Volantis Who? - a UK Open Source Success Story

Guildford is not famous for being a hotbed of open source, but that's where the British open source company Volantis is based. It's not as well known as it ought to be, probably because it sits astride the computing-mobile divide, helping mobile operators and others to display Web content on their devices....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Trouble with Clouds....

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Whoops. Open data, anyone?

Google Desperately Seeking Picasa

What on earth took them so long?

Finally, Google has integrated Picasa Web Albums into Google Image Search. Public albums can be enabled for a public search option, meaning your images will be more likely to come up in Google image results. And that’s a huge improvement, because previously images on Picasa (and Blogger, and Google Docs) were not searchable at all. The other Google applications are still missing out on all the fun, but Picasa images are now searchable. This is limited, however, to a Google image search.

What's the point of having masses of open content if you can't find it? (Via Searchblog.)

The 3D Digital Commons as Metaphor

A few months back I wrote about a video showing an intriguing project that built on the commons of public images posted to Flickr and the rest. By patching these together it was possible to recreate full, 3D representations of public spaces.

There's now a site with more info about this, as well as a paper on the subject:

With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset. For example, a search for “Notre Dame Paris” on Flickr yields more than 50,000 images showing the cathedral from myriad viewpoints and appearance conditions. This kind of data presents a singular opportunity: to reconstruct the world’s geometry using the largest known, most diverse, and largely untapped, multi-view stereo dataset ever assembled. What makes the dataset unusual is not only its size, but the fact tha it has been captured “in the wild”—not in the laboratory—leading to a set of fundamental new challenges in multi-view stereo research.

What's striking about this research - aside from the results, which are pretty dramatic - is that it provides a perfect metaphor for the benefit of pooling digital resources to create a commons. In this case, 2D pictures, many of limited value in themselves, are patched together to create an astonishingly detailed 3D representation of places that goes far beyond any single shot. And the more photos that are added, the richer that commons becomes. Exactly like all other digital commons.

Seeing the Power of the Visual Commons

I've written before about Microsoft's Photosynth, which draws on the Net's visual commons - Flickr, typically - to create three-dimensional images. Here's another research project that's just as cool - and just as good a demonstration of why every contribution to a commons enriches us all:

What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.

One of the most interesting discoveries was the following:

It takes a large amount of data for our method to succeed. We saw dramatic improvement when moving from ten thousand to two million images. But two million is still a tiny fraction of the high quality photographs available on sites like Picasa or Flickr (which has approximately 500 million photos). The number of photos on the entire Internet is surely orders of magnitude larger still. Therefore, our approach would be an attractive web-based application. A user would submit an incomplete photo and a remote service would search a massive database, in parallel, and return results.

In other words, the bigger the commons, the more everyone benefits.

Moreover:

Beyond the particular graphics application, the deeper question for all appearance-based data-driven methods is this: would it be possible to ever have enough data to represent the entire visual world? Clearly, attempting to gather all possible images of the world is a futile task, but what about collecting the set of all semantically differentiable scenes? That is, given any input image can we find a scene that is “similar enough” under some metric? The truly exciting (and surprising!) result of our work is that not only does it seem possible, but the number of required images might not be astronomically large. This paper, along with work by Torralba et al. [2007], suggest the feasibility of sampling from the entire space of scenes as a way of exhaustively modelling our visual world.

But that is only feasible if that "space of scenes" is a commons. (BTW, do check out the paper's sample images - they're amazing.)

Google Does Picasa for GNU/Linux...Almost

In the light of an earlier post wondering whose side Google was really on, the news that it has come out with a GNU/Linux version of its Picasa image management tool is interesting - particularly because of the way it has chosen to do it.

Rather than release a completely re-written version for the GNU/Linux platform, it has chosen to "cheat" by using WINE, which lets it employ the Windows code that is then mediated by WINE. So while it's good to have Picasa for GNU/Linux, it would have been nicer to see Google going all the way, rather than cobbling together this makeshift version.

However, to be fair, Google's decision has resulted in some patches for WINE, which may well help other porting projects. Apparently, a GNU/Linux version of Google Earth is also coming, but this won't be using WINE. (via Ars Technica.)

Google: Friend or Foe?

"Don't Be Evil" is the company motto: but is Google for us or against us?

I'm not talking about justifable concerns that it knows far too much about what interests us - both in terms of the searches we carry out and (if we use Gmail) the correspondence we send and receive. This is a larger issue, and relates to all the major online companies - Microsoft, Yahoo, even Amazon - that mediate and hence participate in much of our lives. What concerns me here is whether Google can be considered a friend of openness.

On the one hand, Google is quite simply the biggest open source company. Its fabled server farm consists of 10,000s/100,000s/1,000,000s (delete as applicable) of GNU/Linux boxes; this means that anyone searching with Google is a GNU/Linux user.

It has a growing list of code that it has open-sourced; it has sponsored budding hackers in its Summer of Code programme; and it keeps on acquiring key open source hackers like Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python) and Ben Goodger, (Firefox lead engineer).

On the other hand, Google's software is heavily weighted towards Microsoft Windows. Programs like Google Earth and Picasa are only available under Windows, and its latest, most ambitious foray, the Google Pack, is again only for Microsoft's operating system. This means that every time Google comes out with some really cool software, it is reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. Indeed, we are fast approaching the point where the absence of GNU/Linux versions of Google's programs are a major disincentive to adopt an open source desktop.

This dilemma is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, since Google clearly wants to serve the largest desktop market first, while drawing on the amazing price-performance of free software for its own computing platform.

But there is another area where it has the chance to play nice with openness, one that does not require it to come down definitively on one side or the other of the operating system world.

Another Windows-only product, Google Talk, is the subject of a lawsuit alleging patent infringement. However, closer examination of the two patents concerned, Patent Number 5,425,085 - "Least cost routing device for separate connection into phone line" - and Patent Number 5,519,769 - "Method and system for updating a call rating database", suggests that one of the best ways Google could show that it is a friend of both open source and proprietary software is by defending itself vigorously in the hope that the US Patent system might start to be applied as it was originally envisioned, to promote innovation, not as an easy way of extracting money from wealthy companies.

Update 1: Google has come out with a Mac version of Google Earth. It's a start.

Update 2: There are rumours about Google working on its own desktop GNU/Linux. Frankly, I'll believe it when I see it: it's a poor fit with their current portfolio, and the margins are terrible.

Update 3: Comfortingly, these rumours have now been scotched.

Yahoo! Gets Del.icio.us

The only suprising thing about Yahoo's acquisition of del.icio.us is that Yahoo got there before Google.

The three-way battle between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for dominance hinges on who can colonise the Web 2.0 space first. Google seemed to be ahead, with its steady roll-out of services like Gmail (albeit in beta) and purchase of Blogger and Picasa. But Yahoo is coming on strongly: now that it has both Flickr and del.icio.us it has started to catch up fast.

The dark horse, as ever is Microsoft: its recent announcement of Windows and Office Live show that it does not intend to be left behind. But unlike its previous spurts to overtake early leaders like Netscape, this one requires something more profound than mere technical savvy or marketing might.

Web 2.0 has at its heart sharing and openness (think blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us etc.). For Microsoft to succeed, it needs to embrace a philosophy which is essentially antithetical to everything it has done in its history. Bill Gates is a brilliant manager, and he has many thousands of very clever people working for him, but this may not be enough. Even as it tries to demonstrate "openness" - through SharedSource, or "opening" its Office XML formats - the limits of Microsoft's ability fully to embrace openness become clearer. But that is the point about being real open: it is all or nothing.

The question is not so much whether Microsoft will ever get it - everything in its corporate DNA says it won't - but whether Google and Yahoo will. In this sense, Web 2.0 is theirs to lose, rather than for Microsoft to win.