to the last day, the qdr appears as "d." Change that to "n" and you'll be limited to results from the last minute, to "n10" and you'll see results discovered in the last 10 minutes - or "s30" to see results from the last 30 seconds. It couldn't be simpler. Here's a sample search for Portland Oregon Coffee with the search options already turned on.
Geva isn't the first person to discover this, but he's the first we've seen place it within the context of real-time search and we didn't know about it until reading his blog post.
By Ryan Singel December 7, 2009 | 2:13 pm | Categories: Search
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google said Monday it will begin indexing much of the web in real time, and marry those results with its relevance-ranking technology to make sense of the torrents of information being published via Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
The announcement, at a news conference at the Computer History Museum here, signals an aggressive push by Google to maintain its mantle as search-innovation leader amid unaccustomed pressure from rivals. Microsoft effectively beat Google to the real-time punch, announcing Facebook and Twitter partnerships for its Bing search engine at the Web 2.0 Summit in October.
“Google Real Time search is Google’s relevance technology meeting the real-time web,” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “There is so much information being generated that relevance is the key to any product, and that’s where Google comes in.”
Monday’s announcement aims to address a major perceived shortcoming in Google’s technology, which has drawn criticism lately for not keeping up with the flood of short status updates on social networks, which some see as creating a new information revolution defined by instantaneous, or “real time,” distribution of information.
Google’s results page will now include a scrolling box of links that update constantly even as you scan through the other results. Clicking through takes one to a page of real-time scrolling updates. This feature is now available on iPhones and Android, Singhal said. The update will be rolled out progressively over the next two days. If you don’t see it yet in your search results, you can try it here. (...)
(...)
Mayer was followed on stage by Vic Gundotra who quickly demoed how good Google’s search by voice on mobile phones has gotten. He spoke, “Pictures of Barack Obama with the French president at the G8 summit,” into his phone, which then returned exactly those results in seconds. Gundotra then demoed how voice works in Mandarin, and announced that it would now work with Japanese as well.
Gundotra said the future of search on phones involves search using microphones as the ears, the camera as eyes, the GPS chip as the location, and the speaker as a voice. (...)
Gundotra also showed off a demo of an automatic translator that lets you speak English into your phone and then have it translated into Spanish which is then spoken. For instance, Gundotra said, “My name is Dick. Please show me to the nearest hospital.” In seconds a woman’s voice said this in perfect Spanish. The app is expected to be released in 2010 in many languages, Gundotra said.
Google also showed off customized Google Suggest that uses location. For instance, starting a query “RE” in Boston suggest the Red Sox, while the same start of query in San Francisco suggests the outdoor store REI, one of the city’s most popular retailers.
Google Local has a button called “Near Me Now” right now that lets you see the surrounding local businesses — and their online ratings. That same feature is now available in a new version of Google Maps for Android, which sends your latitude and longitude from your phone to Google and returns a list of what’s nearby and good.
Finally, Google Goggles lets you take a picture using your phone and send it to your phone, which scans it for text and searches for it. It can also take a picture of a famous landmark such as the Itsukushima Shrine and actually tell you what it is, and show you pages about it. You can try this out by dipping into Google Labs, if you have an Android phone.
We continue to see more of what I am calling the sponsored model of public WiFi. After all the municipal models failed, with city and county governments in many places buying into a very flawed model that was heavily overplayed by Earthlink and a group of advisors to cities, plus an over dependence on a previously failed approach to technology, mesh networking. Metricom had failed with that, with a service called Ricochet in the late 90's and early 2000s.
For some time I have felt that the whole concept of "MuniWireless" is wrong, and that what we really have the need for is a concept I have shared (...) some time ago. That concept is "Public Wireless" and is based upon the concept of WiFi being available, regardless of who pays for the access pipe and connectivity.
We saw Google work with Boingo, JiWire and other members of the WiFi ecosystem join hands and provide "sponsored" WiFi at airports. We have seen the subsidized model at airports, where some of the passenger facility charges are used to underwrite the services availability, and in the sky via GoGo and Google, while others have experimented (and failed) with ad supported access. Recently, CableVision launched free WiFi in MacArthur Airport in Long Island.
By being the "sponsor" companies like Google, Cablevision and others use the perceived concept of "free" WiFi as their way to build market share, mind share and dress it all up at being "good for you." It speaks to reputation, but what it really is all about is the subtle takeaway from the territory the incumbent landline telcos have owned, and through their own protectionist moves over time, gave away to the cable operators what they could have easily owned and operated. What they gave away was the access to the wired grid that now connects to the WiFi world in both private and public places. This philosophy was largely spawned by their high income producing mobile subsidiaries, or sister companies, which argued against WiFi as they needed to protect their investment in 3G spectrum, a commodity that is now running out (just ask any iPhone user in New York or San Francisco) who can't do on their iPhone what someone can do in Naples, Florida, where the bandwidth is less precious. Instead, the telcos stood by in idle as the cable operators used their in ground fiber to pretty much win the connection to the home business, and are now racing to not lose the small business segment to the same sprawling giants (...)
My prediction is that "Public Wireless" really takes hold, not from the telcos, or even the cable companies, but from the likes of Google, who understand how to monetize "free" better than anyone, and who also have the delivery billing system in place to bill back to a "sender" the same way they can bill back a click to an advertiser. Google, will then work with their "partners" in Clearwire, not to promote 4G WiMax as the pipe, but to use real WiMax in consort with companies like Comcast, Covad and TowerStream to deliver super fast Gigabit wireless to a series of access points around the country, where it then is distributed using WiFi. This is more than a likely scenario as Google has been a pioneer in Public Sponsored WiFi access for sometime, with their Mountain View WiFi network which has been up and running for a few years, surviving the failed Earthlink, MetroFi and other third party operator networks. (...)
This then goes back to sponsored access, something NBC/Universal is already doing with Hulu. NBC/Universal, like PBS, knows how to sell "sponsored" programming. Sponsored is far broader in nature than "advertiser supported" as the model usually involves more than just running an ad spot or a commercial, as it touches on more than just an "impression" but is all about being a significant part of the carrier network's universe beyond the spot, and being more intimate with the audience. Once again, Google's insight about people, learned by where they surf and what they look for (Google.com), where they go geographically via Latitude, who they call via GoogleVoice, what kind of content they watch via YouTube. Now, add all that up, and Google will be the first of all the major media companies to be able to deliver a very geo-targeted, content relevant, personalized offer that is sponsored. Marry Comcast and Google together, toss in a variety of access options (WiFi, WiMax, Mobile WiMax, Broadband) and tie together the models of sending party pays, sponsored content, sponsored access, and low cost subscriptions to access, with high speeds, and you have the future of how media is both delivered and consumed.
I say this because it is exactly how the media that is being eliminated first and second by the Internet was built also, and since we know history always repeats, all one needs to do is look at print media, magazines and newspapers, the first media to be basically put to rest by the online world. There advertisers plus subscription or pay as you go models underwrote your readership. Readers paid a subscription fee (which was supposed to cover postage or delivery) and the advertisers or a sponsor underwrote the publishing costs. The second media which is seeing erosion, is radio, which is losing audience to streamed content and personalized portable content that is streamed or downloaded. Radio required the purchase of a receiver but the delivery was ad supported, so in essence we had "sending party pays" with the receiver paying for access to both print and broadcast. The same applied to over the air television, and even to cable - pay for basic, get local TV stations. Pay for more, get the cable channels. Pay even more get the premium content. Pay even more, get the on demand content. Pay even more, have a PVR (personal video recorder) and so forth. That all leads to what Cablevision is doing, and why their move is so smart.(...)
Toss in gap fillers like FON and Meraki, both of which are shared access for "community members" and all of a sudden you have access for everyone, everywhere, without the need for muniwireless. Esme Vos once shared a simple idea to make the city of San Francisco wireless. Her idea was simple. Make it a tax base item. Have the cafes, restaurants and beauty shops all offer WiFi-on one city wide network, and pretty much you would have coverage once you add in schools, libraries and business towers and office parks. The cable and telcos would sell the access, and for the most part, we would have a democratized network, where bandwidth on demand solutions would insure a steady high quality connection. Now, layer in the sponsored, paid or subscription access model and you have everyone making money, something that is far different from the failed concept of what was called Municipal Wireless which Earthlink undertook.
So, at the end of the day, when I look at the sponsored access model, I see history repeating itself once again. Only this time, the players aren't the incumbents in either telecom or media. This time its a whole new group of players.
Strong peer-to-peer mode added to Wi-Fi portfolio:
The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced Wi-Fi Direct, a peer-to-peer wireless networking method that takes the group into a new realm of creating specifications de novo, instead of following IEEE groups. The spec will appear in hardware by mid-2010.
Wi-Fi Direct will allow any device to advertise itself as a combination of software access point and peer. Newer hardware--which will include some existing equipment with firmware upgrades--will be able to maintain a wireless LAN connection to a so-called infrastructure network (via an access point), while also creating a peer-to-peer link to a device like a printer, mouse or keyboard, computer, or handheld. This could be used for file transfers, printing, input, and synchronization, among other purposes. (....) /
The recent formal approval of the IEEE 802.11n wireless standard marks not the end but the start of a wave of Wi-Fi innovation. In the next three to five years, the Wi-Fi experience will be very different from today / x
IEEE 802.11n is the new international standard for wireless Local Area Networks, incorporating new smart antenna technologies (MIMO – Multiple In and Multiple Out) permitting a 5x performance and 2x coverage improvement for WLANs. While this new technology is becoming the de facto standard in consumer and enterprise networks, it has not yet made an appearance in outdoor, metropolitan scale networks derived from Wi-Fi technology. (Note: Meraki just released today the first 802.11n outdoor mesh product)
Until yesterday Swindon was stuck squarely between Bristol and Reading on the M4 corridor in Wiltshire. Now it has moved one step closer to Silicon Valley with plans to become Britain’s first wi-fi town, and free internet access for its 186,000-strong population.
No one within the borough boundary will be out of range of a wireless connection after April next year, when 1,400 access points will be placed on street lamps to form the “Swindon mesh”. The aim, according to the leader of the borough council, which is backing the project, is for the region to show the way for the rest of England.
The project is a partnership between the borough council and two private companies, both of which hope to recoup their investment by offering paid-for upgrades to businesses and heavy users.
However, every Swindon resident will receive free wireless access for a limited period each day. (...)
The project is expected to cost £1 million and is jointly funded by the council and Avidity and aQovia, which each own a one-third share. Together they have formed the company Digital City UK. The private companies will recoup their investment by charging subscriptions for extended access and broadband packages.
Attempts to set up similar schemes in the US have foundered because of the cost of infrastructure, but Mr Bluh said: “This is tried and tested technology. Although it is the first in Britain, there are 90 other cities worldwide where this has been done.
“We are funding this in the form of loans, and even if the companies were to fail we would be covered, because we will own the hardware.”
The service will also be available to visitors to the town, who will pay a one-off fee for access. Installation will begin in the Highworth area in early December and the whole town should be covered by the end of April 2010.
Rikki Hunt, of Avidity, said: “I have a view that the reason this hasn’t been done before is that no one has thought of putting together the public and private model. We both have different skills to bring to the table. We bring the commerciality and the public sectors bring the knowledge of the community. We have built up a trust between us.”
==========
2
Press release | Swindon Council makes the internet free to all | 17 November 2009 (pdf)
Trailblazing Swindon Borough Council is working with the private sector to make Swindon the first town in the UK to provide free internet access for all its residents.
The Council has teamed up with the concept’s originator Rikki Hunt and digital technology firm aQovia to create the company Digital City UK, which under the brand name ‘Signal’, will install a Wi-Fi wireless mesh covering the whole of the Borough of Swindon.
The exciting technological revolution is Swindon Borough Council’s first public/private commercial venture and will provide a range of services and applications for the whole community including free connection to the internet, free line rental and connection charge, and borough-wide movement, while staying online. The public will be able to access the internet and download emails for free but usage will be limited.
Subscribers will also be able to sign up for 20Mb upgrades for significantly less per month than major broadband competitors following a free three-month trial, while there will be pay-as-you-go options so visitors to the town can benefit from the Wi-Fi network.
The technology will also revolutionise home and business security courtesy of CCTV coverage with rapid response, allowing homes and businesses to be monitored via a control room or remotely using laptops.
Anti virus software and Microsoft and Google online services will be a key feature of the network and there are plans to deliver valuable real-time information on home electricity usage and street-wide air quality monitoring. Swindon’s Wi-Fi also has the scope to deliver free voice calls and could be used by health professionals to carry out consultations and remote medical procedures or examinations through Telemedicine.
The Wi-Fi project will be run by Digital City UK Ltd, of which Swindon Borough Council has a 35 per cent share, with the intention of working on similar roll-outs of the technology in other towns and cities across the UK.
The first phase of Swindon’s Wi-Fi network will be switched on in Highworth in early December with the remainder of the project being completed by the end of April.
Rod Bluh, Swindon Borough Council Leader, said:
“This is a truly groundbreaking partnership which will
have real benefits for everyone living in Swindon.
“Not only will residents in the Borough be able to access the internet for free, the Council and its partners will be able to use the technology to provide cutting edge services to the areas or individuals who need them.
“Digital City will also provide the Council with a unique funding stream and it is our intention to use our expertise to help other local authorities follow our lead.”
Rikki Hunt said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for the
whole of Swindon creating total social inclusion through
our free service and, while others talk, Swindon is delivering a Digital City which will benefit both the public and
business communities.”
Mustafa Arif, director of aQovia, said: “Ubiquitous wireless internet is essential to the realisation of a ‘Digital Britain’. Sadly the city Wi-Fi hype died out a few years ago with scant examples of any sustainable networks.
“Digital City’s business model is built around subsidising free access with revenues from business and community services that are delivered over our wireless network. This innovative partnership demonstrates a viable way forward for other towns and cities.”
Are there any plans to roll the network out to other towns and cities?
Once Swindon is up and running we will be giving other towns and cities the benefit of our three years’ of experience.
Do you expect the network to make a profit?
Yes.
Why has this not been done before now?
Others have not been able to make the business case work. By creating a public/private sector partnership, you unlock unique opportunities.
Why Swindon?
Because we thought of it and were innovative enough to forge a public/private partnership to create the ultimate social inclusion model around connectivity.
(...) Color me dubious about the particulars. The Web site for the service, dubbed Signal, is unpopulated. International coverage of this story is breathless, quotes from the press release, and doesn't ask anyone from the company or elsewhere about how this could possibly work.
At least the firm plans to use WPA encryption, according to its press release. The company also recommends using a "wireless" repeater, which means there's a hidden $50 to $150 cost in obtaining such an item to pull the signal in from outside.
The network will apparently be up and running by April 2010, with an initial phase launched in December 2009. Funds will be used from both public and private sources, and a local businessman's firm, Digital City UK, will handle the buildout. The Swindon town council owns 35 percent of the venture.
I don't see how the stated goals, costs, deployment, and service is feasible. I'm looking forward to further details.
Mobile workers of the world can finally unite, as the neat augmented reality application Worksnug has just been approved by Apple for the iPhone. (...)
Worksnug allows you to find wifi locations available nearby, from Starbucks to independent cafes, to libraries and shared offices, complete with reviews describing the atmosphere, power situation and coffee quality. Just what you might have dreamed about as a mobile worker.
Indeed, for Richard Leyland, the man behind the application, Worksnug is not just about finding the next free wifi hotspot, or being able to boast about the potential of your iPhone in front of your collegues and friends. While both might be appealing, the London-based technology entrepreneur envisaged worksnug as a tool to solve some of the problems of the worker of the 21st century – often isolated, occasionally lonely and highly mobile.
And Leyland knows what he is talking about: "As a mobile worker I spent two years commuting from my kitchen table to Starbucks or the next best library. It worked, but it felt lonely. There is an atomisation of work. We are not employed in big companies anymore, we work for ourselves."
For him, developing Worksnug came directly out of this this experience and was designed as a solution to the challenges of modern working practices. "Over the last 15 or 20 years the way we work has changed tremendously. Work was always an ordered thing, and it's not anymore. In the past, there was a hierarchy, there were certain rules and an office, and we also had a very clear sense of what the job was. All of that has changed. Now, we have the mobile phone, the laptop, the internet.", he says.
"The knowledge-based economy confronts us with a style of work that is new and different. The working situation is a bit like the wild west – there's no guide to tell you when to start or when to stop or where you should work. Worksnug is a small attempt to bring back some order. We want Worksnug users to feel part of a community again."
To produce that feeling of community, the application sets priorities for the sort of locations it identifies. Independent coffee chains, art galleries and libraries are more important than Starbucks, for example. "In Starbucks you are a mobile island," Leyland says. "I wanted to help Worksnug users to be able to meet other people who do what they do."
Users can share their experiences by leaving comments both in the application itself or on the website from early next year. To point them in the right direction a team of reviewers was recruited to assess 700 places in London, where the application has rolled out first. San Francisco is next, with New York, Berlin and Madrid to follow soon. (...)
The history of Olympics and Expos is one of heaviness - of mass and monumentality and conspicuous expenditure on immovable objects. Our most extraordinary contemporary feats of engineering are more stealthy, more extensive and more invisible than these traditions of glass and brick and steel: Code rather than Carbon.
FORM
The structure is comprised of a filigree central array of columns - serving as circulation systems dropping from the sky.
PEOPLE
People can choose to ascend to the Cloud by foot or bicycle - gaining the status of everyday Olympians, each individual footstep contributing to a vast collective energy-harvesting effort.
FUNDING
Everyone from around the world will be able to contribute to the Cloud - whether through the admission charges and bodily presence of their visit, or by their contributions towards a particular sphere and their ownership of a single LED, helping to keep the lamp of London aflame.
ENVIRONMENT
The Cloud addresses our twin attention spans of the short-term desire for information and stimulation, and our growing longer-term consciousness about our impact on the future, and our productive role within a larger harmonious ecology. It provides two resources - energy and data - harvesting both the natural ecosystem and humanity's complementary cyber-sphere, fusing the two.
INFORMATION
Like all tell-tale signs of brooding weather, the Cloud is a display system. It is both screen and barometer, archive and sensor, past and future. The patterns of its animated skins offer a civic-scale smart-meter for London as a whole, sign-posting particular events, transport patterns, weather forecasts, timetables, and footage either real-time or decades old. Its movements can reveal the movement of both the crowds below and those within its structure - a space alive to the touch, an aerial ecology.
Proposed monument for London 2012 Olympics unveiled
A team of leading architects and engineers has just unveiled designs for The Cloud - a landmark structure to commemorate London's role as host of the 2012 Olympics. The lightweight transparent tower, composed of a "cloud" of inflatable, light-emitting spheres, would create a spatial, three-dimensional display in the skies of London, fed by real time information from all over the world. The structure is "a new form of collective expression and experience and an updated symbol of our dawning age: code rather than carbon," said Carlo Ratti, head of the MIT SENSEable Cities Laboratory and one of the project leaders. Other members of the design team include artist Tomas Saraceno, digital designer Alex Haw, lightweight-structures expert Joerg Schleich, engineering group Arup, landscape architects Agence Ter and the Internet company Google. Those advising the team include writer Umberto Eco and and MIT professor and artist Antoni Muntadas. "Our main idea is to apply to architecture some of the distributed processes that are currently revolutionizing the digital world," says Professor Ratti. "For instance, we would like the Cloud to become a symbol of global ownership built through a bottom up fundraising effort." The size of the Cloud will not be set in advance, but it will evolve based on the level of contributions received. The global "cloudraising" effort will be supported by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter; Google will provide advertising on YouTube and in search results. "We look forward to applying lessons learned from the Obama campaign to involve the global community in support of the Cloud", said Margo Miller, immediate past Chair of Democrats Abroad UK. The Cloud will also be "a vast, collective energy-harvesting effort," explains Alex Haw. People can choose to ascend the Cloud on foot or bicycle; the energy that it would take to descend the Cloud is converted, on the way down, into electricity through elevators with regenerative breaking, similar to those that are present in hybrid cars. "The people's energy, coupled with solar energy collected through on-site and off-site photovoltaic cells and various energy saving strategies will allow us to reach carbon neutrality, whereby the Cloud produces all the energy it uses."
The structure of the Cloud is an innovation in and of itself. "Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the sphere - all on exceedingly slender columns, stabilized by a cable net such as the one I built in Stuttgart in 2001", commented professor Joerg Schleich. "The Cloud is a delicate yet robust filigree of reliable high-tech components, its ingredients familiar, their composition radically new."
The LEDs in the Cloud, fed by real time information, will be viewable from all over London - something which was of particular interest to Google. "When Carlo Ratti approached our founder Larry Page, we chose to collaborate because of his bold and visionary concept, and because the project fit with Google's mission of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," explain Obi Felten and Matt Brittin, Managing Director of Google UK. "We
particularly like the idea of the Cloud in the sky above London displaying information to the city and beyond - a powerful symbol for the openness and diversity of London, befitting the first truly digital Olympics." Moving inside the Cloud will be like floating inside a three-dimensional display, animated by information feeds that could include energy use, spectator numbers, decibel levels, medal updates, transport patterns, mobile phone activity, Internet traffic, and others. "The Cloud develops our ongoing interest in the idea of the 'civic-scale smart meter', acting as a real-time feedback loop on collective urban activity," said Dan Hill from Arup. The Cloud was initially designed for the 2012 Olympic Park, although other sites in London are also currently being explored. The team states that no public funding will be required. "We can build our Cloud with 5 million pounds or 50 million," says team member Walter Nicolino. "The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached." The Cloud team at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory is composed of Carlo Ratti, Assaf Biderman, Mauro Martino, E Roon Kang, working together with Walter Nicolino and Giovanni de Niederhausern. The Cloud team includes artist Tomas Saraceno, digital designer Alex Haw, lightweight-structures expert Joerg Schleich, engineering group Arup, landscape architects Agence Ter, graphic designers Studio FM, visualization experts GMJ. Advisors to the team include Umberto Eco, Marco Santambrogio, Chris Bangle, Giuliano da Empoli, Antoni Muntadas, William Mitchell, Paul Richens, Gianluca Salvatori, Caterina Ginzburg, Liza Fior, Margo Miller.
"Liquid Modernity" is Bauman's term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the "solid" modernity that preceded it.
According to Bauman, the passage from "solid" to "liquid" modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered.
Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives.
Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could be meaningfully applied.
Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.
Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1998; The Times, 14 April 1998; The Independent, 15 April 1998; The Scotsman, 14 April 1998; The Guardian, 14 April 1998; Financial Times, April 14 1998, p.8 New York Times, 15 April 1998.
Henry Lancaster – Senior Analyst, Europe – BuddeComm
(...)
Missed opportunities There are few governments which consider future IP networks in a larger framework. The UK is a case in point. When building a nation’s NGN, policy makers should take the opportunity to think big, which means thinking far beyond broadband as is currently perceived. At present, the Digital Britain report has taken a silo approach in that it addresses elements such as telecoms, content, radio and TV in isolation of each other.
The trans-sector approach, by which broadband taps into and co-ordinates with other sectors, is currently being championed by Australia, and under its example and guidance is being explored by New Zealand, The Netherlands and the USA. Other sectors include the use of IP infrastructure for a range of services, of which telecoms is only one. Bandwidth tenants will include government departments developing e-health and tele-education services (as well as the private sector doing the same), utilities managing their smart grids, security and entertainment firms, and a plethora of new and entrepreneurial services yet to be thought of. Applications such as e-health, tele-education and smart grids will together account for at least 50% of the digital infrastructure capacity, while broadband as we now know it will represent 10-15%. In effect, broadband will in future years become such a small component of overall IP-enabled services that it can provided for free, much as email and computer-to-computer VoIP are currently free.
So despite the posturing, the government faces a bleak fact: that without a broader vision and a coordinated approach to IP infrastructure it will be impossible to maximise the economic and social benefits from its Digital Britain initiative. This will be shameful for the government, and a pity for all citizens.
A parliamentary select committee is to check whether the recommendations proposed in the Digital Britain report are realistic, particularly those regarding broadband speed.
The Business and Enterprise Committee inquiry was announced on Monday. Many of the government's recommendations in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report, published earlier this month, require new legislation if they are to be put into practice.
According to a parliamentary spokesperson, the select committee's inquiry is intended to "inform the House to better amend legislation" when that legislation is put before MPs after the summer recess.
The cross-party committee will examine several questions. It will ask whether the 2Mbps universal baseline broadband speed is ambitious enough, and will also investigate whether ISPs are providing the speeds they promise to consumers.
The 50p-per-month levy on each fixed copper line, as proposed by Carter, will also come under scrutiny. This charge, if allowed by the new legislation, will feed into a fund that will be used to roll out high-speed next-generation broadband access in areas of the UK where commercial companies do not see a sufficient business case for investment.
The committee will also attempt to find out whether the government's plans for next-generation broadband access will work, and whether current regulation "strikes the right balance between ensuring fair competition and encouraging investment in next-generation networks".
The Digital Britain report has drawn criticism from politicians and technology experts over its proposals for dealing with fibre rollouts and illegal file-sharing.
The report, published on Tuesday, outlines the government's plans for the UK's telecommunications infrastructure and digital economy. Shortly after its publication, Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Party's shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport, called Digital Britain a "colossal disappointment" and lambasted the plan's proposal for a monthly 50p tax on fixed copper lines.
Lord Carter, the report's author, proposed the levy as a way of funding the rollout of fibre-based next-generation broadband to areas of the country where operators might not see a business case for investment. Speaking in Parliament, Hunt said a better tactic would be to stimulate investment by changing regulations to encourage providers to spend on fibre development.
"The cable revolution happened without a cable tax. The satellite revolution happened without a satellite tax," Hunt told Parliament on Wednesday. "Everyone recognises that public investment may be necessary to reach more remote parts of the country but simply slapping on an extra tax is an old economy solution to a new economy problem."
Hunt also pointed out that Digital Britain announced 12 new consultations, and called the report "government of the management consultants, for the management consultants, by the management consultants".
The tax will benefit the biggest existing providers in the UK, according to Chris Smedley, chief executive of fibre-optic network company Geo.
"The tax will only raise around £170m per year from consumers, and [this will] be presumably handed straight back to BT and Virgin Media - who will still have the UK market in a stranglehold - and then only [used] to deliver fibre to the cabinet," Smedley said in a statement.
"Just as importantly, the government will still levy rates on fibre once it's in use, perpetuating the problem of cable lying dormant in the ground. Removing these [rates] would have been a quick and easy way to promote a fibre future for the UK."
Smedley also attacked the 2Mbps base speed for universal broadband coverage proposed by Carter, saying it leaves the UK open to ridicule. "The UK is the world's sixth-largest economy, yet this report says it cannot justify similar investments to those already promised in the US, Australia, Singapore, Korea and Japan, which are aiming to deliver 100Mbps as standard," he said.
