I predict that today, as the iPhone4 is being released global sales will mean more than a million handsets get sold in the first day.

I also predict, that by December, the iPhone4 will be the ‘must have’ christmas gift of the year.

I’m also gonna predict that by the end of this year, it will start to become more mainstream to make video calls, rather than just audio calls (especially because of FaceTime, and the prevalence of WiFi availability everywhere).

I think also, the number of people who start vlogging (video blogging) is going to start to increase signficantly, as the iPhone 4 just looks like it’s going to make it easier for people to capture content, edit it on the device, and then upload it directly.

I hope that the front mounted camera will make it an ideal device to see yourself, whilst you’re recording, and that the software tweaks, and adjustments internally in the device that allow you to zoom in and focus on different images/parts of the scene your recording mean that the quality of content produced makes for better overall video creation. If the new iPhone 4 really does work well with all sorts of different lighting, etc, then I really do believe that there will be a massive influx of more video generated content, and that particularly in my mind, people will start relating to video content and responding to video content in a whole new way.

Whilst it’s been primarily people with video recording devices, or web cams, in the past, and only a minority of mobile users pro-actively generating, and capturing content on the go, I think the iPhone 4 is going to see a huge shift in the sheer volume of real time video content that gets created, in part because of the planning and thinking that’s gone into making the software smarter, but also, because I believe the ‘Apple’ experience of producing and editing a video will be a lot easier, smoother, and more manageable than it currently might be with other mobile devices.

I think also that the way that the iPhone has built up a solid financial eco-system around itself, with regards to the money it gives back to developers, and the amount of developers who are earning a substantial income from the iPhone App store makes it a much much stronger contender to Android, Google’s operating system, and whilst there might be a greater proliferation of mobile devices out there using Android, there’s a lot more Apple users out there that are actively advocating their user experience, just directly with friends, and through Word of Mouth. I firmly believe that the level of customer service that you get from Apple, when you go to one of their stores, and you have a problem with your device, just can’t be replicated by Google, or Nokia, with their respective platforms and devices, and as much as it is about being a mainstream handset, the numbers of people flocking to an iPhone are going up, regularly.

I myself would have never considered an iPhone before this one.. But now that it does video, as part of the design, and it lets me edit the content on the device, and upload them directly from the handset, I’m finally delighted at the prospect of acquiring a personal iPhone 4. The Apps eco-system means it will always be the first platform people think of developing for when it comes to mainstream consumers, and whilst the lay of the land may change 5 years from now, for now, I’m putting my bet behind Apple, and the iPhone 4, as being the most prolific and widely used device for 2011. Even though I thought this was going to be the year for Android, I now seriously have my doubts about that.

Of course, these are just my predictions, and I’m basing it on my own long term experience of using both Mac and PC and how easily my mobile phones in the past have integrated with my physical and online eco-systems. I think it’s time I stopped trying to get it to work, and just get an iPhone, and start syncing my iTunes, and/or spotify playlists.

Now the only question left is, do I wait for the end of the month, or get one today?

EAVB_VHDKJMTJDF

And it’s you!

That’s the premise of a film that I’ve just watched last night. We Live in Public, a documentary styled film, that’s just been released in the UK yesterday, through DogWoof is a truly insightful film.

I find life so amusing at times. Thursday evening, I was at the YesAndClub listening to Shed Simove, the editor for Big Brother. The following day, I was sat watching We Live in Public, seeing how the original Big Brother idea had been done, long before, in New York by a man named Josh Harris.

Josh Harris, a name that most people nowadays don’t recognise or know, was a man who was far ahead of his time. In the early days of the internet, Josh was already creating streaming video content, embedded with chat windows, and real time conversations. The film takes you through Josh’s various projects, and businesses, some hugely, lucrative, others massively successful, and some which just seem completely off the wall.

He started off with founding Jupiter Research, after understanding what sort of market survey data was needed in the Internet sector, then following the trends, and knowing the direction that things were headed, after he became a success with Jupiter, he worked with Prodigy and established their chat rooms. Being given creative license, and the freedom to be a little more risque than the traditional corporate types would have been comfortable doing, he got sex chat rooms going, and eventually ended up having close to 25% of Prodigy’s traffic happening as a result of people in chat rooms. From there, he went on to founding Pseudo.com where he started live streaming video, and having chat rooms alongside the live video. As you watch We Live in Public, you really start to see how even though this was all happening across dial up modems, and this was the late 1990′s Harris really had a vision of what would be emerging, or the direction that things be going in from an industry and tech perspective.

At it’s peak, Pseudo was creating multiple channels of live streaming content each with their own embedded chat rooms, and each one on different topics or subjects. It was an achievement, if you look at it, like no other. He had managed to create more channels than were publicly available through any other medium at the time, and because the tv channels all ran autonomously, the folks producing and editing the shows had an unprecedented level of creative control, and came up with some compelling viewing. But being so far ahead of it’s time, Harris was unable to sell Pseudo off to one of the bigger players, and never really established the dominance in the market place that other media channels had at the time.

Following on from Pseudo, Harris launched into a project called ‘Quiet Place’ which was essentially a ‘closed environment’ live in community in the depths of New York, having taken an old factory, and repurposed it internally to accomodate his ‘under ground’ experiment. Being notorious on the New York scene for throwing wild parties, and perhaps in an effort to further his ‘work’, Harris recruited in something like 100 people, who were each interviewed, screened, and then became inhabitants of this underground community. Everything you wanted was supplied, for free, including food, drink, drugs, and even firearms. But once you came into the community you couldn’t leave, and everyone had to wear the same clothes. Josh himself was a member of this community, but subversively so, as he would often be shown ‘off set’ behind the scenes, getting feedback from a group that was helping him enforce control, and order in the environment, from outside.

The set up was impressive, in so much as it was a full ‘Big Brother’ style experiment. There were cameras everywhere. From the loos and showers, to the beds, there wasn’t anywhere that you couldn’t go, or hide, and not be seen. But more interestingly, he had set up a ‘pod style’ bank of beds, essentially a hundred bunk beds all stacked tightly next to each other, and each contained a tv screen in one corner and a camera in the other. From any bed, you could flick through all the channels, and see what people were doing in any of the other beds, with the idea being that if two people were watching each other at the same time, then there would also be live audio between them. The experimental community ran for the month of December, 1999, right through to the Millenium New Year, but given that they also had a ‘church like’ room, rumors reached police that there was a massive cult and that there would be mass suicides, and so came down to investigate on the morning of either the 1st or 2nd of Jan (the exact date escapes me). Fortunately for Harris, he had grown tired of the project, and so it was the perfect excuse to just shut things down and move on.

His next experiment was in living in public (hence the title, We Live In Public). He found himself a ‘girlfriend’, and played out the drama of being a couple under the scrutiny of the camera. It’s interesting in the movie that the filmmaker Ondi Timoner chooses to show Harris’s girlfriend/public romance as being something that genuinely happened, and genuinely fell apart. In Harris’s own words, after the film, during the Q&A, he confirms that he had pre-meditated the whole experience. Deliberately finding someone to recruit into the role of ‘girlfriend’ for his staged experiment of living publicly. He even claims to have the footage of him going over the moral dilemma of putting someone through that experience, and clearly, as is evidenced by the snippets of footage that’s shown of the experiment, he didn’t hesitate to follow through. Eventually the relationship breaks down, and Harris is left ‘alone’ with his viewing public which whilst at it’s high of as many as a 1000 people when he and Tanya, his girlfriend at the time were in love and all lovey dovey, drops to as little as 10 folks.

Eventually he leaves that experiment, packs up, and just disappears. Later it turns out he had bought an Apple Farm up north from New York, and was just working the farm, working the land. Almost as if he was unplugging himself from the grid, and just getting back to nature. It’s interesting, as I was watching that I was thinking about the Schumann Resonance and how as people we tend to ‘feel better’ in nature, because we get to discharge all the energetic charge we’re carrying from being exposed to technology and the ‘stresses’ of modern life, and have our energy almost ‘neutralised’ or ‘grounded’ and end up just feeling more peaceful or calm in the presence of a natural environment. (As an aside, some folks would also chalk that upto the ‘Aura’ being grounded in a natural environment, and all the energy that hadn’t been properly anchored or discharged from being in an electric and tech filled physical space, and from being deprived of being exposed to the natural base background frequency/radiation gets all balanced out, the way nature knows how to. But since this isn’t a review of Aura’s or energy fields, I’ll leave that as an initial thought for now – will perhaps one day write a more detailed review of some of the evidence to suggest it’s existence.)

After working on the Apple Farm, eventually Josh Harris ends up selling up, upping his roots, and disappearing to Ethiopa, where later we discover he’s bought himself some land, and has made his home. Deliberately living somewhere that isn’t wired up, and technically as forward, it affords him the opportunity to rediscover community, and his own humanity which almost feels like he’s lost at times, when living under public scrutiny in some of his experiments.

The film itself, whilst chronicling some of Josh’s past, and background, doesn’t do justice, in my opinion to his vision, or inspiration to create these experiments in ‘public’ living. After the film, we’re fortunate to be able to have a Q&A with Josh Harris, the ‘subject’ of the movie, and slowly it starts to become evident that Harris really sees himself as an artist, rather than a technologist, or futurist, though it seems he’s aptly positioned to fill any one of those roles. But unlike Orwell, and his vision of Big Brother, in 1984, Harris’s visions, and ‘experiments’ were attempts to understand our own innate desire to watch and be watched. Harris describes post screening how he wanted to capture the experience of losing yourself in the collective consciousness, of the people that are observing you, and relates how in the couples experiment, living with Tanya, in a flat, when he pushes her a touch too far, she goes completely out of character, and acts out the suggestions that her fans provide her, through the chat rooms. It seems that everyone else in the chat rooms is starting to influence Tanya’s thinking and behaviour, and she insists that Josh sleep on the couch, and that she get to stay in the bed. Eventually Tanya makes the decision to leave the flat completely. But Josh identified the moment where Tanya forced him to sleep on the couch, as a direct consequence of the user feedback and not something that she would have otherwise considered. It’s this nature of hyper connectedness, that your own mind, and your own control over what you say or do gets lost in response to the community around you that Harris was trying to capture, understand and express, through these experiments.

Whether he does that or not is a different matter. But it’s understandable why some folks would liken him to the ‘Warhol of the Web‘. Especially if he describes himself as an Artist, and when asked what his motives were he shares that he aspires one day to be in the major Art Galleries, being exhibited. He does make a valid point, that most great artists are never appreciated in their own time, and even shared that he was almost hoping that his content will one day be looked back upon and seen by people as being the revolutionary, ahead of his time visionary that he seems to be, by documenting and capturing in such detail all the content from all of these cameras from all of these experiments in living publicly. He also jokes about the cost of storing all this information, and refers to the half life of the video medium he’s stored all this content on, describing museums as being those repositories that are paid to store our history and keep our art alive.

Personally I had so many questions that I wanted to ask of Josh, but given that the Q&A was for a limited time only, and that there were other people in the audience, I didn’t ask more than a few questions of him, but as I let the fullness of the film sink in, and start to take some of my own background/experience and perceptions into account, I really get a sense of just how cutting edge Harris was with his work, and how his latest project, which he’s now pursuing, since the film is opening doors for him again, is really an attempt by Harris to understand and see through his project who’se name escapes me at the moment. It’s an attempt to recreate the ‘Quiet Place’ experiment, but this time to have ‘work’ for the people to do. Harris reflected that one of the reasons why Quiet Place descended into anarchy and chaos was partly because there was nothing to occupy people’s time and attention, and so apart from being ‘watched’ all the time, people had nothing else to do.

His latest vision is of a ‘wired city’ which will have everyone being watched under the camera, given everything, and also be given work, or tasks and activities to occupy them.

In brief, I think the guy is trying to create real life experiences of what might happen if everyone’s thoughts became conscious and everyone was plugged directly into each other. He even suggests that perhaps that’s what they Mayan 2012 is all about a firmware upgrade of the human CPU, so that we no longer operate as single autonomous units, but as an interconnected hybrid type massive parallell computer. Personally I’d been saying the same thing to my own friends. That all this technology like mobiles that allows us to be uber connected all the time, in any place, at any time is a way for us to physically train ourselves to start experiencing that ‘always on’ moment in preperation for some form of mass telepathy to emerge that will allow us to always be connected with each other. Some folks are already talking about such phenomenon through Indigo Children, and a coming of a new age type talk.. Others recount Mayan prophecies and ‘end of times’ type forecasts to mean just a transform of such a scale that it’s unprecedented, and beyond our imagination.

The one other insight that occurs to me, when reflecting on this film was Sheldrake’s work on Morphogenetic fields, and the sense of being stared at. What if we do communicate information by putting our attention on something. What if when we look at something we’re communicating with it, energetically, and telepathically, but our sense are so numb, and dulled, that we can’t perceive that communication. There’s always stories of Aborigines being able to communicate with each other over vast distances, and even traditional indigenous people having a ‘hyper connectedness’ that allows them to perceive and understand the natural world in a way that escapes most of us urban city dwellers.

It’s indeed an interesting perspective that Harris offers up, and indeed only time will tell how true a visonary, artist, or prophetic futurist he was, but given his track record so far, I wouldn’t disagree completely with him at all. In fact my own thinking and understanding are very much in line with the tack that Harris takes on the subject.

My final thought will be to leave you with an excerpt from The Foundation for the Law of Time, where this is expressed far more eloquently than I ever could:

In its essence, time is a frequency expressed as a mathematical ratio constant, 13:20. This constant defines a whole new realm of reality, the synchronic order. This is the fourth dimensional realm where synchronicity is the norm and can actually be mapped out by mathematical codes based on the ratio constant 13:20.

By means of this constant it can be demonstrated that the present civilization is not coordinated by the universal frequency of synchronization, but by an artificial timing frequency which is a major factor contributing to the present global crisis.

Rooted in an irregular 12-month calendar and a mechanistic 60 second/60 minute timing program, this artificial timing frequency (12:60) drives the human species ever farther from the natural order with alienating effects on human consciousness. In this analysis, the evolution of the human species is dependent on a return to the natural timing frequency.

For this reason the primary social application of the Law of Time is the Thirteen Moon/28 day calendar. By making the Thirteen Moon/28-day cycle the harmonic (13:20) standard of everyday time measurement, replacing the irregular twelve-month global standard, the Law of Time establishes a new foundation for the reformulation of the human mind and its systems of knowing.

[http://www.lawoftime.org/law/law.html]

If you’re reading this, and the film is still showing, I thoroughly recommend you get out to the cinema and watch it. If you happen to read this on Saturday the 14th November, I believe the 6.30pm screening at the Odeon in the Panton Street Cinema in London will include a Q&A with Josh Harris, after the film, and if you feel so inspired, I’d thoroughly recommend you get down there to watch it, and ask him a few of your own questions If you happen to live outside of London, there’s also nationwide screenings next week, for which you could win a ticket by entering the draw here.

So this is ‘Day 2′ for me, during this month of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), though I may just go backwards a little, and peddle in some posts for the first few days of November to fill in the gaps, and make sure I’ve published one post a day for the month of November, especially seeing as I only just discovered NaBloPoMo a few days after November started. (Yes, I know, I probably should have been paying more attention, but I was unplugged from the internet, so kinda missed it kick round!)

Yesterday (as in Saturday) was a pretty tame day by usual standards. There was no real networking, any hardcore event going, or even any real serious work done on my part. (Shocking I know! But occasionally it does happen So having a bit of a ‘rest’ day, I ended up spending a few hours watching TV. Yes, it’s not something I do often anymore.. In fact, I think it’s been a few weeks since I last sat down in front of the tele, and just watched something, but figured it was time to do something that didn’t require too much interactivity or active engagement from me, and just passively absorb some entertainment for a change.

I ended up watching 3 films yesterday. Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Around The World in 80 Days, and Zoolander.

Of the three films, Zoolander was probably the worst. I knew it was bad, but seeing as I’d never had a chance to watch the whole film, and given that I wasn’t too exhausted last night, I ended up staying awake to watch it. It was ok, but really not worth watching unless or until you’re really bored, and in the mood for a really lame film with a bunch of over the top dumbness of the airheaded fashion model type blondie emtpy headedness.

Star Wars, as ever, is always cool to watch. Dunno if it’s the geekness in me, or just the sheer coolness of the idea of space flight, and many planets, with different species all living alongside each other, but I just seem to love stuff that involves flying between planets, and through outer space. Especially if there’s different species involved The 3rd episode really plugs the gap between the first trilogy and the main trilogy of Episodes 4, 5 and 6 – or the Star Wars story, as we’ve come to know it, having grown up with it in the 80′s. It’s a film that you can watch independently of the other films, but really, to appreciate it fully, you need to watch the other films before it, to really get the context. Watching any of the Star Wars epics, really makes me think that George Lucas would love working in Bollywood. The only reason I think that is because the average length of a film there is so much longer than Hollywood that he really wouldn’t have any trouble creating such long films, and he might even find some inspiration in some of the more traditional Indian Myths, that he could feed into his own films

Of the three films I watched last night, Around the World in 80 Days was by far the most ‘entertaining’. Star Wars was a touch too serious and intense, whilst Zoolander was a bit too dumb, and stupid. But Around the World really was a good balance of some more light hearted moments, along with some cool action scenes, with martial artist Jackie Chan providing some awesome fight scenes, in amongst the more slapstick humour directed at the crazy Phileas Fogg.

Now all three films contained an element of mind control, and manipulation, looking to create a certain amount of compliance and render power to the person exerting the mind control. In Zoolander, the entire premise of the film is that the model has been ‘brainwashed’ and ‘implanted’ with a Pavlovian response like ability to murder the intended victim upon hearing a particular sound track. The one ‘controlling’ the models, and responsible for brainwashing them is a designer by the name of Mugatu. In Star Wars III, it is Anakin Skywalker, who’s mind is slowly corrupted by the Chancellor, who turns out to be the Sith Lord, that the Jedi have been looking for. The promise of being able to save his wife from death, through learning to use the Dark Side of the Force, corrupt Anakin sufficiently to turn him into the notorius ‘Darth Vader’. Whilst in Around the World in 80 Days, the head of the Royal Academy of Science, Lord Kelvin, the man who issues Phileas Fogg the wager to travel around the world in 80 days, coerces all the other Lords into agreement, and makes them all seem to want to conform, through bully tactics, which ultimately lead to the revelation that he has no friends in amongst his peers.

In all three films, the desire to have more power, and to control others to accomplish it really epitomizes the way in which fear, greed and a selfish regard of oneself makes one lose perspective, and ultimately leads to people’s downfall. Personally I’m a firm believer in doing good for others, and it comes back to you. Of taking responsibility to help your fellow man. Some of the ‘selfless’ ideals that the ‘Jedi’ display in Star Wars, are very much on track with how I see people needing to become for a society to evolve, and for us to collectively survive, as a species. Inherently a more caring, considerate and self-less frame of mind allows you to see how you can contribute to the world. Whilst in the films, the overwhelming desire or compulsion to gain more power, gain more control, meant people tried to force more, manipulate more, and coerce others more just in a vain attempt to be in charge.

The most extreme example, in Star Wars, with Anakin Skywalker, where near the end of the film he talks about becoming the most ‘powerful’ ever, even more powerful than the Jedi, and that he would overthrow the Sith Lord, the Chancellor, and take control, and rule the entire Empire. In start contrast to the desires of his wife, and mother to be, Padme, who wished for the Republic to remain a democracy, Anakin turns over to the dark side, and becomes consumed by the desire for more power. Ultimately, it is he, who is responsible for the death of his wife, a fear that came to him through his dreams, which ironically was responsible for him courting the dark side of the Force in the first place.

It makes me think, how often, do we in our own society and everyday life act out of fear, and lack? How often do we try to force things to happen in a certain way? How often do we get burned in trying to make things happen a certain way, and then discover later down the line, that actually in the long run, we should have just let things run their course, and just learn to accept that somethings are out of our control?

Personally, I’m a firm believer in there being an inherent pattern to the nature of the universe we live in, and ultimately, things will end up they way they are meant to, regardless of what we do or don’t do. That doesn’t mean we should just resign ourselves to inaction, and complacency. Far from it. I think we should focus all our energy, passion and enthusiasm into those things that inspire us. Into those things that demand our attention, and that we’re drawn to. Naturally they draw our attention for a reason. And if we pursue that, based on our own ‘inner’ desires, rather than manipulated, externally influenced, ideas and thoughts that have been implanted into our heads through society, social conditioning and social norms, then ultimately we’ll always end up exactly where we need to be. The only difference is how long it might take for us to get there

I know it’s not ideal to write a blog post every day, but inspired by @WhatleyDude, who is producing one video per day, for the month of November, I thought I would get stuck in and at least try to capture a bit of the flavour of my days, as they pass.

Today, I started off the morning, helping a friend get set up on a wordpress blog. She’s already an experienced blogger, and we caught up as friends, before then helping her to start to migrate her content from her old hosting to the hosting I had set up for her. (Yes, I do have web hosting, and my prices are really really reasonable, with unlimited usage).

After wrapping a pleasant enough Breakfast up in Waterloo, with some of the basics covered, I jumped onto a train to Richmond, and headed across to Paypal’s HQ for a Brown Bag Session with the finalists of SeedCamp.

I’m not going to list all the guys that presented.. but suffice it to say, there were some really deserving teams there. I was there with a few other folks, some familiar, some not so, but all aimed at providing extra help, advice, feedback, guidance and support to the teams. I met some really great people, shared heaps of advice and found myself being drawn into conversations around how to use Twitter effectively etc. Personally I’m looking forward to seeing the Patient’s Know Best service become something I can use with my local GP, or hospital (especially for my ongoing chronic illness), and one other startup that was there from the Seedcamp week, but not a final winner, was Kwaga – a service that is in the email mass overload solution space..

After spending some time giving people advice on how to use twitter, how to find interesting and useful content, the right people to follow, why not to auto follow, and also showing some of the startups some of their competitors already in their space on twitter, I gave a short interview to @heatherataylor who runs a community website for Paypal.

Then after much more merriment, and more advice giving about all things Twitter, and Social Media, we ended up having drinks and some dinner in a local Pizzeria after which it was time to head home, and now it’s time for some sleep.. Adventure recounted? Aye.. till tomorrow!!

So a while back, I decided to get back into a many months contract commitment with a mobile phone provider. Since completing my 18 month contract with T-Mobile I was loathe to get another phone with a long term contract, partly because I wasn’t sure back then if I would be in the UK long enough to fulfill the contract.

As time progressed, and I got further and further into my work here in London, I came to realise that I’m gonna be here for a while. I won’t be shooting off anywhere anytime soon, and I’m going to be in London for the long haul. That said, I decided that I couldn’t stick with the Sidekick Slide as my primary phone for much longer. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the Sidekick was a great phone, and it served me well for tweeting, and reading a few emails – but I was ready for something a little more ‘serious’, that would let me live stream with Qik, manage multiple email accounts, allow me to choose from a healthy eco-system of apps, and most importantly, still have a decent sized full keyboard.

Settling on a Blackberry, and having received my handset, I had a day before my number would get ported across, to my new network provider, Vodafone, and decided, since I had the handset that I would get it all configured, and set up, ready for when the Sim Card in my new phone went active. That’s when I discovered that my current phone at the time, the Sidekick slide, didn’t sync with a Mac. Worst still, it didn’t even sync with a PC. In fact it just plain didn’t sync with a computer. Terrible I know. And after having had the phone for two years, I realised that most of the numbers on the Sidekick Slide weren’t stored anywhere else online. They were on business cards and online profiles of the people I’d met, but they weren’t in any one addressbook that I could access, and I was loathe to start aggregating them all again, on yet another new device. After spending countless hours hunting, and searching, I finally discovered that I had access to everything that was on my phone, online. After more than 18 months with a Sidekick Slide, I only just discovered that T-Mobile had set up a portal for Sidekick users in the UK, and that I could see many of the items on my phone online. All my contacts were available online, as well as all the emails I had coming into my phone, the notes I’d made, my To Do lists – everything was on this online portal, that I had never once seen, or heard about. I suppose that’ll teach me to not properly read the manuals in the future!

Well, anyways, after spending a half hour with the portal, I came to realise that there wasn’t anyway of ‘exporting’ your data, even from the portal. It seemed just downright dumb, and silly, but it seemed like they expected you to be a customer of theirs for life, and to use the one handset that they had manufactured. Clearly mobile phone manufacturers still hadn’t learnt to think about or deal with people moving their contacts onto and off of a handset. Perhaps they all presume people will just copy it onto and off of the Sim? Well I wasn’t about to do that, given that my past experiences with using Sim cards to copy phone numbers resulted in names being shortened, and multiple numbers for a single person being turned into many entries.

Well, anyways, I ended up finding a ‘printable view’ of all my contacts – thank god they had the decency to think a person might want to at least ‘print’ off all their contacts. Then, with the print view, I at least had all the contact details in a table type view, that I could save and keep hold of

I then had to get that data out of the HTML encoding, and into a CSV format. That was no easy task, I can tell you. First I took the raw HTML, removed all the images, and empty columns, (with much experimenting, and using NVU constantly jumping between the source code, and the WYSIWYG view, to make sure I didn’t lose any data as I did it..

Eventually I managed to get the table down to a basic table that I could then copy into a spreadsheet (notice I didn’t say Excel? It’s cos I’m using Open Office!) Unfortunately, the ‘Name’ field was collapsed into one, and so I had to then edit that by taking that column into a text document, converting the table to text, and then re-converting the text back into a table, at the commas. Finally, with all my data in a spreadsheet, all the columns properly labelled, I was able to consider generating a CSV with all the phone numbers from my current handset. Then I realised, that I also hadn’t properly dealt with all the phone numbers on all of my previous handsets, having just started using a new phone, and then slowly just adding numbers as I was using them. Fortunately, most of the other phones I had were able to Sync with the AddressBook in OSX, using the Bluetooth on my Macbook. With the Motorola RAZR V3 it was no problem.. I’d sync’d that in the past with previous laptops, so knew that wouldn’t give me any trouble, and so merrily got all of the contacts off of that handset. Then came the Sony Ericsson Z310i – an old handset, in so much as I had stopped using it as a phone, but nonetheless, one that in it’s prime had been home to many many phone numbers. That one didn’t sync out of the box, but googling I found the iSync plugin for the Z310i. I did first land on the feisar.com website, and mistakenly thought I would have to buy a plugin, but believing that there had to be a free plugin for Sony Ericsson somewhere, I decided to just keep looking, and boy am I glad I did.. At that late in the night, I might have even bought that plugin, if I didn’t soon find the proper Sony Ericsson iSync plugin shortly afterwards.

So I got all of these contact details of mine into my AddressBook from my previous handsets and realised that I still hadn’t imported my Sidekick Slide phone numbers in. When going to import in AddressBook, I noticed that there were a number of AddressBook formats, and for the life of me I couldn’t see CSV. (Had I not been so exhausted, I might have noticed the ‘import text file’ option – but either that’s only just appeared, now as I look at it again, or I was worried about it importing the data into the wrong columns.. I can’t remember which it was, but I remember thinking I’ll just use Google to sync with, and then there was a Google Blackberry Contacts sync plugin that I’d read about somewhere, when looking for info on sync’ing so figured if I can just get all my contacts into Google, then I can just sync it over the air, with my BlackBerry, which I’ll be able to do from anywhere, so I won’t need to worry about being at my laptop anymore.

I already had my AddressBook on my Mac Sync’d with Plaxo, which had a whole bunch of information that was upto date ( I also had a heap of duplicates, as I wasn’t impressed by the idea of paying Plaxo to have duplicates removed from my addressbook). I knew of a hack that would allow me to make visible the sync with ‘Google Contacts’ option even though I wasn’t an iPhone user, and I didn’t use an iPhone.

Eventually I managed to get my MacBook, my Google Contacts, and my new BlackBerry all sync’d up, but boy did it take some time.

Now I’m keen to selectively filter out some of the contacts in my addressbook out of my mobile, but that’ll be for another day..

So what’s all the hype about? Why was and is Derren Brown trending Twitter? Who the heck is Derren Brown?
So for all you folks out there curious and interested, let me provide a bit of background here.

Derren Brown is one of those people who ‘predicts’ what you’re going to do, before you do it. He uses various subliminal messages, and subtly provides you with cues, and understands human behavioural responses well enough to know how to condition people and how to get people to take certain actions over others. It’s a form of conscious hypnosis, in that he’s learnt to be so in rapport with someone else that he can accurately predict even what they’re thinking, and feeling. He believes he takes his cues primarily in a very physical way, but I’m not entirely convinced that he hasn’t also mastered some form of mind control/manipulation techniques, which whilst he may say to believe them to be only rooted in the physical world, for reputations sake, I’m pretty sure there’s some element of ‘effect’ in the non-physical realm too – inducing some form of projected telepathy or influencing a person’s thoughts. Indeed, I’ve noticed myself how a firm mind unwavering in it’s cause, or purpose, and strengthened with a solid belief system will almost inevitably overpower the mind of someone who doesn’t possess a firmer conviction or belief, or doesn’t have a system in place that they hold too strongly too.

But I’m sure even if Derren Brown secretly did believe or understand any ‘non-physical’ or extra sensory elements to his processes, if he’s convinced himself that it’s all just based on planting messages subliminally then he will believe that to be true. Alternatively, if he wants to maintain his credibility he will always play that double edged sword of making it appear as if that’s what he believes, but secretly inwardly knowing otherwise.

So anyways, Derren Brown, a master manipulator of people, went about on Wednesday of this week, on the 9th of September 2009 (coincidence that he chose such a date perhaps? 9/9/09? – the UK number for ‘emergency services’) to predict live on national television the National Lottery results. He had monopolised the entire Channel 4 network, and was broadcasting live for 10 minutes, across all of their different channels (not the +1 versions of course which would rebroadcast it an hour later). He switched on a TV where the lottery results were being drawn out live, and then noted down the numbers, in numeric order, switched off the tv, and then showed us a series of 6 balls, that had all accurately predicted the lottery perfectly. Had he played those numbers on the Lottery, he would have won the jackpot himself. But given the nature of the experiment, it would have been ‘unethical’ for him to play those winning numbers, since having a stake in winning would have jeopardised the outcome, ironically (as he later revealed.)

Leaving everyone in wonderment, Friday night (last night – 12th September) he then proceeded to break down some of the background to his process, and explained how a ‘fearful’ person could very predictably be controlled and manipulated, demonstrating two examples of experiments where he took a person, placed them in a fear state, and then had them select in a seemingly random fashion items, which he was able to accurately predict. The first example was a women afraid of mice, placing her hand in covered cages, choosing 3 out of 4 and he had accurately predict which one she wouldn’t place her hand in.

The second example was with a man who was shown a knife under a polystyrene cup, and then given 20 cups, and told to stamp down firmly with his foot each cup that he would guess didn’t posess the knife. Again Derren was able to accurately predict which cups would not be crushed, and then of those, he was able to predict all the way down to the exact cup which would be left till last. In that last cup, he actually placed a mouse, rather than a knife, so that in actual fact the man wouldn’t have really hurt himself, but hurt a mouse instead. Fortunately that didn’t happen. Interestingly Derren was able to accurately predict which 6 numbered cups would be left untouched, as well as the final one.

Derren then went on to talk about how humans in fear can apparently be controlled, or influenced to produce a certain result, but to be able to generate a predictable result from a seemingly random mechanical event was an altogether different matter.

He then goes to show how sequences of coins being tossed could end up being influenced based upon a group of people supporting and cheering on a given person. With two people, tossing coins, Derren had one person choose a random order of three tosses (they chose H H H) (where H is Head and T is Tail), and then predicted that he would be able to influence the outcome by predicting that HTH would come out more often. He then had a group of people all cheering and supporting the person tossing the coin who was aiming for HTH and the person who was aiming to get all heads was on their own, with no supporters. The difference in results was astounding, with the single person getting 1 combination, whilst the other team got 10 in the same amount of time. I don’t know how readily the people supporting and cheering the person who ended up winning made a difference, but I’ve definitely noticed myself that when I do something and I feel supported, or want to influence the outcome of a die, say in a game of backgammon, there are times where it feels like I’m actually having an effect. I really do wonder about the whole random causal reality of things sometimes..

Anyway’s Derren Brown proves that he can create a predictable outcome, by having a group of people cheering and supporting the efforts of an individual. He then tries to claim it has no impact whatsoever, by suggesting that all you have to do is swap the middle prediction over, and place it to the front of the combination, and you’ll always succeed. I’m not an expert in probability and statistics, and believe there might be some mathematical basis for his predictions, but I’m not sure that I would necessarily discount a group effect. Especially in the light of Rupert Sheldrakes work on Morphogenetic fields, and how you can have ‘group’ effects.

Well, he then goes on to suggest the Wisdom of Crowds approach, after recalling the research that was done in early England, I think around 1906 perhaps.. It was a Sir Francis, of some sort, who basically collected the predictions from a contest where people had to guess the weight of a calf, the prize being that the one with the closes guess would win the cow. After the contest, he aggregated all the results, and then took the average, and found that the average of all the guesses, was closer to the real weight of the cow than any of the individual guesses. There’s a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, written by an excellent American, who’s name escapes me at present.. But I’ve read the book, and have been suitably impressed..

So much so, that I had a long time ago, thought about possibly trying to crowdsource people’s lottery predictions, to see if there might be some real substance to the idea.

Well, in any case, what Derren did was that he got a room of 24 people, who then each predicted what they thought would be the winning lottery numbers. Each one wrote them down, and then they were aggregated, and between them they got I think 1 number perhaps. Not much likelihood or probability there. Derren then attempted to create some synergy between the people, getting them to bond, and get along with each other, having them perform group activities, and work together, on tasks, as a group, to help them all get a little more familiar and comfortable with each other. Part of that was also to help them relax, and loosen, and get more comfy, and then collectively they would each be a little more receptive, and responsive. It’s common in acts of ‘telepathy’ or ‘clarivoyance’ that in order to get better results you need to be looser, relaxed, more chilled, calm, laid back, and not be tense. Or maybe he was just loosening them up to be more receptive to his subliminal suggestions. Who knows…

Anyways, after having them do a bunch of team building stuff, he got the group of people to then practice ‘automatic writing’ a process which helps to bypass the conscious mind and supposedly connects you directly to your subconscious.. It’s been suggested that people use automatic writing as a way of communicating with dead spirits and entities on the other side. I’d go so far as to say, that it allows you to connect with whatever it is that you’re connected to, be it yourself, or your higher self, or some other spirit entity or what have you.

Well, after getting everyone looser, getting people to use automatic writing to make their predictions, and getting the room of 24 people working as a team, he then had 6 people collect the results, and aggregate the predictions. As a room, they managed to predict 3 our of 6 numbers. It wasn’t a lottery win, but it was evidence of the potential in that room, and what could be accomplished. He then went, and the following week changed the process a little. He had one person aggregate the results, whilst the other 23 generated them. He then held off calculating the results, until after the lotter had occurred. It seems that might have helped, since they were upto 4 correct balls. Interestingly the last 4 at that. He then went and staked his reputation on the process, I think, if I’m not mistaken he did the aggregation, and averaging of the results himself, for the last time round, and then maintained complete secrecy around the results, until the moment of the draw. And then, he only revealed the numbers on public television, with a national audience of people watching him.

Personally I think the combination of people’s expectations, nationally watching him live, the synergy between the control group, and his skillful manipulation of people’s expectations, and anticipation for him to be right might have all contributed towards the final result.

But curious to know if we could just crowdsource accurate lotterey results, I’ve set up a blog post, and a form to capture people’s interest/attention with regard to entering a similar experiment, but perhaps on a larger scale? I don’t know.. To be honest, I’m just following my gut instincts for the moment. But I know that I’ve often wondered if you had a large enough group of people contribute to a genuine prediction for the lottery if it might be possible to crowdsource actual answers..

Depending on how the experiment goes, it may just.. I’ll keep you all posted, on my progress.. Especially if it does work. For now, if you’re interested in joining in, place you’re predictions here – http://bit.ly/8QYME

So following Derren Brown’s wonderful show where he talked about how he created and got a group of people to predict the lottery results, I think we should give it a try.

I’m willing to co-ordinate the experiment, bearing in mind everyone that joins in will have to commit to being involved the whole way.. We’ll need a few weeks to calibrate as a group, and get used to the process, and then hopefully, in two or three weeks time, we might be getting some sort of a result – or it could be a total failure.. But we’ll see.

I’ll update this post with more details, and explaining what happened, and everything, but for now – put in the comments your name, email, and details about you, and how to contact you and tell me a little bit about yourself and why you want to take part in this experiment. I’m going to be very selective in the people that we do this experiment with, since I don’t want any negativity or pessimists ruining the potential success that might come out of any experiments we do.

And just to be very clear, any money’s or predictions that are made, that lead to sucesses, or wins, will be shared equally between all participants, after an initial 10% has been taken out to give to charity. Those are my terms, and I think it’s only fair.. So leave your details below, and don’t worry about anything personal being seen by everyone, any personal contact information, or any details you don’t want displayed publicly in the comments will be edited out, before your comment becomes publicly visible. But if you don’t provide at least your proper email address, then I won’t be able to contact you with details of what we’re going to do, and how we’re going to do it..

So for now – if you want to join the game, or try the experiment, leave your details in the comments below, and be sure to re-tweet the post, so other people you think might be suitable can also join in

Look forward to starting a very interesting experiment indeed.. Now I’ll write a more detailed post giving you more info about what it’s all about..

Updated –
You can now place your lottery predictions here – http://bit.ly/8QYME

11th of September, 2009 – An interesting choice of date, not least because of the symbolic referencing of September 11th and events that occurred in the US back in 2001.
Well it seems that is the choice of ‘date’ that Facebook has decided to wage war on Twitter with, using it as the day that they’ve publicly launched a direct attack to the offering from Twitter.com. Facebook Lite – a cut-down version of Facebook, was officially released somewhere between the 10th of September’s evening, and the morning of the 11th of September, depending on which timezone you’re in.

I only discovered it, after not being able to go back to sleep, having woken up at 4:30am to eat some food before sunrise, as part of my observance of Ramadan. Unable to sleep, I eventually decided I would go online, and was ironically trying to get Facebook to give permission to Qik, to upload some videos from last nights London Twestival. Unfortunately, I wasn’t getting any response from the Facebook Connect URL, and so I thought let me try logging into Facebook directly.

Still no joy. So eventually, as you do, when anything is a bit suspect on the Internet, or in life in general these days, I hopped on over to Twitter’s main search page, to see if anything with the term ‘Facebook’ was trending at all, and was surprised to find ‘Facebook Lite’ as a trending keyword.

Facebook Lite Trending Twitter

Now I’d never heard of Facebook Lite, had no clue what it was, but surprise, surprise, upon reading the ‘Mashable’ article on the ‘Breaking News’ it became clear that something ‘big’ was happening..

If you’re curious to see what’s happened, here’s a few screenshots I caught from the new Facebook Lite pages, in it’s ‘virgin’ stages.. Of course it all might change a few hours from now And contrary to the Mashable article saying that Facebook Lite was only available in the US, being in the UK, I appeared to be able to access the Lite version of Facebook just fine, though again, that could also change a few hours from now

Skip Screenshots to read my take on it all

The new 'Facebook Lite' Welcome/Login Page

"Top Stories" on Facebook Lite

"All Stories" on Facebook Lite

The "Profile" View on Facebook Lite

The "See More" Profile View of Facebook Lite

"Photos and Videos" on Facbeook Lite

The "Events" page on Facebook Lite

The new "Inbox" on Facebook Lite

"Settings" screen for Facebook Lite

List of Friends in Facebook Lite

"Fan of" Page on Facebook Lite

So far it seems the ‘Lite’ service isn’t fully complete. Most notably when you go to edit any of your settings you’re shown the following:

"This Feature Isn't Ready" from Settings in Facebook Lite

Some Closing Thoughts

It’ll be interesting to see if this new ‘Facebook Lite’ makes Facebook more accessible, and usable, than before – given that you don’t have all the ‘applications’ clogging up the interface.. Perhaps more people might start using Facebook differently now. Perhaps all the people who migrated to Twitter, might consider taking another look at Facebook? Or maybe, it’ll just stop or at least slow down the mass exodus of people leaving Facebook to join Twitter..

Personally I’m not convinced. I think the inherent nature of Twitter and Facebook are two completely beasts, or animals, and for one to try to tackle the other’s market is foolish at best. Twitter has an inherent strength in making it possible to have many ‘weak’ connections with people, whilst with Facebook, the level of potential visibility into what many people are starting to consider a very personal part of their lives, means that you’re less inclined to want to necessarily broadcast, or share as openly and freely as you might on Twitter.

The ‘Public Broadcast’ approach of Twitter, which means anyone and everyone can see what you’re saying openly and publicly means that people can just start ‘listening’ (i.e. follow you) without there being any real inherent cost or demand from that ear. With Facebook, the very nature of the ‘friending’ relationhships, and the complex levels of privacy, and circles of trust approach means that unless you opt for a completely open, and publicly visible profile, you’re inherently thinking in terms of limited public exposure, and don’t want the whole world to know or see everything that you could possibly have on Facebook. These two extremely different starting points, and different uses for the platforms, means that Facebook will never beat Twitter at Twitter’s game of broadcast and distribution. But what Facebook may be able to do, is ‘sanitise’ the insanity and craziness of the evolving Facebook interface, so that finally we can get a clear snapshot of our personal lives, and the community of people we choose to share that with.

But Facebook, you’re never going to overtake, or beat Twitter. Twitter is inherently in a league of it’s own at the moment. At least until there are more tools and services out there that are created to innately act as ‘broadcast’ tools, and not sharing and community building/strengthening tools which are also needed, to fortify and solidify relationships with more depth and engagement than the weak coupling of Twitter and it’s 140 characters might allow.

Welcome to my blog. I’ve been long been struggling with how to express myself adequately on the Internet, and came to realise that I have some broad, overarching diverse interests that I can pull together into one place and start to share with a particular voice. I write on many different topics, and subjects, and as such, in an effort to avoid alienating friends and readers, who might all be drawn to similar things such as myself, I’ve decided to shake out my one blog, http://life.magitam.org.uk and put it into a couple of different blogs, in order to capture the full spectrum of my interests which are diverse and varied, in more than one place. For the longest time, I imagined the solution was to consolidate all my blogs into one, but over time I’ve come to realise that that doesn’t really serve me well, nor help me establish a clear purpose or readership across my many different interests. With that in mind, I’ve decided to treat http://farhanrehman.co.uk as my blog for all things tech, and geeky, and related to gadgets and book reviews,and generally anything else that I think might be fitting, and doesn’t really belong anywhere else.

This blog is where I’m going to just be me. Write up my reviews of things that I’ve liked or disliked, phones I’ve tried, gadgets I’ve used, books I’ve read, and just generally share some of the more mundane or geeky stuff that I’ve found personally useful or interesting in the past, or along my own journey.

Look forward to sharing it all with you, warts and all

Thanks for taking the time to read this
Farhan