The Story Of Lettuce from BrightFarms on Vimeo.

Source

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/business/22airport.html?_r=1&ref=business

I was lucky to help out the Bloomberg team with some thoughts about the company, and the 25-minute episode aldo includes interviews with Jack Dorsey — the man who came up with the idea for the service, Tim O’Reilly, Blogger co-founder Meg Hourihan, GigaOm founder Om Malik and investor Mike Maples.

Twitter famously took off at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, in 2007, and has quickly grown to become an integral part of the net’s culture and a headline service for the world.

The 25-minute episode can be watched online, and also airs on Bloomberg TV Friday at 6 and 8 p.m. PST (9 and 11 p.m. EST).

Now in its second season, Bloomberg Game Changers has profiled Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jay-Z, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jon Stewart, among others. Both the Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison episodes, which can be viewed online, are highly recommended.

As in, iPad 2! Or, as BoomTown is now officially nicknaming it: iPad Too!

Analysts expect the iPad 2 to be thinner than its predecessor and feature an improved display, as well as front-facing camera and Facetime video chat support. And some reports suggest it will be powered by one of Qualcomm’s multimode chips and will run on both GSM and CDMA-based networks around the world.

In its last earnings calls, Apple said it had sold nearly 15 million iPads, since it went on sale last spring.

This is a very big deal, although Apple will be facing increased competition with the launch of a passel of tablets coming from numerous manufacturers, most of which are using the Honeycomb version of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

According to several sources close to the situation, the Wednesday date in a little more than a week is firm and will take place in San Francisco, the scene of many such Apple events.

In that case, the venue is likely to be the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

It’s not clear when Apple will begin sending out its famous invites for the gathering, but I am guessing soon, in order to get the Apple faithful to the proper level of froth.

(The image above is from one of my favorite previous save-the-dates.)

Now that this date is confirmed–at least by me!–the next round of speculation will be around whether Apple CEO Steve Jobs will appear or not.

He is currently on leave to deal with ongoing health issues, although has been sighted all around Silicon Valley at various places. In addition, Jobs sat right next to President Barack Obama at a high-profile meet-the-tech-moguls dinner in the area last week.

In other words: Let the media frenzy begin!

http://videos.liftconference.com/video/1179709/brian-solis-social-currencies?player_id=1176439

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 26 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 190 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was July 1st with 253 views. The most popular post that day was Ryanair asks passengers to vote on ‘standing’ flights.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were briian.com, facebook.com, search.aol.com, twitter.com, and scheikh.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for plane, ceo, points of view, google, and inq chat 3g.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Ryanair asks passengers to vote on ‘standing’ flights July 2009
1 comment

Bill Clinton flies to Africa on Google founder’s party plane — until it breaks down August 2008
4 comments

What does collaboration mean to you? April 2007

When Google eats (an) Apple… January 2008
15 comments

We all have different points of view January 2009
4 comments

Om Malik for GigaOM on an experimental application developped by Nokia called Situations which users can “use to define how you want your phone to behave in different situations, like ‘In a meeting,’ ‘Sleeping,’ or ‘Playing with the kids.’”

With the application running in the background, the device “automatically senses the situation you are in (e.g. based on time, day, location, available networks) and adapts to it according to your preferences.”With this app you can do the following: Change Ringtones, answer missed calls with SMS, aave power, change UI theme / wallpaper, open a Web bookmark or application.

… This kind of context awareness is going to become a big deal in the future, mostly because we are entering a world of infinite app options.

Read more.

From my friend Brian Solis:

“In 2007 I said that Facebook would be the home page for your personal brand. Now it seems that Facebook is officially setting out to become your homepage period.

The other day I logged into Facebook and noticed a new message at the top of the screen. I was presented with a simple way to make Facebook my homepage so that I could see “what’s happening with friends as soon as I opened my browser.”  And, I’m not the only one.

Why am I taking the time to let you know that Facebook is making it easy for you to drag and drop Facebook to your home button?

Facebook started out as a social network, but it is officially growing into a full-fledged personal OS, where friends and experiences are interconnected inside and outside of Facebook. And, at the center of everything is you. Facebook is a platform where relationships create the construct for the 3C’s of information commerce. The acts of sharing and consuming content in social media represent the social dealings between people and set the stage for interaction and education.But, it is the platform that offers a sandbox for development and also a solid foundation for social architecture. It is the sites that feature Facebook interconnects that weave the fabrics of relationships and the ties and interests that bind us.

More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform.

150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

The more we interact with Facebook around the Web through Likes, Shares, and Comments, the more we feed the social effect and the greater the personalization inside Facebook and within its partner sites.

Indeed, according to comScore, Facebook traffic soared by 55.2% hitting 151.1 million in October 2010, up from 97.4 visitors at the same time last year. It’s also important to note that Facebook was home to 300 million active denizens last year and now it has a population of more than 550 million. While Google is earning 173.3 million visits in the U.S., Facebook’s trajectory is only gaining in mass and force. And it’s only gaining momentum…

- 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day

- The average user has 130 friends

- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Don’t Google Me, Facebook Me

Over the years, Google has missed steps to foster a social network of its own, perhaps focusing on a culture of code rather than a culture of social sciences. What lies ahead is a quiet war where  your social graph is at stake. Facebook is taking large steps to move you away from Google and toward the social web.  As this new “homepage” request rolls out to active users worldwide, we will see many follow Facebook’s instruction to now make the social graph the starting point to their online experience each and every time they fire up their browser. Doing so changes behavior and teaches us that we can indeed get a little help from our friends by leaning on them for empowerment, entertainment, and enlightenment.

We don’t take to Google for insight, we  now take to the stream…

What’s materializing before us may in fact represent the beginning of the end of the Google era of Web domination. This is the rise of the Facebook economy (F-commerce) where commerce represents the currency of information and engagement and the net worth of the relationships we nurture. While it doesn’t beat the drum in its march toward online supremacy, Facebook is in fact setting out to help you improve the way you communicate, discover, and share. Since you are at the center of the social egosystem, Facebook is designing products and services that make managing and interacting with your social graph more efficient.

From Gmail to Facebook.com > We now have a new messaging platform on its way to us with @facebook.com email addresses yours for the taking. It changes how we think about messages and exchanges and may in fact, encourage us to follow Zuckerberg’s vision away from the traditional inbox. By integrating messaging into one system that connects through multiple clients and devices, Facebook also starts to minimize the value of Google Talk. Does Google turn its 193 million Gmail users out of the inbox and toward a social network…something like say, GoogleMe? Now with its social hooks in MySpace, Google must revisit its human algorithm.

From Google.com to Facebook search > The future of search is social and we are already investing in social media optimization (SMO) in addition to SEO. We can’t underestimate Facebook search. Google has long dominated search and the behemoth of a company is showing its age and its weaknesses. Even though Google is experimenting with integrating social into traditional search results, its algorithm is in dire need of a human touch – a human algorithm. At the same time, Facebook is slowly but surely improving its search feature. What used to simply display results within the network, now starts to feature results from around the Web where the displayed list is curated by the actions of your friends – as part of the platform. This will only improve and become more substantial in the coming months.

From Google Voice to Facebook + Skype > Google Voice is a valuable service that combines voice, Web, and email. While it’s not getting thunderous roars of attention, Skype and Facebook are introducing the ability to call friends directly from the News Feed. As this integration becomes seamless and demand for such a service gains awareness and pervasiveness, Facebook and Skype will rival Google Voice one day.

From Google Latitude to Facebook Places > Google is experimenting with geo location, but Facebook Places is gaining mass adoption. Competing for attention online and offline is helping Facebook merge experiences and channel the activity into the News Feed.

From Google Groups to Facebook Groups > Google Groups was once one of the Web greatest hosts for contextual networks, groups organized by interests, events, and causes. Now with the release of the new and improved Facebook Groups, people are forming nicheworks, networks within networks. Their focused activity is enhanced by a dedicated group framework that fosters collaboration and conversation whether the group unites relationships or actions linked by strong, weak, or temporary ties.

From Google Docs to Facebook + Microsoft Office > Google Docs are the industry standard for Web collaboration around documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms and artistic canvases. While the world was abuzz with Facebook’s messaging service, Microsoft introduced Office Web Apps as part of the new messaging system. The technology alliance allows people to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments with the Office Web Apps directly in Facebook. It just the beginning of something more productive…

Twitter Me This…The Facebook Generation

And what of Twitter? I believe it is the moon that orbits a networked planet. It turns the tides. It defines its rotation.

Twitter is your window to relevance, but Facebook is your homepage for the social Web.

According to recent data released by Hitwise, Facebook accounts for 25% of all page views in the U.S. And it’s only going to skyrocket as we interact with content and one another through the Facebook platform. Depending on which data we review, Google is either in Facebook’s rearview mirror or in its sights. Hitwise claims Facebook has already surpassed Google in terms of views. Earlier we stated that comScore has Facebook nipping at Google’s heels. Either way, it’s just a matter of time until Facebook traffic surpasses Google with tenable data supporting the historic milestone.

We are witnessing the dawn of the social consumer and their network of preference for the immediate future is Facebook.

As I’ve previously observed, the medium is no longer just the message. In social, the medium is the platform and as such, people now represent both the medium and the message where reach is defined by a blending of the social graph, the context of the story and the expansion and contraction of strong, weak, and temporary connections. The Facebook platform serves as the foundation for our Social OS and in turn, we are its driving force. With every action, we trigger an equal and opposite reaction. With our relationships serving as Facebook’s construct, we are realizing that the social graph effect may in fact, spark greater volumes of reaction than Google, or any of us, may have anticipated. Welcome to the Facebook generation…the question is, will you call Facebook home?”

Source

A team at Nokia in Finland has created one of the unlikeliest computer displays yet – the world’s first ice touchscreen.

It is not a practical device, of course, but the screen is being seen as a step towards an era in which the surfaces around us gain computing capabilities.

“This was a playful experiment, but one that we think showed interactive computing interfaces can now be built anywhere,” says Jyri Huopaniemi at Nokia’s research lab in Tampere, whose Context-Aware Social Media team built the touchscreen, dubbed Ubice, or ubiquitous ice.

Finland has a tradition of building snow and ice sculptures during its long winter. It was these that inspired the device, says Antti Virolainen, a member of the Nokia team. “We decided to see if we could make an ice sculpture that was interactive.”

The team commissioned a firm in nearby Oulu to retrieve a tonne of 25-centimetre-thick river ice, and used a chainsaw to cut it into 50-centimetre-square slabs. They used these to make a 2-metre by 1.5-metre ice wall and then blasted the surface with a heat gun – more typically used for stripping paint – to create a smooth surface.

The team made their wall an interactive one by using digital projection technology, rather than peppering the ice with sensors that would raise the cost of the installation, Virolainen told the Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces conference in Saarbrücken, Germany, last week. The icescreen uses rear-diffused illumination (RDI), a technique first used by Microsoft in its table-based interactive touchscreen, Surface, launched in 2008.

A near-infrared light source mounted behind the “screen” bathes it in invisible light, and an array of near-infrared cameras, also behind the wall, are focused on the front surface. A hand placed on the ice reflects the light towards the camera array and the signal each camera receives helps a nearby PC establish the hand’s position, size and motion. The PC is also connected to a projector, which uses the data to project imagery – such as flames – beneath the user’s hand.

“It was -15 °C out there so it was very interesting to show ice on fire,” says Virolainen. “It wouldn’t have been anywhere near as interesting with a plastic screen.”

Patrick Baudisch of the University of Potsdam in Germany, who has turned toy building blocks and floors into interactive devices, says the touchscreen could be compared to Microsoft Surface, with flaws in the ice limiting the accuracy with which it can locate a user’s hand. “But that would miss the point. This is a wonderful piece of work and a quirky idea.”

Nokia suggests ice sculptors, or owners of ice buildings like the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, could make a feature of the technology.

“Playful experiments like this are important – people really liked it,” says Huopaniemi. “New forms of interaction, sensing and content delivery for future mobile devices could come out of it.”