Wouldn't it be great if Google aggregated your starred items across all their services?
Imagine Google Bookmarks becoming more than just bookmarking websites, but rather a single place where I can view all my important items; calendar events, blog posts, email conversations, friends photos, search results, nearby restaurants, dictionary entries, news articles.
This morning I attended the Emergency Response Symposium at Dalhousie University. The symposium addressed "emergency response to disasters (e.g. earthquakes, fires, floods, ice storms, epidemics) that require coordination of diverse resources distributed in time and space, where decisions have to made with limited information." Dr. Mark Elmore of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was there presenting.
The first thing I noticed, was that the room was split between university academics (professors, Ph.D students) and actual disaster response people (Halifax Fire Response, RCMP, Joint Task Force). I got the impression there was a total disconnect between what the two groups were saying. The academics were talking pure theory (graph, data, matrices, analysis) and the disaster guys were talking about reality (gut feeling, life, death, response time). Let's just say, there is a lot to be said for applied-knowledge vs pure-theory. Here are some of the key points I took away:
A really fast search doesn't help you, if it gives you the wrong results. When response time is so critical, having the wrong data at the wrong time is matter of life and death.
Past data can be used to make better decisions in future, but how do you capture 'gut feeling' of a fire fighter that prevents him from going into a room on fire? How can this knowledge be applied to an algorithm for better decision making? Or does this decision need to be left in the hands of the user?
A big challenge is getting past information like building layouts and maps, combined that with real-time data like weather and position of response teams, and render in 'no user manual required' interface to allow fast decision making. Response teams don't have time to analyze charts or graphs.
There is a major problem with data lost when someone retires or quits. Imagine a firefighter retiring after 30 years, all that field experience is lost. How can it be captured? How can it be re-applied to make better decisions in the future?
How can crowd data be verified? In mission critical data, someone needs to be accountable when lives are lost, can we hold the crowd liable?
Public vs Private. There are cases like fires, where public data of the crowd can be used to help make better decisions. One recent example was the Halifax Fire, where Twitter was on fire with activity. But there are private cases like with the military, where public data is not accessible. How can similar decisions be made without access to this public data?
This past fall while traveling through eastern Europe, I often had difficulties communicating with locals (as most foreigners would). How much does that cost? Do you have a room available? I thought, there must be an easier way...
Thus, Zdravo Translate was born, a powerful multilingual translator for the iPhone and iTouch providing an intuitive and easy-to-use interface to Google's translation service. Some of the key features are:
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Halifax is an open dialog barcamp exploring mobile technologies and new media to help make the world a better place.
This active conversation of turning ideas into action welcomes nonprofits, software developers or anyone interested in how new technologies can be used to organize, advocate and provide better health, environment, human rights, citizen media and other social services.
How can Twitter be used quickly mobilize a group of supporters to rally your cause?
Can geo caching be used to increase tourism to your community?
How can Facebook be used to fund your nonprofit?
Can SMS be used to improve healthcare by providing timely intervention messages to patients?
How do you engage new volunteers to form lasting relationships for your organization?
Can mobile phones be used to gather current environmental information?
How can mobile crowdsourcing provide knowledge and skills to achieve tasks previously not possible?
Our goal is to draw together the nonprofit and tech communities to share knowledge, ask interesting questions and spark ideas.
Mozilla recently announced an excited new project called Bespin, an open-source extensible web-based framework that pushes code editing in the cloud. At first glance, it's like Eclipse that runs in your browser, however there is a hidden potential in Bespin, that I believe, will change everything.
Let's take a step back and examine how Google Docs has changed the business world. Prior to GDocs, Microsoft Office (and it's expensive price tag) was the norm. Collaborating on documents usually meant emailing a Word file and waiting for the reply. GDocs not only made real-time collaboration possibly, it also made it easy. Documents no longer lived on your desktop, but rather were accessible from anywhere via the internet. You could just as easily edit and collaborate on a document from a public terminal in a London coffee shop, as you could from your office.
Fast forward to Bespin, which brings the same benefits as GDocs to the developers world. Before Bespin, it was incredibly difficult for a developer to work without their own computer. Hardware specifications and environment settings are no longer important, because now with Bespin you could just as easily develop from a public terminal. Second, even with version control, video conferencing and instant messaging, pair programming was still painful when done remotely. Bespin not only makes real-time collaboration possible, and also makes it easy.
Great, Bespin eliminates the need for expensive hardware, software licenses and makes collaboration a snap, but what's the real impact?
Let's go one step further, and combine Bespin with Google's powerful yet under-utilized translation api. Imagine, two developers collaborating in real-time to create the next big web app. Now imagine our two developers, each working from public computers, one at a coffee shop, and the other a library. Now imagine these developers living in different continents, each speaking a different language, perhaps one Swahili, and the other French. Now imagine an integrated IM sidebar to Bespin which auto translates their dialog similar to GTalk language bots. Now imagine the code comments, being auto translated to every possible language, so the next developer speaking a different language could quickly understand and collaborate on the project. Now multiple the number of developers by 1000, all collaborating in real-time on same open source project, potentially speaking dozens of different dialects. When you combine Bespin and the power of cloud developing with something as simple as translation api, the possibilities are endless.
Imagine the potential usage for a nonprofit like Geekcorp, who already have incredible success stories of connecting technical experts to communities in developing countries.
Or the potential integration with Ken Bank's Mobility Project which "brings together some of the leading academics, technicians, educators and practitioners in the IT and mobile fields with the common goal of developing an exciting and empowering range of tools and resources to unlock the power of mobile applications development for users in the developing world"
Multilingual collaborative cloud developing could play a huge role in the bare-foot college innovative to transfer software development skills, reducing development costs, bridging language barriers and providing real-time collaboration. And with the recent success of netbooks in developing countries, Bespin has the potential to change everything.
Thanks to Kaushal Jhalla for inspiring me and sharing these ideas.
Gmail has an incredibly powerful, yet somewhat unknown feature, that allows you to append a suffix to your userid. This combined with a filter makes for incredibly powerful spam control!
yourid+suffix@gmail.com
The beauty is that you can use as many suffixes as you like, ideally one for each of your services:
yourid+twitter@gmail.com yourid+flickr@gmail.com
This way (god forbid) if one of these services sell your email address to a 3rd party, it would be very easy to track down the culprit.
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