Two new toys: Nabaztag and Chumby

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/7/2008
in Electronics, Internet, Photos, RSS, Social Media, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

As you may know, I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about my Nokia 770 internet tablet (which I got cheap last year and happily use to check e-mail and listen to internet radio via radioten.com) or my little wifi-enabled Nikon S51c digital camera, but last week I acquired two new friends in my office, a Nabaztag and a Chumby.

The Nabaztag is a wifi enabled “rabbit”, that can read out text and RSS feeds, plays music, displays lights to represent different conditions (e.g. weather, new mail), and it has an RFID reader in its ears which can enable the detection of different objects (e.g. it could read an RFID-enabled book to you if you wave it by the ears of the rabbit). While some aren’t happy, I think it’s a cool device with many applications for those who may not want or need a video interface. My Nabaztag is called Babbitty.

The Chumby has been touted as an Internet alarm clock, but it’s much more than that. It has a touch screen which displays and allows you to interact with a set of multimedia widgets which can be grouped into channels. For example, my default channel shows my Flickr photos, tweets from my Twitter contacts, an NHK-style clock, and news from the BBC and the Onion. There’s even a talking Tim O’Reilly widget in there somewhere! I got it from international-orders.com, and named it after me (Cloud)!

You can see them both above. I haven’t gotten them to talk to each other yet, but many things are now possible…

David Price (debategraph.org) visits DERI

Published
by
Cloud
on 11/7/2008
in DERI, SIOC, Semantic Web and Video Games
. 0 Comments

We had a presentation at DERI today from David Price, one of the people behind the argumentation visualisation site Debategraph. Since modelling and visualising argumentative discussions is something that we have wanted to do in DERI with SIOC for some time, this talk was very interesting to us.

The goal of Debategraph is “to make the best arguments on all sides of any debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all”. It’s a really nicely designed tool considering it is the work of just two people over the past few years, and was tested by Downing Street on their website last year following a speech by Tony Blair. The maps can be embedded into blogs posts, which is a useful feature. David pointed to some related work from Walton on argumentative schemes and also from Stanford’s Robert Horn.

Be Bert. Be Ernie. Just be.

Published
by
Cloud
on 8/7/2008
in Television
. 2 Comments

I’ve had this Bert and Ernie t-shirt for 12 years, but it was lost in a press for a while and it’s starting to get very worn. So, since I haven’t been able to find anywhere online that sells them, I scanned in the picture. Now I can make some backups (and remixes)!

You can see the results above. The first image is the original scan; the second is a vectorised version (via CorelTRACE and some hand editing / filling in CorelDRAW); the third and fourth are just with some background and illumination effects in Paint Shop Pro. I lost some of the original shadows and finer details but can probably add those later…

Explaining science and engineering to future students and the public

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/7/2008
in Education and NUI Galway
. 0 Comments

I read two articles today that explained the need to better illustrate the interesting and exciting aspects of science and engineering subjects to the public (and to also attract future students).

The first is from Engineers Ireland where Dr. Jim Browne, president of the Irish professional body for engineers (and also president of NUI Galway), said: “We focus more on the downside of the Internet rather than appreciating the work of the software and telecommunications engineers whose creativity gave us the world wide web and which has such a positive impact on the lives of so many people. It is amazing to me that young children are so quick to adopt the new technologies and to grasp the opportunities they create and never seem to ask: where did this come from? How does it work?” You can read more here.

Secondly, there was an article in the Irish Times “American Business 2008″ supplement today entitled “Science and technology need to foster interest and enthusiasm in schools”. It doesn’t seem to be on the new free irishtimes.com website, hence the scan below. Dr. Peter Hetherington of the American Chamber of Commerce said: “The perception at times is that you spend your life at a bench or an IT terminal, but if you look at the diversity of careers that are there, it’s quite phenomenal. People are following the so-called money at the moment, and going into careers like commerce or law, but all those services are essentially fed by science and engineering - because if they weren’t there, there would be no manufacturing, no new ideas, no companies.” Read more below.

GalwayFirst.ie: Lost in Galway / Stars at Galway Film Fleadh

Published
by
Cloud
on 26/6/2008
in Galway, Movies, NUI Galway and Television
. 1 Comment

From Galway First:

Star Trek fans are called Trekkies, but watch out for the Lost-ies. Fans of the inexplicable and never-ending TV series are planning to come to Galway this week to honour the conferring of the star of several episodes of the series, who is receiving an honorary degree at NUI, Galway.

Fionnula Flanagan is an Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Irish actress. She trained in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and has appeared in numerous films, including The Others with Nicole Kidman, Transamerica and Waking Ned Devine, as well as television series and stage productions. She came to prominence in Ireland in 1965 as a result of her role as Máire in the Teilifís Éireann production of the Irish Language play, An Triail. Ms Flanagan established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce in the 1967 film version of Ulysses.

But as far as fans of Lost are concerned, she will forever be that mysterious white-haired woman Ms Hawking who appeared in the “Flashes Before Your Eyes” of Lost. Message boards online pertaining to the series have revealed that dozens of Irish Lost fans are to come to Galway to congratulate her on her conferring.

So, if you see any black smoke, polar bears or see Mutton Island being moved mysteriously this Friday, don’t panic. It’s just all in a day’s happenings on Lost.

The honorary conferrings are on tomorrow here in NUI Galway. Funnily enough, I think the first thing I saw Fionnula Flanagan in was actually Star Trek (The Next Generation). But I loved her best in Paddywhackery on TG4 in her role as Peig Sayers!

In other news, it was announced yesterday that the 2008 Galway Film Fleadh will play host to some international stars including Peter O’Toole, Jessica Lange, (President!) Bill Pullman, and Alex Gibney, the 2008 Oscar winner for Best International Documentary.

Press release: “NUI Galway and Tourist Republic to Make Travelling Tailor-made”

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/6/2008
in DERI, NUI Galway and TripPlanr
. 0 Comments

http://www.nuigalway.ie/news/main_press.php?p_id=760


TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels

NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is to develop a new intelligent trip planner in collaboration with Irish start-up Tourist Republic Ltd. The internet tool, TripPlanr, will allow travellers to plan more complex trips than existing technology allows, such as combining multiple destinations on a fixed budget and timeline. The cost of this initiative is €200,000 and has received support funding under Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation Partnership programme.

TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels. The technology will combine Touristr.com’s traveller recommendations with information from airlines and accommodation providers, suggesting the most perfectly-attuned trip possible.

Jan Blanchard is CEO of Tourist Republic and sees huge benefits in the partnership: “We knew that to build the intelligent trip planner which we have in mind, we needed a team to rival the in-house expertise at Google or Yahoo! Through Enterprise Ireland we have this opportunity to bring our vision to reality with DERI, which is the largest Semantic Web research institute in the world”.

DERI’s specialised expertise in Information Mining, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 applications will allow TripPlanr to filter data and make recommendations based on the preferences of the traveller and their social network. Building on Touristr.com’s existing destination review site, the new solution is expected to increase the probability of the traveller booking the targeted option suggested.

According to Dr. John Breslin, Project Leader with DERI at NUI Galway, and founder of the popular online forum boards.ie, “The pre-internet problem of information deficit has been replaced with the problem of information overload. We are faced with an overwhelming surfeit of similarly sounding destination descriptions and offers. We hope to make online trip planning much more personalised by enabling networked knowledge using the latest technologies developed here at DERI.”

The TripPlanr project has a skilled team in place to research and develop the application, and the project is currently recruiting for web developers to join this exciting work. TripPlanr is expected to be in beta testing by the end of the year.

-ends-

Google Trends for Websites: boards.ie, ireland.com, independent.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/6/2008
in Boards, Internet and Ireland
. 0 Comments

Via Damien, I tried out Google Trends for boards.ie in comparison to the two main Irish newspaper sites.

Here are the stats for Ireland only from Google Trends (blue = boards.ie; red = ireland.com; yellow = independent.ie):

Here are the stats for all regions from Google Trends:

Here is the worldwide graph from Compete:

And finally, here is the worldwide graph from Alexa:

There are a lot of variations! Although ComScore also do rankings, I am not sure is the service publicly available, and Quantcast’s analysis seems more US-focussed. While some people are not so sure about the figures (1, 2), it is an indicator of sorts - even if it’s just to see if you are in the same league…

Intruders.TV interview with Salim Ismail at BlogTalk 2008

Published
by
Cloud
on 17/6/2008
in BlogTalk and Social Media
. 0 Comments

Conn has published his video interview with Salim Ismail (formerly of Yahoo! Brickhouse) on Intruders.TV Ireland. This was recorded at the BlogTalk 2008 conference in March, where Salim was one of our keynote speakers. Thanks to Conn and Salim!

boards.ie passes by the 1 million unique visitors per month mark…

Published
by
Cloud
on 12/6/2008
in Boards
. 1 Comment

From Vexorg: “1,006,314 unique visitors for the month to yesterday”. Yay!

“You’re banned!”, but we can’t tell anyone about it…

Published
by
Cloud
on 9/6/2008
in Boards
. 14 Comments

We got this letter from the Data Protection Commission a few days ago; apart from us not having a privacy statement visible (it’s now here), there is this silly issue of us not being able to tag users publicly as being banned. Still, it’s the first time in 10 years that we’ve had such a complaint…

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