Erik Sundelöf

entrepreneur, thinker and Swede

The future of the new improved media
150 150 eriks

I have been interviewed by a number of newspapers and news channels lately. The main focus of the interviews has been the future of citizen media or as I prefer to look at it, The New Improved Media. I will try to give my view on the future of it and why it will work.

Parts of the intro-text to the main site are:

“… Delivering unfiltered, uncontrolled and as free news as possible is a crucial part of any work towards and/or to sustain democracy. Making people trust the news media and to enable them to feel part of the news making is equally important. … Imagine people being able to report back from events such as the London bombings, the riots in Paris and the recent events in Belarus or maybe just report from your neighborhood about any crimes or other problems.”

Looking at the on-going conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, the need for citizen journalism is as high as ever. We see a lot of reports on sites such as YouTube, and the discussions inside communities such as MySpace are more intense than ever.

Looking forward: What can we learn? What is the future? What can traditional media do? What can we as individuals do?

I believe some of challenges for the future in citizen media are:

  • Empowering all citizens of this world
  • Credibility and authenticity of the delivered content
  • Friendship between persons regardless of citizenship, ethnicity, race, religion and so forth
  • Solving the connectivity problem

People in regions such as the Middle East are frustrated – frustrated of embargos, tired of war and in many ways frustrated that their voices are not heard. The new media could solve this in many ways. The professional journalist is giving the professional, objective and thought-out version of the story, as does the professional photographer. By giving the working tools for the people on the ground, where event are taking place, people will be able to share their personal stories, the way they see in – in shaky, fuzzy pictures and videos from their digital cameras, their texts from cell phones and shaky voices in audio clips.

They will start to believe that there is someone listening to them, and that they are not alone. Exaggerated, all of a sudden common people will start to feel and believe that there are people listening to them, other than the fundamental religious groups. The concept is known and for the unbelievers I recommend that you read the book: “Naked blogging” by Scoble/Israel.

Unfortunately, just providing them with the proper channel is not enough. You will also need the credibility of the traditional media to make this channel legitimate in the eyes of both the people in the troubled areas and the audience in the rest of the world. Today, many websites such as YouTube suffer from the fact that the authenticity cannot be validated. I do not blame these sites for this, but nevertheless, in order to make the citizen contributions valid, there is a crucial need to create an organization that addresses the authenticity of the citizen reports. The problem is found in both the policy (makers) as so partly in the technology. If the traditional media would get involved the situation would definitely change.

What about the friendship part?
This is according to me the most important part. If anyone wonders why, I thought I would give you an analogy to see the simplicity. When you buy a new TV, you usually ask your friends and family for advice to see what they think and what they have bought. Likewise you do when you trying to digest matters such as the crisis in the Middle East. How can this madness continue? Who is to blame? What can I do? You are asking your friends and family. Sitting at cafés, bars, around the dinner tables and talking about the problem. Trying to understand.

Wouldn’t it be better to also ask and/or listen someone with first hand information? Someone with a human face. Someone to relate to. Someone that will give you the unfiltered, unbiased(?) and uncensored truth.

– Come on, Erik. That does not exist!
– You are so right my friend, but it should!

Why will this work? The philosophy behind the UN and the European Union is to build friendships and relations between countries to prevent them from getting into arguments /disputes that end up in wars. It is a known fact that you don’t, hopefully, attack your friend. (At least my friends don’t.) What is so cool today is that modern technology enables borderless and “blind” communication between all individuals, especially when you enable wireless posting via cell phones such as SMS and MMS. You can speak to anyone, anywhere at anytime. Why not use it? The New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman writes about it in his book “The World is Flat” even though I think that the conclusion is even broader than he concludes in his book.

Wow! Why hasn’t it been done before? Actually it has, but the obvious potential was not seen for some reason. Today in the troubled and/or rural area of this world, there often is no internet, no high-speed connectivity, and no DSL connection. Still their voices must be heard, should be heard and must be heard. As cell phones today are almost ubiquitous there they become the obvious choice.

The “right” solution therefore relies on the facts:

  • Cell phones today transmit audio, video, graphics, photographs and text.
  • When combined with the proper web application, cell phones enable any citizen in any country of any background to publish information and share it with the world.
  • Citizen journalism (or grassroot journalism), coupled with traditional journalism, results in better, more informed and credible news reports.

My project here at Stanford takes advantage of all of the above and I have created a way for anyone to blog to your blog, your photo gallery, your video gallery with their own cell phone. The only thing needed is a cell phone and some quick setup screens online. Soon setup via SMS will be enabled.

Cool, but if a person cannot write? Anyone can take a picture, a video or even tell their story via a simple phone call (see the cool technology by PodTech, Typepad/Skype) or audio clip. A picture tells you more than a thousand words and a video even more. User experience research has shown that the keypad of the cell phone can be replaced by symbols thus enabling illiterate people to send in messages.

The technology is here. Are we?

I am as a friend told me today, hopelessly optimistic about this. I however am not naïve. We will need to give it some time, but we will get there! I believe in humanity and the good of the people. The good guys always win. At least in my world. :)

  • eriks
  • 0

Article: Stanford Fellow Imagines Every Cell Phone as Citizen Media Outlet
150 150 eriks

Mark Glaser at MediaShift PBS met me some time ago and we spoke on the subject of citizen media and the future of it. I truly believe cell phones are the right way to go here if combined with the proper business model.

Key quote from article:
"The key here is that the media organizations need to realize they are losing control. They can’t really control [the news] now because people are posting this stuff to other blogs. I think it would be better to merge traditional reporting with citizen media rather than have a [totally] new media.

To take the best of the old fashioned news organizations and bring in the power of the bloggers, because you have so many people investigating. Mix them and you have an extremely good organization and you’ll have content that’s really important in finding out the truth." — Erik Sundelof, Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University

The interview is found here: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/digging_deeperstanford_fellow.html

  • eriks
  • 0

Article: Stanford Fellow Imagines Every Cell Phone as Citizen Media Outlet
150 150 eriks

Mark Glaser at MediaShift PBS met me some time ago and we spoke on the subject of citizen media and the future of it. I truly believe cell phones are the right way to go here if combined with the proper business model.

Key quote from article:
“The key here is that the media organizations need to realize they are losing control. They can’t really control [the news] now because people are posting this stuff to other blogs. I think it would be better to merge traditional reporting with citizen media rather than have a [totally] new media.

To take the best of the old fashioned news organizations and bring in the power of the bloggers, because you have so many people investigating. Mix them and you have an extremely good organization and you’ll have content that’s really important in finding out the truth.” — Erik Sundelof, Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University

The interview is found here.

  • eriks
  • 0

Where is the geospatial web heading?
150 150 eriks

I attended the Where 2.0 conference earlier this week. The topic as to address the new GeoWeb, which in short is simply mashup of content based on location. The conference highlighted strategies and different applications in this very interesting field. My thoughts and reflections on the conference are:

Lesson 1 You need data, data, data…
You can have the coolest application, but if you simple don’t have the data, the true potential is really lost. Data should be as freely available as possible, accurate and for the whole world. This is a tremendous task and my impression is that many of the big players at least partly are underestimating the necessity. In many ways most attempts are very US-focused, even though some players are starting to realize this. This is especially true for the big mapping projects, as you map is never better than the data you put into it, which is a well-known problem.

Lesson 2 Business models are the problem, not the technology.
I saw quite a few applications that some way or the other had a very cool and flashy appearance, but it was very unclear how this would produce a revenue share. Guy Kawasaki’s comment – “Okay, so you have a cool product, then what…” – is something that tends to gets lost in this hype.

The interesting analogy to the social web is thus very interesting. Before the social web matured the same problems were faced. I think the GeoWeb will pretty much face the same problems.

Lesson 3 Cellphone GPS applications are still not market ready.
This is very simple: There are not enough GPS-enabled handsets combined with the resistance from cellphone operators pretty much makes any attempt in this field highly questionable from a business perspective. If you would like to go into this field it is simple. Make sure you have a well-defined audience in which you can control their handsets and maybe even more important operators. There are some companies doing things right here and I would recommend to take a look at ULocate – http://www.ulocate.com.

Lesson 4 The privacy problem with location based.
Answer these questions: Do you really want everyone to know where you are, have been and also keep track of that. What stops your boss to install this on your cellphone? What are the long term consequences? Do we really want to live in a big brother society? Are there enough advantages to overlook the dangers?

I see this a broader debate on the web as whole. However, developers and solution architects need to start to think in these paths. The sense I got from talking to some developers at the conference and outside is that many developers tend to hide from addressing these issues. I think of a quote from the one of the managers at Google Earth (commenting something else though): “Just because you can do it, does not mean that you should do it…” Unfortunately there are a lot of developers that do this big mistake.

Lesson 5 Cellphone operators are still the main obstacle for any.
You are using someone else’s network and thus you need to ask for permission. I see very little big potential in only mashing up locations, without providing the customers with a mobile solution. The network of interest thus is the cellphone network. All that have been doing anything in that field knows that you need their permission. I think that they definitely have bigger power than they should, and a lot of work needs to be done here. I will leave this discussion simply by saying the rather obvious: If you need GPS-data via your cellphone, you must have access to it. Otherwise the user experience will be too poor.

These are the lessons I learnt at the conference. To conclude I saw a lot of cool applications, yet with very unclear purpose. What is the need to have the applications? What is the market, if any?

I was amazed listening to the big players Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! who all are kind of fumbling around figuring this out. How they are going to take advantage of this opportunity. Interesting enough I think that Yahoo! has been more successful than the others. They linked their geospatial initiative to their social web initiative, which diminished the pressure of making money on the geospatial initiative itself.

It does make less sense to launch a location based service without any cellphone application. To really make cellphone applications to take off, there is a huge need for policy making on both national and international level to erode the monopolistic atmosphere on the market. For now many companies get stuck in partnership discussions and the further development of their products is halted. Initiatives like wireless phones and wireless enabled flash cards together with proper lobbying campaigns will force the market to open up, and it can really take off.

  • eriks
  • 0