Thoughts on systems, engineering, AI, technology and life.
See a very good and entertaining talk on Human Computation and “games with a purpose” by Luis von Ahn, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. What an ingenious method to have humans help solve the open problems yet to be mastered by computers. It's a 51 minutes video, but Luis … Read more
OMG, you guys have to read Joel's review of Sprint's LG Fusic handset. Joel cracks me up! A good, honest review. The following is just one of the examples of the handset's poor UI design/experience that he brings up: “The first thing you see when you click on the Menu button is that you missed … Read more
Deadlines: Abstract due: November 27, 2006 Full Paper due: December 4, 2006 Acceptance notification: March 8, 2007 Camera-ready paper due: April 6, 2007 Location: Puerto Rico, USA Conference Dates: June 19-22, 2007 (Tentative) Organizers: Conference General Chair: Edward W. Knightly, Rice University Program Committee Chairs: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington, USA Ramon Caceres, IBM T.J. … Read more
Anousheh Ansari is a serial entrepreneur and is Chairwoman to Prodea Systems of Plano Texas. She also is the first female private space explorer (tourist), who is flying under commercial agreement with the Russian Federal Space Agency. She is part of the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 14 crew. The ISS Expedition 14 crew is … Read more
Today I watched NASA-TV's video stream – you should check it out, it is pretty awesome to see in real-time (or not) the men and women of STS-115 workingat an altitude of 200+ miles, while moving at 17,000+ miles/second. The STS-115 mission is the Shuttle's 116th flight, and is being flown in the orbiter Atlantis … Read more
Brandon Watts, evangelist at scanR sent me an email introducing their product… scanR allows you to scan, copy, and fax with your digital camera or camera phone. This could be a handy thing… Check out the short YouTube video that shows how to use scanR to grab a snapshot of a whiteboard… From Brandon's email: … Read more
Keeping your handset firmware (the software embedded in hardware) up-to-date is an important thing to do. Why? Because software is constantly being updated with enhancements and/or bug fixes. If you have one of the more recent S60 Nokia handsets, go checkout the Nokia UK phone software update page. There are two methods to update your … Read more
Hey, don't forget this week's Carnival of the Mobilists at the Software Everywhere weblog. David Beers (i.e. Mr. Cervezas) has done a great job compiling the best mobility writing from blogs around the world… enjoy. ceo
Awesome… Congrats to the AdMob team, and Mike and Russell on their Round A of funding… very neat… enrique
I am a widget enthusiast – well designed/focused widgets rock, and will become standard gadgets on desktop as well as mobile. Om recently wrote a piece on widgets for Business 2.0 – see Suddenly everything's coming up widgets… “Breaking down the Web into small, portable pieces is the smart trend that everyone from Nokia to … Read more