Not sure if Amazon will be able to deliver them to China though.
nicolasz
Various things that catch the eye.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends (Feb 2011)
Great article from Mary Meeker on mobile trends.
Ideas I love from it
- SO LO MO - concept of best ideas all involve social, location and mobile
- Another one to starrt thinking of is that mobile commerce has to be tied to physical retail. Def something I'd like to keep pushing for.
Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends (Feb 2011)
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View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Donation peer pressure
I was amused Sunday night when I sat down to dinner with my girlfriend and her friends and we spent an hour going through who had donated what to the Sichuan earthquake victims. And then comparing corporations and stars and figuring out who was cheap and who was extravagant. Got me thinking that in a confucian system where there is a limited sense of responsibility to others, maybe public pressure is the only way to ensure the rich donate to charities.
have a look at this page comparing the donations of each company in China ( note how logos are listed in order of donation size)
四川地震，企业公民在行动_新浪财经_新浪网
have a look at this page comparing the donations of each company in China ( note how logos are listed in order of donation size)
四川地震，企业公民在行动_新浪财经_新浪网
Monday, May 19, 2008
Is Tibet's problem as much about modernisation as it is China
An interesting article in today's Sydney Morning Herald. The basic theses is that it is very easy to attack China as the autocratic state that is crushing Tibet. However, if you tart going deeper you see there have been some great improvements under Chinese rule that may not have transpired if the previous theocratic rulers had been left in power.
"No words, of course, and no external pressure will move the immoveable object that blocks independence for the Tibet Autonomous Region, as it is officially called in China. The romanticism of Tibet's cause also weakens when the history of Tibet's previous theocracy is examined. The rule of the monks and the land-owners was neither enlightened nor just. In 1959, when Beijing resumed full control, life expectancy in Tibet was only 35. Illiteracy was 90 per cent. Infant mortality was a disgraceful 43 per cent. Per capita income was less than $40. Poverty was the real ruler of Tibet.
Today, life expectancy has almost doubled to 68. Literacy is more than 90 per cent. Infant mortality is 2.4 per cent. Per capita income has exploded to $1500. The population of Tibet has increased from 1 million to 2.8 million, which remains 92 per cent ethnic Tibetan. All the while Tibet has remained a palpably Buddhist society."
Monday, April 28, 2008
Stop watching TV
I recetnly half finished Clay Shirky's book "Here comes everybody" (damn good read, will have to go read it now that Ricky has claimed the half finished book back). And I'm following it up with this essay which has much relevance too me, since I watch too much TV and DVD's. I will stop this opium of the masses because I know there is so much more to do out there.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
Thursday, April 24, 2008
beautiful visualisation program
The site we feel fine works by searching blog posts for the last several hours and dragging in the word that finishes the phrase "I feel ...." ( well, it is slightly more complicated than that - but not much)
What is fantastic is the way all this information is visualised.
We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
What is fantastic is the way all this information is visualised.
"At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.
Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified "feelings". This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.
If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.
If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day."
We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Monday, April 21, 2008
Computer generated books
An INSEAD professor (Go the fighting salamanders) has devised an algorithm and technology that enables him to produce books on specific niche topics. He has written over 85,000 of these books.
"In less than a decade, Philip Parker has become the most published author in history, with hundreds of thousands of books to his name.
"In less than a decade, Philip Parker has become the most published author in history, with hundreds of thousands of books to his name.
Amazon.com alone lists him as the author of 85,737 different titles on specialist topics such as childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia, hemochromatosis and the import and export market for women's textile suits and costumes in the Middle East.
Each book takes less than an hour to write and Parker's titles sell for between $US24.95 ($26.60) and $US795 each.
But Parker doesn't describe himself as an "author", and he's far from the creative type. Rather, the US-based professor of management science at INSEAD business school has developed and patented algorithms enabling computers to write books for him. "
Click below for more
Automaton author writes up a storm - Technology - smh.com.au
And watch the video as he attempts to explain it
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Microfiche - are you cursing at me in jewish
Brilliant - absolutely brilliant. Too many great lines.
"It's smokey burnout time"
"I might rub out one"
" I'm going to have the IRS audit your ass for the rest of your life".
"Barcodes in our eyes"
"Your memoirs are fiction?"
YouTube - Will Ferrell As George Bush In Jon Stewart Interview
"It's smokey burnout time"
"I might rub out one"
" I'm going to have the IRS audit your ass for the rest of your life".
"Barcodes in our eyes"
"Your memoirs are fiction?"
YouTube - Will Ferrell As George Bush In Jon Stewart Interview
Thursday, April 17, 2008
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