Nimbology

Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, and researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason.

It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries. (full article)

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Cary, NC company BlogAds has long been the favorite ad network with progressive blogs such as Daily Kos and their Advertise Liberally niche network. BlogAds has grown with other niches like music and celebrity gossip blog networks.

Of late, many blogs on the Advertise Liberally niche have been unhappy with the lack of growth in terms of revenue. Some small to medium sites have seen zero revenue for months from BlogAds while the Big Ten always seem to be running full.

Enter Click To Blue. CTB is a new ad network whose ad inventory zones are on pre-approved sites that have progressive political content. Early adopters from Advertising Liberally have seen tremendous revenue growth compare to BlogAds.

Running on OpenX, an open source online ad network software package, Click To Blue is opening up a new frontier in ad networks - small, invitation-only, and niche focused.

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Nimbus CEO, Storm Williams, appeared in Second Life last week for a taping of The Late Show with Angelico Babii.

Williams’ avatar name is StormBear Hitchcock and he was the last guest of the night. He discussed the the creation of Books For Soldiers and the technology used to bring Books For Soldiers to Second Life.

Angelico’s show is part of the MBC’ (Metaverse Broadcasting Company) 1600 in-world screens and the show is seen throughout Second Life and is also available on the web. If the below player doesn’t work for you, you can also see the show HERE.

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CNBC ran a story on Second Life and how SL is creating a new economy much in the way eBay has. One woman profiled is on track to make over $80,000 in US dollars this year from the sales of her clothing line in Second Life. Her initial investment was a tad over $500.

The video is worth watching.

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Second Life, Open Sim, and now there are sniffs of Google in the metaverse wind.

Massively thinks so.

major media outlets speculated that Google would use its then-newly-acquired SketchUp asset to turn Google Earth into some sort of Second Life-type experience. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was to acquire Adscape Media Inc., a company that specializes in creatively integrating advertising into games. In September, ASU students began testing a mysterious application very likely connected to Google, and observers speculated that the application could be a 3D virtual environment.

Google made a deal with Multiverse (the company connected to the possibly problematic Firefly MMO) to sync Multiverse’s flexible virtual reality engine with Google’s assets and tools. The Reuters blog MediaFile points out that au courant industry figures are taking the existence of a Google virtual world for granted at this point.

The fire keeps getting more fuel. Multiverse’s Corey Bridge was quoted in The Financial Times describing a future when people will use their real identities (rather than fictional character avatars) to interact with one another in virtual worlds that will be integrated into social networking platforms similar to Facebook or MySpace. Google is making a huge social networking push this month.

Google has a unique ability to increase market pressures and push users into new technologies. Second Life is adding about 1000 private islands a month. Imagine what would happen if Google ups and adds a thousand or so islands. Or, what if every Gmail account suddenly gets 2048 square meters of OpenSim space?

Once OpenSim can link into the SL grid, the metaverse changes forever and no one knows how it will change.

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Yelp is a site where anyone can write a review on a local business. Nimbus founder Storm Williams is quite the Yelper! The biggest subject that is Yelped about is restaurants and some restaurateurs in the know fear Yelpers.

But in an unexpected turn, one restaurant has banned yelpers.

An owner of a San Francisco Bay Area cafe […] has posted signs in his two coffee houses that read “No Yelpers!!”

Why? Apparently the cafe owner wants to discourage any (more) customers from writing bad reviews of his businesses on the site. I’m pretty sure that’s not the way to do it.

But more importantly, it seems like that first homemade sign in a coffee shop means Yelp has come up in the world, if only a wee bit. It’s joining an esteemed list of cafe no-nos: no cell phones, no skateboards, no bare feet, no Yelpers.

From a public perception point of view, once you start banning critics, it gives the critics credibility. Currently Rooz Cafe of Oakland has 4 out of 5 stars as rated by Yelpers. Not bad… actually, very good. Why Rooz began banning Yelpers is a puzzler. If the criticisms were invalid… the ones likening the Rooz staff to Nazi’s was clearly over the top. The smart play would have been to INVITE Yelpers to come in - challenge the insane reviews.

As a business, it is always better to embrace your customers than shun them.

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Me and a friend of mine was standing in front of her store and while we were shooting the breeze a Google Street View car drove by - just like the one shown below.

What is a Street View car? Google is taking 3D images of all the streets in cities across the nation to show what the locations of a precise point on a Google Map will look like. To capture these images, they drive a fleet of cars around the nation with a 3D camera on top and a GPS computer to plot what photo goes with which coordinate. Today, one whipped by us in downtown Winston-Salem. Here is an example of Google Maps with Street View enabled - (Bay Bridge, San Francisco). From there you can navigate around the map with the real 3D imaging on the screen.

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There are a great many barriers that block open source graphic arts software from making it into the mainstream. There is the issue of the proprietary elements present in the big print shops. Adobe, not just Photoshop, but most of their print/image based products are based on a proprietary color system that large ink printers use to guarantee color quality. Sometimes called “spot color” but the real term is Pantone Color. Pantone is an global industry standard for professional graphic artists and professional print shops - and it’s proprietary of course.

Every time I send a PDF to a print shop for a job, they need to know the Pantone Color number of EVERY COLOR USED in the PDF unless it is a photographic image. Then they switch to CMYK (explained below) and then I need to trot down to the print shop and give “loop approval” of the final photo print.

This LINK has a good, old-fashioned flame war over Gimp, Photoshop and Pantone.

Then there is the issue of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key) color to overcome. Adobe guards their CLUT (color look up tables) viciously, these are the translators that translates between RGB and CMYK.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love a great open source graphic arts studio suite I could use. As it stands, it costs me about $4,000 - $5,000 per seat in graphic software and support software per artist. Then there are the costs of constant upgrades to keep up with. Drives me nuts. Then there are the costs for Photoshop and Illustrator filters - add another $5k per seat. Don’t get me started on font control.

To really offer a professional alternative I think the community needs to rethink the approach according to filling the pro needs. This has been done with accountants, writers and administrative office workers, but not the graphics part of the creative class.

What a graphics pro needs…
1) Ability to use TrueType and OpenType fonts. (This has already been achieved in Windows and Mac and I guess it has been done for Linux).

2) Bitmapped image graphics manipulation app. This is Photoshop’s main job. Manipulating bitmapped images.

3) Vector graphics images. Vector art is where the image is made up of lines (defined by mathematical equations) instead of pixels.

4) Layout app. - The granddaddy is Pagemaker, an app that can pull in bit mapped images, vector art images and fonts into a file and produce a MULTI page file. Catalogs are an example of the end result of a Layout app. It is also used in newspapers and magazines. Other closed source apps are Quark and Adobe’s InDesign.

5) Bullet points 2, 3 & 4 must work seamlessly together.

6) An open source font management app similar to Suitcase.

7) Apps 2, 3 & 4 are App 6 aware. For example, when a document is opened, it installs the needed font for that doc but does not copy it to the system resources. Adobe products are all “Suitcase Aware” for example.

8) Open source Pantone equivalent. This is a must have and all open source graphic apps must be able to use this system. We all need OpenTone!

9) Most print shop business originates from in-house graphics departments or ad agencies. So from a strategic point of view, you need to get these open source apps running on Macs ASAP. You are not going to have big movements towards Linux for graphic arts pros, no matter what Dell or HP does until the above issues are solved.

These print shops are not going to do anything until the printer manufacturers begin adopting new OpenTone and OpenArtFile (replacement for PDF) technologies in their systems. And it is pointless for me to use open source stuff in my shop until print shops have equipment to read it.

Overcoming the issues surrounding print preflighting will also help a lot.

If the open source community wants to make an impact, here is where I would start if they want to change the way I MUST do business.

A) Start work on OpenTone and let artists have some input on this. Websafe colors is an example of geeks not understanding artistic use of color. I understand why websafe was put together the way it was, but it is no where near a great color palette.

B) Keep pushing open source PDF efforts to better serve vector and layout applications.

C) Take Inkscape and Gimp for the Mac and translate them to run natively on Mac OS (move from X11 to Cocoa based Intel). That takes care of items 2 & 3.

D) Begin developing the open source layout app.

E) Start working on the font management app. You can’t just load 40,000 fonts into your system. (I have tried!!!)

So for now, I am stuck with Adobe and will be for the next decade unless the open source community get serious about opening up the graphic arts world like they did with Microsoft Office. I think one reason they were successful with OpenOffice was the common hatred of Microsoft. That passion does not exist for Adobe.

I hope this helps better explain the path to get real open solutions for graphic artists.

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This says a lot about the state of activism.

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Second Life just passed the 2 million account mark and the growth rate for the past month is remarkable.

The Second Life login screen and XML statistics blobs are reporting that Second Life has passed it’s two millionth signup. The figures normally only update at midnight, but someone manually updated them within the last 90 minutes or so.
[..]
It’s always busy out there. Except for updates, concurrency remains over 7,500 now, peaking over 18,000. Unless something goes drastically wrong, it isn’t going to get less busy than this.

The next 12 months will tell the tale of whether Second Life flames out like Friendster or grow like AOL did in the mid 90’s. Our feeling is that Second Life will be on the AOL track. SL is a quantum leap in user experience, similar to what AOL did for the online experience. If we are looking at a high growth track, SL will also have all the problems AOL had in the mid-90’s.

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