For the last few years I have been recommending Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Black Swans to my students. A Black Swan is an unpredictable event that carries massive impact which after it has happened we generally try to explain it away with some explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The reason I recommend to students, besides being an interesting read, is brings home to us the fact that we generally know a lot less about the world than we may think we do and not to be afraid of trying an idea that defies conventional wisdom. I believe that rich diversity affordable in all types of mobile development is particularly well placed to see the emergence of Black Swans as many of the ideas of the long tail or niche markets in mobile web 2.0 are advocating that we can have unconventional ideas but for large groups of people.

And why Silly Glasses? Last June Will and I created m3dcam to look at emergence in the  long tail mobile applications  by allowing people to create 3-D anaglyph photographs using their mobile phones. The only publicity we gave it was a blog here and MOSH with the result is that yesterday we passed the 4000 photographs up-loaded mark! Whilst this may not seem significant to some you have to appreciate to use the application users need a pair of need 3D and the users bares the cost of the up-load which is two pictures (therefore actually 8000 up-loads).

Whilst I wouldn’t claim it completely satisfies the criteria of Black Swan as we haven’t really made high impact it is very interesting given that the recent emergence of all these social mining tools shows that many consider value in creating a community and its always worth considering a daft idea.

On a final note and in honour of my many Finish friends here is a 3D picture I took with my shiny new N95 8G of a reindeer at the airport baggage claim in Kuusamo, Finland a couple of week ago!