Future of Web Apps

blog posts

Shrink Wrapped Happiness (at a cost)

A set of sterilised crockery and cutlery is included in the cost of the service in this Uighur restaurant. 1 Yuan (0.12 Euro) buys you bacterial satisfaction since you ask.

Not sure any other culture reaches the dizzy heights of South Korea when it comes to bacterial paranoia and technical solutions to sterilise but lets see how China marches forwards.

Random pic of the week

Share This

IT Trends

Shared by Mark Whiting
I think the bigger risk is that people could, and have, designed poor data mining systems that do not actually pass the value intended. In the same whay that google search is not actually as good as we dream of it being, it is just good at dealing with a well optimised system, semantic data mining still quite subjective and can be SEOed so to speak.

3.Data Mining

What is it?

Mining data isn’t new but it’s becoming more universal because software to filter or analyse large volumes of data is becoming increasingly powerful. For example, around 2,000 résumés per day are sent to Fortune 500 companies in the US, with around 90% sent in by email or via company websites. As a result, companies are using word-scanning software to decide who’s worth seeing and who isn’t. Another example is Australia’s Centrelink, which uses what it calls a Job Seekers’ Classification Instrument to work out the probability that a claimant will become long-term unemployed and adjusts the help that’s made available to the claimant.

Opportunities:

Extracting information from large data sets or databases to create forecasts or predictions about future events or behaviour. Hence goods and services will be increasingly personalised to address the needs of micro-segments of the population.

Risks:

Data collected by one company or government department could be passed on to others without permission.

The story of One Thousand Paintings - "The number is the art is the limit is...

Shared by Mark Whiting
interesting projects though the guy is really stuck up

The story of One Thousand Paintings - "The number is the art is the limit is...
googletechtalks
38 min - Jul 12, 2008

Google Tech Talks July, 10 2008 ABSTRACT "One number, one painting - the number is the art is the limit is the price." Onethousandpaintings.com is a truly global art project that has received worldwide media coverage (BBC, Wired, BoingBoing, and many others). On May 30th and 31st 2006 alone, 322 paintings were sold - most likely the highest number of unique, handmade paintings sold on the internet within such a short time. Since then, close to 800 paintings have been shipped to 26 countries. In his talk, Marcel Salath, the creator of One Thousand Paintings, will tell the story behind the project that started as a thought experiment in the heart of Europe, and took him on a trip around the world, eventually bringing him to Mountain View. He'll talk about how the project started, the personal stories behind each number, developing a secondary re-sale market, and many other aspects at this intersection of art, technology, and marketing. This talk will be taped. Speaker: Marcel Salathé (Sala) Marcel Salathé (a.k.a. Sala) has a PhD in theoretical biology and is currently a research fellow at Stanford University. Most bloggers know him for his "webpages as graphs" applet that transformed millions of otherwise ugly webpages into beautiful graphs. His project onethousandpaintings.com has been a worldwide success with about 800 paintings sold in 26 countries, and was featured by BoingBoing, the BBC, Wired and many others. He recently moved from Zurich, Switzerland to San Jose, California.

This is How We Roll in India

Shared by Mark Whiting
In some place I was recently, I forget where, perhaps Belgim, I saw a number of people sitting cross legged on their moter scooters. It was pretty cool, they just were kidn of hanging out on top of them...

HOWTO trick McDonald's into serving you "breakfast" at lunchtime and vice-versa

Shared by Mark Whiting
These are the right guys for the job.

The future is the hacked now.

Casimir sez,

This is a video that illustrates a very simple food hack that anyone can do at McDonalds. Essentially, McDonalds employs the same oppressive menu rules as most fast food establishments and delis. You can't have breakfast food after 11am. And you can't have lunch food before that.

Attempting to undermine their arbitrary temporal laws of eating, we made a short video essay that documents an easy way to combine lunch and breakfast in spectacular futuristic (in the future, you'll be able to have whatever genre of meal at any time) fashion.

Fascinating in concept, but I don't know that I agree with calling any of this stuff "food" or a "meal." Link (Thanks, Casimir!)