Technology Blog

Russell Beattie points to a company called MotionBridge that is doing interesting work in Mobile Internet. They reduce the number of clicks required by a user to visit a particular page. They load content provider’s page (let’s say Amazon.com) on their proxy servers and when user visits Amazon, a search box is shown. Search is done on the proxy servers and user is guided to the real page on the net.




What happens to Motionbridge if Amazon.com reduces its interface for mobiles to a search box? Or simply if user goes to Google first.




Their second offering is more interesting. Wizard brings Google Suggests like dictionary capability to mobiles. THAT is good.

source: Google Suggest for mobiles

Jesse James Garrett writes about how the latest web applications are being written. Apps like Gmail, Google Suggests and Google Maps are all bringing the desktop experience to the browser using an approach he calls Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript + XML.

[via SiliconBeat]

source: Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

A potential cautionary flag. I’ve watched many announcements fly out on Skype to SMS. I’ve seen Skype Technologies quoted as if it is their program. It’s not as far as I know. A few weeks ago I blogged that Connectotel had launched an SMS to Skype service using an SMS gateway. We tried it out and were impressed. Now they are testing Skype to SMS services. I think this is exciting. I would add one cautionary note. Connectotel is the gateway between Skype and the GSM gateway which means there is a “security point” risk. You should be aware that your message is not encrypted end to end.

‘Skype to SMS’ is available as a Beta test service for all users of Skype who have been authorized by Connectotel. For information about authorization please see the FAQ here:
http://www.connectotel.com/sms/skypetosmsfaq.html

There is no charge for the SMS messages sent, for the duration of the Beta test. The ‘SMS to Skype’ Beta test service is available free of charge to all users of Skype.

Connectotel is examining the possibility of providing other gateway services, including, for example, links to and from e-mail, fax and outside data feeds, based on similar technology.

Connectotel

Skype Forums

This post was written by Stuart, source: Skype to SMS - Beta

Frank Luntz’s strategy for the Republicans opens with this stunnner: So how does a President with a national job approval rating hovering at 50%, an economy that lost more than a million jobs over his four years in office, a war that has cost more than a thousand American lives and counting, $50 a barrel for oil, and a national mood that is downright sour still secure more than enough votes to win re-election? And what does it portend for the Republican Party in 2006? The answer? Credibility. George W. Bush had it. John Kerry did not. Credibility!? Luntz has…

source: Credibility

Mike pinged me with the Google’s gonna do calendar thing on Tues am. We were just talking this weekend about the calendar issue, so I was interested. That first piece was a nice bit of speculation, but that was it, so I just turned inward to pick up the pieces of moving to iCal. Then Brendon pinged me with other bits of discussion, so now I’ll put this out.

I calendar almost everything. It helps me remember what I was doing, thinking, living then. My work calendar is completely mapped out, part of making the work of research more transparent for Tokyo (who might well question “What does she do all day?”). That was the original impetus, but I’ve adopted it as a sort of modified Personal Software Process. I simply find I accomplish what I set out to do within my original estimates as long as I keep to the schedule, since I can focus on incredibly diverse things as long as I plan for deep dives separated by periods of general work or phonecalls.

As a Windows user, I have been using categories in Outlook to manage my tasks; unfortunately the only way to get a visual indicator of task (i.e., displayed by color) was to use the proprietary (and buggy) “label” indicator. If you’re an Outlook user, this ends up being a nice feature (right click and select “label”, you can customize labels and colors). You can see it below.

When I prepared my Outlook calendar for export, I used my category-based organization to copy entries by category into new blank calendars I created. The process was rather involved (and I document the full thing here - will be uploaded when done).

I wanted to use the Moz calendar project for this first. I’ve used Moz since 1999 and last tried the calendar about two years ago. It’s come a long way since then, but still has problems. Moreover, it seems to be a huge memory hog. That’s ok, I’ll just have to get more RAM. Be prepared to deal with error messages notifying you a script will take a long time to run. Just hit “cancel” and it will continue cooking.

My 13 categories (which seems high) translated into 13 calendar files under ics. In MozCalendar (currently named Sunbird), I can toggle each one so they are viewable or not, and assign each layer a color to achieve the same effect.
Below you can see a view of my new calendar in MozCal. Horrid colors I know, but the app seems to need a restart before displaying a color change. I won’t bother with being aesthetic now.

Since I have WebDAV capabilities via my web host, Dreamhost, I can make these files available for viewing by others, and theoretically make slices available for public downloads. From this, you would just need a reader that can parse the .ics and add an event to a client calendar.

Since I haven’t really played with this before, let me try with JWZ’s ics for the DNA Lounge (actually, it’s more likely from a guy named John Adams). That will get a nice black or blood red font (I hit DNA for their fringe events). <CRASH!> Well, we’ll have to see MozSuite crashed (perhaps it is not so bad that I’ve been using Firefox as my browser while I test this out). <BANG!> A restart failed as well. Hmmm. Perhaps it is good that I got my screencaptures in while I could, folks.

But what goes on in my pc is only so interesting. The topic has gained traction out in the wild.

Jeremy Zawodny posted about this yesterday, which Brendon Wilson AIM’ed me about. Jeremy asked what features folks would want in additon to his good-start list. I added my thoughts in comments to Jeremy’s post, which I’ll reprint here (bc I’ll forget where I wrote them):

I’ve been near obsessed with this issue in the last two weeks with moving from outlook to ical and have found no easy solutions. Sorry for the long comment - repressed blog post.

Here are the client apps I’ve found in the win(dows) world: MozCal is most stable on MozSuite (I find it very slow and unstable on Firefox and Tbird). PHPical, like EventSherpa, is also gone. WebCalendar (which I’ve found cumbersome for other apps) will be my next bet.

My must-have feature requests:

• layered calendars. That’s the reason I’m moving to iCal is for the ability to layer on and off new calendars. That will fix some of the sharing-of-personal data isssue, as it addresses the rss/rdf thing by making context much more apparent (if users chose to group it in this way).
• for RSS type apps, a “click” to add to your calendar plugin for an individual event (in addition to offering the full ics)
• intelligent, mobile syncing with my treo650

As a personal solution to event tracking that uses RSS, I’m modifying a Wordpress install to publish an event feed (not live yet). I’m tangled in the code right now, but should be able to get smarter eyes on it this weekend and have it up next week.

As for demand, this is totally a scratch-my-itch thing that’s perfect for smaller groups to tackle. We don’t really need Google, but if they do it and it’s exactly what I want, that’s great (how likely is that?). However, this is about as critical as microcontent can get, and the trust barrier is very high. Local copies are still key, so it will take someone flexible enough to work across the various client apps (which really do suck).

And before we get all wound up about how complicated our technogeek lives are, we don’t have any exposure to the level of normal-land user need this is for this product. Can you imagine keeping a handle on family activities? That’s a huge pool of unmet needs. It might be free, it might be $29.95, it’s doable.

So where are we? Nothing really works. We’ve got a ton of dead projects (like what about Outport - code not updated in forever). New rants pushing people off from working on this (understandable though they are). Will Google save us? I don’t think so.

Also in the comments Technorati’s Tantek pointed to hCalendar, but I’m not sure what it means. Right now we’ve got standards around iCal, but limited implementation (except in the Apple world, and don’t think that didn’t cause me to reconsider my Treo650 vs. a nice phone-and-iPod-and-MacMini - but hell three gadgets just can’t compete). It seems like we need new implementations. And hCalendar might be an important source of both momentum and guidance.

One thing is for sure, what we’re really talking about here is search plus social networking plus synchronicity. The question we’re trying to address is how can I make the most effective use of my time? How do I find interesting ways to spend my time, with new friends, close friends, and old friends? How can I control my interests and my scheduling? How can I understand what my family is doing easily? How could I centralize and mobilize?

Let’s see what we can put together.

This post was written by eleanor, source: Calendaring needs

Here’s just a quick post to say that, after 25 minutes of their training programs, ScanSoft’s Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 (even the cheap version) works fabulously, and it scratches an itch I’ve had for years. I only wish the idea came to me sooner!

For some time, I’ve been taking notes from books I read - tagging interesting passages as I go long. Then, I return and laboriously key them in. It’s almost embarrassing to recount such a waste of time, but the end product is valuable. It’s taxing for my wrists, in addition to being a boring chore, so the scheme usually only works when I get books out of the library and can assume I’ll never see them again. A suboptimal solution all around.

The problem was more acute with this week’s offering, The Innovator’s Solution (which, yes, I should have read long ago). My copy, sitting here now, is just filled with little page markers - a daunting notetaking prospect (and I’m on the 3rd last chapter, with more to add). It’s, of course, a remarkable book, as good as you’ve heard and worth reading, filled with insights and tips that are worth capturing. It’s true we know, viscerally, a lot of this stuff, having learned through experience, but often I find I can lose perspective and need to be reminded. There are probably a hundred things Christensen writes that are worth careful study. Who has time for that?

A few years ago, when I started this system of capturing notes, I looked to pen scanners to snatch lines of text, but their performance was just not up to this application. I considered a few other schemes, including that Logitech IO pen and others too lame for me to recall. (ThinkGeek doesn’t even feature those single line scanners anymore - what a failure!)

Techno-flail followed techno flail, until at last, it hit me yesterday afternoon that Dragon would be perfect for the dictation that comes from reading printed material. It’s not creation - there are no pauses while I think, extra movements as I amplify and idea or move text around. This is just pure dictation. It’s a wonderful feeling to successfully think my way out of the problems I set myself.

And how did it do? Beautifully. 25 minutes of going through the tutorials and I was off. Even the control settings and such are easy to use (though I’ve learned I can be sloppy in my pronunciation of “asterisk”). As before, I’m capturing the text in a text editor, using characters as a break so that I can later swap them out in VIM (I’ve become a regex fiend out of pure laziness). When typing by hand, I used the | character. Using Dragon, I needed something easier, and so selected asterisk as my field-break marker. I need to create a macro for<i>, although speaking “open angle brackets - slash - i - close angle brackets” works and I’m able to achieve some fluency. “Open angle bracket - p - close angle bracket” is harder (”P” is a difficult sound to clearly isolate). Of course I can take a different approach with marking and just swap it out later. We must remain ever vigilant against losing our pragmatic approach!

This is excellent news for the world at large, because that means I will be able to convert the handwritten (can you believe it?) notes I have sitting on notecards from all my business school articles. This was before I was into PHP at all guys, so just settle down.

So keep an eye out probably Monday when I roll out the release of my oft-rescheduled repository of business, strategy, economics and other really interesting quotes and ideas. They’ll be direct quotes from books, but in fragmentary form, so they fall squarely within fair use. They’ll be useful for me, since I struggle to recall the specifics of anecdotes I’ve read in books. And perhaps we could do strategy quote of the day, just to share some of the wealth.

And you know, I think I might well be able to build most of this system myself.

Taking this a step further, with Dragon performing this well, I half wonder if it could be an effective way to transcribe other things. I could imagine listening to a conference with headphones and speaking out the content. It’s not reasonable for everything, but it should reduce the effort involved.

There’s one final attribute to note approvingly: The Dragon packaging even gives evidence of a powerful lesson in serving customer needs. Headphones are included. I had just settled in to install the cd and planned on asking (nicely) for Mike to go fetch his Skype headphones. But I didn’t have to - my nice $80 software even came with headphones…. things I had been meaning to buy anyway but hadn’t yet. Way to deliver the full solution and get people started with a positive experience right out of the box.

This post was written by eleanor, source: My new killer app for Dragon

source: Missed Opportunities

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. Long-time readers will recognize this as a tell-tale sign that I’m working on a secret project. Things have been craaaazy busy lately. Devin and I are producing Robert Greenwald’s next project, and it’s much bigger than either Uncovered or Outfoxed. The budget is about four times as much, and it’s still not enough, so we’re working late into the night months before it’ll be finished. But there are milestones worth celebrating. Robert’s now blogging, and today he announced our new media company and asked for help in naming it. Jesse Haff did a…

source: New project

source: VCs in India

Mass customization has given way to extreme personalization as content streams are now sliced thin enough to allow individual subscriptions. Blogging, podcasting, Tivo, OnDemand, iPodding, mobile entertainment and satellite radio all gyrate around the commercial opportunity that is giving people the content they want when they want it.

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard Orb and MobiTV (Idetic), spoke with the folks who make Sling Media and Slim Devices, makers of the SqueezeBox. The message is like a drumbeat: consumer-content-consumer-content.

Put on top of that the increased feed-reading capacity brought by my new Treo650+GPRS. I see that Doc’s shopping for a new car radio and Fred Wilson has a business take on the Tivo problem, riffing off Om’s do-an-Apple post which kicked off so much chatter that I sipped at in my other feeds. Further evidence of the march can be seen on if you hit Fred’s Tivo post directly - I bet your adsense will be as appropriate as mine was: I see an adsense serve for DirectTVvia RapidSatellite and his house ad for an HDRadio.

The same theme is everywhere - not surprising with 3GSM and Demo just having taken place. I like Jonathan’s take on 3GSM and SAPVenture’s Jeff Nolan’s take on Demo (along with the Blogging Demo blog).

I’m still reading though the Fast Company piece on Sirius v. XM that was pointed out by at least one of my feeds. It’s so hard to keep track of what’s interesting when perusing via mobile. Blazer and Bloglines are great together - but I wish the Bloglines interface as seen by mobiles had a checkbox to save posts rather than a per-post link so that you could submit several at a time. I also should see if there is a way to make Blazer have tabs so I could open other pages.

That’s (the hype and flutter, I mean) normally just par for the course, and not a big deal, but it’s funnier when I turn to today’s Wall St. Journal ($reg req’d) and see that some of this impact has begun to chew through to the profits of the big boys:

Viacom executives predicted that this year will be one of transition as the company reworks its mix of assets. It “will be remembered as the year of the reinvention of Viacom,” Mr. Redstone told Wall Street analysts on a conference call.

That reinvention includes shedding assets, including at least 40 under-performing radio stations and its Canadian movie-theater chain Famous Players. The company is also considering selling its theme parks.

Viacom now owns 185 stations. It plans to sell stations outside smaller markets so it can concentrate on its outlets in big cities. In the quarter, radio absorbed a $10.9 billion noncash impairment charge, leading to an operating loss of $10.7 billion, compared with operating income of $252 million a year earlier. Even without the charge, the radio unit’s operating income fell 9% to $231 million in the quarter. Radio revenue for the quarter was $550 million, compared with $551 million.

Game, match, and set. This is what happens when 20 minutes out of 60 are commercials and all the programs are pre-recorded. How can anyone be surprised?

This post was written by eleanor, source: Satellite satellite - where are you?

There was a fascinating discussion yesterday on a “chick list” I’m on, the SF Women of the Web, about housing prices in the bay area and bubble-or-not. Someone posted a link to this massively interesting rant on buy-vs-rent by Patrick Killelea. I’m right in Menlo, just over the ped bridge from PA, and I get to watch how quickly homes get sold — often only to be put back on the market within a year.

Patrick is right on when it comes to renting, which Russ’ househunting this past week proved. Happily, Russ is moving to our hood. His househunting (as he called it) gave me cause to explain to someone that yes - of course, househunting means rental when it’s proclaimed so cheerfully. Otherwise it’s just trauma, right? When Russ IM’ed me his Craigslist of candidate houses this weekend, the low prices surprised me — I hadn’t looked at house prices in more than 3 years. I know the price for our appartment (very nice, hanging off the edge of the San Francisquito and a park) kept going down, but wasn’t inclinded to scope out an upgrade.

What a strange world when renting keeps getting more cost effective (and ever more practical, with Mike working in SF and me with a to-be-determined commute as I scope for a new position). As I’m not a happy driver, it’d be terrible to be fully committed to living in Menlo if there was a juicy company in Pleasanton or Emeryville or San Rafael. That’s one cost that Patrick doesn’t even consider - the decreased flexibility that comes with owning a home or flat.

People continue to wonder how people “afford” houses around here. The answer is you build a great company and manage to so that you can have a few such houses. Or you scrimp and save and hope to profit by selling your house to someone flush with market success. Rinse and repeat.

But with time comes growth. I’m much more accepting of the market here now. Previously I expected to take the money and run to some island bunker. $700K takes you further just about anywhere, why not pick somewhere more convivial. I haven’t blogged about this (as I avoid political and newsish stuff), but the tsunami really made me reconsider the idea of tropical paradise. It’s an odd reflection to have, but since I’ve been mulling the life of an expat integrated into an adopted community, I’ve been troubled by new aspects of this experience that I could see in the aftermath of the tsunami. My somewhat glibly independent and adventurer instincts have been tamed by a sort of morbid practicality. Unspoiled is unspoiled and you can build your own infrastructure, but if something goes wrong, there’s little public infrastructure — the sort of safety net we take for granted here. In the event of some huge devastation like we saw this winter, it’s just impossible to recover. We’d rebuild together, if that was even feasible, but the timeline and cost are much different than recovering from a NorCal earthquake. Brewing up gourmet yuppie rum wouldn’t dig us out of that one (but the BVI’s aren’t so remote as Phuket).

This post was written by eleanor, source: A challenge to a practical mind - the Bay Area buy-vs-rent dilemma

At the 3rd DRM conference this January in Berlin, Ross Anderson gave a dinner speech in which he envisaged a world suffused by region-coding technology (imagine region-coding in RFID-equipped jeans, e.g.). While we are not at this stage yet (at hopefully will never be), here is just another example of the increasing use of this technology:

source: A world of region-coding

source: Top 100 Gadgets of all time

source: Weblog Tools Market Overview

Some readers may remember that we used to have a big comment spam problem at CIS blogs (see here and, more generally, here). Now that this problem has been fixed by a workable solution for several months, we are increasingly getting a new kind of spam: trackback spamming. As long as no workable solution to trackback spamming is installed on the server on which the CIS blogs are running, the trackback functionality will remain turned off. Sorry about that. For some information about the motivations of blog spammers, read here.

source: Trackback spamming

Tonight the EFF is having a little soireé up in SF at Minna on Gadgets. Good preread for the event will be their piece on Endangered Gizmos. If you’re interested, RSVP to the folks at EFF.

I have definitely been planning on getting one of the unhobbled tuner cards, though the last time I looked seriously it was a year or so ago when it was posted on Slashdot (but who wants to shell out just for posterity when you have >1yr in which to procrastinate?) A quick check on /. showed they’re discussing the broadcast flag issue today anyway - sameold-sameold.

My interest was rekindled on Sunday when Wendy Selzer of EFF demo’ed a full system with MythTV at the Berkeley CyberSalon. She showed a pc running Linux and MythTV picking up HDTV signals from SF’s KQED and (at the other end of the spectrum) UPN.

However, MythTV isn’t productized at all; it remains a piece of software. It’s ironic that the EFF has found a really good application here in their effort to promote non-infringing uses, yet it remains a homebrew project. It’d be really nice to just click a button and add the full system to a shopping cart. While I can find time to order a tuner card, I’m not sure that I’ll find time to assemble the pieces myself. Too bad, bc it would be fun to play with.

This seems like an excellent solution for me. I can safely say that 70% of my tv viewing (such as it is lately) is PBS (the other bit is split between Discovery Science, Nat’lGeo, History, Military History and that cluster of geek channels). I consider “Monarch of the Glen” a guilty pleasure program - pretty queer, and pretty fringe. MythTV, a dvr, and GreenCine (Mike and I share a login - user “boygirl”) would take care of my viewing needs comfortably. Mike would miss Adult Swim, but he’d probably get smarter with less ATHF.

I’ll have to see if anyone tonight knows of someone who’s doing some SI work on this MythTV thing, even if it’s custom. Then again living room boxes are still pretty loud. I’ve been tracking changes in chassis design that should reduce noise, and I know this was implemented in a few boxes from Gateway, but it seems that it’s about a year out, further out than I’d hope. I haven’t been motivated to seek out Posted in Events & Happenings, Geek | Comments Off