If you ask the average person, ‘which social network is the largest, measured by number of registered users, most people would probably say ‘Facebook!’.
In fact, though Facebook has more than 200,000,000 registered members (though only about a third are active on a monthly basis), it isn’t the largest.
The largest is, in fact, ‘QQ’ in China, with 300,000,000 active accounts, followed by Facebook. I’m not sure what members of QQ can and can’t say without the government censoring them, and, since I can’t read Chinese, I don’t know what members of QQ are talking about.
The information above was compiled by Vincenzo Cosenza, who also compiled this world map showing social net usage by country. You can click on the image below to get a much bigger version if you are interested…
Now, if I asked you who the most active social networkers in the world were, as measured by hours spent per month, you might say the Americans, the British, the South Koreans, or the Italians (who have always struck me as very social people in the physical world). And all of those guesses would be wrong, apparently.
According to ComScore, the most active social networkers are the Russians! The Russians spend 6.6 hours per month on social networks, with an average of over 1300 page views. The world average is 3.7 hours per month and around 525 page views. The United States ranks 9th overall, with 4.2 hours and 477 page views.
What was most surprising to me wasn’t that the Russians are the most active users of social networks based on time spent and page views, but that the average person in the world only spends 3.7 hours a month total. Given the outsized attention paid to social networks and networking, the relatively small amount of time (less than 8 minutes per day) indicates that people overall are primarily using the social nets to check messages and status updates.
Next time, I’ll tell you who the research indicates is the most active user of social networks in the United States from a demographic standpoint. That answer may also surprise you…though it may be more obvious in retrospect.
Update: If you are sceptic about Google Wave, you might want to reconsider. According to a Google blog update, Wave will launch on September 30. Already 6,000 developer accounts have been rolled out, with 20,000 more to be approved. This is HUGE. Joe will stay on top of this story, for sure!
At its I/O conference last week, Google unveiled its new ‘Wave’ communications and collaboration platform and set of APIs. Like you, I hear about lots of ‘the next greatest’ things on what seems like a daily basis. And, probably like you, I think ‘blecccch’–there are probably 5 people in the world who will really care about that. Lotus Notes and Twitter are both examples of things I either don’t understand or don’t understand why they get the hype they do.
In the case of Google ‘Wave’, though, I have to say that I was blown away. I don’t say that about many alpha/beta projects, but this one is major.
A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:
The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
Our take:
This new communication & collaboration platform was created by the same Rasmussen brothers who created and implemented that little-known location-based service called “Google Maps”, so, right there, you know this isn’t the plaything of some guy with a fetish for web 2.0 mashups that will tell you whether Jupiter is aligned with Mars on April 27, 2130.
Any one of the things that ‘Wave’ will do would be noteworthy and impactful, but taken as a whole, the platform has the opportunity to alter, fundamentally, how we interact online and make it better–I will go into more detail on this below.
The platform will be open-source and so will allow small developers to create very useful and cool applications and services without having to start from scratch–they can piggyback on a complete platform that incorporates a tremendous amount of functionality into one web-based browser interface.
Google understands that third parties will have unique visions and bring applications to the platform that the Rasmussens haven’t yet thought of and will further evolve existing usage models.
It will take the paradigm of ‘upload and publish’ of your photos to a whole new level of efficiency and power–you can have a standing wave (no pun intended for all of you acoustic engineers out there) that involves photography and publish your photos by dragging and dropping them onto that wave. Everyone else who subscribes to your photo wave can then have those photos instantly show up in their browser.
Imagine, for example, that you take a series of pictures at a party and you want to publish them to a wave which includes other people invited to the same party. You shoot the pictures and then drag the ones you want to share with the overall group to the wave. You then pick a particular invitee in the wave, start a new wave and then drag a different picture–that you only want to share with that particular person–to the new wave. You’ve just published photos all from your iPhone using simple drag and drop and a few button-clicks. You don’t have to enter a single e-mail address. Moreover, you can do this all from within your iPhone browser.
It also revolutionizes the concept of communal photo albums, because it provides a very central and effective way of multiple group members each contributing content to a shared repository that is organized and accessible to all members of the group. This will mean that you no longer have to publish your photos to multiple online repositories and point others to them. You can have one set of photos that you publish in parts to several existing waves (for example) consisting of different audiences. There will be no need to have photos on Flickr, Facebook, your own blog. Instead you could have separate waves for separate locations and as you add the photos to the waves in one central browser interface, they get published to those other locations automatically. This looks to work for videos, audio, gadgets, etc. My guess is you could provide an embeddable link to a Youtube video or a map from Google Maps.
A wave can be a blogging tool, too. So, not only can you write or post media to a wave via your main messaging window, but the wave can be published to your blogging site and as you update the wave, you update the blog too. Moreover, as other wave participants add comments, those can get posted to the blog as well.
Social networking–the waves can hook into popular social networking platforms like Facebook. So, again, you can have discussions or 1:1 exchanges and manage them from your ‘wave’ browser window and have them published to your Facebook site–but you don’t have to go to Facebook yourself to edit.
As you can gather at this point, it’s all browser based–nothing to download or install and available anywhere, including your iPhone browser. You will have all of this functionality available from your mobile browser.
It presents a new non-linear thread paradigm (I know that sounds pretty wonky, but sometimes you have to go with the jargon, you know?) in the sense that I can be added to a thread late in its evolution, and insert comments into the dialog represented by the thread after any entry even if it came before I joined the thread. Thus, I don’t have to respond only to the latest post, but can go back and spawn a new thread (if I choose) by commenting on a post that was made much earlier in the textual conversation. Moreover, once I start the new wave, I can invite a whole new set of people to participate that might or might not be the same group as were already in the conversation.
This feature alone will greatly impact forums and community conversations.
If I join the conversation late, I can rewind and replay the conversation to understand who said what when and how it evolved to its current state. I can do this by overall conversation OR by an individual participant to see only, for instance, what “Robert” said throughout the conversation.
Wave integrates calendaring and group organization and so essentially provides ‘eVite’ on steroids. I can arrange group meetings, parties, etc. very easily using my contacts, schedule, e-mail, calendar, etc. all from within one location.
It changes the IM paradigm from wait-until-I’m-done-with-my-typing-to-read to we-can-all-type -and-read-together-without the wait. Now, if you’re over 20, you may not think this is a cool feature, but I will go out on a limb here and conjecture that the teenagers I know will be very happy to have this and will come of age expecting this kind of paradigm.
It offers real-time translation into other languages as you type.
All instances of waves and wave servers can be federated. There are many positive implications to this that I won’t go into here.
‘Spelly’ a spellchecker that uses the web as its reference database.
A built-in system for document management and collaboration. Again much could be said about this and its impact on web-publishing, but I will come back to this in another post.
I will write more about this but wanted to tell you about it if you haven’t already heard about it, because while it may not change the way you shoot pictures with your iPhone, it may well change many of the things you do with your photos once you’ve acquired them and want to share them with others.
Try to watch at least the first 30 minutes of the video above. IMHO it will take at least that long to get the full flavor of what Wave can do.
I believe that this will be big in 1-2 years and that developers will start very soon to build new and cool apps based on this platform.
There are snarky people who will say this is a geek thing that will not impact the average webizen. Let me disabuse those snarks of that notion–it will affect the average webizens in a good way.
Will Google track high-level behaviors and insert ads in various places? Probably.
Am I saying that Google is Mother Teresa because they are creating this very cool platform and open-sourcing it? No. They are a publicly traded company that has to make money–but so is Microsoft (Just so you know, I’m a shareholder in Microsoft but not in Google–go figure), and Microsoft isn’t creating anything remotely like this, though Surface is pretty cool in a different way.
The advent of the video-enabled iPhone 3GS would be notable –and noted– under any circumstances, given Apple’s leadership in the smartphone space. However, either due to pure luck or wise planning, both of which Apple has experienced over the years, the iPhone 3GS is hitting at a very opportune time. The technology is in place for the distribution of video content. The consumption habits are now in place to create audiences for the video originating on the iPhone 3GS (and other smartphones as well). And the appetite for ‘reality’ video –which would favor content created/shot on the iPhone 3GS by ordinary people outside of the Hollywood system– is still high. The only problem is this: the people most likely to afford an iPhone 3GS and who have the most money are the ones most dissatisfied with the places online where they can share their iPhone 3GS-generated videos.
Statistic and Trends:
Consider the following (from Infotrends, Nielsen, Consumer Electronics Association, NPD):
The average American spends 153 hours a month watching video.
It’s 18-24 year olds that are spending the most time watching online video at 5 hours and 3 minutes on average per month. Mobile video watching is also on the rise with 11 million Americans now watching video on their handheld devices, an increase of 9% from Q3 to Q4 [2008].
According to a new report by Infotrends, worldwide shipments of camera phones will jump from 700M in 2007 to surpass 1.3B in 2012.
Consumers aged 35-54 were responsible for 49% of all consumer spending in 2008. This group equals 47M households and includes the highest number of dual-earner married couples. These numbers are not expected to change for 2009, despite this being the slowest growing segment of the population.
The average U.S. head of household is 49.5 years old. 80% of growth in the number of households over the next 5 years will be in those headed by people 55 or older.
For every dollar spent by an average consumer on CE products today, households with incomes of $100,000 or more account for $1.69
The amount spent on CE by $100K+ households fell far less (1.2%) between 2008 and 2009 compared to other groups.
Consumers report they would be willing to spend $6-8 a month (or $72-96 per year) to share their photos and videos on a premium web site.
Top sites for video posting among 18-44 year olds: MySpace TV (48%), Youtube (43%), Facebook (42%). Social net sites top consumer lists
Less than 40% of consumers are satisfied with their video sharing options, while 66% are satisfied with photo sharing options.
History Though Veit and I have both separately alluded to this point in other places (and I don’t want to be accused of re-stating the obvious ), it’s worth noting again here: devices like the iPhone 3GS, by combining a full-fledged communications and media transport device with a relatively high-quality full-motion video camera, enable consumers to shoot video on a mobile device, do things (or not) to it on the device, and then send it to a remote online server without ever having to download the footage to a desktop computer and/or transcode it so it can be burned to DVD, tape or to an AVI file for viewing on your TV. Again, the implications of this are major because it disrupts a usage model that has been in place for 20 years.
For those of you old enough to remember computing tech in the 1980s and early 1990s (and that includes Veit and me), capturing video –much less full motion video (yes, there was a time when you could only afford devices to capture video at 15 fps)– was a major process that required expensive add-on gear. TrueVision, RasterOps, SuperMac, Radius were all companies which offered still frame digitizers (capture a 640×480 frame in thousands or even millions of colors) and later motion video capture at a price. Radius had a series of devices called ‘VideoSpigot’ which could capture 320×240 video in 1993 at around $600, but not at 30 fps. The 30 fps capability came a few years later.
You could output this video at 640×480 via interpolation. Keep in mind that not only did you have to have an expensive add-on card with break-out box, but you had to have a first rate hard drive that would cost several hundred dollars up to over $1000 (I think I paid $1800 for a 1.2 Gigabyte drive in 1996) as well as an expensive graphics card capable of 24 bit color (assuming you wanted to see your video in true color) and a monitor capable of displaying 16.7M colors. To have the whole rig you needed to capture 320×240 video onto your hard drive, edit it, and watch it on your computer RGB monitor would cost no less than $5000 all in, and often closer to $7500. And that didn’t include the camcorder cost or the software you needed.
For a long time thereafter, at least up until the early 2000s, it was not trivial to capture full-screen full motion video and output it to tape or optical disk as an AVI file or MOV file. Even if you had all the hardware, you still had to have mastering software that would allow you to transcode the video, assuming you wanted to watch it on TV and not on a computer RGB screen. No matter what you wanted to do, it was a process you a) had to be committed to; b) had to have some technical knowledge and savvy to make it happen; c) had to understand computer video editing and be willing to apply it via Premiere, Final Cut, Sony’s Vegas Video, Pinnacle Studio, etc.
So, to sum up: until a few years ago you needed expensive hardware to the tune of $5K-10K, technical knowledge, an investment of several hours if not more to create a finished, watchable video; today, a smartphone that costs $399 plus an AT&T service plan (but even if you take the entire 2 year contract for an iPhone and the original purchase price and combine them, they still come out to far less than a third of the total cost of the hardware and software you previously needed to capture, edit and distribute your video just 5-10 years ago), an online account that can accommodate videos sent to it over the airwaves, and the ability to post the video for the consumption of those you wish to view it. And, importantly, this is done via a process that includes the total time to capture the video plus the short time needed to transmit the video to the remote server plus the time needed to finalize the video resident online.
The differences between today with the iPhone 3GS and yesteryear with a dedicated camcorder and computer, explains why as TechCrunch reports here:
YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by a whopping 400%. For a single phone model to have such a major impact on the site is simply phenomenal.
Even without the iPhone, YouTube is seeing major growth across the entire mobile space — the site has seen uploads go up 1700% over the last six months. It’s not hard to guess why. Video-enabled smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, as are high speed data connections. YouTube also attributes part of the growth to a streamlined upload flow (note how easy it is to upload a video from your iPhone to the site), as well as its improved sharing capabilities (you can now syndicate your videos to services like Facebook and Twitter).
As the still-nascent iPhone 3GS continues to take off and more people figure out how to use the video sharing functionality, these figures are going to skyrocket. Other phones are increasingly getting in on the action too, like Android phones, which introduce direct-to-YouTube uploads with the 1.5 Cupcake update.
Opportunity: Target an underserved demographic
While the streamlined acquisition and transmission processes have definitely contributed to the increase in video sharing and uploading to social sites, what’s most interesting is this: most middle-aged people, who are the heads of a majority of $100,000+ income households in the United States, by far (U.S. Census Bureau, 2008), are not satisfied with their choices among media-sharing sites. In other words, though people are using sites like Youtube (for which Google is losing as much as $475M a year) and Facebook (which, at most, is making .17 cents per user per month in 2009) for sharing photos and video, they are looking for something better AND they are probably willing to spend between $70 and 100 per year to do so at a site they find satisfying.
To me, the real interesting opportunity and challenge at the current juncture between the increase in video viewing from all sources (broadcast, satellite, cable, online, DVD, blu-ray, etc.), ease of video capture and distribution, and explosion of communication channels esp. via social networking sites is to provide a media sharing site that appeals to middle-aged people. Why is this an interesting opportunity when people 15-25 are considered the key demographic for new technology adoption?
In two words, money and time. People in their 40s and 50s have lots of money and very little time. And, as reported above, less than 4 in 10 of them are satisfied with their media sharing options while they are willing to pay $72 to 90 a year for the privilege of doing it.
People in their teens and twenties comparatively have much more time and much less money. Facebook and MySpace are primarily designed for these younger demographics and are being used by older people because they want to stay in touch with old friends from High School and their kids in High School (a gross simplification, but generally true). Older people use these sites grudgingly but don’t find them particularly user-friendly.
Since the other time problems have been addressed by Apple: namely, relatively easy to use, must-have 3G+ phone with video camera built-in that people can quickly use to capture footage and send off to the Web, the only two that remain are incorporation of web-based automated video editing and a media sharing site that is Baby Boomer friendly.
So, if Apple or some other enterprising company were to create a more user-friendly media sharing site that incorporated automated video editing (such as Muvee Reveal, which was discussed in a prior post) and was targeted at people in their 40s and 50s, the survey seems to indicate that the site could charge an average of $80 a year for the privilege and this group of consumers would be willing to pay it. Considering, again, that Facebook is only making $2.00 per user per YEAR, if it could monetize middle-aged people at $80 per year, it could vault into the black very quickly. And, it would find a level of stickiness among this desirable head-of-household 45-50 year old demographic heretofore unrealized.
Imagine, social networking services that actually make money!
Of course, the other alternative is for an enterprising startup to come along and use Google Wave to create an easy-to-use video sharing and discussion application that can be incorporated directly into the end-users’ e-mail and chat streams. But that’s a discussion for another day.
At its I/O conference last week, Google unveiled its new ‘Wave’ communications and collaboration platform and set of APIs. Like you, I hear about lots of ‘the next greatest’ things on what seems like a daily basis. And, probably like you, I think ‘blecccch’–there are probably 5 people in the world who will really care about that. Lotus Notes and Twitter are both examples of things I either don’t understand or don’t understand why they get the hype they do.
In the case of Google ‘Wave’, though, I have to say that I was blown away. I don’t say that about many alpha/beta projects, but this one is major.
A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:
The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
First, this new comm & collab platform was created by the same Rasmussen brothers who created and implemented that little-known location-based service called “Google Maps”, so, right there, you know this isn’t the plaything of some guy with a fetish for web 2.0 mashups that will tell you whether Jupiter is aligned with Mars on April 27, 2130.
Second, any one of the things that ‘Wave’ will do would be noteworthy and impactful, but taken as a whole, the platform has the opportunity to alter, fundamentally, how we interact online and make it better–I will go into more detail on this below.
Third, the platform will be open-source and so will allow small developers to create very useful and cool applications and services without having to start from scratch–they can piggyback on a complete platform that incorporates a tremendous amount of functionality into one web-based browser interface.
Google understands that third parties will have unique visions and bring applications to the platform that the Rasmussens haven’t yet thought of and will further evolve existing usage models.
Fourth, it will take the paradigm of ‘upload and publish’ of your photos to a whole new level of efficiency and power–you can have a standing wave (no pun intended for all of you acoustic engineers out there) that involves photography and publish your photos by dragging and dropping them onto that wave. Everyone else who subscribes to your photo wave can then have those photos instantly show up in their browser.
Imagine, for example, that you take a series of pictures at a party and you want to publish them to a wave which includes other people invited to the same party. You shoot the pictures and then drag the ones you want to share with the overall group to the wave. You then pick a particular invitee in the wave, start a new wave and then drag a different picture–that you only want to share with that particular person–to the new wave. You’ve just published photos all from your iPhone using simple drag and drop and a few button-clicks. You don’t have to enter a single e-mail address. Moreover, you can do this all from within your iPhone browser.
It also revolutionizes the concept of communal photo albums, because it provides a very central and effective way of multiple group members each contributing content to a shared repository that is organized and accessible to all members of the group. This will mean that you no longer have to publish your photos to multiple online repositories and point others to them. You can have one set of photos that you publish in parts to several existing waves (for example) consisting of different audiences. There will be no need to have photos on Flickr, Facebook, your own blog. Instead you could have separate waves for separate locations and as you add the photos to the waves in one central browser interface, they get published to those other locations automatically. This looks to work for videos, audio, gadgets, etc. My guess is you could provide an embeddable link to a Youtube video or a map from Google Maps.
Fifth, and, wait for it…a wave can be a blogging tool, too. So, not only can you write or post media to a wave via your main messaging window, but the wave can be published to your blogging site and as you update the wave, you update the blog too. Moreover, as other wave participants add comments, those can get posted to the blog as well.
Sixth, social networking–the waves can hook into popular social networking platforms like Facebook. So, again, you can have discussions or 1:1 exchanges and manage them from your ‘wave’ browser window and have them published to your Facebook site–but you don’t have to go to Facebook yourself to edit.
Seventh, as you can gather at this point, it’s all browser based–nothing to download or install and available anywhere, including your iPhone browser. You will have all of this functionality available from your mobile browser.
Eighth, it presents a new non-linear thread paradigm (I know that sounds pretty wonky, but sometimes you have to go with the jargon, you know?) in the sense that I can be added to a thread late in its evolution, and insert comments into the dialog represented by the thread after any entry even if it came before I joined the thread. Thus, I don’t have to respond only to the latest post, but can go back and spawn a new thread (if I choose) by commenting on a post that was made much earlier in the textual conversation. Moreover, once I start the new wave, I can invite a whole new set of people to participate that might or might not be the same group as were already in the conversation.
This feature alone will greatly impact forums and community conversations.
Ninth, if I join the conversation late, I can rewind and replay the conversation to understand who said what when and how it evolved to its current state. I can do this by overall conversation OR by an individual participant to see only, for instance, what “Robert” said throughout the conversation.
Tenth, Wave integrates calendaring and group organization and so essentially provides ‘eVite’ on steroids. I can arrange group meetings, parties, etc. very easily using my contacts, schedule, e-mail, calendar, etc. all from within one location.
Eleventh, it changes the IM paradigm from wait-until-I’m-done-with-my-typing-to-read to we-can-all-type -and-read-together-without the wait. Now, if you’re over 20, you may not think this is a cool feature, but I will go out on a limb here and conjecture that the teenagers I know will be very happy to have this and will come of age expecting this knd of paradigm.
Twelfth, it offers real-time translation into other languages as you type.
Thirteenth, all instances of waves and wave servers can be federated. There are many positive implications to this that I won’t go into here.
Fourteenth, ‘Spelly’ a spellchecker that uses the web as its reference database.
Lastly, a built-in system for document management and collaboration. Again much could be said about this and its impact on web-publishing, but I will come back to this in another post.
I will write more about this but wanted to tell you about it if you haven’t already heard about it, because while it may not change the way you shoot pictures with your iPhone, it may well change many of the things you do with your photos once you’ve acquired them and want to share them with others.
Try to watch at least the first 30 minutes of the video above. IMHO it will take at least that long to get the full flavor of what Wave can do.
I believe that this will be big in 1-2 years and that developers will start very soon to build new and cool apps based on this platform.
There are snarky people who will say this is a geek thing that will not impact the average webizen. Let me disabuse those snarks of that notion–it will affect the average webizens in a good way.
Will Google track high-level behaviors and insert ads in various places? Probably.
Am I saying that Google is Mother Teresa because they are creating this very cool platform and open-sourcing it? No. They are a publicly traded company that has to make money–but so is Microsoft (Just so you know, I’m a shareholder in Microsoft but not in Google–go figure), and Microsoft isn’t creating anything remotely like this, though Surface is pretty cool in a different way.
Though the pace of technology innovation in the mobile, computing and imaging areas is dizzying, a lot of these innovations don’t necessarily have a direct impact on consumer usage models, but represent incremental advances ‘behind-the-scenes’.
That is not the case with ‘pico projectors’. What are pico projectors and why does it affect mobile photography?
Though Veit and I have both separately alluded to this point in other places (and I don’t want to be accused of re-stating the obvious 
), it’s worth noting again here: devices like the iPhone 3GS, by combining a full-fledged communications and media transport device with a relatively high-quality full-motion video camera, enable consumers to shoot video on a mobile device, do things (or not) to it on the device, and then send it to a remote online server without ever having to download the footage to a desktop computer and/or transcode it so it can be burned to DVD, tape or to an AVI file for viewing on your TV. Again, the implications of this are major because it disrupts a usage model that has been in place for 20 years.
For those of you old enough to remember computing tech in the 1980s and early 1990s (and that includes Veit and me), capturing video –much less full motion video (yes, there was a time when you could only afford devices to capture video at 15 fps)– was a major process that required expensive add-on gear. TrueVision, RasterOps, SuperMac, Radius were all companies which offered still frame digitizers (capture a 640×480 frame in thousands or even millions of colors) and later motion video capture at a price. Radius had a series of devices called ‘VideoSpigot’ which could capture 320×240 video in 1993 at around $600, but not at 30 fps. The 30 fps capability came a few years later.
You could output this video at 640×480 via interpolation. Keep in mind that not only did you have to have an expensive add-on card with break-out box, but you had to have a first rate hard drive that would cost several hundred dollars up to over $1000 (I think I paid $1800 for a 1.2 Gigabyte drive in 1996) as well as an expensive graphics card capable of 24 bit color (assuming you wanted to see your video in true color) and a monitor capable of displaying 16.7M colors. To have the whole rig you needed to capture 320×240 video onto your hard drive, edit it, and watch it on your computer RGB monitor would cost no less than $5000 all in, and often closer to $7500. And that didn’t include the camcorder cost or the software you needed.
