The Digital Future: Copying Files Made Simple

Remember some 15 months ago we told you about Pranav Mistry of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his quest to make our interface with technology more intuitive? The video is still amazing to watch but is now becoming reality.

Our good friend a furturist Ray Hammond has now alerted us to Mistry's latest step along this exciting path where you can transfer images or text from one screen and device to another with just your fingertips? A new program called Sparsh lets you do just that and its no surprise to find Mistry behind it.

SPARSH (स्पर्श) lets you conceptually transfer media from one digital device to your body and pass it to the other digital device by simple touch gestures

The trick is the data is actually transferred via the cloud, but your finger becomes the 'cursor' and to the user the body becomes to conduit.

24Symbols: The Start of Books on Demand

Way back in January 2010 we wrote the following as part of our 2020 predictions:

‘This year will start to redefine ownership and see the entry of the streamed ‘read on demand’ model similar to what we have been raving about with the likes of Spotify. It will take the music model to open up consumers to its potential. The challenge will be the publishers and their obsession in supporting existing models that they understand and their reluctance to think outside the box on rights and royalties.’

Unlike others we have long seen digital as different, as a licence and not an outright purchase.

We believe that viewing digital as a mere substitution rendition is a dangerous route. This not only straightjackets creativity into yesterday’s economic models, it also ties royalties and rights to an inappropriate business model and further subjects the reader to ‘albums when they may find individual tracks more appropriate’.

Amazon are clearly lining themselves up to change the way we write, read and purchase material. What looks from the outside, as often disjointed steps, can be clearly seen as well thought through strides towards a new platform of writing and reading, that today others are struggling to comprehend.

We have recently seen the lending of ebooks enter the market, albeit under a social sharing umbrella. We have seen Amazon’s cloud offer continue to be developed. We have now seen Amazon start to advertise on the Kindle. Hello, can we add two and two and make four? Amazon is potentially one step away from a digital on demand service based on ads plus subscription. We could see it as a new global library, a new ‘book club’, a new way for ebooks to be read and if coupled with social networking, viral marketing, author buy in and also the wealth of tools Amazon has built, maybe a category killer that will be hard to emulate and compete against.

Yesterday we read that ‘24symbols’, a Spanish startup is planning to launch a subscription service with the aim to become the "Spotify for e-books." They will offer an ad-supported and a subscription-based access around 10€ per month for ebooks and the books will be streamed and cloud based. The challenges they face are the same as Spotify and others before them – grappling with a rights and royalty infrastructure not built for pricing not on demand licensing let alone ad supported revenues. They also have to accept that Amazon is about to set up in Spain.

Is it realistic to think that a new entrant can break the mould, or are we looking at the start of a process where the real winner has yet to enter the race. Remember Amazon wasn’t the first internet bookshop but the 14th and the first to get service right.

Book rental on demand certainly is the obvious opportunity for the industry. However, unlike music, and to a degree film, books do not have a consolidated source and supply and is highly fragmented so negotiating contracts could become a nightmare for anyone without true market clout and presence. Secondly, we have the current bookshop versus library mess, which would tend to indicate just how difficult it will be for the rights gatekeepers to see anything that is to them left field. Thirdly, we can’t even price ebooks today, let alone formulate a commercial rental model that is mutually rewarding, so moving to a lower pricing model based on term time licensing and reward could still prove a challenge. Finally, we still have to move to the cloud culture and on demand lifestyle. This may seem a natural evolution but challenges the very basics of a library and ownership that we have know for centuries.

We believe Books on demand via a cloud based services makes logical sense, but the question is less of if and who, and more when and how they can change book culture as we know it today.

Is Google in taking us up into the Clouds?

Imagine a world where you don’t need to worry about data. Where your files are only accessible by you, from anywhere around the world, on any device you wish to use. One immediately starts to worry about security, accessibility, backup, but are these real issues or are they a reflection of how we thought yesterday, when we have to own physical things ourselves in order that they we ‘safe’?

We are all familiar with the concept of servers that store data and effectively make this happen within a localised environment such as a company or service and the migration of applications onto these same servers making the demands on the client machine smaller. Cloud Computing just takes this a step, or leap, further.

To know how you'll be using computers and the Internet in the coming years, consider the typical Google employee his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails all reside on the Web. They are already starting to practices what is considered by many technology experts to be ‘cloud computing’. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

It is widely expected that Google will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online. Industry watchers believe that Google will pull together its disparate cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service. But they are not alone, Amazon's Simple Storage Service, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage, AOL’s Xdrive services offer a capacity of 50 gigabytes and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, is currently in beta, with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are all sitting atop huge volumes of people's personal information and a number of online applications, but these need to be integrated. Many now believe Google has the culture to push the boundaries and tie together the pieces of cloud computing to make it happen.