...more recent posts
Man-Computer Symbiosis, J. C. R. Licklider, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960.
Helio Ocean set to make waves. I like the idea of an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator - this is a company that acts like a telecom, but doesn't actually own any transit, instead buying it in bulk from someone like Cingular. Along with Helio, Amp Mobile and Virgin are other examples.) The big entrenched players are so slow and risk averse, the hope is that a smaller, hungry MVNO might be able to actually make a product someone wants. The danger is that they are still reliant on whoever they are buying transit from, so you could imagine the plug getting pulled if any of them got *too* popular.
In any case, Helio has always seemed cool (this is an Earthlink founder Sky Davidson venture,) but the Ocean is their first handset that is making me take notice. The double slider design is nice.
Joyent Slingshot will allow Ruby on Rails developers to deploy their web apps both on line and off line (on Windows and Mac OS X at least) when it launches in April. This is in a similar category to Adobe's Apollo that I have written about lately. These hybrid web/desktop application technologies are the cutting edge right now, and they are opening up some very intriguing possibilites.
More on Slingshot. Slingshot screencast.
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.(via Kottke)
Hitachi is about to release 1 TB hard drives. Supposedly they perform on par with Raptors. $399, but strangely, available first from Dell bundled in expensive gaming PCs. Hopefully it won't take long to hit the open market. Seagate to follow in Q2 of this year.
Adobe launches Apollo. I mentioned this in passing back in November, and now here it is. Nicely done Adobe. Apollo lets developers write cross platform applications using HTML, javascript, and Flash, that run on the desktop instead of in the browser. This has the potential to unlock a lot of creativity. I'm downloading the SDK now and will report back when I get a chance to play around with it. For now I am guardedly optimistic on this one. And six months ago I was thinking Adobe couldn't do anything right.
The freeware ScriptExport is an iPhoto plug-in that lets you process photos with your own shell scripts. I need this for a project coming up. Excellent.
Geek (attempted) humor: Absolut Hacker.
Also making waves on the music front is the Slacker music service. It's a free streaming radio service, plus a portable playing device that can also stream over WiFi or Satellite connections (portable player coming "soon".) The company behind it, Broadband Instruments, has some big name executives from Diamond / Rio, MusicMatch, and iRiver. You can't listen to exactly what you want, but you can configure "radio stations" that will play particular artists you have selected, plus other artists that Slacker thinks are related to those you have chosen. The free service allows you to skip 6 songs an hour, while a future payed service will let you skip more.
Engadget has some more info.
Pretty big play. My guess is it won't work.