jodhpuriGuy | Avi Mehta

So yesterday, I talked about hITEC, The other project I was working on is called MoMedia. This project was similar to “Video On The Wall“, more generalized, more Mobile based and had Social Networking at its heart. Here are some details from our notes:

• To create a location based blogging service for Mobile Phones (You can upload Images, Videos, Text or Audio)
• Provide an engaging UI for users to view other people in the neighborhood who are blogging from the same platform.
• Create a social networking experience by allowing users to follow others(twitter anyone?), add other users as friends/fellow workers etc.
• Integrate the network with Facebook, Orkut, twitter so that status updates can be propagated to all networks. (Friendfeed ? - I guess so just  that when we thought of the idea, it wasn’t there)
• Provide users with a blog and allow users to specify their own blogs like wordpress and blogger so that posts can be posted their directly without any action on user’s part.

The screen shots follow after the break.

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I have not been active on the blog for quite some time. The reasons being the heavy course load and the work that I have been involved in. Two of the projects that I was working on for quite some time got over last week. One of them, hITEC had the final presentations last Friday. We were a team of 5 people from different departments at UCI and we worked over the last 3 months on this project. The details follow:

Video On The Wall

The project revolved around the idea of Citizen reporting. The new thing in our case was the clever use of  technology that we used and the ease of use and no cost of involvement on user’s part. The main features of the project can be described as:

• Reporters(anyone can be one!) stream videos(yes live!) from their mobile phones. (We used android as our mobile client but it is not limited to that in any way!)
• The web client, that can be accessed through the browser, shows the videos that are currently being streamed and also provides access to the archived videos.
• Use of mobile platform features like the location determination to show relevant content.
• Instant feedback from the browser to the mobile phone thus creating an experience of interactive media.
• Lucrative revenue model and sharing of revenue with Reporters.

Technology-wise, The project involved development of mobile client on Android (Java), Server in Ruby on Rails and Flash for Video streaming and interactive experience.

Below are some of the screenshots of the web client. (Mobile client simply streams videos with a few other simple screens thus nothing much to show there…)

UPDATE: The announcement of the competition results can found here.

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Today Google released their new App Engine. This is seen as a direct competetor of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The service started applications for accounts for developers tonight at 9:30. Some of the features of the service are:

• Comes with a SDK! - start developing even if you dont have an account yet!
• Develop applications in Python - now you know why Google is hiring so many devs with python exp ;)
• Free 500 MB of data and upto 5 million page views a month!
• Integration with other google services so authentication etc need not be developed if not so important(instead use google’s account or sth.)

But there are a few limitations too…

• A limit of 1000 results per query(do we need more then that anyway?)
• Only three applications in the preview period.
• Just python is supported for now
• Only 10000 accounts to be given initially! (Yes I got one already :)

It can certainly be called as a competitor to AWS but is yet to get all the features and take a full form… More updates on techcrunch

I look forward to do somehting with it soon… after 14th that is :)

ThunderBird is an email client from Mozilla. Although it has been around for quite some time, I somehow never got to get all my mails out from Yahoo or GMail to my PC. But a few days back, it all changed. I finally decided to give it a try. There were certian basic requirements that I needed that Gmail did not give me so easily and so I had to resort to this.

• Download all mail to my pc (yeah I know… kindof stupid)
• Have a nice calendar which I can look at while I am looking at mails.  This is important coz I never open Google Calendar to look at my events(yes all my events are there on it..). It’s simply too much trouble.
• Compose mail offline and send it off later on.
• Have a good Address Book - Somehow the FF3 Beta4 was not displaying my address book properly(In Beta5 it has been fixed).
• New email notification! - Yes Gmail has this, but we need to install other things which I dont want to. So I just used AT&T’s TTS service to create two nice audio files for “New Mail” and “Somethi’s up in [the] calendar” and am using them with TB and lightening.

So, I installed TB 2 and also added lightening and Provider for google calendar to it.  When I installed them, they did not work as well as I wanted them to - The offline read+write access to google calendar was not available. But just 2-3 days back, both of them got updated and they now support offline cache of the calendars. The two add-ons also got a nice UI update(not as good as FF3 is going to be though).

The only problem I have right now is the absence of a good Sync app between GMail and TB contact list. CSV is not good enough as it does not let me store all the fields from GMail properly. What I’d like is a way to map fields from Gmail Address Book to TB fields(dynamic! - I dont have a good parallel for this except for the Auto Organize feature in MediaMonkey :)).

Overall, I think I am doing fine with TB and might continue using it.

Muzik! Today, I got my new Sansa C250 Media player. And guess what?? I am really excited about it :D. The details follow:

This small sized media player can’t be compared with iPods and so wont do it… On its own, The C250 looks really small and fits the small pocket of my jeans. It looks goods and everyone who saw it, Liked it. The device has a simple interface but boasts many features. The sound quality is good, I guess I’d give it 3.5/5. The FM radio and the voice recording are features we dont really get to see in some players.Apart for that, You could add photos to the device which can be viewed from its colored(although very small) screen.C250 comes with a rechargeable(through ausb port ofcourse) battery that can be taken out when required. It also has a microSD slot which I dont think I’ll use as I guess 2GB is enough for a day I would probably be syncing it after that…

Running the player was easy… just plug it in and you got it working. I use windows media player to sync the songs but you could just copy paste the music in the music folder and it work:). Although I have not yet tested the battery life of the device, I guess it should be enough.

Now the bad parts: The screen is too small to do anything with the photos. The UI, though simple is pretty boring and bland. They could have done a lot better job of it. The earphones that came with it suck big time and are not at all comfortable.

2007 was a interesting year(for internet and other things too :). But I will be talking about internet here :). While in 2005-06, many of the new startups were founded, the deadpool started populating a bit later on. There were many interesting concepts experimented with. 2.0 was attached to many things and people found more and more ways to spend their time on internet. But coming back to 2007, Google got good and bad publicity. Digg continued to grow its user base even though the comment system and deletion of entries the created a huge fuss.

We saw loads of office apps being released for web from google, zoho and others. Social networking took a big shape with facebook and the Google’s OpenSocial . Microsoft released silverlight and adobe attacked with AIR. But both the technologies have yet to see some serious use. (What is next year for??)

The mobile phone (add media and internet to it) market saw two bigshots jumping in with iphone and Android.  There were otherbig things happening but I need to stop writing right now as I am headed to Las Vegas for the new year…

But what to expect next year?  Well… Wait for the phones with Android! Wait for how EU responds to google and doubleclick merger. Wait for companies to respond to iPhone. Wait for the interesting news from me :D!

Avi

Oh! I just meant it in the technical sense :). I was reading a blog and while reading it, I pondered over various things. The first thing that I thought of was “Why just Audio-Visual?”. Surely, the kind of meta-data talked about in the post is relevant only to audio, images and videos. But is that the limit? Is it not relevant to text - the form in which we have most of our data? I, for one can list things like when, where, by whom and in which meaning that can be associated to text(knol). The knol can be take from internet, from a book, or from notes. Surely that can help us find a lot about its content. Given the time-period when a person came to know about the knol, We can know about the complexity of the content(is it something deep or just introductory). Many of us have heard of semantic <insert keyword here> so does using that information to index also help? I think it does. In fact, We had done something very similar in last year’s Imagine cup with recog.

Recog uses the meta data, not only from text but also from audios and images too, to index them. It uses semantic indexing along with use of other meta-data to present the content to user. This meta data and the way to organize knowledge surely does spice up the things and opens up many possibilities for future.

Sounds interesting? It is and surely we are going to see some great innovations in this field soon (i hope :) )