For background this was the talk proposal. I think I got to most of this stuff.

How “Augmented Reality” and the mobile web changes everything

Mobile broadband access and ever-smarter phones are shaking the internet out its lofty cloud and bringing the web into the real world. As a result, the old “real world”, and many old ideas and many old business models will be running out of places to hide from the pervasive influence of the net.

Meanwhile, each of our smart phones are in many ways even better than the old clunky tools we used to use to surf the net. Our mobile devices are not only connected but, also bristling with sensors like radios, cameras, microphones, GPS etc. that can directly perceive and interact with the world around you. We’re reaching a point where it’s theoretically possible to point that device at almost anything: a landmark, a product on a store shelf, your friends or a crowd of people; and draw from the cloud and your social graph as much, or perhaps more, relevant information than you ever wanted to know. Oh, and the cloud will be watching you and whatever’s around you as well.

In the new augmented reality, the web surfs you.

The goal of this talk will be to provide you with a fast paced overview of what this new “augmented” reality will mean for how we socialize, for how we sell and market physical products, for architecture, for media and entertainment, for public policy, crime, privacy and, as well, few early signals for what might be the new killer apps.

If all that is not interesting enough, I will also bring free beer.

How did it go? I think it went well! thanks for all the wonderful twitter feedback. 100+ tweets and counting =)

wrongbutton @tpurves fantastic presentation! very thought-provoking. especially enjoyed social AR consideration and the notion of layering data sets

BrianSe7en @tpurves great job on the AR deck! somebody who “gets it”.. yeah!

danielpatricio @tpurves Great job on the presentation, it really inspired me and got me thinking. there is a lot of potential in our future

randymatheson @tpurves - inspiring presentation on Augmented Reality tonight at #refreshevents , a balanced look at what is coming in the next few years

sebchorney @tpurves Great job. Real value for me was the “example->implication” flow, and high-level summations/analyses/insights in your tables.

D_Hock Great #RefreshEvents tonight - seeing the crowd engaged by @tpurves‘ talk was truly fascinating.

malcolmbastien @tpurves Awesome talk. It’s clear you know your stuff and have done some deep thinking of its broad impacts.

nitchblog Amazing debate to end the night. Great discussions that brought us around the world and back! Thanks to @jkozuch + @tpurves #refreshevents

davefleet @tpurves is wielding a NFC phone. Love the potential with that technology #refreshevents

pinkbrickroad @tpurves so interesting/funny. Future is crazy. #refreshevents

josephdee @tpurves presentation has been kick-ass so far. Peeks into the future of mobile experience, which is making me grin : ) #refreshevents

AdamSchwabe I love hearing @tpurves talk tech. So intelligent and focused. Fast, well-read. #RefreshEvents

I look forward to presenting again the next revision. Contact or DM me if you’d like me to lead/present this discussion at a future event. Meanwhile enjoy:

Link: Audio track of my presentation (video coming they say)

Love the theme of Reboot number, and according to Thomas the last, reboot conference. The theme is Action. The last 10 reboots have been about insights, this one is about action. June 25-26 in copenhagen, denmark.

The official announcement from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal:

this is a once in our lifetime opportunity, and so it could be the single most important reboot ever - because this year we’re not in a world that thinks the status quo is working - it’s not only the freaks at reboot that feel the need to reboot things. we’re in times of change and systemic failure unlike anything we’ll probably experience again in our lifetime. we’ve had visionary insights and reflections the last couple of years at reboot (renaissance, human and free - great journeys into the deep insights). now it’s time to act on the insights.
it’s up to us edgelings and participatory folks to take charge and begin building a better future - insight comes with responsibility.
we’re not afraid. we know that we need to reinvent and reboot everything on new scales based on trust, networks and participation.

we are at the cusp of a new approach to sharing, consuming, banking, insurance, journalism, democracy - well almost everything - all the core infrastructure we’ve build our societal systems on. how do we move forward?

“ACTION”, THE CHALLENGE
———————–
so the action challenge is:

- what are the great acts, the proven ideas, patterns, solutions, etc. you can implement in your local community, country, peer group, etc. the most important simple ideas we can act on to make a difference
- how can we all learn the skills of action, how to communicate, how to prototype, how to design, how to create, how to manage, how to create movements, how to start an open source project, how to fund projects and companies.
- what to act on first (obviously whatever you’re passionate about, but perhaps there’s lessons of what can make the greatest difference)
- who are the great actionists who can inspire us, and what can we learn from history?

If you haven’t been, this may be your last chance to catch Reboot. It’s a long ways away for most of us Canadians, though I was able to make it in 2009 thanks to some serendipitous business travel at the time. Maybe the travel gods will smile on me again?

In any case, you don’t have to go to be inspired by this theme. Last action heroes, now is your time.

Like the great fire of london, the current globe spanning economic collapse brings hardships to many. The econclipse is ripping like brushfire through the deadwood of dated business, governance and distribution models. For the visionary and actionaries, this is just a window of discontinuous transition, an opportunity for the new architects the digital Christopher Wrens if you will, to build this century’s new edifices and institutions.

Take action.

LINK: register for Reboot 11

[Last of my notes from SXSW, these on the recurring theme of death of many media, but one we may particularly miss, the death of books and long form fiction]

The econoclipse has totally hastened the demise by digital soil erosion of the already shaky foundations of almost every old-media business model. And what’s crazy is how much the geeks lament this **even as they
are the very ones killing them*. It’s like OH WOE to old media STAB STAB STAB why are you dying? STAB STAB I’m so angry with you STAB STAB STAB for not having more foresight, and for selfishly dying and stuff.

“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said, “To play them such a trick, After we’ve brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick!” The Carpenter said nothing but “The butter’s spread too thick!”

Bruce Sterling’s keynote was an absolutely spot-on Irish wake for books and fiction, complete with drinking and chips on stage.

“Look,” said Sterling, pulling out a stack of copies of his most recent novel, The Caryatids, and placing it on the lectern. “These are what we used to call books. I know that you’re sort of unused to seeing them. Let me explain to you how these devices work because I’m not sure a Web 2.0 crowd follows the structure anymore.

If there is a ray of light, the answer became more clear as to what publishers, and authors have to do to thrive. According to Bruce, and echoed by Chris Anderson and Guy Kawasaki’s conversation, it’s about being (to borrow from Hugh) a personal micro-brand not about being someone tied to just one medium “the book”.

This is generally a lot easier for authors than for publishers to get their head around. Though authors could benefit from the tools and representation to help them do that. Of course this model also works better for non-fiction, or authors who are talented at speaking or at blogging or consulting or punditry, or at being charismatic enough or having enough of a following to be paid to show up anywhere like at events, or to lend their recognition/respect/authorial-aura to other projects like Margaret Atwood might in Canada etc.

But the rub, how do you align the interests of the publisher with all of these other ways that the author will actually use to feed themselves?

It’s also clear this whole transition won’t work well for a lot of writers. “Writing+charisma” is a whole other bag of tricks than just being a “writer”. In the worst case, this would be like the transition from silent film to talkies. Talkies wiped out all but a handful of the previous stars. Movie stars still existed (if fact more of them) but for the most part they were stars at a different bag of tricks.

There’s another problem, how micro can your brand be to make a living. The very literary writers who may create works only loved or admired by much smaller peer group, or those writers who are good/great but only so long as you don’t let them be seen out of the house.

Of course we as a society could just fund some of these dead media directly. Thank goodness for charity and government grants (and the CBC).

We do it already, in all sectors of society. If there’s no easy way to charge people for incremental usage of some “public good” like streetlights or paved sidewalks but everyone somewhat agrees that it would nonetheless be nice to have these things in society, then you fund it with tax dollars.

The implication here, for literature, maybe for journalism, is that it we rethink it as “high art” as in those forms of media that no one actually expects to be an economical sort of industry or otherwise supported by the market. like ballet. Maybe we are in this world already?

What does that make General Motors then? are we now considering the making of GM cars a nationally protected art form?

link: Future May Be Brighter, but It’s Apocalypse Now

link: Bruce Sterling’s SXSW keynote partial transcript (It seems, sadly, there is no audio version or full transcript on any of the internet)

Tom Purves, “How ‘Augmented Reality’ and the Mobile Web Changes Everything”

Mobile broadband access and ever-smarter phones are shaking the internet out its lofty cloud and bringing the web into the real world. As a result, the old “real world”, and many old ideas and many old business models will be running out of places to hide from the pervasive influence of the net.

Meanwhile, each of our smart phones are in many ways even better than the old clunky tools we used to use to surf the net. Our mobile devices are not only connected but, also bristling with sensors like radios, cameras, microphones, GPS etc. that can directly perceive and interact with the world around you. We’re reaching a point where it’s theoretically possible to point that device at almost anything: a landmark, a product on a store shelf, your friends or a crowd of people; and draw from the cloud and your social graph as much, or perhaps more, relevant information than you ever wanted to know. Oh, and the cloud will be watching you and whatever’s around you as well.

In the new augmented reality, the web surfs you.

The goal of this talk will be to provide you with a fast paced overview of what this new “augmented” reality will mean for how we socialize, for how we sell and market physical products, for architecture, for media and entertainment, for public policy, crime, privacy and, as well, few early signals for what might be the new killer apps.

Tickets went up this morning, it’s a free event, but the venue is small so as of this moment there’s only a handful left. If you would like to but can’t make, I will also be slidesharing the slides afterwards.

The eventbrite registration link is here: StayFresh07: Tom Purves

^{Photo credit: Kieran Huggins}

UPDATE: Is now sold out

At South by southwest interactive this week (SXSW) a huge theme was “augmented reality” the idea of, Amazon-app style, pointing your phone at any product to get more information -or a better price- online. We’re getting to a world where holding a mobile device means all of the potential knowledge and intelligence of the cloud is now in your hand as well, everywhere you go. “The web” is no longer separate place or channel we go to visit at home through our computers. The web and the real world are rapidly converging. It’s now just up to us to design the apps, and interactions to make that useful.

What was clear is that brands have a long way to go yet to figure out what to do with or what retailing models will work in this new “augmented” reality. Consumers may beat the brands at the game using their devices and information advantage to arbitrage themselves consistently better deals.

To compete as a retailer, someone mentioned the idea that physical stores just become “really expensive websites” that help brands build relationship with consumers seamlessly across both physical and virtual channels.

This is a problem for retailing models like malls, which typically take a slice of retailer sales. Now the interests of retail merchants and their landlords may be mis-aligned as a consumer may go to the apple store just to see and touch the product, make use of the genius bar, but then spend their money on apple through the internet channel, or post-sale through itunes etc.

It’s another problem of misaligned interests for merchants if physical retailers are franchises that don’t have piece of the revenues from online sales.

Apple (no surprise) is a good example of a merchant that will do well do well in the hybrid cross-channel retailing environment.

Some other merchants that compete just on product and price without specific competitive advantages are going to get killed.

Tags: sxsw, sxswi

^{Originally tweeted, reblogged here for posterity.}

A friend asked me today for a two line bio of what’s been keeping me so busy these days. And the most accurate description in very general terms I came up with was this. Stopping to think about it, I thought it sounded pretty good. I’d hire me.

Thomas Purves is a Toronto based blogger, technologist and innovator. By day, Thomas helps global major brands plan for their digital futures and navigate the as-yet murky waters of mobile commerce.

Of course, by early morning and night, my other nearly full time job consists of hurling Frisbees for a particularly indefatigable furry four legged dingo.

If you’d like your future told, or like to toss a disc sometime, drop me a line.

[liveblogging as we go. here we go...]

DemoCamp19 5 min demos, because 5 minutes is long enough. DemoCamp is like open mic night for high tech. At the lovably seedy Imperial pub.

Austin Hill demoing Akoha, telling us about a card game that makes the world a better place. This app has come a long way, facebook like interface with friends, wall etc. You play cards that involve other people, like take someone for a drink, and then you pay it forward by giving them a card for them to push forward. There are leaderboards for cities, people and groups. You can even suggest or design missions. Apparently they are not supposed to be “dirty” (what’s wrong with dirty eh? wouldn’t that be half the fun?). But you can link your decks to a charity of your choice and help them raise money. You can see your karmic connection and the impact of your missions. they are building a school in nepal based on 25000 missions are completed.

Why not virtual/mobile cards? Cards are more common denominator. Is a tactile card more meaningful?

Revenue model? pay for cards, corp sponsors for decks (like a GE green deck) and premium services

Chris, backtype Shows you all the conversations about a url. Aggregates and crawls comments and commentary around the world. Now demoing backtweets it will tell you all the twitter activity relative to a post, or a story like a NY times story, even if the urls are shortened. Also cool is back alerts that lets you subscribe to a search. All built on AWS (amazon web services) so it scales. They are making money through a commercial API, but at the moment not a huge priority. Most of the app was built over the summer, buy these two pretty young guys. And it’s pretty sweet piece of technology is the general consensus.

Scott is showing Dex is a personal CRM/contact manager that aggregates all the folks you know (and you get to say how important each friend is) and it crawls the social web to keep track of what their up to. So the idea is when you move from company to company in your career you can take your personal CRM with you rather than leave it with someone else. Track leads and deals etc. Gives you a kind of personal metrics / business card that you can point to that says the size/value of your book your history deals.

Matthew from Foodea At first glace, Foodea is classic democamp demo, here’s a vertical special interest social media rails site I made in my pajamas. Essentially a social recipe site with the ability comment, edit, upload photo/video etc and the ability to export ingredients to a shopping list (not a bad idea). All ingredients also hyperlinked to the “pantry” area of site where they have a wikipedia like section dedicated to food ingredients.

Oooh ImageSpark is a T&L. They couldn’t get a ffffound invite, so they invented their own alternative. For images and designs that inspire your work. I am so wanting this. You can also create a “mood board” related to, for example “all things helvetica”. Great firefox plugin to just right click anything on the web and send it to impagespark. This is one of my faves. I’d like to work in a place that used this.

[pizza break!]

Albert who is a grand daddy of democamp is presenting kontagent a viral analytics tool for facebook. Focused on game developers. There are game developers out there, secret developers, recent Waterloo dropouts, making seven figures on facebook games. You can filter by age, gender, geography. You can measure k-factor which is your viral coefficient, you can track your acceptance rates by invites and invite channels to rapidly do AB testing. “It’s amazing who subtle changes in your applications can massively changing the virality of your application”. Very sophisticated, compare cohorts against virality, engagement and churn.

Leigh Honeywell - presenting the awesomeness of Hacklab.to Open tuesdays, python thursdays. It’s cheap! $50 a month for unlimited hacking. I have visited this hacklab. I approve.

N8RTXT is a location aware haiku service that texts you haikus about where ever you are. Tailored to place and season and covering almost all of Canada, uses plant and animal databases, urban mapping and urban/rural distinguishment. In the backgroud it downloads a google satelite image and does a color analysis to determine what sort of environment you are in. And time of day, because for example racoons are tagged with “nighttime”. The phone number is 416 662 3408 text a postal code or “queen and ossington, toronto”.

And now the poor battery is fading. Too close for missiles, switching to beer…