New Florence. New Renaissance.

Technology and Global Youth

"Globally, the average young person connected to digital technology has 94 phone numbers in his or her mobile phone, 78 people on a messenger buddy list and 86 people in his or her social networking community. Yet despite their technological immersion, digi-kids are not geeks -- 59% of 8-14 year-old kids still prefer their TV to their PCs and only 20% of 14-24 year-old young people globally admitted to being "interested" in technology. They are, however, expert multi-taskers and able to filter different channels of information."

Read more of the global survey conducted by MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft at CNN

Data Visualization at Digg

MIT Technology Review

"Stick figures enter buildings that grow a notch taller with each visit. Blocks fall from the sky into stacks. Dots cluster one by one around larger circles on the computer screen, looking like cells on a microscope's slide.

These varied images are different attempts to visually illustrate the flow of reader activity at Digg.com, the popular news site that lets readers post links to headlines elsewhere online and rank them by voting on their popularity."

See previous posts on data visualization at IBM's Many Eyes and Wikipedia

Aggressive and Defensive Traffic - on the Network

MIT Technology Review

"The problem, Kuzmanovic says, is that FastTCP isn't the only attempt to improve on Reno. Other protocols have been designed that could speed file transfer while still using packet loss to monitor congestion. If those protocols send over the same line as FastTCP, they could hog the bandwidth. A protocol that senses delays could be at a disadvantage, Kuzmanovic says, since it might politely back away from congestion where more-aggressive protocols push to the point of packet loss.

Low says that his research group has been studying the issue of fairness--the question of how polite and aggressive protocols should interact. In theory, he says, it is always possible to create a fair situation, even between different types of protocols."

"The Next Big Thing" in Enterprise Software

One of the major attractions in the annual Sandhill Enterprise conference I attended this week is a showcase of 5 promising technology companies. The track record is impressive: to date, seven past Next Big Thing presenters have been acquired for more than $2.5 Billion. Two have recently filed for IPOs. Key executives from each present for about 10 minutes each

This year the 5 profiled year were:

Cast Iron - an application integration "appliance" vendor
Ketera - a SaaS based procurement/spend management solution
Seriosity - which brings multi-player gaming concepts to enterprise apps
SpiceWorks - which is pioneering an advertiser funded model for enterprise apps aimed in their case at IT managers
Vocera - which packages a device with mobile communications and voice recognition aimed at medical and other work groups 

"Periodic Table of the Internet"

argue about the elements and their positioning or enjoy the perspective and buy one of Wellington Grey's posters

Photo Clip Art

From Cargenie Mellon and Microsoft Research

"We present a system for inserting new objects into existing photographs by querying a vast image-based object library, precomputed using a publicly available Internet object database. The central goal is to shield the user from all of the arduous tasks typically involved in image compositing. The user is only asked to do two simple things: 1) pick a 3D location in the scene to place a new object; 2) select an object to insert using a hierarchical menu."

Jeff Han on a better user interface

Jeff Han, the inventor of the multitouch screen that influenced the iPhone, displays his work in this MIT Technology Review video

The iPhone is just a preview...

PC as a service

NY Times

"(Zonbu) will begin selling a simplified Linux-based PC for $99 and a $12.95 monthly subscription charge. They say that the deal is better than it looks because the 15-watt PC can save up to $10 a month in electricity compared with a standard 200-watt PC."

Interview with Peter Norvig

MIT Technology Review talks to Google's Director of Research

"The two biggest projects are machine translation and the speech project. Translation and speech went all the way from one or two people working on them to, now, live systems."

Color Matching by Phone

MIT Technology Review

"...consumers use their mobile phones to take pictures of themselves or objects, and then send these pictures to HP servers. Within seconds, the consumer receives a text message with a color recommendation for matching makeup to skin tone, or for finding the right paint hue for the home."