Tuesday, March 01, 2011
The Shared Web: Making curators of us all
Some of the hottest companies I've seen this year are either content presentation companies like Paper.li or Flipboard, or content curation systems, like Pearltrees, Storify, and Curated.by. But today The Shared Web is going to change my ideas about everything.
"We decided to start The Shared Web in order to solve a problem that we noticed that we were having," says Kareem Amin, co-founder. "Something that we always talked about is, 'What are you reading? What are you looking at online?' What we realized is that what each other is reading is extremely interesting to us, and not enough of it is being shared on Facebook or Twitter, perhaps because people don't want to flood each other. What we decided to do is to build a platform for social curation that allows people like me and my friends to do just that."
The Shared Web uses an elegant flipping motion, like Flipboard, but it only curates shared web content, not status updates or random tweets. Then you get access to a highly targeted experience, by selecting the topic you want to read about. "We pull in the sharing that's happening on Twitter and Facebook, we organize it into different topics, and then we show it to you in a beautiful layout," says Amin. "We know that people are already sharing on these sites, but the core idea is to democratize curation, the same way that blogging democratized writing. It opened up for everybody. We want to open up the curation for everybody. And by curation, I mean seeing something that's interesting, and recommending it to the right audience through a topic."
Amin is aware that he's standing on the shoulders of giants—and he's glad to be there. "What we're really excited about is that today's the perfect time for this: in order to build our product, we needed somebody to figure out the social graph," he says. "Facebook and Twitter have already done that. Lots of thanks to them for that. We can build on top of what they've done, and start figuring out what is the interest graph, and start to personalize the web for you."
More information:
The Shared Web site: http://www.thesharedweb.com/
The Shared Web profile on Crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/the...
Kareem Amin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kareemamin
Cargo Collective: A stunning web publisher for eye-popping content
There’s a whole lot of content on the internet, and much of it doesn’t look all that good. But if you visit the Cargo Collective, like we did, you’ll see just how amazing the web can look when designers empower fellow creatives.
“Cargo is a web publishing system meant for creative professionals,” explains Folkert Gorter, co-founder of Cargo, and an interaction designer originally from Holland. “You can say it’s a CMS, as well as a system that provides web site templates that are starting points for designers to create their own web site. It’s mainly used by people who have a lot of visual content to publish, like designers, photographers, architects, stuff like that, though it’s transitioning more and more toward more textual as well. If you think about it, WordPress is mostly text-oriented publishing, and say, something like Tumblr is a lot more visual, like pictures. Cargo is sort of in between those, where we are truly multimedia: we put a lot of emphasis on the combination of text and image.”
Cargo isn’t a CMS for everyone—but those with eye-popping content and some knowledge of CSS can create sites that look better than almost everything else on the web. Amid their stylish design and sophisticated programming, Gorter and co-founder Josh Pangell have discovered some tricks to making HTML look fantastic. “‘Float left’, the CSS rule, is like our biggest thing,” says Gorter. “We float everything left, and it becomes liquid instantly,” adapting to whatever size screen it’s on.
How does Cargo set itself apart from a web dominated by big guns like WordPress? “L-O-V-E,” says Gorter. “We make no compromises. We have design skill, and we have programming skill, and we don’t f-ck around. We really design it in the best way possible and we don’t compromise.”
More info:
Cargo Collective web site: http://cargocollective.com/
Cargo Collective on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cargocollective
Space Collective web site: http://spacecollective.org/
SpeakerText: Extracting text from video, with speed and savvy
Rocky and I go around the world shooting videos. But it’s hard to consume the information in a video unless you have the 20 minutes to watch it, and Google can’t search the words spoken in my interviews. Today we’re going to see how SpeakerText solves the video/text conundrum.
SpeakerText is an online, on-demand, video-to-text platform. “What we’ve done is built this virtual assembly line that combines the power of crowdsourcing, with the parts of speech recognition and artificial intelligence that actually work,” says Matt Mireles, founder and CEO of SpeakerText. They do that by breaking the video’s sound into chunks, and sending it off to sites like Mechanical Turk, where workers transcribe the audio in units just five or ten seconds long. Then they reassemble the parts, have editors check for errors, use phonetic speech recognition to timestamp each word, and natural language processing to figure out sentence boundaries. And that’s just the platform.
“On top of that, we’ve built this application layer,” explains Mireles. “We’ve built this widget that taps into the JavaScript API of a video player, any player, whether it’s Brightcove, Ooyala, YouTube, blip.tv, even self-hosted videos. As the video plays back, it highlights each sentence as a video plays, and scrolls through the transcript. You can click on the transcript, and it will jump to the exact moment you’re interested in.” That also allows you to find a great quote in a video and tweet a link to that exact moment.
Mireles points out that this process, which he calls “distributed human computation,” allows SpeakerText to transcribe a two-hour long video just about as fast as one that’s only a minute long. “There are all these things where people are trying to create truly artificial intelligence, and it’s not there,” says Mireles. “It always reaches maybe 85 percent accuracy that is okay, but not complete. The way these problems actually get solved is by layering on the human component.”
More info:
SpeakerText web site:
SocialEyes: The intersection of video and the social graph
While video conferencing via the web has been around since the 1990s, the concept hasn’t kept pace with the radical changes in social interactions made possible by services such as Facebook. SocialEyes is changing that with a new tool that introduces video into the Facebook experience.
“The way that people collaborate now in the age of social networks is very, very different than the way they used to,” explains Rob Williams, CEO of SocialEyes. “SocialEyes is a social video product that lets people connect with their Facebook friends in much more dynamic and powerful ways than they have before and to go beyond their Facebook friends to connect with people who have a shared interest or passion…both in real-time and asynchronously.”
SocialEyes is a free service and works directly within your browser using Flash. You can have multiple video conversations going on at once in separate windows, and if you want to combine conversations, the software has tools to connect windows and create ad hoc group meetings.
By associating with Facebook, SocialEyes has an enormous potential pool of users, and the goal is to make it easy for each of them to use the service. “One of the very powerful things we do with SocialEyes,” says Williams, “is rollout something that works across every [Facebook] user–500 million users around the world–with essentially no software download.”
More info:
SocialEyes web site: http://www.socialeyes.com/
SocialEyes on Twitter: http://twitter.com/socialeyes
SocialEyes profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/socialeyes
Motorola Xoom Review
Once considered mainly a recreational/entertainment tool, tablets are quickly making their way into the business world as more and more industries are finding ways to put the devices to use. Whether it’s a car salesman looking to accelerate the sales process before a buyer gets cold feet, or a contractor accessing material costs right from the job site, tablets are starting to make an impact.
The Apple iPad has led the way in terms of sales, but competitors aren’t standing idly by. Recently, Robert Scoble reviewed the new Motorola Xoom, scheduled for release tomorrow, and compared it side-by-side to the iPad.
A self-described “iPad freak”, Scoble was surprised to find several features of the Xoom superior to the iPad. “Multi-tasking on the Motorola is much, much better than the iPad,” explains Scoble. “The other thing I’ve noticed is the common Google apps are much better on the Xoom. Gmail is the full version and Google Maps has turn-by-turn navigation, which it doesn’t have on the iOS devices — not yet, at least.” Calendaring and contacts through Google also function better on the Xoom, and the screen resolution is superior, according to Scoble.
It’s not all bad news for the iPad, however, as Apple still has a big advantage in one area. “Apple is still winning on apps,” says Scoble, “and that’s going to be a huge problem this year for the Android devices.” Additionally, Apple will undoubtedly be addressing concerns and adding features with the much anticipated release of the iPad 2, rumored to be right around the corner.
Lithium Air: IBM’s quest for the super-battery
The four-minute version here:
Watch the whole video:
The days of $1.50 gasoline are long gone, and high costs coupled with environmental concerns have ignited a search for the battery that will power the cars of the future. IBM is at the forefront of this effort with its development of the lithium air super-battery.
The goal “is to create a battery that will power the typical family car about 500 miles between recharges,” explains Winfried Wilcke, Senior Manager, Nanoscale Science and Technology with IBM. “Today’s batteries…fall short of this goal by quite a factor, with [the best batteries] only lasting approximately 200 to 240 miles.”
Bridging this gap requires drastically increasing the battery’s energy density by making it lighter. IBM reduces the weight by getting rid of the heavy transition metal oxides like cobalt oxide or manganese oxide and replacing them with a lightweight, high-surface carbon structure.
The lithium air battery represents “the highest energy density of any imaginable system,” says Wilcke, “but it’s not easy to do. It’s a long-term project currently in its early science phases, but in the last six or seven months we have gotten a lot of positive results, which make me cautiously optimistic that this can actually work.”
Wilcke hopes to have a lithium air battery in cars by 2020. A battery that could power a car for 500 miles would certainly be worth the wait.
More info:
IBM Research – Almaden web site: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/
IBM Research – Dr. Winfried Wilke: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/background/?wilcke
Watch the whole video:
The days of $1.50 gasoline are long gone, and high costs coupled with environmental concerns have ignited a search for the battery that will power the cars of the future. IBM is at the forefront of this effort with its development of the lithium air super-battery.
The goal “is to create a battery that will power the typical family car about 500 miles between recharges,” explains Winfried Wilcke, Senior Manager, Nanoscale Science and Technology with IBM. “Today’s batteries…fall short of this goal by quite a factor, with [the best batteries] only lasting approximately 200 to 240 miles.”
Bridging this gap requires drastically increasing the battery’s energy density by making it lighter. IBM reduces the weight by getting rid of the heavy transition metal oxides like cobalt oxide or manganese oxide and replacing them with a lightweight, high-surface carbon structure.
The lithium air battery represents “the highest energy density of any imaginable system,” says Wilcke, “but it’s not easy to do. It’s a long-term project currently in its early science phases, but in the last six or seven months we have gotten a lot of positive results, which make me cautiously optimistic that this can actually work.”
Wilcke hopes to have a lithium air battery in cars by 2020. A battery that could power a car for 500 miles would certainly be worth the wait.
More info:
IBM Research – Almaden web site: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/
IBM Research – Dr. Winfried Wilke: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/background/?wilcke
Zipcast: SlideShow’s one-click web presentation tool
The ability to share presentations via the web has been around for years, but it has always involved both the presenter and the audience having to download an application of some kind. This often makes the process cumbersome and time-consuming. Slideshare is solving this problem with the launch of ZipCast.
“You can start a meeting from any presentation on SlideShare in one click,” explains Rashmi Sinha, CEO and founder of SlideShare. “You go to a presentation, and there’s a button called ‘ZipCast’. You click on it, and immediately it becomes a web meeting. You can then take the URL and post it on Twitter, Facebook, etc.” to invite participants.
ZipCast works completely in your browser and allows you to keep all other applications running. You can even skip ahead of the presenter during the presentation. The basic service is free, and there is no limit to the number of presentations you can give or the number of participants. For a monthly subscription fee, you can eliminate advertisements and acquire the ability to conduct private, password-protected meetings.
Hashable: The next step in relationship tracking
When you meet someone at a party or an event, do you just exchange business cards? Unlikely, unless you still have a Rolodex on your desk. Today, you probably have a smartphone, and Hashable has developed an innovative solution to help you use technology to make the most of your interactions.
Hashable is “a mobile-first service that allows you to track relationships,” explains Michael Yavonditte, CEO. “It’s similar to Foursquare in a lot of ways. As Foursquare is to location, Hashable is to people. So when you meet a person, you can say, ‘I’ve run into this person, I’ve met this person, I’ve just had a meeting with this person’. It runs the gamut to breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, coffee. Anything that a white-collar professional might do with another person, Hashable gives you a chance to log that event.”
If you enter an acquaintance’s information into the system, Hashable will reveal other people who have also posted interactions with that person. The more interactions with someone you post, the stronger your relationship with that person in the system. Over time, you can look back at your relationship graph and see the entire history of your relationship.
“It’s a way of keeping track and informing,” says Yavonditte. “It’s taking it one step further than any network has tried to take it before . . . There’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to happen. We want to be the company that it happens with.”
More info:
Hashable web site: http://hashable.com/
Hashable blog: http://blog.hashable.com/
Hashable on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/hashable
當年師傅不教 阿基師：偷瞄學的
最近獲網路票選幸福指數第1名的名廚「阿基師」鄭衍基，昨天對三重、蘆洲兩區學校志工和餐飲科學生主講「工作的幸福煮藝」。他說，在動盪不安的年代，會做菜就可養家餬口，足證「專業是很重要的」，阿基師認為現在學生很幸福，但校園、職場倫理不足，有待加強。
總統府前秘書長許水德在一次內部餐敘時，介紹阿基師只有初中畢業，李登輝前總統當場回說「沒讀書，做廚師有什麼不好，總比那些讀很多書，卻做很多傷天害理的事的人好。」讓阿基師很感動，也堅定自己努力的志向。
阿基師昨天用「叉燒包」來說明當年困難的學習環境，他學廚那個時代，師傅不肯將技藝傳授徒弟，連要做叉燒包的皮和的麵，都不讓他看，叫他去拿東西來支開他。
當師傅做菜，他就拿著蔥到對面切，但眼睛卻偷瞄師傅的秤盤，記住材料大約的量、步驟，然後偷偷記下、練習，憑藉著如此勤學及不斷閱讀吸收新的觀念，終於造就他頂級廚藝，他認為現在學生很幸福，有那麼多樂於傳授所學的老師。
處世上，阿基師講求態度決定事業，凡事要盡力做到100分。他爆料自己做的生菜沙拉竟曾被驗出生菌數過高，還被罰款，他沒生氣，而是檢討製作流程出了那些問題？還因為一場宴會的菜色被主人嫌棄，他擔起所有責任賠款和辭職，但這些事都讓他學會更謙卑。
阿基師勉勵餐飲科學生，多做少說是成功的關鍵，人生不要怕挫折，要樂於與別人分享歡欣與喜悅，知足惜福就是他對幸福的定義。
Camino del Rey, 2010
El Caminito del Rey (English: The King’s little pathway) is a walkway or via ferrata, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Álora in the province of Málaga, Spain. The name is often shortened to Camino del Rey (English: King’s pathway).
Shanghai Sideways: On a Changjiang Motor Bike!
Shanghai Sideways: On a Changjiang Motor Bike! from Jakob Montrasio on Vimeo.
Discover Shanghai from a sideways look, seated in the side-car of a classic motorbike.
Enjoy an incredible cruise through the city and avoid traffic jams. We make you feel the pulse of this fast changing city and take you from modern Shanghais futuristic look to the heart of the 1920s French Concession. Tours follow a ready-made route or tailor-made to suit your interest.
With Shanghai Sideways, you enjoy the company of a foreign guide and driver who is a long term Shanghai resident. Although our classic motorbikes are antics, they all are perfectly maintained and monitored to guarantee your comfort and safety.
THE GREEN POOL
The northern island of New Zealand has a geothermal area in Rotorua called Wai-o-tapu that is filled with these strange places. One of the best things about these are the names… Various mysterious pits have names like the Devil’s Throat, Hell’s Gate, and Devil’s Cauldron. You don’t want to drop your cell phone in any of these.
How to build a PC with HotHardware
Marco Chiappetta of HotHardware.com shows us how to build a PC from
the ground up in this super-sized episode of This Old Nerd (over 30 minutes!).
Unleashing Your Router
Today we have Robert Borgesi guest-hosting in the most intense episode of This Old Nerd where he shows you how to unleash the power of your router using DD-WRT. In particular, you’ll learn how to create a wireless repeater-bridge.
World Tapir Day!
http://vimeo.com/4222347
Flickr informed me that it was World Tapir Day, so I thought I’d give a little shout out to one of my favourite animals. Plus, I have this little vid that I took at the SF Zoo last year starring a very lovely and docile Tapir Goober!
Flickr informed me that it was World Tapir Day, so I thought I’d give a little shout out to one of my favourite animals. Plus, I have this little vid that I took at the SF Zoo last year starring a very lovely and docile Tapir Goober!
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