All posts in Technology

iPad, what do you think?

by Ades on January 29, 2010 in Advice to Businesses, Technology, Usability with 91 Comments

Well, as you know the whole internet is going crazy about the new product of Apple, iPad. I just wanted to know what is your opinion on it? As a product and what its impact will be on the PC industry in general. For sure it’s going to strangle Amazon’s Kindle, will probably cannibalize Apple’s own product – MacBook, because with iPad you can pretty much do anything what you would normally do with normal notebooks/netbooks. It also comes with accessories like doc, casing and keyboard in case you want to use it like a real notebook with real keyboards.

I personally think that it’s an amazing product, it will be particularly popular with marketing professionals who would benefit from this kind of beautiful tablet PC (Mac) for their presentation purposes. As with normal people, they would enjoy it for reading e-books and browsing the internet. And of course, there will be tons of great apps that will make the iPad more valuable and usable than it actually is.

One thing disappointed me though… the photo-frame like edges of the iPad. I thought some of the photoshopped ones prior to the launch looked a lot better. I know that they did this out of usability, so that there would be a place around the device that is not-touch-sensitive. This would make your handling of the iPad easier, it wouldn’t interfere with your work, you wouldn’t accidentally launch some apps..etc. However they could have left the preferences of the not-touch-sensitive margin to the user. Don’t you think?

For example, if you like all four sides to be touch-sensitive you could set all four margins to zero. If you like to hold the left-side while using, you could set only left side margin to 1″ and the rest of the sides to zero…. you know what I mean? Basically, it would be just like the Word document where you can specify the margin of your paper before you print. But anyway…

How about you? What’s your thoughts on this product of Apple? I would like to know your opinions, leave your comments under this post.

Connecting Hard Disk to TV

by Ades on April 3, 2009 in Gadgets, Personal, Technology with 19 Comments

CDs are great for writing digital media but they get scratched very easily, especially when you have kids that are 3.5 years old and 1 year old in one team ;)

So I said to myself I should get one of those “harddisk encapsulators” that can hook up your harddisk to a TV and make it a media player. After doing some research on hdd players on the net I decided to buy Popcorn Hour A-110. However when I went to local IT Mall “Low Yat” there was no “popcorn” brand whatsoever. When I asked the sales assistants whether they had this “popcorn hour” player, they simply smiled and didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I am sure they thought I was kidding, asking for real popcorn…

After going from one shop to the other, it was clear that most of the shops had only two brands for 3.5″ harddisk encapsulators, they were GigaView by Noontec and WD TV by Western Digital.

GigaView 3.5” HDD Media Player

GigaView was priced at $70 and WD TV was $100. Also for GigaView you can put the harddisk inside the media player, as for WD TD you have to connect the harddisk via USB cable – that means your harddisk would be lying around the TV cabinet. So I said “I will buy GigaView, it’s cheaper and I can put the harddisk inside it”.

How was I wrong! It was a nightmare product! I came back and put up everything – connected to TV and played a sample movie file. At first it was taking too long to detect the harddisk (hdd was brand new btw), I said I am sure it will be faster next time, it’s just for the first time I said to myself. Then it finally detected the harddisk but now it would only play the files for 5 minutes and then get stuck. So I formatted the harddisk and changed it from NTFS to FAT32 file system, this solved the 5 minutes issue, but now it was flickering every 10-15 minutes and jumping the frames… After few hours, it wasn’t even recognizing the file names and was showing some scrambled characters instead. Now it wouldn’t play completely.

After that I didn’t bother to touch the player, I just put it back in the box and the next day took it to the shop back. I told them that I want my money back or to change it to different brand. They said they could only change it to same brand but different unit. I said I don’t want the same brand. Because after checking online it was clear that the problem was not with specific units but with the whole product of the company. So I got my way and got it changed to WD TV by Western Digital. I paid extra $30 bucks plus $4 for changing to different brand. The guy wanted the $4 to be paid in cash specifically so I asked him whether it was going to his pocket ;) he said “no” and gave me some unconvincing reasons. Anyway, I was happy that I could get it changed to WD TV now.

WD TV 3.5” HDD Media Player

WD TV was great, came back put it up everything and pressed ‘on’. It showed everything instantly, it could detect the harddisk and its different partitions, different folders.. etc. Compared to GigaView, the difference was like the earth and the sky.

This post is already long, so I won’t be talking about WD TV here. You can see a detailed review of this product at Geek.com here. But so far, I am very satisfied with WD TV, and the issue of harddisk being outside the media player became a “no issue” anymore ;)

Google indexes speech in YouTube videos

by Ades on September 20, 2008 in Google, Technology with 11 Comments

Google Labs has a new technology – Gaudi or Google Audio Indexing. Gaudi allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels.

It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken (see screenshot below).

Google Audio Indexing uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return to the user. The returned videos are ranked based on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness.

Isn’t that something? It will revolutionize the way people watch online videos after this. If the person in the video talks too much, now you have the option to skip his bla bla bla and go right to the points that you want to hear.

It will also be easier (for authorities) to keep track of what people are talking. I hope this option won’t be abused. What do you say?

URL: http://labs.google.com/gaudi

AdesBlog is now mobile compatible

by Ades on June 20, 2008 in Sponsors, Technology with 10 Comments

AdesBlog is now mobile device compatible, thanks to AlexKing‘s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin.

Once installed, this plugin will redirect all mobile devices’ browsers to a mobile friendly version of your blog.

As you can see from the screenshot (i am not sure you can see or not, sorry for the bad shot ;), only the content of the blog will be displayed in the mobile version. All the graphics and other excessive things will be removed.

Unlike in RSS readers, in mobile version you can view/make comments too.

Mobile RSS Reader

As for RSS readers for mobile devices, I have found NewsGator’s RSS reader for mobiles particularly useful. SonyEricsson’s built in RSS reader was not so good, it truncates the posts. And when you click on “more” it loads the blog itself.

But one disadvantage with NewsGator’s RSS readers is that, you need to manage all your RSS’s through your account on NewsGator’s site. That means, you cannot add any new RSS’s through your mobile phone, you need to add it online to your NewsGator account first and then it appears in your mobile phone automatically. I have no idea why they have done it this way.

Do you know of any other good RSS reader for mobile devices?

Gmail for Mobile

And what is mobile device without your favorite email service – gmail, right? Gmail has developed a mobile version of its Gmail. It’s very neat application. I have been enjoying it very much. To install, point your mobile device browser to http://www.gmail.com/app

Do you have any interesting internet related mobile apps? (not games) I would be

Note: Maxis users type *100# and press “Send/Call” to setup your internet connection on your mobile. When you receive a message, press reply and type “5″ and send. (5 should be “Phone Settings”). Then reply again and choose “1″ and send (1 is “GPRS WAP Settings”), after which just follow the instructions.

Spectra – visual news reader from MSNBC

by Ades on May 9, 2008 in Flash, Technology with 9 Comments

Do you find reading news boring? How about adding some flare to it? Well, MSNBC is trying exactly that.

MSNBC has launched new visual news reader called Spectra that makes reading news a lot more entertaining.

It’s a flash based reader that shows news in a 3D fashion. You can choose different channels (e.g top news, international, US, Iraq..etc) and add to your reading queue.

Spectra

Alexa modifies its ranking system

by Ades on April 18, 2008 in Technology, Trackers with 10 Comments

Alexa announced that it has modified its ranking system. Apparently, it’s now tracking from multiple sources (what are these sources, it’s not mentioned) to rank the sites. Previously it used to rely only on its Alexa Toolbar statistics to rank the sites. And the system was hugely flawed. I guess now we can expect more realistic stats from Alexa.

Due to this new ranking system, more people are now reporting that their sites have dropped in Alexa rankings. This holds true with my blog too. Now my blog’s weekly rank is at 88,172 and three months average is 133,396. So goodbye Top50K with the new system ;) How is your blog’s stats doing with the new system?

Google StreetView, view any street in 3D panoromic view

by Ades on December 12, 2007 in Google, Technology with 3 Comments

Do you use Google Maps to give out your home address? Well, soon you will be able to send your house photos, better yet, you will be able to send it in 3 dimensional panoramic view. And it’s not limited to your house only, you can actually navigate along the street and view the surroundings.

Google’s StreetView is currently available to cities like New York, San Fransisco, Las Vegas, Denver, and Miami. But should be coming to your cities very soon.

Since Google take these digital images of the streets by hand, there are concerns that some people might be captured in the photos, especially in compromising situations. (eg. throwing your rubbish in your pajamas, or worse without pajamas ;) Therefore, Google provides people to report inappropriate images on the StreetView pages.

Report Inappropriate Image
Google takes concerns about its services very seriously. Please use the link below to report concerns about an inappropriate street view.

If the location that you are browsing has photos, the StreetView button will be enabled on Google Maps, as shown in the screenshot to the right. You can see YouTube video about StreetView and how to use it here.

P.S I hope Google won’t come up with HouseRank next ;)

Google experimenting social marketing style of voting on its SERPs

by Ades on November 30, 2007 in Google, Technology with 7 Comments

Is this the beginning of the end for Google PageRank system? Maybe.

TechCrunch reports that Google is experimenting on social marketing style voting system. This is an experiment that is still on individual level, not yet public. In this experiment Google allows you to manage your personal search results. You can promote some websites, and you can also remove some websites from the search results page (see screenshot to the left).

How you use it?

In order to use this feature, first you need to be signed in to your Google account. And I think not everybody will see this feature, even after you sign in to your Google account. But for those who can see this feature, here is how you use it.

I like it! If you like particular result (website) you can promote it by clicking on the arrow-up icon beside the result.

I don’t like it! If you don’t like particular result, you can press on “x” icon beside the result. This will remove the result, and it will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

The changes you make are not permanent. There’s a link at the bottom of the search results that lets you view the results in their original ordering.

In addition to these features, you can also add some websites that are not included in the search results. This will allow Google to include the websites that it had missed. But this feature can be misused easily. I think that’s why Google wants users to sign in to their Google accounts first. So that Google can track their activities.

Will it replace PageRank?

In my personal opinion, this is directly related to the latest PageRank crisis. It’s the product that resulted from this very problem. Google now is trying to find a long term solution for its PageRank algorithm (which is open to manipulation), which is responsible for defining search engine results.

Since social marketing and collective collaborative projects are becoming the norm in this age. It’s no surprise that Google is moving in that direction too. Millions of people use Google everyday, so this experiment can actually be proven successful. Because the people who are manipulating the system will be very small, and there will be thousands of other people who will help to improve the search (by removing spam from the SERPs).

What do you think of this? What is your opinion? Is it a good move by Google?

Source: JohnChow, TechCrunch

Audio comments are the next big thing? I think so!

by Ades on October 8, 2007 in Advice to Businesses, Business Ideas, Online Tools, Technology, WordPress with 17 Comments

Browsing Yaro Starak’s blog, I noticed that he started using audio comments widget (see screenshot left) on his blog. When you select the person’s name in the widget, it will play that particular individual’s audio comment. What a great idea!

Clicking the footer link of the widget “MobaTalk Audio Comment System“, I signed up for the service. However upon logging in to my account, I saw no such service being offered by MobaTalk.

Doing a little research on Google, I found out that this service is actually offered by http://www.mychingo.com and it’s not a free service. It costs $3.95/month. Also the site says that the service is being taken over by MobaTalk soon. Aha, no wonder the footer link takes me MobaTalk website I told to myself ;) So they are in the process of integrating it to MobaTalk then.

I was quite tempted to subscribe for the service, but then I realized how you guys (my readers) are not so talkative type, so I decided not to. I hardly get text comments on my posts, I don’t think it will be worth to purchase an audio comment service just yet (i thought to myself).

Audio comments in the future

Nevertheless I think, it’s a great idea to have audio comments on the blog. I hope there will be some free services in the future. If it could be integrated to WordPress as a default commenting service, it would be even better. Readers could leave text comments, as well as audio comments on specific posts. It would also make the discussion a lot easier – replying to each other by text would be a thing of the past. Blogs would save space too, especially the ones that receive hundreds of comments per post (e.g JohnChow). Instead there would be only one widget at the bottom of the post.

Free idea for entrepreneurs

I believe there is no such audio commenting service for blogs yet. So if you are an entrepreneur, you can bank on this idea and make it a reality. I am 90% positive that it would be a success.

I wish I had the capacity to produce such a system. If I had, I definitely would. To give you some visualization of what I think the widget could look like, here is an illustration I have created:

So what do you think? Do you think one day we will be “audio commenting” in the blogosphere? It would be interesting to know what you guys think.

Ping: http://blog.guykawasaki.com (Let me ping Guy, he can make it reality. Afterall, it’s a better idea than truemors ;)

New technology in resizing images

by Ades on September 1, 2007 in Technology with 1 Comment

New technology, created by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan, could have a great impact on the dynamic nature of web pages. Just like liquid design for html pages, this technology allows dynamic resizing of images. When this technology comes, cropping your images will be a thing of the past. Check out the demo: