Life on the Grid

History repeating itself in realtime with Tweetbe.at

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:04:00 +0000

The entire world is re-awakening to the phenomena of real-time, short messages, ala Twitter. It was the lone vehicle to carry the news of revolutionary protest in the streets of Tehran following the failed elections in Iran. It's not only captured the attention of the global news media, but stolen it from them. Even the White House and it's State Department validated the site's role and geopolitical importance. One former Bush administration official has called for it to receive a Nobel Prize. Even Oprah's using it these days. Heady stuff.

But this isn't the first time technology like this has 'shrunk the world' and shone a light in dark places- In 1991 the news of Soviet coup d'état attempt was carried over IRC despite a media blackout in the country. Reports from the first Iraq war were carried over its channels as well.

And IRC is as old as the hills. In spite of that, It's always allowed for realtime group conversation -or- private one-to-one dialog. You don't need to create an account, big personal network, or audience of followers to start-up and jump into a conversation. You can monitor channels of topics and come and go as you please. It's a pretty damn efficient twitter, way before Twitter (and cell phones, text messages, even AIM for that matter)

What Twitter's done to the individual messages of SMS (and by extension, chat & IRC) is marry them to hosted nature of the world web web. Individual statements in 140 characters, published as html documents; those documents aggregated into user profiles & feeds.

With so many documents being broadcast and so little inherent organization to it's delivery, Twitter can be very much like being in crowded room where all your friends are shouting at themselves and each other. Third party software like Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck are powerful tools that help manage these twitter feeds like mini-email, but neither helps you discover the rest of twitter at random or topically, like you do on IRC.

Thankfully, developer Alex Bosworth has connected the dots and come up with something that marries the two. It's a proof-of-concept alpha called Tweetbe.at.

If you use twitter, you know that putting #hashtags in your messages is a way to tag or catagorize them. The idea behind Tweetbe.at is that #hashtags represent IRC channels of tweets. You need to log-in using your twitter account (not with password, but OAuth) and then you can visit or create and participate in as many channels as you want. If you like, It allows you to fold in other search terms and user's feeds so you can develop and refine the channel. The important thing, whether you want to moderate the channel or just sit back and watch, is that you can now surface more relevant tweets you may have otherwise missed, or use it to get into @reply conversations with new & interesting tweeps you otherwise may not have ever met!

Well done, @p1bx

"We want to push social down into every experience on the phone"

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:42:00 +0000

Andy Rubin, creator of the original Sidekick, driving force behind Android, and VP of mobile engineering at Google wants you to be able to see your friends photo & current facebook status on the caller ID when he calls.

That's one of the things the company's pushing as the launch of the next Andriod phone, the myTouch 3G, approaches in August.

In terms of technological innovation, the biggest steps forward are an enhanced battery life from the G1 and the Voice Search application. According to T-Mobile's site:

Search by voice lets you find what you’re looking for, hands-free. The built-in GPS knows your location. So when you say, “Pizza” you get back your closest pizza places first. Search by Voice also comes in handy to help find long or hard to spell words, like amphitheater.

Over 5,000 applications are available for Android - Contrast that with over 50,000 for the iphone, and it does seem pretty small. However over the long haul there should prove to be more applications available on Anrdoid devices than on Apple ones. Especially given that Andriod is open source and Apple is, well...Apple. Say's Andy:

With Android, there can be 1,000s of different products built, and the magic here is that all those products can be compatible and all of them can be hosted by the same [application] marketplace...it's in an earlier stage of adoption

Other enhancements to Android include a multiple desktop concept which will be familiar to linux users. Another application that looks to figure prominently will be Sherpa a GPS-history app that learns what you do and where you go, and makes search easier.

The phone is available for pre-order now, and hits T-Mobile stores in the US August 5th. It retails for $199.00

The battle for control of user experience will rage on.

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:23:00 +0000

Whether on the desktop, in the browser, or the mobile device - The Giants of computing technology want to control the way you interact with the digital word.

The Google announcement of an impending Chrome operating system -as an extension of their browser by the same name- drew a huge reaction this week from all quarters of the web. Speculation and conjecture were rank amongst the bloggeratti. Handicapping Mountain Veiw's strategy & the potential impact to industry titans Microsoft & Apple, was (and still is) the meme de jour.

The take here on the Grid is that controlling the user experience is central to any company making software or interactive applications.

Google's revenue comes from advertising, but they are fundamentally a (web-based) software, or user experience company. Apple's revenue comes from selling hardware and devices, but they are fundamentally a software, or user experience company (the user experience company, many would argue). Even Facebook, Myspace, Digg etc are earning revenue from advertising, but if you stop and think about it, are fundamentally software, or more generally, user experience companies. (made valuable by virtue of facilitating electronic interaction for, and being a destination of multiple users)

Big bad old Microsoft, OTOH, still makes it's money selling software, but has to do web stuff & sell hardware in addition to that just to support and defend the legacy revenue stream.

The problem for a company like Microsoft is that software (like file storage & management, apps, etc) is going to eventually move to a web-centric, subscription based model.

So is Google trying to monetize the experience, bring it out onto the web more often, or get into your machine and control it?

The answer is ALL OF THE ABOVE. Ultimately the web is out in the cloud and on our local machines. It doesn't matter what the form factor is (pc, notebook, netbook, phone) or where the code running it lives.

If Google can control the experience it reinforces their other properties and future ones they roll out. It also paves the way for subscription based services, like file storage.

It's a multifaceted approach to be sure, from all players. At the end of the day, they all want the same thing: To control us, er...the user experience...and we let them, because they usually give us such cool toys to play with :)

The browser as a two-way window

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:29:00 +0000

Opera has released an alpha build of their new web browser Unite. I don't know if they've fullfilled their promise to, 'reinvent the web' or not, but the software is pretty cool.

Depending on your level of engagement with the internet, your web browser is like your window to the world and much more. While many users passively go with system defaults such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Apple's Safari, 3rd party browsers such Firefox and Opera are perferred by many power users.

So what's all the hype about? It's simple yet powerful: Unite is a robust, multi-tab browser with a literal web server package built right into it. What that means is, this software has the capability to turn *your* computer into a web server, as long as you're online and it's running.

If it's not immediately evident why you would -or- should want to do this, let me explain:

We're already uploading our photos, music, and personal content to different 3rd party websites and social services. We don't need to store our info locally. We can host it somewhere else -for free - and it's publicy available to anyone, anywhere.

Here's the only dilemma with that: While all your content is in the cloud, it's still in various different sites (silos) like Your blog account, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, etc. Projects like Friendfeed go a long way to aggregate & stream all that activity - but it's still push delivery and users interaction with your content or resources isn't granular or ala carte. You're also at the mercy of any one of these sites, should they go down, lose your data, or worse.

The other problem is sharing your music library over the web. You can upload to rapid share and be a dj on blip.fm, but your core library is still likely 'personal' unless you're runing some kind of media server. Apple iTunes can be shared over the web with apps like Simplfymedia, but you need an account and have to run their software.

You can't simply call up your MP3 library or host / transfer large files from your PC to any web-connected browser/device easily - unless you know how to configure & your own ftp server with dyndns, etc...until now.

Opera has pre-configured everything with a nice graphical interface that maps file destinations or directories on your system (music, picture, file folders, etc) to a series of dynamic URLs that you can share with others, selectively, or keep private. You can always change the URLs or even move/delete files if you're concered about too much traffic or exposure/privacy issues - or you can just close it and not run Opera Unite :)

If this catches on it, it could be really, really cool. Opera is encouraging developers to come up with more applications.

More to come...

I've set up a "Chat Lounge" on my notebook using Opera Unite.

Feel free to drop in, if any friends or myself are online, choose a screenname and say "hi"

Waiting for Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:28:00 +0000

I know it's still in developer preview, but I cannot wait to test out Google's Wave platform. The idea is simple, yet transformational: Conversations as live, hosted, documents that your friends are interacting with.

It's the combination of email, chat, twitter, facebook, etc - essentially all the communication services they aim provide but everything, live, at once. Google's social graph, if you will. Google has intentionally set out to make Wave an open source protocol and a federated platform, which means that individuals or even enterprises could run their own private Wave instances.

I tell you what: While Google puts the finishing touches on Wave, Ray Ozzie and Microsoft would do well to pick-up Twitter, or even partner with them. It competes with their investment in facebook, but it doesn't matter. It's worth the hedge.

Twitter, though only 140 characters, is both a destination, ecosystem, and a protocol. Microsoft could keep things exactly as they are right now, so as not hurt the ecosystem or destination aspect, and even open up and extend the twitter api/protocol. (embrace and extend?)

Microsoft typically behaves kind of "evilly" in these instances, but I think under Ray Ozzie it's possible that they could play much nicer and not hurt the buzz and vibe that twitter has going for it. They could eventually normalize it for the enterprise which is where Wave would be going with Google's Apps.

Just some thoughts as I eagerly await a Wave invite...

Edit: I know Twitter is built on Ruby & LAMP or something like that. This obviously is much different from Microsoft and their whole ethos of proprietary .NET stuff. It's completely off the wall, but that's the kind of world we live in these days - off the wall. It's just a damn shame to see Ray Ozzie bad mouth Wave instead of answering to it.

Edit II: Here's some of the video of Ozzie's spin at The Churchhill Club:

Almost too beautiful for the coffee table

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:16:00 +0000

I just found this book and had to share it with you

I think it was Omni magazine introduced me to this guy when I was in high school. I recall writing a term paper on evolution vs. creationism. I managed to work in some citations to McKenna's idea of the 'Stoned Age' from "Food of the Gods"into my evolution argument. Yeah, I was that kind of student ;)

His daughter's photography is stunning.
His legacy was clearly a lot bigger than just his work.

Where we're headed. (or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the Matrix)

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:38:00 +0000

Well, this is what's become of dodgeball...the original group location awareness platform that Google acquired a while back.

According to Google, Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile on these phones:

* Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
* iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
* most color BlackBerry devices
* most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
* most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
* many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)

A summary of the post-modern set.

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:19:00 +0000

Hipster: The Dead End Of Civilization
(Cover story of Adbusters Issue #79.)

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Ouch. Harsh one, dude.

Make your own fake album cover with Web 2.0 sites!

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:52:00 +0000

Going through the steps of this is half the fun. Major hat-tip to @Chris Rowe for spreading this meme. Instructions are his (with my inclusion of the ever-sophisticated MS Paint)

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title
of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use MS Paint, or photoshop, or similar to put it all together.

Here's mine:

The ironic and artistic beauty of Fail Charts to Songsmith

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:29:00 +0000

As per Gizmodo, "If this doesn't put a smile on your face, you're probably not closing your eyes shut enough."

Unify4Life turns your Blackberry into a Universal Remote

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 01:49:00 +0000

...And soon a garage-door opener, thermostat control, and more. These guys are at the CES this year. Huge hat tip to Scobelizer for posting a video on it also. Seeing as I really need a new phone, and I'm a huge sucker for the sheer geek factor in this, Unify4life makes me want to go out and buy a Blackberry.

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:31:00 +0000

Let's learn judo with Vladamir Putin!

Russia's Prime Minister also just got a tiger cub for his 56th birthday yesterday.

The dude's a badass.

He tried to find a job in science but failed. So he went to work at the car dealership.

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:36:00 +0000

"I got a hard luck story," says Doug Prasher.

He gave away the gene for the protein that, that he discoverd, and later led to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year by a group of there scientists that didn't include him.

Prasher doesn't have any regrets about giving away the gene. Tsien and Chalfie did great work, he says, which he probably couldn't have done because the National Institutes of Health had rejected his funding proposals.

"At that time, I knew I was going to get out of it; my funding had already run out," Prasher says.

more to the story at NPR

The Funometer -- A real vending machine in the East Village of NYC that sells Ideas for $.50

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:30:00 +0000

source: Boing Boing

Morph Monkey Spreads Chlamydia On Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:54:00 +0000

"A new app from the American Social Health Association aims to spread Chlamydia on Facebook to raise awareness of the disease."

I always thought spyware was the first unofficial internet STD - It's the "Browser Clap" picked up from shady domains.

read more at Techcrunch (source) | digg it here

Thoroughbred Germs Make Gas From Garbage

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:17:00 +0000

Imagine converting virtually any waste--grass, municipal waste, old tires, wood chips--into fuel for your car. A company called Coskata claims it can do this using a patented bioreactor and anaerobic microbes found in nature.

Unlike corn ethanol refining, Coskata's process essentially vaporizes, or gasifies the feed stock, and their patented colonies of bacteria are fed the gas created, and then emit ethanol as a byproduct. The science behind the process comes from Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma, and was developed and perfected at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Yesterday, the company announced a 40,000 gallon per year "demonstration plant" ethanol facility. It is estimated that they will be able to produce automobile fuel at wholesale sale cost for $1.00 per gallon. (Retail cost would likely be closer to $2.00 per gallon, but that's still an enormous savings from current prices of approx $3.75 per gallon/US.)

By 2011, they plan on having a 50-100 million gallon per year facility.

The smart money is behind them too, including General Motors and Koshla Ventures (Sun Co-founder's VC firm) The long term business plans of Coskata is to license their technology and colonies of "thoroughbred germs" to other companies who can build refineries and produce large amounts of low-cost biofuel.

read more | digg story

Deer Blogging Their location using GPS, cellphones, and free Google Products

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:51:00 +0000

A buck named Thor is the latest member of the animal kingdom to take up blogging. He and two other Bambi-bloggers named Laura and Kelsy are part of a deer research project at Bryn Athyn College in Pennsylvania that is tracking and automatically mapping their location in blogger, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

What's really cool about this project is the researchers ingenious use of email/sms & entirely free Google products-working in concert with one another- to accomplish this.

Every 5 minutes, Thor's GPS location is sent from the cellphone on his collar via SMS to a gmail account. The gmail account auto-forwards these messages as blog posts here. This Blogger account is tied into this Google Spreadsheet, that through some google-hackery and error-checking, automatically feeds Thor's location data to a Google Map (below) AND to a this Google Earth KML file that auto-updates. Detailed and Step-by-step instructions of this new "Mail-to-Map" hack can be found here.

View Larger Map

It's not entirely clear from the College's website what the purpose of the research is, or for how long they will be tracking the deer. As pointed out elsewhere, one wonders for how long the GPS/Cellphone units will hold power, or if the deer will meet their demise from a local hunter.

In any case, there appear to be at least 2 "firsts" here: Non-human members of the animal kingdom blogging and the invention of a free "mail-to-map" hack/application using all Google services. Well Done, "Siberian!"

Digg this Story Here.

Data Art: The Sheep Market

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:26:00 +0000

"Artist Aaron Koblin's phalanx of 10,000 sheep, all drawn by random strangers through Amazon's labor distribution mechanism, The Mechanical Turk. Koblin's goal was to raise questions about the emergence of new labor systems in the information age"

Techmeme over Time lapse

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:57:00 +0000

Digitial Inspiration has a great video up here of Techmeme screen shots animated over 50 hours in 50 seconds. It shows how blog posts move up through the homepage of this memetracker over time.

Jimmy Wales early Christmas present: A "Search Wikia" Alpha Launch?

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:41:00 +0000

Search Wikia, The open-source, community search engine effort backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could go live as an early test version as soon as next week. according to New Scientist.

Jeremie Miller, the project's technology chief, hopes an "alpha" version of the engine will be running by Christmas. As well as search, it will offer "wiki-style tools to improve search and basic social networking"

"Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor invade privacy by storing users' search terms...The effort's architecture is similar in fashion to the SETI@Home project...500 volunteers are running web-crawlers to compile Search Wikia's web index, which so far totals 100 million pages"

Wikia's Search is smartly boot-strapping off of the established open source distributed web crawler software/project that it purchased in July, Grub. An introduction from Grub's site:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will start to change all that.

Grub started back in 2000 with a simple concept of distributing part of the search process pipeline: crawling. In a way, we were a bit ahead of our time, but our intention then was what it is now. We want to help fix search.

Now, with the help of Wikia, community members, contibuters, and Open Source developers our time has come again. Come be part of something greater. Come help us change the World.

This is a very interesting project with altruistic motives. Google and Yahoo do good job at search, but as pointed out here previously, having an open source, and non-commercial democratic search index/application would be a welcome addition to the proprietary ones offered by the web giants. Time will tell if the Search Wikia can deliver the same kind of quality, relevant results.

digg the New Scientist story here

Google's "My Location" Makes your Phone a Real Beacon...GPS Not Required

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:40:00 +0000

Google's "Maps for Mobile" makes it so you can automatically send your phone's location to their maps application without GPS!

After this light-weight maps application is downloaded and installed on your phone, you just type the "0" key to activate the new, "My Location" Beta service.

It doesn't work on all phones, but if yours is one that does, It will then get your phones location data from the cell tower serving it, and it will plot your location on the map (within 1000 meters or better). You can then search for a destination, get directions, and more.

The MIT Technology Review has an excellent article about the underlying technology, and other developments in this kind of non-GPS related mobile tracking. Interestingly, Google does use some GPS data on the back-end of this "My Location" application:

"Google also uses data from cell phones in the area that do have GPS to help estimate the locations of the devices without it. In this way, Google adds geographic information to the cell-phone tower's identifiers that the company stores in a database."

So instead of "triangulating" your location by pinpointing you relative to two other towers, Google is just using the single tower that is serving your phone, and then using other people's Maps enabled GPS devices to help fill in the gaps! It sounds like quite an amazing mashup & cross reference of geo-location data. Integrating all of it with the maps application making it work with relative accuracy is a remarkable feat.

Not surprisingly for Google, they expect the service to improve and more "intelligent" with time.

"As the database grows, says Lee, the service will become more accurate. It will never be as accurate as GPS, but he expects that it could eventually find a person within a couple hundred meters"

Here's a wild thought: Since Google is the Authority on "Search" (and privacy issues notwithstanding) wouldn't it be something if you could search for another person by dialing their cell phone number and then find their current location on the map ?!?!

Cellphones as an Airline Boarding Pass

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:36:00 +0000

Continental Airlines & Transportation Security Administration are doing a 3 month test in Houston that lets passengers board the plane with their cell phones or PDAs!

The way it works is that a bar code image is sent to the device (presumably from the airlines website or from a check-in kiosk at the airport) The image that's displayed on the device gets scanned at the baording gate just as the bar code on a paper pass does.

While the test doesn't allow for multiple passengers to board from one bar code, Continental is working on upgrading their system to allow for that.

While this is the first use of this kind of technology in the US, it's not the first ever implementation. Air Canada has been offering it since September of this year. USA Today reports that other US Airlines such as Delta and US Airways hope to offer this kind of paperless technology in the future too.

read more | digg story

How can I use spreadsheets to answer some of my many questions about the world?

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:48:00 +0000

The following was produced by Google and the original can be found here. For some reason, the URL is unacceptable to several social bookmarking sites. I've reposting it here so it could be shared, which I'm assuming Google is OK with ;-D. The video demo below is also an offical Google one, but I found it from the Googlesystem Blog.

This is some pretty powerful stuff You can basically create dynamic spreadsheets with data snarfed from all over the web!!

You can get answers to many common questions by using the GoogleLookup function. Please note that this function is only available in English at this time.

The GoogleLookup function attempts to answer your question using the web, with information about people, places and things, like the population of Japan, the mass of Jupiter, or the place of birth of Abraham Lincoln.

Keep in mind that, while the GoogleLookup function knows quite a bit, it doesn't know everything. Not all of the formulas that you might try will work, but we encourage you to experiment with the function and see what does work.

Using the GoogleLookup function

To use the GoogleLookup function, enter the following formula in the desired spreadsheet cell:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup("entity"; "attribute")
where "entity" represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and "attribute" is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

Different attributes apply to different objects. For example:

Boston has a population.
Kofi Annan has a place of birth.
The Mississippi River has an origin.

Here are a couple examples using the formula:

To insert the number of Internet users in Paraguay:
=GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users")
To insert the Earned Run Average of Roger Clemens:
=GoogleLookup("Roger Clemens";"earned run average")

Note: In order for the formula to compute properly, quotation marks must be used around both the "entity" and the "attribute."

Some of the entities and attributes you can use

Here are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names (some entities won't have all these attributes, and some will have more, so feel free to experiment):

Countries and Territories (like "Burkina Faso"): population, capital, largest city, gdp
U.S. States (like "Tennessee"): area, governor, nickname, flower
Rivers (like "Amazon River"): origin, length
Cities and Towns (like "Chicago"): state, mayor, elevation
Musicians (like "John Lennon"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
Actors (like "Audrey Hepburn"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
Politicians (like "Anwar Al-Sadat"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
U.S. Presidents (like "Zachary Taylor"): date of birth, place of birth, political party
Baseball Players (like "Wade Boggs"): games, at bats, earned run average, position
Chemical Elements (like "Helium"): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight
Chemical Compounds (like "Isopropyl Alcohol"): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density
Stars (like "Betelgeuse"): constellation, distance, mass, temperature
Planets (like "Saturn"): number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere
Dinosaurs (like "Velociraptor"): height, weight, when it lived
Ships (like "USS Chesapeake"): length, displacement, complement, commissioned
Companies (like "Hewlett-Packard"): employees, ceo, ticker

Note: You're allowed 250 GoogleLookup calls in a single spreadsheet.

Twitter, Social Web 2.0 Apps Breaking California Fire News

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:41:00 +0000

"Parislemon" MG Siegler has a excellent post on how Twitters power lies in breaking events in times of big news or crisis. MG is out in the San Diego area and he points out how the NPR radio station out there, KBPS, had thier web site go down go down temporarily, but advised listeners to check the station's twitter page for news updates in the interim. At the time of this writing, I see from it that evacuation orders have been issued for areas of Del Mar & Solana Beach, Califronia. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in SoCal affected by this. I hope you remain safe.

More broadly across the web is more firsthand coverage and information on the fires. Center Networks has a good roundup of all the fire coverage on social media sites.

The LA Times has created a google maps mash-up of where the fires are:

View Larger Map

Free Point-to-Point Mobile Phone Service !?!

noreply@blogger.com (spinchange) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:56:00 +0000

Imagine a mobile phone system where any two phones form their own "network" as soon as they are switched-on and within range of one another. Such a system would eliminate the need for a carrier and large mobile network; Replacing it with a shared grass-roots public network that allowed for private phone calls.

As reported on the BBC News, such a system has already been developed out of Sweden by a company called TerraNet AB!

The technology is designed for remote areas where wireless base stations are not practical. It is being used in Lund, Sweden where it was developed and projects are underway in Ecuador and Tanzania.

How it works

Each wireless unit instantly communicates with other units within a range of up to 2000 metres - without the need for a base station. Calling and texting are free between the units, with all units acting as nodes and carrying traffic between other units in the cluster. A call hops from one unit to the next until it reaches the destination, up to seven units away. The cluster of TerraNet wireless units creates an organic communication mesh that spans a large area, be it a university campus, a rural village, a company site or a disaster zone.

A TerraNet access point can be established wherever a computer with Internet access is available. Simply insert a TerraNet USB dongle. At least one TerraNet unit must be within a range of up to 2000 metres. The unit communicates with the access point and with other TerraNet units in the cluster. This way, any user in the cluster can set up free VoIP calls via the Internet to users in other TerraNet clusters, and via low cost VoIP dial-out services to fixed line phones and mobile phones anywhere in the world.

CEO Anders Carlius seems to enjoy the implications of disrupting the mobile telephony business model. From the company's site is the following:

Traditional operators are charging for landline and mobile phone calls like a taxicab - by the minute and by distance. With the arrival of flat rate or zero-rate communication solutions, including VoIP initiatives like Skype, the taxicab business model is no more. To eliminate the cost between the endpoints, you need to minimise the network infrastructure, the base stations, the antenna installations and the telephony servers. With the TerraNet Wireless Technology, the users deploy their own network.

If the calls sound good, it Sounds real good to me!