Webtop Mania

Is Cinch really better than Twitter and Evernote?

2009-10-28T11:51:00.000Z

There were a lot of reactions around the last post on Cinch. And some folks might be curious about the service and the iPhone app. So I decided to write a follow-up post (the title is possibly borrowed from someone else by now).

Cinch, the iPhone app, allows to share audio-notes taken with the iPhone, complemented with a photo and a 140 chars message. Cinch also works with regular mobile phones as you can call a Cinch number and record your audio-notes. Your "cinches" are forwarded on RSS stream and they'll pop-up in your Google reader, Twitter and facebook stream in near real-time (as good as it gets - except for Google reader, as I don't think they use the pubsubhubhub tech, yet). In the last post, I said that it was better than Twitter and Evernote combined together :) So, is it?

First of all, the good news: I may find it absolutely more interesting than Twitter, but it doesn't "replaces" Twitter. In fact, it *feeds* Twitter with more interesting links to rich audio content. It also feeds your facebook stream. I can say that I got more reactions than average over at Facebook because of my cinches. And *that* is what matters to me.

Second, Cinch *is* a lot better than Evernote for audio notes. The iPhone app just works, whereas Evernote's iPhone app has bugs and failed on me several times in the past. The sound quality is way better than Evernote. However, I wouldn't mind if my cinches were duplicated on Evernote's servers. In fact, I wish they were...

Finally, Cinch is *well-implemented*. They did it the right way. I won't enter on details, but I know a good implementation when I see one. (Ok, I wouldn't have implemented the front-end in asp, but that's me...).

Thus, to sum up, Cinch is for audio-notes what Twitter is for 140chars text messages. Cinch is not a reason to ditch Twitter (au contraire) nor is it to ditch Evernote (I duplicate all my flickr uploads on Evernote using this custom workflow I made with Tarpipe).

So, the only "bad news" is that you're going to spend 20 minutes to try it out. If you've got an iPhone and if you're an iphone app addict, it sure is definitively worth it. Best app in its category. If you don't like texting your tweets (like myself) you may consider calling the Cinch number (us only) and voice them (though Twitterfone is perhaps better for small audio-notes).

Here are my Cinches: I cinch mostly to share all my sound and visual experiences, like music concerts, new city sounds, strange eery magical atmospheres, friends chatter and laughter... all those beautiful sensorial experiences that a simple photo just cannot keep. I do it for me, for my friends, for my future memories of my past :D

Disclosure: I have no connections with CinchCast or BlogTalkRadio. First, I liked their app. Then, I enjoyed some amount of feedback from the Silicon Valley tech-sphere with the last post. So, I try to keep it up =)

Cinch: better than Twitter, better than Evernote.

2009-10-25T10:35:00.007Z

Wow, it's been a looong time since I posted something here. Lots of spider webs to clean up...

Anyway, I'm posting this entry to tell the world about this cool new thing I started using out of lately. It's called Cinch and it's the best thing since sliced-bread.

Seriously, this little birdie is better than Twitter and Evernote combined together!

It allows the user to post a short message (like twitter), a photo (like brightkite) and an audio stream (like ?? AudioBoo - as suggested by a reader). Your media-shots are syndicated on RSS and on a web-page stream where other cinch-ers can leave comments, reply and follow you. And you can show your love back at them ;) You can also download your cinches in mp3 format or redirect them to Twitter and Facebook (which I did. I Wish could store it on Evernote as well. Oh well...).

But the killer-feature (secret-sauce) of this service is its usability. You can post your media-shots from the iPhone app, which is fantastic AND free. It just works. It's the best free app in its category. (I ditched the built-in audio recorder in the iPhone presto due to this app). And if you don't have an iPhone, all you have to do is set up your mobile phone number in the Cinch web-service and make a call to a Cinch number (us phone only). Your phone call will be recorded and immediately posted on your wall and RSS stream. Now, that's A GREAT IDEA and a great implementation!

I use Cinch to record live music events. These are my most precious memories. I was using Evernote to do that, but their iPhone app is buggy and sound quality simply sucks compared to Cinch's. Mailing mp4 from the iPhone built-in audio recorder also sucks, because you have to limit it to less than a couple of minutes, while full live songs usually take three to six minutes. So, I fell in love with the Cinch iPhone app, because it just works, plus, it adds a photo to your audio stream and a 140chars message. Finally, the sound quality is good-enough and the audio length is long enough to record full live songs.

What's missing? Video. Video's missing. Badly. Adding an option to choose between audio or video would have made it a total killer!

I seriously believe Cinch could become the best mobile social media platform. Best combo so far to use with your mobile phone or iPhone. What do you think? Have you tried out Cinch yet?

*UPDATE*: I forgot to mention that Cinch is powered by BlogTalkRadio (BTR), the technology that pipes audio streams from phone calls or mp3/4 files into rss feeds. BTW, we already covered BTR in this blog almost two years ago...

My take on cloud computing

2009-07-30T14:57:00.022Z

Update: if you want to check out what is cloud-computing in a secured sandboxed environment please follow this link.

When I first started this blog, I wanted to make a statement about my vision regarding the future of computing. I called this new thing the webtop. That was back in 2006. It turns out that they called it the cloud.

But what is cloud-computing anyway?
The answer is easy if you take it logically. Here's my take:

This is cloud-computing

Well? What did you expect?

UPDATE: if you're reading this in google reader or any other feed reader, chances are it has erased the javascript with an inocuous void(0). Go to the original blog to see what is cloud computing ;)

(Original concept: Guilhermo Rauch)

BTW, you can save the link in your bookmarks as a bookmarklet and see how it works on other pages...

The iPhone needs glasses

2009-05-25T12:35:00.012Z

Yes, it's true: the iPhone actually needs spectacles to correct its vision on close-up shots. Otherwise they get blurry.

Now, this isn't a problem for the regular family meeting group shots, BUT, if you're into REALLY futuristic stuff, you'll realize that the Apple design crew missed an important point: by not choosing a lens with auto-focus, they crippled the iPhone's vision to a point it performs text-recognition badly, or not at all.

Text-recognition? Yes, the iPhone does text-recognition. It does stuff like "reading" a business card, or "identifying" a product from a bar-code, or simply "opening" physical-links. These are all actions that are available in several apps from the App Store. Text, image, sound, music and speech recognition are in the inevitable path of the future of hand-held devices, and, frankly, this is mostly why I get excited with the iPhone.

Now, the people at Griffin propose a solution: they sell spectacles for the iPhone. By sliding in a $31 special lens, dubbed Clarifi, one can get crispy close-up photos. Oh, and the lens wrapper also acts as a protective iPhone cover.

Popular text-recognition apps like Evernote and Snappr are recommended to be used with this corrective lens.

We can only hope that the Apple crew will correct the device's faulty vision in the new version. Meanwhile, you can check out this exciting Snappr demo:

Just a word about Snappr: the service tries to do exactly John Battelle's vision of the future he described in his 2005 "The Search" book about Google; and that was to google a product, from a shelf in a store, and instantly get the best price and where to look for it.

P.S: you'll notice that the Snappr logo is, well... a snapper. That's a fish! But this one is to stick in the eyes and not in the ears ;)

The Future Of Hand-Held Devices...

2009-01-26T22:01:00.013Z

People don't realize this yet, but what they really want is a device that becomes a living extension of their body, while enhancing their own sensing limitations. It'll make them feel smarter, more powerful. And - that - is a very addictive feeling.

I'm starting realizing this myself, because I've been using an iPhone for over six months now, and I've become pretty much addicted to it. With it, I do stuff I never dreamed I could do before!

Actually, some people did realize this back in the eighties, and thought that the coolest thing they could have was a digital watch.

In an infinitely large universe, such as, for instance, the one in which we live, anything; even the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; is POSSIBLE, when other things are NOT! -- especially when you own a digital watch.
Douglas Adams

I carry in my pocket the instant access to all my pictures, all my music, all my notes, all my work, all the people in my world (phone numbers, emails, addresses,...). And I can show it all off at social events in a useful and convenient manner.

While traveling, I'm fully aware of my location, of the route I want to take and of what's happening around me. I can get the instant access to the History of the place around me or any place in the world. I can get answers to every single question that might spring in my mind. Find out which of my friends are near me, and engage them to do stuff (Not yet actually. I still can't do that, but I'll get there someday).

Sounds familiar? To me, it sounds at lot like The REAL Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy :)

So what makes these hand-held devices different from the other devices? The looks? Nope, think again. It's the sensors! The difference are those wonderful little sensors that enable location and orientation awareness to the device. They give ears, eyes, skin and mouth to the device, and they are well programmed, so they start to become a living and breathing extension of our own limbs and organs.

Then again, this is nothing new, and I'm expecting, any time now, someone crying at me saying:

[...]that's no problem. just stick this fish in your ear.
Douglas Adams.

Syntax Highlighter

2008-12-12T21:23:00.024Z

Hi, I'm testing a javascript based syntax highlighter for this blog. Let's see how it works:


 #Ducktyping: Does it walk like a duck? Does it quack like a duck?
 if arg1.responds_to? :capitalize
   puts "Then '#{arg1.capitalize}' must be a string.\n"
 else
   if arg1.responds_to? :modulo && arg1.responds_to? :numerator
     puts "Then '#{arg1.to_s}' must be an integer.\n"
   else
     if arg1.responds_to? :modulo && arg1.responds_to? :truncate
       puts "Then '#{arg1.to_s}' must be a float.\n"
     end
   end
 end

~~Whoops, guess not :( Anyone knows how to solve this issue?~~
Nice :) Actually I used this widget to make it work.

Update: I couldn't resist and I also implemented it in this wiki.

Lolcats on my google mobile app

2008-11-19T23:16:00.017Z

Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around. We all remember the twitterfone and the cinch blogtalkradio concepts and we're still thinking on how huge their impact will be in the info-included community.

It's been over a year since Tim O'Reilly, the great web2.0 visionary and O'Reilly media books founder, noted that google was actually harvesting and harnessing precious voice-recognition data from their Goog-411 phone search. It's also been a year since Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned that 2008 was all about "mobile, mobile, mobile". Well, all those signs were foretelling the biggest thing I've seen ever since google reader and twitter came along: voice-search in your mobile web-able phone, voice-search in your iphone that is. Frankly, if anyone was doubting between getting a blackberry, a nokia or an iphone for christmas, just go and get an iphone, really. Or maybe an Android device, if you like to take chances.

But enough, here's my quick review:

Voice searching is lightning fast like 1-2-3. One, slide and tap on the google mobile app icon from your iphone launcher. Two, raise your phone near your ear, wait for the sound signal and voice your query: "lolcats". Three, wait a few seconds, get the results, tap on the image tab and be amazed with those cute furry cats. PERFECT!!

More below, you get a full screenshot tour of the voice-search experience! On the left-panel, you can see how the goog mobile app keeps a quick list of your past frequent queries for a quick tap; otherwise, voice and text searching are easily accessible. On the middle-panel, you can also quickly access to all your other google services (Google earth too? Yup, google earth too). On the right panel, you can see how voice search is optional and how you can add your google domain, in case you have one.

On the triptic below you get a 1-2-3 a-few-seconds experience. One, talk. Two, wait. Three, done. It should take in all, oh, about less than 7 seconds.

The next triptic below shows you the type of instant results you might expect. The green text string is google's voice-to-text resulting query. Below you can see the results. Note that you get a one-tap refinement if you're looking for images, local search or news. Easy. Pretty slick, don't you think?

The texting search is also top-notch, while google suggests and provides with different kind of contextual search related to your iphone contacts (synced with gmail), to your location on the map, or simply to regular search. Here's a contact search from my over 500 contacts for a quick call or email.

And below, here's the local search experience for the nearest new pizza place in photos. Note how in the middle-panel google suggests me with relevant keywords for my search, thus saving me my precious thumb-typing energy:

Even though mobile search on the iphone is really like riding a rolls-royce, there do are some relevant details that can be improved:
1 - Voice search does not relates with the text search contextual results, thus I cannot call for "Johnny" from my contacts, or do something like a "Call Johnny", or even a "Find Johnny".
2 - While searching for pizza near lisbon, or for the weather in lisbon, I must explicitly call for "pizza lisbon" or "weather lisbon". That's dumb, the google app should implicitly provide me first hand with pizza within my current location whenever I voice "pizza", or "weather", respectively.

So, the google mobile app is GREAT, it's game-changing, it's disruptive, it's clean, it's slick, it just works, even my mother or my 3 year-old nephew will be able to use it, and it's going to set the new standard of mobile search. Mobile searching is going to be even more contextual and relevant relative to who I am and where I am, because it has close access to my most personal stuff like my contacts, my recent phone-call history and my present location. The next step could be ... where my friends are? IMO, the next big thing coming soon, will be the pocket-pc/phone ubiquitous experience. Google, Apple... thank you.

Sapo codebits 2008

2008-11-19T12:20:00.030Z

Last week I went to codebits, the 24/3 hackers contest organized by the portal sapo.pt. And it was awesome! I had loads of fun, learned tons of stuff, met a bunch of new and interesting people, worked on my tech social network, etc, etc...

The organization was perfect (some sapo team members are the organizers of the famous Shift conference). We had free wifi, free pizza for lunch AND for dinner, 24/3 free fruit, candy bars, chips, sodas, water, all inclusive and in abundance. Never was I found short on anything of those precious resources. That's pretty impressive in my book. Loads of puffs, loads of tables and chairs. We had xboxes, playstations and wiis to relax. All that with cool lighting in an open-space environment. All you had to do was to bring your laptop. Heck, that's a programmers paradise. The only single itch was that there only was two internet wires available per tables of six laptops. That combined with frequent wifi jams. But still, that wouldn't stop us from coding hard.

The main buzzwords that got wired into my brain were xfn, xmpp, couchdb, erlang and javascript. The talk that impressed me and inspired me the most was Mario Valente's talk über server sided javascript.

Over 580 participants presented roughly 80 projects built during the 24 hour contest. I met and teamed with @arturmartins and we built an xmpp bot which can be invited to chat with at codebits@jabber.cc. We called it "Codebits spy, #27". The bot yields the latest rfid location of the participants at the event, provided the user inputs a name or an id. It works quite nicely IMO, but sadly another participant also presented the exact same concept. I guess that was a pretty obvious and rather easy thing to do... Another easy and obvious thing to do was the codebits buzz page, which I implemented an iPhone version, only to find out later that the codebits organization already had a web-based identical version of it...

A lot of projects were really fun and interesting. Loads of rails web2.0 apps, a cool miniature remote truck commanded from a web interface with a camera-mount; powerful apps containing data-harnessing algorithms; mashups; a million-dollar world app; and so many other cool stuff I can't remember...

I think I'll integrate all the xmpp bots I'll build into @als and @rubenfonseca's github served modular xmpp bots project in the future... By the way, @rubenfonseca developed an historical database of the participants' rfid location. So, kudos to him.

Some easter eggs found were the Magellan laptop cluster, the chumby column, the Meo box-tv with messenger functionality, the arcade workshop, #anita became the fastest twitter meme ever,and more, many more...

All-in-all, it was great. And I'll be there next year!

Location and social networks on the iphone

2008-11-03T11:20:00.023Z

Here are some location based tools that I use on the iPhone. Some are social canvas, some are useful tools.

Google Maps

I use it to:

Locate me.

Search places.

Bookmark places.

Find routes.

Navigate.

Unique features:

Built in iPhone.

Street view (coming to Europe, one country at a time).

navigation system.

Google Earth

I use it to:

locate me.

search places.

do 3D earth exploration.

browse nearby Wikipedia and Panoramio entries.

Unique features:

3D flight mode.

Gyroscope sensor view tilting.

Wikipedia and public Panoramio layers.

Firefone

I use it to:

Update my location on fireeagle.

Unique features:

location brokering service. "Update once, update many" feature.

Here I Am
I use it to:

Mail my location.

Keep a mail record of my tracks.

Unique features:

Sends an email with my textual gps coordinates from the touch of a button.

Wizi

I use it to:

Locate me.

Bookmark places (private).

Add friends (private).

Share my location (mail, friend, friends or public).

Locate friends.

Send direct messages. Reply.

Navigate (to places and to friends).

Journaling (Picture, text. Private and friends-only).

Unique features:

Know how distant I am from my friends and from my places by looking at the timetag.

Wizi tries to do everything: Social networking, instant messaging, journaling, navigation. This approach can be risky though, as other more specialized tools may out-perform it. It started as a navigational tool to reach friends by leveraging on user-provided tracking data. This is still, by far, it's greatest asset. A distinctive approach would be to add value to my iphone/gmail contacts, by providing my current location to my contacts and by providing the current location of my contacts. This is what I'm really excited about Wizi. But the Wizi team has to slowly adjust and fine tune their service as they need to compete with traditional navigation systems and typical conversational journaling services. If they want to compete with Brightkite and Loopt, they also need to refine their conversational canvas so users can engage more. So far the Wizi client still isn't released on the App store, and I only got access to it as private beta tester. But you can download it on many other platforms such as windows mobile and blackberry. An Android version is also being developped.

Brightkite

I use it to:

Locate me.

Bookmark places (private, friends-only, public).

Add friends (private, friends-only, public).

Locate friends.

Share my location (private, friends-only, public).

Conversational journaling (text, picture. Private, friends-only, public).

Unique features:

Best UX for a micro-blogging/journaling platform.

Brightkite does one thing and does it well: it's a location based micro-blogging/journaling platform with a clean interface and a good user experience. It provides a conversational canvas to engage with the community. It's biggest threat is the fact that it doesn't works two-way on the importing/exporting of data. Neither with location, neither with pictures, neither with micro-posts. Thus, I'd rather send a tweet with a link to a picture to engage conversation, than make a brightkite journal entry. However, it does provides an RSS feed for the journal so you can still pipe it to Twitter, to Facebook or to Friendfeed.

Loopt

The problem with Loopt is that it isn't available out of the US (and perhaps Canada). So I really can't go in depth with it. For all I know, it's very similar to Brightkite and, thus, it's based on the journaling concept. However it integrates with Facebook quite nicely (two-way) and it also integrates with Twitter while providing an RSS feed. These features alone make Loopt more "data-portable" than Brightkite. This is very interesting, as my main social-networks are Facebook, Twitter and Gmail contacts (so it's 2 out of 3 ducks).

Unique features:

Facebook and Twitter integration

U.S (& Canada?) only.

Plazes

Plazes isn't available yet for the iPhone, though an iPhone app is rumored to be underway anytime soon. The interesting thing about Plazes is that, beyond conversational journaling, it also adds a whole new social object: the conversational agenda. It's basically an agenda/calendar where you share/appoint events. The events that you actually attend get lit up, and you and your friends can always comment on them. It potentiates an integration with your calendaring tool.

Concluding remarks

So I just went through the list of location-based apps I use the most on my iPhone. We must retain that the basic social features are locating, routing, navigating, sharing location, locating friends and journaling. Each of these features have several degrees of security -private, friends-only, public-; and several radius of proximity -exact location, neighbourhood, city-. Plazes goes a step further by adding the events agending feature.

I feel most of these applications are still transient, and I still have this need to import/export my tracks data. I really think those services should work more tightly with fireeagle. Brighkite does update fireeagle, but that's it. There are also other location baseds services like Zintin and Cence me. So please let me know if you're interested to learn more about those. But I'm curious, what location-based social apps do you use?

Post - Shift'08

2008-10-20T09:47:00.007Z

Last week I went to Shift.pt, a conference about new technologies, society and the web, organized and sponsored by Sapo.pt. There I've acquainted a bit more with Pedro Custódio and his team/friends, as well as a whole new bunch of very interesting people.

In particular I enjoyed the workshop über wireless technologies (organized by Tijmen Schep), where I had the opportunity to meet and work with ad-hoc shifters.

Our workshop project was to arrange a mobile phone number that shifters could SMS to, and shout their names and interests. The SMSes would be displayed live on a screen in the conferencem so other shifters could see and discover their peers. We called our project ShiftNetwork. The other projects from the other teams were also very interesting and some actually were implemented!

Though we didn't carried our project all to the end, we did had a nice looking iphone mobile page, that we changed a posteriori to rebroadcast the twitter updates stream on Shift08. Basically, we never managed to setup a working phone. But we did found interesting software to extract smses from phones at gammu.org. Might have a deeper look on that...

All talks were very interesting, but definitively, the one I enjoyed the most, was the one from Felix Petersen, the Plazes creator, now head of social activities at Nokia. He really has a clear vision about the location aware mobile social experience and it was a real treat for him to share his vision with us all.

On friday I missed most of the talks, due to other commitments, but I still got in the end to mingle a bit with other shifters and taste some web2.0 wine (bottles attached with QRcodes! Cute! Courtesy of Adegga).

So, it was a great conference! Thank you Shift!

Shift.pt starting tomorrow

2008-10-14T22:19:00.004Z

Here's an excerpt of a mail (addressee anonymacy kept) I wrote today that tells a long way about what are my expectations on shift, the web2.0 and society conference happening in Lisbon the 15th, 16th and 17th October 2008.

Dear Mr. Smith,

In short, I'm afraid I'm not available at all for this week. Can we schedule for next week?

I'd be delighted to apply to your interview and your programming tests. However, I'm afraid I will not miss the Shift conference (http://www.shift.pt/), which is probably the best conference on Web2.0 and society, happening this week, right here in Lisbon.

In the meantime I send you some code I did in C a while back in 2004[...]

Thank you,

Guillaume

By the way, that's official, I'm looking for an exciting job to start somewhere during 2009, 1st quarter. I hope to work in the mobile and/or web2.0 area.

Wordle: beautiful tag clouds

2008-10-10T16:53:00.006Z

Wordle is an instant, genuine, original, art creating engine that leverages on the single most creative content originator on the whole galaxy: YOU.
Wordle is BEAUTIFUL because YOU are BEAUTIFUL.

Wordle picks up your blog feed or your del.icio.us tags and creates a beautiful painting of tags that define your semantic cloud.
Wordle helps you pass the word of your web-assumed interests.

Wordle is your digital fingerprint... in beauty print.

Fire Eagle and Tarpipe: two ways to avoid battery-drain on your mobile

2008-10-02T19:06:00.033Z

One of the interesting things about web-wired mobile devices, is the ability to quickly geolocate the user, either by GPS, either by cell-tower antenna id, either by networked wifi ip.
This single ability should provide tremendous possibilities in terms of social networks, and in terms of added value by leveraging massive amounts of user's geo-tracks (while preserving privacy and anonimacy). Another cool ability is snapshot-updating social networks.

Right now, we're seeing a boom in location-aware social networks for mobile devices. Services like loopt, wizi, brightkite, pownce, lightpole, socialight, cence me, zintin and many others (btw, what are the services that you use and like?). Another interesting light-weighted mobile social-network, good for today's most regular phones, would be handivi.

However, the major technological bottleneck for this new eco-system to strive, is the device battery-life. Today's smartphones and pdas drain all the power in just a few hours. This is a big problem that is bound to stick around for a while, (unless some physics Nobel prizer comes up with a brilliant solution). Hence, the user experience becomes seriously degraded. Each time the user performs any new action on his device, his brain is trained to assess the power-drain damage it'll do to it, as he always wants to keep the phone functional for the basic tasks, such as receiving calls, receiving agenda alerts, take that one-in-a-lifetime snapshot, etc... This is problematic because it skews A LOT the natural rate of exploration on the device's new possibilities: "Ouh - I could toy around with this new cool-looking web-app... Oh, yeah, I shouldn't do that, cuz then I'd have little power left for receiving important calls. Right... better stay idle with it for the time being" :(
This is actually how my brain works with my iphone, when I'm outdoors. I only test & toy at home where I have the power cable nearby. This limits A LOT my learning curve on new iPhone apps. Power IS the real bottleneck for mobile exploration. (I'm assuming this is case for other smartphones and PDAs).

Thus, the best solution would be to build more efficient power consuming phones and more efficient power consuming apps.

In particular, each time I authorize an app to take advantage of my geo-position, I'm multiplying the GPS usage AND potentiating the power-drain syndrom. So, suppose that I take a snapshot and that I want to send it to facebook, to flickr, to zintin, to wizi, to evernote and that I also want to email it to some friends, plus I want to update my location on wizi and on cenceme at the same time. For each of these apps I must drain power (and bandwidth) to upload (redundantly) the image and to get a GPS fix for my location! Wow, that is NOT efficient!

In this post, I'm advocating the relevancy for geo-aware mobile apps to rely on fire eagle as their sole provider of server-sided users location tags. And to rely on tarpipe to "upload once, update many" social-networks.

fire eagle, developped by yahoo!, is an API enabled, users geo-tracks database. It stores all its users locations, and then provides a free API for user-authorized third-party developpers to extract the user's location and/or update the user's location.

tarpipe is an "upload once, update many" service (kind of like ping.fm, but for snapshots as well) that works really well!

To improve energy efficiency from GPS usage, I pledge the developpers to ask fire eagle for the user location rather than asking the user's device for its location. That way, the user updates once its location on Fire-eagle and, automatically, all its authorized geo-aware social-networks and services get updated. Thus, if it had 10 location based services, it would drain 10 times less power with the GPS. Right now I'm using Firefone to update my location on Fire-Eagle.

Likewise, if the user builds a smart, easy looking workflow on tarpipe, its photo emailed-attachs would be forwarded to all its favorited services, like twitter, pownce, jaiku, flickr, photobucket and evernote. That'll be 4 times less bandwidth AND 4 times less energy consumption for that user. So, I pledge the users to use a tarpipe workflow to "upload once, update many" social-networks.

Below you can see a diagram of how things are today, the wrong way :p

and how things could be tomorrow, the right way :)

So, developpers, be smart! Use fire eagle when location matters. And users, be smart! Use tarpipe when you want to update many services at once. With this in mind, you'll hopefully drain less power from your device, and yet have the same functionality.

Will Google collapse by 2011?

2008-09-08T19:45:00.008Z

The people at thinkeyetracking have conducted a research on search behavior. They analyzed humans while googling by mapping their eyeball tracks.

They exposed these tracks as heat maps (as seen on the left and middle panels of the figure below, for the years of 2005 and 2008, respectively), and spotted a disturbing trend:

People went from eyeballing search-results throughout several pages in 2005, to eyeball only the top-three results of the list in 2008!

At this pace, we can easily prognose that by 2011, the famous Google-ish Feeling Lucky button that jumps right to the first result by skipping search results page, will be renamed Go To The Result button, as mocked on the figure's right panel. Strangely enough, some experts argue that, around the same time, Google's business model will collapse ... due to a lack of sponsored ad clicks!

Why is Chrome a big deal?

2008-09-03T09:55:00.015Z

Google just launched today their new open-source browser called Chrome. They're now adding a new element to the browser wars along with IE, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. This is a really smart move from Google towards building their Google OS.

So, will I use it as my preferred browser? Well, YES and NO. YES, as I will use it to quick launch my gmail, reader, igoogle, gdocs and blogger apps (each taking around 50MB in machine memory resources). But NO, as far as non google-apps web browsing is concerned. I will stick around with Firefox. But the beauty with Chrome, is that it wonderfully works besides a firefox process.

In this post I'll try to show the new features that aren't present in the other browsers, and then I'll list what's missing in Chrome that I really like from the other browsers.

What's new AND interesting?

One of the big problems with Firefox and IE, are memory leaks. After a couple of days of running non-stop those browsers, even if you close all the tabs, you'll still get a 300 MB hit in your memory resources. Opera is the most efficient and the fastest for that matter. But Chrome revolutionizes the traditional approach as it creates a separate process for each tab, each eating their own memory chunk. So this means that when you need to free up some memory, you simply need to close old tabs and that memory will be immediately released. This is a big plus for Chrome. All other browsers could follow that approach as well, in my opinion.

Second, Google team claims to have created a faster start page. Well, actually, Opera software has created the concept and implemented it in their Opera browser. Give credit where credit is due. What Google did, was put in some improvements, as it also yields the latest bookmarks, besides the most visited pages. And the most visited pages cannot be edited, whereas in Opera, the user gets to choose which page to keep as a start page.

Third, Google created an incognito mode, that way you can do some cof porn cof searching in stealth mode. Ok, this could be useful.

Fourth, google gears is built-in, which is nice. They allege the javascript engine is faster and more efficient (V8 they call it).

Fifth, you can run web apps in a special web-apps mode that make your app experience feel more like a desktop experience. This is particularly valid for google apps, of course. Cute.

What's missing AND important?

First, I couldn't install firefox add-ons: I really really need the del.icio.us add-on.

UPDATED ~~Second, I couldn't create bookmark shortcuts~~ I couldn't create bookmark shortcuts but I could create opera-like search engine shortcuts. I really really use those shortcuts all the time. Heck I programmed some for the new Ubiquity extension for Firefox (I was WOWed by that one, I can tell you). Too bad I can't sync them with del.icio.us in chrome. Finally, I wish they could enable a 'POST method' option, like in opera.

What could be improved?

Well, things could be improved if only google bookmarks and google web history were seamlessly synchronized with Chrome ... However that could fire-up anti-trust laws.

Bottom-line

UPDATED I would use Chrome rather than firefox IF and only if i) it really proves out to be more memory efficient and faster, ii) they manage compatibility with the firefox plug-ins or create their own plug-in system, ~~iii) they enable bookmark shortcuts (such as Opera's or Firefox's)~~.

Finally, Why is chrome a big deal? Chrome IS a big deal, because it reminds us all that, whatever we want to do with the internet, we have to do it through a browser. It reminds us all that today's browser paradigms are ill-equiped for the future as far security matters, as far as efficiency matters, as far as smart development matters, and even as far as collaboration, sharing and social networking matters. This is Google's statements: "Guys, wake up! Today's browsers just aren't adequate enough for the webtop/cloudlife. Here's our take. Now improve it, please." The proof that today's popular browsers are ill-prepared are all these new browsers or powerful add-ons like Chrome, Ubiquity, AlchemyPoint, Strata from Kirix, Greasemonkey, and even Flock, the social web-browser, that springle into the scene on top of old-paradigms (kind-of like everything being built on top of the dinosaur x86 architecture). Finally, what's in for Google with this new browser? Google's move is crystal clear: they don't never ever want to make a business model out of a browser. What they do want is that the internet becomes ubiquitous. They want that everything we do, we do it on the internet, within the browser. Never resourcing to desktop apps ever again. Why? Because the internet is their turf! It's their comfort zone. Their ultimate horizon goal is that we spend 100% of our time on the internet, so they can grow on their search ads revenue. THAT's their cash cow, and it's not going to change anytime soon.

Wanna see more? Check out the comic on Chrome, to get an interesting walk-throuhg.

And you, what do You think about chrome? Will you use it?

Semapedia, or, how to link the real world to wikipedia

2008-08-26T22:43:00.009Z

The other day we were having this discussion promoted by @ppinheiro76 at Twittlis about this semantic tagging concept. The idea was that every tag we use in del.icio.us, blogger, or whatever web-data-harvesting tool we use, be unambiguously defined and linked with it's Wikipedia definition. Well, even though we didn't found an universal way about how to do it, I did found on the internet an universal way to tag the REAL world and map it to wikipedia :)

The tool is called Semapedia

and it uses this new (in Europe) technology called smartcode which basically allows to encode information in a black and white pixelised structure (think: 2D version of the traditional supermarket barcode), like a web link.

Basically using sites like Semapedia, you can generate these smartcodes that contain an html link for any wikipedia article (like Wall-E, I liked Wall-E). Semapedia will return you with a pdf containing real world tags that you can readily print and glue wherever you find it interesting in your physical vicinity.

Then, the anonymous mobile troller that passes by, may take a snapshot and, if his mobile device has installed a smartcode scanner (I use the neoreader app for the iphone), he can scan the picture and extract the link that will give him instant access to the web page contained in the smartcode. Here's what I got on my first test:

Cute, hu?

This new technology can encode any textual information including links, SMS messages, microformats, you name it. The applications for this are really mind-blowing and it gets my vote as what regards the next disruptive big thing coming ahead! Wait 'till more people get mobile net access to watch those marketeers "smart tag" virtually any product around you! Heck, I want a t-shirt and a fake tattoo with a smartcode for my web-page!

With the iphone I used the free neoreader app. But I found out there are heaps of smartcode scanners available for hundreds of mobile devices out there. So, if you've got mobile web on your phone or pda and you're a tech enthus like I am, you may want to give it a shot at this service ;)

So far, there are several encoding standards that I know of: QR code, datamatrix and shotcode. You can very easily generate a smartcode to your web-site here, here and here. There, you'll find also useful links for smarcode scanners for your mobile device. UPDATE: You'll also find here a heap of interesting news related with 2d codes in Europe. In particular I found there a link to blog4mobile, which turns my blog into a mobile blog AND provides a QR code to it. Anyone knows of other such services?

People have already started tagging the real world, all over, using Semapedia smartcodes :) Is this the birth of a new socio-cultural movement?

How about you? Have you tried it yet? What smarcode generators/scanners do you use?

Evernote: extend your memory beyond an elephant's.

2008-07-26T17:05:00.011Z

Evernote is an interesting web service that stores all your notes, audio-notes, and snapshots and archives them for you. It then allows you to perform text search on them, even inside images. That is a really cool feature!

I've been using it with a camera-phone to quick and safely store my business card contacts. It could work better. Indeed, the iphone camera can't do macro shots nor focus properly, so I need to take extra care when taking shots. Still, sometimes, it doesn't seem to work. Below you can see a search I made for "Moura", a contact and good friend of mine.

I do hope these guys can improve their text-in-images searching algorithm; and when they do so, my life will be a lot more convenient!

BTW, I expect Google to either buy them or make its own text-in-image search engine.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention, but it is also available as a desktop client for mac and windows.

The iphone 3G is a pocket satellite.

2008-07-19T18:34:00.009Z

Ever worked with satellite engineering teams? I have. I had some experience in the AOCS (Attitude and Orbit Control Systems) subsystem team in the ESA-SSETI program, designing ESEO, a micro-satellite designed to take space pictures and do some simple science, while I was an undergrad student. Ok, we were all students, and most of us were complete noobs at satellite engineering. Most of us remained so afterwards. Cool times though.
Basically, AOCS is the satellite navigation subsystem. It deals with determining and changing the sat's position (lat,lon,altitude) and orientation (aka attitude). The main task is all about stuffing the satellite with the right sensors and actuators so that it can sense it's orientation and make corrections if need be. Attitude sensors can be Earth-horizon-sensors, sun-sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers (check out the first portuguese crafted magnetometer ever) and star-trackers. Attitude actuators can be micro-thrusters, reaction-wheels or gravity-gradient torques. The satellite follows a closed orbit. Thus, changing orbit requires another subsystem, all by itself, called "Propulsion" subsystem. The propulsion subsystem eats a lot in satellite mass (fuel obliges), which is always set on a very tight budget, and allows to make orbit changes. Plasma propulsion is much more efficient however, as it manages, via electromagnetic fields, to expel at very high velocities the propeller, plasma gas in occurence. The downside is that it's slooowwer than fuel propulsion. Propulsion and AOCS must work closely. Both also rely heavily on the "Power" subsystem, which, by means of solar panels, makes the satellite a living system. However, power is perhaps the scarcest resource on-board. Our micro-satellite had to work, in average, with about 100 W if I can recall correctly, FOR ALL the systems. So we, AOCS, had to choose the adequate sensors and actuators to meet the mission requirements. Redundant systems were also the word of the day. As we can't fix anything in outer-space (ah... we wish we could space-walk), there's no room for mistakes nor failing parts, thus making redundant systems a necessity. This is probably the main difference between an iPhone and a micro-satellite. The iPhone doesn't need to have redundant parts.

Like any good satellite, the iPhone 3G has a position sensor (GPS), attitude sensors (accelerometers), a ccd camera for taking Earth snapshots and upload them on the net, a communication subsystem (which includes 3G, GPRS, wifi and bluetooth devices), and a ground-system (itunes and the App store). It is battery powered and must survive with somewhat less than 100 W (don't know the iPhone power consumption). Also, the harness subsystem team did a good job at keeping a minimum amount of loose wires (a power/data wire and an ear-buds wire). When I'm orbiting around town I feel like an applenaut, doing the apple-walk (Ha-ha, lame joke). I guess Steve Jobs could have made a great satellite engineer.

But my point IS, we can send an iPhone in space, let it orbit around the Earth, and navigate it and make it take cool snapshots of the Earth and then upload them to a web-site. Maybe it can be built around a light-weight infrastructure with some solar-panels in order to extend the batteries longevity. But anyway, sending an iPhone in space is FEASIBLE!

Now for what matters, the iPhone: hype or not?
I say hell, no! The iphone IS a disruptive gadget. I had tried before an HTC P3300. They suck at doing what the iPhone does.

Here we go, the iphone is a:

-map with GPS that fixes your precise position in "seconds", not minutes.
-web browser that works for mobile AND desktop pages and 3G IS lightning fast (zooming and paning with smooth multi-touch madness)!
-fast YouTube streamer,
-camera with geo-tagging and email pushing to Facebook, flickr, twitter and what not (update: the email pushing is scaling down the photo AND stripping away the EXIF data. No easy geotagging. AirMe is a quick workaround for the meantime),
-flashlight (there's like a dozen of flashlight apps and strobes for free for the iPhone),
-gaming platform with accelerometers,
-digital guitar tuner (from app store),
-syncs all your gmail contact via iTunes,
-iPod and you can sing or humm a tune to search for it (midomi from the app store),
-remote control for your iTunes or Apple tv (app store),
-compass (g-spot from the app store),
-gtalk and AIM,
-Voip calls (truphone from the app store),
-mobile geo-located social networking device on steroids (update: almost, because it strips down the EXIF data when emailing the photo),
-phone and sms-ing machine,
-realistic fake pint of beer (ipint is my favorite pointless app from apple store),
-store with quickly downloadable free and paid software.

Major downsides: the camera sucks at macro photos and it has no focusing (not good for ocr-ing business cards). No video recording (thus no Qiks nor Seesmic videos). The battery life is good when compared with remotely similar models, but 5 hours still seems very little. Finally, I did get some undesired system crashes and resets while opening third party apps ...

How to receive free SMS alerts using Twitter

2008-07-01T21:26:00.005Z

In this post I will show you how to subscribe to twitter to receive free sms alerts on your cell phone. You can receive live soccer goals, weather forecasts, traffic alerts, the IST canteen menu, you name it ...

UPDATE 2008-08-27: DISCLOSURE 1: SMS ALERTS AREN'T FREE IN THE U.S. It depends on your text-messaging plan.
DISCLOSURE 2: Unfortunately Twitter stopped paying the bill for SMS sent from the UK number. So, if you're in Europe, you can still subscribe to the alerts, but you can't receive the SMS updates. Bummer. There are alternatives like Jaiku (google sponsored) that does send SMS updates. But we haven't migrated our alerts there, yet ;)

1 - Feeling lucky on "twitter"

2 - Join the twitter network

3 - Enter your new username password and email. (Make sure the username is available!)

4 - Create your account

5 - Skip the friends contamination

6 - Choose to configure your phone

7 - Provide your cell phone number and international code call. Make sure it's ok for Twitter to txt messages to your phone, and save.

8 - You need to send the code that twitter gives you to their international phone number in the UK. This step is required only once, as a first time, to make sure you really are the owner of the phone.

10 - Now that you've got a twitter account with the phone enabled, let's start following some alert agents on twitter. From the address bar, goto pointpt on twitter.

11 - Follow pointpt, so you can get updates whenever new free alerts are set up!

13 - Then, activate the updates on the mobile device (i.e. the phone)

14 - Yup, you need to click on ON to make sure that you'll receive the alerts on your phone.

15 - Ok, twitter confirms: you will now receive any time a new txt alert on your phone.

16 - But you can follow more interesting followers of PointPt. Follow the SMS alerts that you like. In this walkthrough, we will follow weatherlisbon, the daily weather forecast agent for Lisbon, sent every morning at 8:30, local time. Click on the weather icon of weatherlisbon.

17 - Follow weatherlisbon (make sure that you're happy to receive those kind of messages on your phone every morning).

18 - Activate your mobile devices.

19 - Make sure you click on ON, so you may receive SMS alerts from this alert agent.

20 - Ok, device updates are ON. Tomorrow morning, get ready to receive the weather forecast for Lisbon city, every day of the rest of your life ;)

21 - If you ever stop receiving txt messages on your phone, send a txt message from your phone to the twitter UK number with the message "ON". Twitter will send you a reply, and the alerts will be reactivated for your phone.

Nostalgia

2008-06-24T09:05:00.001Z

Nostalgia, originally uploaded by Guillaume!.

In memory of Jorge Luís Reis Martins, good friend and colleague.

3G iPhone on the 11th July, in a store nearby you in Portugal

2008-06-09T20:22:00.004Z

Today was the WWDC, the famous Apple keynote by Steve Jobs at the Moscone center.

Basically they announced a new iPhone with the following main new features:

- 3G,
- GPS,
- twice as much battery-life,
- new firmware v2.0,
- half price: 8GB $199 and 16GB $299,
- to be released the July 11th in over 70 countries.

Portugal is included, and it will be distributed by Optimus (Orange) and Vodafone.
You can start screaming like girls gone wild any time now...

The Euro 2008 uefa cup twitter bot

2008-06-08T18:14:00.013Z

Ok, maybe not everyone is aware but, while I'm mingling with numerical models and computational geo-fluid dynamics by day, by night I keep working on this rather low-profile web-project with some friends called PointPontoPt, which is Portuguese for the domain name http://point.pt.

Euro2008uefa

Basically we do twitter bots that send useful alerts to whomever finds them useful. Bots like daily weather forecasts, futebol live scores, cafeteria daily menus, lottery results etc ...
And we've just released a Euro2008 bot. It was tweeting live-scores successfully, before the end of the Portugal-Turkey match. Yay!
Update: However, it failed to work properly for the Germany-Poland game (2-nil) :( Fixed, should work fine now.

Some of you (rare but beloved) readers might have seen my WeatherLisbon twitter bot post. Basically, since that post, we've extended the service to other types of alerts, registered a trademark, made a (poorly simple) site, invited some friends to join the bandwagon, and attended an entrepreneurship course. The latter one of which I heartily recommend. Given an idea and the right will, you'll learn how to write a proper business plan (with financial forecast) that, hopefully, will reach the VC's attention. In the end, I wasn't sufficiently prepared to my final audience of VC's and BA's, so I really believe our potential is completely under-estimated. But I don't mind, as I won't be able to dedicate myself full-time, not until I finish my "#$%"%"#$ phd thesis. Our audience of subscribers has been growing quite steadily and we're nearly topping the 3k followers. (Disclosure: please bare with the show off :p)

Technologically speaking, we're still doing our bash and gnu-tools scripts, only a bit more refined. I'm really looking forward to implement them in ruby, and to develop xmpp bots (though twitter on jabber is now down for some time). We've already been designing a really smart looking relational database for the business. However, it's the web-page that needs more refinements. And I could blog more often about the project.

We've had several requests from different businesses, but most of them I had to decline, due to lack of professional commitment. I only do them on my spare time. Nevertheless, I'm gathering skills, contacts and potential co-workers... There's no rush, as the emerging mobile ecosystem requires a lot of XP before one can really start making good business, and I'm slowly cumulating more than one year and a half of XP on how to give a proper UX on SMS. It's all about second fast with the right UX here.

How to send posts to twitter, jaiku and pownce all at once.

2008-05-30T23:53:00.020Z

In this short how-to we'll learn how to send a post to twitter, jaiku and pownce all at once.

To do it, we'll have to rely on tarpipe, a cool app that lets you upload data to multiple services. For instance, you may want to send photos to flickr and to photobucket. Tarpipe lets you do that.

Before we start, you should read this excellent primer.

Now, you need to have an account on twitter, jaiku and pownce. So go get one. If you need, I can probably send you an invite (still got some).

Then, you'll need to ask pretty please, so that the tarpipe staff provides you with a developer's account (the service is still in alpha).

Once you're in, you just need to create a new workflow. Workflows are pretty similar to Yahoo!Pipe's. I like to call them "pipes" as an homage to the linux vertical bar (|) pipe command. The difference is that, this time, tarpipe follows a one to many philosophy, contrasting with the one-to-one followed by yahoo!pipe.

Build a workflow similar to the one below. You simply connect a REST connector to a twitter, a pownce and a jaiku connector. I linked the "title" element from the REST connector to the micro-blogging services. Once you're through with the connectors, give your workflow a title, a description and choose the REST receptor.

Now, if you still haven't done it, go to your accounts settings and provide to tarpipe with access to all your three accounts at twitter, pownce and jaiku.

Finally, you can just drag and drop this (~~bookmarklet~~) new bookmarklet we (@trodrigues and myself) made to your bookmarks bar. You still need to edit the bookmarklet with the REST API key that tarpipe site gave you for your workflow.

Now, if you click on the bookmarklet, you'll get a new browser window asking you for a text message. Submit it by clicking the "pipe" button and, loo, your message is delivered, presto, on twitter, jaiku and pownce all at once! Enjoy ;)

Here's the extended code for this bookmarklet, if you're interested in getting deeper into bookmarklets...

javascript:
popw=window.open('','Tarpipe micro-post','width=800,height=150');
popw.focus();
popd=popw.document;

popd.write('<form action="http://rest.receptor.tarpipe.net:8000/?key=PUTYOURKEYHERE" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">');
popd.write('<p><input type="text" size="90" name="title" value="%s '+location.href+'"/></p>');
popd.write('<p><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="pipe"/></p>');
popd.write('</form>');

Some final notes: if you don't use the bookmarklet stuff, and instead would rather more email the micro-post, then simply use the Mail connector instead of the REST connector, and then choose email as the receptor. This way, the workflow (aka "pipe") will return you an email address instead of an API key, where you can send your micro-post via the subject or the body of the email.

I personally would have preferred a REST API with GETs instead of POSTs, but, hey, I shouldn't complain so much. After all, it works!

UPDATE:
Some new useful workflows, greatly inspired by Bruno Pedro and Tiago Rodrigues, are "sending a micro-post with link to twitter, jaiku, identi.ca and del.icio.us" and "sending an image by mail attachment to evernote, flickr and photobucket, and then broadcast it to twitter, jaiku and identi.ca".

"If you're going to BarCamp ..."

2008-05-25T11:14:00.011Z

Sweet, yesterday was BarCampFCT, the third Barcamp in Portugal and my first one ever. I nearly missed it... again! But João Moreno and his crew were really nice for letting me come, on such short notice. You can check out updates on the event from twemes.

People from tarpipe, 7syntax and wizi were present. But, except for wizi, none pitched and submitted their ongoing projects. I was a bit disappointed by that. That meant I had to make some sideline talking to get a word or two from them. I pitched my pet-project point.pt and also did a five-second-rounder Ignite talk on bookmarklets, which I find really cool btw.

Otherwise, I got to meet new and interesting people.

However, I was a little bit disappointed by what people presented. I expected more pitches on projects, ideas (at least we had Halfbaked), hacks and demos! No one shared cool hacks! So sad.

We had long talks about platforms, products and services, talks on how to make a presentation. We even had some evangelization uptime on open standards such as OpenId and OAuth. And finally, a talk on entrepreneurship in Portugal. Oh, yeah, and we kick-started with a talk about FireHol.

Anyway, it was fun and it was nice to see what was on people's minds. All my respects to the organizations and the sponsors (corefactor, sapo.pt, Maria Café), but the real stars were the participants.

Twitterfone. Is voice-2-text reaching for ubiquity?

2008-05-18T23:58:00.008Z

Not so long ago, we showed a few ways of integrating voice and the web. Blogbard would stand for text-2-voice. Blogtalkradio would stand for voice-in-rss. But now, the new kid on the block that sits on top of twitter, twitterfone, arrives to show us all what voice-2-text really means. Well, I can't argue that I've tried it out yet - cuz I haven't - for two reasons:
1 - I live in Portugal,
2 - I'm not yet registered in their private beta guest list (hope I will soon enough, though).

What does it do? Well, you simply make a call and talk your tweet in less than a minute. The twitterfone service will translate your recorded voice into text and update your twitter status with it while adding a link to the recording. Simple yet powerful.

Here's a video from this guy who really tried it out (you can see that he's pretty amazed with this service):

Also, nearly on the same level, there already exists this clever hack on top of Blogtalkradio called Twittergram. It basically does the same thing as twitterfone, except that it doesn't translates the recorded message to text (and that's a huge difference).

This could signal a new trend in the mobile web. I really feel that voice-2-text will be a big deal for mobile web-apps ...

This raises an important issue that concerns me, as a mobile-web early-adopter wannabe: I HATE HAVING TO TYPE ANYTHING ON MY PHONE. That's why I almost never send any tweets. The mobile platform is great for reading stuff and browsing around with the phone's joypad, but it's just not comfortable enough for typing. Forget it, I'll never get used to it. And that's why I feel we'll see more of this voice-2-text trending. Voice is the natural way to send commands, messages and content to the phone. It should be the natural way to do anything you want with it: tweet messages, browse the internet ("Google this", "Google that", "weather in lisbon?", etc...), phone some contact...

What do you think? Do you feel comfortable typing messages with your mobile device?