Inspiration, Lifehacks, Marketing, Social Media, Startups, Security, Technology
Just a few years ago, burglars might lurk in the bushes or a parked car and wait to see a family leave their house, or turn out the lights. But in this day and age, all you have to do is send a Tweet. A new site, PleaseRobMe.com, reposts such tweets by Twitter users who disclose when they’re away from home. Host Scott Simon speaks with Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center about Internet privacy and security.
Full story at NPR.
Fifteen years ago, the Internet was a complete mess. No Google, no Twitter, no Facebook—imagine the horror! That’s probably why Newsweek, in 1995, printed the now infamous article entitled “The Internet? Bah!”. If you haven’t yet read the piece, it’s worth a look. The article is a hotbed for quotes that’ll have you grinning proudly about how wrong the author, Clifford Stoll, was, and how far the Internet has come.
See some excerpts below:
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Internet: 1 Stoll: 0
Full story at The Next Web.
A devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Chile Saturday morning, causing widespread damage and triggering a Tsunami warning across the Pacific. The quake, one of the strongest ever recorded, toppled buildings and left an unknown number of people homeless.
Boston.com’s Big Picture has collected some truly remarkable, and a few disturbing, images from the scene showing the destruction in a way only the internet’s finest source for photo essays can do.
Full gallery at Boston.com’s Big Picture.
HOW TO: Donate to Chile Earthquake Relief Online
Silicon Valley doesn’t just produce innovative web companies — it’s also a mecca for the green tech boom. Bloom Energy, which launches officially on Wednesday, has built a refrigerator-sized box that can power your whole house.
Bloom Energy has actually been operating for 8 years, raising $400 million in funding from VCs including Kleiner Perkins (investors in Netscape, Amazon, Google and others). Its “Bloom Box” houses fuel cells that run on oxygen plus natural gas, landfill gas, bio-gas or even solar.
The company’s first customer was Google, which has been powering a datacenter on 4 Bloom Boxes for 18 months. Google’s boxes run on natural gas. eBay is also a customer — the company has 5 Bloom Boxes in San Jose, which it says have saved $100,000 in energy costs over 9 months.
The Bloom Box got its first TV appearance on CBS’ 60 Minutes tonight, which will no doubt drive interest in the launch. Look out for more news on Wednesday.
What do you think? Could Bloom Boxes power the future?
See all the related top Digg stories whenever you do a Google, Yahoo! or Bing search with the new WebMynd Firefox extension.
WebMynd improves your search experience by focusing on the information sources that you most value. As well as Digg results, you can embed other sources such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and Twitter. You can also use WebMynd to remember and search your browsing history.
Every time you use Google, the WebMynd sidebar opens up to show you search results from your favorite places online. Choose from dozens of different search sources, including Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Find stuff faster by customizing your search experience.
RedesignGoogle lets you completely customize the look of Google Search by installing user-submitted designs from an online gallery. A stripped-down version of the WebMynd add-on applies your installed stylesheet whenever you’re on a Google search results page. (You can enable WebMynd’s other features if you like, but they’re turned off by default.)
German company StyleYourGarage makes deceptively realistic garage door stickers that will cause neighbors, friends and passers-by to stop and stare.
These garage billboards, as they are known, are made from high-quality material and can withstand sun, rain, wind and cold weather. [more info]
Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demonstrate SixthSense technology in these TED Talk videos. ‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.
Follow @tedtalks on Twitter
At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.
This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.
We’ve evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.
The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.
The SixthSense prototype implements several applications that demonstrate the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system. The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures, similar to gestures supported by Multi-Touch based systems, letting the user zoom in, zoom out or pan using intuitive hand movements. The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger. SixthSense also recognizes user’s freehand gestures (postures). For example, the SixthSense system implements a gestural camera that takes photos of the scene the user is looking at by detecting the ‘framing’ gesture. The user can stop by any surface or wall and flick through the photos he/she has taken. SixthSense also lets the user draw icons or symbols in the air using the movement of the index finger and recognizes those symbols as interaction instructions. For example, drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application or drawing an ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail. The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch.
The current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.
Creating great content is increasingly a cornerstone to lead generation and lead nurturing. In other words, it’s key to attracting new customers and to deepening relationships with existing ones.
But many companies have trouble creating enough of it. So blogs languish. Flip cameras gather dust. Your Twitter feed is as sparse as Oprah’s. How can you create and distribute a steady flow of stuff that your customers actually care about?
Here are 11 excellent ideas from Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.com
Author Bio: Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs.com, which provides strategic and tactical marketing know-how. She also blogs at her acclaimed personal web log. Follow her on Twitter @marketingprofs.
I can’t believe my local Apple Store had them in stock and was selling them tonight! I took advantage of this OBVIOUS oversight and decided to buy one on the spot.
This is the $499 (16GB) model. As you can see, it runs just fine. Too bad it doesn’t support Adobe Flash.
failin.gs wants to help you answer that age-old question: “What do people think of me, really?”
As humans, we naturally want to know what others think of us, either to boost our egos or to help us know what skills we need to work on. Failin.gs puts the concept of brutal honesty to the test by letting you posit opinions from those who know you, without revealing who says what.
In the last few months, a number of services like Formspring.me and Tumblr’s Ask feature have opened the door to letting individuals answer questions submitted anonymously through the web. Failin.gs takes that concept one step further. Rather than having people ask you questions, you can solicit feedback to find out what people really think of you. Or to put it in failin.gs language, find out “What is wrong with me?”
Not only is this the ultimate test of ego versus curiosity, the system is also set up in such a way that you can limit the ability for people to anonymously ask you questions by restricting it to people who actually know you. How does that work? You can require submitters to answer a question that only people that actually know you can answer. That immediately makes the trolling aspect of these kinds of services much more difficult.
Comments can be categorized into areas like “I knew this about me,” “I had no idea” and “I totally disagree.” Other people can also comment on comments, agreeing or disagreeing with the statements. There’s also the ability for people to vote up or down individual critiques.
Reblogged from switchedblog
Reblogged from nickdouglas
Reblogged from nevver
Feeling sick? Not sure what you’ve come down with? Let Google diagnose you! Enter your symptoms into the search box, and press “I’m Feeling Icky” to be diagnosed. Don’t like your options? Go back and get a “Second Opinion”.
Reblogged from gleuch
Reblogged from brit
