Wolfram|Alpha Test Drive

Ok, Wolfram|Alpha – the computational knowledge engine – is up and running. Granted, I’ve seen three different versions of “site is currently under heavy load”. Do remember that there’s a large amount of on the fly computation and algorithm crunching behind each result. 

These are the queries I tested it with:

Where are you? gives a good result.

Where am I? gives the correct answer.

Who am I? gives the same answer.

sin(n/10) * 100 draws a nice chart.

What are you doing? is the first computed tweet.

What time is it? surprisingly gives nothing.

green, red – minimum result.

BMW presents stock information.

Weather in Lahti Wow!

Weather in Lahti June 2003 Double-Wow!

Neuron is not that interesting for Wolfram to have knowledge about.

Are you OK? opens a “Human Discourse” functionality which is under development. What will it be?

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha provides an interesting approach and implementation. It’s certainly one to follow and use.

However, I do get ”everything is a number or a taxonomy” feel from the data it contains. It mostly answers with numbers; even Madonna boils down to a straight line between two dates.

So, Wolfram|Alpha is the engine Douglas Adams wrote about. 

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

I do not know why, but the system creates an impression of an autistic Rain Man recalling phone book numbers and curated minutia with precision. Whereas Google is the outgoing guy with all the fun; its bots gathering data from the web carelessly, and giving noisy, vague answers at times.

My Second Photosynth Experiment

Deomo booth on OLO.MUOTO trade fair here in Finland - I took several pictures with the Canon Ixus 950 camera, and photosynthed them: 

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=29a44f5f-e48b-488a-8cf0-c87aee0491b6&i=0:2:0&z=467.0787043003208&g=2&p=-2.50427e-014:6.92928e-014&m=false&c=-0.664613:-0.656377:-0.145462&d=-1.56066:1.1653:0.877044

Do remember to set the Photosynth viewer to full-screen mode (icon on the bottom right), it’s much better that way.

Regarding the Photosynth tech, I learned the lesson that one needs to change the camera angle and position only a slight amount between pictures. Otherwise, the end result is too jumpy as the Photosynth algorithm leaves too many images without context.

And yes, I’m bloody proud of the booth we did with my wife, Nina.

Cybertecture Apartment in Dubai

It’s always interesting to follow what they are up to in Dubai. The developments there are just amazing. According to some info, one fifth of world’s cranes are there in gigantic 100 billion dollar construction project.   

One particular building caught my eye: The PAD, also known as iPad. The tower is…

…targeted at switched-on, creative and hip business executives to whom we refer to as “the digital generation” or apple brand lovers who are constantly mobile and connected.

Every apartment will be intelligent and have its own cybertecture to provide a unique experience. Everything from communications, entertainment, health and shopping is covered by the cybertecture of the apartment.

Among the usual household stuff like colour changing tiles are the iFeatures. The iFeatures list contains: iReality (a virtual reality projection wall), iHealth (monitors residents health), iRotation Rooms (rotate your lounge), iArt (project a painting from a server to a wall), etc.

In Dubai, science fiction really becomes a reality. I commend their bold adventures in architectural design and pushing the edge of technology in living spaces. Oil money well spent.

Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water.

Thoughts on OpenSocial API and Social Applications

This week, Google introduced OpenSocial API. It is a set of common interfaces for building social applications. Scobleizer’s blog post led me to more information about the OpenSocial API, here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

I watched the Campfire One video – almost from beginning to end - and browsed through some Developer’s Guide docs. I appreciate Google’s simple and straightforward, hands-on approach. They have not created a “Meta-Reference Application Framework for Interfaces of Social Network Applications” and dozens of new acronyms. Instead, they show working code and the classic “Hello World!”, written with a vanilla text editor.

Why are Google and other companies allocating resources to social media? The way I see it, that is because their main revenue streams come from advertisers. Social applications are filled with data of people’s activities, interests, daily patterns, schedules, locations, networks etc. This data provides juice for building highly targeted marketing systems, which in turn generate happy advertisers.

The more data people put into the system, the better the system will serve the people. It’s a win-win for us all, don’t you think?

Web 2.0 Summit Videos on blip.tv

If you’re interested in anything Web 2.0, you should check the videos of the recent Web 2.0 Summit held in California.

Excellent roster. Excellent discussions. Some of the questions just splat on the faces of the interviewees, politely and with a smile, of course. John Battelle’s way of carrying the conversation is particularly good.

[Update 1.11.2007] Excellent? Nah, not all. What’s the reason for not showing the screens of the presenters? It’s not stimulating to watch a talking guy looking down at his laptop, enthusiastically giving a pitch for something that one can not see even a glimpse of.

W3C – Let’s Extend The A HREF Tag To Convey More Information

Sig’s posts on Thingamy and RDF triples inspired me to “put the verb” back to this interlinked mass of documents we call the Web. In a simplified way. 

Here’s the official W3C recommendation and specification of links: 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

If you go through it, you perhaps end up in the same conclusion with me: There’s no simple way to define a semantic relationship between web resources.

I propose that we extend the A HREF tag so that it carries more meaning with it. Let’s borrow the PREDICATE concept from RDF and add that to A HREF tag. 

Here’s an example. On nokia.com, there could be a link like this: 

<A HREF=”www.nseries.com” PRED=”produces, sells, markets”>Nseries</A>

So, what would we achieve with this? It would be a way to provide more precise information, more knowledge for the search engines, etc… We would be closer to the Internet Singularity. 

Live Search: Good Bird’s Eye Views to Famous Cities – Like Lahti ;)

Have you noticed the amount of detail in the bird’s eye images of Live Search?

There are good bird’s eye views to Munich, Venice, Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, New York… However, I couldn’t find such views to interesting places like Shanghai, Tokyo, Moscow or Paris.  

My home town Lahti is also covered with a massive amount of pixels. Now where was my car at the time the airplane was flying over…

Zooming in Photosynth – Wow!

Around one year ago I wasn’t too impressed with Photosynth, Microsoft’s UI prototype for browsing photo collections. But today I decided to give it another go on our new Vista laptop. And yep, while I zoomed on to the details of Gyeongbokgung (nice word, that one), I was amazed. The amount of detail was extremely high, the experience was seamless and had a nice flow to it. 

Check the pic (click to expand):

You can get it here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

Introducing Deomo TV/HIFI Unit

You know the thing with home audio and video electronics these days: too many boxes, too many cables, hard to keep clean and in order. They are messy looking, you can not put those in to a modern living room.

We couldn’t find a solution in the market for our needs, so I (with my wife) designed a TV stand that solves our storage issues. I gave it a name Deomo.

Magic is in the mirror – you really have to see it to believe it. More pictures in Deomo.com – currently in Finnish only.

If you are interested in manufacturing/distributing/marketing it, drop me an email (tomi.itkonen@gmail.com).

[Update 10.9.2007] An additional pic added of Deomo TV stand: