Piece of f#*@!ng s#!t.

Check this out you techies:

Viewdle blew my mind

This is so advanced tech stuff that it's not cutting edge it's pure bleeding edge . These Viedwle guys come from Ukraine and they have been developing this facial recognition and video search software within the army and university and it's mind blowing. They won the best start-up prize at the Le Web conference in Paris this week and the truly deserved it.

Viewdle has developed video search tools that previously needed supercomputers to run, but their apps run on regular pc's. Check out their demos on how you can search video material: their software can tell who's on the video, what the subject is and when it's been shot. It's still in some kinda beta version, but you'll get the picture. I guess these ukrainian nerd's are gonna be rich soon.

Touch it baby!

This seems kinda cool: The Intua Beat Maker.

I've been waiting to see some really cool apps for the iPhone / iPod touch and this looks like a pretty flashy thingy. If someone tries it, please let me know if it's any good.

Besides this I haven't really seen any really far out apps using the touch screen in innovative ways. I guess there might be soon coming out some porn apps that could have some features of that sort..

But back to music making: I've been trying the BeatEd with my Nokia phone and it pretty much fun as well. I've made some 808 beats with it that really help you getting through long flights. I guess I've joined the mile high club of beat making? However I haven't figured out how to get the beats out of the phone as files that I could convert into mp3's or AIFF's. I guess the analogue output on the phone is kinda crappy, so I might get some white noise as bonus.

Wireless Fantasy

Or something like that has now come true. Apple has this new thingie called Time Capsule" which is basically a hard drive thats connected to your mac via wi-fi. So no more cords and boxes around the room, just stick this under your bed or in the closet and with Time Machine you have automatic back up all the time. A simple thing, but something I've been waiting for a couple of years. Yeah, you could have built such a system by yourself, but once again Apple makes it easy. And for the price... It ain't cheap, but then again not too expensive in my taste either. >

The year 2007 in tech world

Now it's time to make lists about the year 2007, what was good and what was bad. My first list is short and quite tech.

The good stuff:

1) Facebook

There has been a lot of hype surrounding this and it feels boring to write about this, but I have to. Let's face it, it's the first web 2.0 service to gain masses here in Finland. It's got over 300.000 users in the Finland network, which means almost half a million finnish users altogether. This was the first online phenomenon that showed how "Tipping Point" really works. It has been cool to classify your friends by being either FB savvy innovators or second wave users and so on.

A lot of hype, a lot of publicity, a lot of stupid applications, but it really proved two things:

- one of the strongest needs of humans is the need for communication
- it's not about the service it's about the people.

More important is that FB has had a permanent effect on us and on how we use online services. FB may die next year, but it's legacy will live on in more restricted social networking applications.

And it's so lame to diss FB. Really. Even if you we're using it 6 months ago :O

2) iPhone

I have tried this only once, but what makes it cool is that big companies like Nokia have had to adjust to this cool thingy by bringing touch screens to their models and such. Apple just knows how to make cool looking toys that are nice to use.

I'll get one, once it's 3G, I promise.

The biggest disappoinments

1) Second Life

"The ultimate virtual life." SL is reported to have like 20 million accounts and many businesses (like IBM) and institutions (like Harvard) and even countries (like Sweden) have presence there. Many people are making a living by selling and designing virtual stuff for Linden dollars which hade made this "world" a real economy.

So what. I don't know anyone who uses SL actively, and I haven't heard of any real good business cases where SL have been used succesfully. A lot of hype, but what is the future of this world? I guess Facebook was the answer to many peeps need for social networking and all this "virtual 3D" stuff was just a lot of hype. I tried SL once and found the interface and user experience irritating. Well see what happens to SL in 2008.


2) Joost

Don't get me started with this one. A great marketing strategy, I'll give them credit for that. Last spring all nerds were fighting for those limited beta accounts (well, with over 1.000.000 users then, it wasn't really that "limited") and this caused an effective buzz. But now the service is open to public, and don't know anyone who really uses is actively. This might me because it's more of an innovative technological platform than a service with any interesting content. And my experience is that the service is still full of bugs (it collapsed today when I tried to use it first time since june...).

Digital Dan, the coolest guy ever

Last week I attended SIME-conference in Stocholm and one of the speakers was Dan Dubno, AKA Digital Dan . I didn't know of this guy, he's a former CBS News reporter who specialized in new gagdets and techie-stuff. He no longer works for CBS, but you can view some clips of Gizmorama here.

Anyways, this guy is the coolest dude ever. First of all he announced that his favourite hobby is blowing up things (!) and that he once set a lake on fire. And he then showed his t-shirt, that had a build in applause-o-meter that showed the audience reactions in classic VU-meter style. On the front of his t-shirt!!! How interactive and cool ist that??!!!! And among many things he introduced

- talking pill boxes
- IR binoculars
- 3d printers
- plastic forks that dissapear after you use them
- interactive newspapers / tablets (like from the movie Minority Report)

This guy is the gizmo-god. I pay muchos respect to him.