Posts tagged tech
Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most popular browser
Filed under that didn’t take long. Chrome’s first public, stable release was in December 2008. The first version of Internet Explorer, 1995.
In 2002-2003, IE controlled about 95% of the browser market.
More info via The Next Web.
Image via StatCounter.
Made in New York City
A map of NYC start-ups, incubators and investors. Also includes information about companies that are hiring if you’re in the market.
Check One, Check Two: Our Webcasting Checklist
Next Wednesday we’ll be Webcasting GigaOm’s paidContent 2012 event from the Times Center in New York City.
From past experience, Murphy’s Law dominates the production of these type of things. If the Webcast is supposed to start at 9am, everything will work until 8:58 and then all hell breaks loose.
To prepare we take things apart, put them back together again, start streams, stop streams, figure out how and why things break, and figure out how to put everything back together again.
The gear we use runs as follows:
- TriCaster: This is the boxy think in the photo. It’s essentially a Windows box with NewTek’s TriCaster video mixing software in it. Our audio and video feeds go into this, and from there we push the feed out to Livestream.
- Livestream: Livestream is a live event platform that’s been used by the New York Times, ABC and CBS News, the Associated Press among others. If you can get your video to it (say, with a TriCaster), Livestream can push it out to desktop, mobile and tablet clients.
- Sony EX1: We’ve been using these cameras for a while now and they’re work horses. So, a couple EX1’s with 100 foot SDI cables connecting back to the TriCaster will let us position our cameras around the Times Center.
- Mackie Board: While the TriCaster has an audio mixer built into its software, over time we’ve felt that having a separate, analog mixer makes things easier and gives us better overall sound. Also, when there are odd and peculiar audio irregularities (remember Murphy’s Law from above), there’s something reassuring about reaching out and working with real life knobs and sliders rather than pointing and clicking through a software interface. It’s much faster too. So, the house audio will be fed into the Mackie and from there it will go into the TriCaster before being pushed to Livestream.
I’ll post next Tuesday where people can watch the event. The lineup looks great and includes WordPress founder Matt Mullenwag, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo, Condé Nast president Bob Sauerberg and News Corporation CEO Jon Miller among others.
The agenda: explore “business models and debate the best ways to keep content meaningful and profitable in an ever-changing digital environment.”
Learning to Finger Paint
Last weekend I bought Brushes, a digital finger painting app for iOS devices created by Taptrix.
While my drawing talents haven’t improved much since the second or third grade, I thought finger painting would be a great way to occupy my daily subway rides. Besides, there’s aspiration going on here: Jorge Colombo created five New Yorker covers using the app.
Here’s some general background: Brushes, as the name suggests, is a painting app that uses brushes. If you’ve used Photoshop, they’re the exact same thing. The app has 19 different ones and you can change each one’s size and overall style with some sliders that give you overall control.
Importantly, the app also uses layers so you can draw on top and underneath objects. The layers aren’t limitless so you end up using a few and then merging them when you have the need to move on to a different part of your picture.
Other essentials include a color picker, paint bucket for large fills, and opacity and brush size control. The eraser is handy and the history and redo controls are image saving.
So, a few days into my drawing with Brushes extravaganza, here’s what I’ve discovered:
- My fingers are fat, maybe a little too fat: I’m using Brushes on an iPad and while I can zoom in on specific parts of an image to work on a detail, and am getting more facile with this the more I use it, I’m thinking of getting a stylus.
- Drawing on an iPad in the subway is a great conversation starter: four or five people have come up to me over the past few days and asked about the app.
- I need to practice more: I’m finding this very addictive so this shouldn’t be a problem.
If you want to see how people are using Brushes, and what its potential is, check the Flickr user group. And if vector’s more your thing, Taptrix has another iOS app called Inkpad.
Images: Chickens are People Too, by me (Michael Cervieri); various screenshots of the Brushes app showing layers, color pickers, and brush types.
Things You Can Do That You Never Used To
Via Archive.org:
For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.
So if you can’t get enough of whatever it is they’re trying to do in the Situation Room, a one gig tarball of text is waiting for your download.
H/T: Flowing Data
Reach Out and Touch Something
Carnegie Mellon and Disney Research have teamed up to create a prototype called Touché that turns almost any surface — from solid to liquid — into a multifaceted touch surface.
Via Carnegie Mellon:
A doorknob that knows to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped. A smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips. A chair that adjusts room lighting.
They are among the many possible applications of Touché, a new sensing technique developed by a team at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Touché is a form of capacitive touch sensing, the same principle underlying the types of touchscreens used in most smartphones.
But instead of sensing electrical signals at a single frequency, like the typical touchscreen, Touché monitors capacitive signals across a broad range of frequencies.
This Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS) makes it possible to not only detect a “touch event,” but to recognize complex configurations of the hand or body that is doing the touching. An object thus could sense how it is being touched, or might sense the body configuration of the person doing the touching.
SFCS is robust and can enhance everyday objects by using just a single sensing electrode. Sometimes, as in the case of a doorknob or other conductive objects, the object itself can serve as a sensor and no modifications are required.
Even the human body or a body of water can be a sensor.
We look forward to the day Touché and Siri get together and make babies.
A Finely Curated List of Data Tools
A fantastic resource for getting started in — and advancing — your work with data from some of the best in the business.
Via Datavisualization.ch:
Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools is a collection of tools that we, the people behind Datavisualization.ch, work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly. This is not a list of everything out there, but instead a thoughtfully curated selection of our favourite tools that will make your life easier creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations.
As Benjamin Wiederkehr writes on their blog, “It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you’re not into programming, you’ll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code.”
FJP Pro Tip: Jump in and start playing. If you’re just getting started, check out our short videos with Bitly data chief Hilary Mason for her advice on working with data.
Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent for Facebook in 1845
Nate St. Pierre writes:
Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”
He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”
A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.
I’ve long argued Facebook is working towards natural or timeless (for lack of better words) human interaction. That their central idea is relevant in any age should not be surprising.
(Though it is astounding Lincoln was imagining a nearly identical privacy system.)
(Via The Next Web)
FJP: Color me fascinated — Michael.
UPDATE: Like most things too good to be true, so too is this. Yes, we reblogged before checking into it. Yes, lesson learned.
Times’ producer Ben Welsh created PastPages, an hourly archive of the homepages of major news media organizations.
I created this site because I think it ought to exist. The shifting homepages of major media sites should be saved so they can be studied. Done right, I believe PastPages could serve as a resource for scholars seeking to study coverage of news events, like the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
The New Yorker’s answer to everyone pondering the future of reading.
FJP: The world needs more scrolls.
The World’s Fastest Internet Cities
Each quarter, Akamai, one of the world’s largest content delivery networks, issues its State of the Internet Report.
In this chart they look at the global average connection speed by city. South Korea, as usual, tops the list. Then its almost exclusively Japan — with the exception of Umea and Goteborg in Sweden — until we get out of the top 50.
Boston is the first US city to make the list, checking in at number 51 with an average speed of 8.4Mbps.
For those living in New Jersey, congratulations. North Bergen and Jersey City are the second and third fastest US cities (and 52nd and 58th fastest globally).
The only other countries with cities in the top 100 are Latvia (Riga at 76), Australia (Canberra at 78), Canada (Victoria, BC at 81 and Oakville, ON at 97) and Romania (Timisoara at 89).
The speed differential within the global top 100 is immense. Global number one Taegu, South Korea (21.8 Mbps), for example, is more than three times faster than number 99 Hartford, CT (7.0 Mbps).
Akamai’s State of the Internet Report has some interactives where you can select metrics such as average speeds and broadband adoption against a global map. Not surprisingly, countries in the northern hemisphere perform much better than those in the south.
Image: Detail from the world’s fastest Internet cities from Akamai’s State of the Internet Report
If Your Brain Was a Hard Drive How Much Information Would it Hold?
Via Slate:
In its latest taunts directed at South Korea, North Korea’s state-run media has called South Korean President Lee Myung-bak “human scum” and an “underwit with 2MB of knowledge.” How many megabytes should a human brain be able to store?
A lot more than two. Most computational neuroscientists tend to estimate human storage capacity somewhere between 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes, though the full spectrum of guesses ranges from 1 terabyte to 2.5 petabytes. (One terabyte is equal to about 1,000 gigabytes or about 1 million megabytes; a petabyte is about 1,000 terabytes.)
The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.
Neuroscientists are quick to admit that these calculations are very simplistic. First, this math assumes that each synapse stores about 1 byte of information, but this estimate may be too high or too low. Neuroscientists aren’t sure how many synapses transmit at just one strength versus at many different strengths. A synapse that transmits at only one strength can convey only one bit of information—“on” or “off,” 1 or 0. On the other hand, a synapse that can transmit at many different strengths can store several bits. Secondly, individual synapses aren’t completely independent. Sometimes it may take several synapses to convey just one piece of information. Depending on how often this is the case, the 10-to-100-terabytes estimate may be much too large. Other problems include the fact that some synapses seem to be used for processing, not storage (suggesting that the estimate may be too high), and the fact that there are support cells that might also store information (suggesting that the estimate may be too low).
Now, I don’t know about you but it’s this last bit about processing that interests me. I’m not so concerned about the total amount of data my brain can hold. Instead its access — and the speed of access — to the data.
In other words, it’s RAM, drive speed and overall CPU that my brain needs an overall boost in. That and a spell checker. — Michael
I’d seen snippets raving about the iPad app, Paper, then a coworker showed it to me in person. I think I said something along the lines of “Oh my.”
It’s intuitive, creates a seamless experience and has absolutely gorgeous graphics. So naturally I had to download it and share with the Curiosity Counters. And whether for scribbling notes, sketching or showing off some serious artistic talent, this app is a wonderful (and useful) addition to any creators toolkit.
Enjoy!
FJP: Oh my, it is beautiful.
Data Tools, Data Challenges
Bitly Data Chief Hilary Mason explains how the company’s infrastructure is set up, what challenges she sees ahead for data science and offers a wish list of tools she hopes the community will come together to create.
Last week, we posted other segments from this interview. They include getting started with data and how to to work with data. They can be viewed here.
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