Tech Trends – March 12th

I’ve been ignoring the technology section of my blog for way too long, so I’m introducing a little weekly feature called Tech Trends (corny, I know), where I’ll be featuring little nuggets of tech related information that struck/impressed/amused me over the past week. After all, my blog is about Life, Design, Business and Technology, right?

Presenting Tech Trends.

Global Voices needs a Ugandan Correspondent.
TMS Ruge [ twitter ] of Project Diaspora tells me Global Voices online is looking for a Ugandan Correspondent  to do regular wrap ups of what’s being talked about in the Ugandan blogosphere. He was covering this before, but he’s a little over committed at the moment. I’m sure some of you should be interested.

Node Six BlogSpirit v2
Node Six is reversing its BlogSpirit version 2 strategy a bit [ more information here ]. But in the process, we’ll be adding more blogs to the current version of BlogSpirit. I’m sure you’ve noticed the increase in blog. We’ve added about twenty new blogs and we’re still scouring the net for more.

Apple’s Application Store Fallacies
The Achilles’ heel of the iPhone has always been its App Store. With the rigorous screening process, apparently to maintain quality control, it has left many small developers out in the cold. What this means however, is some really nifty apps (and some crazy ones too) don’t make it through.

The Wall Street Journal reports that small stores are opening up online to sell applications that are not approved by Apple. Special software is still needed to install these applications though. More here.

And on the same note, Apple had a major fubar when it initially rejected Tweetie 1.3 because, get this, it was displaying foul messages from TWITTER. It later reversed course and accepted the application. Talk about shooting the messenger.

Google Trends forecasting the flu virus spread.

I was reading a very fascinating article on Forbes.com this morning about The Rise Of The Social Nervous System and there was some very interesting insight on real world applications of the online social paradigm.

For example, during the Mumbai attacks, Twitter was used as a real-time peer to peer information service, tracking movements of the attackers.

Also, Obama’s campaign used real-time data to track people voting and upload stats to its foot agents going door to door.

Most fascinating was Google mashing up searches on certain topics relating to flu to track the spread of the virus. The resulting graph shows the rise and fall of the virus over the course of several years. The graph also shows a severity rating as recently as yesterday. The potential use for such information is boundless.

Apple releases a new iPod Shuffle

And it’s tiny. Really tiny.

If you thought the previous matchbox sized Shuffle was small, this one will blow you away. It’s smaller than an AA battery, costs $79, holds 1,000 songs (4GB), its buttons have been moved to the earphone cord and it now talks to you, meaning it can tell you which song is playing, something with has always been an annoyance with the old shuffles.

Another exemplary product from Apple. With Steve Jobs on medical leave, this is one of the first products to be released by Apple that has not been unveiled by Jobs himself.

Google wants you to advertise to yourself.

The biggest hindrance to advertising is simply this: people don’t like being bombarded with ads, and at the very least, they want adverts that are relevant to their needs and wants. Seth Godin coined the phrase permission marketing, where you have your audience’s permission to engage them in marketing dialogue. Now Google is taking this step further by going into behavioural advertising.

TechCrunch reports:

It (Google) will start placing cookies on consumer’s browsers to collect information about their interests whenever they visit sites that show AdSense contextual ads. Then it will show ads targeted to those interests to the same person as he or she browses the Web on other sites that also serve AdSense ads (which is a large portion of all commercial sites).
[ source ]

A little closer to the Minority Report ads that address you by name, aren’t we?

Facebook’s new homepage unveiled today

They’ve been announcing it on the home pages for weeks and it’s finally here.

Mine is still showing the old home page, so I can’t comment on it so far, but as of today, users will start seeing the changes to the Facebook home page. It’s supposed to be a more real-time approach to Facebook updates. To see more of the details, visit the official blog. [ the comments on that post could use some moderation! ]

Resident Evil 5 receiving backlash for racist undertones.

The fifth series in the best selling horror gaming franchise is under attack for its depiction of African zombies.

For those not familiar with the game, Resident Evil follows the story of a deadly man made virus that first kills it’s victims then reanimates the dead bodies into blood thirsty zombies. The game has been extremely successful, spinning off a wildly popular action / horror movie series starring Milla Jovovich.

The Resident Evil 5 trailer released in 2007 recieved a lot of negative publicity [ see here and here ], especially from the Black Community. More recently, however, with the release date of the game coming up soon, the issue has resurfaced. The Wall Street Journal reports:

When Capcom released its first trailer for the game in 2007, it showed Chris unloading his pistol into hordes of African zombies. Critics contended that the imagery of a white man shooting black Africans evoked troubling memories of the age of Western colonialism.
[ source ]

Japanese game makers have been known for offensive depiction of other races (especially African) from the days of Super Nintendo. Let’s see how this one pans out.

Sun to release 16-core Rock processor.
Later this year, Sun will release a 16-core server grade processor. With each core running at 2.16GHz, that’s a combined processing power of about 33GHz. I wonder how long before we see this raw power on our desktops.

And that’s it for this week. It’s not the full scope of the tech trends I read, so don’t gripe. But I hope this becomes regular, as it was intended to be when I started this blog.

—

Rogue FM: Windows Welcome Music.

[ I discovered this song like 6 years ago when installing XP. I hunted it down till I found it. It a very nice ambient / indtrumental music track.

You can find it on your PC by going to C:\Windows\system32\oobe\images\title.wma ]

—

Offtopic:

Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
- Sergey Brin

It’s pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We’re finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
- Bill Gates

In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself, you have to form alliances.
- Carlos Slim Helu

Related items

• Ugandan Riots – Citizen journalism comes of age
• Facebook’s Woes : A Devil’s Advocate Perspective
• BlogSpirit version 2 – We need you
• of latent hobbies and hybrid vehicles
• lawyer uses Facebook to serve legal documents online

Share