Each year I look forward to April and May. Moderate temperatures, beautiful colors and nature comes alive once more. As much as I love to vacation and dive in tropical climates, living in an area where we can experience all four seasons and the wonderful annual cycle of nature is hard to beat!
Click for large Flickr image.
It would have been easy to mistake the thousands of people assembled in Greenville clutching their colored glow sticks and chanting the name of an all-knowing entity for worshippers at some sort of kooky New Age outdoor revival. But it wasn't God who inspired this crowd of 2,200 to gather on a recent Saturday night. It was Google — and the chance that this South Carolina city might be able to coax down the manna of super-high-speed Internet from tech-giant heaven. (See 10 tech trends for 2010.)
Since Google unveiled plans in February to build — for free — an ultra-fast fiber-optic network in one or more U.S. cities, local officials across the land have been engaged in quirky battles of one-upmanship to get their hometown chosen as a demo site. Topeka, Kans., renamed itself Google for the month of March. The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., went swimming in a shark tank as a publicity stunt. And Greenville organized a "We Are Feeling Lucky" campaign — a play on Google's second most famous search button — with enough glow sticks to form a massive Google logo in a downtown park. (See historical photos on Google Earth.)
How much speed does it take to inspire such fervor? The broadband network that Google is offering may cost as much as $1 billion to build and will be able to transmit 1 gigabit per second. That's fast enough to download a feature-length DVD movie in about 70 seconds — and more than 100 times as fast as the typical connection available in the U.S., which ranks 22nd in the world in network speed, according to Akamai, an Internet-analytics firm. The Google guys are doing this to help spur the U.S. to overtake Romania and other we-can't-believe-we're-slower-than-they-are countries.
Greenville's geek-savvy campaign was a fast operation too; it came together in less than 14 days. Highlights included a YouTube channel and a cartoon with instructions on how to participate in the glow-stick event (plus a tout for the town as the birthplace of a co-inventor of the laser, which gave rise to fiber optics). "We're a city in the midst of reinventing itself as a tech community, and we think Google Fiber could really help," says Aaron von Frank, the baby-faced 31-year-old tech developer who spearheaded the effort to get Google's attention as local officials completed the documentation necessary to keep the city in the running. (See the story of Google's doodles.)
Competition is stiff: as of March 26, the deadline for cities to submit information, Google said it had received more than 1,100 applications. It will analyze each city's demographics and infrastructure before deciding on one or more locations by the end of the year. "One of the top things we're looking for is to develop the network as quickly and efficiently as possible," spokesman Dan Martin says. "We're not looking for special treatment, but we do want to find a community that wants to work with us."
If efficiency is Google's main criterion, von Frank says he likes Greenville's chances. "It's a tight-knit community that comes together to get things done," he says. In short order, thousands of people formed a Google chain. Now Greenville has to wait to see whether faster connections will follow.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1977123,00.html#ixzz0jyVKHUfj
A brief video clip from my iPhone taken from the "e" as 2,000 of us spelled out G-o-o-g-l-e in Reedy Park on the first day of spring. Electric, er battery-powered experience
In 2006, snapped these goldens while waiting for the ferry from Woods Hole to MV
In 2006, snapped these goldens while waiting for the ferry from Woods Hole to MV
Well, I said that if it was as cool as adveritsed I'd be blogging here. Almost better than the app is the pedigree of the senior management team. Read on!!
Siri is created by an all-star team of designers and engineers drawn from Google, Yahoo, Apple, Motorola, Netscape, eBay, RealTravel, SRI, NASA, and Xerox PARC.
Siri's Founders: Tom, Dag and Adam
Siri's CEO is Dag Kittlaus, who founded the company as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI.
A serial innovator and consumer wireless internet veteran of 10 years in Scandinavia and the US, Dag is working on creating his third consecutive mobile internet product with over a million users.
Dag has held leadership roles as VP of Consumer Internet Services at Scandinavian telecom giant Telenor Mobile, and several consumer product groups at Motorola including GM of xProducts and founder and GM of Motorola's Interactive Media Group. He conceived and launched Screen3, a breakthrough consumer mobile application currently used by millions of users and adopted by Cingular, China Mobile, and Telefonica.
Siri's VP of Engineering is Adam Cheyer, who joined the company from SRI, where he was the Program Director in SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center and Chief Architect of the CALO/PAL project. A pioneer in the areas of distributed computing, intelligent agents, and advanced user interfaces, Adam is the author of more than fifty peer-reviewed publications and nine patents. He was previously the VP of Engineering at Dejima and the VP of Engineering at Verticalnet. Adam is also a founding member of Change.org and Genetic Finance, LLC.
Siri's CTO is Tom Gruber, a recognized expert in Artificial Intelligence, intelligent interfaces, and semantic technologies. Tom was a founder and CTO of RealTravel, a knowledge sharing site for travel; a founder and CTO of Intraspect, a collaborative knowledge management application for business; and a founder and Chief Scientist at Consider Solutions. Products designed by Tom are used by millions of consumer and professional users. He was a pioneering researcher at Stanford in the use of Web for knowledge sharing and semantic integration, and helped establish the technical foundations of the Semantic Web.Tom has served as advisor to SocialText, LinkedIn, Powerset, and others.
Going through the archives, I came about this 2005 trip to New York to see this amazing exhibit. Details below
The Gates is a site-specific work of art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The artists installed 7,503 vinyl "gates" along 23 miles (37 km) of pathways in Central Park in New York City. From each gate hung a panel of deep saffron-colored nylon fabric. The exhibit ran from February 12, 2005 through February 27, 2005.The books and other memorabilia distributed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude refer to the project as The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 in reference to the time that passed from the artists' initial proposal until they were able to go ahead with it.
The Gates were greeted with mixed reactions. Some people loved them for brightening the bleak winter landscape; others hated them, accusing them of defacing the landscape. Some cyclists saw them as an obstruction which could cause accidents, although cycling is not legal on those paths. They received a great deal of their nationwide fame as a frequent object of ridicule by David Letterman as well as Keith Olbermann, whose apartment was nearby. (notes courtesy of Wikipedia).My Social Media Personae
Apple reported its financial results for Q1 2010 which ended December 26, 2009 and the results were nothing short of impressive. Apple posted its all time highest quarterly revenue, its all time highest quarterly profit and when annualized, these numbers will push Apple into a $50+ billion per year company. Dollar figures that are so impressive they don’t require an explanation, so we will let the numbers speak for themselves:
Sales of Macintosh computers and iPhones went through the roof in Q1 2010 with Apple selling 3.36 million computers and 8.7 million iPhones, representing a 33% unit increase for Macintosh sales and 100% unit growth for the iPhone when compared to Q1 2009. The only blotch on an otherwise stellar performance was the iPod which sold 21 million units in Q1 2010, an 8% unit drop from the same quarter last year. Estimates for Q2 2010 remain equally as optimistic with the Cupertino company expecting another quarter of impressive revenue that will top out at an expected $11.4 billion. And oh yeah, Steve Jobs said, “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.”
Camera phones may soon offer more megapixels than some DSLR cameras. Imaging company OmniVision announced today that they have developed a 14.6-megapixel image sensor that will fit in cell phones. These sensors are capable of both high-resolution still photography and 1080p high-definition video recording.
I wonder how long it will be before camera phone imaging quality rivals the quality of the best point-and-shoot cameras.
(via Photography Bay)
soon to carry only a phone, no camera...
