Month: February 2011
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IBM Watson on Jeopardy
In a brilliant piece of PR, IBM Research stormed back on the scene matching their artificial intelligence computer, Watson, against top contestants of the popular American game show, Jeopardy. On February 14, 15, and 16 Watson’s competes against two humans on live television. According a piece on Wired’s Epicenter blog, 25 IBM scientists spent four…
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Push Button Social Networking
HTC announced two phones with dedicated buttons for Facebook. The touchscreen Salsa and ChaCha (pictured below). Running Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, HTC modified the Sense UI to integrate the Facebook into the experience. According to the HTC press release, The Facebook button on HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa is context-aware, gently pulsing with light whenever there…
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Dual SIM is Better Than One
Nokia Researcher Younghee Jung has an fascinating two-part post about how people are hacking their phones to support multiple phone numbers. We found a service offered by a local mobile phone dealer (Mobile Phone People, one of the Nokia authorized dealers) in Ghana. It costs 15 euros to have the two SIM cards combined into…
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David Segal on Search
David Segal, the same New York Times journalist who filed the fascinating 5,500+ word piece in November about decormyeyes.com is back again. The Dirty Little Secrets of Search with a great piece looking into an unwitting, client (and now victim) of black hat SEO, JC Penney. His piece goes into quite a bit of detail (for…
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Singularity and Sentience
I tuned into the launch of Echo’s social media mixer, the StreamServer, which they describe as a platform for the activity streams-based economy. As the saying goes, in a world where the amount of information is ever-expanding and time remains constant, attention is what is of value. As your phone and computer beeps and buzzes with…
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Helsinki “Snow-How”
7-minute video on CNN about how Helsinki handles it’s annual snow removal operations. The last time Helsinki’s Vantaa airport closed because of snow was in 2003 and that was for just 30 minutes.
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Bohemian Rhapsody on Ukulele
TED has a video of Jake Shimabukuro playing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on his Ukulele. As Jake says, “If everyone played the Ukulele, this world would be a much happier place.”
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Europe at Night
This amazing composite image hosted by NASA and other cool images are hosted over at Thought Bubbles, a running archive of occasional wallpaper images and quotes I’ve been curating since 2005.
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Throwing Stones
The images coming out of Cairo are very disturbing. Nothing good can come out of a situation where the two sides resort to the throwing of blunt objects at each other. My hope is for calmer minds to prevail tomorrow. Google (and Issac Asimov) tell us, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Ignore…