I’ll be presenting the thoughts we have on a data rich presence in the real world at Nordichi in October. Program and people there looks exciting so I’m very much looking forward to that.
The context of my own presentation is “what can we do with the technology that’s there” and the answer lies somewhere along one of my general principles “If you have data, you need much less technology”. We can make our environment smarter with a little bit of personal history to assist the technology.
Think Amazon collaborative filtering. I.e. replacing natural text recognition, smart but complex queries, and book metadata (what librarians used to think it took to make good book collections) with the statistics of shopping histories.

Some carriers are cheaper than others. Untill they realize the inevitable flat rate, here’s my five cents on how Imity could do its work without spending one cent on a user’s mobile data bill. With a Hollywood ending.

The news is full of stories on online privacy. The highest profile is the story on the released AOL searches, but that story provides a nice counterpoint to Tim O’Reilly’s post on surveillance from below . Like O’Reilly’s commenters point out, while Tim’s optimism is understandable we do have some important historical cases of intense surveillance from below with adverse effects.
Sense of privacy is important for Imity as well. I recently had a good conversation with Eric and Alex of Trustmojo about this. I’ll be blogging more about the specifics when they blog about our conversation, but in the meantime I can point out some of the guiding principles we’re founding our platform on.

• Default Open - sharing beats not sharing. There are proper exceptions to the rule but the default should be “open”.
• Reciprocity - When your neighbour knows something about you, you should know what she knows
• Proximity (obviously) - there’s a huge difference between just sharing your life with anybody and staying open to your immediate surroundings. In the non-digital, analog, physical world you are already placing a lot of trust in your surroundings: You go out expecting to meet people in all kinds of exchanges (commercial, friendly, professional, the list goes on). And in general this trust works out for us. This is a good thing.

Imity is very much about extending this kind of natural trust to the digital realm without breaking it.

Related topic: Steve Mann’s sousveillance project.

I totally dig this Sony GPS designed to integrate smoothly with Sony digicams so that photos can be geotagged by comparing the time on the GPS recording with the time stored on images by the camera.
Using time as a synchronization device for location data is definitely key in Imity. Having a whole Sony toolchain for it seems overkill though. GPS devices with bluetooth are cheap and plentiful and can coordinate with the cameras on their own.

(side note: recording bluetooth transmitted GPS coordinates into your presence data is on the development roadmap for Imity - just not scheduled for the beta release coming up in a few weeks)

(via Julian Bleecker)

We’re getting a lot of questions about the beta we’ve been talking about and when that will be available. I don’t want to name a specific date, but it looks like we’ll be ready to let in users by the end of august. This is probably not going to be a generally available public beta until the end of september - but we really haven’t firmed up the plans in that regard yet.

So far the application is looking great and we’re very excited about it and working as hard as we can to get some software out. Stay tuned.

So if you’re building any kind of social networking style application you need to think about how you’re going to get this off the ground. How is your application going to be fun and useful for the first user? We’ve thought a lot about the empty room problem for Imity and we think we have a good answer, which is: Here’s what our empty room looks like. At the Reboot conference we did a bluetooth scan of the room. The result was overwhelming. There’s so much data out there. Bluetooth is already on, it’s just that nobody’s really paying any attention. Yet.

Trying to explain things that are not already in the world to the world can be difficult. What to leave out, what to stress, choosing metaphors, etc.

Your turn
So I’ve put up a brief note explaining Imity in few (or no) words. Now I’d love to know: Which other three things do you want to know about Imity before you know anything else? Any three things, really. About the company, the people or, yes, the product. (Email me if you’re shy)

We’ve had a lot of discussion at the office about this blog and the website around it. It’s all too easy to fall into some kind of “let’s look corporate” trap always posting as the corporate “we” and trying to stay “on message” through a strict editorial process but that, frankly, is both boring and dehumanizing. Morten found a good discussion on Flock’s blog about this. I like the quote “If you don’t pay attention you drift towards a closed model” and I think it’s true there is a silence trap.

Our informal company motto is “Default Open” (which just means that we think that is really, really important) and we don’t want to close up we decided to broaden the scope on the blog and just blog whatever we find interesting and somewhat related to what we do here. So enough with the We already!. I’m Claus and I’ll be blogging a lot more over here from now on.

(p.s. Yes I realize that I accidentally did this post using the corporate “We” user for Wordpress. Ahh, the irony)

Tour de France, empty room, full room, space, not place. As promised, here is the Powerpoint presentation from Claus’ talk at the Where 2.0 conference. Or, rather, the Here 2.0 conference, as you’ll notice. Also, make sure you see the attending bloggers’ notes.