Technology Trends

This week, I just noticed three highly controversial new services on the Web. In “If the world was run like eBay,” BBC News Magazine reports about an eBay-like lending and borrowing exchange in the U.K. And according to Wired News in “England’s EBay for Sex,” there is another British website where you can offer your sexual expertise, becoming in fact a part-time prostitute. Of course, you also can buy the services of such a part-time sex worker. But the most outrageous service of the week is described by the San Francisco Chronicle in “Point, click and shoot.” From your computer, you can visualize animals living in a Texas ranch and kill them with a click of your mouse, using what the site calls “computer-assisted remote hunting.” Are these services dangerous, illegal, and should they be shut down? Read more about them and send me your comments…

Let’s start with the BBC News Magazine report about the eBay-style banking website.

This week saw the latest twist on what’s come to be known as the “eBay model” with the launch of Zopa — an online loans service that works in a similar way. Anyone with some spare cash can offer it up for a loan, through Zopa. Lenders set their own interest rates and can choose which borrowers to lend to, based on their credit rating.

Borrowers, meanwhile, can pick a rate that’s right for them and because Zopa is simply assisting the transaction, not lending its own assets, it claims to take a smaller cut (1% of the amount borrowed) than a bank. Safeguards are built in to help prevent lenders being fleeced and the whole outfit is sanctioned by the FSA — Britain’s financial services watchdog.

I’m not sure that the safeguards set up by Zopa — and well-detailed on their site — will be enough to lure away fraud.

Meanwhile, Wired News tells us about how “a new British website is helping people to become part-time prostitutes.”

Britain’s AdultWork website is plugging into the growing niche industry of sex-work dilettantes, people who spend a few hours a week in front of a camera, or in bed with a client, to augment their income — or maybe even just because they like it.

Of course, sex-related websites are not new, but this new one has a single activity: “AdultWork is an online clearinghouse for sex work.”

At present it has almost 3,000 members offering services, and several times that number buying or browsing. In addition to sex, the services on offer include webcam peep shows, homemade movies, phone sex and sex by cell-phone SMS. The site launched in late 2003 but had little immediate impact. It’s taken just under two years to rise to prominence.

Users must create a free account to browse the services offered. Users can rate the services they’ve tried, or even offer their own services. Like eBay, AdultWork takes a cut of all transactions, which are processed through the web bank Nochex.

And Wired News explains how “adultery has gone professional.”

Katie’s one of them. Katie describes herself as a BBW — a “big, beautiful woman.” A 45-year-old homemaker living in London, Katie has been working as a prostitute through AdultWork for three months.

Katie said her husband thinks she works a few hours a week for part-time employment agencies and spends the rest of the time looking after their 10-year-old daughter. Instead she makes daytime visits to clients’ homes for sex.

“I have a husband, and sex outside of my marriage is fun,” she said. “He doesn’t know what I do, but I’m very careful STD-wise and really only do it once or twice a month. It’s not much different from having an affair.”

Depending on your point of view, this kind of service can be “immoral” or even illegal. Will it be shut down or be a big success? Time will tell.

Now, with the help of the San Francisco Chronicle, let’s look at how computer users can shoot animals living in Texas from their homes. Here are the opening paragraphs.

On a Texas ranch, exotic sheep and antelope roam about, offering paying hunters an opportunity to bag some big game.

But when the prey wanders into view, the gun can be fired by someone half a world away with the simple click of a computer mouse.

A new Web phenomenon called computer-assisted remote hunting has so outraged one California lawmaker that she has introduced legislation to ban it.

Here is how the Live-Shot service works.

A Web camera is mounted in one area of the range, and both the camera and the gun can be manipulated remotely by computer. [John Lockwood, creator of the site,] said someone on the ground controls when the safety is off the gun to make sure there are no accidents and that the gun is not fired at an animal that is not eligible to be killed.

Luckily for the animals of the ranch, this new service has not been too successful — yet.

[Lockwood] said only one animal has been killed through the Web site so far — a wild boar during a hunt requested by a German television station. He has another hunt set up for early April, with a man who is a quadriplegic and can move only his face muscles.

“This guy was an avid hunter before his accident,” Lockwood said. “He can’t go out and hunt. People like him deserve as much right to hunt as anyone else.”

Right. But is this hunting or killing?

The San Francisco Chronicle also tells us about the costs.

Participants buy a monthly membership for $14. 95 and then sign up for 20-minute shoot sessions for $5.95 at the target range. Participating in a hunt to kill animals costs more and requires a Texas hunting license, which is also available on the Internet.

Lending or borrowing money on Internet, why not? Just measure your risks. Selling your body for sex has been done for ages, so again, why not over the Internet?

But killing animals using your computer should be stopped. If you live in the U.S., you should send a letter to your Congress(wo)man and ask her/him to introduce legislation to shut down this service.

Sources: Jonathan Duffy, BBC News Magazine, March 10, 2005; Jason Walsh, Wired News, March 7, 2005; Lynda Gledhill, San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2005; and various websites

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Today, it’s time for a pause on our technological agenda here. Henry Copeland, from Blogads, is starting a new survey to know who read blogs, and also why and how they’re looking at them. Last year, more than 17,000 people answered the survey, which should not take you more than five minutes to fill. But the number of respondents has to be bigger in 2005 than in 2004, so I’m inviting you to fill this new survey. And don’t forget to mention my blog (www.primidi.com/) as the answer to question #16 — if you enjoy reading it of course. I’ll update you about results when they become available. Read more…

Here is what Copeland wrote in an email yesterday.

Though the survey is unabashadly unscientific, the results will help us better excite advertisers, journalists and the public about the huge and unique audiences blogs serve. I hope some interesting year-over-year trends will emerge, since most of these questions are identical to last year’s.

As was the case last year, the aggregate question-by-question results will be released under the Creative Commons “attribution license.”

This means that the results from this survey will be available to all of you in a few weeks. Let’s look at some key numbers from last year’s survey.

More than 60% of blog readers were older than 30 years old, and 75% were earning at least $75K per year. Not the exact teenagers, isn’t?

Here is a link to the full results from last year’s survey.

And below is a table summarizing why respondents were reading blogs a year ago.

I read blogs for:
	Response Percent	Response Total
Faster news	65.9%	10,504
Latest trends	35%	5,587
Transparent biases	50.3%	8,023
Better perspective	77.9%	12,421
More personality	47%	7,493
More honesty	61.4%	9,788
News I can’t find elsewhere	79.7%	12,713
Other (please specify)	14%	2,241
Total Respondents		15,951
(skipped this question)		1,208

So what has changed since 2004? Fill the survey and you’ll know.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, March 3, 2005; Blogads website

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I’ve read several very interesting stories about social networking recently. In “From Contact to Contract” (neat title), Employee Management writes that many entrepreneurs and even professional recruiters are using services such as LinkedIn, Ryze.com, Spoke.com, or one of the two other dozen social networking sites to fill professional positions, even executive ones. Of course, human resources consulting firms are still also relying on more traditional tools, like their ‘real’ social networks. But in “‘Social Web’ Has Far To Go, But Much Promise,” the American Reporter is more skeptical about the usability of these social networking sites, saying that they are making contacts more difficult instead of easier. And Stowe Boyd, from Corante, concurs, by unlinking from social networking applications he subscribed to in a recent past (links to part 1 and to part 2). So what do you think about these applications? Have you ever used one? And if yes, have you seen some benefits? Read more before answering these questions…

Let’s start with the positive side, as reported by Employee Management.

“These tools take networking to the next level,” says Gerry Crispin, principal of CareerXroads, a human resources consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J., and president of the New Jersey Metro Employment Management Association, a Society for Human Resource Management chapter. “These [sites] are no more than advanced databases that are extremely user-friendly.”

May be they are user-friendly, but are they efficient?

While the sites can be user-friendly, return-on-investment can vary. Social networking sites are best for finding passive candidates and for filling positions that are too specialized to be filled via traditional methods, users say.

Although LinkedIn boasts 1.2 million members, Crispin says fewer than 5 percent of corporate recruiters use social networking sites. The reason, he says, is partly because the sites are relatively new — most having started in the past three years — but also because it is easier to rely on traditional, familiar methods.

But recruiters are still experimenting new methods.

“The best recruiters I know say, ‘I use it some. I find people on LinkedIn, then I Google them and contact them myself,’” says Don Steiny, president of The Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a California-based nonprofit that studies social networking applications. “The best recruiters I know are fearless, and they’re just going to call them up.”

This long article also tells us about the dark side of social networking sites: sharing information.

“I don’t mind sharing that information with friends, but if it’s coming from a business computer, who else has access and how are they using it?” says says Susanne Wetzel, a computer science professor at The Stevens Institute for Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who specializes in computer security. “Too much of our information is floating around out there, and technology is becoming more and more sophisticated.”

Andy Oram, for the American Reporter looks less to privacy and more to ineffiencies.

I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed. For one thing, these networks are technologically rudimentary. They rely heavily on email, which is a reasonable place for a new medium to begin because it’s universal among Internet users. But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating! [...] Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.

Second, the current offerings of social networks are imitations of things already available on the Internet: newsgroup, searches, and chat. There’s nothing here you can’t get elsewhere. The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.

This leads to the third major problem I’ve found with social networks: they make contacts more difficult instead of easier. Yes, broadcasting to friends of friends is trivially easy, so much so that I’ve tried to avoid checking my account because there’s so many irrelevant messages (often in languages I can’t read). But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.

So Andy Oram is not very positive. But what do you think of Stowe Boyd, which writes in Corante that he’s totally giving up with these social networking sites? Here are some short quotes about his motivations.

I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.

I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam.

And as Boyd says, it’s not always easy to exit such a network.

I am annoyed that the SNAs [Social Networking Applications] don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.

I know, I’m asking you to read lots of interesting thoughts. But please do it before answering the above questions about the interest of social networking sites.

Are you using them or planning to dump them? Have they been useful for you? Have you ever fill a very long form asking for your interests? Finally, do you think these sites should be more user-friendly? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Lisa Daniel, for Employee Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 10, No. 1; Andy Oram, The American Reporter, Vol. 11, No. 2,588, February 23, 2005; Stowe Boyd, Corante, February 24 and February 28, 2005

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A Japanese designer has developed a mannequin robot, Palette, which can adapt its movements to the shoppers passing in front of it, according to this article from Agence France-Presse (AFP), “Striking a robotic pose.” Using motion-capture technology, Palette will be able to act as a supermodel. And with its specialized sensors and software, it also will be able to identify the sex and age of shoppers before transmitting them to store owners for marketing purposes. The price has not been set yet, but Palette should go on sale in 2005 in two versions: a body without legs to showcase clothings, and a torso model for jewelry. Read more…

Here is a short description of Palette.

“Mannequins have been static but this will pose for the nearest person by sensing his or her position,” robot designer Tatsuya Matsui told a news conference.

“It makes the product the mannequin wears look more attractive, increasing consumers’ appetite to buy,” said Matsui, who heads Flower Robotics Inc.

The female robot, code-named Palette, can draw inspiration from the world’s most beautiful women, using motion-capture technology to replay the movements of supermodels.

Palette will not only be a mannequin, it will be a spying marketing tool.

Palette will double up as an industrial spy, with the maker planning to program it to judge the age and sex of shoppers and even identify the bags they are carrying and pass along the information to stores for marketing purposes.

Matsui developed Palette with software company SGI Japan Ltd. and aim to start selling it this year for the fashion and service industries.

The price has not been set yet but SGI wants to make it “as close as possible to that of conventional mannequins,” said Hiroshi Otsuka, who is in charge of new business promotion at SGI Japan.

[Disclaimer: I worked in the past for SGI, but right now, I don't have any ties with this company.]

From what you can see in the above image, Palette has no human face, but it’s intentional.

“Consumer attention would be diverted to the face if there were one,” said Matsui, the designer, noting he wanted customers to focus on the clothes or jewellery the mannequin wears.

And as noted above, Palette will initially come in two versions, but Matsui might introduce other models in the future, such as male or child versions.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, via Independent Online, South Africa, February 28, 2005; and various websites

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The ‘real’ booth of the Fraunhofer Institute at the upcoming CeBIT 2005 will feature a brand new and unusual ‘virtual’ reality system. Instead of being surrounded by images, you’ll play with the VR Object Display, a two meters tall cylindrical column with a diameter of 1.6 meters, which has been specifically designed for advertising, trade shows and presentations. The system includes eight off-the-shelf projectors and four mirrors in the lower portion of the column, and is controlled by 5 PCs using a special calibration software. The semitransparent viewing surface for the pictures is wrapped around the upper section of the column. You’ll be able to interact with cars or buildings that don’t exist yet like if they were holograms. It really looks as an impressive step in virtual reality technology. But read more…

Let’s start with one quote from Ivo Haulsen, a scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST.

“We have brought technology out of the darkness of the projection room. When modeling virtual objects, designers, architects and engineers will no longer be surrounded by three-dimensional images as before — they can now install a true-to-life simulation in the display column, walk around it and work on it. This gives the impression that the object they are working on is a hologram,” said Haulsen.

Here is how the system works.

The new high-tech column is two meters tall, with a diameter of 1.6 meters. Examples of what the versatile virtual showcase can do include displaying cars that do not exist yet at trade fairs, showing movie trailers or sets from a stage production in cinema and theater foyers, or reproducing an antique vase for an exhibition. Moving images in luminescent colors grab the attention of passers-by, inviting them to immerse themselves in a world of color — but not by vanishing through a hidden door in the display column, à la Orson Welles in the film classic “The Third Man.”

The innards of the column comprise a combination of proven technology elements: eight off-the-shelf projectors and four mirrors are installed in the lower portion of the column to provide the rear-projection image. The semitransparent viewing surface for the pictures is wrapped around the upper section of the column. The column is controlled by five standard computers using sophisticated calibration software.

Finally, here are some quotes about the past and the future of virtual reality.

“We have now succeeded in projecting the image all the way around the entire column. Original three-dimensional Cave presentations were composed of projections on flat surfaces — in this case, the light is projected onto the walls of the walk-through high-tech cube. In the next step, we were able to cast distortion-free images onto curved surfaces.”

“Projecting onto semicircular screens, for example, produces skewed images, which we straighten back into shape using special software,” says Haulsen, describing the development timeline. An automatic calibration system calculates and corrects distortions in the 360-degree projection, and quickly and precisely puts the pictures back together. Irregular coloring, brightness, unwanted overlaps and tedious fine adjustments are also things of the past.

The Fraunhofer scientists are continuing to develop the technology for multipurpose projection screens in different shapes. It seems there are no limits to what customers can ask for.

I would like to conclude this post with three observations.

In ‘traditional’ — read ‘cubic’ — virtual reality environments, the problems associated with coloring and calibration are hard to solve. If the researchers at FIRST have found solutions for such a new environment, it’s really a breakthrough.

And if they want to invite me to the next CeBIT, which will be held from March 10 to 16 in Hannover, Germany, I’ll be glad to accept.

Finally, if you want more information, here is the VR Object Display page describing the project, its roots and its future.

Sources: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft news release, February 24, 2005; and various pages at the Fraunhofer Institute

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