Since the acquisition of Instagram earlier, the guessing game of who is next ‘Instagram’ to be acquired has become popular. All kinds of guesses are around. You may also have your favorite company or area that you think is the next Instagram.

I find this guessing game interesting.

Instagram was unique and so will be the next company to be very successful – the so-called Next Instagram. The idea that one can simply find a ‘similar’ company in slightly different space seems naive. Instagram was unique in its approach to use filters in such a simple, expressive, spontaneous way that people just could not resist the urge to share their photos. This was photo sharing app, like many others, but was very easy to use, it allowed people to express themselves (note it did not express — it just gave very easy ways to express just a few things), and promoted spontaneity. You don’t have to spend lot of time trying to be ‘expressive’ in your communication. The most powerful communication is usually the one that does not come in the way. If the tools for communication take more effort than the satisfaction given by the need of modern generation for instantaneous communication, then it is likely to be rejected. Most other sharing applications even after Instagram’s success do not have courage to accept the elegance offered by the courage to reject featuritis.

The space of communication and experience sharing is huge. Much of human activities are based on this communication. Interestingly, even in 2012, most of the experience sharing mechanisms have not used even a fraction of experience capture and sharing ability offered by mobile phones. Most applications do utilize photos/videos and location. And yes visual information is dominant mode in experience sharing, but even visual information becomes order of magnitudes more experiential when enhanced using the context and other experiential data. By effectively using multiple modes and sources of experiential data, it is possible to communicate holistic experience that may even surpass one day the experience by being there. Many of us may find it difficult to believe, but that is already happening in some areas and will happen in many more areas and will become available commonly on regular devices.

Most of the current successful companies on mobile phones have used the experiential and contextual power of these devices only partially. Many interesting apps are emerging in this space and most address one component of the experience. What we require is breaking the silos and creating more realistic experiences. And that is now possible using emerging devices.

Entrepreneurism, Experiential Computing | No Comments »

Extreme Stories: 13
Storytelling is a well-known art that almost everybody practices. Some people have special talents, some acquire reasonable ability, and some just manage to use it for their interactions. There has been much written about it.
With increasing amount of data capture, there is a rise in new kind of storytelling, however. This is based on data, using talents to use the data for communicating the point that the storyteller is interested in conveying. This kind of storytelling is not related to weaving through individual events as is done in most traditional storytelling. Here a storyteller uses appropriate data collected over time to convey the story. Usually, there is a predetermined theme and finding from the data and this needs to presented using appropriate rendering of the data. Statistical approaches are used to summarize this data to make the story compelling. Powerful visualization techniques have emerged to represent and render spatio-temporal-thematic data in compelling form. Combination of all these analytical tools with visualization techniques started becoming popular even before computers arrived. With computing power, more attention was given to such tools. The last few years have seen significantly more attention being given to data analytics and visualization approaches. This trend is likely to continue for some time.
The nature of storytelling with large volume of data, commonly called Big Data, is taking another extreme form. In micro stories, one presents just a simple, or atomic, event and all data and information related to that to convey experience of that event. On the other extreme, using analytics and visualization one conveys mega stories that use large volumes of data to convey summary of experiences collected over long time, at relevant geographic locations, and across relevant themes.

One thing is clear: the nature of storytelling is evolving. We will see increasing number of stories that will be told using data. New forms of storytelling approaches will emerge for this new type of storytelling.

Experiential Computing | 3 Comments »

In these days of Increasingly Bigger Data, it will become very important to understand the big picture that could be derived from this data. There are tow related approaches that one could use to provide this big picture: Summarization and Storytelling. These two are related, but not the same. In summarization, the goal is to look at the data that has been collected and prepare a summary of this data to represent all the data meaningfully and in a way that one could explore it. A commonly used structured representation of the data is the index of the data. An index presents pointers to important locations in the data; it is just an index. An index does give an idea about what is contained in the data. Somebody who knows the data commonly prepares this index. And this is where the strength and limitations of index are. In these days on increasingly bigger data, expecting somebody to analyze data in every area and indexing it may result in bottleneck for applications of the data. Also, when a person prepares an index, the knowledge, biases, and perspective of a person result in an index and the index becomes relatively fixed.

Summarization of data or text is used to represent the data in a manageable size summary such that the summary captures the essence of data for a specific application context.

An automated summarization technique could analyze incoming data and prepare summaries as the data becomes available and could also be tuned for specific applications such that multiple summaries could be developed for different applications using the same data. In some cases, these summaries may even be used as an index to larger set of data.
Pinaki SInha (a doctoral student who worked under my supervision) developed a summarization approach and developed an algorithm for a large collection of photos. Given a large collection of photos, say a few thousand photos, this approach will summarize it by selecting a small number of photos, say between 10 and 20. This approach considers three important parameters: quality, coverage, and diversity. Each photo in the original collection is assigned a quality measure. Then the algorithm uses all meta data available related to photos to cover as many events as possible while selecting maximum diversity among events and represents these by selecting the best representative photo from the event. This is a very simple description of the approach and does not do justice to all the power of this approach, but that is not what we are trying to do here.

Summarization algorithms like the one discussed above for photos are required to be designed and developed for large collection of data. Of course once such summary data is available, then one must consider rendering of this data to make it interesting.

Experiential Computing | 4 Comments »

We talked about micro stories. At the other end of data-driven story telling is something that I would call, just to contrast it directly with micro story, a mega story. In mega story, one uses lots and lots of data that may have been collected over a long time. This data represents events at many levels of granularities. These events may be organized based on location, time, theme, person, groups, things or any other ‘concept’ that the storyteller wants to communicate. In many cases, possibly most cases, this data may not be collected by one person, but may be extracted from several sources, transformed it into a suitable unified representation, and then properly organized for the storyteller to render his story.

As a start to discussing mega stories, lets just see such a story in action by a master mega storyteller Hans Rosling. Please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

What did you think of this story? This is a data-driven story put together by collecting data from different sources and rendering it in a very interesting way.

Experiential Computing | 1 Comment »

Given the status of technology today, it is very easy to capture experiential data, such as photos, for events and even organize them. That means that one can now easily store experiential data and use it to tell stories. This means that now that the stories can have more real data associated with them. In this respect the art of storytelling is getting closer to reporting. It may appear that we may lose some important features of stories in this process. Stories based on captured experiences will definitely be different from those that were based on recreating experiences using only text. For one thing, stories are becoming more data driven. Just see popular websites like Facebook – where many stories are being told by posting photos and Albums. Or look at Pinterest where stories are being told by collecting appropriate pictures from different sources. For small or micr stories, people are commonly using sites like FourSquare and Path where stories are being told by collecting different data – photos, location, text, and audio – about an event. This shows that people realize that it is more important to describe (and share) more details of the event than just a textual description. In place of saying that I am on gate 13 at Orange County airport, I can share the map based location, the name of the place (gate 13), and picture of the place at that moment with almost the same effort (but of course with significantly more bits) as in only text. And that is the difference that technology is making – particularly smart phones have made.

This is OK to share micro stories. But what will happen when you want to tell ‘real’ stories that unfold over time. Say you want to share the experience about what happened in 2011, or how your relationship unfolded with Tom, or how dis you build the team and made your dreams real?

Well stories are made of micro stories. There is ‘glue’ needed to put them together, but there are always ‘moments’ that are pulled and then glued to make the complete story. It is quite possible that you may be living those moments and not capture them using your phone, but ultimately all these stories really represent selecting those moments, making them concrete by using appropriate experiential data, and then providing all necessary glue. Remember a beautiful building is made of raw material that is piled at some stage. By selecting appropriate components from different piles and putting it together, an architect and a builder convert it to a beautiful and useful place. A storyteller must select experiential data of all available moments and put it together to tell a story. Just a collection of data for moments is only as much a story as putting together all photos from the year in random order are story of the year. Even a simple organization, like putting them in time order, starts becoming more interesting – then putting them on a timeline makes them more interesting. If we start putting some meta data about each picture, we start providing more components of the story.

Effectively, technology has given us tools that allow us to collect all this data effortlessly. We also have tools to store and organize this data so we can easily pull out what we need. But the problem of selecting appropriate data from relevant moments is a difficult one. And then rendering it in a compelling order is the art that storytelling is. Current technology is changing the nature of stories – by making them more data driven – but it is not going to make everybody a Mark Twain or a Steven Spielberg – it is only helping by reducing efforts in collecting experiences that were either not possible to collect or were very difficult and this in turn will result in making stories closer to facts than fiction. The fiction component will be the ‘glue’ to make stories more interesting and compelling.

Experiential Computing | No Comments »