NL WSA-Mobile 2014 entries

m-Commerce: FietsFinder
m-Health: Beat the Microbead
m-Empowerment: SOS4US 
m-News: Blendle
m-Culture: Touch Van Gogh

We take you to a global stage in Brazil  – 10 more days to submit your social project World Summit Youth Award

Need promotion for you social initiative? –Winning the Youth Award will help! Don’t miss the chance to apply!
WSYA winners have the unique opportunity to be part of an international high-energy networking event. This year the winners’ celebration will take place in Brazil, Sao Paulo, Nov 28th – Dec 1st.
Meet and discuss with young social activists from all over the world about what happens after the UN MDGs. How will they work post 2015? To submit a project go to http://register.icnmdb.at/Youthaward/2014/

BPN 1683: The Finnish Prime Minister is wrong

Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb accused Apple's late founder Steve Jobs of crushing his Nordic country's job market by selling innovations that caught Finland's companies off guard. "We had two pillars we stood on: one was the IT industry, the other one was the paper industry," Stubb told Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri.

However, the Finnish Prime Minister is crying over spilled milk. There was nothing wrong with the innovations of the Finnish and in particular Nokia. The company had the brick, the Communicator phone and mobile internet since 1997. And in 2000 Nokia had a prototype of a tablet in its US laboratory (Which company did not have a prototype? HP was working on its PC/hybrid turnstile screen).

Problem with the Nordic countries and particularly Finland was that despite the famous glass and clothes design, the IT companies did not have the design ability, which Apple celebrated as part of its company policy. Nokia was technically well advanced with its Communicator and shelved in 2000 the beta-development of the tablet for another five years due to the economic downturn.

My observation

In 1999 I was in Finland at the first Scholars’ Network Conference in Tampere, hosted by the Hypermedialaboratory of Tampere University in Tampere, the home of my friends Jarmo, Cai and Sohvi. As I had been studying the second wave of electronic books with Rocket Books, I presented an overview to the audience of the history and the near future.

I divided the history in two waves. Sony hijacked the term Electronic Book in 1990 and introduced a adapted discman plus a minidisk. The first device weighted 450 grams, had a black and white screen, but it rendered text, drawings and photographs as well as music. E-Books were produced for it and in fact the American novel Sliver was first published on e-Book and later in print. The device was introduced in The Netherlands in 1993 and a consortium of publishers and producers bundled reference works like a dictionary and hotel guide. The e-book adventure of Sony did not catch on. In my opinion for the singular function of reading books (no games, no diary), only the electronic cover was too expensive.

The second wave came in 1997 when internet was there as a distribution mechanism for e-books to be downloaded on a small tablet. Again, it was experienced as an exciting proposition for distributing and storing a number of book. But in my opinion it failed again by the louzy design, black/white screen and the single functionality. So in 1999 I projected that smart phones and smart tablets would meet e-book functionality. There were not too many smart phones around at that time, while tablets were just around the corner.

Invitation by Nokia

After the presentation a manager of the Nokia Venture Company came up to me and invited me to Helsinki to speak to the people of Nokia Research and Business Development. They wanted to discover the world of e-books, the production and the copyright issues.

By April 2000 we had set a date and I travelled to Helsinki. I was told that I was going to be picked up by cab and that I would travel with a Nokia researcher in the States. So at 8.30h we were ready and waiting for the cab. In the meantime we had gotten into a discussion on e-book, smartphones and tablets. So in the cab he opened his attaché case and took a demonstration tablet out. It was clear to me that this tablet was for games and e-books. Later on it appeared that the tablet should not have been shown to me. But I had had a peep into the future of Nokia; little did I know that the tablet would be on the market some 4 or 5 years later.

It was not innovation, but design

 

Looking at the statement of the Finnish Prime Minister, I conclude that Nokia missed the design ability of Apple and not the innovation capability. If Nokia had been able to apply more design to the Communicator, they would have been a competitor or Apple. Nokia launched some designs of future Communicators, but did not carry out further laboratory work. And Nokia stopped developing the tablet due to the economic downturn. These days we know that during low economic tides innovative development should not get shelved, but should get priority in laboratories.  

I also conclude that the Nordic countries did not take the threat of e-book serious enough and thought that dead trees would be the basic material for newspapers, magazines and books for centuries to come. At a meeting in Stockholm in 2000 on e-books, many directors of the pulp industry were present. My advice to them was to invest in e-readers and e-books like their American colleague pulp company Mead Corp had done in the seventies with Mead Data Central, the originator of the Lexis-Nexis online information service, now a Reed-Elsevier company. The Nordic directors did not. So, the North American companies like Amazon and Kobe are now dominating the e-reader and e-book market.

Despite the misinterpretation of corporate history, the Finnish Prime Minister is looking at the bright side of the Nordic development. The Nordic pulp industry is now at least investing in bio-technology, bringing in its pulp knowledge. And the Finnish IT industry is putting money on the game industry with companies as Rovio with Angry Birds and many app developers.

Trending Finnish companies on Startup100

Trending companies on Startup100

Startup100 is a monthly chart of the Hottest Startups from Finland. Our proprietary ranking system tracks over 700 startups, and lists them based on the companies' online marketing activities and performance.

Want to see the movers and shakers? Go to www.startup100.net

 

BPN 1681: “My Data belongs to Me”

It is more than 10 years ago that the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held in Geneva (Switzerland). On June 10-13 the WSIS returned to Geneva as the ITU WSIS+10 Review High Level Event. The World Summit Award (WSA) has been part of WSIS and its goals since its first conference. Now at this time of WSIS+10 review and the UN agenda, it seems prudent to take a clear stand and start an initiative of great merit which also signals that WSA and its network has grown into more and addresses issues beyond e- and m-content excellence and the sustainable developement of content industry. In other words, WSA is going into a higher gear, moving from a Human Rights and Citizenship based approach to Personal Data and the Virtualisation Society.

Below you will find the text of the submitted document by Peter Bruck, the chairman of the Board of theWorld Summit Award.

 

 “My Data belongs to Me”

Given the explosion of data and the staggering amount of misuse, one must conclude that data protection is not enough. We need to switch paradigms. The issue is not protection, but rights, not safeguarding, but property ownership.

Today we live in societies with data everywhere, globally accessible, combined and analysed in entirely new ways. From the biggest metropolitan areas to the smallest villages, we are entering a new age.

The trend is clear. We are going to always be online, the things with which we work and live are going to always be connected and everything including nature will be continuously ICT assisted and monitored. Consequently, data is pervasively generated, collected and stored. Already now and more so in the future, data is being generated and stored automatically. It is part of the many applications of ICTs which facilitate our activities from the hospital visits to online shopping, from family chats to professional business exchanges, from TV viewing to birthday celebrations, from driving cars to jogging for fitness.

ICT systems and technologies create a virtual skin for us, a “data skin”. This skin will increasingly represent our total being. Outside of or disconnected from the data skin, a person ceases to exist at both the social and economic level. Without the data skin, we will not get credit at the bank, be able to book a holiday, cross borders or be admitted to an emergency ward.

Data is our virtual face and our factual administrative being. Through data, we find friends and mates, interact with authorities and institutions, do business, engage in politics or entertain ourselves.

Yet this skin does not belong to us, nor is it defined by us. Rather, the data skin belongs to those who operate the systems, who provide applications, who control the technologies, who trace what we do. The data of our phone calls belongs to telecom firms, the data of our social media chats to Facebook or Google, the data of our medical records to health insurance companies, the data of our vacation bookings to the hospitality portal operators. These players monetize our data and turn it into the biggest source of revenue and fastest growing profits of the future. They mine the data, analyse it, and model our behaviour. They shape our data skin.

The hype about big data is justified. The analytical exploitation of the global data deluge is driving new businesses and offers hitherto unknown commercial and political opportunities.

Edward Snowdon has shown us the astounding depth and shocking breadth of data collection by a national security agency and the recent US$ 19 billion purchase of the 150 employee text chat company WhatsApp by Facebook puts a clear price tag on the value of data. One might note that WhatsApp has achieved this company price tag without having any revenues from its users. WhatsApp does not need to collect money from its users. It garnered US$ 19 billion by gathering our data. Data delivers direct cash value.

 

With such big money at stake, data protection does not suffice. It is the wrong approach. It is too weak a concept to withstand the combined onslaught of technology and profit motives. We need to move to a much stronger concept, one that has cornerstone character and a foundational impact for open and democratic market societies. There is only one such concept: namely, ownership.

Considering the intensifying trends, data protection and privacy have to be replaced by property ownership as the basis and principle of order for all data which refer to an individual person.

 Since the English revolution in the 17th century, this approach became anchored in all democratic constitutions. The right to property ownership created the foundation for all modern societies and states through the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, article 17.

When the Internet was developed in the 1970s, few people considered the issue of who would own the data packets transmitted and switched through interoperable networks. Data and wire were thought of as legally one. As the internet grew and was adopted outside its original national defence context (ARPA) by academics, the basic philosophy regarding data was still naïve and even anarchistic. The founders sought to develop open and interoperable networks to unlock closed vendor based and proprietary technologies generating monopolies. They based their work largely on the basic idea of a commons. Data was thought to belong to no one or collectively to all. The right to use data was limited to those from whom it originated or to whom it was addressed.

On top of this, the philosophy and approach of data protection was developed. It is now enshrined in most developed countries by laws and acts of parliament and relates to issues of privacy or misuse. Special agencies enforce data protection, ombudspersons guard it.

This approach seemed reasonable and worked as long as data was relatively scarce, locked into distinctly separate systems and used for limited purposes. This is no longer the case.

The facts of technology today, of Big Data and a globally connected society, have annihilated the basic assumptions of the data protection paradigm. Today and in the future, data needs to be secured by property rights. This axiom provides that the person from whose behaviour the data originates is also and remains the owner. As an owner, the person has the power and right to decide on the data, including the right to alter, share, exchange, sell, give away or destroy it. More importantly, he or she has the right to exclude others from doing these things.

This regime would put the citizen as a person with rights back into the basic equation of globally operating social media platforms, voracious data collecting governments and all commercial exploitation. It would require these players to obtain explicit permission to use data referring to a person. They would need to be transparent about all usage and limited in the extent of usage.

If we as citizens are to be the owners, we must not only remain the subjects of data, but also the sovereign owners. We need to regain the rights set out by the Universal Declaration 65 years ago. We need to stop these rights from slipping away from us due to the virtualisation drive of ICTs in our societies.

The motto of today needs to be “My Data belongs to Me”.

About the author

Peter A. Bruck is the CEO and Chief Researcher of Research Studios Austria Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, the honorary President of the International Center for New Media and the Chairman of the Board of the World Summit Award on e-Content and creativity, the global best practice initiative in more than 170 UN member states as part of the United Nations Action on World Summit on Information Society (2003-2015).

URL: www.peterabruck.at | www.researchstudio.at | www.wsis-award.org

Contact: bruck [a] research.at

 

Tel: +43 662 834 602 | Fax: +43 662 834 602 222

BPN 1680: Disruption – so what is next?

Over the last decade we have seen that the internet, smartphones and tablets – as well as, for example, solar panels – have been very disruptive innovations. They have wiped out businesses and have created havoc in many industry sectors, such as retail, publishing, entertainment, telecommunications, music, photography and more.

So what is next? Emerging technologies such as wristband trackers, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Google Glass and smartwatches are certainly next on the list. The whole development of wearables is going to be very disruptive. A key sector that will be hit with this is healthcare. That sector has been far too slow to adjust to the situation where their customers (patients) at home have been excluded from most of the technological innovations. With increased health awareness, increasing costs and higher lifestyle expectations, the next wave of innovations in this sector will come from end-user services; and wearables are going to empower customers to take a far more leading role in healthcare activities.

As has become clear from the current changes in the market the new emerging technologies will continue to take on the role of game-changers, especially for companies who are looking to make meaningful and valuable connections with their customers. The importance of this is that companies who have already made the cultural change, and with the assistance of ICT tools have placed the customer at the centre of their business model, will be able to embrace these innovations. However many companies – and even whole sectors – are not yet in a position to benefit from these innovations, and before they can do so they will have to undergo a painful and costly business transformation. Those who fail to do so will end up – as has happened over the last few years in relation to the internet and smartphone innovations – as road-kill on the digital superhighway.

Organisations will have to reinvent themselves and change their business models in order to remain relevant to their customers.

While all of the technological elements are critical in these disruptive developments even more important – or at least equally so – is affordability. The fact that within years these technologies reached mass markets indicates that customers can afford them; large-scale uptakes of previous innovations (radio, TV, telephone, cars, home electronics) often took many decades.

What makes these technologies so disruptive is that they can remove much as 80% of the costs from the old ‘analogue’ business models. This is very worrying for the developed economies, where for several years in a row many industry sectors have experienced a decrease in productivity. According to a report from the Productivity Commission, in Australia seven of the twelve key industry sectors show negative productivity. Unless these sectors transform themselves they will only slide further back. At the same time we see large productivity increases in developing economies. Here innovations can be developed from a greenfield position (no legacy), and in these cases innovations only add 10% to costs in their business models. In developed ‘brownfield’ economies retrofitting innovations (that is, transformation from existing models) costs at least ten times more.

This cost factor is a significant contributor to the delays in organisations transforming themselves. They face a significant upfront investment in order to make themselves smarter.

However, once implemented these innovations provide organisations with enormous efficiencies and real time data. This then assists them to speed up decision-making processes, while at the same time liberating consumers, providing great services and experiences, and tailoring communication to a location and a moment.

Paul Budde - See more at: http://www.buddeblog.com.au/frompaulsdesk/disruption-so-what-is-next/#sthash.n1Y4KrOV.dpuf
 

BPN 1679: Mobile and video game John Lennon

I just picked up this news by Ralph Simon from the Facebook wire.

Dateline: Strawberry Fields, New York City
l. to r. Ralph Simon, Mobilium Global CEO, Yoko Ono & Niall Austin, CEO of Butterfly Games celebrating their just signed partnership to produce the first-ever mobile and video game featuring the work, graphics and music of John Lennon. The signing took place at Yoko's Manhattan home in The Dakota Building - John Lennon's piano can be seen in the background. This will mark the first time that any of The Beatles have signed a mobile games deal. "Let's keep that eternal John Lennon flame alive ... by bringing it to the modern generation of mobile "screenagers" and video gamers", said multi-dimensional artist, Yoko.

This is exciting news: the production of a mobile and  a video game featuring the work, graphics and music of John Lennon. The production will be in the hands of a very creative man and his company the Irishman Niall Austin. In the last edition of the World Summit Award Mobile he and his other company Omnimotion Technology was awarded for showing how gesture recognition and motion control technology works. This technology is working on apps that get children interested in sport and help stroke victims recover. It is great to see him accompagnied by Ralph Simon, member of the board of the World Summit.

 

 

 

March 1, 2014: Future Day

an initiative of  

Association of Professional Futurists

Cindy Frewen, Chair cfw(at)frewenarchitects(dot)com

Club of Amsterdam

Felix B Bopp, Chairman – felix(at)clubofamsterdam(dot)com

Humanity+

Adam A. Ford, Secretary tech101(at)gmail(dot)com

The Millennium Project

Jerome Glenn, CEO, Jerome.Glenn(at)Millennium-Project(dot)org

World Future Society

Tim Mack, President tmack(at)wfs(dot)org

World Futures Studies Federation

Jennifer Gidley, President wfsf.president(at)jennifergidley(dot)com

Movie on Future Day

 

 

BPN 1678: Celebrating public internet in The Netherlands

In the past week, there were celebrations in Holland in the framework of the introduction of public internet in 1994. The launch of De Digitale Stad (Digital City) on 15 January 1994 was commemorated. The event sparked off public internet in The Netherlands, which in less than three years registered one million internet users. Both events were celebrated, The Digital City in Amsterdam and public internet in The Hague. I was invited to speak at The Hague event.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam announced two happenings in the framework of the launch of the Digital City. The Waag Society and the archaeological department of the Digital City announced two meetings addressing the question: How free and open is internet yet? On January 15 the international campaign "The Internet is broken . Let's fix the internet.",  was joined.  This meeting was dealing with subjects as  secure and reliable Internet technology, the development of secure protocols, hardware and software NSA proof , designing user-friendly cryptography, supporting data protection legislation and the development of alternative social media and search engines . On January 16 , the results of the meeting "The Internet is broken. Let's fix the internet" were presented in the meeting Silent rough roadmap”.

The Hague

At the Museum for Communication there was an evening meeting, organized around the new permanent exhibition Muscom needs internet. There were three presentations.

Consumer internet

The first presentation dealt with 1994, the year in which consumer Internet made a breakthrough of consumer Internet in the Netherlands. From 1980 Dutch consumers could retrieve information through the online service Viditel and use a rudimentary e - mail service. Until January 1, 1997, this videotext service and its successor Videotex Nederland attracted 325,000 users who irregularly used the service. When the Digital City opened its doors in the context of the municipal elections in Amsterdam in 1994, internet was not only available for users in Amsterdam, but also available for  users from around the country. On March 23, 1994,  De Groene, a weekly, reported, that already 12,000 users were registered. And on January 1 1997, there were  1 million registered users in the Netherlands, using the services of several ISPs (Digital City, Euronet*Internet, Planet Internet and World Online). In 17 years videotext services had totalled 325.000 users, while internet tripled its users to 1 million in three years thanks to the disruptive technology of the Internet.

I also had an epilogue in my pocket, but I forgot to read it out in public. “Marshall McLuhan argued in his book Understanding Media (1974 ): A new medium is never an addition to the old media nor let the old media alone. The new medium does not stop with the pushing of older media until the new forms and positions have been found in the media landscape.

Online has started to conquer strategic positions in the media from 1970 onwards. Since the sixties online pioneers such Lickleder and Doug Engelbart saw a new world for themselves with electronic messaging services, video telephony, electronic ordering and shopping, electronic banking, electronic publishing and translation electronically. Almost all technical issues had been rudimentarily developed in the pre-Internet age.

But thanks to the internet a flywheel effect came into effect. There was a wide user base, and there was a great advancement in refining technology such as e-mail, icu, Skype, e-shopping, e-banking, digital publishing and translation. Now internet has already intervened in the technology and economics, but there  is still some teething to be done. Internet will dig deeper into everyday life, social customs and influencing lifestyle. Life as well as  the Museum for Communication needs internet.

Internet abstinence

The second speaker was Bram van Montfoort. This youngster has lived without internet for a year and has written a book about internet abstinence. He told about the trials and tribulations he has experienced in that year : no Internet and no Facebook. He noticed that he was struggling to enroll into college for a bachelor degree journalism. His responses to requests by letter were not immediate as with e-mail. And after a year in the monastery of analogue media thousands of emails awaited him. His experiences he shares via an analogue medium, the book Een jaar offline (A year offline).

It became clear that the pace of his life changed and that hand written letters became an art form again. I recognize the custom of writing letters. During my time in boarding school, but also during my studies, I wrote many a letter to my parents and friends, in which I told him what I had been through and what future ideals I was striving after. Those subject you will not see addressed in emails and FB postings.

The project Bram van Montfoort lasted for a year. There have been similar projects of internet abstinence previously, but they usually were shorter and of course in a different era and context. Jeroen van Loon, the third speaker, has spent two months without internet during his studies. He got RSI from internet and decided to ignore internet. In 2011, a college in Utrecht started a research project on internet abstinence for a week with sixteen people. They reported by video about their experiences and their " withdrawal symptoms". And in 1996, a number of Internet fanatics in Rotterdam had themselves locked up for a period of time. Public reports on the internet abstinence were published. Of course there are big differences between Internet users in 1996 and 2012. In 2012, Internet penetrated much more in the daily lives of people.

Muscom needs internet

Life on the needs internet project by Jeroen van Loon I wrote as once a posting, a project awarded in the European Youth Award (EYA). Meanwhile, the internet artist has collected more than 300 handwritten letters. This website of this collection now has a new design and is more accessible. Now users can look for letters by categories such as gender, age and region as well as categories such as leisure, online/offline and pre-internet. The letters tell the stories about their first experiences with internet by people worldwide. They cheer the ease of making social contacts, but also question big brother, while children indicate that they may sit behind the computer for a limited time. The Museum for Communication in The Hague has now made ​​a selection from this letter collection and putt eight letters on permanent display under the title Muscom needs internet. For the museum, this is a worthy entry into the world of Internet.

BPN 1677: Launch Digital City Amsterdam (1994)

 

Launch Digital City in Amsterdam

15 January 1994

  

 

BPN 1676: Sound of Colors

This is not a blog posting about synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon of a joining together of sensations that are normally experienced separately (hearing green grass), but the posting will deal with cyborg, the joining of organic and material parts. In fact it will concern the first cyborg ever.

The word cyborg was not in my encyclopaedia till I met Ann Westfelt, a Swedish jury member of the Europrix Awards. In a conversation about trade literature a Scandinavian book on cyborgs was mentioned. But it took till 2004 before I was confronted with a real example, not a concept, again during a Europrix jury.

Neil Harbisson at the Europrix party, talking to Chiara Boeri, an Italian artist.

 

The project from Britain was an entry by the out-of-the-box thinker Adam Montandon. He had met Neil Harbisson, who suffers from a rare disease, achromatopsia. This condition is caused by genes, so that the affected people get monochromatism or complete colour blindness. They really only see black and white and their colour blindness differs from the variety with which the red and green colours can be distinguished.

For a student arts complete colour blindness is an absolute disaster as the colour palette is not more than black and white, not even grey. This was not only annoying for his study, but also in everyday life. "I confused red jam with tomato and orange juice with apple juice" Neil said in an interview. He also used to wear clothes in one colour, black.

After a lecture on cybernetics at the Plymouth University, given by the 23 -year-old Englishman Adam Montandon, Neil got in touch with him and told him about his disability. Adam looked into the problem for his graduation assignment. It was clear that he needed a camera and computer to record colours. But Adam also realized that only then the problem starts. Because how do you convert colour? With words you cannot fully specify the colour shades. Eventually he chose for conversion of colours into sounds. Neil got a camera on his head, a PC in his backpack and an earpiece. The structure he called Eye-borg.

Adam Montandon developed colour-to- sound conversion software, that worked dynamically. Each level got a frequency; in this way, the pure intensity of the colour can be determined and displayed. With a noise value Neil had to learn the pitch of the sounds. Red is translated in low noise , while violet has a high sound. And he did learn fast. Soon he started to wear colourful clothes on his blue jeans.

 

Passport photograph of Neil Harbisson

Soon Adam and Neil saw that technology is one solution, but they also saw the social implication. The gear has become part of his body. It has become a medical prosthesis. So he received a certificate from the National Health regarding his camera. In the meantime he has received a passport with a portrait photograph showing the camera.

Now a group of creatives wants to produce a documentary movie with the title Sound of Colors. The title shows similarity to The Sound of Music, the movie which plays in Austria. That country supported the Europrix Awards and the selection of the sonochromatic cyborg. But then in 2011 Arnau Gifreu Castells of the Universitat Ramón Llull – Universitat de Vic in Spain reports in Graz (Austria) about an audiovisual and online interactive documentary about Neil Harbisson and the cyborg, produced as part of a degree project. And now this project gets a sequel in an official documentary.

 

The official documentary about the first cyborg Sound of Colors will be a crowdfunded project. And now the circle is round. The crowdfunding organiser is the Spanish organisation Verkami, which in 2013 in Sri Lanka received the World Summit Award, the successor to the Europrix Awards. The project group is requesting 3.200 euro to produce the documentary.


Update Febr. 1, 2014: The official documentary about the first cyborg Sound of Colors was a  crowdfunded project by the Spanish organiser Verkami. The requested 32.000 euro has been pledged for and even more, while there are still 18 days left. So the making of the movie can start.

BPN 1675: 2014: already a memorable year

The new year has only just begun. Yet, for me 2014 is already a year to remember. It is 20 years since the Internet for consumers made ​​her entry in the Netherlands. On January 15, 1994 the ISP launched The Digital City ( DDS ) in Amsterdam.

The Digital City ( DDS ) started on Saturday January 15, 1994 with an television interview in the eight o'clock news. DDS was an internet project, intended as a discussion forum in the run up to the municipal elections of March 1994. The project was designed by netactivisten (Hack -Tic), the municipality and partly inspired by Marleen Stikker, the virtual mayor of the city. The town was based on community networks ( free nets) in the U.S. and Canada. The model of the city was chosen as a metaphor.

First DDS interface text without graphics (DDS Archief)

DDS Interface 3.0 DDS Archief)

 

DDS was a great success. In six weeks, 10,000 people applied for access to the city. By visiting the virtual mayor of organizations, but also to institutions, the project received much local attention, as the mayor visited organisations and institutions. And it were not only people coming from Amsterdam, but also people from across the Netherlands. After the project DDS went on as an Internet service provider. DDS actually opened the doors for Internet consumers by January 1994 and by January 1, 1997 the Netherlands  had registered 1 million internet consumers.

The success of DDS was surprising. There used to be an online and multimedia industry in the Netherlands. Online databases such as Kluwer Legal Database were used for scientific, technical and business research. Electronic messaging services like Memocom were separate, mainly business services. For consumers, there was the information service Viditel, followed by Videotex Netherlands. And for amateurs, there were the Bulletin Board Systems ( BBS ). Furthermore, there was there a beginning of a multimedia industry with text CD-ROMs, multimedia CD- ROMs and CD -i titles as well as a few electronic books. But this industry was only 100 million guilders ( 45 million euros) great in revenues and the consumer share was very low.

Internet, however, developed separately from this industry, mainly through the academic network SURF. As of 1990 there were ISPs and by the end of 1993 there were approximately 295 companies connected to the Internet. In May 1993, XS4ALL opened an Internet service to consumers. Although in the first two days, 500 consumers were registered, the number of subscribers grew slowly. DDS, however, was the driver and was a resounding success.

In retrospect, a number of factors accounted for this consumer success.

a. The number of households with a PC in the Netherlands had increased from 7 percent in 1985 to 34 percent in 1994.
b. People wanted to do more with the PC than gaming, word processing, accounting and consult encyclopedias on CD - ROM.
c. Internet came as a disruptive technology. Existing online and multimedia technologies had to adapt or eventually disappeared, eg videotex and CD-i. Out of the concrete mixer containing different technologies, eventually only Internet and email survived. Teletext and CD - OM stayed on, but played no important part anymore.

 

 d. Consumer internet was cheap compared to online databases. Moreover, the Internet technology was user-friendly thanks to hypertext, had more graphic opportunity and had greater potency multimedia ( text, image, video and sound). Besides, Internet combined with email.

e. Internet did not developed within the existing online and multimedia industry, but within the bosom of universities and scientific institutions. Companies that had internet installed proved attractive to students after completion of their academic studies.

For those interested, Reinder Rustema wrote a doctoral thesis on the Digital City in 2001.

BPN 1674: From trade literature to toilet paper

Although the sun is shining, it is today a sad day in Amsterdam. Today, the library of the Royal Tropical Institute will close. The last books - several thousand of titles: doublets, journals and written publications, mainly in English and Dutch - can be sorted and taken along. Then comes the old paper merchant who will takes the remains to recycle. The collection was already cruelly torn apart and components moved to other collections ranging from the prestigious Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt to the Knowledge and Documentation Center for Medical History in a small Dutch fishery village, Urk. That is the irrevocable end of the KIT Information & Library Services (ILS).

In the second half of the eighties of last century, I dealt with the ILS department of KIT. I was working at the newly founded Society for Information Services ( MIS ), which became active in 1986 and mainly worked in the market of electronic publishing. In their portfolio was CD-ROM. In 1987 the company produced the first test disc of the Legal Database Kluwer Datalex. Further, the company produced in 1988 several CD-ROMs amongst others KIT Abstracts for the Royal Tropical Institute, the CD-ROM version of the online database TROPAG & Rural (Tropical Agriculture) .

TROPAG is one of the oldest Dutch online databases with abstracts of official publications and so-called grey literature on tropical agriculture in Africa, Asia , the area of ​​the Pacific and Central and South America. The database was created from a magazine in which the summaries of articles from scientific journals were published. The texts were put in the graphic company Samsom Publishers. Here, in the second half of the seventies, the texts were already stored into a computer with a paper punch tape. Once the text was saved, there was a magnetic tape ready to be sent ​​by snailmail to host computers (servers, they are called now),  at that time the U.S. information services Dialog, SDC, and BRS. The database was included in the portfolio of the Dutch host organisation Samson Data Systems (SDS) for a short period (1981-1983).

However, online was costly and certainly for the developing countries. The telecom connections were also a major technical obstacle for those countries. Using the online database was not an overwhelming success. However, the advent of the CD-ROM in 1984 offered a different perspective for a text database. Although PCs with CD-ROM drives were not readily available in abundance in the second half of the eighties, the KIT ILS department, headed by Hans van Hartevelt, placed more CD-ROM players than there were available in the Netherlands from 1987 onwards. MID was commissioned to produce the text CD–ROM.. Since the CD-ROM production software was still in its infancy, the production and especially the mastering took longer than expected. But when the diffulties were overcome the CD - ROM went all over the world.

The TROPAG & Rural file still exists, but is now part of the CD-ROM portfolio of CAB International and available online with Wolters Kluwer daughter OVID. TROPAG & Rural will be a painful reminder of the rich stream of literature, while the last remaining books and magazines will be recycled to toilet paper.

BPN 1673: 25 years open Internet via Amsterdam

On November 17, 2013 it will be exactly 25 years since the former Mathematisch Centrum (Mathematical Centre), now Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam was linked up to the NSFnet, the network of the U.S. National Science Foundation. This connection gave the Netherlands and Europe access to the open Internet. It was the beginning of today's Internet for scientific institutes and universities and later for businesses and consumers.

Internet pioneers Jaap Akkerhuis, Daniel Karrenberg, Teus Hagen, and Piet Beertema (CWI) at Piet Beertema's farewell party at CWI on the occassion of his retirement on 16 September 2004. Source: CWI.

Until that date, the traffic of the precursor of internet was conducted via Internet ARPANET, the U.S. military network. This network was developed from 1969 and was shaped in 1975 when Vincent Cerf and Bob Khan for the first time used the term Internet in a lecture in which they described the TCP/IP protocol. The network was not only used for military purposes, but also research institutes and universities, which were allied to scientific research for the government. Through this network the Mathematisch Centrum made its first contact in 1982. Thanks to this contact the staff of the Mathematical Centre in contact with the Internet developments. When in 1985 for the first time the URL with the suffix.com was attributed to the American company Symbolics Inc., the staff, including the system manager Piet Beertema, looked out to get the suffix .nl in place. On April 25, 1986 The Netherlands was the first country to have a country suffix assigned. Piet Beertema became the first registrar of the .nl suffix. Not that it was a lot of work, as in the first two years only 87 URLs were issued.

The e-mail about the first open transatlantic Internet connection between CWI and the United States . Source: Piet Beertema.

In 1986, the academic network of the military network informed and in the network of the National Science Foundation, NSFnet, accommodated. In 1988 this network was independent, primarily aiming at academic institutions. And in the same year on Sunday, November 17^th, it was the day that the Mathematisch Centrum was connected to NSFnet. At 14:30h The Netherlands was the first country in Europe connected to the open Internet and registrar Piet Beertema received an e-mail stating that the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam was the first institution outside the US with official access to NSFnet.

The connection also meant that Europe had access to NSFnet through EUnet. With the connection not only The Netherlands got access, but also Europe got access to an academic computer network, which later evolved into the world and open Internet. This network was not checked by soldiers and military industry, but was open, which had consequences for future users, such as free use.

The link-up of the Mathematical Centre with NSFnet opened the way for internet traffic from The Netherlands and Europe. Even today a lot of internet traffic from Europe to NSFnet passes through the Amsterdam internet exchange (AMS-IE).

The CWI will commemorate this festive anniversary on Friday, November 22, 2013 at the Amsterdam Science Park. Here, a plaque will be unveiled at the place, where the Dutch and European Internet started 25 years ago.

 

BPN 1672: Digital entertainment: immersive experiences, multiple revenue models

By Madanmohan Rao

 

Every two years, the World Summit Awards showcase the local diversity and rich creativity of ICT use around the world. Gaming as a sector accounts for more revenues than advertising or the movie industry in many countries around the world.

Five winners of the WSA 2013 awards in the e-Entertainment and Games category were honoured at the WSA Conference in Sri Lanka recently. They presented their gaming experiences and shared some useful words of advice for aspiring game developers and digital entertainers.

EVE Online from Iceland is a spectacular, captivating gaming experience where hundreds of thousands of players compete within the same virtual cosmic universe for riches, power, glory and adventure. The setting is outer space where solar systems are being inhabited with people from a range of professions: traders, entrepreneurs, pirates and commanders!

Making View from Norway offers superbly exciting experiences of Formula 1 racing, blending 360 degree camera and interactive responses. The experience goes beyond panoramic views at the highest speeds: it opens up new possibilities for application in tourism, education and documentaries.

Aqua Lingua from Lithuania lets you ‘see what you hear’ by converting into pictures and works of art. Water surfaces are stirred by emanating sound patters, and then photographed – thus making the invisible visible. It also turns out to be a great service for a gift!

Kinetic Stories from Finland is a series of storybooks for kids that mix traditional storytelling with the latest developments in motion tracking and speech recognition technology. Children take part in the stories through their movements and voice, which are also captured in the online screen. Print and video content can be interleaved in the narrative, thus bringing books to life.

 

WSA - Courtesy – Philipp Benedikt/Alexander Mattersberger

Interactive dance from Italy helps create new dance forms by translating and mapping body movements into innovative musical composition. The product can be used individually or in groups, by professionals and amateurs. Kids can use the product’s interactive video gaming dance applications.

Project leaders and founders from these games offered some insightful tips for the developers and entrepreneurs in the audience, as summarised below.

1.Tap mega-narratives. The frontiers of space have captivated the human mind since time immemorial, and always make for a good backdrop for immersive games and cooperative exploration.

2.Leverage adjacent and complementary media. Sound can map onto images – and vice versa, leading to interesting modalities for entertainment and gaming.

3.Motion blends well into gaming. The use of sensors allows physical motions to be seamlessly mapped into virtual environments, and can be harnessed for everyone from kids to adults.

4.Gaming allows for multiple business models, lending itself well for sustainable revenue streams. These range from individual or family subscriptions to embedded ads in freemium models.

BPN 1671: ‘Micro-multinationals’ develop e-commerce models

By Madanmohan Rao

One of the hottest segments of innovation in digital media has been e-commerce/e-business. Five winners of the prestigious World Summit Awards 2013 showed that innovators are pushing the frontiers of digital markets in emerging economies as well.

From payment and analytics to crowdsourcing and marketplaces, the diverse range of winners from around the world showcased their initiatives at the recent WSA conference in Sri Lanka, and also shed light on best practices for succeeding in the e-business space.

WSA - Courtesy – Philipp Benedikt/Alexander Mattersberger 

 

Springleap is a crowdsourced creative platform based in South Africa but with clients in the US and Europe as well. Global brands are using Springleap’s creative social media marketing campaigns to empower creatives and engage brand fans. The startup rewarded creatives with over $300,000 in the last year and placed them on magazines, sites and TV spots across the world.

Infoline from Ghana is a mobile and web service which connects consumers and businesses in emerging markets. Users of smartphones as well as basic phones can access and send messages to businesses; the data is mined for extraction of useful analytics for companies, which helps them understand and respond to their market segments more effectively.

Ponoko from New Zealand is a Web based marketplace for designers to make and sell products online. The ‘Personal Factory’ model helps them instantly verify, price and order prototypes and custom products. To date, Ponoko designers have produced over 300,000 custom products.

Conekta is a platform that allows businesses in Mexico to process online payments using both online and offline methods. Offline channels are generally disregarded by dominant payment solutions such as Paypal. Conekta is used for a range of transactions: selling physical products, taking donations, ecommerce offers, or enabling marketplaces for third parties.

TransferWise from Estonia is a smarter solution for international money transfers using P2P methods. Banks charge a lot for international money transfers but TransferWise brings the fee down to mid-market exchange rate. Customers pay a smaller, fully transparent service charge to access this facility.

The winners from these companies shared insights on the evolution and impacts of their business models, and offered useful tips for aspiring entrepreneurs in this space.

1. Keep an eye on regulatory changes. Mobile payment and international remittances are still subject to national jurisdictions, and changes in these regulations can alter the fortunes of digital payment providers.

2. Play in both spaces: smartphones and basic phones, especially in emerging economies. Basic SMS and voice services still have a useful shelf-life, but as smartphone penetration increases it will be possible to offer rich media apps and content as well.

3. Think micro-multinational. It is possible for startups, especially in tech and creative spaces, to operate simultaneously in multiple countries, leveraging various skillsets, pricepoints and timezones for effective project management and product delivery.

4. Tap the crowd but protect your brand. Leverage the power of creative crowds to offer speed and diversity in service to your clients, but ensure you have strict quality control and IPR compliance.