Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts

2013-06-15

Google's 'Project Loon'

Meet Google's 'Project Loon:' Balloon-powered 'net access | Crave - CNET

The search giant wants to give everyone on earth Internet access, and it has a high-flying idea for how to accomplish it.


Google has officially announced "Project Loon," its plan to connect the entire world to the Internet that uses a decidedly 19th century technology: Balloons.

Official Blog: Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it.



Loon for All – Project Loon – Google

The Technology

Project Loon balloons float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. They are carried around the Earth by winds and they can be steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired direction. People connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from balloon to balloon, then to the global Internet back on Earth.

The Pilot Test

Project Loon starts in June 2013 with an experimental pilot in New Zealand. A small group of Project Loon pioneers will test the technology in Christchurch and Canterbury.


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2012-05-07

TheBlu: World's First Social Digital Ocean App

"theBlu", social digital ocean app launched

NEW YORK: Wemo Media, the Venice, CA-based entertainment studio, on friday, 4 May 2012, announced the launch of "theBlu," a globally shared art and entertainment experience. Inspired by the world's oceans, "theBlu" is a living and breathing digital art exhibit of ocean habitats and species, created by artists and developers from all over the world.

Wemo Media

The Blu

The Blu is a global mission to create the ocean on the web as a globally shared media experience. It is a beautiful interactive online world where every species and habitat is a unique work of art created by digital artists and developers around the world. The Blu is a geosocial web application where people connect across the Internet and explore a vast ocean on the web. Check it out...

Source: Wemo Media

Source: theBlu

TheBlu - Screensaver

What is theBlu?
Inspired by the Oceans, theBlu is a socially-connected, global interactive screensaver. Each time you participate, your interactions and connections impact the flow of life in theBlu and everyone's experience of it.
TheBlu is created and curated Academy Award-winning leaders and world-class artists and developers - we call them Makers. Each time you purchase beautiful species and habitats to add to the globally-connected Ocean, you support oceanic conservation.
Once you install theBlu screensaver, you can:
  1. Explore and experience a beautiful online 3D underwater world as easily as browsing the Web.
  2. Connect and interact with your friends via Facebook and go diving together in theBlu.
  3. Have fun learning about the Oceans because theBlu is both entertaining and educational.
  4. Support oceanic conservation each time you purchase 3D species and habitat art work.
TheBlu is available on Mac and PC. It requires a one-time, one-click, quick download. TheBlu will soon be available on iPad, iPhone, Android and other devices. (read more about our tech specs)



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2012-01-30

Web Content Curation

What is Content Curation?


Content Curation basically means that – out of all the content you find on the social web – you pass on the most valuable stuff to your network.

A slightly more coherent definition of someone who curates content comes from marketing expert Rohit Bhargava:
A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.


Content Curation Primer | Beth’s Blog

Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation.     Content curators provide a customized, vetted selection of the best and most relevant  resources on a very specific topic or theme.
[...]


The Three S’s of Content Curation:  Seek, Sense, Share
Content curation is a three-part process:  Seek, Sense, and Share.    Finding the information or “seeking”  is only one third of the task as Mari Smith points out in this video about why curation is important and some tools  for doing it.     



30+ Cool Content Curation Tools for Personal & Professional Use

[...]  a look at over 30 content curation tools (mostly free, but some paid/professional tools as well) that will help you cut through the clutter of your information stream to find the gems. [...]

Curation tools and Desktop Clippers / Browser Extensions in Judy O'Connell (heyjude)

Curate, create and conquer: Journalism 2.0 startups to watch



From aggregators that tailor content exactly to their readers, to citizen-powered news outfits, here are some of the startups changing the face of journalism in 2012.

The content curators

[...]


Ones to watch: Zite, Pulse, flipboard.com, Skygrid, News.me, techmeme.com, Storify, Paper.li, scoop.it, Percolate

The content creators

[...]

Ones to watch: Digital Journal, PandoDaily, ThePhenomlist, The Bay Citizen, Allvoices, California Watch, Patch, Spot.us, The Verge, Propublica, Examiner


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2011-12-05

'Truth Goggles' a Lie Detector For the Internet

MIT boffin's 'truth goggles' probe print and pols • The Register

A student at MIT’s Media Lab is developing a browser plug-in that can check the accuracy of information posted online, and may use it to monitor political speeches for untruths.


Schultz’s script, which he calls “Truth Goggles,” (not Googles, as I originally wrote) is still in a very early state. At the moment he is using Politifact and NewsTrust APIs as his sources, and has a system of breaking down articles into snippets, which are essentially chunks containing a verifiable claim and some context.

Introducing Truth Goggles

I’m working on a magical button.  This button, when pressed, will tell you (an average person who just wants to know what is happening in this crazy world) what is true and what is false on the web site you are viewing. I have a fair amount of the platform finished already and you can check it out here.

[...]

The next steps are:
  • Designing and implementing the snippet creation process
  • Designing an interface to present the verdicts and claim information in more detail
  • Writing scripts to update the claims with the latest results from fact checking databases
The long term ways that this project could be expanded are:
  • Incorporating social media to aid in claim and verdict mining
  • Adding in the ability to view news through the lens of RELATIVE truths rather than just the attempted absolute truth.  For instance, what would a superliberal democrat believe?  What would a tea party member believe?  What do people from Ohio think?



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2011-09-23

Google Wallet

Visions of a Future Where Phones Replace Wallets - NYTimes.com

Plenty of companies would love to get their hands on our wallets. But Google wants to go one step further: it wants to be our wallets.

Its new phone software, called Google Wallet, is intended to replace the credit cards in our actual wallets.

It does sound pretty spectacular, doesn’t it? No fishing plastic cards out of wallets, no paper slips, no signatures. Everything is handled securely, instantly, conveniently, with one tap of your phone at the register.

Google Wallet - the vision



Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication, or NFC.

Google Wallet - how it works


  1. Look for these symbols at checkout.  
  2. Tap your phone on the reader.    Your phone sends payment, and, at some merchants, offers and loyalty information. 



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2011-05-26

Google Correlate

FAQ - Google Correlate

What is Google Correlate?
Google Correlate is an experimental new tool on Google Labs which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.

Collected from: FAQ - Google Correlate




Google Correlate lets you see how your data relates to search queries


A while back, Google showed how Influenza outbreaks correlated to searches for flu-related terms with Google Flu Trends. It helped researchers and policy-makers estimate flu activity much sooner than with previous methods. Google Correlate is the evolution of Flu Trends in that now you can correlate search trends with not just flu cases, but with your own data or other search queries.

Google Correlate

Find searches that correlate with real-world data

Most search terms vary in popularity over time. Find search terms that…
[...]
Search terms are often more popular in some states and less popular in others. Find terms correlated with…
Collected from: Google Correlate

How To Use Correlate, Google's New Data-Mining Tool, To Help Your Business | Fast Company

After logging in, you can upload any data and leverage Google's huge search history and algorithms to see if there's a correlation over time. Brand managers keen to see if their promotional TV ad campaigns result in echoed online activity searching for their brands (and possibly compared to their competition) can do so with a few clicks. Publishing houses can see whether readers are searching for their magazine, or their online entity. Economists and sociologists pondering if searches for "credit card" and "no interest credit card" decline proportionally to a recovering economy now have a powerful data ally (spoiler: yes, that correlation is true).

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2011-02-05

RoboEarth an Internet for Robots



What is RoboEarth?

At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment.
[...]

RoboEarth will include everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database will be implemented on a Server with Internet and Intranet functionality. It stores information required for object recognition (e.g., images, object models), navigation (e.g., maps, world models), tasks (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies) and hosts intelligent services (e.g., image annotation, offline learning).





The aim of RoboEarth is to use the internet to create a giant open source network database that can be accessed and continually updated by robots around the world. With knowledge shared on such a vast scale, and with businesses and academics contributing independently on a common language platform, RoboEarth has the potential to provide a powerful feed forward to any robot’s 3D sensing, acting and learning capabilities.
Collected from: RoboEarth | Motivation

RoboEarth: robots sharing a knowledge base for world modeling and learning of actions (ROBOEARTH)

Project description

The RoboEarth-project exploits a new approach towards endowing robots with advanced perception and action capabilities, thus enabling robots to carrying out useful tasks autonomously. The core of the innovation involves a world-wide web-style database: RoboEarth. RoboEarth will allow robots to share any reusable knowledge independent from their hardware and configuration. When a robot starts performing a task, it is able to download available high-level knowledge on both task and environment; next, it can use and translate this knowledge to its hardware specifications and its configuration and will improve it by learning during the task. Finally, it will upload its knowledge to RoboEarth again.


YouTube - AMIGO robot downloads its instructions from the RoboEarth internet !



During the RoboEarth workshop at the University of Technology in Eindhoven a group of engineers was able to make robot AMIGO download its own instructions from the internet! check www.roboearth.org or www.techunited.nl



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2010-12-05

Buy This Satellite -- Bring Internet to Developing World

The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

An online appeal to raise $150,000 to buy Terrestar-1 and rain bandwidth down on the Third World has already topped $16,000, despite the obstacles ahead of the project.

The plan is to buy Terrestar-1 off the bankrupt TerreStar satellite phone operation, then drive it round to somewhere over the developing world and offer internet access to the disenfranchised masses ... all of which sounds lovely until one takes a moment to think about the technical, logistical and financial issues involved.



BUY THIS SATELLITE - Connect Everyone.


Bringing internet access to the people who need it most






Help Buy a Satellite from a Bankrupt Telecom to Beam Free Web to the Developing World | Popular Science



Terrastar-1 This diagram shows how Terrastar-1 can beam the Web to handheld devices – in this case in North America. Ahumanright.org wants to buy Terrastar-1 from its parent company and move it to an orbit over a developing nation to provide free Internet to the population there. 


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2010-11-01

Chrome OS -- Google's Online Operating System

FoxNews.com - Will Google's Online Operating System Revolutionize the Computer?


That big old hard drive in your computer? Google says you don’t need it anymore. The company is also betting you won't need that Windows, Macintosh or Linux stuff either. No, Google wants you to access, operate, and edit all your files on the Internet.

To help with that, the company has developed a lightweight operating system of its own, the first new competition for Windows and Macs in years. It's called Chrome OS. And it could have a profound effect on the way we work with computers. 

Google Chrome OS Will Be Released By Year’s End


Chrome Google Operating System would be launched in time for the holidays.
Developers at Google have reached Release Candidate stage of completing the operating system.


Chromium OS - The Chromium Projects

Chromium OS

Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web. Here you can review the project's design docs, obtain the source code, and contribute. To learn more about the project goals, read the announcement blog post.

Videos




Google Chrome OS Could Shake Up PC Market - PCWorld


Ultimately, Google plans to extend Chrome OS beyond netbooks and into the desktop/laptop market dominated by Windows. Given the ergonomic shortcomings of today's netbooks--specifically, cramped keyboards and small screens--consumers who find Chrome OS appealing may avoid the platform simply because they don't like the hardware it runs on. Since Chrome OS runs on both x86 and ARM processors, it's likely that a new crop of thin-and-light laptops--larger than netbooks but slimmer than full-size portables--will soon feature Google's OS too.

Chrome OS is more than simply another Windows or Mac competitor. It represents a dramatic shift away from desktop-oriented PCs to a cloud-based future. It'll be interesting to see how consumers and businesses take to Chrome OS devices--and how Microsoft and Apple respond to Google's latest threat.

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2010-10-04

Fits.me - Virtual Fitting Room

Fits.me Shape-Shifting Robots Help Shoppers Find the Proper Fit



No matter their size, everybody has purchased clothing online, and then discovered, upon delivery, that it didn't fit right. But a European company has a solution to this problem -- shape-shifting robots. According to BBC News, an Estonian company has created moving mannequins that allow shoppers to view clothing items on more than 100,000 different bodies' shapes and sizes before they make a purchase.






How it works

After the customer has entered their body measurements, they can see the fit of a clothing item – like in the real-life fitting room. We use robotic mannequins to mimic the shape and size of the customer and we show the customer photos of the mannequin wearing different sizes of clothing. We can show the true fit with real-life photos of the clothing as it looks on the customers’ body.

The fitting room can be used as a component of the retailer’s “size help” or “size chart” showing only samples of clothing. The Fits.me biorobotics solution as a ‘visual size chart’ can help shoppers with the decision-making process about which size fits them best. It reduces costs and ensures that the fitting room experience remains separated from emotional factors driving the purchase.


Collected from: How it works | Fits.me


Fits.Me's Shape-Shifting Robot Lets You Try On Clothes, Online [Video] | Co.Design

Fits.me is now pursuing several new retail partnerships. Though there's only a male mannequin for now, they'll be unveiling a female mannequin in November. (The expansion was funded by a $3.5 million second-round of financing; the lead investor has been the Estonian development fund.) As Haldre tells it, "My engineers now have the best job in the world: Studying women's breasts."
[Haldre, with his robot army of one]

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2010-09-11

Mapping The Internet with Hyperbolic Geometry

'Hyperbolic map' of the internet will save it from COLLAPSE • The Register

International computer boffins are warning that the internet may "collapse" at some point within the next decade. They propose the use of a new routing method based on hyperbolic geometry, and have devised what they call a "hyperbolic atlas" of the entire net to aid in this plan.


Scientists draw up world atlas of the internet | Broadband | News | PC Pro



A transatlatic group of scientists have created the first geometric map of the internet in a bid to prepare for the mother of all online traffic jams.

The team - from universities in California, Barcelona and Cyprus - says its geometric “road atlas” of the internet could help improve web routing.

“We compare routing in the internet today to using a hypothetical road atlas, which is really just a long encoded list of road intersections and connections that would require drivers to pore through each line to plot a course to their destination without using any geographical, or geometrical, information which helps us navigate through the space in real life,” said Dmitri Krioukov, principal investigator of the project.

Krioukov is concerned that existing internet routing, which relies on only this topological information, is unsustainable.

Nature Communications | Article


Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping

Marián Boguñá, Fragkiskos Papadopoulos & Dmitri Krioukov

Nature Communications
Volume:1, Article number:62, doi:10.1038/ncomms1063

Abstract

The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads associated with the primary function of the Internet—routing information packets between any two computers in the world—cause concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. In this paper, we present a method to map the Internet to a hyperbolic space. Guided by a constructed map, which we release with this paper, Internet routing exhibits scaling properties that are theoretically close to the best possible, thus resolving serious scaling limitations that the Internet faces today. Besides this immediate practical viability, our network mapping method can provide a different perspective on the community structure in complex networks.

Figure 1: Hyperbolic geometry at a glance. 

The exponentially growing number of people lying on the hyperbolic floor illustrates the exponential expansion of the hyperbolic space. 

Figure 2: Synthetic network in the Einsteinian model. 

 The modelled network illustrates the connection between hyperbolic geometry and scale-free topology of complex networks. All nodes lie within a hyperbolic disc of radius R. The radial node density grows exponentially with the distance from the origin O, whereas the average degree of nodes exponentially decreases.

  Figure 3: Hyperbolic atlas of the Internet.



The Internet's hyperbolic map is similar to a synthetic Einsteinian network in Figure 2. The size of AS nodes is proportional to the logarithm of their degrees. 

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2010-09-04

TOTeM -- Tales of Things and Electronic Memory


Ask anybody about the most meaningful object he owns, and you’re sure to get a story — this old trunk belonged to Grandpa, we bought that tacky coffee mug on our honeymoon, and so on. The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us.

About | TOTeM

 The TOTeM project is funded through a £1.39 million research grant from the EPSRC to explore social memory in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things. This term is used to describe the increasingly popular use of tagging technologies to track physical objects in the real world.
Collected from: About | TOTeM


Tales Of Things gives real-life objects a digital memory


It’s a simple idea but one that suddenly makes secondhand goods all the more exciting. Imagine selling an old keepsake that had an interesting story tied to it. The buyer would find the QR code and upon scanning it with their phone or via webcam on the website would be presented with your online story via the Tales of Things website.


Internet of Things - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computing, the term Internet of Things (also known as the Internet of Objects) refers to the networked interconnection of everyday objects.[1] It is generally viewed as a self-configuring wireless network of sensors whose purpose would be to interconnect all things.[1] The concept is attributed to the original Auto-ID Center, founded in 1999 and based at the time in MIT[2][3].
The idea is as simple as its application is difficult. If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post.
If all objects of daily life, from yoghurt to an airplane, are equipped with radio tags, they can be identified and managed by computers in the same way humans can.[4][5] The next generation of Internet applications (IPv6 protocol) would be able to identify more objects than IPv4, which is currently in use. This system would therefore be able to instantaneously identify any kind of object.[6]


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