With 2010 closing up shop, it’s time for an obligatory list of favorite posts from this past year.
Based on a non-scientific review of this site’s web traffic, a few of our more popular can be found after the jump:Continue reading
Year: 2010
Snowed In with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules
After burning off my holiday calories shoveling out of Snowmageddon 2010, I was ready to settle down with a good book and a flagon of mulled cider. Perhaps I was still looking for more Sisyphean exercises, so instead of Harry Potter, I reached for my MacBook and downloaded the FCC’s complete Report and Order in the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet, otherwise known as the Net Neutrality rules.
Published on Friday, this 87-page document, excluding appendices and the commissioners’ separate statements, contains over 400 footnotes. A lot of work was expended, so kudos to the FCC’s paper-meisters.
Spoiler alert: the good part starts at Section IV ( paragraph 115, page 62), “The Commission’s Authority to Adopt Open Internet Rules.”
I am all for the Report’s net neutrality rules for transparency, no blocking, and no unreasonable discrimination. But after reviewing the FCC arguments in section IV, along with the usual relevant cases, I don’t think this dog will hunt.Continue reading
Rest in Peace, Yixin
I bricked my Yixin. It didn’t really take that much in the end: merely taping over the on-off button in an attempt to lock a micro SD into a defective slot. Ultimately, I de-springed a not very resilient power switch, rendering this inexpensive Android device powerless, so to speak.
The market is flooded now with under $200 Android tablets with basic capabilities, most of which will not survive till the next holiday season. And that is the point: overseas factories will be busy again next year around this time churning out the latest gadgedroids.
My New Year’s resolution after the jump.Continue reading
FCC on Specialized Services: Yawn!
The FCC voted 3-2 (along the usual party lines) to approve the Open Internet Order or as the media refers to it, NET NEUTRALITY. I suppose a set of rules that has brought condemnation from both sides of the argument can’t be all that bad. Consumers received some protections with a non-blocking rule subject to reasonable network management. As expected, the FCC did not approve its third-way approach (Title II reclassification with forbearance of many statutes). And the agency also decided to leave mobile broadband to its own devices, so to speak.
I was most curious about the fate of specialized services, the new category of vaguely defined advanced (or as the Google-Verizon proposal put it “additional”) capabilities that was in the FCC’s original Notice of Proposed Rule Making issued back in late 2009. And which the FCC asked for additional comments again in September 2010.
Anyway, after the FCC’s barrage of questions and stated concerns—most significantly over anti-competitive practices and re-allocation of telecom investments—it ultimately took the completely radical stance of doing nothing.Continue reading
Google’s Ngram Viewer: Internet vs. Telecommunications
While waiting for the text of the FCC’s Open Internet Order to show up on their web site, I decided it was the right time to take a quick at look Google’s fascinating Ngram viewer. So what has Google wrought this time?
From their vast digitized collection of 15 million books, they’ve analyzed 5 million and produced a frequency dataset of all phrases or ngrams up to five words in length. Even better: the frequency of a particular ngram occurrence includes a time dimension.
With the new Google Ngram Viewer, you have a cute visualization app that shows the rise and fall of phrases or expressions over the years. In the context of the FCC’s “momentous meeting” this morning, it’s worthwhile to really see how the Internet has become what we mean by communications.
I decided to compare the usage of the words “Internet” vs “telecommunications”.Continue reading
Google Delays Announcing Fiber Winners
scott_waterman/Flickr
Communities waiting to hear if they’ve been selected for Google’s high-speed Internet access contest will have to wait a little longer.
In February Google said it had plans to deploy a 1 Gig per second, fiber-to-the-home network in several communities in the US. Over 1100 towns and cities responded to their request-for-information feeler, hoping to become one of the Google fiber finalists.
Yixin: Yikes!
I’m afraid my brief infatuation with Yixin may be nearing an end. I was having trouble with freebie voice recorder apps from the Android Market. Since many require an external chip to store the voice files, I knew it was time to purchase an 8 GB micro SD card. That started a chain of events that led to the disabling of my Yixin 7200’s power button.
Valuable lesson I learned: highly sticky moving tape can be dangerous.Continue reading
New York Tech Meetup: Holiday Extravaganza
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And there is no other place I’d rather be than New York City in December— chestnuts roasting, falafels cooking, and Food52 giving a demo at New York Tech Meetup.
Of course, this is also the season of NJ Transit delays, so thanks to mechanical problems at Sunnyside Yards yesterday, I missed most of 52’s presentation. As I walked into NYTM’s temporary digs at New World Stages on 50th street, I heard some questions being asked about “FoodPickle.” FoodPickle? More on that later.
My favorites from the evening: WanderFly, Food52, and Marco. In the interesting, but problematic category: ClearGears.Continue reading
…the grunt work of key clicking and comment writing is being done by us, the ambassadors from Brandistan who are paid with logos and other …
GetGlue: Platforms, Brand Ambassadors, and Puccini
I’ve been writing lately on rating and suggestion services and their underlying data prediction technologies, which are fascinating.
What about those users (like me) who don’t completely trust the algorithmically generated suggestions that are proffered?
They can instead lose themselves in the stream of likes and comments that are displayed in the standard “recent activity” box found on the home pages of these sites. It’s a direct way to pick up ideas on movies, books, food, TV shows, and lizards.
I made up the part about lizards, but the point is that with social rating sites, anything in this world can be judged as good or bad and then become a part of the intimate information flow for the rest of humanity to see.
For example, GetGlue, the recommendation service I’ve been referring to in my posts, has an Android (and iPhone) app that lets the crowd comment on what they’re currently reading, watching, listening, or thinking. It’s really a check-in service—Foursquare without being tied to a specific physical place
With my new Yixin Android tablet now on my coffee table, I’ve become another gadget-owning media critic. Continue reading
Google eBooks: The Search for Free
On Monday, Google opened the doors to its eBookstore. Google is just getting started as a ebook seller, but they are already boasting they have “the world’s largest selection of ebooks.” Take that Amazon!
While the Google claim makes for good copy, the truth is that most of their ebooks, over 3 million in fact, are from their trove of public domain classics—Dickens, Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, and all the others you were supposed to have read in high school.
In fact, these free books have been available from Google since 2009. It’s not a big secret that Google has been busily scanning books from partner libraries and making them available on-line.
Sure you can select new books from Google’s growing list. But for me the lure of free books, especially now that they can be read on my Yixin Android gadget, is irresistible.Continue reading
SIP on Android
One of my very modest goals in finding an inexpensive, usable Android tablet is replacing my cell phone with an open source SIP client. I spend enough of my time near WiFi hotspots that an Android gadget could do double-duty as a browser-email-ebook as well as a phone. And the chance to free myself from Verizon’s tentacles with WiFi telephony has been tempting me for a long time.
With the Yixin 7200 MID I finally had the right platform. Could I locate a functioning SIP client in the Android Market, Google’s answer to the App Store?
So I walked the virtual aisles of the Market and pulled a few SIP clients off the shelves for testing.
I did discover a working client and learned that the quality of Android freeware is, charitably, very uneven.Continue reading
Do I Need a Web Recommendation Service?
Xydo is a recommendation startup I first discovered at Hoboken Tech Meetup. Since then I’ve partially trained GetGlue and Hunch to respond to my tastes (not successfully), perused Parse.ly’s recommendation app for filtering feeds, and gauged Google’s own Prediction APIs and Set suggestion tools (pretty good stuff).
So when I received the beta invite from Xydo, I was almost at the beginnings of an existential crisis: do I really need a web site to show me other URLs to look at? After all, I was heavily reliant on Google Reader to bring the feeds I like to my attention. I wasn’t sure whether I required additional content advice.
I would want Xydo and other such sites to be my web magazine 2.0, bringing both content that I absolutely need yet also uncannily anticipate what I may want.Continue reading
Year of the Yixin: Inexpensive, Capable Android
After my previous experience with a sub-$200, sub-10? Android tablet, I was almost ready to give up on the idea of an inexpensive and usable …
Parse.ly’s P3 Platform
I was finally able to spend quality time with the Parse.ly Reader, an app designed to show some of the capabilities of the underlying Parse.ly platform, called P3, which is currently in beta. To be clear, unlike many other players in the recommendation patch (GetGlue, Xydo, Hunch, etc.), this NYC-based startup is not in the business of providing a direct service to users.
Instead they give access to their cloud-based recommendation server through a set of RESTful APIs. The Reader app is just a demonstration of what can be done with their technology.
So what can be done?
After reading through the P3 reference documents and interacting with the Parse.ly Reader, you quickly see that P3’s aim is to reproduce formerly expensive, proprietary technology mastered by a few players (Netflix, Amazon) for businesses in general— most likely, those in the small-to-medium bins.
It’s another Nick Carr moment for me, in which technology has turned a previously mysterious application, recommendation algorithms in this case, into something closer to an appliance meant for wider usage. Continue reading
Meanwhile Back at the FCC
In case you weren’t at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this month to hear FCC Chairman Genachowski, O’Reilly has published the interview on YouTube. My Google Reader had already bombarded me with excerpts of Genachowski’s remarks (“net neutrality will happen”) and his unhappiness with the Google-Verizon proposal.
Still curious about what he said, I decided to sit through most of the interview during my lunch hour. It was a typical Genachowksi performance that he gives to interviewers who are not entirely up to speed on the issues. He was gracious, jocular, and made sure to sprinkle his conversation with the right words: innovation, competitiveness, less government, openness, and market-based forces.
And then he took an indirect swipe at the carriers when he said : “…it’s the market and consumers picking winners and losers, not people who control access to the Internet.” Followed by a right-jab when he called the Supreme Court’s Comcast decision “seriously incorrect.”
Somewhere in course of my viewing I started to stare at a map behind the Chairman. I first thought it was a map of the world, the kind you see in television newsrooms. It was actually a conceptual Web 2.0 geography that broke the Internet community into separate islands and land masses.
If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the …
Mini-Incubation Space Courtesy of MetroFlats
One of the benefits of joining Hoboken Tech Meetup is learning about tech startup activity and entrepreneurial opportunities on the other side of the Hudson. …
A Holiday Gift Idea from Voxeo
I’ve been exploring less expensive Android gadgetry lately in my search for a capable but not overly glitzy e-book reader. My experience with Velocity Micro’s Cruz Reader, which I have previously documented, was not a positive one. I’ve now turned my attention to a Rockchip-powered Android tablet from Yixin, a Chinese electronics and toy manufacturer. I’m hoping to have one in my possession shortly.
The gadget gift giving season is upon us. And no doubt in the coming weeks many Android tablets will be wrapped up and adorned with ribbons and bows. But are there other creative ideas out there, possibly free, that could put a smile on a young child’s face?
I don’t normally turn to Voxeo in these matters, but I came across a neat suggestion in their blog for turning their Tropo multi-media development environment into a joy machine.Continue reading
Google Prediction Goes to the Movies
With my request to use Google’s black-box Prediction APIs finally approved and a little time available in my schedule, I set out to see how well Google’s racks of CPUs would do against a few training sets I had in mind.
Ultimately, I was hoping to gain more insight into the question: Can software algorithms (with help from the crowd) predict what I’ll like in books, movies, web sites, and food?
To make this a manageable project, I limited the scope of my exercise to the modest problem of predicting amusing movie titles.
Wait, don’t laugh! I have some definite ideas on this subject, which I was able to compress into simple rules. For example, a number or date with an exclamation after it, funny! I’m tickled by these somewhat hypothetical movie titles:“Ten!”, “1941!”, or this real knee slapper, “22!”
I’m also similarly affected by titles with a man or woman’s name that ends in a vowel followed by an exclamation or question mark. “Ralphie?” Hilarious. “Albert.” Not funny. And titles with “Being”, as in “Being Ralphie”, are funny in a knowing, ironic way.
So how did Google’s mysterious Prediction oracle do ?Continue reading