Metaviews.ca is currently setting up a new project: The Academy of the Impossible, located at 231 Wallace Ave. in the Junction Triangle neighbourhood of Toronto’s downtown west end. It will partly serve as a location for our salons and seminars along with all facets of our daily operations.

The setup for the Academy is a relatively novel one. As an open source social enterprise, it will integrate both for-profit and non-profit enterprises, along with providing a physical touchpoint for our clients and broader community. This will include bringing to life many online ideas that often end up remaining hypothetical — we want to make them feel possible.

Since consumers are also taking on the role of producers, the Metaviews programming at the Academy will reflect that inevitability, with events designed to empower the human relationship with technology. During this era of disruption for business, media and politics, our infinite series of “Hacking Reality” events will explore all forms of self-expression, from mobile apps and videogames to improv comedy and public speaking.

The events for AOTI members and guests will be concurrent with our continued subscriber efforts throughout the week. Now, with a permanent space, we expect to exponentially expand the insights we can share with clients. But we covered a fair bit of ground on the way there:

• How gadgets are marketed during the holiday season even if they’re about to become replaced by new models

• Shopping apps designed to follow people around the mall, measure window shopping and offer a better deal via Amazon

• YouTube’s evolution from a cat video free-for-all to a more Hollywood-friendly platform based on subscription feeds

• Changes to Facebook, Twitter and Google in the race to build social media market share — possibly at the expense of user trust

• Compliments and criticism for Open Government initiatives in Ottawa including reaction to the official social media guidelines

• The hopes and hypes of 2011 including the evolution of Anonymous, theories of Gamification and digital currency alternatives

Also, on deck for 2012, our second year-long major research project will focus on “The Future of Health” — which will include recurring discussions in our seminars and salons.

Please see the Metaviews.ca website for more information on the subscription package. And follow The Academy of the Impossible for news about all its programming.

Fall 2011 has been a fun time developing of Metaviews. While keeping tabs on the disruption of fields from advertising to academia, we have continued to develop our own projects, which has included extending our presence beyond Toronto.

A pair of salon events in Ottawa have focused on the challenges involved in the transformation to Open Government, which drew interest from all areas of the bureaucracy, as developing a more citizen-friendly approach has been pledged by the federal government.

Similar challenges are being faced by the non-profit sector as it attempts to retool its messaging for the social media age. The conversational research style of Metaviews.ca will increasingly be applied in this direction, too.

With the technological stakes increasingly being raised, though, we have continued to focus our attention on the business of the Internet. Recently, our subscriber newsletters, teleseminars and social media conversation has focused in areas that include:

• The state of the relationship between producers and consumers — and whether they can ever really be one and the same

• Whether or not self-styled internet intellectuals can be taken seriously in the age where everyone has their own online experience

• The increasingly blurred relationship between online communities and the way that we interact in physical spaces

• Marketing efforts that reach beyond online coupons or viral videos to target customers based on where they are standing

• New currency alternatives that stand to subvert the banking system and interest rates of credit card companies

• How hardware producers are constantly challenged by the marketplace to emphasize similarities more than differences

• What needs to be done in Canada to keep pace with the global evolution of online access and the distribution of content

As the year draws to a close, Metaviews.ca will conclude its year of specific research into “The Future of Authority,” and launch a similar project on how the internet stands to transform health care.

During the past year, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with a great team of researchers, writers and practitioners to develop Metaviews.ca into an original think tank dedicated to the relationship between media, technology and society.

Some of our efforts have been open to the public: regular posts to the Metaviews.ca website and other social media outlets, a growing library of original videos, and live events like the Monday Night Seminar series in honour of Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday.

Subscribers have also been able to access our insights on a deeper level, through the Metaviews Weekly newsletter, the Metaviews Telseminar and private presentations related to our research project, “The Future of Authority.”

Discussion topics for fall 2011 have ranged from the analysis of mass media coverage on topics ranging from the future of gadgets in the post-Steve Jobs era, to the influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, to how retail stores will be impacted by mobile marketing.

Developments in social media, the political scene and the economics of the internet have also been at the forefront of the Metaviews.ca agenda.

Other topics that will be high on our collective minds this fall and beyond include:

• Challenges faced by all levels of government to keep pace with a new communications era

• The ongoing transition of mass media to personalized forms of distribution and consumption

• Why some online communities are trusted more than geographical ones — and some are not

• Video games as a new cultural force and the hope and hype that surrounds “gamification”

• Social enterprise as a gateway for corporations to make a personal connection with customers

• How wider online access to health care information will result in a two-tier system for Canada

While some elements of our Metaviews.ca agenda will remain free to all on the web, subscribers receive access to the full scope of our collective efforts.

The email newsletter, distributed each Friday morning, is packed with ideas that will help sharpen reader perspectives for the week ahead.

Teleseminars also include participation from both industry experts and opinionated observers, in the effort to approach topics in a friendly, articulate, conversational format.

Subscribers also get priority access to the entire Metaviews.ca team, who provide research and opinion from backgrounds including academia, education, journalism, politics, business, and technology, along with expertise in executing special projects and in dynamic presentations.

Please see the Metaviews.ca website for more information on the subscription package.

This week, Samsung is making 3D televisions available for purchase in Canada. They will quickly be followed by other major manufacturers with their own 3D displays. Does this mark a new shift in how we experience entertainment, or just a neat concept that lacks the content to make it tangible?

Our culture seems obsessed with what's new, and what's innovative. There's always a need to push forward, and the TV/Entertainment industry still remains a powerful force when it comes to pushing new technology into the marketplace and convincing us that we need it.

When done right, 3D TV is phenomenal, as anyone who saw Avatar can tell you. Yet it's not always done right, and Alice in Wonderland is a great example of this.

Is the imperative of first pushing HD and now pushing 3D partly a response to the internet and the larger phenomena of sharing content? If you keep innovating, if you keep evolving, it makes it harder for the barbarian hordes on the internet to undermine your business model. Which is not to say they won't catch up, rather this might be the new way of doing business. Make money by getting people to keep buying into new technologies and platforms.

For example while the initial Samsung models start at $2,500 for the TV, the glasses start at $250 each, and those are just entry level. When I first heard of 3D TV I imagined them being a hit at sports bars, but not if you have to give drunk patrons goggles that cost a few hundred bucks each.

As another year comes to a close I thought I'd share some brief thoughts on what I anticipate for the world of technology in 2010:

The Might of Mobile

Mobile technology will continue to be a dominant trend as smart phones go from being tools for professionals, to devices that just about everyone has or wants.

A lot of the growth in the mobile sector is driven by applications. A related platform that I think will thrive in 2010 is Augmented Reality (o/k/a AR).

Augmented Reality is an effort to bring the qualities of the web to the physical world by literally adding a layer of hypertext on top of our material reality. Often described and associated with the concept of the "Internet of Things", the idea is to unlock web-based information associated with each object or location.

As a concept AR has been receiving a considerable amount of attention and investment. The recent announcement of advertising in AR will have a powerful and also normative effect.

In this regard, "hyper-local" advertising will be a big trend in 2010, and it will be driven by mobile and AR applications. This will be a way that Twitter starts to cash in, for example, bu having localized ads that target people in particular cities or neighbourhoods. If you don't want to be exposed to these ads, you'll be able to pay a premium and get Twitter with spam filters.

Tablet Computing

I'm kind of excited about the (re)arrival of tablet computers. Apple has one coming out in the spring, Google is rumoured to have one out in early summer, and I've been playing with Nokia's N900, which calls itself a tablet.

What excites me is the combination of mobility with traditional computational power and abilities. On the one hand, it will further drive the development of mobile applications, with the tablets marketed and treated like mobile devices. On the other, they enable a truly rich multimedia experience with their expanded touch screens and user interfaces.

One of their impacts will be to continue to accelerate the rate of technological change as evolution happens faster and companies push out new products and upgrades to keep up.

I do a lot of work with World Vision Canada and have this week met with some great people working on an innovative project that could have significant impact above and beyond their initiative. It's called "Last Mile Mobile Solutions" and it's a partnership with FieldWorker Mobile Technology Solutions to produce mobile units that speed up, and digitize, the process of food distribution in poverty and crisis relief programs. Here's a video that illustrates the technology and its potential:

This quote from the website contextualizes the potential for innovation with this device/concept:

LMMS replaces an intensive manual, paper-based process. Crucial information is captured using handheld computing units that wirelessly transmit that information to permanent database storage, analysis and reporting. The mobile features enable staff to roam and send and retrieve data that they need. Bar-coded identity cards link beneficiaries to a wireless data management system, which enables faster and more efficient field operations. Preliminary results indicate a 75% reduction in beneficiary processing and verification times at food distributions. LMMS eliminates the reliance on paper-based systems, automates calculations and delivers faster web-based reports to donors and stakeholders. The project is an example of how the humanitarian and private sector have combined their respective strengthens to achieve substantial impact in improving efficiency and accountability in humanitarian action.

Update: Jay Narhan has setup a blog dedicated to the LMMS project.

I've been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren't in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of "group think." In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn't an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being "here" at some point in time.

Augmented reality is kind of a hybrid between material reality and virtual reality in that it combines the power of hyperlinks and interconnected media with the geography and architecture of the physical world.

For a long time everyone assumed that virtual reality would be the basis of "cyberspace" and that it's arrival was imminent, however while it has been around from a technical perspective for well over a decade, very few regular folk have adopted it, outside of the gaming world of course.

So augmented reality is appearing as a kind of compromise that brings the benefits and promise of virtual reality to the real world that we all find so comfortable.

As well the rate of technological change is so rapid these days that while this may be the first time you've heard of augmented reality, I anticipate that you'll hear a lot more real soon, and by the end of the year it could be a regular part of the popular culture.

There are two fascinating developments in the world of online security that are so sensational as to seem right out of a cyberpunk thriller.

The first, which I've spoken about on CBC recently, is the resilience of the Conficker worm, which culminates in some kind of action on April 1st 2009.

The second is an incredible espionage initiative called GhostNet, which friends of mine at the Citizen Lab here in Toronto have helped unearth and expose to the public.

Combined these two stories depict something I've been describing as an open arms race, in which proxy forces develop new types of information based weapons and test them live on the internet. While it's never clear who the players are behind this perpetual information war, researchers are able to dissect the tools and compromised systems to portray a fascinating tale of computer-based cloak and dagger.