Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

A Guide to Twitter

“What is Twitter?” People still keep asking me this, 5 years after Twitter was founded (I joined mid-2009). This “guide” will be my answer from now on. Just read this if you want my understanding of what Twitter is. So what is Twitter? Is it… …a celebrity medium? Charlie Sheen is the latest addition to [...]

Platforms, innovation and Nokia

There’s yet again a lot of silliness in the air regarding the future of Nokia. I don’t have any idea what will happen tomorrow, but it probably can be a decisive point on how well I can live when I retire (I guess a lot of my state-run retirement funds are in Nokia). This week Elop’s [...]

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas [...]

Facebook’s power grab of the social web

Seems like Facebook is teh new evil. The new Microsoft of the nerd epic. The biblical mark of the beast, the Windows-logo, has been replaced by Facebook’s like-button on a website. But seriously. Facebook’s grab of their users is getting quite out of hand. Exposing more and more of stuff that could be argued to [...]

Social web for the long-term

Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, [...]

The iPhone as Human-World Interface

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] [...]

GHG Emissions now on Google Earth™

The European Commission’s  Joint Research Centre has developed a high resolution digital view of man-made green house gas (GHG) emissions for any 10 km x 10 km area in the world. Scientists from the JRC Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) have made it possible to visualize the distribution of GHG emissions all over the world at local [...]

One reason I don’t like Google Chrome on the Mac

In my continuous drive to “pimp” my Mac experience, I use this application switcher called “LiteSwitch.” It hasn’t been updated in years, but it still works and amongst some other cool features, it allows me to see (and manipulate) all running processes, including the hidden ones (which I choose to hide on a case-by-case basis). [...]

Changing markets – OS opportunities in retrospect

Whether or not to design a new OS is probably the wrong question to ask at this point. Gruber says that hardware makers should strongly consider going the Apple route and design their OS and hardware combined. I think that the iPhone vs. any other mobile OS battle, and any other standards-battle really, proves that [...]

Google’s Building Maker and the importance of fun

I’m starting to think that I’m wayy too interested in maps and geographical coordinates. Things like Google Maps and GPS just make me want to make something great out of all the information we have lying around and put in a map context. I think this is also the reason behind all the location based [...]

RSS is far from dead, long live web feeds

Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS  is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme. This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. [...]

How to make the Browser a more Efficient OS

Browsers are not ready to be OSs

Summary of visit to Silicon Valley

Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there. UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies. Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the [...]

Theory: Why No One Cares about Video on the Internet

Online video suffers from a lack of success-stories, being too bandwidth-intensive, being too expensive and time-consuming to work with, too immersive, intrusive, and non-indexable by search-engines

With Virtualization, does hardware simply no longer matter?

With Google OS recently having been announced, which is supposed to integrate flawlessly with Macs and Windows, assumably Android, as well as being designed for Netbooks, I wonder if Intel, with it’s multi-core processors, has not created a situation where nothing else matters, hardware-wise, except to have a powerful enough processor? In other words, have hardware-manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, and to some extent, Apple simply become irrelevant?