Lunch over IP

EuroScan: Making Online Content Pay

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has been published yesterday. It discusses three interesting examples from Europe of innovative business models for online content -- subscriber-supported online television show, partially-free news, and Radiohead launching the final assault against the music industry by using a "name your price" approach for their new record. Full column here.

EuroScan: Mapping a Country's Political Face

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has been published yesterday. It discusses how the Swiss newsmagazine L'Hebdo is reinventing election coverage by sending its reporters to stay at candidates' homes and letting readers follow their travels on Google Earth. Here it is:

Journalistic coverage of election campaigns is in need of reinvention. In many countries, it has turned into a festival of sound bites, an endless exegesis of what a candidate says in speeches, position papers, and televised debates rather than who she is or what he does, which are better predictors of future behavior and policy.

A Swiss news magazine has started exploring a new route by sending its reporters to sleep at the candidates' homes, having them blog about it, and connecting it all with an innovative Google Earth extension.

The magazine is L'Hebdo, a French-language weekly published in Lausanne that became known last year for sending all its reporters in rotation to live in a troubled French suburb. The experiment gave birth to one of the most amazing examples of citizen journalism to date, the BondyBlog, now run by a group of young locals.

Over the past three months, L'Hebdo has applied the same formula to its coverage of the Swiss parliamentary election campaigns. Every week, one of the editors, reporters, or contributors to the magazine, regardless of assigned beat, packs a bag of tech gear (laptop with GSM/UMTS/Wi-Fi wireless connectivity; still and video cameras; cell phone) and travels to a different region to follow candidates around, to stay at their houses—and to tell all on a Web site called Blog & Breakfast.

With the Oct. 21 elections still more than a month away, the Hebdo journalists have already spent more than 110 nights in as many candidates' homes. The blog has texts, pictures, videos, and a particularly neat feature (technically a mash-up): Articles and videos are geo-tagged and can be viewed in Google Maps or Google Earth. Switzerland being a place of beautiful landscapes, of mountains and forests and lakeside cities, this allows readers to "navigate" the country visually, following the reporters via maps and aerial pictures and clicking on red Hebdo logos to call up the corresponding article within its geographical context.

Earlier this year, the editors at L'Hebdo (disclosure: I contribute to the magazine but am not involved in this initiative) sat down to discuss their upcoming campaign coverage of reports, investigations, interviews, analysis—the usual magazine fare. Then they started talking about doing something different, an online diary, getting closer to the candidates—the famous ones, as well as the totally unknown or those who don't stand any chance of being elected—to explore their ambitions, talents, characters, doubts.

At a certain point, one editor suggested the best way to learn about a country is to ask the locals for hospitality. Hence, the Hebdo reporters should sleep at the candidates' homes.

The way Titus Plattner, the editor in charge of Blog & Breakfast, recounts it, first the suggestion triggered laughter (with one wag offering "Embedded" as a name for the blog, a reference to the "embedding" of reporters with U.S. military units in Iraq), then worry ("people will misread that for sleeping with the candidates"), then a serious discussion about the boundaries of political journalism. Some feared losing independence and credibility by getting so close to the politicians. Others warned against the people-ization of politics and the downward spiral of gossip and minutiae. But most defended the idea as an original way to tell the story of politics and to help bridge the growing chasm between citizens and politicians by offering ground-floor descriptions of their days, their lives, their houses, their motivation.

It must be explained that here in Switzerland, elective positions, with very few exceptions (such as the federal president and ministers), aren't jobs. They are part-time mandates carried out alongside a person's regular employment. Some expenses are covered, and a basic salary is paid, but politics is still very much a question of personal motivation and conviction, of public service, and of juggling professional and political commitments. Odd as this may sound to an American ear, Swiss politics is characterized by the normalcy of (most) politicians.

So, mid-May, off went the reporters, working on a weekly rotation. Every day they post several stories and pictures; a video in which the candidate they "shadowed" that day expresses one idea in one minute; and a photo of the guest room or the couch where they stayed the previous night. They tell of tagging along with the candidates at meetings with party members, about discussions with designers on campaign logos, or what it's like being at the office to check the day's work. They describe having dinner with families, driving up mountain valleys to participate in local events (and getting to shake hands), or chasing SUVs with young urban environmental activists. It's sociopolitical reportage in the purest form.

Of course, when asked to participate, some candidates say no. But as Blog & Breakfast has become more well known and election day nears, others are calling up offering hospitality.

Blog & Breakfast "is as much a collective portrait of the Swiss political personnel as it is a journey into the political process," says Alain Jeannet, L'Hebdo's editor-in-chief. In other words, what do politics mean today in a country of advanced direct democracy such as Switzerland? How does it work? What's the life of an idea? What motivates people to run for (unpaid) office? How does a novice candidate negotiate the smooth party platforms?

The mandate of the reporters/bloggers is not to find flaws in the politicians' position papers, nor to immediately seek the reaction of the other political side: It's to observe, listen, and describe. Despite the proximity, they respect the candidates' privacy, except when private stories are relevant to the campaign coverage. "It's clear for us that sleeping at the candidates' is not voyeurism; it's a way to open a different discussion space," says Plattner.

On the trail, ideas emerge, such as the controversial concept voiced by a young candidate from Zurich of giving citizens voting rights at birth, with parents voting on behalf of the child up to a certain age. This provides a way, argued the candidate, of giving more weight to young families in an aging society. Great personal stories are told. Anecdotes are plentiful. Misunderstandings, too: When a female reporter asked a Swiss-German candidate for hospitality, he appeared confused and replied "but…I'm married!"

The ability to read the blog within online maps and aerial pictures offers an additional layer of information, pinning people to places and visually expressing the country's geographical diversity. Plattner believes in the near future all news will be geo-tagged, carrying not only the location and date, but the hour the story broke or was filed, and the corresponding GPS coordinates. "It's a way to improve transparency and make the personalization of news easier," he says.

For now, his and his colleagues' efforts are providing an unusual, highly original, and insightful portrait of both the noble and the prosaic aspects of contemporary Swiss politics. The experience is also turning into a living lab for a magazine that, like every other print publication, is searching for its online future, and for a newsroom where many journalists are still anxious about the new tools. "With a little training, everybody mastered the wireless, the blogging, and the video," says Plattner.

And mostly, they found the guest rooms austere, but clean and comfortable.

Like Swiss politics.

EuroScan: Challenges for Creative Minds

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has been published today. It deals with the growing number of creative challenges and how they reflect a change in the way innovation happens. Here the full column:

If you have an idea for an innovative, executable consumer product or service that can "contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle" or a plan for the smart use of media in communities, then get ready to jot it down, draft blueprints, and fill out the submission form: Your idea could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Three new initiatives challenge creative minds everywhere to come up with innovative ideas and designs related to sustainability and to digital media. Part of a growing trend of competitions seeking solutions for pressing problems, all three combine two powerful concepts: the social-change catalyzing award (à la TED Prize) and the competition-fuels-innovation contest (à la Ansari X-Prize).

Help Consumers Reduce Global Warming

The Picnic Green Challenge, the first of the three, is an eco-contest organized by Picnic, an annual conference and idea festival that takes place in Amsterdam this year from Sept. 23 to Sept. 29. The best ideas (one or several, depending on the quality of the entries) will win up to €500,000 ($670,000) in funding, plus free consulting and help opening doors that could bring the project to fruition.

The winning projects should be executable; the submissions (which must be received by Aug. 30) will include a concrete plan to bring the idea to market. In addition, organizers are looking for well-designed products and services that can "enable large numbers of people to effortlessly reduce their personal impact on global warming."

The winners will be selected by a jury chaired by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who has launched several environmental initiatives recently, including devoting part of the profits of Virgin Atlantic Airways to research on greener fuels. Other jurors are representatives of both big business (Unilever and Tommy Hilfiger) and environmental organizations (Greenpeace and the Climate Group) as well as designers and tech investors. (Disclosure: I've been asked to join the jury.)

Apply Fuller's Trimtab Principle

The Buckminster Fuller Institute, the Brooklyn (N.Y.)-based organization named for the visionary American inventor, has issued a broader challenge. The BFI seeks an idea with "significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth's ecological integrity." Ideally, write the organizers, the entries should demonstrate Fuller's "trimtab principle", which posits that "small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change."

BFI Challenge entries (which are due Oct. 30) can relate to any field, from art to industry—it remains to be seen if such a wide and vaguely described target will yield significant results (the most successful innovation competition to date, the X-Prize, has worked because of its very precise guidelines). The winner will receive $100,000 "to be used to take the winning strategy to the next stage of development". The judges have not yet been announced.

Reinvent Digital Media

Last week the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami issued its second News Challenge, an initiative that will award a total of $5 million to a range of innovative proposals for using digital technologies to "inform and inspire communities" and "improve the lives of people where they live and work."

  Entries, due by Oct. 15, should employ digital media (ideally within an open-source framework), deliver news or information on a shared basis, and involve a geographically defined community. In other words, this is about collaborative journalism and information.

In 2006, its inaugural year, the jury awarded prizes to 25 individuals and organizations for projects such as community databases and immigrant newscasts. Although all the first-year winners were Americans, the News Challenge is open to innovators from any country and of any background.

Bottom Line: Executable Ideas

This is actually a common trait of the three challenges: You don't need to be a scientist to participate in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, nor a journalist to compete for the Knight money. Ideas are what matters. Executable ideas, that is. This is no time for blue-sky dreaming. All three challenges seek realistic, achievable ideas and designs and explicitly intend the prize money to be used to bring the winning concept to the next stage of development or to market.

Innovation competitions and awards are nothing new, but they are a growing trend. Many have been inspired, no doubt, by the success of the Ansari X-Prize, which saw teams compete for the first private manned craft to reach space twice in two weeks. (The $10 million prize went to Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne team in 2004). The X-Prize itself has now been expanded to push scientific and technological advances in other fields, and similar challenges have been issued by a variety of organizations, from the Defense Dept.'s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (for the development of autonomous robotic vehicles) to the three outlined above.

But the success of the X-Prize isn't the only thing driving the trend. At its core, it reflects a change in how innovation happens. Long-term corporate research and development is declining, structured and slow traditional approaches are weakening, and at the same time we are witnessing the Internet-fuelled rise of open, nimble —and fast—innovation methods. In this perspective, challenges could become a future organizing principle for open innovation.

EuroScan: Videobreakfast with grandma and more unconventional skyping

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has just been published. It deals with the unconventional ways in which people use Skype and similar free Internet-based voice and video communication services. Here the full column:

Give people unlimited cheap or free phone or voice-over-Internet service and what happens? Not much, according to research by sociologists and anthropologists. People don't tend to increase the number or length of their calls significantly. There is only so much time you can spend talking, after all, and a phone call requires more commitment in terms of attention than, say, an instant messaging session—just try handling multiple phone conversations in parallel.

Yet there are exceptions. The rise of Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, iChat and the other free Internet telephony and videotelephony services out there has led people to use voice and video communication in surprising, unconventional, and creative ways.

Here, for instance, are two anecdotes culled from the Skype Web site:

• An American band that had split up after college wanted to reunite for their 10-year reunion, but three of the musicians resided in California, others in Colorado and Massachusetts. With a few amplifiers and some microphone adaptors they practiced in real-time via Skype, and did the reunion gig.
• A piano teacher in Illinois gives private lessons to students across the U.S., and as far away as Europe and Australia. He mails them the assigned arrangements and then listens to them through his Skype headset.

A few weeks ago I started collecting my own stories and anecdotes through my blog and at conferences I was attending, specifying that I was not interested in traveling businessmen keeping in touch with the office, which I considered a "normal" use of Skype. I was looking for more unpredictable uses, and I found plenty:

• An immigrant family from the Balkans living in Switzerland has a big computer screen in their living/dining room, with a Web cam focused on the dining table. The MSN messenger window is open all day, for incoming messages or calls from family back home or friends who migrated to other countries. And almost every morning they have breakfast "with" grandma (the husband's mother) who lives in Kosovo with a similar Webcam set-up.
• A girl in Switzerland, the daughter of immigrants from Spain, gets regular video-over-Internet tutoring from her aunt, a teacher who lives in Spain.
• Several evenings a week, a retired grandfather in New York reads bedtime stories to his young grandson in California over Skype.
• After hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a group of activists from around the world used SkypeIn and SkypeOut (the features that allow Skype users to communicate with normal phone users and vice-versa) to set up a virtual phone bank and messaging center. Collaborating also with ham radio operators, they relayed emergency messages in and out of the devastated region, let people ask for information, or just let them reach a friendly voice. The phone bank was staffed by volunteers from India, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S.
• Kid Lucky, an MC in New York, uses Skype to jam with beatboxer Zede in Switzerland.
• VeeSee TV is a British Web-based TV service airing news and other programs tailored to deaf viewers, using British Sign Language (BSL). Via Web cams, viewers chat freely on the channel's Web site in their native sign languages.
• Parents use Skype as a baby-monitoring application by keeping the Skype channel open on a laptop placed in the baby's room while they are working on their computer in another room.
• Customers are starting to use Skype to call help desks and customer service departments so that, if they receive poor service, they can record the calls using plug-in software that stores Skype conversations as audio files.
• Language schools are offering lessons with native teachers or tutors. A U.S. or European student learning Chinese, for example, can work directly with a teacher in Shanghai. The lessons come as a downloadable podcast, while conversations with the teacher happen over Skype.

Needless to say, these are all uses of Skype, MSN, and similar services that the engineers who developed them never intended, and the marketers never foresaw.

There is a whole history of this type of adaptation, stretching back to Edison and Antonio Meucci and probably beyond. More recently, the inventors of the Internet and the developers of the Web didn't set off to create a network that would one day be used to connect avatars, stream videos, and book flights. It's a testament to the openness and flexibility of their inventions that these uses are possible.

This leads to a speculation: Successful communication technologies are those that are designed with this openness at their core, so that their real applications can be figured out not by the developers or the sellers, but by the actual users.

EuroScan: Reinventing the wheel – and the car

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today here. It reports on a test-drive of the Hy-Light, a zero-emission fuel-cell car developed in Switzerland that drives 130 km/h and refuels at a solar-powered pump that may one day be a household appliance. Here the full column.

While every carmaker in the world is tailing the successful Toyota Prius by developing low-emission hybrid models of various kinds (flex-fuel; gasoline-electric; gasoline-natural gas; gasoline-hydrogen), the real innovation in automotive is taking place in a nondescript industrial building on the outskirts of the Swiss town of Fribourg.

There, recently, Pierre Varenne sat me behind the wheel of a small prototype called Hy-Light (picture right) and told me to drive. I found myself in a silent car with great speed and acceleration and amazing stability, but no gear box, clutch, or anti-roll bar. And it produces zero air pollution. As we stopped beside a group of solar panels, Varenne pointed and said: "That's the fueling station."

Switzerland may seem an unlikely home for the reinvention of the auto industry, since there are no Swiss carmakers. Yet that also frees Varenne from the pressures of domestic car and oil conglomerates, creating an ideal environment for his project. This soft-spoken engineer with sharp opinions believes that the only way to truly reinvent the car and make it sustainable is to also reimagine the system that procures the energy to power it. "We need to create 'clean' cars as well as 'clean' ways to generate the energy," he says.

Working for tiremaker Michelin, Varenne runs a small group of researchers who are really thinking differently about the future of the car and of mobility. And they have a real car to show, not just a concept: The Hy-Light is registered with the Swiss department of motor vehicles (hence, it complies with all existing regulations), carries a regular plate, and has been discreetly travelling the Swiss roads and highways and showing up at specialized fairs for a couple of years now.

The Hy-Light is a car built around a hydrogen fuel cell, meaning it generates electricity through a basic chemical reaction involving hydrogen and oxygen. The gases are stored in two specially developed tanks (the hydrogen is pressurized and its tank can withstand the direct shot of a Swiss Army rifle). Probably the only drawback of the vehicle's design is the need to fill two tanks, which currently takes roughly eight minutes total.

The Michelin prototype is a catalog of clean-tech innovations. The key novelty is its "active wheel": the electric motors (which weigh a few kilos each) and the suspensions are lodged inside the wheels (picture left). "We have designed a system made of a central energy production unit (the fuel cell) and two or four peripheral energy usage units (the motors in the wheels)," explains Pierre Varenne. "In between, there are only electric cables."

The fuel cell used in the Hy-Light prototype was developed by the Paul Scherrer Institute, a leading Swiss research center. What sets it apart from most other automotive fuel cells (such as the one in the GM Sequel) is that it uses pure oxygen from a tank. Most fuel cells suck oxygen from the surrounding air, but that approach requires an onboard compressor and a system for controlling air quality — all of which lowers the efficiency of the power system. According to Varenne, the Hy-Light method increases the efficiency of the fuel cell by almost one-third. Michelin is now working on the next iteration of the fuel cell.

Electric motors have an advantage in that they can become energy generators. In the case of the Hy-Light, when the car slows down or the driver brakes, the kinetic energy produced by the vehicle's motion is captured and stored, to be released when the driver accelerates. The energy is stored in supercapacitors: an ingenious compromise between a battery (which can store a lot of energy but isn't good at delivering bursts of power) and traditional capacitors (which offer phenomenal power but little storage). Made by Maxwell in Switzerland, this technology increases the car's power for acceleration without increasing its energy consumption.

The Hy-Light is packed with sensors that relay data to a central processor controlling the motors and the suspension. When I drove it, I took some turns at high speed, and was surprised by the car's stability. The electronics in the wheels, I was told by Pierre-Alain Magne, the engineer/test pilot, are designed to monitor the stress of rounding a corner and to compensate for brake pitching.

While the advantages of lodging the engines and a lot of electronics in the wheels are clear, the design also raises a question: By putting these systems closer to the ground, doesn't the design expose them to water, snow, mud, and shocks? Varenne acknowledges that that's something they haven't thoroughly tested yet.

In its current incarnation, the Hy-Light weighs 850 kilograms, maxes out at 130 km/h (80 miles-per-hour), can accelerate to 100 km/h in less than 12 seconds, and can travel 300 km on one tank (well, two). This compares to a mass-produced medium-sized car. The key difference: To travel 100 km, the Hy-Light uses the energy-equivalent of less than 2.5 liters, or half a gallon, of gasoline, and its only byproduct is steam, created when the hydrogen and oxygen are combined.

Beyond working on the car, Varenne and his team have their eyes set on something bigger. When it comes to the future of mobility, the really tricky thing is the fueling and charging infrastructure. They see the car as a piece of a larger energy puzzle, and are trying to devise ways to power it in the least invasive and most sustainable way possible. Currently, hydrogen accounts only for about 1% of world energy consumption (industrial purposes count for most of that) and is produced mostly from natural gas, oil, or coal. Less than 5% is extracted through electrolysis—the process by which water is split into hydrogen and oxygen by an electric current.

Given the size of the oceans, water is the most abundant, and most obvious, future source of hydrogen. Yet with current technology, the amount of electricity required to extract the hydrogen makes the resource inefficient. Here lies the paradox: While we know how to mix hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and steam (the process of a fuel cell), we can't yet efficiently do the process in reverse—use electricity to split water into H2 and O2. "Unfortunately, no one has been able yet to figure out a fuel cell that could work both ways," says Varenne.

Instead, the Michelin engineers teamed up with the innovative regional electric utility in Fribourg, Groupe E, to install 55 square meters of solar panels on their premises—the "refueling station" that Varenne had showed me. The energy generated powers an electrolyzer that splits enough water into oxygen and hydrogen to run the car for 20,000 km (12,500 miles) a year.

In other words, covering a portion of a house's roof with solar panels would be enough to power the average Westerner's annual driving needs (depending on how you measure them: Europeans drive some 9,000 miles a year; Americans about 13,000), while emitting only steam.

And consider that Fribourg is hardly the sunniest place in Switzerland.

Groupe E is heavily invested in the development of higher-efficiency, smaller-size electrolyzers. The one used for the Hy-Light is the size of a small garage: "We're working on getting it down to the size of a washing machine," says Groupe E CEO Philippe Virdis. The metaphor isn't random: Virdis' vision is that over time "every Swiss will be able to produce the energy for his own home and car," through a combination of solar panels, a home electrolyzer, and a fuel cell. "It's a totally different approach than the current centralized, hierarchical energy production and distribution system: a decentralized, renewable, sustainable one."

It's also a totally disruptive approach. It will take a moment before the Hy-Light and the electrolyzer-as-household-appliance reach marketability. Still, the Michelin engineers set off to reinvent the wheel and, with their partners, they're now showing that it's possible to rethink both the car and the whole energy-supply system.

The design of solar

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It discusses a beautiful lamp that runs on solar energy -- and how it was designed. Here it is:

I recently moved into a top-floor apartment and have been looking for solar lamps that I could use on the roof deck, which is bathed in sunlight all day—a never-ending source of free energy. I wanted a lamp that would store power during the day and release it at night, when I may be having dinner with friends or reading a book in the evening's breeze. Yes, I know solar lamps don't come cheap, but at least there's no need to run wiring, and maintenance requirements are low.

What I found was initially pretty disappointing — uninteresting and tacky plastic or metal objects made to be tucked away in garden corners and along walkways, installed on posts or pedestals, or mounted on wall fixtures, making their presence felt only when they lit up.

Moreover, most of the available options featured only a small area of solar cells, and hence a relatively modest battery duration. When I found ones with bigger solar-cell surfaces, they looked like upside-down shovels. While there are now several LED lamps by world-class designers—such as Yves Behar's Leaf and Richard Sapper's Halley — solar lighting seemed stuck in the realm of engineering.

Then I discovered Damian O'Sullivan's prototype for a "Solar Lampion" and I'm wondering how fast he can get it into production. I want one. It's the first example I know of great design applied to solar lamps. The pictures below show how it looks. The design is visibly inspired by natural organic structures such as pine cones, but it is somehow reminiscent also of Chinese paper lampions—which he has explored in a great many successive sketches that he made available to me.

The most innovative characteristic of the design is that instead of combining a lamp with a solar cell, he has created a lamp made of solar cells. This not only provides a large surface for capturing the sun's energy but gives the lamp its distinctive look.

The lamp's 30 off-the-shelf, 25-sq. cm solar cells are mounted on injection-molded plastic crowns stacked on top of each other. Each crown holds six cells inclined towards the sun, and is rotated 30 degrees from the layer above, creating the faceted cylindrical form that ensures the lampion will catch the sun's rays no matter which direction they are coming from. Each cell is then coupled with a white LED tucked under the frame along the cell's top edge. The rechargeable battery, which stores the energy, is hidden inside this frame, which is otherwise empty. And a simple handle allows it to be carried easily or hung from a tree branch.

A 38-year-old Franco-Irish designer living in the Netherlands, O'Sullivan has created bags and tie racks for French luxury brand Hermès, tech gadgets for Dutch manufacturer Philips, and shoes for Spanish brand Camper, among others. He said during a phone interview last week that in its current stage, the Lampion can collect enough energy on a sunny day to give light for 24 hours.

Not only is it a beautiful object, it's the first lamp design that makes the solar cells an integral part of the form. It also suggests that solar lighting—that "alternative" technology typically housed in ungainly forms—is starting to be considered a dignified field for cutting-edge designers.

EuroScan: Zattoo, the new kid in online TV

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It discusses a Swiss startup, with a service currently in beta, that has so far remained discreet but is getting ready to enter the soon-to-be-hot field of online TV. Here it is:

I don't own a TV set but I do have the BBC and CNN and the major channels from various European countries running live on a corner of my laptop screen -- thanks to Zattoo.

Online video is one of the hottest trends of the moment, pushed by the convergence of broadband, compression algorithms, and sites for sharing clips and more. Yet so far, TV broadcasters have viewed the Internet with lots of skepticism, for example asking YouTube to remove files of broadcast shows, despite the fact that such user-led, viral marketing tends to boost a show's popularity.

Rare are the broadcasters, in Europe or the U.S., that let you view programs in full online. Their often sophisticated Web sites are meant to attract online ad money, rather than to deliver video feeds to the online audience.

But here's a safe prediction: That will soon change as demand for longer, high-quality, online video content grows. And the technology that will make it happen may come from Europe.

Unless you've been on an extended exploration of the deep sea for the last couple of months, you've probably heard of Joost, the online TV venture. Founded by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis (the pair famous for having disrupted music distribution with Kazaa and telecommunications with Skype), Joost is being generously covered by "old" and "new" media alike. The startup is currently running an invitation-only beta test with a few thousand people (it runs only on PCs and Intel-based Macs for now) and is busy signing licensing agreements with content owners, such as broadcasters.

Zattoo is a similar effort. The legal service streams live TV content (including everything a channel airs) to your computer. And while the one-year-old startup, based in Zurich, may be the underdog, it deserves some ink as well. Their service is currently in beta too (so the images sometimes flicker, depending on your bandwidth) and for legal reasons it is geographically limited.

If you're not based in Switzerland, you won't be able to download their software yet (though you can sign up for an e-mail alert when it's made available in other countries, which I'm told will happen within days, starting with Britain and Denmark). If you are in Switzerland and want to try it out now, just go to their site and register, download the software, and start watching (it runs on PCs and all Macs and soon Linux).

The Zattoo interface is a simple window with a volume controller, a stop button, and a menu of channels; to change the channel, click on the one you want. The technology behind it is, in contrast, rather complex. It was originally developed at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor by professor Sugih Jamin to distribute scientific conferences online, and is based on a real-time, peer-to-peer design.

The software that users download is both a client (it allows users to view content) and a proxy server (if the central server is overloaded with requests, the system "rebalances" the load by streaming some video directly from one user's machine to another watching the same channel). This is very similar to the Skype approach, which transforms some users into "supernodes." Joost is based on this principle, too.

Unlike Joost, Zattoo offers no time-shifting, no search, and no tagging: just old fashioned TV channels -- live and unedited. These will be complemented by additional offerings, such as channels devoted to music, festivals, movies, and so forth. Some will be offered for free, some will be bundled and sold to subscribers á la the cable model. It will also be possible to subscribe to individual channels. Content owners will feel that their rights are adequately protected because no part of the encrypted stream is stored anywhere, and they will receive a fee per user, just as cable operators do today.

Neither Zattoo nor Joost will allow programs to be recorded, but given the TiVo experience, I suspect that a "save as MPEG" button will be very high on the list of future features requested by users or future plug-ins developed by independent programmers. Although for either company, implementing the feature would create a legal minefield.

With both Zattoo and Joost, TV is uncoupled from TV sets. Get Zattoo and you can watch a local or national channel at the office or on the go -- basically anywhere you can establish a broadband connection. The word "zattoo" means "big crowd" in Japanese. For now, it has about 150,000 beta users in Switzerland with other countries, including the U.S., on tap.

When both services exit beta testing and are released to the world, Joost will have a huge advantage: The 100 million-plus people already using Skype will almost certainly receive an unsolicited e-mail from the founders. That will make for an interesting big vs. small, fast vs. faster race.

EuroScan: A Big Bang of innovation

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It describes a visit to the site of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, at CERN in Geneva, and discusses the technology of this most ambitious scientific experiment, aimed at re-creating the conditions of the first moments after the Big Bang and possibly finding an elusive particle.

EuroScan: Read that voicemail

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It discusses a British service that takes voicemails and turns them into text, opening up new communication possibilities. Here it is:

While generally useful, I find voicemail to be inherently inefficient. You dial someone. The phone rings. The call rolls into the machine. You listen to a message that too few keep short. You leave yours, often just asking to be called back. When the other person calls back, you may be in the middle of something and ask to call them back, or you may just be unavailable and so the call rolls into your voicemail, launching a game of phone tag. And even when a caller does leave a to-the-point message, you still have to retrieve it, and that can't be done at any time. It's rude to retrieve messages during a meeting, for example, and if you're driving, you have to stop to write down a phone number. It is not uncommon to have to listen to the message twice to get a detail right. Frustrating is voicemail's middle name.

Someday, so-called "presence information" (a system that tells the caller whether you're available at that moment, as happens on Skype or on instant-messaging platforms) may solve that problem. But for now, wouldn't it be better if your caller's message was delivered to your e-mail in-box or to your cell phone as a text? Christina Domecq believes it would, and that's the whole, simple idea behind her company, SpinVox, a two-year-old startup based in London.

Domecq used to be a consultant, and experienced voicemail frustration firsthand. "I would get to the end of a fast-paced day and check my voicemail and find that I had still 14 messages to go", she said when we spoke recently. She started looking for a solution, and when she found none, she decided to create one, together with co-founder Daniel Doulton. They developed their voice-to-text system on top of existing speech recognition software, adding some patented technology, and launched in Britain in the second half of 2005.

Today, SpinVox has 150 employees and claims 120,000 paying users, mostly in Britain, but the service has recently launched in the U.S., Spain, and France, with Germany following soon. Users pay about five British pounds (just under $10) a month for the transcription, on average, of 30 voicemails a month (you can listen to the original messages anytime). This year, the company plans to announce deals with telecom operators to deploy its technology directly within their networks.

Transcribing a voice message into text may not seem like much, and there are other companies that offer similar services, but SpinVox seems to have made it extremely easy to use. And cell-phone subscribers accustomed to receiving SMS alerts that they have new voicemail will quickly appreciate how much better and faster it is when that notification contains instead the actual text of the message.

"It's all about saving people time," says Domecq, "and giving them more free time." Or the time to do more. "One evening at a party," she says, "someone walked up to me and said, jokingly, 'You should be ashamed; you sped up my life another notch.'"

Of course, a key question when it comes to voice recognition is accuracy, and SpinVox's is surprising. I asked them for a test account and called in leaving myself a message with the text of the first few lines of this column. Here is what came into my e-mail and (by SMS) my cell phone about three minutes later, unedited:

"While generally useful(?) I find voicemail to be inherently inefficient. ___ someone, the phone rings & the call rolls into the machine. You listen to a message that too few keep short, you leave yours often just asking to be called back. When the other person calls back you maybe in the middle of something & have to call them back or you may just be unavailable & so the the call rolls into your voicemail launching a game of phone tag."

And consider that I speak fast and have a thick Italian accent.

The idea, really, goes beyond voicemail-to-text. "It's about voice-to-screen in any application," says Domecq. SpinVox is working on expanding the concept to blogging by voice, for example. What gets me really excited, however, is when voice gets turned into text on a screen, then it becomes searchable, archivable, editable, taggable, bloggable, and forwardable, opening up whole new areas of communication.

EuroScan: The route to the open-source car

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, was published on Friday - and for most of the day was the most-read article on the BW site. It discusses the OScar project, which aims to build a car by tapping the knowledge of a volunteer team. It won't be an easy ride, but the journey is what matters. Here it is:

The computer operating system Linux and the Web browser Firefox are generally considered the two biggest successes of the movement to develop open-source programs -- software anyone can modify, transform, and redistribute back into the community. While there are thousands of other examples, Linux and Firefox have managed to mount serious competition to established commercial products, and have therefore come to represent this specific, collective mode of creation.

But Linux and Firefox are made of bits. They are immaterial. Bits can be shared and sent around easily, so that distant people can work on them concurrently; bugs can be corrected almost instantly; new versions containing updates, improvements, or fixes can be released virtually for free.

So here's a question: Can open-source practices and approaches be applied to make hardware, to create tangible and physical objects, including complex ones? Say, to build a car?

Markus Merz believes they can. The young German is the founder and "maintainer" (that's the title on his business card) of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build a car according to open-source (OS) principles. Merz and his team aren't going for a super-accessorized SUV -- they're aiming at designing a simple and functionally smart car. And, possibly, along the way, reinvent transportation. After all, "Form follows function", says Merz.

The OScar is not the only open-source hardware project out there. Others include Zero Prestige, which designs kites and kite-powered vehicles, and Open Prosthetics, which offers free exchange of designs for prosthetic devices. However, OScar is certainly the most ambitious.

Merz is the son of Bavarian farmers. He studied agricultural sciences, before going to work for a nearby automotive plant, first as a production-line worker, then in communications, marketing, and new media. The way he tells it, it was an accidental career, but it gave him some of the background for the OScar project, which he and a group of friends first dreamed up in 1999, when Merz was working as an Internet consultant.

"I was then a very idealistic young man", he told me recently when we met at the European Futurists Conference, an annual gathering of forecasters and visionaries in Lucerne, Switzerland, "so I wrote a manifesto".

In the manifesto (which is available in full on the OScar Web site), Merz lays out the goals: "Building a car without an engineering center, without a boss, without money, and without borders. But with the help of the collective creativity of the Internet community… . Three or four months should be enough for the project definition phase. Then we 'freeze' the concept, and start developing. With a little luck and a lot of support…within the next year we should be able to build a prototype".

That timeline proved vastly overoptimistic. Merz's manifesto laid out a series of basic rules for people to work together, but they were too generic (things like "everyone has a voice" and "what's on the Web site is fact"). And the tools -- mostly software -- needed to work on such an ambitious plan weren't yet available. "And of course we didn't have a clue what we were doing, we didn't have a master plan nor clear directions," he adds.

At the beginning, the group worked quietly. Then suddenly, a few months into the project, it began to attract a lot of attention -- too much, actually. A popular German tech online newsletter linked to the OScar manifesto, German TV broadcast a report, and things slipped out of hand. Hundreds of people offered to join a project that wasn't ready to incorporate all of them, not to mention that many were just not the right people: wrong area of expertise, wrong mindset. "I was overwhelmed", Merz says. Under the weight of this unanticipated interest, the project slowed to a crawl.

It took three years to resurrect it, and only at the beginning of 2004 were a stronger structure and clear rules of the game put in place, starting with the tech requirements for the car (ideal size of the vehicle, target performance, etc.) and a division of labor along a comprehensible set of modules: board, shell, engines, power systems, security systems, and information systems.

The latter module is key, because the OScar project is also meant to be an exploration of alternative designs for individual and collective mobility. While he believes in the right to mobility for everyone, Merz explains, "this doesn't need to translate into individual car ownership". For instance, an efficient system for distributing information about who needs a car when to go where could enable more car sharing. Technology could also be used to recommend optimal routes, etc. The OScar will be from the onset a "connected" car.

One of the key difficulties encountered by the project so far has to do with tools. A decision was made early on to use only open-source software, but "computer-assisted design (CAD) tools are still the biggest weakness in open-source," says Merz.

On the other hand, bringing together the right people has also been a challenge. "This is not supposed to be a race car or a tech monster, but that's what some people, particularly car enthusiasts, tend to think. They're more into designing an über-car than a smart car". Currently, about 110 people from all over the world are involved with the OScar project, around the core team of three (and surrounded by another 1,000 or so who registered on the site but aren't playing an active role -- yet, at least). They are all volunteers with other rent-paying jobs. "This is a hobby, and we intend to keep it that way," Merz says. "I spend an average of 16 hours a week on OScar -- the equivalent of two days -- but I could easily spend 200 if I had them."

The profile of those involved varies, but Merz says that while building a car today "is mainly software, until a certain point anyway," the people working on a hardware project tend to be more "real-life, hands-on technical" than engineers developing OS software. They know how to code, but they're also familiar with the smell of axle grease.

Six years after the first seed, the group's Web site says the OScar is currently "in release 0.2," which Merz translates as "early conceptual stage." "We aren't trying to speed it up anymore, we will let it grow based on the amount of time we can all contribute," he says. One lesson he has learned: The process of doing things, particularly pathbreaking things like imagining an open-source car, "is more important than the deadline."

UPDATE - The article has been Digged and there are many interesting comments.