REaltor.com

Visited Vizio

visited Vizio (you already saw that visit in a previous post) to learn more about 3D, then visited Oakley to learn more about the latest in 3D glasses (hint: they are selling far better than they expected, I learned from execs there, which shows that 3D TV is indeed taking off, just not with the tech press). While there I got a good look at a new custom printing technology they built, which shows how custom products can be in the future.
If you were watching my wife’s Facebook feed you’d know that we got lots of beach time, along with time at LegoLand and Disneyland too. Great times and my brain is buzzing with new ideas to bring back to my work at Rackspace.

ゲゲゲの女房

Visited Dan Meis

He’s a world-famous architect who designs sports stadiums around the world. You’ll know his work if you see a baseball game in Seattle’s Safeco Field or a basketball game at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. I always am inspired by how big he thinks, which is why I started the conversation asking about something small he designed lately. Of course he switched the topic to discussing what he’s working on now: a soccer stadium for a future World Cup in Qatar.

TEDxBloomington -- Robert Scoble -- "The 2030 Class Is Arriving"

Robert Scoble co-authored Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers and is a well-known technology blogger/evangelist. He is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace where he is building a community called Building 43.

At TEDxBloomington, Scoble talks about how, today, we're about midway between his graduating class from the mid 1980s and that of babies being born today, that of 2030. Reviewing all the current technology that was unavailable during his education, he asks what the future will look like for these new babies, and suggests a series of ideas so we can help our children better prepare. He says "The future belongs to the geeks" and asks "Are we preparing our kids to be the geeks of the future?"


About TEDx In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxBloomington, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxBloomington event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Talkwheel: roundtable

One problem with many of the most popular social networking sites is that conversations are displayed linearly. This breaks up the discussion and can make it difficult to locate specific parts of a conversation. Talkwheel is changing this with its new user interface.

"Talkwheel is a real-time collaboration platform built around group discussion," explains Jeff Harris, Founder and CEO of Talkwheel. "We believe at Talkwheel that the core of collaboration is actually the discussion. All these companies out there are building a bunch of bells and whistles around the discussion model, but all have really neglected the actual discussion area. In the real world when we're with a group of people, we don't stand in a line and try to talk to each other. We sit around a roundtable and try to create this circular dynamic to get everyone involved...Talkwheel is really trying to keep this round table design and really capture the real world dynamic online."

In Talkwheel, each "wheel" has its own specific group, and you can filter the wheel by topic, time or users (coming soon). This eliminates the need to search through emails or scroll up and down forums to find the information that is most relevant to you. Groups can be private or public, and users can comment to the entire group or send individual, private messages to one other within the groups.

Talkwheel offers both a free social site as well as a version it hopes to sell to businesses. One feature set that has been particularly appealing to business users during beta testing is real-time analytics on all the information shared. "You can get sentiment analysis—what users like and what they don't like about different issues going on," says Harris, "so it's very helpful for HR. Companies are also using this to engage their customers on different focus groups, so you can get a really deep insight on what your employees and customers feel on different issues and topics."

Users can upload photos and videos to a discussion, and these items can be opened within the app, so users do not have to hop from page to page during a discussion. Talkwheel also plans to go mobile soon with apps for iPhone and Android devices.

"We wanted to make Talkwheel very, very viral," explains Harris, "so when you create a wheel, you can invite users who are registered or are unregistered. If I invited an unregistered user, all they have to do is click accept and it automatically registers them. They just type one password, and they're into Talkwheel.

Plizy

With so much video content online, navigating among all the options and choices can sometimes be overwhelming. Plizy recognizes this and is providing a solution that may change the way you watch and discover video on the Internet.

"We are a video discovery platform, so everything is cloud-based," explains Jonathan Benassaya, Founder and CEO of Plizy. "We have a cloud with a recommendation engine able to understand, from your video habits and your interests, [how] to create automatic channels tailored to what you do and what you like."

Plizy uses a variety of factors to learn what you like and recommends videos based on that information. "We have a patent pending recommendation engine," says Benassaya, "where we use three kinds of information. [We use] the social graph, obviously, but also we create your interest graph based on your Facebook and your Twitter account. So we try to understand if you like tech, if you like sports, if you like baseball, if you like Asia, etc...and above that, we use some algorithms. The most well known is collaborative filtering, which is the ability to recommend content based on your habits. It's a hybrid recommendation engine, so we don't use only your social graph."

The content that the service provides comes from a large and growing list of providers that Plizy hand picks—both public sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, and sites that provide original content, such as Revision3.

"As of today, we have more than 300 channels that we've picked on the web," says Benassaya, "which are the best web content so far. You can enjoy TED, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook at the same place. And we are adding something new in the coming days, which is the ability to download some content, so you will be able to download TED videos [for example] and watch them on the plane or the bus or in a train. So we're trying to push the experience, the discovery, and the access to the best content."

The company is also working on technology that will allow you to push content to just about any device you would use to watch videos. Unlike when using AirPlay, you will be able to continue using your tablet for other things while streaming content. "[The system] is cloud-based," explains Benassaya, "and the cloud can control two screens. That's why you have an entire communication between two screens."

Plizy plans to roll out a wealth of new features over the coming months as it expands from its current iPad app to other devices. "We help people discover the right content," says Benassaya, "because they want to discover things, but they don't have time for that. Plizy is here for this."

Skype For Android Now Supports Video Calls, Works Over WiFi And 3G

This would go over big here in Vegas.

AutoWed Wedding Vending Machine by Concept Shed from Conceptshed on Vimeo.

Viral Video: “The Muppets” Are Back (and I, For One, Am Thrilled)

As with my deep adoration of Barry Manilow, I am a closet fan of “The Muppets.”
They’re back in a new movie and, apparently, it’s still not easy being green.

Rajesh Rao: A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist -- no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. What might they find? Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers -- buried in the hills somewhere in North America -- massive versions of these same symbols. Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future?

Now this is no hypothetical question. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. Now the Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. So it occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. Now given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. They've found small objects such as these.

So here's an example of one of these objects. Well obviously this is a replica. But who is this person? A king? A god? A priest? Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? We don't know. But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say. And that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. We don't know what any of these symbols mean.

Now the symbols are most commonly found on seals. So you see up there one such object. It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. Now that's a magnificent piece of art. So how big do you think that is? Perhaps that big? Or maybe that big? Well let me show you. So here's a replica of one such seal. It's only about one inch by one inch in size -- pretty tiny. So what were these used for? We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? So these were used to make those kinds of packing slips. Now you might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. So perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other -- we don't know. We need to decipher the script to answer that question.

Now deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. So first, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. Now there's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. So if you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit.

Now there's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. Now these people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian.

Now which of these hypotheses can be true? We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. First, there's no Rosetta Stone. I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. So we don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny.

And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. So in the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. Now I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. And why was I fascinated? Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. Now my career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on.

But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. Are you ready?

The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. So here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. So can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. Okay. Left to right? Oh, it's almost 50/50. Okay. So the answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the sign. One of the signs is also below the text on the top. And so this suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left. And so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. And the Indus script now has this particular property.

What are the properties of language that would show? So languages contain patterns. So if I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? Most of you said U, which is right. Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? Now the Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. So there's a lot of texts that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. And this is very similar to a Q and U example. This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign. And this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script.

Now given such patterns, here was our idea. So the idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. Now given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. So here are some examples. So you may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune.

So what we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. Now in the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. Now there's also practical use for this particular procedure. There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. So here's an example of one such text. And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. So here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze.

Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. Now such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. This is a physics and information theory term. But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. Now how many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? You might have encountered the stuck keyboard problem -- so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. Now this kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. What about the Indus script? Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. So at the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters -- and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them with a very high range. Now at the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range.

Now what about the Indus script? So we found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. Now when this result was first published, it was highly controversial. There were people who were raising a human cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. I even started to get some hate mail. My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. Now who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? Now what does this result really show? It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. So what other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language.

Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. Now if you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. Now the same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. So the computer found several texts -- two of them are shown here -- that have very unusual patterns. So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. Now this sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair.

So why is that the case? We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. And why were they found there? But what I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived. And so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. It's just like our English and Dutch example. And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. So this suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language.

So if it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? That's our next big challenge. So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. So most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. So as an example, here's a word. Can you write it using pictures? I'll give you a couple seconds. Got it? Okay. Great. So here's my solution. So you could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf -- and that's "belief," right. There could be other solutions. Now in the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. So you have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles, because the stakes are so high if you solve it.

Now my colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola have been making some headway on this particular problem. And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. So here's a really short text. It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "meen" which happens to sound just like the word for star. And so seven stars would stand for "elu meen" which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. Now similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "aru meen" which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. And that could be translated into "mey meen" which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. So that was pretty exciting. It looks like we're getting somewhere.

But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? Well not yet. So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. So today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. Now the Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.

So why should we care? The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. So these are our ancestors -- yours and mine. They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. Now if we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. So what would they tell us? What would we find out about them? About us? I can't wait to find out.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough

My name is Joshua Walters. I'm a performer.

(Beatboxing)

(Laughter)

(Applause)

But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. I reframe that as a positive, because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ.

(Laughter)

I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. They're just practicing. One day they'll get here. Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. "Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some -- why don't we give you some Zyprexa. Okay? Mmhmm? At least that's what it says on my pen." (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. I can feel your noise. The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. When I got out I had a choice. I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness.

(Bugle sound)

There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive -- at least the hypomanic edge part of it. Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible.

And there's a book -- John Gartner. John Gartner wrote this book called "The Hypomanic Edge" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "Touched With Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. Some of them committed suicide. So it wasn't all the good side of the illness.

Now recently, there's been development in this field. And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum -- you know what I'm talking about -- not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum -- where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. (Laughter) Your call. Your call. And everyone's somewhere in the middle. Everyone's somewhere in the middle.

So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. Maybe no one's really crazy. Everyone is just a little bit mad. How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much depends on how lucky you are.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Irregular verbs

Irregular verbs

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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Is Ready for His Close-Up: The Full D9 Interview

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is well-known in Silicon Valley as a funny guy, but he trotted out some serious stats in this onstage interview with Walt Mossberg at the recent ninth D: All Things Digital conference.
Among the many topics: Acquisition interest by Google and others; its new photo sharing service; the evolving business plan of Twitter; and how Costolo does not have a super-secret Mach 20 government plane to impress the crowd, even if the microblogging service is growing fast.
Still, as you will see, Costolo is pretty quick.

Solar Sinter solar-powered 3D printer turns sand into glass, renews our faith in higher education (video)

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Pelican Imaging's prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner

Pelican Imaging's prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner (video)
By Tim Stevens posted Feb 10th 2011 11:05AM

If you want to look for life on another planet you don't build one radio telescope that's miles wide, you build a bunch of smaller ones and create an array out of them. As it turns out that basic idea works for capturing visible wavelengths as well. It's called a plenoptic camera, using an array of very small lenses that, when combined, can create an image as good as a larger one. Pelican Imaging is largely interested in the slim factor this kind of system could offer, potentially allowing for thinner phones, but this could also open the door to some interesting effects. Check out the video after the break for an example of the dynamic aperture control this sort of setup can allow, where you can change the focal plane of an image after it was taken. Given the small size of the array here you probably couldn't do anything too crazy, like take a picture through a tree, but the days of poorly focused cameraphone shots might finally be at an end -- whenever this actually comes to market.

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Desmos is a place where anyone can create and share rich, interactive content that works across platforms – from computers, to interactive touchscreens in classrooms, and even to many tablet devices and smartphones. We believe that educational content should easy to build, easy to access, and easy to share, and should never be restricted to one device.

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Is Nanosys’ awesome new screen technology gonna be in iPad 3? I hope so. Wow.

When Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove pulled two iPads out of his bag and turned them on one looked like when I first saw my first Kodachrome slide while the other looked muddy and crappy in comparison (I pulled out my own iPad and saw my screen looked muddy and crappy in comparison too). The new one was clear, beautiful, stunning, with richer colors than I had ever seen on a screen before.
“Is that the new retina display?” I immediately asked him.
“No, it is not a higher resolution display.” My eyes were telling me otherwise.
“What the f*** is going on here then?” I asked him. He calmly explained what Nanosys did and why they own 400 patents on what they were showing me, which they call Quantum Dot Enhanced Film (QDEF™) . 400!
This technology is so important Economist magazine just wrote about it (and they don’t write about startups very often). Even better, it’s designed AND made in the USA! For once Silicon Valley is seeming like Silicon Valley again.
Unfortunately you can’t really see the difference in the screen very well. Why? Because you are watching this video on an old crappy Dell, or a Macintosh, or an old-style iPad.
When Nanosys starts shipping its screen technology later this year our lives will change forever.
Every screen in your life will look dull and lifeless compared to a screen with Nanosys technology in it.
Now, let’s go through the business advantages:
1. Does not take more battery life.
2. Does not increase cost.
3. Does not require a new display architecture to push out more pixels or a GPU that is four times as fast to support more pixels.
4. They can make craploads of it.
5. They have patents up the yingyang so are gonna be the only game in town for a while.
6. This company is real and funded by the best VCs in the business. They also just won best new display technology at the Society for Information Display conference a couple of weeks ago.
If you watch one video of mine, watch this one. It’s awesome tech and I can’t wait to have it in all my screens. Unfortunately we gotta wait for Steve Jobs to bet on it big time.
I can just see the iPad 3 launch. We all know Apple is going to put in a double-pixel display (my sources have been talking about that for months now) but when you see this technology you’ll know just why the next displays are so freaking good on colors, too.

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Bootstrapping the CNN of tech: The story of TWiT
By Janko Roettgers




It all started with boredom. Leo Laporte had a few gigs with TV and radio networks back in 2005, but his work schedule left him with nothing to do half of the month. So he started an audio podcast called This Week in Tech, also known as TWiT. He asked listeners for donations, which allowed him to hire production help and add additional shows. And then, one day, he told his then-bookkeeper Lisa Kentzell about his real goal: to become the CNN of tech.

“I said: Okay, let’s do it,” recalled Kentzell when I met her and Laporte in the TwiT cottage in Petaluma, California last week. Kentzell is now the CEO of TWiT, and the company is ready to take the next big step towards its ambitious goal in July with the move into a spacious new studio built with a 24/7 live video operation in mind.

Check out this video of Leo Laporte and Lisa Kentzell showing off their new studio:


The new space is only a couple blocks away from the old studio, but in a way, the two studios are worlds apart. The old TWiT cottage, which has been Laporte’s home base since 2005, looks like your grandma’s small old summer house taken over by a bunch of geeks. Too many geeks, actually. The 18 staffers are literally bumping into each other all the time. The new studio, on the other hand, will have multiple sets, 40 cameras, state of the art tech and lots of room for future expansion.

The move is also as sign of TWiT doubling down on live video. It’s a ambitious proposition, in part because most of its audience still thinks of TWiT as a podcast network. Kentzell told me that TWiT sees about 5 million downloads every month. Live is harder to track, she said, but still much smaller.

“The live audience isn’t here yet,” admitted Laporte. “It’s a big bet on the future.” And live is expensive: TWiT recently had to shut down the live feed of its Roku channel because of exploding bandwidth costs. However, Laporte believes that these things will eventually sort themselves out with bandwidth prices going down.

Taking a step back when things get too expensive is also a part of the TWiT way of doing business. Laporte and Kentzell thought about moving to San Francisco with the new studio, but decided to stay in Petaluma to get more bang for their buck. The company only spends as much as it can afford at any given time, and has been entirely bootstrapped from day one, declining many opportunities for outside funding. “We are very committed to bootstrapping,” said Laporte. Kentzell agreed: “We wanted to have full creative and financial control.”

Speaking of Kentzell, she’s one of the lesser-known folks on the TWiT team, but Laporte couldn’t speak more highly of her. “It really wasn’t a business until Lisa came along,” he told me. Laporte initially hired her to do his books; he soon discovered that she was outsourcing the actual bookkeeping to a whole team she managed. Impressed, he convinced her to bring some of that leadership to TWiT. Laporte credits her for doubling revenue every year in the past few years, up to the tune of $3 million in 2010.

Much of that money comes from advertising these days, which is brought in by an external sales team. Initially, TWiT was entirely donation-based, with listeners shipping in as much as $20,000 per month. The company is relying on some of that loyalty to finish its new studio, which will cost about $850,000, by selling commemorative bricks to fans. “Donations give people a feeling to be part of it,” said Laporte.

So what’s next for TWiT? 24/7 live streaming is one goal, a satellite bureau in New York is also in the cards. Laporte also wants to hire more talent and add more shows after poaching broadcaster Tom Merritt and producer Jason Howell from CNET last year. But he doesn’t believe in branching out too far. “I’m not trying to get bigger, I’m trying to serve our niche better,” he said, adding that he’s confident to have a good sense of the content that will be popular. “I really understand our audience. I am one of them.”

And as for the ambitions to become the CNN of tech, Laporte says it’s not just a numbers game. He may never reach as many simultaneous viewers as the cable channels, but he believes TWiT can be just as relevant. His team will have succeeded once “a breaking news story happens and people turn to us,” he explained. Getting there may take years, and millions of dollars that Laporte and Kentzell intend to make the old-fashioned way – through bootstrapping. Said Kentzell, “It’s a little risky, but I think it’s worthwhile.”

Paul Nicklen: Tales of ice-bound wonderlands

About this talk

Diving under the Antarctic ice to get close to the much-feared leopard seal, photographer Paul Nicklen found an extraordinary new friend. Share his hilarious, passionate stories of the polar wonderlands, illustrated by glorious images of the animals who live on and under the ice.

Meet The Nokia N9: A Colorful Slice Of MeeGo Magic

Video: A Look At High-Res 3D Laser Scanning With Makerbot’s Bre Pettis

In the olden days, when you wanted a bust made, you hired some fancy sculptor to come to your house and sit with you for hours a day until, months later, you had a handsome marble or ceramic bust. Now, however, you can get a bust made in a few minutes using laser scanners and Makerbot rapid prototyping machines. Ain’t progress wonderful?

Makerbot’s Bre Pettis invited me over to his new storefront in Brooklyn to build a bust for his upcoming New York Notables event in July. I got to join folks like Cory Doctorow and Moot (in miniature form) as we were scanned into a PC using a Polhemus laser scanner. To grab my physical details they dusted me talcum powder and then sat me down for a good two minute scan. The process was quick and painless and the results, as you see in the video below, were impressive.

We could have printed out my head in a few minutes but Bre and the gang were pretty backed up so they’re going to let me know when my tiny little head appears in their machine, ready for eventual deification by future generations.

Mitnick starts talking about LulzSec at about the 4 minute mark in the following video via CBS News’ What’s Trending.

On the other hand, LulzSec may inspire other hackers. Future groups may leave the cockiness at home and quietly do a lot more damage. It’s not like LulzSec’s potential demise will do much to shore up security efforts in various companies.

Microsoft Looks to Mango to Make Windows Phone a Better Communicator

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft was basically looking to get back into the smartphone conversation. With the next version, codenamed Mango, the company hopes to prove itself a social butterfly.
Improved communications, along with better Web browsing and more powerful apps, were the key focal points as the company looked to make the first major update to its revamped phone software.

On Tuesday, the company is announcing a host of new communications options that are among 500 new features that Microsoft is adding to its phone operating system in the “Mango” update due out later this year. The company is outlining the changes and sharing other details at a press event in New York that is just getting underway. (It’s being Webcast and AllThingsD has live coverage here).
As part of its effort to be a better communicator, Microsoft is adding support for Twitter as well as tighter integration with Facebook and an integrated conversation feature that allows chats to move between Facebook Chat, Windows Live Messenger and text message all within a single “thread.” The company is also adding an option to let users combine contacts into various groups that can be reached en masse via email or text message. On the email side, customers will now have the option to combine views from various email accounts into a single inbox as well as view messages in either standard or conversation view.
While apps are important, Microsoft is hoping to convince friends that when it comes to keeping in touch, it is better to integrate multiple modes into a single hub than to have to open a different program for each means of communication.
“Our friends aren’t apps—they are people,” Sullivan said.
That said, even with Mango, users will have to do some switching. The feature that lets discussions move from chat to text message doesn’t extend to email, while Twitter users will still need a separate program to handle more advanced tasks.
Still, Microsoft hopes integrating more options into its People hub will help the company’s products stand out from rivals. Sullivan noted that Microsoft’s research shows people spend 2.5 hours a day socializing on their phone–more time than is spent eating. “It’s pretty dramatic,” he said.
The Mango release of Windows Phone is due to show up on phones later this year. In addition to current hardware partners that are planning new phones, Mango will work on existing Windows Phone devices and will form the basis for Nokia’s first crop of Microsoft-powered phones.

Three Things to Take Away From Apple’s WWDC Announcements

William and Harry open up about dating and friendships

ANGRY BIRDS theme!!! covered by Pomplamoose

Resistance to the "Arab Spring" is Futile

Resistance to the "Arab Spring" is Futile

Doha Debates: An overwhelming majority of Arabs are betting on reformist movements across the Middle East

Mode Vakschool - Het Klokhuis

ASML

Talking Social Media Success With Robert Scoble

Creator Video App Collabracam Talks iPhone Video

Kyle Hilla, speaks from his Grand Rapids, Mich. HQ about his app that aims to be a TV studio in your pocket, linking iPhones together to create a single, seamless video.

Deceptions

The Dangerous Infidel

My TV Remote

Using the iPad in the Classroom

Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation Grants $1.5M To Turn Human Waste Into Biofuel

Two of many challenges developing countries face are unsafe water and a lack of affordable energy. With the help of a new $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ghana may be able to combine these lacks into an asset in the form of biodiesel.

The grant, for a “Next-Generation Urban Sanitation Facility” in the country’s capital of Accra, will turn human waste from sewage into biodiesel and methane that can be used as fuel.

The project not only produces energy from waste, but tackles a major sanitation problem common in cities that are unable to pipe sewage to treatment plants. Bacteria in sewage can easily make its way into water sources used for cooking, drinking and irrigation, leaving locals, especially children, susceptible to dying of diarrhea-related diseases such as cholera.

Columbia University’s Dr. Kartick Chandran will lead the project. In collaboration with Moses Mensah, a Chemical Engineering professor at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and Ashley Murray founder and director of Waste Enterprisers, the team will build a biorefinery to recover energy from fecal matter, turning it into a useful resource instead of something to be inconveniently discarded. When completed, the project will reduce fecal sludge in Accra’s water supply and offer an affordable energy source to its residents.

The Gates Foundation estimates that 2.5 million people, or half of the world’s developing world population, doesn’t have access to safe sanitation. Chandran is familiar with Ghana, having worked for two years as faculty advisor to the an Engineers without Borders team there.

This isn’t the first time fecal matter has been used to create energy, but it could be a step towards a brighter future for areas struggling with wastewater sanitation and high fuel costs.

Here is video of Chandran discussing some of his wastewater treatment research.

MyVoice, a Great App for the Speech-Disabled, Is Foursquare Meets Text-to-Speech

The MyVoice app offers up location-based searchable phrases and helps users easily navigate social situations.

A new GPS-enabled app will give millions of speech-disabled people a simplified way to communicate in the local tongue. MyVoice is a text-to-speech app that uses location-aware dialogue and customizable phrases to streamline the search for the perfect phrase. Additionally, because its a smartphone app, using it in social situations isn't as awkward as a proprietary device.

"Usually, people would have to navigate through a huge hierarchy of words on a traditional device in order to find these seemingly unrelated words. But using our technology, using MyVoice, they're able to very quickly get to the words that they actually need to say at that time," designer Aakash Sahney tells Canadian broadcaster CTA.
The GPS and customization is what drives the experience. As an example, at a movie theater, the app may pull up words like "tickets" or "seats," or, at a coffeeshop, users can program their regular purchases.
"It fits in really well in social situations, too. It's natural to have an iPhone in your pocket and take it out somewhere," he adds.
MyVoice plans on being a monthly service with an online, syncable web component. It will be available for $30 a month, and Aakash says it will be available next week.

Video – Neil Gaiman on Copyright Piracy

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

Plains Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Dynamic Perception Stage Zero Dolly dynamicperception.com

During the month of May, I shot Milky Way timelapse in central South Dakota, when I had the time, and the weather cooperated. The biggest challhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifenge was cloudy nights and the wind. There were very few nights, when I could shoot, that were perfectly clear, and often the wind was blowing 25mph +. That made it hard to get the shots I wanted. I kept most of the shots low to the ground, so the wind wouldn't catch the setup and cause camera shake, or blow it over. I used a Stage Zero Dolly on the dolly shots and a "Milapse" mount on the panning ones.

Canon 60D and T2i
Tokina 11-16
Sigma 20mm F1.8
Tamron 17-50

Keen On… Suzanne Vega: Music, Like Oranges, Shouldn’t Be Given Away for Free (TCTV)

Question: Who is the mother of MP3?

Answer: Singer songwriter Suzanne Vega, whose iconic 1981 song “Tom’s Diner” was used by MP3 inventor Karl-Heinz Brandenberg to calibrate the standard of the revolutionary codec that would change the music industry forever.

Vega’s attitude to the music industry is pretty matrimonial too. On Wednesday, she keynoted the “CREATE: Protecting Creativity from the Ground Up” conference in Washington DC, put on by the technology and media coalition Arts and Labs (for whom, full disclosure, I consult). Not only did Vega play us an haunting intimate version of “Tom’s Diner”, but she also spoke uncompromising in favor of the artist’s right to be paid for his or her work. Arguing that if she wasn’t paid for her songs she would have to go back to being a receptionist, Vega argued that music, like oranges, shouldn’t be given away for free.

Whatever else one might say about Vega’s critique of free culture and piracy, she can’t be accused of being a Luddite. As she confessed to me when I caught her on camera after her CREATE speech, she is a big fan of Twitter and particularly Facebook where she goes “eight or nine times a day”. Nor does she defend the status-quo of the old record industry. “The audience is the most important thing”, she explained the new reality of the business, telling young musicians that it’s much more important to build a loyal following than get a record deal.

Her faith in today’s digital technology to build viable new business models was echoed by a number of other speakers at CREATE. On a panel about the future of the digital economy that I moderated, for example, all the panelists agreed that the digital economy provided exciting opportunities for all creative industries in the 21st century. From Mike Fricklas, Viacom’s General Counsel to Matt Serletic, CEO of Music Mastermind to Jim Cavanagh, President of the American Society of Media Photographers to Tom Adams, Rosetta Stone CEO, everyone agreed that new streaming and anti-piracy technologies and devices offered incredibly exciting opportunities for media entrepreneurs. But, like Suzanne Vega, too, all the speakers on my panel agreed that digital content, like analog oranges, couldn’t and shouldn’t be given away for free.

Make-o Lego

Nazi Germany’s Secret Army of Flying Beetles: The Volkswaffe!

Google Scaling Solar, Commits $280 Million To Finance SolarCity Installations

Google today announced a new partnership with SolarCity, committing $280 million from its coffers to finance SolarCity installations, namely solar rooftops for homes in North America.

Google Doodle

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif




http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html#tune=IAR1xrg0PodcODaAAAdYuxUy5nSNgA**

Conan O’Brien’s Dartmouth Commencement Speech

Walt Talks About iCloud With Charlie Rose

This week, post-WWDC keynote, Charlie Rose sat Walt down to discuss the implications and impact of Steve Jobs’s iCloud announcement, and of cloud computing in general. In clip one, Walt lays out cloud computing basics. In clip two, Rose asks Walt about Jobs’s vision of the “post-PC” era.

Twenty Feet lets you know more about your social media stats

I love Twenty Feet. Every morning it sends me an email and lets me know if something weird happened in my stats for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other places. For instance, did more of my videos get favorited than usual? Did more people subscribe or unsubscribe than usual?

Here CEO Martin Seibert explains more behind what TwentyFeet does and shows off a preview of a new iPhone app coming soon.

Twimbow brings color to social media

Twimbow looks a bit like TweetDeck, but look again and you'll see a colorfully different approach! By using colors you can uncover tweets and status messages from people and brands you care about. Here Luca Filigheddu, CEO of Twimbo, shows me what it does and what his philosophy is behind social media clients.

Apple to Lodsys: Now, Youse Can’t Leave

Apple to Lodsys: Now, Youse Can’t Leave
JUNE 10, 2011 AT 1:00 PM PT



Lodsys has really stepped in it now.
Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the patent infringement lawsuits that the patent holding company has brought against seven iOS developers, a move that could add significant legal heft to their defense.
Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the motion explains that developers who’ve been targeted by Lodsys “are individuals or small entities with far fewer resources than Apple and … lack the technical information, ability, and incentive to adequately protect Apple’s rights under its license agreement.”
So Apple would like to intervene on their behalf.
“While the Developers will likely be interested in resolving this case as quickly and inexpensively as possible, Apple’s interest is in protecting its broader license rights with respect to thousands of App developers for Apple products who may be the subject of future Lodsys lawsuits or threats.”
In other words, Lodsys, which has been harassing independent developers who lack the means to fend off its litigation, may soon find itself grappling with Apple legal, which is an ugly, ugly proposition indeed.
The situation reminds me of a scene midway through “A Bronx Tale” in which a group of bikers disrespect a local Mafia don’s bar (video below). When asked to leave, they refuse. The don walks over to the door, locks it — trapping the bikers inside, turns to them and says, “Now, youse can’t leave.” A group of heavies emerges from the back of the bar and beats the bikers senseless, while this narration runs in the background.
“I will never forget the look on their faces. All eight of them. Their faces dropped. All their courage and strength was drained right from their bodies. They had a reputation for breaking up bars, but they knew that instant, they’d made a fatal mistake. This time they walked into the wrong bar.”
If the court grants Apple’s motion to intervene, Lodsys may have just done the same.

Big Live: fostering real-time interactions around content

Producers of online video content are always looking for ways to get their audience more involved and more engaged beyond just leaving comments. By leveraging the social network, Big Live is providing a solution that fosters real-time discussion among audiences.

"Big Live is a synchronous video platform," explains Jonathan Zakin, President, CEO & Co-Founder of Big Live. "It's a social network built around the idea of sharing experience around viewing content that you enjoy with other people. We've looked out there at the other video platforms that have basically a chat room next to a player, and they approach that problem through the player side. We approached it through the social networking side. We built a social network around that, and so as a result, you have a very immersive social experience around this content."

Big Live recently released a widget that allows content providers to embed the app into other sites or their own site using an iframe. Users can still view the content anonymously, but you must log in using Facebook Connect in order to socially interact. Once you have logged in, you can see everyone else that is also viewing that content simultaneously, you can roll your mouse over the audience and see the profile of individual audience members, and you can sort the audience members based on several criteria.

"You can sort on age, location and gender and whether or not they are Facebook friends of yours," says Zakin. "Once you do that, you can begin to interact with them in real time around that synchronous video experience either through group chat or through a one-on-one chat, so if you find somebody in the crowd that you're interested in talking to, you can take them offline and chat with them that way. We're trying to emulate going to an event, turning to the person next to you and saying, 'Hey, this is very cool.'"

MovieClips Raises $6M To Curate And Mashup Scenes From Movies

Online movie clips site Movieclips.com has raised $6 million out of a $7 million round, according to a recent SEC filing. The startup has previously raised $3 million. We’ve confirmed the new funding with the company.

Movieclips.com, which launched in 2009, offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. Last year, the startup also launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips.

Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc.

The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL’s Moviefone actually uses the technology on its platform.

Google vs Apple: The Cool Factor [Video]

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html





Earlier today I was invited to do a quick guest spot on CNBC’s Power Lunch, where we discussed a question that’s fundamentally important to the future of Silicon Valley: Who is cooler, Google or Apple?

Okay, so the topic was a bit goofy. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it: after all, public perception can play a role in how quickly products from each company get picked up by new users, which in turn can impact their bottom lines.

Tune in to hear my thoughts. Because if there’s a guy who knows cool, it’s me. Oh, and there’s an interview with the folks who made the awesome Les Paul Google Doodle gracing the search engine’s home page today. You can watch that one here: