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SOPA in Memoriam
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If you didn’t know about SOPA before January 18th, you might not understand why your son failed his report on Edwin Vose Sumner. The internet was on strike, and he couldn’t look anything up on Wikipedia, which I assume is what you just did.
The largest online protest in history included, among its estimated 75,000 participating sites, Wikipedia, Google, Vimeo, Flickr, Mozilla, WordPress, Wired, Craigslist, MineCraft, reddit, and on and on. Some of the sites went completely dark, and others just censored their logo or something in between. They were protesting a couple bills that were coming up for discussion: SOPA and PIPA.
The full names of these bills are The Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, and its mouthful of a sister bill, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). I wonder how long it took legislators to come up with that clever acronym (PROTECT Intellectual Property Act).
The stated purpose of these bills was to give more power to those who police the web in order to prevent copyrighted works from being stolen. When artists have their work stolen and profited on by those without the will or ability to create anything of value for themselves, we all lose. The world becomes a bleaker and less creative place. Supporters of the bills include the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). (more…)
Pandora’s Box is Open
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For almost ten years, Pandora has been the biggest, although not the only, gun in town when it came to streaming music. Its utilization of advanced algorithms within the Music Genome Project, pairing music lovers with a deeper connection to what makes them happy using attributes rather than artists, was groundbreaking and ahead of its time. Sure, every once in a while Pandora decided your love of a minor key Stevie Wonder song must mean you love a dirge-like Bauhaus tune. This was the price to be paid. As in everything technological, however, time catches up, and Pandora is under siege by a number of newer and perhaps better alternatives.
Take, for example, Senzari. Still in beta testing and accessible by invite only, Senzari has an impressive number of advantages over Pandora. Most obvious is the selection of music—Senzari’s beta launch boasted 10 million songs (as opposed to Pandora’s roughly 900K), and it is available outside of the United States, something Pandora can’t offer. Additionally, Senzari integrates with Facebook seamlessly, allowing for a user to message friends and view their stations in real time. Although there are bugs to be worked out, the social media applications and the engaging design (including some fantastic artist photography) make Senzari a player. Senzari is scheduled to launch officially on three continents by the end of February.
Lorem Ipsum
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Anyone working in the print or design industry knows about lorem ipsum. It’s dummy text, meaning text you throw onto a page to hold the place of future copy. Dummy text lets you set up layout and design features without distracting the reader with temporary copy, but what is lorem ipsum?
Printers have been using lorem ipsum since the 1500s. The name of the printer who started it has been lost to history, but lorem ipsum has survived into the digital age. But, again, what is lorem ipsum?
Lorem ipsum is scrambled text from a work by Cicero written in 45 BC, de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). It’s mostly about pleasure and pain. And, so you can get a feel for what it’s all about, here’s a translated passage from which some of the text (pre-scrambled) was taken:
“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”
Circumstances in which toil and pain procure great pleasure? Yep, that’s pretty much the life of a designer.
Siri-ous Competition
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Siri is changing what it means to be mobile. The more we’re on the move, the more ridiculous it seems to have to stop and type on a tiny, clumsy keyboard to look something up or make an appointment. Now, if you have an iPhone 4S, you can just tell Siri what you need.
Tell Siri you want Italian food, and Siri will tell you where to get it along with restaurant ratings. Tell Siri you need to hide a body, and Siri will give you a list of reservoirs, mines, dumps, and swamps (really).
Siri, for the first time, makes voice a viable user interface. Earlier technologies were awkward, imprecise, and single task oriented. Siri is smart. It learns your habits and can answer questions based on context. It can distill what you want out of your natural speech, and the more you use it, the better it gets at understanding you and your user trends. Siri will update your calendar, transcribe and send email, check the weather, find a bookshop, make a call, or look up talking points on Wikipedia. It’ll even talk to you and read your messages to you.
Everyone expected Apple to get into the search game, but no one thought it would be like this. Apple slyly jumped into search under the guise of a voice activated assistant. Sneaky. We think Siri and its kind will forever change the way we search. It also means that Google won’t always be the gatekeeper since Siri also uses local and user-review sites like Yelp.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, went so far as to say Siri could pose a competitive threat to Google. Why? Because when you ask Siri to look up that seafood place at the intersection of Main and William, you don’t need to see a Google ad for Red Lobster. Siri bypasses user interaction with Google, which includes bypassing Google’s ads. But remember that we’re talking about Google here. Google’s been the reigning champ in search for a long time, and competition will only push them to do what they do best: innovate. Google, however, may be obliged to share a piece of the pie.
So how is the future looking now that Siri is in the picture? Search will start to change rapidly. Not only is Apple building up an immense amount of data on how people use Siri and how they can improve it, but competitors have been given a spur in the side. Search is about to change in two big ways: this new way to interact with our machines will breathe a second wind into the already powerful trend toward mobile. With a lot more of the process happening behind the scenes, Apple and Google will need to focus on both online and offline user experience to survive, which is good for us.
Siri is still technically in beta and the voice recognition can trip up on accents. The integration and interaction with databases and other iPhone applications make talking to Siri a meaningful exchange. And on a less technical note, Siri has personality.
Siri’s personality is probably what, at least in part, has fueled the rumors of the name. Siri was created by Dag Kittlaus, a Norwegian man who co-founded Siri in 2007 and got a fateful call from Steve Jobs last year with an offer to buy. While Siri, in Norwegian, means “beautiful and victorious,” there were rumors that Kittlaus named his company for Siri Kalvig, a business woman and famous meteorologist with whom he worked at Telenor. This caused some to theorize a co-worker crush. According to Kittlaus, however, he wanted to name his daughter Siri, but he had a son, so the name went to his company. And now, Siri may become a household name.
Remembering the Great Ones
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The technology industry lost a great innovator when Steve Jobs died this year at the age of 56. Jobs was known to demand center stage, which may have overshadowed the passing of Dennis Ritchie, Jean Bartik and Michael Hart. Without these visionaries, our favorite technologies, like Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle, may never have existed. Each contributed a unique and vital part to the history of technology, from the infrastructure to the language to the idea of freely sharing content. We would like to honor these giants of technology.
Dennis Ritchie (1941 – 2011)
Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language, which was a new philosophy in programming as much as it was a language. Concise and elegant, C and its progeny (including Java and C++) make up the world’s most popular programming languages. From this foundation, Ritchie, along with colleague Ken Thompson, developed UNIX—the predecessor of Linux and the heart and soul of many operating systems, including those of Apple.
Without Dennis Ritchie, personal computers and the Internet would not be what they are today.
Jean Bartik (1924 – 2011)
Jean Bartik was a lead programmer, one of the world’s first, on ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrator and Computer), the first all-electronic digital computer. Bartik, with a B.S. in mathematics, was employed by the Army as a computer (when the term referred to a person) to program ENIAC. She went on to help convert ENIAC into a stored program computer, reducing program set-up from weeks to hours, and later worked on UNIVAC, the first commercial computer.
At the time, Bartik and many other women programmers were not given the recognition they deserved. Bartik and her colleagues are now celebrated as pioneers of modern computing.
Michael Hart (1947 – 2011)
Michael Hart was the father of the e-book. On July 4th, 1971, he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer and made it available for download by users of Arpanet (a precursor to the Internet). This was the beginning of Project Gutenberg. Hart went on to hand type several books, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the King James Bible. He saw that information sharing was the future and he continued his work for decades before the world caught up.
Currently, Project Gutenberg offers more than 36,000 e-books in several languages. According to Hart, one of the goals of Project Gutenberg is to “help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.”
Detroit — “Call it Home,” a $1.6 million grant program, launched today as a partnership between Citizens Bank and Mayor Dave Bing’s Detroit Works Project.
Media Genesis, a Troy, Mich. Internet services firm, collaborated with Citizens Bank and The Detroit Works Project to brand, design and build the “Call it Home” website (http://MyDetroitHome.CitizensBanking.com). Media Genesis also created some of the map signage that was featured at the press conference Monday.
The program offers grants of up to $10,000 for exterior home improvements. When the home improvements are complete, the grant can be reimbursed for 50 percent of the homeowner’s pre-approved project, up to $10,000.
To qualify, current homeowners must reside in one of the five qualifying neighborhoods: East English Village, Boston Edison north end/Virginia Park, north Rosedale Park, Hubbard Farms southwest, Bagley/Detroit Golf Club/Green Acres/Palmer Woods/Sherwood Forest/University District.
Also, Citizens Bank is providing low-interest loans for home improvement projects to residents of Detroit and Wayne County.
Media Genesis is a leading Internet services firm based in Troy, Michigan. Media Genesis services more than 300 companies and nonprofit organizations. An in-house team provides a wide range of services including web design & development, e-learning, search engine optimization, application development, intranet, social networking, and content management systems. For more information on Media Genesis, please visit www.mediaG.com.
Cloning, space travel, and microwave ovens existed in fiction before their dawn as fact. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, born in 1892, may not have been cognizant of his own precognition, but foresaw the advent of our most powerful handheld device, the smartphone. More specifically he saw the one phone that would rule them all. Tolkien predicted the iPhone and veiled his prediction in The Lord of the Rings.
In the series, there were many rings distributed to various groups throughout the land. The rings given to the “Elven-kings under the sky” and the “Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone” are indicative of the Android OS devices, probably HTC and Motorola. And those for “Mortal Men doomed to die”? BlackBerry, of course.
But there was one more powerful than these, a single device that came from a mountainous and geothermally active region (California, clearly), and we believe this was Tolkien’s preview of the iPhone.
Evidence: (more…)
If you’re a pirate, the kind that might have a parrot on your shoulder, you may find using search engines frustrating. Few serve your unique language needs, such as the transposition of your common linking verbs and the unique application of determiners (e.g. “She is searching Google” becomes “She be searchin’ the Google, Arrr!”).
Take heart, because Google has hidden a surprise just for you. First, you need to turn off Google’s instant search feature. On the Google homepage, click the gear in the upper right, select “Search settings,” scroll down to “Google Instant,” select “Do not use Google Instant,” save your preferences, and you’re ready to go. Search for “xx-pirate” and click “I’m Feeling Lucky.” You should see all of your options change into a lexicon more familiar and comprehensible. The confusing use of “Images” becomes “Engravin’s.” “Maps” goes away, because what proper seafarer can’t navigate by the stars? (more…)
After clearing the world of Y2K mass hysteria, civilization stopped fearing a Maximum Overdrive dystopia and began to trust technology again. At the end of 2000, it was reported by Nua Internet Surveys that the number of people connected to the Internet passed 400 million.
Since 2000, we have seen new uses for technology that have forever changed the way we work and play. The evolution of how we interact with music alone could fill a novel, but we would like to note a few other high points in technology over the past 10 years.
2001: The AbioCor artificial heart, an artificial liver, a fuel cell bike invented by Aprilia, and digital satellite radio were introduced.
The year 2002 turned out to have some surprises… and robots! Her name was CoWorker and she was a 3 foot tall, Pentium-powered office robot. She had a built in digital camera, which sent a live feed of pictures directly to the boss. CoWorker moved at one mile per hour and had sonar sensors preventing her from running into people or walls.
2002: The wind up cell phone was invented and the Mars Odyssey found ice on Mars.
Between 2003 and 2006, the social network phenomenon began. In 2003, MySpace led the way, followed by Facebook in 2004, and Twitter bringing up the rear in 2006. Twitter and Facebook now dominate. MySpace, the only social network out of the three giants which lets users manipulate the look of their space, has fallen short by comparison.
The camera phone emerged in 2003, but its reception was not unanimously positive. The Saudi Arabian government outlawed the devices completely. In the U.S., camera phones were banned in health clubs and corporate headquarters.
Time.com reported that 80 million camera phones were sold by November of 2003. At that time, most stand-alone digital cameras were only around three to four megapixels. Today, Apple’s iPhone 4 has a five megapixel camera with an LED flash built in.
It was in 2007 that Steve Jobs wowed the world with the first iPhone. Lev Grossman wrote on Time.com that the iPhone was the year’s best invention for five reasons: It’s pretty; it’s touchy-feely; it will make other phones better; it’s not a phone, it’s a platform; and it is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come.
With the launch of the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the iPhone is considered by many to be the smartest phone. New features include FaceTime (video chat), the aforementioned camera features, HD video recording, video editing, and much more.
2007: The Electro Needle Biomedical Sensor Array and Functionalized Nanoporous Thin Film were invented.
User generated and commercial video became virulently popular online over the past decade. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim struck gold when they launched YouTube in 2005. In May of 2010, YouTube passed the two-billion views per day milestone. In 2008, Hulu launched, allowing users to view network shows and movies online.
2008: The retail DNA test, the time eater clock, and the Nexi MDS Robot were introduced.
Between 2009 and 2010, the cult of the social network continued its undaunted growth. Facebook surpassed 500 million users. The online and offline worlds began to mingle with services like Foursquare, a network of users who post updates about real-world features of cities. Users earn rank as they help people find the best things to do in their area through a live feed.
Developing in tandem with online environments were platforms to access them. The iPad was launched in April of 2010. Like the iPhone, the iPad offered a touchscreen, Wi-Fi, and 3G. With 16, 32, or 64 GB flash drives, a 9.7 inch screen, and 1024 × 768 pixels with LED backlighting, the iPad delivered a new way to compute. It also spurred on the progress of the tablet computer, which is expected to be one of the technology milestones of 2011.
2009 and 2010: The first consumer jet pack, the first synthetic cell, the straddling bus, and hologram pop stars made their debut.
The past 10 years have delivered too many innovations to mention. We didn’t even touch on eBook readers or the next generation of 3D entertainment. We can only imagine what will come in the next decade. What do you think we’ll see over the next 10 years?
Online technologies, hand-in-hand with their benefits, have a dark side: The dichotomy of undesirable public exposure and the perception of impersonal automation. Workfolio offers a solution to both.
“Workfolio elegantly solves the problem of how workforces represent themselves on the web.” – Mykolas Rambus, former CIO, Forbes Media
Workfolio provides a moderated environment for associate representation to the public as well as within an organization. Employees can develop their outward and inward facing content with tools that are remarkably intuitive and require no coding or software installation.
According to Advertising Age, 77 percent of business people search online before meeting someone. In a world where the Internet is ubiquitous, it is detrimental to prevent employees from having a web presence. Individual creative freedom and reputation management coexist within Workfolio, as the representative’s unique site supports and works in concert with the overall brand identity.
The idea for this innovative platform solidified in June of 2006, concurrent with the wave of social media development that became the smashing successes of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. These public portals demonstrated the value of open information exchange.
Charles Pooley, former president of The Side Project, an award winning online development and advertising firm, wanted to create a new way to blend company and associate web presences. His vision was to embrace the benefits of a social media platform, but not hazard the risks.
Workfolio breaks away from the cookie-cutter employee list, allowing personalized visibility to cultivate trust. According to Zatso, 66 percent of people prefer personalized content over traditional marketing information.
Information, however, must be shared internally as well. Workfolio functions as an intranet with directories, knowledge mapping, and collaboration tools. These tools allow for effective and efficient team building and make each employee’s skills a known resource to the organization.
“Workfolio allows organizations to capture, locate, and share knowledge like never before.” – Matt Parsons, VP Sales, ADP
The associate’s site becomes a separate yet connected and controlled personal website, which enhances and promotes the brand. Greater individual visibility creates greater organizational visibility, expanding the search engine footprint in a way similar to how content shared on Facebook affects search engine optimization.
This platform creates a unique atmosphere of public and private information flow. Workfolio can be:
- A tool for official communication with clients or within an organization
- A tool for self-administered workforce knowledge mapping
- An advertising platform
- A customer portal for interaction with employees
- A tool for collaboration and virtual team development
- A company intranet with an innovative content management system
- A media kit
- A staff directory
- A multimedia social network
A leader in online workforce representation, Workfolio is a highly versatile, cost effective, user-friendly platform that can be used to fill the reputation management and web presence needs of corporations, organizations, and even individuals. For more information, including a video tour and free trial, please visit www.Workfolio.com.
