What’s a man got to do to get some privacy around here?

While reading the TechCrunch I came across a strange story about a guy who is serving a three year prison sentence for impersonating the Moroccan king’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook. I did not understand why this is a crime at all, I mean we see kids impersonating a celebrity everyday on facebook here in North America with out any trouble. But that’s not why I found this story so strange for I don’t really know about the Moroccan policy and all, but how did the government got a hold of this guy?

My guess is that the government had some assistance from Facebook to identify this man. Especially after Facebook refused to comment specifically on the situation my suspicions turned up high. But why would Facebook even bother getting involved in this sort of situation at all? What’s in it for them?

Perhaps market penetration in Morocco? I don’t know but this really ticked me off that they would do such a thing if indeed they have.

As users I think we are too trusting. This sort of situations really proves me that companies are not looking out for us, but their own behinds.

If that’s is not the situation, another way of catching the guy might have been that the government actually recording all traffic all the time and just had to run a query on their archives.

Either way, so much for PRIVECY, unless I missed some other more legitimate way to find the IP address?

your blog, your resume

Seth Godin writs on his blog asking “why bother having a resume?” and makes few points about how a remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular person shouldn’t probably have a resume at all. He suggests instead an extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects. Other suggestions were a sophisticated project the employer can see or touch and/or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up.

This is not a bad idea but my question is how many employers are willing to hire someone with out having a look of a resume just based on someone’s blog or a single project? This also challenges the education dynamic. A person who barely made it high school might be the one writing the blogs that impressed the employer so would this be fair to others who spent most of their life in school trying to make their resume look good? where does this leave volunteer work and school participations? Also could one project be strong enough to show a person’s character, experience, education status and other factors a resume provides? I highly doubt it.

Also another thing a want to address from Seth’s blog is he says “here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that, “and boom, you’re out.” Well, if you don’t submit your resume my first thought is going to be, “Oh they’re missing a resume” boom, they’re out!

Seth concludes with:

Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for… those jobs don’t get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever.

How many of us (college students) are looking for a world-class job, a job people kill for? I don’t know about you but certainly not me. Think about it, what would be my chances of getting a job if I went on an interview and started my sentence with “I don’t have a resume but I’m an A+ student”, chances are zero!!

In another note, people like George Bush, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt probably don’t have resume and I couldn’t think of a situation that they would be needing one, but they sure do have a reputation that precedes them just the way Seth puts it.
So my thoughts are it all depends on the person, what they are looking for and what they have done in the past.

Sofonyas

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Nokia`s biggest threat Apple has been working closely with Google lately and it was just a matter of time before Nokia reaches out to other major player as a stop gap, of course who else but Microsoft, sort of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend“ move and I`m not sure why Robert Scoble found this deal surprising. Nokia has signed up to use Microsoft’s Silverlight platform for its S60 and S40 mobile devices as well as its Nokia Internet tablets. Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

“This is an important relationship on so many levels. Working with Nokia means we are easily able to reach a huge number of mobile users, including customers of all S60 licensees. This is a significant step in gaining broad acceptance for Silverlight and ensuring it is platform agnostic. This is critical since we want to make sure developers and designers don’t have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms,” said S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division.

This is not a bad move for Microsoft and I do agree with what S. Somasegar said, this does help Microsoft reach large number of customers that they would never be able to reach out to, but let`s face the fact, no collaboration with any company is going to put them ahead of their main competitor, Google, at least it`s not likely that it will happen any time soon.

First the Microsoft Yahoo deal and now this, clearly Microsoft is itching to accomplish their goal of taking the lead over Google.

With that being said, two questions end up unanswered, first, where does this leave Adobe (supporting both now but ultimately will end up going one way) and will we ever see Sliverlight on iPhones (Apple`s product which is working closely with Google) only time will tell.

 Sofonyas,

Make3D

While browsing through the TechCrunch, I came across this really cool technology called Make3D.
Make3D is an application that extracts 3-D models from 2-D images. The Make3D algorithm, developed by Stanford computer scientists, can take any picture (image) and create a three-dimensional model of its content, giving viewers access to the scene’s depth and a range of points of view. This amazing application can be used from enhancing pictures for online real estate sites to quickly creating environments for video games.

This makes the 3D modeling job very easy. Just look at the two videos below.
The first one shows the regular way people’ve been making 3Ds and the second one shows how a picture turns in to a 3D model instantly.

I just wonder how long it took them to make the algorithm.

Sofonyas,

Change!

No, this is not about Obama, his slogan or even politics for that matter, I’m talking about technological changes we’ve come to see over the years. I remember it like it was yesterday when I use to walk up to the TV to change the channel or flipping a cassette out of the tape player. If someone told me few years back I’d have hundreds of channels with out having a huge dish on top of my roof I would have thought that they were crazy. Now sitting in front of my blue-ray player, when I look back, the stuff I thought that was cool back in the days are so lame right now. This kind of makes me wonder if I will ever live to look at the iPhone the same way I see the rotary phone. I understand now why Gordon Moore predicted that technology would double up every 18 month on his Moore’s Law.
Robert Scoble mentions few of the things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us. The list looked kind of a bit funny and interesting to me so I decided to post it so here it goes.
1. Dialing a rotary phone.
2. Putting a needle on a vinyl record.
3. Changing tracks on an eight-track tape.
4. Shorthand.
5. Using a slide rule.
6. Using carbon paper to make copies.
7. Developing film/photos.
8. Changing the ball or ribbon on your Selectric Typewriter.
9. Getting off the couch to change the channels on your TV set.
10. Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set.
11. Changing the gas mixture on your car’s carburetor.

Couple more I thought of: Winding a watch and setting the timer on a VCR, let’s see if you guys can think of any more played out technologies.

Sofonyas,

Mashup: Good or Bad?

I found this article interesting when I was reading my feeds; it is posted on the Fred Wilson blog. What is mahsup? Mashup is originally referred to the practice in pop music particularly in hip-hop of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing song.

To create mashup song at first artist has to come up with idea (idea creation). Then simply choose two favorite track which are you want to mashup. Once you got the idea start cutting the selected song. And then start mixing selected song together to create a whole new track (obvious it is not that easy).

Check this site for how to create mashup- Guidelines.

The reason for mashup increasing rapidly is the growing blog culture of the internet and cheap remixing tools are making it easier than ever for djs to create mashups and share them with the world. Mashup is the product of internet where people easily able to create and upload it. But bloggers might be afraid of it according to copyright issues.

Lwarance lessig said that according to copyright law mashups are illegal, and increasingly, as record levels learn about mashup artists they are doing what their lawyers say that they have to do, which is to stop it and shut it down. The people producing mashup are furious. Mashups themselves no longer promote the work of the artist. Yet the existing regime of copyright says that that is absolutely obvious, that this is what you should do, and the claim of ‘they have a right to do this’ turns out to be very, very weak.

Every creative thing has a good side, and has a bad side. I think mashup is a creative idea where every artist has to spend huge amount of time to produce an attractive music or music video. Some of them are come out nicely done and some of them are really lethargic to watch or listen. But if someone really put on that good effort then sometime it is really nice to watch even actual artist would love to watch this. But the original artist and the true lover of the song might not like it unless they have control over it.

—Romiz

“Nokia n82”, could this be the next best thing in news journalism?

“Nokia n82”, could this be the next best thing in news journalism? I say so and here is why

Anyone who is not familiar with the Nokia n82, by just looking at it, might possibly think that it just another fancy phone. But that’s not quite true. There’s more to this phone than u might just think. The Nokia82 comes with software installed in it that lets the user upload a video reports to the news service’s video pages while taping it at the same time. The software that lets you broadcast live is called Mojo.

With the Nokia n82 you can go live with your life by streaming anytime, anywhere, right from your phone. You can be an eyewitness, capture first steps, or whip up your own streaming video blog.
Jeff Jarvis gives an excellent example in the below video regarding the Virginia tech tragedy. At the time of the incident if one of the students had this phone, the police would’ve known the exact location where the victims and the murder were, so the situation might have been prevented from turning the way it did.

I certainly think that this is a revolution to news journalism. With in few years I believe that all news would be going live from a phone captured by random people.

Sofonyas,

Addicted!!

Ok last night I was hanging out with some of my buddies, we had a bit of a party sort of thing, and yes alcohol was involved. Suddenly I excused my self, went upstairs and started checking the blogs and going through my Google reader. And that’s when it hit me how much of an addict I’ve become to this blogging life. I have to say, if there is a good enough reason to get me up at that time usually it would have to be a real big emergency, and trust me I’ve sat down and watched some real life action pass by but I wasn’t able to sit back and watch few blogs get away. Wow I seriously felt like a nerd and thought “Dave what have you done to me?” but I guess that’s the power of blogging. No wonder why 116 million blogs have been track down by Technorati (Internet search engine for searching blogs) to date. Anyway, the main reason I wanted to post this blog is because I wanted to know if I was the only one who’s became a blogging addict, so am I?..help a brotha out.

Sofonyas,

IPod Touch a letdown!?!

I don’t’ understand why people get all psyched up to get the iPod Touch for $399 considering the fact it lucks half capacity of a similar-sized  iPod Classic or iPod Nano provides.  And the $399 is only for a 16GB of flash memory, which happens to be the biggest you can get in this iPod model. This iPod looks exactly like an iphone but lacks some features like bluetooth and camera that iphone carries. It’s a bit hard to compare the IPod Touch with the classic one since it is made in an Iphone model. Though the iPod Touch neither looks nor acts anything like a traditional iPod, it does perform iPod functions. Fred touches this topic on his blog (A VC) roughly and gives about five reasons why he doesn’t like this iPod model.  He mentions few very simple letdowns and fails to go deeply to technical problems and so do I for I don’t own the gadget. But few deal breakers that Fred left unmentioned that I think worth mentioning are: missing edge, mail, link sharing, notes, calendar, bluetooth, volume buttons, maps, weather, stocks, a dock, or a built-in camera, also recently few owners of the IPod been crying foul over a display issues, though apple clamed that the issues are due to defective screens.

I don’t mean to hate but I just don’t see the reason of cloning a gadget with lesser features. Maybe it’s because I can’t get passed that price but I sure don’t think it’s worth buying an IPod Touch over the Iphone.

Sofonyas

A Shortage of Digital Coaches by Tony Elliott

After reading through all the blogs this week, I was somewhat in a dilemma on what to respond to, There was very little in what interested me and the biggest news this week was Apple’s announcement of their new MacBook Air. But I think enough people have commented on this new innovation and although it seems like a great thing for Apple it appears that a lot of users will be dissappointed because of the lack of a ethernet port and no DVD drive in it. However, Seth’s blog on the shortage of digital coaches did somewhat catch my eye or at least 1 comment. He said, “Here are three things that are true:
1. Digital technology, especially computers and cell phones, can dramatically increase productivity.” Although this may be true, IMHO the use of computers and cell phones also can decrease productivity. Despite all these advances in technology and how fast we are able to achieve the results, we are still not able to process this information any faster or what to do it with all of this information. David Allen in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity says that”says CIOs should focus more on individual accountability and personal behavior, and less on technology.” I think that even though we have the ability to access information so quickly and almost everywhere, we still need to learn to unscramble all of this information and be able to make good decisions. Its still human nature for individuals at work to abuse the computer for their own personal use (Cyberslacking). This type of behaviour is costing businesses in the U.S. about $85 billion a year according to Websense Inc. in 2002. How much is this costing businesses today? Is this really more productive?

Tony Elliott