"nokia" entries

Four short links: 26 February 2014

Four short links: 26 February 2014

Library Box, Data-Driven Racial Profiling, Internet of Washing Machines, and Nokia's IoT R&D

  1. Librarybox 2.0fork of PirateBox for the TP-Link MR 3020, customized for educational, library, and other needs. Wifi hotspot with free and anonymous file sharing. v2 adds mesh networking and more. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Chicago PD’s Using Big Data to Justify Racial Profiling (Cory Doctorow) — The CPD refuses to share the names of the people on its secret watchlist, nor will it disclose the algorithm that put it there. […] Asserting that you’re doing science but you can’t explain how you’re doing it is a nonsense on its face. Spot on.
  3. Cloudwash (BERG) — very good mockup of how and why your washing machine might be connected to the net and bound to your mobile phone. No face on it, though. They’re losing their touch.
  4. What’s Left of Nokia to Bet on Internet of Things (MIT Technology Review) — With the devices division gone, the Advanced Technologies business will cut licensing deals and perform advanced R&D with partners, with around 600 people around the globe, mainly in Silicon Valley and Finland. Hopefully will not devolve into being a patent troll. […] “We are now talking about the idea of a programmable world. […] If you believe in such a vision, as I do, then a lot of our technological assets will help in the future evolution of this world: global connectivity, our expertise in radio connectivity, materials, imaging and sensing technologies.”

Four questions about Microsoft with Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley on what’s on the horizon for Microsoft in 2012.

Long-time Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley tells us what to expect with Windows 8, Metro design guidelines, and the Kinect SDK for Windows.

Open, closed, then “open,” but not really

A look at Symbian's on-again, off-again history with open source.

Symbian, once Nokia's flagship smartphone OS, has had a rocky road recently. It looks like its on-again/off-again open source saga is finally coming to a closed ending.

Open, closed, then "open," but not really

A look at Symbian's on-again, off-again history with open source.

Symbian, once Nokia's flagship smartphone OS, has had a rocky road recently. It looks like its on-again/off-again open source saga is finally coming to a closed ending.

Four short links: 14 February 2011

Four short links: 14 February 2011

Vesting Incentives, Camera Hacks, iPad Longform Saviour?, and Bogus Science

  1. Stephen Elop is a Flight Risk (Silicon Beat) — a foresight-filled 2008 article that doesn’t make Nokia’s new CEO look good. A reminder to boards and CEOs that option vesting schedules matter. (via Hacker News)
  2. CHDK — Canon Hack Development Kit gives point-and-shoot Canon digital camera new features like RAW images, motion detection, a USB remote, full control over exposure and so on. (via Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 Mod)
  3. The Atavist – iPad app for original long-form nonfiction (what used to be called “journalism”). (via Tim O’Reilly)
  4. Why Most Published Findings are False (PLoS Medicine) — as explained by John D. Cook, Suppose you have 1,000 totally ineffective drugs to test. About 1 out of every 20 trials will produce a p-value of 0.05 or smaller by chance, so about 50 trials out of the 1,000 will have a “significant” result, and only those studies will publish their results. The error rate in the lab was indeed 5%, but the error rate in the literature coming out of the lab is 100 percent!.

ePayments Week: How to steal coffee from your friends

Starbucks skips security, Visa wants a cut of those Smurfberries, and Nokia's CEO sets a fire.

The stakes may be low, but the weaknesses in Starbucks' mobile app highlight the trade-offs between security and convenience. Also, Visa buys a virtual goods platform and Nokia won't go quietly.

Four short links: 4 February 2010

Four short links: 4 February 2010

Personal Ad Preferences, Android Kernel, EC2 Deconstructed, Symbian Opened

  1. Google Ad Preferencesmy defaults look reasonable and tailored to my interest. Creepy but kinda cool: I guess that if I have to have ads, they should be ones I’m not going to hate. (via rabble on Twitter)
  2. Android and the Linux Kernel — the Android kernel is forked from the standard Linux kernel, and a Linux kernel maintainer says that Google has made no efforts to integrate. (via Slashdot)
  3. On Amazon EC2’s Underlying Architecture — fascinating deconstruction of the EC2 physical and virtual servers, without resorting to breaking NDAs. (via Hacker News)
  4. First Full Open Source Symbian Release (BBC) — source code will be available for download from the Symbian Foundation web site as of 1400GMT. Nokia bought Symbian for US$410M in 2008 (for comparison, AOL bought Netscape for $4.2B in 1999 but the source code tarball had been escape-podded from the company a year before the deal closed). This makes Symbian more open than Android, says the head of the foundation: “About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.” (quote from Wired’s story).

The War For the Web

It is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today. If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects. We're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

User interfaces for AR

There is a risk that talk about haptic interfaces and heads up displays for AR will seem like just hype, and certain industry participants fear that over promising and under-delivering could send AR in the same direction as Virtual Reality went a decade ago: into oblivion. That said, new ways of interacting with digital data on the real world are possible and not hype to those who work on them. To appreciate the full potential of new user interaction for AR, a test drive is valuable.