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Category Archives: New Tech

November 5, 2007 Thoughts on OpenSocial API and Social Applications

This week, Google introduced OpenSocial API. It is a set of common interfaces for building social applications. Scobleizer’s blog post led me to more information about the OpenSocial API, here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

I watched the Campfire One video – almost from beginning to end – and browsed through some Developer’s Guide docs. I appreciate Google’s simple and straightforward, hands-on approach. They have not created a “Meta-Reference Application Framework for Interfaces of Social Network Applications” and dozens of new acronyms. Instead, they show working code and the classic “Hello World!”, written with a vanilla text editor.

Why are Google and other companies allocating resources to social media? The way I see it, that is because their main revenue streams come from advertisers. Social applications are filled with data of people’s activities, interests, daily patterns, schedules, locations, networks etc. This data provides juice for building highly targeted marketing systems, which in turn generate happy advertisers.

The more data people put into the system, the better the system will serve the people. It’s a win-win for us all, don’t you think?

October 27, 2007 Web 2.0 Summit Videos on blip.tv

If you’re interested in anything Web 2.0, you should check the videos of the recent Web 2.0 Summit held in California.

Excellent roster. Excellent discussions. Some of the questions just splat on the faces of the interviewees, politely and with a smile, of course. John Battelle’s way of carrying the conversation is particularly good.

[Update 1.11.2007] Excellent? Nah, not all. What’s the reason for not showing the screens of the presenters? It’s not stimulating to watch a talking guy looking down at his laptop, enthusiastically giving a pitch for something that one can not see even a glimpse of.

October 12, 2007 W3C – Let’s Extend The A HREF Tag To Convey More Information

Sig’s posts on Thingamy and RDF triples inspired me to “put the verb” back to this interlinked mass of documents we call the Web. In a simplified way. 

Here’s the official W3C recommendation and specification of links: 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

If you go through it, you perhaps end up in the same conclusion with me: There’s no simple way to define a semantic relationship between web resources.

I propose that we extend the A HREF tag so that it carries more meaning with it. Let’s borrow the PREDICATE concept from RDF and add that to A HREF tag. 

Here’s an example. On nokia.com, there could be a link like this: 

<A HREF=”www.nseries.com” PRED=”produces, sells, markets”>Nseries</A>

So, what would we achieve with this? It would be a way to provide more precise information, more knowledge for the search engines, etc… We would be closer to the Internet Singularity. 

September 27, 2007 Live Search: Good Bird’s Eye Views to Famous Cities – Like Lahti ;)

Have you noticed the amount of detail in the bird’s eye images of Live Search?

There are good bird’s eye views to Munich, Venice, Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, New York… However, I couldn’t find such views to interesting places like Shanghai, Tokyo, Moscow or Paris.  

My home town Lahti is also covered with a massive amount of pixels. Now where was my car at the time the airplane was flying over…

Lahti, Live Search

August 20, 2007 Zooming in Photosynth – Wow!

Around one year ago I wasn’t too impressed with Photosynth, Microsoft’s UI prototype for browsing photo collections. But today I decided to give it another go on our new Vista laptop. And yep, while I zoomed on to the details of Gyeongbokgung (nice word, that one), I was amazed. The amount of detail was extremely high, the experience was seamless and had a nice flow to it. 

Check the pic (click to expand):

Photosynth

You can get it here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

August 19, 2007 Introducing Deomo TV/HIFI Unit

You know the thing with home audio and video electronics these days: too many boxes, too many cables, hard to keep clean and in order. They are messy looking, you can not put those in to a modern living room.

We couldn’t find a solution in the market for our needs, so I (with my wife) designed a TV stand that solves our storage issues. I gave it a name Deomo.

Deomo, TV stand, HIFI unit, tv-taso

Magic is in the mirror – you really have to see it to believe it. More pictures in Deomo.com – currently in Finnish only.

If you are interested in manufacturing/distributing/marketing it, drop me an email (tomi.itkonen@gmail.com).

[Update 10.9.2007] An additional pic added of Deomo TV stand:

Deomo, TV stand, HIFI unit, tv-taso

May 30, 2007 Jumped From Sculpt 3D to Blender – I’m Hooked

In the late 80s, most of the neighbourhood bitboys had an Amiga 1000 or 500. Some of us were interested in 3D rendering with Sculpt 3D or Imagine software.

Raytracing took a long time with a CPU running at 7.1 MHz and 1 MB of memory. So, I left the Amiga run its raytracing overnight – in the morning I would check how the picture turned out to be. Heh, I did not even have a hard disk, so I must have been a patient guy.

Now, I’m amazed about the quality of the open source Blender software. I added YafRay renderer, and I’m hooked. Check out those galleries…

April 20, 2007 Jaguar Design Briefings

Jaguar Cars provides a breathtaking and informative set of presentations covering the design decisions behind the C-XF Concept and future Jaguar models.

“Jaguar Design Briefings are a compilation of online videos, photography and words that capture various themes of the future design direction for Jaguar.”

If you are interested in design, cars, or … then take a look.   

February 5, 2007 Thingamy – What Are They Cooking?

Remember the mystery and hype around Transmeta during their “This web page is not yet here.” phase, circa 1998? Linus was working there, they were designing or doing some mysterious hardware or software or something. Because of their uncompromising secrecy, nobody knew what the product will be. Finally, they presented their morphing microprocessor technology to the eager public – someone was playing Quake III on it in the event.

With Thingamy, it is totally the opposite. Sigurd Rinde and co. are sharing every detail and design decision of their forthcoming software on their website. It is important to notice that the product is on development phase. How many companies would share this information before version 1.0 is out? In other words, who would show their cards at this early stage of development?

Perhaps, one cause for this behaviour is that Thingamy will break the rule books in so many ways and in so many areas, that they must carefully prepare their market for it. The potential customers need to be educated beforehand.

I highly respect Sigurd Rinde’s attitude and views on software. I’m eager to see that they succeed. As I daily see the mess that badly-designed or -implemented systems cause on businesses, it naturally makes me think that there must be a better way. No question about it.   

“No need for other enterprise software nor middleware.”

I’m dumbfounded by that bold claim. Hopefully, someone won’t be playing Quake III on it… 😉  

January 28, 2007 Semantic Web – Have You Seen It?

Some of you have already heard about W3C’s Semantic Web framework. Tim-Berners Lee, the inventor of the Web,  presented roadmap for Semantic Web in 1998.

The framework can be summarized as:

“The Semantic Web is a web of data.”

“The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects.”

Web today is about sharing documents, Semantic Web is about sharing and reusing data. If it gets the momentum, it will break the boundaries between applications, free the data from their silos. W3C provides a concrete example: my calendar application could – if I wanted – display my bank transactions from this week, and also the photos I’ve taken, day by day.

Some of the tools that the Semantic Web will be powered by are RDF, a knowledge modeling language, and SPARQL, a query language for RDF.

RDF is a method of describing data and resources formally so that they become accessible and understandable for software. Here‘s a primer for it. Berners-Lee’s view is that the future lies in “programming at the RDF level”.  

Below is an example of a SPARQL query. It displays title and price for books that are priced below 30.5. 

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX ns: <http://example.org/ns#>
SELECT ?title ?price
WHERE { ?x ns:price ?price .
  FILTER (?price < 30.5) .
  ?x dc:title ?title . }

On IBM’s developerWorks interview (28.7.2006), Berners-Lee gives his view on the status of Semantic Web:

“I hope the Semantic Web will take off so that the data basically all the data which is out there which you have access to, to the Web pages, will now be available as data so you can treat it as data. There will be lots of very exciting applications built on that.  And we’re starting to see that now, but it really is, you know, we’re seriously into the exponential growth of the Semantic Web right now, and that’s very exciting.”

Some questions arise in my mind:

Is the original Web – this Web here you’re using now – non-semantic?

Where’s the boundary between data and a document? If Semantic Web uses RDF documents, will it eventually fall to the same “trap” with the original Web?    

Considering the massive amount of data in the Web today, could it be somehow utilized and reused in building the Semantic Web?   

Is there a demo somewhere showing the power of Semantic Web?

Do we really need another query language with its own syntax – why not expand SQL or use English? Could this query be enough:

book title, book price, book price < 30.5