Blog’s Worth
I have found this “widget” by Technorati, the most important analyzer and search tool for blogs. It uses the popularity of your blog to estimate its worth:
My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?
So where do I cash my money? 
Photosynth
I guess it has already been commented somewhere, at least I saw it at laJunglaDigital (although I had seen it before 
), but still I think it is an amazing technology.
This time, it comes from Microsoft (or a company it bought recently ) and it is a technology to create 3D environments from a series of digital photographs called Photosynth. For this, it takes regular pictures from any source (cell phones to SLR cameras) and detects the relations between them. With this, it creates the environment which you can navigate being enriched by pictures. So that you can understand it a bit better, below is a video with a demo:
You can do a live demo of the technology at the Photosynth website. It is really amazing, and just imagine the possibilities this opens to!
Pocoyo 2
Get ready for the second season of Pocoyo!
San Francisco in ruins
This picture was floating around the web a few weeks ago, and I thought it was absolutely amazing but forgot to post it… so finally here it is hehe Taken from a blimp, it shows a panoramic view of San Francisco’s Bay area in 1906 after the earthquake. It is amazing how all the city was planned. Obviously, the golden gate bridge is not there yet
cheers!
WWDC’07
Well, as many of you may already know, last Monday was Apple‘s yearly Worldwide Developers Conference. As it has been widely discussed, it generally didn’t show new “top-secret”, eye-dropping new features of the future release of Mac’s OSX. However, there are three points that I believe have not been widely discussed that I feel are of great importance.
The first, is the announcement by EA Games (which we visited during the residential period at Silicon Valley ) and id Software of future game releases for the Mac platform. This is definitely good news, considering that gaming is one of the weakest points of the Mac. But what is very important are the underlying reasons, and its that the Mac is gaining popularity, period. It is starting to become an attractive market for programmers, in which they will find a big enough market that makes Mac programming profitable. So maybe this means that a critical mass of mac users has been reached, with which more and more programmers will begin to shift towards the Mac. This will in turn make Macs more attractive, with a wider offer of applications. How will this change the monopoly of Windows in the future? I guess we will have to wait and see.
Another announcement that took place was the release of the Safari browser for Windows. Although at first sight it looks as a move to increase the market share of Apple’s browser, I believe there are more underlying reasons. First of all, Safari’s future increase in popularity is questionable… starting because most of the Mac users (including me) use Firefox primarily. I think Safari is a great browser but is missing an important feature, which are plugins. Without plugins, it is impossible to expand the browser’s features as you can now do with Firefox. Therefore, as much as I like Safari for some things, I will keep using Firefox. Therefore, this move is very questionable as a try to hook new Windows users and convert them into switchers. Specially now that just after a few hours of release several security holes have been found in Safari.
But in fact, Safari was released for Windows for another purpose: the creation and testing of applications for the iPhone. Which brings us to the other big important announcement: the iPhone will only support Web 2.0 applications, which in other words is no applications. Or is it? I think this marks clearly the shift from typical system based applications to web based applications. And there are several advantages. First, as Apple’s main concern, it is a lot easier to maintain a level of security and system stability. And second, there are no needs for installation, maintenance, updating, etc. Everything is maintained remotely and updated instantly for every user. This I believe is the future, if not for all uses, but at least for a lot. This however, also limits in a way the possibilities for such applications. An important example we have already studied at the MMTDB is Salesforce, which manages to remove the cost of system maintenance from its users and gains by economies of scale.
This is another move towards the previous model of shared computing power through “dumb” terminals. Let’s see how fast and how far we will go in this direction…
Instituto de Empresa @ SecondLife
So last Friday evening (I know, tell me about it!) we had the first meeting on the new campus of Instituto de Empresa. That’s right, well, at least the new virtual campus As an initiative of our academic director, Instituto de Empresa in trying out the new possibilities brought by virtual worlds such as SecondLife. For that, we (the MMTDB class) had an online conference with Jaime from Telefonica. Overall I have to admit it was an interesting experience… from seeing the avatars and behavior of my classmates, to having the idea of a virtual classroom. I believe this promises a bunch of new opportunities for the future, that combined with products such as HP‘s Halo or Cisco‘s Telepresence, could become incredible tools for a more enriching communication experience.
However, I must say that we did had quite a few problems during the conference. To start, only god knows why we had a server breakdown at Instituto de Empresa, making Internet unreachable. After this was solved, we all managed to login and locate the school, but having everybody fake names (SecondLife doesn’t allow any last name) it is very hard to keep track and know who is who… you don’t have any physical relation to the real person and no similar name. Furthermore, having 15 people typing and reading at the same time becomes extremely confusing, specially when several conversations happen at the same place. Finally, the speakers were able to use a microphone and broadcast their speech, which is infinitely better than typing. However, only a few people were able to hear which I believe was due to a not fast enough connection.
So overall the experience was somewhat troublesome but for a first try I believe it went pretty good. With practice, it could definitely go better. However, I do believe that it is still a bit immature and with some time both the platform will become better and the bandwidth will grow. But this development gives me a concern, and it is that if such platform evolves and becomes in a future the world ‘standard’, it is still a proprietary platform that belongs to a private company. Therefore there are a lot of legal issues regarding property and level of service that are not very clear now. I would think a distributed open standard could be a better solution, although definitely not at all easy to do. What do you think?
Silicon Valley
Well, as I have already posted, as part of the masters program we had recently a residential period at Silicon Valley. I have already posted about the trip in general but I wanted to write more about the visits. However, I haven’t had much free time recently, but luckily our academic director Ricardo Pérez has written very good reviews on the school’s Digital Convergence blog. So yes, they are a bit long, but if you are interested they are definitely worth reading.
Day 2 – Accenture & Sun Microsystems
cheers!