I did not have the time and the occasion to take the photos of the big camera out, so no photos now, but I will update this same post later on.

San Juan is a beautiful place. I wouldn’t mind staying here a couple of days. Honestly. .

We spent most of the day in the pool area. I am reading “the Help”, from Kathryn Stockett which is about maids in Louisiana on the 60’s.

It was the gala day, with the captain and the nice dinner. Everybody (except me) with suits, ties….

Before I went to have a hair cut here at the ship’s hair dresser. Wow, beautiful with great views  over the sunset.

After the captain’s cocktail we went to listen jazz for a while and then to the theatre. It was Island, a story with dancers, magicians and more. Very nice.

In Nassau we had a great day. The temperature is great, it is sunny… mmm…

We went down and after us 4 more cruises arrived. We are all here. the last one in the biggest cruise ever build, and I encourage you to Google it or to look in a previous post in my blog. It is called “oasis of the seas” from Royal Caribbean. It is amazing. Huge! Ours, the MSC poesia is the second biggest and it is noticeable smaller.

Anyway, we went down and met the a couple with a kid that we know who live in Brazil. We all took an island tour with a very nice chap who explained everything and kept us entertained for nearly 3 hours. First we went to the Atlantis hotel, a 900 million dollar hotel, with an incredible aquarium.  We just saw part of it but as we are coming back to Nassau in a couple of days, we will take the whole tour, which has tunnels with sharks and other fishes. The suit of this famous hotel costs 25.000 usd per night. It is a nice hotel, but I was not that impressed.

After that we visited several places and when we were done, we had a walk around town, had lunch (seafood, of course) and went to the beach. Now the sun is going down and from the balcony of our room I catch several wifi (paid) so I am going to pay for one in order to post all the blog entries. By the way in the last photo you can see all the cruises from the beach. The one of the left is the Oasis of the seas.

ps; I did not succeed with the wifi in the balcony…. I try once more from the ship.

We spent most of the day in the pool area, reading. Nuria had a massage before the theatre and gala night.

We are leaving Jamaica now, in our way to Nassau (Bahamas). Everything great.

Then in Cayman island (Georgetown) again. They claimed bad weather, so the cruise could not properly stop. It took like 4 hours to take everybody in little boats to Georgetown.

Today, the cruise stopped at the port, we went down and were surprised that all the buses downstairs (a lot of them) where charging people to get them to town. Strange, but OK we are happy to pay 5 dollars each for that.

We went to downtown and you could see that Montego Bay is like any other place in Africa. Underdeveloped, dirty and not safe. Before, and when I go on mission, I don’t care, but with a baby…. it is a different story.

We walked a bit around downtown and were stopped several times by locals saying that we should now go beyond the couple of streets in downtown, as it is not safe. We decided to take a city tour with one of the tons of authorized drivers (JTB, Jamaica Tourism Board) who took us for an hour around Montego Bay, a very ugly city with NOTHING to see, a part from a nice old hotel on top of a hill with nice views. Plus the guy had no idea of anything. Anyway,the weather was not good either so no point in taking a taxi to the beaches so we decided to go to the ship. We had lunch in the 13 floor (buffet) in a table in the pool area with incredible views over the bay, and then we stayed until now in the pool area. Now I moved again to another table (facing the other side) and decided to write today’s and yesterday’s posts, even if I don’t se how and when I am going to be able to publish them, as the satellite internet is pretty slow, specially when uploading photos.

Now Nuria and Kai went to the room (Kai is hungry) and when they come we will enjoy a cocktail and try to connect to internet in order to try to check in with Iberia and the the right seats… which I doubt we will.

They distributed numbers and were calling. I think our turn came at 1.30pm and at 3pm was the last boat back to the cruise. Goood. Pretty bad organized. People complaining a lot. Probably they had local boats to help but with the other 2 big cruises there was not enough for all. Anyway, it was quite an experience to go in such a boat, with such a sea (it moved a lot) and with Kai. I would say it was interesting. Poor Kai did not complain at all. It was not very sunny but it was very hot.

One thing I did not like from MSC (our cruise organizer) is that they don’t care about babies or disable people. You cue like anybody else, and in our way back it was killing us to cue under the sun. Kai was suffering so we kindly asked to go to the front of the cue.

Well, in Georgetown there was not much to see either. It is packed of shops with jewelry, diamonds and watches. When I say packed is packed. We walked around but of course we did not have much time to do more due to the disembarking problems. I could not buy rum because they don’t allow you to buy food or drinks outside the ship… maybe I should ask if they can keep it at least until the last day.

All this places we are stopping by are great for diving. What a petty. We would have loved to dive, but looks like it won’t be this time.

Well so we stayed most of the day on board, which honestly is not bad. Judge by the photos… it is better than a super hotel.

I bought a wi-fi connection at the ship, it costs 20usd for 60 minutes, but it is so slow, that I tried to upload the posts and I did not succeed, so I will try later using the web interface instead of this Windows Live Writer. I cannot access to my email at norai because uses port 8080….

We spent most of the day at the MSC poesia. It was good. We went to the deck 13 and took a seat on a table near the pool. Relaxing with amazing views. Nuria had a swim and I took some time to write on the laptop. With visits and all the activities they plan on board, you have little time to actually relax and type or read a book. I don’t know how many restaurants, bars, shops, disco and so are onboard. I am starting to know the ship now. I went to smoke a pipe to the Hitchcock room and to read a book while Kai and Nuria were having a siesta. We have walkie talkies to be in touch (of course… you know me…). Now there was a concert in the central area, there is the theatre later today and there is a huge screen in the pool area where there will be a film at 10pm. I have to check but I think there was a jazz concert in the zebra bar. Every morning they leave you a paper with the activities and offers. You can buy excursions, but we did not buy any, basically because we don’t feel we can do the sort of things they do with Kai: catamarans, snorkeling, etc… which is a real pity. Today for instance we would have gone diving, but… even if we do one dive each, I think it is too much to take a 11 week old baby in a small boat.

Tomorrow we’ll be arriving at Cayman Islands. Now, we are going to go to have a cocktail in the pool mohito bar probably and see the sun going down. I don’t know when I am going to be able to publish all these posts because the internet is not good enough for that.

Now for instance we are leaving Cozumel and I am in the balcony with the laptop. The sun is still up, a bit cloudy but the temperature is just perfect. It is a great experience to be outside in your own balcony with the sea by your side, the sun going down.

After a full breakfast (eggs, sausages, bacon, pancakes,…)  we went down to deck 4 and left the ship. We spent the day in Key West, a beautiful small town at the end of Florida Keys.

We had buses organized driving everybody to town (5 min). We spent the day walking around that beautiful city, full of nice cars, nice Harleys and old people. We visited Hemmingway’s house and went to a small beach.

Houses in Key West are all colonial style. Beautiful lovely small town.

At 1.30 we went back to the ship and started our trip to Mexico. Nuria had a bit of sea sickness. Yes, this huge ship moves quite a bit…

It was the Captain’s cocktail and gala dinner. I did not bring any suit or any tie, but I went with a shirt. Everybody had their best dresses….

After the captain’s speech, there was the daily show but it is too loud for Kai so we left. Nuria rested for a while in the room and then we went for dinner. We always sit in the same table. The gala dinner was too much. I think we are going to put (more!!) on weight here.

We went back to the hotel, took our stuff and put it in the car. We drove up towards port everglades, which is like an hour or so towards the north. We took it easy enjoying the road by the sea, stopping by to see the beach.

Once we found the budget agency we left the car and a shuttle dropped us at the port, where we checked in in an impressive place with security, photos for their record and so.

Once on board, we went to the cabin (8189) and when we saw it we couldn’t believe we were in a brand new room, with our own balcony, and all luxuries.

We went for a tour and finally to have dinner. The ship left at 19h direction Key West.

The hotel is at the heart of Miami Beach, it is cheap a bit noisy but highly recommended. Just for sleeping though.

We wanted to have breakfast so we went out of the hotel at Espanola way (photo on the right), where all the bars and restaurants are, and walked along Washington Avenue to the north where you have a lot of shopping. A couple of blocks from here there is Lincoln a pedestrian road full of shops and places to eat. We had a hot chocolate with a huge cookie at Ghirardelli. (photo above) Then we walked Lincoln towards the ocean stopping by a bank to redraw some money, and then along the beach. Lovely day. Perfect temperature. Perfect day.

We walked down the famous Ocean Drive, with all the art deco buildings, full of  restaurants and hotels, beautiful people and incredible cars.Food here is cheap. We reached the bottom of Ocean Drive with a ton of leaflets on 9.95 usd meals.

We then went to the beach for a while, where Kai ate a bit and I had a bit of a “too much sun”, and went to have something to eat at Atlantic, in ocean drive.

Nuria had a lobster salad and I had a cubanito (excellent meat). We shared a huge mojito (photo above).

After lunch we went to the supermarket to buy some nappies for Kai (for the cruise) and back to the hotel.

We woke up this morning and went to the airport. In the airport they told us that we did not have the right seats in order to get a crib. We booked this flight long time ago! and after booking it, we called Iberia to make sure we had the right seats in order to put the baby with a crib. Right.

In Barcelona the supervisor changed everything so we could get this seats. We took the plane towards Madrid, we learned that we had to change planes… and they call it technical stop… but it is a joke, not only you have to change planes, you have one hour to go to the other corner of Madrid airport… so quite a bad start…. landing in Madrid Kai crying because he was hungry (he had great flight by the way) and running to get the connection train and to the other terminal…

Up to here OK. We made it. Now, when boarding they tell us that the seats we have are not the right ones for having a crib… I could not believe it. That the flight is overbooked and we have to see once inside.

Indeed the row 29 or the Airbus 340 is just one more raw, so of course we complained… I could not believe that after booking in advance (you already say you are traveling with a baby), calling by phone, and in Barcelona asking again, and being the 8th passenger to board (we went in advance to the airport) we did not have the seats for the crib… a 12 hour flight with a 8 weeks old baby and no place to lay him… incredible.

The story does not finishes here. We discussed with the cabin crew, and the chief ot the crew, but the people occupying those seats did not want to move. Can you believe it? There are a couple of places where the crib can go, one with 4 passengers (all together) and 2 couples. They all argue that for a long trip this is the best seats, and I agree, it is not their fault, it is Iberia’s incompetency, but come on!! don’t they have a heart? Could you tell a mum with her 8 week old baby to go and fuck off?

The cabin crew tried but no success. I also cannot believe that they don’t have the authority to tell the to move. How legal or just how can they allow this?

Well here we are, in a 3 seat for us, and we managed to put the crib on the floor. I did not want to go to this rows myself because I would be capable of beating them in the face with the laptop until their mother cannot recognize their faces… sorry this is how I am feeling now.

Iberia sucks. It doesn’t mater if you are a frequent flyer, if you have a baby… Ah, and if you seat in the seats at the end of the plane, remember you will not be able to choose your food… so we had pasta.

Anybody knows how to put a claim? I guess I should count 1000 and continue our trip…

Anyway, I will continue from Miami.

We are now in Miami, at the Clay Hotel in Washington avenue. What a cool place! This is a little street packed with bars and restaurants and the hotel is in an old style Spanish house, very nice. A bit noisy but nice.

We landed with delay, we went to customs which is process in itself where you have to put all your fingertips (digitally now) and photo. Now you understand how this TV CSI series have this incredible databases… well, the airport is pretty old. We arrive when the sun was going down. Once outside the terminal there are shuttles that take you to the rent a car dealers. We took the budget one and we were worried because it was taking us damn far. Once you get there you understand… a huge place with tons of cars. We cued for 10 minutes and we got our car. We took the option of baby seat for Kai and an economy car. Wow though, the economy car we have is a brand new car as big as our volvo… with 1000 miles in the counter! Very nice. It will cost us around 90 usd for 2 days. It is OK considering we are dropping it 80Km north where the cruise starts.

Well, we fitted the seat plugged the iphone to have the GPS, searched for POIs of hotels in Miami Beach, and headed towards the Clay hotel. We had to pay 1.25usd of toll road. In 30 min we where at the hotel. The valet .guy took the keys and parked our car.

We went upstairs to our room, where I am now, I found a free hotspot (typical linsys open router) and here I am.

We went for dinner downstairs to this busy street. We had a Caesar salad and Nuria tuna. Californian wine.  We shared a desert. Delicious! The tip is now included (18%!!) in the bill, so it is a bit misleading in the US. When you order food the price you see is without the taxes and without the tip.

Tomorrow will be another day.

In the morning we woke up pretty late because we the night before we went to bed at 2am from Alberto’s place. We took the 55 again towards placa de catalunya and we went to pizza marzano to meet Vanesa. We had lunch with her. Menu was 9.90 euros but quality is pretty bad.

We catch up with her over lunch. It was very nice to meet her and let her. She met Kai too, sure.

After lunch we had to meet with my friends from Salo de la Infancia, but we were going to meet late and my brother wanted to come over to my mum’s to say bye, so we cancelled (or postponed) with them and walked up home. We prepared the bags and went to bed.

We walked down portal del Angel and had a coffee in around placa del Pi. We walked down the Ramblas to the sea, to the Maremagnum where we had lunch at Wok. It was lovely. Nice temperature, close to the sea, sunny… and great company.

After that  we took the metro L4 back home and drove to the new terminal of the airport. There we had also some drinks and Kai had his first true laugh. Not just smiling and making noises but true laugh. Very funny.

Once they left we went to Gava de Mar to Marisol and Alberto’s house. They cooked for as a very nice cold soup and chicken. We stayed until late. Kai had one colic attach though, but dinner was great and they are doing great too, so I was great (once more) seeing them ;-) Gava de Mar is a great place, 2 blocks from the beach. We should come to visit them in summer.

We went for dinner to a Pans & co. and home to bed.

In the photos you can see Kai in the bus, drinking his cocktails. The first one is the “celler de tapes” or “lonja de tapas” at Borne where we had our tapas.

We had Gerard and Nuria with Clara coming over. Clara is lovely. Look at the photo…

Then we went to can cortada to have lunch with my uncle (my mum’s brother) and her wife (Angelo & Angels).

We had calçotada, a typical dish of this season. Great.

Then we were going to meet my friend from Salo de la Infancia but we cancelled as weather was crap. Instead we had siesta and a relaxed afternoon at my mum’s.

Look at kai’s way to sleep. By the way, the t-shirt is a present from my mum. We bought it at la maquinista a couple of days ago.

For me trends as twitter shows them are spammy and useless. For what I see with this improvement, only a few cities in the world are included. Obviously not Barcelona, where I am now, or Geneva where I live.

We walked towards downtown, stopping by Barbara’s parents so they could meet Kai as well, and then in Joanic we took the metro (L4) towards Barceloneta, where we walked to the beach and all along the beach until villa Olimpica. There we had paella, wine… mmm then we went to meet my uncle and cosine who live there.

Later one we met Barbara, Agusti and the twins, Nuria and Silvia. They are so nice! so beautiful, funny and lovely….

Finally they drove us to Mariajo’s place where we stayed for dinner and we met Joel who is 2 weeks older than Kai.

I took most of the photos with the nikon so … no photos here…

I wish there would be an easy way to do this. Currently people calls me, I check my calendar, add them and I keep creating busy slots. I guess I could create a writable online calendar (maybe with google calendar) and with a password allow people to allocate on free slots. Is that possible? I know that for events where it is one time inviting people it is easy, with tools such as evite (before) and facebook (now).

Anyway kai met his great grandmother. It was veeeery emotional. My grandmother is 94 and she was crying of joy. Kai of course is too young to remember this in the future, but I took a couple of photos. Maybe I should have taken a video. I will.

Before though, we went to la maquinista (sort of an open-air shopping mall)  where we had lunch and bought some stuff (like dodotis).

We also met my best friend Sebas and Nuria. We went out for drinks at a cool place (see the photos) in the new area of Barcelona called Diagonal Mar. I don’t know that district at all… I am ashamed. Then we went to where Seba’s Nuria works, the Hospitality school where we had a delicious gastronomic dinner. It was delicious and it is nice because you are served by students who are doing their test on you. The teacher is overlooking but it is a great deal because you get to eat very nice things at a very affordable price.

We packed the car and we headed towards Annecy after stoping by Nuria’s office because she had to drop some stuff there.

Once on the road, everything went smooth. Kai would sleep and wake up every 3 hours (so 3 times in total) to eat, so we stopped in the nearest exit to change his dippers and feed him.

Once in Barcelona the weather changed… raining… but there it was, my mum and my brother waiting for us. Finally my brother got to know Kai.

Now to organise ourselves in order to meet the maximum amount of people in these few days before taking the plane to Miami. By the way, I learned that we will have to change planes in Madrid…

We are going to the checklists we have: winter clothes for Barcelona, summer clothes for the Caribbean… replacing the batteries of the alarm sensors, putting up the system to water the plants, bought a 5Mb roaming travel data plan for the iPhone (just for email) and a long etc…

I have added a link on the top right corner of the blog to filter only the posts related to our trip.

In Barcelona we will block monday and tuesday next week to be with Kike and Raquel, who are coming from Bilbao to meet us. For the rest of the agenda, still to plan it…

Previously companies wanted to have maximum profit, now thanks to google and the Internet, companies trend to have the minimum profit to survive so they can provide free or cheap services, listening to their customers and being inventive  and interactive about the way to gain benefits thanks also the the increase in sales and user pools.

Anyway, there is a very good read about this from a guy I like a lot Jeff Jarvis (twitter) called “What would Google do“. This book gives you a very good idea of how the new businesses are going. All you learnt in your MBA is obsolete.

Well, here I did not wanted to talk about Google philosophically, but just to give my thoughts about the way it is growing and even if they don’t have a shadow, how they should grow.

I am an apple fan. I like it because I also use Windows (at work and on my other laptop) and Linux (on my servers). The cloud services Apple offers are crap compared to Google.

The problem I see is that by buying and having so many products they are starting to spread too much. I found a couple of annoying problems:

They look to favor Gmail users over google apps one, which is stupid because the google apps ones are paid costumers (at least some) and companies (where google can grow profit), so it should be in the other way around.

I host the email from tokao with google. Norai I have it at home on my servers (tokao I use for newsletter and so, norai for the rest… I don’t trust anybody to host my stuff… but this is another chapter). Well I cannot use buzz with tokao. I cannot use many services in fact. Google app users have limited services. Google services are not extended to them.

By having so many services now integrations does not mean just to log in with the same user and password. For instance youtube is independent from picasa and picasa from gmail, and gmail from wave… and what if you have several accounts? I have an acount with norai, another with google apps with tokao and I have a gmail too. Why can’t I merge them? It is very annoying.

With norai I don’t have email with google, but I tried buzz in my iphone and worked! I wanted to use tokao instead. Now my norai login is starting to have a lot of friends in buzz, that I can only see in my iPhone  (well there is a workaround: https://m.google.com/app/buzz?force=1 but it is not the right way).

From my iphone there is no way to upload photos to buzz either. If you follow people who is more or less famouse, they colapse your home screen, as comments push their conversations premaritally to the top… no filtering. You can mute a conversation (pressing M) but then is hard to have it back.

What do you think about google spreading that much? wave, buzz, … don’t we have enough with Facebook, twitter and foursquare?

The pool of user with gmail I thing is less 30 million users. Facebook around 400 million. Twitter might be around 80 Million. Buzz is limited to gmail users. Some people thinks that buzz can eat part of the Facebook share as well as twitter’s. What do you think?

They also thought that wave was going to be big. And it is a quite interesting tool, but once you are in… who do you use it with?? It is not like email that is cross platform… and in my case maybe less than 15% of my friends are in gmail while they are all in facebook. For shouting to the world, well, there are plenty of other alternatives, such as twitter.

I think buzz can be big, but we are starting to have a saturated market. At least google is reactive to people. They changed privacy settings quick, and they will add filtering. We cannot say the same of twitter. If twitter would be so reactive they would not have shadow. They could do so by creating something similar to brightkite.

I will be blogging daily as we did in our previous trip around the world one year ago!

You will be able to follow our trip on by going to:

http://tokao.com/tag/caribbean-cruise/

It is our first trip with Kai. It is not like the trip we did last year but for a 2 month old is going to be a good test. We are planing to drive to Barcelona first, stay there for a while, then take the plane to Miami, rent a car at the airport, go to our hotel in Miami South Beach: The Clay Hotel, and then to Port Everglade (north of Miami) drop the car and start the cruise on board of the MSC Poesia, a 2008 cruise for 3000 people. You can make a virtual tour here.

We will be cruising around the Caribbean in the floating city for 15 days. In fact this is two 7 day cruises in one, so two circuits, passing by Port Everglades in the middle of the stay.

After, once we are back on the 13th of March, we will rent a car again (still have to do that, and in fact still have to do the first one too), and go around as we will have 3 days. We might go to the National Parc of the Everglades in the south of Florida… we have to see.

Then back to Barcelona arriving on the 17th March, and probably drive back home on the 22nd or so.

Here you have a map with markers of all the places we are planning to go. Click on the marker to find out more information.

The fact is that over the past two years, there have been a plethora of online invoicing startups that have popped up and Zoho is catching up to its competitors with version two of its offering. With this update, Zoho has redesigned its UI making it easier to navigate and customize to fit the look and feel of a business’ design. Zoho Invoice will also allow users to record separate expenses they incur while serving particular clients (like travel, material etc).

The version also has full organization, multi-user support so that several employees can access and collaborate on invoices for a particular account. And Zoho has opened up the API for Invoices to that developers can integrate the application into their own applications. Additionally, Zoho features useful bells and whistles such as multi-currency support and email history which tracks your email exchanges with your clients and other users.

The plus of using Zoho’s invoicing application is that it ties into its other productivity applications seamlessly. And its affordable, with a free version and the most expensive version coming in at $35 per month. Last year, we wrote that Zoho has continued to implement an intelligent strategy to launch new products and add-ons to its existing offerings, partly to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. It looks like Zoho is continuing this strategy in 2010.

Last year, startup unveiled a new version of Zoho Reports; launched a deeper integration with Google Docs; rolled out Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses; and debutedZoho Recruit.

And over the past two years, Zoho has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. According to out latest states, Zoho has definitely reached over 2 million users is even catching the attention of its competition. Hopefully, 2010 will be as fruitful as 2009.

(from techcrunch and zoho)

I tried though it still does not work in google apps, and it is pretty good. It is sort of twitter with location and photos, in fact if you read me, you will see that in a way this is what I was looking for… well no.

Yes, it does have all the ingredients: location, you can follow people and in a way is like twitter on steroids (which is great), you can have it in your gmail, there is a cool mobile version too… but…

Well the but is the but I had with google wave. A lot of people can follow you but you need a google account. Like wave, where ended up being a very promising tool but from the moment that it is closed to google users (or wave users which is worse) then is meant to have a difficult future. With buzz the pool is bigger, as there are a lot of google users, but it is still not like email where you can send email across systems, or like twitter where you can just shout and everybody can see it, and follow you.

Did we need another social tool?

Most of us are happy with facebook and twitter. Twitter is limited as I said in the past (location, photos, etc…) but it is big.

Do you think buzz could be a twitter killer? Maybe…

We are starting to have a bit of fatigue on social tools. Recently I posted an article on location based apps, well I got several emails from little companies and I tried all their products. Some are good, but it will be difficult to beat foursquare which looks like is the most established.

For the time being I stick to facebook (for my friends), twitter (for the world), and brightkite to post in both (location and photos). For location foursquare and tellmewhere.

I keep trying buzz and latitude, that by the way, how do they live together? Looks like they don’t know each other…

By the way, google should work harder on integration. I would like to merge all my accounts under one profile and for the time being is not possible…

OpenTable is the leading supplier of reservation, table management and guest management software for restaurants plus www.opentable.com, the world’s most popular website for making restaurant reservations online.

With more than 12,000 customers throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and Japan, the OpenTable hardware and software system replaces pen-and-paper at the host stand. It automates the process of taking reservations and managing tables, while allowing restaurants to build robust diner databases for superior guest recognition and targeted e-mail marketing.

For diners, concierges and administrative professionals, the website provides a fast, efficient way to find available tables that meet desired criteria for cuisine, price and location at a specified time. Reservations are free and can be made around the clock. The website is directly connected to the thousands of computerized reservation systems at OpenTable restaurants. Search results reflect actual, “real-time” availability and reservations are immediately recorded in the same electronic reservation book used by the maitre’d.

Unfortunately there are only 2 restaurants in Geneva, but I see the potential of a tool like this, which has an iPhone app and also manages reviews (like other location apps such as tellmewhere or tripadvisor).

The nice thing of this one is that allows restaurants to manage bookings, and you can go and see who in a specific area and cusine has a free table at 8.30pm, click and book it. Pretty cool. True that you can always grab the phone and call, but here you can do much more: search, etc…

While the majority of consumers are content to purchase the newest brand of name brand shoes, in the same color and style they always get, this doesn’t hold true for everyone. In our daily lives we only come across the occasional individual who truly works at expressing their personality via their shoes. Here are 13 groups of the wildest shoes you wouldn’t even see on the most outrageous free spirit:

(Images via fashionvictim101, popgloss, twolia, hellishhumor)

Fur coats are common, but fur shoes, not so much. In the Native American tradition of using every part of an animal, some creative shoe designers have taken this philosophy to the next level… creating shoes that appear animalistic to an extreme.

(Images via splendidcity, thefashionpolice, fashionvictim101, funalso)

Designers are always pushing the boundaries between form and function, in the hope of inspiring new lines that can be sold to a wider audience. Some designers add new features, while other try to go so minimalist that they remove entire sections of a shoe to reveal what’s beneath.

(Images via babydoll, declubz, myamazingfact, gemersiksufi, anshul, ebaumsworld)

Almost all shoes are designed in the same boring fashion, but there are definitely exceptions. Whether a designer utilizes a smoother, waving form, or manipulates the shape into something that hardly resembles a shoe, they all let their creativity go wild.

(Images via messandnoise, oddee, coutureavenue)

There aren’t any rules when it comes to design, and some creative innovators try to redefine what we consider set in stone. Some of the results are too radical for most people’s taste, but the occasional design will strike a chord with a larger audience (or a wealthy customer), and become a true success.

(Images via hem, specialfootwear, designswan, 2dayblog)

When you’re dressing up in costume, it’s important not to forget your feet. You can go for the realistic, disgusting look, or put on a pair of rats that look way too real. Either way, you’ll leave a trail of groaning friends in your wake.

(Images via aioviga, misslalaland, timetranscript, highheelshoemuseum)

High heels give a graceful, elegant look, and the height of a model. Just like anything, though, extremes can be ridiculous. Incredibly tall high heels can add an artistic flair to a model walking down the runway, but there is an element of very real danger. A lot of women have twisted their ankles, and taken bad spills.

(Images via interestingfacts, toxel)

Some shoes are made out of alternative materials in order to be more environmentally friendly, or add an interesting twist to a typically mundane clothing item, but this isn’t always the case. Necessity breeds invention, and sadly, this means that some of the poorest people are forced to make shoes out of any materials they can get their hands on.

(Images via sarahselectronicblogride, meganginter, geekscape, sikendi)

Not all mainstream shoe makers are boring. Shoe makers will make special edition shoes that appeal to a niche group of consumers, and advertise the brand as something unique. Form fitting shoes are meant to give better feedback to one’s feet, while still protecting them from the elements, but they look as out of this world as a pair of a dinosaur sneakers, or as ridiculous as a tennis ball shoe.

(Images via designswan, popgloss)

While it may not be incredibly functional, shoes can be a fantastic medium for artistic endeavors. There’s something inherently interesting about a common, and typically boring, element from our everyday lives being turned into something creative and unique.

(Images via freshvintage, fashionandnonsense, stylefeeder, nypost, effamadha)

Quirky and outlandish shoes are a great way to stand out in a crowd and express an artistic spirit. You can search high and low for rare and exotic designs, or add to an already existing model and make it your own. The true DIY fanatic will find a way to make anything unique.

(Images via declubz, funnypictures, impactlab, blacklognz)

Like a novelty clown nose, or gigantic foam hands and hats created for sporting events or special occasions, there’s a seemingly endless variety of shoes meant to cause a laugh. The stereotypical clown shoe is just the beginning, as almost any item can be turned into a semblance of a shoe, though it might not be the most comfortable thing to wear.

(Images via designswan, showmeyourshoes, gizmodiva, thefashionpolice)

Most people who have worn high heels will attest that they’re not the most comfortable clothing item in the world, but some designers express this in an industrial, and blatant way, by adding heavy, painful looking spikes and metals, and turning an elegant item into something intimidating.

(Images via cemilanmata, fun-maniac, myspace, twolia, untitiledarchive, weirdositylives)

Perhaps the best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the organization’s website. Given the wealth of insight we’re sure to see tomorrow, we thought we’d whet your appetite by highlighting a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

1. Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media

We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

2. Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

3. Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter Users

With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

4. Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy

As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.

5. Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

(from mashable)

Take a look at Siri, your personal assistant. Just like a real assistant, Siri understands what you say, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time.

Today, Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night.

Siri is young and, like a child taking its first steps, may be awkward at times. Siri may occasionally misunderstand things you ask it to do even within its range of understanding.

Nonetheless, Siri will improve quickly by getting to know you better and understanding a broader set of tasks. In fact, right now, Siri’s learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions. Our vision is that, over time, you’ll trust Siri to manage many personal details in your life – from recommending a wine you might enjoy to managing your to do list.

The current version of Siri is built for iPhone 3GS and requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later. Soon, Siri will run on the iPod Touch, iPhone 3G and additional mobile platforms, as well.

Google is organizing at its headquarters an event where they will “unveil some product innovations in two of [its] most popular products.”

The description fits very well with the WSJ report. Gmail is one of Google’s most popular products, and this new social status update feature would be a “product innovation” within Gmail.

“Web design is 95% typography.” That quote has been repeated around the internet so many times it has practically become gospel – probably because it’s true. While images are important, most of what we process while browsing the web is text. Using the same old boring fonts doesn’t make for exciting design, so some graphic artists have turned typography on the web into a stunning art form unto itself. These 18 websites use typography to inform, but also as an (often interactive) design element that’s like a magnet for our eyeballs.

Espira Web Technology

Priorities, priorities, priorities. Espira Web Technology has emphasized the most important words on the page using large, eye-catching typography that’s a seamless part of the overall design of the site. Following the cardinal rule of using serif typefaces only for headings, the text is easy to read and almost forcibly pulls you in regardless of whether you even speak Spanish.

Jesus Rodriguez Velasco

Sometimes, typography is used in web design to firmly establish the theme or essence of what the site is all about. In this case, archaic-looking typeface and hand-painted symbols hint at what’s inside: “a veritable panoply of literary, visual and aural diversions related (or not) to academic pursuits, arcane (or simply dusty) vagaries and very earnest but most likely misguided contemporary concerns.” The author, Jesus Rodriquez Velasco, is a medieval and early modern studies professor at Columbia University.

Oliver Kavanaugh Design

It’s big. It’s loud. It’s overwhelmingly the most important element on the page, and that’s the point. Graphic and web designer Oliver Kavanaugh managed to make jumbled, overlapping text that might be far too busy in the wrong hands work with subtle texture, a controlled color scheme and careful attention to composition.

Ryan Keiser Design

“I create usable accessible colorful experiences.” All three of those adjectives also apply to the typography-centered design of this website, helping Ryan Keiser establish his brand in a way that’s immediate and memorable.

Denise Chandler Design

Can you resist scrolling further down the page after getting a look at this web header? It’s clean and simple yet dynamic – even without the cute animated insects. Web and graphic designer Denise Chandler showcases her talent with an online portfolio that’s classic and modern all at once.

The New York Moon

Sure, the most eye-catching element of this page is that huge vintage radio. But though it may be subtle, the typography on The New York Moon website still shines. It’s a great example of how less can be more – the type doesn’t have to be acid-bright or two inches tall to call attention to itself and help define the page.

Kidd 81 Design

It’s not hard to tell that Paul Jamie Kidd really loves his job. Everything about the playful, colorful typography on his website screams “fun” – but not in an annoying way, thanks to the balanced white space and neutral brown background.

Circus Family Design, Direction, Animation & Production

Whoa – four different typefaces in a row? That’s usually a terrible idea (especially on the web) – but Circus Family pulls it off here with an austere layout and monochromatic color scheme. The chosen typefaces give the site a very “edgy silent film” feel – appropriate given the nature of the company’s work.

Alpha Multimedia

How can a brand name force itself into your head without screaming like a headache-inducing car dealership commercial? Alpha Multimedia gets it done with excellent use of negative space, filling in the entire header with the word and subsequently drawing your eye down the page to view their featured work samples.

Lorem Ipsum Design

There’s an argument to be made that using ‘lorem ipsum’ isn’t a great idea when designing a website, but that doesn’t extend to using the graphic design agency of the same name. Lorem Ipsum Design goes bold and, well, graphic with a home page featuring nothing but two fonts, one a stark sans serif and the other a hand-written scrawl on a moveable post-it.

Maurivan Luiz Design

The word ‘WELCOME!’ in huge typeface with an exclamation point at the top of a website can be a sign of an amateur designer. That’s definitely not the case here. Maurivan Luiz keeps the friendliness from being cliché – the greeting warmly sets the tone for the site and balances well with the white background and the italicized serif text below it.

The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely

What would the blog of a hedonistic Victorian gentleman with a penchant for getting sidetracked by the ladies while solving mystifying mysteries look like? A little something likeLordLikely.com, a rather racy account of all sorts of mustachioed aristocratic adventures. The chosen typefaces and parchment-like background are evocative of the era, but the clean design is a nod to the modern world.

Love Freelancing

Sometimes, the right balance of typography is like music – it flows with its own rhythm and harmony. Web designer Kai Branch created this little site to hype an ebook of web designer interviews, and it does the subject proud with a beautiful composition of type in various fonts, sizes and orientations.

Giant Creative Web Design & Development

Who needs fancy illustrations when you’re this good with nothing but type? A web design and development firm called Giant Creative literally makes typography the center of attention on their own website. The design is clean yet fun, using a font that’s just playful enough to give a lighthearted yet professional impression.

Ben Lind Design

“I create simple, clean websites that are easy to use and fun to look at.” So says designer Ben Lind on his own website, but perhaps he needn’t have. The design of his site says it all, with a large typography graphic in the center that not only reads “Hi, I’m Ben, I love making websites” but also forms an L for his last name.

Elysium Burns Design

Graphic designer Sean Baker goes for bold sans-serif type for headlines and titles and a more elegant serif font for the text blocks, but with a tightly controlled color scheme and varying font sizes, it all comes together into a cohesive design.

FL2 Blog

It doesn’t get much bolder than this. Interactive agency FL2 isn’t shy about making typography just about as big as it can be both on their blog and website, leaving you with absolutely no question whatsoever which page you’ve landed on.

(from weburbanist)

As Internet is moving at giant steps towards smart phones which now provide a decent browsing and Internet experience such as iPhones and new Android phones (nexus one, droid and others) and why not by the new segment surging now in a serious way, such as iPad, and soon others (probable android based ones), location is the next big thing, so if you are an investor, consider new companies such as foursquare, gowalla, or what it has been and still is my favorite: tellmewhere.

All this smartphone apps allow you to check in at a certain place so you can know who is there (you set up your privacy levels, of course) and depending on the app you can do several things.

What I like about tellmewhere is that it is simple, you check in or you review a place. If it does not exist you can create it. You can upload photos of that place and read comments. You can add it to your todo list (if you would like to visit it) and give tips. It is linked to your facebook and twitter accounts so you can spread the word.

Tellmewhere was small at the begining. It was an app basically for France. I started using it (it is call dismoiou) but now they have received some funding and it is in english, a 2.0 version of the app with checkins and much more. The beauty of it is that is sort of a location based wikipedia. You can create/edit a place, list it under the right category and add photos, etc… Other apps such as foursquare had a game part like being a major of a place (if you check in often) which is a cool thing. Others, like gowalla allow you to take virtual stuff (a piece of pizza, a boot…) and leave stuff. Personally I don’t like this game side of the app and gowalla is the one I use the least.

Facebook is clearly the biggest social network out there. They have now redesigned their web interface for their 6th anniversary when they have reached more than 400.000.000 users. It still think it lacks location. Twitter is great too but location is basic. You can use nice clients such as tweetie to keep updating your profile location but I see this more like a workaround. Also it does not support natively photos. You have to use twitpic or yfrog (that I prefer) for that. I like to have all in one place. Ideally Facebook should have location but it would not be the ideal solution too, as I see facebook and twitter complementary. One for your network of friends (Facebook) and one for shouting out loud to everybody (twitter).

My work around is brightkite. I also talked in the past. Is the app I use in the iPhone to tweet/twit (not to read the tweets) and to update facebook. I can handle photos and location. Unfortunately not video like yfrog with twitter, but the best compromise out there for creating content (writing) and send it to your desired social networks.

Give tellmewhere a try. It will succeed if they get the right critical mass, and for the time being, in the US I guess the winner is foursquare.

Thumbs up fro tellmewhere.

This piecing together of a jigsaw of different organizations and technologies with one common goal serves as a testament to what is possible using cloud computing and may serve as a template for disaster relief operations in the future.

SMS and Radio

Whilst SMS is low tech in comparison to mobile services like 3G and Wi-Fi, its simplicity is its success. Repairing or erecting temporary cell towers is a far more efficient way to reach people than fixing wire-line infrastructure. As SMS is a basic feature supported by all handsets, it is widespread and popular in Haiti.

A short-code weather service (4636) was commandeered and setup on the Digicel and Comcel networks to serve as a gateway for anyone who could access a mobile phone. Josh Nesbit co-founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic humbly describes his involvement as a “co-coordinator” who put together the SMS team by getting lots of different volunteers and organizations talking together. The work was done by people like Jean-Marc Castera, a Haitian network engineer for Digicel, and Nicolás di Tada from InSTEDD who went station to station and made sure the message got out and was clear. The service was publicized via local radio stations and word of mouth.

The earthquake hit on Jan. 12, and the first emergency messages from Haitians were being received four days later on Jan. 16.

Translation and Classification

Messages received were forwarded onto a crowdsourced team powered by CrowdFlower and SamaSource who would translate the messages into English and then classify them. Other information such as addresses, mobile number and map coordinates were derived from the cell locations.

Once classified, messages and the accompanying information was forwarded on to a number of different agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States Coast Guard.

Messages relating to lost or found people would be forwarded to people finder services. Mobile phone numbers were added to a distribution list to receive information bulletins via the Thomson Reuters Foundation AlertNet and InSTEDD.

The Big Picture

An open source piece of software called Ushahidi was re-purposed by volunteers wanting to assist from afar. They created a Web portal to visualize and collate this information for relief agencies and the public.

Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili, was originally developed to map reports of post-election violence in Kenya. Its ability to graphically display maps and “hotspots” was ideally suited for visualizing areas where relief was most needed.

The Future?

The earthquake disaster in Haiti happened less than a month ago and the emergency support service built has already served over 26,000 messages and played a vital role in coordinating the relief effort. You can imagine what an impact this service has to the people who need it most when you consider one such message:

“We need water, food and medications. We are about 950 people. Thank you Abner”

The world may just have had its first glimpse of a truly global disaster management system. We should marvel at the scale of problem it tackled and how quickly it was developed. The use of cloud services like the crowdsourcing platforms and their APIs demonstrates how quickly cloud services can be used to integrate traditional agencies like the Red Cross.

Given the frequency of natural disasters and the uncertainty around climate change the world has an opportunity to rollout a global 911 service that could benefit us all.

(from readwriteweb. Image credit: visualpanic. Mission 4636 diagram kindly supplied by Josh Nesbit)

What is Google PowerMeter?
Google PowerMeter is an opt-in software tool that allows users to see detailed home energy information right on their computer. It is a secure Google gadget that displays data on home energy consumption received from either a “smart meter” or another electricity monitoring device.

Why are you doing this? I thought Google was an internet company.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful; Google PowerMeter is all about giving users access to their own energy information.

Who are you working with today?
We are working with a number of utilities to deliver Google PowerMeter to their customers. You can see our current list of partners here.

How much will this gadget cost?
Google PowerMeter is free for all. Utilities and device manufacturers pay no fees to integrate into the offering and users likewise do not pay anything or see ads when they use Google PowerMeter.

We’re building this tool to provide energy information to consumers and to expose the opportunity that this front represents. As a project of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, the focus is on helping users understand how they use electricity and help them use less.

How can I get Google PowerMeter?
We are gradually rolling Google PowerMeter out in tests with partners and we currently have limited tests with utilities in the United States, Canada, the UK and India. We have also partnered with the independent device manufacturers of TED and AlertMe that work with Google PowerMeter.

How can I sign up for Google PowerMeter?
Google PowerMeter is not yet widely available. We’re currently testing it out with a small number of our utility partners and Google employees and plan to expand our rollout later this year. Stay up-to-date on our progress by joining our mailing list.

I’m a utility or an in-home energy device manufacturer. How can I partner with Google?
We are working with a number of utilities and firms that make power measurement devices and are eager to partner with even more. If you represent a utility company that has rolled out smart meters to some of your customers, we’d love to work with you, even if your rollout isn’t finished yet. Please fill out this utility form. If you represent an in-home energy device manufacturer and are interested in partnering with Google PowerMeter, please fill out this device form.

I’m a customer of one of your partners. How can I get Google PowerMeter?
Google PowerMeter is currently released as a limited beta to a small number of customers of each of our partners. We are working with our partners to scale Google PowerMeter and make the product available to all customers with smart meters.

What are Google PowerMeter’s privacy practices?
Google PowerMeter is an opt-in service and users must sign up to participate. No personally identifying information will be shared between Google and the user’s utility. All energy data received by Google PowerMeter will be stored securely, and users will be able to delete their energy data or ask their utility to stop sending data to Google PowerMeter at any time.

Memoria Casa Joaquin is a house located in Spain and designed by A-cero Architects. The rich, pure and volumetric qualities of the forms are also apparent in the structure, which includes concrete walls that create the outlines of volumes. The design process is intended to discover new visions of everyday life directly related to Galician culture, like making life in the kitchen area. The architects sought the concept of a family home and paid equal attention to the urban development, architecture and details.

(from design milk)

Adidas recently joined the race to connect your running gear to the Internet, with its miCoach system. There is also the Wii Fit and innovative Web fitness services like NordicTrack’s iFit.
Keep up, because tracking your fitness progress on the Internet – via sensors attached to your body or workout gear – is going to become very popular.

A recent USA Today article notes the increasing usage of Web-enabled products that help you monitor your workouts and give you real-time coaching. The Nike+ shoes and iPod system is one of the market leaders.
The Nike+ shoes come with a sensor that tracks your run, then sends the data to your iPod. It even has its own social network. And what Web product circa 2010 doesn’t come with a Twitter and Facebook connection? Sure enough, the Nike+ can automatically tweet.

Meanwhile the Adidas miCoach PACER is a running pacer device that retails for $140. The bundle includes a Heart Rate Monitor and a “Stride Sensor” – a battery-operated sensor that fits into your shoe.
The miCoach Pacer can also verbally coach the runner during their run, “to ensure that they are staying within their targeted heart rate zone.”
There’s an accompanying website, where users can create training plans, set goals and monitor their progress.
Let us know if you currently use an Internet-connected fitness system, especially if it makes use of sensors.

(from readwriteweb)

I wrote a couple of stories with the iPhone wordpress app but they were lost…

Ovronnaz is at 2 hours from here and it is surrounded by snowed mountains. When we arrived we went to our little studio and then to the baths. All buildings are like huge chalets and they are all connected. It was -6 degrees celsius and it was snowing.

I have never had the chance of being in an outside pool with all the mountains painted in white, bubble below you at 37 degrees and snow falling in your face. Quite an experience. I do recommend it. If you choose to go to this particular complex, make sure you choose one of the chalet buildings close to the services and with a studio which is facing south and not located in the ground floor.

It was quite a test to see how our little 7 week old Kai was doing. He did pretty well. I guess he is ready for the big one then.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on Kiva, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else.

Kiva partners with existing microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to entrepreneurs from communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Kiva creates an interpersonal connection at low costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery.

It looks like iTunes, and you can buy music directly from amazon. If you have a nexus one, give it a try.

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Enjoy!

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign andWebhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats fromSymantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here andhere), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

(from pingdom)

We’ve been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It’s baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way. We’re all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend’s blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.

While we’ve been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we’ve been hard at work on new features. For example, we’ve added social to Google Images. Now when you’re doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called “Results from your social circle.” Here’s what it looks like:
Looking at the screenshot, you may notice two new links for “My social circle” and “My social content.” These links will take you to a new interface we’ve added where you can see the connections and content behind your social results. Clicking on “My social circle” shows your extended network of online contacts and how you’re connected.

Clicking on “My social content” lists your public pages that might appear in other people’s social results. This new interface should give you a peek under the hood of how Social Search builds your social circle and connects you with web content from your friends and extended network. You can check out your social circle directly by visiting this link. (Note that it may take some time for the connections and content to update.)

We think there’s tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. We’re leaving a “beta” label on social results because we know there’s a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services. Check out this short video to learn more:

The new features are rolling out now on google.com in English for all signed-in users, and you should start seeing them in the next few days. Time to socialize!

(extracted from the official google blog)

Here it is folks, the Apple iPad. The screen is gorgeous, tilting is responsive, and the thing is insanely thin and light. Still, if you’ve used the iPhone before — and you can see the two devices side-by-side here — there’s not a lot of surprises here so far. Here are some initial thoughts on the device:

It’s not light. It feels pretty weighty in your hand.

The screen is stunning, and it’s 1024 x 768. Feels just like a huge iPhone in your hands.

The speed of the CPU is something to be marveled at. It is blazingly fast from what we can tell. Webpages loaded up super fast, and scrolling was without a hiccup. Moving into and out of apps was a breeze. Everything flew.

There’s no multitasking at all. It’s a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you’re working in Pages… you can figure it out. It’s a real setback for this device.

The ebook implementation is about as close as you can get to reading without a stack of bound paper in your hand. The visual stuff really helps flesh out the experience. It may be just for show, but it counts here.

In my case there is an extra problem, I live in France/Switzerland and most of the stuff out there are for american users (types of foods, stores, etc…) so there is actually no good solution for me, with the food I eat (that I buy at migros).

Here you have the options:

1.- I have been using for a while a service (free) called fatsecret (I know, horrible name) which is good. Most of the foods are there and it is sort of a community. Again, using the iPhone browser was not good enough but now lately they have open the API and there is an iPhone app (free) called Calorie Counter. I was going to give a try but it only works with iPhone 3.1.2 and I am not going to upgrade for that.

2.- I continued researching for similar solutions and I found myfitnesspal. This is a great service too (free) with the addition of exercices as well. Here you set up your target, and upfront you have the calories left for the day. I liked it. They have a nice iphone app, where you can add what you eat, classifying it in breakfast, lunch, dinner and snaks, discounting from the calories you have left for the day, add exercises. Very good, and the iphone app too.

3.- I found a third one called diet tv which has by far, the best website in terms of nice and graphics. I have not tried this a lot though. Looks like you can do most of what the other two can do: log food, weight, measures, see your progress, engage in the community, record your diary… and in a very nice interface. I don’t think they have an iPhone app, so for me is a no-going.

4.- Finally what is probably the best, but you have pay plans, is DailyBurn. You can do basically the same than with fatsecret and myfitnesspal but when you add food, the results are much better than with the chaotic other two. They have photos for each entry (which is a killer feature) and you can also track your workouts. They have two iPhone apps, one (free) to enter your weight and food, and another one (paid) to scan food code bars. Looks like it is good for the US, but not for Europe. What I don’t like is that you just keep adding food but you cannot structure it on breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is just what you eat. I also don’t like that you can only create 20 favorite food entries (otherwise you have to pay).

I guess for me the winner is myfitnesspal. With myfitnesspal and dailyburn you can use the withings scale (a weight scale connected to wifi), which make life easier. Withings scale can even twit your weight… cool (and expensive) gadget.

If dailyburn would be free, it would probably be my winner.

While spending 30 seconds on an escalator, where do you look? Most people just stare straight ahead – making escalators an ideal location for advertising. But some ads are more colorful, clever and controversial than others, using both the ideal eye-level platform and shape of the stairs to their full potential. These are the kinds of ads that make people pause and marvel for a moment before continuing on their way.

Canadian Red Cross Escalator Ad

(image via: allbusiness)

From the top of the stairs, this ad looks so realistic that it could prompt people to rush down so quickly they injure themselves – completely undermining the purpose of the campaign. Created for the Canadian Red Cross, the decal intends to promote the knowledge of first aid with a message reading “Know What to Do.”

DHL Gridlock Escalator Ad

(image via: adoholik)

Hong Kong traffic is notoriously nightmarish. But even the gridlocks of this city can’t stop DHL, or so they insinuate with this escalator ad which depicts their trucks speeding down a convenient (though imaginary) fast lane, located on the moving handrail, as the rest of the cars remain at a maddening halt.

IKEA Staircase Ad

(image via: directdaily)

IKEA is practically synonymous with “organization”, something nearly everyone could use a little help with. That makes these stair stickers that much more effective, depicting neatly stacked clothing and linens in drawers.

Hopi Hari Escalator Ad

(image via: adland)

When people momentarily forget they’re on an escalator, imagining themselves having a great time at an amusement park instead, you know that an ad is special. This one for a Brazil amusement park called Hopi Hari turns each step into a snapshot of a couple enjoying a roller coaster.

Nationwide Staircase Ad

(image via: ads of the world)

Bad things happen every day… like bizarre automobile accidents that send your car flying in the air like the General Lee, if this Nationwide Insurance staircase ad is to be believed. It certainly takes full advantage of the huge set of stairs at the end of Fashion Show Drive in Las Vegas.

Revita Beauty Center Shiatzu Escalator Ad

(image via: adland)

When possible, it’s best to avoid stepping on people – unless you’re a professional masseuse. While this ad may make some people uncomfortable, others may be reminded of just how good it would feel to let someone work out the knots in their backs.

Table Soccer Staircase Ad

(image via: ads of the world)

An outdoor guerilla ad campaign to promote the first international table soccer world cup featured realistic-looking flyers shaped like table soccer figures on stair handrails around the city of Hamburg, Germany.

Consol Energy Coal Mine Escalator Ad

(image via: ads of the world)

Consol Energy reminds people of what it takes to power our world with coal – descending into deep, dark, dirty mines – with an ad bound to make environmentalists cringe.

Coca-Cola Escalator & Staircase Ad

(image via: ads of the world)

Coca-Cola engaged in some targeted marketing in a joint campaign with McDonalds. Regular, full-calorie Coke was advertised to people who take the stairs, while the people getting less activity by taking the escalator see ads for Diet Coke instead.

Jeep Parking Space Ad

(image via: toxel)

Capitalizing on the Jeep’s reputation as a vehicle that can go places other cars can’t, these guerrilla-style ads create parking spots in the most unlikely places – like stairs. No word on whether Jeep owners that took the ads up on their offer got reimbursed for pricey parking tickets.

Gillette Venus Escalator Ad

(image via: ads of the world)

Who was the advertiser that looked at the side of an escalator and thought, ‘hmmm, that looks like a leg’? Someone had to have made that questionable connection to come up with this eye-catching ad by Gillette, which featured small decals of razors on the handrail.

Greenville Literary Association Staircase Ad

(image via: toxel)

It’s not hard to grasp how book lovers at the Greenville Literary Association came to see a stack of books in a flight of stairs. This ad, created to generate book donations, takes full advantage of the shape of the advertiser’s chosen medium.

Juice Salon Escalator Ad

(image via: adland)

How many different haircuts can one man possibly get? This creative example of escalator advertising attempts to answer that question, putting a different style on every step, each of which briefly join with the man’s face at the bottom of the escalator to demonstrate the effect.

South Carolina Time to Thaw Stairs Ad

(image via: bounce agency)

The same agency that came up with the creative Greenville Literary Association book stairs also turned a set of stairs into stacks of suitcases, inspiring passersby to “pack your bags: it’s time to thaw.” The ad encourages travel to South Carolina.

Pizza Kingdom Escalator Ad

(image via: ads of the world)

Is the sight of a pizza lying on a dirty escalator, stepped on by thousands of pairs of feet, really all that appetizing? A chain called Pizza Kingdom hoped that it would be with this strange ad, designed to demonstrate “extra cheese” stretching from step to step. Amazingly, it worked: revenue increased by 53% within a month.

(from weburbanist)

Try WooRank, you will get a ton of information about a website.

Click to enlarge

How does it work?

We capture images of the articles on our partners’ websites and then display them in an easy-to-read way. The stories are grouped by categories, such as Entertainment, Business, Opinion, Politics and Most Viewed. Readers can flip through stories quickly by simply pressing the left- and right-arrow keys until they find one that catches their interest. Clicking on the story takes them directly to the publisher’s website.

How are the Topics selected? Can I choose my own?

The Topics are generated automatically by rising stories in the news. Users can also search for any subjects they want and basically create their own topics, almost like a custom magazine, on the fly.

To find out more go to this website

We’re happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you’ll be able to upload and access your files from any computer — all you need is an Internet connection.

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You’ll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don’t convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.

You can also search for document files you’ve uploaded or that have been shared with you just like you do with your Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. And you’ll be able to view many common document file types with the Google Docs viewer.

To learn how businesses can take advantage of this new functionality, check out the post on the Enterprise Blog.

As always, we’d love your feedback and if you have any questions, please check out our help page. This feature will be enabled for your account over the next couple of weeks — look for the bubble notification when you sign in to Google Docs.

There’s an answer, thanks to the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences. If you click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, you can assign “Paste Without Formatting” and/or “Paste and Match Style” to Command + V for all applications. Just click the  button under the list, type in the name of the appropriate menu items, and press ⌘-V in the Keyboard Shortcut box.

One note: Panic designer Neven Mrgan found that using this tip means you won’t be able to paste images into iChat using Command + V. Dragging and dropping (or choosing Paste from the Edit menu) still works, though. Update: If you explicitly add ⌘-V in as a shortcut for Paste that’s specific to iChat, you can restore the image paste capability without breaking the global shortcut.

Apps that don’t have either of those menu items will still default to regular old “Paste” for the same key command. Paste away!

(tip from tuaw)

I would like to extract (literally) part of that entry in order to have an entry of its own:

What can we expect in the next 10 years?

Obviously the hardware will continue to explode. Hard disk, processors, screen technology (LED or something new, ebook readers, tablets), internet speed and connectivity (wimax, 4g)… that will make information easier to access and to share. Now a smartphone has GPS, accelerometers and a lot of sensors. I foresee a step towards this sort of uses: location, using the camera of the phone to take a photo from anything and have image recognition, reviews, who is there, where is cheaper, banking, payments… all!!. Search engines will go one step further and they will have other ways to search than text, photos videos, voice… everything indexable. With my phone I will be able to see where my friends are, what they are drinking, etc… reviews are important. I use internet to review and read reviews of what I buy, the hotels I go (tripadvisor), google, tell me where, etc… so location, location, location.

But not everything are flowers… I think that because Internet is going to be so big, Internet Governance is going to be a big issue. Now the US controls ICANN and a lot of other stuff. Internet Governance is going to be a difficult topic. Also Internet as a human right. ISP (internet providers) will try to get the maximum out of it, by capping, limiting connectivity, filtering content (like in China) and so. If this is the case, Internet could be in danger. It should be a 100% open platform. No restrictions. I hope governments intervene to avoid this sort of issues that we are already starting to see in the US with ISPs. Access to Internet should be unlimited and unrestricted. Government should be careful also not doing like in Finland where they are going to filter content at ISP level… a biiiiig mistake.

Privacy is also going to be an issue, but I guess we will be living in public. There is no problem for me, but privacy should be seriously managed. Specially when companies are outsourcing for instance email to google apps, or google docs and calendars…

Cloud computing will be big, and I don’t know if computers will trend to be more like terminals and run all the programs in the cloud. I do use google docs a lot I must say. Online photo services, backups, etc… I can’t wait to see how it progresses. The combination of cloud computing and terminals with strong browsers with offline technology could be a way. If you think about it, why not log in at any computer/terminal and have your files programs and so? Well this could be achieved with good connectivity and good cloud computing. But again, if this is where we go, we will start to see issues of compatibility and standards. Exporting things from a cloud to a computer or to another cloud… it should be standardized.

But the I wonder… when I bought my fiat 500, I printed out the price I was getting in internet and went to my local Fiat dealer. The salesman was furious. He said he could not compete with that. They have cost of personnel, stocks, training, etc… while the guy in internet buys bulk and gets incredible prices… so it made me think. There is no point in having shops or car dealers. They are simply not competitive with internet. So where is the business? Well, services I guess. Garage to repair. Warehouse to collect parts. Advise… but not in selling goods. I told the guy in Fiat that his business model was condemned to die.

There is another ethical question you could ask yourself. If you could buy cheaper 98% of people would buy cheaper. What about paying extra if it manufactured at home, or uses organic stuff, or is environmentally better? It is a difficult question. Specially for our generation. I hope next generation will think differently. Developed countries can not live from services alone, and the rest is more expensive than to do it abroad. So what to do? Free trade has given a lot of opportunities to developing countries, but we have seen with Doha failure that one size does not fit all. What about free movement of people? Goods and people are not strangers. If I am a farmer in France and all farming goes to … China (just a stupid example), then what happens to the french farmer? Should he go to China? Move to something else? Should we cluster activities wherever they are more productive? I don’t know. That would not be sustainable for the environment. Look at Indonesia, they have destroyed the forest to put palm oil plantations. It is so sad. Al fauna is dead and most of the country is monocorp…. but this is where we are going! Look at the farmers in the US. Maybe it should be studied where the environmental impact is lower and do it there.

If you go to Africa you will see how developed countries have destroyed. We imposed the capitalism there. The richer continent in earth is the poorest. Before people there did not have to work. If they were hungry they would take it from the trees. No effort. Simple and happy life….

The end of it is that we can not avoid to spread wealth with this model, meaning that developed countries will have to lower their living standards, otherwise I don’t see how this is sustainable. Closing borders? Big mistake… Anyway that is whole new story.

• Prezi
• xmind
• bubbl.us

A bench is a bench – except when it’s also a platform for a surprising, thought-provoking, memorable advertisement that sometimes even functions as urban art. The best bench ads turn ubiquitous public furniture into interactive displays that entreat the public to get fit, go on vacation, try a new product and even conserve resources.

District 9 Bench: For Humans Only

(image via: aharvey2k)

Before anyone heard of a little film called District 9, signs barring non-humans from using benches and restrooms could be seen in major cities such as Los Angeles. With a phone number and a warning that “non-human secretions may corrode metal”, these advertisements blurred the line between reality and the fictional world created by the filmmakers in typical guerilla fashion.

Fed-Ex Bubble Wrap Bench

(image via: advertolog)

Fed-Ex can ship practically anything – including benches, as ‘demonstrated’ by this bubble-wrapped bench. The ad series, conceived by BBDO New York, was created to announce the opening of FedEx Kinko’s locations in fairly remote locations.

Instant Ski Vacation

(image via: adsneeze)

Can you picture yourself on an adventurous ski trip, heading up the slope on a lift that provides stunning views of the surrounding landscape? If not, Alberta Travel is happy to help with this creative bench ad that even emulates skis on your feet and snow down below.

Use Only What You Need

(image via: advertolog)

Ads promoting water conservation might be easily overlooked by a public that has begun to tune out conventional modes of promotion. But, it’s hard to pass by this bench, created by Sukle Advertising & Design advertising agency for Denver Water, without taking a second look and absorbing the message: use only what you need.

Skinny Bench for Skinny People

(image via: scaryideas)

A similarly skinny bench communicates something different altogether: if you can’t sit here, perhaps you need to lose some weight. Slim Fast helpfully points people in the right direction with a plaque that reads “Donated by Slim Fast”.

Collapsing Bench for Special K

(image via: coloribus)

Similarly, one cereal brand hopes that consumers will be enticed to try their product after finding that a public bench caves in beneath their weight. This bench in Germany was made with a flexible material to shock people into thinking about how heavy they are, and convince them that 99.9% fat-free Special K was the way to fix the problem.

A Weighty Matter

(image via: businessweek)

Of course, if undersized or collapsing seating areas don’t work, there’s always a more potent way to shame the overweight public: a bus shelter bench with a built-in scale that broadcasts their weight to the world at large. This one in Amsterdam was created by the world’s third-largest gym chain, Fitness First.

No Choice But to Get Closer

(image via: directdaily)

Just try sitting on this slanted bench with somebody else without sliding right into each other. It literally forces people to “Get Closer”, which happens to be the ad slogan for a Czech liquor called Becherovka.

A Stroller Fit for a Baby Giraffe

(image via: ads of the world)

This extra-tall stroller – or pram, if you’re not American – certainly catches the attention of anyone who happens to sit on the bench beside it. The unusual ad by Calgary Zoo uses an embroidered blanket to tell the public that “the baby giraffe is here”.

Nivea Says Goodbye to Cellulite

(image via: directdaily)

Sitting on cellulite isn’t pretty – unless it’s in the form of a dimpled blue bench. This ad by Nivea promoting its Goodbye-Cellulite lotion manages to convey the message that smooth skin is superior to cellulite without anything too disturbingly skin-like.

Homey IKEA Bench Makeover

(image via: culture-buzz)

IKEA proves that even the ugliest, most worn-out bench you can find in an urban environment can be instantly transformed into a homey, welcoming space to relax with some inexpensive Swedish fabric and accessories.

Kit-Kat Bench

(image via: Noah Dylan Goldblatt)

Seeing the brown slats of a bench partially enveloped in a Kit-Kat wrapper begs the question: why didn’t they think of this earlier? It’s a perfect fit that undoubtedly had many an onlooker suddenly craving chocolate-covered wafers.

Istanbul’s Book Benches

(image via: adrants)

Istanbul is an open book – 18 of them, in fact, all written by Turkish poets. This ad campaign not only promotes reading and publicizes the work of native writers, but turns boring public furniture into functional works of art.

Amnesty International ‘Electric Bench’

(image via: funforever)

We might let important social issues slip our minds while going about our daily lives, but Amnesty International is here to remind us that “More than 4000 condemned until death are waiting for their execution. No to Capital punishment”. Accompanying these words at a Barcelona bus shelter was a bench designed to look like a pair of electric chairs.

‘Extra Safe’ Credit Union Ad

(image via: thefinancialbrand)

If this ad and others in the same series were put out by an insurance agency, one would have to wonder whether the “extra safe” message really implies that consumers are buying way more coverage than they need. But the ads were actually created by FirstOntario Credit Union to assure the public that their short-term investments are secure as can be, even in this shaky economic climate – so it works.

(from weburbanist)

Square is Jack Dorsey’s (Twitter co-founder) new startup that now has Kevin Rose (Digg founder) on board as an investor and YouTube pitch man for the prototype payment device that plugs directly into the iPhone’s headphone jack.

This is what I posted in the forums:

1.- Save your settings: Settings/System then the big settings button will donwload a file called luci. Save it.

2.- Download the latest DEV version of your 2.0n: http://download.fonosfera.org/LATEST/fo … .0_DEV.tgz (remember that from the web you can only instal tgz files)

3.- In my case I tried upgrading to dev from my mac (safari) in the wan and it did not work. I tried from a lan computer and it did work. It takes 5 min. Then I went setting/system/settings update and then I could not see any difference between the DEV and the normal firmware. I could not access via ssh, so I thought it might have been because in my setting I have the fonera running on 192.168.1.1 instead of the default 192.168.10.1. I then reseted to factory default.

4.- Once in factory default you are asked to follow a wizard. You had a password of 8 char with numbers and then I tried ssh and worked.

5.- Now how to send the 2.3.5.0 to the fonera? I tried put and get and did not work. Filezilla over sftp did not work either. Only wget. So I had to dowload from here (http://flash.fonera.be/FON2303/20091210 … EV-RC2.tgz) but from ssh you cannot install tgz, so I had to extract the .img and upload it to a server: http://yourserver/20091210_FON2303_2.3.5.0_DEV-RC2.img

6.- You go to ssh root@192.168.10.1 and then your 8 char password, go to the #cd /tmp folder and

7.- Then #wget http://yourserver/20091210_FON2303_2.3.5.0_DEV-RC2.img

8.- Now you have to install the image make sure you are in the #cd /tmp then #mtd -r write 20091210_FON2303_2.3.5.0_DEV-RC2.img image

9.- DONE!!

10.- Now you can upload your luci settings again.

Nowadays mass advertising is transforming into custom advertising. Google does so in its add sense and gmail. I would say it might work better as you can be interested in what it is being offered as it fits in the context of your search, emails, etc…

Is mass advertising dead then?

I guess no. Walmart or Carrefour, Coca-Cola and so need to continue with mass advertising as well as customizing their campaigns into this new era.

As you know I listen constantly to podcasts audiobooks and so. At first I was surprised that one of my favorite podcaster (or netcaster as he likes to call himself) started adding 2 to 3 adds in each show. The difference is that he would talk about the products and looks like he really likes it.

I think that it is not the same to listen to a commercial in a traditional way, than to hear someone you trust recommending a product. For the person you trust doing this could cost him the fact that you don’t trust him anymore as you might think that if he does reviews and some of them are ads, he is not being transparent and objective…. unless…. if he really likes a service he can choose to be paid by them to advertise.

Well this is where we are going and this website is some of it. Take a look: open candy

Others could be services like trialpay where if you are normaly buying something, you can get a discount on a product you want to try. For instance you are going to buy something from gap anyway and you would like to try 3 free months of evernote. Voila.

Here the features:
Personalization & Company Branding
Personalized URL Remindo gives you a personalized URL like http://intranet.yourcompany.com to access your company intranet. Share this secure URL with your clients and team to give them access to your company intranet anywhere on the web.

Company branding
Brand your intranet by uploading your company logo. Your team and clients will see it prominently displayed on every page of your intranet, truly making it your own.

Company Intranet

Company Network
When you sign up, your corporate email address immediately creates an intranet for your company on Remindo. Anyone with an email address ending in your corporate domain will automatically be added to your company network on Remindo, once they sign up.

Sharing links and status updates
A powerful Twitter-like messaging system but private for your team. Team members can share thoughts on work, projects, ask questions, share URLs, or simply post status updates.

Instant Messaging
As team members join your intranet, they are automatically added to the Instant Messaging list and instantly organized. Clients and partners can also be added to IM allowing your entire team to have instant one-on-one access to each other. You can also send offline messages as a great replacement to sending emails.

Rich Team Profiles
Each team member gets a personal profile space to fill out. This allows team members to get to know each other better and allows new team members to familiarize themselves with the team quickly and easily.

Online File Storage
Tag, upload, and share files. Its a great place to share frequently used files like employee manuals, sales collateral, presentation templates etc. Comments can also be posted for these file. Each file can be up to 200MB in size and can be downloaded from anywhere. Every company intranet gets 3GB of free storage.

Team and Client Communication

Discussions

Threaded discussions organize all inter-company and client communication in tidy strings saving you and your team the hassle of digging through emails to find what you need.

Communication Archive
All communication gets archived for future reference and is organized by the work they are related to. This allows you to quickly and easily recover any discussion if the need arises.

200MB File Sharing
Attach massive files of up to 200MB to discussions. Files this size cannot be sent by email and third party transfers create security risks, but Remindo discussions allow you to easily share files that too with platinum standard security.

Client Extranet

Work planning
Interact with your clients and set tasks and milestones on the shared work calendar to keep everyone on the same page.

Client privacy
No matter how many different clients you might be working with, Remindo architecture ensures that your interactions with one client are always invisible to all others so there is no risk of privacy breaches.

File sharing with clients
Share huge files of upto 200 MB each with your clients. Since everything in Remindo is protected with multiple layers of security, this is the best way to share sensitive information with clients.

Unlimited clients
There is no limit on the number of clients you can work with in Remindo. Invite as many as you want.

Work planning and project management

Personalized Work Calendar
Get a quick overview of the status of all your work at a glance. Each team member gets a personalized calendar with only work for which they are responsible.

Unlimited Users
Allow any number of people to be a member of your private intranet. Authorize any team members, freelance partners, and/or clients to view work and participate in projects.

Unlimited Projects
Setup and manage an unlimited number of projects on your intranet.

Unlimited Subprojects
Each project can have an unlimited number of subprojects within it allowing you to further organize your company’s work.

Milestones
Easily add milestones to projects by clicking the appropriate day on the calendar. Assign responsibility for the new milestone to anyone on your team.

Task Lists and Tasks
Link any number of tasks to each milestone and assign each task to any team member you choose. In this way, management of work can get as granular as you wish. As tasks are completed, team members mark them complete. When all tasks in a given milestone are complete, the milestone is automatically marked as completed.

Milestone Auto-Completion
Milestones can be set to automatically be marked complete on any date you specify.

Milestones and Task Delegation
Delegate milestones and tasks to any team member you choose. As they complete these tasks and milestones, Remindo will send email notifications to your email inbox alerting you that they are complete.

Milestone Alerts
Remindo sends you an email notification of any milestones or tasks that are either pending or overdue, alerting you to possible problems in plenty of time to make the necessary adjustments. Milestone alerts help you keep your work on track.

Cross Company Milestones
Milestones and tasks across all your work and projects from your entire company intranet can be viewed from a single calendar. Management can track the operations of the entire company at a single glance.

Multiple Calendar Views
View the progress of milestones and tasks on either a broad monthly basis or on a detailed weekly view. Both calendar views are available at a single click allowing you to toggle back and forth between views.

Enterprise Security

Engineering
Platinum standard security that plugs SQL injections, prevents XSS attacks, and protects your data from mismanagement, hackers, and your competition’s prying eyes.

VeriSign SSL
Remindo uses a 128 bit VeriSign SSL to secure all communication pipes. This encryption is the same as used in many global banks and Fortune 500 companies.

Amazon Web Services
All your company information gets stored on secure Amazon S3 server clouds using EC2 technology protecting you from the risks of stolen laptops, server crashes, and malware attacks.

Work Alerts

Email Alerts
Remindo sends alerts directly to your email inbox keeping you notified of the completion of work, tasks, milestones and projects. You will also receive notifications of pending or overdue tasks allowing you to get that work back on track.

Daily Digest
If you prefer, Remindo can send you a quick daily digest of all the day’s activity allowing you to review the progress your team has made during the day.

Instant alerts
Receive notifications the moment tasks or milestones are completed. These alerts are sent directly to your email inbox and flag you the moment they are marked completed by a team member.

Special event notifications
Get a daily report of all event activity that has taken place across your projects.

Live Feed

Live activity feed
All activities on your intranet and within projects are brought to you directly. Live feed instantly alerts you to activity so you don’t waste time report, updating, notifying, and sending team members emails on an individual basis.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Cloud Hosted
Remindo operates from Amazon S3 server Internet clouds. These are among the most secure and reliable available for SaaS.

Backed Up
Remindo backs up every file, message, tweet, and instant message so none of your important documents and communications are lost.

Access Anywhere
As Remindo is web-based, both you and your team can access it from any computer anywhere in the world that has an internet connect. You’ll stay connected with company operations no matter where you’re traveling.

Nothing to Install
You don’t need to install or maintain anything. Remindo does all that for you. All you have to do is log in.

Reduce System Admin Loads
Remindo manages your entire corporate network for you. We keep servers up and running, troubleshoot any glitches, and keep the system up-to-date. This frees up your IT team to focus on other things.

Always Up-to-Date
Remindo makes sure your project management system is always the newest, most stable environment for your project management.

Support

24×7x365 Support
Remindo has a dedicated support team that will answer your queries and provide support 24×7x365. Just shoot a mail to remindo [at] remindo [dot] com and support will get back to you.

Video Tour Guides
Detailed video guides to walk new users through everything from basic project management and collaboration features to advanced functionality

FAQ’s
All questions that Remindo users frequently ask are compiled for reference.

Case Study
Detailed case study that captures how a global company incorporated Remindo into their processes to boost productivity and get more ambitious with targets

Guides
Step-by-step guide for CEO’s and owners of Small Businesses on how to use Remindo to increase organizational efficiency and get results.

Free!
Free for unlimited users, projects and subprojects
There is absolutely no sign up or usage cost associated with Remindo. You can start availing all these features simply by signing up with your corporate email id.

Give it a try. The final price of the case is a bit expensive but you’ll get something unique.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog andthis presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

(from google blog and here a nice blog discussing this)

They have announced that VMware has bought email and collaboration software developer Zimbra from Yahoo. Rumors of the sale have been floating around for some time now but the writing was on the wall when Scott Dietzen, former CTO of Zimbra, quit Yahoo last fall.
Yahoo bought back in 2007 zimbra for $350 million.

Here the press release from zimbra and vmware.

Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not just benefit Google). Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information. These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren’t there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap between reality and aspiration. If we can embody a consistent commitment to open — which I believe we can — then we have a big opportunity to lead by example and encourage other companies and industries to adopt the same commitment. If they do, the world will be a better place. Open systems win To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software … expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t. Open systems are just the opposite. They are competitive and far more dynamic. In an open system, a competitive advantage doesn’t derive from locking in customers, but rather from understanding the fast-moving system better than anyone else and using that knowledge to generate better, more innovative products. The successful company in an open system is both a fast innovator and a thought leader; the brand value of thought leadership attracts customers and then fast innovation keeps them. This isn’t easy — far from it — but fast companies have nothing to fear, and when they are successful they can generate great shareholder value. Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics. The race to map the human genome is one example. In the book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams explain how in the mid-1990s private firms were discovering and patenting large amounts of DNA sequence data and then assuming control over who could access that information and at what price. Having so much of the genome under private ownership raised costs and made drug discovery far less efficient. Then, in 1995, Merck Pharmaceuticals and the Gene Sequencing Center at Washington University changed the game by creating a new, open initiative called the Merck Gene Index. Within three years they had published over 800,000 gene sequences into the public domain, and soon other collaborative projects followed suit. This in an industry where early stage R&D was traditionally pursued individually in closed labs, so Merck’s open approach not only changed the culture of the entire field but also accelerated the pace of biomedical research and drug development. It gave researchers everywhere unrestricted access to an open resource of genetic information. Another way to look at the difference between open and closed systems is that open systems allow innovation at all levels — from the operating system to the application layer — not just at the top. This means that one company doesn’t have to depend on another’s benevolence to ship a product. If the GNU C compiler that I’m using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don’t have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response. So if you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic. Rather it’s good business, since an open Internet creates a steady stream of innovations that attracts users and usage and grows the entire industry. Hal Varian has an equation in his book Information Rules that applies here: Reward = (Total value added to the industry) * (Our share of industry value) All other things being equal, a 10 percent increase in share or a 10 percent increase in industry value should lead to the same outcome. But in our industry a 10 percent increase in industry value will yield a much bigger reward because it will stimulate economies of scale across the entire industry, increasing productivity and reducing costs for all competitors. As long as we contribute a steady stream of great products we will prosper along with the entire ecosystem. We may get a smaller piece, but it will come from a bigger pie. In other words, Google’s future depends on the Internet staying an open system, and our advocacy of open will grow the web for everyone – including Google. Open Technology The definition of open starts with the technologies upon which the Internet was founded: open standards and open source software. Open Standards Networks have always depended on standards to flourish. When railroad tracks were first being laid across the U.S. in the early 19th century, there were seven different standards for track width. The network didn’t flourish and expand west until the different railway companies agreed upon a standard width of 4′ 8.5″. (In this case the standards war was an actual war: Southern railroads were forced to convert over 11,000 miles of track to the new standard after the Confederacy lost to the Union in the Civil War.) So there was some precedent in 1974 when Vint Cerf and his colleagues proposed using an open standard (which became TCP/IP) to connect the several computer networks that had emerged around the U.S. They didn’t know exactly how many networks were out there so the “Internet” — a term Vint coined — had to be open. Any network could connect using TCP/IP, and now, as a result of that decision, there are about 681 million hosts on the Internet. Today, we base our developer products on open standards because interoperability is a critical element of user choice. What does this mean for Google Product Managers and Engineers? Simple: whenever possible, use existing open standards. If you are venturing into an area where open standards don’t exist, create them. If existing standards aren’t as good as they should be, work to improve them and make those improvements as simple and well documented as you can. Our top priorities should always be users and the industry at large and not just the good of Google, and you should work with standards committees to make our changes part of the accepted specification. We have a good history of doing this. In the formative years of the Google Data Protocol (our standard API protocol, which is based on XML/Atom), we worked as part of the IETF Atom Protocol Working Group to shape the Atom specification. There’s also our recent work with the W3C to create a standard geolocation API that will make it easy for developers to build browser-based, location-sensitive applications. This standard helps everyone, not just us, and will lead to users having access to many more compelling apps from thousands of developers. Open Source Most of those apps will be built on open source software, a phenomenon responsible for the web’s explosive growth in the past 15 years. There is a historic precedent here: while the term “open source” was coined in the late 1990s, the concept of sharing valuable information to catalyze an industry existed long before the Internet. In the early 1900s, the U.S. automobile industry instituted a cross-licensing agreement whereby patents were shared openly and freely amongst manufacturers. Prior to this agreement, the owners of the patent for the two-cycle gasoline engine had effectively bottled up the industry. Today’s open source goes far beyond the “patent pooling” of the early auto manufacturers, and has led to the development of the sophisticated software components — Linux, Apache, SSH, and others — upon which Google is built. In fact, we use tens of millions of lines of open source code to run our products. We also give back: we are the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source, with four projects (Chrome, Android, Chrome OS, and Google Web Toolkit) of over a million lines of code each. We have teams that work to support Mozilla and Apache, and an open source project hosting service (code.google.com/hosting) that hosts over 250,000 projects. These activities not only ensure that others can help us build the best products, they also mean that others can use our software as a base for their own products if we fail to innovate adequately. When we open source our code we use standard, open Apache 2.0 licensing, which means we don’t control the code. Others can take our open source code, modify it, close it up and ship it as their own. Android is a classic example of this, as several OEMs have already taken the code and done great things with it. There are risks to this approach, however, as the software can fragment into different branches which don’t work well together (remember how Unix for workstations devolved into various flavors — Apollo, Sun, HP, etc.). This is something we are working hard to avoid with Android. While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to “game” our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone. So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation? If so, then you should make it open source. And when you do, do it right; don’t just push it over the wall into the public realm and forget about it. Make sure you have the resources to pay attention to the code and foster developer engagement. Google Web Toolkit, where we have developed in the open and used a public bug tracker and source control system, is a good example of this. Open Information The foundation of open standards and open source has led to a web where massive amounts of personal information — photos, contacts, updates — are regularly uploaded. The scale of information being shared, and the fact that it can be saved forever, creates a question that was hardly a consideration a few years ago: How do we treat this information? Historically, new information technologies have often enabled new forms of commerce. For example, when traders in the Mediterranean region circa 3000 BC invented seals (called bullae) to ensure that their shipments reached their destinations tamper-free, they transformed commerce from local to long distance. Similar transformations were spurred by the advent of the written word, and more recently, computers. At every step of the way, the transaction, a consensual agreement where each party gets something of value, was powered by a new type of information that allowed a contract to be enforced. On the web, the new form of commerce is the exchange of personal information for something of value. This is a transaction that millions of us participate in every day, and it has potentially great benefits. An auto insurer could monitor a customer’s driving habits in real-time and give a discount for good driving — or charge a premium for speeding — powered by information (GPS tracking) that wasn’t available only a few years ago. This is a fairly simple transaction, but we will encounter far more sensitive scenarios. Let’s say your child has an allergy to certain medicines. Would you allow her medical data to be accessible by a smart wireless syringe which could prevent an EMT or nurse from accidentally giving her that medicine? I would, but you might decide the metal bracelet around her wrist is sufficient. And that’s the point — people can and will reach different decisions, and when it comes to their personal information we need to treat all of those decisions with equal respect. So while having more personal information online can be quite beneficial to everyone, its uses should be guided by principles that are responsible, scalable, and flexible enough to grow and change with our industry. And unlike open technology, where our objective is to grow the Internet ecosystem, our approach to open information is to build trust with the individuals who engage within that ecosystem (users, partners, and customers). Trust is the most important currency online, so to build it we adhere to three principles of open information: value, transparency, and control. Value First and foremost, we need to make products that are valuable to users. In many cases, we can make our products even better if we know more information about the user, but privacy concerns can arise if people don’t understand what value they are getting in return for their information. Explain that value to them, however, and they will often agree to the transaction. For example, millions of people let credit card companies retain information on the purchases they make with their card in exchange for the convenience of not carrying around cash. We did this well when we launched Interest-Based Advertising in March. IBA makes ads more relevant and more useful. That is the extra value we create based on the information we gather. It also includes a user preferences manager that clearly explains what users are getting in exchange for their information and lets them opt out or adjust their settings. The vast majority of people who visit the preferences manager choose to adjust their settings rather than opt out because they realize the value of receiving ads customized to their interests. This should be our default approach: tell people, in obvious, plain language, what we know about them and why it’s valuable to them that we know it. Think that your product’s value is so obvious that it doesn’t need explaining? There’s a good chance you’re wrong. Transparency Next, we need to make it easy for users to find out what information we gather and store about them across all of our products. We recently took a big step in this direction with the launch of the Google Dashboard, which is a single place where users can see what personal data is held by each Google product (covering more than 20 products including Gmail, YouTube, and Search) and control their personal settings. We are, to the best of our knowledge, the first Internet company to offer a service like this and we hope it will become the standard. Another good example is our Privacy Policy, which is written for humans and not just lawyers. We can go even farther than this though. If you manage a consumer product where you collect information from your users, your product should be part of the Dashboard. If you’re already there, you’re not done. With every new feature or version, ask yourself if you have any additional information (maybe even information that is publicly available about users on other sites) that you can add to the Dashboard. Think about how you can increase transparency within your product as well. When you download an Android app, for example, the device tells you what information the app will be able to access about you and your phone, and then you get to decide whether or not to proceed. You don’t have to dig deep to figure out what information you are divulging – it tells you up front and lets you decide what to do. Is your product like that? How can you increase users’ engagement with your product through increasing transparency? Control Finally, we must always give control to the user. If we have information about a user, as with IBA, it should be easy for the user to delete that information and opt-out. If they use our products and store content with us, it’s their content, not ours. They should be able to export it or delete it at any time, at no cost, and as easily as possible. Gmail is a great example of this since we offer free forwarding to any address. The ability to switch is critical, so instead of building walls around your product, build bridges. Give users real options. If there are existing standards for handling user data, then we should adhere to them. If a standard doesn’t exist, we should work to create an open one that benefits the entire web, even if a closed standard appears to be better for us (remember — it’s not!). In the meantime we need to do whatever we can to make leaving Google as easy as possible. Google is not the Hotel California — you can check out any time you like and you CAN, in fact, leave! As Eric said in his 2009 strategy memo, “we don’t trap users, we make it easy for them to move to our competitors.” This policy is sort of like the emergency exits on an airplane — an analogy that our pilot CEO would appreciate. You hope to never use them, but you’re glad they’re there and would be furious if they weren’t. That’s why we have a team — the Data Liberation Front (dataliberation.org) — whose job it is to make “checking out” easy. Recent examples of their work include Blogger (people who choose to leave Blogger for another service can easily take their content with them) and Docs (users can now collect all their documents, presos, and spreadsheets in a zip file and download it). Build your products so that the Data Liberation team can work their magic. One way you can do this is by having a good public API that exposes all your users’ data. Don’t wait for v2 or v3, discuss this early in your product planning meetings and make it a feature of your product from the start. When reporters at the Guardian, a leading UK newspaper, reviewed the work of the Data Liberation team, they proclaimed it to be “counter-intuitive” for those “accustomed to the lock-in mentality of previous commercial battles.” They are right, it is counterintuitive to people who are stuck in the old MBA way of thinking, but if we do our jobs then soon it won’t be. Our goal is to make open the default. People will gravitate towards it, then they will expect and demand it and be furious when they don’t get it. When open is intuitive, then we have succeeded. When bigger is better Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these. Because of our reach, technical know-how, and lust for big projects, we can take on big challenges that require large investments and lack an obvious, near-term pay-off. We can photograph the world’s streets so that you can explore the neighborhood around an apartment you are considering renting from a thousand miles away. We can scan millions of books and make them widely accessible (while respecting the rights of publishers and authors). We can create an email system that gives away a gigabyte of storage (now over 7 gigs) at a time when all other services allow only a small fraction of that amount. We can instantly translate web pages from any of 51 languages. We can process search data to help public health agencies detect flu outbreaks much earlier. We can build a faster browser (Chrome), a better mobile operating system (Android), and an entirely new communications platform (Wave), and then open them up for the world to build upon, customize, and improve. We can do these things because they are information problems and we have the computer scientists, technology, and computational power to solve them. When we do, we make numerous platforms – video, maps, mobile, PCs, voice, enterprise – better, more competitive, and more innovative. We are often attacked for being too big, but sometimes being bigger allows us to take on the impossible. All of this is useless, however, if we fail when it comes to being open. So we need to constantly push ourselves. Are we contributing to open standards that better the industry? What’s stopping us from open sourcing our code? Are we giving our users value, transparency, and control? Open up as much as you can as often as you can, and if anyone questions whether this is a good approach, explain to them why it’s not just a good approach, but the best approach. It is an approach that will transform business and commerce in this still young century, and when we are successful we will effectively re-write the MBA curriculum for the next several decades! An open Internet transforms lives globally. It has the potential to deliver the world’s information to the palm of every person and to give everyone the power of freedom of expression. These predictions were in an email I sent you earlier this year (later posted as a blog post) that described my vision for the future of the Internet. But now I’m talking about action, not vision. There are forces aligned against the open Internet — governments who control access, companies who fight in their own self-interests to preserve the status quo. They are powerful, and if they succeed we will find ourselves inhabiting an Internet of fragmentation, stagnation, higher prices, and less competition. Our skills and our culture give us the opportunity and responsibility to prevent this from happening. We believe in the power of technology to deliver information. We believe in the power of information to do good. We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get. Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet. As Google product managers, you are building something that will outlast all of us, and none of us can imagine all the ways Google will grow and touch people’s lives. In that way, we are like our colleague Vint Cerf, who didn’t know exactly how many networks would want to be part of this “Internet” so he set the default to open. Vint certainly got it right. I believe we will too.

(extracted from the official google blog)

Very easy to use and very handy when wanting to go over a document on the phone remotely.

Notable helps your team collaborate through visual feedback on screenshots, via a chaos-free process so that everyone can express their opinion.

The fact is that I aim to have a digital indexed life. I take photos of all visiting cards, job and private, wines, books I have, and lately all the mail (bank, cell, etc..). What I like about Evernote is that you take a photo, it is uploaded to their servers and they extract the text, even if handwritten so the images are indexed and if you search for a work appearing in a bottle of wine, author of a book you have taken a photo, there you have it, in your phone, in the web or in the desktop app.

What I like the most is that you take the photo and you forget about it. You can later add it to a specific notebook and tag it for easier access and organization.

What I also liked is that in the windows app, the OCR was done locally so you could have local notebook not synchronized, which for mail was fine. In the mac it has to be sent to their servers for OCR recognition. I hate it because I soon finish my free quota which is 40Mb per month. You can go pro for $45 a year increasing it to 500Mb per month.

I have always been interested in OCR. Ideally I would love to have it in the mac by default so I could use spotlight and it would search in the photos, pdf, and why not, mp3s. I hope that is what will happen next, but for the time being the indexing does not go that far.

Windows is more advance. Onenote does precisely all this.

With this I would like to point out that in my view scanners are dead. We all have mobile phones and we take photos of documents, visiting cards or whatever, and ideally OCR should be part of the jpg so everything could be indexed. We are not there yet.

I found a program for mac: Prizmo

Prizmo will allow you to take a photo which has text and put it into the right perspective and then do OCR. Then you can save the new modified image or a PDF with the embedded text. It is a cools software, but at the end of the day, what you want is more intelligence, like Evernote. You want to take a photo and forget about it. Here you have to make a rectangle, select the text, apply OCR save file…. don’t get me wrong, it is a great software.

If you use windows you can use Onenote, SimpleOCR, topOCR (which is equivalent to Prizmo for windows) or freeOCR.

Google has also an open source OCR treatment, but I don’t know a lot about it.

There are also other ways to organize your bills and mail: snapscan scanners and neatreceipts which are expensive and for neatreceipts I’ve read mixed reviews.

Conclusion: I like simplicity. Take a photo and ideally when in iPhoto be able to index it and be able to find it using spotlight. Not possible yet.

The solution that is the easiest, more effective and efficient is still Evernote. Pity that OCR is not done in my mac.

The galleries do not look as cool as with smugmug but you have a ton of cool features such as HD video (up to 2Gb per file) support or a desktop client.

Give it a try!

I still have not decided how to back up all my photos (around 50.000 with raw and jpgs…) may be just a backup service of S3 in amazon… as I have my own galleries at http://norai.net with a selection of good photos and http://norai.net/gallery with the rest.

I still need an offsite backup though even if they are all in raid mirror and external HD… but looking at the prices of backing up at amazon S3, dreamhost or others, I rather buy an external HD and put it is a friend’s house.

Interesting to see how to waste $530 just to show up how is it made…

See it at iFixit

You can get them at prankplace or at amazon.

I just ordered the first and second one for Kai in ebay. Search for: billy bob pacifier

You can share them with Friends and the community or keep them private.

For each Someday, we’ll show you related step-by-step Plans for achievement. You can copy and customize a Plan or build your own.

They’ll also show you people in your area that have similar Somedays.

If none exist you can post an ‘Open Invite’ so others can find you. You can help others by posting a Plan with the steps you used to achieve your Someday. You can help others get on the right track by posting comments. Each time your comments are found helpful, your Altruism Rating goes up and you can promote your product/services by posting a Plan. The better the Plan, the more likely it will be copied and the more attention you’ll get.

Free Wireless: Free 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle. No monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots. For non-U.S. customers, there are also no additional charges for wireless delivery in or outside your home country. See Coverage Map. See Wireless Terms and Conditions

Growing Selection: Over 330,000 English-language books to choose from; plus U.S. and international newspapers and magazines are available for your country. Because publishers give us eBook rights on a country by country basis, available titles for your country will vary from our current U.S selection. We are actively working with publishers to get the rights to all titles for every country and adding this selection every day. Check the Kindle Store to see available titles.

Low Book Prices: New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases are $11.99 to $13.99 (prices include VAT), unless marked otherwise. You’ll also find many books for less – over 90,000 titles are priced under $5.99

Here you have the official link.

Engadget had an early copy to review. You can read the review here. It has videos and unboxing photos.

It has a 1Ghz processor, 5Mp camera, microSD (up to 32Gb) and a 3.7 inches screen. Thiner than the iPhone. A very powerful machine indeed.

Johansson seems to live in a surreal world where roads unfurl like fabric, giant mirrored objects dangle from the sky, humans spring forth from the soil like potted plants and disturbingly elastic faces pop out of joint to swallow oranges whole.

The Swedish artist takes all of his photos himself and manipulates them digitally in Photoshop CS4, spending 10-20 hours on each photo. “I got my first digital camera when I turned 15, I did some changes to the photos and thought it was fun. But I really started in 2007 when I bought my first SLR camera. That is when I started to do some serious photo manipulations,” Johansson told Abduzeedo.

In an interview with Don’t Panic, Johansson said, “My goal is to make pictures as realistic as possible, but at the same time impossible. Many photographers try to look weird, so I try to make my shots as plausible as possible. I would say I try to use humour a lot and I rarely have a didactic message. Sometimes I want to tell something, but mostly I want people to interpret.”

“A lot of young people think they’re fascinating but the older generation don’t really believe in Photoshop. They think photos should be a pure image. Myself, I’m never satisfied with them but I think that’s a healthy instinct.”

(from weburbanist)

Once we learnt that, I was working at Shelter Centre where I was the Web Communications Chief, I asked for leave without pay, so we could have a dream trip around the world February and March. They accepted. The new Drupal website was up and running now it was just a question of fine tuning it.

We bought a round the world ticket with roundtheworldflights.com very nice people (thanks Jarvis) and very good price.
We did Geneva, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tahiti, Auckland, Christchurch, Hong Kong, London, Geneva. All flexible. In Tahiti we bought internal flights to Moorea, Bora Bora and Huahine (see photos at http://norai.net)

Well we blogged every day in our TDM (tour du monde), so you can see our adventures, skydiving, and 9000 km driving in New Zealand.

There we conceived Kai. Our Christmas present for 2009.

Once back in Geneva Nuria started her job, and I was called by my former employer (the ITC) where I worked nearly for 5 years as a consultant and they asked me to join them, so I finished the site at Shelter Centre and joined ITC in July, where I have been an Advisor in Export Strategy and Competitiveness up to present, traveling extensively to Africa (Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Rwanda…).

When kai was born, 23 days ago, we also got our new car. We said bye to the 1989 red Golf GTI and said Hi to the new Fiat 500.

Now I can go to work in the car rather than in my Ducati. It is pretty cold and rains often. I’m very happy with my new little car too. Pack of technology by default (bluetooth for mobile, reads mp3 from USB key, vocal commands, … etc…)

So as you see, even if for most of the world it has been a bad year, not for us.

My brother lost his job. Nuria’s brother’s too. The economy is in pretty bad shape, but 2009 has been a very good year for us.

Now it is coming to an end. In less than 6 hours in fact. It is also the end of a decennium.

What happened this decennium technologically speaking?

This decennium has been a huge change in technology. Internet has changed the world. We carry our computers in our phones, specially since the iPhone came out. Internet is fast web2.0 has brought us video and ajax. The web experience has reached unthinkable limits. Google has become bigger than General Motors and one of the most profitable companies in the world… and it is in internet… who could have imagine something like that 10 years ago! They are even on the phone industry!

Information is now at the tip of the hands. Mobile phones have spread like mushrooms and have given Africa a huge step towards development and poverty reduction.

Now the big media companies (CBS, CNN and so) are not that big. Internet has provided real time news and information has been democratized with tools such as twitter or Facebook. We know what it is going on firt by social media tools than from BBC or CNN. We are the writers and we control the content with tools such as digg or delicious. Now we have millions of people feeding the news. It is a user generated era, even companies have started to learn that they should have API’s or be open source (google). Look at the contribution in kind done to the iphone platform! nearly 100.000 apps!

The hardware has progressed a lot too. My iPhone 3GS has 32Mb. Solid state memory has increased at huge steps too. Who could think 10 years ago that a mobile phone could have 32Gb or/and a 8Mp camera? 10 years ago we had 3Mp with a terrible screen. Now cameras like canon 5d mark II provide video at a HD quality with the plus of professional lenses.

What else have we seen… the web… the web has gone from a showroom to a two-way collaborative tool making our live more efficient. We buy all via internet now. I bought not only my car via internet but most of the stuff I own. And I have been doing that for a while already. My 42 LCD TV I bought in ebay in 2003. In my house, the shower with sauna, the massage chair, all the kitchen appliances and most of the stuff I bought via internet.

Last that I can think of for this last decade, having kai and Nuria sleeping on my right, is that finally the LHC (at CERN) is working! I am proud as I worked for 3 years in the conception phase of the LHC 10 years ago. To see it now running is great, specially when I contributed to it.

What can we expect in the next 10 years?

Obviously the hardware will continue to explode. Hard disk, processors, screen technology (LED or something new, ebook readers, tablets), internet speed and connectivity (wimax, 4g)… that will make information easier to access and to share. Now a smartphone has GPS, accelerometers and a lot of sensors. I foresee a step towards this sort of uses: location, using the camera of the phone to take a photo from anything and have image recognition, reviews, who is there, where is cheaper, banking, payments… all!!. Search engines will go one step further and they will have other ways to search than text, photos videos, voice… everything indexable. With my phone I will be able to see where my friends are, what they are drinking, etc… reviews are important. I use internet to review and read reviews of what I buy, the hotels I go (tripadvisor), google, tell me where, etc… so location, location, location.

But not everything are flowers… I think that because Internet is going to be so big, Internet Governance is going to be a big issue. Now the US controls ICANN and a lot of other stuff. Internet Governance is going to be a difficult topic. Also Internet as a human right. ISP (internet providers) will try to get the maximum out of it, by capping, limiting connectivity, filtering content (like in China) and so. If this is the case, Internet could be in danger. It should be a 100% open platform. No restrictions. I hope governments intervene to avoid this sort of issues that we are already starting to see in the US with ISPs. Access to Internet should be unlimited and unrestricted. Government should be careful also not doing like in Finland where they are going to filter content at ISP level… a biiiiig mistake.

Privacy is also going to be an issue, but I guess we will be living in public. There is no problem for me, but privacy should be seriously managed. Specially when companies are outsourcing for instance email to google apps, or google docs and calendars…

Cloud computing will be big, and I don’t know if computers will trend to be more like terminals and run all the programs in the cloud. I do use google docs a lot I must say. Online photo services, backups, etc… I can’t wait to see how it progresses. The combination of cloud computing and terminals with strong browsers with offline technology could be a way. If you think about it, why not log in at any computer/terminal and have your files programs and so? Well this could be achieved with good connectivity and good cloud computing. But again, if this is where we go, we will start to see issues of compatibility and standards. Exporting things from a cloud to a computer or to another cloud… it should be standardized.

But the I wonder… when I bought my fiat 500, I printed out the price I was getting in internet and went to my local Fiat dealer. The salesman was furious. He said he could not compete with that. They have cost of personnel, stocks, training, etc… while the guy in internet buys bulk and gets incredible prices… so it made me think. There is no point in having shops or car dealers. They are simply not competitive with internet. So where is the business? Well, services I guess. Garage to repair. Warehouse to collect parts. Advise… but not in selling goods. I told the guy in Fiat that his business model was condemned to die.

There is another ethical question you could ask yourself. If you could buy cheaper 98% of people would buy cheaper. What about paying extra if it manufactured at home, or uses organic stuff, or is environmentally better? It is a difficult question. Specially for our generation. I hope next generation will think differently. Developed countries can not live from services alone, and the rest is more expensive than to do it abroad. So what to do? Free trade has given a lot of opportunities to developing countries, but we have seen with Doha failure that one size does not fit all. What about free movement of people? Goods and people are not strangers. If I am a farmer in France and all farming goes to … China (just a stupid example), then what happens to the french farmer? Should he go to China? Move to something else? Should we cluster activities wherever they are more productive? I don’t know. That would not be sustainable for the environment. Look at Indonesia, they have destroyed the forest to put palm oil plantations. It is so sad. Al fauna is dead and most of the country is monocorp…. but this is where we are going! Look at the farmers in the US. Maybe it should be studied where the environmental impact is lower and do it there.

If you go to Africa you will see how developed countries have destroyed. We imposed the capitalism there. The richer continent in earth is the poorest. Before people there did not have to work. If they were hungry they would take it from the trees. No effort. Simple and happy life….

The end of it is that we can not avoid to spread wealth with this model, meaning that developed countries will have to lower their living standards, otherwise I don’t see how this is sustainable. Closing borders? Big mistake… Anyway that is whole new story.

Happy new year!!!

I would like to share my experience on the gear I think we have and what I think.

As the geek I am I started thinking about:

• stroller: that is the first thing a father looks at. At least I did. If you do a bit of research online you find out that there are very funky strollers, and very expensive too. Some are super cool in design, and most of my friends started buying some of these… for instance the stokke, quinny or bugaboo. Both are super cool. Bogaboo has the pack with the stroller, the car sit and the carrycot (be careful bugaboo carrycot is not homologated for car use) and when you see the videos you do want them… but… after talking to most of my friends with kids, who have bought one or another, they ended up confessing that at the end of the day, what you really want is a practical light stroller, that you can fold and unfold with a single hand, and that for that reason, the classical umbrella ones are the best… and they all ended up buying one of those. In this list we can find maclaren and red castle. You even consider to buy a 3 wheel one, in case you go to the mountain, or off road… bah! if you do, then it is better to buy a baby carrier…
  Now I knew I was going to skip the mistake of spending $1000 on a funky stroller, the question was: is there a light umbrella type stroller that can fit a maxi-cosi (the seat for the car) and a carrycot? Well the winner for me was a new model of 2009 from bebe confort, in particular the mila. Why? Well it is light, you can open it and fold it standing and easily, it is less than 1meter folder (so it can go as cabin baggage, most of maclaren can’t) you can push it while it is folded, it has a huge basket, and the most important is that with an adaptor you can put the maxi-cose and the carrycot, and the carrycot is homologated for car use.
    
• Car sit (also known as maxi-cosi): if you have chosen a stroller, then probably there is either a car sit model that goes with, or it is a standard maxi-cosi so you have more choice.
  You do need this piece of equipment. The reason why is because in the hospital they will not let you take the baby home unless you have one, as they are mandatory if you travel by car. Well you can use an homologated carrycot too, sure. In my case I bought the one on the photo above: the creatis fix. I just used it twice so far. People say that newborns can not be in one of these for too long, as their back is not flat like in the carrycot. I understand it is far safer in the car than the carrycot as the baby sits with his back to the front, so in case of an accident is much safer.
  In the car you have the isofix system to attach baby seats. Well not for the maxi-cosi. I guess this system is for proper big baby chairs. When I first bought it I attached it with the belt. It was damn complicated, so I ended up buying a support for the car with a simple click system. I bought it in ebay.
• Carrycot: We did not want to buy this in a first place. Most of the people would say that they used it only for a couple of months and they are very expensive. In our case the baby is ALWAYS in it. We bought it in ebay too. Second hand. New is very expensive (more than $350) and we paid less than 50%. It can go in the mila, and we put it inside the baby cot (that we bough in ikea). How is that we use it so much? well the baby cot is too big for a new born. This is confined. You can take the baby around even if he is sleeping (and he sleeps a lot!). Ours, windoo.
     
• Baby cot: that was a present. It is a cheap model from IKEA. We put the windoo inside. For the time being in our bedroom.
  
• Baby video camera: I bought this in ebay. I searched for a baby cam with pan and tilt and infrared. It is a key thing. You could do with audio alone, but isn’t it nice to see you baby? even in the most absolute black?. In our house the audio has some interferences, not 100% happy, but it is a house. During the day they told us that the baby should stay in his room rather than in the living room with all the noises, so we put him there with the camera, on the first floor of the house.
  
• Thermometer: One the key things you need is a thermometer. Well in fact you do need 3 of them. One to measure the room temperature, which should be between 19-21 degrees (celsius), one for the bath (37 degrees) and one to see if he has temperature.
  I found one in amazon that does the 3 things seamlessly. The Hartig-Helling 6 in one.
  • 6 functions: measurement of forehead and ear temperature, room temperature, and surface temperature (e. g. baby food or bathwater), stopwatch, time/date
  • easy-to-read LCD display
  • including multifunctional adaptor for measuring in the ear and on the forehead – no special adaptor for forehead measurement necessary
  • audible tone when measurement is complete
  • fever alarm when temperature is over 37.5 °C (99.5 °F)
  • storage of the last 9 measurements
  • 12/24-hour display
  • choice of °C or °F
    

• Travel baby cot: This you can find very cheap in big surfaces. We bought the ferrari of travel baby beds: babymoov. It costs more than $150 and you can buy it in amazon too. It has a changing table, light, music, pockets…

  They told us you might need one of this. We have not used it so far, but I guess if you travel, or once you are done with maternity/paternity leave and you have to leave the kid with the baby sitter, then this a fundamental piece of equipment you need. At the beginning we thought we might leave it in the leaving room but we end up having him on the carrycot all times.

  

All these gadgets we bought before kai was born. Now, once he was born we realized we needed a bath tube, a practical place to change his diapers…

Also you want to add some control on the breastfeeding, on the pooing, baths, and so.

I found a great iPhone app for that: Total Baby. There is a good review here. Looks like it is the best of its class. The problem is that Nuria has no iphone… and she is the one breastfeeding, obviously… but I am consider buying it myself, in order to control the visits to the doctor, and to try to extract some patterns se we can have a routine. It is important for the baby.

Finally we were given as a present one of this baby carrier that you put in front of you. We heard that it is not the perfect way, as when they are so small they cannot be there for more than a couple of hours.

The one I like a lot is this french one, looks like is very ergonomic and great for the baby. I am wanting to have kai always with me with this gadget. It was recommended at the hospital where he was born (la tour).

It is called “je porte mon bebe” which means “I carry my baby”. Look at the video… is elastic and so cool! They even organise gatherings to show you how to use it… but looks great. A bit expensive though…79 euros plus shipping.

Lean, mean and sometimes even green, concept motorcycles often make us want to head out on the highway and look for adventure. These bikes may not be quite ready to tear up the road as we zoom into the wind, but we wish they would move from concept to reality very soon! As we take a look at concept motorcycles, here are 20 of the most bad-ass bikes to hope for in 2010.

Lamborbiker Inspired by Lamborghini

(image credits:tuvie)

Flavio Adriani took his inspiration from two great names in invention, engineering and design, Nikola Tesla and Ferrucio Lamborghini. Flavio has created some stunning motorcycles from his concept. We want this bad boy to become reality soon!

Nuclear Fusion Motorbike 2050

(image credits:The Design Blog)

Romain Herment has a motorcycle concept that uses nuclear energy as a power source. He calls it “Motorbike 2050 version 2.” This futuristic bike uses two inexhaustible natural elements, deuterium and tritium, allowing a sustainable ride in the days to come. The motorbike consumes 1 liter of water for a 100 km drive.

Mad Max Aitu Motorbike

(image credits:coroflot)

The Aitu seems to be rough and rowdy, ready for Mad Max to take it for a spin. Designer Renato Gschwend is hoping to attract adventurous souls who want to make heads turn if this bike ever hits the street. It features a powerful V-twin 1800cc engine and non-silent exhausts to ensure you’re heard roaring down the highway.

Electric Motorbike: ZEVS

(image credits:www1.uni-ak.ac.at)

Three designers Bernhard Ranner, Anders August Kittilsen and Rudolf Stefanich, worked to make ZEVS, “The first electric motorcycle for the “real biker.” It’s designed for “real men” and dusty roads, in the spirit of Harley Davidson, Custom Chopper culture and the good old Route 66 romance.

Carbon Fiber For Fast, Light Cruise

(image credits:The Design Blog)

Designed by Julian Silva, this concept motorcycle is covered in carbon fiber for a fast and light ride. The framework is made of aluminum and wrapped with carbon fiber panels that store the mechanical systems. This motorbike was designed to encapsulate the pilot´s arms, legs and back through the secondary red panels and to keep the driver safe in case of a fall.

Super Green Super Dangerous Super Bike

(image credits:Yanko Design)

Designer Pierre Yohanes Lubis thinks if you would like a very fast, very dangerous, very tiny motorcycle, then the Halbo might be for you. If it gets beyond concept and hits the main highway, let’s just hope you don’t hit the pavement too because it could be much worse than road rash. However, it does have a BMW stamp on it and is electric powered.

Super Skinny Swordfish & Stalker

(image credits:coroflot)

Designer Alexander Kotlyarevsky peered into the future and then created both these concept motorcycles. He molded their alloy frames into a minimalistic design. The sleek silver hotrod is called Swordfish while the metallic pink bike is called Stalker. This futuristic duo is like his and hers for a rebel ride.

Harley Davidson Circa 2020

(image credits:Yanko Design)

Will the Harley Davidson Hog of the future resembles this beast? Designer Miguel Cotto believes so. The large 883cc engine is coupled with a Tron-like body. The wheel hubs are actually giant bearings.

STRIDER – Super Hero Motorcycle Concept

(image credits:Industrial Design Served)

Designer David Gonçalves has created more than one futuristic motorcycle. This project, however, started with a request from one of his clients who needed a bike for a cartoon superhero. A female superhero at that. Inspiration struck him and the concept of Strider was born.

Sleek Sci-Fi Superbikes

(image credits:The Design Blog)

Designer Matt Williams created a superbike called KTM Motorbike. Vroom must have been the mantra playing while creativity blossomed. KTM looks ready to leap forward, looks fast even when parked. The V-twin engine is hidden within the frame. Its hub-center steering system provides a more usable steering angle than telescopic forks while the center is a more stable and predictable ride.

Icare Bike Concept

(image credits:hypebeast)

Conceptualized by Enzyme Design, the Icare motorcycle is meant to be the Aston Martin of the two-wheeled world with a six-cyclinder 1.8 Honda engine. It looks like a muscle motorcycle of the future, ready to rip up the road and outrace the cops in hot pursuit.

Jaguar M-Cycle

(image credits:m-cycles)

This roaring jaguar is the result of interior designer Lee J. Rowland teaming up with motorbike fanatic Barend Hemmes. Jaguar concept motorcycle has only been taken up to speeds of 55 mph, but you better believe heads turn as fellow bikers drool. The big cat is powered by 1200cc Harley-Davidson V-twin engine. The shape of this sleek cat is not suitable for anyone under 6 feet, meant to have feet propped far up front on the pedals as a real drag-style riding machine.

The Bull Concept

(image credits:m-cycles)

Designer Lee J. Rowland was struck again with inspiration after the Jaguar and tackled this shiny bull. He had to think hard and long to figure out how to get the bull’s horns positioned on this bike. Red, loud, and shiny, the Bull concept motorcycle will surely call to some bike lover to be made into a reality.

Ghost & Devil Motorcycle Concepts

(image credits:En Derin,En Derin)

What does a ghost and devil have in common? They’ve been turned into slick speed machines, or at least concept motorcycles. Designer Muhammad Imran designed Ghost while keeping a flying falcon in mind. He was also inspired by the bike tribute of “Ghost Rider.” Ghost calls out to the young and reckless and will hopefully offer fantastic future fun to those who really have a need for speed. Designer Robert Liddell aimed to give his motorcycle features fitting for the name Devil Bike. He created it with V-twin engine, so this shiny black bike will fit the personality of the young with a passion for speed and style.

2015 Honda CB 750

(image credits:Yanko Design)

Designer Igor Chak came up with this concept bike, 2015 Honda CB 750. The brains of the bike is the on-board computer that can be controlled through a 5” OLED multi-touch display positioned right on the fuel tank. There are 3 menus: GPS, drive modes, and diagnostics mode. CB 750 gets its power from a four-cylinder liquid hydrogen engine. Ready, set, rocket outta here!

Speed Racing Motorcycle Inspired By Aliens

(image credits:Tuvie)

Designer Daniel Bailey was inspired by two things, making them clear in his concept motorcycle. Speed and the alien characters in “Alien.” This speed racing bike is rugged yet sleek. The design is aerodynamic and based on Kawasaki ninjas stats (height, wheel base etc…), so will future road ninjas or aliens be seen riding it?

Magic Tricycle

(image credits:Car Design News)

Iranian designer Javad created the Magic Tricycle to drive on all three wheels for normal highway use, but can rotate around a longitudinal axis running from the front to the rear right wheel with the left wheel elevated into the air so the vehicle can be ridden as a motorcycle in more congested areas. To facilitate this, the seats rotate to keep the occupants sitting upright and the airborne wheel opens up blades which work like a helicopter tail propeller to aid stability.

Ferrari V4 Superbike Concept

(image credits:autoblog)

Designer Amir Glinik conceptualized this Ferrari V4 superbike. He created his design around the theoretical application of the Ferrari Enzo’s V12 engine, chopped down to four cylinders and modified to drive in a motorcycle frame. Hopefully this hot puppy will be hitting the highway soon. It’s lean and mean.

Dodge Tomahawk Concept Motorcycle

(from weburbanist)

I did posted previously about another one: pollux but looks it does not work anymore….

Google Goggles is a little more interesting from a technology standpoint: it’s an Android app that takes photos, tries to recognize what in them, and then generates search results about them. Goggles can recognize landmarks, books, contact info, artwork, places, wine, and logos at the moment, and Google says it’s working on adding other types of objects, like plants. Pretty neat stuff — but how about linking these two services together at some point, guys? Check some videos after the break.

Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and more.

It is now in beta but interesting idea on a twitter like website.

See what the people is searching for
With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. See examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search.
Categories
Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.
Examples: Top Newspapers in the UK | Soccer in 2008, 2007…
Seasonality
Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.
Examples: hotel in 2008, 2007,… | soccer in 2006 vs. 2007
Geographic distribution
Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.
Examples: tickets in different US metro areas | kangaroo in United States vs. Australia
Properties
See search patterns in other Google properties.
Examples: New York christmas shopping, 2008 | puppies vs. kittens, in the USA (image search)

When we go to bed at night, are the contents of our refrigerators, utility shelves and medicine cabinets throwing wild parties, getting amorous, acting out plays and engaging in cannibalism?  Maybe not, but it’s fun to imagine them getting up to all kinds of mischief behind closed doors, and that’s exactly what a photo series called “Bent Objects” by Terry Border illustrates.

“Bent Objects” began with the artist making little wire sculptures to sell. Border took photos of his creations and posted them on his blog, eventually finding that people were more interested in photographs of the sculptures acting out comical scenarios. Over 70 of Border’s funniest photos are featured in his new book, “Bent Objects: The Secret Life of Everyday Things”.

Many of the situations that the animated objects find themselves in would be disturbing if the subjects were people – as in “Cereal Killer”, in which the remains of a cornflake drowned in milk are mourned over by two relatives. But there’s just no denying the humor in anthropomorphized food with wire limbs.

In an interview with Neatorama, Border explains how he gets some of his ideas. “I’ll tell you a secret – a lot of times I’m not trying to be funny at all. I’m just creating the saddest situation I can think of while using a certain object. Sometimes, while I’m photographing a scene, I’m like ‘Oh man. I’ve gone too far here. People are gonna see how sick I am, and make me get psychological help.’”

“Know what though? Those are always my most popular images. People see them as funny. There are a lot of sick people out there, just like me. Hello out there, all of you sickos!”

(from weburbanist)