Rudy De Waele has an updated overview presentation on Mobile 2.0 startups he did last week in Brussels at the Plugg Conference.

NOTE from Rudy: As for the startups represented in this presentation, they are only some of the ones I am following. This is not intented as a complete overview but a representation and moment in time. If you’re not included in this presentation you might be in my next one smile Just ping me if I missed you somehow.

More soon – but I am speaking at Over the air on Saturday(the second day). If you are there, lets meet. I will be speaking on Identity, Reputation and Revocation – (which relates to my PhD work)

following on from my last post .. Object models and data sets for a social network .. crawlers vs simulation ..

(read the previous email first to get the context)

I have been thinking of this last night and this may be a solution

The question is – Can we extapolate social network data based on existing data patterns?

We have three components

a) A knowledge base(typical size of friends, no of blog posts etc)

b) Parameterization (setup configuration to run the generator) and

c) The generation itself

We need a large volume of data to be relevent

We need parameters that mirror real life

Here is my plan

The objective is to ‘clone’ the transactions from a core set first and then apply the parameters(intelligence)

a) Create configuration tables (for instance a profiles table)

b) Create transactions tables(blog entries, facebook pokes etc) and

populate it with the base entries

c) Create a cartesian join between the profiles table and the blog

entries table. In a normal course of events, cartesian joins are not

desirable. However they are good to create a massively large number of

records very quickly

fror instance

select profile.profile_id, blogs.blog_id from profiles, blogs

If profiles has profile_id P1, P2

blogs has blog_id B1, B2

will give 4 rows

P1, B1

P1, B2

P2, B1

P2, B2

d) We thus get a large number of rows

e) We then ‘apply’ the rules as a series of update statements on the

base data(post cartesian join)

f) This gives us the ‘real’ data

g) To make this work, I plan to ‘open source’ the whole thing -

tables and more importantlyt the knowledge base.

h) So, I see many people contributing insights(A typical user on FB

has typically 100 friends on average, Myspace has 40 blog entries per

week that sort of thing)

i) So, we can now create a set of data based on parameters and its

all open sourced

thougts?

kind rgds

Ajit

This relates to my PhD – I wonder how people do this?(or if you encounter similar problems)

To simulate a social network, we need datasets

These are not easy to get

There are some crawlers. They have limitations

One option I am considering is to generate data for a social network based on a set of parameters

For this, we need a data model/object model of a social network

for ex:

facebook has profiles, relations(friends), posts(wall), groups, applications and so on.

ultimately I am thinking of the characteristics of social data and then considering how closely we can mirror generated data to real life

For this, we need to know the distribution i.e. the typical number of friends, blog posts etc etc for social networks. This link gives some info – but not a lot.

Any thoughts on

a) Existance of a data model

b) Your approach to simulation / data sets

c) crawlers v.s. data generation

d) data distribution

Apparantly, this is also a big topic for sigcomm this year!

kind rgds

Ajit

Portable reputations have been discussed recently. Have a look at these recent articles on Portable reputation from Business week and from mashup

Here are two thoughts

Firstly, Is portable reputation overrated?

Do users really care about portable reputation? I know many of the thought leaders, bloggers etc do (for instance with the bill of rights for the social web).

But do users care?

Take me for instance (as a user of social software)

I often speak in Germany or Switzerland.

Every time I speak there, I get requests to connect from a social network called Xing. (The dominant social network in the German speaking world)

A long time ago, I used to be a member of Xing

Now its an abandoned account discovered by German speaking people when I am there

Same with twitter(have an account, don’t use)

So from my own behaviour(and I suspect from others) people simply abandon reputation and start again unless there is a good commercial reasons to ‘port’ the reputation.

Hence, is portable reputation overrated?

Secondly

Given what I think I know about open social – can we not create an application using Open social APIs that enable reputation to be portable from one network to another (for instance from Myspace to Xing. In fact, we can create an application that aggregates all such reputations in different constituent social networks and creates a ‘consolidated’ reputation (so to speak) across social networks covered by Open Social?

I think this is possible via Open social APIs? (and I continue to explore it – so maybe wrong).

Thoughts?

kind rgds

Ajit

EU picks mobile TV standard in DVB-H but UK sill lags …

The critical question for the UK is can national coverage be delivered in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Spectrum will be released only next year, leaving it very tight for coverage to be in place and services available nationally.

Citizens in Italy, Finland, France, Switzerland and Austria (to name a few) will be able to watch. Let’s hope the citizens of Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff and Southampton have the same opportunity.

This is a serious economic question for the UK given the fact that the UK Creative economy has a similar value to the financial services market.

Can this scenario work in Open social?

I am a third party developer. I am using open social. I want to create an application that sends a message from MySpace to Orkut. (both being members of open social). Can I write a third party app to do this using open social? In other words, can third party apps bridge constituent networks

kind rgds

Ajit