CNN: Let’s Watch Socially.

It has been days since the inauguration of President Obama a week ago, with the close of change.gov and the new whitehose.gov. We can see how this old government will bring change to this old land under the leadership of a new president.

While that is yet to be seen, I still could recall the CNN + Facebook experience I had that day. It was wonderfully executed online. As long as you have logged into your facebook account, you have a tiny conversation box with your friends and everyone, here is a 1 minute screencast explaining what happened on the day:

It was indeed a powerful experience, though dated back to the days when we have no money to afford one TV per house. When the crowd gather to one place, watching the TV program, talking to each other on the programme, or some other randomly interesting topic. The desire inside people wanting to socialize is always there, and CNN facilitated this desire by creating this virtual platform for everyone. The “everyone-come-together-watch-tv-and-talk” experience.

PS:
It’s interesting that some people was wondering that who few people twitterred during the election. I did some research through compete.com, the result is quite shocking:

Facebook Twitter Plurk Comparision

Facebook has 60 million unique visitors per month, comparing with pathetic twitter or plurk. Guess the numbers say all.

Shall I really clear all my half a million personal message?

It’s been a while since I visited Xiaonei to check for information and socialize, and I found this:

431079 Personal Messages

I thought it would take me ages to clear all the spam and real personal messages that could ever accumulate to that number, but when I clicked it, I found none of the claimed half a million messages acutally existed. Not sure if that’s the result of clearing spam or a miscalculation.

What I learn from Xiaonei and Facebook is that when numbers are catching up, you better learn to ignore selectively.

Ignoring on Facebook

And since Youtube has this HD function, let me try it out here:

Orkut is a successful social networking product, so is Yahoo 360

I came across this chart on the Internet today, which explains the popularity of the different social networking services around the globe. The accuracy of this chart might be in doubt, but the data still has interesting data for me to muse on.

1. Japan, Netherlands, Poland and Russia has its own dominating social networking website ( China has xiaonei.com as the primary one)
2. None of American social networking websites was popular is Japan and Russia.
3. Yahoo ditched the Mesh, while maintaining 360º , for it is still popular in 5 out of the 17 places mentioned.
4. Google is still losing to Yahoo in India market

One more thing as one of the most discussed topics in the web:

Chrome, the Google Browser is out, after using it for a while and reading the making of Google Chrome, I realize one thing this browser is best for: Surfing all Google Product Website – Google Reader, Google Email, Google Calendar. Simply perfect. For the rest of the web, Rocks.

10 Things Your Might Not Know About HP TouchSmart – A Short Review from Singapore

This is short summary and review for the newly release HP Touch Smart IQ500 has launched in Singapore. I was invited by Melvin Yuan to take a look at their releasing product in this coming July in Asia last Tuesday.

After talking with the HP product manager Daniel for TouchSmart IQ500 in Singapore, and tried first hand on the set. I’ve discovered that there are 10 things you might not be aware of HP TouchSmart through merely looking at the Ads or some online review, here they are:

1. No Apple-like multi-touch yet, which means no pinch to zoom nor three fingers to go back, but the multi-touch screen is designed to be object-sensitive rather than pressure-sensitive, so you can actually use your fountain pen to write on the screen.
2. The native screen resolution is 1680 * 1050, which means you can view HD1080p with large amount of pleasure due to its clarity because of many pixels are present, but you can’t take the advantage of the full resolution of 1080p because it still lacks quite a number of pixels according to that.
3. The keyboard and mouse came with the computer are both wireless. To me they feel just alright comparing with those magnificent ones on my MacBook Pro and my Logitech DeNovo Edge. And the wireless duo doesn’t come with a dock + charging station like that of DeNovo Edge – Yes, you need to replace the battery.
4. Don’t eat KFC and play with the screen at the same time! the screen is not oil-proof, though it could resist a certain amount of normal grease on your fingertips.
5. The PC comes with a remote control, which is designed for Windows Media Center rather than the HP TouchSmart Center, which is the piece of software HP developed for this TouchSmart PC.
6. TouchSmart Center can’t do TV, nor could it easily help you to transfer photos from your memory card to computer just yet. And yeah, you can’t delete the photos or videos through the interface either, which might be a good thing for people who like to press the X button all the time.
7. The plainly washed white and bright ambient light makes me want to buy a nice lava lamp and put beside the PC to create some nice ambience  instead
8. They are many pieces of pre-installed software on the PC. Many are quite useful, unlike that of Sony. But for that many games installed, you have only 4 free credits to play, so pay more to play them all.
9. HP software does not use the native resolution, which causes screen to flick  and computer to hang for a period when switching out of the TouchSmart center program using Alt+Tab
10. Vista still hangs now and then, and many applications take a while to start.

And here are the ten things you might know about:

1. HP produces some of the best Ads in the market today, including a nicely composed tune
   
2. The product looks really nice from afar, a giant photo frame sitting there.
3. You can use your stylus to write on the screen and play ink ball with your thumbdrive
4. Playing Solitaire and BeJeweled with fingers are really neat with friends together, a multi-user hot-seat scenario.
5. Coverflow on the machines is nicer than that of Apple, there is more context visible when spreading like a fan instead of vertically stacked.
6. You can watch TV on your desktop without bothering to buy TV cards and install them
7. They have wooping 4G RAM pre-installed to use on the system
8. It runs a 64-bit Windows Vista!
9. Telling Mom how to use the computer has never been easier, MA, just use you hand to press that red button!
10. It has built-in audio and video recording capability, you can do audio notes and voice memo easily.

Check it out for yourself when this coming July, you just find the perfect PC to sit in your living room.

PS: I think Apple’s iMac 24 inch’s look is cool comparing with this as well, but it lacks the Touch function and many more. And there are many reviews out there, if you will, take a look at them as well. But you really gota touch this HP TouchSmart IQ500 first to experience for yourself.

Google ads on the go with iPhone on your desktop

Here is a short video podcast we did for about two weeks, our pilot episode of the Geek Goddess show. It is created by Bernard Leong and Michael Cheng. Though it has been a tough time filming and editing it, I thoroughly enjoy working both of them on the show.

Take a look at the first episode and you’ll understand the title. From the next episode onwards, we hope to have more news for you and concentrate more on the Asian region.

God created the bloggers and then …

I just came across this piece of comics by Geek And Poke. As a Christian and IT loving person, I simply find it hilarious to read the what is written there. DMCA to us is always a hot topic to discuss. File Sharing = Stealing? If the person could not win the market by forcing them to buy the cd, shall he prevent people from copying the song from his friends as well?

Vidfest is going on Vancouver now, check the post by Bill Claxton:

1. From Cinema to Cellphone (I tempted to write Handphone..)
2. Sci-Fi in Lo-Fi and HD (Hmm.. Tricky Title)

This is really an interesting event we shall watch out for, perhaps it will come to Singapore one day.

Walking Tubes on the Beach – A Type of New Life Form

Peter is not a hardcore evolutionist believer, but he is a hardcore believer in art and design.

I watched a video clip of beach “animals”(10 mins) from TED. What astonished me was not only the simple material and mechanism which makes the beach animal with numerous tubes walk by itself, but the concept of creating a new type of life from scratch.

(click to view)

Theo Jansen created the walking beach animal. To me, he is an artist, a scientist and an engineer, and much more than that. The genius idea inside his creation is not only stirring up an new phenomenon, the sensation and chill caused by it is more than what I people handle: we are seeing a new type of life form!

After watching the video, the question of creating life in this world has come into my mind again and again: are we creating something new that would ultimately destroy human race? Inspired by Raymond Kurzweil, Stanford university held the “Singularity Summit“. Perhaps there is more answers there.

Connecting…Connecting…Still Connecting… !@#$%?

 

Imagine having 3488 friends on your Facebook, 1492 friends on Pownce and 4452 friends on Twitter, how can you build relationship with each one of those? Ask Robert Scoble. When technology barriers is lowered, people around the world desire connections, more connections, better connections and more innovative ways of connections, which leads to a vacuum of relationships.

There are some recent posts on this subject:

Steve Rubel reflected on the important social networking tools we have been using since year 2003, ranging from Friendster, LinkedIn, Blogging, YouTube, MySpace to recent Facebook, Twitter and iPhone.

Dave Slusher announced that he finally decided to give up in the conquest for better and shinier platforms.

And Jason Calacanis declared he quit the Facebook with a quote:

Facebook is a multilevel marketing platform where you agree to pay attention to people’s gestures in the hopes that those people will pay-attention to your gestures in the future

On the Internet, Robert Scoble seems to the king of connections, every cyber place he goes, there are a dozen of followers, but the question is “can a normal person handle that”?

The Internet today has shaped our life, especially the younger generation’s, towards more and more Internet oriented. Via the Internet, we book tickets, shop for goods, seek for advice, tell people our stories, and now, make connections. Thousands of web applications have sprung out for this purpose, the social networking applications. I love to find my old classmates on Xiaonei, link with speakers through Facebook and get an introduction through LinkedIn. They are still, however, the means, not the end of a relation. Human’s psychology has determined that we prefer more choices over fewer, we would like to explore more and more choices, deciding only when necessary upon events. And it is also human’s inability to choose well.

Imagine you are in a superstore, buying a bag of potato chips for your best friend, and there are 200 types of potato chips to pick from, which one are you going to choose? And if there is only 5 with their nutrition information on the back?

In this new era, where Internet as the “Information Express” has gradually change the way we communicate, and overflowing choices we have on the Internet, shall we still remember major of us are living in a physical world where a cup of coffee, a jar of beer, a bottle of wine weighs more than an email, a twit, and a Facebook friends request?

I love to be complexly simple.

Ever Lost your Phone?

tenCube, our very Singapore startup company has officially launched a mobile phone security product called WaveSecure.

The product offers several functionalities including:

• Lock your phone remotely
• Trace your phone
• Backup information in your phone
• Restore information to your phone
• Wipe all the data in your phone

Here is a short demo by one of the team players, he walked us through the main features of the product: lock your phone from being used by unwanted people.

My personal review: this is a good product to have when you have many contacts in your phone that is confidential. You can make sure the minimum is leaked to whoever picked up your phone.

Things I think the software should improve: scare NOT people away with the scary tone and an non-informative screen. Provide them with the owner’s address and contact information (first contact, second contact), so whoever gets the phone could return the phone easily. REMOVE the scary sound: most people are to help, they just don’t know how to help by looking up the contact list – Help them with NO scary sound. Give them the option to call first / second contact when the device is locked up. (These can be part of the business model)

Talking about the phone, the iPhoney iPhone is my top list. Please support them as there are a large of people going to switch phone next Year

And one more thing: the current models supported by WaveSecure are mainly Nokia Models, the sad truth about people who would like to pay are largely using Treo Palm Series and BlackBerry series.

There are some interesting advertising going around, like this

And a final peek around the place

Live @ REMIX 2007 Morning

Thanks to Nic Fillingham, I am able to attend REMIX 2007, a web developer, designer and decision makers’ conference.

I went straight into the breakout tracks, you can find the information about the Keynote and opening from Jiin Joo’s blog posts.

As I was a fan of Sliverlight because of all the cool demos I saw the other day, I first joined the Silverlight development sessions.

Sliverlight 1.0 uses Silverlight ActiveX 1.0 plugin and manipulate that using Javascript and XAML. The Quick Start kit is found on Silverlight.net. Well, a simple Javascript from Microsoft file called SilverLight.js

Silverlight has windows-less mode with a change of simple parameter that is passed to the object. As Silverlight 1.0 was produced for a direct competition with Flash, most of the time you do not need Visual Studio to program, but rather solid Javascript and XMAL skills.

Extensible Application Markup Language (XMAL) is a declarative XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML. XAML syntax focuses upon defining the UI (user interface) for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is therefore separate from the application code behind it.

Just a side note, the room is filled with ASP.NET developers, let’s hope all of them are Microsoft Fan, and a few people do J2EE development, and even fewer does Python and Ruby on Rails programming. There are real gurus among source developers – they develop real good programs. Yet for a platform like Microsoft .NET, because of its extensive documentation and online support built by Microsoft MVPs, it is really easy to pick up and develop some interesting program on top of it.

Silverlight is still under heavy development, the most current version is 1.1 alpha, with C# support. But for this conference, they are talking about Silverlight 1.0 beta, the more mature version from the suffix. The emphasis they put in the conference is on design, so the speaker spent a great deal of time talking about Canvas and Brushes. For those of us who like to program a picture, Silverlight supports various type of brushes, including gradient brush, picture brush and shape brushes. The feeling of drawing using Silverlight is like composing a picture in illustration using different layers.

The speaker for that Silverlight session is Laurence Moroney, you can find more information on his blog.

We went on to talking about the video capability in Silverlight. The very first thing stuck in my mind is the word “DRM”: Laurence told us how good Silverlight support video streaming, you can even play “DRM” video through that, just use a simple tag<MediaElement>. I am not sure how I like that, though the mp3 player I have now supports DRM. But the most troubling thing is they only supports windows media player file. Which means I will have a lot of difficult in the video conversion on my Linux Box. Which reminds me that Microsoft might be coming up with a ZunePhone to support all these fun things for mobile devices. While I was fascinated about the easiness of using the video streaming capability, like locating a particular time in the video using Video.seconds.play = 5, I realized from the speaker, the video must be loaded until that seconds for you to use the property. That translates into no support for the real streaming like RSTP yet, but they are going to add MMS streaming support in version 1.1

For programmers out there, Silverlight 1.0 beta is DOM compatible, you can program the way you use to do in the web page. However, it does not support any CSS extension directly yet, which is not too bad an idea, as we do not want to see a new standard for CSS again. Creative solutions to this would be reading CSS using Javascript and operate on the DOM using the information through Invocation like SetValue() and GetValue()

Laurence:

Performance optimization is last thing Microsoft does.