Bill: ICT Today and Tomorrow

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:36:46 GMT

I.B.M. Tops Forecasts and Expects a Good 2009. The forecast may signals that the company’s focus on high-margin services and software contract is paying off. [NYT > Technology]

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:18:03 GMT

EyeTV 3.1 brings in TV Guide, series recording. Elgato has released an update to EyeTV 3, its Mac-based DVR software. Key to v3.1 is the addition of a TV Guide schedule for North America, which covers broadcasts up to 14 days in advance and provides associated cast, rating and genre information. A year of the schedule will be free for new and existing EyeTV 3 owners, but subsequent years will cost $20 each....

[MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:02:44 GMT

Google Earth Surfing with Wii.

At MacWorld this week Google has been thrilling crowds with a chance to surf with Google Earth using a Wii Balance Board and running on a Mac. Googler David Oster wrote some javascript code to interface the Wii with the Google Earth API, and he's releasing the code as open source. He has more details on what he did at the Lat Long blog. And, David says the source code will be posted at the Google Mac Developer Playground next week. In the meantime, watch this video to see it in action:

By Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog. [Google Earth Blog]

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:26:10 GMT

Google search finds missing child. A nine-year-old girl, allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, has been found using a phone signal and Google Street View. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:26:52 GMT

Sling Media debuts iPhone client, Mac HD; due in Q1. EchoStar's Sling Media on Tuesday announced it will demo a version of SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone at the Expo and will deliver a version of SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone to Apple for certification in Q1. Sling Media also unveiled a prototype of a new SlingPlayer for Mac HD which allows Slingbox PRO-HD users to stream HD to their Mac desktop or laptop computer. The new SlingPlayer for Mac HD is a...

[MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:54:44 GMT

Google ships Picasa for Mac, works with web albums. Google has released Picasa for the Mac, allowing Mac users to manage, edit and share photo collections. The new software works with Google's Picasa Web Albums and provides tools for photo editing, eliminating scratches, blemishes and fixing red-eye. It has automatic web sync, offers collage making and simple movie editing and, using Picasa's web albums, photos can be tagged with names for tracking...

[MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:57:11 GMT

The future of presentation?
(Below) Cisco CEO John Chambers was live on a Bangalore stage when he [base ']Äòbeamed up[base ']Äô Martin De Beer and Chuck Stucki live from San Jose, California. Chambers then had a "face to face" discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the same stage. Not sure what this means for the future of presentation, but it is very cool. Watch it.¬[sgl dagger] (H/T Guy Kawasaki.)

[Presentation Zen]

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:19:20 GMT

Hologram Google Earth.

Check out this cool display and interface with Google Earth:

Holographic Google Earth from Nicolas Loeillot on Vimeo.

The technology comes from UbiqWindow and lets a computer screen be projected in mid-air. They have devised a touchless way to interact with the "hologram", and Google Earth is a great way to show off its capabilities. it's not a 3D projection, just 2D. But, it sure looks cool. via Google Earth Design

By Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog. [Google Earth Blog]

Fri, 30 May 2008 06:17:49 GMT

iPhone Earth - Coolest Things I saw at Where 2.0 2008.

Last week at the 2008 Where 2.0, there were a number of interesting technologies being shown in the exhibit hall. One of the most interesting exhibits I saw was by a Boulder, Colorado company called earthscape. They showed a number of interesting things (see below), but what really impressed me was when their CEO Tom Churchill pulled out his iPhone to show me how they're working on a 3D Earth application for the iPhone. Check out this video I made as he demonstrated it to me:

I was particularly impressed when I saw they had used the iPhone accelerometers to allow you to tilt and rotate your view by tilting the iPhone. They weren't downloading the imagery data over the net, it was all running local with just imagery for the San Francisco area. But, it was still very cool! The application is under development using the Apple iPhone SDK. So, assuming they finish the product, it should run under iPhone 2.0. You would definitely only want to run a real app like this if you had a WiFI connection or 3G - imagery and 3D takes a lot of bandwidth. But, this demo definitely makes me look forward to the possibility Google will maybe have a version of Google Earth running on our phones. NOTE: the beta sign-up on their home page is not for the iPhone Earth it's for their geobrowser (next paragraph).

When I first saw earthscape's booth, they were showing something that grabbed my eye. They have been developing their own Google Earth-like geobrowser. When I first saw it, the browser was showing a life-like 3D model of an airliner flying over 3D terrain. I spoke to their CEO Tom Churchill at the booth, and he described what was going on. They had developed an in-flight plane tracker for passengers using their 3D browser which showed the position of the aircraft in 3D relative to ground. Passengers can switch to the inside of the cockpit (also rendered in 3D), top-down, or oblique views. They also demonstrated geotagged photos. Tom said they had been working on their browser for 3 years, and they've obviously been able to look at other browsers (like GE) and innovate new UI techniques and data. I liked how they implemented the ability to switch to different base imagery showing older aerial photos. They mentioned a Javascript API to control the geobrowser. I've signed up for the beta on their web site.

And, if that's not enough - during the Where 2.0 sessions earthscape presented demonstrations of software they are developing showing augmented reality for police helicopter pilots. They showed video of the helicopter pilot looking at infrared night video cameras through his goggles. Their software automatically showed augmented information such as street names, addresses, and other useful information so the pilot could concentrate more on flying and keeping his target (usually a car trying to escape capture) in sight. At any moment the pilot can easily tell ground forces the location of the target. Very cool technology! Because of the relevancy to Google Earth, and just the way cool way their iPhone Earth worked, they get my vote for coolest tech shown at Where 2.0.

By Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog. [Google Earth Blog]

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:19:04 GMT

Understanding Apple (Apple now the #1 Music retailer).

According to Apple, over January and February of this year they surpassed Wal-Mart as the largest music retailer in the U.S.

Here’s why this is amazing:

The itunes store is only 5 years old. FIVE YEARS.
According to Apple, they account for 70% of all digital music sales.
The ipod is the market leader with ~75% of all music player sales.
Apple was a late entrant: they did not invent the first digital music player, nor the first digital music store.

The most important but rarely told story is that Apple is no longer a niche brand. When else in history has a BMW, a Rolex, a Four Seasons, successfully transitioned into a Honda, a Timex, or a Holiday Inn? It’s rare. When high-end brands go mass market, they rarely get it right. But Apple made the transition in a handful of years without anyone even noticing.

And more interesting to students of innovation is how the story line around Apple is still about innovation despite the gaps in the stereotype. It’s rarely mentioned how they were late to the digital music game, how many of the technological breakthroughs were done out of house, or how many mistakes competitors made that accelerated the rise of the i-pod and i-tunes so fast.

It’s thrilling to see a company thrive on maintaining their standards, and entertaining to see the late followers respond. But the true innovation at work here, if it can really be called an innovation, is quality. The distinction of the Apple brand is superior aesthetic, functional and design quality, and Apple has succeeded in making quality the distinctive factor in tech purchasing decisions. Not price. Not features. But quality. And the irony is how competitors refuse to compete on this turf, retreating back to price and features.

Perhaps the most important overlooked point lesson in all this success is how unexpected it was. I doubt any marketing projection for i-tunes or the i-pod had anything like the adoption curves seen above. I suspect they predicted they’d maintain their high-end brand with it’s resulting high-end marketshare, and were as surprised as the rest of the world with how quickly the i-pod became a phenomenon. For all their well deserved success, Apple still experiences the unexpected.

[scottberkun.com]

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:36:44 GMT

Edusim. Edusim is a free opensource 3D virtual world specifically for use with interactive whiteboards. Edusim is a 3D virtual environment that allows direct haptic manipulation of the 3D virtual learning objects directly from the interactive whiteboard surface. [edna]

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:13:13 GMT

Apple trades at $200 for first time (AP).

AP - Shares of Apple Inc. hit the $200 mark for the first time Wednesday, as investor confidence in the company continued rising near the end of what has been a strong year for the iPod and computer maker.

[Yahoo! News: Apple/Macintosh News]

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:48:29 GMT

DoCoMo chief meets Apple's Jobs amid iPhone rumours (AFP).

AFP - NTT DoCoMo said Wednesday that its president had met with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs amid reports that Japan's top mobile telephone operator is in talks to launch the iPhone here.

[Yahoo! News: Apple/Macintosh News]

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:46:24 GMT

Leopard Sets Operating System Sales Records For Apple (TechWeb). TechWeb - In the first full month of sales, Mac OS X 10.5 raked in 32.8% more money than its predecessor, according to The NPD Group. [Yahoo! News: Apple/Macintosh News]

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:58:10 GMT

SmartSTIK biometric flash drive shipping. BioMETRX recently shipped the smartSTIK finger-activated USB flash drive, available in 1GB and 2GB sizes. The drive is advertised as being consumer-friendly, requiring no additional drivers or software to function, making it simple to setup and use. SmartSTIK is fully plug-and-play, making it a good choice for users who routinely bring sensitive in... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:13:31 GMT

Amazon removes the database scaling wall. When Amazon introduced S3 in March 2006 I knew I would use it and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet.

I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here.

When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.)

As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue.

A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.)

Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there were a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem.

If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task for Manila, but it would have made it economically possible.

Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.

Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.

They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply).

Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.

[Scripting News]

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:05:13 GMT

Toyota aims to put robots to use early next decade. TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp said on Thursday it aims to put its humanoid and other advanced robots to practical use soon after 2010 to help people in factories, hospitals, homes and around town. [Reuters: Technology]

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:53:11 GMT

Internet access doubles since 2001. Internet access in Australia has nearly doubled since 2001, according to an analysis of census information released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). In 2001, just over a third (35%) of homes across Australia had internet access; in 2006, that had grown to nearly two-thirds (63%). Nationally, two-thirds (66%) of homes in major cities have internet access, compared to under half (42%) for very remote Australia. Broadband is used by 46% of homes in major cities and 24% in very remote Australia. The report also found that income and education were key factors influencing people's internet access. ABS media release, 29 November 2007. [edna education news]

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:53:22 GMT

The Times *finally* gets the Leopard story. When Leopard came out Pogue gushed that it had so many features he couldn't hope to write about them all. The real news -- not approved by Apple of course -- to get Leopard to run, many users would have to do things that would make a Windows system administrator blush. This, from the computer that "works the way you do," according to their ads.

On the NY Times blog, today, Saul Hansell finally has the story.

[Scripting News]

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:39:16 GMT

Google makes 700MHz bid official. Google today confirmed its bid for the FCC's 700MHz spectrum auction, validating a late leak in the press of the company's intentions. The maneuver will give Google an opportunity to use and license the airwaves for services such as cellular calling or Internet access, both of which are likely to occur given the company's purported secret testing ... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:26:07 GMT

Steve Jobs Anointed Fortune's Most Influential Exec (TechWeb). TechWeb - Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Hurd also made the top-25 list. [Yahoo! News: Apple/Macintosh News]

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:18:31 GMT

Patterns of internet access in Australia, 2006. There has been significant growth in Australia's access to/use of the Internet between 2001 and 2006. In 2001, 35% of Australian dwellings had access to the Internet in the week prior to the Census date. In 2006, 63% of Dwellings had access to the Internet. [edna recently added]

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:38:56 GMT

Google Doesn’t Know Where You Are (but It Has a Good Guess). A new feature to Google’s cellphone mapping service can figure out more or less sort of where you are. It’s got some slick technology to help it figure that out. By SAUL HANSELL. [NYT > Technology]

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 05:49:40 GMT

Deutsche Telekom to sell Apple iPhone without subscription (AFP).

AFP - German telecommunications operator Deutsche Telekom said Wednesday that as a result of a court ruling it would sell Apple's iPhone without forcing customers to sign up to the operator's mobile telephone service.

[Yahoo! News: Apple/Macintosh News]

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:21:27 GMT

Wars of ideas. Science and technology: Bobbie Johnson introduces a list of the 10 greatest legal battles in technology history. By Bobbie Johnson. [Guardian Unlimited]