Tag: research

Podcasting Research from Forrester

Post ImageNo disrespect to Peter Chen or the Diffusion Group or anyone else that has done podcasting research thus far, but I was pleased to see a research report from Forrester. Finally something from a widely respected and referenced research group. Also refreshing is the fact that the report doesn’t make podcasting out to be an amazingly fast growing technology (though it is growing pretty quickly and will probably grow faster over the next couple years). In the new report, titled “Podcasting Hits The Charts“, Forrester shows that only 1% of North American households regularly download and listen to podcasts:

Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.

So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists – such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. Think of us poor analysts who must listen to streamed quarterly calls while chained to our laptops! My caution is that companies shouldn’t be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience – unless they gain value from being seen as innovative.

That first sentence is incredibly important, I think. Podcasting still isn’t easy enough for most people! And yes, these things take time, but hopefully we can help solve that problem in a couple months. The goal of our podcasting solution is to first of all make it easy.

The second bit of stuff I quoted there is important too. We’re doing a lot of our own research on the business sector of podcasting right now, and we really agree – there’s a huge market. Podcasting is an excellent way to solve some communication problems that have always existed.

Read: Charlene Li

Brain cells fused with computer chips

Post ImageVia Scoble, I came across this story about European researchers who have developed “neuro-chips”, silicon circuits that have been fused with living brain cells. Seems that things are happening even faster than Ray Kurzweil predicted!

To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size. They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.

“They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip,” said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.

Scary or exciting? I say exciting. If they perfect this sort of thing, drug testing times could be greatly reduced, and neurological disorders could be corrected. Not to mention the fact that we might have the ability to put computing power in our heads! No more thinking when you need to perform a calculation.

Read: MSNBC

Thought Typing

Post ImageI’m sure you’ve heard of “touch typing” but have you ever heard of “thought typing”? Imagine being able to control the computer simply by thinking it. The technology has been developed, and the latest demonstration took place at CeBit in Hanover, Germany this week:

The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) – dubbed the “mental typewriter” – was created by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and Charité, the medical school of Berlin Humboldt University in Germany.

The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around.

Apparently it only takes about 20 minutes to “train” the device. Obviously, there are many huge benefits to technology like this, benefits that go well beyond typing without having to touch the keyboard. Medical uses are the most obvious and will likely be the first applications of such technology. Longer term though, this could lead to new interfaces for games, automobiles, just about anything that can be hooked up to a computer (and really, that’s almost everything these days).

I’d love to try something like this out. The great thing about it is that it’s non-invasive. I bet the experience is still pretty crazy though!

Read: New Scientist

More on the oil sands

Post ImageA week ago today I wrote a post explaining how I think Canada should be making a greater effort to develop and benefit from the oil sands in Alberta. Naturally, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for any news regarding the oil sands, and I’ve actually come across a couple things.

First is The Oil Sands of Alberta which aired on 60 minutes on Sunday. A couple things stood out for me:

There are 175 billion barrels of proven oil reserves here. That’s second to Saudi Arabia’s 260 billion but it’s only what companies can get with today’s technology. The estimate of how many more barrels of oil are buried deeper underground is staggering.

We know there’s much, much more there. The total estimates could be two trillion or even higher,” says Clive Mather, Shell’s Canada chief. “This is a very, very big resource.”

Very big? That’s eight times the amount of reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, there’s a lot of oil there. We just need the technology to be able to get it out of the ground for a reasonable cost! That’s key to my argument – we need to work on ways of fostering that research and development.

“I think it’s bigger than a gold rush. We’re expecting $100 billion over the next 10 years to be invested in this area – $100 billion in a population that, currently, is 70,000 people,” says Brian Jean, who represents the region in Canada’s parliament.

There’s a lot of money coming in too. More than I expected, to be honest. However, I am still not convinced that big corporations are going to be the ones who find a way to improve the technology and thus the ROI. Sure companies make progress in a lot of areas, but more often than not, it’s an individual or smaller group of individuals that find a way. Corporations then either copy or acquire.

For more commentary on the piece, The Oil Drum has a very good post with a ton of interesting comments too.

The 60 Minutes episode makes it seem as though China currently doesn’t have much interest in the oil sands, though not for lack of desire. A press release I found yesterday though tends to suggest that the country is starting to make investments:

What is certain is that global demand for oil – especially from Asia – is far outstripping the ability of companies to meet current demand and replenish their diminishing reserves. These factors are being exacerbated by global political uncertainty. The oil sands are increasingly on the U.S. radar screen as they focus on reducing their reliance on oil producing countries outside of North America. The Chinese have become increasingly involved in the oil sands with the China National Offshore Oil Corp., recently investing $150 million in MEG Energy Corp., a private company engaged in the oil sands.

In a different press release, I learned that Purvin & Gertz, an independent energy consulting firm, made available a study that analyzes the challenges and opportunities presented by development in the oil sands.

Producers face issues of growing existing and new markets for oil sands crudes. The need for diluent to transport heavy crude will increase with bitumen production. Upgrading in Alberta could reduce diluent demand, but requires major capital investment and does not eliminate the market risks associated with marketing SCO.

I’d have thought that with the increasing demand for oil there would be little or no risks associated with marketing synthetic crude oil! I’m not an expert though, so maybe I’m missing something. You can find out more on the study at the Purvin & Gertz website.

I need to dig around a little more, but I would not be surprised if much of the $100 billion that has been announced turns out to be nothing more than a foot in the door for the companies making the investments. If you’re in the oil business, you don’t want to miss out on the oil sands. In order to benefit though, we need to get better at extracting and refining the oil!

I guess one reason Canada wouldn’t be all that interested in sponsoring research and development is that so much of the oil sands has been sold to foreign investment (at least that’s how it appears). Like I said, more research is needed, but if that’s the case, it’s potentially a major loss for Canada.

Judging websites in a flash

Post ImageThere’s a very popular article (according to NewsGator) at Nature.com today titled “Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye“. Even though you think you’re giving a website a chance by taking a good, long, hard look at it, chances are you’ve made up your mind in less than a second:

We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

The research is particularly interesting for website designers like myself. And students of visual design, for that matter. Chances are if someone likes your design better, they’re going to like the content better too. I know I am guilty of that. I hate reading a plain black and white HTML page with only text, but I don’t mind reading something that is styled attractively, even if the content is the same.

What’s your flash judgement on this site? Be honest now!

Read: Nature.com

Podcasting Research Findings

Post ImageYou might recall that a little over a month ago I mentioned Peter Chen’s very promising survey of podcasters and the preliminary results. I remember getting the email about the final findings, but I must have overlooked it in the chaos that was my November (at least the first two weeks). From the abstract:

Based on a survey of 366 podcasters and videobloggers, this paper examines these emerging cultural practices from aspect of production, with specific interest in producer motivations, production methods, the relationship between formats, and audience numbers. The exploratory research findings – largely limited to English language producers – illustrates a number of interesting features about this area of activity.

I’d go out on a limb and posit that “podcasting” and “audioblogging” are generally accepted to be different practices, and I don’t think that “video podcasting” and “videoblogging” will be any different. That being said, the title of the research as “Podcasting and Videoblogging” is kind of off-putting. Is it really videoblogging, or is it actually video podcasting? It would make a difference if you’re really trying to compare the audio and video guys.

The findings are really quite interesting and basically make me long for even more research. Of course, too much research can be a bad thing in some cases too (today wine will save you, tomorrow it will kill you, etc). The frequency of production, gender, and age of producers are immediately the most interesting, but there is lots of data to grok.

Read: Peter Chen

Preliminary Podcasting Survey Results

Post ImageVia Derek I came across Peter Chen’s preliminary statistics from his podcasting and videoblogging survey. He makes it clear that the results are preliminary, and that follow-up data is being requested with more analysis to come. Having said that, the results are quite interesting! Here are some highlights I picked out:

  • Looks like the majority of podcasters publish content weekly. (48.77 %)
  • Average episode length is just over 29 minutes.
  • The average number of minutes spent producing an episode is almost 260! That’s an incredibly high number that we hope to reduce with our solutions. I know how much time it takes – that’s one reason I stopped BlogosphereRadio to focus on building the tools!
  • About 61% of respondents say they have no business model – they do it as a private endeavor. Sounds like my Average Joe Podcasting post was spot on!
  • English is overwhelmingly the most commonly spoken language. (85.75 %)
  • One stat that surprised me – around 83% of respondents were male. For some reason, I expected that to be a little lower. I think it’s because of the recent push in blogging to find female voices; I probably figured that podcasting would benefit.

Very intriguing results. I look forward to seeing what Peter comes up with next. I also wonder just how representative these numbers are – there’s no margin of error or anything posted (probably because they are preliminary results).

Read: Peter Chen

Google and NASA

Post ImageWhen I first came across this story a couple days ago, I didn’t give it much thought. As soon as I saw NASA and Google in a story about them supposedly collaborating on various technology projects, I figured it was a joke. Turns out, it’s not. From the September 28th NASA press release:

NASA Ames Research Center, located in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, and Mountain View-based Google Inc. today announced plans to collaborate on a number of technology-focused research-and-development activities that will couple some of Earth’s most powerful technology resources.

NASA and Google have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlines plans for cooperation on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The MOU also highlights plans for Google to develop up to 1 million square feet within the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field.

I don’t know about you, but it makes me wonder how Google scored such a deal. And it makes me wonder why. What the heck does search have to do with space travel?

Read: NASA

Microsoft's own BitTorrent

Post ImageIt seems as though Microsoft is working on a technology that is very similar to the popular BitTorrent file sharing protocol. The technology is code-named “Avalance”, and is being created by researchers at the Cambridge facility:

While Avalanche is based on a different system than BitTorrent, both are essentially used for the same purpose–to distribute large files between a number of users.

A Microsoft research paper on the technology both praises and criticizes BitTorrent: “Despite their enormous potential and popularity, existing end-system co-operative schemes such as BitTorrent, may suffer from a number of inefficiencies.” The coding system used by Avalanche, which is based on network coding, is 20 percent more efficient with downloading, according to the research paper.

While the company currently has no plans to implement the technology in any products, or to otherwise release it, you never know, it could find it’s way into something like Windows Media Player in the future. A technology like BitTorrent that includes some sort of DRM would be perfect for Microsoft to allow movie downloads right inside Windows Media Player. I wouldn’t be surprised anyway!

Read: CNET News.com