Today’s Wall Street Journal (January 24, 2006) has a short profile of Paul Motian, an outstanding jazz drummer who was part of the Bill Evans Trio in the early 1960s. (If you haven’t heard of Bill Evans and have any interest in jazz piano, I highly recommend checking out their recordings).
What caught my attention, however, was this comment from Paul Motian on the decline of the recording studio business:
“A lot of recording studios are closing because people don’t use tape anymore, and that’s where the recording studios make their money. Everyone comes in with their hard drive, puts it on their computers.”
I still have a bunch of 1-inch 16-track master tapes somewhere out in the garage and remember spending a relative fortune on studio time and services, back in the 80s, probably the waning days of multitracking and overdubbing by hand on a mixing board. The Cars were wildly successful at the time and had opened a state-of-the-art studio at Synchro Sound, which was starting to use digital recording systems, but which far exceeded our band’s budget.
The other day Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch wrote a rave review of Bluepulse, a new mobile application platform. In a quick read through their website, it looks like they’re trying to offer a carrier-independent path for 3rd party mobile application developers to reach mobile users.
Bluepulse is planning to develop applications for customers, as well as rev share with 3rd party developers, and offers a free SDK. Getting applications onto wireless carriers network is a pain, and getting paid for them is also painful, so there are some good opportunities here, and I thought I would give it a try on my Nokia 6820.
The application downloaded and installed, but nothing happened, so after a few tries I sent off a message on the Bluepulse web site, and got a quick response from Stuart Hely, their general manager.
P.R.A.S.E., aka “Prase” is a new web tool for examining the PageRank assigned to top search results at Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Search terms are entered in the usual way, but a combined list of results from the three search engines is presented in PageRank order, from highest to lowest, along with the search engine and result rank.
I tried a few search queries, such as “web 2.0″, “palo alto”, “search algorithm”, “martin luther king”, and was surprised to see how quickly the PageRank 0 pages start turning up in the search results. For “web 2.0″, the top result on Yahoo is the Wikipedia entry on Web 2.0, which seems reasonable, but it’s also a PR0 page, which is surprising to me.
As a further experiment, I tried a few keywords from this list of top paying search terms, with generally similar results.
Tagnautica is a fun and interesting Flash user interface for exploring and navigating among tags, in this case on Flickr. After keying in an initial tag, related tags are displayed in a circle, with a sample image from each tag category displayed in a representative size.
When you move the cursor over a tag bubble, it temporarily becomes larger so you can get a look at it. The other bubbles keep resizing as well, giving the interface a very fluid appearance. When you find something you like, you can click on the Tagnautica bubble to view the tag page over at Flickr.
I always enjoy these sorts of user interfaces for semi-random exploration. I’ve noticed that I don’t really use any of the cool visualization tools when I actually want to find something, though. Not sure if that’s because they don’t represent a useful set of questions as implemented yet, or simply because my brain doesn’t work that way.
Last Friday I spent an hour with my daughter’s 4th grade class, helping them do online research for reports on early California explorers. They were individually assigned an explorer, and were looking for basic biographical information such as dates and places of birth and death, and notable historical achievements or other interesting items to write about. From my perspective, this turned out to be a sort of small focus group on using search engines.
I spend most of my time around people who are pretty good at using search engines and online research tools, so it was interesting to see what they would do with this assignment.
The kids are all familiar with computers to varying degrees. They have had classroom activities using the computer at least once a week since kindergarten, and most of them have some experience using computers at home (this is Palo Alto, after all). I don’t think they’ve done any organized “internet research” in school up to this point, though.
As financial systems become more automated, there more opportunities for humans to key in an extra zero or transpose a digit or two, with instantaneous results. Last week there was yet another “fat finger” trade, this time in India on the Bombay Stock Exchange, during the first day of trading for Tulip IT Services. Someone offered to sell shares at 25 paise (less than one US penny), a fraction of the market price of 171 rupees (around US $3.80), and found many takers.
It looks like the buyers are going to have to pay the market rate after all, though.
The BSE today said some trades executed at 25 paise in the shares of Tulip IT Services on Thursday will not be settled at this rate.
The exchange said trades executed below Rs 96 would be transacted at Rs 171.15. This means that investors who bought shares at 25 paise will have to pay Rs 171.15 and sellers will get the money at such rate.
The VoicePulse signup problem I described earlier today seems both worse and sillier than before. They apparently stopped signing up new subscribers at the end of November 2005, due to non-compliance with the FCC E911 requirements. They’re currently doing integration testing with Intrado for 911 service as well as negotiating with the FCC on what constitutes an acceptable solution, with an expected resolution sometime in January 2006.
Here’s someone who ran into a similar signup problem (although I didn’t get a warning prompt about no E911 today):
It turns out that Voicepulse isn’t selling new service at all right now. Of course it’s all the big bad FCC’s fault (never mind the fact that many other VOIP providers are selling new service at the moment, and many of them are providing usable 911 service.) I’m sure the FCC is making it hard on these providers, since the old-line phone companies are pulling the strings, but a) other companies are currently selling new service (I proved this to myself, I ordered VOIP service from a known-good provider) and b) many of these other companies are providing 911 and E911 services.
You are currently browsing the Ho John Lee’s Weblog weblog archives for January, 2006.
© 2004-2008 Ho John Lee
