...more recent posts
Of course I love this headline: "Samsung Unveils Unprecedented Line Up of Wireless Phones for U.S. Consumers. More Breathtaking Product Designs and Capabilities in Store for 2005." Sounds like some breathless marketing speak, but check out the list:
Damn. I'd say that qualifies as "unprecedented". Speech to text? I hadn't even thought of that. I'm skeptical it would work very well, but it wouldn't even have to be that great to solve a bunch of problems with mobile phones as computer platform. And 5 megapixel camera phone with 3x zoom??? OMFG! I wasn't joking last week when I said Samsung is kicking ass.
- The world's first speech-to-text dictation phone, allowing consumers to speak their message and have the phone convert the words to text.
- The U.S.'s first multi-mega pixel camera phone line up, including a two mega pixel and a five mega pixel camera with 3X optical zoom capabilities.
- The U.S.'s first two mega pixel camera phone with QVGA screen resolution and TF-R external memory card, which allows for extensive video clip recording space and crisp, vibrant viewing of pictures and video taken with the phone.
- The U.S.'s first line up of phones to operate on the next-generation high-speed wireless networks known as EVDO, allowing consumers to send and receive pictures, video and data at speeds comparable to cable modem or DSL connectivity.
- Video-on-demand (VOD) devices that allow consumers to wirelessly stream videos onto the handset from the network or download and store the videos on the handset for convenient playback.
- Music-on-demand (MOD) devices that give consumers instant access to digital music, allowing them to download or stream popular tunes directly to their handset.
- Phones with Bluetooth wireless connectivity capabilities that will make transferring pictures, music and data files from computers to wireless devices quick and seamless.
- Phones with integrated Wi-Fi technology allowing users to roam onto corporate networks from their wireless device while away from the office, at the airport, cafe or hotel.
- Phones with integrated BlackBerry push-email capabilities that allow consumers and business users to send and receive emails from anywhere.
You can now query Technorati for advanced search terms such as tsunami AND ("red cross" OR "red crescent") and it will give you all of the blog posts in order by how long ago they were posted that include the word "tsunami" and either "red cross" or "red crescent". You can then click "Make this a Watchlist" and create an RSS feed so you can track all new posts that match that query in your news reader.That part about the custom RSS feeds blows my mind. Again: simple, clever.
In light of my massive world domination plans for 2005 I have joined Apple's streaming server mailing list. After a few days my impression is that streaming video, especially to mobile handsets, is still in it's infancy. If it's even that advanced. I guess I haven't missed the boat yet.
Here are a couple google searches that return open webcams: 1, 2. You might suspect there is something interesting in there, although my quick look through the results was pretty uninteresting. Finding unusual key words to plug into google searches is very interesting though. The result of having the entire internet indexed is difficult to predict.
These searches work, obviously, because webcams create similarly constructed URLs for their feeds, so searching on the non unique portions of those URLs using the inurl: advanced search technique finds lots of webcams, whether their owners wanted this or not. Simple. Clever.
(Already forgot where I saw this.)
Six Apart to buy Live Journal? Wow. A lot of people are saying this isn't true, so I wouldn't count it as a done deal just yet. Six Apart is the company behind Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad blog hosting service. Live Journal is a *huge* blog community with 5,655,452 users (2,443,264 of whom actively post.) This would create a very large blog entity which could, as Om points out in the first link above, have "a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces."
Still, for all the wow factor of a big merger like this, I'm not sure what difference it will make to anyone. For instance, it is not at all clear that blog hosting is ever going to make anyone any money. And technorati already mines all the data, so having your own big stable of blogs doesn't get you any secret use data that might have value. Sort of seems like a big headache to me. MIght be a classic dot com era business play:
1. Get a lot of users
2. ???
3. Profit!