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The future will bring more and more surprising products based on the reuse of digital 'residue'. These residue based products are products created on the residue of other products. To illustrate let me give you some examples:
- mobile phone positioning data (a residue mobile phone users leave when then are linked to the network) to calculate car traffic; a valuable input for car navigation devices (e.g. Vodafone and TomTom);
- (tagged) bookmarks collected by individual users in their browser can be used to build resource taxonomies (e.g. del.icio.us, mypip.com). An intranet version would be a simple and probably very effective way to manage corporate knowledge (especialy when it also enables highlighting).
- gaming data (e.g. a game to find similar characteristics) to create picture indexes; a valuable input for a search engine wanting to improve the relevance of image search (e.g. the espgame.org and peekaboom.org). The same principles might be used to create a very sophisticated grammar checker or translation service or a way to add logic to existing web resources to transform the web (including the existing content) into a semantic web (without the need for RDF, OWL, etc.). Residue based products are using the same ecological principles one finds in nature. Elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen (all essential to life) are continuously recycled. When you want to get really rich, here are some unexplored examples of residue that might be leveraged to create highly valuable residue-based products: RFID traces, biometric monitoring data maybe even in combination with mobile phone positioning data, community data (in itself sometimes already a residue based product based on outlook address books / email addressing data), voting data, zap data (e.g. from TiVo) and last but not least avatar behaviour.
The content presented in this editorial reflects the personal opinion of the author. Copyright notice: This publication is based on the principle of open content Erik Vermeulen is director of Stichting Digital Architecture and member of the Via Nova Architectura editorial board. He is executive business consultant at Atos Consulting. 
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