Category Archives: Web/Tech

Check out amAze

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I received an email this morning from Ofer Tziperman of Israeli company.  He’d read my post about Google’s new SMS service and sent me a note about his company’s amAze GPS service.  (He was amused that I used "amaze" in the title of my post).  I’ve not used amAze and my phone is not compatible with the service, but it looks like a very interesting application of the mobile GPS-based service I was writing about in the Google post.  If you’re interested in the service and want to know if it will work with your phone just take a look at the "Handset" page on their site, or you can also browse their message boards to see how others find the service.

Also, check out this PDF of a Financial Times article describing how LocatioNet is planning to build it’s business.  These three paragraphs from the article describe what I was envisioning re. the future of mobile advertising:

It (LocatioNet, ed.) has decided to distribute its local search and navigation application free and generate revenues via targeted advertisements and sponsorship integrated into the application.   Typically mobile navigation services are based on subscriptions.

For instance a chain of petrol stations is interested in giving its customers a branded version of the application. Similarly, mobile phone distributors see it as a way to maintain a customer relationship that lasts beyond the initial sale.

Locationet is also utilising the Yellow Pages model, based on revenue sharing for local search.

A key point here: amAze is free which means it stands a real chance of exploding the universe of mobile phone GPS users.  Think of it this way: would you use MapQuest or Google Maps if you had to pay for it?  Probably not.  Would Google be the monster it is if you had to subscribe to use it?  No way.  I’m not saying that LocatioNet will be the Google of the mobile phone GPS market, but I think their business model is basically what the winner in this market will use.  Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google becomes the Google of the GPS market, but until then it’s nice to see a service like amAze making a go of it.

For more info on Ofer and LocatioNet check out this interview at inbabble.com and this Q&A at Services Mobiles.

Google Continues to Amaze: Search From Your Phone

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Google has launched a service that allows you to send them a text message with a search phrase from your phone and then they send a text reply with the results.  Here are some examples:

  • I sent this text phrase: "pizza 27023" and within 10 seconds I had two text reply messages with pizza restaurants in the 27023 zip code, including their addresses and phone numbers.
  • I sent this text phrase: "weather winston-salem" and within seconds I received the current weather in Winston-Salem, including temperature, partly cloudy, humidity, wind speed and direction, and the temperature/rain forecast for the next three days.
  • I sent a text message with my address followed by "to" and then a destination address and within 10 seconds I had detailed directions sent back.  The directions are broken into 5 messages because there is a limited number of characters that each message can have.

Think about this for a second.  You’re trying to get from point "A" to point "B" and you aren’t sure of how to do it. You find the closest address and then text message that address, "to" and your destination and in seconds you have directions.  How cool is that.  Check out the information page for full details, but I can tell you that other search functions that are equally as cool include movies, flight status, stocks, translation from one language to another, currency conversion, and on and on.

Eventually I think that all mobile phones will be GPS-enabled or have some sort of ‘place recognition’ via triangulation of the tower signals and then you won’t even have to actually know where you are.  Then services like this will enable you to feed you information based on a query like "pizza restaurants within 2 miles" or "directions to 8800 Elm Street, somewhere, usa 22222".

This is the kind of stuff that makes my head want to explode.

Media Future?

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Faces of Faith in America, this year’s project for News21, a journalism initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, offers a glimpse of new media applications for tomorrow’s journalists.  I especially like the Data Road Trip which displays data about different statistical extremes on a map of the U.S.  For instance you can click on a county in Arkansas that has the highest per capita rate of divorce in the country and it pops up a window with a one paragraph overview, some stats and an embedded video story.  Very nice.

Found via Boing Boing.

So You Want to Put Your Google My Maps on Your Blog

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So you’re a geek like me and you’ve started using Google’s My Maps function and you think, "Gosh darnit I want to put one of my maps on my blog" but you don’t see one of those convenient "embed" buttons like they have on YouTube and other Web 2.0 sites.  What to do?

Well, you can visit My Maps Plus, sign up for a free account and before you know it you have your embed code.  One caveat: when you update your Google Map you need to go back to My Maps Plus and update it there too, but until Google adds the embed feature themselves I think this is the best you’ll be able to do.

Here’s an example on Triad Eats, a new blog we’re developing to subsidize our rather ludicrous eating out habits.  FYI, if you’d like to be a correspondent for Triad Eats just shoot me an email at jon.lowder AT gmail.com.  We don’t pay but if you feel like sharing your opinion on area restaurants we’d love to hear from you.

Fun With Maps

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One of the things I do for my day job is manage the sales of sponsorships, exhibit space and advertising for a non-profit professional society.  For a variety of reasons I’m often asked where our customers’ offices are located.  For instance my client might have a local event and want to target companies in that region for sponsorships.  Typically I just do a search of my database by zip code or state, which works fine for areas I’m very familiar with, but it’s tough for me to get a sense of how many companies we deal with in an area I’m not familiar with.  For instance I’m very familiar with the northeast corridor of the US so I don’t have a problem pulling the data together very quickly for a Philadelphia event, but I’m not at all familiar with the western US so I’m not at all sure if a company in Calabasas is a good prospect for a local event in San Francisco. 

Yesterday I decided to take some time and use Google Maps’ new My Maps feature and load in my vendor database. Note: I wouldn’t do this if you couldn’t make the map "private" so that it can’t be searched or found by others, but I can share the page with whomever I want which makes it a good collaborative tool with my client.  Since there are several hundred records in my database I decided to input only the exhibitors from this year’s conference to see if it was worth the effort.  After putting in the 60+ companies I looked at the result and was amazed to see how much it changed my perspective.  Not only did it give me a good sense of how my exhibitors were distributed, but it allowed me to zoom in on a city and click on the little balloons for each company and see who was in Washington or Philly or wherever.  Very cool.

I did a little more playing around and found out that I could download the map to view in Google Earth.  That caused me to remember an article in Business 2.0 about a company that allows you to "mashup" your own data with Google Maps via a free service called Geocommons.  I went to Geocommons.com and signed up for a free account, and then tried to upload a file but found that it had to be in KML format which I know nothing about (i.e. I was in over my head).  So I did a search on KML and found a website called batchgeocode.com that will take data from an Excel spreadsheet or any tab-delimited file and convert it to KML.  I used the site to convert my vendor data to KML and then opened it in Google Earth.  Voila, all of my vendors are now mapped on Google Earth and I can zoom in and click on the little icon and see all the contact information right there.  VERY cool and I didn’t have to actually type in all the data.

I’m sure there are applications for this that I haven’t even imagined, but if you give me enough time I’m sure I can find something totally ridiculous to do with it.  If nothing else I’m good at figuring out how to quickly turn the useful into the inane.

Rule the Web

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Mark Frauenfelder, he of BoingBoing, has written what I consider to be the most indispensable books I’ve purchased in a long time.  Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet — Better, Faster, Easier is the book I’ve often dreamed of writing, a practical guide to all the useful stuff online.  I can hear you saying, "How useful can a book about the web be?  Won’t it be out of date by the time you get it?"  I’d probably have agreed with you in the past, but having been an avid reader of BoingBoing for years I had confidence that this would be a worthwhile buy and upon skimming through it this week I can tell you it’s a great resource.  A couple of points:

  • Obviously the book will be dated in the not-too-distant future, but that just means I can look forward to updated editions. In the interim there’s a companion website, ruletheweb.net, that provides updates, corrections, video, etc.  Awesome!
  • Amazingly this book references Twitter which became all the rage with web geeks just a couple of months ago.  That just blows my mind.
  • Chapters include:
    1. Creating and Sharing
    2. Searching and Browsing
    3. Shopping and Selling
    4. Health, Exercise and Sports
    5. Media and Entertainment
    6. Travel and Sightseeing
    7. Work, Organization and Productivity
    8. Communication
    9. Toolbox
    10. Protecting and Maintaining
    11. Tips from My Favorite Bloggers
  • I love how within the chapters there are sub-categories and then within those Frauenfelder utilizes a Q&A format to address specific issues.  My favorite example so far is in the first chapter, Creating & Sharing, under the sub-category of "Photography and Video."  The question is "What’s the best way to share and store my videos online?"  Frauenfelder doesn’t like YouTube because of the poor video quality so he recommends signing up for a free blogging account at Vox.com and hosting your video there.   Each video can be up to 50 MB (compared to 10 MB for YouTube) which allows you to share much higher video quality.  FYI, Vox is a Six Apart product as is TypePad which is what I use for this blog so I’m kind of embarassed that I didn’t already know this.  For video files greater than 50 MB he recommends Internet Archive, but he points out the catch that you can’t copyright anything hosted there.  Fec and I were talking just last week about the lousy video hosting choices out there and then, "Voila!" I come across this great tip. 

I’m telling you, if you spend any amount of time online this is a GREAT resource.

Fun With Photos at Picnik.com

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I read about this free photo editing site called Picnik and decided to give it a try. Below is a picture of our dog Arthur in it’s original format and then after I had some fun with it at Picnik. If you have pictures you want to edit and don’t want to spend a pile on Photoshop and don’t like the free photo editing software on your computer (if you’re using a PC you probably have Microsoft Digital Image Starter Edition on your PC), then you should give this site a try.  Easy to use, fast and can be ported to your Flickr account if you have one.

Arthurcropped_2   
Arthurcroppedshopped_3

Let Customers Promote You by Marketing Themselves

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Last month I traveled to France with my family and we stayed with some
other family members and some family friends.  One of those friends was
Helene Blowers the Public
Services Technology Director for the Public Library of Charlotte &
Mecklenburg County.  Helene maintains the blog LibraryBytes.com which
is a great resource for anyone who’s interested in the applications of
evolving online technologies and services.

Recently Helene gave a presentation at the ALA 2007 conference and she focused it on one slide in her presentation that said the following:

The best way to get customers to market your brand is to allow them to promote you (the Library) by marketing themselves.

All you have to do is substitute "your company" for "the Library" and
this statement is applicable to just about any business.  Many elite
brands figured out long ago how to help their customers promote
themselves and by extension the brands simply by putting their logo on
items.  People who buy high-end items want the world to know that they
can afford said items so they want the brand symbol to be prominent.
Back in the 70s that meant wearing shirts with the Lacoste crocodile
and in the 80s it was the Polo pony player.  What Helene is talking
about, however, is deeper and is specific to the world of Web 2.0:

For me, this is really what web 2.0 is all about. Tools
that allow
users to express themselves, participate in the conversation, and
celebrate and showcase their individual talents. So in looking at web
2.0 and the potential that they hold as marketing tools, it’s important
to realize that "the library" is really not about us (aka the library,
it’s staff, and services); it’s about our community. And what better
way to market to your community and create a sense of ownership then by
letting your community members use your brand to celebrate and market themselves.

While you might think this only applies to companies that provide web
2.0 services, companies like YouTube, Flickr and Yahoo, it really
doesn’t.  Helene’s library doesn’t create Web 2.0 applications but it
does use them to help their end customer.  Your company can probably do
the same, and here are a couple of "off the top of my head" ideas to
demonstrate how:

  • A restaurant could use a service like Flickr to have a t-shirt design contest and have customers create design ideas, enable them to show off their designs to friends and family, and prompt them to have their friends and family vote on the design.  It would make for some great word of mouth marketing and announcing the winner would be a natural PR opportunity. 
  • A small company can create its own channel on YouTube
    and have customers submit advertising ideas for your company.  This is
    basically stealing a concept from a few Fortune 500 companies that hosted their own ad contests, and now the evolution of YouTube and like services allows any company, no matter how small, to do the same.  Of course the company should do the same things as they did with the first idea (invite family and friends to view and vote) and it also has built in PR opportunities.

Your first step should be subscribing to LibraryBytes.  Helene knows what she’s talking about.

Cross posted on LowderEnterprises.com

Why I Love My Web Apps or The Upstairs AC is Fried Again

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Our house has two AC units: one for the main floor and one of the upstairs, which was an attic that was converted to more living space some time before we bought the house money pit.  The upstairs AC went out last year and it just went out again yesterday which means that when the AC company gets out here this week (HUGE wait list for service) we’ll probably be paying for a new unit.  In the meantime my office is a sauna so I’ve shut down my computer and am working away on my wife’s computer.  In the past this would have been problematic, but about 90% of my work is now done on web apps that I can access from any computer connected to ye internet.  Makes the sting of our dying AC unit a little easier to take.

Oh, by the way, in the span of one hour yesterday afternoon I found out that our AC wasn’t working, our microwave (three years old) died and our home phone started acting up (seems to be fixed now).  Still trying to figure out when I walked under the ladder.

Comment on a Blog and Help Type a Book

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There’s an initiative afoot to kill two birds with one stone: secure websites and get a book written in the process.  Here are the details from CNN:

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a way to
enlist people across the globe to help digitize books every time they
solve the simple distorted word puzzles commonly used to register at
Web sites or buy things online.

The word puzzles are known as
CAPTCHAs, short for "completely automated public Turing tests to tell
computers and humans apart." Computers can’t decipher the twisted
letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated
programs are using the Web sites…

Instead of wasting time typing in random letters and numbers, Carnegie
Mellon researchers have come up with a way for people to type in
snippets of books to put their time to good use, confirm they’re not
machines and help speed up the process of getting searchable texts
online…

Many large projects are under way now to digitize books and put them
online, and that’s mostly being done by scanning pages of books so that
people can "page through" the books online. In some cases, optical
character recognition, or OCR, is being used to digitize books to make
the texts searchable.

But von Ahn said OCR doesn’t always work on
text that is older, faded or distorted. In those cases, often the only
way to digitize the works is to manually type them into a computer.

Von
Ahn is working with the Internet Archive, which runs several
book-scanning projects, to use CAPTCHAs for this instead. Internet
Archive scans 12,000 books a month and sends von Ahn hundreds of
thousands of files that are images that the computer doesn’t recognize.
Those files are downloaded onto von Ahn’s server and split up into
single words that can be used as CAPTCHAs at sites all over the
Internet.

If enough users decipher the CAPTCHAs in the same way, the computer will recognize that as the correct answer…

Von Ahn approached the Internet Archive to get help in developing the
new system, but it has not been put into use yet. Theoretically, von
Ahn said the new book-based CAPTCHAs could be used in place of any
CAPTCHA currently on the Web.