Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone.  We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar.  It seems to me that the Tab will also be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8,  HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy.   Supporting both  2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, the Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.

The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted.  What struck me was that many of  the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the  FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.”

Almost wish I was in Berlin at this event, and getting my mitts on  Samsungs latest gadget.  The Tab is important news, and I certainly appreciate getting a fuller picture from all the separate nuggets of information I’ve extracted from the bloggers  I’m reading.

Yes,  I have been noticing more and more disclosures on the Web, which is a positive development.  The reason?  The Federal Trade Commission’s longstanding rules on material connections were recently clarified for the blogosphere. The relevant guideline is:

There will be a $11,000 fine per post for violaters. Enough said.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Samsung Galaxy Tab Makes Its Intriguing Debut (pcworld.com)
• Samsung to Challenge Apple (huffingtonpost.com)
• Samsung Announces the Galaxy Tab 7- inch Android Tablet (androidcentral.com)
• Afternoon in NYC with Galaxy, Droid, and iPhone (technoverseblog.com)
• Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is Official (pcworld.com)
• Samsung Galaxy Tab Preview (engadget.com)
• IFA 2010: Hands-On With the Samsung Galaxy Tab (techcrunch.com)
• FTC to Fine Blogger $11,000 for Not Disclosing Payments (mashable.com)

Does this mean in the future I’ll be able to directly think my emails, SMS, and tweets to a super smart phone?  (Hat tip to Nick Carr.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• New frontiers in social networking (roughtype.com)
• Exploratory Research into the Development of Networked NeuroPhones (nsf.gov)
• What’s hot (and not) about Windows Phone 7 (cnet.com)

Sure, it is similar to other sites in this genre. Like Hot Potato, Hunch, and Foodspotting, Bubbalon banks on its members’ social altruism and cognitive surplus.  Ratings of friends (as supplied by Facebook) also give users a benchmark on which to gauge  judgments and potentially sway decisions. And there’s a Foursquare integration to boot.

Bubbalon, though, separates itself from other social sites in its emphasis on the emotional value assigned to rated objects— in other words, does it make you happy.

I took the bait, and registered as a subscriber.  I rated a nearby park, where I spent part of a lazy Sunday afternoon this past weekend, as raising my serotonin levels.  What can I say: green parks, lush trees, and reading the Sunday Times in a reclined position brings me joy.

One interesting challenge raised by Bubbalon and other recommendation startups is this, how do you classify the world?  There’s a nice connection between ranking sites and another topic I’ve written about recently, the semantic web

Bubbalon was started by entrepreneurs Alex Galkin and Todd Hamilton (who also runs a local meetup called Shift Happens).  Their site is currently in beta, and as with other early stage social media  I’ve demoed, there’s a local feel to the restaurants, cafes, and shopping that are commented on.

Certainly, a sense of place is important, and for a few minutes I found myself staring at the scrolling feed of real-time Bubbalon rankings, waiting for someone to counter my comments on a favorite local pizza place I just scored.  As Clay Shirky has pointed out, we are inclined to share our expertise and display our competencies, and mine is dispensing rulings on the area’s pizza emporiums.

Once a social ranking site moves beyond classifying just food or retail shops, they run into the challenge of organizing a universe of diverse information and their  related attributes and properties.  And as purely practical matter, they’ll want to at least seed some of the categories with content—to get the ball rolling.

So … I made a brief visit  to Hunch, a much-hyped and well funded recommendation site that I find overly complicated, to find  a comprehensive list of movie directors, more than I would have expected to have been contributed by the crowd alone.

One way to get all this classification data—and I’m not saying that Hunch has necessarily taken this approach—is through a novel free, open database called, unsurprisingly, Freebase.

It’s a network style database ( non-relational) that’s populated using a Wikipedia-style organizational structure of editors and contributors.  By the way, all the content is licensed through The Creative Commons.  Naturally, there’s a query language to pull out  the data objects.

Freebase can  provide a granular classification menu for  Bubbalon and others in this space. For example, when I went to classify my pizza place, Bubbalon gave me a choice of restaurants, bars, and cafes, which didn’t quite fit my pizza joint.

Just suppose I wanted to tell the Bubbalon world about a Spanish white wine that brings me much contentment, a varietal known as Godello. With a Freebase hookup, Bubbalon could list Spanish whites, perhaps organized by region, which I could then select from.  And existing factual information for each grape, as stored in Freebase, could also be displayed along with my comments.

The programming and development work would be minimal—a blessing for cash conscious startups.   And the additional attributes that are connected with a Freebase object would be incredibly useful for a site’s suggestion engine.

Enough about Freebase. There are links at the end for you to learn more.

Overall, I think these ranking and recommendation sites, even if they decide to take a local or hyperlocal approach, have a promising future.  There are obvious business models that would involve revenue sharing with town merchants.

Or if they want to take a different tack, a Bubbalon could team up with an e-tailer infrastructure player, say TurnTo, which I wrote about recently, providing them with recommendation data.

In any case, I’ll be watching this part of the social media world closely over the next year—should be interesting.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Summer in the City: Shirky, Kind Strangers, and Neat Startups (technoverseblog.com)
• Freebase:Semantic Sandwich for Google (technoverseblog.com)
• Bubbalon (bubbalon.com)
• Freebase
• Hunch
• Turnto
• Shift Happens (meetup.com)

The biggest difference between the ancient branches on the email-voice evolutionary tree and the latest VoIP creations from Google, Skype and others is the Web and mobile calling, coupled with improved codecs. In other words, the overall technology has evolved in steps, not with a giant leap forward. It is slowly but surely achieving greatness.

There are already tens of million of existing Gmail users to talk and video chat with in direct computer-to-computer fashion. Google’s announcement last week to unite Google Voice (the service that rings all your phones) with Gmail and to throw in free outbound calls will probably add millions more. Most significantly, this service, is or will soon be available on Android phones as well.

Over the weekend, I tried Gmail’s existing video chat and made a free landline call. Conclusion: the new and improved Gmail service is a big deal for a number of reasons.

I’ve been a Google Voice customer since it was in private beta, relying on their voice transcription service to email messages left on my cell phone. The transcription quality is good enough, and for simple messages without too much background noise, it is very, very good.

On the email side of the aisle, I have a Gmail account, which I use when I don’t want to clog my other email accounts with non-urgent, non-personal correspondence. I just don’t access it that frequently, and had let the text and video chat features completely rust away.

Spurred by the free dialing that was added to Gmail last week, I took a first look at the video chat. Video calling a friend, I experienced smooth and non-choppy sailing with excellent HD sound quality. This is not at all like the early video apps I trialed pre-dot com bust.

I had so much fun with Google Chat, I may schedule more of these digital meetings.

As for the free calls from Gmail to a wireline phone, there wasn’t a hitch.

So Google has engineered another simple, error-free app that clearly will compete and may ultimately assign Skype to a long list of extinct tech companies. A very big deal!

Another big deal is that the new integrated Gmail-Voice app will gain a foothold in large and small businesses. When I was walking between meetings in my last cube-land job, I invariably saw someone staring into their Gmail or iGoogle page.  Now with Gmail’s free phone outbound calling, there’s fewer reasons for corporate workers to use that aging relic, the business phone.

Hint to business phone manufacturers: Try a retro campaign and make the business phone chic, in a Mad Men kind of way!

Finally, it is not a coincidence that this announcement comes after Google and Verizon went public with their dating, I mean their joint net neutrality proposal.

Google Voice has been a point of contention for the carriers. In the past a shot across the bow like this from Google would be met with letters to the FCC.

I suspect this time around there won’t be a peep. Except from Skype.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Call phone from Gmail (gmail.blogspot.com)
• Google Voice
• Cost-Effective Calling with Gmail Voice Feature (pcworld.com)
• Google Voice calls are not free (danielgreene.com)
• AT&T Letter to FCC on Google Voice (docstoc.com)

The winners were …  ChatterCast, which monitors 911 activity in your area and sends SMS notifications, and GeoCast, which lets you learn, also via SMS, about traffic conditions within a shape you draw on a map.

Tropo scripts  handled the telephony aspects for both these apps.

Congrats to the winners!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Live from the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon Demos (twilio.com)
• 24 Hour Hackathon
• ChatterCast
• GeoNotify

There are other shareware Flash tools out there, and  so I wanted to take a quick peek at the competition before making my commitment to Frontal.  It didn’t take long during my survey to realize Frontal’s advantages.  Most of my issues with the likes of MiniBuilder, FlashDevelop, and a few others involved having to learn Adobe’s ActionScript, deal with compilers, or overcome my severe allergic reaction to integrated development environments.

I was sold.  On page two you can see an embedded Frontal photo slideshow I put together in under 15 minutes.

Having grown accustomed to a keep-it-simple approach to infrastructure from working with Twilio and Tropo in the telephony realm,  I readily grokked Frontal’s HTML/CSS -ish framework for developing basic Flash —slide shows, embedded video, animation.  I had just enough room in my working memory to deal with their straightforward script language.  It’s a Javascript variant, which should be second nature for real developers.

The workflow for Frontal is completely intuitive. Their pared down HTML tags are for layout, add the script sauce for interactions, and use Frontal’s own CSS for display.

To help out with interactions, they’ve created two of their own HTML tags, manager and transition, to indicate which HTML elements will be managed for transition effects and how the transitions will take place— slide left, slide right, fade in, etc.  In fact, you can get basic Flash animation without a lick of scripting, just sticking to their HTML and CSS tags.

The site has excellent documentation including plenty of code samples and tutorials to get you quickly off the ground. And they have an incredibly friendly development sandbox where you can rapidly sketch out ideas.

So here’s the entire HTML part for a slideshow I worked out, which will eventually become the core of this blog’s photo album widget:

<![CDATA[>
<include rel="assets" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.frontalcode.com/assets/swfs/fonts.swf" mce_src="http://www.frontalcode.com/assets/swfs/fonts.swf" fontClasses="Bodoni, BodoniBold, BodoniItalic" blocking="true" />
<div style="background-color:#000000; " mce_style="background-color: #000000;" >
<div id="main">
<div class="slides">
         <manager id="picnav" style="hide-unselected: true;   style-tween-ease: fl.transitions.easing.Strong.easeInOut; " mce_style="hide-unselected: true; style-tween-ease: fl.transitions.easing.Strong.easeInOut;" >
<transitioner custom="com.frontalcode.transitions.TweenTransition" target="current" property="left" start="0" finish="600" duration="10"   />
<transitioner custom="com.frontalcode.transitions.TweenTransition" target="next" property="left" start="-600" finish="0" duration="10"   />
       </manager>
       <img src="http://localhost/blog/wp-content/themes/technoverse/moutain.jpg" mce_src="http://localhost/blog/wp-content/themes/technoverse/moutain.jpg" />
       <img src="http://localhost/blog/wp-content/themes/technoverse/flower.jpg" mce_src="http://localhost/blog/wp-content/themes/technoverse/flower.jpg" />
       <img src="http://localhost/blog/wp-content/themes/technoverse/kitten.jpg" mce_src="http://localhost/blog/wp-content/themes/technoverse/kitten.jpg" /></div>
<div id="control" >
<div style="left:0;top:0;" > <text class="frButtonPrev" mgrId="picnav">Prev </text></div>
<div style="left:352; top:0;" > <text class="frButtonNext" mgrId="picnav">Next </text></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
]]>

Updated: I meant to add the actual Frontal demo yesterday, but was having WordPress challenges in getting the Flash embedded in my post. I finally slew the “shortcode” dragon, and here it is:

I’ve already put my Frontal skills to use by creating a slidehow of hot posts on my home page (top right corner). It’s really just an extension of what I’ve shown you, along with a few well placed event-driven scripts.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Summer in the City: Shirky, Kind Strangers, and Neat Startups (technoverseblog.com)
• Learning Flash (elearningtech.blogspot.com)
• Frontal
• MiniBuilder
• FlashDevelop

Related articles by Zemanta

• Velocity ships first mainstream Android tablet in September (electronista.com)
• They’re (almost) here: Android tablets to rock the market (computerworld.com)

What happened was that in less than a generation, a media landscape that should have been moving toward more diversity, more localism and more competition was transformed into a market controlled by a handful of players, too often providing little more than infotainment, canned music and program homogenization. … The apologists told us this was the natural result of changes in technology …  The facts told another story. The huge debts these mega-companies took on to curry favor with investors and hedge-fund operators overwhelmed broadcaster obligations to be good stewards of the people’s airwaves. The public’s right to know got lost in the frenzy of financial hyper-speculation.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, The Future of the Internet Public Hearing, August 19, 2010

The original uni-tasker

You know it’s August when The New York Times makes front pages news out of five brain researchers taking a rafting trip in Glen Canyon, Utah. It was really a working vacation, as these high-powered scientists, accompanied by a Times’ reporter (great gig, Matt Richtell), pondered how our brain changes when disconnected from Google, email, and the whole darn Internet.

Leave it to brain scientists to discover that they feel different and better after three days of vacationing with nothing to do but row, chat, and drink Tecate beers in the evening.  Of course, this group’s idea of hanging around the camp fire involves light banter about  brain chemicals in the bloodstream, the neuroeconomic value of information, and a famous University of Michigan study showing that people are better learners after a walk in the woods than maneuvering a busy urban street.

Fortunately, Nick Carr was not on vacation and read the same article.

It seemed that even the skeptics among these scientists—those who believe that multi-tasking with multiple gadgets is benign— think that this off-line vacation led to clearer thoughts and new perspectives.

Mr. Kramer, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois and a skeptic, informally and unscientifically discovered that maybe he can’t listen and type on his laptop at the same time.

Non-brain researcher Nick Carr, who has just written The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is obviously way ahead of these guys, and in his blog post he picked up on the scientists talking about “working memory.”  That’s the small collection of neurons getting saturated by email, twitter, and Facebook.

More memory taken up by tweets, leaves less for storing and integrating ideas— it’s basic neuro-arithmetic.

Considering there have been so many breakthroughs made by scientists relaxing —Newton under a tree, Heisenberg hiking, etc.—it’s a little surprising the skeptics are having problems with the idea that the Internet may not be entirely beneficial.

Carr has an even more disturbing follow-up post on Google —yeah, I’m a little down on Voozle lately— discussing their plans to  simply take over all our short-term thinking and decision making.

Here’s the money quote from CEO Eric Schmidt:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google to end serendipity (by creating it) (zdnet.com)
• Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain (nytimes.com)
• The Unread Message (roughtype.com)
• Brave New Google ( roughtype.com)

Jonah Peretti explains viral marketing

HuffingtonPost founder and “viral media marketing hotdog” Jonah Peretti spoke at the NY Viral Media Meetup last week.

Sure enough the slides from the talk have now gone viral. Here are the key takeaways, things you already knew but you just didn’t have the sense to condense into a short deck. One, viral content is spread through a network of bored office workers. Two, you never can tell what will go viral. And three, the web is ruled by crazy people.

He also dispensed valuable advice on how to present serious news on the Web, which he perfected at Huff Post. It’s something I’ll be trying to put into practice. Hint: it has to do with mullets.

Peretti’s presentation can be found in its entirety after the link.

Back in the pre-Internet era, the role of the bored office worker was played by brawling and swearing traders on Wall Street. They were in constant phone contact within a closed network of other traders; their eyes were focused on monitoring news feeds, and they liked good tasteless jokes. So a few hours after some event, usually a disaster, I started hearing about NSFW jokes from my financial friends.

Thanks to social networks, we’re now all part of one tribe or another, swapping tales and jokes around the virtual camp fire. According to Peretti, these 9-5 posses are great breeding grounds for viral media.

Jonah Peretti Viral Meetup Talk

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lessons In How to Go Viral: Use the “Bored at Work” Network (nytimes.com)
• How to engineer a viral web hit: just add “Mormons, Mullets or Maniacs” (boingboing.net)