Mittwoch, 20. Juli 2005

Mobile GMaps for Java/J2ME phones. The mobile geoweb comes another step closer with Mobile GMaps: (Via freegorifero) Mobile GMaps is a free piece of software that displays Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones or other devices. Mobile GMaps is distributed under the Attribution/NonCommercial/NoDerivs Creative Commons license. You may download, use and distribute the application free of charge for non-commercial purposes. You may NOT use it for any commercial purpose. [Smart Mobs] 11:54:40 AM    comment []

Home Egg McMuffin machine I've never actually eaten an Egg McMuffin, but as it's from McDonald's, I'm sure it's delicious and disgusting and terrible for you. Now you can make those unhealthy breakfast treats in your own home at drive-through speed. Back to Basic's new Egg & Muffin toaster simultaneously toasts your English muffins or bagel while poaching (or steam scrambling) an egg and warming up a sausage or a slice of ham (as long as it's pre-cooked or you're in for a nasty, warm but raw surprise). I suppose you melt the processed cheese food in your microwave to complete the McMuffin experience. I want one of these for making other things like Eggs Benedict. The round egg steamer would make perfectly shaped poached eggs. I kind of love the idea of having one appliance that cooks several things at once so they'll be ready at the same time. The Egg & Muffin toaster will be available in September for $49.95. Back to Basics products are usually available in most of the big appliance or electronics retail stores like Target. - Mia [Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women] 11:53:59 AM    comment []

Unlocking the Mobile Phones Gaming Potential. Frequently the most astute viewpoints are those that come from people seeing things from a different vantage point. Tonight's post is a prime example. Mobile gaming, in spite of its growing popularity and billion-dollar annual revenue generation is still in its naissance. Today's games as others, including Russell Buckley have pointed out, are typically just scaled back versions of games that we play on PC's or gaming specific handheld devices. As Greg Costikyan points out in his post that the celular phone is disappointing as a gaming device in light of the realization and execution of the games that have been developed to date, and that further, the games which could be developed have potential to be far different, far more engaging, and even far more viral than anything we have seen yet. THere is an important caveat however. As Greg points out; the significant attributes of the phone; its primary function as a communications device, the fact that your "REAL BUDDY LIST" is your address book, and yet none of these functions can be accessed and used to advantage by the developers of the current crop of games. It's fascinating to consider what he says, and I highly recommend reading the execpt below and paying a visit to his site to get the full treatment; it should open the eyes of developers and operators alike. This is a somewhat edited version of a presentation I gave at Nokia Research Center's Game Day, an internal Nokia event, two days ago--redacted mainly to remove anything that might be considered Nokia confidential... But I think the basic thesis is something worth thinking about more generally.) In five short years, we've gone from b&w static browser games via WAP to full-motion, full-color 3D. And we've gone from basically zero in revenues to $1b globally. And good for us. But.... This has basically been built on the basis of interpreted language environments (BREW and J2ME) that provide the capability to emulate existing game styles, and whose security models make it difficult, often impossible, to access most of the features on a mobile phone. In essence, we've been using mobile phones as inferior GameBoys--and that's apparently enough to build a $1b market, and growing. But while there have been a handful of interesting attempts to do things you can't do on other devices (like Botfighters), we haven't seen many successful games that do something novel and interesting with mobile as a platform. Forget about games for a moment: What makes mobile devices different? Well, for one thing, they are first and foremost voice communication devices. And they store quite a lot of information about your circle of friends and business contacts, in the phone book. Along with a datebook (which most people don't use, but some do, particularly on higher-end phones where they can hotsynch to an Outlook calendar). They are personalized devices--people add ring tones, screenery, and images of friends so they can see a pic when someone calls. And they're networked--as computing devices, they may be primitive, analogous to (say) pre-Pentium computers, but early home PCs weren't networked until comparatively recently. From a user perspective, they are primarily social devices, used to keep in touch with friends, family, and business contacts, mainly via voice and texting. The early success of mobile games as a business has been built on simply enabling existing video game styles. But remember that "the video game" is a subset of "the game," dependent essentially on a video display screen attached to a computer. A mobile device is, today, a (tiny) video display screen attached to an (underpowered) computer that is used for social purposes, enables voice communication, is personalized, and contains information about the user's social circle. In other words, we can conceive of a different category of game, something we might call the "mobile game" that may bear some connection to the "video game," but depends ultimately on the differences between mobile devices and PCs, rather than attempting to simply imitate the video game. I'm not going to be so foolish as to try to predict what this "true mobile game" might be like--indeed, I suspect there are many as-yet undiscovered game styles that could be commercially successful as "mobile games." But to be true mobile games, they need to be able to take advantage of what mobile devices can do. Here, however, is the kicker: The technology that, today, allows us to build games for mobile devices, does not allow us to access the other features of mobile handsets. You want to use voice? You can't--a mobile phone can make a voice connection or a data connection, not both at once. You want to access the phone book? You can't--the phone book is its own application, in splendid isolation from any others operating on the handset. You want to access personalization information? No can do. You want to use the network? You're stuck with HTTP (usually) which, together with a G2 network, means you need to plan for 3+ second latency. Here are some use cases to illustrate what I mean: see what he means by going [The Mobile Technology Weblog] 11:51:42 AM    comment []

Electronic Arts Launches Massive Mobile Assault; Jamdat Threatened?. Wow...it's almost "deja vu all over again" or at least that's what Yogi Berra would say... That's how I felt, anyway, after reading the news that Electronic Arts, the PC Gaming Giant had inked deals with Verizon and Sprint to provide a slew of new high performance video games for the mobile handset. NEW YORK, July 18 (Reuters) - Verizon Wireless and Sprint two of the biggest U.S. mobile providers, plan to offer their customers video games from Electronic Arts Inc. , the companies said on Monday. Electronic Arts shares were up slightly on the news, while shares of rival JAMDAT Mobile Inc. ( which specializes in mobile games, saw its shares drop more than 4 percent. "It indicates a potential for increasing competition against JAMDAT," said Moors & Cabot analyst Jason Willey. He said the Electronic Arts deals were not surprising but may have dampened recent rumors that the company might buy JAMDAT. Willey estimated that JAMDAT leads the U.S. mobile gaming market with a 15 percent to 20 percent share, while Electronic Arts has a share of less than 5 percent. Mobile phone gaming is one of the fastest-growing segments of the video game industry, and service providers are embracing wireless game downloads as a additional source of revenue. What to me was most notable from the release as it related to my post yesterday and the observations made by Greg Costikyan are summarized below...incidentally I have to wonder if Greg is psychic, knew something in advance, or simply understands his field very, very well. According to the news release; EA games will be available in the Game Lobby by Sprint, a virtual mobile community for gamers to meet, recommend games and challenge each other. It is accessed from both the fixed Internet and the mobile Web by more than 500,000 members and includes many features: - Single gamer username across games and publishers - Centralized listing of high-score postings - Ability for users to manage their identity and determine what information is stored in their profile, such as pictures - Opportunity to rate and review games - Ability for users to create a buddy list of other members for challenging and instant messaging - Option to opt into receive new game alerts - Interoperability with other game communities for cross-carrier buddy communication, game ratings and leaderboards - The new status points program where users earn points for their activities to enhance the fun, competitive nature of the virtual games community You can read EA's press releases here. Though games have been off my list for some time now due to the fact that I tend to become dysfunctionally obsessive until I beat them, I might just have to try one or two of these for...you know...research. [The Mobile Technology Weblog] 11:51:09 AM    comment []

Quick del.icio.us search with Firefox. Del.icio.us user Daniel Miessler searches del.icio.us bookmarks and tags from the Firefox address bar by typing d searchterm in the Firefox address bar. Here's how to set it up: Using Firefox, go to the del.icio.us tags page here (or your del.icio.us bookmarks page, or ANY page with a search box on it.) Right click inside the search box. Choose "Add a Keyword for this Search." Set the name to "delicious tags" and the keyword to dt Now type dt lifehacks into the Firefox address bar, and you will be magically transported to the life hacks del.icio.us tag. Useful! Firefox Quicksearches + Delicious = Godlike Powers (Repost) [dmiessler.com] [Lifehacker] 11:48:06 AM    comment []

Tattooed fruit en route. Xeni Jardin: Produce industry service company Durand-Wayland, Inc. developed a system for identifying produce with laser-etched codes in 2002. These "fruit tattoos" would replace those little stickers that always get stuck in your teeth when you bite into a nice, crisp apple while distracted. The technology's beginning to catch on, according to this NYT story. A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance. And that is what pears - not to mention organic apples, waxy cucumbers and delicate peaches - are becoming in some supermarkets around the country. A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin and are visible to discerning consumers and befuddled cashiers alike. Link to NYT article. 251 [Boing Boing] 11:45:08 AM    comment []

Free Software for Busy People. Cory Doctorow: Free Software for Busy People is a new book from Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, a Bahraini MD who is on a mission to help information-civilians understand why they should use free/open source software. The book tells the story of six people from six walks of life (government administrator, MD, corporate exec, entrepreneur, Arab teacher, primary school teacher) who adopt free software. The book simply and clearly states the case for adopting free software and provides equally clear and simple explanations of how to switch and what to expect when you get there. You can buy a printed and bound copy of the book, download a PDF, or read it as a hyperlinked html file. Link (Thanks, Mohammad!) [Boing Boing] 11:43:06 AM    comment []

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 4-10 July 2005. A bit of admin before I start. The Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up is looking for a new sponsor, now that ThePort Network has completed its sponsorship arrangement with me. Dan Backus from ThePort Network told me they had a lot of positive feedback to the sponsorship and their product offerings - which I was very pleased to hear. I want to thank Dan and ThePort Network for sponsoring me and I wish them all the best with their Web 2.0 product range. So now I'd like to put a call out for a new sponsor. Please contact me to discuss. This week: Big events and news on the Web, automatic content for the people, things you can do with RSS, API round-up, Techie Post of the Week: Social principles of Web 2.0. Big events and news on the Web It was a tough week for the Western world, when London was struck by a bombing attack. I don't want to use this tragic event as a backdrop for tech talk, but I do think it's noteworthy that the Web has become a crucial tool for news dissemination and discussion nowadays. The Wikipedia page on the London bombings was a comprehensive and thorough work-in-progress as the news unfolded. As was the BBC's Web coverage, so it's not like mainstream media is being run out of business. But it's clear that the Web is a key platform now when it comes to covering big news events - at least on a par with television and newspapers. So-called social software websites played a big role too. Flickr was used extensively by people to post photos and for discussions. Personally I found myself visiting the sites of bloggers I read who live in London, are British expats and even kiwis who were in London at the time. And when you consider things like the LiveJournal Moodgrapher, which recorded a mood of "sadness and shock" amongst LiveJournalers following the attack, well you realise how integral the Web has become when dealing with such events. On a less serious note, the Live 8 event was also covered very well on the Web. Indeed, apparently AOL's Web coverage was far superior to MTV's on the television. PaidContent.org quoted this from an AP person: "AOL's coverage was so superior, it may one day be seen as a historical marker in drawing people to computers instead of TV screens for big events." The latest Gillmor Gang has some interesting comments on this, particularly from guest Susan Mernit. Automatic content for the people This week I wrote a musing post about the new age of automated content we're seeing on the Web. I looked at (what I deemed to be) both good and bad examples of this phenomenon and concluded that my decisions about such matters are more moral than legal. It turned into a very interesting discussion, which is still open. As I noted in a comment I made later in the thread, my goals for this post were to come to an understanding of: a) where my own content fits in with this new era of automated websites - I've established that I'm comfortable with sites like Planet Web 2.0 and Memeorandom, and even [Article Bot-generated] Stock Pick Report to a degree; and b) what things should we, as users of the Web, be wary of in this new era of automation. And I think we should be wary of hundreds of thousands of robot-generated pages that have no redeeming social value for the Web and will clutter up search engine results. It's a great discussion about Web 2.0 morals and ethics. Join in, the conversation's still happening! Things you can do with RSS Tim Yang continues his run of excellent tools and resources - he was the bloke who created the Google News To RSS Scraper called scrappygoo. Now he's come up with a Wiki featuring an extensive list of things you can do with RSS. Things like: - Track Fedex packages - Get bargains at Ebay - Get stock updates - Get the weather reports - Find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products - Track Music, radio shows, TV clips - Stay updated on someone's schedule - Get cinema schedule updates - Read your favourite comics Check out the wiki for the whole list. API round-up But wait, there's more! I also want to highlight Chris Campbell's round-up of APIs (via Eric Lunt). As Chris wrote, "if you're interested in adding to the Web 2.0 goodness, you've got to start understanding APIs." Too right - go check it out! Techie Post of the Week: Social principles of Web 2.0 Ian Davis (of Planet Web 2.0 fame) wrote a great post about what he calls the Web 2.0 principles of "participation, openness and communication." Here's how he defines this: "Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It's about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts." Obviously this theory has a lot to do with the whole automated content issue I raised this week. Often when we talk of Web 2.0, we mean APIs and RSS and XML and all those other acronyms. But the whole idea of the 'read/write' Web is that everyone can and does contribute thoughts and ideas to the Web. So the social aspects of Web 2.0 - participation, openness, two-way communication - are just as important as the platform and the acronyms. On this I heartily endorse Ian's position. But we all have a lot of work to do yet, when it comes to defining what is socially acceptable use of content and the Web - and what is not. I myself am still working it out and I'm only just beginning to get comfortable with the idea of other sites re-publishing my writing. The Remix Culture requires a big mindshift for everyone, so we're all figuring it out as we go along. That's a wrap for another week! [Read/Write Web] 11:41:55 AM    comment []

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 11-17 July 2005. sponsored by: This week: The future of RSS, Amazon turns 10, Yahoo HotJobs, big bucks for blogging, techie post of the week - RSS systems. New Sponsor & Special Offer For R/WW Readers I'm pleased to announce Onfolio as the new sponsor of the Weekly Wrap-Up! To celebrate, Onfolio has a special offer for Read/Write Web readers. The following coupon code entitles the bearer to $30 off a purchase of Onfolio Professional before August 31st, a 30% saving off the normal $99.95 price. To use the coupon, enter it at the time of purchase. Coupon Code: RM857202 RSS Growing Up So Fast A number of posts came out this week with thoughts on how RSS is evolving and the need for new kinds of feed management tools. VC Fred Wilson thinks centralised RSS Readers (like Bloglines) are on the way out. What's needed, according to Fred, is new ways to manage our feeds and make them available to other apps to use. An example he gives is "applications and services that can use the [RSS] infrastructure that Microsoft is building into the operating system layer to add value."  Don't miss the comments to Fred's post, there are some excellent points. e.g. Charlie Wood says that Feedburner is a great example of a "value added service" (they would be my prime example too). Heather Green then comments "What I am interested in watching develop are the services that are created on top of RSS, like maybe a service that parses for resumes or job listings." In a similar vein, Tommy Lee look-a-like Nivi wrote an interesting post entitled RSS is the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0. In it he asked: "will RSS become the fundamental building block of Web 2.0 and the Internet Operating System?". See also his follow-up post, featuring an analysis of Jonathan Aquino's "command line for the Web" app YubNub. Other thought-provoking posts on these themes include David Beisel's musings, Heather Green's The Evolution of RSS, According to Yahoo, and Michael Parekh's theory about "Broadband Content End-Runs". All of this is head-spinning stuff, but well worth pondering if you're interested in finding out how RSS is beginning to outgrow its blogging roots. Oh and incidentally, Atom (an alternative RSS format) was all but officially released this week. I'll review this further once the techies have finished their latest bout of handbags at ten paces :-) Amazon Turns 10 This week Amazon celebrated its 10th birthday. Amazon is in a way is the quintessential Web 2.0 company, because they've been using the Web as a platform for all of their 10-year existence. They recognized the power of the Read/Write Web before most Internet companies, by inviting their users to contribute reviews and rank products - amongst many other community-enabling features. They were one of the first bigco's to open up their data with APIs and they made it easy for third-party sellers to become affiliates (currently more than a quarter of Amazon's sales are via a third party). Not to mention that Amazon sold products from The Long Tail long before Chris Anderson popularized the term. And boy did Amazon celebrate in style! They ran promotions for a Hall of Fame, Wish List Spree, Special Deliveries and finished up with A Show of Thanks - a live concert with "Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Bill Maher, Hall of Fame writers, and exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage from the Lord of the Rings trilogy." nb: I have a post brewing about Amazon's future, which hopefully I'll publish this week. Yahoo's Job Search Engine This week Yahoo announced a new "jobs search engine" - and it's a shot across the bow for the online jobs market. Yahoo HotJobs crawls the Web looking for job vacancies and automatically adds them to its index. Although this will probably "cannibalize" its paid listings, it'll also take a big bite out of its two main rivals in this market - Monster and CareerBuilder.  Forrester analyst Charlene Li predicts that the next big thing in online classifieds is social classifieds, "where the ability to connect people to each other will be the hallmark of success." This is actually already a feature of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and niche market blogs like PaidContent.org. Professional Blogging Pays Off My Australian cousin Darren Rowse announced recently that he got a Google Adsense cheque for "between $10k and $20k ($USD)" for the month of May. Holy Gamoly! Darren works extremely hard on writing content for his 20 or so blogs, so full credit to him for the financial rewards. The income revelation led to a Slashdotting and the inevitable blog-trashing comments from the /. community. But some commenters had good things to say, like this one: "He [Darren] is just an info junkie who has happened to find a way to make a living at his passion." Professional blogging is different things to different people. For some, it's part of their day job. For me, it's my way of trying to get a day job like those guys ;-). Reputation is my currency in the blogosphere and I'm hoping it pays off in the long run. Techie Post of the Week: RSS is for creating systems I'm still spinning my wheels on the future of RSS. Dave Winer wrote an interesting riff on this. Here's an excerpt: "RSS is more than a format, it's an approach to creating systems. [...] The whole point of RSS, Jim [Moore] argues (imho correctly) is to make connecting systems together so easy that users can do it themselves, without any help from system managers or vendors. This is a brilliant observation, in all my years thinking about RSS, I had never approached it from this direction." I'm not entirely sure what that means yet, but if Dave says it's a brilliant observation - then obviously the rest of us need to think seriously about it. That's a wrap for another week! [Read/Write Web] 11:41:10 AM    comment []

Web 2.0 Sampler. I'm making yet another attempt at a regular branded list of Web 2.0 links. Let me admit straight up that I've copied the following format from Ypulse, Anastasia Goodstein's excellent site that covers New Media for Generation Y. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as I have discovered, so I thought it's worth giving this a go on my blog. - Mash-Ups the wild wild west of the Web (pretty good business overview of Web 2.0 and Remix Culture - and don't miss the slide show 'Sampling the Web's Best Mash-Ups') - Steve Rubel wants Microsoft to bet the company on Web 2.0 (in the comments, I pointed to my own analysis of Microsoft and Web 2.0 - in short, I think millions of Windows-run 'devices' will be their interface into Web 2.0) - Om Malik gets cozy with Marc Andressen (I like Marc's point that new minds and new tech talents will grow in places "we would have never looked before". right on!) - Latest Harry Potter book digitally pirated within 12 hours (a fully scanned + proofread ebook within 12 hours... I still don't want to read it though) (via waxy) - More great Tim O'Reilly Web 2.0 quotes (someone advised me recently that I need to work on my "pithy quotes", if I'm to get any mainstream press coverage as an analyst - see Red Herring link below) - RSS Goes Corporate (I gave some background info for this Red Herring article, but I don't rate a mention) - You can't sell content online (Mary Hodder says selling services that help manage data and content - such as filtering, search and aggregation - is where the money is) - Charlie Wood forsees the rise of post-processing feed services, such as inserting ads into feeds. (what's really interesting will be the non-advertising services. e.g. how about more remixing functionality) - News Corp buys MySpace owner for $580 million (I hadn't realized that mainstream music groups like Black Eyed Peas and R.E.M. streamed their latest releases on MySpace) - Does MySpace sale signal Web 2.0 peak? (I agree with Adam Rifkin in the comments, it's only just begun!) [Read/Write Web] 11:40:31 AM    comment []

Web 2.0 Sampler. - There are 1.2 million feeds in Bloglines that "matter", says Ask Jeeves Blog (meaning at least 1 person subscribes to it. nb: SEW and Niall both point out that some blogs have multiple feeds) - Feedburner begins to expand into "major media accounts and global relationships" (fulfilling all the hype I lavished onto them in my Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004 post last year) - Comparing tech companies to countries (check out the comments - there are some funny comparisons. e.g. "delicious is Chechnya: Comprehensible only to those inside.") - Profile of Bokee, China's top blogging network (they're planning a "virtual currency", a la Korea's Cyworld, which will enable Bokee bloggers to charge their readers) - Study finds usability issue with blogs (if you're a blog consultant, the PDF report is well worth pondering) - Tony Gentile tells us to expect continued integration in Yahoo's network (yes the social networking, aggregation, RSS, media, etc pieces are all coming together quite nicely for Yahoo) - PaidContent.org on Yahoo's Silicon Valley and Hollywood goings-on (see also WSJ.com and Om Malik) - Greasemonkey has a serious security flaw (Mark Pilgrim sounded the warning and the Greasemonkey blog has details) - Slashdot community debates the future of Firefox (as one commenter said, "I want to know how firefox devs plan to address security concerns with the browsers.") - Backing up your Gmail account (use pop3 or the auto-forward feature) nb: The photo of the dog and its long tail is from Anil Dash's Flickr photo stream. [Read/Write Web] 11:40:00 AM    comment []

Papercraft Howl's Moving Castle. Cory Doctorow: On a Miyazaki message-board, fans are discussing and linking to two magnificent papercraft models of Howl's Moving Castle (from the film of the same name). One is a free download (though, bizarrely, it is a PDF in a Windows self-extracting archive, ugh) while the other is a $50+ book. Link (Thanks, Jesse!) [Boing Boing] 11:34:53 AM    comment []