Lifecasting will be Prevalent, and has a Down-To-Earth Future

Lifecasting is one of those things that is interesting on a theoretical, academic, political, and artistic level. Yet, right now, it's pretty boring in "real life."

But there is a big bourgeois, commercial opportunity coming for lifecasting, and with that will come low prices, ubiquity, and all sorts of new content also relevant to the avant-garde. In the same way that cellphone cameras now catch politicians off guard and police beating protesters, the surveillance (sousveillance?) society will take a quantum leap forward.

Walgreen's sells a low-end USB web cam for $14.99 today, and for well under $100 one can get a higher-end unit. I predict that in 2-5 years, I'll be able to drop $40 in Walgreen's and get a wearable cam/mic with an 8-ounce belt-clip battery that will plug in to my cell phone ... and I'm in the game with justin.tv.

This is not live-without-a-net futurism here, either. I'm making a modest argument by extrapolation on the hardware side. The original justin.tv rig was a hassle to put together with today's technology. The biggest challenges involved upstream mobile bandwidth, battery power, and data compression.

With EVDO Rev B, HSUPA, and WiMAX, bandwidth looks to be less of a problem than giving customers a reason to buy it. As MPEG-2 fades away in favor of MPEG-4 flavors like H.264 and 3GP, cheap hardware compression is already becoming less of an issue. In fact, many of today's low-end smartphones are most of the way there in terms of a basic lifecasting rig. Battery power will remain an issue for anyone wanting to go live 24/7. But for a few hours at a time, several ounces of lithium-ion will keep the camera, compressor, and radio humming.

So what are the bourgeois, commercial applications?

• Conferences: organizers won't love broadcasts of the content, but, at least in tech, they are desperate to find some way to keep the shows compelling. I can see a lot of organizations sending one delegate to lifecast while others back home watch and interact, including talking to vendors, visiting hospitality suites, etc.
• Meetings: an interactive lifecast of a remote meeting would be a more productive way to participate than just a conference call or even a traditional web/videoconference.
• Social events: suppose your school reunion is far away and not nearly exciting enough to make the trek. But a friend who lives in the area goes, and you can ride along via lifecast? That could be a riot. And if it isn't, just close the browser.
• Education: how cool would it be sit in on some virtual flight lessons, tuned in to a lifecast from a CFI giving a real student a real lesson.
• Remote Personal Assistant: Instead of a worrying about wearable computers with smarts, you go about your business while a remote assistant tracks your lifecast. Need directions? a pickup line? a reservation? instant info on anything? Your assistant, sitting somewhere comfortable with easy access to all things cyber can do the virtual legwork and send you what you need in real time.

The monetization platform is already here, as early adopters have jumped out ahead. Phone hardware (which will serve as the workhorse for the system, just as it does now for millions of phone-cam snapshots, videos, and mms messages) is moving at a rapid pace. That just leaves a few more parts to design and sell to complete the picture. With the amounts of VC money flowing today, I don't see that last part as a problem.

Free Stuff Heralds Changing Conference Scene ... Not Just More Money Either

LinuxWorld is offering free exhibit hall passes for the San Francisco show next week. They have always made exhibit passes available for free. But in the past, as with many conferences, free guests were

• only free when pre-registered by a certain date
• restricted from conference sessions
• not invited to catered events

After the dot-com crash, free passes got cheaper. This year, things are even easier, with LinuxWorld providing

• free day-of-conference passes
• coupons for passes sent to all pre-registered attendees, with instructions to photocopy
• open invitation to the "kick-off" shindig
• a voucher to attend one conference session for exhibit-hall-only guests

The tech show world has been evolving: JavaOne, after some years of a no-exhibit-pass policy started selling them. The Web 2.0 conference not only invited people in for free, but invited them to a free-beer-and-food fest. It's not just that the shows are hurting for attendee numbers to prop up sponsorship and booth prices. They may be, but I haven't got data to prove it.

Rather, it's that the value proposition of the show has changed. Conference sessions used to be a critical way to keep up with the tech landscape. I remember my frustration at not being able to get into the $2000 JavaOne show in 1999: I was working on a critical app using the brand-new Java2D API and the only people who really knew what I needed to find out about this API were not available to chat except at that show.

Now, the developers themselves blog about the newest APIs, post examples, and answer comments, providing a richer kind of support than was ever possible before. So you don't need to wait in line to snag them for 30 seconds at the end of a session.

Companies large and small are freely distributing pre-release bits too. Years ahead of RTM, in some cases. The audience has gotten sophisticated, and understands the difference between a brilliant but unofficial "side project" of a developer, a CTP, a "Go Live License" ... and that their favorite features may not make it to the RC, but that's a small price to pay for having running code -- for free! -- many quarters ahead of retail launch.

Valuable beta bits from the show goodie bag are usually posted by their creators within hours of any significant announcement at a show. And the blogosphere is de facto host to a worldwide birds-of-a-feather session that dwarfs any single show.

Meanwhile, unconferences are proliferating, where developers go to jack their brains straight into the coding matrix of other geeks, bypassing silly conference stuff, going right to what's relevant, and showing something off or banging something out on their own.

So where does that leave traditional format tech conferences? Honestly, I'm not sure. I hope somewhere good, since I'm presenting at one in September.

The current vibrancy of the tech economy should guarantee that these traditional-format shows will not whither due to lack of sponsorship/exhibitor money, or employers' belt-tightening. Money isn't the currency at issue at the moment. But attention is, and the quest to craft something that combines the meaningful intimacy of the unconferences with the massive scale of the every-day-is-Christmas tech-blog world. It's a big, expensive, and maybe even lucrative opportunity.