Bingme

My Daughter’s Softball skills video is now available. It is being sent to college softball coaches now.

Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the sensor when it's close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode -- no word on standby time yet. In a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we're almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we're going to have an opportunity to run this picture? The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599. Ships Stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008. Engadget

Also see the full Macworld Keynote 2007

Full Mac OS X in the palm of your hand!! Seamless WiFi with full Safari and quick access widgets. This is a game changer and the best next target for innovation. Music, TV, Movies, Email, RSS, Google, Maps, Yahoo, Amazon all in my pocket.

Amazon.mil?: "In an interesting short piece at Federal Computing Week, reporter Bob Brewin looks at Amazon.mil? and how the Department of Defense might utilize web service APIs like those from Amazon, Google and others.

In a recent test, the Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA] compared the cost of developing a simple application called the Tech Early Bird on $30,000 worth of in-house servers and software with the costs of developing the same application using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud from Amazon.com’s Web Services. Amazon charged 10 cents a minute for the service, and DISA paid a total of $5 to develop an application that matched the performance of the in-house application.

The test is an example of how DISA has been borrowing ideas from Amazon and other Web-based companies and sites, including Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. ‘There may well be a commercial analog for everything we want to do,’ said Dave Mihelcic, DISA’s chief technology officer.

<p>Easier said than done of course given the DOD&rsquo;s need for security and renowned bureaucratic, waterfall model for acquiring and developing software. And it isn&rsquo;t that those agencies are not aware of the issues. In a speech last month at the U.S. DISA Industry Day, the agency&rsquo;s Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom advocated a web service approach noting that &lsquo;Information is America&rsquo;s greatest weapons system, but processes we have created are holding us back.&rsquo; (See also the recent New York Times Magazine story by Clive Thompson <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin">&lsquo;Open-Source Spying&rsquo;</a>.)</p>

Of the 1325 mashups listed here, none end in .mil. Yet.

(Via Programmable Web.)

In 50 years the scene will be transformed. Instead of typing a few words into a search engine, people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary, which will offer suggestions and refinements. The result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesises the important points, with references to the original literature. People won't think of "search" as a separate category - it will all be part of living. Peter Norvig

I just ran across an old post on Jeff Clavier's site on some guidelines for getting funded. The ideas are a rework of Ray Lane's original ideas and even more true today. The key idea is that the ideal buyers in the enterprise act just like consumers. They want an instant solution to an immediate problem. Keep it simple, clear, well designed and easy to sell to your neighbor.

7 rules that enterprise software startups must meet in order to be considered for an investment: bac5a56b4c3c0d81768ad99185700b8e Friend Jeff Nolan reminded me that these rules were actually introduced by Ray Lane, a Kleiner Perkins Partner, during his keynote of MR Rangaswami's conference, Software 2006. I actually recommend listening to the podcast and reading through the presentation. What is interesting is that these rules seemed to be focusing on enterprise software companies, and upon reading them they were really fitting consumer-facing services. Yet another data point showing that Consumer and Enterprise 2.0 are getting closer and closer in the way they are built and marketed. Ben Barren from down under had a similar thought. By Jeff Clavier

I was at StartupCamp talking with Jeff Barr of Amazon and Tim Bray of Sun and it was clear to me that there are some big things coming. Rails is the darling of the web construction world right now and getting incredible mind share. The basic components of what makes a web service are also now becoming standardized and solidified. Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, and the other Amazon Web Services are the perfect platform for cost effective scaling. Rails is the perfect construction set to build that killer application. I predict an avalanche of innovation when this pair gets linked. I am working on some useful pieces for this but expect others to announce things soon. I just saw this great post that does a great job linking Amazon to 37signals.

Are 37signals and Amazon.com building the ultimate Ruby on Rails hosting solution? Imagine a reliable host that could provide effortless scalability combined with a killer application deployment solution. What if there was an “official” Ruby on Rails host from the creators of the framework itself?
...
Think about it this way - as development with Ruby and Rails becomes more and more popular, there’s an opportunity here for a major player to step in and build a deployment platform that makes it easier and cheaper to scale. Something like Amazon’s s3 would work for the small guys, but the large guys (read enterprise) might be able to trust it, too.

Apple's missing "Home on iPod" feature resurfaces in filing Dubbed "Home on iPod," the technology was once destined for Apple's Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, before it was abruptly yanked from pre-release builds of the operating system back in Oct. of 2003. "Ever thought you could carry your home in the palm of your hands or in your pocket? You can. Panther's Home on iPod feature lets you store your home directory - files, folders, apps - on your iPod (or any FireWire hard drive) and take it with you wherever you go," Apple had written in a blurb on its Panther preview website that was eventually removed. "When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and you're 'home,' no matter where you happen to be," the description continued. "And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes you've made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory." Apple never offered an explanation for the feature retraction and popular speculation was that it would eventually resurface in a later iteration of the Mac OS X operating system. It never did.

Apple cell phone is real and ready for production - analyst "Apple chief executive Steve Jobs "is finally satisfied with the end product Apple engineers have produced in terms of quality and the right blend of cell phone and portable media player."

Given Jobs' previous track record, the analyst said he has the utmost confidence the Apple branded cell phone, which he says will conform to a sleek candy bar form factor, will meet the highest of standards with "no exception."

"Clearly, we would like to share more detail as we have conducted extensive work on the product pipeline, but for now, here is what we will convey," Wu wrote. "The design will be an iPod nano-like candy bar form factor and come in three colors (we are not certain of the exact colors but we suspect black, white and platinum, similar to Apple's current color scheme of iPods and Macs)."

Caterina Fake had a great post from her time at FooCamp

Notes from FOO Camp: Getting High Performance out of High Potential People Great weekend at FOO Camp, which is the annual O'Reilly campout, and the original "unconference". I took a lot of notes while I was there, and will post them in batches. The first talk I went to was Getting High Performance out of High Potential People by Keoki Andrus of Intuit. Since I work with a posse of supersmarties this was quite relevant. First we talked a little bit about the characteristics of High Potential People. They tend to be smart, sure, but they also tend to be the kind of people that are incredibly curious, motivated and passionate, who have their own personal projects going, are always thinking and learning -- a lot of FOO Camp attendees, truth be told. I didn't take notes during this part, so don't want to attribute anything to Keoki that he didn't say. But I think you get who these people are. Design and deliver RFMB solutions. RFMB means "Right For My Business" -- obviously in a work situation, you need to figure out what the job at hand is, otherwise everyone will be unhappy. Figure out what work activities turn them on and off. Then for their job, downplay the stuff they hate, or that are their weaknesses, and figure out what they love doing. Make their job mostly about the things they love doing. And figure out what they are solving for not only in their jobs but in their personal lives as well. Listen and Care. Get to know them deeply. Follow them around. Walk them through journey line analysis. Look for activities that "light them up". (There are also many tools to discover this stuff, Keoki says, like Meyer-Briggs, Strengthfinder.com, but nothing can replace gtting to know them. What you're looking for is deeply embedded life interests.

Picasso, Paula Scher, and the lifetime behind every second: "A story from Charging By the Project or the Hour:

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

‘It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.’

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

‘It’s perfect!’ she gushed. ‘You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?’

‘Five thousand dollars,’ the artist replied.

‘B-b-but, what?’ the woman sputtered. ‘How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!’

To which Picasso responded, ‘Madame, it took me my entire life.’

Charging hourly vs. charging per project is always an interesting dilemma for designers/programmers who do client work. If you charge hourly and you solve problems quickly, you wind up being punished for your efficiency. But if you charge per project, you often face scope issues (i.e. endless revisions or changes in direction seem to become the norm).

[Fwiw, the article linked above offers this advice: ‘Charging by the hour is a good option for short-term projects with specific goals…When you’re offered a long-term project with clearly defined goals, you should charge by the project.’]

The designer version of the Picasso story usually involves a designer sketching out a brilliant logo on a napkin during a lunch meeting. If you’re looking for a real-life example, that’s pretty much what happened to Paula Scher; She walked into a meeting and, a few seconds later, sketched the new logo for Citibank.

No lengthy process, just the right solution. In this Adobe video profile of Scher, she offers an explanation similar to the one in the Picasso tale:

How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it is done in a second. it’s done in a second and in 34 years, and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that’s in my head.

The video’s worth a look. She talks about other work she’s done (including her incredibly detailed and very cool map paintings) and also offers her first reaction, after years of working solely with her hands, to designing on a computer:

The computer made me feel like my hands were cut off…You don’t type a design…The idea of doing this…[She taps in the air as if typing]…That’s not the right mode and it doesn’t smell right. It doesn’t smell like an art supply store. It smells like a car.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive."

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

What if you could see all your company activities in realtime? This has been the goal of many technology companies over the years. No single solution stands out as being great but, new approaches based on metadata mashups might make this a reality soon.

The first generation of mashups have focused on maps to highlight the relationships between location based metadata. The new mashup dashboards can show your companies sales based on location, buyer profile, total sale across time. Your marketing team can know who just experienced their key product message along with the effectiveness of the delivery channel over time. Collecting the stream of attention metadata as your target customers listen to your product message on their iPod and presenting it in a dashboard puts the CMO back in the driver seat.

This is great overview of participant segmentation and the data flows that are driving the new web. Media metadata is the key element of many of the new viral participation sites and can be applied to old problems. Segmenting the participants and tuning the metadata using the model below will enable the addition of web2.0 elements into the enterprise. Any enterprise is made up of a collection of roles and technology adoption profiles. Yes these are people but from the enterprise point of view their employees are personas performing processes. Executive can now imprint and influence the performance of their company at less cost and higher fidelity then ever before.

The diagram below illustrates how we see media and metadata flowing to and from different activities around media on the web. The corners of the matrix are meant to represent activities, not kinds of people. So, for example, a Flickr user might fluidly switch between creating and uploading her original photos, to enthusiastically tagging and commenting on others’ photos, to passively watching syndicated photos appear on her desktop or phone, to Photoshopping a Creative Commons-licensed photo that catches her eye and re-uploading it… The point of the diagram is simply to emhasize that each of these activities generates different kinds of metadata that potentially can be used to support the other activities. MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project’s

A creative mashup presented as a game. A bit like Risk with the randomness of Google search results.

a cool online strategy game that exploits Google's search engine in an original way. the search results are localized using the Netgeo database (www.caida.org) & "captured" on a world map by virtual pins. by choosing well chosen search queries, players can occupy specific places on the world map. the 2nd player (or the computer) then tries to "hit" those exact places, or to explore alternative cities or countries to occupy, until all pins are used. Information Aesthetics

The new web properties have certainly started to get mainstream attention. Businessweek and other magazines are dissecting the main components of Web2.0. Now even the guardian of the mainstream is including (and defining?) the elements of the new web.
2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models. Particular focus has been given to user-created content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared revenue models. Technologies rated by Gartner as having transformational, high or moderate impact include: Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions. Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. Ajax is a collection of techniques that Web developers use to deliver an enhanced, more-responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for example, recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari or Opera). A narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of making a difficult-to-use Web application somewhat less difficult. However, Gartner said, even this limited impact is worth it, and users will appreciate incremental improvements in the usability of applications. High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps). Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services. Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A "mashup" is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from public Web sites and Web applications, they’re lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.

GeoRuby A few days ago, IvyGIS was released by Robert Thau. It is a Rails engine which connects to MapServer and PostGIS databases and can display Google Maps-style views. Here is a demo and it is quite impressive. It uses the SVG display feature of Firefox (since version 1.5) to overlay geometries obtained from the PostGIS server on top of MapServer image tiles. This is the first time I have seen this functionality actually put to use and it looks absolutely great. It also works on IE6 using VML (but I haven’t tested yet). There is some functionality overlap with my own project, GeoRuby and the PostGIS Spatial Adapter, regarding PostGIS data access. A difference is that, in the case of IvyGIS, the use of geometric columns must be declared in the model whereas for GeoRuby, it is transparent, but that is a functionality not difficult at all to add.

Now that we are collaborating on documents and ideas using services like Writley, how do we find the documents we are working? This a a many to many problem that needs a live tagging or clustering solution. Ajax spreadsheets are not a real solution but some of the attributes built into a spreadsheet like solution do help this problem.

The concept of individuals owning documents is broken. The network of documents, clustered by type and usage, are owned by the group. Permissions may create an ownership hierarchy but, input is allowed by all. Wikis are certainly one solution to this problem but not a complete solution. Ajax editors and document viewers are needed to provide a richer interaction with these new documents. You need awareness of who is editing a section of a document as it happens. Certain section get locked dynamically as users need to post an edit. All edits are version controlled and different version clusters can be shared as almost new documents. The idea of what is a document is based on the set of editors over stream of time. The classic version control problems come to the forefront. Branching, merging, conflicts need to be supported in these new ajax document editors.