The iPhone needs glasses

Yes, it's true: the iPhone actually needs spectacles to correct its vision on close-up shots. Otherwise they get blurry.

Now, this isn't a problem for the regular family meeting group shots, BUT, if you're into REALLY futuristic stuff, you'll realize that the Apple design crew missed an important point: by not choosing a lens with auto-focus, they crippled the iPhone's vision to a point it performs text-recognition badly, or not at all.

Text-recognition? Yes, the iPhone does text-recognition. It does stuff like "reading" a business card, or "identifying" a product from a bar-code, or simply "opening" physical-links. These are all actions that are available in several apps from the App Store. Text, image, sound, music and speech recognition are in the inevitable path of the future of hand-held devices, and, frankly, this is mostly why I get excited with the iPhone.

Now, the people at Griffin propose a solution: they sell spectacles for the iPhone. By sliding in a $31 special lens, dubbed Clarifi, one can get crispy close-up photos. Oh, and the lens wrapper also acts as a protective iPhone cover.

Popular text-recognition apps like Evernote and Snappr are recommended to be used with this corrective lens.

We can only hope that the Apple crew will correct the device's faulty vision in the new version. Meanwhile, you can check out this exciting Snappr demo:

Just a word about Snappr: the service tries to do exactly John Battelle's vision of the future he described in his 2005 "The Search" book about Google; and that was to google a product, from a shelf in a store, and instantly get the best price and where to look for it.

P.S: you'll notice that the Snappr logo is, well... a snapper. That's a fish! But this one is to stick in the eyes and not in the ears ;)

The Future Of Hand-Held Devices...

People don't realize this yet, but what they really want is a device that becomes a living extension of their body, while enhancing their own sensing limitations. It'll make them feel smarter, more powerful. And - that - is a very addictive feeling.

I'm starting realizing this myself, because I've been using an iPhone for over six months now, and I've become pretty much addicted to it. With it, I do stuff I never dreamed I could do before!



Actually, some people did realize this back in the eighties, and thought that the coolest thing they could have was a digital watch.

In an infinitely large universe, such as, for instance, the one in which we live, anything; even the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; is POSSIBLE, when other things are NOT! -- especially when you own a digital watch.
Douglas Adams

I carry in my pocket the instant access to all my pictures, all my music, all my notes, all my work, all the people in my world (phone numbers, emails, addresses,...). And I can show it all off at social events in a useful and convenient manner.

While traveling, I'm fully aware of my location, of the route I want to take and of what's happening around me. I can get the instant access to the History of the place around me or any place in the world. I can get answers to every single question that might spring in my mind. Find out which of my friends are near me, and engage them to do stuff (Not yet actually. I still can't do that, but I'll get there someday).

Sounds familiar? To me, it sounds at lot like The REAL Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy :)

So what makes these hand-held devices different from the other devices? The looks? Nope, think again. It's the sensors! The difference are those wonderful little sensors that enable location and orientation awareness to the device. They give ears, eyes, skin and mouth to the device, and they are well programmed, so they start to become a living and breathing extension of our own limbs and organs.

Then again, this is nothing new, and I'm expecting, any time now, someone crying at me saying:

[...]that's no problem. just stick this fish in your ear.
Douglas Adams.

Syntax Highlighter

Hi, I'm testing a javascript based syntax highlighter for this blog. Let's see how it works:

 #Ducktyping: Does it walk like a duck? Does it quack like a duck?
 if arg1.responds_to? :capitalize
   puts "Then '#{arg1.capitalize}' must be a string.\n"
 else
   if arg1.responds_to? :modulo && arg1.responds_to? :numerator
     puts "Then '#{arg1.to_s}' must be an integer.\n"
   else
     if arg1.responds_to? :modulo && arg1.responds_to? :truncate
       puts "Then '#{arg1.to_s}' must be a float.\n"
     end
   end
 end

Whoops, guess not :( Anyone knows how to solve this issue?
Nice :) Actually I used this widget to make it work.

Update: I couldn't resist and I also implemented it in this wiki.

Lolcats on my google mobile app

Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around. We all remember the twitterfone and the cinch blogtalkradio concepts and we're still thinking on how huge their impact will be in the info-included community.

It's been over a year since Tim O'Reilly, the great web2.0 visionary and O'Reilly media books founder, noted that google was actually harvesting and harnessing precious voice-recognition data from their Goog-411 phone search. It's also been a year since Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned that 2008 was all about "mobile, mobile, mobile". Well, all those signs were foretelling the biggest thing I've seen ever since google reader and twitter came along: voice-search in your mobile web-able phone, voice-search in your iphone that is. Frankly, if anyone was doubting between getting a blackberry, a nokia or an iphone for christmas, just go and get an iphone, really. Or maybe an Android device, if you like to take chances.

But enough, here's my quick review:

Voice searching is lightning fast like 1-2-3. One, slide and tap on the google mobile app icon from your iphone launcher. Two, raise your phone near your ear, wait for the sound signal and voice your query: "lolcats". Three, wait a few seconds, get the results, tap on the image tab and be amazed with those cute furry cats. PERFECT!!

More below, you get a full screenshot tour of the voice-search experience! On the left-panel, you can see how the goog mobile app keeps a quick list of your past frequent queries for a quick tap; otherwise, voice and text searching are easily accessible. On the middle-panel, you can also quickly access to all your other google services (Google earth too? Yup, google earth too). On the right panel, you can see how voice search is optional and how you can add your google domain, in case you have one.

On the triptic below you get a 1-2-3 a-few-seconds experience. One, talk. Two, wait. Three, done. It should take in all, oh, about less than 7 seconds.

The next triptic below shows you the type of instant results you might expect. The green text string is google's voice-to-text resulting query. Below you can see the results. Note that you get a one-tap refinement if you're looking for images, local search or news. Easy. Pretty slick, don't you think?

The texting search is also top-notch, while google suggests and provides with different kind of contextual search related to your iphone contacts (synced with gmail), to your location on the map, or simply to regular search. Here's a contact search from my over 500 contacts for a quick call or email.

And below, here's the local search experience for the nearest new pizza place in photos. Note how in the middle-panel google suggests me with relevant keywords for my search, thus saving me my precious thumb-typing energy:

Even though mobile search on the iphone is really like riding a rolls-royce, there do are some relevant details that can be improved:
1 - Voice search does not relates with the text search contextual results, thus I cannot call for "Johnny" from my contacts, or do something like a "Call Johnny", or even a "Find Johnny".
2 - While searching for pizza near lisbon, or for the weather in lisbon, I must explicitly call for "pizza lisbon" or "weather lisbon". That's dumb, the google app should implicitly provide me first hand with pizza within my current location whenever I voice "pizza", or "weather", respectively.

So, the google mobile app is GREAT, it's game-changing, it's disruptive, it's clean, it's slick, it just works, even my mother or my 3 year-old nephew will be able to use it, and it's going to set the new standard of mobile search. Mobile searching is going to be even more contextual and relevant relative to who I am and where I am, because it has close access to my most personal stuff like my contacts, my recent phone-call history and my present location. The next step could be ... where my friends are? IMO, the next big thing coming soon, will be the pocket-pc/phone ubiquitous experience. Google, Apple... thank you.

Sapo codebits 2008

Last week I went to codebits, the 24/3 hackers contest organized by the portal sapo.pt. And it was awesome! I had loads of fun, learned tons of stuff, met a bunch of new and interesting people, worked on my tech social network, etc, etc...

The organization was perfect (some sapo team members are the organizers of the famous Shift conference). We had free wifi, free pizza for lunch AND for dinner, 24/3 free fruit, candy bars, chips, sodas, water, all inclusive and in abundance. Never was I found short on anything of those precious resources. That's pretty impressive in my book. Loads of puffs, loads of tables and chairs. We had xboxes, playstations and wiis to relax. All that with cool lighting in an open-space environment. All you had to do was to bring your laptop. Heck, that's a programmers paradise. The only single itch was that there only was two internet wires available per tables of six laptops. That combined with frequent wifi jams. But still, that wouldn't stop us from coding hard.

The main buzzwords that got wired into my brain were xfn, xmpp, couchdb, erlang and javascript. The talk that impressed me and inspired me the most was Mario Valente's talk über server sided javascript.

Over 580 participants presented roughly 80 projects built during the 24 hour contest. I met and teamed with @arturmartins and we built an xmpp bot which can be invited to chat with at codebits@jabber.cc. We called it "Codebits spy, #27". The bot yields the latest rfid location of the participants at the event, provided the user inputs a name or an id. It works quite nicely IMO, but sadly another participant also presented the exact same concept. I guess that was a pretty obvious and rather easy thing to do... Another easy and obvious thing to do was the codebits buzz page, which I implemented an iPhone version, only to find out later that the codebits organization already had a web-based identical version of it...

A lot of projects were really fun and interesting. Loads of rails web2.0 apps, a cool miniature remote truck commanded from a web interface with a camera-mount; powerful apps containing data-harnessing algorithms; mashups; a million-dollar world app; and so many other cool stuff I can't remember...

I think I'll integrate all the xmpp bots I'll build into @als and @rubenfonseca's github served modular xmpp bots project in the future... By the way, @rubenfonseca developed an historical database of the participants' rfid location. So, kudos to him.

Some easter eggs found were the Magellan laptop cluster, the chumby column, the Meo box-tv with messenger functionality, the arcade workshop, #anita became the fastest twitter meme ever,and more, many more...

All-in-all, it was great. And I'll be there next year!

Location and social networks on the iphone

Here are some location based tools that I use on the iPhone. Some are social canvas, some are useful tools.

Google Maps

I use it to:

• Locate me.


• Search places.


• Bookmark places.


• Find routes.


• Navigate.

Unique features:

• Built in iPhone.


• Street view (coming to Europe, one country at a time).


• navigation system.

---

Google Earth

I use it to:

• locate me.


• search places.


• do 3D earth exploration.


• browse nearby Wikipedia and Panoramio entries.

Unique features:

• 3D flight mode.


• Gyroscope sensor view tilting.


• Wikipedia and public Panoramio layers.

---

Firefone

I use it to:

• Update my location on fireeagle.

Unique features:

• location brokering service. "Update once, update many" feature.

---

Here I Am
I use it to:

• Mail my location.


• Keep a mail record of my tracks.

Unique features:

• Sends an email with my textual gps coordinates from the touch of a button.

---

Wizi

I use it to:

• Locate me.


• Bookmark places (private).


• Add friends (private).


• Share my location (mail, friend, friends or public).


• Locate friends.


• Send direct messages. Reply.


• Navigate (to places and to friends).


• Journaling (Picture, text. Private and friends-only).

Unique features:

• Know how distant I am from my friends and from my places by looking at the timetag.

Wizi tries to do everything: Social networking, instant messaging, journaling, navigation. This approach can be risky though, as other more specialized tools may out-perform it. It started as a navigational tool to reach friends by leveraging on user-provided tracking data. This is still, by far, it's greatest asset. A distinctive approach would be to add value to my iphone/gmail contacts, by providing my current location to my contacts and by providing the current location of my contacts. This is what I'm really excited about Wizi. But the Wizi team has to slowly adjust and fine tune their service as they need to compete with traditional navigation systems and typical conversational journaling services. If they want to compete with Brightkite and Loopt, they also need to refine their conversational canvas so users can engage more. So far the Wizi client still isn't released on the App store, and I only got access to it as private beta tester. But you can download it on many other platforms such as windows mobile and blackberry. An Android version is also being developped.

---

Brightkite

I use it to:

• Locate me.


• Bookmark places (private, friends-only, public).


• Add friends (private, friends-only, public).


• Locate friends.


• Share my location (private, friends-only, public).


• Conversational journaling (text, picture. Private, friends-only, public).

Unique features:

• Best UX for a micro-blogging/journaling platform.

Brightkite does one thing and does it well: it's a location based micro-blogging/journaling platform with a clean interface and a good user experience. It provides a conversational canvas to engage with the community. It's biggest threat is the fact that it doesn't works two-way on the importing/exporting of data. Neither with location, neither with pictures, neither with micro-posts. Thus, I'd rather send a tweet with a link to a picture to engage conversation, than make a brightkite journal entry. However, it does provides an RSS feed for the journal so you can still pipe it to Twitter, to Facebook or to Friendfeed.

---

Loopt

The problem with Loopt is that it isn't available out of the US (and perhaps Canada). So I really can't go in depth with it. For all I know, it's very similar to Brightkite and, thus, it's based on the journaling concept. However it integrates with Facebook quite nicely (two-way) and it also integrates with Twitter while providing an RSS feed. These features alone make Loopt more "data-portable" than Brightkite. This is very interesting, as my main social-networks are Facebook, Twitter and Gmail contacts (so it's 2 out of 3 ducks).

Unique features:

• Facebook and Twitter integration


• U.S (& Canada?) only.

---

Plazes

Plazes isn't available yet for the iPhone, though an iPhone app is rumored to be underway anytime soon. The interesting thing about Plazes is that, beyond conversational journaling, it also adds a whole new social object: the conversational agenda. It's basically an agenda/calendar where you share/appoint events. The events that you actually attend get lit up, and you and your friends can always comment on them. It potentiates an integration with your calendaring tool.

---

Concluding remarks

So I just went through the list of location-based apps I use the most on my iPhone. We must retain that the basic social features are locating, routing, navigating, sharing location, locating friends and journaling. Each of these features have several degrees of security -private, friends-only, public-; and several radius of proximity -exact location, neighbourhood, city-. Plazes goes a step further by adding the events agending feature.

I feel most of these applications are still transient, and I still have this need to import/export my tracks data. I really think those services should work more tightly with fireeagle. Brighkite does update fireeagle, but that's it. There are also other location baseds services like Zintin and Cence me. So please let me know if you're interested to learn more about those. But I'm curious, what location-based social apps do you use?

Post - Shift'08

Last week I went to Shift.pt, a conference about new technologies, society and the web, organized and sponsored by Sapo.pt. There I've acquainted a bit more with Pedro Custódio and his team/friends, as well as a whole new bunch of very interesting people.

In particular I enjoyed the workshop über wireless technologies (organized by Tijmen Schep), where I had the opportunity to meet and work with ad-hoc shifters.

Our workshop project was to arrange a mobile phone number that shifters could SMS to, and shout their names and interests. The SMSes would be displayed live on a screen in the conferencem so other shifters could see and discover their peers. We called our project ShiftNetwork. The other projects from the other teams were also very interesting and some actually were implemented!

Though we didn't carried our project all to the end, we did had a nice looking iphone mobile page, that we changed a posteriori to rebroadcast the twitter updates stream on Shift08. Basically, we never managed to setup a working phone. But we did found interesting software to extract smses from phones at gammu.org. Might have a deeper look on that...

All talks were very interesting, but definitively, the one I enjoyed the most, was the one from Felix Petersen, the Plazes creator, now head of social activities at Nokia. He really has a clear vision about the location aware mobile social experience and it was a real treat for him to share his vision with us all.

On friday I missed most of the talks, due to other commitments, but I still got in the end to mingle a bit with other shifters and taste some web2.0 wine (bottles attached with QRcodes! Cute! Courtesy of Adegga).

So, it was a great conference! Thank you Shift!

Shift.pt starting tomorrow

Here's an excerpt of a mail (addressee anonymacy kept) I wrote today that tells a long way about what are my expectations on shift, the web2.0 and society conference happening in Lisbon the 15th, 16th and 17th October 2008.

Dear Mr. Smith,

In short, I'm afraid I'm not available at all for this week. Can we schedule for next week?

I'd be delighted to apply to your interview and your programming tests. However, I'm afraid I will not miss the Shift conference (http://www.shift.pt/), which is probably the best conference on Web2.0 and society, happening this week, right here in Lisbon.

In the meantime I send you some code I did in C a while back in 2004[...]

Thank you,

Guillaume

By the way, that's official, I'm looking for an exciting job to start somewhere during 2009, 1st quarter. I hope to work in the mobile and/or web2.0 area.

Wordle: beautiful tag clouds

Wordle is an instant, genuine, original, art creating engine that leverages on the single most creative content originator on the whole galaxy: YOU.
Wordle is BEAUTIFUL because YOU are BEAUTIFUL.

Wordle picks up your blog feed or your del.icio.us tags and creates a beautiful painting of tags that define your semantic cloud.
Wordle helps you pass the word of your web-assumed interests.

Wordle is your digital fingerprint... in beauty print.

Fire Eagle and Tarpipe: two ways to avoid battery-drain on your mobile

One of the interesting things about web-wired mobile devices, is the ability to quickly geolocate the user, either by GPS, either by cell-tower antenna id, either by networked wifi ip.
This single ability should provide tremendous possibilities in terms of social networks, and in terms of added value by leveraging massive amounts of user's geo-tracks (while preserving privacy and anonimacy). Another cool ability is snapshot-updating social networks.

Right now, we're seeing a boom in location-aware social networks for mobile devices. Services like loopt, wizi, brightkite, pownce, lightpole, socialight, cence me, zintin and many others (btw, what are the services that you use and like?). Another interesting light-weighted mobile social-network, good for today's most regular phones, would be handivi.

However, the major technological bottleneck for this new eco-system to strive, is the device battery-life. Today's smartphones and pdas drain all the power in just a few hours. This is a big problem that is bound to stick around for a while, (unless some physics Nobel prizer comes up with a brilliant solution). Hence, the user experience becomes seriously degraded. Each time the user performs any new action on his device, his brain is trained to assess the power-drain damage it'll do to it, as he always wants to keep the phone functional for the basic tasks, such as receiving calls, receiving agenda alerts, take that one-in-a-lifetime snapshot, etc... This is problematic because it skews A LOT the natural rate of exploration on the device's new possibilities: "Ouh - I could toy around with this new cool-looking web-app... Oh, yeah, I shouldn't do that, cuz then I'd have little power left for receiving important calls. Right... better stay idle with it for the time being" :(
This is actually how my brain works with my iphone, when I'm outdoors. I only test & toy at home where I have the power cable nearby. This limits A LOT my learning curve on new iPhone apps. Power IS the real bottleneck for mobile exploration. (I'm assuming this is case for other smartphones and PDAs).

Thus, the best solution would be to build more efficient power consuming phones and more efficient power consuming apps.

In particular, each time I authorize an app to take advantage of my geo-position, I'm multiplying the GPS usage AND potentiating the power-drain syndrom. So, suppose that I take a snapshot and that I want to send it to facebook, to flickr, to zintin, to wizi, to evernote and that I also want to email it to some friends, plus I want to update my location on wizi and on cenceme at the same time. For each of these apps I must drain power (and bandwidth) to upload (redundantly) the image and to get a GPS fix for my location! Wow, that is NOT efficient!

In this post, I'm advocating the relevancy for geo-aware mobile apps to rely on fire eagle as their sole provider of server-sided users location tags. And to rely on tarpipe to "upload once, update many" social-networks.

fire eagle, developped by yahoo!, is an API enabled, users geo-tracks database. It stores all its users locations, and then provides a free API for user-authorized third-party developpers to extract the user's location and/or update the user's location.

tarpipe is an "upload once, update many" service (kind of like ping.fm, but for snapshots as well) that works really well!

To improve energy efficiency from GPS usage, I pledge the developpers to ask fire eagle for the user location rather than asking the user's device for its location. That way, the user updates once its location on Fire-eagle and, automatically, all its authorized geo-aware social-networks and services get updated. Thus, if it had 10 location based services, it would drain 10 times less power with the GPS. Right now I'm using Firefone to update my location on Fire-Eagle.

Likewise, if the user builds a smart, easy looking workflow on tarpipe, its photo emailed-attachs would be forwarded to all its favorited services, like twitter, pownce, jaiku, flickr, photobucket and evernote. That'll be 4 times less bandwidth AND 4 times less energy consumption for that user. So, I pledge the users to use a tarpipe workflow to "upload once, update many" social-networks.

Below you can see a diagram of how things are today, the wrong way :p

and how things could be tomorrow, the right way :)

So, developpers, be smart! Use fire eagle when location matters. And users, be smart! Use tarpipe when you want to update many services at once. With this in mind, you'll hopefully drain less power from your device, and yet have the same functionality.