Holocene is a
distinctively new - and now patented -
approach to real-time online
communications.
Initial versions will quickly replace the 30-year old
"chat" standard of interrupted, upward-scrolling lines. No more
crude-cartoony "speech balloons" that dumb-down conversation to the
level of grunts! Instead, Holocene offers a graphical interface
incorporating more than two dozen skills that people use in the real
world, during natural speech.
These capabilities come
along with the following attractive features:
Agile movement in virtual worlds. (3-D expansion built-in.)
A multitude of conversation styles, from old-style
scroll-chat to structured meetings, to vivid "cocktail party"
formats.
Flexible interaction with other users. "Kiosk" services & advertising.
Host-definable functions: teleportation, keyword alert,
syntax analysis, social nets, business meetings, file exchange
etc.
Limitless scalability.
Rapid, convenient portability to remote or hand-held devices.
Users require no special downloads, only a modern browser.
Expansion opportunities into games, meetingware, virtual trade
shows, behavior-based marketing, all using a core technology that is
both unique and technologically straightforward.
Robust personal contact,
allowing self-organized meetings & communities at low
bandwidth, even during partial service shutdowns.
The need and market for better interface grows
evident as governments and corporations spend millions developing high
bandwidth meetingware, to let executives face each other, swap data and
make rapid decisions. Holocene v.2 will offer much the same
variety of tools and services, only ingeniously at low-cost, low
bandwidth, and high portability.
Beyond chat and
meetingware, Holocene promises expansion into several
complementary product lines that include hosting services, virtual
world-building, augmented reality overlays and games.
The core element is strong proprietary IP covering several entire classes
of possible interaction online. Methods that are as natural as
face-to-face conversation, but that somehow never made it to any
electronic interface, till now. Applications may extend far beyond today's business model.
A
functioning demo and online test communities have shown that no
technical obstacles stand in the way of rapid deployment, sales, and
return on investment over short time scales.
Principals
of Holocene are David Brin, a scientist-engineer known worldwide
for novels and nonfiction about the future, and Mark Burgess, CEO of
Sandiego.com, a leader in web-hosting services. Their innovation leaps
generations to modernize realtime, onscreen communications.
Background:
Millions depend on net services like email, file-transfer and web browsing,
under the general category of asynchronous onscreen communications -- where the originator and recipient do not share the same area
of cyberspace at the same time. These services have advanced
tremendously, becoming essential tools of daily
life.
But the other half - realtime or synchronous
onscreen interaction - is largely undeveloped. Though some governments
and corporations have invested in
meetingware, these high-end, high-bandwidth systems are still raw and require capacious bandwidth.
Most adult users simply dismiss the entire realm of
synchronous interaction with a derisive word -- "chat."
Yes
chat -- a crude jumble of upward-scrolling,
alternating-interrupting lines in which nobody gets to finish a
sentence or track a thought for more than seconds at a time. To most of
us, "chat" means shallow flippancy -- a way for teens to gush about
rock stars.
The one major attempted upgrade -- cartoony avatar worlds --
consume bandwidth and millions in development without adding any
significant utility or service to help customers get things done.
(The interface in most synchronous "worlds" appears aimed at
suppressing meaningful conversation to the level of flirtation, grunts and "ROFL!")
No
wonder realtime interaction remains a backwater, avoided by
grownups. (Do you spend much time in chatrooms or in avatar worlds?)
Holocene proposes to change all that by
focusing on fundamental skills that human brains naturally use in
spoken conversation. Skills that have heretofore been ignored online.
Leaping decades past the obsolete chat standard, HCM incorporates many
of the subtle techniques people have long used to sift meaning out of
crowded gatherings, e.g., our amazing skill at tracking the 'gist' of
one person's statements while paying closer attention to another.
Having
produced an 'alpha' demo that works via any web browser, we
have found no intractable -- or even very difficult - technical issues
to hinder rapid implementation of several commercial product lines --
once moderate development funding is secured.
Business Plan:
The
principals have so far concentrated on acquiring a wide-ranging patent
and developing a demo that can be used by anyone with a web browser. We
can now report two major results.
1. No technical obstacles
appear to stand in the way of full implementation. All promised
services should be deliverable within about a year of full development
funding.
2. A demo version, while lacking many planned features, already works on several online test communities, offering wide ranging collaborative interactions entirely within Holocene Virtual Space.
We are now ready to bring in partners who are experienced with
company-building and prepared to help finance the step from demo to the
first commercially viable products.
* Chat replacement, Instant-Messaging enhancement and improved avatar worlds.
Most full service ISP companies offer
chat rooms and related free services to remain competitive. An ISP that
adopts a better chat system - more useful and fun - will gain
advantages worth some value in licensing fees, scaled to client base or
usage. Old style chat persists because avatar-based alternatives hog
bandwidth without offering any utility/services/incentive.
In contrast,
Holocene is smooth, flexible, functional, low-bandwidth, easy-to-use
and inherently inexpensive to license.
Beyond
the limited ISP market, thousands of companies and individuals will
want to offer fresh services at their web sites by becoming licensed
Holocene hosts, allowing customers to roam and browse, converse or
offer feedback using a comfortable virtual-world format. Purchasers of
host licenses will not require 'shrink-wrap' overhead, though many may
pay for modifications, to fit particular needs. (E.g. Legoland might
want speech bubbles and kiosks formatted as Lego bricks.)
IM Enhancement would apply these general capabilities to one of
the most lucrative "killer apps" around, finally empowering IM users to
prioritize each other, apply tools of reputation, content, timing etc,
to make this widely used channel more efficient and effective.
The
chat-level product should be available for sale/license within one year
of development funding. We estimate 2-4 programmers should suffice,
transforming today's demo into a robust hosting system, offering dozens
of features and services that clients find fun and useful... and that
hosting sites of all sizes will want to license at reasonable rates.
Avatar worlds like "There" and "Second Life" illustrate a third realm where improved real-time conversation can be quickly - almost immediately - useful and profitable, even in a purely text mode. A VR world that allowed people to express thoughts deeper than "ROFL" might have competitive advantages over one that did not.
* Meetingware.
Subsequent versions of HCM, offering inexpensive, low-bandwidth
'meeting-ware for everybody' will extend these advantages beyond hosted
chat to general, real-time, onscreen interaction. Unlike other products
that emphasize glossy surfaces and video, HCM starts by building up
from basics. A text-based meeting room welcomes low-bandwidth users who
are on the road, in the field, or even using an Iridium modem from the
Arctic. Video, audio, voice-recognition, text analysis and file-swap
are easy to add.
The meetingware product could be
available for sale/license within eighteen months of development
funding. We estimate 3-5 programmers should suffice to extend the chat
system with services like white boards, meeting tables, collaborative
tools etc., some now available off-the-shelf. Companies of all sizes
will want to license such a system at reasonable rates.
* Games.
The lucrative world of online gaming is crowded with mega-producers,
capitalized at nine-figure levels. Entering this daunting market
requires deep pockets... or an unexploited niche. Holocene's look-down
VR protocol, with easy drag-and-drop capability, seems ready to exploit
such a niche, long-abandoned but ripe for rediscovery. Even a
small-scale "boutique" success - on the scale of 10,000 units sold -
would more than pay for the 3-4 programmers that we estimate are needed
for creating a first-level product.
* Augmented Reality overlays. In today's demo version
of HCM, the "bird's eye viewer" (BEV) is a small box offering a glimpse
of a wider scale. This supplementary feature becomes star of the show
when overlain upon a real locale, e.g. a Convention Center, hotel, or
cityscape. Or else a virtual world, town or trade show might be
constructed from scratch.
Taking the notion of a "virtual trade show",
direct upgrades of inherent HCM capabilities will give every booth a
clickable "kiosk" on your PDA, adaptably answering queries about
products and services. WiFi-equipped visitors will see their symbolic
presence move through a useful virtual landscape, correlating with the
real world. Similarly-equipped users can find or message each other,
sifting by name, interest or other factors. (There are dozens of
hi-tech shows every year that might allow spectacular demonstrations of
this capability.)
Augmented reality has long
been promised by sci-fi tales and internet pundits, and yet, it always
seems to be five years in the future. Holocene may help achieve AR
now. In parallel with chat, meetingware and game endeavors, 3-5
programmers should suffice to map HCM onto real locales, offering
pop-up information about, convention exhibitors, plus search/find,
visitor messaging and other tools. First customers might be e-media
trade shows. Later, convention bureaus, architects, and companies
needing site-specific VR overlays will want this product, which is,
after all, only what we were promised for cities of the 21st Century.
Looking
beyond, people will host 'Holocene presence spaces', with entry as open
as a public park or as limited as corporate headquarters. These will go
beyond synchronous communications, to mail-drops, project white-boards,
team rooms, decision-support tools, resource kiosks... all new ways to
deliver the asynchronous services we now require, in a convenient and
useful settings.
* "Citizen empowering" software.
Responding to interest from a federal agency following the September
11, 2001 tragedies, Holocene joined in a proposal to develop
"citizen empowering" online networks, in the national interest. DARPA
encouraged Holocene to look into promoting ad hoc self
organization through internet-based meeting places that make very low
bandwidth demands - in case of outages or system failures in a crisis.
(Infrastructure damage- or takeover by emergency services - may limit
citizens to low rates.)
Holocene may offer quality organizational services, even over constrained plumbing. Consider how the national
interest will be served if inexpensive but high-service products can be
offered to citizens, helping them to self-organize in times of trouble.
Potential Return On Investment
The
principals avow that they have not yet conducted in depth market
analyses. (One reason to seek experienced partners.) Still,
back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest very rapid ROI at very low
risk.
Limiting the potential downside are several key advantages:
Tractable technical milestones -1 year from salable product.
Initial customer base - upgraded chat - simple to evaluate.
Low capital needs. Rapid make-or break determination.
As for the upside potential,
it is simply enormous. We have compared five business opportunities,
identifying likely customers. Patent protection seems strong, with no
sign of appreciable prior art. (Attested by audiences at ACM-CHI and
the MIT Media Lab.) Many innovative aspects are already up and running
in our demo. Above all, no competing products on the horizon even claim
to be developing such a comprehensive range of new and unique services.
For these reasons, there would appear no visible obstacle to Holocene rising up to take an important place alongside web browsers and email clients, becoming viewed as an essential internet tool.
Summary