In the New York Times

It’s been a couple of weeks already, so this is old news in the age of Twitter. But the fact that Simon and Andrea were featured in a New York Times story more than justifies the delayed post.

Robots like Simon are probably decades away from leaving the research lab and heading to people’s homes, but I have no doubt in my mind that it will happen. These kinds of stories give people a taste of what’s to come.

Very cool.

World Cup Visualizations

The World Cup is under way in South Africa. For a soccer fan, being able to watch 3 games played by the best teams in the world every day is a dream come true.

To me, what has been particularly interesting this time around is how the media has been pulling all the stops to show, communicate and broadcast the games – there’s TV, mobile, newspapers, radio, live commentary on blogs, Twitter and lots more.

It’s been really cool to see that visualizations have been used so widely, sometimes to illustrate an on-going game, sometimes to put results in perspective.

This one is from the New York Times, for a live game, Greece vs. Nigeria:

This visualization represents Brazil’s performance in World Cups:

There’s a lot more, for example here, here, and here, just to mention a few.

Simon at CHI 2010

The folks at IDG caught Simon and Andrea on tape earlier this week during CHI 2010 here in Atlanta. I’ve heard from multiple sources that the Socially Intelligent Machine Group rocked the boat during the demos on Monday.

Check it out for yourself:

Towards Bit Communication

It started in the mid-nineties. Pretty soon, everyone wanted to have a web page. Services like Geocities and Tripod made the set up of a web page a simple task and soon enough, millions of users had a place on the web they could call their own.

Fast-forward a few more years, into the early-2000s, and the free web page phenomenon is losing steam. As it turned out, managing a personal web page, even with a tool like Geocities, was too much work. Writing posts, managing images, creating links, choosing templates was not something people wanted to do every day. Not to mention the ads shown on people’s personal web pages, which degraded the experience and made it feel impersonal.

Around the same time, a guy named Evan Williams built a tool called Blogger that made it possible for everyone to use the web as a true personal publishing platform. No web site management required, just focus on the writing. Not too long, Blogger was growing by leaps and bounds, and was eventually acquired by Google. Successful story.

In the mid-2000, Evan does it again, and with a group of colleagues, creates Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that becomes more powerful and influential than Blogger by at least an order of magnitude. What makes it special? Unlike a blog, whose posts tend to be at least a couple of paragraphs long, a tweet can’t exceed 140-chars. Who has time for a “long” blog post anyway? 140-chars here and there and you stay in touch with friends and family. Twitter raises more than US$100 million from investors and is at the center of the new social media craze. More than 50 million people create Twitter accounts. It’s a category defining product.

Early in the 2010′s, a new service is beginning to gain in popularity. Foursquare lets anyone communicate their location by “checking into” places with their mobile phones with the press of a button, nothing more.

The fact that we are moving towards a one-bit communication culture is undeniable. We want to be able to communicate quickly, but we don’t want to give up control over that last button press.

BBC Redesign

As it’s become painfully obvious by now, I’ve all but abandoned this blog. The truth is, things got busy, the baby started crawling and I am still figuring out what type of format I would like to adopt moving forward to communicate thoughts, ideas and interesting things I find online that are worth sharing. So for now I will leave at that.

But before I disappear again, I would like to share a link from the BBC discussing their digital language overhaul.

Definitely worth 5 minutes of your time if you do or think about this kind of stuff for a living.

Information vs. Confusion

A simple graph that explains so much. (via Flowing Data)

The AT&T MicroCell Scam

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy, so no blog posts from me since more than a month ago. But it’s time to get back on track, and I have a great topic to get me pumped up about writing again. It’s a rant (I’ve found that my best posts are rants).

I’ve been a happy owner of an iPhone for more than a year, and a fairly unhappy customer of AT&T Wireless for the same amount of time. One of the big problems with AT&T for me is that signal strength in my house is very poor. Dropped calls is something I am used to.

Fast forward to yesterday. I checked my mailbox and one of the letters I got was from AT&T. It was actually one of those glossy brochures filled with stock photography – you know, what they usually send you when trying to get you to sign-up for new services or products.

This time AT&T was promoting a product that I could really use – a 3G MicroCell. Main selling point: it increases signal strength at home. Cost: I don’t remember exactly, and it’s not too relevant. What’s important is that AT&T charges extra for this device, on top of the plan you already have.

All very well, but let’s get this story straight. AT&T owns a network of cell towers that is obviously not able to handle the load in some cases, and does a very poor job sending a strong signal to my house. I am a subscriber and pay around $170 a month for subpar service (iPhone family plan).

Now, AT&T is trying to sell me yet another product/service that wraps around their suboptimal cell coverage, so that I can finally use my cell phone at home reliably.

What’s wrong with this picture? This is like buying a brand new car and discovering that it starts intermittently in some parts of town. After talking to the manufacturer, you are told that there’s nothing they can do except sell you another device for $30/month that connects to your ignition system and addresses the problem for good. I am not the only one unhappy about this.

This MicroCell offers some other services, but their primary marketing message is “Five Bar Coverage in Your Home”, service mark.

AT&T should offer me this MicroCell for free. Watch out AT&T, there are many other players in this industry and I have a feeling they might eat your lunch one day if you are not careful. Too bad the telecom and airline industries share customer service expertise with each other.

TR35

Every year, the MIT Technology Review magazine publishes their list of top young innovators under 35. I always find the people and work profiled really inspiring, and every once in a while someone that I know is on the list.

But nothing tops this year’s. Andrea and her work on socially guided machine learning made the list. Not only that, but her robot Simon is on the cover of the magazine. This is super cool, very special.

Flipping through the magazine, and looking at the smiling faces of the “innovators under 35″, the thought of these people pulling all nighters and working really hard to meet deadlines doesn’t come to mind easily. But that’s very much how it works. I know it. Lots of hard work and dedication, no shortcuts.

What the Technology Review people don’t know is that Andrea has another little “robot” at home. It’s still “under development”. Just wait until they see him in action, it might just award Andrea another top prize.

Desert Shuttle

When you think you’ve seen everything the auto industry is capable of producing when it comes to car ads, they bring out something new and refreshing. A great idea, one of the coolest car ads I’ve seen in a long time.

No, Microsoft, You Didn’t Do This

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. When I worked at Microsoft, I found the technical team to be very solid and the marketing team to be pretty awful.

Here’s yet another piece of evidence of what I mean by awful. In the US site of some business productivity software it sells, Microsoft chose to use stock photography. Not a problem.

However, in the Polish version of the same site, Microsoft replaced the head of the black guy with the head of a white guy.

I found this on TechCrunch and had to post about it. It’s simply unreal. If you are in charge of a web site like this, how can you possibly think this is a good idea?