Tech Positive

2011-09-01T04:16:00.000-07:00

Meeting Schedulers

2010-04-07T23:25:00.000-07:00

A slew of online applications are attempting to eliminate the headache of scheduling meetings. And, unlike their proprietary older brothers, such as Outlook and iCal, these new entrants into the scheduling market are completely web-based, compatible with Google Calendar, and best of all, don’t require your invitees to install software or register on their site ... more here

I have actually used ScheduleOnce and it is impressive !

Looking to save money on Printing ink ?

2010-04-07T07:34:00.001-07:00

Looking into ways to save money on toner cartridges, a University of Wisconsin, Green Bay professor suggested the previously mentioned Ecofont to his IT department. IT came up with an even easier solution—the commonly available Century Gothic font. More here

Stains troubling you ... here is a solution

2010-04-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

The University of Illinois' Stain Solution web site gathers exhaustive remedies for hundreds of common, hard-to-remove stains in one easy-to-search resource—with surprising specificity ... more here

Pico Projectors

2010-04-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

Looks like the future of Portable Projection systems is here with WVGA (848 x 480) resolution and a 5000:1 contrast ratio ... imagine the impact it can have on education ... more here

Global Image Project ? Online Image Editor - With an Interesting Twist

2010-03-30T20:03:00.001-07:00

There are many online image editors. Like Picnik (which was recently bought by Google), Pixlr, Aviary Phoenix, Photoshop online and many others. All them require that you go to their website to edit your images. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could bring the online image editor into your own web apps.?

What if you could embed an image editor? …. Make way !

Picmeleo. And they have done just that. An image editor that you can embed into your own site or web app.

Content aware fill --- Photoshop’s new magic tool

2010-03-27T20:41:00.001-07:00

Ever wondered how you could remove a patch on a nice little image, generate or extend a background to cover the rest of your panoramic photo image .. well here is the answer and a few neat demo videos below:

Phone Booth and Google Voice

2010-03-13T21:42:00.001-08:00

Interesting developments in the field of Internet based Voice solutions ….. more here

No more Attachments !!!

2010-03-09T18:56:00.001-08:00

Imagine not having to attach a document, instead upload it to the cloud and just share links … Google Docs and Mainsoft have more

Sixth Sense … an adaptation

2010-03-02T09:22:00.001-08:00

If you have seen Sixth Sense, this isn’t too different, only an adaptation of the same innovation with folks from Microsoft. The future will be something similar … just that the hands and fingers will be substituted by thought ! More here …

Quakes and Shifts …

2010-03-02T09:13:00.001-08:00

The elements at work … the earth is changing with quakes …. slowly but surely … more here

Online Photo Editing

2010-03-01T19:34:00.001-08:00

Potential use of online photo editing for flyers and posters … rich features, no cost, no licenses.

http://www.picnik.com/

http://fotoflexer.com/

https://www.photoshop.com/

Test from Windows Live Writer !

2010-02-28T22:57:00.001-08:00

Test post … lets see how this works …

Thought controlled machines

2007-11-20T05:06:00.000-08:00

How stuff works article on thought controlled wheelchairs.

Physicist Stephen Hawkings uses a wheelchair that is very advanced and even speaks on his behalf once he has formulated a sentence using minimalistic movement of his finger on his right hand.

The thought controlled wheelchair uses subvocal speech.

Ambient Audeo System

Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman founded Ambient, the company that develops and markets the Audeo system. Audeo was initially envisioned as a way for severely disabled people to communicate, but Ambient expanded the control systems to include the ability to control a wheelchair or interact with a computer

Keyboard shortcuts database!

2007-11-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

Keyxl is a neat collection of keyboard shortcuts. Checked out for Word 2003 and discovered many things that were somehow not 'findable' so far.

Open Source software links

2007-11-18T05:47:00.000-08:00

Some nice links to useful open source software

Huge collection (categorized) from mashable. Called 'Open Source God'
Open source as alternative (osalt) has open source comparisons for commercial ones.
Digitaldarknet has another collection.

Timetracker

2007-11-18T05:29:00.000-08:00

Timetracker is an open source tool for monitoring where the time goes. Very good for checking personal productivity and identifying time wasters.

TimeTracker (TT) is a PC activity monitor. TT will determine every second which window is currently active on your desktop. TT captures the window caption from the title bar and tracks the active time for that window. Custom tasks may also be added.

Technology review videos

2007-11-18T04:45:00.000-08:00

For those who have a good broadband connection, try out the Technology Review videos (published by MIT). Good stuff - on different emerging technologies

Dojo Foundation - Open Source Toolkit

2007-11-18T04:32:00.000-08:00

Press release on Dojo 1.0

Dojo provides easy-to-use, high-quality UI components and JavaScript infrastructure critical for building responsive Web applications without the need for proprietary plugins or single-vendor solutions. Only 25K in size, the base of Dojo delivers key support for Ajax, progressive enhancement, animations, and opens the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.
The Dojo project has attracted a talented and vibrant community of individuals and corporate supporters since its founding in 2004. Dojo is a key part of products from active community members like AOL, BEA (NASDAQ: BEAS), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), and many others.
IBM uses Dojo in a number of products including WebSphere Commerce and its popular mashup maker, QEDWiki. "Dojo enabled IBM to create user interfaces that are internationalized and accessible out of the box, which helps us to deliver projects much faster and with more value to our customers," said David Boloker, CTO for Emerging Technologies, IBM Software Group

MIT's opencourseware now has video search

2007-11-18T04:21:00.000-08:00

MIT Researchers Advance Lecture Capture with Search Capabilities. A Report from the journal.

The functionality of MIT's new technology shares a little in common with traditional search technology from a user perspective. That is, if you enter in a search term, the system calls up a list of results, along with relevant details, such as the title of the lecture, running time, highlighted search terms within the results, etc. And that's where the similarity ends. From this point, clicking on any word within the results calls up not only the relevant lecture, but takes the user to the precise point in the lecture where that term is used.

Identity Management and Protection

2007-11-18T04:12:00.000-08:00

Centre for Identity Management and Protection website has some ongoing research work in the important area of identity management and also provides links to some whitepapers on the topic.

Popfly review

2007-11-18T04:07:00.000-08:00

Microsoft offers popfly - a tool for creating mashups. Etech's review on it here.

Example of what can be done:

Mix and re-mix photos and videos. Popfly makes it easy to create and share beautiful slideshows using pictures from Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Facebook or to embed a podcast or a video player hosting videos from Soapbox or YouTube and share it on your Facebook profile, Windows Live Spaces page, or any Web page.

Razor thin display bends like Paper - Sony Innovation

2007-05-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Sony has what is called Electronic Paper which is built of two technologies: Sony's organic thin film transistor, which is required to make flexible displays, and organic electroluminescent display.

The next step .... a wearable TV or a wallpaper TV !

More details here.

Applications on a stick

2007-04-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

Portableapps.com lists a bunch of applications that can be used on a USB drive without the need for any installation. Very useful indeed!

Web 2 style guide

2007-04-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 style guide

Kaye effect and related

2007-04-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Interesting post on the Kaye effect (impressive demo and explanation on youtube video) followed by some nice comments.

Web design sites

2007-04-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

Web design book shares a list of highly rated web design sites. Worth checking out.

Online file conversion

2007-04-29T06:24:00.001-07:00

Zamzar is an interesting online file/video conversion tool. Can come in pretty handy if a file is required quickly but is in a format that you don't have. Pity they don't support (so far) proprietory formats such as psd and cdr... would have been useful to convert them into tiffs.

Online file conversion

2007-04-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

QEDWiki

2007-04-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Great video demo on Youtube from IBM. Shows how wiki can be used as a mashup of services from different databases... and therefore can be easily shared to others at work... this way, users can continuously improve upon the system.

OpenSource Travel System

2007-02-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

Open Source ... Open Standard, information system for travel organizations.

A non-profit organization promoting the Open Source TravelSystem. It is based on OFBiz and will support in future the OpenTravel™standards as published at www.OpenTravel.org.

OFBiz in itself looks like an exciting new initiative from Apache. OFBiz is now officially a TLP (top level project) at the Apache Software Foundation. Information here ... Click

But if OFBiz for me ? Answers here ... Click

Feature list here Click !

Intuitive UI

2007-02-03T06:13:00.000-08:00

Jeff Han on TED shows off completely unconventional 'intuitive' User Interfaces that operate through touch, heat, multiple points of interactions.

The possibilities of use are so many.

Rolling with Ruby on Rails ....

2006-08-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails. This article steps through the development of a web application using Rails.

Rolling with Ruby on Rails

This article also has lots of useful links on Ruby on Rails...

IPTV & OpenSource Set Top boxes

2006-06-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

This News item details IPTV's emergence as the next tech wave and the entry of big players such as SONY, HP, Motorola, CISCO and Scientific-Atlanta in this arena.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/50807.html

Also, now Open source set top boxes seem to clear another hurdle on the cost front.

" ... Global IPTV revenues will top US$17 billion by 2010, TDG Research predicts. If those numbers hold up, then capitalizing on IPTV will be critical to the success of broadband providers and could offer an attractive opportunity to wireless providers. ...."

OpenAJAX

2006-05-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

Infoworld reports about the OpenAJAX Alliance where there 31 group members are reaching out for consensus on AJAX

Something about AJAX

The AJAX definition as written in Wikipedia states that AJAX is a Web
development technique for building interactive Web applications, with the intent
of making Web pages more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server. With this technique, the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded
each time the user makes a change.

The AJAX technique consists of XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets for marking and styling information, and a DOM (Document Object Model) accessed with a client-side scripting language, particularly JavaScript or JScript.

Also featured is an XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the Web server. In some frameworks and situations, an IFrame object is used instead of XMLHttprequest to exchange data. XML is sometimes as used as the format for data transfer between the server and client, although formats such as preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and EBML (Extensible Binary Meta Language) also will work.

Quote from Zimbra President and CTO - Scott Dietzen:

"Our take is that OpenAjax exists to best leverage the investment protection and
community innovation inherent in the open source model to accelerate AJAX
adoption," and ensure that AJAX remains multi-client, multi-browser,
multi-server, and independent of any specific language or container on the
server"

Zero Energy Home

2006-05-17T02:24:00.000-07:00

ZDNet talks about a Zero Energy Home in Oklahama.

But what exactly is a zero energy home (ZEH)?
A ZEH is connected to the utility grid, but at off-peak time periods, it generates more power than it uses by combining renewable energy technologies with advanced energy-efficient construction. As a result, a ZEH lowers the power demand on its utility provider. It produces about as much energy as it consumes during a year, so it is considered to achieve "net zero" energy consumption.

AJAX Toolkit from IBM

2006-05-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

Sys-con reports announcement of AJAX toolkit from IBM. The toolkit is now available as Open Source at Eclipse

IBM has announced that the a first build of the AJAX toolkit framework is
available for download. This is a continuation of the Open Ajax Initiative
which Zimbra announced last month. The Zimbra AjaxTk is a key part of this
initiative.

AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides extensible tools for building IDEs for the
many different AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) run-time environments
(such as Dojo, Zimbra, etc.).
This technology also contains features for developing, debugging, and testing
AJAX applications. The framework provides enhanced JavaScript editing features
such as edit-time syntax checking; an embedded Mozilla Web browser; an embedded DOM browser; and an embedded JavaScript debugger.
An additional and unique aspect of the framework is the Personality Builder
function, which assists in the construction of IDE features for arbitrary AJAX
run-time frameworks and thus adds to the supported set of run-time environments
in the ATF.

Emerging Construction Technologies

2006-05-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

Nice site on the topic from Purdue...

Infotech and Accounting Top 10 technologies

2006-05-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA ) have identified the top 10 technologies to watch for professionals who sit at the 'intersection' of information technolgoy and accounting.

They are:
1. Information Security.
2. NEW Assurance and Compliance Applications (e.g. SOX 404, ERM).
3. Disaster and Business Continuity Planning.
4. NEW IT Governance.
5. NEW Privacy Management.
6. Digital Identity and Authentication Technologies.
7. Wireless Technologies.
8. Application and Data Integration.
9. Paperless Digital Technologies.
10. NEW Spyware Detection and Removal.

Quick and Easy Programming

2006-05-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Application Development Trends has a nice article on 'End User Programming in 5 minutes or less'.

IBM's new PHP-based QEDWiki project (“quick and easily done wiki”) is an IDE and framework designed to allow non-technical end users to develop so-called situational apps in less than five minutes.

QEDWiki is not yet widely available, but IBM is testing it with its corporate
customers. If the PHP community shows an interest, IBM may open source the
technology, as it did the Eclipse framework. IBM expects to release the QEDWiki
software on its emerging technology Alphaworks Web site sometime this year

Sketchup from Google

2006-04-28T05:27:00.000-07:00

Sketchup is a Cool 3D modelling tool from Google. It has both free and professional versions. The features demo is cool.

User Manuals for widget xyz

2006-04-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

Lots of user manuals available on the net

Walking on water...

2006-04-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

Even if most humans can't walk on water, there is a robot which can do it now.

Unique Maps

2006-04-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

Worldmapper is an interesting site that shows world maps resized according to the area of interest. For example - China and India are shown as the largest countries in terms of population.

Digital Magazines

2006-02-16T05:50:00.000-08:00

DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a image compression technology that is useful for creating digital magazines... Check out the tutorial for what is possible.

Here is a related website talking about DjVu

Workgroupshare - Collab tool

2006-02-11T00:13:00.000-08:00

It is for a price, but looks impressive .... (needs use of outlook)

" WorkgroupShare lets the people in your organization share their Outlook data, such as calendars, contacts, email, tasks and notes, without the expense or expertise required by Microsoft Exchange Server."

More info here

Searching copyleft photographs

2006-01-09T04:18:00.000-08:00

Yotophoto is a site that focuses on providing search for free photographs on the net.

Cool talking...

2005-11-30T00:15:00.000-08:00

Check out Sitepal which talks business with online animated characters that can read out what you type and provide answers. Its a subscription service.

They also have a virtual host demo where the characters can be customized.

Worth digging deeper...

Sony IVE

2005-11-21T04:06:00.000-08:00

At first check its really cool... The Sony Instant Video Everywhere

Top Utilities

2005-11-18T02:15:00.000-08:00

Gizmo's top picks at TechSupportAlert is really cool. Check out the 46-Best ever freeware utilities

Tips for Online Safety

2005-11-11T21:22:00.000-08:00

"Get Safe Online is sponsored by government and leading businesses working together to provide a free, public service."

Talks about safety tips against viruses, spyware, online financial transactions and security for small businesses.

Interactive Technology Glossary

2005-11-03T01:32:00.000-08:00

Techtionary is a multimedia animated glossary(and part tutorial) on internet, networking, telecom and such. Its flash based (and rather flashy at times).

"... a comprehensive visual reference tool designed to enable C-level executives and decision makers to quickly understand technical concepts and terms necessary to make mission critical business decisions"

"About 2000 indepth tutorials" (as of today).

Technology Source Articles

2005-11-02T04:38:00.000-08:00

Nice archive of articles at University of North Carolina.

Here is an interesting one: Blogging as a Course Management Tool that dates back to July/Aug 2003

Higher Education through use of IT

2005-11-02T04:18:00.000-08:00

Educause is an interesting initiative. Transformative Assessment is very interesting...

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology
The fundamental purpose of transformative assessment is to improve student learning outcomes, and "transformative assessment works by providing students and teachers with insight into learning processes and their results. It assumes that deepened insight will lead to individual, programmatic, and institutional improvements."

Project Management

2005-11-02T03:08:00.000-08:00

Interesting tool called Track+ for project management

Track+ supports the following project management knowledge areas as defined by IEEE standard 1490 and the PMIs "Project Management Body of Knowledge"
project quality management
project time management
project scope management
project risk management
project human resource management
project cost management (planned)

Internet Research

2005-10-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

Marcus Zillman has an amazing set of whitepapers for internet research.

Open Sourcery

2005-10-28T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Open Sourcery is an interesting site for web developers with plenty of informative links and tutorials. The flash gallery for example contains some nice text flash animations and tutorials.

WebCollab is here !

2005-10-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

Managing Projects .... collaborating them online, multiple users, different locations, timezones ......

Here is a site that seems to have a a ton of OpenSource Projects that any small to medium enterprise could use OpenSourceCMS.

To start with look under GroupWare for :

dotProject [Username- admin, Password- passwd]

phProjekt [Username- rootPassword- demo]

Also try the e-Learning modules, they are good too.

and many more...

Blogging for God

2005-10-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

Blogs to share and document experiences is an amazing way to reach out to millions.

"What would Jesus Blog?" asks CNN in this news article on the God Blogger's conference.

There are a few who are already trying this out, just a matter of turning things to the unlimited.

More on GodBlogs : http://www.godblogcon.com/

Document Collaboration and writely so

2005-10-07T04:47:00.000-07:00

Writely has a nice solution for online web document editing and collaboration... and is being talked about a fair bit nowadays.

They have their own blog and here is a link to a presentation that was posted recently on the blog

A Photoshop alternative ?

2005-10-02T01:24:00.000-07:00

Needed a good photo editor software for a service program coming up shortly, and looked on the web .... came across GIMP, here is more .....

-*-

GIMP is a popular open-source image editor originally developed for Unix/Linux. Often lauded as the "free Photoshop," it does have an interface and features similar to Photoshop.
more here

-*-

I have just downloaded it, I'll post a comment once I use it. The reviews have been very good and support seems to be excellent, for free again!

Downloads
Documentation

*******************
4:11 PM 10/17/2005
Have installed it and have been using it for some time, looks promising. For a once-in-awhile user there should be no difference between PS and GIMP.
*******************

Extending google maps

2005-09-22T04:41:00.000-07:00

Per ZDNet's post on Fun with Mashups :
Lots of people are finding applications for google maps with mashups with other data sources.

A really cool site with many other links is Google Maps Mania

So there are many applications possible. How about listing all the meditation centres in the world? Or maybe just the retreat places and the main centres and giving all the details within that. That's a good feature for a new website... in the "contact us" or "how to reach us" information section.

Now how to go about doing all this? There is a post just for that at Endgadget. Ah technology...

Viewlets for presenters

2005-09-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

An interesting application, may be good for e-learning modules.

Click Viewlets Demo

Website : http://www.qarbon.com/

Desktop Search and Efficiencies

2005-08-25T03:13:00.000-07:00

The new Google Desktop has a new sidebar feature that makes frequently used or interesting info very easy to reach and access. In addition it does a great job at searching as the previous version did. The outlook add-in for searching mails quickly is also a good addition.

Cool developments in the real time collaboration world

2005-08-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

Lots of interesting things happening in the online collaboration world...

Google Talk Beta got introduced. Its comparatively low bandwidth, very clear and just great stuff. There is even some UI feedback to show connection quality on any call. Chat is of course possible and its an improvement on the old google notifier so that checking out gmail becomes easy. No conf calls possible though.

and... now vskype beta offers video conferencing for upto 200+ users... very cool indeed. Allows web presentations. It has limited features and can't be compared with webex etc but its getting there. And its Free. (No, it is not connected to skype which is a Luxembourg based company. It adds on to skype technology and has been developed by Santa Cruz Networks).

It claims that it works over dialup also (speed is slow expectedly so...) but broadband is preferred for these.

Browster for cool searching

2005-08-02T02:39:00.000-07:00

Check Browster for a neat way of browing search results.

"A free plug-in released for Internet Explorer allows users to mouse over Web search listings for an instant view of the content rather than having to wait for the full page to download." says Elinor Mills, CNET News.com

Its a small download and has no spyware tagging along (as they claim) and can save much time while sifting through search results for the right answers.

Works with IE and Firefox...

State of the Blogosphere

2005-08-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

Dave Sifry at Technorati says the following about Blogs:

Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Web based presentation and Training Example

2005-06-02T05:44:00.000-07:00

Check out the Yahoo tour for an example of a presentation that serves multiple market segments in a really neat way.

Useful way of serving seekers with different interests...

Quick Research Notes

2005-06-02T03:42:00.000-07:00

Rojo is a free web based RSS Reader that makes it a breeze to sign onto to multiple RSS feeds of popular blogs and have a quick start on the subjects that you are interested in.

The Rojo FAQ also is a good place to help clear some basics.

Flash drive on the net

2005-06-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

Gmail Hard Drive (GMHD) is a simple and innovative application for storing upto 2GB of files on the internet.

People can login with their usual gmail credentials and upload/view/download files on this account.

So, if people open a new gmail account with credentials shared for a group, they can just use this as a secure shared storage space.

GMHD also sends the gmail account an email with the uploaded file as an attachment. So if someone logs into gmail normally, they will see these new emails instead.

Service Orientation

2005-05-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have been in the news for a while and are picking up even further. Web Services - the currently popular technology implementation mechanism for SOAs are also getting into the mainstream.

Centipedia defines SOA as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architectural concept that defines the use of services to support business requirements. In a SOA, resources are made available to other participants in the network as independent services that are accessed in a standardized way. Most definitions of SOA identify the use of Web Services (using SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) in its implementation, however it is possible to implement SOA using any service-based technology.

What does this mean to us? If various projects start developing softwares as independent services, they can be reused across the globe... very powerful.

An Indian's Trail Blazing Invention

2005-05-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

Arvind Thiagarajan explains how he compressed data, on his way to a
path-breaking invention.

An invention that saves money, time and precious resources, and at the
same time also exemplifies simplicity.

"Conventionally, compression is done using complex transformations
such as Discrete Cosine Transformations (DCT) or data
transformations, wherein the whole image is converted into a frequency
signal and some of the high frequency details are filtered. Because of
that loss, we are able to get the data compressed. This is a
well-known method used all over the world.

"What I thought was a completely new approach where you keep the
data in the original form itself. It was challenging to code colours.
Although they look quite similar to human eyes, in reality, there are
minor variations in them. The pattern is not like single pixel colours
occurring continuously; it will be like, if one is in the 1st position, the
other is in the 5th and another in the 10th.

"So, the challenge was to put all of them together. I felt if we can do
that by rearranging the data, we can code them better. When we
rearrange the data, it is necessary that we need to maintain the original
order. That's where the technique of repetition coding using an index,
which we call it as bit- plane, originated.

"What we do is, we maintain a binary index to store the original
location of the data when we do the rearrangement and coding. So, at
the decompression stage, we can bring back the original data without
any loss because we had already indexed it. So, it's a perfectly
reversible technique, and very simple, too.

"I really don't know how I hit upon the idea. It was more of a practical
approach where intuition played a part. It was logical thinking that
helped me.

"Yes, I wondered why nobody in the world thought of this before
because it is such a simple thought. Thousands of papers are produced
all around the world on compression of data but, somehow, nobody has
thought of this fundamental problem."

Not only lossless, but more compression too

When Arvind Thiagarajan applied the compression technique on the
images from the hospital, he got 35 times lossless compression. The
compression was only 5 times in the traditional techniques like JPEG
and data was lost.

Click to Seefor more details

Guess What?

2005-05-03T22:39:00.000-07:00

Try this site...

Significant Technology Trends for 2005

2005-05-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

The following link provides the Significant technology trends for the future.

Have a look at it to get more details.

A Nice Source of Information

Future Impacts

2005-05-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

This Website has some articles that we feel could impact the future and may be interesting to our visitors who have a stake in forecasting and future-related areas. Future Impacts is a listing of these items
with links and brief descriptions of the articles, followed by editorial comments (italicized) by a TFI
staff member. Many of the extracts are from online versions of such publications as Scientific
American, MIT Technology Review, The Scientist, R&D Magazine, The New York Times, The
Harrow Technology Report, and FUTUREdition.
Future Impacts It's really a nice resource

More encyclopedia

2005-05-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

Another encyclopedia project, this one has been there for some time (since 1999), free-to-edit style h2g2.

Also, interesting are comments to one techpositive blogs. which has been quoted on another blog

Ajax and Web Applications

2005-05-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Jesse James Garrett talks about Ajax and Web Applications. Interesting...

"Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web."

Rapid Application Development

2005-05-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

ZDNet post on Enterprise TenFold

Jeffrey Walker makes some seemingly outrageous claims. The iconoclastic
founder and CTO of TenFold asserts that business users can build high-end
enterprise applications ten times faster with his application development
platform than using other development platforms.

The Time Traveler Convention

2005-04-28T13:10:00.000-07:00

A Group of MIT ians try out something interesting, trying to be at a place again at the same day same time .....

We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in two weeks, and WE NEED YOUR HELP! ......

More on the Convention (Click)

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Another interesting read Be there again

Multi user document repository

2005-04-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

For a multi-user Document Management System (DMS) this should be a good starting point.

Owl Document Repository

Wondir - Free Q&A

2005-04-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

First it was wikipedia and its brethren... now its wondir...

The former offers free information - an encyclopedia(way more than official ones offer).
The latter lets people answer other people's questions - for free.

Top 10 Emerging Technologies

2005-04-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Technology Review (an MIT Enterprise) talks about the Top 10 Emerging Technologies...

Airborne Networks
Quantum Wires
Silicon Photonics
Metabolomics
Magnetic-Resonance Force Microscopy
Universal Memory
Bacterial Factories
Enviromatics
Cell-Phone Viruses
Biomechatronics

Fascinating reading....

More about Education and Games

2005-04-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

More news stories about use of games to handle World Hunger, children's literacy and communication skills, cultural training to troops...

Robots underwater

2005-04-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Applications of Robotics grow...

Wired talks about an underwater robot that takes very little energy and goes around gathering data about the realm underseas...

Online Games and Learning social skills

2005-04-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Wired talks about Second life and novel and meaningful applications of this online game. Among other things, its been used for developing social skills amongst people with Cerebral Palsy and abused children.

Cluetrain Manifesto

2005-04-18T07:40:00.000-07:00

This is way late to talk about it... but its amazing stuff... the Cluetrain Manifesto

...People of Earth. The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember

Google Maps and Applications

2005-04-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Slacker Manager talks about excellent applications of Google maps.

The connection with Craigslist is excellent for housing info in the US but the memory maps pool at Flickr is awesome. Annotated photos to share info, history... useful for collaborative work.

Open Courseware from MIT

2005-03-23T04:16:00.000-08:00

MIT provides excellent learning resources on the web through its MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. Plenty of courses from many different fields... It has assignments, lecture notes, study materials and the like.

Good example of using technology to provide great but otherwise restricted access resources to a large audience. They have provided a comprehensive how-to section to help others replicate this effort.

Top eBusiness Trends for 2005

2005-03-23T01:55:00.000-08:00

Information Week talks about top eBusiness Trends as per eMarketer

The full list of E-business trends is:

Alternative advertising
RSS
Changes in AOL business model
On-Demand TV
Wireless broadband
RFID
VoIP
Linux
Cross-channel retailing
IT security

URL Info from Fagan Finder

2005-03-22T23:30:00.000-08:00

URL Info is a great site to find out everything about a URL.

It has 107 tools! Can even do translations...

IT as a utility

2005-03-17T01:15:00.000-08:00

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz draws a parallel between IT and the Electrical Industry to explain the the three phases that any technology goes through...

customization
standardization
utilization

SOA's killer app

2005-03-16T23:44:00.000-08:00

InfoWorld talks highly about Rearden Commerce's EBS (Employee Business Services).

Essentially, EBS is a container of application services with no vanilla version. By default, customers use EBS' application framework to whip together -- without coding -- browser-based purchasing applications tailored to their company's business rules, processes, and employee roles.

The result is a services marketplace that wraps itself around the identity and permissions of individual business users, automating, centralizing, and controlling purchases that in most organizations remain slapdash. Carriers' shipping prices can be compared side by side, air travel rules can be enforced at the user level, audio- and videoconferencers can get the best rates, and so on -- all through a unified Web app that runs on anything from a desktop to a smartphone.

Pervasive architectures

2005-03-16T23:36:00.000-08:00

Interesting article on Pervasive architectures : "Enterprise environments are being designed for anytime, anywhere access to company resources, apps, and data."

“It’s the death of the business day,” says Jeff Schulman, vice president of architecture at Gartner. “The old model was shutdown and batch catch-up; now it’s seven by 24. There’s a dynamism here that really pushes on our architectures. In real-time mode, there are responsiveness issues and issues around capacity.”
Schulman also claims that in this pervasive future, everything will be addressable and the state of everything will be fully known. “If there is this level of profound connectivity, from an architectural standpoint, there’s a very different level of managing resources, of understanding state, of process optimization, and even of governance,” he says. “And there’s lots of privacy and security issues to be wrestled with.”

How should enterprise architects prepare for this coming pervasive future? “Pervasive is a side effect of doing everything Web-exposed and middleware-driven,” CareGroup’s Halamka says. “My programmers these days are experts in the glue, which is what allows us to create what feels like an integrated product even though the parts may be very different.”

In other words, leverage a unified back end to serve multiple channels, devices, and formats.

Robots getting popular

2005-03-16T22:44:00.000-08:00

Hitachi unveils 'fastest robot' - Article that talks about the progress in robotics.

By 2007, it is predicted that there will be almost 2.5 million "entertainment and leisure" robots in homes, compared to about 137,000 currently, according to the United Nations (UN)

Virtual meetings

2005-03-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

Computerworld Article focusing on Centra's e-meeting, Documentum's eRoom, Groove networks' (now MS) Virtual Office - gains in productivity, saves money...

Centra has done a very nice job of capturing a familiar user model," O'Kelly says. "So if I'm used to facilitating meetings with groups of people, I find familiar concepts when using a tool like Centra -- like there's a podium, and there might be a seating chart, and people can raise their hands."

Skype hype

2005-03-15T23:47:00.000-08:00

Interesting interview with Skype CEO

Skype is growing extremely rapidly: We have 29 million users and are adding 155,000 users each day. Most of them run the software on their computers, but we
also have around 1.3 million Pocket PC users.