The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Islamic Finder: not what you think

Who says old and new can not co-exist? My neighbor is a devout Muslim and as the Islamic religion stipulates, he must pray five times a day (known as Salat) at fixed times physically facing towards Mecca.  But how to know the exact right time to begin prayer since Athan, the call to prayer, is occurring far away in Egypt (or elsewhere) and he is in San Francisco?

Islamic Finder is a software application that launches when it is time to pray wherever you live.  You simply enter where you live (it supports over 6 million cities) and it starts running. 

Much more than just a reminder app, Islamic Finder actually plays the audio of all of the relevant prayers from the different places in the world where Athan is occurring, automatically launching the prayer audio at the appropriate time.  It’s a kind of automatic call to prayer application with the prayers built right in.

You can send messages to people in your network that it's time to pray, SMS them and even choose to rotate different Athan reciters for the different pray times throughout the day.

So can old and new co-exist?  Are they really so incongruent is it just a matter of creating accommodating space and having the (crazy) wisdom to pursue it?  You decide.

Re-Inventing TV

MediaPost has an interesting write up on the coming turf battle between telcos and traditional broadcasters where broadcast media and IPTV intersect. 

My personal bias here is that the conversation, to be meaningful, really needs to have some context wrapped around it.

By that, I mean there is the transport question of proprietary versus TCP/IP networks, which is kind of a yawner at this point, as the trend lines are clear -- IP is swallowing up proprietary.

The real question is whether TV is being re-invented to be more interactive and more deeply integrated with web functionality, thereby becoming a "lean forward" experience, or will remain "lean back" oriented.

Will the experience continue to be one device at a time focused or increasingly optimized for concurrent use with multiple devices (i.e., watch TV on a big screen while IM'ing on a handheld and playing on a PlayStation)?

Will TV show producers control the creation of such services by being thought leaders and better integrating new functionality with their content, or will it evolve as "out of band" and separate from the producer?

What applications are most compelling and what types of TV programs are best suited for re-invention? 

Finally, how does the virtual water cooler effect play into this model, whereby producers and networks desperately want viewers talking about their programs, all the while knee jerking to walling off their content from being re-purposed by consumers?

Some time back, I wrote a blog on this topic called Middleband: Television content-aligned services for O'Reilly, which attempts to answer some of these questions.  If interested in such things, check it out.

The next big thing: Make a YouTube with vSocial

Tom Taulli, who writes the Straight Up column for Forbes, has done a nice write up of vSocial, and how we enable individuals, companies and organizations to rapidly roll out their own YouTube-like video content, channels and communities.  You can read the article by clicking HERE.

The Final Word on Kramergate?

As a big time fan of Seinfeld who can no longer quite watch the show with the same eye post Kramergate, I thought that this mashup, which merges news and real content from the show, captures the paradox within the paradox.  Enjoy.