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raindropper

“pouring…”

September 15, 2008 My Second Photosynth Experiment

At our Deomo booth on OLO.MUOTO trade fair here in Finland – I took several pictures with the Canon Ixus 950 camera, and photosynthed them:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=29a44f5f-e48b-488a-8cf0-c87aee0491b6&i=0:2:0&z=467.0787043003208&g=2&p=-2.50427e-014:6.92928e-014&m=false&c=-0.664613:-0.656377:-0.145462&d=-1.56066:1.1653:0.877044

Deomo, modern furniture

Do remember to set the Photosynth viewer to full-screen mode (icon on the bottom right), it’s much better that way.

Regarding the Photosynth tech, I learned the lesson that one needs to change the camera angle and position only a slight amount between pictures. Otherwise, the end result is too jumpy as the Photosynth algorithm leaves too many images without context.

And yes, I’m bloody proud of the booth we did with my wife, Nina. 🙂

August 26, 2008 The Book of W: A Book or a Blog or a Blog Book?

As you have probably noticed, I’ve partially moved my act to thebookofw.tumblr.com.

On that site, I’ll create an experience which takes all the good parts of books and blogging. Furthermore, the site should be readable with mobile devices also.

One of the simple, minor, mundane things that bug me is how the pages are numbered. In blogs, the most recent page is the page number 1, by default. In books, page number 1 is the beginning. In my view, the best solution would be to number the oldest (i.e. first) blog post with the page number 1, and increase from there on. I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this feature with Tumblr technology without relatively heavy scripting, or manual tagging (using tags like “page1”, “page2”). Yeah, I could code it using Tumblr API, but we’ll see.

Anyway, The Book of W is an interesting experiment. You wouldn’t believe how much, how long, how dearly I kept the contents and the subject hidden. Only my wife knew something about the unpublished, unprinted, unagented book. My face blushed and hands started to shake on those rare moments when the discussion reared it. And now, I’m on the other extreme as I publish the chapters to the web for you all to read.

When I was younger, I hided all my creative works (music, writings, …) from others. The rationale – if you can call it that – was that the works felt too personal, they gave out too much of me and made me vulnerable. Now I’ve learned that life’s too short for that. So, if you have something to present, just pour it out. Thanks for the web, it’s easy, fast, inexpensive and leads to an uncharted territory…

June 9, 2008 Cybertecture Apartment in Dubai

It’s always interesting to follow what they are up to in Dubai. The developments there are just amazing. According to some info, one fifth of world’s cranes are there in gigantic 100 billion dollar construction project.   

One particular building caught my eye: The PAD, also known as iPad. The tower is…

…targeted at switched-on, creative and hip business executives to whom we refer to as “the digital generation” or apple brand lovers who are constantly mobile and connected.

Every apartment will be intelligent and have its own cybertecture to provide a unique experience. Everything from communications, entertainment, health and shopping is covered by the cybertecture of the apartment.

Among the usual household stuff like colour changing tiles are the iFeatures. The iFeatures list contains: iReality (a virtual reality projection wall), iHealth (monitors residents health), iRotation Rooms (rotate your lounge), iArt (project a painting from a server to a wall), etc.

In Dubai, science fiction really becomes a reality. I commend their bold adventures in architectural design and pushing the edge of technology in living spaces. Oil money well spent.

June 4, 2008 Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

The Book of W

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water. 😉

April 5, 2008 Ponzi Scam in Finland

The pyramid scheme named Wincapita made a few happy people and thousands of angry ones. According to some news, the happy ones are in Thailand. Angry ones are reporting to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, or silently cursing their losses. 

Here’s a good wrap-up of the issue. The scheme started in 2005 with the prop of Forex trading; the high interests for investments (400%) would come from currency exchanges. The Wincapita website went offline in March, company vanished and damage assessment began. Details are scarce as usually, but in essence top 50 or so got huge gains, 10000 or so lost packs of money. Estimated 50 million euros were invested to the company.

Interestingly, the brochure of Wincapita clearly stated that “Invest only the amount of money you are capable of losing.”

Internet has made the spreading of Nigerian letters and building of Ponzi companies easy. Nowadays, one can easily hire a person who under different fake names hoax the Ponzi company in newsgroups and message boards etc.

Why do people fall in to these traps, time and again? I’d see that at least some of the persons who give their money to these kinds of games know the odds, know the risks, and have a thought: what if I’m one of the inner circle winners, let’s try this, I might make a huge profit! 

As the pyramid scheme mechanism works, latecomers’ money goes to the top members’ – early adopters’ – pockets. Could the same happen in stock markets – in real estate business? Is the role of a latecomer always to make a loss?

[Update 12.12.2008] Yes, it can happen on stock markets also. WSJ article: Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud – His Investment-Advisory Business for the Wealthy Was ‘Giant Ponzi Scheme’

January 26, 2008 Radiohead – …

Crystal Set Radio - Neuron

… Learnings from The “On How The Brain Functions” Experiment.

You, the web wanderer, are perhaps aware that a bit over one year ago I posted my research paper about theory of how the brain functions. I also built a blog around it so that you, the brain researcher, can comment it with witty references to tin-foil hats. 😉

The current gain is zero remarks to tin-foil hats.

Seriously, though, I still stand behind the theory and see several strenghts in it. The question is: why I’m not building a working prototype as it only takes a few diodes, capacitors and coils to make it. Maybe it’s because I do not want to disturb the local neighbourhood with electromagnetic noise.  

And: I’d like to thank Joni Tuoreniemi and Paul Tudsbury for commenting it and creating conversation. Thank you!

January 20, 2008 Google Search Works in Mysterious Ways

The moment I saw the first prototype – my drawings in flesh – of the Deomo TV/HIFI unit (“tv-taso” in Finnish), I realized its potential and began marketing it. You can call it passion hitting when you least expect it – I’ve never been inclined in designing or selling furniture.

How do people find the great product (if you pardon these plugs)? Via searching the web, of course. So, the marketing plan is currently a simple one – it’s a start and one can build from there. Later on, the product will be on the shops at display and advertising moves on, the usual.

Selected a perfect name for the product. I chose the word “Deomo” because of its visual properties; it looks good and dynamic, and yet stands firmly. Say it out loud: the word starts sharply and ends landing softly giving nice contrast to it. And Deomo.com domain was available.

Then, I designed and built the Deomo.com website. Simple, once again. (I use Microsoft’s free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.)

The point (gripe) of this post is: the whole site is based around one product “tv-taso” – and yet, currently, it only appears on the distant page 13 of Google search results for that word. Some sites on the results prior www.deomo.com are not that relevant, e.g. they contain random, one-off “I’m selling my piece of furniture” ads.

The other day, it was on the first page for a while, then it dropped back to depths. My guess is that the site had an overload of the term “tv-taso”, and Google punished it for that reason and gave a meagre PageRank. An additional factor is that Google servers are not all in the same state, data-wise, and this inconsistency generates irregular search result ups and downs, high rankings and low rankings making the analysis more difficult. 

Well, I’d guess that after GoogleBot comes and scrapes the contents of this WordPress post, the Deomo site will go higher. Or not, or get even blacklisted – hmm… not really. Who knows – The Google Algorithm, are you listening? Deomo.com is not a typo. 😉

In mysterious ways, indeed. The mystery recipe of The Algorithm keeps us website creators/marketers humble and not capable of tinkering the machine, righteously so I might add. In the past, one of the main trade secrets was Coca-Cola formula, now among the secrets hides also the Google one.

December 28, 2007 I Am Legend – And I’m Driving a Ford

Just came back from watching “I Am Legend” movie with my wife. If you liked Spielberg’s “War of The Worlds”, you’ll probably like this movie also. They both decipit a ruthless, dismal and dark world with people turned to violent animals.

Will Smith does a marvellous job in portraying a man in the brink of insanity.

My wife’s reaction? Well, she almost puked. Too much exploding low frequencies and too little steadicam. Don’t go to this movie with your girlfriend. It takes all the fun out of your evening.

Product placement thanks go to Apple and Ford.

December 17, 2007 Double-Slit Experiment…

…is something that wasn’t taught on my physics lessons. It’s one of the most interesting and mysterious phenomena, and as yet unexplained by scientists.

Put simply, the experiment goes like this: shoot photons through a plate which has two slits on it, to a photographic film. An interference pattern appears on the film – even if you shoot the photons one by one, during a period of time.

Double-slit experiment

Here’s a movie of the experiment.

The question is: from where the interference pattern emerges, how do the photons know where to land on the film to create this pattern? There’s only one photon “on the air” at a time so with what it is having an interaction?

More info on Wikipedia.

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?