Show 96 - Life logging, Futurology and LED Lighting
Here is a transcript from FrequencyCast Show 96, where we discuss life logging, talk to a futurologist and look at the future of LED lighting.
Listen to, or download, FrequencyCast Show 96 (31 mins) |
FrequencyCast Show 96 Transcript:
Pete:
Focus time, hello Kelly.
Kelly:
Hi, Pete.
Pete:
You're looking very well.
Kelly:
Ah, thank you very much; so are you.
Pete:
Thank you very much – you say the nicest things. Right, today, first off, we're going to talk about life logging. Now, what does that mean to you?
Kelly:
To be honest, life logging for me is happening every day, particularly with social media. It's basically logging your life on the internet.
Pete:
That is true, yes. We do tweet and Facebook, and all that kind of stuff, as we go along. But this is the concept of serious life logging, where you put your entire life, twenty-four hours a day, on the net for all to see. How do you fancy doing that for a while?
Kelly:
You know full well I'm not going to fancy doing that, at all.
Pete:
I kind of thought you'd be a bit anti this, but there is a whole science building up around this, and there are communities of life loggers, or gloggers, and also life caching, which isn't actually transmitting what you do, but it's storing a record of what you do, so there's constantly this archive of what you've been up to.
Kelly:
I don't see why you would actively help this entire Big Brother scenario, and make it so easy to access everything about yourself.
Pete:
But come on, you're being tracked anyway. Every time you use a cash machine, an Oyster card; you walk past something with a CCTV camera; your mobile phone is constantly sending where you are anyway, all your emails are monitored.
Kelly:
Well firstly, why would you aid it? You're actually making it far worse for yourself, by kind of putting that out there.
Pete:
Look at things like your loyalty cards – you've got a Tesco card, a Nectar card, so they know what brand of loo roll you use, what supermarket you've been in – all that kind of stuff. You're being tracked all the time, so why not?
Kelly:
I think it's very dangerous. You only have to look at how many people have been sacked, because they've put the wrong thing on there. How many employers, how many people generally are going to do a full search on you? The smallest mistake, the smallest moment of being young, can literally ruin the rest of your life.
Pete:
Now, you see, that I do believe in, and I have actually seen some evidence of that, and certainly kids today that are typing comments about their employers, or what they've been up to, that's going to be on the net forever. But the idea of where you are, who you're with, what you're doing, I don't see any problem with that being tracked. I think that's a fair thing.
Kelly:
Imagine if we were together, and you'd bunked off work, and I had put something with you linked to it, how stuffed would you be?
Pete:
All right, fair point, but ... I don't know. You see, I'm trying something out. I'm actually trying a little bit of this at the moment, using a new app that we'll talk about in a minute, but before we go onto that, we're going to look at an app that we looked at when we went to Gadget Show Live. Do you remember the little brooch thing that you were wearing?
Kelly:
Yes, I do. It took pictures constantly, I believe.
Pete:
That was a live tracking device, that was constantly taking pics of what you were up to. Shall we have a little listen?
Kelly:
Why not?
Pete:
You've got a lovely necklace on there, it's bright orange. What are you wearing?
Kelly:
Well, I'm basically wearing my entire life.
Pete:
You are indeed. We're talking to Nicholas, from a company called Narrative. Can you explain this rather colourful little necklace that Kelly's wearing here?
Nicholas:
Sure. She's wearing the Narrative Clip, which is a fully-automatic, effortless, wearable camera, which is also the smallest wearable camera in the world, and it takes a photo every 30 seconds, along with capturing GPS and other sensor data.
Kelly, wearing the Narrative Clip
Pete:
OK, so Kelly can wear this, walk around and live her life, and at the day there's a record of what she's been doing, and where she's been – is that the size of it?
Nicholas:
That's roughly it. We thought that, why not take the documentation part of life, and not have it get in the way of living life.
Pete:
OK, so the photos it holds, are they high res, or is it VGA kind of stuff?
Nicholas:
It's normal res, I'd say. It's five megapixel, which is about the same as an iPhone 4 takes.
Pete:
And it stores where it was recorded as well, with GPS?
Nicholas:
Yes, so it's photos plus GPS, it stores on the device itself, until you offload them on your computer, and send them to the cloud, where we can do lots of processing and sorting.
Pete:
OK. I actually love this idea, walking around, recording where you are, and what you're seeing all the time. What's the main use case, who would you say would use this kind of product?
Nicholas:
Many people think of this as capturing special occasions, and they want it to wear it for weddings, or birthdays, or travel. What we also notice is that the more people use it, and when they realise that they capture more than they thought they would they want to use it more and more.
Pete:
Excellent. And where would someone find out more about these?
Nicholas:
We're at GetNarrative.com, and if you search for Narrative Clip, you can find all sorts of links of, people have been writing about us.
Pete:
OK, and what sort of price point are we looking at for this?
Nicholas:
This will be £219, including one year of service.
Pete:
Excellent, thank you very much. It looks very nice – it suits you.
Nicholas:
Glad you like it, thank you.
Pete:
So how would you feel about walking around with a camera strapped to you, 24 hours a day?
Kelly:
Again, you know what my answer's going to be. I have absolutely no desire to do that at all.
Pete:
OK, well of course, when we start moving into this wearable tech, particularly I'm thinking of these Google Glasses. Those things you will wear, and it will record everything that you see, so I'm guessing you're not overly keen on that idea, even if it's not recording you, but it's recording what you do, and where you are?
Kelly:
I think there's a really nice purpose for it, when you're travelling, say, and you want to capture things of the moment. Past that point, I mean, it's not necessary – you've seen it.
Pete:
This app is called Saga, and before you ask, it isn't an over-50s' holiday club kind of thing. It is a free life logging application, and I'm rather impressed with it. Let me just fire this up. So it has now correctly identified, I've stopped moving, so you can see the address of our studios, yeah?
Kelly:
Yeah, absolutely.
Pete:
Now, what this does is, it uses the GPS in the phone to record where you are. It also knows that I've been stationery for a little while. Now, I can tag that with a location, like work or studio, or home or whatever, and every time I'm back here, it will know where I am, and what I'm doing. Now, if you look back a little bit, let me just look back at my day, see if you can tell me what I've been up to today.
Kelly:
I could probably tell you that without an app.
Pete:
Go on then, where have I been today?
Kelly:
You've been to Costa.
Pete:
OK, so here we go, look – let me just scroll back a bit. So it's got where we are now. It's also showing how many calories I've eaten today, because I'm doing my calorie tracking at the moment. It's showed that I was at home one hour and 29 minutes ago. It shows that I took that photo, and put it on Facebook earlier.
Kelly:
Fantastic!
Pete:
Yes, that's the cat sitting on me. I couldn't get off my chair, because I had a cat on me. Now, it's lifted that from Facebook, and you can see, if I scroll down a little bit more, I was at ...
Kelly:
Costa.
Pete:
Yeah, I did stop off for a Costa Coffee. Before that, I stopped off at an electrical shop, and what's my status there?
Kelly:
Oh, you were looking for LED lightbulbs?
Pete:
Indeed, for the show today, no less. We'll explain a bit more about that in a minute. But this has basically tracked everything I've done, how far I've walked, what my weight is, what my calorie intake has been, how many steps I've done; all of my tweets, all of my Facebook messages, all of my locations; and basically, what it does is, it ties your Facebook account to your Twitter account, to your Foursquare account, to Instagram, to Runkeeper, BodyMedia, Withings (the wireless scales), my little Fitbit that I carry around. It collates all of that information, about where you are, what you've been up to, who you've interacted with, where you've been, all in one app.
Kelly:
OK, I'm going to ask you a question – what are you going to do now, with that information?
Pete:
Keep it forever.
Kelly:
But why? – for what use?
Pete:
I know where I've been.
Kelly:
You know where you've been anyway. Your mind cannot be that bad, that you would need to backtrack to that extent, to see what you've posted on Facebook, to see where you happen to have been, or how many calories you ate six months ago.
Pete:
Ah, now, it does tell you that. What you can do here – it does, look!
Kelly:
This is ridiculous! This is beyond ridiculous!
Pete:
Look at this, you see – that's the time spent at home versus the time spent at work, and a graph; distance travelled each week, distance walked, distance driven; number of unique places visited each day. It calculates all of this kind of stuff, in real time.
Kelly:
Well then, how depressing is that going to be, when you look at work/life balance, and actually how much you get out?
Pete:
Look at it – graphs and everything, it's awesome.
Kelly:
It's completely pointless.
Pete:
Now, the really clever bit though, is look – that exports it to a calendar in an iCal file, so I can actually merge that in real time into my diary.
Kelly:
What, so you've imported Costa Coffee, half-an-hour?
Pete:
It's got everything!
Kelly:
Diaries are for forward planning. They're not for just randomly adding in what you did that day. You can't even come up with a valuable use for this information.
Pete:
Well, I'm really not convincing you about this, am I?
Kelly:
No, and you knew that you wouldn't.
Pete:
I did know that. I must say though, in theory, if this starts doing all that it's promising to do, I can potentially see some uses for this. One of the things it's meant to do is learn your habits, so learn where you are, and where you're going. So it will know, for instance, the days that you work, and the time that you leave. Once it starts learning patterns about you, it can start predicting, so checking the travel news for you, or checking the weather, before you leave, so it can start predicting what could be a problem; also reminding you of things that are in your diary, and alerting you that you should have left by now to be at a particular appointment, at a particular location. I can see some potential – I know it sounds a bit daft, but there is some mileage in something being with you all the time, that knows what you're going to do next, and can help you make sure you do it.
Kelly:
Well, I guess you are considerably older, and my potentially need a nudge every now and then, to remember the general day-to-day activities. I've been waiting to get that in for a while! I've listened to that for a long time, and thought, I'm getting that in. You thought you'd come up with a really good argument, and I've stumped you again!
Pete:
I'll get me coat.
Pete:
Right, dear listener, please – somebody out there must think this is a good idea. I did at the time; I'm now beginning to change my mind. So please, someone, tell me this is a good idea.
Kelly:
And somebody please tell him he's not, so he does not continue tracking how many Costa Coffees he's had.
Pete:
Well, this does remind me of a presentation I went to, it must have been about five years ago, at the BT Tower. It was a social event that BT were putting on, and they brought along a futurologist. Have you ever met a futurologist?
Kelly:
I haven't, but I'd love to.
Pete:
And he was talking about a rather clever little gadget. Fortunately, I actually bumped into him about six months ago, and of course I had my trusty tape recorder with me, so would you like to hear what the futurologist thinks about this life tracking? – and also, what his prediction is for the biggest trends in tech?
Kelly:
Yes please.
Pete:
So I caught up with Jonathan Mitchener a little bit earlier. My first question was, just what is a futurologist?
Jonathan:
It's a great job, and it's a great title, but it's actually a fantastically interesting and enjoyable job. So what I do is, I go around understanding what technology is coming ahead, sometimes years, sometimes decades ahead. I go round to talk to experts around the world about what's coming, and then distil that into a story that helps some senior people in organisations understand the strategy for how that sort of technology change is going to affect their organisations in the future.
Pete:
Now, I first met you, it must have been five or six years ago, and you were talking about wearable technology, and some of your experiences. Now this year we're fairly sure is going to be the year of the smart watch, and we're seeing Apple and Google rushing out these watches that can get you text messages, and link up to your mobile phones. Where do you think this wearable technology could take us?
Jonathan:
The wearable stuff is quite interesting, because I think what one's got to think about is, the reason why somebody will want to buy that. Everybody wants a phone, so the smartphone isn't a difficult thing to sell. Smart wearables is something else, so the Google Glasses, for example, not many people want to wear glasses if they don't already have to wear glasses, so it's got to be really fantastic as an experience, in order for that to take off mass market. I'm sure it'll be great for the niche market, but in terms of mass market, like smartphones, I think wearables generally have to be really good at what they do, or offer something additional to what we can already do. In terms of the smart watch, I think that we will see products like that from the sort of players that you mentioned. I think it'll be an additional thing to the smartphone first of all, and the sort of thing we were talking about when I met you at the Tower, I think lends itself to the whole data explosion that's coming as well. So we've got data all around us at the moment, it's how do we make use of that stuff, and how to we put what's important in front of us.
Pete:
When I saw you talking, you gave a very good example of making use of presumably near-field technology. Would you mind just giving us a quick summary of what that was all about?
Jonathan:
Yeah, that was the smart badge, so I went to a conference in Boston, and they were trying out a very early prototype of that sort of device, but the normal badge you get when you go to a conference is normally a piece of plastic, that you pin onto your lapel pocket. This, they gave me, was an active badge. It was a bit clunky and bulky, but it was only a prototype. What it did is, it used location-based sensing to work out who you'd been with, who you'd been talking to, socialising with over the course of the conference, and then, by the time you got home from it, you could be sent an automatic generated list of people that you'd met, with their contact details, and it was pretty good. The top five that I got sent were the people that I was going to connect with afterwards.
Pete:
So it gave you the top five people that you were speaking to, and I thought the way it worked out, who the top five people were, was quite clever.
Jonathan:
Yes, it would work out precisely how many times you'd been with the same person, or how much time you'd spent; whether you were sitting next to them during the seminar sessions, and things like that. The other thing that I think was important about it was that it was able to message, so in real time, when you were standing in a small group, for example, having coffee at the start of the event, if there was a message, like for me, because I was doing a talk at the conference, that message could come up on the badge of the person opposite that I was standing with – not anybody else's badge, not my badge, but the person who I could naturally see, and that was really a neat way of using the location and the positioning, to give a message in a nice, subtle, and uninterruptable way.
Pete:
Very clever – yes, I'd forgotten that bit, when you were talking – that was exceptionally clever. And one thing that you would see on the horizon that we can all look forward to, just with the futurologist's hat there, what's the next big thing going to be, do you think?
Jonathan:
I think the television manufacturers are all barking up the wrong street, with just flogging the connected TV. I think the thing that will really make a difference is when somebody gets hold of the a la carte aspect of TV. If you walk into your living room at the moment, it's like going back thirty years, rather than looking into the future. The TV hasn't changed an awful lot, and just connecting it to the internet doesn't really do the job. I think what we want to see is where somebody takes away the pain, and the device in this case takes away the pain. If you like football, or you like soaps, or whatever you like, it finds the content for you, and it doesn't matter whether it's on one provider or another, or one subscription or another. Somebody takes care of that, and that's just one thing for you to pay. I think that will change the way people think about the content and the business model, as well as the device. When you get those coming together, that's when you get a sensation.
Pete:
Well, you heard it here first, didn't you, Kelly?
Kelly:
I did indeed.
Pete:
And thanks very much to Jonathan, who, like us, is a licensed amateur, although he's a heck of a lot better at Morse code than we are.
Kelly:
Well, that's not hard.
Jonathan:
It's all about rhythm, so for example, if you we take the letter C, da-dit-da-dit, is the wrong rhythm – it's da-dee-da-dit. They're the same characters in the same order, at the same speed, a different rhythm.
Pete:
OK, the next part of our show, the future is bright.
Kelly:
The future is?
Pete:
Light bulbs.
Kelly:
Oooh!
Pete:
Now, we've got to thank our good friend, Peter Howav, for this one. He got in touch, and said, have you watched Photonic Induction's YouTube clips? Now, that stumped me.
Kelly:
Well, it stumped me.
Pete:
Well, I had a look. You know when someone sends you a link to a bit of YouTube, and you open it up, and it's fifteen minutes long, and you think, nah.
Kelly:
Yeah, often.
Pete:
I thought, I'd better watch the first minute of this, just because Peter told me to, and I must admit I sat there, and was glued to this for fifteen minutes. This dude is awesome! Have a quick look at this, Kelly.
Photonic Induction:
Finally, I have changed every single light bulb in my house for LED lights, and I'm quite impressed. I can save a thousand watts an hour – that's quite an incredible amount. So we're discuss the good, the bad and the ugly – that must be me, so we'll get straight on with it, yeah?
Pete:
So what do you think? – Mr Induction, your kind of dude?
Kelly:
Erm, certainly entertaining!
Pete:
OK, obviously we're not going to play the whole fifteen-minute clip here, but what he's talking about is LED lighting, and the fact that we all spend a fortune on our electricity. He's converted every light in his house.
Kelly:
He has quite literally transformed his house.
Pete:
What I'm handing you here is a light bulb. This is a GU10. It's a halogen light bulb, 35 watts, and I've got these in the kitchen – little spotlights that use these things, a fairly standard bulb, a halogen bulb, yeah?
Kelly:
Yeah.
Pete:
Now, if you look at the back, can you see an energy rating on the back there?
Kelly:
Yes – E.
Pete:
Which is not an overly energy-efficient light bulb. The move is to LED lights. Now, I've looked at these before, and the original type of LED energy-saving light bulbs basically had four sort of LEDs glued in, and I didn't get on with them. Fortunately, Photonic Induction also found the same problem. The new ones, the second-generation ones, look like that. What can you see in there?
Kelly:
Lots and lots of LEDs.
Pete:
Yeah, so you've got a little network of square LEDs, and these are absolutely brilliant. They're quite bright, but the beauty is, they're A-rated energy bulbs, so a lot better, and a lot more energy-efficient.
Kelly:
Fantastic, and how much did they set you back.
Pete:
One of these was about £5, so they're a little more expensive, but they save about 88% of the electricity. So that one that you're holding there is three watts, and they replace 35 watts.
Kelly:
So certainly worth the money.
Pete:
Over time, yes indeed. The other beauty of these things is, they don't generate any heat, so ordinary light bulbs like these do generate quite a lot of heat; these things don't. It's got a 25,000-hour life, and you can potentially save a heck of a lot of money with these things. So this could be the future of lighting, and do check out this dude's video thingy. What he's put at the end is very, very funny. He's got a wall of his viewer's pictures, and he's crying out for a young lady to join him. So Kelly, do you think we should have a go at that?
Kelly:
Oh, go on – why not?
Pete:
Right, are you ready for a selfie?
Kelly:
I'm ready!
Pete:
And it's definitely worth watching, just to find out why light bulbs and sex are similar!
Kelly:
Yes – absolutely!
Pete:
You'd have to watch it, to find out why. OK Kelly, the final thing we're going to talk about in Focus today, and you tweeted this for me, and it stumped me – food trends, I've written here on my notes. Tell me all about that.
Kelly:
This is fantastic. This is something I come across, during my day-to-day work. Apparently, in the next year, one of the top food trends is that we're now going to have top chefs actually appearing in our homes as holograms, so that they can actually give you cooking lessons in your kitchen. My only reservation is if I had somebody like Gordon Ramsay come in, and start shouting at me in the middle of my kitchen, it probably wouldn't make for a very enjoyable evening.
Pete:
How do you fancy a night in the kitchen with Jamie Oliver?
Kelly:
Definitely far more up for that!
Pete:
So that's your one to watch then, is it? – holographic chefs?
Kelly:
I think just holographics in general will be certainly coming out in the next few years.
Pete:
Well, I'm waiting for the Star Trek Holodeck, and I'll be in there with seven of nine.
Kelly:
Of course you will be. I will not.
Listen to, or download, FrequencyCast Show 96 (31 mins) |
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