Lights, camera, action, web site

As IT chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) one of my favourite events of the year is our annual conference, mainly because I get involved in the technology of making this available to our members across the country electronically.

Several years ago I decided to video record our annual conference which this year was held at the Novatel West in London and back in the dim, distant past it was simply a case of recording a megabyte or two and pushing it onto the web site – after all, most of the members had dial-up connections so we were talking about videos the size of a pack of matches.

With guests this year including David Bellamy, Sir Trevor McDonald and General Sir Mike Jackson to name but three, the challenge was on to make the best possible experience available to members back at home. Recent surveys show that a diminishing minority now use narrowband so no excuses!

Like most large organisations we can cater for only a relatively small number of members at our conferences - several hundred out of more than 210,000 - and so for me it is important to remember those who can’t make it – especially the “grass roots activists”.

Thankfully both the technology and the broadband are now routinely up to the job and so this year we made the decision to record pretty much all of our conference and make it available on the web in 16:9 widescreen format, usually getting the video on the site within an hour or less of the event completing.

When we first started recording some years ago things were simple –  with today’s demands for quality I found myself making PC video recordings several gigabytes in size before reducing down to something suitable for the web – and spending most of the day uploading to the site (broadband upload is still the main bottleneck). But at least PCs are now fast enough to make the whole experience a lot of fun.

If you’re interested in any of the above speakers or small business issues in general, take a look – the videos are here: www.fsb.org.uk/conference2008

Celebrating small business success

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has launched British Small Business Champions 2008 (BSBC), our unique national awards scheme, aimed purely at small businesses.

Entries are invited from well-run businesses that are highly regarded by staff and customers. Businesses have to have been trading for at least five years at the time of entering and must employ no more than 50 staff.

Across the UK, six Area Champions will be chosen and these six businesses will go forward to the national final. One  business will be chosen as the National Champion and scoop the top prize of £10,000.

For BSBC 2008 there are two additional categories: Young Entrepreneur and Most Promising New Business. These have been chosen as a way for the FSB to show support for the new generation of up-and-coming businesses. Entries in both will go straight to national judging.

BSBC was launched by the Federation of Small Businesses in 2002 and is now firmly established as the most prestigious and highly valued of business awards for SMEs.

For more information go to http://www.fsb.org.uk/bsbc

A tale of lost data

When identity cards first came to the attention of the public, many of us were concerned about EVEN MORE centralised information being in the hands of our government.– and now the validity of such concerns is clear to all : 25 million records including financial details, apparently routinely transferred, unencrypted, by junior officials onto standard CDs and put in the post, unregistered, unprotected except for passwords that schoolkids could break.

It almost sounds like an April Fool’s joke, it’s that inconceivable – except that this isn’t April and it’s no joke.  Data we trust our government to preserve is now, more than likely, in the hands of criminals – and what a bonanza. If the people of Britain don’t treat this disaster as a major wakeup call then heaven help us. Seems to me that the government is very good at apologising for getting it wrong but disastrous at not getting it wrong in the first place.  Between this and recent revelations of the TV companies ripping us all off, one could be forgiven for wondering if we’ve lost the plot somehow.

Travelling through time - a 3D tour of the world made real

I’ve just come out of the most AMAZING talk and demo.

This is superficially on the subject of photos – and what we (by that I mean the world) can do with them – I think you’ll find this very interesting, mind-boggling in fact, but you’ll have to bear with me as I take it through in stages – don’t try to skip any.…

Traditionally, most of the more elderly amongst us (myself included) used to go off on holiday, take pictures, take our films along to Boots, get the pictures printed, look at them and then shove them away in a draw to go mouldy.

Then along came digital cameras – the ones that some said “would never replace film” – well, they have, well and truly.  So, many people now have digital cameras and go on holiday, take WAY more pictures than ever before… and put them on a disk to go, erm, mouldy. I’ve been taking pictures since the first digital cameras came out – all neatly categorized and stored in directories which no-one will ever see.

Recently I’ve noticed the way the younger generation don’t have the same security-centric view of the world that previous generations seem to have – far from it, Via the web, they want to show off who they are and what they’re doing, what they like, what their aspirations are – and so you see sites like Facebook  and Myspace popping up – and blogs coming from the least expected places.

In other words, significant numbers of ordinary folk, not techies, are putting their lives on the web - or at least the parts they want people to see. Most savvy teenagers in the UK have a presence in the likes of Myspace and put their photos up there, what they’re doing and so on. The figures for anyone who’s been down a mine for the past five years will take your breath away, more and more people discuss and meet on the web, but that’s not news.

For some time now, I’ve joined the party and put all of my personal photos on Flickr, well, the nice ones – the ones in focus anyway -  and if anyone has any doubts as to the number of people who put their photos on Flickr instead of hiding them away,  I just looked – and in one minute, try 3,500 photos. That’s not a special minute – that’s every minute. That’s a lot. A quick calculation says two billion a year. Go to Flickr and key in just about anything you like and someone’s taken a photo of it. Flickr is big – but it’s not the only place online for storing photos by any means.

Here’s an example Flickr search  - “Eiffel Tower” – 147,000 photos. Even Big Ben managed 82,000 photos.

SoO, you can organise your photos, tag them, organise into groups, show them off to friends if you have any… lovely… but so what? Fine if you have friends who live a long way away, but it’s not that different to printing them out and showing them off, or is it?

For some time, developers have been doing something called mashups – indeed there are tools to let the public do that. You take something from this site and that site – and incorporate it into your own. Embedding Google maps into a web site  is commonplace and I’ve now started embedding my Flickr images into my personal web site – and so you get all sorts of nice slideshows you might not want to develop yourself – for free.

Earlier this week I discovered a new tool to let you take images from Flickr and just about anything else – into an intermediate block – let’s say a book with pages that turn – with your pictures in it – and put that in your website. That’s a mashup. Ask me about it if you’re interested.

then along comes Microsoft Labs at the TechEd conference this week in Barcelona. These chaps been working for some time on something called Seadragon. 

Stay with me – I’m making a point and it’s worth it.

So – Consider Google Earth – you can zoom in and out to any part of the world and go in with incredible detail - turned geography lessons upside down I’d imagine – I could not imagine not teaching a kid how to use this tool.  Of course, you don’t hold data for the whole world in your PC – no, it’s pulled in from the web only as and when needed – as you zoom in from the entire world view which has very little detail, to someone’s back yard. And this is the key to the next stage.

Now consider a screen with thousands of little thumbnails of pictures, you can zoom into any one, and keep zooming. The only hit your machine is taking is the size of your screen – like Google Earth, it’s pulling in information only as it needs it – on the fly.

So, in the Seadragon demo they zoomed in through hundreds of tiny, side by side photos lying on the screen, into a tiny glossy car advert. But wait, in the corner of the tiny ad as they zoomed in, were some little car images taken at different angles – zoom in – they’re actually hi-res images with text - pages within pages if you like – almost ad-infinitum if need be. In another example one photo when zoomed in turned out to be the entire text of a whole book, chapter by chapter side by side – and you just zoomed in smoothly till you got what you wanted. Think about this for your web site – instead of lots of pages – you have one page – and just keep zooming in on the bits you’re interested in.  A completely different way to think of publications.

At this point the audience of hundreds were starting to smile, but just a little – hardened coders to the last, it would take more than this.

So now take Seadragon and put it together with some or even all of the images available in the world online. Fantastic, want to know all about the Eiffel Tower – thousands of photos taken at different angles and zooms and times of day - everything you could ever want on your desktop for the zooming – great but not too easy to navigate!

And none of this is really new – a different slant on microfilm – bigger, better and faster – but then, along comes Photosynth… and here I’m coming to the interesting bit.

What the guys at Microsoft have done is to make software that analyses photos and gives them scoring points for all the features, angles, corners, colours and so on and assign a set of numbers to each photo – all totally automatically of course, no human interaction – making it possible to compare one photo with another and – wait for it – yes, they can actually tell how one photo relates to another and where the photographer stood when he/she took the shot.

So – take a few pictures of your house at various angles – all the way around and fire the photos at the software and it is capable of building a “mental image” of the original shape - and you’re right – they’ve managed to put those flat photos in a virtual 3D space - in the order and orientation that they relate to each other.

To explain – imagine you built a plaster model of your house, and on each wall or corner, stick a photo you’ve taken of the real house, hold it there with a pin, and let’s say you’ve a really nice door - as someone moves up to the door in the photo of the front of the house - well, you can’t do this in a real model – but imagine moving close up to the door, and the photo changes from an image of the front of the house, to the close-up of the door. Imagine an image of the door handle – look toward the handle – image smoothly changes to that image… one could go on ad  nauseum.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not really talking about a guided tour of your house. Taking a slight leap, we’re talking potentially about a guided tour OF THE WORLD!!!!! (minus boring fields and the sea of course)

That’s today, but what’s really exciting is this: Some time ago I saw a demo at a university of a very crude attempt to extract 3D imagery from photos – but this is WAY beyond that. They then briefly showed us a demo - same scenario,  a church this time with about six photos. Move around the photos smoothly and you get an idea of the original church – but that was not good enough – all of a sudden the image smoothly moved around the outside of the building in full 3D. Amazingly they have demo software that figures out the original 3D image from the photos and lets you view and pan a complete, solid 3d image! All from a bunch of flat photos and NO human interaction.

Move forward to a different world to the one we have today… let’s say in a few short years at most (and most of this is conjecture on my behalf).

Consider something like Microsoft Virtual Earth – consider a system that lets you zoom down to the ground in full 3D, walk around at ground level in full 3D, up alleys, into shops, to anywhere in the world that Flickr etc have available in images in sufficient number. Not only that but the text that accompanies modern photos (metadata information) is used to tap into Wikipedia as required and extract useful notes for you.

Imagine sitting at the screen,  descending to a shop in a street, going into the shop, let’s say a jewelers shop – and as you zoom along the shelves you spot a ring you like. Zoom in and you can see the crystal in every minute detail.  Press a button and get complete information about the product – and how long it will take to get to you. Press another – credit card – and it’s yours. Within seconds the images changes on the shelf to “sold out” and everyone else looking in sees that change.

But won’t all this need horrendous graphics and power on your PC?  Well, this is 3D – and  the gaming industry has long since mastered this stuff. Most modern PCs can run Vista’s amazing graphics because the gaming industry drove the development of cheap graphics cards. They’ve had 3D games for a few years and are that far off having thought-controlled navigation – headset, sensors, shutter glasses (alternating images to each eye) – and when this all works together seamlessly, which it will at some point in the near future -  we’re looking at 3D virtual travel around the world in seconds.

What about adding sound to images – or simply uploading geocoded sound. Before long, most smartphones will have GPS built in – and I’m thinking cameras will too – so photos and any sound will include where they were taken and when!

But it doesn’t stop there. In 20 years time we’ll not only have photos of just about anywhere relevant – but we’ll also have photos going back 20, 30, 40 years.  it’s not a big leap to then not only move through a virtual 3D landscape – but move through time for heaven’s sake!  Imagine looking at, let’s say a city centre – and then smoothly pan back in time to what it looked like, say, 30 years ago… all in a matter of seconds and at the touch of a button.

But you might say - would people really spend their time wandering about in virtual worlds? And that takes me off in another direction. Look up on the web to see how many people are playing World of Warcraft, Halo 3 and any of hundreds of other massive online games. The answer is yes, people do that. People even discover friends and get married to people they meet in these strangle places, and the imagery in these worlds is fictional though the people inside are real – what happens when it is all about real places as well?

There are many potential uses for this and you can guarantee that once the fun is over and the novelty wears off that - business uses for this will follow en-masse. The point being this goes beyond anything that certainly I’ve seen in science fiction – and its most definitely not fiction, it’s mere months away from slowly beginning to turn into a reality.

I hope I’ve somehow managed to convey the awe that those of us who attended this talk felt, not only during the talk, but importantly in the moments after we left as it all started to sink in.

Why identity theft matters to small businesses

Many of you will know that a few weeks ago we had National Identity Fraud Prevention Week and clearly the FSB, with over 200,000 members has something to say on this. My own personal view is that identity theft, (which is one of the fastest growing crimes in the UK) is something we need to take very seriously. It seems that many of our smaller businesses are hanging onto sensitive documents instead of destroying them once done with - and worse still they're not doing enough to check on their customers and suppliers. 

Considering that the livelihoods of over 12 million employees are at risk this is something we should all be taking very seriously. I'm long past the point of trusting complete strangers who ring, fax or email and taking that attitude has saved me months of paperwork-chasing.  Your identity can be stolen in so many different ways, from email 'phishing' attacks  - for example FSBs members still respond to emails pretending to be from Barclays bank asking customers to update their personal details - to someone intercepting your post or even more complex scams where fraudsters can even manage to take over financial bonds in your name and open bank accounts.  One place I often point to for advice is www.stop-idfraud.co.uk which gives more advice and info to businesses about how to protect themselves. 

Businesses need to protect sensitive information not just about themselves but of their customers and clients too - sadly, research indicates that this isn't happening.

All the excitement of TechEd

Here at Microsoft's TechEd conference, there is a definite air of excitement. With Vista just around the corner and a host of other goodies coming out of Microsoft "real soon now" they certainly have plenty to shout about. The weather in Barcelona isn't stunning but compared to the UK it's heaven, touching 20C.

There are over 4,000 developers here (I hasten to add almost but not quite exclusively male) and the week started off with an introduction comprising the usual adverts for Microsoft but perhaps more appealingly, a story about a young Pakistani girl who at 10 years of age got her Microsoft programming qualifications. After giving us some background, the speaker introduced her to us. Now 11 she's writing her own .Net programs (and to prove it she took the audience on a guided tour of her coding) and wants to start up a new Silicon Valley in Pakistan. Were it not that we could actually SEE her, one could be forgiven for thinking you were listening to an adult maybe in her early 20s. She got far more applause than anyone else.

Microsoft are clearly focused on the forthcoming Vista launch but they have so many other massively updated products coming up (Office 2007, Sharepoint 2007 to name but two) it was a pretty hard job to decide what to concentrate on. For those who've never been to TechEd, essentially this is week of solid learning. With over 250 sessions of one sort of another and hands-on labs you basically have to decide from a massive number of opportunities how to spend your week - there's no way to cover more than a small fraction of what's involved but it's fun trying.

Around the massive "Centre Convencions Internacional" is a wireless network to end all wireless networks - feeding as it does the many hundreds of laptops scattered all over. Even mid-sessions it's hard to miss techies everywhere frantically checking their email. As one speaker said, with this number of users it's a miracle it works at all, but works it does, as do the hundreds of hands-on lab computers which are provided to let users gain first-hand experience of the many new toys on display. It's not really like being overseas as despite the presence of people from all over the world, the conference itself is exclusively handled in the English language - handy for me as my Spanish is about as good as my French - I can just about manage to ask for a drink at the bar.

Bearing in mind that everything here is Microsoft-based, I had a laugh last night at one of the exhibition stands as a young chap and I were looking at the latest mobile phones - I asked him if he liked one particular model - his disgusted response in broken English: 'No, it's too big, and... it's Microsoft.' - I couldn't help thinking he'd come to the wrong exhibition!

On the programming side there is no doubt that users are in for a treat in the near future as Atlas, Microsoft's Ajax web development tools, finally comes within the grasp of mere mortal programmers. For the novice, Atlas provides a way around the constant page refreshes we see in traditional web pages and takes the experience a step nearer to that which you might expect from a desktop application. This is not new technology of course but the work that Microsoft has put into this makes it a lot easier for novice programmers to use this technology in their web sites. Time will tell but the claim is that the tools will create web pages that work on everything from Apple Macs through Netscape to the increasingly popular Firefox browser.

It's Wednesday morning and there is a long way to go, with sessions starting at 9am every morning and going on until mid-evening, I plan to return at the weekend full of enthusiasm and excitement. It won't take long for reality to bash it out of me but for now it's a rush that's definitely worth the trip and I'm enjoying every minute.