November, 2008

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30
Nov 08

Speak Google, Speak!

Google’s recent update on their iPhone app now allows smooth, reliable speech recognition.

Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you’re looking for. That’s it. Just talk. Once the App is on, you don’t have to push any buttons to search. [...] And if you’re doing a local search, there’s no need to specify where you are because Google Mobile App now has Search with My Location. Search for “movie showtimes” or “Mediterranean restaurant” and you’ll automatically see results based on your current location.

All made possible by the iPhone’s built in GPS, accelerometer, and proximity sensors. As Tim O’Reilly astutely points out:

Future applications will surprise us by using them in new ways, and in new combinations; future devices will provide richer and richer arrays of senses (yes, senses, not just sensors) for paying attention to what we want.

 

 

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29
Nov 08

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

If you only read one book this year, make it: Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman.

 

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27
Nov 08

Open Source More Efficient Than Proprietary

Information Week: The Open Source Enterprise: Its Time Has Come

Led by founder and CTO Ari Zilka, once the chief architect for Walmart.com [...] Terracotta saves money not because you can download it for free–though you can–but because it’s a substitute for buying more database systems, more application servers, and more hardware to run overworked applications, the former brute-strength solution to a data-volume problem.

IE, Open Source uses resources more efficiently than their proprietary counterparts. Nice.

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25
Nov 08

Porter Hypothesis

From Wikipedia:

According to the Porter Hypothesis strict environmental regulations can induce efficiency and encourage innovations that help improve commercial competitiveness. The hypothesis was formulated by the economist Michael Porter.

According to this hypothesis, strict environmental regulation triggers the discovery and introduction of cleaner technologies and environmental improvements, the innovation effect, making production processes and products more efficient. The cost savings that can be achieved are sufficient to overcompensate for both the compliance costs directly attributed to new regulations and the innovation costs.

This is exactly why I am thrilled when the price of gas goes up. The sooner, and higher, the better.

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23
Nov 08

Google Predicts the Flu

Google Flu Trends is pretty darn cool:

We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

 

 

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