Autologin allows to auto login a user by only passing username and password thru request variables ([user] and [passw]) e.s. http://www.domain.com/index.php?user=admin&passw=password

AiJSlideToggle is a joomla plugin gives you slidetoggle in joomla contents. You can add multiple slidetoggle in contents item.

With AdminBar Docker you can undock the admin toolbars to keep them in view when scrolling through long admin pages. Also it helps you quickly jump to the top or bottom of your admin page. Once you've started using this, it is hard to imagine how to work without it! :) How to use it: http://www.nonumber.nl/adminbardocker Changelog: http://www.nonumber.nl/adminbardocker/changelog Keep up to date: http://www.nonumber.nl/news Support forum: http://www.nonumber.nl/forum Please do not use the reviews to post support issues. Use my forum for that.

Joomla Latest News Vinazoom Slice effect is written for Joomla 1.5 module. Building on the foundation of the default Latest News module for Joomla, and library jquery effects. Joomla Latest News Module Vinazoom Slice effect allows to display articles, with photos and short introtext. Integrated applications Fade Slider form of jquery. Create nice effects for the website. Applications written on the standard JQuery library, a library leading applications javascript. Use 100% presented in standard CSS. Module also built many parameters, allowing users to customize to fit your website. The order set module simple, similar to the normal sequence of installing Joomla. After installation you can access the Admin panel of Joomla to set the parameters of the module as follows: * Count: The number of articles displayed * Width of slice: slice width frame * Height of slice: The height of the frame slice * Width of image intro: the width of Image articles * Height of image intro: the height of image articles * Max char of intro: maximum number of characters of the description article * Duration: switch between two time frames slice (milliseconds) * Order: sort order display articles * Author: filter posts by author * Section ID: the ID of the section filter article (can select multiple section) * Category ID: filter by category ID of the article (can select multiple category) * Module class suffix: support customized presentation module. Ask me or donate for remove the back link!

* Joomla 1.5.x (Native) * Slide Width * Slide Height * Display Images (Random / Latest) * Show Title (Yes / No) * Show Description (Yes / No) * Entry Link (Read More / Learn More) * Image Option (Origional / Thumbnail) * Number of images display

DM Analytics Pro inserts Google Analytics code directly on your site, with a simple and easy-to-configure module. DM Analytics Pro's main and unique feature is the possiblity to configure, directly from the module, the Google Analytics account's link to Adsense: DM analytics Pro inserts the needed code in your site, and will allow you to view Adsense data directly in your Analytics profile once you have configured your Analytics account. This feature proves highly useful when needing to monitor more than one Adsense-enabled site.

The module shows your latest news/articles with tooltip showing first few words of the articles when you hover your mouse over the article title. Some features of this module are: * Allows you to set number of articles/news this module shows * You can change the date format * Allows you to set the category and section of articles the module shows * others

SAML2 authentication support for Joomla! This extension adds SAML2 based Single Sign On support to a Joomla website. Based on simpleSAMLphp SP is compatible with any IdP or Federation that implements the 'Interoperable SAML2 Profile' (e.g. Shibboleth2)

Provides button to insert the favorite TypoCSS element to the article.

the elegant module that display the alexa traffic rank and google pagerank in a single professionally designed button. the module is one step install.

2009-11-22 01:47:58 by JavierDeLorenzo

Successful retailers retain their customers, and that's how they become successful. :) Here, our guest blogger Michelle talks about retaining the customers. Michelle Strassburg heads the sales and marketing at wood and beyond that sells hardwood flooring. Winning new customers is often easier than keeping them! Not too dissimilar to other types of relationships, business or personal, you must work hard to make sure the other party is happy. Retaining customers creates a happy relationship...

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2009-11-20 17:18:31 by PhilDaintree

I'm on the board of CommonCrawl.Org, a nonprofit corporation that is attempting to provide a web crawl for use by all. An interesting report just got sent to us about the use of robots.txt files within the .Gov Top Level Domain, a standard known as the Robots Exclusion Standard.

In examining about 32,000 subdomains in .gov, it turns at least 1,188 of these have a robots.txt file with a "global disallow," meaning robots are excluded from indexing this content. Even more curious, on 175 of these sites, while there is a global disallow, there is a specific bypass that allows the Googlebot to index the data. You can look at the raw data on Factual.

At Public.Resource.Org, we've always felt that the use of a robots.txt file by the government should only be used for purposes of security and integrity of the site, not because some webmaster arbitrarily decides they don't want to be indexed. Indeed, on several occasions we have deliberately ignored government imposed robots.txt files because we felt this was an arbitrary and illegal attempt to keep the public out.

And, needless to say, it doesn't make any sense at all to let in some webcrawlers and not let in others. If this is a reaction to a security/integrity issue, such as limited capacity, the proper thing to do is include in the robots.txt file a comment that can be used by other bots to explain what is going on. For example, it could be perfectly reasonable for a government group faced with limited capacity to ask a robot to limit crawls to a certain number of queries per second and only whitelist crawlers that agree to that condition.

Government webmasters should use the robots.txt file sparingly, and should do so in a non-discriminatory fashion.

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).

Compared to the U.S., the proportion of Facebook users in their teens (13-17) or in the 18-25 age group are much higher in Asia:

As was the case in other parts of the world, expect the share of users 45 and older to climb as Facebook becomes more mainstream in Asia. Growth was strong across all age groups in Asia over the last 12 weeks, particularly among teens (+90%) and the 18-25 age group (+60%).

In other regions, notably North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, growth in the 18-25 age bracket, lagged behind users 45 and older.

In closing I want to highlight countries (within several regions) where Facebook has been growing rapidly:

In Europe, growth has been fastest in the East: as an example, the number of active users in Poland doubled over the last 12 weeks. Growth in Southeast Asia remains strong in countries that have been home to Friendster's core user base. While Facebook added over 800,000 active users in Brazil, for now Orkut remains the dominant social network in South America's most populous country.

1. Spokeo -- abysmal indictment of society, first prize in mankind's race to the bottom. Uncover personal photos, videos, and secrets ... GUARANTEED! Spokeo deep searches within 48 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers. PS, anybody who gives their gmail username and password to a site that specializes in dishing dirt can only be described as a fucking idiot. (via Jim Stogdill, who was equally disappointed in our species)
2. Biologists rally to sequence 'neglected' microbes (Nature) -- The Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea is project to sequence genomes from more branches of the evolutionary tree of life. Eisen's team selected and sequenced more than 100 'neglected' species that lacked close relatives among the 1,000 genomes already in GenBank. The researchers reported earlier this year at the JGI's Fourth Annual User Meeting that even mapping the first 56 of these microbes' genomes increased the rate of discovery of new gene and protein families with new biological properties. It also improved the researchers' ability to predict the role of genes with unknown functions in already sequenced organisms. (via Jonathan Eisen)
3. Mail Learning: The What and the How (Simon Cozens) -- a few things that a really good mail analysis tool needs to do. I hope that my mail client and server does these out of the box in the next five years.
4. Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement -- The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. Applying the open source approach to better standards.

We have recently been asked to jot down a few website extensions and updates that we have implemented recently. Screen Pages has a team whose sole purpose is to extend existing websites - fundamental to our approach of creating bespoke...

Healthcare is one of the biggest industries in the world. The United States spends over 17% of its GDP on healthcare and the issue of the industry's future is being hotly debated in Congress. Whatever happens to other elements of health reform, health information technology will play a key role in moving us towards the goal of bending the cost curve and improving quality and clinical outcomes. A Personal Health Record (PHR) is one way that patients can have some control of their own health data, while providing an interoperable platform for sharing relevant clinical data between providers. Healthcare is changing rapidly and there are some important trends worth watching.

Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.

For example, Google announced at the Health 2.0 conference that they have entered into a partnership to provide telehealth services through their Google Health platform using MDLiveCare. With the integration of MDLiveCare technology, Google can provide a service that offers patients access to doctors from remote locations, via webcam or telephone, into its personal health record offering. This will be particularly valuable for those who are caring for their loved ones from far away. My family is scattered around the country and caring for our mother with advanced stage Alzheimer's was quite a challenge that would have benefited from this type of service.
Here is a screenshot of Google Health:

"Patients remember less than 25% of what they're told when they consult with a doctor,” said Bob Smoley, CEO, MDLiveCare, in the statement. "By directly synchronizing the information that's shared…we're able to provide patients with a convenient solution to review their physician or therapist encounters."

"We strongly believe that the patient has the right to control their own health data," said Product Manager of Google Health Roni Zeiger, MD a practicing Internist who also works in urgent care. "You can now request an online consultation with a physician. At the end of the visit the doctor documents the encounter and it is immediately sent to your Google Health account and you will have a complete record of the doctor's notes."

Also, Microsoft has introduced My Health Info as part of HealthVault. My Health Info is an interactive and customizable dashboard that allows people to view all their health information: Blood pressure, blood glucose, BMI, immunizations, allergies, lab results, medications, steps walked, health articles and more, in a single, organized, and convenient location. It connects with HealthVault so information updated in one product is automatically updated in the other. This service offers tools and widgets to upload, organize and monitor health information stored in their personal HealthVault accounts. The service also allows people to research medical concerns, read the latest health news, gain guidance from medical experts, learn about nutrition, and monitor conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes.

This is the main screen for My Health Info: "As consumers are increasingly being asked to manage more of their health and wellness, they are looking for solutions that help them navigate an overwhelming amount of information, enabling them to take control of their personal health data," said David Cerino, General Manager of Consumer Health in Microsoft Health Solutions Group. Marguerite Yeo, Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft HealthVault told me about Online Care deployed by Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA) an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Online Care, enhanced by Microsoft Healthvault, allows patients to see physicians immediately, through live consultations via Web or phone. By providing access to doctors anytime in the patient‘s home, health plans like HMSA have the opportunity to shift healthcare to less expensive care settings when appropriate.

Another company that is doing some interesting work in this area is Practice Fusion. Practice Fusion is a free, Web-based electronic health record service for physicians. They recently announced the launch of Patient Fusion, their new PHR, at Dreamforce 2009 in San Francisco, salesforce.com's user and developer conference.

"The healthcare and life sciences community is a rapidly growing sector," said Clarence So, Senior Vice President of Strategy, salesforce.com. "The Force.com platform allows companies like Practice Fusion to quickly innovate around a common objective for improving health." Through Patient Fusion, doctors grant patients instant access to their medical records, medications and immunization history. Updates to the patient's records are available in real-time in the cloud. Patients will also be able to schedule appointments, request prescription refills, email their physicians, and, most importantly, share their data with other providers at any time.

Here is a shot of the main Health Manager screen:

They also announced ChartShare, a feature which allows users to have real-time access to patient records in a familiar and interactive format. All authorized users can access records simultaneously. This enables care providers to share clinical data and allows real time collaboration and consultation.

"Practice Fusion continues to innovate in the healthcare market by offering a free Web-based PHR that is an extension of the practitioners' EHR. We're unlocking the physician EHR to give patients access and control over their own health data," said Ryan Howard, the CEO of Practice Fusion. He also told me, "The January release of Patient Fusion will allow the same ability that physicians now have using ChartShare for portability of data on the patient side."

Whether it is by using a platform like Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health, or a SaaS model EMR/PHR like Practice Fusion, the options for patients and providers to coordinate care using Web 2.0 technology is making great strides. We will increasingly see platforms that provide virtual visits with care providers, and greater use of the web for tasks like making appointments, medication and therapy reminders, and making payments. I look forward to the day when I can login for a consultation with my doctor as easily as I Skype with my friends around the world. The future of healthcare is here, and it is beginning to be distributed.

We're thrilled to see that our client Real Flowers has won another Walpole award - this time for best emerging luxury brand....

1. Chumby One (Bunnie Huang) -- new Chumby product released. In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it’s not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There’s also a knob so you can easily/quickly adjust the volume. But I don’t think those are really the significant new features. What really gets me excited about this one is that it’s much more hackable.
2. Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer (John Resig) -- very sexy deep inspection of Internet Explorer. Finally, something IE does better than Firefox (other than exploits). dynaTrace Ajax works by sticking low-level instrumentation into Internet Explorer when it launches, capturing any activity that occurs - and I mean virtually any activity that you can imagine. (via Simon Willison)
3. Less Than Free -- begins by talking about Google giving away turn-by-turn directions on Android, and then analyses Google's "less than free" business model: Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line - because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!
4. Expert Labs -- a new independent initiative to help policy makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens. How does it work? Simple: 1. We ask policy makers what questions they need answered to make better decisions. 2. We help the technology community create the tools that will get those answers. 3. We prompt the scientific & research communities to provide the answers that will make our country run better. New non-profit from Anil Dash.

2009-11-18 22:24:23 by JavierDeLorenzo

Recently, Open Source Matters received an unsolicited proposal for the management of http://demo.joomla.org. After consideration and consultation with the Community Oversight Committee, the OSM board the Community Oversight Committee determined that, in the interest of fairness, others should also be invited to submit proposals.

Open Source Matters is requesting proposals for the management of the Joomla!^® demo site (http://demo.joomla.org). The existing Joomla!^® demo site has been highly successful, with an average of 25,000 registrations monthly. OSM reasonably expects the number of registrations to increase with more prominent displays of the links to the site on the joomla.org family of websites. The joomla.org sites now receive approximately 5 million visits per month.

This is an open and competitive process. Responses to this RFP ("proposals") received after December 9, 2009 will not be considered.

To learn more about the detailed requirements, please read the complete Request for Proposals.

1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
3. Mapsicle -- open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
4. Freedom of Creation Shop -- online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).

Last year as the economy was in the throes of a recession, there was a lot of speculation on consumer behavior, and retailers feared that their holiday sales would take a hit. They slashed prices to lure customers, there were70 percent markdowns on merchandise. This year, the story is slightly different. Retailers are trying to boost their holiday sales through promotions and not mere discounts. Some promotions are aimed at e-mail subscribers, though most deals are featured on the website...

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The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket.

On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them. Alasdair Allan (the University of Exeter and Babilim Light Industries) and Jeffrey Powers (Occipital) will be among the speakers, and I recently spoke with each of them about how the iPhone has evolved as a sensing platform and the new and interesting things being done with the device.

Occipital is probably best known for Red Laser, the iPhone scanning application that lets you point the camera at a UPC code and get shopping information about the product. With recent iPhone OS releases, applications can now overlay data on top of a real time camera display, which has led to the new augmented reality applications. But according to Powers, the ability to process the camera data is still not fully supported, which has left Red Laser in a bit of a limbo state. "What happened with the most recent update is that the APIs for changing the way the camera screen looks were opened up pretty much completely. So you can customize it to make it look any way you want. You can also programmatically engage photo capture, which is something you couldn't do before either. You could only send the UI up and the user would have to use the normal built-in iPhone UI to capture. So you can do this programmatic data capturing, and you can process those images that come in. But as it turns out, at the same time, shortly after 3.1, the method that a lot of people were using to get the raw data while it was streaming in became a blacklisted function for the review team. So we've actually had a lot of trouble as of late getting technology updates through the App Store because the function we're using is now on a blacklist. Whereas it wasn't on a blacklist for the last year."

Powers is hopeful that the next release of the OS will bring official support for the API calls that Red Laser uses, based on the fact that the App Store screeners aren't taking down existing apps that use the banned APIs. Issues with the iPhone camera sensors pose more of a problem for him. "In terms of science, it's definitely a really bad sensor, especially if you look at the older iPhone sensor, because it has what's called a rolling shutter. A rolling shutter means that as you press capture or rather as the camera is capturing video frames or as you capture a frame, the camera then begins to take an image. And it takes a finite number of milliseconds, maybe 50 or so, before it is actually exposed to the entire frame and stored that off into a sensor. Because it's doing something that's more like a serial data transfer instead of this all at once parallel capture of the entire frame, what that causes is weird tearing and odd effects like that. For photography, as long as it's not too dramatic, it's not a huge deal. For vision processing, it's a huge deal because it breaks a lot of assumptions that we typically make about the camera. That has gotten better in the 3GS camera, but it's still not perfect. It is getting better, especially when the camera's turned on the video mode."

One thing that has significantly improved with the iPhone 3GS is the actual camera optics. Most people know that the 3G and the first gen phone don't have autofocus at all. So their optics is just a fixed-focus simple plastic lens that doesn't allow you to focus up close. For anybody trying to do macro imagery, something up close, you're just not going to be able to do it on the 3G or the first gen phone. When we set out to build our application, we specifically had to work around that problem. A lot of why our application was successful was because we did focus on that problem. Then in the 3GS, the autofocus mode was enabled which is actually a motor-based autofocus system that can autofocus not only on the center of the image, but also somewhere that you pick specifically. And one more thing is that the autofocus system doesn't just change the focus, it also changes the exposure, which is something a lot of people don't notice. "

Another benefit the 3GS has brought to the table for vision processing is the dramatically increased processor speed. "With the 3GS, it's actually an incredibly powerful device," says Powers. "So we think right now that there's actually a lot of power there that hasn't been exposed. So I mean, there obviously are limits. But I don't think we've seen software that really hits those limits. Honestly, the limits that we're seeing right now are just in the SDK and what you can and can't do. One of the things about the iPhone is, as I was alluding to earlier when I talked about previous problems with the Android which are now being addressed, is that you could code at the lowest level on the iPhone, whereas you could not code at the lowest level on the Android. What that means to the iPhone is that you can actually write on ARM assembly if you want.

Almost everyone who's doing any sort of image processing today on the iPhone isn't taking advantage of that. We are to a very small extent in Red Laser, but there's certainly juice that can be extracted by just spending time optimizing for the platform, which is something that the iPhone lets you do. And the other thing to add to that is there are new instructions enabled by the ARM 7 Instruction Set which is used on the 3GS, which wasn't available previously. And, again, I actually haven't heard of anyone utilizing those functions yet. So there's a lot of power there that is yet to be exposed."

Although the iPhone has been an interesting platform for Powers, he is turning his attention toward the Droid at the moment. "From our perspective, we would love to keep developing our vision software on the iPhone, but because of the fact that the APIs are so restrictive right now and we have no ETA on when that'll be fixed, we're actually looking to the Android now, specifically, the new Droid, as an interesting platform for computer vision and image processing in real-time. Again, if it's not a real-time task, the iPhone's a great platform. If you can just snap an image, process it, you can do anything on the iPhone that has that characteristic. But if you want to process in real-time, Android is really your best bet right now because of the fact that A, the APIs do let you access the video frames and B, you can now actually write on the metal of the device and write things in C and C++ with the new Android OS which, again, you couldn't do before. "

Alasdair Allan is approaching the iPhone from a different direction, using it as a way for astronomers to control their telescopes remotely while "sitting in a pub." While he's seen some primitive scientific applications of the iPhone for thing such as distributed earthquake monitoring, he thinks that the real benefit of the iPhone over the next few years will be as a visualization tool using AR.

That isn't to say that he isn't impressed with the wide variety of sensors available on the iPhone. "You have cellular for the phones. All of the devices have wifi. And most of the devices, apart from the first gen iPod Touch have Bluetooth. You, of course, have audio-in and speaker. The audio-in is actually quite interesting because you can hack that around and actually use it for other purposes. You can use the audio-in as an acoustic modem into an external keyboard for the iPhone, I think that's in iPhone Hacks, the book. It's quite interesting. Then on the main sensor side, you've got the accelerometer, the magnetometer, the digital compass. It's got an ambient light sensor, a proximity sensor, a camera, and it's also got the ability to vibrate. "

According to Allan, the iPhone sensor that the least people know about is the proximity sensor. "The proximity sensor is an infrared diode. I think it's actually now a pair of infrared diodes in the iPhone 3G. It's the reason why when you put your iPhone to your head, the screen goes blank. It basically just uses this infrared LED near the earpiece to detect reflections from large objects, like your head. If you actually take a picture of the iPhone when it's in call mode, with a normal web cam, you'd actually be able to see right next to the earpiece a sort of glowing red dot which is the proximity sensor. Because, of course, web cam CCDs are sensitive in the infrared so it would actually show up. This was a bit of a scandal early on in the iPhone's life. The original Google Search app used undocumented SDK call to use this so you could actually speak into the speech search, and Apple and everyone really was very annoyed about this. So they actually enabled it for everyone in the 3.0 SDK."

Unfortunately, Allan doesn't know of anyone who has been able to make practical use of the prox sensor, partially because it has such a short range. On the other hand, the newly added magnetometer in the 3GS has opened the door to a host of AR applications. But Allan points out that like any magnetic compass, it can be very sensitive to metal and other magnetic interference in the surrounding environment. "It is very susceptible to local changing magnetic field monitors, CPUs, TVs, anything like that will affect it quite badly."

Also, he adds, to do any really accurate AR applications, you need to use the sensors in concert. "By default, what you're measuring, of course, is the ambient magnetic field of the Earth. And that's how you can use it as a digital compass, because there are tables that will show you how to do deviations from magnetic north to true north, depending on your latitude and longitude. Which is why to do augmented reality apps, you need both the accelerometer and the magnetometer, so it can get your pitch and roll to the device and the GPS to get the latitude and longitude so you know the deviation from true north."

Allan thinks that although the current sensor suite has limited uses for scientific data capture, things will improve quickly. "I think the science usage is definitely going to grow. When the sensor get slightly more sophisticated than they are today, for instance gyros or you can imagine slightly better accelerometers or light sensors or sort of other things. You could even put LPG or methane gas sensors in there very easily. They're both sensors that are very small now. You could certainly get going in science doing environmental monitoring, all of that sort of stuff going very easily. And it would quite easily piggyback off sort of social networking ideas as well. I do see the very high-end smartphones contributing to growth in citizen-level science and people in the street getting out to do science and help people build large datasets that can actually be used to predict long-term trends and that sort of thing."

Powers concurs. "It behaves more like a tricorder than a communicator, right, because certainly voice communicating isn't all we're doing anymore. And I think if you take voice communication as a fraction of the utilization of a phone, you're going to see that there's definitely a trend that goes down all the time. I don't think it'll ever go to zero, but it'll certainly go to a smaller fraction. At the same time, the sensors are increasing. I would like to see not necessarily barometric or environment measurement sensors, but things like solid-state gyroscopes on phones and maybe a pair of cameras and maybe even different sensors that can allow us to read credit cards and do transactions on the device. I think there's even some talk of that appearing in the next gen iPhone so you can actually do transactions just by swiping your phone into a register. So I would agree with the assessment that they're becoming more like tricorder."

I've been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. This is what the White House and others have termed a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government.

Unfortunately, the engagement for the most part is not very authentic nor meaningful. Boring "fan pages" on Facebook are one example I've written about, but there are many others. Often, engagement, when it does happen has so many rules associated with it, or such a high barrier to entry, or such a limited window as to be practically meaningless.

It seems to me that everyone can celebrate the fact that government entities merely have a YouTube channel here, a Twitter account there, or a Blogger profile some other place (the so-called "TGIF revolution"), or we can think a little harder about what the goals of citizen engagement really might be, and how to go about achieving them. But first, a personal example of responsiveness and engagement from the private sector.

On the evening of Nov 2nd, I tweeted from my phone about a local DC restaurant, Co Co Sala, just as I was leaving. We had a nice experience, but the hostess had been a little, shall we say, disinterested in helping us? So I commented as much.

Less than a week later, the co-owner of Co Co Sala sent me an email and cc'd his general manager. He apologized for the treatment I experienced, assured me it was not policy, introduced me to the manager, and said he'd talk to his staff. It was a four-paragraph email. I've never met him before, and furthermore, my personal email is discoverable but not the most easy thing to find.

This is what real social innovation looks like. This is what customer service looks like. This is what true engagement with stakeholders looks like. I want to give this great lounge Co Co Sala a hearty shout-out for not only having a great product, but also really caring about their customers.

Now, imagine we weren't talking about a restaurant here. Imagine we are talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Patent and Trademark Office, or your Congressman. If you tweeted, would they see it? Would they care? Would they react in any way? I think the answer in many cases is no. And when was the last time you gave the DMV a shout-out for a job well done?

Let's look at a sliver of data. According to TweetStats.com, the people behind the White House Twitter account reply to individuals less than 2% of the time, and seem to have never @ replied to any single more than once (i.e., they have never come close to a conversation). They re-tweet others' tweets about 6.5% of the time, but they only seem to re-tweet other government accounts and the New York Times. Granted, there are more people tweeting about White House issues than Co Co Sala, but does the above data represent any caring in any way, shape or form?

The terrific techPresident blog recently noted that actor Vin Diesel is the single most followed living person on Facebook - and that he recently passed up President Obama. Perhaps that's because Vin Diesel's Facebook fan page is awesome. He is engaged, his fans are engaged, and the tone is informal and fun. There are also many other high-profile people who have taken the plunge into innovative social engagement; my favorite at the moment is Alyssa Milano.

So when exactly did "serious and formal" become a substitute for "informative and meaningful" in government circles? And why is everyone scared of letting their guard down in public? People and entities that innovate and use new social networking tools to engage with stakeholders will be winners. The ones that don't will be losers in the long run. It's that simple.

If a goal of Government 2.0 is to provide citizens better services, and a strategy towards reaching that goal is to use social media tools to communicate better with citizens on multiple channels, it seems to me that listening and responding better to comments and complaints would be a great tactic.

The reason why people still cite the TSA's blog as a good example of citizen engagement is because few other outstanding examples of federal government social media engagement seem to have emerged in 2009. What does 2010 have in store?

It is somewhat outside the scope of this post, but my guess is that more and more local government responsiveness and engagement is happening. We heard some of those stories at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in September. What are some new ones that the feds should hear about?

1. Digital Natives (Ze Frank) -- digital natives have grown up in a landscape where access to information and influence has been flattened. they have watched media distribution bottlenecks in the form of networks and studios lose influence to youtube and independent production houses. They have watched companies bow down to viral video critiques, and watched political systems get hacked by social networks. this is a generation that doesn't understand restrictions on access to media if those restrictions are inefficient or obviously detrimental to the system as a whole. this is a generation that has been at war with DRM and copyright right from the start. it is a generation awash with free tutorials and download-able source code. When is a conversation with a precocious 17 year old a glimpse into an inter-generational gulf with implications for the role and status of formal education, and when is it just an encounter with a brat? Ze's piece is worth reading, whichever way it comes out.
2. ICU64 -- an open source Commodore 64 emulator (Frodo) hacked to visually and textually display memory. Watch the video embedded below, it's hypnotic and seductive. It immediately made me want one for my programs (without having to port my code back to 6502 assembler). (via waxy whose return from pneumonia is greatly welcomed)
3. Me and Belle du Jour -- interesting story from a UK blog master who guessed her identity but kept it secret, creating a googlewhacked page as a tripwire to let him know when someone else guessed. He tipped her off that her cover was blown. (via waxy again)
4. The Hail Mary Cloud -- the world's slowest yet effective brute force attack. If you publish your user name and password, somebody who is not you will use it, sooner or later. A botnet is brute-force trying every known username and password combination against every known ssh server. Each attempt in theory has monumental odds against succeeding, but occasionally the guess will be right and they have scored a login. As far as we know, this is at least the third round of password guessing from the Hail Mary Cloud (see the archives for earlier postings about slow bruteforcers), but there could have been earlier rounds that escaped our attention.

The view from the eye of a recession isn't great. When companies are going bust, unemployment growing, and everyone's scouring their budgets for costs to cut, it can be hard to see opportunities. However, when Tim pointed to Stephen O'Grady's fine set of 2010 predictions I found myself popping with "oh, so naturally this will happen next ..." thoughts. Think of this as a glimpse of the blue sky after the economic funnelspout that's demolished our economy. (Continuations of the tornado metaphor with "being sucked into the cloud", or "trailer park economics", or "we're not in Kansas any more, Tantek" left as an exercise to the reader)

1. As every cloud provider creates their own "open API" (itself a fraught term), look to see the rise of brokers who can migrate you from one cloud to another. Deltacloud is an early free project here from RedHat, but there are many business opportunities waiting. It's possible that companies will pay for assurance (you've tested your migration tool, you know it works on corner cases), service vs product (they don't want tools to run, they want to pay you to install and maintain the tools accessible through a web console), or premium services so that you're a partner helping them get the most from the cloud and not simply a vendor.
2. We're a long way from sated in the world of collaboration tools. The current rage is mail learning, applying machine learning techniques to email so as to better understand social networks and prioritise incoming email messages and these are largely server-based solutions because it's so hard to get access to the desktop/web clients. Should Google Mail create an app store environment with hooks into the backend, the game could be on for consumer plays around email analytics, prediction, and simply smarter behaviour (why does my email client still not tell me when I say "see attached" yet don't have an attachment in the message?).
3. Beyond email, many interesting tools have sprung up around the Gov 2.0 space that have applicability within organisations. Yammer has done well to bring Twitter to large companies, but there are still opportunities around simple document markup and suggestion gathering and filtering. Solve a real problem and there's money waiting.
4. Google's low overhead management is made possible by its automated intranet and the visibility into projects from public code repositories, public smoke builds, and public status blogs. The opportunities to sell this into large companies looking to be "more like Google" are huge.
5. If Stephen's right that datasets are increasingly viewed as "serious, balance sheet-worthy assets" then the world is going to need some serious balance sheet-worthy help in valuing those assets.
6. Big data is being democratised, but there's a lot of unmet need in businesses around data warehousing. The typical solution is to build a data warehouse team around a product like Oracle, but I've heard plenty of business people grizzling about the result. They want answers, they don't want the headaches and lag that a data warehouse involve. Big Data (or Cloud Analytics or whatever) may be the opportunity to figure out a new minimum viable product for these folks, and offer it without the "data warehouse" baggage. This might be back end, might be UIs, might be visualisation, but all of these have a lot of room for improvement.
7. The proliferation of developer targets immediately makes me think of the early PC era. It makes sense to proliferate: let the most useful ("successful") bubble to the top and survive naturally. At this point in the evolution of the scaleout of massively multiplayer online programming languages, we don't know exactly what winning looks like: it's a big feedback loop between the people who build the programming languages and the people with problems to solve (there are always more of the latter than former) and each time we go around it we know more about what is and isn't useful in this brave new world of coding for other people's data centres. Opportunity? Join the mob and write your own programming language, or simply take your commercial opportunity for a spin around the many different languages out there and be the first in your niche to find a good fit between problem space and solution tool.
8. Stephen's throwaway comment "I’ve never subscribed to the idea that only what can be measured can be managed - open source, in particular, belies that claim" seems like a thrown gauntlet on open source analytics. In particular, I suspect there's a tools opportunity around the nebulous "community manager" role that every company seems to need. It's part CRM, it's part developer tool, it's part tech support, and part camp mother. Usefully quantify aspects of open source development and help companies that are doing it to know how they're doing and what they could do better.
9. Marketplaces are big in mobile, but I look to other areas as ripe for the picking. For example, if Google Apps are catching on in many companies then a plugin marketplace is a natural extension. It would build out the Apps suite faster than Google can, would enable the tight loop between demand and supply that will drive the product along, and make Google's offering very different from other parties. This is also true of Microsoft and others, but I feel like momentum is more with Google's product than the others. (A feature can push a leader further in front, but rarely helps a laggard leapfrog to the lead)
10. Every marketplace thus far has been flawed. Apple's famously annoys many developers and blocks huge categories of product (the "don't be better than we are" rule, which is hard to justify as being in the customer's interest), but don't forget Palm's impedance mismatch with jwz's open source code. I think the final chapter on how marketplaces work is far from written.
11. NoSQL tools remain in their infancy and so there are huge opportunities here. Identify a niche ("fast accurate and timely web metrics for decision-making"), a tool that can solve it (MongoDB), and build the deployment, scaling, administration, reporting tools so you can sell a complete package into that niche. Rinse, lather, repeat.

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

I'm not saying that News Corp and other mainstream media publications would adopt Jason's suggested strategy, or that it would work if they did, but it is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today.

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.

A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it's also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that "data is the Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free -- but only to their own business partners. Everyone else still has to pay high fees to NavTeq and TeleAtlas. What's more, Google upped the ante by adding in such features as Street View.

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the plattform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I'll be speaking on this topic in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Tuesday. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there.

1. Choose Your Own Adventure -- numerical and visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The distinguishing characteristic of My Kind Of People is that they appreciate the quantitative study of the commonplace. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
2. Tracking Droid Numbers -- uLocate, the makers of the Where app for Android, have been tracking the growth of the Droid phone using the data they get from the Android app store. (via BoyGenius Report)
3. Fly Eyes Makes Better Robot Vision -- to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles. [...] Intriguingly, the algorithm doesn’t work nearly as well if any one operation is omitted. The sum is greater than the whole, and O’Carroll and Brinkworth don’t know why. Because the parameters are in constant feedback-driven flux, it produces a cascade of non-linear equations that are difficult to untangle in retrospect, and almost impossible to predict. (via Slashdot)
4. Meat Band Aids and Mass Production of Living Tissue -- Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. This Gizmodo Q&A is informative.

The Web 2.0 Expo starts tomorrow, 11/16, in NYC. We're kicking off the conference with an Ignite featuring 14 great speakers. The event is at the New World Stages. I'll be co-hosting with Ignite NYC organizer Tikva Morowati.

As always each speaker gets just five minutes on stage. Their presentation will each be just 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds. The Speakers include:

* Alison Lewis, http://www.iheartswitch.com/ (high tech craft)
* Brady Forrest, http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/ (Burning Man as tech incubator)
* Casey Pugh, http://www.starwarsuncut.com/
* Hilary Mason, http://www.hilarymason.com
* Jennifer Pahlka, http://www.codeforamerica.org/ (Gov 2.0)
* Jonathan Brill, http://Productlust.com, http://www.multitouchmaven.com
* Judy Shapiro, http://trenchwars.wordpress.com
* Kevin Marks, http://epeus.blogspot.com/
* Leesean Hepnova, http://www.leesean.net
* Lauren Schmidt, http://www.mit.edu/~lschmidt
* Molly Wright Steenson, http://www.girlwonder.com
* Nora Abousteit, http://www.burdastyle.com
* Patrick Davidson, http://Whereikeepmythingsontheinternet.com
* Quinn Norton, http://quinnnorton.com/ (body hacks)
* Ray Beckerman, http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
* Tony Haille, http://tonyhaile.com

Here is a rough schedule for how the night will go:

7:00 pm - Doors Open for Conference & Expo Plus Pass holders
7:30 pm - Doors Open for Expo Plus Pass holders
7:45 pm - Doors Open for general public attendees (pending capacity)
8:00- 8:15 - Mobile Music Competition
8:15- 9:45PM - Ignite Talks
10PM -- Bar closes

We are going to start the evening off with an Ignite Mobile Music Competition, giving you a chance to win a FREE pass to Web 2.0! We will provide the mini cord, you provide the mobile instrument. Recommended apps include Sonifi, Drumbanger, and Bloom. Please fill out this entry form if you'd like to show off your mobile music making skills!

We will also randomly choose one lucky Twitter user who tweets using http://bit.ly/IgniteWeb20 to win a FREE pass to Web 2.0 Expo NY. You must show up at Ignite to win!

RSVP on Facebook

This plugin will allow you to easily verify your Joomla! website with Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! SiteExplorer. Now you can easily verify your website for Google, Bing and Yahoo!. No need to change your template or use multiple plugins. To get this extenstion you don't need to login / nor a registration or membership. Download will cost you 1 euro.

This module (based on the "sections" module from Joomla! 1.5) lists categories inside a specific section. It has several enhancements added over the Joomla! "sections" module, such as number of displayed categories, choose whether empty categories are displayed or not, order, etc.

The Joomla! Project plans to have major multi-day conferences beginning as early as November 2010. Community members in a city or region who would like to consider hosting a major conference are encouraged to submit expressions of interest followed by formal proposals. The Request For Proposals gives instructions for putting together a proposal. The events team will work with interested groups to prepare proposals.

Up to four events will be planned in a 12 month period starting in November of 2010. There will be a maximum of one event per quarter and one per continent. The events will last 3 to 5 days. Local organizing committees will choose the theme of each conference and manage the program with the support of the events team and Open Source Matters. Community members and potential organizers are encouraged to use the events forum for discussion of ideas and proposals.

2009-11-13 17:06:04 by PhilDaintree

The first ever Joomla! event specifically for third party developers will be in New York City on December 5 and 6.Focused on the transition to Joomla! 1.6, the Joomla! Developer conference will feature all four development coordinators (Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Ian MacLennan, Mark Dexter), master Joomla! developer Andrew Eddie, Hannes Papenberg from the 1.6 release team and MooTools team member Aaron Newton.

Joomla! 1.6 is currently at alpha 2 status, so this is the time for extension and custom developers to begin working with its new features such as Access Control Lists, JForm, nested sets and other enhancements. The conference is appropriate for developers who have experience working with Joomla! as extension developers, custom developers, and in house staff. Tickets are $100.

The Joomla! Project thanks Rochen Performance Hosting, Joomla! Showroom and the Joomla! User Group New York for their sponsorship of the event, which, among other things, is supporting the attendance of six student and young non commercial developers at the conference.

In the past 25 years, the personal computing revolution has evolved from tethered (desktop) to luggable (portable) to joined-at-the-hip (mobile).

Via the iPhone Platform (including iPod Touch), Apple has set the bar for mobile computing by seamlessly integrating computation, communications, and media across hardware, software, and service layers.

No less integral, Apple has significantly evolved ecosystem development models by cobbling together developer tools, media relationships, marketplace/e-wallet functions, one-click software distribution, explicit platform governance, and a simple, but compelling, approach to sharing revenue with developers.

But, the pièce de résistance has been a touch, tilt, sensor, and virtual keyboard-based user interaction model that has rendered the traditional physical keyboard plus WIMP-based model (i.e., windows, icons, menus, and pointing device) as so last century, the proverbial horse-and-buggy to Apple's Model T.

The end result is that the iPhone has become the first truly personal computer; more personal to its owners than the PC ever was, a truth that bubbles to the top again and again when you talk to the 50M (combined) iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

Thus, the core thesis of this article is two-fold. One, that while Apple remains committed to cultivating its position in the legacy desktop /portable segment via the Mac, they understand that they will never be the leader of the PC market.

Two, given their dominance in mobile computing platforms, Apple will expand upon their iPhone strategy by attacking an "undefended hill" (an HP axiom) that's less hospitable to desktops/portables; namely, the bag-carrying consumer (think: purses, backpacks, briefcases, and the like).

The Bag-able Device: from Living Room to Classroom, Café to Bus
First, a market-sizing question. How many tens of millions of people carry a bag wherever they go that is large enough to accommodate a bookish-sized device?

From a sniff test, would there be room for a really "phat" version of the iPod Touch in your backpack? Your kid's? Would you make room?

Before answering, imagine that you're kicking back on the couch, with a cappuccino in one hand and a Tablet in the other. After all, this is a device that is recline-able in the sense that you can comfortably use it from any position that suits you (it's neither overly bulky or hot, and input operations can be performed from any angle you desire).

Moreover, owing to its relative absence of moving parts and exposed interfaces, the Tablet is also slob-friendly, a euphemism for saying that it's not the end of the world if you are eating pizza while using it (less susceptibility to spills, sauces and greasy fingers).

In turn, this means that it's kid-friendly since the dearth of moving parts also means fewer to break. On top of this, Apple's governance model provides a more direct path for parental controls on what types of apps can be used, and for how long.

Taking the Tablet out of your bag, you instantly notice that this is a device that can support multiple modalities in a robust fashion. A bigger screen means truer multi-touch, richer interaction possibilities, and a personal home theater experience that simply rocks (especially, when wearing decent headphones). Plus, as iPhone has proven, this is no underpowered computing device. Skype me? Sure. Video chat? In a snap. Day planner? C'mon!

Now, imagine iPhone's current gaming support scaling up to this device (not to mention the other two thirds of the 100K-app-strong App Store).

(Sidebar: I expect a straightforward upgrade path for developers to port their iPhone Apps to also run on the Tablet, offering tremendous platform leverage to the estimated 120K iPhone App developers.)

Moreover, given their iTunes foothold, how much do you want to bet that, coincident to the Tablet launch, Apple pursues a TV 3.0 play (aka, TV Everywhere) powered by a subscription service for music, movies and TV programming? In one fell swoop, the leverage of a TV 3.0 play could be extended not only to the Tablet, but to the Mac, iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV as well.

Who else can match that kind of end-to-end firepower, especially in light of Apple's announcement that the iTunes/App Store Universe is backed by 100M active credit card-backed user accounts?

That's also why Apple rebooting the book marketplace is such a given from where I sit (i.e., look out, Kindle).

A final note: while businesses/enterprises have been less central to the iPhone story to date, I think that the Tablet is a device that is tailor-made for verticals and VAR (value added reseller) channels, with Education, Health Care, Retail, and Field Support as obvious beachheads.

Flies in the Ointment: Avoiding the Tyranny of the Either/Or
So what could go wrong? Apple's challenge is to ensure that consumers never feel like they are being forced to make a binary Either/Or decision between an iPhone, an iPod Touch, a Tablet, and of course, a MacBook.

Under the hood, managing this one touches upon core strategic decisions about form-factors, runtime capabilities, and functional symmetries/asymmetries between the different Apple device offerings (read more about Apple's coming Hardware/Software Matrix decisions).

At the same time, some of this is market segmentation thinking, and allowing consumers to choose the level of integration, the type of computing model, and the depth of Apple-centric leverage that makes most sense for them.

Why? Because Apple's overriding goal is to grow their portion of the consumer's communications, media, entertainment ,and Engagement Time online, and in concert, their Portion of Spend for those services.

To be clear, though, Apple has already proven that they can navigate this one with the release of iPhone, and the related segmenting decisions relative to iPod Touch and iPod (if anything, the net-out has been a total Halo Effect). Hence, I am optimistic that not only will they successfully navigate this path with the Tablet, but that they have been planning for this transition for a long, long time.

As such, for Apple, a successful Tablet launch is not merely a fuzzy ambition, but rather, it's in the bag.

Related Posts:

1. Rebooting the Book: One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time


2. Apple, the 'Boomer' Tablet and the Matrix


3. Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch

We are looking for experienced PHP/CSS programmers to develop and enhance industry-leading e-commerce websites, developed with the fast growing Magento open source e-commerce software platform....

This plugin allows you to order the frontend list view and/or the search results by a custom field. You can select in the backend the fields used to sort the entries and select multiple fields selection of fields from which the user selected sort fields. Works with the list view and search results. Works with custom field types: inputbox, listbox, checkbox, and calendar. In the sample url (main page and search page), search for 'Trier par:' (sort by). If AlphaUserPoints is installed, you can sort the entries by number of point of the owner.

View modules assigned to menus, compare menus, and clone modules between them. This administrator component allows you to select 2 different menu items, and then displays the modules that are assigned to each menu item. You can then add or remove the modules to the menu items selected. I needed this as I'm constantly creating new landing pages for products, and wanted a quick way to view, at a glance, what modules are displayed for each landing page (a menu item of type article layout). It's designed to be completely language independent, and subsequent version will include the ability to compare two modules, and see which menu items they are attached to. Coming soon! A website with instructions, FAQs and how-to videos, along with a logo for the component

Simple and free system-plugin to display an own header-logo on top of each page when printing with Joomla!'s integrated function. Activate this plugin and select a logo from the imagelist (upload your logo to images/M_images/). (Beta info: Tested only with templates: rhuk_milkyway, ja_purity, beez. If the logo appears on other than the desired pages, please report!) [valid xhtml]

Simple and free content-plugin to show a 'go to top of page' text- or image-link. Very useful when having very long articles or contents lists. Activate this plugin and insert: {gotop} in the content/article where the link shall appear. The following plugin-admin options are available: -custom link text or -custom link icon (selectable from an image list-upload an own icon to: images/M_images/) -custom link tile-text (popup/tooltip-title) -custom width for link (click) area -custom css code possible -if desired, place a horizontal line above and/or below the link (this plugin requires the browser's Javascript to be activated!) [valid xhtml]

JomEstate is a powerful combination of the most desired features and easy-to-use interface for property management tasks. This real estate system allows you to automate and simplify the realty business process. Feature avaible: - Easy Edit Bakend/Frontend - Custom Attributes (state, features etc..) - Contact Seller Form - Multi-Language Support - Multi File Upload - Personal Admin Panel ... - AND MUCH MORE!!!

JEEMA Image scroller is a simple module for Joomla1.5 written in MVC pattern. It just selects images from a specified folder and it displays as a module. JEEMA Image Scroller comes with the following features * Different folder for thumbnail and large images * It can limit to number of images * It can select random images * It support .gif, .png and .jpg files * It can scroll images in any directions (left, right, up, down) * It integrates JCE popup (lightbox effect)

JoomClip a powerful, feature rich, fully customizable Joomla! component which gives you ability to create your own VCMS (Video Content Management System) on the fly. Joomla! administrator can import the video(s) from YouTube, BlipTV, Break, DailyMotion, MTV Music, myspace, Veoh, Vimeo, and Yahoo Videos etc. On the same note, front end users and Joomla! administrator can upload videos from local hard drives. Fully integrated video player with watermark and watermark linking.

Use {mgetuemail} to get the logged in users email address or Guest if no one is logged in.

1. Open Source Enters The World of Atoms -- an academic statistical analysis of open design. We indicated that, in open design communities, tangible objects can be developed in very similar fashion to software; one could even say that people treat a design as source code to a physical object and change the object via changing the source.
2. Why I Like Redis (Simon Willison) -- coherent explanation of why Simon likes and uses a particular nosql system. I can run a long running batch job in one Python interpreter (say loading a few million lines of CSV in to a Redis key/value lookup table) and run another interpreter to play with the data that’s already been collected, even as the first process is streaming data in. I can quit and restart my interpreters without losing any data. And because Redis semantics map closely to Python native data types, I don’t have to think for more than a few seconds about how I’m going to represent my data.
3. © kiwiright (Vimeo) -- short documentary about copyright, made to raise awareness of the issues in New Zealand. (just as applicable to the rest of the world)
4. Your Movements Speak For Themselves (Jeff Jonas) -- Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below10 meters. A thought-provoking roundup of the information leakage with modern locative systems. (via TomC on Twitter)

2009-11-13 00:57:14 by ThomasTimothyLie - delete a )

2009-11-13 00:09:43 by ArwanGalaya

2009-11-12 18:09:13 by DocSetup

I came across this podcast featuring an interview with Richard Sexton of CarolinaRustica.com as he discusses his company's growth from a startup bricks & mortar "upmarket" furniture retailer to a $4M /year online retailer, primarily through successful search engine marketing....

We recently received a round-robin email from an outdoor clothing company with a well-thought approach to generating (inbound) links to its site: either by placing relevant content (for free) on other people's sites (linking back to them) or simply by...

1. Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system.
2. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets)
3. Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I loved Andy's book How We Got Here about the intersecting histories of economics, finance, and technology. Read the book instead of reading about the disappointing keynote.
4. The Teapot Effect -- the thing I love about geeks is how their passion causes them to explore, ruthlessly and quantitatively, the everyday phenomena that the rest of us take for granted. Such as dribbling teapots: “Previous studies have shown that dribbling is the result of flow separation where the layer of fluid closest to the boundary becomes detached from it. When that happens, the fluid flows smoothly over the lip. But as the flow rate decreases, the boundary layer re-attaches to the surface causing dribbling.” Read the post and the research it talks about to learn how to prevent Dribbling Teapot Syndrome ....

Loren Feldman. 1938 Media. Audience Conference.

That’s about as much of a summary as you’ll find about the Audience Conference held in New York last Friday. That’s because there were no open laptops allowed during the performances. There was also no Wi-Fi, no video streaming, no tweeting, and no blogging. Something akin to omertà joined the members of the Audience Conference together.

This bond of silence was at the core of the Audience Conference, and it goes against everything that technology and Web 2.0 events normally stand for: openness, transparency, and participation. You would be hard-pressed to find any information anywhere on the web about any of the Audience Conference content. Tweets during the event were generic (“just arrived at the Audience Conference”) and posts after the event were vague (“loved the conference, got to meet Calacanis”). Nobody knows what happened unless you were a genuine member of the audience.

Many other features of the event were also unfamiliar. There were no sponsor booths, banners, and signs all over the place, the speakers had no slideshows, internet connections, or videos to keep us interested, and there were no press or even questions from the audience allowed. No problem.

That’s because the content and experience was so damn good. It was technology. It was performance. It was even culinary. Loren Feldman, our MC for the day, treated the event not as a conference so much as a 20-act play that he directed from start to finish. Inside the historic Hudson Theatre in New York, the members of the audience acted like precisely that - an audience. We watched, listened, and learned. We didn’t talk, text, or tweet. We sat in comfortable chairs facing the stage, not at round tables facing at all different angles to it. We retained the information we heard instead of regurgitating it for our own audiences. We learned that the essence of having an audience is performing for them on a stage - perhaps a digital one - and telling great stories.

What was the Audience Conference? From the website: "Audience is a conference aimed at those who recognize the need to reach engage and influence audiences of all kinds, an investigation into how this is changing, and a look at how technology has in the past and is now, through new media tools and the social web, changing audience participation and interaction." I would love to tell you about what I learned from Jason Calacanis and Rachel Marsden and Rae Hoffman and Andrew Keen and Jeremy Schoemaker and Joe Jaffe and Melanie Notkin and others. But I won’t. Half the philosophy of the Audience Conference was that events are ephemeral experiences that people attending can share with each other - and people not there cannot experience.

In my opinion, casually live-tweeting conferences is overrated because to a large degree it doesn’t serve an external audience very well. When 30 people are tweeting 10 times during each of 10 talks at a conference, and then people re-tweet the tweets (on a delay, naturally), the hashtag stream is a jumbled mess of disjointed quotations that don’t tell a coherent story. I’ve written about why I think tools like Posterous might be better for summarizing thoughts from events; they serve the audience better.

That said, I disagree with the notion that everything needs to be live streamed, live blogged, and live tweeted merely because we can. I recently attended a conference that was about the size of the Audience Conference, and I had a fine experience there so there’s no need to call them out. But strange to me in hindsight was that the audience’s tables were arranged at 90 degrees to the stage, and furthermore that nearly everybody at the tables was staring into a laptop nearly the entire event. Who is that a great experience for?

Now, I am not going to start calling for a ban on Twitter at conferences. I do it sometimes when I think it provides unique value and perspective. I’ve live-blogged some events myself. Furthermore, banning these technologies at an event like the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo would probably result in an all-out revolt. But what Audience Conference taught me was a new perspective on the actual value that all of the technology adds; if you’re planning an event and you’re more worried about power strips and Wi-Fi than content and experience, you’ve got a problem in my opinion.

The comments on Nicole Ferraro’s blog about Audience Conference might lead you to believe that being able to film and tweet from a private, closed door event was some God-given right of Those Who Possess An iPhone. Sorry, it’s not. Loren Feldman took video of the entire event from six different angles (including a small cam pointed at, you guessed it, the audience) and he will decide how and what and when you get to see anything. Why not? It’s his show, not yours. Can you stream video from a live production of Wicked?

The other half of the philosophy of the Audience Conference was that it’s okay that people are better than you at something. And it’s perfectly alright to just sit back and watch them perform. And we watched performances, to be sure - not just tech talks but also personal stories, poetry readings, and musical acts. (Yeah, musical acts.) Not everyone is good enough to be the best financial blogger, or best personality, or best musical act - that’s a dream. Maybe you’re great at something, but can’t you sit back and relax the rest of the time?

I liked this too. With all the talk about how everyone is a citizen journalist and everyone is a content producer and everyone needs a digital media strategy it’s easy to forget that most people are horrible at all of this stuff. And that’s not necessarily because people don’t understand whatever shiny object has come along, it’s because many people are not gifted communicators. New media, at its core, is old-fashioned because the instinct to communicate with other individuals predates man. But some are way better than others at it. And that’s okay.

So are quarantined conferences more likely to result in claustrophobic technophiles or attentive audiences? While some in the tech community clearly think that a lack of engagement is a violation of some imaginary social media code and in an age where even live music isn’t sacred it may seem like heresy to sequester people participating in your event away from their new media toolbox. And maybe sometimes it is. But having experienced the Audience Conference myself, I can also say that in some situations people are not entitled to break out the social media toolbox, because they will genuinely gain a more valuable experience without it. In my opinion, if one event wants to encourage new media use and another discourages it, who are we to argue? We’re only the audience.

What do you think? Were people at the Audience Conference correct to obey Loren Feldman’s requests? Should they deliberately continue “hiding” the content of the event from people that chose not to attend? Should other Web 2.0 events disallow Web 2.0 usage in real time??

.

As the web increasingly becomes real-time, marketers and publishers need analytic tools that can produce real-time reports. As an example, the basic task of calculating the number of unique users is typically done in batch mode (e.g. daily) and in many cases using a random sample from relevant log files. If unique user counts can be accurately computed in real-time, publishers and marketers can mount A/B tests or referral analysis to dynamically adjust their campaigns.

In a previous post I described SQL databases designed to handle data streams. In their latest release, Truviso announced technology that allows companies to track unique users in real-time. Truviso uses the same basic idea I described in my earlier post:

Recognizing that "data is moving until it gets stored", the idea behind many real-time analytic engines is to start applying the same analytic techniques to moving (streams) and static (stored) data.

Truviso uses (compressed) bitmaps and set theory to compute the number of unique customers in real-time. In the process they are able to handle the standard SQL queries associated with these types of problems: counting the number of distinct users, for any given set of demographic filters. Bitmaps are built as data streams into the system and use the same underlying technology that allows Truviso to handle massive data sets from high-traffic web sites.

Once companies can do simple counts and averages in real-time, the next step is to use real-time information for more sophisticated analyses. Truviso has customers using their system for "on-the-fly predictive modeling".

The other main enhancement in this release is Truviso's move towards parallel processing. Their new execution engine processes runs or blocks of data in parallel in multi-core systems or multi-node environments. Using Truviso's parallel execution engine is straightforward on a single multi-core server, but on a multi-node cluster it may require considerable attention to configuration.

[For my previous posts on real-time analytic tools see here and here.]

1. ParticipateDB -- database of online tools for public participation. Closed alpha now, with 32 tools and 15 projects in the database. (via Sara Winge)
2. DataTO -- like data.gov, but it's where users request data sets. (In this case, from the Toronto municipal government)
3. Go -- new language from Bell Labs and Unix central figures Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, who now work at Google. Bits of C, bits of Google, it compiles to native binaries and runs nearly as fast as C. Built with concurrency and memory management as central figures. Not used in production at Google yet, but grew from a 20% project to something worthy of public release.
4. On Commit Bits (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- that day-one-commit-bit is one of the starkest differences between the corporate and the open source development model. [...] Granted, Django’s very conservative when it comes to granting that commit bit, but I’m not aware of a single open source project under the sun that’d give out a commit bit on a contributor’s first day. I’ve seen developers who’ve been hired to work full time on open source work for months without commit access to the project they’re paid to develop! One of several posts that Jacob's made about why open source makes for (on average) better software.

2009-11-11 02:00:31 by JaneLynch

The people of the United States are finally pulling together around the
goals of reducing health care costs (by far the highest per capita in
the world) and improving outcomes (we have the worst health of any
developed country). Everyone seems to recognize the critical
importance of data and communications in these efforts. So several of
us at O'Reilly Media, having been involved with information
technologies for some time, are tracking the issues that come up in
deploying computer technology in health care--not just to streamline
payments, not just to facilitate access by doctors to records, but
actually to create new ways to deliver and track health care.

I recently attended a forum on how my state, Massachusetts, is
facilitating the move to Electronic Health Records, a prerequisite for
many things doctors, patients, and insurance companies can do to
improve health. It's notable that the chief sponsor of the event, the

Massachusetts Health Data Consortium,
derives a lot of its support from insurance companies. Lots of invective has be\
en
thrown at these companies recently, but the questions of technology
can pull together the insurers, providers, and patients in a common
quest.
[AO: My original blog said that insurance companies set up MHDC,
but this was incorrect.]

My own understanding of the progress and frustrations in deploying
heath care technology was enhanced by the conversations I had that day
and the statistics bandied about.

Smallness is not nimble

Small doctors' offices went along with other industries and services
in the 1970s and 1980s by computerizing--but certain parts stayed in
the 1960s. So now, the big stumbling block that doctors face--adapting
their workflows to computerization--is reminiscent of the problems
other industries had in the 1970s and 1980s.

A typical scenario in those other industries was to use the waterfall
development model (or something even less structured) and setting
aside a requirements phase during which managers confidently told
application designers, "This is our workflow."

OK, requirements phase over and done with. The applications were
deployed, and it turned out that hundreds of little things the line
staff did every day were left out of the workflow. In other words, The
official workflow that the manager knew about was not rich and subtle
enough to encompass reality.

Doctors are more aware than those managers of how hard it is to
formalize their workflows, but the mismatch between current practice
and computer ideal is just as great. I can understand doctors'
reluctance to install electronic systems because in their work, more
than most, when one standardizes their data ands fit their
observations to the structure of the electronic record, lots can
easily get lost in translation. Not only is every patient and every
symptom a bit different, but every doctor is different in the manner
of observing patients and recording results.

It would seem, therefore, that the unique individuality of the
doctor--as well as the patient--would make digitization of records a
problem that was independent of the size of the provider's
organization. But still, some aspects of conversion are easily when
it's done on a large scale. Thus, speakers at the conference suggested
that the biggest barrier to adoption is the fragmentation of medical
practices.

According to the president of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative,
Micky Tripathi, 80% of US medical practices consist of just one or two
physicians, and small practices handle 90% of all outpatient visits.
Given the difficulties of electronic record conversion and the
reluctance of doctors to put in the effort, only 1% of these practices
currently use electronic health records.

I suppose that small practices may improve care the way small
restaurants cook more gourmet food, but the structure of medical
practices clearly reduces efficiency. But electronic records hold out
hope as well. Doctors can use computer technology to accommodate their
preference for small practices.

The division of the industry into tiny segments also increases the
risk of lost records (especially when they're on paper, but even
electronically). Forum speakers said the patient must ultimately be
the steward of his or her own records.

It's great when a new practitioner can start up an office tightly
oriented around electronic health records. Converting an existing
paper-based site is much harder. And I wonder whether EHR proponents
are willing face the cost (in time as much as money) of training.

Issues arise when large institutions adopt electronic records,
too. For instance, who gets control and the right to use the data, the
employer or the doctor who actually generates the data? As we'll see,
resolving questions about who benefits are critical to adoption.

Always somebody else's job

Tripathi made another impressive point: doctors don't see the benefit
to them in digitizing. In fact, they see it as benefiting everybody
else but them. I think this is because they don't know of any killer
app that would make the change not only desirable but indispensable.

This is the same reason Linux hasn't taken over on the desktop, even
though its applications and interfaces are quite easy to use and
highly functional. Linux can do everything Windows does--but for the
average computer user, it doesn't do anything more than
Windows does. After looking over the applications provided on a common
desktop distribution such as Ubuntu, one could well ask--why bother
switching?

In short, if a system just does the same thing as the one it's
replacing--even if it does that thing more efficiently and with fewer
errors--it won't generate enough excitement to drive adoption and make
adoption seem worth the pain.

The move to electronic records seems to have garnered support from the
leadership of all the important stakeholders: the medical profession
(as illustrated by the participation of the American College of
Physicians and Massachusetts Medical Society today), insurers,
governments, and patient advocates. But as I've mentioned, support in
the medical profession hasn't penetrated to the grassroots.

I wonder whether doctors could be swayed by stories of promising
apps--such as the one used by the Army's mCare Telehealth initiative
for Wounded Warriors suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). As
described to me by Stuart Vaeth of Diversinet Corporation, which
created the mobile platform underlying the application, doctors can
use this little utility to remind soldiers to follow treatment plans.
Better health, fewer doctor visits, lower overhead--all in one small
app.

Another expert I talked to claimed that wouldn't suffice. What doctors
need is to be offered an array of useful applications that are
guaranteed to work with the platforms they choose to install. This
suggests that standardization is even more important than is usually
thought, because it will create a platform for new applications. That
leads to my next point.

Government's role

Without speaking about current health care bills, I'll focus for a
moment on the medical part of the stimulus package, which suggest ways
government intervention can help fix health care.

First comes standard-setting. The most obvious role here is to promote
standards that ensure the different systems adopted by different
providers fit together. As reported by Ray Campbell, executive
director of the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium, the
Medicare/Medicaid part of the bill requires conformance to
requirements that will force conversion. God is still in the (yet to
be worked out) details concerning meaningful use.

Second comes actual investment. When up-front expenditures are high
and it takes years to recoup them, and especially when most sites are
small, somebody has to provide incentives. Campbell said the best
stimuli are actually up-front. In the case of the the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus, the up-front stimuli aren't even
direct cash bonuses (which make up the bulk of the stimulus, but after
conversion is complete and judged to conform). Rather, the up-front
stimuli are research centers that provide expertise to sites that want
to digitize.

Although I am still holding back on commenting about the current
health care bills, I should reveal that I worked on grassroots efforts
to pass the 2006 Massachusetts health care bill that inspired
others to push for the current efforts by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.
With all its problems, the Massachusetts bill put all of us on the
line in this state to work together to solve our health problems.

So instead of fearing a takeover of health care by government (it's
strange how Americans tend to view "government" as some homogeneous
monstrosity, like the mysterious obelisk in the movie 2001),
the public can view legislation as a way to stand together as a
country.

The one thing of which I am convinced is that we need to replace the
current adversarial model of allocating health money with a
cooperative one. Only if providers and patients get lots of data, and
are willing to use it creatively, can we lower costs.

It worked with the energy utilities. Until recently, they operated
under a simple model where the more energy the sold, the more money
they made. Regulators and utilities worked together to find new models
that rewarded them more for conservation than for consumption. Health
care is a more complex problem--more levers and pulleys to the system,
and subjects who face a diversity of diagnoses--but with all that is
at stake, we should find a way forward.

2009-11-10 13:13:35 by GlobalNet - HELLO EVERYONE.

The RSPB shop delivers £2m to bird protection and care every year. Sales are up significantly since launching the new site (http://shopping.rspb.org.uk). Read the slides from Ecommerce Expo....

1. A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips -- microfluidic chips (with tiny liquid-filled channels) can cost $100k and more. Michelle Khine used the Shrinky Dinks childrens' toy to make her own. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro­fluidics," she says. (via BoingBoing)
2. Complete Genomics publishes in Science on low-cost sequencing of 3 human genomes (press release) -- The consumables cost for these three genomes sequenced on the proof-of-principle genomic DNA nanoarrays ranged from $8,005 for 87x coverage to $1,726 for 45x coverage for the samples described in this report. Drive that cost down! There's a gold rush in biological discovery at the moment as we pick the low-hanging fruit of gross correlations between genome and physiome, but the science to reveal the workings of cause and effect is still in its infancy. We're in the position of the 18th century natural philosophers who were playing with static electricity, oxygen, anaesthetics, and so on but who lacked today's deeper insights into physical and chemical structure that explain the effects they were able to obtain. More data at this stage means more low-hanging fruit can be plucked, but the real power comes when we understand "how" and not just "what". (via BoingBoing)
3. Far From a Lab? Turn a Cellphone into a Microscope (NY Times) -- for some tests, you can use a camphone instead of a microscope. In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.
4. Augmented reality helps Marine mechanics carry out repair work (MIT TR) -- A user wears a head-worn display, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smart phone attached to the mechanic's wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions. [...] The mechanics using the AR system located and started repair tasks 56 percent faster, on average, than when wearing the untracked headset, and 47 percent faster than when using just a stationary computer screen.

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

James Turner: Could you start by talking a little bit about your background and how you came to PopCap and what you did before then?

Jason Kapalka: My career in computer games started back in the early '90s, when I was writing for the magazine, Computer Gaming World, doing various reviews and articles. In '95, one of the editors from the magazine left to join an internet dotcom start-up in San Francisco called TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. He invited me to come down there and work there, which I did. And TEN evolved over the dotcom boom and bust cycle, from a very hardcore gaming service into what eventually turned into Pogo.com around 1999. I worked there initially on hardcore games. One day, I was working on Total Annihilation tournaments, and then the next day, someone said, "Hey, design bingo." And I was sort of like, "Oh. Bingo? Okay."

That was the beginning of my casual game design career, I guess. And yes, I was there at Pogo. I helped design a lot of the structure for their casual games until around 2000 when I left, and Pogo eventually went on to get bought by Electronic Arts, of course. I left in 2000 and started PopCap with two other guys, Brian Fiete and John Vechey who are these guys from Indiana that I'd met earlier, around '97. They had made an internet action game called ARC that we'd produced on TEN, and we stayed in touch. In 2000, we all thought we wanted to try something different. So we all left our respective companies to start PopCap. As you might remember, 2000 was not the best year for internet companies. So we didn't really realize that the entire industry was collapsing. We had an interesting time initially. Luckily, our ignorance protected us, I guess.

PopCap started from there, just the three of us working out of our apartments. And over time, we'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire an artist." And I'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire maybe another guy here to program this stuff." And then eventually, maybe someone should look at the books or whatever, so we'll hire someone to take care of the bookkeeping. And it kept going like that until eventually we thought that maybe we needed an office. And from there, suddenly, we've got nearly 300 employees now in 2009. So it's been an interesting kind of experience. We never really intended PopCap to get anywhere near as big as it has today.

James Turner: How would you describe PopCap's place in the market today?

Jason Kapalka: I guess it's a bit odd. Casual game companies exist in these strange spaces where they're often the developer and the publisher at the same time. And then they also publish stuff with other guys, where they're sort of rivals, but also they're partners. There's a lot of this co-opetition thing going on. PopCap is obviously a developer, and we develop a lot of games. We used to publish other people's games. And we still do indirectly. in that we have SpinTop Games. which is a company we bought a couple of years back. They distribute a lot of other people's games through their site. But primarily, I think we develop and then publish titles. But we primarily focus on publishing our own titles. So we're kind of a self-publisher, I suppose.

James Turner: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about because one of your distribution channels now is Steam, which is another company's portal for their games and others. How do you see that relationship?

Jason Kapalka: Steam's been really good. We work with lots of different portals. Steam is one of many that our typical game would go out on. On Steam, on Real Arcade, Big Fish Games, Yahoo Games, MSN, WildTangent, a whole bunch of smaller channels. So Steam was just one of several. It's been interesting in that it was developed differently than a lot of those other ones. Steam is definitely much more of a hardcore game distribution channel than something like Real Arcade. So initially, when we started on Steam, it was uncertain whether our games were going to really fit in. Initially, a lot of the ones we tried on Steam didn't really work too well for their audience. Hidden object games don't do especially well with Steam users, for example.

The turning point for Steam was probably when we did Peggle Extreme with Valve. I don't know if you remember that. Peggle had just come out, and the guys at Valve really liked it. We were talking and we had some weird ideas. Someone had the odd suggestion to do sort of a miniature-themed version of Peggle that featured all of the Orange Box's characters, the Half-Life, MT Team Fortress guys. It was a really strange idea, because that was a fairly mature violent kind of franchise. And certainly, it didn't seem like the obvious fit for Peggle. But, on the other hand, we thought, "Well, what the heck? We can try it and it's only going to go on Steam anyway so it's not like it'll offend the soccer moms necessarily." So we tried that out, and it went up. And we were all kinds of nervous because we didn't know -- it had launched initially as a free download with the Orange Box. And even though it didn't cost people anything, we were still kind of wondering if there was going to be this big backlash from the hardcore community about, "What the hell is this cheap little pinball thing doing in the middle of my Orange Box product."

But actually, the response was really good. I mean, the Orange Box guys all really liked Peggle a lot. And ultimately, that led them to go and seek out and buy the regular versions of Peggle which made Peggle suddenly this fairly big success on Steam. Which a month or two ago, before that, didn't seem very likely that this game with unicorns and rainbows would be selling well on Steam. So after that, that sort of seemed to kind of be -- it sort of opened the floodgates a little bit. And now a variety of our games do very well on Steam. Obviously, Plants Vs Zombies was the last one that had quite a hit there. Not everything. There's still some of our games that are clearly more casual and that don't particularly work well on Steam. But the ones that do work there seem to really work well.

James Turner: There seems to be a fairly different expectation level for casual games in terms of graphics and such. Do you think that's a natural result of how they're produced and what they're intended for? Or could you see something like Plants Vs Zombies but with the graphics levels of a Half-Life?

Jason Kapalka: It's certainly possible. I mean in some cases, we're not intentionally trying to make the games low fidelity. We try to do the best art direction we can. Although the usual contradiction, or decision to be made, there is we also want to make games as accessible as possible. So we want Plants Vs Zombies to play on every crummy netbook and seven-year-old computer your mom has and all of these types of things. And so that tends to mean that we try to work and have good art, but usually make the technical requirements very modest. We've been working at making things that can scale well so that on a good computer, you'll get a really nice experience and it'll still scale down to play on a lower-end computer. But that can be challenging in itself. So usually, we err on the side of not worrying about the graphics being too high-end because our experience is showing that a good game with not very fancy graphics can sell very well, like Plants Vs Zombies. And I think that game has good graphics, but it's definitely limited. It's only got 800X600 resolution and so forth. But on the other hand, we've seen plenty of games in the casual space that have really good graphics and they sell very poorly if they're not a fun game. So accessibility and fun definitely, for us, end up being a first priority over graphics. And especially 3-D or technically impressive graphics versus just good art direction.

James Turner: You would think Nethack and Rogue would be the ultimate proof that you can have good game play without good graphics.

Jason Kapalka: Sure, I love Roguelike games. We have lots of Nethack fans over at PopCap, which seems a bit weird in that they're obviously not very casual in many regards. But yeah, they're good exemplars of that principle that graphics are not as important as game play.

James Turner: In a lot of your games, and especially games like Peggle and Zuma, the game play, to put it mildly, is pretty simple in terms of what the user can do. A lot of times, it's just a mouse click or two mouse clicks. How can you take what is fairly simple game play and keep it engaging so that people want to play it for hour after hour?

Jason Kapalka: Typically, the hard part is keeping it simple to begin with. Usually the problem is is that a lot of time, games become increasingly more complex as you work on them. And it's hard to resist that temptation and keep things simple. With Peggle, certainly one thing that everyone asked for was everyone wanted to have some sort of control over the ball once they'd launched it. So they all thought, "I shoot the ball and then I can't do anything. I just sit there and watch it bounce down. Why can't I have bumpers or a laser beam or something that I can do?" And on the surface, there's nothing inherently wrong with that request. But when you do things like that, suddenly it changes the game. And so the simplicity goes away, and it's no longer as compelling. It's kind of like bowling. If you can control the ball after you throw it in bowling, that doesn't necessarily make it a better game. Or golf. If you had a game of golf where you could change the direction of the ball after you shoot it, again, it doesn't necessarily make it better.

I think with computer game players, often they want all of this control, but I think a lot of classic games actually work well because they limit the amount of control you have. You have to really focus on these clear, specific decisions. And that's a very engaging thing to do. I don't think games like pool or golf will be going away any time soon, and they have fairly simple mechanics at the base of them. You're calculating angles and trajectories. And so that's the case of something like Peggle. It's a similar game. You're calculating angles and trajectories and then making one single decision. But I think that simplicity doesn't mean that it lacks appeal.

James Turner: This next question, keep in mind, is coming from a guy who's now spent three weeks trying to get through the last level of Zuma's Revenge. How do you decide the balance between too easy and too frustrating?

Jason Kapalka: That is quite hard. Obviously, I think I once said that no casual game has ever failed for being too easy. But that's not entirely true. I mean a game that is too easy, people don't perceive it as being too easy; they just perceive it as being boring. And so you certainly don't want to have a game that's boring. At the same time, it's much, much easier to fall into the trap of making a casual game too hard. That's certainly one of the hallmarks of computer game design is to make them very challenging because as a game designer and hardcore game player, that's sort of what you're used to. A lot of the DNA of video games comes from things like the arcade where they were very pure games of skill that they were intended to get very hard very quickly. That's some evolutionary development that's not really relevant in a lot of games today, and especially not in casual games, but it's kind of hard to get out of the habit of that. So with that in mind, trying to figure out how to balance things to be the right level of difficulty is quite challenging.

Sometimes people have a thing where you can select easy, medium or hard. We don't like doing that at PopCap. By and large, the problem I always have with that is it's really hard to calibrate what that actually means because obviously, easy, medium or hard are going to mean different things for different games and for different people. And so one game's easy might be ridiculously difficult on another one. And typically, you're asked to decide that at the beginning of the game when you don't actually know. So I'll start up a game of whatever, whether it's Halo or Ninja Gaiden and decide "Do I want normal or do I want easy? Do I want hard?" In various cases, it could be any of those things and you don't have any good way of knowing until you've actually played the game.

So I don't like having those choosable difficulty settings which means you need to have a game that has one degree of difficulty and that people can adapt to or it adapts to them as they go along. That was a big challenge of Zuma, to try to arrange the levels and so on in such a way that they provide an interesting scale of challenge going upwards without ever getting too insanely difficult. Although, as you pointed out, the later levels of Zuma can get quite hard. Zuma's Revenge is a bit easier than the original Zuma. The original Zuma was quite punishing in many ways. And Zuma's Revenge has gotten a little more forgiving than that. But we figured that it's okay on the later levels if it becomes difficult because by the time someone gets to level 60 in Zuma's Revenge, we assume that they've got the hang of the game and are enjoying the basic game play. Whereas if someone starts at the first level of a game like a Ninja Gaiden type experience and gets his ass kicked repeatedly, that's the sort of thing that may discourage them from continuing to try it at all.

James Turner: I'm going to go off interview for a second here and say the only problem with that is that almost all of the bonus play in Zuma's Revenge is locked to getting through the whole game.

Jason Kapalka: Yeah, and that's something that we've thought about and is actually on our list of things we would probably try to address if we have another Zuma sequel. If you ever see a third Zuma game, we'll definitely try to make some of that content more accessible before people complete the game.

James Turner: The other way that sometimes difficulty is addressed is through cheat codes. And it seems like you've gone out of your way not to have any of that backdoor stuff. Was that a conscious decision?

Jason Kapalka: Yeah. Actually, there's a few Easter eggs and so forth we have in the games, but it really seems the opposite of casual to have these kinds of codes that you need to have the secret hidden knowledge, whether it's digging through the internet or magazines to find these special codes. It's the opposite of making the game accessible, by making one that you have to discover this secret information in order to play effectively. I think it's kind of fun, but only in the context of games where you expect the audience to be really so invested in the game that they're going to kind of go outside of it and seek out that kind of extra information, which is quite common in MMOs and other hardcore games.

James Turner: Is it easier or harder to do sequels to a casual game? Does the lack of a complex storyline make it more difficult in some ways?

Jason Kapalka: Obviously, I haven't had to make Uncharted 2 or anything like that so I couldn't say for sure about the challenges of dealing with a 300 person team. But the challenge that we find for things like Bejeweled 2 or Zuma's Revenge is that you have a very simple structure, and it's challenging to improve that without changing it. The problem I always had is the one that I saw with a lot of Tetris versions. They've been making versions of Tetris for years. And you see a new version of Tetris come up for a new system. You pick it up and check it out. And often, they'd have some new twist on it that once you played it was not very good. And you switched back to playing basic Tetris as soon as you could because whatever new gizmos they threw in there just didn't actually make the game of Tetris any more fun. It made it different, but not more fun.

So when we did Bejeweled 2 or Zuma's Revenge, my first priority was not to make the game less fun. For the sake of making it different so you can say, "Zuma's Revenge has this many different things in it," that helps with your bullet list of stuff if you're trying to sell it. But once you start playing it, we found a lot of the stuff we tried initially -- we put in a lot of things. We put lots of extra power ups in there and a bunch of different kinds of levels and different boss monsters and a whole bunch of stuff, mini games. You could sort of play Space Invaders type mini games with a frog shooting at tiki invaders and so forth. But none of them actually made the game any more fun. It was one of those things where the mini games, for example, you kind of felt more like you were playing Tetris and suddenly, you were forced to play a round of Bejeweled in the middle of it. It didn't make sense. If you're playing Zuma, most people kind of want to play Zuma. They don't want to be interrupted with some random other type of game play. Some of the power-ups, again, we had some extra ones in there that they were different; they just didn't add a lot to the game play and didn't make it any more fun.

So it can be challenging to add stuff and modify a game that has a lot of fans and that is very simple because it's not easy to change that without breaking it. It's like trying to make Chess 2. Many people have made up all sorts of different variant rules for chess, but I don't think too many people would claim that they had improved chess in any universal way. But in a sense, we feel like our job is to try and improve chess, some sort of game that's very simple. That's, to some extent, classic in that it's been out for a while and is loved in its current form by a lot of people. And so you don't want to mess it up just for the sake of saying you changed some stuff and made a sequel that was different.

James Turner: I'm going to morph together a couple of questions that came out of our editors because some of them were similar, and they all were on a theme. So I'm just going to read them all and then you can figure out how to amalgamize them. The first one was: Can you describe your development platform including frameworks and programming languages used and how that relates to target customer platforms? Someone else asked: How do you manage development for games that need to run on multiple platforms? Is that changing with the popularity of mobile platforms like iPhone, Android and Pre? What about mobile platforms like netbooks and Chrome OS? And then someone asked if you were still planning to develop for Web OS?

Jason Kapalka: Okay. Well, our usual platform we develop on is typically for PC and using C++ as the programming language. For a fair number of years now, that's been our default. So when a game is started, that's typically the way we develop it. And later on, we call that our reference build, if we do that. Typically, we'll figure out where to port to after that. And some of the ports are somewhat easy and can involve a lot of the same C++ code. If you're doing a port to XBox, for example.

Other times, if it's Flash, for example, or some Java or Brew mobile handset, it ends up being a fairly major rewrite. We don't have a magic button that ports Peggle onto every different platform available. Sometimes you just have to do it the hard way and do a lot of rewriting of the code and revising the graphics and layout in UI and all of that stuff. So we definitely think it's important to do other platforms, but we certainly feel like you have to take a lot of care to make sure that the game works properly on whatever that platform is. So we do spend a lot of time and effort on ports. I guess we think of them less as a straightforward port than as an adaptation because the challenges of doing Bejeweled on the iPhone, for example, are significantly different than doing it on XBox or some other kind of device.

James Turner: Mobile like netbooks and Chrome OS.

Jason Kapalka: We definitely are trying to keep netbooks in mind when we do games, so that even if we have a game like Zuma's Revenge which has some high-res options, it'll still scale down and run on a typical netbook. And that's unlikely to change. We certainly are well aware that a lot of our audience has lower-end computers. So in a sense, netbooks don't cause us any problems because we were already making games that played on that kind of computer. So we don't really have to do anything extra special to make our games work on a netbook.

James Turner: I was just going to say that I can tell you that I think your Mac port doesn't like running on Hackintoshes because I tried using Zuma's Revenge on a Hackintosh Del 10V and I think you probably didn't optimize your Mac version as much as some of the other ones.

Jason Kapalka: It may be true. Our Mac versions -- definitely our Mac ports, we've had some troubles with those over the years. And we don't yet have 100 percent reliable system for doing our Mac releases at the same time as our PC ones. So yeah, I wouldn't be too shocked to see that there were some issues with the Mac version being not quite as efficient as the PC one. I'm sorry to hear it, but I'm not entirely surprised. We're working to try and get out Mac support to be a lot better than it is currently.

James Turner: The iPhone, obviously, has had a lot of good and bad press about the App Store and how well you can actually make money on that. What's your experience been and how do you think it's going to go with the other platforms like the Android and Pre?

Jason Kapalka: Well, we've been doing pretty well on the iPhone. Bejeweled has, I think, been pretty consistently in the top ten or twenty since launch. And Peggle's done well. And Bookworm's done pretty good. So we've done okay with it. It'd definitely an interesting and challenging platform in that the sheer number of apps out there means that unless you have some way of standing out from that crowd, there's a very high risk with it. I mean, if you're at EA and you have the ability to get big brands out there, or if you're like PopCap where you have a couple of games like Bejeweled that people recognize and will seek out, you have an advantage there. But if you're a brand new developer working on an iPhone game, it's a little scary. One hears about the stories of the guy who wrote a game in his spare time for two months and then put it up on the iPhone store and made $250,000 and quits his day job and all of that. But there's a lot of stories that don't end like that in the same way when you hear about guys going to Vegas and betting their last 20 bucks on a slot machine and getting rich. That does happen, but it's not necessarily a typical story. And it's easy to overlook the risks when you only hear the sort of success stories.

So I think the iPhone is a really cool platform. I think it's a risky one, even for small developers. And I think for large developers, they've already started to realize that it's hard to justify a large development budget for an iPhone game. So they might do it as a marketing tie-in with another game or occasionally if they have a very casual, friendly title like EA with Scrabble. But, for example, right now, not too many people are going to think about investing $1 million making an iPhone game because the risks are just way too high that you'll never make any of that money back. That may change in the future with Android and other platforms that are similar to iPhone, if they start having more touch screen App Store type devices. That might suddenly multiply the potential audience for some of these games by a large amount. I mean the iPhone is cool, but compared to other mobile phones, it's really still owned by a small percentage of people. That might change. In a year or two, you might see iPhone-like devices in a lot of people's hands and if the UI and the App Store experience are similar to the iPhone that might have a huge impact on the way games work. Suddenly, you may find that audience not just growing by a small amount, but doubling, tripping, quadrupling overnight if some new phones in that category become popular.

James Turner: So I have a question from Tim O'Reilly. He wants to know, how do you go about getting new customers? And he says, "Be specific."

Jason Kapalka: How do I go about getting new customers? Well, I'm going to mention two things. One is the not very exciting answer, which is we do what a lot of people do in the casual game space do, you do search engine marketing. That's the most common way on the web to drive people to download games from a casual game site, search engine marketing largely through Google where you buy keywords for various things and people search and blah, blah, blah. You pay a certain amount and they click through. And it's fairly mechanical now because we have metrics to know if this many people download the game, you'll sell this many on average and so forth. So that's kind of the non-interesting way that we get new customers.

The more interesting ways -- well, one example would be Facebook. We've been looking at social networking games for a while. And there've been some interesting things going around there, but we weren't too sure if it was a good idea for us to get into it. It wasn't really our forte. But at the same time, it was a very different kind of crowd. A very different space for us to try something with. So that was the idea behind Bejeweled Blitz, to get into a completely different market than the ones we were in at the time. And sure enough, it has done quite well on Facebook in terms of getting Bejeweled out in front of people who otherwise have not maybe seen Bejeweled very much. And it is a very different crowd on Facebook. The players there are not the types who -- most of them don't play very many games at all. So even by the standards of casual games, they're not the type who even download a game. They don't do any games whatsoever. So that's been a way of expanding our user base to a whole different crowd.

James Turner: One of the ways that you market your games is through one of our editors called teaser apps. What's your conversion rate like on those? Is it an effective way of marketing the games?

Jason Kapalka: If he means the web sort of Flash games and so on on the web, yeah, that is pretty effective. It's less effective than it was when we started about eight or nine years ago when that was, by-and-large, the primary way that you drove people to get interested in games. There would be a flash game on some website or, at that time, a Java game. The player would play a bit of Bejeweled or whatever it was, and then there would be some sort of ad saying, "If you want the deluxe experience, download Bejeweled Deluxe." And then they'd download that, and then they would hopefully buy that. It's less important nowadays. More people are willing to download a game directly, and fewer people feel the need to play the web game first before doing that.

Also, there are a lot of flash games out there that don't have any sort of downloadable component. So people who are playing a lot of flash games are not always in the market for downloadable stuff either. That said, it is still useful. And the conversion rates, they vary a lot for different types of things. Once someone downloads a game, the typical conversion rates are usually in the range of one to five percent. So if you can get somebody to download a copy of Peggle, for example, the typical conversion rates are in the one to five percent range that those people will actually end up buying it.

James Turner: You've mentioned Flash a couple of times. There are some players out there who are pure Flash players, like Armor. Do you see them as a serious competitor to what you're doing. Or are you seeing the same thing as what newspapers are going through, if people are giving it away, how do you make money at it?

Jason Kapalka: I don't think, as far as we've seen anyway, the pure Flash game guys don't really seem to be competing for the same audience that we are. Sites like Miniclip and so on, they do okay with their own business model. It doesn't seem to be crossing over with ours. The problem with developing Flash games for those kinds of sites is that it can be very difficult to turn a profit on them because there's so many Flash games out there. So a site like Miniclip or some of the other ones like that, they pay a pretty small amount of money for a Flash game, between maybe $500 to $5,000 basically, and that's it in most cases. So if you're a Flash developer, that's a pretty small amount of money, unless you're making the game in one or two days.

There are few larger outfits, like Armor Games that you pointed out, that do actually produce games of a higher level of polish and so forth. As for how they make money, I don't know. It's a good question for them actually. I'm kind of curious. I suspect it's a fairly tough business right now because of the massive commodification of Flash games. And so I definitely have heard from a lot of Flash game developers who, despite turning out lots and lots of games all of the time, like some of them are doing a game a day or whatever, they still have a hard time making ends meet just because the prices and so on are just not good for the pure Flash plays.

James Turner: How international is your development effort? And how do you manage it technically and logistically?

Jason Kapalka: Oh, international? Well, we have a development office in Dublin, in Ireland, of about 40 people. And they handle the bulk of our internationalization. So we take it fairly seriously. It's work. It takes time and money to do a decent job with it. The majority of our games, we try to end up eventually internationalizing. Usually there's some kind of decisions. There's EFIGS, which is English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. And that's the basic level for doing European coverage. Beyond that, the typical next steps would be to maybe do some of the Asian languages, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. And we do that as well. We have an office in Shanghai, and they do some of that. Those markets are a little more challenging right now. Some of the reasons are that that Japan is very much a console market and has not got into PC, downloadable stuff very much. China, on the other hand, has big problems with piracy. There's just a lot of piracy out there. And Korea obviously has a lot of MMO kind of focus. So casual games are challenging to get done over there. But yeah, we're trying our best to have a global reach for all of our games.

James Turner: That's a good answer. But I was actually asking do you have international developers? Or is it pretty much all done out of one area?

Jason Kapalka: Yeah, the majority of our developers are all in the US. I mean we do have some developers in Ireland and Shanghai. But in terms of the games that you'd be familiar with now, the majority of them have been developed in North America, either in Seattle or in some cases in Chicago or Vancouver or San Francisco.

James Turner: What these days would be the career path for someone who wants to get into game development?

Jason Kapalka: Well, there's a variety of different paths. There are a number of schools that have some kind of game development programs now. I don't know too much about them. And although I think some of them are very interesting, they're certainly not a requirement. Certainly at PopCap, we don't specifically look for anybody with a game design school background to hire. In many cases nowadays, the best way to get into the game industry is just to do it yourself. The barriers to entry are not what they might've been even five or ten years ago. If you want to make a game now, as I said, you can make a Flash game easily enough yourself. You may not make a lot of money with it, but you can certainly produce it and get it out there in front of people easily enough. And in many ways, the experience of just actually making games is more valuable than any amount of training or books that you can read.

So for someone who wants to get in the gaming industry right now, my personal advice would be to just do it. And whether that means a Flash game or yeah, there's lots of student collectives or just independent guys making a variety of things. It's entirely possible to just make a game. You don't have to go to school for it. You can do the traditional path like ten years ago, get a job as a QA guy at Electronic Arts or Activision or something like that and then work your way up. And that certainly can work. Or go to school for programming or art and then get an entry level job at a big developer. And those methods are still entirely valid. But if you want to get into game design and the creative side of things, I think you can actually just go ahead and do it now which was something that ten years ago was a lot harder to do because there just weren't as many venues for getting your work out there.

James Turner: So two fan boy questions to end things. First of all, are we going to see Plants Vs Zombies 2?

Jason Kapalka: I don't know. We'll see. I'd like to see it myself. We have the same challenge with that as we do with some of our other games in that the guy who made Plants Vs Zombies, George Fan, is hard at work on another game. And so it's a tough one in that we like his new game. We'd like him to work on that. We'd certainly like a Plants Vs Zombies Two as well as that. But it's challenging in that no one besides George would really do as good of a job on Plants Vs Zombies. So we don't necessarily want to just hand it off to a B team and produce something that's not as good. So it's a challenge. I'd like to see it happen, but we'll see what we can do.

James Turner: And finally, do the words in Zuma actually mean anything?

Jason Kapalka: The words, the various chants and so forth?

James Turner: Yeah.

Jason Kapalka: Yes, actually, they do mean something. The chants in the original Zuma are -- well, they're mangled Aztec. So as much as people know of what Aztecs actually talked like, the words in there are very badly grammaticalized versions of that. I think some of the things say stuff like, "Too bad little frog," when you die and so on. And in the second one, Zuma's Revenge, there is actually, again, a very badly mangled version of the Easter Island dialect, which is in existence still and known by Easter Islanders to some extent. So yes, it's possible some people out there in Easter Island, if they played Zuma's Revenge, might recognize a few of the phrases.

James Turner: All right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

1. A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor (MIT Tech Review) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Uses RFID's induction technology which means the power source can be up to a meter away. Proof of concept was implanted in a moth to sense central nervous system activity.
2. New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future of UI using a sexy glass prototype that features tablet PC, gesture, speech recognition, and even eye tracking. Lustable.
3. Adding Usability to Print -- detailed description of a failed pitch to reinvent a newspaper, to bring web sensibility to print. Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of separate media, while using the strength of the paper (pictures, info graphics, nice text) to the max… Make a product that people want to buy because it is more usable that the competitor, not because it wins graphic design prizes. (via Evolving Newsroom)
4. StressAppTest -- Google-created open source project to pound the living crap out of hardware by maximising random traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing hardware devices in a computer.

2009-11-08 19:22:37 by MangoCrusher

People following the issue of open sourcing the U.S. Patent Database might have been surprised to read an announcement in the official business opportunities web site of the U.S. Government: Synopsis for Public Data Dissemination Sole Source Contract to Google, Inc.

While the first reaction of many might be "OMG, WTF, how could they," this is actually good news, with an unlikely cast of characters working together including Google, Intellectual Ventures, and the Internet Archive.

In September, the Patent Office announced a rather strange "Request for Information" (RFI). Under this proposed scheme, the Patent Office would receive a substantial (upwards of $10 million!) donation of equipment from a vendor. In return, the vendor would get to be the official distributor of the patent database to the public, and would get to sell "value-added products." Among other things, the vendor would get access to the patents before the public does, allowing them to mine the database, and would be allowed to sell a variety of bulk products.

While the RFI makes a nod to public access, like all these Zero-Dollar deals the government cuts, there would be a lot of limits on what is "public" data as the vendor tries to recoup their investment by selling the so-called "value-added" products. Readers may remember a similar fiasco with the General Accountability Office where the Federal Legislative Histories were given away to Thomson West and now even the U.S. Congress has to pay to access this material.

The patent database is no ordinary database. This is the only database specifically called out in the U.S. Constitution as being the responsibility of the U.S. Executive Branch to run!  A lot of people think this Zero-Dollar deal the Patent Office is contemplating kind of stinks, and I'm really pleased to announce that a broad coalition has come together to make this data more broadly available immediately:

• Intellectual Ventures, the IP group founded by Nathan Myhrvold, is donating several terabytes of the back file to Public.Resource.Org, the Internet Archive, and a variety of other groups to make available to everybody.
• Google asked for permission to crawl the public application system (known as "PAIR"). The announcement by the Patent Office of a "sole source contract to Google" was the government's way of saying we have permission to crawl their system and bypass the CAPTCHAs. This is good news, because the PAIR system contains the "binders," which is all the material that supplements the basic applications and grants.
• The Internet Archive has set aside a boatload of disk drives to serve this data. In addition, Public.Resource.Org will provide the usual rsync and FTP, and we expect a variety of other groups to provide mirrors both for bulk access and end-user systems.

It goes without saying that Google, the Internet Archive, and Intellectual Ventures are 3 groups that don't often work together, and I think this illustrates the compelling public interest in making the patent database more broadly available. We announced this Section 8 Task Force in a letter to Congressman Mike Honda. And, we also sent in a FOIA request to the Patent Office, putting them on notice that we expect any responses to their RFI $0 boondoggle to be made available to the public, as required by law.

In the long-term, Patent Office just needs to fix their system instead of resorting to silly $0 deals. They have 600 staff in Information Technology and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Surely, they can find a way to serve the public as part of that? Putting a lien on the Patent database in return for $10 million in hardware instead of fixing their 70's-era mainframes just doesn't make sense.

In the meantime, we should have the first 8 terabytes of data up pretty soon. Those interested in learning more about the issue are urged to consult the paper trail on our PTO page which includes letters to and from Congress, and pointers to the Patent Office procurement docs.

The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return.

As we move from the “web of information” to the “web of people” (aka the Social Web) the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.
This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences: MIT’s Project Gaydar can spot your sexual preference by your social ties, Facebook checks are occurring customs and every quiz you take on Facebook delivers a shocking amount of personally identifiable information to third parties.

Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.

Here are links to the previous posts in this series:
One: More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.
Two: Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller



What are other paradoxes of the Internet Age? What did I get wrong above?

Google has stepped in to help Philippine businesses make their presence felt online. The Philippine Business Stimulus Package, consists of Web design package as well as P2000 worth of Google AdWords credits The package also includes tutorials on the basics of marketing, Website maintenance and Google technologies. The whole package has been designed and executed with the help of partner institutions and organizations such as STI, GoNegosyo, the Philippine Marketing Association, CITEM (Center...

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We are proud to release our Joomla! Piwik component. Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It is a great alternative to Google Analytics. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages. Check http://piwik.org for further details. With com_piwik you can easy install this great tool direkt into joomla! 1.5 with the well-known installer. A plugin will be installed together with the component to put the trackingcode directly in your current template on the right place.

The Image Swap Module from CorFun shows up to three images in a module position. The first image shows when the page loads. The second image shows when the user mouses over the default image. The third image shows after the mouse is moved off the image. The images can be different sizes, or the module can be used to make them all the same width. This module is perfect for 'Buy Now' or other call to action buttons. It introduces an interactive quality that will boost sales and improve conversions. The user will see a different message when mousing over the default image, and the third image can remind the user of the call to action just shown. The module will not conflict with other Joomla extensions and is simple to install and configure.

• 100% FREE and takes only 2 minutes to add to any site - no coding needed. • Increase traffic - Get return traffic when users share and tweet from the toolbar. Users can email friends and even import contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL. • Virally promote your site - Supports 80 social destinations and includes a Facebook fan page and Twitter updates buttons. • Solid performance - The toolbar does not affect page load time! It loads only after the page is fully loaded. • Google site search – Users can search the content of your site. • Get Revenues - Get paid for searches made from the toolbar (coming soon)

This plugin replaces the default email cloak plugin included in the joomla core. This version supports the use of both images and text in links (the default version only supports text). To use, simply install using the Joomal installer. In the plugin manager, ensure that this new plugin is published and that the default plugin is unpublished. ** This appears to be fixed in 1.5.15.

This plug-in enables you to build dynamic pages using the TinyButStrong Template Engine under Joomla. Unlike Smarty and other engines, TinyButStrong allows templates made using visual authoring tools. This makes it the ideal tool to make few dynamic pages, or even complete PHP applications implemented within a CMS. By default, the plugin has a strong level of security. But you can setup several options to make it appropriate to your Joomla site.

Component to manage a portfolio Integrates with Phoca and Agora if these are installed

A little module that displays an article in a module position. It calls all content plugins like com_content does. For suggestions or bugs please send an email to seija (at) dragons-server (dot) de

1. Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store ... (via Ed Corkery on Twitter)
2. The Art of Community For Free Download -- Jono Bacon's O'Reilly book on community management now available for free download (still available for purchase!).
3. Gov Hack -- Australian government ran a hack day with their open data, this is their writeup.
4. Android Mythbusters -- slides for talk by Matt Porter at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. A (long) catalogue of the kludges in Android.

Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller

This gem from Whimsley makes the point - with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument - that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through recommendations engines...

Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

In short, the long tail has gangrene at its extremity - the niche. More disarming is the conclusion that it isn't just the output of our recommendation algorithms that is leading to what the author calls "monopoly populism"and the end of niche culture:

"The recommender "system" could be anything that tends to build on its own popularity, including word of mouth...Our online experiences are heavily correlated, and we end up with monopoly populism...A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.

The network effects that so characterize Internet services are a positive feedback loop where the winners take all (or most). The issue isn't what they bring to the table, it is what they are leaving behind.



here is a link to yesterday's post: More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.


Tomorrow: The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

1. Heat Maps in R -- We used financial data here because it's easier to access than the airline data, but it's actually a pretty interesting way of looking at a financial time series. Weekend and holiday effects are a bit more obvious, and it's a bit like being able to see the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly closes all at once (by scanning your eye over the calendar in different directions). Includes source code. (via migurski on Delicious)
2. BlackHat and EC2 -- Theft of resources is the red-headed step-child of attack classes and doesn't get much attention, but on cloud platforms where resources are shared amongst many users these attacks can have a very real impact. With this in mind, we wanted to show how EC2 was vulnerable to a number of resource theft attacks and the videos below demonstrate three separate attacks against EC2 that permit an attacker to boot up massive numbers of machines, steal computing time/bandwidth from other users and steal paid-for AMIs. (via straup on Delicious)
3. Funny Characters in Unicode -- I never get tired of the wacky stuff in Unicode. I love the thought of a Unicode committee somewhere arguing passionately about the number of buttons on the snowman .... (via Hacker News)
4. Statistics to English Translation -- The terms sensitivity and specificity generally refer to diagnostic or screening procedures, such as an HIV or allergy tests. The sensitivity of a test is its true positive rate; the specificity is its true negative rate, although it can be more intuitive to think of specificity as the complement of the false positive rate. This matters. Bandying around numbers with misleading labels, or misinterpreting numbers that have a precise and defined meaning, does not further understanding. (Said 78.4% of statisticians, with a 20% confidence factor probability of false positives)

This is the fifth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of October and different sources such as tweetsentiment.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. Joe continues to provide some great 'hard' data that allowed me to better place more items on the grid this month.

A quick refresher, the matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion. You may agree or disagree with my placements and that's all good to me. After all, this is partially about taste and numbers. The matrix and plots do not represent a thorough analytical treatment, but rather a view of the trends that could be found in data sources allowing me to plot with some sense of relevance.

For this post, I've limited the data and activity to the month of October. Again, I'll continue with this project as long as I get enough feedback/help. So, if you are interested in contributing, you can comment here, or read the original post to figure out the best way for you to submit your plots.

I hope you enjoy this and see it as a potentially useful tool to monitor trends that your fellow readers are both contributing to and tracking.

In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony...and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative.

Here is the first of three paradoxes of the Internet Age. I would love to see Radar readers point out others.

More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." In the review she lays out the concept of "group polarization"

People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.

The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.”

(Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)

1. ChipHacker -- collaborative FAQ site for electronics hacking. Based on the same StackExchange software as RedMonk's FOSS FAQ for open source software.
2. Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we're particularly proud of is that we've managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we're told, is unique. I think of this as the start of a They Work For You for video coverage. I'd love to be able to scale this to local government coverage, which is disappearing as local newspapers turn into delivery mechanisms for real estate advertisements.
3. InfiniDB: Open Source Column Database -- hooks into MySQL, uses MySQL for SQL parsing, security, etc. The commercial enterprise version has multi-server support (parallel scale-out). (via Brian Aker)
4. Massive Online Analysis -- MOA is a framework for data stream mining. Includes tools for evaluation and a collection of machine learning algorithms. Related to the WEKA project, also written in Java, while scaling to more demanding problems. . (via joshua on Delicious)

Yes, Google is no longer considering Meta keywords as a critical factor in search rankings, though other on-page elements such as the title, description and so on are still vital elements in terms of SEO. Google has stated that they use over 200 factors to determine rankings, but keyword tags are not one of them. Check this video to know more...

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Guest blogger Brian Ahier is a City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon, and he works in Information Systems at Mid-Columbia Medical Center. He is passionate about healthcare reform, government 2.0 and health IT.

One of the interesting things about the new Lists feature is the expansion of the asymmetrical nature of relationships on Twitter. I use Twitter Lists to control the flow of the fire hose of my data streams into manageable list streams. But another important aspect is the ability to create lists composed of accounts I don't follow. This is radically changing relationships and the way we build communities on Twitter.

As Mark Drapeau pointed out it will become more important which lists you are on than who is following you. You could actually follow no one at all and have lists for each group of accounts you want to follow. You can create listreams to follow rather than following individual people. This is also going to add a new dimension to some of the social aspects of twitter. People will share lists, recommend lists, and get bent out of shape when they are not included on certain lists.

But you don't have to go out and find all the accounts to create great lists. You can subscribe to lists created by Twitter superstars such as Robert Scoble's fascinating lists, Tim O’Reilly's great resources, or Muck Rack’s list of journalists lists. A new service called Listorious will point you to some useful lists to follow. I have created some lists and my best so far contains most of the Twitter healthcare community. Companies will create lists of employees like the Twitter employees list and you can follow their tweets without having to follow every employee.

Twitter Lists also eventually means the death of the Suggested User List. At the Web 2.0 Summit Tim O'Reilly asked Ev Williams if it wasn't time to move past SUL. Tim admitted that he has benefited from being on the list, but implied that it did not reflect actual authority and suggested it may be time for it to die. Ev Williams said, "It has been time to retire suggested user lists for a while... once we get lists rolled out we can retire the Suggested User List and make that, as we like to say, much more Twittery and democratic." Since you can follow other people’s lists, others can follow yours, and you do not have to actually follow an account on your list, Twitter Lists is a game changer.

The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.15 [Wojmamni ama mamni]. It has been three months since Joomla 1.5.14 was released on July 30, 2009.

The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.

Download

Click here to download Joomla 1.5.15 (Full package) »

Click here to find an update package. »

Instructions

• New installation and technical requirements
• Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version
• Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x

Want to test drive Joomla? Try the online demo or the Joomla JumpBox. Documentation is available for beginners.

Please note that you should always backup your site before upgrading.

Release Notes

Check the Joomla 1.5.15 Post-Release FAQs to see if there are important items and helpful hints discovered after the release.

If you have modified core template overrides, please be sure to back them up before upgrading.

Security

Two security issues were fixed in this release:

• Moderate Priority - Core - Front-End Editing. More information »
• Low Priority - Core - XML File View. More information »

For additional information, visit the Joomla Security Center.

Components

• Allowed search to use the Itemid of the current Menu Item (15780)
• Removed unnecessary quotes in search results (16919)
• Fixed problem when using relative URL's in editor with SEF enabled. (16445)
• Fixed formatting problem in Category List layout with Internet Explorer (17110)
• Fixed problem with entering HTML in user confirmation messages (17259)
• Fixed Media Manager issues in Windows (17337)
• Fixed problem with Archived Article filters when cache is enabled (17470)
• Fixed RSS feed problem with ampersand in page title (18343)

Modules

• Allowed underscore character in menu names (16086)
• Fixed problem with mod_newsflash and altenative read-more text (17231)
• Fixed problem with Alias Menu Item Type not opening in new window (18240)
• Fixed problem with UTF-8 characters in breadcrumbs (18493)

Plugins

• Fixed problem with email cloaking and non-ASCII characters (11578)
• Fixed TinyMCE configuration error (16982)
• Fixed problem with multiple editor instances on one page (17043)
• Fixed problem whereby TinyMCE stripped some image HTML (17057)
• Fixed TinyMCE Extended Valid Elements problem (17121)
• Fixed problem with TinyMCE blockquote (17215)
• Allowed Firefox inline spell check to work in TinyMCE (17356)
• Fixed problem saving changes in TinyMCE (17367)
• Fixed TinyMCE problem with caption.js and filtering (17379)
• Fixed TinyMCE bullet issue with Internet Explorer (17414)
• Made image title names consistent in front and back end (17430)
• Fixed issue with email cloaking and images (17692)
• Fixed problem in email cloaking syntax (17964)
• Fixed caption alignment when image alignment is not set (18010)
• Fixed JavaScript error in TinyMCE (18192)
• Added option to create templates in TinyMCE editor (18245)
• Fixed problem with TinyMCE Sql (18246)
• Fixed problem when using email cloaking and JavaScript (18310)
• Fixed problem with email cloaking when using images (18481)

Legacy

• No legacy issues were fixed for this release

Templates

• Fixed problem with missing template CSS files (16609)
• Fixed problem with linked images in Beez template (16804)
• Added default text color for backend error messages (16914)
• Added missing spinner.gif (17432)
• Fixed problem when copying Beez template to new name (17559)
• Fixed error in JA_Purity template with Internet Explorer 8 (18070)

Language

• Added TinyMCE Language file for Toggle Editor button (17332)
• Added Ulaanbaatar in timezones (17577)
• Fixed problem with localisation of pagination strings (17618)
• Added missing Display # language string (18124)
• Added missing com_media language strings (18349)
• Improved tooltip text for mod_search (18518)
• Fixed problem with version information for core languages (18522)

Administrator

• Fixed problem with FTP fields auto-completing (18297)

System

• Don't show password in configuration.php file (16484)
• Fixed problem when Itemid does not exist (16927)
• Fixed PHP 5.3 compatibility issues (17150)
• Fixed problem with caching for com_weblinks and com_contact (17475)
• Fixed additional PHP 5.3 compatibility issues (18008)
• Fixed problem with warnings in system_config.php file (18054)
• Added missing JEXEC checks in code (18080)
• Fixed problem converting UTF-8 characters to ASCII (18142)
• Added option to disallow users to view extension XML files (18353)
• Fixed problem with onAfterDisplayTitle event and PHP 5.3 (18430)
• Fixed problem with displaying error messages with right-to-left languages (18537)

Statistics

Statistics for the 1.5.15 release period:

• Joomla 1.5.15 contains:
  • 60 issues fixed in SVN
  • 59 commits
• Tracker activity resulted in a net increase of 15 active issues:
  • 185 new reports
  • 110 closed
  • 60 fixed in SVN
• At the time the 1.5.15 release was packaged, the tracker had 220 active issues:
  • 103 open
  • 92 confirmed
  • 25 pending

Joomla! Bug Squad

Thanks to the Joomla Bug Squad for their dedicated efforts investigating reports, fixing problems, and applying patches to Joomla. If you find a bug in Joomla, please report it on the 1.5 Bug Tracker.

Active members of the Joomla Bug Squad during this last release cycle include: Ian MacLennan and Mark Dexter co-coordinators; Airton Torres, Alan Langford, Amy Stephen, Andras Debreczeni, Andrea Tarr, Ankit Ahuja, Christophe Demko, Dennis Hermacki, Elin Waring, Ercan Ozkaya, Flavia Silveira, Gergő Erdősi, Hannes Papenberg, Jean-Marie Simonet, Jennifer Marriott, Johnathan Cheung, Joseph LeBlanc, Julio Pontes, Kevin Devine, Klas Berlič, Marijke Stuivenberg, Mati Kochen, Ole Bang Ottosen, Pete Nurse, Peter van Westen, Ron Severdia, Samuel Moffatt, Vicki Payne, and Will Mavis.

A warm welcome to the newest members of the Joomla Bug Squad: Andras Debreczeni, Andrea Tarr, Ankit Ahuja, Christopher Raymond, Geo Hern, Naveen Gavini, Peter van Westen, Ron Severdia, Vicki Payne, and Will Mavis.

While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week^†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps:

Since most Book apps are actually individual e-books, the Gaming category would have a hard time keeping up with the ever increasing number of Books. Once publishers figured out how to turn their titles into iPhone apps, the number of Book apps started growing faster than Games. Nevertheless Games continue to rule the Top 100 charts.

A similar story is playing out on the Android platform: the most popular Android apps are primarily Games. (In the Android taxonomy, most Books are in the Reference category.)

Returning to the top iPhone apps, the price of the Top Grossing apps stabilized somewhat last week. Except for the top decile (rank 1 through 10) for which the median price was about $7, the median price across the other deciles was around $5.

Over the last week, the Top Paid Games were slightly more expensive than apps that made the overall Top 100 Paid list. iPhone Game developers will tell you that (visually) compelling and engaging iPhone Games are far from trivial to design and market^††. So it's no surprise that the creators of the most popular Games are starting to charge a little more for their software.

(†) Data for this post was for the week ending 11/1/2009.
(††) First, designing for such a small screen poses a major challenge. Secondly, the sheer number of Game apps (close to 20K last week) makes it hard to create something that turns into a long-running top-seller.

1. First Test for Election Cryptography (MIT Technology Review) -- The first government election to use a new cryptographic scheme that lets both voters and auditors check that votes were cast and recorded accurately will be held tomorrow in Takoma Park, MD. Founder of the company behind the technology is David Chaum, who ran the first electronic currency company in the 90s. That was ahead of its time (Internet faced a credibility problem, not a convenience problem), but his timing for this seems spot-on. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Do I Have The Right To Refuse This Search? -- a former police officer questions the efficacy of TSA screenings and is doubly worried by by the lack of data collected. For years in policing, we relied on random patrols to curb crime. We relied upon this “strategy” until someone went out and captured some data, and did a study that demonstrated conclusively that random patrols do not work (Kansas City Study). As police have employed other types of “random” interventions, as in DWI checkpoints, they have had to develop policies, procedures and training to ensure that the “random” nature of these intrusions is truly random. Whether every car gets checked, or every tenth car, police must demonstrate that they have attempted to eliminate the effects of active and passive discrimination when using “random” strategies. No such accountability currently exists at TSA. Trend I see lately is a return to quantitative decision making, reality-based data-directed system interventions. (via BoingBoing)
3. Visualising Transport Data -- It can be hard to make meaningful information from huge amounts of data, a graph and a table doesn't always communicate all it should do. We have been working hard on technology to visualise big datasets into compelling stories that humans can understand. We were really pleased with what we came up with in just one and a half days. Like many places, the UK data.gov ran a dev camp to jumpstart people using their data. These appear to be successful, but I'm not aware of studies into the longterm effects nor the "value" of different types of developers.
4. Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do -- there's a numerical optical illusion at work here: count your friends, then ask them to count their friends. If you average the friend counts of your peers, it'll probably be higher than your friend count. The reason for this is also why (on average!) your sexual partners seem to have had more sexual partners than you, and why previous generations seem more fecund than current generations. It's because connectors (with large numbers of friends) distort the average, so unless you're the connector (and if you're reading this, you might well be!) the average will be bigger than a normal person's friend count. Left unmentioned is what kind of person would count the number of friends they have, then ask their friends for their counts .... (via Hacker News)

Scam is an attempt to deceive a person or an entity by gaining full confidence, and it is a word that people want to steer clear off. SEO scams have no other meaning than cheating or swindling an online business owner or a website owner by providing dubious SEO services.  In the early days of search engines when AltaVista and Yahoo were ruling the search engine market, SEO was in its infancy but SEO scams were still prevalent but the numbers weren’t so alarming. Once SEO techniques...

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1. Your Botnet is My Botnet (PDF) -- 2008 USENIX Security paper analysing >70G of data gathered when security researchers hijacked the Torpig botnet. A major limitation of analyzing a botnet from the inside is the limited view. Most current botnets use stripped-down IRC or HTTP servers as their command and control channels, and it is not possible to make reliable statements about other bots. In particular, it is difficult to determine the size of the botnet or the amount and nature of the sensitive data that is stolen. One way to overcome this limitation is to “hijack” the entire botnet, typically by seizing control of the C&C channel. [...] As a result, whenever a bot resolves a domain (or URL) to connect to its C&C server, the connection is redirected or sinkholed. This provides the defender with a complete view of all IPs that attempt to connect to the C&C server as well as interesting information that the bots might send..
2. cartographer.js -- build thematic maps using Google Maps. To be precise, you can build a choropleth, which is my word of the day. (via Simon Willison)
3. Making Privacy Policies Not Suck (Aza Raskin) -- interested in developing a standard set of privacy policy components the way that Creative Commons has created a standard set of copyright license components.
4. Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell (TechCrunch) -- many of those games on Facebook that your friends play are evil. To get in-game money or objects, they'll let you take a survey but at the end you're signed up for crap you never wanted. Related: this article on monetizing social networks which talks about social gaming's business model.

Hello Visitor, The Retail eCommerce blog is owned by Mobius Knowledge Services, a solution provider for online retailers, comparison shopping engines and other online businesses. Our blog has undergone a major change in terms of its look and feel, but the navigation is the same. If you are a regular visitor to this blog, hope you like the change, and if you are visiting us for the first time, welcome to our blog. You’ll find blog posts/articles pertaining to the following...

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2009-11-02 01:17:35 by TeHonu

Welcome to our new extension FEEDBACK, thanks to the extension you will be able to receive mail from the recording site to know their thoughts or ask to test some parts of the site.

Catalog of archives (Docs, Images, Videos, mp3 ... ) It can classificate objects by tree categories and attach files. The files can classificate in families. Units: Title, Description, Units with multicategories,Units with Tags, Units with multifile attach Files/Attacheds: Title, Description, Filter with family, Whatever type file

Finally Autostand as SEF support, using JoomSEF. For previous versions of Autostand (

Display a list of the published, but pending articles from specific section, category. Based on mod_latestnews - Joomla! Project Features: -optional title with h4 tag -display article's Start Publishing date (with predefined or custom date format) -display remaining time (days, hours, minutes) options: -limit article's number -timezone -ordering languages: -english -hungarian

This plugin removes the need for your visitor to enter a username and email when registering through the Virtuemart, Joomla or JomSocial registration page. Users can then sign in using just thier email address. Think about how this benefits you and your users: 1. Your time is freed from people forgetting thier username and emailing you 2. Links such as "Forgot your username" are no longer needed 3. Users dont have to remember what username they signed up with 4. No core hacks means you can upgrade Joomla or Virtuemart without having to make code changes Whats included: * The plugin * Simple installation instructions * 30 day support to get it running on your site

VM Breadz - a module that will show breadcrumbs of your store. It includes all filters that were applied by user. Will display in correct order and allow user to delete filter with close (x)-link. Just like Newegg.com! Features: * VM Breadz will work only when you enter your Virtuemart store. It is done on purpose. When you browse your other Joomla categories you may use default Joomla Breadcrumbs, and put it to display everywhere except Virtuemart. When you enter Virtuemart - that is where VM Breadz's role starts. * From a start it is styled like Amazon.com with functionality of Newegg.com. Though you can style it through CSS as you wish. * Includes all filters apllied by user in correct order (in the same sequence they were applied). * Provides with '(x)', sort of 'Close-link' to remove the filter. * Easy customizable through the back-end menu. * This module is developed to be used in combination with Cherry Picker. http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension-specific/virtuemart-extensions/10328 Though it will also work by itself as Virtuemart breadcrumbs. * Supports SEF.

Cherry Picker will allow your visitors to filter products by any parameter they want. Just like Amazon.com/Newegg.com. Features: 1. Provides your store with a powerful tool, that allows your visitors to filter products the way they want. 2. It is styled like Amazon.com, but you can easily style it in CSS as you wish. 3. You can apply as many filters at the same time as you want. 4. Shows only those parameters which are actual due to filters already applied. 5. Shows the number of products in brackets to all parameters. 6. Easy customizable through the back-end menu. 7. Supports SEF. 8. In combination with VM Breadz http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension-specific/virtuemart-extensions/10329 gives a really good experiance to your site.