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Recently, I was reading about the news of the “first specification for Interoperability and Preservation of Metadata in Digital Photography” from vnunet and although it’s great news on the photo-data standardisation process it’s really disappointing to see very few progress on the “data convergence front”.

You see the problem I have is that I have one gadget (my dear Nokia N95) which does all of sorts of things in a mediocre way and other 200,000 million gadgets which do one thing very well…Why do we have to stick with this jack of all trades gadget (acclaimed by many people and me) but master of none? Why do we have a “moving target” and it looks like we’ll never get true convergence? You could argue that I have already an exceptional device because my mobile can take good pictures, play music and show videos but my point is that I will claim to finally have a “converged device” when I won’t need to buy something else with exactly the same functionality.

You can read about “one side of the coin” in this post:

“…convergence is the future, many portable devices can do many things at the same time, but at the end of the day when it comes to take a very good photo, you use your $1000 DSLR camera, when it comes to play a videogame seriously, you use your PlayStation and when it comes to record a video, you use your “serious” videocamera. …”

and this could be true for many years to come considering there is a new generation  which is growing up and is more than happy with “beta-quality” standards. Ok, I’m no saint and my generation was more than happy with VHS-quality videos but good quality products are now becoming a premium especially when in the blogosphere people are shouting to give everything away for free!!! Anyway, I don’t think this is the way it should be at all and Metadata Working Group is a fine example at how big companies can get together if they recognise the disadvantages of  walled gardens… Would defining a standard to move and process my data between devices reduce the barrier to convergence? Perhaps, here’s few examples:

• Renting Market. At the moment, there isn’t a gadget renting market because there isn’t a clear way to shift the data from place to place… Imagine if during a concert you can use the best camera on the market to take pictures and transfer all the data to your phone at the end of the event. Imagine that you don’t have to carry with you a 5kg bag all day just to take high quality pictures and don’t have to settle for mobile-quality pictures…well, data mobility could help that.
• My N95 does not have a FM Transmitter radio, but I could add one using a 3.5mm audio jack. Imagine the same modularity and extensibility with the camera, the memory and everything else…
• Imagine you have a saturated mobile market where mobile phones are becoming a commodity. Really really busy people have a blackberry and another phone; not so busy people have only one … What if you could move the data between two or more mobile phones (not from the same vendor) easily and transparently? Would you use the blackberry mobile during the day and keep the other in the bag and do the opposite in the evening? Would it help selling more phones? Perhaps…

We got to the point that not only different technologies are being converged into single multipurpose gadgets, but also content is being converged and I’m glad with have at least a starting point which is Internet but without a clear business reason I don’t think many companies will make any efforts towards convergence. I just hope that the next “open xxxx” or data portability project will bear some fruits data standards

Update:

I was writing post this and I just read about a microsoft patent to share resources

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