Social Studies

Meanwhile Over at Seatle's OpenGov Hackathon

 , , ,

Another weekend, another hackathon.  But the one that was just held in Seatle concerned itself with Gov 2.0 projects. And Technoverse favorite Tropo was there, along with open data service provider Socrata.

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!

Continue reading

The Rack

Hey, $199 Cruz Reader Ships in September

 , , ,

This is the summer of the Android tablet. With all the gadget sites tracking products from Archos, Sony, Asus, et al., I thought I’d remind you of  an inexpensive ($199) Android 2.0  color e-book reader that is also a media player and has a browser.   Velocity Micro is now taking orders for their Cruz Reader 7″ tablet, which it plans to ship in early September.  I just plunked down my money.  Continue reading

The Rack

Researchers Give Up Google and Discover Single Tasking

 , , , ,

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.Continue reading

Social Studies

BWN: The Bored at Work Network

 , ,

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.Continue reading

Social Studies

Google’s Pakistan Relief Project

 , , , ,

Google has made two tools available for relief workers involved with Pakistan’s historic floods. It’s been a bad year for natural disasters, but Google gained valuable insights in emergency management during the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. By talking to aid workers in the field, Google discovered that up-to-date information on hospitals (available medial equipment and staffing) was crucial.

From the Haiti crisis was born Google’s Resource Finder. It’s an online, editable Web page that lets health workers update status information on medical facilities. It’s also coupled with a map for providing positioning information. Google has made an early release of Resource Finder available for the Pakistan relief efforts. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

OnSIP and PhoneTag

 , , , ,

I decided to take a break from watching Google-zilla’s next move. Yes, the search monster has some interesting news today with Voice Actions for Android.  Terrific.  But there are also capable speech rec apps outside their orbit, in the competitive world of  what the FCC calls information services.

Last month I tried the  OnSIP cloud-based PBX. This startup has since partnered with PhoneTag to provide transcriptions of voicemail. I’ve known about the PhoneTag service when it had the eponymous designation of the corporate owner, Simulscribe. Good move on their part with this name change.

PhoneTag has taken the approach of supplementing its algorithms with crowdsourced workers who copy edit the harder-to-transcribe sessions.

It takes a few clicks to set this up, and before you could say “net neutrality” I was able to email  .WAV files from my OnSIP virtual PBX voicemail to the PhoneTag service.   The results are quite good.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

"Sergey, I am your father"

 , , , , , ,

Is this what Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg metaphorically whispered into the Google founder’s ear?  I’m still reeling from the Google-Verizon non-aggression pact and what it will mean for a  competitive and open Internet.  Some have pointed out that the proposal is merely a regurgitation  of the FCC’s six freedoms for an open Internet.

True, but up to a point.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meet Our New Regulators: Verizon and Google

 , , , ,

So there wasn’t an agreement between Google and Verizon, as reported by The New York Times, on price tiers. Instead the two companies released a modest proposal and legislative framework for an open Internet.  I like the boldness of their end-run around that puny regulatory agency, the FCC, by directing their demands, oops I mean request, to Congress.

Google-Verizon has more advice for the FCC after the jump.Continue reading

@NYC

NYTM 8/3/10: Shirky Rebutted, Social Shopping, and Semantic Web

 , , , , , , , , , , , 1

My ears are still ringing from a rant by Sam Lessin, Drop.io founder, as he went about trying to disprove intrinsic altruism and trust, and reclaim the commanding heights with neo-classical economics. More on this later, but it is a curious position for a tech entrepreneur whose site is based on people uploading and sharing content for a cost of bupkis.

A few of the high points for me at last night’s New York Tech Meetup: TurnTo, which lets online shoppers find out what friends have purchased; Twilio (which I’ve written about before) had a nice telephony demo for this data-centric audience, and Indaba is a great site for helping musicians monetize their craft.

Oh, and there was a startup, I think called Microsoft, showing off their Bink, or maybe it’s Bing(?) search engine. And Willow Garage, a robotics startup, gave us a glimpse into a future where we stay at home and let our mechanical avatars roam the corridors and aisles of faraway office suites.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T Charged with Slamming

 , , ,

Ars Technica reported a few months ago that the practice of slamming still lives on. Slamming involves the deceptive switching of a customer’s voice carrier. It is one of those minor protections spelled out in Title II of the Communications Act.

By the way, the specific rule is covered in  section 201 ( “any such charge, practice, classification, or regulation that is unjust or unreasonable is declared to be unlawful” ) and is one of  the six sections that will be applied to cable broadband providers in the FCC’s novel third way approach.

So it is disturbing to read that AT&T was caught  slamming customers in Illinois. On Friday, the FCC granted a complaint against AT&T for switching a customer of Unitel Communications without first receiving authorization.Continue reading

The Rack

Borat-style Translation Now in Google Documents

 ,

Last Tuesday, Google introduced a translation service to its cloud-based word processing software, Documents. I abandoned the Microsoft Word ship a long time ago—I think my last release was Word 2002 — and use Documents for all my text entry.  So this additional feature is a neat novelty that just makes my move from MS even sweeter.

Google has been offering the ability to translate Web pages into 53 different languages for some time. So I’m assuming some Google engineer finally got around to adding the right Web service hook into their office software.

Language translation has been  a long standing problem for computer science,  and Google has not solved this by any means.  There are still complexities with idiomatic expressions, verb moods ( subjunctive),  modal verbs, etc. that won’t be untangled with a series of rules coded in software.

So for kicks, I cut and pasted a small section of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables into my Document and then let Google have at it.  Conclusion: Star Trek’s Universal Translator has not yet been reached,  but Google Translate does a good job of making everything sound like Borat.

Results after the jump.Continue reading

Social Studies

Suggestion Software: Perfect match for idle CPU cycles.

 , , , ,

I recently tried a silicon oracle called GetGlue.  I’m genuinely impressed at how racks of CPUs can quickly navigate through an enormous knowledge graph and grab a suggestion node that matches some characteristic of my preferences. Great searching capabilities, but I’m less than excited about the results.

Like other recommendation software (say, Hunch), you register preferences by initially rating a sample list of movies, books, TV shows, and music. I told GetGlue that I liked The Breakfast Club, Goodbye Columbus, The Great Gatsby, and Nina Simone.  GetGlue quickly responded with a list of predicable tips: lots of Philip Roth novels, Catcher in the Rye, American Beauty, and Sara Vaughn.

I suppose if I had lived in vault, then some of these suggestions would be novel. One quibble for the GetGlue crew: how about adding a “like, but already know about” classification.

On the plus side, GetGlue deserves credit for bringing swing band leader Jimmie Lunceford, who I hadn’t heard known about, to my attention.  Thanks.Continue reading

The Rack

Dueling Headlines on Apple's Magic Trackpad

 , , , ,

Magic Trackpad: “Swipe me!”

For the record, I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro.  One reason I was able to break the spell cast by Dell and live happily ever after in Steve Jobs land is the Mac’s magical multi-touch trackpad. He/she  that masters it—and it doesn’t take much—will enjoy effortless web navigation, healthy wrists and knuckles, truly higher productivity, and never having to shlepp their mouse in endless circles on their desks.

So it is amusing to read the conflicting headlines on Apple’s announcement yesterday to introduce this Mac technology to PC users in the form of the Magic Trackpad.  Over at Silicon Alley, Dan Frommer lobbed this headline at the Apple gadget: “Hands On With The New Apple Magic Trackpad: It’s Weird But Could Be Useful.”  At TechCrunch, MC Siegler has, for my money, a  more insightful take:  “Apple’s Magic Trackpad Signals The End Of The Mouse Era.”

I realize writers don’t necessarily choose their headlines, but Frommer is pretty clear that he thinks the Trackpad is kind of a novelty — an incense candle for those that need to connect with their Mac spirituality.

He is wrong.Continue reading

Social Studies, The Rack

Freebase: Semantic Sandwich for Google

 , , , , 2

There actually was some significant news last week in the technoverse, and it didn’t involve another episode from Mark Zuckerberg’s reality show: on July 16, Google purchased Metaweb, the semantic database company and the force behind the freewheeling Freebase.

No doubt, the semantic web has entered into your own knowledgebase during the last year.

If it hasn’t, quick go to Google: enter empire state building height in the search box. Notice that the numeric height “1250 ft. ( 380 m.)” is highlighted in the search results. Google knew to answer this query with an actual number, instead of merely returning text snippets in which those search keywords were found. This flavor of artificial intelligence comes courtesy of an analysis of the knowledge space.

In a way, Google comprehended that “empire state building” is a structure, which has an attribute or property known as height, which itself has a numeric value associated with it measured in distance units.

Impressive.Continue reading

@NYC, The Rack

Android: The Evil Side of Openness

 , , , , , 3

Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures (Foursquare), recently called Apple an evil company. The reason?  “They believe they know what is best for you and me. And I think that is evil.”

It’s a definition of evil I think most of us would not agree with. On the other side of Wilson’s argument, you’ll find a few light-weight thinkers such as Socrates (see Plato’s Republic).  So … doctors are evil because they claim to know what’s best for us. Add to the list accountants, plumbers, carpenters, and architects.

I think Wilson has a different gripe with Apple. Apple has successfully shown that the America consumer has an appetite for quality products, even though they’re based on walled-off hardware and software.  While passing Wilson’s test for goodness, Google’s open-source Android platform is not necessarily a path to quality and may actually do some evil.Continue reading

Quote of the Day

Our analysis of broadband subscribership data and the broadband availability model constructed for the National Broadband Plan indicates that while a substantial majority of Americans …

Archaic Telecom

FCC: 14 Million Americans Without Adequate Broadband

 , ,

On Tuesday, the FCC released its sixth annual report, as required by law, on the state of US broadband. Their conclusion:”… broadband deployment to all Americans is not reasonable and timely.”  This differs from the five preceding reports.

The reason for this agency’s change of mind?  The FCC decided— justifiably— to set the benchmark for high-speed Internet access from a piddling 200 Kbps to a somewhat more meaningful 4 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Afternoon in NYC with Galaxy, iPhone, and Droid

 , , , , , , 1

Why not see three of the newest smartphones during a hot Saturday in NYC?  Since the  Apple store on Upper Broadway is a five-minute walk from where the Samsung Galaxy S was receiving visitors in the Time Warner building,  we could hop from one air-conditioned venue to another without getting broiled.  Along the way we could also check out the Motorola Droid X at a cell phone shack.

It seemed like a good idea when my friend, let’s call him Dr. Smartphone, suggested it to me this past weekend.  He was anxious to see how Galaxy’s 4” super AMOLED 800×400 display performed, and I had yet to gaze upon the iPhone 4.  Continue reading