Why yet another eco system?

• A growing market! With sufficient size! BTW: There is more people with mobile phones (5.2 Billion) than with tooth brushes (4.2 Bio). And the revenue made simply by selling apps is 2.2 Bio. US$ (2010).
• To distinguish oneself from the other competitors.
• To know what people want and use!
• In the longer term, there will be more than Bada supported by Samsung

Some really good links

• Mary Meeker (at Morgan Stanley) on mobile Internet trends
• The Samsung Bada developer platform developer.bada.com
• 193 videos on a YouTube Bada channel (how to use the compass in the Bada platform, etc.)
• Tomi Ahonen Main Trends in the Telecommunications Market

There is a strong cluster of companies in the region, we had many of them as contributors. For instance Salzburg AG, IBM, Audio Mobil, Skidata or Hale electronic. Additionally, the County of Salzburg and obviously we as Salzburg Research are committed to a smarter Salzburg as well.

For the current (mega-)trend towards cities (in the 21st century – by 2050 70 % of the world’s population will be living in cities), this could mean that information and communication technology (so to say: the Internet as the successor of the printing press) is the basis for future prosperity. But then: we also now that a creative milieu, the youth of the population, openness towards immigrants/and or new ideas are part of future city development.

The Diffusion of the Movable Type Printing Press in Europe, 1450 – 1500, by Jeremia Dittmar, available on voxeu.org:

Some interesting quotes in the article by Jeremia Dittmar:

• The figure above gives an overview of the adoption of the printing press. Interestingly, the U.K. is sparsely populated, also, it seems that northern Italy is a real hotspot in 1500 (besides the Netherlands).
• the growth argument in the article says, that those cities that adopted the printing press, had an advantage in growth of the population – against the other cities – of 21 points (1500 – 1600).
• the reason for this could be that the diffusion was still difficult (the technology was almost kept proprietary for over a century, books were heavy) and thus the geographic coverage was limited. This in combination with positive spillovers (creative, intelligent, young people were attracted) finally led to growth. More concrete, the availability of books on arithmetic basics was key to trading countries and regions such as Portugal, northern Italy, etc. (in order to calculate exchange rates, profit shares, interest rates, etc.).

Technically, this is realised with a time of flight camera which recognises movements of people (standing in front of a shopping window) and interpreting them intelligently.

Info in German on the project: see HTL project page

The remaining part of this entry is in German because it does not translate well

Ralf Gerstner, from Springer Verlag in Heidelberg, gave an interesting talk about liquid books. The idea, put simply, is that for publishers like Springer, there is “something” in between the traditional, high quality and longer term printed book publishing and the creative-commons, all-free bottom-up way of publishing in a wiki. They refer to it as the “liquid book”.

See http://liquidpub.org/ for more information. Interestingly, as presented by Gerstner, there are commonalities between traditional software engineering and the way web applications are engineered today (i.e., Web Engineering).

E.g., for liquid books there are

• low barriers / short time to market.
• agile development
• new credit attribution rules less constraints
• …

This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.

The themes the students covered includes

• Usability
• Tag Clouds
• Flash Overlays
• geotaging on the iPhone
• Open Street Map Clients
• Rich-Client-Applications

We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.

Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.

There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.

… an interesting tool that allows a visual comparison of the coverage of various maps, e.g. google maps vs. open streetmap (OSM). Based on people’s enthusiasm, in many (local) places the OSM coverage is much deeper/exacter. However, with respect to quality necessary for routing and navigation applications, OSM in its current status will not be sufficient.

Comparing google maps (left) and open streetmap (right)

The tool for comparison is available at 

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=googlemap&mt1=mapnik&lon=0.00012&lat=0.00043&zoom=17

it points at Techno-Z, home of Salzburg Research. One can see that buildings, local paths, etc. are covered much better in OSM than in google maps. Still, this is what we as human users interpret; software/machine readability can be – and is! – quite different.

Here we go:

• Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
• You will have a crystal ball for your health
• You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
• You will have your own digital shopping assistants
• Forgetting will become a distant memory

One of the issues is to define the scope of “future”, i.e., are we talking 10 years, 20 years, etc.? IMHO I believe that for applied research already 5 years is a pretty long period.

Anyway, there is a nice publication (in German only) by the Feldafinger-Kreis: “Trends, Technologies and Applications”. They argue for the following trends

1. Peer-to-Peer Networking
2. Embedded Software-intensive Systems
3. Security and Safety / Privacy / Self-Defending
4. Semantic Technologies
5. Knowledge Management
6. Intelligent Software-Agents
7. Service Grids in the Internet of Services
8. Intelligent Resource Management
9. Self-Managed Systems
10. e-Processes
11. Internet of Things
12. Mobility / Networked Vehicles
13. Ambient Assisted Living
14. Human-Computer Interaction

As far as our own work is concerned, I think that the following items are of particular interest to our research

• the Internet of things (we were talking about all-Ip building infrastructure)
• ambient assistance
• realtime geography/mobile systems
• semantic technologies

Also, in March 2008 the European Commission hosted an event in Slovenia on the Future Internet, see the following URL http://www.fi-bled.eu/ and a short video: