Innovation in Software

So whilst I’m thinking opportunity, it seems the incumbents in the web application industry are starting to separate the wheat from the chaff, or at least according to ReadWriteWeb, Google is at any rate.

I’m actually genuinely surprised at the announcement on Google Video simply because it’s a better service, despite being less popular.

If Yahoo! do this, expect it to become a usable service again.

Interesting times…

Let’s take a couple of ideas driving Innovation in the software arena right now:

• Work should be more like play
• 3D alternate Worlds are useful in some way
• People are finding it difficult to deal with the incoming flow of information

Each on their own can lead to ideas like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Second Life or better Bayesian filtering. In short, when you focus on an idea you can find ways of making software better. Some people ask themselves, wouldn’t it be great if you mixed some of them up? Say a 3D World where you work? Or handling information flows like a game?

What happens when you try and mix all three up? Well, I concur with TechCrunch when I say this example is just pure evil.

Yes, I can’t quite believe it myself. And I thought the ads in GMail would harm productivity in a mail application…

A few years from now, people new to the Internet will find it impossible to imagine an era before video online. What use is that content though, if your user is visually impaired? How do we go about indexing and searching it?

A few weeks ago IBM announced an “Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia” over at alphaWorks. It addresses the short-comings of JAWS or voice-enabled browsers, and is built on top to of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform as a stand-alone application. It means the play/pause buttons (normally unavailable to visually impaired users) are stripped out and made accessible, and that playback doesn’t ‘clash’ with voice-synthesised browser operation.

Developers can add metadata to reorganise or simplify the content, provide additional information, add special navigation or even provide audio descriptions for movies using XML metadata.

It’s this last point that I think is going to be interesting. If this tool – or one like it – becomes standard, and video producers are encouraged to mark-up their content properly, existing search and relationship algorithms can be applied to video content. Right now searching video content is pretty limited – maybe by making it accessible, we all benefit.

I don’t know if I’m one of the lucky few first people to get access, but I’ve just received my PIN number for the BBC Archive Trial which places some of the content of the BBC Archives online.

Right now, there are around 1,000 pieces of content up in the site, which the BBC approximate to be around “0.01% of the total material available” in their archives. They’ve provided a mixture of video and audio content, and obviously focused on some of the more memorable items. The abdication of King Edward VIII is in there, as is British coverage of the Apollo moon landings.

The good news is that it all works with OS X, and the layout is pretty straight-forward and simple. These screen shots were done in Firefox on OS X, and the video playback on my machine was using Flip4Mac WMV codec for Quicktime, but Real Player was an option if you wanted it.

It really would be better for most people though if they embedded a Flash player in there – it’s how people understand video on the web these days, and they’re going to get confused with codecs and plug-ins.

A few years ago I was talking around about what would happen when archivists at the TV networks got to grips with Video on Demand (VoD), and I think this is an important first baby-step in the right direction. I personally think the Freeview switch-over debate is a load of noise, given nobody will want to watch TV coming over an aerial 20 years from now: VoD is the future, and the networks need to work out how they are going to serve that World if they want to justify continued existence.

Interestingly, they’re already dealing with some of the more complex issues – they have included content that some people may find offensive, because they believe that this should be as much about the historical value as it is the entertainment value. Personally I’m not interested in seeing a guy black-up and do a minstrel routine, but I’m glad that if I wanted to grab that out of the archive for historical research purposes, I could.

This might be a weakness though. For a lot of the Web 2.0 crowd, this might all be a bit “dated” and “fuddy-duddy”. I’m fascinated by it, but I’m also fascinated by Enlightenment-era art, 16th-century choral music, Rosseau and theology – I’m not a mass audience kind of guy. I listen to Radio 3 & 4, I read Steinbeck for fun and not because I have to. The BBC might have made an error in asking me for my opinion here…

There is also the question of how things have been organised. For 1,000 pieces of content, ‘Programmes’, ‘People’ and ‘Collections’ combined with a search box might be enough for people to find what they need. What happens after the trial when they want to put 100,000 pieces of content in or even 1 million? They’re going to need to start working now on tag clouds, collaborative filtering and other technologies “long tail” websites use to help people help themselves.

The fact you can save programmes to “your page” is handy, but the power of that needs strengthening, and is a good place to start around classification, the social aspects and even collaborative filtering of content (i.e. “People who liked this, also liked…”).

It might be nice to rate content, review it and discuss it as well. Right now it feels a bit like a PVR with a small playback screen loaded with old content – they need to get the web parts of it right in the long term.

What this trial should allow the BBC to do is work out how the underlying technology works, then work out how to use the power of it being a website and then get the other 99.99% of the content up and online – if they use this trial just to look at how people view the content, rather than try and work out how to get people to interact with the content in new ways, it’ll be a waste of time in my opinion.

This is perhaps the oddest promo video I have ever seen. It’s worth every minute, despite being from the evil empire themselves down at Microsoft.

And it is really worth sticking with it until 7 minutes in. At that point it gets even weirder.

With all the production values of a porn film, the standing ovation at the end for a bit of copy’n’paste plagiarism and the closing shot suggesting Microsoft sales guys sleep with their clients, it’s one to file in the “how not to sell your product” category.

Either that, or the shots of 5.25” disks, audio cassettes and the “when we get OS/2, I’ll be ahead of the learning curve” references have just made me feel a bit ill.

Take a look at this video.

Awesome, no? The guy is called Matt and you can read all about his exploits (and see an earlier video he made of different places) over at wherethehellismatt.com – his FAQ is an interesting read in itself.

See, if I were a TV executive and somebody came to me and said “I want you to give me a large pile of cash to travel around the World” I would be thinking “Michael Palin” and “sounds like a good idea”. However, if they went on to tell me they wanted to make a 3-minute video of them dancing in remote locations and that was it, I suspect I would have a problem seeing the vision. Because nobody would sign up to spend the money on a project like that. It makes no sense – who is the audience? How do you sell advertising or recoup costs? It doesn’t work!

This though, works. And it works because it has a guy who is inspired with a great taste in music behind it. It works because it was a great deal cheaper to produce than we probably think. It works because it’s unique and original. People are good at original/unique, TV execs by their nature are not. This thing works because it is an inspired piece of creativity that doesn’t really rely on the “money thing”. Matt doesn’t care about audience, or demographics or ROI. He cares about making people smile. 500 years from now, I hope smiling is an accepted form of currency, but right now it takes guts to do that.

Now if you were to go and do the same thing, nobody would care. It worked for him, he’s that guy who dances around the World, you never will be[*]. But if you come up with a different idea, you can go and do it. The technology is now moving to your favour, you are getting empowered by the minute. If you feel like doing it, you can find a way to do it.

That, I confess, is the driving factor behind the first round of projects I’ll be releasing soon: people with great ideas being able to do amazing things, just because they can and the tools are there to empower them. If any of my projects results in just one piece of content being created as good as Matt’s there – as uplifting, and eye-opening – I will feel justified in never caring much about the money.

[*] Note, I am not saying you can’t travel around the World and dance on video like Matt. If that’s what you want to do, cool. Just realise you’re not going to get a gum company to sponsor you or as much attention as Matt, because you’d just be a copycat. But if you want to stand in front of the great pyramids and flail your arms about in front of a camera, I hope you love every minute of it. It’ll probably be better for you than sitting there reading this right now.

Everybody loves video on the Internet – sites such as YouTube have shown the power of video, particularly in a network of people who are fed up with traditional media. However, it’s bandwidth-hungry, and low-quality webcams are the norm still. This means watching video on your PC is slow if it’s high-quality – a DVD quality BitTorrent can take days to download – and makes you feel sick if it’s fast but low-quality.

MotionDSP have created a new technology that tries to improve low-quality video by working out information that is ‘lost’ through aliasing of pixels. It’s impressive stuff, originally developed for the military. Now it is likely to find a home on the numerous video sites that are changing the way we all think think about film and video.

The demos look pretty good, but you can still tell there is something low quality about them – the blurred nature of the refined video makes me feel like I’ve lost my reading glasses and after a while, I think I’d feel a bit ill.