Information filtering/processing

What is data with no order? How do you find a specific paragraph, phrase or word in tons of papers, or in billions of web pages? How do you read an article of 200 pages when you have only 10 minutes? How do you read it from your mobile? All these questions are very relevant when talking about the huge amount of raw data exist today. The "where do I start" question was not left unanswered. Copernic Summarizer is one example to an application that in one click can summarize a document for you. But even summarizing is not enough. We need the context of the data and we want the ability to search for it. Google Desktop Search is one good example that we need to search external and internal data but what is the context of each piece of information we find?! Olive Software scans and manipulates content and stores it in a contextual manner according to definitions that can be modified. The contextual search means you get a paragraph or a story or any other defined part of the document with no need to open the document in its whole. While dealing with bigger scopes, tagging mechanisms for web addresses can provide the personal context of each piece of information we find and to enable better retrieval in the future. In the magic trio of knowledge management we have the data, the content, and the knowledge. The data is the raw information located somewhere, the content is the processed /filtered information and the knowledge is the content that was absorbed to the organization in a form of accessible information backed up by procedures and methodologies. This post summarizes some ways to achieve knowledge or shape this information to content and to knowledge. This subject will be discussed n the future using specific examples that emphasize the use and services in this field.

Information / data presentation

It is not by accident that I delayed this post after the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005 closure. I knew I could use some information from the publications about it to prove the trends are definitely going towards the expected future. By writing presentation I mean the way we interact with the information. The information / data presentation include visual presentation, audio interface, and every other element that uses our senses to experience the information. Usability is mainly measured by the experience of the presentation layer because no matter how efficient the technology of transportation is, if we cannot notice the start button, we will never be able to play the movie. The presentation is the conceptual representative of the technology and as such, it has the most noticeable effect on the way we experience technology.

The information presentation is a huge area and I will only mention several of the many aspects in this post. Audio and video presentations will be the most significant so lets begin with the audio presentation. The world trend of personal players was very noticeable in CES. This is a comprehensive article of PCWorld’s CES picks and pans. After realizing how HOT the audio market is, I would like to discuss shortly about a very exciting technology. The technology is NXT. The essence of the technology is to produce sound using surfaces and not the standard membranes. NXT claim that: “our engineering and scientific resource has done much to establish it as the new paradigm in sound reproduction”. NXT technology is licensed to mobile phones manufacturers like Siemens, Sharp, NEC, and more. Mobile phones will need no speakers but will use the existing screen to produce the sound. The same approach was taken with personal computers, TV&display and even with cardboard speakers. But in my opinion the most revolutionary product was produced by Ellula and was an inflatable speaker. Unfortunately the company’s future is uncertain and its website is down but you can still see the Hot Air speakers in the gadgets stores. This technology is well adjusted for our mobile future of consuming audio content anywhere easily.

Another product that uses existing surfaces like windows and tables to produce sound is the Sound Bug. The quality of this product is that we can hear it with a group (not like earphones) and it is highly portable (not like most speakers).

Now we switch to the visual department. There are many standards for the next “screens” that are foldable, cheap, lightweight, and mainly very thin. Among the standards in this area are the E-Ink, Universal Display, and more. This field is called E-Paper from obvious reasons. The approach is to provide the ability to have thin, lightweight and foldable screens for various products. Universal display talks not only about mobile products but also about “screen wallpapers”. You can arrange the lighting and pictures on your walls electronically and change the appearance of the room using a single mouse stroke. Think of a situation where you can actually create templates and customized appearances to your living room, bedroom, and practically any other room in the house with this wallpaper. The quality of content is also improved by creating the 3D displays using stereoscopic concepts (2 identical images with an offset create 3D sense) with no need for special glasses. Such a solution is offered by Opticality (formerly known as X3D technologies). Hitachi created a prototype named transpost that creates images that can be viewed from 360 degrees angles. IO2Technology took a fascinating new approach towards image projection. They started with a very big model but now they have very logical sizes for this product. The Heliodisplay takes air from the room, modifies it and projects the images on it. The company checked and found that the change is only temporal and therefore it causes no damage to the air. Look at the images and videos to see how wonderful this solution can be. I thought there is another technology worth mentioning but I really did not know how to encapsulate it, it is what they call a “photon vacuum” which means it takes the image from an existing display (using the maximum of the photon stream) and projects it on a larger surface.

* I would like to mention another exciting feature A9 (Amazon’s search company that was mentioned in previous posts) added to their search engine. It is connected in a way to data presentation but it was something I came across this week and I though was worth mentioning. A9 added visual yellow pages based on a map and images of the businesses. This feature is significant because it gathers many existing technologies to form a new way of experiencing the information. You can see this new feature at: http://a9.com/optical?a=oyp. Another search engines feature released recently is the ability to search for content in TV shows. Google indexes the captions and let you search the desired content in TV shows: http://video.google.com/ and Yahoo lets you search video just like we search for images. It is important to notice that as said in previous posts, we live in a very content rich world and therefore we want a tool to search for everything from anywhere.

Information accessibility

The previous post concluded that there is a huge amount of data and that quality of the data is crucial. To extend the understanding of the smarter search, you can read a very comprehensive article located at: http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/lsa_intro.htm. The internet of things and the ubiquitous manner of networks is the answer for the data gathering and consumption. There is currently an extensive work around the creation of an adequate infrastructure for a connected reality with huge amount of connected elements. When we analyze the different components in the always-connected network we find RFID technology as a basic component. RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) is actually not a new technology but there is hype around it and this hype drives this technology forward. EPC (Electronic Product Code) Global (http://www.epcglobalinc.org/) takes the technology of assigning every product an ID to the industry. The goal is to make everything with unique ID that can provide data of type, history, serial number and more. This will serve to optimize the supply chain and allow the ability to track specific items and handle them in every level of the supply chain from assembling to disposal. In the category of identification and applications of short-range wireless there are the NFC (Near Field Communications) and Felica. NFC is a consortium that combines consumer electronics, telecommunications, and credit companies. The first application of the technology was a smart wallet but there are many more applications under development using this technology. Sony which is a member of the NFC consortium created the Felica technology (http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/contents02.html ) to support the need for a contactless technology. NTT DoCoMo uses Felica in a mobile wallet application (http://www.nttdocomo.com/corebiz/imode/services/felica.html). Short-range wireless technologies also include the Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiFi, UWB (Ultra Wide Band) and some other technologies that provide communication means between devices and sensors to create a private network in different speeds and purposes. Alongside these technologies we have the cellular technologies and several other technologies like MobileFi, WiMax, WiBro, and more.
Enough technologies were mentioned and there are many more technologies that provide us the ability to access different kinds of information from different places for different purposes. The complexity of networks and the semantic meaning of networks make networks act not just as a mean to get the information but also as a piece of information. The topography of a network determines its meaning, its capabilities and the different roles of the components in the network. Changing the network is changing components’ meaning. The area of mobility and connectivity is the obvious evolution of the world we live in. If we can access information, why should we be limited to our location? A true convergence of technologies mean we could access any information from any place at any time through whatever network. The concept of software radio demonstrates the true convergence where we use the same antenna and software to access several different networks to retrieve the needed information. All the technical side and the networks selection are done automatically in the device itself and it should be seamless to the consumer. As information consumers we only care how fast we get the information and what is the presentation quality. The handover between the networks, and the detection of the optimized combination of networks should be done without any intervention of the user. Data transport and accessibility will continue to evolve and will keep our consumer behavior of replacing terminals to support the new standards. I will write much more about information accessibility because it has a great impact on the way we experience the technology. A connected environment (not wired anymore) is the next step towards the next paradigm.

Information management

The burst of information sources and raw data increases the need for high capacity storage devices. Storage takes two ways at the same time. The first approach is the local storage devices. The capacity of local storage grows with SIM cards of 256MB (http://www.m-sys.com/Content/Corporate/Press/prInfo.asp?id=701), MMC cards for smart phones with 1GB, Toshiba announced its 80GB 1.8” drive for iPod (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118925,00.asp), PC Hard Drives of 250GB, and estimation of 1 TeraByte of memory on handsets by the next decade. The other approach is the distributed storage. In this category we have clusters, storage wrecks, GRID computing (distributed computing and joined resources management) and other remote storage techniques like web storage. In the centralized storage capacities we see capacities of several PetaBytes like in the CERN project.
So now to align with all the names of capacities, here is a basic guide to measures:

Each line we pass adds three zero digits to the number.

We start with Kilobyte that is 1,000 bytes.
Megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes (a common diskette is a little bit larger).
Gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes (a little bit more than a standard CD’s capacity).
Terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (4 big home hard drives).
Petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (size of data in big research facilities).
Exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (no current application)
Zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
And finally Yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

While I write this post Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize Petabytes (marks it as a spelling mistake) but who dealt with Gigabytes two decades ago?

Back to the subject itself, we understand the huge amount of data but where does it come from? New technologies enable the gathering of more information from research. There are more connected elements to networks like cell phones, computers, connected cameras, and machines like ATMs. More network elements means more accessibility and more need to trace all the traffic. All these come down to one result of huge amounts of data to be manipulated, analyzed and stored. Information is now stored in general places like with web access to mail, online calendars, Plaxo contacts sharing and therefore people publish more of their personal data. Once again personalization influences the change we experience in information management. The new approach of search engines even provides us a learning mechanism to adjust to our preferences as for the results we need. We can search, refine the search and store our results for further research and for future use. This field is yet to be published for the masses but you can find samples of this trend at: http://mysearch.yahoo.com/ , http://labs.google.com/personalized/ , http://a9.com/-/search/home.jsp?nc=1 as the major commercial projects in this field. Many features are still missing but it is a matter of evolution until we see real information management in its personalized form. There will be no dependency on storage, location or the form of the raw data. Each piece of information will be stored in a centralized online place, public and private by decision, and can be formed by many different pieces of information from different sources that will be compiled to one page tailor made to the request of the search. Knowledge management concepts are applied on the Internet. We need to make the data available anywhere, at any time, at any form, manipulated and analyzed. Only formatted information can be useful in the future when we have even more information and even more focused targets. We will need to get a very specific piece of information out of all the information available and we will need to get it in a very short time. Most of the information we will consume will be a puzzle made of existing information pieces ordered in a specific manner. The amount of data will continue to grow and the only mean to effectively overcome this potential obstacle is by improving the efficiency of our searches and not the number of the results.

Information, technology, and human behavior.

We live in an era of information. Recent studies show that the rapid growth of the information capacity is several times larger than our ability to manage and analyze it. In the past, people had to be in direct contact with other people to get their opinions about different issues. With the appearance of modern printing and afterwards the radio and the programs that allow callers on air, we broke this basic assumption. Today we have the ability to publish any information at all without the need to print it and even without the need to pay for our words to be heard. We generate information, consume information, and gather information in capacities that were not feasible in the early days of the print. The ARPANET was, in fact, the new breakthrough in the way to the behavioral change. With each connected computer, mobile device, and tool we become more and more information dependant and our behavior indicates it. Contemplate of the difference between hearing the news by chance with a delay of several days from vagabonds to the present form of news consumption. We feel strange if the time interval between the news updates is longer than several hours. Newspapers became obsolete as news tellers in the digitized society and they still haven’t done the needed revolution to adjust. The behavioral patterns still change and from a form of getting the news by chance or in dictated hours like the newscasts, we became news consumers and we decide when we want to get updated with the news. Of course the example of the news is just a small example that emphasizes the behavioral change caused by the information. This evolving area will have significant role in the new technologies and inventions we see in the next several decades.

The main aspects of the information revolution as we experience it for several centuries already are:

1. Information management – gathering the information, stocking the information, and making it available to the designated people.

2. Information accessibility – the ways provided to access the information, to generate the information, and to influence the information and the data.

3. Information / data presentation – the means provided to view, listen and generally interact with the information.

4. Information analysis – tools to assist in filtering information, manipulate information, and provide the desired format for the consumption of the information.

The next four posts will discuss these aspects with general background information and several specific examples. These posts are crucial to better understand future progress in the field of information consumption, and the technologies that will be discussed in details in the future posts.

The first post...

First, I would like to greet all the audience for the first post of this blog. I am sure no one reads it at the time I post it but I really hope it is not going to waste and that people will read this post in the future.

This blog is dedicated to present the technology to entrepreneurs, non-technological people, and technological people who are interested in gaining a wide technological perspective.

I contemplated about the way I should open this first post and I figured out there is nothing more appropriate than the sentence: “To know nothing is bad, to learn nothing is worse”. This sentence is part of the “survival culture” of the Serer tribe which is far from being a technological tribe. The Serer tribe uses the concept of constant learning in order to well adjust to its surrounding. In my opinion, the biggest challenge of the modern society is to adjust to the changes in our day-to-day life. The ever-changing surrounding is caused by the technological changes and the change in our perspective as a society.

As you can read, this post is more philosophical that technological but it is required to understand the drive of this blog. Now I will show some historical processes that can serve as indicators.

The industrial revolution and its rejection by the society was a very significant process. Until the revolution, every product was hand made and included some personal characteristics of the customer. As a customer you would go to the tailor and ask to make your suit with silver buttons and tight sleeves. The industrial revolution just changed the way we used to buy and reduced the personalization level we could get. Today we combine the commodity aspect with the ability to add our personal touch. Our society wanted the “personal touch” in our products and therefore we have examples like SMART, ringtones, and skins for software we use. The industrial revolution came to serve the industry in lowering the costs and produce more products. Only recently the balance between the industry and the customers regained with the ability to have that personal touch again in our products.

The second process is the evolution of the real and the virtual. The main focus on reality served us well for centuries. We produced smart tools to serve our daily tasks and our art reflected this perception. As technology evolved, the virtual took a more significant place. Movies combined aliens, men, and robots. There are many tools to serve the virtual aspects like the famous tamagutchi and supplementary accessories. Today, we see the movement towards a combined world of real and virtual. We live our life in the real world but we still have our masks for the cyber space. We play with identities and confuse real with virtual so much, that we need “reality shows” to see what reality is in the virtual domain of the television to serve as an anchor. We go to hang out with friends in pubs, return home and log on to places like There.com where we have our community and friends. The line between real and virtual is blurred and in the future we will see a total convergence between the real and the virtual to make our experience richer.

Mcluhan describes technology as the extension of man. The next paradigm is not the enhancement of existing skills but the shift to alternative ones.

I hope you enjoy your stay here and welcome you to return.