There’s a lot of ebook devices out there (Kindle, Sony reader, Iliad et al), and obviously the iphone/touch and other mobile phones. The one technical feature that I think makes a device suitable for extended text reading is the pixel density of the screen. Here’s a good illustration of the effect of pixel density. A [...] Read more – ‘The forgotten perfect ebook device’.
I only realised today that there's an RSS feed for my unread articles queue - here it is , if you're interested in my inadvertent web curation... Read more – ‘My Instapaper unread feed…’.
Wow, Apple’s new version of Pages includes a proper outliner. Great stuff…nice to see outlining as a writing/thinking tool getting prominence _and_ actually being decent (MS Word’s outliner is frankly, shit). Also nice to see in Pages, and obviously influenced by WriteRoom, is the new fullscreen view. I use iWork pretty much every day (still haven’t [...] Read more – ‘Apple’s Outliner’.
Fascinating story in Wired about how scientists have hacked consumer cellphone cameras to do cheap and quick blood analysis. Analysing blood for signs of disease and infection previously required equipment that cost tens of thousands of dollars. I presume this would work even more effectively with cheap consumer digital cameras? Stories like this reaffirm my [...] Read more – ‘Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease’.
Remember the Playstation EyeToy? Here’s a technology preview using a webcam and -printed- (no printer, so I figured a scribbled logo would work just as well – it did)… The video on the site shows it in action… I can this imagine printing off a bunch of symbols, drawing live paths for the game characters, [...] Read more – ‘Augmenting reality’.
NYTimes.com: “Mr. Obama’s memorandums and briefing books were seldom printed out and delivered to his house or hotel room, aides said. They were simply sent to his BlackBerry for his review. If a document was too long, he would read and respond from his laptop computer, often putting his editing changes in red type… …But [...] Read more – ‘The paperless President’.
Google.org’s Flu Trends is a fascinating attempt to map emergent trends based on their insight into geo-based search terms (“tickly coughs”, “where can I get headache medicine”). Larry Brilliant talked about his idea to use search terms as a trend analyser for pandemic outbreaks on TED.com. It’s an extraordinary idea…for once a good example of [...] Read more – ‘Google flu tracking’.
I’ve spent spare moments over the last few days ploughing through Newsweek’s excellent ‘insider’ coverage of the presidential campaigns. Consisting of a bunch of breezy essays, it’s methadone for a US political junkie in the UK. It’s worth ploughing through (best through their print versions and Instapaper) for the personality profiles; the Clinton and McCain [...] Read more – ‘Obama’s facebooking of political campaigning’.
Quite a while ago (er, actually a year ago) I read a couple of great posts by Tim O’Reilly outlining his wishlist for iphone apps and the potential for mobile operators to enhance their customer’s social networking reach. One of the posts outlined a great idea for an upcoming call queue app for the iphone; [...] Read more – ‘Upcoming Call Queue for iPhone’.
37signals Product Blog: A BaseCamp message informed me that 37Signals are dropping support for IE6. Good news. IE6 has personally cost me thousands in extra development efforts over the years – it’s a non compliant nightmare. Trouble is, the glacial pace of change in many corporate IT depts means that IE6, a seven year old [...] Read more – ‘37signals phasing out support for IE6’.
Apparently Google released some more info on their open source browser project today. All looks great, however, what got _me_ really excited was the Scott McCloud produced promo booklet they commissioned (slide show here) Perfect way to get geek attention, methinks (and no copies on ebay yet). More seriously, cartoon (and even just drawing in [...] Read more – ‘Scott McCloud and the Google browser’.
Interesting review of Google’s slow inroad into mainstream IT. Key points: * Gen Y isn’t yet in charge of corporate IT decisions. Change is slooow. * Google Apps is still a ‘consumer’ set of apps (e.g. lack of records management) * Apps is basically a ‘online’ version of Office – not much differention (e.g. document [...] Read more – ‘Google Apps and the Enterprise’.
Quicksilver, meet the Internet. Actually, that’s unfair, but it’s a convenient way to explain the concept (well, at least to a Mac user). Lovely to see the determination of Aza Raskin, whose devotion to the idea of a language based interface lives on from Humanized, and ends up in the current ‘OS’ of Firefox. The [...] Read more – ‘Language as an interface’.
Just had an idea, which I’ve mailed to the Geekup mailing list, and thought I’d post here. I’ve been really impressed with recently released Silverback App – a Mac app, that utilises screen recording and the webcam on (recent) macs, to create a combined screen cam of people using an application. It’s a brilliant way [...] Read more – ‘Distributed usability testing with Silverback App?’.
Pity it doesn’t exist I really like the effort (and hook at the end) that this chap has gone to, in order to mockup his dream text editor. Reminds me of Khoi Vinh’s mockup of BlockWriter asking for someone to build the ideal, distraction-free text editor. Which they did. Read more – ‘Prose – great writing app’.
Its that time of year again – a big, scheduled Apple keynote. I always get it wrong, so here’s my completely uneducated guesses on what will and won’t be announced: I think they’ll kill off ipod classic, we’ll see the framing of the ‘touch platform’ – I reckon Jobs will literally delineate the touch and [...] Read more – ‘Apple (mis) predictions’.
TechCrunch covers the new release of Google’s Gmail Labs here and here: “Gmail Labs is essentially a stage for Google employees to develop new features for Gmail under the public eye. Starting at 6pm PT tonight, all Gmail users in the US and UK will see a new tab in the settings area called “Labs”. [...] Read more – ‘GMail Labs’.
BBC NEWS – Tube drinks party sparks mayhem So, the last day of open drinking on the Tube network, and some bright spark(s) decide to convene and impromptu party to celebrate… Cue thousands(?) descending on the Circle Line for the last night of boozing… Could have been a wonderfully eccentric British bash, except it ends [...] Read more – ‘The ultimate flashmob’.
230 miles of love is a sketch show structured around different positions along the m6. Lovely idea – download it to a satnav, and it plays various sketches at relevant points on your journey. I’m intrigued (if a little sceptical), so I’ll try this on the way back to Mancs this week. Found this mentioned [...] Read more – ‘230 miles of love’.
ROADTOUR – Browse Heritage Sites is a lovelty idea (well, actually a mature product). Heritage site info, plugged into GPS navigation devices. I’d like this in my TomTom, as I nail up the M6, and persuaded to take a diversion, but it only works on Garmin devices for now. Even better would be geo-tagged wiki [...] Read more – ‘ROADTOUR – Browse Heritage Sites’.
About a year ago, I wrote that for me, Twitter would hit a ‘real world’ tipping point when it was used by active participants in a unpleasant event (I was writing this around the time of the Virginia tech shootings) to actively record the events as they unfolded. Well, browsing Techmeme, I see its happened, [...] Read more – ‘Twitter tipped…’.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime: “” Fascinating story about a Google Maps powered wiki that lets Brazilian citizens report crime. “Like many in the city, I was hesitant about contacting the police. For some there is a feeling that there is little point; for others a general distrust of them. But [...] Read more – ‘Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime’.
I’ve just got round to reading ReadWriteWebs’s story on Amazon’s Shipping Centre APIs. Pretty incredible – I could basically build a physical goods company, with all inventory storage, shipping and returns handled without any upfront investment in infrastructure. I think this is an incredibly bold, innovative move by Amazon – makes my head spin with [...] Read more – ‘Amazon’s physical goods APIs released’.
iPlayer is brilliant – it lets me watch BBC TV at a schedule I choose, but it’s interface is a pain in the ass – lots of pretty pictures, but programmes listed in splayed episodes, alphabetically… iPlayerlist is a fantastic, highly usable interface for the BBC’s iPlayer (which is appallingly designed) – finally I can [...] Read more – ‘iPlayer – finally an interface I can use.’.
An interesting article, Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours that reviews a recent legal review of ebook vendor’s legal agreements and ownership of the ‘books’ they sell. In short, as a DRM’d ebook buyer, you’re really entering a rental, rather than ownership agreement, and Amazon, Sony et [...] Read more – ‘Why Your (e) Books Are No Longer Yours’.
Brilliant. I thought they must be doing something along these lines. TomTom have a with Vodafone (disclaimer, Vodafone are a client), to anonymously process the location and speed of Vodafone cellphones on roads (worked out from cell towers)…and relay this as traffic condition data to new TomTom devices with an embedded Vodafone SIM. Putting aside [...] Read more – ‘TomTom to use cellphone data to determine traffic conditions’.
The New Heavy Metal :: Innovation in Software :: The Vagueware Blog Paul Robinson links to a fascinating and appalling blueprint for Google’s new DataCentre. Although the energy is being generated by hydro-electric (and they’re investing in greentech in a big way), Paul points out that the cost of Google’s business is masked by this [...] Read more – ‘The New Heavy Metal :: Vagueware Blog’.
Dennis Howlett nails what I thought as soon as I heard WordPress were doing a lightweight Twitter called Prologue (actually it’s more microblogging, as no sms/email love) inside WordPress. The more widespread I see ‘consumery’ tech like this take off inside companies, the more obvious it becomes – companies are just _groups of people_ – [...] Read more – ‘Twitter for business?’.
The invisible computer revolution is a short, but compelling call to arms to build software services for the fast growing cellphone market in non-Western countries; sms updates for health-care workers as continuing education, for example. I often come across anecdotal references to farmers getting sms‘ (smsii?) on crop prices in adjoining towns and moving to [...] Read more – ‘The invisible computer revolution’.
I just posted this as a comment to a O’Reilly Radar post on Tom Tom’s new Google Maps integration, which is ‘post device’ (via syncing). (I’m recycling the effort I make writing comments/emails elsewhere). Actually, TomTom’s can ‘do internet’ on their devices in a non-integrated way – I have a two year old TomTom ‘One’ [...] Read more – ‘TomTom’s user data goldmine’.
I was thinking about this last night – I don’t know (without doing any research, mind you) of any transferrable way of creating and sharing annotations for books. I’m thinking something along the lines of a ‘mapped’ outline/opml file, where the outline structure maps against chapters and pages of a book, and an ebook reader [...] Read more – ‘An idea for (e)book annotations’.
I’ve been digesting the news this week (and rumoured for the last 12 mths), that Amazon is launching its long awaited ebook reader: I’d written a few emails to a geek mailing list, before the device was officially announced and after the first wave of histrionic blog reviews came out. I thought I’d reuse those [...] Read more – ‘Thoughts on ebooks’.
Sandy — your personal email assistant looks really interesting… Basically – forward @whatever tagged based emails with some key verbs (‘remind’ ‘tell’ etc) and this system will parse this into a reminder system, squirting back reminder It’s based, I think on the Stikkit tech (certainly the same team). I really like the personalised faux human [...] Read more – ‘Sandy – personal email assistant’.
Oh, it’s much more than a phone – it’s Google becoming the Operating System -vendor- benevolent dictator for the emerging dominant platform of this century – connected, portable devices. It was clear Google was on the verge of announcing something, framing the conversation – but in retrospect, the framing was all around ‘platform’ of handsets. [...] Read more – ‘Google mobile platform’.
Joi Ito has a fascinating writeup onOtetsudai Networks: > “With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash [...] Read more – ‘Joi Ito’s: Otetsudai Networks’.
Anthony Grafton on “Future Reading” is a really tight (I presume) overview of a long New Yorker piece on the impact of book/text digitization by Google. I’ve parked the New York article for later reading (I pop these interesting, but timesink articles into folders that pop on weekends :-) – this one is for the [...] Read more – ‘Future Reading’.
Craig Venter; Prepare For The BioHackers bq. “The big era will come when ourselves and others can produce enough biological fuel that we can crash the price of oil” Interesting overview of an interview with Craig Venter (the guy who mapped the genome). I keep thinking of the Sterling quote: “The future’s already here, it’s [...] Read more – ‘bio-engineering fuel for fun and profit’.
Following on from yesterday’s post about the lack of Mac/Lunix iPlayer, comes this news from PC Pro: bq. “The BBC asked the Trust if the Flash streaming service would fulfil its commitment to “platform neutrality”, but was told that a multi-platform service across downloads, streaming and cable was needed.” The interesting question is will the [...] Read more – ‘Beeb told iPlayer *must* be cross platform’.
Among the interesting news on using Flash (which I presume replaces RealPlayer) for streaming, and free content access on Cloud wifi hotspots, was this snippet: bq. “But Mr Highfield said the BBC had not committed to offering the iPlayer to Mac and Linux users who want to download and keep content on their machines for [...] Read more – ‘BBC almost gets there on iPlayer’.
Wow. I got home this evening to find, amongst the mail, the ‘Architecture Pack’ a popup book by Ron van der Meer. I ordered it ta while ago (£15, second-hand!), but postal strikes etc delayed – I’d half forgotten I’d bought it – lovely suprise; compeltely energised me, even after a 4hr drive. It’s just [...] Read more – ‘Architecture popup book’.
Great writeup of the interactive touch environment that MS is touting as a table unit for stores and public places. Some really clever stuff – check out the transparent sensors stuck on glass tiles (the first video on this page, that display video through the glass…very, very cool. Of course, touch screens have been around [...] Read more – ‘Microsoft Surface…’.
One Laptop Per Child — XO Giving: bq. “Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one [...] Read more – ‘One Laptop Per Child (and one for me!)’.
And Microsoft hits back with a ‘top ten’ of why Google Apps is such a bad idea for enterprise… Couple of the points stood out amongst the (fairly poor) FUD: bq. “4. Google’s primary focus is on ad funded search. Their enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe and in combination with [...] Read more – ‘Microsoft’s retort to Google Apps…’.
The Guardian has the rejigged press release: bq. “Google has linked up with IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini to target corporate customers with its range of desktop (er, web) applications, in the search engine’s most direct move against the dominance of Microsoft.” _UPDATE:_ there’s a great summary by Dan Farber, touching on issues of [...] Read more – ‘Google partners with Cap Gemini in corporate desktop push’.
Ok, so I spend oooh, all of 2 minutes and ‘outsourced’ this Participo’s search function to google (you can do this too). Pow – google search across the site.. I need to spend some time to refine the search results so they don’t include all of the non blog stuff on this server…but oh so [...] Read more – ‘by the power of google…’.
So, obviously along with the rest of the world, I’m salivating over the ipod touch. Two ideas/questions I have about it, that I haven’t been able to answer: *1) Would the iPod Touch make a good ‘ebook’ reader?* The pixel density is very high (it’s slightly higher than the iPhone at 163 pxels per inch)…the [...] Read more – ‘iPod Touch ideas/questions…’.
Storm Worm Dwarfs World’s Top Supercomputers “”People aren’t respecting the threat this thing represents,” Baldwin said. “But when you pit it against the biggest military and government supercomputing resources, they’re like a speck on the back of a fly compared to the power that’s under the control of this one criminal group.” Another wonderful example [...] Read more – ‘sounds sensationalist…because it is?’.
PG&E Ambient Energy Orb Now this is bloody interesting – a power company in the States has an incentive program to reduce usage during peak times (heard usage surges are big problem in the US). So, the orb glows red – customers in the thousands now have a glanceable view of energy load – and [...] Read more – ‘Ambient Orb used for glanceable energy load’.
Laughing Squid reviews the Drobo. PhilW, during a GeekUp email discussion, sent a link to Drobo this rather amazing desktop RAID that makes it dead simple to shove a bunch of old drives into a box and automatically configures itself to an optimised RAID… Much better than the collection of single hard drives daisy chained [...] Read more – ‘Hard disks done right…’.
A Cell Phone for Baby Boomers Interesting phone design – I think I’d like these features to appear if I’m driving: “Instead of icons or menus, the phone presents features as a series of simple questions, which the user answers with the bold YES and NO buttons on the handset: Do you want to check [...] Read more – ‘Designing handsets for old people…’.
The Register has an interesting, but apparently incorrect, autopsy over the failure of iMode in Europe. It’s interesting, because the article states that the biggest reason for failure is cultural. Make sure you click the comments, because there is a really decent collection of comments that expands on the original articles premise. Like this one: [...] Read more – ‘i-Mode’s failure outside of Japan’.
Every week brings a reminder about why paying my beeb licence fee makes me happy – here’s another… The BBC are experimenting with an adhoc, multi-channel reportage with Ben Hammersley, where he flows the incidentals, as well as the main reports through youtube, twitter, his blog, etc. He’s reporting on the challenges to secularism in [...] Read more – ‘BBC web news experiments’.
I noticed that the latest n series mobiles from Nokia all have 3d barcode readers. Now Nokia have realised a simple web app that lets you create the 3d codes…Brilliant. Of course, these things have been around for ages, particularly in the far east, but if Nokia are pushing this, plus making content creation simple [...] Read more – ‘Nokia starting to push 3d barcodes?’.
A news item on the OLPC project, with extensive (well, for US news) interviews with Negroponte, and footage of the devices in situ. I’m still in lobe with this project, it warms the cockles of me ‘art to see these kids teaching eachother and learning through constructionism. Read more – ‘One laptop per child video..’.
A good article (and, usefully, a re’print’ from the less accessible media section) about the Beeb and it’s inordinate delays and balls-ups with the iPlayer, which underlines an increasing lack of leadership in the digital space. God, I hope this doesn’t pan out – the beeb’s technology depts. used to have some very cool people [...] Read more – ‘Is the BBC screwing up it’s technology leadership?’.
BBC news on MIT’s coding tool for kids offers ‘easy’ coding I love the programming stuff like Squeak, and now Scratch, which clearly follows another MIT conceptual innovationSeymour Papert’s Constructionist concepts (massive summarisation: learning by making stuff). A lovely quote from the story: “A program doesn’t congratulate you for the 90% that you got right. [...] Read more – ‘MIT’s new free tool offers ‘easy’ coding’.
Why the BBC Trust’s decision on iPlayer sells us all short outlines the failure of the BBC Trust to listen to public opinion and it’s desire to restrict DRM content through it’s iPlayer. I love the BBC, it’s something I’m really proud of; it’s public service broadcast remit and innovation in internet content (e.g. podcasts) [...] Read more – ‘Public good turns into public bad from the BBC’.
I’ve been using this week – really interesting ‘short-form’ blogging service…(mine’s at http://participo.tumblr.com/) Apart from the very easy/pleasant interface, the medium definitely affords a more spontaneous, less ‘aggh, I’ve got to write something long and meaningful’ type interaction with blogging… It’s had a really interesting affect on me – almost a sense of relief(!) that [...] Read more – ‘Tumblr – short form blogging…’.
I started writing this on Monday and left it in draft form…given recent events, it seems a bit eerily prescient…(I would be surprised if the scenario below hasn’t happened during the Virginia Tech shootings) I had a not particularly nice thought the other day – imagine a Twitter or Jaiku user finds themselves in a [...] Read more – ‘future Twitter/Jaiku tipping point…’.
Google desktop is excellent (I tell clients to install it and crawl their shared drives as a quick knowledge management ‘upgrade’). The Mac client released last week – it’s great. Feels faster than Spotlight, I like the bezel. Really like the blended list of results in Google style browser window Actually, I’ve just uninstalled it [...] Read more – ‘Google Desktop on the Mac’.
Skim is a excellent PDF reader for the Mac. I love PDF, I read stacks of documents via PDF, I print a lot of stuff to PDF and try to print to paper to read/review documents. However, I loathe the bloated Adobe Reader, and until now used Apple’s Preview (which is fast and lightweight). But [...] Read more – ‘*amazing* PDF reader for the Mac’.
Eco-Geekery : Blog Archive : Bruce Sterling closing remarks at SXSW 2007 A good set of notes on Bruce Sterling’s SXSW ‘rant’ – another classic, brilliant Sterling polemic on social networks, the near future and ultimately, optimism. The notes are pretty a near transcription…a good resource for me, as I listen mainly whilst driving, and [...] Read more – ‘Bruce Sterling closing remarks at SXSW 2007’.
Andrew McAfee’s article on the barriers to adoption of new technologies/tools is superb, and jarringly prescient: “The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what’s currently out there.” Basically, the newnew thing has to [...] Read more – ‘the 9x as good problem..’.
Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo Good, high-level (exec summary?) write-up of a set of talks about Prediction Markets. I like the low-complexity example of using a prediction market to suss out a release date: “Todd Proebsting of Microsoft, in his case study, described a market he created to predict the validity of the testing schedule for [...] Read more – ‘Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo’.
I love the One Laptop Per Child project, it’s a brilliant initiative. I’ve banged on about it before, but was just reading this NYTimes article that made me splutter tea over my keyboard… Of course, the project is laudable, but there are so many lessons from this project for driving and shaping the _mentality_ of [...] Read more – ‘the ($150) laptop’.
The Windows Shutdown crapfest outlines, in some detail, the ridiculous bureaucracy involved in building Vista, and in particular, the teams that intersected to build the power off feature I mentioned last week. Amongst other nuggets, was this quote that kind of sums up the antithesis to keeping things simple: bq. “The end result of all [...] Read more – ‘24 people to build the new Vista shutdown feature…’.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Welcome back to frugal computing is a fascinating article on the paradox of computing abundance…it squares nicely with this article profiling Jeff Bezos’s conversation with Tim O’Reilly: “Bezos explained that the biggest cost for Amazon is not power, servers or people maintaining data centers, but utilization. “Because we are high [...] Read more – ‘‘frugal’ computing’.
RED HERRING article on Lotus Notes doing the RSS shuffle: “…Technologies such as blogs, RSS feeds, and portable storage devices are changing the way businesses collaborate, said IBM Lotus general manager Michael Rhodin in a statement. We are helping organizations take advantage of new industry trends to share ideas and reach new markets…” Yup, you [...] Read more – ‘RED HERRING | Lotus Notes Goes Web 2.0’.
Cryptography | The non-denial of the non-self | Economist.com – er, I think I understand the principles behind this, although it’s far better to read the article than for me to try and bumble an explanation… Read more – ‘Using philosophy to make databases secure…’.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobile web shake-up gets started. I just don’t see the benefit of a .mobi extension. Surely this is utterly pointless – just detect the user string of the client browser and serve the appropriate page…. Mobile versions yes, but not hanging of another domain…it’s not even a decent 4 letter [...] Read more – ‘.mobi launched…yaaawn’.
Attensa is free. Fantastic. Attensa’s a pretty robust Outlook plugin to read RSS. I’ve been installing the trail on some client desktops (it’s been installing where Newsgator hasn’t). But now it’s free, the RSS flow from the wiki/blog ecosystem I’ve built can be plugged in by all their project teams with no worry about cost. [...] Read more – ‘Enterprise RSS Feed Servers and RSS Readers – Attensa – Download’.
I can’t decided whether the term ‘crowdsourcing‘ is utterly brilliant or vulgar – but no matter, the core ideas that underpin it are excellent – distribute small tasks (evaluation, processing, etc.) to a large group and aggregate the results. A great introduction to a variance on this theme (group decisions trumping experts) is Surowiecki’s Wisdom [...] Read more – ‘Interesting podcast on ‘crowdsourcing’’.
BBC news mentions that Sainsbury’s is (finally) going to use ‘compostible’ packaging for some of it’s products…why not all of them? Still, it’s a good move – the sheer amount of packaging I accumulate in a week or so is ridiculous, particularly for fruit and vegetables which I immediately discard the packaging. Looks like Ross [...] Read more – ‘Sainsbury’s packages in green…’.
ok, not really (not yet, anyhow :-) But my dream of buggering off to Tuscany and working via broadband gets a little bit closer. iChat’s new video presentation facility looks amazing…so, buy client’s a mac mini…set it up and see them physically in six months, while all the while working with them remotely through ichat.. [...] Read more – ‘that’s it – I’m moving to Tuscany…’.
Nicholas Negroponte on TED Talks. Ok, so he’s a little arrogant, but I like him – I like his attitude, his vision, and he’s got the self-belief in the creation of the $100 laptop that will get it done. He was a little tetchy – understandable, I think, based on the timing of the talk, [...] Read more – ‘Nicholas Negroponte riffing on the $100 laptop’.
I read about the Tesla in Wired – 0-60mph in 4 seconds, Lotus design AND most importantly, it’s all electric…fuck yeah! My Prius feels, well, so _carbon_ So, if this is all electric, I’m sure I’m not the first to think this – what if the cars had the roof covered in photovoltaic cells? Wonder [...] Read more – ‘Tesla – the electric car that does’.
MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting: Ray Ozzie: “The world is evolving into a highly networked form in which the barriers to participation in almost everything we do are crumbling down%u2014the barriers to sharing, the barriers to contributing and learning, the barriers to working together. As more participants come online, platforms and marketplaces will serve to make [...] Read more – ‘Ray Ozzie outlines MS’s services strategy…’.
Great point by Jason Fried on the difference between _writing_ words and word _processing_ . It’s basically a defence of their pared down collaborative writing tool (I’ve used it as part of Basecamp it’s pretty nice). It’s an important point – when I get back to a client’s office next week, I’ll be pushing an [...] Read more – ‘37Signals on writing vs. word processing…’.
A Search Engine That’s Becoming an Inventor – New York Times: Great article about Google building their tech infrastructure: “Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening [...] Read more – ‘Google…powered by Velcro’.
Interesting (year old) interview with Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie about how to ‘escape email hell’ I’m clearing through my drafts folder in MarsEdit and publishing the half finished articles if they’re still interesting… I think this one is. Email’s becoming a real bugbear in organisations – so many people are spending hours a day [...] Read more – ‘Gates and Ozzie: How to Escape E-Mail Hell’.
An Open University project that uses Flash (running on Cold Fusion?) to manage realtime, multi-person video conferences. Obviously there’s a bunch of these type of applications, including the really excellent Breeze. But what sets this apart is it’s timeline interface…it really makes for an interesting retrospective experience – far more ‘hyperlinky’ than a bog standard [...] Read more – ‘Interesting flash meeting app’.
I’ve just taken a quick look at some Windows Vista screencasts. One thing that really caught my eye was the ‘Guided Help’ – an automated (or prompted) macro-type function that shows you how to perform certain tasks and configurations. It basically takes over the mouse cursor, highlighting the button presses etc. Of course, this stuff [...] Read more – ‘Windows Vista – Guided Help’.
BBC NEWS | Most Popular Now | Live World Map is a realtime, flash driven ranking of the most popular news items at the moment. It’s excellent – you can drill down to see what different regions are looking (pictures seem popular with the Americas :-) and there’s some historical views as well. This will [...] Read more – ‘BBC News – live popularity rating news map’.
Semapedia.org – The Physical Wikipedia is an unbelievably cool idea. Basically, you see a 3D barcode, use some software installed on your phone to take it’s image and you access the wikipedia page for that building/object/sculpture/whatever. See it in action here. It’s a great idea – I’ve seen this ‘augmented reality’ idea done elsewhere, with [...] Read more – ‘Semapedia.org – The Physical Wikipedia’.
A guy called Pete Barr-Wilson has a photoset on Flickr of working prototypes of the $100 laptop, also known as the OLPC (one laptop per child). It’s a great idea, and the actual units are inspired. I’d personally love to get hold of one, and there’s a pledge to get the project to sell them [...] Read more – ‘working prototypes of the $100 laptop…’.
A pal invited me to his Skypecast – a CB Radio style free for all, with some fascinating potential. Basically, it’s a audio chat room/teleconference, initiated by one person (who has some rudimentary controls) and open to all. A quick run-through show the usual geek tests, but also coaching, education and other social, business and [...] Read more – ‘Skypecasts’.
Interactive Architecture dot Org is a blog I’ve just come across, that documents interactive environments. i think designed interactions with physical space is a fascinating area. It’s probably why I’m _so_ looking forward to the Wii Read more – ‘Interactive Architecture’.
Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory? is an excellent look into the inefficient page design of MySpace and the pageviews the inefficiency creates. Apart from the odd metrics, there’s the interesting dilemma of whether to actually fix the problem and reduce the required pageviews to actually do stuff. It’s also interesting, because the guy who [...] Read more – ‘MySpace: Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory?’.
Web 2.0 meets the enterprise | CNET News.com It’s a puffy, high-level piece, but this article pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling for the last, oh, 3 years :-) It makes some important points – consumers (at home) come into work, use the same technologies and then think “hang on, why can’t my [...] Read more – ‘Web 2.0 meets the enterprise – CNET’.
I got a Nabaztag (http://www.nabaztag.com) becuase I wanted to see the utility/benefit of an ‘ambient device’ , and living in the UK, can’t use “Ambient devices”:http://www.ambientdevices.com . The nabaztag is a lot of fun, but turn off the clock – it gets irritating. It is, at the moment, slightly gimmicky, but as the services develop [...] Read more – ‘My Nabaztag ‘ambient’ device…’.
Two interesting takes on Microsoft, Windows and Apple’s OSX. The first from the New York Times is more interesting, as it looks at the costs of inherited complexity, and critically, maintaining support for legacy applications. Cringely’s take on Apple’s Boot Camp (which loads Windows onto a new Intel-based Mac) is a lighter punch at Apple’s [...] Read more – ‘Windows, Windows, Windows…’.
Is it just me, or does Microsoft’s Origami product look seem just like Apple’s Newton from the 1990′s? Right down to the attached keyboard… Read more – ‘Origami = Newton?’.
Sun Fire T2000 Server Try Before You Buy What a great idea – fill out the form and you get one of Sun’s ‘eco friendly’ servers to play with for a couple of months. Good write up on the strategy from Jonathan Schwartzhere. Bloody hell, write a decent review and you might get to keep [...] Read more – ‘Sun Fire T2000 Server Try Before You Buy’.
I’m liking today’s buzzy featureTechnorati Favorites, which is a pretty straightforward aggregator in Technorati, but nice and easy to ‘add favourites’ and so makes it a good, straightforward aggregator. Now, they make it really easy to _add_ feeds via opml etc, but I can’t see an export anywhere…seems an odd omission, as the CEO says [...] Read more – ‘Technorati Favorites – no opml export?’.
Scoble’s got interesting personal memetracker using his opml file as an uber-reading list. Now that’s pretty cool. But what if you could do semantic analysis, or some other kind of relationship inference based on your opml and get a reading list on _assumed, connected_ sources…but sources that don’t actually feature in your list – the [...] Read more – ‘Scopml?’.
I really like the phrase ‘brain training’ – it’s a great phrase and feels ‘right’. I guess we all train our brains to some extent. But lately I’ve been getting very aware of some of my mental ‘flab’ and want to think leaner, faster, and more creatively. Almost certainly a side-effect of approaching my 34th [...] Read more – ‘tools for brain training…’.
Wired 14.02: Buddha on the Brain is a really interesting Wired story I just read about observations of Tibetan monks who have changed to physiology of their brain structure through meditation. Apparantly, Tibetan mocks showed massive, positive differences in their brain activity, compared with a control group of non meditators: “… The monks produced gamma [...] Read more – ‘Brain training…through meditation…’.
I gave a guest lecture today at Manchester Met Business School, and mentioned a few software tools and inspirations…here’s the list, guys :-) _Inspiration/Philosophy:_ Well, I guess the main one I mentioned is 37Signals – click here and look at the sidepanel under ‘writings’, there’s a bunch of essays on the ideas I was alluding [...] Read more – ‘notes from the MMU talk, 1st Feb, 2006’.
Microsoft Bloggers is a ‘top 10′ list of various Microsoft bloggers and links to their blogs… This would make a perfect reading list – sucks the feeds in automatically, shows me collated entries and I let Mary Jo Foley keep the list up to date.. Read more – ‘Microsoft Bloggers – a perfect reading list!’.
now, let me disclaim that I dislike the idea of printing from an ecological perspective, and I’ve avoided buying a scanner for several years, simply because every time I’ve needed on I’ve used a camera instead…and got by. but I finally broke down and bought an all in one hp device…because it has an ethernet [...] Read more – ‘I’m all excited…by a printer…’.
Guy pointed towards Pligg in his “Links for 2006-01-14″ post. Having played around with Digg for a while, I was amazed at the similarity of the two sites. In fact, except for Digg’s use of a blue-and-yellow theme and Pligg’s use of a green-and-orange (blecch) theme, it was hard to ascertain the difference between the [...] Read more – ‘Digg, Pligg, and the Internet Echo Chamber’.
The web is a great place to find step-by-step histories of DIY projects. From case-mod projects to Lego models, to sites such as MAKE magazine, these sites are filled with pictorial narratives of creations mundane and extreme. One thing missing in many of these logs, however, is collaboration: the ability to ask questions, make suggestions, [...] Read more – ‘Step-by-step instruction and collaboration’.
How to use Copenhagen City Bikes. Lovely write up of Copenhagen’s rather nifty bike rental scheme. I just found this in my drafts folder. What a great few days attending the Reboot conference. So this would have been much more in chronological context if I’d posted it back in May. And I rode one of [...] Read more – ‘How to use Copenhagen City Bikes’.
God, what a difference six months makes. I kind of forgot about last.fm and their fab audio plugin for itunes. It’s a site that is, basically a personalised, yet communal, and very public radio station, that listens to you – to throw out recommendations, tags, and personalised streaming radio stations. Late 2004, and early this [...] Read more – ‘Last.fm – musical objects’.
OPML Workstation Home looks interesting – a way to convert PowerPoint to OPML. Interesting, because most of the thinking and intellectual output in companies I’ve dealt with is exclusively locked in PowerPoint. People think, create and share ideas in this hideous program, but sharing is via email. And people in orgs are collaborating, they’re sending [...] Read more – ‘PowerPoint -> opml convertor’.
Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese – New York Times Fantastic: “From Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them…” Isn’t there a [...] Read more – ‘Outsourcing gameplay to Chinese workers..’.
Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features Twitchr is a fascinating sounding ‘game’ that uses constructivism to teach features and use of a mobile phone…which is exactly the approach I was pushing with Vodafone a few years back, except I’d come up with the idea of teaching photoblogging – inroduce the camera, MMS, email photos [...] Read more – ‘Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features’.
AppleInsider | Image Gallery – shows Google Earth for the Mac. Fantastic. This is probably the only application that’s on the PC (apart from some games) that I’ve really envied. I’ve never even seen this in action, but I’ve heard good things about it – imagine you had this in your Geography classes. It would [...] Read more – ‘Google Earth – coming to the Mac’.
IBM to support OpenDocument early next year | Tech News on ZDNet: “‘The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this,’ Fontaine said. ‘They don’t have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from…This is an opportunity to start out right.’” This is fascinating – hot [...] Read more – ‘IBM to support OpenDocument early next year’.
Wired 13.12: Thinking Outside the Box Office Soderbergh’s releasing his film on DVD, Theatres and Hi-def cable all at the same time. “Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, [...] Read more – ‘Wired 13.12: Thinking Outside the Box Office’.
Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox): “” Nice use of eye tracking software to review viewer behaviour…as TV becomes more interactive, will ‘viewers’ still sit still. I’m unconvinced by the arguments here, though, there’s a lot of subtext to a keeping half a (tracked?) eye on a face while soaking in other info…and [...] Read more – ‘Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)’.
BT dials up free mobile phone calls service “BT is to take on leading mobile phone operators such as Vodafone and O2 by enabling customers to make free calls on their mobiles. The service has been under development at BT for the past 18 months. It will be available to customers owning smartphones, the latest [...] Read more – ‘This is (almost) massive…’.
The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Harvard Offers Course Via iPod Fantastic. Apparently, only a few CompSci intro courses, but still… It’s interesting that it’s got to take a ‘cool tool’ such as the iPod Video as the platform – iTunes on a PC is a fantastic video playback environment – and sucks in video [...] Read more – ‘Harvard podcasts lecture video…’.
Dave Winer talks about Yahoo and their adoption of opml for subscription output. Very cool. However, he finishes on a innocuous but really bloody important point – a standard way of representing an RSS/Atom/whatever feed to consumers…a simple subscribe button – as demoed on the right hand column of this blog. It’s a small, but [...] Read more – ‘Winer says SUBSCRIBE’.
It’s starting to happen – I’m actually enjoying running a business. After 3 and a bit years working for RWD, I was nervous (to say the least) about setting up some businesses and striking out. And the crap of invoicing, financial management and so on is as dreary as I anticipated. But today, after working [...] Read more – ‘Cool Tools for start-ups…’.
Digital cameras redesign the photographic process | The Register : “” This is really interesting – we’re seeing the evolution of omnipresent media recording – a complete visual (and hopefully audio) memory of our activities. Add auto-sensing/tagging of location from GPS and flickr style emergence of photo ‘sets’ and we’re getting closer to losing any [...] Read more – ‘See and hear everything I do?’.
MIT’s Technology Review has got a quick-to-read article on Amazon’s web services…excellent overview. And there was a nice non, techy Salon article on flickr yesterday. Flickr is simply genius, and their API is shit-hot. Witness the majesty of 1001 an app that streams the latest uploaded photos on your desktop (mac only…). I’ve got so [...] Read more – ‘web 2.0’.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Robin Good, in his recent “10 Technologies which will change the way we learn in the future” discussed several discrete trends and challenged us to think about how they may affect the world of learning. I believe that all of Robin’s listed technologies are already here, and I’ve [...] Read more – ‘Your life… online’.
In honor of Global Learn Day VIII, Robin Good has posted his list of the ten technologies that will change the way we learn in the future. The technologies he lists are: Search technologies Data visualization tools Blogs Audio and video RSS P2P Unlimited storage Unlimited bandwidth Real Time Collaboration Collective and Collaborative Filtering (One [...] Read more – ‘The Technological Future of Learning’.
Openwire – Moveable Type Search “…Due to the big changes (particularly in regards to MT v2.2), I have released an upgrade to MT-Search. The changelog since v1.2 (which most of you have) looks like this: v1.31b – Now supports MySQL and MT v2.2 thanks to Phil Ringnalda. v1.3b – New Features: * Full MT Tag [...] Read more – ‘excellent….’.
BBC NEWS | Business | Scam jams Japanese phone lines “…Phone lines in Osaka and the surrounding region were jammed on Monday – the second time this month – as a result of multiple calls made mechanically by one company. The company involved has over 200 phone lines and programmes them via a machine to [...] Read more – ‘Spam II – calls to Japanese mobiles…’.
Atlassian – JIRA – J2EE Issue Tracking, Bug Tracking and Project Management Software “…Tracking and managing the issues and bugs that emerge during a software development project is a critically important task, but one that few development teams do effectively. JIRA is a J2EE-based, issue tracking and project management application developed to make this process [...] Read more – ‘Rather nifty looking web based project management app’.
With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services has developed OAIster, a “harvesting” engine for difficult-to-access digital resources, such as images, manuscripts, audio files and the like. These assets, in university, museum and library collections are often impossible to find using standard search engines which are unable to [...] Read more – ‘Pearls from OAIster’.
Right so I am out of the flea pit that contained the 2000 or so hackers and ended up here. I’m in “The W” in S.F that has everything in the room (apart from an automagical teamaking robot). I didnt trust the wavelan access so I will post my thought over the next 2 days [...] Read more – ‘out of flea pit’.
[brad choate dot com] SQL Plugin Fantastic. No need to use php and inc’s and array’s from the query result and etc etc….this looks really powerful – time to play on w/e I feel. Read more – ‘easy sql for movable type…’.
