Steve Prentice

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Stephen Prentice
VP & Gartner Fellow
13 years at Gartner
35 years IT industry

Stephen Prentice is a VP and Gartner Fellow working in the Executive Leadership and Innovation Group (part of CIO Research). He takes a specific interest in emerging trends and the long-term future of technology - looking at the intersection of technology, business and society. Current research interests include... Read Full Bio

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Getting the BIG picture

by Steve Prentice  |  January 26, 2009  |  Comments Off

They say “a picture tells a thousand words” and I am increasingly awed by the technology that is becoming available to the general public, often for free or at minimal cost, to enable us to capture, store, manipulate and publish images rather than text. Whether this is what is driving the mental migration of the next generation towards images rather than words, or it is their preference for images rather than words that is driving developers I don’t know. In all probability it is the combined impact of both.

Two examples to illustrate this. My children frequently use YouTube in the way that most of us oldies use Google – as a search engine to find a video to show them how to do something rather than a (text-based) description. The requests can be as diverse as the steps for a new dance move or instructions on how to put a watermark on an image in Photoshop. The combination of millions of people being able to create video “tutorials”, upload and publish them, with huge online storage and a service that allows users to search for them (and all for free) is a powerful and compelling of what technology can do.

The second example combines the power of images and the social community that develops around a big event. Photosynth was developed by Microsoft Labs and made available some time ago. It stitches together multiple images to create a panoramic, almost 3D view of a scene but it does it automatically. The recent inauguration provided a wonderful example of what it can do. Literally thousands of people who were in Washington DC on the day have uploaded their pictures from wherever they were and Photosynth has created an incredible panoramic image that perfectly captures the “moment” in a way that a single individual, taking photos from a single vantage point, would never have been able to. A perfect combination of images and an “on the day” community to capture a moment in history with a powerful image that owes everything to technology.

This was organised and hosted by CNN and MSNBC. Check it out.

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