everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Tango, the world’s fastest (and thinnest) urban car

    Tango, the world’s fastest (and thinnest) urban car

    So I was at Maker Faire this past weekend which I cannot recommend highly enough. There were so many cool things to see and a really wish I hadn’t lost my camera at the Web 2.0 Expo otherwise I would have been posting tons of pictures of all the wild and crazy things I saw today. If you’ve never been, go next year and if you have kids, bring them along for sure. I went when the gates opened at 10 in the morning thinking we’d pop by for a couple of hours and poke around but ended up having to drag them out at 3pm while they were both in the middle of creating their own board game. My 5 year old daughter left decked out in a tin foil cap with Mickey Mouse ears, a crumpled sheet of mylar strapped to her back as makeshift fairy wings, along with a wand of rolled up magazine paper and lace and tinsel fixings – it was a day well spent!

    I could write about the fantastic Neverwas Here Victorian landship, the 200 lbs. battling robots, the standup acoustic bass made from the fuel tank of a Triumph motorcycle, or the dude who was teaching my son the art of hydroponic farming but it is hard without photos to capture the image.

    I saw the Wrightspeed electric car but what caught my eye was the Tango. Made by an outfit in Spokane, Washington, this electric car is so thin and short that it can park between cars making it the ultimate urban car. Seating two (one behind the other) it can get from 0-60 in 4 seconds and, because of the weight of batteries in the floor, can turn corners as smartly as a sports car.

    Check out the image below taken from the Commuter Cars website – no, that’s not a distortion!

  • How to lose friends and influence competitors

    Gamers are sniggering behind Sony’s back as they roll out an advertising campaign for the Playstation that uses game images from Project Gotham Racing 3, a game made exclusively for Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

    On their website

    On their partner’s website, Kia

    Then in print.

  • YouTube Active Sharing

    YouTube Active Sharing


    First time I noticed this but there’s an icon up by your profile next to “History” that lets you know about YouTube’s Active Sharing feature.
    First time I noticed this but there’s an icon up by your profile next to “History” that lets you know about YouTube’s Active Sharing feature.

    When you start Active Sharing, your username will appear to other users on the videos you watch. A list of videos you’ve recently watched will also appear on your profile page.

    Is this new?

  • BluBet, predictive markets for the rest of us

    One of the problems with predictive market sites is the complexity of the economic model makes it difficult for the casual participant to get involved. Because the underlying dynamics of the market or methods of measurement are hard to grok, the markets never really scale to a number that filters out noise effectively enough to get a strong signal.

    In order to gain mass adoption, you need to make the game drop dead easy. Digg has done a great job at this. Right from the results screen it’s immediately understood what’s going on and the wonderful little flash widgets give you immediate gratification when you add your “digg” to a story and it’s easy to see how you can make an impact. Flickr is the same with it’s “favoriting” feature. A simple click on the “Add to favs” star and you see the impact and know you’re feeding the interestingness machine.

    BluBet is new service along the same lines. A wager is the simplest way to express your conviction and it’s a little more compelling than a digg-like vote because you’re putting your reputation on the line with your BluBucks so it’ll keep you coming back to see how you’re doing. I’m with Dave McClure, “this is going to be big.”

    I’ve got a wager going right now. Do you think any of the top 100 newspapers in the US will cease to be available on newsstands by the end of 2007?

  • Justin.tv knock off caps to be released by V-Tech

    Justin.tv knock off caps to be released by V-Tech

    It was only a matter of time. The latest internet sensation, Justin.tv has been picked up will become commercially available this Spring. Guangzhou-based electronics firm V-Tech picked up to the trend and is planning on making “Justin Caps” available for sale for $29.99.To keep costs down, the camera has been replaced with a high-resolution CCD cam and a condenser microphone. Connectivity in the United States is going to be via an arrangement with Virgin Mobile who will provide caps with a pre-paid plan for 1000 minutes with a code that will allow cap owners to login to the Virgin Mobile website and purchase additional minutes as needed or upgrade to the Infinity plan subsidized by video advertising inserted into the live feed every ten minutes.

    Obvious Corp. is also in talks with V-Tech and Virgin Mobile and will connect their popular Twitter service to each Justin cap in a multi-media version of Twitter code-named “Snow” in homage to the 1992 science fiction book by Neal Stephenson. As a member of Snow, members will be able to clap their hands to activate a clapper-based shutter that will capture 10 seconds of video and sound and broadcast it to all their Snow network friends simultaneously. When asked why the beloved technology advertised on late-night television was used as the interface, the Twitter staff replied, “if someone’s clapping, it’s got to be worth broadcasting out to your friends.”

    Justin Kan, the Justin of Justin.TV could not be reached for comment. He was too busy running from a crowd of applauding teenagers.

  • Tivo vs. Apple TV

    That was quick. I thought the distribution of home movies directly downloaded to Tivo would have been handled by the Amazon Unbox arrangement which I wrote about last week but I instead Tivo is promoting a service called One True Media.

    Here’s how it works. Upload your photos and short movies to the service that allows you to add a soundtrack, titles, and simple effects. In return for your subscription ($3.99/month, $39.99/year), you will get a special Tivo subscriber’s code. Any broadband-enabled Tivo can then use this code to subscribe to anything you upload to your One True Media account. More details on the One True Media site.

    While this is exciting, there is also a compelling alternative with the Apple TV which supports subscription to any Video Podcast via the iTunes store. While Tivo’s solution seems well integrated and easy to use, it still relies on the publisher to give the Tivo owner a subscription code that they manually need to put into their Tivo setup.

    1. Tivo/One True Media – $$ to publish, free to download, editing platform restricted to One True Media
    2. Apple TV/iTunes – free to publish, $$ (or free to download), use whatever editing platform you like

    Historically, the more open publishing models prevail. I’m afraid that charging your publishers to upload their videos is going to limit the market to just those that want to push home movies of their kids to their grandparents. I wonder how many grandparents have an IP-enabled Tivo?

    A better idea would be to set up Tivo’s to publish so all you need to do is upload your finished movies to your Tivo box via the USB port and then it’s available on a peer-to-peer network. When grandma or anyone else who browses the Tivo catalog wants to pull a file (either via one-time request or RSS subscription), the peer-to-peer network copies the file either off the seed Tivo or off any other Tivo that is hosting the file. Tivo can manage the index and use the metadata on what you watch to improve recommendations and suggest other things to watch, either from the networks or from the peer-to-peer network.

    Who do you think will be the winning solution a year from now? Apple TV or Tivo?

  • Movies to your Tivo via Amazon Unbox

    Movies to your Tivo via Amazon Unbox

    I decided to give Amazon’s new Unbox service a whirl over the weekend (they are offering $15 in credit if you register your Tivo broadband service with Amazon by April 30th) and was very pleased with the experience.

    It took only a few minutes to link up my Tivo account and after that, any movie listed on the Amazon Unbox catalog was ready for one-click purchase and download.

    I chose two movies (Devil Wears Prada and Little Miss Sunshine which run $3.99 each) and they began to download within minutes and were available for viewing later that evening.

    You have 24 hours to view the movie from when you begin viewing and have full Tivo control over stopping, starting, rewinding and fast-forwarding through the movie. Notice the new “red flag” icon which alerts you that the movie will be deleted. Also notice the “save to VCR” option is avaialble although I didn’t try it yet.

    It’s early days yet and Netflix has also mentioned that they’re in the download on demand business as well (the Netflix CEO has been quoted as saying that they’re not called “mailflix” for a reason) and from what I see here, it looks like this could be quite a compelling reason to move off of expensive cable plans for HBO and other premium channels if you’re able to get what you want via an on demand service. Add an archive of standard television series and specials and you’ve got a nice alternative to the Apple iTunes/Apple TV product.

    Additional bonus is that purchases made here feed into my Amazon recommendation profile (most likely my Tivo profile as well). This will be a space to watch.

  • Sparkletack is Back!

    sparkletack.jpg

    My favorite podcast , Sparkletack – the San Francisco history podcast, as told by a distant relative of Mark Twain, is back after a longish hiatus. If you, like me, have a long commute and are looking for something to listen to and enjoy a good tale, subscribe to Richard’s podcast.

    The latest episode, The Crocker Spite Fence, is about the 40-foot tall fence built by the railroad baron Charles Crocker around the one fellow who would not sell so that Crocker could build his hill top mansion on Nob Hill.

  • Lumos Labs – brush away the cobwebs of your mind

    Lumos Labs is a new site which, through a series of simple online games, excercise your brain. The site’s games are “scientifically proven to improve your attention, memory and processing speed.” Like doing situps for your mind, the site sends you through a series of short games that are fun, engaging and beautifully designed. Scores are tied to your account so you can push yourself to beat your high score or invite your friends to top you.

    The screenshot above is from a game called Raindrops where you solve the problems in each bubble before the raindrop hits the lake. As you progress, the math gets harder and the raindrops become more frequent. The game ends when the lake fills up.

    There are other games which require you to focus on pattern recognition, spacial memory, or attention and processing visual information. The approach here is similar to Brain Age (which runs on the Nintendo DS) but the appeal here is that all you need is an internet connection and a web browser with Flash to play.

    A glance at the about us page shows there’s some serious science behind the fun and games and there are presentations that you can download to learn more.

    And the best thing? Two of the founders are roommates of my sister! Way to go guys!

    Lumos Labs is in beta and free of charge.