By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on November 14th, 2007 Use case
Photos are inherently-social event markers. We take pictures to remember an occasion and – often – people who were present with us at that point. While most of the photographs are not looked at more than once or twice, the more popular ones become very important in our history.
The same does not . . . → Read More: Viewfinder Friends – idea for Facebook application
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on October 26th, 2007 I want to get my parents a digital picture frame. But at the moment I cannot. That’s because I don’t want my somewhat less-technical parents to have to fiddle with memory cards, choosing and transferring photographs or running Vista.
My ideal digital picture frame for them would be one sitting in a living room or . . . → Read More: Chumby: Digital picture frame for parents and much more
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on October 4th, 2007 Use case
Many people come to the foreign countries and feel lost/confused traveling around and/or getting services. If possible, they like to go places with a local friend who will point out the best features, explain how things work and/or translate the requests into the local language. This is a service for those who do . . . → Read More: “Your local friend” – business idea for travellers
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on October 2nd, 2007 Ed Foster has discovered that it is very difficult to sign out from big companies’ websites. Yes, it is true when staying within the website’s rules. But it is dead easy otherwise.
The important thing to remember is that your identity is most of the times stored in the browser cookies. So, if you kill . . . → Read More: Easy ways to sign out from Amazon, eBay, others
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on September 8th, 2007 As part of The Rich Web Experience, Fairmont hotel – where the conference is held – offers free WiFi. You have to enter username/password on the first post-connect page and then it unlocks browsing capabilities.
I love WiFi. I have an HP PocketPC that has WiFi built in. I was fully prepared to read my . . . → Read More: Not so progressive JavaScript enhancement
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on September 7th, 2007 I am currently at The Rich Web Experience 2007 conference. It is interesting to compare it to JavaOne conferences I have been to in the past.
To start, RWE is much smaller. It is about 400 people as compared to 15 thousands at JavaOne. This obviously makes scheduling logistics and eating arrangements simpler, but there . . . → Read More: The Rich Web Experience – day 1
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on July 27th, 2007 This was the fastest beta invite confirmation ever. Unfortunately, Digger‘s Terms of Service do not allow any sort of disclosure about features or results from it. This is very different from Powerset which has been going out of its way to get beta subscribers (even unconfirmed ones) to know what they are doing. Digger does . . . → Read More: I received the Digger beta invite
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on July 26th, 2007 Powerset hasn’t even started competing with Google yet and already it has its own competitor.
Digger – which is currently in private beta – does sense disambiguation of the search terms like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, however, they expose the underlying WordNet definitions to the searcher and allow them to pick, rate and even . . . → Read More: Digger – Another NLP enhanced search engine (beta)
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on July 18th, 2007 Two books, two views – no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other hand . . . → Read More: Is the Internet good, bad or bits of everything? – Weinberger/Keen debates
By Alexandre Rafalovitch, on June 29th, 2007 Dan Farber has written a good article on Powerset.
It mostly talks about their grandiose marketing plans and how NLP (Natural Language Processing) will change the world, however it also has a reasonable explanation of what they are doing with fairly transparent references to (expanded) WordNet, named entity recognition, event extraction and semantic web technologies.
. . . → Read More: More details emerge on Powerset’s engine
|
|