tech

Hi everyone! I decided to ask redditors for help: I have just moved in to my new appartment in Paris and I have to renovate everything: windows, electricity, plumbing, floors, walls...

I was hoping that the reddit community could help me with technological suggestions (choice of layout, components and materials) to create a swank XXIst century appartment that respects energy consumption and the green philosophy of today/tomorrow. I can supply you with all the information needed (plans and measurements of the place) and even document the 'before and after' pics on this thread.

I have had ideas like: a waterproof touch screen in the shower to select music (and/or video), LED lighting, a big flashing red button to cut the hardline to the internet, fiber optics backbone or gigabit ethernet, hidden cameras in the walls, SMS alerts every time the main door is open...

I am open to all suggestions even the crazy ones if they aren't too expensive or if they are absolutely necessary.

In the order of things, I am at the point where I am dealing with installation of a completely new electrical setup (cabling, fuse box, plugs, lights and anything that will need power). I have only setup electricity temporarily for the renovations and will soon be able to finalize my setup by making holes in the walls to hide my cabling.

This brings me to my first request for help: Designing the electrical panel layout (main power and fuse box) and in the same surface, include the network patch panel (incorporating ADSL phone line) with a BIG RED 'do not press' flashing button to cut the network ling to the outside.

So this is my cry for help. All suggestions are welcome!

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Writer and marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t plan to publish any more books – at least not in the traditional sense.

After writing 12 books, he doesn’t think the traditional publishing process is “worth the effort,” he revealed in an interview with Mediabistro. Godin, the author of bestsellers such as “Purple Cow” and “The Dip,” has quite a bleak view on the paper book and the way we consume it.

One bit from the interview is particularly revealing. “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread,” says Godin.

I still like to visit a bookstore. But in general, I can’t shake the feeling that Godin is right: paper books aren’t a particularly elegant way to spread an idea in the age of blogs, e-readers, and social media.

“I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically,” says Godin.

Do you agree? Is traditional book publishing really a thing of the past? Please share your opinion in the comments.

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In this Sunday’s New York Times, reporter Brian Stelter outlines his using Twitter as a tool for weight loss by setting up a @brianstelter25 account for his progress and tweeting out his exercise plan and meals.

“I knew that I could not diet alone; I needed the help of a cheering section.”

He ends up losing 75 pounds.

On my birthday this year, I decided that 15 years of smoking were enough and tossed cigarettes. I don’t think I tweeted about it at first, mostly because I felt really sick from nicotine withdrawals –- but on day three I mustered enough energy to pound out the above missive.

The amount of support I received then and in the days afterward was overwhelming, and much like Stelter I would have felt like I’d let people down if I picked up a cigarette instead of my iPhone.

I stuck to my guns and stuck on my nicotine patches, tweeting instead of smoking when in at risk situations like parties with friends and passing by airport entrances.

I loved smoking like Stelter loved Dunkin’ Donuts, but seeing the support tweets like this one from Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca and this one from Twitter’s Troy Holden made me think twice before buying a pack of cigarettes, no matter how much the urge to smoke burned.

I could not quit alone, I needed the help of a cheering section.

Why do people overeat, or smoke or drink in the first place? In my experience it’s because they want attention or need to be soothed. If you can replace the “stress relief” or whatever satisfaction unhealthy behaviors give you with the positive feelings engendered by reinforcement from the people you’re connected with on Twitter, then Twitter becomes a powerful supplemental tool in the management of addiction.

“Then she mentioned, casually, ‘By the way, I’ve lost 50 pounds along with you.”

The idea of using Twitter as a support group is as new as Twitter itself, but I’ve heard countless stories like Stelter’s, whether it’s OneForty’s Laura Fitton using it to make sure she does her yoga poses every day or our own Paul Carr and his successful attempt at quitting drinking.

One of the more haunting Twit-quitting stories: ZDNet blogger Marc Orchant’s last tweet before his death was in support of blogger Aaron Brazell’s efforts to kick the habit.

And sure some may argue that the gross self-indulgence of the first vice is replaced by the gross self-indulgence of the second. But I’ll take TMI over black lungs any day.

And of course, there’s a Twitter app for that.

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On a desktop computer, StumbleUpon makes sense. You’re on the prowl for cool stuff, click a button and find it. But there is a ton of competition these days among services that let you do this — and increasingly people are relying on Twitter and Facebook for this. But mobile is a different beast.

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Recommendation site Hunch has been going through a reboot lately. Back in June, it stopped showing results to people who are not signed in, and earlier this month it redesigned its home page to offer personalized taste recommendations across a wide variety of categories such as dog breeds, U.S. national parks, camcorders, soft drinks, luggage, and film directors.

Now it is testing out local recommendations on a map with a sidebar showing restaurants, nightlife, hotels, spas, clothing stores, and more. Hunch local tries to figure out which spots your friends on different services might like (you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account) and offers them up at the top of its local search results. Each spot has a corresponding pin on the map. You can filter by different types of venues, and there is also a slider which lets you select more personalized “unique” results or more “popular” ones.

The restaurant recommendations it gave me are pretty decent for an early alpha. In New York City, it suggested Katz’s Delicatessen (a classic), Artichoke Pizza (trendy), Momofuku Noodle Bar (if only I could get in), and Hundred Acres (my wife went there last night! no joke). Each spot contains links back to profiles on Foursquare, Yelp, Hunch, or other places, just like a local search engine.

“It starts out looking at what your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare friends like, and then gets smarter over time as people give feedback,” says Hunch founder Chris Dixon. He notes that the feature just launched in alpha and is far from fully baked. His plan is to partner with Foursquare, Yelp and others to get their direct data feed of all of their places, which should improve the data.

Hunch took a hit when it started requiring that all visitors sign in. According to comScore, the site went from about 750,000 unique visitors in May, to 250,000 in June, but it already started rebounding in July to 350,000. These numbers undercount Hunch’s actual visitors by at least half, but the trend is right. By focusing on its core “taste graph” and giving people actionable recommendations every time they log in, Hunch is making the right moves to get back on track. Before, Hunch was interesting, but vague. I wasn’t really sure why I needed to go there. Now there are more and more specific reasons, and Hunch Local is something I will definitely go back to try out when I need to find a new place for lunch.

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The problem is obvious: it’s hard to launch a startup. But one potential solution, great mentorship and support, isn’t so easy to come by. With their own startup of sorts, seven ex-Googlers are going to attempt to solve that.

While there isn’t too much information out there just yet about AngelPad, it should be something very interesting to watch in the next couple of weeks. A tweet today (the first from their account), reveals a launch date of Friday, September 10 and the opening of an office in San Francisco.

So what exactly is AngelPad? As they briefly state on their site:

AngelPad is a mentorship program founded by a team of ex-Googlers to help web-technology startups build better products, attract additional funding and ultimately grow more successful businesses.

As they also note on their site, AngelPad is about “founders and angels working together to build great startups.” In other words, it’s an incubator.

While at first, it undoubtedly won’t be as structured as something like Y Combinator or TechStars, given the pedigree of the people involved, AngelPad could be a hit among young startups in the Valley.

Here are the seven ex-Googlers involved complete with the bios they included on their team page:

Thomas Korte
Thomas is an active angel investor and startup advisor. Before investing in web technology startups, Thomas was a longtime Product Evangelist for Google and the company’s first international product marketing manager responsible for European advertiser and partner acquisition.

Richard Chen
Rich is an active investor and board member with several technology startups. Previously, Rich led Google’s product strategy for international versions of its advertising, content, and distribution products. He also founded an interactive marketing agency based in Tokyo, Japan.

David Scacco
David is the Chief Revenue Office of Mylikes and an active angel investor. Prior to Mylikes, David was a longtime Google business executive and the company’s first advertising sales executive. He was responsible for Google’s sales strategy dating back to 2000.

Vibuh Mittal
Vibhu is the founder of Root-1 Research and an active angel investor. Prior to Root-1, Vibhu was at Google Research where he worked on a variety of machine learning technologies – several of which made it to publicly facing products. He has also worked at Xerox PARC, Carnegie Mellon University and TIFR, Bombay.

Gokul Rajaram
Gokul is the founder and CEO of Chai Labs and a board member for several internet startups. Prior to founding his own company, Gokul was a Google Product Management executive who helped start Google’s Adsense partner business and other key products.

Deep Nishar
Deep is the Vice President of Products & User Experience at LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, he was a Google executive who helped start Google’s mobile business and was responsible for the product strategy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Keval Dasai
Keval is the VP of Product at Digg. Prior to Digg, Keval was a Google Product Management executive responsible for Google’s AdWords, Syndication & TV Advertising products.

As I said, this a solid list of people that could undoubtedly help any startup. Expect to hear more about this in the coming weeks an months.

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Mr. Barack Obama, President

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington DC 20500

August 22, 2010

RE: Oscar Vazquez

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to ask you to bring Oscar Vazquez home.

As you may recall, in April 2009, you delivered the commencement address at Arizona State University. Among the graduates you addressed that day was Oscar Vazquez, whose mother brought him to the USA illegally when he was just 12 years old. Oscar was an outstanding student. As a high-school senior in 2004, he guided his small team to victory in a national robotics championship—beating out a well-funded 12-person team from MIT to do so! (An in-depth article in Wired magazine, published in April 2005, tells the story of how Oscar and his teammates created “Stinky,” their award-winning underwater robot.)

In college, Oscar studied mechanical engineering; having been an ROTC member since the ninth grade, he hoped to earn an ROTC scholarship and then build a career in the US Marines (a hope he still cherishes), but his immigration status meant that he was ineligible either to receive scholarships or join the service. Instead, he worked menial construction jobs to cover his tuition. At commencement, he received special recognition for his leadership and community outreach work.

In 2009, Oscar—now a husband and father—worked up the courage to address the unresolved issue of his immigration status. Trusting in the system, he voluntarily returned to Mexico, leaving his wife and their one-year-old daughter behind, and has been attempting to immigrate through the proper channels ever since.

Unfortunately, even though his wife Karla is a US citizen, because Oscar remained in the country to attend college after his 18th birthday, he has been barred from re-entering the U.S. for 10 years on “grounds of excludability.” He is currently working a blue-collar job as a night-shift manager at a factory in Mexico; his wife and daughter visit him whenever they can. In spite of these hardships, he does not regret his decision to face his immigration challenges honorably.

In the speech you presented at ASU last year, you told Oscar’s graduating class “We'll need young people like you to step up. We need your daring and your enthusiasm and your energy.” In that commencement address, you also explained that the body of work that a person will create in his or her lifetime is an accumulation of “the choices large and small that add up to a lasting legacy… it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best, and give back, and contribute to the life of this nation. You may have setbacks, and you may have failures, but you're not done—not by a long shot.” Oscar has been trying to make the right choices, and he is committed to giving his best, to making a remarkable contribution to the nation he has called home since childhood. Now, though, he faces a setback that threatens his potential legacy as one of our country’s brightest young minds. There are many nations in the world that would welcome Oscar, his wife, and their child—but he doesn’t want to move to any of those countries. He wants to come home.

Mr. President, I am hopeful that if you consider the extraordinary circumstances of Oscar Vazquez’s life in its full context, you will see how very much this brilliant and dedicated young man has to offer our nation. He is doing his best to remedy the earlier choices—some of them not his own—that have resulted in his being separated from his family and unable to use his degree as he intended, in the service of the country he loves. Please offer Oscar Vazquez a waiver from this ten-year ban so that he can return home to his family and begin building a career that will make Americans proud to claim him as one of our own. Thank you.

With warmest regards,

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Ad network Federated Media is announcing an acquisition today, buying a semantic profiling technology platform from semantic search startup TextDigger today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TextDigger, which was incubated at CNET in 2005, spun out a platform for semantic search and related services. TextDigger’s technology allows owners of large content
collections to add semantics indexing on top of an existing keyword search engine.

Federated Media will use the new technology to add semantic technology to content tagging, filtering, topic extraction, and SEO. The technology will also be used for ad targeting, and semantic search engine optimization for a site or network of sites. As you may know, Federated went beyond just serving ads a few years ago, to giving advertisers and publishers a marketing toolbox to see how people interact with these ads.

Tim Musgrove, TextDigger’s founder, will join Federated as Chief Scientist, while retaining an affiliation with TextDigger as their Senior Research Fellow. TextDigger will continue its search business. TextDigger will bring over 5 customers to Federated

Federated Medias founder John Battelle tells me that the acquisition (which he says is the first in the company’s history), will help website owners make their content more engaging. He says the buy is part of of the company’s aggressive strategt towards boosting its product offerings. Last fall, the Federates launched more ad-units and social media-focused ads. The company also recently brought on a Chief Product Officer as well.

After shopping the company around in 2008 and not finding a buyer willing to pay his price, Federated raised a $50 million investment round instead. The company is now profitable and reaches 70 million uniques worldwide.

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When it comes to mobile app stores, there’s iTunes and then there is everyone else. PocketGear which bills itself as the “World’s Largest Mobile App Store,” closed a $15 million series B round. The round was led by Trident Capital, with the Blackberry Partners Fund and Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s personal investment vehicle, TomorrowVentures.

PocketGear isn’t the prettiest app store in the world, but it sells apps for practically every smartphone platform except one (that would be the other App Store). PocketGear sells apps for Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, and Java phones. It distributes more than 140,000 paid and free titles, and claims that it has sold more than $2.5 billion worth of apps total (which would make it bigger than iTunes, which just recently crossed the $1 billion mark).

Obviously, there is a large and growing market for mobile apps across multiple smartphones that are not made by Apple, and PocketGear aims to be a one-stop shop for all of those apps. PocketGear is based in Durham, NC and was bought out from mobile phone software platform Motricity by Jud Bowman, who was CTO and co-founder of Motricity and now acts as CEO of PocketGear. Previous investors include Noro-Moseley Partners and Wakefield Group.

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A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare
- W.H. Davies, Leisure

A little over a week ago, I closed down all of my social media accounts, with the exception of Twitter, which I locked. The explanation I gave was that, in an age when everyone and their dog is sharing every aspect of their life, being a digital recluse is the new “Internet famous”.

Since then, some people have criticized my logic – pointing out that if I really wanted to be a digital recluse then I’d close Twitter too. By drawing attention to myself for becoming a semi-hermit, am I not just trying to have my social media cake and eat it too?

Perhaps. The truth is that there were numerous reasons for me wanting to dial down my use of social media, but presenting numerous arguments in one column is the kiss of death to a columnist. The neo-narcissistic benefits of locking Twitter were what finally made my decision, and so that was the reason I gave. The others would keep.

This morning, though, Leo Laporte wrote a hugely revealing blog post and, in doing so, artfully proved the misquoted maxim that the medium is the message. In short: Laporte discovered last night that, due to a glitch in Google Buzz, several weeks of his updates had failed to reach either Buzz or Twitter. The kicker? Not one of his tens of thousands of followers had noticed, or cared.

Leo’s response was a vow to turn his attentions back to his blog – a place where people visit specifically to read about Leo, and where they email in the hundreds if he skips an update. By contrast, he argues, people on Twitter are so busy broadcasting their own updates that they’re unable or unwilling to listen to others’.

But, while I certainly agree with Leo’s reasoning for abandoning Buzz and going back to macro-blogging, it was another – almost throw-away – line in his post that chimed most loudly with me.

“I should have been posting [on his blog] all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

Reading that line, I instantly felt Leo’s pain. When I was researching my most recent book – which mainly focusses on the events of the past three years of my life – I spent several days going back through my blog archives, plus Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the rest – to remind myself of details and events that may have been missing from my more traditional notes. What I found – or rather didn’t find – shocked me.

Throughout my earlier archives, I was able to find lengthy, sometimes surprisingly personal, posts – recounting the highs and lows of starting companies, making and losing friends, leaving London, beginning to travel around America and Europe… and countless other published episodes that backed up, and enhanced the contents of my private notebooks. But then, as I clicked forward through the archives to more recent years, something odd happened. At a certain point, the number of posts in each monthly archive dropped off a cliff, particularly where details of my personal life were concerned.

The reason, of course, was that I’d started to use Twitter for that kind of personal stuff. Unperturbed, I moved my research attentions away from my blog archives and over to my Twitter archives – and that’s when I started to panic: for all the dozens of updates I wrote each month, there was absolutely no substance to any of them.

“I am learning a lot about pens.” reads one update from last year. What does that even mean? “Ok, that’s quite enough of all this. I’m going out”, reads another. Enough of all what? And where was I going? Of course, the fact that I’m a particularly boring tweeter doesn’t help, but look at anyone’s Twitter account and it’s the same story – 140 characters simply doesn’t give enough depth or breadth to commit events, memories or feelings to the permanent record.

I’m one of the lucky ones: I hand-write a lot – and I mean a lot – of notes. Recalling personal experiences is what pays my rent so I have dozens of Moleskine books full of memories to look back on. I also have a similar number of published columns and a couple of memoirs to refer to if my recollection gets patchy.

Others aren’t so fortunate. A decade or so ago, a new generation who would previously have kept diaries instead started to set up blogs. Sure those blogs may have been twee or self-absorbed or clumsily written or emo or just plain boring – isn’t that the joy of a diary? – but they at least required the writer to take the time to process the events of their life, and the attendant emotions they generated – before putting finger to keyboard. The result, in many cases, was a detailed archive of events and memories that they can look back on now and say “that was how I was then”.

And then along came micro-blogging – and, with a finite amount of time and effort available, the blog generation turned into the Twitter (or Facebook) generation. A million blogs withered and died as their authors stopped taking the time to process their thoughts and switched instead to simply copying and pasting them into the world, 140 meaningless characters at a time. The result: a whole lot of sound and mundanity, signifying nothing.

To argue for a mass switch back from Tweeting to Livejournaling (or Bloggering, or Movable Typing…) in the interests of the permanent record is as ridiculous as campaigning for everyone to abandon instant messaging and return to letter-writing. The fact is people are busy (or lazy, depending on your view of humanity) and for the vast majority, immediacy will always trump posterity.

But for those of us who have had reason to look back at the past few years – like me writing my book, or Leo having “woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands” – the realisation is slightly terrifying: by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.

On Friday, controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was accused of rape. Only hours later the charges were dropped, and now Al-Jazeera has quoted Assange saying that the accusations were part of “a smear campaign.”

Assange and WikiLeaks said on Twitter that some enemy of the site was using the rape accusations as “dirty tricks.” According to The New York Times, Assange claims that even though the charges were dropped, damage has already been done because enemies of the site can use the rumors in a war of public opinion and perception.

WikiLeaks drew fire from the Pengaton and other governmental organizations for releasing more than 70,000 secret military documents about NATO’s Afghan War, and it’s clear from its Twitter updates that WikiLeaks believes those organizations are trying to prevent the site from releasing 15,000 more documents that Assange calls even “more explosive.”

Assange was reluctant to directly name the Pentagon or any other specific government or intelligence organization as the instigator of the rape charges. He has simply said, “We can have some suspicions about who would benefit, but without direct evidence I would not be willing to make a direct allegation.”

Assange was in Sweden to arrange for some of WikiLeaks’ operations to be hosted there. The country is known as a safe haven for radical freedom-of-information types like Assange and the founders of The Pirate Bay. In fact, The Pirate Bay and its loosely associated political party The Pirate Party will host some of WikiLeaks’ servers moving forward.

The Pirate Bay has spent years fending off legal actions that have threatened to take it down or control the data sharing that it facilitates with varying degrees of success and failure, so it seems to be a natural ally to WikiLeaks.

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While ranting and raving about the amazing android/iphone application that is SubSonic (stream your entire music collection to your phone, even if its FLAC, on the fly), I've run into a good number of geeks who seem entirely turned off by the idea of having a PC at home, that is online 24/7. A seedbox... a Home server... call it what you will. How many of you geeks have one? How many don't? I honestly cant imagine not having one of my PC's on 24/7, the very idea of not being connected makes me uneasy. How will i maintain a ratio on my favorite private torrent trackers? How will i stream my entire 400gb FLAC collection to my phone any time of day? If you pay for an internet connection at your house, how do you sleep at night knowing your not taking advantage of it to upload 24/7? Correct me if im wrong, but Smartphones and Laptops have killed the "Home Server Star" and we have a whole generation of people now that weren't even around when it was more common for people to have home PC's that were left on constantly. It makes me sad, but i guess its also what puts me in a different tier of geekery than most. Are we all really moving into the cloud now? Are we really going to rely on google, dropbox, amazon to host all of our internet service needs? As a geek I think decentralizing things, and having a personal server at home gives you a huge advantage over those who do not.

EDIT: I just want to say thanks to Reddit for taking this thread and running with it, always a pleasure! I have 20 more new reasons to keep my home server up and running the night away.

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