You’ll soon see Apple’s new tablet or iPad. It will be fantastic, to be sure, but what will come next? Well, how about a touch screen that can work on any surface? Robert Scoble interviews Light Blue Optics’ CTO, Dr. Adrian Cable, and co-founder about what this projector and touch surface computer can do. It is remarkable and you need to see it demoed to understand that it is what comes next. More at http://lightblueoptics.com/
Unless you’re a real wine aficionado, you probably lack the confidence to know which of those bottles of wine on-sale at the local BevMo are a bargain and which deserve the appellation, two-buck-chuck. Mint.com asked two Master Sommeliers to suggest some wines that can stand-in for more well-known (and expensive) bottles. With the right attitude and the handy chart above (click to view), you’ll upgrade your wine cred, impress your guests, and save money!
An organic transistor paves the way for new generations of neuro-inspired computers
For the first time, researchers have developed a transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse. This organic transistor, based on gold nanoparticles and known as a NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organix Memory Field-Effect Transistor), has opened the way to new generations of neuro-inspired computers, capable of responding in a manner similar to the nervous system.
So, what does this all mean? Well, neuro-inspired computers produced using this technology are capable of functions comparable to those of the human brain. Intense, huh?
Firefox is bringing together all kinds of personalization awesomeness to make browsing better for you!
One of my favorite features in the new Firefox version 3.6 is Personas. You can now instantly change the look of your browser with thousands of easy-to-install themes. You can choose anything from simple designs to colorful patterns to content like Harry Potter, Bob Marley or Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong Foundation with a single click. The best part, all the changes to your browser are applied instantly with no restart required!
Firefox has always been an open source browser, meaning anybody can contribute to making Firefox a better overall browser. Personas are no different and all the themes are designed by you the users. Anybody can make a personal Persona it is literally that simple. Make a Persona featuring you, your favorite team, favorite hobby or even your pet! The options are endless. If you have Personas Plus installed, all you need to do is create two graphics files in your favorite graphics editing program (e.g., Photoshop). To get started, go here to download Personas Plus, then read more about how to create a Persona.
What will your browser wear today? Go to getpersonas.com and click on the gallery to get started!
Don’t forget Firefox Add-ons & Collections. Add-ons add style, functions, and features to your browser. Whatever you like to do online, there’s an add-on waiting to make it better.
This expansive graph by Online Education tells you all you need to know about bottled water, as you scroll from top to bottom. Now excuse me while I try to hide my bottle of water. Won’t happen again, promise.
If you are like many developers and design Web sites with sketches before coding, you’ll love this post by Geek Chix, which pulls together more than 20 resources for the ideation phase. One cool template (shown above), for instance, already provides a browser outline.
Now if I could just download some artistic skill to go with it!
After US Airways flight 1549 emergency landed in New York’s Hudson River last January, citizen journalism provided the first on-the-scene reporting, thanks to Janis Krums’ infamous Twitpic of the crash.
More citizen journalism from David Martin resulted in the following time-lapse video embedded below, of the Airbus A320 aircraft submerged in the Hudson’s icy waters and eventually extricated by crane. It’s a strangely captivating book end to the crash landing, which thankfully saw all 155 passengers safely rescued by nearby watercraft.
After its chilly rescue, the Airbus A320 actually went on the auction block. It’s listed “as is,” so if you’re hankering for a salvaged aircraft sans engines, wings on the side, get on down to Kearny, New Jersey to claim your insanely large souvenir.
Android-based phone owners that are also Verizon FIOS customers now have access to a free app that enables remote control of the service. Once the app is downloaded from the Android Market and activated to a given home FIOS control box, users can use it to browse TV listings, set shows to be recorded via DVR and more. If you’re the type who always rushes out of the house without remembering to program the device on which you watch your favorite shows, it’s a pretty handy app.
And if you’re an early adopter, the FCC web site is a good place to spot new gadgets before they’re announced. One such gadget that appeared this week is a smartbook running atop of Android from none other than HP. Details on the HP Compaq AirLife 100 are few and far between, but it appears to be an ARM-based smartbook with Android on board, much like the concept smartbook that HP was quietly showing folks at CES a few weeks ago.
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.
Email
90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
100 million – New email users since the year before.
81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
24% – Increase in spam since last year.
200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).
Websites
234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
47 million – Added websites in 2009.
Web servers
13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
-22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
-72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.
Domain names
81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.
Internet users
1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
Social media
126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
350 million – People on Facebook.
50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.
Images
4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
Videos
1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.
Web browsers
Malicious software
148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.
This is another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist. For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://mediaconvergence.economist.com and http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com.
Anyone who has been on Twitter for more than a few days knows that it’s rife with bots — accounts that are run by a computer, rather than a human. But while bots may be pretty easy to come by, it isn’t often that you get the chance to read through the code that makes one tick. Tonight, you’ve got your chance. The bot’s name? Jason Thorton. He’s been humming along for months now, sending out over 1250 tweets to some 174 followers. His tweets, while not particularly creative, manage to be both believable and timely. And he’s powered by a single word: Love.
Thorton is the creation of developer Ryan Merket, who built him as a side project in around three hours. Merket has just posted the code that powers him, and has also divulged how he made Thorton seem somewhat realistic: the bot looks for tweets with the word “love” in them and tweets them as its own. From Merket’s blog:
Jason tweets A LOT about the word “love” – that’s because Jason actually steals tweets from the public timeline that contain the word “love” and posts them as his own.
Jason also @ replies to people who use the word “love” in their tweets, and asks them random questions or says something arbitrary.
Merket then goes on to detail why the ease with which he could build the bot should be cause for concern:
It took me about 3 hours to code Jason, imagine what a real engineer could do with real AI algorithms? Now realize that it’s already a reality. Sites like Twitter are full of side projects, company initiatives, spam bots, and AI robots. When the free flow of information becomes open, the amount of disinformation increases. There’s a real need for someone to come in and vet the people we ‘meet’ on social sites — it will be interesting to see how this market grows in the next year.
Can social networks really vet every single user that joins? That would likely be incredibly difficult to scale, but there’s certainly room for the algorithms to improve. In any case, here are some of Jason’s most recent tweets:
And here are some of the people who fell for them:
What does that mean exactly? I have made some ground rules that I will be living by over the year. Here they are:
- I will start with $2,500 that I’ve saved during college - I will have a car, a phone, a computer and cameras to document the trip - I am not allowed to live out of my car - I am not allowed to live with someone I know for longer than a week at the beginning of each city - I am allowed one large bag containing clothes and a few staple foods - I am not allowed to initiate contact with someone unless it is through an online interaction
This means, put simply, I will find jobs, housing, friends, food and other necessities entirely via Craigslist.
