Just in case anyone was still in doubt that Apple’s iPod is going to slowly grow into a universal portable media server, Apple has just announced several new iPod accessories, including a voice recorder (microphone to turn the iPod into a dictaphone) and media reader (accepts various media cards and slurps the data onto the hard drive for later retrieval). The iPod isn’t the first hard-drive based MP3 player to offer these extras (Archos has had one for a while), but Apple goes one step further with automatic synchronization of recorded audio and stored pictures with iTunes and iPhoto respectively. Now if they can just add Bluetooth the iPod will be well on its way to becoming the personal server it’s destined to become.

I just got my first automated blog-comment spam, attached to my post about artificial diamonds (I’ve since deleted it). Interestingly enough, the spam wasn’t meant for me or my readers but for Google — it was just random snatches of English peppered with the word “jewelry” and links to http://jewelry.lstor.com/, which produces more random phrases. No doubt the idea is to raise the pagerank of some real page that will go there later.

Wonder if this is what they mean when all those spammers keep telling me they can raise my Google ranking?

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks have just released a report that sheds a lot of light on the much-reported polls that show Americans have serious misconceptions about the facts surrounding the Iraq War. (PIPA’s press release and questionnaire are also available).

At the heart of the PIPA study are three questions:

• Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization?
• Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?
• Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the US having gone to war with Iraq, do you think the majority of people favor the US having gone to war?

The answers, by the way, are “no clear evidence has been found,” “no weapons of mass destruction have been found,” and “the majority of people in the world do not favor the US having gone to war.” If you got at least one wrong don’t feel too bad: only 30% of people surveyed in three polls (June, July, and August-September) got all three correct.

The report is well worth reading, but here’s a brief summary of their findings:

NeoMedia has just announced a service where you can take a picture of an ISBN code (the barcode printed on every book jacket) with a cellphone camera and be automatically brought the the Amazon.com page for that book. From their press release:

“Now, shoppers can take out their Nokia(R) 3650 camera phone at Barnes & Noble, Border’s, or just about any other book store, and just take a picture of the ISBN on the book to comparison shop at Amazon.com right on the screen of their wireless Web browser,” Jensen said. “It’s kind of a high-tech version of the Santa Claus at Macy’s(R) sending Christmas shoppers to Gimbels in the classic movie, ‘Miracle on 34th Street’,” he mused.

Gizmodo suggests this is Barnes & Noble’s worst nightmare, but I expect it won’t hurt the large chains, as their volume keeps prices fairly close to Amazon’s as it is. It’ll be harder on independent bookstores, but even then there’s a premium that people are willing to pay for a book that’s already in their hot little hands. That premium will be even larger than the usual amount people will pay for bricks-and-mortar convenience because the customer is already in the store — I expect a lot more.

The biggest question for me is whether “now is the time.” I first saw this kind of technology about 6 years ago, both in a class project at MIT and in Anderson Consulting’s (now Accenture‘s) Shopper’s Eye project, and even briefly looked at doing a startup in this area just before the crash. It never quite felt like the time was right for this to go mainstream because the technology wasn’t in the hands of enough consumers. Clearly NeoMedia thinks we’re getting close.

References

• Direct Link to Amazon.com for Book Price Shoppers is Newest Application for ‘PaperClick for Nokia Camera Cell Phones’ from NeoMedia Technologies(NeoMedia press release, 30 September 2003)
• PaperClick and IDOCS Technology (NeoMedia)
• Bad news for bookstores: instantly check Amazon prices with a cameraphone (Gizmodo, 2 October 2003)
• Shopper’s Eye: Using Location-based Filtering for a Shopping Agent in the Physical World (Andrew E. Fano, May 1998)

The CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) is working to develop training simulations with the help of the Institute for Creative Technologies, a center within the University of Southern California that specializes in combining artificial intelligence, virtual reality and techniques from the videogame and movie industries to create interactive training simulations. The company recently received accolades for their “Full Spectrum Warrior” project, which was designed as a training aid for the US Army but has also lead to a commercial videogame for the X-Box. The Army project uses material developed with the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning and a rich AI engine to run trainees through both military and peacekeeping scenarios. For example, in one scenario the trainee plays an officer in charge of a unit that has just been involved in a traffic accident between a tank and a non-English-speaking civilian. If approved, the CIA’s simulation would allow analyst trainees to play themselves or the part of terrorist cell leaders, cell members, money-movers and facilitators.

The Washington Times, who broke the story, is highly critical of the project, comparing it to Vice Adm. John Poindexter’s ill-received Idea Futures project and quoting unnamed military officials and other critics who call it “a ridiculous and absurd scheme that makes Poindexter’s project look good in comparison” and suggest that “the key issue here is the CTC misspending funds on silly, low-priority projects, exactly the kind of thing that forced Admiral Poindexter to resign.” A follow-up article, also in the Washington Times, quotes former Georgia congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) as saying “Perhaps this is the reason we were surprised by September 11. If it weren’t so serious, it would be comical… What we ought to be doing is focusing our money and attention in identifying terrorists and their associates so we can be on the watch for these characters, not playing video games.” The Sydney Morning Herald was slightly less critical, but also linked the project with Poindexter’s projects.

It’s entirely possible that this project is too expensive (the CIA has not revealed the price tag) or that the simulation is in some way teaching the wrong lessons. However, the main criticism seems to be of the form “the CIA is wasting time playing video games,” which is patently absurd. Simulation role-playing has been an effective training tool in both the military and business for decades, and in fact much of the technology now seen in video games was originally developed for training U.S. Army officers. To suggest that the CIA should be out catching terrorists instead of playing video games is like suggesting the U.S. Army should be out fighting wars instead of wasting their time doing training exercises consisting of “running around with toy guns playing capture the flag.”

It’s pretty clear that there’s a thicket of political wrangling going on behind the scenes, and the Times story is a salvo fired by people who want this CIA project canceled. I’ve no idea whether this is a case of fighting over scarce funding, vengeance against the CTC, or an honest attempt to scuttle a project that won’t provide good training, and I won’t even begin to speculate. Hopefully someone with a better understanding of the ins and outs of intelligence and military politics (like Phil Carter at Intel Dump) will weigh in on this before long.

• DCI Counterterrorist Center (CTC)
• Institute for Creative Technologies
• Full Spectrum Warrior (Institute for Creative Technologies)
• CIA pursues video game (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, 29 September 2003)
• CIA criticized for video game (Audrey Hudson, Washington Times, 29 September 2003)
• CIA to combat terrorism with Bin Laden video game (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2003)
• CIA agents ‘to play bin Laden’ (ITV.com, 29 September 2003)

Intel’s Personal Server project, lead by Ubiquitous Computing long-timer Roy Want, got some press this past week after it was shown at the Intel Developer Forum. The prototype is a 400MHz computer with Bluetooth, battery and storage, all about the size of a deck of cards. No screen and no keyboard — I/O is handled by whatever devices happen to be around, be they the display and keyboard on your desk, the large-screen projector in the conference room or your portable touch-screen. This concept isn’t new; it’s something that researchers in Ubiquitous Computing and Wearable Computing (including Roy) have been talking about for over a decade. But it is the right concept, and Moore’s Law is finally bringing it to almost within reach.

There are three main reasons why this is the Right Thing(tm):

• Your hands aren’t getting smaller. Handheld computers are now small enough that the limiting factor is screen and button size. Since our hands aren’t getting any smaller, we’re pretty much at the limit for everything-in-a-single-brick handhelds, at least for current applications. One of the ways out of that box is the wearable computing approach, where interfaces are spread around the body like clothing or jewelry. Displays are shrunk by embedding them directly into the glasses, tiny microphones are used for speech recognition, micro cameras and accelerometers are used for for gesture and context recognition, and specialty input devices such as medical monitors get used instead of more generic input devices. One of the big difficulties with wearables is all the wires leading from the CPU/Disk/Battery unit to the I/O devices, and in fact this problem was a big motivating force behind the IEEE 802.15 short-range wireless standards, which include Bluetooth. Wireless isn’t a complete solution (you still have to worry about powering your I/O devices) but it’s a start.

  The other way to break the hand-size limit is the UbiComp approach: use whatever interfaces are in your surrounding area. When I’m at my desk I want to use my nice flat-panel display and ergonomic keyboard, not my black-and-white cellphone LCD. When I give a presentation I want to use the conference hall’s projector. I don’t need a keyboard at all, just enough to launch my Keynote presentation and change slides. Roy naturally leans towards this second approach, but as I’ve argued before the Ubicomp and Wearables approaches work well together; there’s no need to choose.

• Always the right tool for the job. Another advantage to breaking the CPU from the I/O is it gets around an inherent conflict in interface design. On the one hand, designers will tell you that you always want the interface to fit the task. Use a hammer to drive nails and a screwdriver to turn screws, and all that. But in the mobile world you don’t want to carry around your cellphone, PDA, MP3 player, two-way pager, camera and laptop everywhere you go. When it comes to mobility, most people choose to carry a Swiss Army knife instead of a full toolchest, even though the one-size-fits-all interface won’t ever be quite right for the task. (That’s why I still carry my Danger Hiptop, which is great for text messaging but feels like I’m holding a bar of soap to my ear when I use it for voice.) When you break the brick, as it were, you can use one CPU, main battery, network connection and storage for all your devices. Then just bring whatever interfaces you need for whatever you tasks you expect that day, and use interfaces in your environment when they’re available.

• Thin clients don’t grow with Moore’s Law. An alternative to having your personal CPU with you at all times is to run a thin client that has just enough smarts to talk to a server over wireless. The server then does all the heavy lifting. The trouble with this approach is that thin clients rely mainly on two resources: wireless bandwidth and the rather significant battery power needed to get to the nearest cell tower. The trouble is, these are the two resources that are growing most slowly. Since 1990, the RAM in mobile computers has improved a hundred-fold, CPUs 400-fold, and disk-space a whopping 1200-fold. In that same time, long-haul wireless speed has improved only 20-fold and battery efficiency only three-fold. (Thanks to Thad Starner for those numbers.) And, of course, thin clients don’t work when you’re in a wireless deadzone.

It’s not clear when Intel (or Apple or Sony for that matter) will finally come out with a successful Personal Server style product. The hardware is just one necessary piece to the puzzle, with resource discovery, communication standards, good interface design and of course the all-important “killer app” to bring it all together. But in spite of the hurdles yet to come, this is the right approach. I’m glad to see Intel is giving it the support it deserves.

• The Personal Server (Intel Research)
• Intel Personal Server Research: Mobile Computing in the Palm of Your Hand (Roy Want, Intel Research, 5 September 2003)
• Intel Foretells “Personal Server” (Mark Hachman, eWeek, 16 September 2003)
• Intel Developer Forum (Intel, 16-18 September 2003)
• IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2003)

As a reminder for those who are interested in wearable computers, the early registration deadline for the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers is this Friday, September 26th. You can check out the advance program here.

I’ll be co-teaching the Introduction to Wearable Computers tutorial with Thad Starner, and am also tutorials chair and on the program committee.