XPOD is a prototype portable music player that can sense a user’s context — what she is doing, her level of activity, mood, etc. — and that to refine its playlist. The device monitors several external variables from a streaming version of the BodyMedia SenseWear to model the user’s context and predict the most appropriate music genre via a neural network.

German engineers are working on a new smart car that knows how to find empty parking spaces and park itself.

Parkmate, which is expected to be available from 2008, is part of a battery of technology being developed by Siemens VDO, one of the world’s major suppliers of in-car electronics.

In the blogosphere, pings are notifications sent by updated blogs to PingServers. A major issue recently has been unjustified pings, also known as Spings, sent by Splogs. Splogs have been discussed a lot recently, including an interesting thread on post piracy that Steve Rubel initiated on Micropersuasion.

The problem of splogs prompted us to analyze pings from weblogs.com, which publishes hourly pings as changes.xml. We have been collecting these pings over the last 4 weeks for a total of 40 million pings from around 14 million (so claimed) blogs. To begin with, we applied a language identification technique implemented by James Mayfield to identify language by fetching these blogs. As expected most of the pings were from blogs authored in English. But we were able to identify blogs from many other languages as well. For instance, charts below show a distribution of pings from blogs authored in Italian — over a day and over a week. Each bar denotes the number of pings per hour.

All times are in GMT; clearly Italian authored blogs display a specific blogging pattern.

In the next step we used our work on splog detection to detect splogs (and hence spings) among the english blogs. Our detection mechanism is close to 90% accurate. As shown in the charts below pings from blogs average around 8K per hour and those from splogs average around 25K.

Clearly almost 3 out of 4 pings are spings! Going back further to the source of these spings, we observed that more than 50% of claimed blogs pinging weblogs.com are splogs.

Based on the interestingness of this preliminary statistics, scope for further analysis and interest in the resulting dataset we decided to continuosly monitor the pingosphere. So, we now do it “live” on updated blogs published by weblogs.com(delayed by an hour), and have made it publicly available at http://memeta.umbc.edu. The site lists blogging patterns for many other languages, and compares splogs with blogs. All of our work is part of a larger project memeta, towards analyzing the content and structure of the blogosphere.

We hope our effort is a good complement to existing services (e.g., FightSplog, SplogReporter and SplogSpot) towards combating splogs. We currently publish only simple ping statistics on this site, but do stay tuned for fresh splog and classified blog dumps and much more!

UPDATE: Matthew Hurst from BlogPulse points us to an interesting analysis he has done on a day of weblogs.com pings.

As the size of the Web gets bigger and bigger, search engines such as Yahoo! and Google may be too general for building applications that focus on some particular domain of information. To solve this problem, Alexa provides a web search platform that allows people to define their own search engine.

Although you have to pay for the service, but it definitely looks promising. Alexa crawl works over 100 Terabytes of Web content spanning 4 billion pages and 8 million sites, and support a wide variety of types of content from the Web (jpgs, gifs, mp3s, movies. text/html, and even metadata). How does Alexa work?

(Source)

Here is what a smart doorknob can do.

“When you approach the door and you’re carrying groceries, it opens and lets you in. This doorknob is so smart, it can let the dog out but it won’t let six dogs come back in.

It will take FedEx packages and automatically sign for you when you’re not there. If you’re standing by the door, and a phone call comes in, the doorknob can tell you that ‘you’ve got a phone call from your son that I think you should take.”

This smart doorknob is part of a MIT research project called “Internet of Things” (see IHT). An interesting thing about this system is that it relies on the extensive usage of RFID tags. When it comes to RFID technology, some people are very worried, and some others are very excited.

Shanghai might be China’s business hub, but getting to a meeting on time has always been a problem because of the high demand for taxis. Starting this week, Shanghai residents can now hail a taxi using their mobile phones and a new wireless short message service (SMS).

The Shanghai Taxi Control Center has launched a “Booking Taxi Via Short Message” service to ease citizens’ transportation needs.

After citizens input their name, location, destination and starting time, and indicate the traffic details nearby, they only need to send the message to 96965. The control center will relay them with a message to confirm the booking and then send a taxi to the required place within 10 minutes.

Source: ChinaTechNews.com

Open Source software has increasingly grown in popularity and dominance, challenging the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. Both Industry and Academia have adopted Open Source Software like Linux, OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL and OpenOffice to replace or supplant commercial versions of Windows XP, Websphere, Oracle, DB2, and MS Office. This dominance will be seen to continue to grow in the coming years.

Giants like Google, Amazon, eTrade, and eBay use Open Source Software to run their web businesses/services. The tradeoff to paying royalties or license fees, is the availability of source code, which is closely scrutinized or safety tested, by these companies and then deployed. Thus, these companies no longer depend on licensed proprietary solutions.

Google Ads and the roaring profits made by Google in its last quarter have led to Google stocks jumping by around 50 dollars in less than a month. Online targeted advertising has been seen to be more effective and more companies are now investing in online advertising like Google Ads.

Open source software projects and their “profitability” have often been questioned and even dismissed as a fools errand. However now bighshots like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle amongst others seem to have formulated strategies to cope with Open Source. Venture captitalists have been pouring money into Open Source Projects — a sign that this is seen as next big thing. Companies dismissing Open Source or failing to adapt to it, risk losing their user base and affecting their longterm survivability.

Microsoft: Shared Source, Windows Live, Office Live

IBM: Open Source Acquisitions, Adoption of Open Source (support model)

Oracle: Free version of the Oracle database

Everyone wants a piece of the online-advertising pie. With the increasing growth of high-speed internet, people are growing to expect free services on the Internet. The success of XBox-live is a sign of things to come.

The availalbility of cheap/free software replacements for most of the popular commercial products will see further decline in the revenue for commercial products.

Software Companies seem to be realizing that in the coming decade, online software services will be a major source of revenue — search, ads, trading, gaming, and so on. The “free” Internet Browsers will be the gateways to the online world, while the stored PC programs will see a declining role.

CMU roboticist Daniel Wilson has apparently flipped and gone over to the other side. His new book reveals all:

Daniel H. Wilson, How To Survive a Robot Uprising : Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, 1 November 2005, Bloomsbury.

Wilson says “Any machine could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator.”

Here’s a story on Wilson and the book.

Yesterday I installed and played with the new ontology editor, SemanticWorks 2006, by Altova. I posted my 30 minutes user experience on my blog.

In summary, I think the software need some more work. Many functions are rough. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like. I think Altova did a great job in being the first commerical company to offer an ontology editor product.

Microsoft Shared Source Initiative

These new licenses represent a broad spectrum of approaches needed to facilitate an ever-growing, rich set of technologies for release.

The three licenses are:

• Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) — The Ms-PL is the least restrictive of the Microsoft source code licenses. It allows you to view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes. Under the Ms-PL, you may change the source code and share it with others. You may also charge a licensing fee for your modified work if you wish. This license is most commonly used for developer tools, applications, and components.

• Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) — The Ms-CL is a license that is best used for collaborative development projects. This type of license is commonly referred to as a reciprocal source code license and carries specific requirements if you choose to combine Ms-CL code with your own code. The Ms-CL allows for both non-commercial and commercial modification and redistribution of licensed software and carries a per-file reciprocal term.

• Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) — The Ms-RL is a reference-only license that allows licensees to view source code in order to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a Microsoft technology. It does not allow for modification or redistribution. This license is used primarily for technologies such as development libraries.

Paper presentations at CASCON 2005 started today. This annual event is sponsored by IBM Toronto Labs and IBM CAS in co-operation with National Research Council Canada. Initial impressions — a very good place to demonstrate/present work relevant to IBM.

CASCON 2005, the 15th annual international conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

Check out CASCON blog for information as it happens.

A few months back I had a discussion on an interesting concept initiated by our group, but was not yet public. Response from the person I was talking to was short — “We will uncloak soon”. He eventually did, and at the right time. This brings me to a interesting question — “What does it mean to uncloak on Web 2.0?”

A recent post we and others (here, here, here and here) made about Sphere – a new blog search engine based on initiation by Om Malik is an interesting example. Om, an A-List blogger now posts on yahoo blog search engine and how Sphere is better. Some readers would have noticed del.icio.us count at the bottom in our previous post. What was 3 then is now 47! Moreover it is (was) widely discussed on the blogosphere.

It’s all a result of Web 2.0. In this context the Blogosphere and Folksonomies. Both have been able to generate higher visibility and provide fresher content. You no longer have to wait for centuries before a traditional web search engine indexes them and find out what people were (! not are) talking about you. You know what is being said NOW — or rather as Technorati rightly puts it — We are in the The World Live Web.

Web 2.0 has then an important implication — there is a new way of uncloaking

• Initiate discussion on your product.
• Monitor Buzz (the key).
• Uncloak!

In the context of Sphere it’s when buzz is at the peak. One of the creators of Sphere, Tony Conrad says, they are still waiting and will uncloak next week. Is NOW the peak buzz — well, arguable. Are they waiting for the second peak following a trough — well may be, or are they waiting for the buzz to continue – well only time will tell.

Bottomline — Web 2.0 has made sure that the Web aspect is even more important and you know what is being said about you NOW. It’s not just about “discussions on the Web”, but also about “when?”. Hope Sphere Beta is uncloaked on time. That said, Technorati has been doing fairly well in the middle of all competition. Good job!