Teknovis

The Register is running an interesting competition to test people’s ability to distinguish camouflaged mobile phone base stations from normally occurring objects. There are 20 photos in total, and most of them are quite tricky! My answers are:

1. Cellular mast
2. Cellular mast
3. Dead tree
4. Flagless flagpoles
5. Tree
6. Flagless flagpole
7. Unrelated microwave relay
8. Lonely tree
9. Suspicious black thing
10. Fire alarm bell
11. Cellular mast
12. Cellular mast
13. Ideal fixer-upper opportunity
14. Cellular mast
15. Cellular mast
16. Unexplained post
17. Cellular mast
18. Dead spot
19. Cellular mast
20. Drainage pipes

If you feel like testing yourself, then proceed to Would you know a base station if you saw one?.

Tags: The Register

I spent several years (maybe even too many) working in the area of Location Based Services (LBSs). Indeed, I first started working in this area before it become the next “killer application” area! I spent my time working on both the technical enablers of LBSs, and the commercial groundwork for a start-up company. Happy memories ;)

This morning I read an article titled Location, location, location – geo-commerce is here and now. The article starts with the usual scenario describing how LBSs will revolutionise our lives by changing the way we make every decision. It also claims that now is the right time for LBSs to make an impact. Different people have been saying this for years now, so I suppose that somebody might be correct some day! Maybe I am just to cynical!

The article focuses on two Irish companies that are currently developing LBSs for mass market consumption based on mobile phone and PDA technology:

• ICAP Media has developed an “opt-in mobile-phone marketing platform” that supplies the user with discounts that can be redeemed in nearby businesses. Unfortunately, this just sounds like location aware spam to me :(
• Tagggit has developed a virtual tagging system that allows users to leave tags in specific locations. These tags can then be read by the same user at a later stage, or shared with other users who are in the same location. This seems like a commercial application of the Stick-e Note Architecture developed by University of Kent researchers in 1997!

There are many other companies also developing LBSs in Ireland.

Tags: ICAP Media, Ireland, Mobile Phone, PDA, Spam, Tagggit, University of Kent

I was looking at a video on YouTube earlier (Making of the Ryanair Cabin Crew Charity Calendar 2009 – not that it is relevant ;), and I suddenly realised that the video player was widescreen! Some quick investigation revealed that some videos already make use of the extra width.

More details about this change can be found in the official blog post Bigger Isn’t Always Better… But in This Case, We Believe It Is.

Tags: YouTube

A French friend of mine sent me a link this morning, and told me to take a look at it. The link was http://www.obama08.fr/, so I was expecting another Barack Obama website.

However, if you visit this link you are actually taken to http://www.elysee.fr/, which is the official homepage of the French President!

I think that this is nothing more than a good joke, because the registration details for each domain are quite different according to the WHOIS Service for French domains.

Tags: Barack Obama, France, WHOIS