ncubeeight

This morning I was struck by the story of Susumu Sugawara on CNN who said that when he heard the tsunami sirens on Oshima, he jumped into his boat, riding into the oncoming wave to avoid losing his boat and risking his island's isolation in the aftermath. The fact of his survival is miraculous.  The testament of his humble dedication to his community and his boat, to whom he said, "If we live or die, we'll be together," is profoundly touching.  (As he fled land he bade an apologetic farewell to all his other boats whom he could not save.) It is amazing to think how many stories were lost in this tragedy.  I wondered this morning if we might be able to develop personal or device black-boxes (the way that all airplanes have to prove as record of what happened to them).  I say this not to be morbid as in the case of the posthumous/forensic case of airplanes.  When I was in Jordan last month I irresponsibly hiked up a mountain late in the day.  When nigh...

During the recent Tsunami in Japan, the internet infrastructure upon which Twitter and Facebook (including their mobile equivalents) are based, was taken offline in eastern Japan near the epicenter of the earthquake.  However, social networks that were built on the widely distributed feature phones in Japan continued to transmit messages over GPRS (General Packet Radio Service).  As a result, 80% of short message communication during the disaster was made on the social network maintained by Gree , a leading social network which is embedded on these feature phones distributed in Japan. * This brought me to realize that other internet initiatives in markets dominated by feature phones could leverage similar approaches to get communities onto the web grid.  Most networks in the developing world are feature phone-dominated.  Though they may lack the GPRS network of Japan, they do have the ability to distribute bundled apps pre-loaded into the widely distributed low cos...

Walking through the Khan al-Khalili Market in Cairo I met a clairvoyant merchant.  He welcomed me into his shop and let me peruse around at his amazing collection of ancient Egyptian graven images. At one point my eyes alighted on a delightful sculpture of Horus.  He said, "You probably can't afford that one," and pointed me to another one that he thought was in my price range.  I asked, "How do you know what I'm able to afford?"  He said, "Because I watched what you paid attention to when you came in, and they were all items within a very specific price range.  My guess is that you have less than $10 in your pocket right now."  He was right.  He was able to assess my liquidity as easily as a doctor estimating visual acuity using a Snellen chart.  It left me with an interesting concept, you can measure a man by how he limits his vision. There have been tech projects I've worked on over the last decade where I believed the scope my colleague...

Have you ever wanted to track mentions of your company brand across all the major social networks? Collecta enables you to search across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, flickr, YouTube, Google Buzz and 15 Million blog sources, location sharing services.  This permits you to do a keyword search across all locations in one view. In addition to following real-time mentions in a web browser at www.collecta.com or on your phone's browser at m.collecta.com , Collecta enables a quick means to embed a widget in your iGoogle homepage. This enables you to passively monitor your mentions, tweets, content updates and buzz from one single screen. The screenshot left is a view of Collecta tracking ncubeeight across Gowalla, Blogger and Twitter as shown from my iGoogle homepage.  This is an affordable way to track your company's reputation. Steps to add Collecta to iGoogle are first to click on "Get Widget" from any one of our 80,000 publishers or go to widget.colle...