Have you heard about Google's Goggles? This is from the NYTimes story<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/business/20ping.html?em>.
*Goggles* <http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#dc=gh0gg> allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine. How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there. Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web. It's not in the iPhone store (yet?). It's available for Android phones. This strikes me as a great example of the subtle development of a platform-like mechanism. PDAs and then cellphones have had the ability to take pictures for a long time. But recently that capability has begun to be used for far more than taking pictures. The other day I heard a report of an iPhone app that lets you use the iPhone camera as a magnifying glass. Run the app and hold the lens over something you want to see, and it appears enlarged on the screen. (I don't have the app and can't say how well it works. But it certainly seems feasible.) The Google Goggles application uses the picture-taking capability to convey information from the phone to Google's image database and image recognition software. It's the first step in giving a phone the ability to see in some reasonable sense. All that's really neat, but the point I want to make here is that 1. It wouldn't have happened if cellphones didn't have a basic picture taking capability -- which require the existence of a lens and imaging hardware/software. 2. Once that equipment was in place, people started to find new ways to make use of it. It is, in effect, becoming part of the infrastructure of the hand-held device and not "just" a way to take pictures. *It has moved from a stove-piped capability to a platform capability.* 3. It wouldn't have happened if the device within which this imaging capability is embedded weren't programmable -- and available to be programmed by external entities. So this is a nice current concrete real-life illustration of how a platform/infrastructure element becomes established. In this case the mechanism of establishment was not the explicit decision by someone to make imaging part of the platform. Presumably, cellphones were equipped with lenses and imaging software simply because it was a competitive necessity, not because anyone thought anything additional would come of it. Yet something additional is coming of it. So what's important is to understand what was needed so that more could be made of the basic imaging capability than just the original "requirement" to be able to take pictures. We should keep that in mind when developing *any *system. Having a system that *only *meets the requirements is not enough. Systems should be open enough so that they can be expanded in unanticipated ways. This is a nice illustration of how that works. -- Russ
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