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The growing network of people, through telecommunications, smartphones and the Internet allows people to come together in many ways.  People share aspects of their lives in numerous ways and access unprecedented amounts of information, content and services.  In recent years, however, it has become apparent that this vast network of connected and on-line people are not just consumers, but a valuable resource. ‘Crowdsourcing’ is the term used for outsourcing tasks to large groups of people, and today’s massively connected world makes crowdsourcing more viable and powerful than ever before.

Recently, we have seen some fun and exciting applications of crowd-sourcing in scientific research.  Classification tasks, or repetitive tasks that cannot be performed by a machine are particularly suitable for crowd-sourcing.  The idea is that certain tasks that may usually be performed by teams of people or by computers can be broken up into many parts, so everyday people can offer a few minutes of their time for free.

MoonZoo is such a project (read an article on Wired), focusing on classifying features of the universe, such as the formation of galaxies and the surface of the moon.  The project aims to classify features in the gigantic archive of photos taken by astronomy satellites, thus extracting invaluable information.  Users of the site look at photos of the moon surface and identify and locate craters, boulders and other features by comparing them with examples provided.  GalaxyZoo uses the same approach to classify types of galaxies –   human input is invaluable, elegantly put ”Computers will slowly get better at classifying galaxies, but looking at an image and asking ‘what’s that odd thing?’ remains uniquely human.” - Galaxy Zoo.  Another interactive science crowd-sourcing project, Foldit, allows users to solve visual puzzles folding proteins to help discover ways of making chemical reactions more efficient.  For more examples of science crowdsourcing projects that you can try look here.

A more common example that you are likely to have come across is “captcha” the security check on many websites that asks you to spell out difficult to read words.  A basic nuisance to most, this process is actually helping the process of digitising books – words that cannot be correctly identified by the scanning software are crowdsourced by getting people to identify what they are.

But crowdsourcing has many uses beyond science and academia.  Mobile apps are emerging that can take advantage of their users, to help eachother, or to help businesses.  MapShare, Trapster, SubwayArrival and GoogleMaps all allow users to share information about transport and traffic to promote safety on the road or help others avoid congested areas.  LocalMind allows people to share information about what’s going on around them – such as whether a particular bar is busy.   Crowdsourcing is a great way to quickly  acquire up-to-date information about an area or situation, and has recently been employed in many humanitarian and natural disasters.

Businesses already value the extensive customer behaviour tracking that is now possible because of our extensive digital lives.  Facebook has become a useful source of information for businesses to perform consumer research, with many people wilfully publishing information about their behaviours and preferences that they would previously have had to go to great lengths to get via customer surveys.

Here in the Scribble offices, we’ve been playing the massively popular ‘DrawSomething’ app – a social game similar to Pictionary.  With millions of people drawing their interpretations of specific words, could this be an interesting resource: for example to analyse social trends, or to help train computers to recognize images?  Game developers have recently started to monitor detailed stats about game-player’s habits to inform design changes.

Crowdsourcing offers businesses and app developers a new way of looking at how they relate to their customers – users can be viewed as a resource and not just consumers.  Maybe the way people use their apps can offer interesting insights – so what exciting uses will we see for crowdsourcing apps in the future?

Mobile is huge.  For some evidence of how huge, take a look at the vast crowds of attendees at the recent Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.  Some 60,000 people attended the event, and the amount of content and technology on show was simply staggering.  Scribble were very excited to join the crowds this year.  News is still filtering through the networks, and with so much to take in, it is hard to know where to start.  We will spend the next few weeks talking about some of the hot topics for mobile this year to come out of the MWC, beginning with an overview of new mobile devices on show at the event.

Powerful smartphones

Many handsets are now appearing with quad-core processors – making them capable of high performance in entertainment applications such as videogame graphics and HD video playback.  It also means that devices will be able to perform processor-heavy tasks such as real-time image processing for better camera performance and photo and video editing.

Android

Android is continuing to gain momentum, powering many of the major smartphones on show.  Their new operating system “Ice-Cream Sandwich” was also on show, in handsets such as the impressive LG Optimus 4X HD and the HTC One X.

Tablets

In terms of competition, Apple still hold a very strong spot in the marketplace for tablets, especially with the recently announced iPad3 refreshing their lineup.  But the MWC showed that tablets are here to stay.  Rather than a competition to see who is crowned the winner, the entry of many new sizes and forms of tablets is testament to the arrival of a new category of devices that is sure to replace the PC for a number of common tasks, and allow more flexible mobile computing.

The metric for comparison still remains the iPad, which has set many precedents.  Some tablets will attempt to stand out simply with a smaller price tag, but there are a number of stand-out tablets hoping to carve a niche by offering something new, such as using docking stations to offer the functionality of a laptop, or having controls and graphics capabilities tailored for gaming on the go, many devices at the show were even touting water resistance, with basins of water ready to dump expensive digital devices into!

Somewhere Inbetween

Many new smartphones are emerging with a larger form-factor.  This move comes in tandem with faster processors and advances in screen technology – all with the aim of driving bigger and more impressive displays, for movies, gaming and making web and text content easier to read.  The LG Optimus 4X HD, LG Optimus Vu, HTC One X, Panasonic Eluga and many more have 4-inch and above screen sizes.  The Asus Padfone even connects to a docking station (essentially a touchscreen) to turn it into a 10inch tablet computer.

Windows 8

Whilst there are still comparatively few Windows Phones available, demonstrations of Microsoft Windows 8 clearly show that Microsoft is heavily invested in the future of mobile.  Their new operating system runs on both PCs and tablets – as opposed to having a separate system for each – and is designed with touch in mind.  Microsoft have been largely absent in mobile technology in recent years, but their impressive technology shows that they are likely to be a major player as the mobile sector matures.

HTML5 is the new emerging web standard, the technology that brings internet content to the screen.  This is the code that acts as a toolset for developers to design and create web content and applications.  The new standard will address the way the internet has evolved in recent years, giving developers greater control of media and graphics content and a suite of tools to facilitate building services and applications.  HTML5 also makes it easier for developers to work cross-platform, creating content that will work on mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones as well as on PCs.

It will be some years before HTML5 is completed and fully deployed, but many developers are already starting to use the technology in exciting ways.  We at Scribble are excited about the possibilities offered by HTML5 and potential applications in the future.  So we’ll be keeping an eye on developments and making regular posts to talk about things that get us excited about the future of HTML5.

One of the main views of HTML5 is as a replacement for Flash.  While Flash is a popular choice for interactive and media content on the web, it’s closed nature and search engine unfriendliness has had developers yearning for an alternative for some years.  Apple’s refusal to incorporate Flash compatibility into iOS devices has also added significant pressure for developers to move away from Flash. HTML5 offers media playback, animation, 3d graphics and many more tools for rich-media content.

In fact, HTML5 offers many more tools outside of rich media content and is much much more than an alternative to Flash, but we thought this would be a good place to start.  We’ve picked out a number of beautiful examples of what developers can do using HTML5, and they paint a pretty picture of what we can expect from HTML5 in our web browsers and on our mobile devices in the future.

Click the images to view these beautiful examples of HTML5 in action.  A recently updated version of Chrome is recommended to view these.  Many of these are found on ChromeExperiments.com a site set up by google to showcase the exciting possibilities of HTML5.

WebGL Terrain

Beautiful landscape procedurally drawn in real time.

Endless Forest

An endless generated 3D spooky forest.

3 Dreams of Black

This is what you get when you put HTML5 tools in the hands of amazing artists and animators.  A jaw-dropping journey through a 3D world exploding with life!

8-Bit Colour Cycling

This demo replicates an old-school effect used in the days of 8-bit colour palettes.  This involves ‘colour-cycling’ – automatically shifting specific sets of colours in the palette - to create animation effects.  At the time, this was used as an efficient way to bring movement to images without actually animating multiple frames.  Enjoy this stunningly beautiful set of images steeped in gaming nostalgia!

Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown, Interactive film by Chris Milk

A superb example of innovative and out-of-the-box thinking. Difficult to sum up in words…  as you go through the experience, the browser opens and closes windows, showing you pictures of your home town fed in from Google Maps and depicting flocks of birds that interact with the narrative.  In addition to the beautiful and impressive motion graphics, the experience is thoughtfully designed to instill nostalgia and make you engage with the music.

This week at Scribble, we thought we would try out the latest service to jump into the Cloud.  Eager to find out for ourselves, we signed up to OnLive, the first commercial ‘cloud-gaming’ service.  This new technology offers very exciting prospects, and hints at a future where mobile devices could bring the power of a high-end PC or console right into your hands.

OnLive allows users to play a range of PC and Xbox360 titles via a streaming service.  As with other cloud-based and streaming services, there are several appealing factors:  no installation or hard disk space required, there is immediate access to a wide variety of titles, and your settings and profile are stored online meaning you can connect on any computer and continue your experience.

With cloud gaming, however, there is another significant advantage:  since the graphics are rendered on the server and streamed to your PC, you don’t need powerful processor, graphics card or games console.  The only requirement is a consistent Internet connection with decent bandwidth.  Of course, this part is key.  When OnLive was announced, I was sceptical, as were many critics.  The main reason for scepticism is based on the fact that games must respond instantly to user input: can an internet connection really respond and get the rendered image back to your screen quickly enough?

OnLive recommends using a wired connection to connect to the internet, and tests your connection before letting you connect.  To my surprise, I found my modest ADSL connection yielded an enjoyable experience, even over WIFI.  Keeping an eye on the data transfer rate, around 700kbps gave a good picture quality, and even 300kbps was pretty good.  The main surprise was the responsiveness – I didn’t detect any noticeable delay except for when playing on WIFI when there would be occasional delays and drops in responsiveness.

All the games have their graphics settings cranked up to the max: at it’s best the games look stunning; when the streaming performance drops, the picture degrades in the same way that streaming video does on YouTube or iPlayer, but the framerate does not drop.  The visual performance may not be up to the standards of seasoned gamers, but I gave up trying to stay up to date with expensive graphics cards and games consoles long ago.  Even when I was a frequent PC games player, my computer was rarely powerful enough to play the latest games with the best graphics.  So in that respect, OnLive gives me better performance than I ever had.  What’s more, now having just one laptop that I use for work, I don’t feel like dedicating half of my hard disk space to the hefty 10GB+ installations that many games now require.

OnLive, then, offers a great casual gaming platform – I can quickly jump in and out of games with little hassle, and £7 a month gets you a pretty substantial bundle of games to play, with the option to buy or rent other titles.  The games library is far from comprehensive, but there are plenty of top titles to choose from, and the collection will only continue to grow.  It is a great solution for people who, like me, only use a laptop, often having lesser graphics capabilities.

The future of Cloud-Gaming?  Better internet connections will make this a viable option for more people, and the lack of need for expensive consoles or hardware make the price attractive.  OnLive will soon be joined by competitors, Microsoft to be the first, so this is unlikely to be a fad, and a bit of healthy competition is always a good thing.  Streaming games, like movies, requires a LOT of data transfer, service providers will need to start offering true cap-less internet packages if these kind of services are to become mainstream.

But overcoming some minor obstacles, who knows?  With 4G mobile networks on the horizon, maybe we could be playing top-end games on our tablets and smartphones!  A few years ago people would not have believed the capabilities of today’s mobile devices would be possible, and no one predicted the role mobile devices would come to play in our lives, so here at Scribble, we know that when it comes to mobile devices, the sky is the limit.