Mobile radar research concept by Nokia

by George T on Jan 28 2010 at 01:39 Comments 2

While Apple was announcing the game-changer iPad, Nokia was also letting us peak behind the curtain of future mobile technologies. It’s about a technology named “Mobile Radar” which seems quite promising with endless possibilities.

In the video shown below, you’ll see researcher Jani Ollikainen use his hand to adjust the music player’s volume, without ever touching the hardware. Even with an object in his way (like your pants pocket or even a wood door), the radar works without a hitch. In the second demo, you’ll see fellow researchers Terhi Rautiainen and Risto Kaunisto measure the distance, speed, and direction of a human walking.

[ via - photo via 88941558@N00 ]


The day after the iPad showed up

by George T on Jan 28 2010 at 01:16 Comments 2

There is so little chance that you haven’t heard of the Apple Event that took place a couple of hours ago. But just in case here is a sum up of the event (in headlines):

We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts — we want to make the best tech, but have them be intuitive. It’s the combination of these two things that have let us make the iPad.

iPad’s main features inlcude:

You may find out more about the iPad here. However, as you may have noticed, there a few missing features.

If you ask me, I was getting ready to catch up with the event along with gdgt’s and engadget’s live coverage. I was ready to listen to whatever Steve was ready to say. I mean, we were all ready for the best tablet pc ever, right? Well, the first impression of the iPad was like “hmmm.. it’s not bad”. Not that I don’t think this is an exceptional mobile device. Maybe I was overwhelmed by all the buzz going on about the Apple Tablet. I was waiting for something truly innovative and outstanding.

The User Interface was awesome, as usual in all Apple products. Could be better though. The whole idea of downloading the same apps you download for your iPhone was a bit surprising and also a good way to endorse the power of the iPhone App Store. Everything else seemed to be quite elegant.

Anyhow, Apple’s iPad has definitely killed the netbook market and we are about to witness, as I have said before, a change in personal computing in the years to come shifting the Personal Computer (P.C.) towards the mobile devices.

Don’t forget to check out this real-time look at twitter mentions of terms related to Apple’s product launch earlier today.


Android developer labs 2010

by George T on Jan 23 2010 at 13:20 Comments 1

Hola Android fans. Like last year, this year too Google announced a series of Android developer labs taking place all around the globe during February and March. (Unfortunately Greece is not included)

Our Android Advocates are going on a world tour, traveling to locations all around the globe! Hear about the state of the Android platform, get hands-on with the latest version of the SDK, meet like-minded Android engineers, play with the latest Android devices, test your apps, and ask your questions directly to Android team members.
Space is limited, so please wait for an email confirmation after you’ve been registered before making any travel plans. If you’re interested, click on one of the links below to request your seat.
Registration deadline for currently open sessions is February 1st.

Upcoming Sessions

North America

Europe

Asia

[ via ]


YouTube, HTML5 and the new intriguing Video Page

by George T on Jan 22 2010 at 00:37 Comments 1

In case you live in another planet than Earth, YouTube is experimenting with some changes that will shape the future of the way we experience on-line video. First and foremost, HTML5.

-”Just hold on a minute..”, you might say. “Isn’t that the new..?”
-Yes, it is.
-”But is this backwards compatible with my old-dusty-and-almost-gone-forever Internet Explorer 6?”

Nop, is the answer. Well, the truth is YouTube hasn’t switched over using the new <video> tag of HTML5 permanently, but you can have a sneak peek on what YouTube would look like riding the Horse 5 (==HTML5). You can opt in by visiting youtube.com/html5. You should give it a try.

Apart from that, YouTube is trying out an experimental re-design of the Video Page, which, in my opinion, was about time! Take a look at this example over here. How does it feel?

P.S. Check out this HTML5 Canvas Experiment by Sebastian Deutsch.


2010: The year we learned how to ‘check-in’

by George T on Jan 21 2010 at 23:36 Comments 1

After the iPhone, the Android and the Palm version it’s time for the Blackberry version of the well-known-and-soon-to-be-the-next-big-thing-in-2010 Foursquare! Yes its true, all the blackberry users can now access foursquare through a beautiful app from their own Blackberry. It’s only been a couple of weeks since Foursquare launched its Palm version and decided to go Global. I guess this is the right time to say a line from ‘Toy Story’ where Buzz (yes, Lightyear) said “no time to loose”.

Our BlackBerry app is still in beta so bear with us as we add new features.  In the near future look for the the ability to add friends and view nearby tips…  stay tuned!

Great work is been done over there at Foursquare. Both the iPhone and the Android version are quite excellent mobile apps driven by the need to check-in! I can’t tell for the Palm version which I haven’t used so far. Who would know that the year we learned how to ‘tweet‘ (aka 2009) would be followed by the year we learned how to ‘check-in‘ (aka 2010)? After hours, days and weeks of usage (of the Foursquare app), talking and coffee with friends, Foursquare naturally became one of the most (if not the most) desirable/likable mobile application. Location data seems to be quite important these days. No wonder why Foursquare is expanding so fast lately.

Have you tried foursquare yet? What do you think of it?


Google is about to get a lot faster

by George T on Jan 14 2010 at 14:39 Comments 1

I just ran into a linux-ext4 mailing list concerning Linux ext4 filesystem development and I found an interesting read regarding Google, filesystems and the future of search that I wanted to share. The particular discussion was about jfs filesystem benchmark results where Michael Rubin (from Google) said:

Google is currently in the middle of upgrading from ext2 to a more up to date file system. We ended up choosing ext4. This thread touches upon many of the issues we wrestled with, so I thought it would be interesting to share.

Just think about this for a moment. Google was still running on ext2 filesystem. Although ext2 remains one super stable filesystem, imagine the size of the impact of the forthcoming upgrade to ext4 filesystem. In case your are not familiar with the ext4 filesystem, ext4 is a journaling file system developed as the successor to ext3. Ext4′s main features range from backward compatibility, bigger filesystem/file sizes and multiblock allocation to fast fsck, online defragmentation and inode-related features. For more detailed information you should check out kernel.org‘s article on ext4.

The driving performance reason to upgrade is that while ext2 had been “good enough” for a very long time the metadata arrangement on a stale file system was leading to what we call “read inflation”. This is where we end up doing many seeks to read one block of data. In general latency from poor block allocation was causing performance hiccups. We spent a lot of time with unix standard benchmarks (dbench, compile bench, et al) on xfs, ext4, jfs to try to see which one was going to perform the best.

–Michael Rubin

Now, back to Google, what do you think this could mean to our future searches? Search results showing up in light speed time? Probably. For example, take a look at Google Goggles. It is an amazing product right? However the current status quo of the speed of its results is limited by the perception we have about the device’s speed and not only. I mean most of us realize it is not an easy thing to match a photo of the Parthenon temple I just took with trillions of random photos indexed somehow. Every query like this one, is narrowed by the network bottleneck and the processing speeds, which include hard disk’s read/write speed.

Imagine a super-fast network, with lets say 10Gbps bandwidth, where on the one end you press a <button> and all it does is erasing 10^100 rows and recreating 10^100 rows in a SQL database on the other end. Given that, apart from the CPU usage which is required for a process like this, there is the limit of read and write speed of the hard disks even if using RAID technology. This is where ext4 comes in to make this whole process a lot faster.

I can only imagine what’s next for our future searches. Fast and responsive holographic search results? I really don’t think there is a limit here, right?


Gmail, Security and the vulnerability in SSL/TLS protocol

by George T on Jan 13 2010 at 21:18 Comments 1

Back in 2008, Google released a nice feature inside Gmail’s settings where you could opt to enable https throughout your session. That made you feel a little bit safer when browsing your emails using a public WiFi at your local coffee shop. However, the usage of SSL/TLS protocol has one main drawback which is imposing some extra overhead. Thus causing some extra latency. This latency could be noticeable a few years ago when the average broadband speed did not exceed 1 Mbps in contrary to nowadays. So after researching the security/latency tradeoff, Google decided to roll out default https for all Gmail users for the sake of security (you can still turn it off at any time but https will still be “on” when you login).

About two months ago, I came across with a couple of interesting articles at the h-online.com regarding a vulnerability in SSL/TLS protocol which could lead to password theft. It is surprising that something we used to trust for years now has been compromised. At first I thought “what the heck..?!”. Indeed, what’s the point of choosing to use https or not at all. Well, the truth is that if you are investing in 100% security you are wasting your money. Unfortunately there is no such thing as 100% secure (at least for the time being). The good news is that there seems to be a solution to the TLS vulnerability. According to H-online:

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has ammended the RFC 5246 specification (Transport Layer Security [TLS] Protocol Version 1.2) and introduced a new renegotiation_info TLS extension which will store a connection’s cryptographic information.

If you ask me, there is nothing even close to 100% secure. The harsh truth is even when quantum cryptography will be applicable somehow, end-to-end security will still suffer from various kinds of attacks. Still having second thoughts every time you try to login somewhere..? In that case you should check out ForceHTTPS (a Firefox add-on) which forces https “every” time you hit the enter button.

ForceHTTPS allows sophisticated users to transparently retrofit security onto some insecure sites that support HTTPS.

[ photo via anonymouscollective ]


Google I/O 2010 – Moscone Center, San Francisco

by George T on Jan 12 2010 at 22:03 Comments 0

Google announced the next Google I/O taking place at the Moscone Center,  in San Francisco during May 19 – 20, 2010. Early discounted registration is now open through April 16, 2010. If I lived in San Francisco I ‘d definitely register right away. Last year’s Google I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so all those lucky guys and girls who live nearby San Francisco sign up as soon as possible. Maybe I ‘ll see you at the Moscone Center at Google’s largest developer event of the year. :)

Sessions include overviews, basics and advanced content featuring:

Google I/O features 80 sessions, more than 3,000 developers, and over 100 demonstrations from developers showcasing their technologies. Talk shop with engineers building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications.

Follow @googleio for the latest updates on I/O. (official hashtag: #io2010)

[ photo via oemebamo ]


Boxee Box to be announced tomorrow at CES

by George T on Jan 6 2010 at 15:13 Comments 4

I recall the first time I downloaded Boxee for my Mac about a year and half ago. At that time Macs were already equipped with this thing called the Front Row, a media center software by Apple which was quite impressive back then.

If you haven’t tried Boxee, go to boxee.tv for download it for free. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Apple TV. Once you ‘ve installed it just move around to explore Boxee’s capabilities and be prepared to be amazed.

Boxee is the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet and computer on your TV

Until yesterday Boxee was available only for your computer where you had to connect your computer to your TV to enjoy media from the Internet or your computer. However Boxee announced yesterday that they will be announcing Boxee Box tomorrow at CES.


[roll over to see the back]

Yeah, that’s right, now you can get all your favorite TV shows & movies from the Internet or your hard drive onto your TV – no PC needed.

Boxee Box features:

As you can see in the list above, Boxee Box comes with a super-remote (named after the super-phones). It’s a two-face remote with a QWERTY keyboard at the back! How amazing is that?!


Foursquare goes global and launces Palm version

by George T on Jan 6 2010 at 01:59 Comments 2

It’s been very-very-very busy start for this year. I was having a conversation with a friend about the technology in 2010 and we both agreed that 2010 is probably going to be the year of tablets or smartphones. After tonight’s event at Google HQ I think I misspelled smartphones. I should have said superphones.

Anyhow a few hours ago foursquare announced that you can now check-in from *anywhere* and later they released their Palm version of foursquare in the Palm Marketplace! Just go to the Marketplace from your Palm device and search for foursquare.

I am interested in Gowalla‘s next move.

Hurray! Location, location, location!

P.S. I just saw that Google Reader for mobile got some great new/old features.


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