//www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9FMlv5a_FI

That was shot by Nate Bolt with a DJI Phantom quad-copter and both a GoPro Hero3 Black and an iPhone 5S. Slowed down with Twixtor in After Effects to make up for the glaring lack of a Gimbal.

A stunning video taken over Niagara Falls this past summer with the same helicopter (watch this one full-screen):

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfoLYTKObiU

Not as lovely, here’s an example of flying the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Gateway Arch and the Museum Court house in St. Louis with a turbo Ace X830 helicopter. This has potential, but the blades hurt the effect.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP62Bk-ydRo

Inside the Australian Museum is a charming, short view of the collection from Journeys to the Deep. However, the shots are shaky. The stabilization methods used in the above library example are important.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnR0tGpGJmw

Drone regulations vary by locality, but is generally legal within height and distance limits from the operator.

Not only are the results a fresh view of scenes, lending an appealing aerial perspective, but audiences are now used to complex camera shots on television and film, so  step up your game with your visuals.

You are not limited to Microsoft Excel, or your own programming abilities. We’re now in an awesome generation for visualization, with dozens of freely available software libraries — which developers have spent months (or years!) building. Increasingly these use Javascript (so they work in all browsers and mobile devices). The folks at Datavisualization.ch highlight most of the best tools for making maps and charts, or processing data…

Arbor.js is a library of force-directed layout algorithms plus abstractions for graph organization and refresh handling.

CartoDB is a web service for mapping, analyzing and building applications with data.

Circos is a software package for visualizing data in a circular layout.

Cubism.js is a library for creating interactive time series and horizon graphs based on D3.js

Dance.js is a simple data-driven visualization framework based on Data.js and Underscore.js

DataWrangler is an interactive web application for data cleaning and transformation.

Degrafa is a powerful declarative graphics framework for rich user interfaces, data visualizations and mapping.

Envision.js is a library for creating fast, dynamic and interactive time series visualizations.

Flare is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations in Flash (ActionScript). Note, Flash is increasing an obsolete choice of platform because it is rarely supported on mobile devices.

GeoCommons is a public community and set of tools to access, visualize and analyze data with compelling map visualizations.

Gephi is a visualization and exploration platform for networks with dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

Google Chart Tools is a collection of simple to use, customizable and free to use interactive charts and data tools.

Google Fusion Tables is a web application that makes it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables.

Google Refine is a tool for working with data, cleaning it up, reformating it or extending it with web services.

Impure / Quadrigram is a  visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information.

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit is a Javascript library that provides tools for creating interactive data visualizations for the web.

Kartograph is a simple and lightweight framework for creating beautiful, interactive vector maps.

Leaflet is a lightweight JavaScript library for making tile-based interactive maps for desktop and mobile browsers.

Many Eyes is a web application to build, share and discuss graphic representation of user uploaded data.

MapBox is a web platform for hosting custom designed map tiles and a set of open source tools to produce them.

Miso Dataset is a client-side data transformation and management library to loade, parse, sorte, query & manipulate data.

Modest Maps is a display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash, JavaScript and Python.

Mr. Data Converter is a web application that converts Excel data into one of several web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.

NodeBox is a desktop application that lets you create generative, static, animated or interactive visuals.

Paper.js is a vector graphics scripting framework in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Peity is a simple jQuery plugin that converts an element’s content into a simple mini pie, line or bar chart.

Polymaps is a library for making dynamic, interactive maps with image- and vector-based tiles.

Prefuse is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations in Java. Note that Java is increasingly marginalized, and is not a good choice for most mobile development.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment to create images, animations, and interactions. Processing.js is the sister project of Processing that makes projects work using web standards and without any plug-ins.

Protovis is a library that composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots.

R is a software environment for statistical computing and graphical techniques. It’s a complex language, but highly favored by people who have to process a lot of numerical-type data.

Raphaël is a small library that simplifies working with vector graphics on the web.

Recline.js is a simple but powerful library for building data applications in pure JavaScript and HTML.

Rickshaw is a library for creating interactive time series graphs based on D3.js.

Sigma.js is an open-source lightweight library to display interactively static and dynamic graphs.

Tableau Public is a desktop application to build and post interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables to the web.

Tangle is a library that allow to interactively explore, play, and see the document update immediately.

Timeline is a tool to create timelines with data and media from different sources like Google Docs, Twitter, Flickr or Vimeo.

For more information on any of the above, and a fresh list of anything new, see the selected tools compiled by DataVisualization.ch.

Also, IDEA’s SpicyNodes project is a way to easily display concept-map type visualizations. Currently available in web browsers using Flash, and coming to the iPad in 2013.

Their new system, ReadCube Access, has an iTunes sales approach: a library can rent an article for less than $6 or can buy the same article for $11 (or less, depending on the source). Hrvatin and McGrath hope that ReadCube Access can not only lower expenses for universities, but also allow more journals to reach students around the country.

Other features allow for importing PDFs, finding new papers via Google Scholar or PubMed, downloads via institutions’ paywalled logins, recommendations, annotations, and citations.

They sold their idea to industry giant Nature Publishing Group and to the University of Utah’s library system. (See their blog post.)

Serious cloud computing is done in massive data centers, measured in multiples of football fields. The centers have redundant connections to the Internet, power direct from one or more local utilities, diesel generators, vast banks of batteries, and huge cooling systems. Centers house tens or hundreds of thousands of servers. Google has approximately 900k servers. The servers are small computers (think of a stripped-down motherboard from a laptop computer, plus a hard drive) stacked into towers. See videos below.

The latest trends involve slashing power usage, and containerizing (thousands of servers packed into shipping containers, which are plugged directly into the power, network, and cooling systems in a warehouse).

The scale is mind boggling, and so there are relatively few companies setting these up. Recently, a few companies have released videos. You can jump through these videos, and tune out the jargon.

Microsoft

New tour released this week.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOxA1l1pQIw

Google

A tour from 2009 of Google’s first container-based data center

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

And here’s a video focused on security:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SCZzgfdTBo

Facebook

From a tour 3 months ago:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhOo1ZtrH8c

And a more promotional video:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY

Explosion since 2007

The term ‘cloud computing’ traces back to at least the 1980’s, and has exploded in popularity since 2007:

Organizations have been outsourcing the complex details of hosting many servers in data centers for years. Ever since the start of the internet, there have been “content delivery networks” like Cambridge, MA based Akamai who specialized in placing warehouses of servers throughout the world, and then routing web surfers to the nearest network. This was a workaround for the problem of a slow internet. Even with light-speed fiber optics, many factors slow down transmission speeds, and reducing the number of steps between a web user and the server usually translates into speed. For example, The New York Times outsources hosting of its images to Akamai. In fact, although it’s not a household name, at any-given time, 15-30% of the world’s web traffic is carried by Akamai’s network of cloud facilities. Akamai has nearly 100k servers deployed in 72 countries, spanning most of the networks that make up the internet. Other major players include Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.com.

Many organizations host their web sites on “dedicated servers” or “virtual private servers” for their web hosting, which are managed in remote data centers. For example, the New York Times uses dedicated servers at NTT America, a subsidiary of NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation). NTT is one of a dozen “Tier 1” providers. (IDEA also hosts our web sites on dedicated servers at NTT.)

What’s new is the proliferation of platforms and software — such as hosting all of an organizations’s email, or museum collection, or customer database, in the cloud. Ofter this is abstracted so the data is actually stored on multiple servers, which is the key to scaling to large numbers of users. My prior post on building social networks touches on this problem, that if you run our own software or use software designed to run on just one server, you limit the number of concurrent users. Setting up software to spread load across multiple servers is a hard problem, which is partially solved by many of today’s cloud computing providers.

Update: 1-Aug-2011: Added mention of Google’s estimated 900k servers. 

The arguments for open source are:

• Lower cost: Since development is done by a community of volunteers (many of whom are paid by other organizations), your costs don’t need to cover a company’s development expenses. That said, this is a minor savings because in mid-sized software company, the vast majority of expenses are customer support and marketing.
• Customization: Systems like BuddyPress and Drupal are designed for developers to adapt and extend. Whereas, you usually can not make non-cosmetic changes to a proprietary system.
• Nimble: Open source projects adopt new trends faster than proprietary systems. For example, support for posting to Twitter or logging in using an existing Twitter username was added faster to the open source packages than to commercial ones.
• Openness: Open Source systems are usually designed with integration in mind; whereas commercial systems have business motivations to lock organizations into a closed system.
• Fast bug and security fixes: BuddyPress and Drupal have many people combing their source code, and rapidly fix problems as they are discovered. (See security updates from WordPress, BuddyPress and Drupal)

The arguments against open source are:

• Questionable quality: This is an invalid argument. All software, proprietary or Open Source, runs the gamut from exceptional to poor. In the case of BuddyPress and Drupal, both have large teams of developers who report bugs, and people who work on the source code, quickly improving it. This crowd-sourcing approach yields more secure code than any company can accomplish in-house. Even major companies like Apple, Microsoft and Oracle routinely fix bugs discovered by outsiders. Open source projects just tend to be more open than proprietary systems about talking about their bugs.
• No responsibility: The sticking point for Open Source is that it’s not a company, and there’s rarely any direct customer service. Open Source is a process and philosophy which produces software, but it is not a contract. No customer support rep at BuddyPress or Drupal is waiting to answer calls. However, they have a ton of documentation and online forums. You can hire a consultancy to be accountable to you, or a company like Acquia (see below) who provide an SLA and full support.
• Not aligned with corporate needs: Open Source software often starts small, and while they may be technically robust (scalable), they might not be designed with the needs of corporate users. In the case of social networking software, the Open Source platforms don’t have all the moderation/censorship, monitoring, and other kinds of features that some commercial platforms do.

The argument against is is typified by Kristi Grigsby, Sr. Director of Marketing at INgage Networks, who says her company’s system has better security, privacy, scalability and support than comparable Open Source projects. Ms. Grigsby says, “Open Source platforms can be terrific tools for DIY projects. But our customers have too much at stake to risk their business with so many potential issues/threats.”

This is echoed by her colleague, Kathy Saenz, INgage Networks’s corporate communications manager. Ms. Saenz says, “Our 11+ years of experience working with highly sensitive customers within federal government and the financial services industry has taught us that. A company like American Express would rarely, if ever, trust their business to an open source platform – I doubt they could pass their stringent security and privacy requirements, scale to the degree needed, and provide the support we provide (from account managers to tech implementation to customer support). Not to mention be exposed to potential network outages or security risks — ‘issues/threats’ that are common weaknesses of open source — and we know several industry analysts who would support this.”

Many newspapers and museums are based on Drupal. Also, the WhiteHouse runs Drupal.

For additional, thoughtful discussion, see an article by Thomas J. Trappler, “Is There Such a Thing as Free Software? The Pros and Cons of Open-Source Software” in the EDUCAUSE Quarterly. Also, here’s a nice table summarizing generic, philosophical arguments.

Note: A shorter version of this article was originally part of the post, Software options for niche social networks.

IDEA’s second mobile app, WikiNodes (see app store link) puts the encyclopedic knowledge of Wikipedia at the fingertips of iPad users. Articles are displayed as nodes that can be touched, dragged and spun around — showing the relations between articles and sections of articles. The app is currently featured in Apple’s app store.

Here’s a 30 second demo:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdiXXxMnqJQ

The app is based on IDEA’s SpicyNodes system for displaying and navigating information using nodes (see SpicyNodes.org). The SpicyNodes approach has great potential for other subjects, from browsing museum collections and archives, to browsing flora & fauna, and many other kinds of linked data.

Encyclopedias contain large amounts of interlinked information — which is begging for a creative and engaging visualization. Tap any node, and it expands to give you more information. Or, switch to a full-page view to display articles as pages, then scroll up and down. Nodes link together sections of Wikipedia articles and related topics, making Wikipedia come to life. Browse in a way that mimics how you look for things in the real world.

Tablets are the new frontier for conveying art and science to the public. Industry analysts estimate that by the end of 2012, there will be 100-120 million tablets. IDEA will produce apps for whatever platforms have the lion’s share of the market.

Getting a new app noticed by the world is a huge challenge, as the app store is flooded with hundreds of new apps every day, of varying quality. Our download rates increased by more than 10x when featured by Apple as a “New and Noteworthy” app on their iTunes main screen.

Upcoming features for the app include multilingual support (many users are in non-English speaking countries), and other enhancements to browsing (e.g., bookmarks and more linked nodes). The app is currently free, but not for long.

Here are key points and comments Nancy shared about developing mobile products…

Mobile visitor experience

Mobile is dissolving the walls of the museum. Museums are becoming distributed networks. Visitors have experiences in the physical museum, with mobile products, plus a host of (increasingly mobile) information outside the control of the museum, like posting photos to Flickr.

Mobile itself is diverse, including both pocketable and portable devices. Mobile includes smart phones, but don’t forget 70% of the world’s phone users who have just voice/SMS phones — an important, but rapidly shrinking market share. Apps are reaching a small minority of visitors now, but app use is exploding.

Mobile includes podcasts and downloadable content like PDFs, eBooks. It can be devices that visitors own, or devices that are provided onsite by a museum. Mobile web sites, apps, and large-screen web sites all can be seen on smartphones and tablets.

Mobile should be understood as social media and projects should leverage its ability to create conversations, communities, and collaborations both alone and in combination with other platforms. Mobile projects should expand and create new opportunities for engagement, not seek to reproduce existing ones on mobile devices.

To make mobile products easy to use by many people, mobile initiatives should use standard interfaces and include clear, easy routes to find other mobile products and platforms. And people of all abilities should be considered (e.g., blind, poor vision or deaf), in creating accessible tools. This is increasingly easy to do with the accessibly tools built into modern smartphones and tablets.

In terms of mobile access to web sites, Nancy finds that 2% traffic to museum’s sites via mobile devices is pretty much average now. On IDEA’s WebExhibits site, we have closer to 8% mobile share, so it depends.

Money & resources

Nancy suggests that mobile web sites (web apps) can and should created by a museum’s existing web teams. It’s just a matter of formatting for a smaller screen. On the other hand, native apps (e.g., an app for an iPad) may be a better candidate for an external vendor. (See our post about making web/native apps.)

Even if vendors are brought in (e.g., to make an app), Nancy wants to see more economy of scale so that hundreds of exhibitions and museums can inexpensively leap into onto mobile devices. That means highly-reusable modules; not years of designer and programmer time for each new app.

Also, museums and the broader community should reuse with Open Source libraries both within and among museums. Within an organization, developers should try to reuse existing mobile code modules, so as to avoid writing new and/or dedicated code and using proprietary or dedicated systems. Moreover, the community will benefit from sharing code, tools, best practices and other learnings between museums.

Finally, Nancy says, “I don’t think anyone is going to get rich buying and selling apps right now.” Mobile can support existing revenue streams, but don’t try to think of mobile purely as a business right now. She’s giving a talk next week about business models at MW2011.

Research & measure

Embed metrics and analytic tools in every mobile product, and include audience research and product evaluation in every mobile project to inform iterative development and ensure quality.

Future-proofing

Too many projects die after the funding/development period, and that’s a higher risk with mobile since devices are changing so fast. What you make this year might not work on the majority of devices in 2-3 years. With the exception of simple apps for short, temporary exhibits, plan for the future.

That means building mobile websites on a standards-based content management system, so that you can port you content to future systems. It also means using vendors that allow you to export your own data in a standards-complient, or at least flexible format.

Digital content should be conceived for cross-platform use and re-use according to mobile content standards which will inevitably evolve.

Every mobile project or product must include a commercial or other plan for its sustainability and maintenance — That could mean cash or time, but there should be some way to update content and fix bugs down the road.

To learn more, see the archived one-hour talk and PPT slides, provided by MIDEA.

One popular type of game is a miniature scavenger hunt, called “location-gaming.” The premise is that players go places (e.g., a restaurant or park), do fast, simple tasks (like typing something into their phone, or uploading a photo of something), and win a reward (the reward can  virtual “points,” or something tangible, like a free postcard or sandwich). Other types of games are more thematic, such as creating playing-card “battles” between characters that appear in art.

SCVNGR

The leading platform for location-gaming is SCVNGR, which recently reached over 1 million users (people who have used the app on iPhone and Android phones) and has been funded with $15 million from Google and other venture funds.

SCVNGR’s business model centers on collecting fees from merchants who want customers to come to their businesses to play and receive rewards. In an interview with GigaOM, SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch said that SCVNGR analyzed its data and found that it takes three visits by a consumer before they are likely to become a regular at a business or at least have that merchant at the top of their mind. For businesses, paying SCVNGR is a form of advertising.

Kellian Adams, the company’s museum education technologist presented SCVNGR to an audience of museum staff. The conference attendees were mostly unfamiliar with SCVNGR: according to a realtime poll, 46% had never heard of it, 40% had heard of it but never played, and only 6% have created a game with their tool.

Kellian said that SCVNGR can work for museums, with some adjustments. She said, “Originally I would just give museums SCVNGR access and tell them to have a nice day but it really didn’t work. People weren’t playing, the games weren’t so great so SCVNGR tasked me to make sure everything that happened at a museum was good.” In her presentation, she suggested that prizes like sunglasses and glowsticks are good for motivating gamers, and emphasized that regardless of the game design, the most common demographic is 18-35 year olds.

For History, Kellian said, “a great way to use SCVNGR is to connect history with modern locations,” with a quest that takes visitors to various locations in a community. It can also work well for science topics when visitors have distances to walk, such as in a zoo or botanical garden. (See a detailed article by Charles Outhier about SCVNGR at the National Zoo, and further discussion of SCVNGR for museums.)

Hide&Seek

For other kinds of games, London-based Hide&Seek, showcased their first art museum app, Tate Trumps, a card-game based app in which different paintings at the Tate Modern do battle, are collected, or examined by ‘mood.’ The free game is designed to be played while visitors are inside of the Tate Modern. As the Tate explains, “In Battle mode, you need to ask yourself the question, ‘If this artwork came to life, how good would it be in a fight?’. In Mood mode, you’re looking for artworks you think are menacing, exhilarating or absurd. Or, if you wish you had a gallery of your own, try Collector mode, and find pictures which are famous, recently produced or practical to house. Once you’ve formed your collection, meet up with your friends, and play a fun game of trumps to see who did the best.”

According to Peter Law, development producer & creative project manager for Hide&Seek, games “can be used as marketing tools, to reach new audiences, or to change how people enjoy the galleries.” He says, “More than 20,000 games of Tate Trumps were played in the first two months after launch.” In the UK App Store, the app has 1020 ratings, averaging 2/5 stars; the most recent version fixes some bugs and has 23 ratings averaging 2.5/5 stars.

Law is enthusiastic about the future of mobile games for museums, saying, “Museums are really interesting right now. They’re looking for new ways to engage people and to encourage them to experience their collections.” His company makes a variety of games, and can readily adapt the format of Tate Trumps for other collections.

Web sites for mobile devices (web apps)

The easiest way to go mobile is to have a web site formatted for the small screen — often called a “web app.” Robert Pyles, CEO of TourSphere, advocates for web apps, saying “part of the mission of museums is maximum accessibility, and reaching as many people as possible,” which he says web apps allow. They are easier to edit than native apps, and will work on future devices that don’t exist yet. The downsides  are that devices need to be online to work (either on the cellular network, or by installing wireless routers in the museum), and interactivity is limited compared to a native app.

These companies offer web-based content management systems (akin to a blog engine) for quickly making mobile-friendly web sites.

TourSphere — For $399/month, no contracts, they will give you a web site at their domain, e.g., YourMuseum.TourSphere.com, with several templates, a media manager, maps, multiple languages, links to your current site via RSS, keypad navigation, surveys, and some other features. Pyles says, “Depending on the complexity of the app you can do get something going in one to three days.” Customers can make a full backup of all their data and images. Their sister company, Audissey Media, offers audio/video production, providing an easy way to produce additional content. They plan to launch a public beta next month at Museums and the Web 2011, and also plan to make native apps.

Guide by Cell — The “MOBI site” product produces a bare-bones mobile web site. Using an online administrative site, museum staff chooses items, uploads media (e.g., audio tour recordings), and enters text. The visitor’s interface on the phone is a scrollable list of items, which can be objects or topics. The system is suitable for a few dozen pages/topics. Pricing not disclosed.

Kanvasys — Offers web-formatted web sites, edited via their CMS. Pricing not disclosed.

Alternatives: A cheap and easy alternative to these services is to use the WordPress blog engine and the $40 WPtouch plugin. You can set up any suite of pages and posts, browsable by tag, delivering information and a tour. (You would not have keypad navigation, surveys or other interactive features of TourSphere.) If you want to put an extensive collection onto mobile devices, you’ll probably need a collection management system. Two options are the mobile plugins for the open-source Omeka, or using custom plugins and themes in the commercial, cloud-based eHive.

Native apps — semi automated

Native apps can be a better experiences than web apps. The apps can be preloaded on rental iPods at a museum, or downloaded to visitor’s phones/tablets, ready to launch. Apps are popular: There are currently 369k apps for Apple devices (77k publishers); 295k apps for Android devices; and 11k apps for Windows 7 devices (4k publishers).

Native apps are expensive and time consuming to create from scratch. Costs rapidly exceed $20k for a small app, and the development process strips museum staff of control. Costs are inflated because app development is new (since March 2008 for Apple, and August 2008 for Android), so there are fewer app programmers than web developers (since the mid 1990s).

To cut costs and speed development, several companies offer a semi-automated, modular approach, in which content and programming are separate. Museum staff can create the content (via a Content Management System, CMS), and the vendor’s programmers create a placeholder-based app with fixed bins for content. The app consists of filling the predefined bins with content from the CMS. Vendors differ in the features they offer (audio tours, calendar, panoramic images, movies, etc.), how much time it takes for updates to reach the app (instantaneous or a few days), the underlying speed and elegance of their user interfaces.

GuideOne — Their CMS is called “G1 Curator CMS” and they only target Apple devices. Their preset modules include: audio tours, zoomable floor maps and images, scavenger hunts and quizzes, membership/donation features, and links to social networks. According to Juan Sanabria, head of product development. the costs vary widely, from $12k to over $100k, with a typical price around $25k. They don’t have standardized pricing yet. Their apps are used on the floor in museums, and are not in the app store. The Detroit Institute of Arts has been distributing iPads with their app since March 2010, the Chrysler Museum of Art has been distributing a fleet of iPods since mid February 2011. An app related to Alaskan Natives is launching later this year.

Kanvasys — Based in Gatineau, Québec. Offers a variety of services for iOS and Android. The costs vary widely, from $8k to over $100k, with a typical price around $25k. Their free Eco-Odyssée app was released in Dec 2010, but has fewer than 3 ratings. They have 3 more apps available later this year. Their apps work online and offline, and content can be edited via a web-based CMS.

LookBackMaps — Free. Created by Jon Voss in 2008, this system was designed to provide mobile access to historical photos in various online archives. Museums or archives can create an account, and submit photos, location info (lat/lon), and some other meta data, and the site will make the image available to users via their mobile web site. The app has 3/5 stars rating in the Apple App Store.

MobileXpeditions —  Based in Dublin, OH. The company founders previously ran a Macintosh development company. Their first museum app is in the works for Ohio’s COSI (Center of Science and Industry). According to co-founder Mark Gilicinski, they are not sure about pricing, but hope to charge around $10k or less for apps. They are building a CMS. They currently have one art-related iPad app, which is used on Celebrity Cruise lines as a walking tour of contemporary art on their Solstice ships (2,850 passengers).

NOUSguide — Coming from a background of creating handheld audio guides for European museums, Nousguide has made the jump to commodity hardware. According to CEO Alexander Stickelberger, “we have long term relationships with our clients, and all of them shifted to the Apple iOS or Android devices.” NOUS can deliver apps (see list), or a full package with sturdy cases for an iPod Touch. NOUS has an extra focus on accessability, and has incorporated sign language in several apps. They also design the apps to work with or without network coverage. Stickelberger says the costs for an app for the app store is in the ballpark of $10-25k. That includes streaming content, and various interactive features. Adding their Mac-based CMS, the “NOUS Conductor CMS” in their all-in-one solution adds $25k.

NOUS’ SFMOMA Rooftop Garden iPod/iPhone app is free, released Jan 2010, has accumulated 33 ratings in 14 months, 3/5 stars; the sister iPad app released April 2010, also free, has 79 ratings, 3/5 stars. Stickelberger says their Red Bull Hangar-7 museum app has a couple thousand downloads every week. They publish apps under their name, and also white label under the brands of museums. Approx 50 apps are public (in the app stores), and another 100+ are distributed only within a museum.

Toura — Depending on the features and the target devices (Apple or Android), program director Chris Alexander said the cost is approx $5-20k, negotiated per client. According to their marketing rep, Christina Daigneault, the cost depends on how many apps a museum buys, the features they activate, which platforms (Apple and/or Android), and how long they want the app to be in the app store. When museum staff is done creating content with the CMS, with two-day turnaround, Toura programmers deliver a working app which can be tested or submitted to an app store. Currently, Toura has published 21 apps in the Apple app store, and 11 in the Android app store.

Toura’s most popular app is British Library: Treasures. The app was featured in Apple’s app store in mid January and was a top education app, but as is typical, download rates plummeted when it was no longer featured. The $4 iPhone app has 10 reviews in the UK and US, averaging 3.9/5 stars. The $6 iPad app has 41 reviews, averaging 3.3/5 stars; the Android versions have 35 ratings, and a rating of 2.5/5. The second most popular app is French Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has 14 ratings in the Apple app store, 3.3/5 stars; and 11 ratings in the Android store, 4/5 stars. According to the Android marketplace, both Android apps have been purchased between 100-500 times.

Native apps — fully outsourced

To make a totally custom app, museums will hire design/development firms. This is costs more, makes edits harder if not impossible, and can yield better results. Often these companies have a pool of source code they can re-use from project to project.

LookBackMaps — Based in San Francisco. Jon Voss’ team also offers simple native apps, starting at $1-2k. Their first custom app for Historic New Orleans was released earlier this month.

Nousguide — NOUS, listed above, also offers full development services.

Tristan Interactive —Their free Infinity of Nations app for Smithsonian was released October 2010, has 13 ratings, 3.5/5 stars. Their free Canadian Museum of Civilization app, released Dec 2010 has 32 ratings, and 3.5/5 stars. Pricing not disclosed.

Alternative: The field is expanding. There are currently 77k publishers for apps on Apple devices. There are other museum-focused app developers (see vendors at MW2011 in April), and thousands of generic developers.

Audio production

Regardless of the methods used, if you have audio or video, someone has to produce it. The vendor, Earprint Productions, promoted their content design, audio production and digital storytelling. They have worked with several museums.

Alternative: If you write scripts in-house, tons a great voice talent can be easily auditioned and hired within a matter of days via voice123.com. Those audio producers will deliver great audio, inexpensively. Many voices are seasoned radio announcers. I’ll cover games in a follow up article.

Games

Another type of app is games, which can be appealing for some museums. Two vendors who showed their games are SCVNGR and Hide&Seek.

Update: Added new data for NOUS. Update 2: and Kanvasys.

“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”

That quote comes from yesterday’s article, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” which looks at how the American retailer JC Penney used sneaky methods to get high Google rankings. They used so-called “black hat” techniques, which are legal, but involve cheating to manipulate Google’s results. When discovered, which normally happens, Google penalizes sites by trashing their ranking in search results, making a site that uses black-hat techniques virtually invisible.

It’s rare that we hear from black hat operators. The article notes, “Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens — who says he had nothing to do with the Penney link effort — agreed to chat.”

The differentiation which Stevens points out is great for educational projects because it means that normal publicity, community building, and “white hat” approaches to boosting rankings in Google have a good chance of helping you reach your audience.

Also, coming soon, these experts predict that by 2014, augmented reality and game-based learning will be important. And by 2016, they predict students will often use gestures to interact with computers, and that learning analytics will be common.

According to Larry Johnson, CEO of the consortium which organized the deliberation process and the report, these technologies, are “…mainstream–in the world as a whole–but they are far from mainstream in education. Mobiles, for example, are banned from virtually every high school, and most university classes do not yet take advantage of their capability.”

The panel sees new trends, for example: people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want; student projects should be collaborative since workplaces are increasingly collaborative; and cloud computing is gaining.

Some overall challenges were also identified:

• Digital media literacy matters, though “what skills constitute digital literacy are still not well-defined nor universally taught.”

• Evaluation metrics lag new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching. “Books, blogs, multimedia pieces, networked presentations, and other kinds of scholarly work [are] difficult to evaluate.”
• The traditional model of the university is under threat, so “innovative institutions are developing new models to serve students, such as streaming survey courses over the network so students can attend from their dorm or other locations to free up lecture space.”
• Students and teachers have trouble keeping pace with information overload.

The report was produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), and is the 8th edition. Dr. Johnson says, “Campus leaders and practitioners…use the report as a springboard for discussion around emerging technology.”

Practicing what they preach, the panel’s work on selecting topics for the report was managed in a project wiki (see the wiki). Dr. Johnson says the wiki was a vital tool for the advisory board panel. “The wiki is where we had our (asynchronous) conversations, where we housed our reference materials, where we posted interim products, and generally where the pulse of the project lived. It remains as a history of the work, and contains a whole lot of very interesting stuff.” The panel used a 2-round voting process, and 38/42 of the panelist voted, to whittle down their ideas about what’s hot.

The findings are from NMC’s Horizon Project, which looks at “emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching and creative inquiry in higher education.” NMC is international not-for-profit consortium of hundreds of universities, colleges, museums, and research centers. According to Dr. Johnson, the report was partially funded by HP, but most of the funding came directly from NMS’s operating budget (not a grant). EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association working on information technology in higher education, with a membership of 2,200 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 250 corporations, and more than 17,000 active members.

For technologies with a horizon of a year or less, the panel also debated cloud computing and collaborative environments, but those trends did not get as many votes as eBooks and mobiles. Looking farther into the future, interesting technologies that drew fewer votes from the panelists were open content, visual data analysis, brain-computer interfaces, and the semantic web.

See NMC’s post about the new report, from where you can also view the free PDF.

IDEA presented and demonstrated “Concept Maps for Online Exhibits” at the 2010 Museums and the Web Conference, April 13-17 in Denver.

Concept maps are a useful component of online exhibits, as they help meet the needs of multiple learning styles and provide an innovative way to visualize information. SpicyNodes’ radial mapping engine improves upon previous concept mapping tools and mimics the way that people look for things in the real world. It fills current voids in how people find information on-line, and presents complex topics in a way that invites exploration and triggers creative thought. SpicyNodes is being adapted to work with emerging hardware and software that supports portability, multi-touch, and gestures.

Problem

Flash does not display correctly in browsers on Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty.

Solution

Setup WindwsXP in VMWare on Ubuntun 7.10 Gusty.

Discussion

The solution looks a bit far from the problem. Before deciding to use VMWare, I tried:

• Firefox 2.0.0.6, install flash-nonefree plugin for firefox
• upgrading Firefox to 2.0.0.15
• use Firefx 3.0
• upgrading my Ubuntu
• Konqueror (I use gnome desktop, so no settings menu item to install flash plugin)
• Opera

Finally, I decided to install VMWare 1.0.4 Server, and a WindowsXP image. I did by:

• register an account – https://www.vmware.com/account/customerRegistration.do?
• download (free) vmare server (1.0.4) – http://register.vmware.com/content/eula104.html
• get a serial number which needs at last step of installation – http://register.vmware.com/content/registration.html
• install vmware, ref: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-vmware-server-in-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon.html

You might meet two special situations:

• bridge vmware connection to your wireless connection: you might meet situation as – http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-285846.html in which krnlpanik’ solution is ok. But that post was in 2006, madwifi source code structure changed a lot, I modified on an older version 0.9.3.2. My madwifi works fine now.
• ISO format incompatible: vmware cannot install my Windows XP iso image made by “mkisofs -o disk.sio WINDOWSXP_DIRECTORY”, I did not try to fix this problem. I just install from my cdrom.

Interactivity helps explain why the sky is blue.

Problem

Some subjects are naturally difficult to teach, while others are perceived as tedious. Teaching through the use of static text and images leads to a passive learning experience that doesn’t engage students. As a result, students’ attentions wane and the information isn’t assimilated.

Solution

Introduce interactivity to your web site and enhance the learning experience. Interactivity makes information come alive, and is the next best thing to hands-on learning.

Interactivity can be incorporated through a variety of techniques, including comparing data and images; interacting with objects; providing visitors with insight and a context for which to assimilate information; implementing an inviting user interface; designing content for easy navigability; and creating an online community.

Interactivity makes students into detectives. Here, students look at X-ray images of a painting through a spyglass.

Discussion

Over the last two decades, many notions for displaying data and information have passed through phases of theory, exploration, abstraction, and demonstration. Computers capable of real-time visual manipulation are now mainstream and commonplace. The vast majority of online visitors now have browsers capable of advanced interactivity. Network connections and hardware allow ever-faster data transfers, and video will soon be a common component of the online experience.

Cooperative learning theory stresses that the best learning occurs when students are actively engaged in the learning process and working in collaboration with other students to accomplish a shared goal. Online education is an excellent way to facilitate cooperative learning because traditional text can be intermingled with interactive exercises, so that students have a balanced approach. For example, students can pace themselves while reading some sections and completing additional interactive experiences alone or in cooperation with others.

The best learning is experiential, as when students really go out into nature, or on ships, or to hospitals, or into outer space. Although such real-world travel is unrealistic or impossible, the use of web technology creates interactive possibilities that are limited only by the imagination.