Emergic: June 14, 2006 Archives

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Life-Hacking Tips

The Economist provides tips on improving personal productivity:

Slow down your e-mail: Set your e-mail program to fetch new messages every 15 minutes or every hour, rather than every minute, so you are interrupted less often.

Create form responses: Any time you find yourself typing substantially similar e-mails, create a form version and save it for future use.

Go full-screen: Switch your computer to full-screen mode, filling the whole screen with your current application, minimising the visual distraction of other programs.

Park on a downhill slope: When wrapping up work on a task, make a note of what needs to be done next. This makes it easier to get started when you resume work on the task.

General | PermaLink | Comments (4)

Very nice !!

Posted by Vaibhav

Not to forget, less time on blogs :)

Nag .B /at/
StartupHubs.com

Posted by StartupHubs.com

I'd add using an aggregator so that you can make use of otherwise "dead" time, i.e. time on trains planes etc.
Use the aggregator to read and listen to your favourite content offline.

Posted by Stuart Oliver

Here is one that I find useful.

Every once in a while I get overloaded with work. I simply open a notepad and write down a list of things that I can remember. No tasks/one note or sticky notes. Just a simple text file with my list helps me get focused. Most of the other times I carry that in my head and keep revising it as the day goes along.

Posted by Tarun Anand

Search Fragmentation

Fred Wilson writes about the search engines he uses:

I used to always search via Google using the Firefox search field. Then I switched to Yahoo! Now I search on both and a bunch of other services as well.
...
I wish there was a way to track which search services I use the most, but here is my best guess:

1 - Google - 25%
2 - Yahoo - 20%
3 - Wikipedia - 20%
4 - Delicious - 15%
5 - Flickr - 10%
6 - Answers - 5%
7 - Others - 5%
...
I do think that as Firefox and hopefully IE7 offer more opportunity to customize the search field, people will do just that and start choosing the appropriate web service to search before hitting the enter key.

Search Engines | PermaLink | Comments (2)

I think that Google is still the best search engine, so I do not use others. But I hope this will change soon, because I am worried about Google's power. MSN would be nice.

Posted by Kylie M. Lee

it's way more skewed than that in google's favour. Google delivers 50% of all sarches originating in the US and nearly 60% worldwide. Yahoo is closer to 22%, and MSN is around the 12% mark according to the latest comScore media metrix report. What's even more significant is the fact that in the last 12 months Google has actually increased it's lead over both Yahoo and MSN, despite the best efforts of the latter two to get on the level playing field with google. Also, do you know that a large percentage of Yahoo and MSN's search figures come from the SEO's trying to check their positions in these two engines ? Now, on may argue that the same is true even in the case of Google, but if you were to strike off lets say X% of searches from each of these 3 engines as being of the SEO rank checking variety, you'll end up with an even more depressing picture for Yahoo and MSN especially the latter.

Posted by saurab

Web 2.0 Overview

EDUCAUSE REVIEW has an article by Bryan Alexander, with a discussion in the context of teaching and learning.

Software | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Pingerati

From the site:

Microformats are tiny bits of markup in web pages that label contacts, events, reviews, addresses, geo-locations, and other commonly published chunks of information. Microformats are often published on blogs and in feeds, but are increasingly published on other types of web pages as well such as event databases, social network profiles, reviews sites, and contact information pages. Traditional ping services only handle blog or feed updates, so we've set up Pingerati to handle microformat updates on any web page.

Pingerati is also a ping router (multiplexer). Pingerati receives updates of pages with microformats from numerous sources, and sends those pings to services that support microformats.

BlogStreet | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Mobile Social networking

Business Week writes:

Just how big could mobile social networking get? This application's usage could become "as big as online social networking," says Dennis Crowley, founder of wireless social network Dodgeball, owned by Google. About 45% of active Web users have been to online social networking sites, according to a recent study by Nielsen/NetRatings. As MySpace expands beyond its core market of teens and young adults, "We expect penetration of MySpace mobile to match penetration of cell phones," which are owned by 80% of Americans, says Digiaro. Mobile access could become even more prevalent outside of the U.S., where in some cases more people use cell phones than personal computers to surf the Web.

Indeed, it's the cell phone, rather than the personal computer, that's the constant companion for today's hip and socially networked. Why wait till you get home to log onto the PC to tell your 20 closest personal friends about your date? Teens can use a network-friendly cell phone to relay stories, pictures, and videos instantaneously.

Software | PermaLink | Comments (2)

Yeah, mobile social networking is exciting, but I my opinion it is only attractive to teenager. In fact I do not know any adult who uses it frequently ;-)

Posted by Kylie M. Lee

As devices get powerful and 3G (Edge)coming in this December , operators making flat rates available to users , that would kick off Mobile networking, be it anyone. In a scenario of 24 X 7 you connected to the internet will be a new area of opportunities in the Mobile segment with client server based mobile applications. Mobile networking would be one the prominient one. Personal local searches would be an added value.
With nokia managing to port the APAche webserver on its 6630 model. WOW i am excited to tap opportunities.

Posted by Nihar K

TECH TALK: Computing for the Next Billion: OLPC

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has attracted the greatest attention with its ambitious goals of creating a $100 laptop and getting it out to hundreds of millions of school kids everywhere. Ethan Zuckerman wrote on the project recently:

[The] goal is to produce a laptop designed for use by children - students in grades K-12. And that requires radically different design decisions that what one would make in simply creating a low-cost laptop… The current prototype is little, orange, and very, very cute. It has a molded plastic handle and looks remarkably like a Speak and Spell.

It’s got bunny years - antennas for the 802.11s wireless radios, which are designed to self-assemble meshes with other laptops. The ears fold down to cover the USB, power and mic ports, an excellent design for the sorts of dusty environments I can imagine the device used in. The screen in the current prototype is a conventional LCD screen - the screen in the production devices will be roughly the same size, probably slightly larger than the 7.5″ screen in the prototype, but will be based around a technique that doesn’t require white fluorescent backlight. (Many of the questions I need to answer for the IEEE article concern the screen, as it’s one of the most expensive and power-hungry components of the machine.) The keyboard is about 60% of the size of a conventional keyboard and has calculator-style keys.
…
As promised, the laptop can be folded into an ebook, with the screen on top, used as a handheld game player, or have the screen turned around so the machine can be used as a video player.
…
Really taking advantage of the potential of the laptop requires changing the entire ecosystem of education in the developing world, a process that’s going to require more time than the year or two after laptops are distributed… and the efforts of people other than very bright MIT professors. The scale and scope of this project means that a large portion of the questions I most want to ask - how will this be used in the classroom? will teachers accept it? how will kids cope if machines break or get stolen? what happens when people use machines to do decidedly antisocial things? or creative and entrepreneurial things? - are really hard to answer until the machine is out in the field. I wonder out loud if it would make sense to do a small pilot before the project goes further - Jim points out that the current plan to distribute five million laptops in five nations next year is a pilot - when you’re talking about building and distributing more than two billion devices, a few million is just a toe dipped into the water.

Tomorrow: OLPC (continued)

Related Entries: [All]
TECH TALK: Computing for the Next Billion: My Views [June 23, 2006]
TECH TALK: Computing for the Next Billion: Network Computers [June 22, 2006]
TECH TALK: Computing for the Next Billion: The Mobile Alternative [June 21, 2006]
TECH TALK: Computing for the Next Billion: Microsoft's FlexGo [June 20, 2006]
TECH TALK: Computing for the Next Billion: Intel’s Billion [June 19, 2006]

Tech Talk | PermaLink | Comments (3)

The only cool thing about the $100 laptop is its power consumption. I dont see how it will help though. In fact the most prominient thing that i remember about the 100 dollar laptop is Atanu Dey calling it a "silly idea on stilts". Still seems to be a valid observation. I have explored the problem from the energy perspective below.

http://valluvar.blogspot.com/2006/06/limiting-factors-mips-per-watt.html

Posted by shiv

100-Dollar Laptop: UN Secretary General’s Office shouldn’t be used for exploiting the poor
My eyes were stuck to the news that the UN Secretary General Mr. Kofi Annan, while launching a 100-Dollar Laptop, on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia, said “the invention is an impressive technical achievement. The project promises to provide flexible technology that can be used in any place, even in the desert without energy supply”. It is also reported that the U.N. is backing the project even with financial support thinking that it could help to promote education in the Third World. A professor and his team mates of MIT (USA) have claimed the credit for the project and the invention (!).
At the very outset, let me state certain hard facts, which I believe will largely explain the title of today’s write-up. Long 31 years ago, in 1975, I invented the Free-play Radio technology and demonstrated a working model in a jam-packed press conference on 23 July 1975 in Dhaka. The news came out in almost all the news papers in the country in addition to an editorial the following day. Raymond Lee Organization, Inc.(USA) wanted to take initiatives for patenting the invention and marketing the product (Receipt No.71001, dated 13 February 76 ) when I contacted them from the then West Germany. On the request of Bangladesh Science Museum, a working model was presented to them in 1978. The invention, although apparently a simple (addition of storage facility to a hand generator) one, was never conceived and publicly demonstrated by anyone on this earth before 23 July1975. It opened the gate for free playing and playing low-powered electrical gadgets and equipments in remote and yet vast electricity-less areas of the world.. Thus the technology is especially handy for mass communication, mass literacy, emergency weather forecasting or as a life-saving communications tool following a natural disaster ( be it in the coastal areas of the Bay of Bengal or New Orleans city), mass-scale low-powered emergency medical equipments etc
. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….......
Read more in : http://www.stefanhayden.com/blog/2006/04/04/100-dollar-laptop/
Written by: Nazmul Huda, 38/10 Siddheswari Road, Dhaka-1217, Bangladesh. E-mail : nazinvbd@yahoo.com

Posted by Nazmul Huda

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Posted by bob