Tech for Lunch!

Twitter has become very popular for keeping everyone informed about what you are doing almost instantly. There are a few ways to get information to and from the site, the most useful and popular one is via SMS - aka Text Messages from your mobile phone.

When the massive Earthquake hit China last week, Twitters used their mobile phones to update their statuses letting everyone know about their situation immediately. Many updates even came during the earthquake.. now that’s way faster than the media! Twitter reportedly became a source of information for major news organizations covering the China earthquake.

Twitter users get a maximum of 140 characters a message; ironically, Twitter designer Biz Stone envisioned its potential as a communication tool by a “tweet” warning he received about a California earthquake while about to board a train.

This is proof that even though it is sometimes mundane to know about every little move all your friends make in one day, it can also be extremely useful to have access to these kinds of services. Chinese users ended up notifying the world of an event, through a California-based service… that’s what I call Networking.

We are seeing more and more websites who do not come up with a brand new product, but rather a product that sits on top of someone else’s site. In most cases, these sites are simply an interface to another tool or directly enhance your experience. This is the case with Powerset’s new Semantics-based search tool for Wikipedia.

“Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language. While this is a difficult challenge, we believe that now is the right time to begin the journey. Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.”

The idea is to allow you to run a search based on a natural language phrase instead of having to figure out the best combination of keywords to use. As a proof of concept, they have decided to use only the information from Wikipedia because it is already using a fairly consistent structure and because this limits the amount of information to search through. Eventually, the plan would be to allow users to search through as much information as Google is able to offer and apply the same filters and tools as with Wikipedia.

Let’s take a look at what they are currently offering. When you run a search on powerset, you get all the results that could contain what you are looking for (keep in mind it has to be information that is available on Wikipedia for now) displayed in a relatively familiar manner. The top shows the best match with a summary and if you click on that article, you get the actual wikipedia article, but enhanced with Powerset’s tools. The most important addition here is the “Article Outline” box which appears to the right of the article. This box is always visible to the right and follows the scrolling window. Inside that box are two display options: Show Outline and Show Factz. The outline is simply the same one as the Wikipedia article, but it does make large articles a little bit easier to navigate. The Factz are a summary of all the important details found in the article and broken down following the outline. This is where Powerset’s algorithms work their magic. The Factz are a bunch of snippets which are “understood” from the main article and show some relevant information that you could be looking for.

This promotional video is certainly the best way to see and understand all the features that are built in Powerset. I hope they will be able to further develop their product to include a complete internet search and add their tools to the results.

The Search Engine world is a very competitive one and when something interesting is brought to the table, everyone usually follows. Combining search results for different categories is nothing new anymore. Google has had that for a while now and Yahoo! also offers the same thing. When you search for something, at the top of the results, you can switch between the traditional results and images, news, videos etc…

Some websites like Pageflakes offer the possibility to create your own homepage which gathers information from many places. These are called Mashups and some sites even offer the possibility to present results in the same manner. This is what Yahoo Glue is all about. When you run a search on Yahoo Glue, you get a results page that is far from the traditional text results we are used to. You get a complete break down of almost everything that is available on that subject.

You can try Yahoo Glue on Yahoo! India which is where the product is being tested right now. If you run a search for Britney Spears, you will get a bunch of different results and what’s really different is the presentation. You can see standard search results, along with a biography, images, videos, news etc… naturally the sources of the results are based on the keywords you enter. For example, Britney will return some Last.FM results which would not show for Katie Holmes. If you leave the celebrities alone and search for “Adobe Flex” ( yes I know… I can’t get Flex out of my mind), you will get results for Adobe’s Stock prices and job postings for Flex programming.

I think we should be seeing Yahoo! Glue get implemented in all other Yahoo sites pretty soon because the results are very impressive and become very useful if you don’t really know where to start on a new subject.

I’m sure most of you have heard of (and probably used as well) Napster. Napster changed the way we trade, discover and, most of all, download our music forever when it was launched in June 1999. After a very successful run and a whole bunch of lawsuits and pressure from the record industry, Napster closed in July 2001. It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Even though traffic was abundant and the sharing services were practically flawless, there were many other problems and Napster was not a very profitable business. In fact, after the final blow of lawsuits, it had to file for Chapter 11 and liquidate it’s assets.

One of the founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning has been hard at work on a new startup called Rupture: “All Games, All Platforms. Connect, Share, Achieve. Rupture builds a profile for you based on your game play. It’s not like other profiles, however. We automatically pull information from many video games. Did you beat the Drums Tour in Rock Band on Expert? All your friends will know”. Rupture has been in beta for quite some time and so a public release hasn’t happened yet.

It turns out that Shawn Fanning will finally get some payback for his hard work because Electronic Arts has been keeping an eye on the site. EA is buying Rupture for $30 million in a deal that should be announced soon. They are looking to integrate this technology in their business plan because the social networking aspect based around Massively Multiplayer games is something EA has been wanting to add for a while now.

Shawn will be working for EA once the deal goes through. Looks like setting up a few Internet Startups may eventually get you someplace cool!

Once again, I’ve come across a really cool online application that can be very useful to some readers out there. This one is called Presdo, which you can try for yourself at www.presdo.com, no need to register to see it in action.

Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. So basically, it is an online scheduling tool that you can use to invite people to an event (as simple as a cup of coffee to anything else..) and it helps you work-out the details so that the most people can attend without conflicts.

The thing that’s really cool about Presdo, and what makes it different from some of the others, is that it uses natural language to enter your events. When you get to the front page of the site, you are presented with a Google-inspired input box and not much else. You type in what you want to do using plain english, like “have lunch with Josee and yanick tomorrow at noon” and Presdo will take you to a screen with everything already filled out according to what you entered. At this point, you can modify what needs to be modified and enter the email addresses for the people you want to invite. If you have a sign-in, you would only need to do this once and you could re-use many of the things you’ve entered previously. You can use Google maps to find locations in your area and that map is included with the event to let everyone know where to go.

Once you send our the first invitation, everyone can confirm or suggest new times and locations to better accommodate them. When everyone agrees or you have the best date/time/location to get the most people, you can save the event directly in your calendar. You can export the event as an Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar items.

Presdo works extremely well and is a free service. Eventually, the founder would like to offer a premium service.

It was thirty years ago, on May 3rd 1978, that the very first spam message was sent out. I’m not sure if this is a wonderful event to remember, but the first message was not of malicious intent contrary to the ones we sometimes get today.

Back then, the internet as we know it today was not quite born just yet.. The network was known as the Arpanet and was still government-owned. According to Wikipedia: “The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.” While I was digging around for this story I ended up reading a few documents on the origins of the internet and it’s original purpose and I’ll probably write an article about all of this later on.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, the first SPAM message. Gary Thuerk, the guy who sent the message had to use a text-based email client (there was no Windows at that time ;-)) and had to type all of the addresses manually. Compared to today’s spam attacks, it was a very limited number of recipients. It was an advertisement (or actually an invitation to come see) for the new DEC Computers. DEC does not exist anymore, but not because of the spam. The message was sent to a whopping 393 people and was not sent without problems. The person who sent the message was not very familiar with arpanet and its rules, nor with the software to send messages. He typed in all the addresses in the TO: field but after 320 names, they started overflowing in the body of the message. The first recipients then received the email with a bunch of addresses before the actual message. When they figured out that the last 73 names had not been included in the first broadcast, they sent another one!

The response was not very friendly to Mr. Thuerk’s pioneering message. Because the Arpanet was only used by researchers and the U.S. Military, he received many replies telling him that the system was not for his business purposes. In fact, he had managed to connect one of his DEC Computers to the Arpanet, which was also a violation of the rules.

It was approximately 10 years before another spam message was sent out in another form, and the evolution of spam followed the networks. Spam was used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and today as we know it on the internet, where they account for about 90% of all emails sent in one day.

You can see the full transcript of the original message as well as many of the replies that followed here.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced “ Onesearch 2.0“. Onesearch is Yahoo’s search software for Internet connected mobile devices. The newly released version allows users to use voice commands to search the web.

Now you can use your voice to get answers on your phone. With Yahoo! oneSearch™ with voice, it’s fast and easy to search for anything you need when you’re mobile. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch, an industry leading mobile search product.

Onesearch is a pretty cool product because it allows you to find things faster than you normally would on your mobile phone. No need to browse to yahoo, search and then hope the results are relevant and well formatted for your phone. OneSearch runs directly on your mobile phone and lets you launch a search faster and returns relevant results that you can actually use.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007. The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

For those of you who have been paying attention, Microsoft is slowly moving towards using the internet as their platform rather than the actual machine you use to access it. Basically, in the long run, we should be able to access all of our stuff from anywhere, using any kind of computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac or even mobile devices. Techcrunch has a very complete article about it and I wasn’t quick enough to get into the first beta round so I’ll just write a summary of features here.

Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.

Live Mesh provides you with an online virtual desktop to which you connect your computers and any other device you want to use to control it. Right now, only Windows XP and Vista are supported but Macs and mobile devices should be added this year, as well as the capability to connect your xbox or even a picture frame.

The current product is definitely oriented towards developers and supplies all the necessary APIs to start building applications that will make good use of Live Mesh. Essentially, you could use it to not only sync files and folders, but entire applications. This would really take the desktop out of your local PC and move it online, allowing you to truly work (or play) from any machine you choose.

I can’t wait to see more of this product, but I will have to wait for openings in the beta which is full right now. In the mean time, the article I mentioned above is very thorough and has some screenshots.

I know that this was a few days ago, but since I posted an article about selling domains for profit recently, I thought it was still interesting to mention it here. If you were quick enough to get your hands on a good, catchy and relevant domain name a few years ago, you might want to start being proactive and not just wait for someone to make an offer on it. Putting it up for auction, could be a good way to get rid of it and make some cool cash while you’re at it. This article has the full story on how it all happened.

Chris Clark bought pizza.com in 1994 for the usual reservation price of 20$ and has kept it all these years. He originally bought it for his company to try and get contracts with local pizza businesses but it never worked out. He still held on to it thinking it wouls someday be useful. A couple of years ago, he and a friend used the domain to make it a pizza directory with ads returning about 5000$ a month.

The natural traffic on sites with single words like these is impressive. Without ever having to advertise, sites like tees.com, vodka.com, sex.com and pizza.com get regular monthly traffic just because people are curious and because the domain names match exactly the keywords being typed into search engines.

After earing about the sale of vodka.com for $3 million on the auction site Sedo.com, Chris Clark decided to see what the interest might be for his domain. The auction started slowly but then shot up to the $2 million reserve price that was set and ended a $2.6 million for the final sale price. Sedo keeps 10% for running the auction and running background checks on bidders because of the high numbers being rolled in.

Just as previously reported, Facebook has begun rolling out their IM client on some selected networks. This was the only available information since the complete roll out schedule has not been made public. it is to be released to limited networks first for load testing and bug-hunting, and then rolled out to broader networks.

The new chat bar appears at the bottom of every page and cannot be removed. The client has all the regular functionalities that you would expect such as the ability to show yourself as offline and lets you know who is available for chatting.

The integration is very well done and should prove to be a great addition to Facebook. I know that it will give a good reason to many people for leaving a browser with Facebook open all the time.   You can find a full post about the features with screenshots here if you can’t wait to try if for yourself.  You can “pop-out” the chat windows to allow many chats at the same time and a better visibility and the status window shows your friends letting you know who is active or not.

Mini-feed items will also appear directly in your chat windows for the person you are chatting with if they are related.  So if you are chatting with someone who does something on your profile, you get instantly notified.

I hope the networks I am in get this very anticipated IM Client rolled-out because I am really anxious to try it out. Not that I have that much chatting to do, but I like the technical integration that they have made and I want to try it out even more for myself.