Stopped by TagCamp this weekend. This is TagCity, which a sort of physical tag cloud built by having people add blocks tagged with places they had lived or would like to visit.
Palo Alto and San Francisco were well represented, although I was a little surprised at the number of votes for Paris and Tokyo. You can read more of the place tags in the full size (3072 x 2304) image.
Check out the Skybuilt MPS (Mobile Power System). These transportable (not exactly “portable”) power systems fit inside a standard shipping container, which means it can be moved using standard rail, ship, and trucking systems. It can also be dropped by parachute. Power output depends on the configuration, but ranges from 1KW up to 50+ KW. It looks like their basic configuration uses wind and solar power, the higher power systems would probably require fuel-powered (diesel or gas) generators.
From the Skybuilt web site:
The MPS is a complete power station in a standard shipping container. It can be transported by truck, train, ship or plane.
At the site, you can deploy solar panels or wind turbines in just a few hours, for self-generated power. Or, use diesel, propane, natural gas or gasoline-powered generators.
The interior of the MPS can be used for anything—air-conditioned office space, telecommunications, medical center, emergency operations/command center or storage.
Andrew Wooldridge has built a web application which will instantly generate a web2.0 buzzword-compliant startup name and concept.
Web Two Point Oh!
Create your own Web 2.0 CompanyBelow you will find a pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company just for you!
Hit reload to create another potential million dollar idea
Some of the candidates I got were:
Just to be safe, he adds an editorial footnote:
Note: this is just a little programmatic satire. Any semblance to an actual company is purely accidental and not intentional! It’s supposed to be funny
Before too long, someone may start to automatically generate examples of these on Ning or something along those lines…
Haven’t been keeping up on feedreading due to this cold for the past few days. I’m still kind of out of it, but I finally went to see the doctor and the prescription meds seem to be knocking it back a couple of notches.
I see that Riya (née Ojos) is about to start their public alpha trials. Mike Arrington got an early look today. Looking forward to trying it out.
During the past few days of semi-coherent downtime, I was having something like the following thought, which Russell Beatty articulated in a post this evening:
I’ve been only semi-functional for the past few days, having gone through three bottles of Robitussin so far in an attempt to fend off some sort of cold.
In the meantime, I see there’s more ominous news about the possibility of an avian flu outbreak. Latest is in CNN:
The latest outbreak, among geese, was in a village in the suburbs of Changtian city in the eastern province of Anhui, Noureddin Mona, of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters.
He said the Ministry of Agriculture had told him on Monday 2,100 birds had been infected, 550 had died and 45,000 had been culled.
“We are highly concerned about this,” he said of the outbreak, adding that the area had been sealed off at a radius of 3 miles (5 km).
Bill Bishop points out coverage in Caijing, a Chinese business magazine:
Pithy comments in Charlie O’Donnell’s post I’m off eHubwatch! and a followup:
“I think the web-based features that are appearing all over the place will be the home pages of this new era — many will be abandoned by their developers and left to die a slow death once the developers realize that they don’t have many long-term users. And others will be cultivated and slowly grow into businesses. In that respect, I think Ning is the new GeoCities.” - Scott Moody
“…that sounds right on. And it looks like Squidoo will be the new About. This whole web 2.0 thing is getting pretty retro….” - Pete Cashmore
There has always been a place for speculative ideas and proposals. The difference is that now, many of the ideas can be tried out with relatively little time and money, specifically, those that relate to consumer-ish web services. These can achieve the appearance of depth and capabilities that they may not actually have yet, or ever, though…
SimonWorld notes some analysis in the South China Morning Post on last week’s official Chinese GDP numbers.
Last week China reported another stunning GDP growth number of 9.4%. But as we’ve found numerous times before, the numbers underlying the GDP calculation don’t add up. Either China’s consumers went on strike or fixed asset investment has been over-estimated. Jake van der Kamp is on the case and reaches an unsurprisingly but important conclusion:
…It seems from this that in the year to September the man on the street spent 17 per cent less on daily necessities and toys than he did the previous year. But this is not what other official statistics say. They say that retail spending for the year to September was 13.6 per cent greater than it was the previous year (the blue line) and that this retail spending alone was almost twice as great as the remainder number we calculated for all personal consumption spending.
The cable guy actually did turn up last week, so we still have cable TV. In the meantime, there are many interesting, non-mass-media video projects online.
A few days ago I got around to fixing Azureus on the house server so I could download Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning using BitTorrent. This is a Finnish-made take-off on Star Trek and Babylon 5, created by a group of motivated fans over a period of seven(!) years. (Wikipedia entry)
Digital video tools became drastically cheaper and better during the project, and the quality of the composited sets and special effects is impressive.
The movie is available (with English subtitles, too) free, under a Creative Common license.
See also: Rocketboom
Jeremy Zawodny posted a summary of his October search referral statistics, and I thought I’d take a quick look at mine.
Nearly all of the search referrals here come through Google. I also have a relatively large number of “Other”, some of which (I think) are various Chinese search engines.
Jeremy says:
The gap between Google and Yahoo! is hard to interpret, since it doesn’t come close to matching the publicly available market share numbers. The same is true of the numbers for MSN and AOL. They should be higher.
There are two ways I can think to explain this:
1. People who use Google are more likely to be searching for content that’s on my site.
2. The market share numbers are wrong. Google actually generates more traffic than has been reported and MSN and AOL have been over-estimated.
Came across a couple of posts which prompted me to dig up some of my backlog of material from the Kuppam program.
Voltage stabilizers are uncommon and almost unknown in the US, but in India, voltage stabilizers are household equipment. Although the electrical service is nominally 240 VAC, in many rural areas the grid is underpowered, with priority given to agricultural users. This leads to scheduled power outages and wildly varying line voltages. While it is possible to run computers and other IT equipment directly from the AC line, this commonly leads to rapid equipment failure due to repeated undervoltage and overvoltage conditions.
The Kuppam i-Community program office is equipped with rooftop solar panels, diesel generator backup, and a voltage stablizer system. This site houses a computer training center, network servers, wired and wireless network routers, and various desktop computers for staff use. There are classes and activities there throughout the day, and the servers support network traffic from the entire region, so there is a premium on keeping the facility running as much as possible.
During trips to China, I’m always intrigued by the departure boards in the Beijing airport showing flights to places like Pyongyang, Ullan Battor, and other parts of the world that are hard to get to from here. I’ve been to the South Korean side of the DMZ but the only way to get to the North is through China, and it’s not like you can just hop over for a weekend to take a look around.
In the meantime, here’s a fascinating series of posts with photos and video from Dan Schorr (not the reporter), who recently spent several days on a tour to North Korea, where he attended the Arirang Festival.
One of the applications investigated for the Kuppam i-Community program was using RFID or other tagging system for tracking cattle. Much of the farming there is in small herds, so they don’t typically have a large animal management issue, but it turns out that cattle are commonly used as collateral for securing small loans from the bank. There are a number of problems with the same animal being used as collateral for multiple loans, or being declared lost, missing, or deceased.
from BoingBoing:
New Mexico State University researchers are testing a retinal scanner and radio frequency identification (RFID) tag system for cattle. Part of the USDA’s planned National Animal Identification System, the technology could help identify and keep tabs on animals that may have been in contact with diseased livestock.
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