By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher



I was at HP Labs Tuesday morning, chatting with Josh Tyler and Philippe Debaty about their work in trying to determine how people will use camera phones. A primary goal of HP Labs is to be able to predict novel uses of consumer technologies and develop supporting computer products or services.

But in today's world, these researchers are realising that they cannot do things the old way, and that they have to get out of the labs.

One of the HP Labs' projects was photo-blogging. About 20 researchers carried camera phones linked into a location-aware cell phone network. As they took pictures with their camera phones, the images would be uploaded to a central database along with location data. A heavy concentration of images in a location would flag that some type of event took place. It would also uncover large aggregate social behaviors, a subject of high interest to Mr Tyler.



The photo blogging project closed because HP doesn’t make camera phones, Mr Tyler said.

But, I asked, hadn’t Flickr obviated the need for this project anyway? If you want to discover aggregate social behaviors around photos and sharing, take a look at Flickr’s millions of users. There are communities on Flickr that could not have been predicted. And this is true of all true platforms--in the current sense of technology platforms for groups: unpredictable behaviors and communities will arise.

Using 20 HP Labs researchers is not going to reveal many, if any, novel uses. How many people using a platform technology would it take to flag the potential for large aggregate social behaviors, I asked?

That’s a question we have been pondering, says Mr Tyler, and "we don’t know" is the answer.

Mr Debaty showed me a photo-sharing slideshow project where you can add your own voice narration using an iPaq handheld computer. That project is still in development because it uses an HP device.

On the way home, I wondered how HP Labs or other researchers will be able to plan innovative consumer products if they cannot predict how people will use them, or what unexpected types of services will be needed. Product development and design of consumer digital devices is expensive and takes about 2 years.

Clearly, these researchers will need to change their approach. They should be out on the Internet crouching in the bushes and taking notes on what people are doing, and then determine new product development. In fact, these should be boom times for anthropologists. Surely, now is their time(!)

Spotting potentially large aggregate social behaviors, and being the first to monetise them, is going to be the name of the game in the consumer digital space.

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