Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Web-Based BitTorrent Downloads via BitLet

Web-based video players revolutionized online multimedia and made YouTube a huge success. It made video streaming easily and universally available for users with a simple web browser.

BitLet allows users to download .torrent files on a computer that doesn’t have a BitTorrent client installed. It makes P2P downloads simple to use. Will it revolutionize file sharing?

BitLet also offers a code generator for publishers who can offer direct BitTorrent downloads on their websites without the need to have a BitTorrent client installed.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Low Cost Online Backup with Amazon S3

How do you backup your critical data? Traditional backup procedures use regular copy sessions to tape, disk or CD-R/DVD-R media. The broadband internet allows companies to provide online backup services. Such online systems can easily scale and provide cost effective remote backup for a wide range of customers. However they are definitely not one-size-fits-all.

Consumer oriented online backup offering such as Carbonite, Mozy or XDrive has a typical price of ~$1/GB/month although limited free services are available. Check out this review on ars technica for details.

Another solution is to use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) with the s3sync tool or the Amazon S3 Firefox Orgainzer plug-in (S3Fox). Pricing ($0.15/month for a GB of stored data) is really attractive compared to the above services.

Find out more in these practical how to guides:

Friday, July 27, 2007

Low Cost Virtual Reality in Second Life

Building interactive VR simulators for training could be an expensive project. Second Life could lower the costs since it's relatively easy to build interactive objects and buildings for avatars in this 3D virtual world. Add a motion-sensitive controller like the Nintendo Wiimote and the simulator is ready for training!

Wired has a nice article discussing the possibilities: Wii + Second Life = New Training Simulator. Imagine the setup with a nice 3D display and you have a full low cost VR simulator environment!

Image Copyright 2007, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Web Trend Map 2007

Welcome back to Innowave - the next wave of internet innovations.


Have a look at this awesome Subway Map of the Internet by Information Architects Japan. It shows the most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective mapped just like a subway map.

The map includes the following "subway lines":
  • Sharing
  • Tools
  • Technology
  • Knowhow
  • Moneymaker
  • News
  • Social News
  • Community
  • Design
  • Movies
  • Music
The sites are mapped as subway stations including Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Ebay, Digg, SecondLife, LinkedIn and many others. Congratulations!