Breaking Down Barriers Against More Value

Cameras today are proprietory machines full of man-made barriers to new and exciting features. They were built to fullfill marketing and sales purposes and not to exhaust all current opportunities. 

Think of a camera's mission to house technical innovation and not to be primarely a vehicle to drive companies' sales. You will end up with what Standford computer science professor Marc Levoy and his graduate student Andrew Adams would call "camera 2.0".

In a collaborative approach between Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto Laboratory and also supported by Adobe Systems, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and the Walt Disney Company, they developed an open source camera to enable users to create new features for the camera by writing aps that control all the camera's functions -- focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. Cameras could be taught new tricks with downloadable apps, analogous to iPhone apps.

Camera 2.0 shows that if you release innovation by breaking down barriers you might get even higher value to serve people better. The next level of news - News3.0 - will need to discover ways to utilize the open source concept as well. There is more value in an open than in closed systems - in the long run.

More details can be found on the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory website. You can also read the official Standford press release.

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Comments

[twitter.com/100janovic]

Great digg Steffen, the Open Source and the transparent media reporting as I refer to it, is the great promise for future.