Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Scoble posts about Kyte.tv on Techcrunch and how Kyte.tv will kill Qik and others in the live video streaming arena. I have been testing the new Kyte.tv S60 app on my Nokia N95 for some time, and it is very powerful.  I am not yet sure if I want all those features within on applications but it does lend itself to not only quickly sending a video onto kyte.tv but rather as a full channel management application, something Robert needs for his work. I am watching Kyte closely, as one of the video start-ups to watch.

Their winning items are the good channel systems with a feedback loop (they had video responses way before seesmic was here if I remember correctly) and their mobile focus, because that is where this video stuff is going. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but you will mostly post video from your phone, simply because there are now already more phone cameras than digital cameras out there and there are way less video cameras than digital cameras and all mobile phone cameras are moving to be able to record video.

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

Anyway, I do believe Kyte.tv will rule them all and will be one of the big video players to watch in the next 10 years. They have the backing, they have the right focus, and they are developing the right tools. They are just a service that provides a service. They are not focussing on becoming a destination, because the destination is always the player, and the TV of the future is distributed and re-aggregated. There will not be one controlling system.

The invitation to the Nokia Idea Generation Workshop came in some time ago and I have now full confirmation as well as a list of other attendees for the event. The general idea is to generate ideas for future mobile products with a timeframe of several years out. With the development of a new phone taking something like 3 years, it has to be a few years out of course.

Up till now I am wonderfully cared for and all things are settled for a wonderful two days with some really great people. Sadly I will not be able to blog about the contents but can blog about everything around and who is there. That list alone will tell you that it will be ahrd for the event not to turn out great.

Mika Röykkee is one of their Nokia senior usability people coming from the S60 team and moving to the next generation products. Udo Szabo is senior product manager on the Ovi team. Urpo (Upi) Nokkonen is hardware designer and I seem to have to thank him for the N95 :). Joeske Schellen is designer at Nokia focussing on wearable electronics. Damian Dinning seems to be the oversight man in concepting and planning and is largely focussing on the imaging part of it all. Sami Oinonen is in the innovation acceleration team and is responsible for co-creation activities so I seem to have to thank him for the event (and probably charlie for the invitation ;)). Laura Richards is one of their category and consumer understanding people (buy does Nokia have cool department names ;)) and Jarkko Kaislasaari is a product manager that worked on the N95. Of course we can’t leave out marketing, so Eri Kuwabara is there too. But actually we all do not need to be there because Timo Veikkola is there, and he is Senior Future Specialist, systematically analyzing the world to spot trends … Our facilitator is Scott Hirsch who seems to have worked on some interesting things.

All in all, this alone gives a great Nokia base to the meeting that will make sure that we have some very productive two days.

But who got invited? Interesting list to say the least. Dave Green is out gaming guy who also runs Snackspot, what a cool blog. Christopher Macintosh Morrison is one of the marketing people, having sold the first digital only marketing agency in London to WPP and now has a new one among others doing marketing for mobile social networks. And Mac, once you get the fire eagle beta login I’d love an invite Vilhelm Sjostrom was Strategic Director at Agency FWD in Helsinki and has turned pro Photographer. Matt Brown is interaction designer at last.fm, which means lots to learn on that front. Thayer Driver was developer at UpMyStreet, which might lead to interesting discussions to what we are doing, and is focussed on social media, gaming and web 2.0. Dietmar Müllser is part of the ISO digital photography committee, tests cameras and knows digital. Jim Griffin is the guy holding the talks about the future of music and entertainment delivery it seems. Sascha Pohflepp studying design interactions and is part of the people behind We Make Money Not Art. Rafe Blandford runs All About Symbian. Matt Hunter is Partner at IDEO and I found a fun video about where digital cameras are going. He is also a drummer, like I am, and not playing, because of a sun, like I am Sami Köykkä is a digital services consultant, speaker and author from what I could find, and Moritz Waldemeyer seems to be another interactions designer type of guy that actually seems to have an iPhone based on his blog.

I actually just posted a video on Seesmic to ask the question what you think the future phone should look like. Just to possibly get a bit of feedback.

This post from This is going to be BIG! right here and there are many very valid points. Let me put some down here.

The thinking, not just the building, has gotten small and lightweight…  Too many people building  features, not applications, or, gasp, companies.  People are confusing design with innovation.  Just because you add AJAX and rounded boxes to something does mean you have innovated.

We are seeing a lot of this out there at the moment, just thing of all the copy cats. The thing is that you can now build stuff very fast and it might even be taken up very fast. But is it a company? We are putting a lot of effort into building a company here at Ormigo. Among others, this means we hired the right group of people that have experience in leading teams and are happy enough to do the base work now. There are some very cool companies out there, but also a lot of featuritis.

Web 2.0 is a conversational vacuum. I’ll prove it.  Unless you live in the Valley, walk outside your door and try to find a Twitter user… You’ve got six hours.  Go.  Trust me, we’re talking to ourselves.  (Don’t get me wrong…  I really like Twitter…  We just need to remind ourselves about how close to the edge we all are out here.)

Yes! Thank you! We are our own echo chamber. It was the blogging world now it’s the startup world.

A lot of powerful people don’t participate.  How many VC’s out there fund widget companies without having a blog or a MySpace profile?  Any Sony bloggers out there?  What about brand managers that want to do Second Life campaigns without ever having been inside.  How about my elected representatives?  They get out there and kiss babies during election time, but how many blogging elected officials are there?  (And not watered down campaign blogs… actual blogs written by the actual people.)  We could do great things if we weren’t so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who’ve never even heard of Kool Aid. 

It is getting there I have to say here. We have real people blogging, more and more, but it’s not an easy concept to grasp. It will make the world a better place in the long run, forcing companies to be open. But I have been saying this for a long time. The good thing about this Internet thing getting into the mainstream is that you can not as easily fake it anymore. And it will get harder.

Rainer Wasserfuhr has some thoughts about Google Earth 2012. I translate from German:
Google Earth 2012 looks something like this: 100.000 people walk around with headcams, retinadisplays and wirelesshubs. You can connect to the cam of your friend and choose a perspective. Thanks to magical Google Software you can choose between different locations and fly back and forth seemlessly. The software calculates what you see from satellite and video stream data that it has archived. Effects like daylight and weather are calculated dynamically, annoying moving objects filtered out.

I love his other bets too. End of 2006 there will be lawyers with Skypenumbers on their web site. Agreed. The cooler one is that by End of 2007, when riding a bus, a red light on his 3G phone will tell him that a contact of a contact from OpenBC is on the bus and can be talked to directly. Looking forward to all that stuff Rainer!

Technorati Tags: Future, Google, OpenBC, Rainer Wasserfuhr, Skype

If you want to know a bit more about what Les Blogs 2.0 was like, I suggest taking a look at the videos (Update: That link doesn’t work anymore, please go here.) from the event. I can especially suggest Eight Ideas that will revolutionize the centry by Ben Hammersley, who did a very very good talk. The guy is great to listen to.

But a bit of feedback about that one. Ben Hammersly did his speech and I sadly could not ask a question because I had to leave before he was finished. What he said is very valid. In previous times stuff you did, did not scale as easily. As Hugh MacLeod said: “Real people don’t scale.” If you built swords then those swords could not make better swords. Race horses can only go this fast. But in our IT world, a better software will help you make better software. Better tools allow you to build better tools. It is quasi self-priming. He said that we might suddenly have something that will always get better and that there will not really need to be one big step forward, like with the car which replaced the horse.

There is a problem with that though and the problem might be bigger than any of us want to admit, because especially for the upper class, the knowledge workers, the problem will be minor… but only when not considering the wider impact, like riots of the lower class. What is the problem? Being able to always get better, always get more and more for less. Less money, less work, less money. Suddenly lots of people are doing stuff for themselves, personally, individually. On my wedding we had a professional photographer but while it is good thing to have somebody like this for such a special event where you want to be absolutely sure you have good pictures, more and more people learn how to shoot good photos. We are making photos personal, and hence take away somebodies job. On the bigger scale we can produce crops with less and less people. We will get fusion reactors going and suddenly don’t need to drill for oil. Everybody just has their own hydrogen generator or fusion reactor in their home. Of course those things are build automatically. The personal power grid is actually something that people are thinking about, making us all into power producers.

All this is great, but we need to redistribute money differently, or need to allow people to survive without a job, because there just will not be a job for a lot of people out there. And with all the information suddenly being free, and tools mining them automatically, you do not need so many people. People defined each other about their jobs for ages though and you can’t just take that away from them. And with less people making more money, more people have less money. I mean we don’t grow money on trees. That might really be the next trap that we are moving into. Yes, we can all be nice, connect, blog, furl, whatever, but that does not make any money and there are very few people that get the amount of traffic on their blog that gives them an ego boost big enough to overcome joblessness.

Just a few things to think about. But I am looking forward to Ben’s book.

Technorati Tags: Ben Hammersley, Free Knowledge, Future, lesblogs, video