Every once in a while a new shift in paradigms affects our way of living. Particularly when the internet and the mobile phones came around (can't remember how my life was before). Today, a new shift is officially announced from the techco leader, Google, as he's moving ever more steadily into telcos turf. The web (and the 2.0 of it) is going mobile (mWeb)!



The search, ad and internet giant announced a location finder for mobile phones that don't have Global Positioning System (GPS). It's called Google Maps with My Location and, as the name tells us, it's an utility built on top of Google Maps  that displays the mobile owner's location on Google Maps, just by pressing the '0' button on the mobile phone. How? Simple: with the aid of a cell tower location database. Indeed, each mobile phone knows which cell tower it's communicating with, in a nearby area, as it provides the phone with a unique cell tower id (like the physical mac addresses of ethernet cards). That way, Google can simply locate any mobile phone within a 1000 meters radius approximately.




This technique is not new at all. In fact, Yahoo already had implemented a similar feature with ZoneTag. ZoneTag allowed mobile phone users to automatically geotag their snapshots prior to sending them to Flickr. Neat, uh?

This feature is mind-blowing (though I already anticipated that for months now). When you think of advertisement, think of geotargeted ads! Now THAT'S powerful!

But that's not all! Google's also trying to implement a neat 2dbarcode reader called ZXing using mobile phones built-in low-quality ccd cameras. Check out this post! This mobile-web-app (mweb-app) allows mobile phone owners to "scan" a product's 2dbarcode with their ccd camera and in return, the mweb-app would return the mweb-page related to the good. Now isn't this cool? Think of linking this to an ebay or craigslist, asking for a cheaper web-shop for the product, presto! It appears the 2dbarcode technology combined with mobile phone built-in camera has been existing for years now in Japan (the nº1 country in mobile web usage). That is mind-blowing in my game.

Wait, I haven't finished! Google's also recently announced the Android platform and Open Hanset Alliance, most of you have already heard all about it. Check out this video from Google founder, Sergey Brin himself:



Hey, but there's more! Google wants to get more 2.0, as in more social. That certainly was Google's Achille's Heel from my point of view. Google never really created any social network other than developper's networks (ok, excepted for YouTube, and maybe Orkut). Something that Yahoo! proved a lot better at, if you consider Flickr and del.icio.us. So Google launched the Open Social Platform SDK to call third party developers to build social apps related with google services. Also, the mysharedstuff was released to share bookmarks between igooglers or gmailers. Also, MyMaps has gone a lot more social now as well, if you care to take a look.

So, basically, Google's tracing two ways in the near-term: one is getting his web-apps (documents, gmail, reader, picasaweb, shared stuff) more social - the Yahoo way. And two is... going Mobile! mWeb's coming! Whether its on expensive iPhones whether its on cheap ad-paid low-cost Android based regular mphones, you'd better get ready if you want to get a chunk at it early!

Either way, my life's going to take another gentle twist in a good way. What about yours, what do you think?







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Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal.

Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media". However, back then, it really wasn't the modern facebook-ish "social-media" model that was tingling my neurones; it was rather the emergent nature of these disruptive new tools such as blogs, wikis and web-based productivity apps such as Google Docs or Zoho.
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Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ... what is the REAL future of computing, as seen from 2010?

I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.

Somebody wrote a while ago:

Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

To which I add:

Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.

And, to my insistence, beyond games/apps, music, movies, tv-shows, books and magazines, Apple will try hard to become a vacations, travel and experiences re-seller. It's the natural next-step for them ...

I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,

I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and a horde of PT finest geeks. I'll participate and assist to the biggest festival of creativity in PT geekdom. Missed it last year.

One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted.

Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.

At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform. But first, the life/body-hacks platform will need to walk the walk it has to walk, and I expect it to be, at least, a five-years march.

Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
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