Visual Search engine SearchMe
SearchMe.com has had a couple of updates since I last saw it in action. It now has a feature to search online videos and another that creates “stacks” for bookmarking your favourite search results.
SearchMe.com is one of the better visual search tools I’ve seen on the web and the media search options are one of the best user experiences for finding videos & pictures I’ve come across.
Posted By Shane Williamson
Apple iPhone 1 year old – a user’s year of experience.
Will Park over at IntoMobile picked up a shiny new Apple iPhone 20 minutes after they were originally released to the world a year ago.
Park has a nice balanced user review of the iPhone 1 year on.
Posted By Shane Williamson
I attended the HTC Touch Diamond launch in Australia yesterday and was impressed that one device could pull so many Australian press and Bloggers. The much touted iPhone killer was impressively demonstrated during the presentation, but the timing of their release of the product so near to the Apple 3G iPhone was a pachyderm sized headache for the HTC launch crew during the day.
After the demonstration the Q&A session got into full swing except for the occasional stupid question like Peter Blasina of Channel 7 asking why it didn’t have GPS after they had just demonstrated it, most questions fell into a pattern of comparison between the HTC product and the upcoming 3G iPhone.
It was blatantly obvious that the HTC, Telstra & Microsoft reps had not been prepared properly for dealing with iPhone questions. For instance, one poignant question to the Telstra rep, Ross Fielding, queried how Telstra would position the HTC Touch Diamond alongside the Apple iPhone, his response was “We are not here to talk about the iPhone”. Fielding clearly failed to address the issue by choosing to dismiss a very important question. How do you expect users to understand the benefits of an iPhone comparable device without constructively positioning your product against the competition.
HTC’s failure with this device in the Australian market may come down to ignoring the bleeding obvious. The Apple iPhone has a massive marketing engine behind it especially with the three major Telcos all selling the device. As a competitor you must position yourself clearly to potential customers so they understand why they should choose your product over others.
Very sorry to hear that the HTC Touch Diamond will only be available via Telstra, which doesn’t leave consumers choice of carrier.
HTC Australia Touch Diamond site
Posted By Shane Williamson
The June edition of Total Telecom (http://www.totaltele.com/) is out and there is a great article on Mobile social networking.
The article has some great stats on mobile subscribers in European countries and their usage of social networks via mobiles. Whilst the focus is still on ease of use by some of the major players, it will be interesting to see if the 3G iPhone will impact the usage of these services with its great user experience.
Total Telecom is a great free e-magazine for all things global telecommunications. They do a great job of including news from all parts of the globe (including an article on Australia in this issue).
Head over to Total Telecom to subscribe – http://www.totaltele.com/Subscribe.aspx
Posted By Shane Williamson
What does a Petaflop of computing power do for you?
Just ask the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, as they have announced that they will be using IBM’s Roadrunner super computer to model the extraordinary complexity of the US’s stockpiled nuclear weapons systems.
Yes that’s right, the world’s fastest super computer is being used to simulate nuclear weapon effectiveness so the US government doesn’t have to explode a real one. Imagine this amount of power in SecondLife!
When it’s not creating virtual mushroom clouds (80% of its processing time) the Petaflop beast will be able to used for other more productive work such as tackling global warming or the mathematical reasons as to why bees can fly.
So what does a Petaflop comparatively give you?
A “flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second or million billion operations per second.
To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.
Lots of laptops. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today’s fastest laptop computers. You would need a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high to equal Roadrunner’s performance.
Today, just three of Roadrunner’s 3,456 Tri-blade units have the same power as the 1998 fastest computer. A complex physics calculation that will take Roadrunner one week to complete, would have taken the 1998 machine 20 years to finish.
Roadrunner geek facts:
- Roadrunner is the world’s first hybrid supercomputer
- 1 rack of the Roadrunner system = 1000 standard desktop PCs
- Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron™ chips and 12,960 PowerXCell 8i processors. The Opteron processors handle standard processing such as file system I/O. The PowerXCell 8i processors accelerate mathematical and CPU-intensive processing.
- Two PowerXCell 8i-based blade servers (IBM BladeCenter® QS22) and one AMD-based blade (IBM BladeCenter LS21) are integrated into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration.
- The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blade units, each of which can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 gigaflops).
- Its 10,000 connections—both InfiniBand® and Gigabit Ethernet—require 57 miles of fiber optic cable.
- The system has 98 terabytes of memory
- Weighs 500,000 pounds
- Housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet
So anyone want to guess how long till we see a Petaflop on a mobile?? 😉
US Department of Energy’s press release
IBM’s Deep Computing site (in case you want to buy one…)
Posted by Shane Williamson
Looking for a mobile social network?
Fierce Mobile Content has some nice reviews of 5 up and coming mobile social networks.
Interesting to see the differences in the various networks, but the uptake of location based services is a growing trend amongst them.
Posted By Shane Williamson
Mobile’s with media projectors
Looks like a Chinese mobile manufacturer called CKING has developed a commercial mobile with a projector built into it. Very interesting to see this becoming a reality as it was only a year ago we were hearing about the small projector devices being developed.
Intomobile has further pictures and details on the device.
Posted By Shane Williamson
Polaroid Pogo – inkless mobile printing
I’ve been waiting for the first commercial ZINK inkless printing product to appear and it looks like the Polaroid PoGo is the first. This system will give mobile users the ability to print their pictures as soon as they take them.
From their website…. “Polaroid PoGo™ – short for Polaroid-on-the-go – is a pocket-sized, inkless digital photo printer that produces full-color photos wirelessly from cell phones and via PictBridge from digital cameras.
The full-color digital photos are created without ink cartridges or ribbons using ZINK Photo Paper™, keeping the printer to about the size of a deck of cards. The paper is a durable material that contains colorless cyan, yellow and magenta dye crystals. Heat activation brings photos to life, colorizing ZINK™ dye crystals, so digital photos can be shared instantly.”
The Polaroid Pogo will be available on July 6th in the USA (Bestbuy www.bestbuy.com ) I’ll keep an eye out for when and if, it hits Australian shores.
The Polaroid PoGo website – http://www.thenewinstant.com/index.cfm
Posted By Shane Williamson
Great mobile user interface design resource Wiki
Just stumbled onto this great mobile user interface design resource Wiki at Little Springs design.
The site states “This wiki aims to be the *authoritative resource for all things related to the art and science of mobile user interface design.”
Linkage: http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/index.php/Main_Page
Posted By Shane Williamson
Mobile numbers to double in 5 years
IntoMobile has a post about the CEO of Ericsson claiming that there will be 6.5 billion mobile subscriptions by 2013.
Even more impressive is the CEO’s statement that 60% would be mobile broadband connections. Of course it’s anyone’s guess as to what percentage of these will be using what type of mobile technology 3G or 4G or …., but the largest portion of these devices will be in both China & India. This will have a huge influence on the development of devices and focus on web services for these specific countries.
Posted By Shane Williamson
Universal Convergence 