iGeneration xplained!

Protect Your Content With QuickInsert

2007-09-27T19:23:00.000-07:00

This post earlier on how a reader can make money by watching ads. Alternatively, AdPerk also allows you to get subscription issues of a few magazines just by watching a short commercial. All-in-all, a pretty neat idea - until you think of the positive implications this may have on bloggers who are planning to monetize their blogs, but an essential payment service is still missing.

To bridge the divide, there's QuickInsert. In their own words,

You have a site, a blog, or webspace. We protect and host your membership content. This content is known as your "protected content" and is unavailable to non-users. Once a visitor registers on your website, they are either prompted for payment via Google Checkout/Paypal or are activated instantly. They can then login on your site, and your site's protected content becomes available!

As a blogger, now you can keep snippets in your main blog and keep the full posts accessible only to registered users. But that's not as far as you can go - imagine (as suggested in this post's heading) a mashup between the two services and you have a wonderful money maker. You can get your readers to view short ads before they can read your posts. Everyone benefits! Well, except the readers of course as they now have more clicks before the content becomes available.

Using QuickInsert is easy and you don't need to do any extensive HTML/Javascript editing before getting this to work. What's more, your readers/users will not be redirected to any other site. Payment and logging-in will be taken care of at your site itself.

If an entrepreneur out there is reading this blog, here's your million dollar idea! Don't forget to make me the (honorary) co-founder.

Other blogs that reported QuickInsert:

The QuickInsert Blog

QuickInsert: Charge for Your Content at Mashable

Protect or Sell Your Content via QuickInsert at Jeffro 2.0

QuickInsert - the free and easy way to protect and sell your content at Hotscripts.com

Nike+ - Technology

2007-09-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

It's been official for almost a year now - the shoe sensor does not need Nikes (and you don't need to take a dermel to your insoles either, like this guy did(second comment)). Gizmodo reported in August 2006 about Marware's $10 waterproof pouch for you to stuff the sensor in. Today, Gizmodo reported a $7.99 Neoprene pouch that does the same thing.

What was originally thought to be measurement using the Piezoelectric effect (which explains why the sensor needs to be placed below the foot), as reported here, turns out to be a simple play with Accelerometers. While a Piezoelectric crystal also fits with the economic, accuracy and power consumption models, using an accelerometer really frees the user from buying the Nike+ shoes. Nice work Mr. Jobs.

Incidentally, accelerometers are also at the heart of the new Wii(I had the previlige of testing one today - it's wonderful! Now you can actually get some exercise playing a tennis video game) and the Tango bike.

What's bad about this Apple device? Two things -

The device is not compatible with the iPhone. Actually the iPhone isn't compatible with the device, but you get the idea. Now you need to carry your iPhone and your iPod Nano so you can listen songs and attend calls while measuring your run. Quite a feat indeed!

Insufficient reason? How about the fact that you can be tracked from a distance of about 60ft as long as you have the transmitter in/on your shoe? I believe carrying it in your pocket might also cause it to detect movement (Piezos would've been better for this). You should keep it 'Switched off' when you're not using it. Doing that, however, is a chore if you're donning the Nikes. And it doesn't stop at just tracking, this research at the Washington University suggests that your travel information can also be put up on the Google Maps. Do you really want everyone to know how much you ran? Or how little you ran? One of these is a real invasion of privacy.

Buzznet's Buzz

2007-09-02T10:27:00.001-07:00

Launched in 2003 by Marc Brown, Anthony Batt, Steve Haldane and Kevin Woolery, Buzznet really appeared on the public radar sometime towards the last quarter of 2004. Since then, though, it has grown exponentially into a 6 million user strong "vibrant social media destination representing the next generation of social networking".

Not just a video sharing network, Buzznet is Social Networking service that offers more than profile pages and communication tools (read MySpace, Facebook and Orkut). Buzznet enables users to interact with and create dynamic multimedia communities around the topics they are most passionate about. The demographics (and audience targeted) keeps the topics around music and pop culture. Users connect, discuss, discover and share audio/video media and photos.

There's a reason why this 'video sharing networks' post mentions Buzznet's video sharing platform at the end - a lot of users embed videos from popular video sharing services like YouTube, MySpace and others. Frankly, I think services that offer only Video sharing are plain vanilla. The real chocolate sauce that separates Buzznet from the others is the type of customized pages users can create. A quick look at Jeffrey Star's page will illustrate Buzznet's power of creating social networks. Users can subscribe to communities, tag and rate videos, display information specific to the community and, of course, leave comments.

Overall, for the unique blend of many vanilla services, I would give Buzznet a hearty 4 out of 5. Do you feel different? Leave a comment!

Link For Infinite Memory

2007-09-02T04:20:00.000-07:00

Anyone who uses USB Memory Drives knows the pains we need to go through to transfer the bulky files. It's amazing how movie files (legitimately acquired, of course) are always just a little over the capacity of the flash drive and we need to find ingenious ways of transferring them (from the home PC to the Laptop) like setting up a LAN connection. Hell, I even tried to move files via Bluetooth! Painful process... Here's the solution.

Designer Vicky Wei has come up with an excellent design to extend the storage space of your USB Flash Drive. How far can you extend it? Well, is infinite good enough for you? Here's a quote from Yankodesign:

Memory Infinite has a USB male connector at one end and a female connector at the other, providing an "add up" concept for USB finger discs. By connecting one Memory Infinite with another to, you can grow the space you need. The user can choose to combine or separate Memory Infinites to share files and if you build a chain long enough, you can wear it. When plugged into a computer, the daisy chain appears as one unified USB drive.

The way the design works is, the USB drives each have a male and a female connector (the current ones have only the male connector that plugs into, well, wherever you want to plug it). This way you can daisy chain multiple drives and theoretically have that much more storage available. The designer also envisaged a flexible middle in the drives so that the multiple-connected chain does not protrude too much.

Other uses include using the chain as a bracelet or around the neck, in case people don't already know your geek god status. Whatever the use, we may never have to throw old USB Drives away again. Unless you switch to Wireless USB.

Content Aware Image Resizing

2007-08-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while there comes a service that really helps all of us in a big way. Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing is one such service. The patent is held by Dr Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science and the service revolves around finding horizontal and vertical seams that can be removed/added to resize images. The video below will give you a 'better picture' of how exactly it happens in real time.

Dr. Ariel Shamir's Home Page will give you a detailed description on how it's done. The technique is impressive and comes at a time when most of us thought of image editing as a plain vanilla service. On a related note, it's interesting to imagine how this may change things in the future. For one, it'll give copyrighting a whole new definition as pictures can be easily altered to remove content (and thereby creating totally new images).

Comments on TechCrunch also talk about editing music files, videos and even text to fit the browser in your desktop or handheld device.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how this service gets integrated into some of the more well-known photo editing softwares (like Photoshop) and whether the technology can be borrowed into resizing our videos.

Blog Linking

2007-08-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

Reading through Startup Dunia, I realized my thoughts resonate a lot with this post about why bloggers are not linking among each other's posts as much as we should. Forgive me for my strong sentiments, I'm after all a newbie in the blogosphere, but I feel the blogging community may be missing out on the collective gains bloggers reap by cross-linking amongst each other.

The one thing helping everyone in the blogosphere is the links we create to other locations and the links that other people create to our blogs. Some of the visible advantages of cross linking, from my 'narrow' viewpoint:

- Increase in the mindshare of information among the community
- Availability of credible information, since none of us is as informed as all of us
- The more viewpoints we share, the better informed our readers (and, indeed, all of us) will be
- Increased cross-linking will drive more traffic to everyone

Agreed, every blogger explores an area that is different from what anyone else explores. But, believe me, our individual interest bubbles intersect at more points than one. At this point in time I don't have the authority to pass any judgement about the things all of us should do so all of us can benefit, but I do believe veteran bloggers will agree in the power of linking amongst all of us.

Lastly, do share your views, it helps everyone.

Next Generation Storage From Hitachi

2007-08-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

Hitachi's new 'Perpendicular Storage' promises to save enough room on existing hard disks to store 10 times the data! How do they do it? Well, apparently the data bits in current hard disks lay flat on the surface of the disk. With the current data density increase (in line with Moore's Law), the bits are so closely packed that they end up influencing each other's magnetic orientation - leading to data corruption. The very orientation of the bits also comes across as a wall when it comes to companies trying to increase data density.

Hitachi came up with this radical new idea to have the bits standing instead of lying on the disk. The result? Less crowding of the bits, more space available for more space (aka higher capacity) and happier bits. Now if only they could have multiple levels for the standing bits, kinda like city apartments ...

Follow this link to watch a flash video of the new technology. The soundtrack is interesting. I couldn't ascertain if the domain name is owned by Hitachi though, if you have any idea on that, do leave a comment.

Another interesting way of storing massive amounts of data doing the rounds these days is the transparent disk. If you remember how a DVD works, it's basically a surface where a laser etches data. Imagine if, instead of one (currently two), there were 200 layers for the laser to write the data on! Such disks promise to store upto 500Gbs of data and, when manufactured inexpensively, will definitely replace the Blu-ray and HD DVDs of today.

Backpack Energy

2007-07-25T03:31:00.000-07:00

I've been in this buzz ever since I read this article by Hank Green - it reminded me of an article on Popsci about something similar as a battery replacement for soldiers. Where Steve Beeby's device captures about 30% of the vibration energy in its environment, this backpack device invented by biologist Lawrence Rome generates about 7.4 watts of energy - enough to power your cellphone and iPod (or an iPhone), a flashlight and a host of other personal electronics.

Dr. Larry Rome also started a company Lightning Packs to make these special energy generation backpacks available to the general public. Not only are the packs good at energy generation (and thereby saving the environment), they also help provide ergonomic back support to the wearer! A video demonstration here (no sound):

Over the last few days I have really been touched by what humans have received from our environment and what we're giving back in return. I'm not asking all Indians to buy one of these backpacks and start selling electricity to Madagascar (Given our numbers, we could possibly even sell electricity to a small developed nation). Rather, I would like to take my reader's attention to what each one of us can do to help every other resident on the planet. Sooner or later, we'll all need to make big lifestyle changes to keep our growth sustainable. Let's start with the small little things - switch off that light if you aren't using it!

Gmail for beginners

2007-07-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

If you have a gmail account, you will find the below information useful. If you don't consider yourself an expert on everything related to the internet and if some of the nuances still puzzle you, you will find the information very useful. With every post, we will try to explain a small thing to make online life easier for you. Let's take a look at Gmail in a little more detail today.

If you use Internet Explorer as your default browser (as most of us do), it'll be easier for you to follow this post. Below is what you see when you type www.gmail.com in the browser's address bar:

Once logged in, you'll be delighted with the plethora of features and shortcuts that Gmail offers. It is Ajax based, which means the page will not load unnecessarily every time you choose to read or reply to an email. You can tag your email for easy retrieval later. With close to 2GB of storage available, you wouldn't even need to delete messages. And coping with a stuffed inbox couldn't be easier. With Gmail, you can archive your messages and then search for them whenever you want to go back to an earlier message.

You can even set alerts in Gmail. If you are following a word/phrase (your name, perhaps) on the internet, alerts give you a daily message on where the word/phrase appeared on the internet. All of the internet! Keeping tab on items of interest also couldn't be easier.

So go ahead and register for a free Gmail account today! It's one choice you wouldn't regret making.

Spam Scam. Made in Nigeria

2007-07-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

There are many different types of scam techniques floating around on the internet. One of the popular ones is the Nigerian Spam services. I call them services because, just like those annoying salesmen selling you millions of insurance dollars in exchange for petty cash every month, the Nigerian spamsters also sell the promise of making a lot of money. The two services differ in that the insurance sometimes pays.

The latest of the Nigerian scams is detailed here. As you can see, the technique has evolved from the simple mails we used to receive a couple of years back. New Nigerian geeks are coming up with brand new ways of robbing us of our hard earned money. No wonder then that scamming is one of the largest industries in Nigeria today! Some of the documented ways of being robbed are illustrated here (click the link to go to the page that explains the method):

- You've won a lottery! - What you get in your email is a poor photoshop job of your name superimposed on a lottery ticket. Common sense should tell us that a person's chances of winning a lottery are ZERO if no ticket is bought! Why would someone buy a ticket in your name in the first place?

- Need to move money from my country - You get a usual looking email from some stranger (first red flag) asking your help to move lots of money (usually in the hundreds of millions) from their country. What you get is a cut from the transaction, anywhere between 15 and 40 percent. Again, common sense should tell us that a crook (yes, they aren't like you and me) wouldn't solicit help from a decent person to move that huge an amount of cash..

- The classic eBay scam - You put up your old, $100 phone on eBay hoping to sell it for something like 40 - 50 bucks and the winning bid surprises you! Some bloke in Nigeria is willing to pay you 300 bucks for your old phone! Well, maybe they don't have such advanced equipment in Nigeria and you decide to sell it to the bidder. The money will never reach you and you'll lose the merchandise as well. They bait you into mailing the item by promising a 'held payment' cheque deposited in your name with some (usually well known) postal department. Again, common sense should tell you never to ship out an item without first receiving payment for it. Also, check the buyer's reputation before entering into a transaction. Also, if you think an email is sent to you from eBay asking you to trust the buyer, check that the email is valid. An example - eBayCustomerService@polar.com is an not a mail from eBay at all while customerservice@ebay.com is a valid email. Check for the domain name (bold).

- The great 419er - The name comes from section 419 in the Nigerian criminal law which deals with cheating. The scamster will usually ask for a small amount (to the tune of a couple of hundred thousands) so that they are able to free amounts in millions. Of course, they'd be more than willing to share between ten to thirty percent of the amount with you for your help. Problem is, the hundred thousand you wire to them will never be heard of again. If you try to pursue your money and reach Nigeria searching for it, you risk losing more money - and worse, your life!

- Someone's died, no will, please help us recover the money - Same as the 419er mentioned above.

- The Dating scam - This one might sometimes pay you a pittance first before you're lured into parting with lots more. Spammers, usually masquerading as foreigners working in Nigeria, try to establish a correspondence with you. Once the initial hesitation of 'talking to strangers' is over, they pretend to fall madly in love with you and even send you some (cheap) presents. Eventually they will ask for your help in moving large amounts of money out of the country. After that, it's basically just like the 'Need to move money from my country' scam illustrated above.

So what does an average person like you and me do when contacted by such scammers? Do not respond! That's the best defense we have against people who try to rob us of our hard earned money. If the scammers do not get people to respond to their bait, maybe it'll persuade them to actually look for meaningful work. Another thing you can do is try your hands at scambaiting. It's kind of like hunting and presents some inherent risks - you may burn your hands doing it, but the rewards are gratifying too. You pretend that you're falling for the bait and get the scammer to spend some of his (hard earned) money on you. A better idea would be to let an expert do the baiting and read about it on their website. Report a scam to 419eater.It's a source of some entertainment while also a detriment to the scammers. With enough scambaiters around, some day we will hopefully see the end of these fraudsters.

What the hell is email?

2007-07-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

On the left is an old 1997 advert by Honeywell that I took from here.

The man in the picture is waiting for an 'Electronic Mail' to land on his desk. Fortunately for us, almost all the people know what it means to receive electronic mail (email) and where it can be read and accessed.

In this blog I will try to explain to you some of the nuances of the internet and how you can make sense of the new terminology and technology available to the mass market. The internet is empowering everyone like they've never been empowered before. The tools, with which to compete in today's markets, are available to everyone. Freely!

As with any technology, the Internet too has its drawbacks and you will find some posts here that address the very problems that sometimes make us lose our hard earned money to unscruplus people.

Other than scams, I will also endeavor to keep you updated on what's new in Technology, as well as some interesting websites and blogs that will help you unwind once you're back home after a hard day at work. Check this place often. For the easy way out, subscribe to my posts if you have a feed reader. What is a feed reader? You can find that out in one of the coming posts.