The World, Filtered*

Manfrotto ModoPocket
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/003412.php
 
"Billed as the "World's Smallest Tripod," the ModoPocket is actually a
quadrapod, but definitely just plain tiny: 1.5 x 2.5 x 1.25 inches and 2
oz. Mostly I have been using it to take indoor group photos with the
self-timer, using face recognition to trigger the shutter when I jump into
the group. Shoot it again? Much easier to repeat the composition than if
the camera is propped on a book and/or tilted with a coin (either way,
that method often results in a photo that includes the table in the shot).
The ModoPocket simplifies these tasks, makes them more easily repeatable,
and provides good stability. The photos posted on Amazon show how easily
it tilts up or down, or turn it 90 degrees and it tilts side-to-side. It
also folds very thin (0.25 inches), so it can be left permanently attached
to the camera. In addition to shooting, I use mine as a work stand while I
edit photos in the camera, and use it for easier viewing and
huddling-around-the-camera (aka "chimping")."
 
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2 Via Cloudal (http://www.coudal.com/)
 
The Annual Hajj Pilgrimage
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/photos/2008/12/017673.html
 
"Islam requires that all Muslims who are financially and physically able
to perform the hajj at least once in their lifetime. The pilgrimage is
supposed to cleanse Muslims of their sin. The hajj begins and ends in the
holy city of Mecca, the birthplace of the 7th century Prophet Mohammed and
the site of Islam's holiest shrine, the Kaaba. Pilgrims on Monday, joined
in a feast of freshly slaughtered sheep, goats and camels at a huge tent
city in Mina, a desert valley east of Mecca. Muslim tradition says it was
at Mina, 3 miles from Mecca, that the devil tried to tempt Abraham to
disobey God by refusing to sacrifice his son. Hordes of pilgrims dressed
in their white robes streamed across Mina valley Monday toward three walls
symbolizing the devil known as the Jamarat, chanting "at thy service, my
God, at thy service." The massive crowds streamed through a four-story
platform the size of an airport terminal built around the walls, and each
pilgrim stoned the largest wall with pebbles collected earlier on the
nearby rocky plain of Muzdalifah. They will return on each of the final
two days of the five-day pilgrimage, which ends Wednesday, to stone all
three walls. -- associated press (18 images)"
 
&
 
Bulgarian Squat Shots
http://www.polarinertia.com/dec08/squat01.htm
 
"In the late 80's, private ownership of production was legalized in
Bulgaria. Among the first businesses to appear were these small "Squat
Shops," operated out of floor-level cellar windows. Despite more
legitimate storefront space becoming available, these small portals
remained operational and lucrative - miniature convenience stores catering
to the cigarette fix of the passing pedestrian or the midday thirst of
those waiting on bus stops, for which patrons have no objection to
stooping to street level. An idiosyncratic, now common element of the
Bulgarian capital, over time the shops have evolved elaborate displays,
framing the small street level openings with bottles of alcohol, coffee,
and cartons of cigarettes, often in eye-catching bright colors."
 
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Microsoft releases toolkit for reusing SharePoint portlets
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/15/Microsoft_releases_toolkit_for_reusing_SharePoint_portlets_1.html
 
"Microsoft has released a tool that allows developers to reuse data and
mini-applications from SharePoint-based portals on rival portal software
that otherwise would not be natively interoperable with SharePoint, the
company said.
 
The WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) Toolkit for SharePoint
provides sample code for producing WSRP-conformant data from SharePoint
lists and libraries, according to a blog post on the Microsoft SharePoint
Team Blog."
 
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WorldHum
http://www.worldhum.com/
 
The independent travel magazine WorldHum was bought last year by the
travel channel. They just released the 3.0 version of the site. Its
worth taking a look at.
 
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At 85, More Peaks to Conquer and Adventures to Seek
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/sports/othersports/16beckey.html?_r=1&ref=sports
 
The New York Times today has a profile on the prolific climber and
adventurer Fred Beckey. When I started climbing 30 years ago Beckey was
already a legend and, to my eyes, old. He is still going.

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London Shop Fronts
http://londonshopfronts.tumblr.com/
 
A simple idea well executed. A photographic collection of London shop
fronts.
 
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40th Anniversary of "Mother of all demos"
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/40th-anniversary-of-mother-of-all-demos.html
 
"Today is the 40th anniversary of what came to be known as "The Mother of
All Demos", Doug Engelbart's presentation to the Fall Joint Computer
Conference in San Francisco. In this one 90 minute presentation he showed,
in working form, for the very first time all of the following
technologies:

• The mouse

• Graphical user interface with point and click of objects

• Intermingling of text and graphics within a document, styling of text in a document

• Hypertext and linking between documents

• Remote collaboration plus videoconferencing

 
That's a pretty astonishing list. It basically described the landscape of
computing for the following decades, presaging things like desktop
publishing and the world wide web. And some things, like the remote
collaboration and videoconferencing, we are still struggling to do well
today. The fact that they were able to pull it off with a home-made modem
forty years ago is amazing. Remember, this wasn't a simulation, this was
working hardware and software being shown in real time.
 
This page at Stanford has video of the full 90 minute demo, broken into
chunks. This is the highest quality version I've seen."
 
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Oh, Great: New York Times (NYT) Online Business Falling Apart Now, Too
http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/oh-great-new-york-times-nyt-online-business-falling-apart-now-too
 
"We're sorry about the stream of New York Times posts today, but the
company keeps making news. At the UBS conference this afternoon, NYT
Digital head Martin Nisenholtz said online display advertising on the
company's sites is plummeting."
 
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Core77 "Shoot Your Inspiration" Photography Contest
http://www.core77.com/blog/events/shoot_your_inspiration_international_photo_competition_launches_today_12060.asp
 
"What inspires you? What thought, object, vista, event or person has moved
you more than any other? To celebrate the launch of the international
BraunPrize 2009, Braun and Core 77 invite you to share your most inspiring
images and stories with the world by entering a special photo competition.
Photos can be of objects, people, or environments; they can be artistic
gestures or graphic messages. Use your camera as a lens or as a
paintbrush, as a tool for revealing, informing, or provoking. But whatever
you submit, make sure it has the power to make an emotional connection
with others."
 
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Android Developer Meetup @ Fast Company
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/lynne-d-johnson/digital-media-diva/events-android-developer-meetup-fast-company
 
"Medialets, an advertising solution and analytics mobile company, has
announced the first New York City Android Developer Meetup to be hosted at
Fast Company.
 
Thirty of New York City's top Android developers will speak about their
experiences and show off their applications at the event, which takes
place December 16, 2008, from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. at the Fast Company
offices. The best apps will be featured on FastCompany.com"
 
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You Really Can't Hide From Google Street View Anymore
http://mashable.com/2008/12/09/street-view-doubles-coverage/
 
"While Google has been tightening its belt in some areas, attempting to
photograph every square inch of the world for its Street View product
doesn't appear to be one of them. The company pushed out a massive update
today, doubling the amount of terrain covered in the US.
 
In addition to incorporating street level photos from Memphis, Birmingham,
and Charleston, Google added photos from several whole states that
previously hadn't been touched: Maine, West Virginia, and North and South
Dakota…"
 
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Eye-fi shoots photos straight to Evernote
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10119717-1.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
 
"It seems like a natural fit: Evernote, a Web service that turns random
pictures of information into a searchable database and Eye-fi, a company
whose SD cards enable you to turn random information into pictures and
upload them to the Web. In theory, it's a great idea. Evernote, which
requires input ubiquity to be really useful, gains another data stream,
and Eye-fi gains a relatively compelling productivity application."
 
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People don't trust company blogs. What you should do about it.
http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2008/12/people-dont-tru.html
 
"Consumers trust company blogs less than any other channel.
This result comes from a survey we did in Q2 of 2008. Have a look at the
data yourself. Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they
rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts.
Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them.
If you're a corporate blogger or somebody who advises companies, you need
to take this into account."

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Zappos CEO: transparency helped employees during layoffs
http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=309
 
Just under two weeks ago Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer, very
publicly laid off nearly 8 percent of its workforce. The truth is, the
company didn't intend for everything to be so public. It just was, due to
the social media darling's corporate culture of transparency.
 
Is this bad? Not according to Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO.
"We've generally found it to be beneficial to be public online about
everything," he said. "And we will continue to do our best to be as
transparent as possible."
 
Even, sometimes, if transparency is hard. Zappos.com gained prominence on
the social media radar earlier this year when Hsieh, his executive team
and hundreds of the company's employees created a one-brand army on
Twitter. Those hundreds of employees reacted strongly to the news of the
layoffs - online - on the company's Twitter-focused feed. To some
companies, this might've created bit of a public relations nightmare or a
crisis to manage. For Hsieh and his team, it was something to embrace.
 
"We believe that transparency is important and have continued to encourage
our employees to Twitter," he said. "We also publicized on our blog the
email sent to employees within minutes of it being sent internally."
If you watched the Zappos employee Twitter feed post-layoff, you would've
seen a few things…
 
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Offshoring Patent Services to India
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/08d9d4/offshoring_patent
 
Revenues from the Indian patent services offshoring industry are estimated
at $46 m for the calendar year 2007 and are expected to reach $206 m by
end 2012.
 
Typically catering to the international markets, patent services
outsourcing to India is still in its infancy with a history of only about
3 to 4 years behind it. There are about 50 vendors in the industry with an
estimated 1,550 professionals employed as of end 2007. While a few vendors
have been in this business longer, this industry has gained momentum only
in the last few years.
 
Patent services include a wide range of specific tasks or services. We
have divided these services into the following broad areas: Patent
searches, Patent illustration and proofreading, Patent drafting, Patent
analytics, Patent asset management, Patent litigation support and Patent
consulting.
 
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LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
http://images.google.com/hosted/life
 
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching
from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available
for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
 
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HP Touchsmart TX2 Laptop is a 12-inch Multitouch Wonder
http://gizmodo.com/5092686/hp-touchsmart-tx2-laptop-is-a-12+inch-multitouch-wonder
 
HP's Touchsmart tx2 is awesome because its the first consumer-oriented
convertible notebook to feature a multitouch technology built into the
display. The 12.1-inch screen uses a capacitive touchpanel that can track
two points simultaneously, operates with fingers or a stylus, and comes
with the Mediasmart 2.0 interface customized for the notebook. While
Dell's oft-mentioned Latitude XT came out last year with the multitouch
power to simultaneously track all five fingers, the feature was kept
dormant until the middle of 2008 and lacks any realy mainstream software
to take advantage of the tech.
 
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Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War
http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=621
 
You'd think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social
engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like
"community of practice," "expertise locater," and "knowledge capture,"
would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution.
 
You'd be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every
other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to
turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow
war. I suppose I must be a little dense, because it took not one, not two,
but three separate incidents before I realized there was a war on. Here's
what's going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are
actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and
technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of
Enterprise 2.0.
 
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Backpacker's Diary: Next Gen PC Design Competition
http://www.nextgendesigncomp.com/entrydetail.aspx?id=944
 
Backpacker's diary is a PC concept that integrate with the form of
traditional book, the target user is the enthusiastic travelling fans. In
this "book", different pages include different functions, like media
recording, solar recharging and EL illuminant. The approach of reading a
book takes the traditional way of operating computer, which encourage
those backpackers to experience and share more about their trips.

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Why Canada's Banks Don't Need Help
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1855317,00.html

In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,
Canada has joined the ranks of governments that in recent weeks stepped up
to help banks cope with more fallout from bad U.S. subprime mortgages. In
Canada's case, however, the reason for the assistance is a little
different from some of its G-7 partners. Unlike banks in the U.S., Britain
and Germany, which needed to be bailed out with hundreds of billions of
dollars in new capital, Canada's major banks are solid and solvent. They
don't need any help to work through their subprime exposure.

So why did Ottawa agree to insure the money they routinely borrow from
other banks, a practice that keeps their credit operations liquid?
Ironically, the troubled non-Canadian institutions that received capital
injections and loan guarantees in other countries now carry a government
seal of approval that tilts the playing field in their favor when it comes
to borrowing. That leaves Canada's big banks, including Scotiabank, TD
Bank Financial Group, RBC Royal Bank and CIBC, at a competitive
disadvantage. So the government acted to level the field, not to aid
troubled banks.

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RED Monster Announcement: Modular Cameras, a DSLR, 3D and 28k
http://gizmodo.com/5085242/red-monster-announcement-modular-cameras-a-dslr-3d-and-28k

Rumors of a RED DSLR had been confirmed a long time ago, but what of the
Scarlet and EPIC übercamcorders? On the REDUser forums, RED CEO Jim
Jannard has explained it all: Scarlet and EPIC are the DSLR - all cameras
are "part of the same DSMC system", so each and every camera will be part
of a modular, build-your-own, still and video product line based on the
Scarlet and EPIC 'Brains'. To do this, RED has furnished an insanely
diverse new collection of components, with sensors ranging from the $2500
3k Scarlet to the $55,000, 28k EPIC 617 Mysterium Monstro.

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Entrepreneurs Who Rose From The Ashes
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2008/11/10/recession-depression-entrepreneurs-ent-manage-cx_ml_1110upfromashes.html

A word of encouragement for all the entrepreneurs (and every other working
stiff, for that matter) scrapping it out in the latest downturn:
Recessions--for all the havoc they wreak--can also sow the seeds of
serious fortunes.

"At a basic level, there is an important job or problem that customers
can't do or solve for themselves," says Scott Anthony, president of
Innosight, a Watertown, Mass.-based innovation strategy consultancy. "The
best chance of creating something powerfully profitable is starting with
an important, unsatisfied problem."

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Using Design to Crack Society's Problems
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/mission-critical.html

…Participle isn't a conventional bunch of social workers or do-gooders.
It's a design team. Participle's interdisciplinary crew includes
anthropologists, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social
scientists, and a military-logistics expert, but it is driven by design
techniques and headed by Cottam, 42, who also has used such strategies to
tackle the shortcomings of Britain's school and health systems. "Hilary's
-- and my -- favorite kind of design has to do with making people's lives
better, often taking account of their mundane daily concerns," says Paola
Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. "Her projects not only work, they give people a
sense of hope and strength."

Cottam is one of a new wave of design evangelists who are trying to change
the world for the better. They believe that many of the institutions and
systems set up in the 20th century are failing and that design can help us
to build new ones better suited to the demands of this century. Some of
these innovators are helping poor people to help themselves by fostering
design in developing economies. Others see design as a tool to stave off
ecological catastrophe. Then there are the box-breaking thinkers like
Cottam, who disregard design's traditional bounds and apply it to social
and political problems. Her mission, she says, is "to crack the
intractable social issues of our time."

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Jane McGonigal's Brave New Worlds
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2008/id20081110_453173.htm?campaign_id=rss_innovate

Major corporations, including Procter & Gamble (PG), Electronic Arts
(ERTS), and National Semiconductor (NSM), have given some of their
employees an unusual assignment: play a free online game.

Admittedly, it's not a typical entertainment video game, with
sophisticated 3D graphics, fantastical characters, or shoot-'em-up plots.
And the corporations aren't just allowing workers to have fun on the job.
Instead, the game, called Superstruct, asks players to imagine the world
in 2019.

They're asked to consider a series of future scenarios, including a
respiratory disease pandemic, a global food shortage, or a refugee crisis.
Then they write blog posts, upload videos, and enter discussions on social
networking sites such as Facebook to paint a picture of life in those
conditions. For the players, it's an exercise of the imagination. For the
supporting firms, it's an experiment with the idea of future-scenario
planning using the game as a collaboration tool.

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The Crisis Last Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Parker-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

For writers who seek to influence public affairs, timing plays a paramount
role. And few writers have had better timing than Adolf Augustus Berle.

In the summer of 1932, with America trapped in the greatest financial
crisis in its history, Berle published "The Modern Corporation and Private
Property," a scholarly yet readable analysis of America's largest
companies and their managers. Berle is largely forgotten today, yet with
that book he succeeded in persuading Americans to see their economic
system in a new way - and helped set the stage for the most fundamental
realignment of power since abolition.

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