Innowave

Bing Maps Augmented-Reality Demo on TED

2010-02-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. He is the architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft, building augmented reality into searchable maps. He's also the co-creator of Photosynth, software that assembles static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.

Bionic Eye - An Augmented Reality iPhone App

2009-09-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

Bionic Eye is a new iPhone 3GS application to visualize Points of Interest (POI) located in your nearby environment in the US, thanks to a unique Augmented Reality functionality using the iPhone camera. It is similar to the Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser which have been released for Android phones earlier.

Bionic Eye's POI databases include restaurants, WiFi hotspots, subway stations (New York Subway, Washington Metro, Chicago L Rapid Transit), etc. Over 100.000 POI are already included in this application.

Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You're History

2009-09-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Wired: Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You're History

Today, nearly 3 million users access Netflix's instant streaming service, watching an estimated 5 million movies and TV shows every week on their PCs or living room sets. They get it through Roku Digital Video Player, which was successfully launched in May 2008. (The Roku now also offers more than 45,000 movies and TV shows on demand through Amazon.com and, since August, live and archived Major League Baseball games.) They get it through their Xbox 360s—Microsoft added Netflix to its Xbox Live service last fall. They get it through LG and Samsung Blu-ray players. They get it through their TiVos and new flatscreen TVs. By the end of 2009, nearly 10 million Netflix-equipped gadgets will be hanging on walls and sitting in entertainment centers. And Hastings says this is just the beginning: "It's possible that within a few years, nearly all Internet-connected consumer electronics devices will include Netflix."

Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser

2009-09-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

Layar is a free application on your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality through the camera of your mobile phone.

Layar is available for the T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and other Android phones in all Android Markets. It comes pre-installed on the Samsung Galaxy in the Netherlands.

How do you use Layar?

By holding the phone in front of you like a camera, information is displayed on top of the camera display view.

For all points of interest which are displayed on the screen, information is shown at the bottom of the screen.

What do you see in the screen?

On top of the camera image (displaying reality) Layar adds content layers. Layers are the equivalent of webpages in normal browsers. Just like there are thousands of websites there will be thousands of layers. One can easily switch between layers by selecting another via the menu button, pressing the logobar or by swiping your finger across the screen.

The Layar Content Catalog includes the following categories:

Real estate
Health care
Transportation
Tourism: Places to stay
Tourism / Tours / Guides
Leisure and entertainment
Games
Weather
Retail
University / Schools
Local search & Directory service
Social networks & communities

What does it take to make a layer

A layer consists of three parts: The layer definition, the list of POIs (Points of Interest) and each individual POI.

The layer definitions are created on the Layar Provisioning website and stored in the Layar database. The web interface will allow developers to set all the attributes that make the look & feel of the layer. It will also allow the developer to manage the publishing process of a layer. Once published, the end-user will be able to view the new layer in the Layer Gallery inside the app.

In summary, a layer developer needs to create a layer definition via the Layer Provisioning Website and expose a web service (REST) that can be called by the Layar Server using the Layar API and optionally expose (made-for-mobile) web pages for further action on each POI.

Wireline and Mobile Broadband Penetration and Traffic Study

2009-07-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

In Q1 2009, the US market exceeded $10B in quarterly mobile data service revenues for the first time. The subscription penetration in the US is well past 90% and the mobile data usage is on the rise. While the rate of new subscriptions has slowed, the pace of innovation is going very strong. It is quite apparent that the mobile industry is going through a significant transition from voice to data, from making calls to getting lost in applications and from voice communications to multimedia communications. Helped by the ever expanding wireless broadband networks, and release of hit devices every quarter, and consumer’s insatiable appetite for information and content has brought us to the surge of a data tsunami that will shake the industry to its core.

In 2009, the global yearly mobile data traffic will reach a new milestone – 1 Exabyte(EB) or 1 Million Terabytes (TB). By 2016-17, the global yearly mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 1 Zettabyte (ZB) or 1000 Exabytes. By 2014, in the US alone, the total yearly mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 40 EB. How do you go about managing such growth in a profitable manner when the cost of supporting such traffic will increase exponentially despite the move to 4G? Will the move to LTE offer some respite?

The new report Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era discusses the analysis done by Chetan Sharma Consulting on the growth of mobile data traffic in the US market and how the ecosystem can apply some strategies to manage growth and profits. We built detailed models to estimate the rise of mobile data network traffic and discuss some solutions to handle such growth in this paper.

Youtube 3D Video Player

2009-07-24T00:26:00.000-07:00

YouTube introduced a stereoscopic player for watching videos in 3D. If you play a 3D video a drop-down menu will show options for red/cyan and amber/blue 3D glasses and some options that don't require glasses. Here's a brief overview video.

To enable the 3D player, you need to add the following tag to one of your videos: yt3d:enable=true. Peter Bradshaw, a Google employee, has more information about this experimental feature:

I'm the developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project. It's currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes. A fix for this is in the works.

The current tags are provisional and may change or expand. They are:

yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode.
yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships.

You can try the new feature by searching for yt3d:enable=true.

Self Destructing E-Mail with Vanish Firefox Plugin

2009-07-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.

Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment — specifying that the document or message should "vanish" in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.

The technical paper, which will appear at the 18th USENIX Security Symposium in August, describes the concepts behind Vanish in detail. Briefly, as mentioned above, the user never knows the encryption key. This means that there is no risk of the user exposing that key at some point in the future, perhaps through coercion, court order, or compromise. So what is done with the key?

Vanish leverages an unusual storage media in a novel way: namely, global-scale peer-to-peer networks. Vanish creates a secret key to encrypt a user's data item (such as an email), breaks the key into many pieces and then sprinkles the pieces across the P2P network. As machines constantly join and leave the P2P network, the pieces of the key gradually disappear. By the time the hacker or someone with a subpoena actually tries to obtain access to the message, the pieces of the key will have permanently disappeared.

The Vanish prototype uses the Vuze Bittorrent Distributed Hash Table as the underlying P2P network. It supports data timeouts of 8--9 hours by default, though longer timeouts are possible.

BlockBuster OnDemand Streaming on Samsung HDTV and Blu-ray Players

2009-07-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Blockbuster OnDemand challenges Netflix and Amazon's Instant HD Video on Demand service.

Blockbuster OnDemand is coming to a long list of Samsung TV and home theater products. The online pay-per-view streaming service will be added to Samsung's online-enabled HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and Blu-ray home theater systems via future software updates. As part of the deal, Blockbuster will also sell some of the Samsung products in its video rental stores.

The service, due to launch in September or October in the United States, is similar to Blockbuster's existing pacts with TV maker Vizio and digital video recorder maker TiVo Inc, which was announced in March.

According to Samsung, the Blockbuster OnDemand feature will be added to "Samsung LCD and Plasma HDTVs Series 650 and above, and Samsung LED HDTVs Series 7000 and above," as well as "select 2009 Samsung Blu-ray players and home theater systems."

Most probably these top HDTV and Blu-ray players will play Blockbuster HD movies:

Finally TV's will partially take over the role of the desktop monitors to be our window to the broadband internet. How will Netflix and Amazon keep up in this competition?

Do you like these Samsung devices or do you prefer the excellent and Vizio 32" 1080p LCD HDTV (VOJ320F1A) at a low price of ~$500?

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

2009-07-08T03:22:00.000-07:00

So today, Google has announced a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's their attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year Google will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. Google is designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. Google is completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and Google is working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.

This is the age of Web as the Platform. As Eric Schmidt said in his Google I/O keynote it is just the beginning for the new computing model enabled by cloud computing, the open web and mobile devices. Viva la Web 3.0!

Webware 100 - The Coolest Web Apps 2009

2009-07-02T03:32:00.000-07:00

Below you'll find 100 Web apps in 11 categories voted to be the best of the best by CNET Webware readers and users of the apps themselves. Each category lists the top 10 applications:

Audio & Music

Amazon MP3
Grooveshark
iTunes
Jamendo
JamLegend
Lala
Last.fm
Nexus Radio
Pandora
Project Playlist

Browsing

Diigo
Firefox
Flock
Google Chrome
iGoogle
Internet Explorer 8
Maxthon
Opera
Safari
XMarks

Commerce

Amazon
Craigslist
Elance
Etsy
Eventbrite
PayPal
Woot
Zillow
ZipRealty
ZocDoc

Communication

Digsby
Dimdim
Gmail
Pidgin
Postbox
RingCentral
Skype
Windows Live Hotmail
Windows Live Messenger
Yahoo Messenger

Infrastructure & Storage

Adobe Air
BitTorrent
Carbonite
DropBox
Dropio
Facebook Connect
Mozy
OpenID
Windows Live SkyDrive
YouSendIt

Location-based services

FlightStats
Goog411
Google Earth
Google Maps
Live Search Maps
OpenTable
PolicyMap
Topix
TripIt
Yelp

Photo & Video

Amazon Video on Demand
Flickr
Hulu
Justin.tv
Photobucket
Picasa Web Albums
Picnik
Ustream
Vimeo
YouTube

Productivity

FreshBooks
Google Calendar
Google Docs
Intuit QuickBase
LogMeIn
Microsoft Office Live Small Business
Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Mint
Remember the Milk
Zoho

Search & Reference

About.com
Answers.com
Ask.com
eHow
Google
Live Search
Scour
WikiHow
Wikipedia
Yahoo

Social & Publishing

Bebo
Drupal
Facebook
Gaia Online
Hi5
Meebo
MySpace
StarDoll
Twitter
Wordpress.com (with Wordpress platform)

Editors' Choice

Amazon Web Services
Aviary
Cuil
Evernote
Farecast
GoodGuide
Google Voice
Mobile Me
OAuth
Presently
Twitter Search
Windows Live Sync

Google Voice - One Phone Number To Rule Them All

2009-06-29T03:25:00.000-07:00

Google Voice is a new service from Google currently available free of charge by invitation only.

Google Voice offers one Google Number for all your calls and SMS. The service includes Google Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts, free calls, conference calling, and more. Google Voice is in fact a convergent telco 2.0 type service that executives of telecommunications companies can worry about. Is it Google's answer to Skype?

A Google Phone Number is like a regular phone number except it is not tied to a phone or location. It's tied to you. When somebody calls you they just call your Google Number and they don't have to decide to call you at home, work or on your cell. And with a Google Number you choose where it rings. It can ring all your phones at one or different phones based on who's calling... When you change jobs, move homes or switch your phone service your Google Number stays the same.

Google Voice is based on the GrandCentral who has been acquired by Google in 2007.

Google Voice features include:

One number for all your calls and SMS

Call screening - Announce and screen callers
Listen in - Listen before taking a call
Block calls - Keep unwanted callers at bay
SMS - Send, receive, and store SMS
Place calls - Call US numbers for free
Taking calls - Answer on any of your phones
Phone routing - Phones ring based on who calls
Forwarding phones - Add phones and decide which ring

Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts

Voicemail transcripts - Read what your voicemail says
Listen to voicemail - Check online or from your phone
Notifications - Receive voicemails via email or SMS
Personalize greeting - Vary greetings by caller
Share voicemail - Forward or download voicemails

More cool things you can do with Google Voice

Conference calling - Join people into a single call
Call record - Record calls and store them online
Call switch - Switch phones during a call
Mobile site - View your inbox from your mobile
GOOG-411 - Check directory assistance
Manage groups - Set preferences by group

Augmented Reality Games on Phones

2009-06-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

Augmented Reality is going to be coming to your Android phone or iPhone 3GS very shortly. All it takes is a decent processor, a camera, a compass and a GPS. These features enable fun games and useful geo-oriented applications.

The Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech investigating the design and implementation of augmented- and mixed-reality experiences. Their new AR game is called ARhrrrr.

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3D town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

This fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game.

ARhrrr! was designed for the Nvidia Tegra but similar games and applications will become widely available for the iPhone 3GS and Android phones soon. The virtual world and real world are merging into the Metaverse.

HOME Movie Views Tops 1M on YouTube

2009-06-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

HOME - the Film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand has been released on June 5th 2009 World Environment Day. For the first time ever, a film has been released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format: movie theaters, TV, DVD and Internet.

The full Project HOME movie is available on YouTube in HD (1280×720 mp4 @ 2000 kbit/s) for free. It has reached one million views in 9 days. The network traffic to deliver the full 93 minutes of HOME HD is in the magnitude of a petabyte!

The plan was to show HOME Project on YouTube until 14th June but the date has been apparently extended. The download counter is close to 1.2 millions and counting. Thank you Yann Arthus-Bertrand, PPR and YouTube!

HOME on the iPhone

It is now possible to find out the latest news on the planet, calculate your carbon footprint or watch Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film thanks on the iPhone thanks to a free application available on the Apple Store website.

Siri Virtual Personal Assistant iPhone App

2009-06-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

Siri is a Virtual Personal Assistant - a new way to interact with the Internet on your mobile phone. Like a real assistant, Siri helps you get things done. You interact with Siri by just saying, in your own words, what you want to do. You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, and get reservations for Saturday night. You can discover things to do over the weekend, get tickets to the movies, or call a cab when you’re out on the town. You don't have to search through a bunch of web pages, following links and hunting down facts. Siri does all the work giving you the information you need at your fingertips.

Years in the making, Siri is born out of SRI's CALO Project, the largest Artificial Intelligence project in U.S. history. (CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). Made possible by a $150 million DARPA investment, the CALO Project included 25 research organizations and institutions and spanned 5 years. Siri is bringing the benefits of this technology to the public, in the first mainstream consumer application of a virtual personal assistant.

Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) represent the next generation interaction paradigm for the Internet. In today's paradigm, we follow links on portals, feeds, and search results. With a VPA, we interact by having a conversation. We tell the assistant what we want to do, in our own words, and it applies multiple services and information sources to help accomplish our task. If the assistant does not understand completely, it asks for clarification. If it cannot find a solution from available sources, it offers alternatives. Like a real assistant, a VPA is personal: it uses information about the individual's preferences and history of interaction to help solve their specific tasks, and it gets better with experience.

Siri will launch later this summer so you’ll be able to download the Siri iPhone app later this summer.

Further Reading

Technology Review - Emerging Technologies 2009: Intelligent Software Assistant
Nova Spivack - Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone

HOME project - Free HD Earth Movie on YouTube

2009-06-04T00:42:00.000-07:00

HOME - a Film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (to be released on June 5th)

The French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand is well known for Earth from Above, a stunning collection of photographs that affords its viewers a window into the world's workings. He has wandered the globe to gather this collection of more than 200 uniformly striking photographs. His new project is a unique movie HOME. In his own words:

"We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.

HOME has been made for you: share it! And act for the planet."

More than a movie, HOME will be a major event all over the globe: for the first time ever, a film will be released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format: movie theaters, TV, DVD and Internet.

HOME project is available on YouTube in HD for free. Home is also available on DVD, Blu-ray formats and as a companion book - Home: A Hymn to the Planet and Humanity.

The free release of the first HD movie is another milestone for broadband internet innovations.

Google Wave Reinvents E-mail, Instant Messaging and More

2009-05-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. Yet, it is the most common form of communications on the Internet. What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?

Google plans to reinvent hosted communications. Google Wave which has been unveiled today is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.

Google Wave was developed by the Sydney-based Google team that created Google Maps, used by millions of people worldwide. Led by Lars and Jens Rasmussen and operating as a remote start-up within Google, under the codename "Walkabout", the Aussie team focused on improving the way communication and collaboration works for users on the web. They developed Google Wave, equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Open Communications Platform

The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself, or extend other applications with waves. The Google Wave Federation Protocol enables sharing waves between wave providers. Check out the introduction on the Google Wave Developer Blog for more details.

It's time to reinvent communications!

Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow

2009-05-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

"I guess that Web Hooks are now officially the Next Big Thing." - Tim Bray

What are Web Hooks and why are they the "lightning bolts of cloud computing"? Web APIs and mashups have been popular in the world of Web 2.0. In fact at the time of my last post on the Top 10 APIs for Web Mashups in 2007 there were ~500 APIs listed on ProgrammableWeb. Today the number of APIs listed are more than 1.300 and mashups has passed the milestone of 4.000!

Web hooks are user-defined callbacks over HTTP. They’re intended to, in a sense, “jailbreak” our web applications to become more extensible, customizable, and ultimately more useful. Conceptually, web applications only have a request-based “input” mechanism: web APIs. They lack an event-based output mechanism, and this is the role of web hooks. People talk about Unix pipes for the web, but they forget: pipes are based on standard input and standard output. Feeds are not a sufficient form of output for this, which is partly why Yahoo Pipes was not the game changer some people expected. Instead, we need adoption of a simple, real-time, event-driven mechanism, and web hooks seem to be the answer. Web hooks are bringing a new level of event-based programming to the web.

Jeff Lindsay ( http://www.progrium.com ) at Google talking about Web Hooks. Slides here.

His talk introduces the concept of web hooks: simple HTTP callbacks with huge implications. This model allows web services to be customized by the user and tightly integrated with each other unlike anything before. Chock-full of demos and real world examples, this talk also shares an under-appreciated vision of the web that most of the experts have missed: a vision of user-generated functionality and the *real* programmable web.

Who is using web hooks today?

A rapidly expanding list of some of the companies or projects which provide Web hooks in their applications.

DevjaVu
BitBucket
GitHub
Shopify
SurveyGizmo
Versionshelf
PayPal (Instant Payment Notification)
Jott (Links)
PBwiki
Google Code
PubSubHubbub

The concept of webhooks is another innovation milestone on our way to the world of Web 3.0.

Eric Schmidt @ Google I/O 2009: It's Time

2009-05-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

In his Google I/O keynote Eric Schmidt said that it is just the beginning for the new computing model enabled by cloud computing, the open web and mobile devices. As the CEO of Google he has defined Web 3.0 in 2007. Now it is time for make it happen!

"It is the beginning of the real win of cloud computing, of the real win of applications, of the real win of the Internet which is changing the computing paradigm ... so it just works. And it works no matter what device you're using, no matter what operating system you're using... That is the promise of our new web computing model."

Google I/O is a developer gathering focused on pushing the boundaries of web applications using Google and open web technologies. Google engineers and web development leaders will lead you through two days full of in-depth breakout sessions on the latest technologies, and informal Q&A at Fireside Chats. The sessions include topics about AJAX and Data APIs, Clients, Google Web ToolKit (GWT), App Engine, Enterprise, Mobile and Social applications.

Interesting Google I/O sessions:

There is great innovation happening at Google! Check out the Google Code Channel on YouTube for more insight.

Rovio Wi-Fi Home Security Robot

2009-05-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to be in two places at once? Now you can.

WowWee Rovio Wi-Fi Enabled WebCam Robot is a groundbreaking new Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam that lets you view and interact with its environment through streaming video and audio, wherever you are! It is a new challenger of the remote control Spykee bot that you have seen on my blog earlier.

The Rovio has an impressive list of features that makes it useful as a home security robot, telepresence device or a just for fun toy gadget:

Easily remote control from any web-enabled device: PC or Mac, cell phone, smartphone, PDA or even your video game console.

Head-mounted moveable camera and wide range of vision

Indoor GPS

MPEG4 video

Self-docking capabilities for auto recharge

Built-in LED headlight

Wi-Fi connectivity (802.11b and 802.11g)

The Internet of Things is happening as innovations like remote control wifi robots are becoming connected devices. Roveo is a pioneer and it could probably be improved but it shows the possibilities and is fun to play with.

Why is the Internet Disruptive? What Industries will it Disrupt Next?

2009-05-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

Fred Wilson has given a recent Marketing Talk@Google Mountain View. He is a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures. Here's how the talk was described in the email that was sent around Google announcing it:

Fred will be talking about "disruptive industries". Media/entertainment has taken the brunt of the disruptive force of the internet and internet technology but that’s just the start. What industries are next? Energy, education, consumer finance, and health care all seem ripe. What are those industries going to look like in 20 years, 40 years, 60 years?

So what industries are next to be disrupted by the Internet innovations after media? Fred argues that any business that is End To End Digital is a good candidate. He suggests the following list:

Consumer Finance
Education
Energy
Health Care?
Government?

Disruption - Final Version

View more OpenOffice presentations from fredwilson.

The Disruption Talk is also available on Fred's blog avc.com.

Amazing SSD and Hard Drive Deals on Amazon

2009-05-20T03:59:00.000-07:00

The first terabyte hard drive had been introduced 2 years ago. Nowadays you can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $100. Great capacity at an affordable price!

2009 will be the year when Solid State Drives (SSDs) will become mainstream by offering faster disk performance and greater durability than traditional hard drives. Since they use NAND flash memory instead of spinning platters for storage, there's no waiting for disks to spin up, and there are no moving parts to worry about breaking down.

Amazon offers great deals (up to 64% discount) on traditional hard drives and SSD storage. Have a look at these selected bestsellers of Western Digital Hard Drives and Intel SSDs:

WD My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N
1 TB external USB disk for $120 (save 25%)
WD Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, SATA II WD10EADS
1 TB 3.5" internal disk for $90 (save 35%)
WD My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDME3200TN
320 GB portable USB disk for $90 (save 31%)
WD 1TB GreenPower AV 16MB Cache 25dBA Hard Drive WD10EVCS
1 TB low noise disk for audiovisual applications like TiVo for $109 (save 64%!)
Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5 X25-M 80GB 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive (MLC SSD)
80GB mainstream SSD for $325 (save 49%!)

These are the top hard drives and SSD for now. Can they keep up with the huge storage requirements of HD video content?

PlanetInAction Ships 3D Ship Simulator Using Google Earth Plugin

2009-05-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the ever increasing detail in Google Earth it has now become feasible to write high quality applications and games for the Google Earth API. PlanetInAction.com hosts such virtual environments where the world is your playground. Their first installment is "Ships" - a 3D ship simulator which will take you past the World's incredible scenery at a leisurely pace. All you need to play Ships is a browser and the Google Earth plugin. Many more exciting applications will be added soon.

"Ships" is a case study / Technology show piece that demonstrates what can be achieved with Google Earth. While map data has a tremendous value for practical purposes, it can also be used as a backdrop for a range of games. Google Earth proves extremely capable to handle many overlays with alpha transparencies which enables developers to create intricate and graphically rich instruments. Proof of that can be seen in the Compass/rudder instrument which consists of 5 layers of bitmaps.

When you start "Ships" you will be looking at this screen. By default you are in control of a closed river barge located at "Waal haven Noord" in the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This location is chosen because Rotterdam is one of worlds largest ports and is shown in great detail in Google Earth. You are looking out across the "Nieuwe Maas" river towards the city of Rotterdam. On the horizon you can see the "Euro mast" tower. From this vantage point you can see some of the other ships you can sail on in "Ships" and yes, the Airship Hindenburg is also part of your fleet.

Check out the gallery for more screenshots or click here to play ships now.

Ships was developed by Dinther Product Design. They have other innovative project such as Virtual Windows. It will turn your monitor into a true window onto a 3D world. Head tracking and special screen management will one day make for the next generation of simulator equipment. Have a look at this video on YouTube.

Wolfram|Alpha Launch Webcast

2009-05-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Watch a live webcast of the Wolfram|Alpha system being brought online for the first time today on Friday, May 15, beginning at 7pm CST.

Check out my earlier post for an overview on Wolfram|Alpha or this new introduction screencast by Stephen Wolfram.

The Best of the Web 2009 - 13th Annual Webby Award Winners

2009-05-12T05:04:00.000-07:00

Webby Winners truly represent the best of the Web. With nearly 70 categories, Website entries make up the majority of Webby Awards Winners, Nominees and Honorees. Some are beautiful to look at and interact with. Others are a testament to usability and functionality. And a handful excel across the board. To be selected among the best is an incredible achievement worthy of praise.

Webby Award Winner Websites in 2009 by category:

Activism - Protect An Acre
Art - Keith Tyson Website
Associations - Create an Effect
Automotive - The Truth About SMART
Banking/Bill Paying - Xero
Beauty and Cosmetics - AXE 100 Girls
Best Copy/Writing - NYTimes.com
Best Home/Welcome Page - adidas.com homepage
Best Navigation/Structure - WHITEvoid online portfolio
Best Practices - NYTimes.com
Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics - Coraline Website
Best Use of Photography - The Big Picture
Best Use of Typography - Wordle
Best Use of Video or Moving Image - TED.com
Best Visual Design - Aesthetic - The Turbo Gene Test
Best Visual Design - Function - NIKEiD
Blog - Business - 5 Blogs Before Lunch
Blog - Cluture/Personal - 1000 Awesome Things
Blog - Political - Democracy in America Blog
Broadband - NBC.com Full Episode Player
Celebrity/Fan - Yahoo! omg!
Charitable Organizations Nonprofit - The Nature Conservancy
Community - Flickr
Consumer Electronics - Secret Services
Corporate Communications - Seymourpowell
Cultural Institutions - Guggenheim Museum
Education - Smarthistory
Employment - TheLadders
Events - YouTube LIVE
Family/Parenting - Disney Family.com
Fashion - Red Issue
Financial Services - Mint.com
Food and Beverage - Hotel 626
Games - Club Penguin
Games-Related - The Escapist
Government - BayBridge360
Guides/Ratings/Reviews - Very Short List
Health - Take Care Down There
Humor - The Onion
Insurance - NWMutual "Let Your Worries Go"
IT Hardware/Software - HP - Creative Studio
Law - WomensLaw.org
Lifestyle - BBC Climate Change: Bloom
Magazine - TheAtlantic.com
Movie and Film - Sundance Channel
Music - NPR Music
NetArt - Dreamgrove: webpage and interactive garden
News - BBC's News website
Newspaper - guardian.co.uk
Personal Web Site - My Star Wars Collection - Joshua Budich
Pharmaceuticals - Leading Ladies
Podcasts - guardian.co.uk podcasts
Politics - The Huffington Post
Professional Services - cake-factory
Radio - NPR.org
Real Estate - Trulia
Religion and Spirituality - Comment is free: belief
Restaurant - Parish Food and Goods
Retail - NIKEiD
School/University - Campus Daily Guides
Science - Cassini Mission Website
Self-Promotion/Portfolio - Thank You begins with a T.
Services and Applications - Animoto
Social Networking - Digg
Sports - ESPN.com
Student - Mission Loc@l
Telecommunications - Orange 'Balloonacy'
Television - Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub
Tourism - Tourisme Montreal
Travel - Kayak.com
Weird - Jason Nelson's Digital Oddities
Youth - Tate Kids

Congratulations! Check out the full list of 2009 Webby Award Winners, People's Voice Winners and Nominees on WebbyAwards.com.

Web Trend Map 4 by Information Architects

2009-05-11T03:15:00.000-07:00

The 2009 Web Trend Map is the fourth edition of this awesome annual publication by Information Architects. Web Trend Map 4 visualizes the 333 leading web domains and the 111 most influential Internet people on the Tokio Metro map.

Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it and is assigned to an individual station on the map.

The soon to be published 2009 version of Web Trend Map 4 includes the following lines:

Application
Publishing
Opinion
News
Identity
Creativity
Money
Broadcasting
Knowledge
Advertisement
Sharing
Entertainment
Filter

The map also includes Web Trend Ranking with the Top 50 most influential domains:

Google
Yahoo
MSN
Apple
Wikipedia
Amazon
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
The Pirate Bay
The New York Times
Firefox
Adobe
Digg
Reddit
eBay
LinkedIn
Flickr
craigslist
deviantART
WordPress
The Huffington Post
Drudge Report
The Daily Show
CNN
The Guardian
The Washington Post
TechCrunch
The Wall Street Journal
TED
vimeo
FriendFeed
hulu
PayPal
StumbleUpon
Blogger
Bloomberg
Dailymotion
MySpace
O'Reilly
Last.fm
Delicious
Drupal
Ask
Blizzard
CNET
Skype
Fotolog
mixi
Spiegel.de

The final beta version of the map is available as a PNG image on flickr.

Amazon Launch Kindle DX 9.7" Wireless Reading Device

2009-05-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

Today is the launch of the Kindle DX, the large 9.7" screen addition to the Kindle family.

This is the customer letter by Jeff Bezos:

Dear Customers,

A strange thing happened on the way to the paperless society. We humans created more paper than ever before. Computer printers (and their evil companion, the ink-toner cartridge) have proliferated, and most of us routinely print out and lug around loads of personal and professional documents. Why? It's not that buying printers or changing ink-toner cartridges is fun. It's because reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays. Printing has been worth the hassle.

Kindle starts to change that. People who see Kindle's display for the first time do a double-take. It looks and reads like real paper. People who swore they would never read books on computers are reading books on Kindle in numbers far greater than we ever expected. And they're now starting to ask: If I can carry my whole library around on my Kindle, how about I carry all my personal and professional documents there too?

We're excited to announce Kindle DX, the large screen addition to the Kindle family.

Kindle DX's display is two and a half times the size of the Kindle display. The display is large enough that you can read PDF files natively without scrolling, panning, or zooming, and without re-flowing, which destroys the original structure of the document. Text and images are amazingly sharp, and you can carry all your personal and professional documents with you in one slender package.

Kindle DX is also terrific for reading books, magazines, and newspapers. The Kindle Store has more than 275,000 books to choose from, including 107 of 112 New York Times bestsellers. Thin as a magazine, Kindle DX holds up to 3,500 books. The larger screen size especially benefits highly formatted books like cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks.

Kindle DX is wireless so you can think of a book and start reading it in under a minute. Email personal documents to your Kindle DX, and they too will be delivered wirelessly. Our vision is every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds. Inching a bit closer to a paperless society sounds good too.

We hope you enjoy this new addition to the Kindle family.

Jeff Bezos
Founder, Amazon.com

P.S. To have Kindle DX shipped the day it becomes available, preorder today to reserve your place in line. The Kindle DX page has a side-by-side comparison with Kindle so you can choose the right one for you.

Some additional details from Wired Gadget Lab:

Among the new feature are an auto-rotating screen, technology iPhone users will be familiar with, and a native PDF reader, finally adding support in that ubiquitous digital format.

The device measures one-third of an inch thick. Its 9.7-inch screen offers 1200 x 824 pixels at 150 dpi, and 16 levels of gray (like the Kindle 2). The screen is held within a plastic housing that measures 10.4″ tall by 7.2″ wide; the unit weighs about 1 pound 3 ounces. Like the two earlier Kindles, the Kindle DX has wireless download capabilities via the Sprint EVDO network.

It contains about 3.3GB of usable memory for storing books, and can display or play a wide variety of text and document formats — including, significantly, at least three open formats: PDF, MP3 and TXT.

Shipping this summer, the Kindle DX costs $489 and is available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

EON ICUBE - Amazing 3D Immersive Technology

2009-05-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

EON Reality, Inc. has amazing immersive solutions such as the ICUBE, a revolutionary PC based multi-sided immersive environment in which participants are completely surrounded by virtual imagery and 3D sound.

The EON ICUBE consists of 3, 4 or 6 walls according to the users requirements, and that can be setup in any configuration. Thanks to the rear-projection of the images and the flawless image continuity in the corners, the illusion of a complete sense of presence in the virtual environment is created. On top of that, the system is fully compatible with tracking and input devices. It is built on PC technology whereby several PCs are synchronized together to generate simultaneous images in stereo (stereoscopic visualization) on multiple walls seamlessly.

Using a series of infrared emitters, high-end projectors, and stereoscopic active lightweight shutter glasses and position trackers, the result is complete immersion of the user in a virtual world where objects float in space with high quality graphics. Electro magnetic 6DOF trackers are implemented to monitor the user's position and orientation and are used to calculate a stereoscopic perspective view while allowing the user to freely move into and around the objects floating in space. The stereoscopic visualization is supported by an integrated audio surround system. Peripheral devices such as force feedback devices, and gesture gloves are optionally integrated into the system.

Innovative solutions such as large immersive displays, 3D and holographic displays, tele immersion systems, and mobile 3D stereoscopic and augmented reality systems can be the next step in user interfaces and the web.

Minoru 3D Webcam - The First 3D Web Camera

2009-05-04T03:50:00.000-07:00

Minoru is the Worlds first 3D webcam. Your friends and family can now see you in 3D over your favourite messaging program like Windows Live Messenger, Skype, AOL instant messenger, OoVoo and many others. Minoru can also take 3D photos or even shoot 3D videos for YouTube or other video sharing sites. Minoru = Reality (at least in Japanese)!

The red and cyan anaglyph image produced by Minoru can be viewed by anybody who is wearing commonly available red and cyan 3D glasses (five pairs included with Minoru). It is not HD quality for 3D HDTVs but it is fun nevertheless. Minoru can also be used as a standard 2D webcam for anyone who doesnt have the 3D glasses at hand.

Minoru 3D Webcam is available on Amazon.com for $89.95.

Another innovative step for the coming 3D Web.

Gigapixel Photography on the Rise

2009-04-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

What is a gigapixel image?

A gigapixel image is a digital image composed of more than one billion pixels. It contains more than 150 times the detail captured by a typical 6-megapixel consumer camera. One way of visualizing the size of a four gigapixel image is to consider a photograph of a regulation football pitch (soccer in USA) which is 90m x 45m. A four gigapixel top-down photograph of the entire field at 1mm per pixel would cover the entire area of the football pitch!

How does it work?

Gigapixel images are created by tiling a large number of photographs, or scanning a large film negative (8" x 10"). Gigapixel images are displayed on-line using streaming technology which breaks the image into small tiles and loads them as you look. This allows you instantly view high-resolution images that are over several gigabytes in size. There are beautiful gigapixel photography online at GigaPan and GigapixelPhotograpy.com.

What are the applications of gigapixel imagery?

Gigapixel photographs are ideal for tourism, real-estate, architecture, medical imaging, archiving, and documenting special events. High-resolution images create the impression of "being there" by immersing the viewer within the scene. The extreme level of detail captured in a gigapixel image allows artifacts to be accurately preserved for future generations.

Can you print a gigapixel image?

Yes, gigapixel images can be printed. At a size of over 20ft (6m), a gigapixel print retains jaw-dropping detail even when viewed a few inches away.

The largest digital photographs

The largest digital image at the moment is a 17 gigapixel photograph from Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park. It is claimed by Gerard B. Maynard.

Dimensions: 214,414 pixels X 80,571 pixels
Size: 96.5 GB
Pixels: 17,275,550,394

Google O3D Plugin Brings 3D To Browsers

2009-04-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. O3D allows you to create rich 3D web applications using JavaScript. O3D is a much needed effort to enable innovative 3D applications in the web browsers. Virtual worlds and games such as WoW and Second Life could use O3D instead of native clients.

Vangelis Kokkevis and Gregg Tavares will discuss O3D on the upcoming Google I/O conference in May 2009. This session will primarily cover best practices for getting 2D and 3D content into O3D. They will also explore the API's advanced features, primarily through demos and coding examples to keep the session fun.

Download O3D for Mac or Windows and test it for yourself. Nice job, Google!

Amazon Instant HD Video on Demand Streaming Movies and TV Shows

2009-04-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

2009 is the year of HD Video on the internet.

Amazon.com (AMZN) has launched "Instant HD", a high-definition video version of its on-demand service, offering consumers the ability to rent movies and purchase television episodes shown in HD.

Amazon will add more than 500 HD TV shows and movies to its Amazon Video On Demand service. Titles are from major networks and studios like Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Showtime Networks, with new-release movie titles including "Twilight" and "Frost/Nixon" and TV shows such as "The Tudors", "Saviors" and "Smallville".

Customers can use Panasonic Viera CAST-enabled HDTVs, the Roku Digital Video Player, certain types of TiVo and the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link device to order and watch HD movies for $3.99 to $4.99 each. Television episodes are available for purchase at $2.99 each.

Customers also can buy the content to watch on their personal computers or download it for later viewing offline. Finally the promise of on demand HD video streaming has come true.

1 Billion Downloads on the Apple App Store in Nine Months

2009-04-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth (that is 1 000 000 000) application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps built by thousands of developers. Amazing!

Mobile Broadband is the Next Internet.

Learn more on TechCrunch.

Top 5 Books on Innovation and Strategy in the Facebook Era

2009-04-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Right this minute, more than 1.5 million people are on Facebook. They’re interacting with friends and talking about brands. They’re learning about businesses and providing valuable information to market and sell. In the Facebook Era, businesses are closer to their customers than ever before.

Clearly, social media is the most important innovation in the recent history of the internet. Web 2.0 is about people - rapidly changing the competitive landscape. Companies must adapt their strategy and execution quickly to be successful in this new world.

The following is list of top 5 (5 star) books on business strategy and execution in the Facebook Era:

The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff - practical case studies of how actual businesses are using social networking in real life

The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth - practical and actionable book on innovation

The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth - best of strategy, marketing, innovation, business development and so much more

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day - comprehensive, perfectly paced guide on social media marketing

The Innovation Zone: How Great Companies Re-Innovate for Amazing Success - practical guide on innovation

Sparkle Brings Second Life to the iPhone and iPod Touch

2009-03-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

Genkii has launched a new iPhone application in the App Store called Sparkle IM. It is a Second Life client that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch that allows sending and receiving IMs directly on the mobile device.

Sparkle IM is just the first virtual world app by Genkii. It is expected that the updated full Sparkle Second Life iPhone client will support 3D presence, too. Stay tuned!

Virtual Worlds could be rendered on the server side as demonstrated earlier by Vollee and Liveplace.

Virtual Cocoon Helmet to Mimic All Five Senses in Virtual Worlds

2009-03-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

We rely on our senses to interact with the world around us. Do we actually need to travel to be somewhere to experience it fully? The “…towards Real Virtuality” EPSRC Research Cluster" project aims to develop a "virtual cocoon" through which people can interact naturally with the world without actually traveling or being put in that particular, potentially dangerous, real situation. All five senses will be stimulated to provide a rich sensory "real virtuality" experience.

The virtual cocoon will revolutionize the way in which we do business by providing low-cost, high confidence, high quality multi-sensory knowledge directly to your current location. This will significantly change, for example, purchasing via the internet because you could smell the flowers, feel the fabric of a dress, try out a sofa for comfort, examine products in any desired lighting condition, etc, all before you buy them. The virtual cocoon could even be linked to, for example Google Earth, to enable you to investigate the ambiance of a restaurant on the other side of the world when you are planning your trip.

The Virtual Cocoon headset is a nice accessory for 3D immersive surfing of the metaverse. It is a great gadget for gaming, entertainment and virtual tourism. Too bad that it is somewhat expensive for now.

SixthSence Wearable Device by MIT Media Lab

2009-03-12T05:42:00.000-07:00

At the MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another. She works with Pranav Mistry, who is the genius behind Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. Their Sixth Sense demo was the buzz of this year's TED conference. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

We've evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers at the tip of the user’s fingers. The movements and arrangements are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces.

The SixthSense prototype implements several applications that demonstrate the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system. The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures, similar to gestures supported by Multi-Touch based systems, letting the user zoom in, zoom out or pan using intuitive hand movements. The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger. SixthSense also recognizes user’s freehand gestures. For example, the SixthSense system implements a gestural camera that takes photos of the scene the user is looking at by detecting the ‘framing’ gesture. The user can stop by any surface or wall and flick through the photos he/she has taken. SixthSense also lets the user draw icons or symbols in the air using the movement of the index finger and recognizes those symbols as interaction instructions. For example, drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application or drawing an ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail. The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch.

The current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.

The innovative Sixth Sense project demonstrates that the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. The uses of this tech -- from healthcare to home furnishings, warfare to supermarkets -- are powerful and increasingly real.

Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine to Answers Questions

2009-03-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

Stephen Wolfram is known from his ambitious projects: Mathematica and A New Kind of Science. But in recent years he has been hard at work on a still more ambitious project called Wolfram|Alpha which will be launched in just two months in May 2009.
Stephen Wolfram is building something new - and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose. It's not a "Google killer" -- it does something different. It's an "answer engine" rather than a search engine. It is not even a natural language search engine. The True Knowledge answer engine shares some similarities with Wolfram Alpha but there are also considerable differences.

Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions that have factual answers. It doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions. This almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!

Stephen Wolfram has introduced his new invention on the Wolfram Blog: Wolfram|Alpha is Coming! Check out Nova Spivack's public twine for more details which also appears as a guest post on TechCrunch.

Kindle 2 by Amazon Raises the Bar on EBooks

2009-02-10T01:41:00.000-08:00

The Amazon Kindle has the potential to start a new wave of innovations for ebooks and mobile internet devices. The second-generation Kindle ebook reader has much improved aesthetic thin design with aluminum back. It feels almost like an Apple product.

The Kindle 2 will costs $359, but it's much thinner than the angular original -- in fact, it's thinner than an iPhone at just .36 inches. Read to Me can read any content on the device back to you in a decent-sounding computerized voice, but there's also seven times more storage, a sharper 16-level e-ink display that turns pages 20 percent faster and 25 percent longer battery life.

Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon (AMZN) has announced the new Kindle 2 on amazon.com:

Dear Customers,

Today, we are excited to introduce Kindle 2 - the next generation of our wireless reading device.

Since launching the original Kindle a little over a year ago, customer response has far surpassed our highest hopes - and we're grateful and appreciative for that. More people are reading more books, newspapers, and blogs on Kindle sooner than we ever imagined.

We kept everything readers love about the original Kindle - the convenience of reading what you want, when you want it, the immediacy of getting books wirelessly delivered in less than 60 seconds, and Kindle's ability to "disappear" in your hands so you can get lost in the author's words.

We chose the same 3G wireless technology used in advanced cell phones, so you never need to hunt for w Wi-Fi hotspot. But unlike cell phones, there are no monthly wireless bills, no service or data plans, and no yearly contracts. There is no software to install and no syncing required.

Improved battery life means you can read for up to two weeks on a single charge. Its new, streamlined design makes Kindle 2 as thin as a typical magazine and lighter than a paperback. We added more storage, allowing you to carry over 1,500 titles. An advanced display provides even crisper images and clear text for an improved book-like reading experience. Our new Text-to-Speech feature means Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you.

At Amazon, we're always been obsessed with selection, and we know that even the best reading device would be useless without the books you want to read. Today, the Kindle Store has more than 230,000 books, including 103 of the 110 New York Times Best Sellers, plus top newspapers, magazines, and blogs. We added over 40,000 new titles in just the last three months. Our vision for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.

We hope you enjoy Kindle 2.

Jeff Bezos
Founder, Amazon.com

P.S. If you'd like to have Kindle 2 ship to you the day it becomes available, we recommend you preorder today to reserve your place in line.

Is Kindle the future of reading? It can be if Amazon executes its Platform Business Model well. The integrated broadband access and the number of available ebook content can fuel its acceptance. The Kindle roadmap promises color display and international access though the dates have not been announced.

The Emerging 3D Web and The Metaverse

2009-02-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When you use a virtual Earth to navigate the physical Earth, and your avatar becomes your online agent? What happens is the Metaverse.

The Blog of Marc Wallace and friends, 3pointD.com reports on this emerging 3D connectivity — a phenomenon sometimes called the metaverse — in all its manifestations. From virtual worlds like Second Life to applications like Google Earth, from cool mapping hacks that link up real-world locations to new ways of creating virtual ones, from concepts like folksonomy to the culture of online worlds, find news and feature articles about all that and much more at 3pointD.com, every day.

A nice example of the emerging 3D Web is AjaxLife - an AJAX based SL client by Katharine Berry. It enables us to experience the 3D Second Life Grid in a web browser! Imagine this in a 3D Web browser and 3D display and you have a virtual window into another universe.

Philips Leads Autostereoscopic 3D HDTVs

2009-01-30T04:47:00.000-08:00

We are just at the beginning of a new era where 3D displays will eventually replace the current 2D displays in both professional and consumer applications. 2009 could mark a new milestone for the adoption of innovative 3D technologies.

Since the mid nineties, Philips is conducting research and development on lenticular based auto-stereoscopic 3D display technologies. The Philips lenticular auto-stereoscopic 3D technology comprises the lens design, 3D signal processing, manufacturing process technologies and innovations in the 2D panel to optimize for the 3D functionality.

Philips is entering new ground with its flagship 56″ quad full autosteroscopic 3D HD TV. Based on a new rendering technique, the 56-inch QFHD 3D Display creates 46 views and has a large 3D comfort zone! The ‘autostereoscopic’ part of the description means that depth perception is achieved without the use of special (and geeky) glasses.

The Philips 56-inch QFHD 3D Display is based on an LCD panel resolution of Quad full HD (3840*2160 = 8.29 million pixels) meaning it is like having FOUR 1080p LCD TVs. This results in a stunning perceived 3D resolution of HD quality with 3D viewing angle of 160 degrees.

The special 3D display interface format is based on 2D-plus-Depth and Declipse. It is described on the Philips 3D Content format page and in the 3D Interface Specifications white paper.

The unique Philips 56" Quad Full HD 3D Display is commercially available on customer request in large scale projects for an estimated $25.000.

Stereoscopic 3D displays such as the Samsung Syncmaster 2233RZ and the ViewSonic VX2265wm FuHzion 3D are much cheaper and are compatible with nVidia GeForce 3D Vision Kit introduced at CES 2009. The new DisplayPort 1.2 standard will enable 3D thanks to the large bandwidth and support for 120 Hz.

It is time to create new content such as 3D movies on Blu-Ray, 3D games and 3D video. These innovations will add a new dimension to communications, entertainment and the Internet.

2008 Year in Review

2009-01-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

2008 was the year of social networking and mobile internet innovations.

Let's highlight the most interesting news and trends of last year.

Cloud computing hype has reached all time high:

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
Google App Engine + OpenSocial = Web 3.0?
IT in 2018
Wua.la Launches Online P2P Storage Cloud
Bandwidth usage of the Amazon Cloud has surpassed all of Amazon.com’s website traffic

Mobile Internet and gadgets has become a platform:

iPhone Apps Lead Mobile Internet Innovations
iPhone Roadmap Possibilities
Rapid Mobile Broadband Usage Growth

High-Definition Video has started to conquer the Web:

Hybrid P2P-CDN Streaming Enables HD Video Delivery
Video Traffic Bandwidth to Reach Exabyte by 2015
HD Flash Video on the Web

3D and Virtual Worlds have grown:

Sun's Open Source 3D Virtual World
Virtual Worlds are Rendered in the Cloud

Amazon's Platform Business Model

2008-12-18T06:45:00.000-08:00

Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, describes Amazon’s platform business model and its ‘flywheel’ for growth on the latest episode of the Telco 2.0 ‘executive brainstorm’ series on Telecom TV. It is well worth the time to watch it.

The other videos are also full of insights:

Chris Barraclough, co-founder, Telco 2.0 Initiative describes how the ‘two-sided’ telecoms business model works, and what’s needed to turn it into reality
Martin Geddes, Chief Analyst Telco 2.0 Initiative articulates the untapped opportunity for growth in the core telephony business
Pieter Knook, Director of Internet Services, Vodafone Group, unveils his vision for a ‘next generation open mobile internet platform’
Cenk Serdar, Chief VAS Officer, Turkcell on how his company is blazing a trail with identity and banking services
Evidence that challenges the Long Tail theory
James Enck, Senior Associate Analyst at the Telco 2.0 Initiative on the impact and opportunity of the Credit Crunch for telcos
And a stirring speech by Trudy Norris-Grey, MD Strategy & Transformation at BT Wholesale challenging the Telecoms sector to make the change to realise the $375bn Telco 2.0 growth opportunity

Break Free of the Browser with JavaFX

2008-12-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

Internet innovations have taken another step towards Web 3.0 with the introduction of Drag-to-Install feature of Sun's new JavaFX Rich Client Platform. Do you like a (JavaFX) web application? Break free of the browser and drag it to your desktop! Check out the demo video here.

JavaFX is a rich client platform for building cross-device applications and content. Designed to enable easy creation and deployment of rich internet applications (RIAs) with immersive media and content, the JavaFX platform promises that RIAs look and behave consistently across diverse form factors and devices.

JavaFX will have to compete with existing RIA platforms like Adobe Flex/Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. See the JavaFX samples for some example applications.

Kevin Kelly on the Future of the Web

2008-11-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

Kevin Kelly recently delivered a pure inspirational talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

"I gave a talk yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit. It's a short talk, only 10 minutes long, so I decided to skip Web 3 - Web 9 and just speak about the upcoming Web 10.0 and what I think will happen in the next 6,500 days."

Some notes:

Evolution: Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web 6,527 days ago. In that period we saw: linking of computers (the net), then linking pages (the web), sharing links, the next phase will be linking data
Sharing data feels intimate, we are entering an era in which we will share data. Every object we make (even physical) will have data in it, and it will all be part of this web -> the database of Things
In the next 6,500 days of the web: it will not be the web only better, it will be something entirely different
There will be one machine, everything will be part of it. The web will be its OS. If information is not on the web it will not count. Everything is always on.

Kevin Kelly had a similar talk earlier on TED: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web. Is this the way to Web 3.0?

Recast Digital Delivers HD Flash Video with RVD1

2008-11-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

2009 will be the year of Full screen HD video on the Web.

Recast Digital is a provider of High Definition (HD) Internet video streaming services.

Recast Digital combines advanced Flash Player development with vastly scalable video delivery mechanisms to offer content owners, media businesses, and online advertisers, a highly effective method of serving ultra-high quality interactive on-demand - and live - video to large audiences.

Recast Digital's Flash-based RDV1 player senses the computer power and bandwidth available to the user, and adjusts the definition accordingly up to the 3.2 Mbit/s required for full HD quality. They have re-engineered Flash using existing codecs so that it enables HD content very smoothly, even across the internet and works with Adobe Flash 9 or above. The player supports the following quality and bandwidth options:

580 Kb/s - WD Bronze
736 Kb/s - WD Silver
1036 Kb/s - WD Gold
860 Kb/s - SD Bronze
1.2 Mb/s - SD Silver
1.7 Mb/s - SD Gold
1.2 Mb/s - HD Bronze
2.2 Mb/s - HD Silver
3.2 Mb/s - HD Gold

Experience the Recast Digital high-definition Web video on their demo site.

Camera Phones to Scan 2-D Mobile Codes

2008-11-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

Camera phones combined with 2D codes in innovation that mobile users could take advantage of. The use of Mobile Codes is only limited by imagination. One possibility is innovative marketing:

When BMW launched the BMW 1 Series 3-door version last year, it was the first white car they had introduced in a long time. So they decided to produce their advertising campaigns in black and white.
“Because the campaign was black and white, we decided to combine it with 2D bar codes, which we wanted to test.” (2D bar codes, both Semacodes and QR Codes, are also black and white).

What are mobile codes?

'Mobile codes' are codes in the same way as ordinary barcodes are, but their matrix structure can hold more information. The codes are also mobile in the sense that the camera of mobile devices can be used to scan and decode them.

A web address (URL), a phone number, an email address or plain text can be converted into a mobile code. After scanning it their camera phone, people will have instant access to the encoded information straight on the display of their mobile device.

Mobile codes are increasing in popularity: as tags on flyers and posters; on business cards and CVs; in magazines and blogs; offline and online.

Mobile phones such as a Nokia N82, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, E66, E71, E90 or 6220 Classic comes with the Nokia barcode reader preinstalled, ready to scan mobile codes.

How to Create Mobile Codes?

There are free easy to use tools to create Mobile Codes such as the Nokia Mobile Barcodes site. Once the mobile code has been generated scan, print or save it for sharing the way you want.

How to scan and decode Mobile Codes?

There are many other tools in addition to Nokia Barcode Reader such as

NeoReader, by NeoMedia for the Apple iPhone
I-nigma reader, by 3GVision
Glass reader, by Active Print(HP) / Gavitec AG-mobile digit
UpCode reader, by UPC
Semacode reader, by Semacode
QuickMark reader

Have fun and connect the real world and the virtual world with innovative mobile codes!

Mobile Broadband Usage Statistics by Nielsen

2008-10-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

The mobile consumer spends $350B each year on connectivity, devices, and content.
Nielsen Mobile provides syndicated consumer research to the mobile media markets.

The latest Nielsen Mobile Insight Research Reports feature interesting topics such as

Check out Nielsen Mobile's other Research Findings here.

Spykee Robot - Remote Control Spy Robot with Wifi Skype Video

2008-10-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

Spykee, the spy robot is an innovative home surveillance solution and an incredible fun and cool gadget all in one. It is Skype compatible and have 3 different models.

Spykee Spy is the WiFi robot you build yourself! He can be controlled remotely from anywhere in the world using a computer and Internet connection. Spykee moves, watches, hears, speaks and monitors (whatever you want). He is available for preorder on Amazon.com for less than $300. He is a great toy but also an universal home surveillance security guard robot too.

Discover all his other functions:

Photo/Video: Spykee takes pictures and records video.
Monitoring and Video Surveillance: He monitors and protects your room from intruders with his video surveillance function! Spykee detects movement and sends you a picture of the intruder by e-mail.
VoIP Phone: Spykee lets you make free calls on the Internet with VoIP Phone function!
MP3 Player: Spykee can play mp3 music. It is made for iPod through Erector.
Self-recharging: When Spykee gets low on power it will find its power station and automatically dock with it to recharge.

The robot is equipped with:

Webcam
Microphone
Speaker
Flash lightning and lights
Rubber tracks
Comes with recharging dock

The Spykee robotic sentry is the most fun wireless broadband gadget you can get today. I can't wait to get mine! I hope that the Spykee remote control iPhone app will soon make it to the Apple iPhone App Store. Check out the Spykee page for more information.

FUJIFILM FinePix Real 3D Camera and Imaging System

2008-09-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

FUJIFILM has finally announced on Photokina 2008 a radical departure from current imaging systems with the development of the Real 3D System that marks a complete break from previous attempts to introduce 3D technology to the consumer camera world.

The Real 3D System consists of

Dual CCD 3D digital camera with ‘RP (Real Photo) Processor 3D’ chip
3D photo frame: 8.4-inch “FinePix Real 3D Photo Frame” with over 920,000 pixels
High Resolution 3D printing system

One major benefit of the FinePix Real 3D Photo and Movie Camera technology is that for digital camera LCD playback, display and print, the consumer can enjoy the image just as it was originally seen with the naked eye. No need for special glasses! Check out the articles on the Real 3D System on Wired and DPReview!

Welcome to the world of 3D Imaging! The next step is to use 3D desktop, mobile devices and ultimately the 3D Internet!

When will Apple deliver the iPhone 3D with 3D Camera and 3D Display? Until then check out the wonderful animations of stereoscopic images made by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings.

Wuala Launches P2P Online Storage Cloud

2008-08-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

Wuala has launched a hybrid P2P social online file sharing service.

Wuala provides secure online storage and backup for all kinds of files (including photos and large videos). Accessible from anywhere at any time and easy sharing with friends, family, and co-workers. 1 GB is free of charge and additional capacity is available either by trading in your local storage of buying more from Wuala at a reasonable starting price of $25 for 10GB.

The Wuala client supports Windows, Mac and Linux. I look forward to downloading a client for the Apple iPhone on the iTunes App Store. Is this the way to the TeraPod?

On the technical side the Wuala has an interesting P2P architecture. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage.

Dominik Grolimund, the founder of the Swiss startup Caleido, discusses interesting details in this Google Tech Talk video.

Liveplace - Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered by OTOY Cloud

2008-08-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

Mobile phones and devices can already access virtual worlds such as Second Life on 3G networks. Vollee delivers Second Life to more than 70 handhelds by rendering it on the server side. Their Second Life iPhone client is in beta.

LivePlace plans to take cloud rendering of 3D virtual worlds to a new level. TechCrunch has posted a very impressive video of LivePlace's City Space which is a Photo-Realistic 3D virtual world. The beautiful ray tracing is done on the server side or "in the cloud" and delivered to the clients via OTOY. OTOY is a 800k web plug-in that enables cinematic quality 3D rendering in a browser with compressed content streaming.

The City Space demo shows beautiful and highly realistic rendering of different environments. It looks and feels more real and immersive than Earthmine, Everyscape or Google Maps Street View.

The demo video shows real time rendering using an ATI RX 1900 GPU and live streaming to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. The final product is said to be even more impressive! The first comment on the demo: "this is the pinnacle of what has been dreamed of since computer modeling and rendering was begun."

TechCrunch has more details on OTOY and LightStage here including interesting interviews with Jules Urbach, the founder and CEO of OTOY.

Exaflood - Internet Video Traffic - Zettabyte by 2015

2008-08-08T06:19:00.000-07:00

From YouTube, IPTV, and HD video, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras–to 3D games, virtual worlds – the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. The Discovery Institute estimates that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1024 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.

Video and rich media is expected to dominate IP traffic. TDP's IP Traffic Projection in the U.S. by 2015 shows:

video calling and "virtual windows" could generate 400 exabytes
Internet video, gaming, and virtual worlds could produce 200 exabytes
movie downloads and P2P file sharing could be 100 exabytes
non-Internet “IPTV” could reach 100 exabytes, and possibly much more
business IP traffic will generate some 100 exabytes
cloud computing and remote backup could total 50 exabytes
other applications (phone, Web, e-mail, photos, music) could be 50 exabytes

Will this huge data traffic increase drown the Internet? No, it won't - argues Nate Anderson of ars technica.

IT in 2018: From Turing’s Machine to the Computing Cloud

2008-07-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

How will the IT landscape look like in 2018? This is the question asked by Nicholas Carr, the author of "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google". He takes readers of this free Internet.com eBook on a trip one decade into the future to see how IT as we know it will change and what those changes mean for IT professionals, hardware and software vendors, and corporations of all sizes.

This interesting journey starts at 1936 in Cambridge where Alan Turing has invented the idea of the universal computing machine.

"With enough memory and enough speed, Turing’s work implies, a single computer could be programmed, with software code, to do all the work that is today done by all the other physical computers in the world.

And that is why the modern corporate data center, with all its complex and expensive stacks of machinery, is on the path to obsolescence."

Carr clearly explains the current hot virtualization and consolidation trend:

"Turing’s discovery that “software can always be substituted for hardware” lies at the heart of “virtualization,” which is the technology underpinning the great consolidation wave now reshaping big-company IT. As the cost of computing power and storage capacity has continued its decades-long freefall, it’s become possible to turn more and more hardware into software code – to use a single powerful computer to run many virtual machines.

All the pieces of hardware stuffed into corporate data centers – not just servers but storage drives, load balancers, firewalls, switches, and even the cables connecting the gear – exist, after all, to carry out instructions. Virtualization simply turns the hardwired instructions into code and gets rid of the physical machinery. That not only saves a lot of cash, it makes the radical automation of formerly manual IT processes possible. Once IT infrastructure turns into software, it can be programmed, easily and from afar. Code, as always, replaces labor. "

Check out his eBook to take the journey to the conclusion:

"Just as the last century’s electric utilities spurred the development of thousands of new consumer appliances and services, so the new computing utilities will shake up many markets and open myriad opportunities for innovation. Harnessing the power of the computing grid may be the great enterprise of the twenty-first century."

Inexpensive 3D Camera to Control Second Life

2008-05-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

Mitch Kapor and Philippe Bossut are developing body language mirroring with 3D cameras. The exciting Handsfree 3D demos use a 3D camera to navigate and work in Second Life. They plan to use the camera so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression. Kapor expects that 2009 will see mass availability of inexpensive 3D cameras which could be used to control virtual worlds.

Check out the impressive innovation on the video.

The Hands Free 3D blog features more info such as:

Price of the camera, time to market
Applications Beyond Games
“Hands Free” Object Editing

Facebook Leads Top Tech Startups List

2008-05-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

Silicon Alley Insider has published the list of the World's most valuable digital startups. In the SAI 25, they value and rank some of the world's leading private digital companies.

So far, the SAI 25 ranks the world's 25 most valuable digital companies and 25 additional "Contenders." More companies are expected to be added to the list.

The current list of the most valuable technology startups and their estimated valuations:

1. Facebook - $9 billion
2. Wikipedia - $7 billion
3. Craigslist - $5 billion
4. Betfair - $5 billion
5. Mozilla Corp - $4 billion
6. Yandex - $3 billion
7. Webkinz - $2 billion
8. LinkedIn - $1.3 billion
9. Habbo - $1.25 billion
10. Oanda - $1.2 billion
11. Linden Lab - $1.1 billion
12. Kayak - $1 billion
13. QlikTech - $850 million
14. Ning - $560 million
15. Slide - $550 million
16. TheLadders - $500 million
17. Stardoll - $450 million
18. Ozon - $450 million
19. Thumbplay - $400 million
20. Glam Media - $400 million
21. Rock You - $325 million
22. Tudou - $300 million
23. Efficient Frontier - $275 million
24. Zazzle - $250 million
25. Spot Runner - $250 million

Contenders

Federated Media - $245 million
Yelp - $225 million
Meebo - $220 million
Indeed - $200 million
Zillow - $200 million
LoveFilm - $200 million
Metacafe - $200 million
Adconion - $200 million
4INFO - $175 million
Photobox - $150 million
Vibrant Media - $150 million
Gawker Media - $150 million
Mahalo - $150 million
56.com - $150 million
Youku - $125 million
Digg - $125 million
Etsy - $115 million
LinkExperts - $100 million
Powerset - $80 million
Trialpay - $80 million
Huffington Post - $75 million
Associated Content - $65 million
Live Gamer - $60 million
Twitter - $75 million
Mint - $50 million
Prosper - <$50 million

Who would you add to the list?

Google App Engine + Opensocial = Web 3.0?

2008-04-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

Web 3.0 has been defined earlier by Eric Schmidt as applications living in the cloud that are pieced together. It is a fundamentally different application model that we have ever seen in computing before. Google App Engine is a big step towards this cloud computing vision. It lets developers run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. How does App Engine fits into the Web 3.0 world? Let us review the definition by the CEO of Google:

Take Google App Engine and OpenSocial and a couple of other APIs to get to Web 2.5. It is the beginning of The Big Switch - the coming age of information utility. They let developers focus on innovation rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT operations, such as setting up and maintaining scalable servers, databases, storage, and networks.

Google is not the first big company to offer utility computing or platform as a service (PaaS). Amazon leads the space with its successful Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). There are very interesting analysis and comparison of Google App Engine and Amazon AWS on the SmoothSpan Blog.

App Engine costs nothing to get started and there are dozens of examples to check out in the Applications Gallery.

App Engine applications are easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. The open source Scalr aims to offer similar Auto-scalability on the Amazon AWS platform.

Welcome to the cloud computing age! Let clouds do the dirty work of operations and let developers innovate.

Sun's Open Source 3D Virtual World - MPK20

2008-03-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment built using the Project Wonderland Toolkit. In this 3D world, employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun's physical Menlo Park campus, known as "MPK," inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters. Unlike the physical campus, however, in MPK20, the community can be built and maintained without the constraints of physical location.

MPK20 is a sample virtual world built using the Project Wonderland open source 3D virtual world toolkit. Within the world, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games.

The Wonderland toolkit is built on top of the Project Darkstar server infrastructure. Darkstar, a platform designed for massively multiplayer games, provides Wonderland with a scalable and secure multi-user infrastructure well-suited for enterprise-grade applications.

Check out the interesting demo videos on the MPK20 project page.

Hybrid P2P-CDN Streaming Enables HD Video Delivery

2008-03-26T05:56:00.000-07:00

Peer-to-peer technology innovations will take center stage for content delivery. Why? The combination of commercial P2P technology and Content Delivery Networks promises the best of both worlds: scalable yet cost effective media streaming and delivery.

The companies and services that have voted for Hybrid P2P-CDN architecture include:

Akamai
BBC iPlayer
BitTorrent
Cisco Invests in Hybrid Content Delivery Network, GridNetworks
Cisco to Distribute Grid Networks P2P Client
Internap
Limelight
Pando (P4P)
Velocix (formerly know as CacheLogic) announces hybrid-P2P live streaming solution
Verisign

Have a look at this interesting panel discussion at Streaming Media West on how P2P is emerging as a critical enabling technology of a video-centric Internet.

Yahoo Search Architecture Based on Hadoop

2008-03-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

How to implement internet scale search based on open-source technologies?

Yahoo has solved this problem using the open-source Apache Hadoop distributed computing framework. Hadoop provides a distributed filesystem (HDFS) and support for the MapReduce distributed computing metaphor that is also the foundation of Google's architecture.

The Yahoo! Search Webmap Hadoop application runs on a more than 2,000 node Linux cluster each with two quad core processors and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.

The Webmap build starts with every Web page crawled by Yahoo! and produces a database of all known Web pages and sites on the internet and a vast array of data about every page and site. This derived data feeds the Machine Learned Ranking algorithms at the heart of Yahoo! Search.

Some Webmap size data:

Number of links between pages in the index: roughly 1 trillion links
Size of output: over 300 TB, compressed!
Number of cores used to run a single Map-Reduce job: over 10,000
Raw disk used in the production cluster: over 5 Petabytes

Smaller companies who cannot afford to run their own Hadoop cluster can combine it with the Amazon EC2 ans S3 cloud computing service. The result? Open source utility computing on Google scale!

iPhone Roadmap Possibilities Until 2012

2008-03-19T05:44:00.002-07:00

The future Apple iPhone generations will generate huge waves of innovations. Tomi T Ahonen argues that June 2007 marks a watershed moment in time. He is certain that the mobile telecoms world will count its time in two Eras. The Era BI: time Before the iPhone, and the ERA AI: time After the iPhone.

What are the possibilities in the Era AI?

2007 iPhone

Samsung ARM SoC 620 MHz 1176 running at 412 Mhz + PowerVR MBX 3D GPU

Trustzone security for sandboxing
Advanced Power management

128MB RAM
8 or 16GB Flash storage
320×480 3.5” 163 DPI display with multitouch input
100 Hz Accelerometers
2 Megapixel camera with Micron CMOS
Quad band GSM + EDGE
WiFi 802.11 b/g
BlueTooth 2.0 EDR
Web applications

2008 iPhone 2.0

3G/UMTS
Wireless USB
Open SDK

Cocoa Touch

OpenGL ES 3D graphics
OpenAL 3D surround audio

Applications like

Google Earth
Facebook
Ebay
Twitter
Home automation / remote control

Games like

Spore
The Sims
Second Life

2009 iPhone and iCar

Next generation 45 nm SoC with advanced processing and multimedia
512MB RAM
64GB flash memory
GPS
5 Megapixel camera with Image Stabilizer
iCar integration
HDMI TV/video interface to work as a personal AppleTV or videopod
Next generation LCD with embedded scanner functionality
NFC radio interface for contactless applications like

Access
Payment
Ticketing

Personal 3D display as iPhone accessory
Games

Social, Location Based and MMORP Games

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications

EveryScape

2010 3D iPhone

HSPA 3.5G
Autostereoscopic 3D LCD display
High resolution stereo camera

2011 iPhone, iPhone Mini or iWatch

WiMax/LTE 4G wireless networking
Alternative iPhone Mini or iWatch form factor
Embedded pico projector

2012 iWow

Terabyte iPod or iPhone aka the teraPod
What else do you need in an ultimate iGadget?

If you like this post check out this fun iPhone roadmap forcast until 2010 in The Red Ferret Journal.

Disclaimer: based on my own ideas and research - and not Apple information

Copyright Geekr 2008

Management 2.0: Business Model Innovation

2008-03-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

Innovation is core to internet startups. What kind of innovation?

Business Model Innovation
Product & Service Innovation
Process Innovation
Technology Innovation

It is usually the business model and not the technology that creates unique competitive advantage. Alexander Osterwalder of Arvetica examines the role of business model design and innovation in the age of management 2.0.

Alex examines and visualizes the innovative business models of Zopa, Google, Grameen Phone, Apple iTunes & iPod, Amazon S3, Skype, Netflix and others. It is an excellent and very informative presentation on strategy and innovation.

The slides include valuable tools such as

Business Model Framework
Business Model Template
Big Picture on Business Model

iPhone 2.0 SDK Applications to Lead Mobile Internet Innovations

2008-03-14T09:08:00.001-07:00

What it takes to have the Internet in your pockets? Apple understands the needs and delivers. The recent announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and the iPhone 2.0 marks the start of the revolution of mobile computing:

"What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth. Watch the Steve Jobs video from today and you will understand how Apple will dominate the smartphone market for the next 25 years. Wow. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile. "

Until now the internet experience required a PC or a Mac with a browser, e-mail client and several other applications or clients like Google Earth or Second Life. To deliver this multimedia experience it takes a powerful device and a full featured operating systems like Mac OS X. The Apple iPhone is a unique device that makes true mobile internet experience a reality for the first time.

What makes the Apple iPhone uniquely powerful? Kontra has found 10 reasons in his blog post on Who can beat iPhone 2.0?

Design - Apple’s industrial design and highly polished multi-touch interface have no peers
Stores - The promise of the iTunes Store-like App Store is genuinely outstanding
Pricing - Apple can now leverage its high-volume iPod/Mac businesses to get favorable component prices
Games - high-resolution 3.5" screen, Core Animation, H.264 video, SQLite, OpenGL ES, 3-D OpenAL sound, accelerometer and multi-touch makes the iPhone 2.0 the most capable mobile game platform. Have you seen Spore on iPhone?
WebKit - the Web shines on the iPhone with its multi-touch gestures and big screen
Depth - multi-touch patent portfolio and gesture library bridges PCs and mobile devices. Economies of scale, core design competencies and cross-device integration opportunities will give Apple an huge advantage in product design in the post-PC era
SDK - Cocoa Touch, the marriage of OS X and multi-touch UI, gives developers access to the hardware, multi-touch controls and events, accelerometer, camera, etc., in the top of the line XCode IDE with built in emulator
Enterprise - The mobile space enables Apple to openly court businesses large and small. The enterprise world is a new and significant market for the company.
Ecosystem - Apple has already created the biggest-ever ecosystem around a consumer electronics product line with the iPod. No other player has comparable experience in growing a billion dollar plus ecosystem
Curatorship - Apple has proven with Mac OS X and the iPod that it can anticipate user needs, trade features for enhanced user experience and carefully distill choices to create coherent and desirable products.

User satisfaction surveys consistently prove actual users love their iPhones at rates far above rival devices. Safari on the iPhone has already captured 71% of the mobile browser market in less than a year.

The new iPhone SDK will start a new wave of innovations in mobile computing with applications such as:

Reality Tagging
People Tagging
Reality Recognition
Physical Social Networks
Personalized Travel Guides
Digital and Physical Treasure Hunt
Distributed Mobile Games
Credit Card and Biometrics as Software
Paperless Receipts & Digital Business Cards
Medical records as Software
Physical Browsing & Digital Shopping
Location/time-based deals

Will Apple Dominate Next Gen Computing? It is hard to tell. But the iPhone value proposition looks great for developers and users alike. A revolutionary new platform is a rare and prized opportunity for entrepreneurs as well. So much so that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has created a $100 million fund to fuel this innovation. KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform.

Developers are indeed interested. Apple has announced more than 100,000 SDK downloads in just the first 4 days.

It is certainly a challenge for Google Android, Microsoft and Nokia/Symbian (to catch up?). What do you think?

A Practical Guide To Augmented Reality

2008-03-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

Augmented Reality (AR) brings virtual objects into the real world where we live in.

Powerful mobile devices and smartphones such as the Apple iPhone can be enhanced with innovative video-see-through technology. Just hold the device up and see through the display to view both the real world and the superimposed virtual object. Move around and see the virtual object, model, animation, or game from different views as the AR system performs alignment of the real and virtual cameras automatically. Augmented Reality is a technology that could become mainstream in a couple of years and revolutionize mobile entertainment and our interaction with the world around us.

Imagine Google Street View, Earthmine or Everyscape on steroids!

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide will introduce you to Augmented Reality (AR), provide detailed explanations of how the technology works, and provide samples for you to try on your own. Code samples using the freely downloadable ARTag software SDK in C++ and C# are included; all you need is a computer, printer, and a webcam.

The book provides everything you need to quickly start developing your own Augmented Reality (AR) applications including

how to get started by running AR on your system
how OpenGL is used to create computer graphics for AR
how to create OpenGL applications
how to develop Augmented Reality applications
how to integrate ARTag into your OpenGL programming
how to create 3D models and import them into the AR program you're writing
how to create a 3D Augmented Reality video game

Telepo Delivers Enterprise FMC

2008-02-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

The promise of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) has been envisioned for a long time. However the challenge to deliver true mobility with flexibility for enterprise workers – anytime, anywhere and on any network is huge. True fixed-to-mobile convergence solutions need to integrate the mobile phone and new IP based communication services into the enterprise communication infrastructure. The requirements:

same set of call handling features both on fixed and mobile
easy to use and manage
no change in end-user behavior
open standards (such as SIP) and proven components
future proof and interoperable
security

Telepo is a pioneer in FMC innovation. Telepo provides companies with a feature-rich, cost optimized communication system that spans both wired and wireless networks, providing a consistent user experience on a variety of commercial phones. It has won the Best Mobile Enterprise Product or Service award by the GSM Association in 2007.

The Telepo Business Communication Solution provides mobile business users and enterprise voice administrators with a uniform set of services – independent of device, network and location including:

Single Number Reach (i.e. Single Identity)
Presence Services
Personal Call Routing
Unified Messaging
Least Cost Routing
Rich set of traditional PBX features
Mid-Call Services
Corporate Directory Services
Support and roaming between VoIP clients, IP phones and dual mode mobile phones
Telepo Mobile+ and VoIP clients, including the Telepo Softphone+

Telepo has innovative solutions where the internet and mobile technologies meet. Check it out!

Amazon EC2 Flash Video Streaming

2008-02-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

The ability to host web video clips in the Cloud is getting near with the release of the Wowza Pro media server for Amazon EC2 (beta).

Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited is a high-performance, extensible and a fully interactive, Flash media server for live and on-demand flv streaming, chat and recording.

Wowza Media Systems has teamed with Amazon Web Services to make billing quick, easy, and secure for the combination of Wowza Media Server Pro, machine time with various EC2 instances and bandwidth.

Pricing of Wowza Pro Unlimited for Amazon EC2 is:

Instances

$0.14 per Small Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)

$0.45 per Large Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)

$0.88 per Extra-Large instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)

Data Transfer

$0.12 per GB of data transfer in

$0.20 per GB of data transfer out

Monthly Charge

$5.00 recurring monthly charge

This pricing includes all charges for the use of Wowza Pro instances on Amazon EC2 (both Wowza Pro licensing and Amazon EC2 fees).

It is still in beta so improvements might be expected related to

performance
load-balancing
using Amazon S3 for hosting videos
management

Streaming video using Amazon EC2 and S3 is a great utility computing and storage application. It could help startups with limited resources to compete with youtube and other video hosting services. Check out the user guide and the forum to learn more.

Recommended books on Flash Video Streaming:

Amazon EC2 and S3 Surpassed Amazon.com

2008-01-31T01:29:00.000-08:00

Amazon has announced in its fourth quarter earnings release that the bandwidth usage of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) has surpassed all of Amazon.com’s global website traffic combined. This milestone means that the 330,000 registered Amazon Web Services (AWS) developers collectively use more bandwidth than the web retailer itself. Amazon has become the leading cloud computing service provider with its own internet platform.

The Amazon Web Services solution catalog lists more than a hundred solutions based on AWS including innovative backup, archival, community and media hosting services by web 2.0 startups and developers.

The resources of AWS Developer Connection grows rapidly. Check out these featured tutorials and articles:

The Amazon Cloud propels new innovation by changing the economics of scalable computing and storage resources. Let's prepare for the Big Switch!

Google Maps Apartment View (Fun Video)

2008-01-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

Two young men take a turn down the wrong street view and discover a secret Google Maps feature. Brilliant!

A fun video by the Vacationeers - a stylized comedic film group that features Todd Berger, Kevin Brennan, Jeff Grace and Blaise Miller. Imagine the (frightening) possibilities of this innovative feature where reality and virtual worlds meet!

Trend Map for 2008+

2008-01-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

See what to expect in 2008 and beyond on the latest Trend Map!

Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have once again collaborated to create a trend map for 2008 and beyond. The map uncovers key trends across Society, Politics, Demographics, Economy, and Technology.

Innowave is focused on technology innovations and trends so here they are:

Geospatial web
Ubiquitous connectivity
Robotics
Nanotech
Biotech
Embedded Intelligence
RFID
Open innovation
Transparency
GPS
Virtual worlds
Wireless
Device convergence
Mobile devices
Social networks
Place shifting
Too much information
Time shifting
Aggregation
Personalization
Online video
Web 2.0
Enterprise 2.0
Simplicity
3D printers
VoIP
Artificial intelligence
Reality mining
Humans 2.0

Click on the map below to get the full pdf of Trend Blend 2008+.

The Storm Worm and the Rise of P2P Malware

2008-01-24T08:37:00.000-08:00

It is estimated that several million PCs have been infected by the Storm Worm. It represents a new generation worm/botnet. Although it's most commonly called a worm, Storm is much more: a worm, a Trojan horse and a bot all rolled into one. Storm has been around for a year, and the antivirus companies are pretty much powerless to do anything about it. Why?

The Storm worm first appeared at early 2007 in e-mail attachments with the subject line: "230 dead as storm batters Europe." Those who opened it became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet of zombie computers.

There is no central "command-and-control point" in the Storm botnet that can be shut down. The infected windows host computers use encrypted communication over a modified version of the eDonkey/Overnet peer-to-peer protocol. The name and location of the remote servers which control the botnet are hidden behind a constantly changing DNS technique called ‘fast flux’, making it difficult to find and stop them.

We simply don't know how to stop Storm, except to find the people controlling it and arrest them. The Storm botnet uses the power of P2P networking to protect itself.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations explains this nicely. Although a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Storm botnet are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them.

The Storm botnet has been used for spamming, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and other malicious activities including phishing attacks targeting banking European banks. It appears that portions of the Storm botnet and its variants were for sale. The controllers of the Storm seems to lease out portions of the network for misuse.

The Storm represents serious security threat for internet users but it is only the tip of the iceberg. It has started a new wave of innovation by hackers. More advanced P2P malware like Nugache is on its way. Are we prepared?

(To remove the Storm Worm from a Microsoft Windows computer use the Malicious Software Removal Tool as described in the link.)

Most Compelling Startups and Innovations

2008-01-22T00:03:00.000-08:00

The Winners of the 2007 Crunchies award have been revealed. The most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year have been nominated and chosen by the internet community.

Best Overall: Facebook
Best technology innovation / achievement: Earthmine
Earthmine picks up where Google Earth leaves off, bringing deep semantic data to 3D panoramas of the real world. They are indexing reality into 3D maps.
Best Clean Tech Startup: Tesla Motors
Tesla’s green sports car has captured the imagination of a public who had come to expect electric cars to be dull are boring.
Best video startup: Hulu
Hulu put television online. Their mission is to help you find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it.
Best user-generated content site: Digg
Best mobile start-up: Twitter
Best International startup: Netvibes
Best consumer startup: Meebo
Meebo made instant messaging ubiquitous by bringing it online.
Best enterprise startup: Zoho
Zoho’s comprehensive online suite of 14 business applications ranging from document editing to CRM continues to lead the way in the move away from desktop computing to working in the cloud.
Best design: SmugMug
SmugMug is professional photo site.
Best new gadget/ device: Apple iPhone. See the Apple acceptance speech here.
Best business model: Zazzle
Zazzle is an on-demand factory of consumer goods for top brands. It lets consumers become producers by uploading their own images onto that T-shirt, mug, or mousepad and receive a commission on products that they sell and design.
Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.
Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.
Best Startup Founder: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)
Best new startup: iMedix
iMedix combines search and social networking to change the way people find health information online. Users are encouraged to help each other by sharing health experiences and links from around the web.
Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)
The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service. They have just announced 3 GB of free space thanks to hosting on Amazon S3.
Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million
Best time sink site: Kongregate
CEO Jim Greer describes Kongregate as XBox live for casual games. This site hosts some of the webs most addictive casual games. Remember Desktop Tower Defense?
Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChose
DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to connecting classrooms in need with individuals who want to help.

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

2008-01-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

I have found this amazon.com review today:

Don't walk, run to your nearest bookstore to read Carr's dazzling THE BIG SWITCH. If you can only read one book in 2008 this should be it. The writing is clean, pure as spring water and thoughtful. Nicholas Carr makes the coming "information utility" simple for the layman to understand. The description of the development of electricity and its impact on society is fascinating and lays the groundwork for the likely outcome of the information age over the next few decades. I enjoyed this book which is a must for anyone interesting in the future of the information utility.

I am looking forward to receiving my copy of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

The Big Switch's full ramifications are still far from clear, but the areas it has touched so far are profoundly changed. We are further along in The Big Switch than most people suspect, and the momentum to continue is unstoppable.

The Big Switch represents a great opportunity for the next wave of internet innovations. In fact utility computing or cloud computing is maturing quickly thanks to Amazon EC2, Google and many others. Let's get ready for a great ride!

2007 Year in Review

2008-01-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

2007: What an exciting year in terms of internet innovations!

Let's highlight the most interesting news and trends of last year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ruled the Cloud:

Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable cloud database completes the AWS suite
Is it time to learn Amazon EC2 and S3
How to deliver high definition video on the Internet
Internet platforms have been defined
Amazon EC2, S3 + Hadoop = Open Source Utility Computing

3D Virtual Worlds have met the Real World Online:

Earthmine is indexing reality into 3D Maps
EveryScape takes the real world online in 3D
3D Birds Eye views in Virtual Earth
Metaplace: Virtual worlds meet the Web
Street View in Google Maps

Devices and gadgets:

The Apple iPhone starts to disrupt the telecommunications industry
Stunning 3D displays
Next generation personal displays
Surface computing has arrived
The first Terabyte Hard Drive makes personal storage affordable

Web 2.0 and Telco 2.0 disruption:

VoIP phones coming to your browser soon
The War for the next generation mobile consumers intensified
The Amazon Kindle offers bundled broadband
Web 2.0 has met Telco 2.0
Top APIs for Web 2.0 mashups

Hot startups pioneered unbeaten paths:

Here comes another bubble? (fun video)
True Knowledge and Powerset explores Natural Language Search
Peer to peer banking has arrived

Earthmine is Indexing Reality into 3D Maps

2007-12-22T02:51:00.000-08:00

Earthmine is a street-level, 3D mapping company that is focused on indexing reality. Their geospatial data mine of urban environments is an order of magnitude more detailed and accurate than anything before. Earthmine's new kind of map is a geospatially accurate model of the world that is accessed through an intuitive panoramic interface.

Google Maps Street View and Everyscape offers similar immersive visual experience. However every pixel in each high quality Earthmine image has highly accurate latitude, longitude and elevation data. This provides a unique three-dimensional context to existing spatial data not offered by others.

Check out this amazing Earthmine demo video:

Earthmine has vehicles with a calibrated camera array, collecting highly accurate and detailed data at the street level using technology licensed from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This data is processed into a form that is deliverable over the internet as a subscription service to their customer base. Their highly scalable data collection and processing technology is highly scalable allows entire municipalities to be captured in weeks.

Earthmine will offer the first street-level geospatial platform for urban environments in early 2008. Their framework includes

a pre-collected base data layer of 3D panoramic images tagged with 3D location data
a set of web-based professional tools to gather, analyze and visualize street-level location-based information

This geo-spatial framework will integrate into any web application, act as the foundation for layers of geo-tagged meta-data, and connect with existing systems and applications.

AIR iPhone on your Desktop Powered by Ribbit

2007-12-18T07:53:00.000-08:00

Get a fully-functional iPhone on your desktop that enables users to make and take calls on your computer. The innovative AIR iPhone developed on the Ribbit API using Adobe AIR technology makes this a reality. Users can make outbound calls to any type of phone; landline, mobile or online phone. They can also receive incoming calls and voice messages from any phone networks.

The AIR iPhone was developed by Joe Johnston of Knoware. Check it out here.

My earlier post describes the Ribbit API which enables VoIP phone calls directly from the browser. The Ribbit Developer Platform has just been released so developers can access it by signing up for an account.

Ribbit's open API enables developers to integrate voice 2.0 communications into web sites, communities and applications. A great example is Ribbit for Salesforce which links mobile voice communication to Salesforce.com. Mobile calls, voice messages and text transcriptions automatically flow into Salesforce, so users can play, read, store, search, and act on voice communications right inside their customer relationship management (CRM) web environment.

Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable Cloud Database

2007-12-14T04:35:00.000-08:00

Amazon has announced the limited beta of Amazon SimpleDB - a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Together with the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other web services Amazon offers a complete utility computing platform. SimpleDB was the missing piece of AWS - the scalable structured database.

Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data like:

CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
GET, PUT or DELETE items with attribute-value pairs
QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators

Users pay only for the resources that they consume. Pricing is based on

Machine Utilization
$0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
(normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor)
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.13-$0.18 per GB - data transfer out
Structured Data Storage
$1.50 per GB-month

Get started today with the Amazon SimpleDB Guide.

Many companies already use Amazon Web Services as their utility computing infrastructure like finalists of the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge:

Ooyala - a platform to deliver video content for publishers
Brainscape - an engine for measuring the networks in the brain
Commerce360 - optimize paid search campaigns to deliver improved campaign efficiency
Justin.tv - a massively scalable live video platform
MileMeter - “auto insurance buy the mile”
UserTesting.com - quick and cheap website usability testing
WeoGeo - a one-stop marketplace for mapping

With the introduction of Amazon SimpleDB utility computing just got even better!

Here Comes Another Bubble Video

2007-12-11T04:14:00.000-08:00

Are we riding the Web 2.0 bubble? For some fun (or reality check) enjoy this video by The Richter Scales:

Got me a CS degree
Honor roll, MIT
Moved to Palo Alto
Opportunity knocked

Thought I have the perfect plan
Took a job at webvan
Traded in my twenties
For a worthless pile of tech stocks

Suffered through the market crash
Lost a giant wad of cash
Pink slips, burger flips
Would you like some fries?

Happy days are here again
Larry Page, Sergey Brin
Time to write a business plan
So I can be like those guys!

Here comes another bubble
It's a monster rally
All around the valley

First you need a buzzword
Then a second and a third
Pick at least two industries
You'll revolutionize

Find yourself and engineer
Feed him pizza, buy him beer
Give him just a fraction
Of a fraction of the pie

Need a good domain name
Must be cheap, can't be lame
Something cool like
Flickr, meebo, wikiyou, mahalo, bebo

"telephone" without the "t"
"digg" but with a triple "g"
Make your elevator pitch
Code it up and flip the switch

Here comes another bubble
The VCs are backing
Baby let's get cracking

and so on ...

IMINDI Thought Engine for Collective Intelligence

2007-11-29T10:43:00.001-08:00

IMINDI is a Web 2.0 application to collect and expand your thoughts by exploring and connecting with the thoughts of other Like Minds. It is a "Thought Engine" that can augment the way we think of new ideas, concepts and questions based on the idea of mind maps.

Mind mapping is taken to a new level by allowing everyone’s thoughts to be collected together. The interface is an interactive visual map of your mind called a "Journey". Each Journey has its own theme, and once you have chosen a starting thought you can travel to wherever your mind takes you. People can share their thoughts or make them public. Journeys can be connected to expand your thoughts and take them in new directions.

On top of the IMINDI Thought Engine new and useful applications are built that enable you to attach the information to your thoughts such as:

IMINDI Write - an online word processor where you can produce "Essay" documents with keywords marked up with links back to your Journeys
IMINDI Search - A meta search engine that enables you to use the thoughts in your Journeys as queries to all the major search engines
IMINDI Thought Agent - A recommendation engine where IMINDI looks at the thoughts in your Journeys and suggests related thoughts and Like Minds
IMINDI This! - A book mark that enables you to link websites of interest directly to your thoughts in a Journey as a resource

Check out the Journey on the Thought Engine to experience this unique online collective intelligence tool. Collaborative mind mapping is a nice way to collect and harness Collective Intelligence.

Shoogle - Shaking cellphones reveal what's inside

2007-11-28T07:32:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a new innovative idea we can shake our devices to feel and hear how full their battery or message inbox is - as if it were a liquid fuel tank. Shoogle is a novel, intuitive interface for sensing data within a mobile device, such as presence and properties of text messages or remaining resources.

It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around "inside". Accelerometers built into advanced devices like the iPhone or some Nokia phones makes this possible. What can I say? This is cool!

Amazon Kindle Bundles Broadband Wireless

2007-11-27T01:53:00.000-08:00

Amazon wants to change how you shop for and read books with its new device, the Amazon Kindle. Its bundled hidden wireless connectivity marks a new wave of internet innovations. No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments—they take care of the wireless delivery so you can simply click, buy, and read.

Bundling broadband internet connectivity with devices such as the Amazon Kindle or the Apple iPhone is a new way for companies to create compelling gadgets and services. Kindle connects to Whispernet which is based on Sprint's national high-speed (EVDO) data network to enable you to wirelessly search, discover, download, and read content on the go. Unlike WiFi, there is no need to find a hotspot.

Arc Technica posted a detailed review on Amazon's eBook reader.

True Knowledge Gives Direct Answers to Questions

2007-11-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

True Knowledge addresses one of the fundamental problems in internet search: namely that computers (unlike humans) cannot understand the content of web pages. As a result, simply asking a search engine for the desired information in the most natural way possible doesn't produce a direct response. We have to rely on keywords.

Their technology can represent the world's knowledge in a form that is clear and accessible to humans, as well as being comprehensible to computers.

Wikipedia is a repository for the collegtive knowledge of humankind. But it does not provide semantic search. True Knowledge aims to change this.

Check out the promising demo video:

There are several ways of looking at True Knowledge. These include:

Question-Answering Site
Enhanced Search Engine
"Wikipedia for Facts"
Universal Database
Platform for Building Knowledge Services

True Knowledge is a semantic search engine using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. They are not alone in this space. Check out my earlier post on PowerSet. Both are in beta test phase. True Knowledge and PowerSet could possibly create another wave in the ocean of innovations!

Open Internet Video: Miro Challenges Joost

2007-11-14T00:37:00.000-08:00

Turn your computer into an internet TV with Miro - the free open-source video platform with the recently released version 1.0!

There are many ways to explain Miro:

"A TiVo for the internet."
"Turn your computer into a TV."
"Simple, elegant internet video."
"HD TV on your computer."

Miro is open-source, DRM-free, friendly to all content creators, connected to all the popular video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv, high definition, full of content, and BitTorrent-enabled. Miro challenges Joost which, on the other hand, is proprietary, DRM-protected, closed to video sharing sites and entirely streaming video.

Miro functions more like iTunes: download interesting videos from the internet or subscribe to 2500+ video RSS channels. Miro has build in BitTorrent support. Since videos must be downloaded, playback is not instant for now; but the videos load pretty quickly. Miro can play MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format.

Joost is like a better TV with instant play and interaction. It has 250+ commercial broadcast channels to choose from.

Miro and Joost have different strengths and focus. Users enjoy the competition of the maturing online video services.

The War for the Next Generation of Mobile Consumers

2007-11-13T02:17:00.000-08:00

Mobile broadband services will revolutionize our life and create opportunities for companies like Apple and Nokia. Who will win the mobile consumers?

The landscape is changing quickly as companies prepare for this war. The moves so far:

Apple launched the iPhone in collaboration with AT&T

change the business model for operators and handset vendors
revenue share agreement with an operators
European operators O2 and others follows

Nokia made strategic acquisitions

buying companies such as Intellisync, Sega, Gate 5, Navteq, Enpocket and Loudeye
introduced Ovi - its music and web services platform
Vodafone and Telefonica have both plan to offer Ovi services

SonyEricsson

introduced its own Internet music portal: PlayNow
Ericsson acquired Tandberg TV, Redback, Marconi and LHS (billing) to build the next generation services network
Sony builds on its Walkman, Cybershot and Playstation brands to leverage with consumers

Google phone turns out to be an open software initiative

Android is Google’s open mobile operating system initiative. Check out the demo here and the architecture overview here.

acquisitions for location based services, mobile advertising, chat, search, and others set Google up on a collision with the others. But it is a collision with partnerships.
the Open Handset Alliance is betting on the revolution of the mobile phone industry. The alliance includes handset manufacturers such as Motorola, HTC, Samsung and LG, mobile operators such as Sprint, T-Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia and Telefonica, other companies such as Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, eBay, and PacketVideo
but Android will not appear in phones for about a year

Microsoft is going Live

betting its mobile future on Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger, Live Contacts and Live Spaces and bringing together a total end-user experience
acquired companies to extend its offerings and plans to acquire about 20 companies—from $50 million to $1 billion—every year for the next five years

Stay-tuned for the coming battle of the internet and mobile giants. On the other hand media and entertainment companies will create new services and experiences on these platforms and devices. Consumers will have many choices as this brand new mobile broadband world unfolds.

It is Time to Learn Amazon EC2 and S3

2007-11-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

Utility computing is here to conquer the IT world! Amazon Vice President Adam Selipsky has recently unveiled the newest statistics on usage of Amazon S3. Their 265,000+ developer community has now stored over 10 billion (10,000,000,000) objects in S3 at a rate of 27,601 transactions per second. That's huge progress compared to the 5 billion objects just a few months ago!

Programmers and web developers should really look forward to books such as Programming Web Services - S3, EC2, SQS, and FPS by James Murty. The book will cover the most disruptive and useful web services available today:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (just launched in Europe!)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (now in beta with new instances)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (offers reliable and scalable hosted queue)
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (still in limited beta)

To illustrate the power of the Amazon Web Services check out this blog entry by Derek Gottfrid: Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!

The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work!

Derek has achieved this with the help of Amazon S3/EC2 and Hadoop!

I quickly got to work copying 4TB of data to S3. Next I started writing code to pull all the parts that make up an article out of S3, generate a PDF from them and store the PDF back in S3. This was easy enough using the JetS3t — Open Source Java toolkit for S3, iText PDF Library and installing the Java Advanced Image Extension.

For deployment, I created a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for EC2 that was based on a Xen image from my desktop machine. I logged in, started Hadoop and submitted a test job to generate a couple thousands articles — and to my surprise it just worked. It churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3.

Now that this adventure can be called a success, I can’t imagine how we might have done it without Amazon S3 / EC2 . The one caveat I will offer to people who are interested in doing something like this is that it is highly addictive.

Indeed an interesting utility computing success story!

EveryScape Takes the Real World Online in 3D

2007-10-29T04:38:00.000-07:00

Another stunning 3D mapping service goes live: EveryScape isn't an online world, it's the world online.

EveryScape takes you from the streets to the sidewalks and through the doors of the world's cities and tours. Unlike Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps, EveryScape will let users explore both the outside and inside of major cities.

EveryScape has launched beta with 4 destinations: Boston, New York City, Miami and Aspen. They plan to quickly expand this list to 10 cities in 2007. Users are not only encouraged to tour various cities and towns, but also to collaborate and share in the very creation of them. Everyscape's technology transforms digital still photos from inexpensive cameras into 3D models. The company hopes to recruit users to become "scape artists" and upload these photos.

Check out the experience in this launch video:

The 3D virtual reality experience is based on scapes. A Scape is a three-dimensional, photo-realistic experience of a city, street or business. In a scape, anyone with a Flash capable web browser can move seamlessly and look around via a 360-degree panoramic photograph.

The company aims to get real world businesses to establish their own scapes so that potential customers can experiance their business online. A scaped business can be engaging, immersive and realistic.
Standard pricing for the service is $180 a year to get a business listing displayed along with a photo of the outside. For $250 a year, a business can get one inside photo. Two or three inside photos cost $400 and $500 respectively.

3D Birds Eye Views in Virtual Earth

2007-10-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

Another milestone in virtual reality has been reached by Microsoft today. Live Search Map v2 (Gemini) is out with amazing new features! The coolest of them is 3D birds eye views based on aerial photos taken from different angles stitched together just like in Photosynth.

This feature is described in the Virtual Earth blog as:

"Basically, as you navigate the virtual world the camera is snapped to the same parameters the real-world camera had at the time the scene was captured. As you rotate, you will first see virtual 3D buildings and terrain just as the corresponding scene is loaded and overlaid. if you are zoomed out past a single image, a series of white outlines hint at where to click to bring in a new image, very much like the Photosynth UI. smooth camera tweening links the scenes creating an amazing tapestry of the highest resolution aerial image online."

Check out their full to get the details on birds eye view and many other new features such as:

1-Click Directions - Also known as “party maps”, this is a single permalink that you can send out, and each person can get directions to it from their house with a single click.
Route Around Traffic - It’s a check box option to have it automatically route around traffic jams, based on the live traffic data.
Data Import - Import GeoRSS, GPX and even some KML.
Birds Eye View in 3D - A way to view Birds Eye imagery while in 3D mode. It’s kinda weird, but very cool.
3D Tours and Videos of Collections - You can build a “tour” (fly around, look at stuff, etc), then share it with others by sending them a simple URL. They can control the tour using DVD-style controls.
3D Modelling - Using Dassault, you can create 3D buildings in VE.
Collection Search and Explore - A search engine for more content.
Enhanced Detail Pages - More info about each business listed in VE

IT Futurology : What Could Happen to the Web by 2012?

2007-10-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

What will happen when the MySpace generation grows-up? When employees want Facebook rather than a phonebook? When your monthly report is on your iPhone, your spreadsheet's on your Wiki, your e-mail's moved to Google, you haven't got a home directory (or a PC) any more, and blogging's no longer a buzzword - it's just what everybody does to stay employed? Tune in to Alec Muffett's entertaining presentation on blip.tv to find out!

Alec projects current trends and discusses the possibility of a terabyte iPod by 2012. In comparison a recent Hitachi announcement expects the 4TB desktop and 1TB notebook hard disk drives by 2011. Until then we can buy the industry's first cost effective desktop terabyte drive, the Hitachi 0A34915 1TB 7200Rpm 32MB Cache SATA II Hard Drive.

Check out Alec Muffett's blog for more on IT futurology and security.

Natural Language Search - Mining the Web for Meaning

2007-10-03T02:19:00.000-07:00

Do you have a question? Chances are that you can find the answer online in Wikipedia's 2+ million articles or somewhere on the web. How?

The Present: Keyword based search

How do we search today? Search engines use bots to crawl the web to find documents, process them, and then build an index. Google has indexed more than 25 billion web pages in 2006. Search engines consult this huge index in response to a user's query to find a set of matching documents. So far so good. Then they try to rank the potential matches to present the most relevant results. The ranking of the matches, and possibly the short presentation of each result, are tailored to the query and potentially any other information available to the search engine.

It is challenging to rank potentially thousands or millions of matches to get relevant results. However relevance is critical especially for mobile users. Keyword-based search engines such as Google rank pages using a number of criteria and features: PageRank [link graph analysis], keyword frequency, and keyword proximity, and many others. Many of these smart algorithms are discussed in my earlier post on Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. Google was clearly the innovator in that area that made them he undisputed leader in the search space. What is the next step to improve relevance?

The Promise of the Semantic Web

The natural language of web pages is difficult to understand and process for computers. The vision of the Semantic Web promises information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web. The idea of the Semantic Web would require authors and publishers to make the information easier to process by computers using special markup languages.

There are many projects who aims to capture the knowledge of the world in a structured manner that software can process. Most interesting of them are Freebase and Google Base. However most of the web remains unstructured text therefore the idea of the Semantic Web remains largely unrealized. How is it possible to mine the meaning of those billions of web pages?

The Future: Natural Language Search

Imagine if you could ask a search engine the following question and get relevant results: "what did steve jobs say about the iPod?"

True natural language queries have linguistic structure which keyword-oriented search engines ignore. This includes queries where the function words matter, where word order means something, and where relationships that should be explicitly stated easily are stated. Instead of ignoring the function words, a natural language search engine respects their meaning and uses it to give better results.

In fact one of the most buzzed startup companies on the TechCrunch 40 Conference aims to implement such a natural language search engine. It is a big challenge.

Powerset has licensed key Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology from Xerox PARC. Their search engine examines the actual meaning and relationships of words in each sentence for the web pages as well as the queries.

The NLP technology they’re using has been under development for 30+ years now. Their unfair advantage is the fact that Powerset has reduced the processing time for indexing one sentence down from two minutes to one second. Currently they’re limited to a select few sites to crawl: Wikipedia, New York Times and ontological resources like Freebase and WordNet. They plan to use Amazon’s EC2 and build out their data centers to scale. Indexing billions of web pages will take time but natural language search is certainly an interesting wave in the ocean of web innovations.

Check out Powerset's blog or sign up for Powerset Labs to experience their latest technology.

Metaplace: Virtual Worlds Meet the Web

2007-09-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

Innovation happens when ideas are combined. What do we get when Virtual Worlds meet the Web? Second Life on the Web? Areae has unveiled Metaplace on the Techcrunch conference. It has the potential to change the way how virtual worlds are made.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Using a suite of tools anyone can make worlds and put them on their web pages.

The differences: Metaplace vs. Second Life

Second Life is a rich client based immersive 3D metaverse. It is a walled garden although Linden Lab plans to open it up to some extent. Metaplace on the other hand is a web-based network of online worlds right from the start. It is an open metaverse that looks more like the web.

Metaplace: the web-based metaverse

The open web like nature of Metaplace is present on the technical level as well. It is not a walled garden. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. An object can be scripted in MetaScript so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser (imagine a newspaper with real headlines can sitting on your virtual desk). MetaScript is based on the Lua programming language that is also used by other MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft.

There is a huge interest for the alpha application for Metaplace which will close today. The open beta is planned for spring 2008.

Open source metaverse projects

Immerse 3D environments are getting more and more popular. There are two major open source projects in this space:

Croquet is a software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

The OpenSource Metaverse Project was created to support virtual worlds that allow customization by the player and creation of custom worlds. It aims to provide an open source metaverse engine and a client that is flexible, scalable.

The OpenSource Metaverse Project is analogous to the web. You can create hyperlinks to any other metaworld running on any metaverse server worldwide. In this aspect it is similar to Metaplace.

Let there be new virtual worlds!

Internet Platforms Defined

2007-09-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Platforms on the Internet are one of the hottest topics these days. Marc Andreessen helps to overcome the current confusion of the platform concept in his incredibly insightful blog post. Marc has tackled the concept of internet platforms and defined the three levels of them. Here is a short summary but I recommend you to check out the full article for details.

A "platform" is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

A Level 1 platform's apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services -- this is how Flickr does it.
A Level 2 platform's apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API -- this is how Facebook does it. Most likely, a Level 2 platform's apps also call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.
A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.

The most interesting of these internet platforms are those that are level 3. Some examples of these are:

Akamai's EdgeComputing
Amazon S3, EC2 and FPS
Ning (Marc's own company)
Google Apps could became a level 3 platform
Salesforce.com
Second Life

The platforms of the future will be in the cloud as online services that you will tap into over the Internet. This is a fundamental change that will drive a lot of innovations. We are living in very exciting times!

The Secret of Hottest Startups

2007-09-19T04:55:00.000-07:00

Forty of the hottest startups have announced and demonstrated their new products at the TechCrunch40 conference. That is plenty of innovative and disruptive ideas in action!

Each startup company had 8 minutes to present their business plans in one of these sessions:

Search and Discovery
Mobile and Communications
Community and Collaboration
Crowd Sourcing
Productivity and Web Applications
Revenue Models and Analytics
Rich Media and Mash Ups
Entertainment for All Ages

What is the secret sauce of technology startups? How did they present their unfair advantage in 8 minutes? John L. Nesheim provide step by step guide for entrepreneurs to create and execute a strong business plan. His book The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create It, Build it, and Use It to Maximum Effect offers essential tips, tools, and techniques for startups.

It is not only techniques that are important though. Real-life, down-to-earth stories told by founders of famous companies shows another perspective about the early days of startups. The book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is awfully inspiring. It is like reading a pile of books written by founders of Apple, Yahoo, PayPal and others, each with their own insights and useful advice.

Innowave - Internet Innovations Search Engine

2007-09-13T02:48:00.000-07:00

I have created a new Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) which aims to help you search sites related to internet innovations. Feel free to contribute to this search engine!

Check it out here or at the right tab of my blog!

How To Deliver High Definition Video on the Internet

2007-09-05T06:05:00.000-07:00

Today more and more households have HDTV sets and broadband internet connections with 6-8+ MBit/sec bandwidth. However the scalable delivery of HD video content is still a big challenge.

The capacity to deliver high definition video already exists at the edge of the network – leveraging the massive build-outs of individual networks. The challenge comes from how you tap into that capacity. The best way to solve this problem is to deliver from the edge using distributed architectures.

The potential benefits are huge and the demand for high definition video is growing. How to deliver HD content to the internet? Let's examine the possibilities.

1. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai have tons of servers distributed across hundreds of cities. These servers can deliver high bandwidth content such as HD video from the Edge to the users. Even YouTube moves most popular content to a CDN. Akamai has recently announced their plans to bring High Definition to the internet. Their platform is architected to meet the following technical requirements:

Technology and an operational model to operate serving devices in the largest high-throughput networks around the world
Established relationships with the largest high throughput networks
Support for delivery, storage, and management of files greater than 2 Gigabytes
Support of VC-1 and MPEG-4 video standards
Support for files with resolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p

2. Use Utility Computing services such as the Amazon S3 and EC2

Utility computing and storage services are another way to host scalable video content and applications. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides such an on demand distributed service. However these services are not yet proven for hosting High Definition content. Check out my previous post on Amazon S3 for Video Hosting.

3. Use Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent

P2P file sharing applications have been popular in the last couple of years. P2P could be used for TV and movies as well:

Joost offers a new way of watching TV using P2P as the underlying architecture
Vuze offers Hi-def Theater using their BitTorrent based client software

Although P2P could be an efficient way to distribute content it can have significant bandwidth overhead for the users.

Which way to go?

The optimal choice depends on the requirements. CDNs are proven technologies but P2P could be cheaper as it matures. Utility storage services are similar to CDNs and the two could became competitors. What is your choice?

Displays with Embedded Touch Screen and Scanner Functions

2007-09-04T03:13:00.000-07:00

Sharp has announced a new display with touch screen and scanner functions using an optical sensor built into each pixel of the LCD.
The LCD is targeted to be used on displays for mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone, PDAs, and UMPCs. Conventional methods to provide touch screen functions are based on bonding a film on top of the LCD panel, leading to problems with reduced display image quality and increased thickness for the display section.

Sharp's System LCD technology eliminates the need for films. In addition, multi-touch tactile recognition is now possible, a feature previously difficult to implement. For example, users can easily tap the screen with two fingers to enlarge or reduce a displayed map. The scanner function can be used to scan in a business card placed on top of the screen.

Amazon S3 for Video Hosting

2007-08-28T03:38:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I have written that the next YouTube could be built on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0. It is indeed very easy to host videos on Amazon S3.

All you need to do is to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and upload your videos with the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (available here: S3Fox). To see this in action check out this interesting Amazon S3 video hosting tutorial by Perry Lawrence on YouTube.

You can simply include the hosted files in your web pages. However it is also possible to create nice web applications or mashups using the video content on S3. The book Amazon.com Mashups by Francis Shanahan will help developers to get familiar with Amazon Web Services. The examples in this book demonstrates how to integrate AWS with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. Check out this sample chapter on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) available at Wrox.

It has never been easier to create your own YouTube!

Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

2007-08-23T01:09:00.000-07:00

Successful internet companies have learned the hard way how to use the collective intelligence of users:

Amazon, Netflix and others have built recommendation engines
Goole has invented a unique page ranking system based on links

In his new book, Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran teaches the secrets of harnessing the power of user generated content. This practical book takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. The book explains:

Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media
Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset
Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm
Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one
Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features
Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made
Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models
Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites
Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset
Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game

Web 2.0 meets Telco 2.0

2007-08-22T05:39:00.000-07:00

The closed telecommunications business model is in trouble. Large operators find it difficult to introduce new profitable services using their expensive infrastructure. Some of them have realized this and are rushing to enable 3rd parties to implement new services by publishing interfaces to their networks. The prime example is British Telecom who has made major investments implementing their open 21st Century Network. Several APIs are now available for messaging, call control and mobile applications to create interesting mashups.

The Web21C SDK is a set of libraries that makes it simple for developers to consume Web Services exposed by BT. Many services can be accessed easily:

Messaging - send SMS messages
Voice call - place phone calls from applications
Conference call - place and control conference calls
Location - determine the geographic location (latitude,longitude, altitude) of a mobile device
Authentication - create and control authentication realms for applications, including management and authentication of users
Inbound SMS - receive and process SMS text messages from any mobile network
Contacts - give users the ability to build and maintain a list of buddies and set their availability
Information about me (IAM) - store and retrieve data about an individual in key value pairs

The Web21C SDK allows product and service developers, from major enterprises to one-man programmer start-ups, to integrate their new applications with BT services in a single line of code.

Competitive pricing model: Web21C SDK services are charged through a credit system with each service having an associated credit cost per invocation.

"No other telco in the world is doing this," says Dirk Wood of the Web21C team. "BT is ahead of the game. This product shows that BT is in the business of becoming a fundamental part of the new world where innovation is agile and can originate from anywhere. This is central to what web 2.0 really means, it's where all services are going and we're right at the leading edge of this movement."

ProgrammableWeb has a great how-to article on the big picture of telephony APIs and mashups.

Disruption in Telecom: Voice & Messaging

2007-08-21T03:31:00.000-07:00

The proliferation of the internet and wireless broadband connectivity is disrupting the telecom industry status quo. Innovative IP based voice and messaging services challenge traditional phone services.

The Telco 2.0 blog (STL) has teamed with Telecom TV to cover this topic in a very interesting panel discussion. Their Chief Analyst Martin Geddes explains how the value proposition of telephony is likely to invert over the next 10-15 years:

access was in short supply (traditional telco)
user's time and attention is in short supply (next wave)
value is shifting from providing access to serve real needs of the users
(usability, relevance, transactions, trust)

Keith Wallington represents a disruptor on the panel: Truephone. They offer free software that brings Internet/Wi-Fi based VoIP to mobile phones. That means free or very cheap mobile calls and messaging. He explains:
"the ability to charge a human being ... for a minute or a second of air time will tend to zero"

So the future is in rich services that create real value for the users. The user is the king!

Check out the full video here:
Telco 2.0 on TV: Disruption & Innovation in Voice & Messaging.

Top 10 APIs for Web Mashups

2007-08-17T05:39:00.000-07:00

Mashups are web applications that combine data from two or more external sources into an integrated experience. Content used in mashups is sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Many people are experimenting with mashups using Microsoft, Google, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, and Yahoo APIs, which has led to the creation of Mashup Editors.

ProgrammableWeb is a great resource on mashups. Based on their latest stats the top 10 APIs for web 2.0 mashups of all time are:

Google Maps - to embed Google Maps in your own web pages
Flickr - to present public Flickr data
Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) - exposes product data and e-commerce functionality
YouTube - access to key parts of the YouTube video respository and user community
Virtual Earth - access to Microsoft's online mapping platform
Yahoo Maps - developer APIs of Yahoo Maps
Ebay - eBay Web Services and eCommerce platform
411Sync - SMS text messaging
del.icio.us - social bookmarking
Yahoo search - web, contextual and related search API

However recently popular mashups also use these APIs:

Twitter - What are you doing?
Skype - create applications that work together with Skype
GeoNames - eight million geographical names available under free creative commons licence

Check out the full list with ~500 APIs on ProgrammableWeb and their tutorial on how to make your own web mashup!

Erlang: The Programming Language for Multicore CPUs

2007-08-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

The future of computing is going to be concurrent. Sun has just announced the UltraSPARC T2 CPU which they call the World's fastest microprocessor. With 8 cores and 64 threads it makes a true system on a chip. Even desktop systems have multi-core processors nowadays. However traditional software is not well prepared to effectively utilize large number of cores.

Concurrent programming is hard. Most programming languages do not make it easier either. On the other hand Erlang is ideally positioned for this new world. It was designed from the ground up to take advantage of parallel and multi-core architectures.

Erlang is a concurrent functional programming language and runtime system. It was designed to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. Erlang was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson, but was released as open source in 1998.

Erlang programs usually scale very well on multi-core systems. Joe Armstrong explains why:

"Back in the old days (20 odd years ago) there were two models of concurrency:

Shared state concurrency
Message passing concurrency

Now the whole world went one way (towards shared state), and we went the other"

The Erlang concurrency model differs from other languages by not having any shared state. If a process wants to communicate with another, it does so by sending messages. This method scales better than methods that uses shared memory for communication.

You can learn much more about Erlang in Joe Armstrong's new book:
Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World

It's very readable and does not require prior experience with functional languages. The book is packed with examples and encourages experimenting; in fact the first chapter explains the installation of Erlang. A reviewer calls it "the most important programming language book this decade".

To have some fun check out this article and video from 1990: Erlang Now!

More resources:

Erlang for the practical man - tutorial on using RSS, POP3, SSL and HTTP in Erlang
ErlyBird - Erlang IDE based on NetBeans

Open Source Realtime 3D Engine for Flash

2007-08-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Papervision3D is a high performance 3D engine for Flash. It features linear texture mapping, optimized for rendering speed and quality. It has been designed to be simple and easy to use.

Papervision3D is in public beta and available on Google Code under the open source MIT License. The project has a Wiki and a Blog as well.

Check out these stunning demos to get a glimpse of the possibilities:

Shark (Flashforward Film Festival Finalist)
Panorama

Papervision3D based rich internet applications would look amazing on these real 3D displays!