With UbiKann, I Can Be Everywhere
Developers of iPhone Apps were told by Apple this Thursday that:
“If your app submission is not compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, it will not be approved.â€
As explained on techradar all application submissions will need to be compatible with iPhone 3.0 OS. I’m guessing this means quite a few applications may need to be upgraded, and some nice news for iPhone App developers and probably some extra revenue in some cases unless they were nicely coded to begin with…?
So if you were to list the functions you would like in a USB drive what would it be?
Here is my list:
1) Small and not bulky, not heavy, easy to transport, can fit in your pocket
2) Large capacity, at the moment that would be 128 Go
3) High speed read and write capacity ( > 30MB read and > 20MB wite per second)
4) Biometric user authentication (fingerprint)
5) Hardware based data encryption
6) Backup via Internet of data (incremental backup, versioning) when connected
7) Shock proof, water, temperature and magnetic protection, with a lifetime warranty
8 ) Nice sleek but simple design (maybe titanium for extra protection and light weight) without a cap or with a cap that is attached and can’t be lost, fall off.
9) The ability to run an OS or software from the drive and or use as a memory booster
10) Maybe a short range beacon type system or even a GPS system that can be activated if it is lost, to quickly find it
11) For the paranoid a wipe or even remote wipe system, should the key really be lost and if it has confidential information on it. I guess this would need a small battery power source that triggers ths should it be tampered with or to allow for the GPS function if not connected to a computer.
12) It could serve as an RSA type system that randomly generates a number. This number when combined with a user id completes a login identification process
Edit: I was just checking out the comment from Steve below concerning the 64 Gig USB Key from Kingston and came across an advert for the “IronKey”. It seems that quite a few of the items from the above wish list can be found in the IronKey USB key coined as being the “world’s most secure USB key”. Looks pretty impressive take a look.
So Google was one of the first large companies to actually use cloud computing extensively and now, as usual in the English language, there is a move to talk about ‘the cloud’, dropping the more geeky ‘computing’ part! Like other buzzwords, take web 2.0 or SaaS (Software as a Service) not everybody has the same definition. It is highly likely that some people will say that ‘could computing’ and ‘the cloud’ are two different things.
Seamless access to hardware and software: the Supercomputer
The main idea with ‘the cloud’, from an IT perspective, is to seamlessly supply extra resources to providers of IT services and by ricochet to end users of these services. Even though it is not a behemoth word like sustainability that continues to suck in so many different meanings, cloud computing is likely to evolve and cover more and more services. Hey it could even end up being synonymous with the Matrix type concept from the film!
In the case of IT infrastructure, people are interested in outsourcing their hardware needs which can be covered by what is called HaaS (Hardware as a Service). One of the most well known services of this type is Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud or EC2.
Does this remind you of passive terminals that connect to supercomputer?! It is not a coincidence that equipment like Netbooks are so successful in the current context of more and more key services, instantly available on the internet. Cloud Computing can help provide further such important services to people. The Cloud services currently available and Netbooks are however far more complex than the mainframe and passive terminal model.
HaaS and SaaS
The Cloud services provided can be viewed as building blocks. Both HaaS (Amazon’s and Google’s server farms) and SaaS type applications (like Google Docs, Salesforce.com and Sliderocket) are purchased without needing to worry about the risks involved in evaluating growing usage. In this sense cloud computing is also referred to as “on demand computing” where you just purchase the system and someone else worries about your evolving needs.
Utility Computing & Server Virtualization
If you are aware of solutions like VMWare that allow you to run several virtual instances of a server on a physical server, then you will quickly see the similarity with cloud computing whereby clusters of servers can provide hundreds of instances of virtual servers. Google’s need to ‘crunch’ huge quantities of data, which requires highly knowledgeable people in cloud computing or grid computing. Like Amazon, Google is now offering the public some of the cloud computing services that used to be restricted to their own projects and internal service requirements.
The ability for companies to tap in to this cloud of both services and hardware (data centers) in the same way you would just turn on the tap or the light, provides powerful and efficient “on demand” services and resources a bit like a utility grid hence the idea of utility computing.
The Cloud is in its infancy but is already proving to be an extremely efficient solution for small to large companies and even the general public though services like Google Aps etc. Could computing is also likely to take on many new meanings along the way
Take a look at the following video where numerous tech celebs explain what Cloud Computing is (audio is a bit shoddy though):
Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby are asked “what is Could Computing?”.
Just came across an interesting article that provides some good tips for people looking a simple checklist of the key areas to review with regards to SEO. The main parts are:
1. URL canonicalization and 301 re-directions.
2. Unique Title Tags and Meta Data.
3. Search Engine Friendly.
4. Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Central?
5. Check for Duplicate Content.
There are also details for each section that are in this article called “5 Minute SEO Site Audit“.
Also there is a tendancy to see SEO as the “be all and end all” solution when behavioural targeting versus SEO is a subject I would recommend you look into
If you have ever thought about hiding your identity in order to view sites in the US that just display a message saying you aren’t allowed to see it this may be for you. There are technically complicated ways of doing it that are not for the faint of heart and there are solutions like HotSpot Shield that is nicely explained on the below video:
So open the doors to TV sites in the states, that allow you to see the last episode of your favourite series and whether you are from France, Germany, Spain , Italy, UK etc., Enjoy !
You may have read articles explaining Ruby on Rails was the system behind Twitter and how there were numerous issues, for such a demanding and successful service as Twitter. In an article from Technology Review, Alex Payne from Twitter explains how they hope to replace a lot of the back-end systems in Ruby on Rails by Scala based services by the end of the year. Extract to understand what Scala is :
So the Twitter team turned to Scala, a programming language with its origins in work by Martin Odersky, professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, around 2003. During his presentation, Payne, who’s also writing a book on the language, explained that Scala has many of the benefits of other languages but without the drawbacks. Some of the characteristics that make Scala so appealing to Twitter is that it’s able to efficiently handle concurrent processing–that is, separate instructions that need to use the system’s resources at the same time. This is useful when messages from millions of people need to be sent out instantly to different devices all over the world.
Although Scala has, like any language, it’s weak points, it seems that the language has great advantages for a company like Twitter. It is a leap of faith though for the company, since there are few, to no examples out there comparable to Twitter.
So I was reading an article on the BBC about Google StreetView, how people had been ‘caught’ by the Google van. I remembered when I was working at LBi in London, I was not far from Brick Lane, on the phone and saw a Google car with the multiple cameras on top. I was on the phone for about 10 minutes and the car came past twice. So a few days ago I decided to check out where I was standing to see if I could see myself. When using Streetview to turn around the corner from Commercial Street I couldn’t see myself but going down the road the other way there I was, as seen below. My face has been blurred even though I didn’t even ask them to do so…
Streetview on Toynbee Street
So you have heard about pop-up blockers, what about overlay site blockers ?
While reading an article about how behavioural marketing is placed just below SEO in terms of efficiency I wanted to check out the report from MarketingSherpa.
To set the scene, I have very large screen with a smaller screen to the right and had IE in the left screen at this point.
Suffice to say as you can see below the scroll bar only had an effect on the page behind and I could not even close the window to get to the page. The page greyed out behind the overlay would move up and down but the overlay itself didn’t budge an inch. So, no way to get to the close link on the overlay, and nothing else to do either. Only choices left: press the back button or close the browser. Wonderful user experience, not!
MarketingSherpa overlay site blocker
Well you may not have seen, but if you use Gmail, there is an unsend feature now. You have to go into settings in Labs and activate the option “Undo Send”.
This allows you for a few seconds to stop (and not have to recall) messages before they actually do leave your outbox forever…
Gmail Unsend Function
OK so you know that being able to serve adverts to people that mean something to them is a good idea. I was watching an episode of “Being Erica†a new series from CBC and heard a song a liked and remembered. Pick up the words that follow each other “With the rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum†paste into Google and find that the singer is (uhhm forgotten but shouldn’t) Rod Stewart. You click on link and find on imdb.com that it is no other than ‘Rod Stewart’
And there you kind of freak out because on the imdb.com web site you see an advert for ‘La Redoute’, a French catalogue company, specifically advertising the Braun Oral B electric toothbrush that you looked for on their site last week. Freaky and not cool…
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