Blogs

Copenhagen.
We move on to Marinka Vangenck and (again) Jo Pierson as the next speakers at COST298, focussing now on user-driven innovation in 3D urban environments. This requires a thorough understanding of users themselves, and their systematic involvement as early as possible and throughout the entire innovation process. This R&D innovation process took place with computer-generated 3D city models in the present case, and aimed for service innovation and its adoption - test cases here were planning and going on a city trip, and researching and purchasing real estate.

Copenhagen.
The next presentation at COST298 is by An Jacobs and Jo Pierson. Their interest is in the role of users in innovation - an increasingly prominent perception, but which 'user' are we talking about here, and where are they taking us? Their ability to innovate also depends on contextual factors, of course, some of which may not be entirely known to them.

In the digital environment, there are two key conceptions of innovation: innovation as dominated by technology, and disruptive (rather than incremental) innovation. Users themselves are placed along a continuum from everyday users to productive users to users who are even mainly producers (and there are also non-users, of course); innovation at the lower, everyday end can be described more from a dominant, incremental sociotechnological innovation perspective, while innovation at the production end is more often seen from a breakthrough technology innovation perspective. These forms of participation also spread across content creation, technological innovation, and more general forms of innovation.

Copenhagen.
The first main session at the COST298 conference is on interdisciplinary design, and begins with a presentation by James Stewart and Laurence Claeys. They ask how speculative research for innovation can be conducted within interdisciplinary frameworks. Problem here include that different disciplines work within very different time scales (e.g. rapid prototyping vs. long-term observation of users), that they use different mental models, and that disciplines tend to under-value one another and misuse one another's research approaches.

Copenhagen.
Following the next09 conference last week, I've now made my way to Copenhagen, to attend the COST298 conference with the somewhat unwieldy title "The Good, the Bad, and the Challenging" - don't hold that against it, though: the actual theme of the conference (and of the COST298 EU research programme) is participation in the broadband society, so it should be interesting. (The two-volume proceedings alone are going to seriously push my luggage weight over the edge on the flight back.) Also, erm, interesting is the choice of location, at Aalborg University's campus in Ballerup on the outskirts of Copenhagen, almost an hour's metro ride out of town - I must say I much preferred the IT University campus, just cross from the city centre, where we held the AoIR conference last year.

Hamburg.
The final presenter at next09 is conductor (as in, music) Itay Talgam. He begins by describing the way an orchestra tunes up - everyone doing their own thing; this is noise, not yet music. But when the conductor steps up to the podium, attention is focussed, and music begins. Whose creation is this music? Who is responsible? Who contributed to the success of the performance?

This is a question of ownership, of course - and it applies just as much to collaborative online environments as it does to an orchestra. The conductor of the orchestra provides the leadership, controls the process, and the musicians follow - but in the process, the musicians also lose some of their independence, their ability to introduce their own personality into the performance.

Hamburg.
Only two more sessions to go at next09... The next one brings together a number of the major professional networking sites, with Kevin Eyres from LinkedIn, Stefan Groß-Selbeck from its German competitor Xing, and Markus Berger-de León from German student networking site StudiVZ (which has also launched a post-studies site, MeinVZ, and a site for schoolkids, SchülerVZ).

Stefan begins by stating that social networking has been the key development in online media over the past few years. In Germany, Xing is a leader of this development, especially in the professional networking context; its business network is moving through the current financial crisis very in a very stable fashion. The current crisis is an opportunity - and the company is confidently planning for its future. Kevin adds that for LinkedIn as a global platform the main challenge is to service the global business community. And he agrees that the crisis has raised the awareness of networking as a crucial element of professional life. By contrast, Markus describes StudiVZ with its strongly German focus as the most truly local networking site of the three. So far, the sites has not yet experienced any impact from the financial crisis - members are as active as they have been previously.

Hamburg.
The next presentation here at next09 is by Rafi Haladjian from Violet, a company founded in 2003 in Paris. He says that the new frontier for future developments is no longer cyberspace, but meatspace - the physical world. There is a life after the PC...

But how do we get there? Violet's first step was to create the world's first Internet-connected, wi-fi, toy rabbit (think robotic, not fluffy). This also demonstrated that everything is now possible, no matter how absurd - if you can network rabbits, you can connect anything. In effect, the rabbit blinks, moves, speaks, reads, sings, hears and 'smells' (using RFID); it is an ambient information device which acts as a spontaneous information provider for short 'goot to know', real-time, information and snack media, and as a multi-expression messenger which can be controlled over the Internet.

Hamburg.
The next next09 panel is with Jeremy Allaire from Brightcove and Axel Schmiegelow from Sevenload - online video hosting companies in the US and Germany. Brightcove licences its video platform to a variety of partners; it now operates online video for some hundreds of media companies. Increasingly, this is used for syndicating and distributing content through a variety of social media Websites. Sevenload, by contrast, brings together communities and the content they are interested in, significantly also including user-generated content. They monetise for the content providers by running advertising on the site. (And the two companies have just entered a commercial partnership.)

Hamburg.
We continue at next09 with a panel expanding on the question of brand-consumer relations in the social media age. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club promotes a holistic, whole-of-business approach here - it's about more than marketing. Great products aren't sold, he says - they're bought; this has been the case for the iPhone, for example. The brand needs to convene the conversation around their products, and act like the host of the party - this means returning to basics, and letting go of the illusion of control.

Hamburg.
The next session here at next09 is a panel on the future of public broadcasting organisations with Ian Forrester from the BBC and Robert Amlung from the ZDF, under the theme of open media. Both are clearly aware of the increasing involvement of users in media content creation and distribution, and aim to tap more into this; the ZDF is aiming especially to make redistribution legal by employing appropriate content licencings schemes (e.g. Creative Commons) and offering a suite of RSS feeds for its content. It is becoming more and more important to make content available to users (who, as licence or as tax payers, have already paid for it).