Interesting Chumby articles and videos around the web

Since Dave Winer declared Chumby the next breakthrough device, there has been a small flood of people talking about how cool it is and how much they want one. The usual TechMeme effect, I guess.

I admit, it is a cute device. I have a black one, which I am hoping will work well as a picture frame for less-technically minded parents. It is certainly worth learning Flash for (Flash Lite actually), a decision I kept putting off.
For those just starting with Chumby, I have a list of interesting articles and videos people have already written about their experiences.

Videos:

• Interview with Chumby’s founders on Intruders.tv (UK channel). I believe, the interview was taken a while ago, but it just came up. The second half of the interview has interesting technical details.
• Chumby as an ambient computer - presentation by Chris Hughes at BarCampLA4.

Interesting articles:

• Chumby as a sign of the future of Internet TV.
• New York Times’s blog article
• Chumbys as cultural probes (and another one)
• Possible role of a Chumby in a museum

Interesting technical articles and resources:

• Streaming bee. fm music directly from Chumby, while we all wait for the official Internet Radio support.
• Basic wireframe templates for screens development from Scott Janousek.
• Heated discussion on how open Chumby actually is.

There are many more articles and first experience videos around the web, but they very quickly start to repeat each other.

Bee.fm is an internet radio station that allows to stream custom playlists or individual albums. It is similar to pandora.com, but with full manual control over the playlist.

It uses open streaming that can be listened to from iTunes as well as from its own flash player. It can be also listened to with Chumby’s btplay command.

To get Chumby to stream the Bee.fm’s radio, you need to get the URL for the playlist you are interested in. The URL is in plain text form inside the .m3u file you receive after clicking on larger play button. Normally this file is opened with iTunes or other streaming music player.

The streaming URL can file can be extracted by looking at the entry in iTunes and clicking Get Info, Edit URL. Alternatively, the .m3u file can be opened in a plain text editor.

The URL will be quite long and look like http://77.91.228.2:80/play/46df15a1e4f1 … f/66……

To play it, connect to Chumby via ssh and run btplay URL or btplay URL & ; the later if you planing to do other tasks in the shell. On Windows, if using putty, the URL can be pasted into the shell with right mouse button.

Enjoy!

P.s. Warning: sometimes after btplay is stopped, it does not want to start again, complaining about missing /tmp files and unhappy ALSA device. This may specifically happen if btplay is run in a background and kill command is used. Restarting Chumby fixes the problem. I am not aware of other fixes at this point.

Pandora.com has just added classical music to their already huge collection. It made my day.

I like classical music, but never took enough time to actually figure out my exact preferences or composers. I just recognise familiar or mood pieces when they are played and enjoy them.

So now I can put the name of the piece I do remember into Pandora and let it find that or other items with the same feel. I have  already rediscovered and found out names for some of my semi-forgotten favourites. And with bookmarks only two clicks away, I actually have a chance to slowly identify all those pieces. That has a value all of its own beyond just Pandora.

This may not be for the people who enjoy snobby experts on the radio playing something so obscure that it requires 20 minutes explanation of why exactly it is good. Pandora’s interface is still a little bit too-pop oriented with no composer information on the name card.

But for me, it is manna from heaven.

I just found my own oldest webpage (handcoded) and my oldest public source code (Java) at once. Archive.org - that has hosted this long-dead memory since 1999 - is just so great.

Looking back at it, I realise that I was right in the thick of Internet development:

• When I just started working with Java, we had to throw out all the printed Javadocs, because jdk1.0b2 was released and a lot of Java API (e.g. FTP and MAIL) from jdk1.0a3 has been hidden under sun’s internal packages
• I did a first (alpha) implementation of standard servlet API for W3C’s Jigsaw server, by porting it from Sun’s Jeeves
• I dabbled in hot 2.5D Apple technology (HotSause), by generating web server’s directory content in MCF format. The format has died, but apparently it turned into RDF. I was developing Semantic Web applications well before the term got popular.
• I contributed to an Open Source project, well before SourceForge’s first appearance
• I was a late-comer to /. and my ID is still below 36000

I am not bragging! I am just musing out loud at how much personal web history can be retrieved with few well placed searches.

The flip side of a coin of course, is that this history will not go away, even if I wanted it to. Which is why I do not link to my Slashdot account (and this is not an invitation for exercise in forensics). One just hopes that the future recruiter will look at timestamps of my various web appearances and makes appropriate adjustments to skills and effort.

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 happen to other people on our photograph, despite our best efforts to share. Emailing photos is cumbersome and subscribing to Flickr streams requires all people to look at all photos just in case they are in it.

Once upon a time, Riya.com got a lot of attention for promising to fix that. You would upload your photographs to Riya, train it to recognise your friends and family and it would then automatically find those people in newer uploaded photographs and notify them. Riya even had a basic Social Network, so the photos could be tagged collaboratively.

Eventually, Riya has failed and changed focus to become just another Visual Search Engine. I suspect at least part of the downfall was the single-purpose destination of Riya. You had to register, upload photos, train application, invite other people and do many other basic things with fairly small return on such investment of time. It was much easier to just dump photos on Flickr and let others make an effort of subscribing to your feeds.

Enter the Facebook. It is extremely popular, has all the machinery for registration, adding friends and photos and provides free development API. As it is a platform, rather than a single-purpose destination, it is more sticky than, say, LinkedIn. Succeeding as an application inside Facebook can bring more than a million people to your application.

There are many photo related applications inside Facebook now; more than 400 at the latest count. Most of them however are fairly basic. Combining computationally interesting idea with distribution platform of Facebook could be a wining combination.

Basic business flow

1. You receive a message from Viewfinder Friends Facebook application that somebody in your network has a public photo with you on it. You can install the application to see which particular photo was tagged for you. That’s the viral distribution method, that most of Facebook applications rely on.
2. Interested, you add the application. At that point, it shows you the photos from your friend’s profile that he/she has marked with your name. It also presents your photographs and asks you to name people in them. The lookup is all inline and the facebook names are automatically auto-completed, so it does not take much time. The application now spreads to the other friends you nominated.
3. After a while you come back to your profile and there is another picture with you in it from a friend using the application to tag you. That means he/she have thought of you. Delighted, you keep the Viewfinder Friends in hopes for future signs of attention. The aperiodic, but obviously personal nature of the gift makes the application sticky.
4. The application does not just show the pictures, it recognises where the people on the photograph are and asks to actually map people’s names to their faces. The mapping can be done by you or by your friends that you identified as being in the picture, but are not yet matched to the face. The distributed marking effort makes the application more interesting and easy to use.
5. Mapping faces to names also allows to train the application on facial recognition (Riya’s original promise) and later to automatically guess the names of people that the photograph show.  Automatic people recognition will increase return on time investment and will make application more sticky. It will also make the application more viral, as knowing that all but one of the faces are identified and have the application installed, increases the pressure on the remaining people to join the Facebook and install the application.

Revenue

1. You take a picture of a friend at a party, waving a can of beer at you. You upload it to your Facebook account and mark it with your friend’s name (say Kevin). Viewfinder Friends pipes up and mentions that the beer in the picture of Kevin is actually delicious Busch Light and there is currently a taste promotion on it run by the distributor in your area. A link is provided to request a free sample.
2. This information can appear either as application notification, or as a different-color box on the picture. It could show up to you only, to Kevin or to anybody who can see the application. Either way, this is an advertisement that is strongly targeted and is in context. The cost per click (or per transaction) of such advertisements is much higher than for average banner ads.
3. You go skiing on a weekend and there is a notice at the hotel saying that if you take a picture of the hotel’s front and upload it to Facebook with Viewfinder Friends application installed, you will receive a personal discount of 15% next time you come and stay at the hotel. Happily, you take a picture of yourself, still red-cheeked from skiing, goofing around in front of the hotel with your best buddies. The application recognises the hotel name (or Data Matrix element) from the picture and messages you and everybody else you identified in the picture the discount code. The advertisement costs nothing to the company beyond the initial setup, is created  by happy visitors and is shown to other people in context of the trip. The impact of such an advertisement would be much higher than a stock message.

Implementation

• Joyent can provide Facebook hosting that scales up or down depending on demand, making it cheaper to build out the infrastructure. Currently, they even offer some free Facebook application hosting and bandwidth to the limited number of developers.
• Initial fund for the business can come from one of many Facebook specific funds. The facial recognition part does not have to be implemented until after the application has proven itself popular.

Tags: business ideas, Facebook

Does this look different? If not, you are probably reading this through the RSS feed and can just skip to the next item. Unless, of course the feed is now broken. Then, I really want to know.

But for those of you looking at this article on its own website, there has been an upgrade of components. This blog now runs:

• Wordpress 2.3.1 -the latest and greatest
• Soleil theme, slightly modified. I like per-category RSS subscription buttons. I think it is important for the blogs with multiple barely overlapping topics
• Bookmark and feed subscription buttons from AddThis. Hopefully, it does not slow down the blog too much. If it will, I will explore some other options.
• Other Posts from the same Category plugin.
• ReCAPTCHA
• Akismet (of course)

Not everything is perfect yet, but it looks like a good step. If all goes well, this look will probably stay until WordPress 2.4, which is rumored to include a fully semantic theme, based on Sandbox.

I had a quick look at Sandbox for this switch, but the only interesting theme I found was incredibly heavy on the images and other downloadable elements. Much as I believe that this blog is best read through RSS or email subscription due to its aperiodic nature, I still don’t want to make the visitors of the website to get slow loading pages.

If you see anything odd or find a particular aspect extremely nice or annoying, do let me know in the comments or directly via email (listed on the About page).

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 a bedroom with new photos to delight my parents every so often.

Such a device would have to be:

• Wi-Fi capable - My parents have a wireless router and there is no point for a picture frame to sit next to the computer
• Able to pull content from private online photo account, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb, to which our extended family could push photos
• No ongoing monthly costs - subscription would make it a gift that keeps taking, rather than giving
• Controllable over the internet
• Ideally with speakers and/or some way to show video to be more future proof

I have been on a lookout for such a device for more than a year and had no luck. Obviously, digital picture frames are still a personal purchase rather than a gift one. Or maybe less technical parents is a smaller niche than I imagine.

But I have hope. Yesterday, I have received a small package that contained a Chumby! Chumby is not a digital picture frame. It is quite small (I think the website’s image is real-size). But it has features that make up for its size.

It has Wi-Fi access, including password-protected; it has no monthly costs; it is configured over the internet and comes with speakers. It also has touch sensitive screen, microphone and accelerometer (like in Wii controller).

Notice I did not say anything about pictures or videos. That’s because Chumby is a more generic device. It allows to choose what widgets run on it and a widget is a program written in Flash, the same environment that allows us to watch Flickr slide-shows and youTube videos, listen to internet radio and play casual games. It can also double as alarm clock and iPod music player.

More importantly, because anybody can develop and share a widget, I am not married to any particular way of presenting photos. Flickr widget exists already, but other photo and video service widgets are on the way.

And, if I am still unhappy, I can write my own widgets. Chumby runs Linux under the covers and Flash Lite 3 interface. And, differently from Apple’s position with iPhone, Chumby Industries encourage people to modify their software, hardware and even basic device shape. Already, there are compilation packages for python, perl and even Java (actually JamVM).

Chumby is not yet for public sale, but that should happen any day now. I was on a mailing list, so got a pre-release invite. That is good, as it means I have some time to really play with my Chumby.

And if all goes well, my Chumby will soon have a new friend or two hiding under the Christmas tree overseas.

Obras de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - Tomo Primero is a collection of stories in Spanish available with recording and text (both plan and PDF). It was produced by Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse that has a lot more audio/text stories in English in its Lit2Go project.

MP3 recordings can be downloaded individually, but nice iTunes interface is also available from the home page of the project.

(via LearnOutLoud.com)

I have seen plenty of visual illusions - both static and moving - but I have never seen a rotating human figure as an optical illusion. Took a while to even convince myself it was not a joke.

I did work it out in the end (after a hint). The secret - at least for me - was to concentrate in the bottom-right corner on the feet shadows and force my eyes to track the outer foot’s shadow the way I wanted it to go.

From time to time I experiment with GATE NLP toolkit. Just now I tried to upgrade to the latest version (version 4) and run into really strange problem with ANNIE system not loading correctly. Later, when I uninstalled older GATE version, it stopped loading at all.

The problem is the user configuration file gate.xml that is stored in the shared location, usually home directory. On Windows, that is C:\Documents and Settings\[ProfileName]\.

One of those settings was pointing to where the plugins were loaded from and was still referring to GATE 3.1’s locations. That caused NullPointerExceptions in the GATE and everything was breaking from that point on.

I found this by using FileMon, but later realised that it might have been done easier by changing runtime.spawn property to false in GATE’s build.xml file that is used to start the program. Using ant to start a program is a new one for me, but I guess it makes sense in some cases. Setting the property to false shows the startup messages and the exception that the wrong directories cause.

I have deleted the old gate.xml and gate.session files in my home directory and everything started to work. Back to actually trying to use the software.