May 31st, 2007

Microsoft Surface

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Microsoft Surface is making waves across the blogosphere in the last 48 hours. It brings the meaning of “desktop computer” to a new level…it is a table-top :-)

This is mostly based on the multi-touch technology from Perceptive Pixel, a less then 12 months old company founded by Jeff Han of NYU that changes how user interface works.

The first appearance of this multi-touch technology is over a year ago, in April 2006 where they adapted Warcraft III for multi-touch. Very cool video :-)

May 20th, 2007

Gapminder

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Played a bit with Gapminder (via Loic ). A lot of very interesting countries data can be extracted from the tool, particularly compared country against country and over time.

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May 17th, 2007

“Web site” baffles Internet terrorism trial judge

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From Yahoo News:

“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”

This scares me at so many level that I dunno where to begin…

May 15th, 2007

Exporting I.P.

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The New Yorker has a great article about US Free Trade agreement and the IP provision (DMCA) that comes with it:

Why does the U.S. insist on these rules? Quite simply, American drug, software, and media companies are furious about the pirating of their products, and are eager to extend the monopolies that their patents and copyrights confer. These companies are the main advocates for such rules, and the big winners. The losers are often the citizens in developing countries, who find themselves subject to a Draconian I.P. regime that reduces access to new technologies.

More interesting, it cites the following:

History suggests that after a certain point tougher I.P. rules yield diminishing returns. Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, looked at a hundred and fifty years of patenting, and found that strengthening patent laws had little effect on the number of innovations within a country. And, in the U.S., stronger patent protections for things like software have had little or no effect on the amount of innovation in the field. The benefits of stronger I.P. protection are even less convincing when it comes to copyright: there’s little evidence that writers and artists are made more productive or creative by the prospect of earning profits for seventy years after they die, and the historical record suggests only a tenuous connection between stronger I.P. laws and creative output.

Singapore is one of the first country to sign the free trade agreement with US and we also have our copyright laws changed, sad to say.

ps: Anyone has a source to the study made by John Lerner?

May 12th, 2007

Oh Jesus…Web 2.0

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Haven’t joined #joiito for a while but this reminded me why it is so fun to hang out there

jseng: love what the lifehackers did : http://r0.sharedcopy.com/3dphril
ivan`: oh jesus
ivan`: i think that sums up web 2.0
jseng: haha

May 11th, 2007

More on SharedCopy and Thanks!

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It was very exciting time for all of us at SharedCopy since we have being featured on the followings:


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We even had a very cool screencast made by Demogirl.

Together with the the other bloggers, the usage of sharedcopy went up dramatically. While we know we had a nice niffy tool, we never expect the kind of reception we got from the community.

To all the bloggers out there, thanks for blogging about us. While we didn’t leave comments on every blogs, we certainly take your comments (both positive and negatives) seriously.

Choon keat has also given interviews at SG Entrepreneurs and Web SG for those who are interested.

May 8th, 2007

SharedCopy

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sharedcopy.JPGI have been working with Choonkeat on a “stealth” project for a few months now: SharedCopy. It is not exactly “stealth” because we open it for testing quietly a month ago to a few friends. Also quietly, we acquired users from the chinese and spanish (??) community. But yesterday, we got featured on Killer Startups so there goes the stealth mode.

What is SharedCopy?

It is an web application that allows you to annotate & markup any website, made a permanent copy of that page and then share it with your friends. Above all, we do it without any external program or browser plugins, just pure AJAX. :)

Check out this link to see how it works.

To me, it is some sort del.icio.us + tinyurl + annotation + google cache.

Instead of just sending links to people, I highlight the section I want them to read using sharedcopy and then send them the shorten URL.

If I am worried that a particular webpage or resource would disappear after I link to it on my blog, I save it as a sharedcopy the page and blog that (dated copy) instead. It ensure that the link will always work, showing what the page looks like at the time I blog it, which is kind of cool.

This also open up a can of worm because the same feature can be used to share paid content e.g. NYT… (ah, we worry about the legal issues later)

Like del.icio.us, you can see what I have shared and of cos, subscribe it.

For the geeks, we have APIs and some demo, like how to integrate it with Twitter and Basecamp.

We are pretty excited about the project. There are several feature request and there are a lot more we wanted to do on the site. In the meantime, please give it a try (registration is free) and let me know what you think :-)

May 6th, 2007

India $10 laptop

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The latest news in India is that they are close to making $10 laptop.

Okay, they either made an incredible technology break through or this is up-one-man-ship gone too far. Already $100 laptop is stretching what we can do with currently technology but $10? Maybe in 20-30 years time.

May 4th, 2007

Joost vs PPLive

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Recently, I got invited to Joost, the new Peer to Peer TV service started by the folks behind Skype. The UI is certainly pretty and lots of eye candy. But at this moment, there is hardly anything interesting that I would watch but hey, it is a great start.

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The concept of Peer to Peer TV however is not new. It is first discussed in an academic paper titled Coolstreaming (Wikipedia). With the release of their source codes spur the several P2P TV service like PPLive which I blog about 2 years ago.

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PPLive is grow stronger everyday in China. The barrier is that it is still pretty a Chinese software so it is not appealing to the English speaking community. Therefore, I think Joost will be at least successful as PPLive, appealing to those outside China.

May 3rd, 2007

Intermud Communication Protocol

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I was talking to a friend just now reminded me of a project I done a decade ago (96/97): Intermud Communication Protocol. So I decided to Google it and found: http://www.intermud.org/.

Okay, this is scary. People still using this after all these years? And they actually kind enough to credit me. Thanks.