January 3, 2004

Can Armstrong Win Six?

From a spectators point of view, it’s a little early to be thinking of the 2004 Tour de France, but Eurosport has an excellent analysis of Armstrong’s chances for six

“In the group of five-timers, however, Armstrong excels in one crucial domain: More than any of the others, Armstrong can endure the forces of an apocalyptic Tour de France — and still emerge with his yellow jersey intact.” Here’s why…

December 31, 2003

Retire the Wretched Fax Machine

Please! Let’s make 2004 the year we retire the wretched fax machine!

This is despite some of the valid points Paul Rubens of the BBC NEWS makes in his article Fax – the technology that refuses to die (via Gizmodo)

“The fax machine is an ancient piece of office equipment – it was invented in its earliest form by one Alexander Bain in 1843. It transmits the contents of pieces of paper, but these days the chances are high that anything on paper started as an electronic document. So why print it out and fax it when you can e-mail the digital version?”

December 31, 2003

PVR Parts Ordered

Since the hardware is now on order, I suppose I have committed myself to building what Catherine has branded “STeVo“, which is my feeble attempt at a constructing a homebrew PVR (personal video recorder).

Wish me luck!

December 29, 2003

Corporate Search in 2004?

Call it a prediction or stating the obvious, but I believe in the coming year corporate search solutions will be generating a steady buzz — driven primarily by innovative products that focus on unlocking the terabytes of knowledge squandered away in the reassess of the corporate network data stores. A position John Battelle seems to agree with in a recent post on the topic:

“…the overwhelming presumption of webwide search on your desktop is certainly rewiring how corporations think about their more private databanks. A robust market has grown up around “enterprise search,” (some companies, such as FAST, were spun off from consumer search companies, and Google maintains a unit focused on the market). There’s a crop of interesting startups to boot, including Tim Bray’s company, Antarctica. It’s entirely possible some of the next big ideas in search may well be developed in this more focused, less public field.”

December 23, 2003

Simple, Private File Sharing

As others have predicted, we will see more an more of these…

“MUTE File Sharing is a new peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems to be similar to Waste

December 19, 2003

Heliodisplay- Interactive Free-Space Display

IO2 Technology has demonstrated a 42″ prototype of what they are calling “Heliodisplay- Interactive Free-Space Display“, which is essentially display without a “screen” …

“The Heliodisplay projects full color streaming video into free space (i.e. air). It is plug-and-play compatible with most video sources (TV, DVD, computer, etc.). These non-holographic images can be fully interactive, allowing a hand or finger to select, navigate and manipulate — as if it were a virtual touch screen.”

December 18, 2003

Social Bookmarks Manager Right-Click Context Menu

Last night I hacked together a bit of JavaScript to add a right-click context menu posting option to Joshua Schachter’s Social Bookmarks Manager.

It works in a similar fashion to the bookmarklet, but is accessible via the right-click context menu in IE. It also adds the feature of pulling in any text selected on the page into the “extended” description field and remembers your del.icio.us/user path after the first invocation by storing it in a cookie.

December 17, 2003

Syndication Friendly Longhorn

Others have mentioned the impact of the embedded RSS capabilities that will be in Longhorn. This time however, it’s Scoble talking about the broader implications of a syndication friendly OS

“In Longhorn you can store a ton of metadata with your files. You can also find those files much more easily. Why is that important to syndication? Because now you have a file system that supports sending files out via a syndication feed, storing them locally, and then letting users get to them in new and interesting ways.”

December 16, 2003

Social Networking in the Enterprise

Ephraim Schwartz writes in InfoWorld about how Social Networking Software is targeting the corporate enterprise, with startups such as
ZeroDegrees,
Interface Software,
ContactNetwork, and
Spoke targeting CRM…

“Leveraging advances in communication and integration, a new kind of application — corporate social networking — is being folded into the CRM feature set.”

“Companies like Siebel and Salesforce.com are watching this space. These social networking companies will be gobbled up real quick,”

In addition, I believe that Microsoft and IBM are watching this space as well, because in my opinion Social Networking Software is a natural extension to enterprise messaging software such as Exchange and Domino.

December 15, 2003

Searching RSS Channels for News

Ray Matthews of Utah State Library Division has published an excellent tutorial on the various methods for searching RSS feeds. I think the best part is the comprehensive list of RSS-related search engines and tools.