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Games where physical and virtual worlds unite

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:09:00 -0700

There are numerous examples of gameplay with innovative controlling methods linked to the real life. Wii and Kinect take us off-sofas, mobiles or PSP's double as steering wheels and so on.

Nice innovation from Disney combining toy cars and Radiator springs on iPad!

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Helsinki public transportation network visualized

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 23:58:00 -0700

Nice public transportation visualization video by Lauri Wanhala.

It would be interesting to know, which tools were used. Do you have a clue?

...via Antti Vilpponen

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Europe versus Facebook, round 1

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:52:00 -0700

I was reading Olivier's blog post urging us to request our data from Facebook backed up by European data protection law and started to craft my comment:

Olivier, I understand where you and the source article writer are coming from. Law is law even for the new online behemoths.
I don't believe though that sending request letters to Facebook and acting like a shadow boxer will change anything. How about trying to persuade them with friendlier approach? Instead of trying to get a (pretty much useless) bunch of PDF pages, what about trying to get FB (and others) improving their export functionalities? The ones which give us our data in format whereby some clever coders in new startups can create corresponding import functionalities to visualise and utilise the data.
In fact FB already has such a functionality. They call it download and it works quite nicely...

But prior to posting my comment I started to think about all the data which is NOT in the downloaded XML file. I browsed through the site Europe versus Facebook and got interested in the datamodels, requests, those PDF's and everything. The debate, initiated by some Austrian students, is really heating up and the initiative getting more public - so far mainly in german speaking parts of our continent (no wonder...)

Interesting to see what happens. Facebook will not withdraw from Europe nor re-work their approach, but if the debate moves the behemoth(s) at least slightly towards transparency, better export functionality and control over deletions, I am ready to like, +1 and (heart) the outcomes.

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CEM in telecoms 2011, Day #2

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:17:40 -0700

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CEM in telecoms 2011, Day #1

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:01:00 -0700

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Pictures from #Arctic15 today

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:28:51 -0700

Arctic15 conference today was great. Well done, everyone involved!

New companies and services - Conferize, Holvi, Mancx and Campalyst to name the most interesting in my opinion. Plus great speakers like Steve Huffmann from Hipmunk and Jens Begemann from Wooga.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Social aspects of #londonriots

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:25:00 -0700

It is difficult to understand the ongoing rioting and looting in the UK. Forget the freedom, human rights or world peace - there are iPads and sneakers in the shops! Hopefully the madness will end soon.

Graham Brown opens up the social aspects of the riots in the following slides:

(Graham Brown mobileYouth) The London Riots - wtf?

View more presentations from Graham Brown (mobileYouth)

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Angry Birds everywhere. On top of the next birthday cake as well?

Wed, 25 May 2011 21:10:03 -0700

There seems to be Angry Birds popping up everywhere. Some of them are pure jokes only but then there are serious attempts to sell something as well. I wonder what's the revenue share deal or license payment model between Rovio and Sweetdreams on the Birthday Cup Cakes? I will definitely suggest these to my kids!

While waiting for the Angry Birds movies, there is room for creativity on the story of the birds. Why are the Angry Birds so angry? Read Hilary Curtis' hilarious answer - the Angry Birds are like Dodos.

Have you seen the bird below in nearby forests?

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Will Visual.ly real.ly help me?

Mon, 02 May 2011 11:36:00 -0700

Visual.ly promises to be THE site for creating, sharing and exploring great visualizations. Bold statement. Sounds great!

The above punchline includes "Create". Will visual.ly be an online tool to CREATE visualizations? I am eager to see as the promo video does not include creating vizualisations and if yes, how? At one point the video only talks about exploring, sharing and promoting.

They say: Story + Data + Design = Vizualization. Makes sense.

I only wonder, whether data visualisation and infographics the very same thing as it seems that visual.ly is putting it. I would say that:

Infographics = 40% Story + 20% Data + 40% Design

and

Data vizualisation = 20% Story + 50% Data + 30% Design

Same elements but different proportions.

Let's see, what visual.ly will provide when the curtains unfold!

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What's going on Apple? Why do you store my where-abouts?

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:14:45 -0700

Quite amazingly the iPhone is storing the location history in a file according to the recent revelation. And the history of my where-abouts is then passed on to my Mac in the normal iPhone backups as Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan explain.

The key question is: Why? The gentlemen have asked it from Apple's product security team with no answer so far.

It is slightly disturbing that the tracks are available on my phone and computer - perhaps uploaded to the servers in Cupertino as well, who knows?

Part of me is angry at Apple - while the data-enthusiast part of me is thrilled to see this level of detail available under my keyboard!

With a visualisation software (iPhone Tracker) available to unveil the tracks, it is easy to see that I have travelled to UK, India, Sweden and Finnish Lapland recently.

And that my Indian footprint is pretty much limited to Gurgaon area and the outskirts of Delhi:

The London hovering is a bit more central.

This is all straightforward. But the interesting questions start to appear when I look at my home areas. Why are there no major dots around my suburban area on the map?

What is actually the algorithm to store the dots?

It seems that the location is based on cell network based location rather than built-in GPS. Why is that? GPS would be more accurate and easy to be obtained.

Is it storing only the locations I have used cellular data at? This could solve the home-area mystery as I always use WLAN at home. But the theory fails in India, where I switched off the data roaming.

What is the interval of the data storage? Maybe I should do some detail level investigations on the actual data. Interesting.

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Do you know which data is shared with 3rd parties by your smartphone apps?

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:45:22 -0800

Check out this excellent article by WSJ

Did you know that Angry Birds is sharing your location information and unique phone id with Flurry? Or that Grindr is sharing your location, phone id and age+gender with Millenial Media, Jumptap and Admob?

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Visualising with Impure

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:20:00 -0800

Now I have found THE tool. Barcelona based company Bestiario has created Impure, online visualisation tool. Great!

As they put it: "[Impure is...] bringing all the power of the comprehension of information and knowledge to the not programmers that want to work with information in a professional way."

My first published visualisation of Finnish Fell Orienteering competitions. See the actual visualisation here: meronen.net (in finnish).

This visualisation is based on Impure blog planes crash visualisation. The power of Impure is that you can utilise an existing model, tweak and insert your own data.

Simple steps the visualisation performs:

1. Load the data from Google Spreadsheet and separate the rows out from the table

2. Load the background images from Flickr based on the keywords in the table

3. Put the data together with the images loaded and create the visualisation with the radio button interface

4. Save, publish and embed to your web site.

Still to add, the company is utilising wiki and community based support. I am in!

Some other visualisations made with Impure:

Zaragoza traffic

Barcelona biking

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Taking context into account: Situations and Waze

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:48:47 -0800

Nokia Situations utilises the available data to draw conclusions and automatically adjust the phone behaviour. Turn off the ringer when you are in a concert (time of day, location), turning the phone silent when in a meeting (calendar) or switching on the maps application when driving (bluetooth) like one user tells he is doing.

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Hopefully there is also a feature to let the phone learn about the behaviour. If I always put my phone silent at 11PM, it should learn it automatically. If I always turn on Waze when I jump on my Volkswagen, I would hope to have it on automatically. In a similar way like the application itself learns my routes and my route patterns.

By the way; if the waze community in Finland were bigger...

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Blyk model in four minutes

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:59:49 -0800

Through the TelecomChannel and explained by Geoff Morley.

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Check also "It's a numbers game" if you want to do the maths related to mobile advertising.

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What if JMac had a teleporter?

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:22:31 -0800

JMac would be ubiquitous not only virtually but also physically!

His "If Mandela had tweeted" is a story worth spending fifteen minutes of your life with. Well done!

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And the teleporter? Well - check the wikipedia

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Entertaining with serious statistics

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 10:45:05 -0700

I would not have thought that a swedish professor talking about child mortality rates can be enterteining. But there he goes, Hans Rosling, on links between female education, family size and child mortality. Worth watching!

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