boton.tv is online!
After many months of hard (but enjoyable) work, botón.tv is online.
Botón.tv is the combination of a kiosk with a camera and microphone that records a short message and a web site to publish, manage and share those videos.
We’ve designed it for all kinds of parties, but our focus is now in weddings and quince años.
Let’s hope for the best!
Note for the nerd crowd, it’s entirely based on Grails and makes heavily use of the elvis operator :).
Botón.tv has been taking most of our time for the past 4-5 months.
I am very pleased with the process and with the team’s dedication to the project. It’s been really fun!
We’ll be launching in the next few weeks.
Although not revolutionary, the product and it’s companion site make use of some interesting technologies and services. Please stay tuned for more technical details!
Check our site or subscribe to this blog to be the first to know (sorry, just in spanish for the moment).
I’ve posted about Lautréamont before, and how he perceived progress back in 1870, but really… that’s hardly an original thing to do, we could name quite a few others who have been inspired -oftentimes blinded in fascination- by the brilliance of his sayings.
It’s not without a great deal of irony that us technologists/artists/scientists/geeks turned entrepreneurs look back for inspiration in the great revolutionaries of our history when what we’re actually after all the time is gradual, creative destruction, an evolutionary approach to growth through mutation.
Ideally, continuous innovation, or innovation as a process instead of periodical big-bangs would be the perfect approach, to satisfy both a conservative sense of self-preservation and the imperious need for renewal we’re always trying to realise.
Professor VJ, in his great post “The Renewable Tradition - Part III” very evidently agrees with me when quoting Lautréamont, but he goes much farther to say :
As we sit at our Death Terminals and wait for the next big bang of creative potential to immerse ourselves in, we cannot help but wonder: “Is there another way out? Which way is out? This way? This? How do we move beyond the newness of a tradition typecast as being avant-garde but always trending toward the ‘innovative’?”
and he quotes:
Sukenick:
Innovation bears the same relation to the mainstream as does a concept car to a factory model. Or even better, a hot rod to the mass production version. The former comparison stresses the experimental aspect of innovative work; the latter stresses the excitement, the extra intensity, the pure thrill that comes with the riskiness of high stakes.
Rings so true to me. Professor VJ then goes on to try to identify patterns of possible innovation processes (though he doesn’t get to name them this way, or ellaborate on a systematic approach to identifying them)
In other words: remixologists who play with innovative genres are practicing forms of extreme writing. But here the term “innovation” also brings to mind other terms like “technocapitalism,” “market timing,” “fashion statement,” etc., in that the further you can push the envelope, the more entrepreneurial your writing gesture may be, especially in relation to the way one employs new media technologies that challenge the concept of writing to its core. Could it be that the degree one is more likely to find ways to create measurable value to their embodied praxis using new media technologies is directly correlated to the more attracted they will become to the latest innovations being invented in the commercial marketplace?
In the end he leaves us without a clear conclusion, apparently without venturing to offer an opinion, or definitive statement of any kind… which nevertheless still works well for me as some food for thought. So he borrows Suckeniks voice again to say:
Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before.
There’s no progress in art. There’s no progress in its implementation techniques.
That’s the field of technology. All art has always been preceded by some form of technological advance.
But art is not the same thing as ideas. Art is one possible form of implementation of someone’s ideas, so let me say it:
There can be progress in the field of ideas.
This “remixology” Professor VJ talks about works its magic at implementation level, taking elements from disparate works of art.
But borrowing elements of art, is not the same thing as borrowing the ideas that drove someone to create them.
You could end up borrowing the symbol, but not the context that gives it a meaning… or giving it another meaning entirely.
I’m going well out of bounds there, but interestingly semiotics is one field where the Situationists felt at home (another “revolution”)
And guess who did the Situationists quote ? Well, Debord referred to Lautréamont too, of course.
Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.
…
Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partly misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies (drawing particularly on the ethical maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues) where Lautréamont strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims alone–a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years ago by demonstrating conclusively that Maldoror is one vast detournement of Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. That the prosaists of Figaro, such as this Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging Lautreamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising his insolence, only testifies to the intellectual debility of these two camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it” is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that “must be made by all.”
Apart from Lautréamont’s work–whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a precise critique–the tendencies toward detournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or incidental; and it is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.
So how do we stop awaiting for innovation to happen unconsciously, incidentally, publicitarianly ?
Nurture and embrace continuous innovation, instead of mere decaying aesthetic production.
The irony is that, again… we will find some clues on how to achieve the holy grail of evolutionary development in the works of revolutionaries like Lautréamont and the Situationists.
Coming soon to a blog near you: The Continuous Innovation How-To
For those who want to learn and dare to dream and build, instead of convince themselves of the gospel of web 2.0 shiny stuff, the history of the web is richer than it looks at first sight.
Many of the ideas we now see partially implemented today have been around for many years, some of them for decades, and others for as long as a century.
I’m sure you’ll find this presentation fascinating, I can’t recommend it enough.
(no embedding requested by publisher)
ABSTRACT
For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee’s world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside.
The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown’s Intermedia system. We’ll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in the recent technological past.
Speaker: Alex Wright
Alex Wright is an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Previously, Alex has led projects for The Long Now Foundation, California Digital Library, Harvard University, IBM, Microsoft, Rollyo and Sun Microsystems, among others. He maintains a personal Web site at http://www.alexwright.org/
Not only the “montevidean” pre-figured surrealism and wrote one of the most influential literature works of french literature before he died at age 24, he also had something to say on progress and ideas, giving some insight on how our ethos is at play when we want to be both innovative and true at the same time.
“Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea”
Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, 1870
That’s a good 137 years before Dave Winer.
Jeremiah Owyang makes some interesting commentaries on “How the Social Graph will be implemented”
First of all, we have to acknowledge one thing:
But where I differ with Jeremiah is on the word “implementation”.
There’s probably a topic that can be better discussed getting some advice from the guys who actually implement.
That’s the techies, a very specific kind of techies who are more aware of the implications of the different architectures, involved technologies, and years carrying bloated baggage … a.k.a legacy stuff.
The Social Graph is important, but it’s not nearly as important as the apps that run atop of it.
Right now we have the apps, but we don’t have the social graph integrated.
Facebook has the social graph, but doesn’t really have the *real* apps.
Whatever comes next has to take BOTH things into account.
And that is not Facebook, not Firefox, and certainly not Flock.
(even though some like Jeremiah and Fred Wilson saw promise in Flock, Flock does some integration but doesn’t allow for ad-hoc mashups atop the Social Graph, you get what you get and that’s it, Flock is nice, but it’s not the future… in its current incarnation at least, extrapolating from what we have today is an excercise best left to the reader)
A glimpse of what this would look like has been demoed by Adobe and their AIR platform during the AIR Bus Tour.
More hints: look online for a Q&A session with Eric Schmidt and what he answered when someone asked “what will web 3.0 be like ?”
Eric Schmidt almost gets this right.
(and sorry… not Calacanis, and not twine.com … it’s not what you say it will be, too little, too déjà vu, too late)
I personally dislike the 3.0 versioning number, but let’s de-buzz the question as…
(in the words of Schmidt: small apps pieced together can run on any device very fast, customisable and furthermore virally distributed by social networks and other systems)
By definition, no sole company can do that on their own. And it’s possible not a single product can.
There’s also underlaying technologies that need to be integrated, major integration work.
Nowadays, you can’t really make a Java app to coexist peacefully with a CLR app in a mashed up user interface.
We have this old kind of glue called HTML and Ajax, but it’s patch technology, transitional technology, that has a huge number of sevee limitations for these purposes.
Eventually, there will have to be a standarised runtime system that allows the general public to run mashed-up applications written in whatever language the author fancied, mixed together atop the social graph.
Today… that would probably mean asking Facebook and Myspace to open themselves more, and making some sort of pact with the devils at Sun, Microsoft and Adobe. (with their products Java JVM/JavaFX, .NET CLR and its languages, Flash/Flex/AIR… respectively)
Mozilla is the other incumbent in this play, with Prism and Tamarin. (Tamarin was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and they jointly steer that project)
In this arena, Adobe has gained important customers like Salesforce, Google, Yahoo and eBay, and has a good headstart with the Flash player installed in a 98%+ of desktop computers in the world.
Microsoft got a good foot in the Social Graph door with the Facebook deal.
But all of this is of course, not the last word, given the importance of all the other incumbents in play.
Summing up…. we don’t yet know what will happen, and how it will be implemented.
But one thing is for sure: it will be amazing 
Es el nombre de dominio de internet que figura después de cada aviso publicitario, a donde puedes ir y aprender más acerca de una compañía, por ejemplo: unaempresa.com
Pero estamos cansados del sitio corporativo, se trata de cháchara marketinera, fotos de archivo de tipos atractivos o mujeres de minorías raciales agolpados sobre una computadora encantados con tu producto, el comunicado de prensa positivo, el cliente feliz, los testimonios, la fila de retratos de los ejecutivos, las donaciones que hizo la empresa a una obra de caridad… la óptica unilateral parece no terminar jamás.
Mientras que una parte del tráfico puede irse incrementando en tu sitio web, no es indicativo de como los sitios corporativos son usados.
Las herramientas de análisis no nos dirán por qué la gente va a tu sitio, y puede que no lo hagan por la razón que tu quieres que lo hagan.
El sitio web corporativo es una increíble colección de hipérboles, branding artificial, y contenido pro-corporativo.
Como resultado, las decisiones confiables son tomadas en otros lugares en la Internet
El mercadeo se ha desplazado, ya no está más en tan sólo dos lugares.
Muchos marketineros tienen la impresión de que las batallas son libradas solamente dentro de los resultados de búsqueda de Google y en el dominio corporativo.En realidad, el mercadeo se ha extendido hacia muchas otras áreas donde las conversaciones ocurren: redes sociales, sistemas de rankings, salas de chat, y aún en blogs.
He dedicado un artículo completo al tema, por qué el mercadeo no ocurre tan sólo en dos dominios.
Ayer, durante el almuerzo con una estudiante universitaria, ella me contó que sus compañeros obtienen ideas sobre decisiones sobre productos a través de los sitios de rankings, y de otros colegas.
Emplean mensajería instantánea, Facebook (y otras redes sociales) y rara vez escriben directamente el nombre de dominio del sitio corporativo para dirigirse a él.
Si todo esto fuese cierto, entonces se asume que los prospectos toman sus decisiones en otros sitios web ANTES de llegar al sitio corporativo para obtener información fáctica.
Legalmente, las corporaciones tienen que divulgar detalles de sus productos, este es un caso muy fuerte en soporte del uso de sitios web corporativos.
Sin embargo en mi continua conversación con la Generación-Y, ella continuó diciéndome que usaba los sitios corporativos para obtener información medular sobre estadísticas y precios, pero esto tan solo despues de haber tomado una decisión basada en la retroalimentación de sus colegas al haber visitado el sitio corporativo.
Esto es disruptivo: anticipo que los sitios web más relevantes en el futuro tendrán a los clientes construyendo sitios web a la par de los empleados.
Los sitios web más efectivos contendrán un punto de vista balanceados acerca del equipo de desarrollo del producto y de los clientes, aun cuando estos tuvieran ciertos reparos para con cierto producto.
Ya no serás la única persona que publica en tu sitio web, los clientes, prospectos y otros miembros de la comunidad tendrán acceso para publicar en tu sitio.
Sin dudas, habrán controles para asegurarse de que el contenido sea al menos basado en hechos, y revisado, pero será obvio para la mayoría que la voz única no será la voz del marketing.
Esto es algo duro de tragar, pero… ¿ Cómo haces sino para generar confianza ?
Siendo abierto, auténtico y transparente en el mercado.
Sabemos a causa de nuestra investigación de que el más alto grado de confianza proviene de aquellos “como yo”, un marketinero avezado permitirá que aparezca contenido de sus colegas, clientes y del mercado.
Esto no siempre será un comentario superfavorable acerca de un producto, de hecho puede ser directamente una crítica.
¿ El objetivo ? Obtener esa retroalimentación, y demostrar públicamente como mejorarás tu oferta a la vista de todos: Dell ha hecho esto con IdeaStorm.
Esto significa que pondrás siempre a tus clientes primero.
No, de verdad, lo digo en serio. Esto significa proveer análisis no solamente de tí mismo sino también de tus competidores, esto significa que enlazarás a tus competidores.
¿ Una locura ? He hecho esto yo mismo en mi rol anterior como administrador en una comunidad. Cree un wiki para clientes que enlazaban a la competencia, y eso me hizo más relevante.
El sitio web corporativo del futuro será una fuente creíble de opinión y datos reales, creados conjuntamente por la corporación y la comunidad.
¿ El resultado ? Una verdadero recurso de primera mano para la comunidad donde la información fluye para lograr mejores productos y servicios
Los clientes harán que tu sitio sea el primero adónde ir a buscar información, la confianza se incrementará, y serás capaz de crear mejores productos y servicios con retroalimentación de los clientes en tiempo real, y aún más importante… serás un recurso de la comunidad que te ayudará a satisfacer las necesidades de los clientes más rápidamente.
Empezaremos a ver clientes que ayudan a escribir el boletín de noticias corporativo (newsletter), fuentes de noticias incorporando blogs de la industria, medios (audio y video), clientes clasificando y votando cuales características quieren que sean mejoradas, equipos de división de producto trabajando directamente con los clientes en tiempo real, y clientes dándose soporte mutuamente entre sí.
Le toco el turno Neuros al luego de dormir varios meses en un estante de Kalio.
Estuvimos jugando un poco grabando video a Compact Flash y a un disco de Beto (servidor) y reproduciendo fotos y videos pregrabadas.
Al comienzo fue un poco frustrante: al intentar mostrar un JPG se colgó y reseteó. Pero luego de un update de Firmware mejoró abismalmente.
Luego de busear varias horas por el repositorio SVN y el Wiki pudimos entender un poco más la arquitectura, posibilidades y limitaciones.
En próximas entregas comentaremos sobre nuestra primer meta: hacer un grabador de video a CF sencillo.
Twttrbnnr = Twitter.com + banner with mobile Internet
How does it work?
We‘ve been working in a couple of projects involving mobile phone connectivity (GPRS), GPS and internet-enabled but autonomous LED banners for the some time now. For them we’ve developed a device, called Natrium, capable of running java applications, connecting to the Internet via GPRS, and talking to connected devices through RS-232, RS-485, i2c, and others. We use the excellent gumstix platform with our custom developed boards.
As a demo application we thought that pulling RSS feeds would be cool; then we found twitter.com.
In a couple of days we put together a demo with twitter, pulling the RSS feed for a user, and the twttrbnnr was born!
More photos here.
We’re staring our field tests next week. Cruzemos los dedos!