Phil Smeeton's Tech Thinking Blog

  Thinking about the role of tech hardware for a moment, particularly the mobile smart phone we can see an underlying philosophy of human thought transfer, and this seems desirable. This post is about the idea of circumventing the human voice and hearing systems and directly communicating thoughts. One potential win of communicating thought is security and secrecy, we usually associate thoughts in our brains to have those characteristics, and there's currently no reason to suspect that our internal thoughts are not secure. Some of the wins of connecting to something like TaaS is for the purposes of intimacy, speed, confidentiality and it is also likely to be discrete.  A service like this is going to require some advanced software to recognise human thoughts and represent them as well as transferring and replaying the thoughts in the recipients mind. The visual mind is interesting here, imagine an apple and imagine sending your mental image of an apple to someone across the ne...

Like many people in the tech community, I consider myself a content creator, I produce content regularly including some premium content. One of the important philosophies of the web is that the quality of the content should be increasing e.g. things are continually improving. To help with this improvement I think some richer analytics will help content creators greatly.   As a content creator there are certain questions that I have to answer (some how). The main question is: What is happening to my content? How many devices, location, access frequency, stickiness, copying, sharing etc I think you get the idea, How do we accomplish this?   My thoughts are that a new sdk and ide should be created for content creation, this facilitates the embedding of meta data into a new type of media file, a self-reporting media file. By self-reporting I mean that when the file is viewed or opened the file itself understands enough about the event to report to an analytics cloud application. S...

When users turn up at a new web site they often like to believe they will be represented using all the values and philosophies that apply to them in other communities and worlds. I think that there ought to be a complex and long term trust building rating system inside Twitter where users gradually and consistently grow their reputation and trust levels by posting content that is valued according to the twitter community. I think it is important that the trust relates to the twitter community, users ought to be able to give and receive credit to other users easily as well as analyse the past history of a user’s reputation. As the user adds posts, they are creating a history of credibility inside the site, this can be reflected by some type of scoring system for others to see.  I think more work ought to be done in this area creating a richer functionality and experience.

It might be a little unusual to compare a romantic letter within VR, what am I thinking about? The answer is  intent , and to be more precise  human intent . A romantic letter usually describes the humans plans, dreams, wants, constraints and more using text based human languages. So what I am saying is that the human writer (the user) of the romantic message is capturing human intentions and transferring some or all of them using text.  Here I am interested in how the information, which can just as easily be in a digital message is being processed by the humans involved. We can also see that this object called a love letter has been understood, described and accepted into culture, to generalise people know what love letters are, they know there uses, there limitations, there potential. This acceptance is interesting in as much as a tool is interesting, if you asked a group of computer users whether at some point they would use VR to experience interaction with other huma...

  If someone were to to put me on the spot and say describe to me the most significant methods the tech business has available for the advancement of its objectives since the millennium I would reply with the advancement of computer programming languages. By advancement I mean the capability of the language to describe and model our universe in software, with the right type and amount of compute to be useful and provide usable and rich insight to the human users. Our ability to describe the universe using richer and richer computer languagues is a direct contributing factor in the success of what we are doing in the tech industry. Smarter software, richer bigger data lakes, more meaningful reporting revealing new potentially valuable insight in everything we are interested in.

Liquid, real time photoshop-like corrections of skin tone and the removal of dark circles. With the increasing ubiquity of video calling, I thought that we ought to think about something that is a factor in the developed world, the enhancement of human beauty and care for appearance (particularly) during social interactions. If we take a look at how the computer has helped this process already we can see graphics applications like Adobe Photoshop operated by skilled human users touching up and removing imperfections.  I think the case for digital human beautification is a strong one, after all unless you have scheduled your video calls carefully chances are excellent that you will be caught out at a time when you are not looking your very best. This is where hardware and very good software is the answer using a up-streaming type metaphor the moving images are enhanced prior to leaving the users computer. Maybe we can describe this new specialist hardware chip as virtual makeup, it ...

With the recent increase in the implementation of video calling services like facetime, zoom, MS Teams it seems that there is a significant need for a large web application that provides discovery services for the users of video calling.  By discovery services I mean the ability to index and look up human users of video calling, the ability to make yourself discoverable within the directory, the ability to provide live availability and have it integrated into other systems like mobile or desk-top computing. The way I see this type of application working shares some similarities to old paper phone books that list names and numbers, the main concern of the user of a phone book is the discovery of an individual's phone number and I see this idea evolving into the discovery of video calling credentials online. The phone number part grows into connection details for zoom, FaceTime, MS Teams, the more impressive part of this application is the live availability of the users displayed wit...