My First iPOD

So I bought my first iPOD in early December, it’s the Touch model.
Now I have to say I had this idea years ago. Specifically I remember purchasing my first cassette recorder in 1974 – I remember this because the salesman left Elton Johns Caribou tape in the machine. At the time I was also playing around with broken 8-track machine and the chunkiness of the mechanics and fragileness of the tape led me to proclaim “someday the voice and music recorded on these types of tape recorders will be contained on a integrated circuit”.

That obviously happened in the late 90’s [Apples version debuting in October of 2001] fueled by compression technology from the 80’s and…. the grand daddy of all that created the breakout demand, peer-to-peer file sharing.

Timeline - History of MP3

• 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)
• 1988 - January - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
• 1989 - April - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
• 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
• 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
• 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later. 1996 November 26, - United States patent issued for MP3.
• 1998 - September - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
• 1999 - February - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
• 1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.
  

I knew that Naspter existed and that free music what just a high speed connection away. I did look at the players “of the day” and was considering the Intel pocket Concert for $499.99. My idea of what they should look like was greatly different from the little boxes they were selling at the time. I think the market place was happy to have a sold state walkman.

As I looked at the players available in the late 90’s I wondered why they couldn’t be all screen with touch sensitive buttons - just like the control panels in Star Trek the Next Generation.

iFrame

Idea:
Add inherent connectivity [Wi-Fi] to Digital Photo Frames to allow for “selected” receipt of photos thus creating an intelligent Frame.

Concept:
Address the Photo Frame via a wireless network to load Pictures & information. The photographic content of the received pictures are analyzed for criteria match, and then displayed.

Scope:
Using a Wi-Fi enabled camera, the user can download pictures instantly for review and deletion.
Automatically receive;
-Family pictures that meet pre-set requirements.
-5 day weather forecast
-Road/ highway condition form traffic camera along your route
-Week specials at your local supermarket
-Lotto numbers


Intellectual Property:
The IP [this is where the money is to be made] is held within a peer-to-peer network that allow “pushing” of photos to authorized photo frames. A preference filter allows family or friends send you their photographs but only receive the on that meet your criteria. Example: “receive Billy and Sue, or not Bobby. A complex algorithm then proceeds to analyze the image and passes only the selected to be displayed on your photo frame.

Time Machine

Idea:
When I was a kid I would [and still do] have a overwhelming feeling that “I” will invent a time machine. I’m not sure what put(s) this notation into the my head, I’m not obsessed about it but the thought pops into my brain from time-to-time.


Concept:
It also occurred to me that the actual answer to this complex problem will be most likely be a simple one.
I tend to have two levels of thinking; un-constrained & constrained, so to me "simple" in my un-constrained thinking mode meant the solution would lie somehow within the shared memories of other humans.


Scope:
Before Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of worldwide web, my knowledge was limited to what I had read, saw, or was taught.
Although the concept of "home-based global information" goes at least as far back as Isaac Asimov's short story "Anniversary", in which people would “look up” information on a fictional supercomputer called Multivac – [Multiple vacuum tubes analog computer] which was connected by a "planet wide network of circuits" ….. but I digress.

So then, with a little bit of Goggling I recently stumbled across a 1945 document entitled “As We May Think” and thanks to Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham [not Ritchie’s Father] for the invention of the Wiki data this was liked to a summary page document entitled “Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences”

In summary it's agurment is; while personal media capture has typically been sparse throughout a lifetime, we now have the technology to consider continuous archival and retrieval of all media relating to ones personal experiences.
From a "time Machine" point of view the interesting thing to note is that continuous archival of ones life will fundamentally alter our relationship to biological memory, since analysis of such media powerfully augments human memory.


Form:
Now getting back to the “time machine” and the concept of shared memories; I now havw learned that storage of a persons “media throughout a lifetime” has been discussed since at least 1945, when Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think”.

Bush conceived the fictional “Memex” device “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”
His vision was astonishingly broad for the nineteen forties, including full-text search, annotations, hyperlinks, virtually unlimited storage and even stereo cameras mounted on eyeglasses. Today, with silicon memory storage in the gigabytes, low cost CCD/Cmos sensors, and computing technology have progressed to the point of making a "Memex type" device feasible and affordable.

Intellectual Property:
The IP [this is where the money is to be made] would be to conceive the algorithm to access all living memories and store them in a sort of "personal memory-bank internet" or Life Experience storage vault allowing the other person(s) to have to “live” [vicariously] that persons life - perhaps in another time. Aside for the legal ramifications [would be huge] this solves the classic “time travel conundrum” of altering the future - since your living inside someone’s fixed memories.

NOTE: that the "Memex" approach for me is too constrained with current technology and therefore strikes me as a bit old-school. I mean who’s going to wear camera glasses all the time? I see this memory capture if “hardware” based to be an Omni-present body camera woven into the clothes you and I would wear [more of my thoughts on this in wearable computer Web Log entry]. This would be somewhat like a Life Experience Black Box Recorder or “LEBBR”.

Laterally thinking… the breakthrough could possibly be chemical based. A drug that induces telepathic/ telekinetic abilities allowing one to “time travel” around the world living via others memory experiences. Of course this drug would also need to keep the users memories from fading with age.

Ring of knowledge

Idea:
A mobile knowledge base that can answer your questions with facts. Like Wikipedia only with voice recognition the answer would be in a simple and direct form.

Concept:

• People have questions.
• Knowledgeable people can handle situations better.
• The business of life itself is consisted to be our main distraction, but when given free time even the most un-inquisitive person is given to “ponder” about things.

Scope:
To develop a method linking a “spoken phrase” [i.e. a question] to the internets “ring of knowledge”.

Form:
The hardware would ideally be a wearable computer but technology will ultimately determine how this evolves.

Intellectual Property:
The IP [this is where the money is to be made] is the algorithm of interpreting the spoken question into an accurate and factual answer.