Tuesday, January 17, 2006
A few weeks ago I wrote about FON, a WiFi services company that planned to use open source and sharing principles to do an end run around the incumbents. The idea is to download a piece of software that is loaded into the wireless router and allows for wireless Internet access sharing.
FON has had mixed reactions. Folks like Glenn Fleishman think it won’t work. Others do. Since then another FON type project has emerged: Wibiki. But back to FON, I had wondered what if the FON concept could be married to bigger wireless plays like the ones planned by Google. Apparently, someone was thinking along those lines.
Drison writes that “Martin Varsavsky (the Fon movement leader) has met in several occasions some Google directors (and even Larry Page y Sergey Brin, its founders)” and has talked about the project. Martin, apparently has met with others including Yahoo. Ejovi Nuwere, FON’s man in US writes on his blog that he and Martin met with Sergey Brin sometime in December. Martin posts about this here, though really doesn’t say much.
What do you make of this, my ultra smart readers? Worth keeping an eye on?
PS: I am down with flu, again… so that explains slow posting.
Blog search engine Technorati now provides bar charts which display the rate that a keyword is mentioned over time in weblogs.
Do a search for a keyword (like your name or a web site URL) and the chart will be displayed on the left hand column. The image included with this post is how many times "lifehacker" has been mentioned in the past year. Neat for web publishers and language geeks getting a sense of how terms get born and blossom in the blogosphere (like "podcast," "vodcast" etc.) You can easily blog a chart as well.
Lord only knows when the game will actually come out, but there's a new trailer up for the long-overdue Final Fantasy XII. The CG engine and cut scene stuff looks incredible this time around. This one might be work the wait.
Final Fantasy XII "Kiss Me Goodbye" Trailer [YouTube]
TV Squad guy Keith McDuffee got it right when he said "silly name, neat interface" telling us about Blox0r, which advertises itself as "The best online aggregator ever!" Its an AJAXy feed reader that uses a classic Outlook three-pane interface. On the left is a list of feeds you're subscribed to, a la Bloglines, and on the right are two panes, one for headlines and one to show the stories you click on. I like the default mode because it takes you to the actual web site so you can read comments and so on, but it also has a Preview Summary mode which will show summaries of all of the recent stories in a particular feed. It has most of the features you expect from a web-based feed reader and a few more, so despite the name it's worth a look if you're in the market for a feed reader. What's more, it's open source, so you can download it, tweak the code, and run your own aggregator service if you want.
[via Download Squad]
The latest product in a big mobile push from Google is Google Personalized Home for Mobile, which is exactly what it sounds like: a version of Google Personalized Home for cell phones and PDAs. It includes access to your Gmail inbox, news headlines, weather, stock quotes, movie showtimes, and "a variety of popular RSS and Atom feeds," all from within your phone or PDA's web browser. According to the Google Mobile web site, you can log in with the same Gmail account as you use on the PC version of Google Personalized Home and get all of your customized content modules.
Reuters - Electronic Arts is expanding its "Lord of the Rings" video game franchise beyond the scope of Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning trilogy.
MBoy wrote to mention a Popular Mechanics story discussing 15 technology concepts that are likely to be important in the coming year. From the article: "Body Area Network (BAN) - Like everything else, implantable medical devices are going wireless. A new in-body antenna chip from Zarlink Semiconductor is in preproduction, and should appear in pacemakers and hearing implants this year. By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor's office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home." I prefer Personal Area Network (PAN), myself.
Guinnessy writes "Benjamin Franklin was born on 17 January 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. Franklin was a man of diverse talents: publisher, inventor, ambassador, politician, wit with some human frailities says NPR. In Physics Today, Philip Krider presents Franklin's work on electricity and the development of the lightning rod, work whose fame helped Franklin obtain aid from the French against the British. In the same magazine, Joost Mertens considers Franklin's explorations of the calming effects of oil on water. Those investigations, it turns out, had a less than calming effect on Dutch scholars. Philadelphia is planning a series of events celebratng Franklin's life throughtout the year."
