Elliot Soloway on the Scoble Show talked about building educational software for cell phones. (and a bunch of other stuff). I had the good fortune to be walking down the right street in Ann Arbor this morning and spent twenty minutes with him talking about his new company, GoKnow Learning.
More reactions to this video on Ideas and Thoughs from an EdTech.
Technorati Tags: annarbor
Here's a recipe for promoting your event using a combination of Twitter and Google Calendar.
1. Make some friends on twitter. BE MY TWITTERFREND PLEEZ
2. The recipe for events is to enter "what", "who", "where" and "when".
3. You are writing for both a Twitter audience and for data entry.
4. Please test by cut and paste into Google Calendar "quick add".
What:
5. Put the URL if any in the what part of the event; that becomes event title.
6. Include a #hashtag or @reference in the text to refer to something.
Who:
7. Use both a Twitter @name and a real name in the who part for maximum visibility.
Where:
8. The where clause is preceded by the word "at".
9. If Google Calendar can't geolocate the phrase, it turns this clause into a search. Be creative.
10. You are indexing into Google Map's Community Maps and you can put more information there.
When:
10. Be careful with relative days (today, next week) to avoid confusion when these are seen later.
To be done:
11: build a bot that reads a twitter stream and autopopulates a Google Calendar with events.
UPDATE: a2events calendar via a search at Terraminds. @bkerr is threatening a public google calendar (the #11 TBD).
Technorati Tags: annarbor, arbcamp, calendar, googlecalendar, library, parser, quick-add, twitter
Steve Rubel twittered out the announcement that Google Docs has a mobile version while I was waiting for the bus, so I tried it out on the bus to see how it worked. Here's a micro-review.
More info: Google Docs Mobile link, Google Blogoscoped review of Google Docs Mobile. A few screenshots on A Media Circus.
I tried two document formats, spreadsheets and documents. It's said that presentations are not supported, and I didn't have any, so I didn't test.
The spreadsheet viewer either lets you download as XLS (which I didn't try) to view as HTML. The HTML viewer gives you pages that are 1 column wide and 20 rows deep, so if you are designing reports for mobile viewing you'll want to arrange things in columns, not rows. There's no edit function that I could see. I'll have to rethink the formatting of my Michigan Football Parking spreadsheet and figure out if there's a good way to represent it in this format.
The document viewer successfully loaded a Word file that I had saved from Google Mail earlier and presented it (slowly) for viewing. Some amount of formatting was intact. I tried to edit it, but got confused, and by that time my bus ride was over.
Mobile document viewing and editing has been around at least as long as Socialtext's Miki mobile wiki editor, and I've done successful Mediawiki remote wiki edits on the Ann Arbor civic wiki Arborwiki. It's nice to get a view into Google Docs, but so far I haven't seen more than remote viewing. This is a welcome addition to the Google mobile pantheon, but it doesn't look like it's going to replace my laptop any time soon.
Technorati Tags: GOOG, google, google-docs, google-docs-mobile, google-mobile-docs, techmeme-pick-me-pick-me, mobile, spreadsheet, steve-rubel, twitter
Google has acquired Jaiku. The Finnish service (what do you call it? a microaggregator?) pulls in feeds from your various web presences and turns it into a lifestream. My Jaiku profile hauls in a bunch of news from the various dispersed places I put thing.
I have about 30 friends I'm following on Jaiku, which is tiny compared to the rest of my use of these sorts of things. My use of it in the past has been some part backup relief valve for when Twitter is down, and part keeping in touch with a more European crowd.
The analysis of the Jaiku acquistion is happening in real time to the right hand side of my screen on Twitter. Ross Mayfield expects that Jaiku competes with Facebook's Social News Feed, and notes that integration with Google Talk adn Orkut is perfectly reasonable. Steve Rubel predicts that Twitter is the next to go and suggests that Yahoo will snap them up inside 45 days. There's the usual undercurrent of groaning about yet another chance for a cool service to be swallowed in the maws of a huge company, with the memory of Dodgeball fresh in mind.
Jaiku did some work to integrate with Nokia's Series 60 phones, and they have a mobile version for ordinary mobile phones. My early take on it compares it head on with Twitter's mobile version, which is much more awesome for me in part because it has my motley assortment of Ann Arborites, librarians, web geeks and fellow bus riders to help me get through the day in real time. I don't have that collection of people on Jaiku, and thus for me it does not have the same real time feel.
The other point of comparison is Jaiku vs. Facebook's tools for aggregating information about yourself. I don't know any other tool out there that quite so neatly pulls in abbreviated versions of the things you're up to and consolidates them quite so well as a personal chronology and record. This "lifestream" approach is nicely done, compact, and useful, and they figured out search optimization enough so that every so often I get Jaiku as a referrer for something I've written and have it show up high in search results. Facebook feels like it needs constant tending, but Jaiku can run in the background and passively gather the stuff you're doing on the open network and pull back 1% of it to keep a record.
With the current froth around Facebook and thus by extension all close substitutes for it I'm not surprised by this acquisition. Jaiku is much more a tool that belongs on and lives in the open Internet than Facebook. If you were to roll back the clock and make a comparison, it would be between AOL or Compuserve back in the day in the Facebook seat, and Usenet, home pages, email lists and What's New pages in the rest-of-the-world seat. Last time, AOL lost and the net won, but it won only by mostly destroying itself and remaking itself in the process. This time who knows.
Technorati Tags: jaiku, google, facebook, goog, acquisition, hosting
New typepad version for iphone works well enough for my to post this on my BlackBerry. Hooray!
I've updated the m.*.com directory of mobile sites. In this edition I added links to mobile versions of Facebook, Youtube, and Clusty, and to Tiny Twitter. Haven't tried Youtube yet (I don't think my phone has any hope of doing anything useful with video), there's a review of Clusty, and the Facebook mobile site is really quite good.
I also added direct links on this page to the Mobile Ride Guide for the two Ann Arbor bus routes I use the most, the 1 and the 5. If you would like a link to your bus status page, so that you don't have to fiddle with a long drop down menu to find it, let me know and I'll add it in.
Thanks to Brian Cors for the feedback and update.
Technorati Tags: annarbor, aata, theride, bus, mobile, facebook, youtube, clusty, twitter
I've been collecting links to mobile versions of web sites; they are appearing more frequently, and the results are getting better all the time.
The latest one to try is Clusty mobile search, which is built on top of the Clusty search engine, which in turn is a clustering tool on top of a few other 2d tier (Ask) and 3d tier (never heard of them) search engines.
It certainly returns different search results than Google - not random, not always great but often good, and interesting enough to warrant a try.
Clusty's claim to fame is its clustering; e.g. if you search for "strawberry picking Ann Arbor", you get 4 compact search text results plus links to results grouped in clusters of Ann Arbor, Michigan; Picture; Blog; Music; Member; Restaurant; Movies; Books. Clicking through any of those shows results in that cluster only. If you have used Flickr's clustering tools it will be familiar.
The right answer, by the way, is not found on page one of this or any other search results on the net I have found. The word on the street is that the best place to pick berries around Ann Arbor this year is Rowe's Produce Farm in Ypsi south of the Rawsonville Road exit. My informant Katrina writes
We picked strawberries this morning at Rowe's on Martz Road (just off
Rawsonville Road). The picking was good too. I don't believe they are
organic though.
More local strawberry info on Arborwiki. Kitchen Chick picks at Rowe's too, and provides this strawberry chocolate shortcake recipe.
Technorati Tags: clusty, search, mobile, annarbor, strawberries, recipe, kitchenchick, arborwiki, chocolate
m.*.com
For most of this, I followed the instructions at
http://www.nodrm.com/2006/03/22/how-to-use-sprintsamsung-a920-as-an-evdo-bluetooth-modem-with-mac/
UPDATE: more instructions specific to the UpStage at
It wasn't hard once I found that page, but there might have been a few steps I missed. Let me write down what I know I did, and then go back and fix any missing spots.
THIS IS A DRAFT. It really wants to have screen shots or even heaven help us a screencast of the whole thing. When I set this up the first time it was on the train - I bootstrapped the configuration using my Blackberry's browser to find the nodrm site above. I *think* I was stuck a few times along the way, and I doubly think that the missing step that changed between OS releases was the need to get the serial port configured (below, under Bluetooth / Sharing). Comments welcome.
1. Pair your phone with your computer. Turn the phone on; turn Bluetooth on on the phone; turn the computer on, and turn Bluetooth on on the computer. When you get a passkey on the Mac's screen, punch it in on the phone.
System Preferences / Bluetooth / Settings:
Bluetooth Power: On
[x] Discoverable
[x] Show Bluetooth Status in the menu bar
System Preferences / Bluetooth / Devices
Device Name: UpStage
Device Type: Phone
Device Services: Object Exchange, BTA_FTS, HSP Gateway, HFP Gateway, Advanced Audio source, Dialup Networking
Paired: Yes
Configured: Yes
Favorite: Yes
Connected: No
Serial Port: Yes
System Preferences / Bluetooth / Sharing
on key service name
[x] [ ] SerialPort-1
if you don't see a serial port, select "Add Serial Port Service" to add one.
2. Set up the phone as a modem. In the Bluetooth setup assistant, pick "access the internet with your data connection". Keep the user name and password fields blank, and use #777 as the phone number. Use "Sprint PCS Vision" as the modem script. Add the modem to you toolbar so it's easy to get to. I got error messages about not having a serial device when I did this the first time, and I had to go back and add the serial port in under Bluetooth / Sharing see above.
3. To connect, click on the modem toolbar and then select "connect". It will dial, and if you have service it will connect for you. Speeds will vary depending on cell coverage and the phase of the moon.
Technorati Tags: ambassador, bluetooth, mac, osx, samsung, sprint, upstage
from the latest Plazes weekly newsletter (I travel 9 km/day, woo)
Featuring Mobile Monday
Since we've been jet-setting across Europe from one Mobile Monday event to the next. We've decided to give it a proper newsletter editorial feature. For those of who you unfamiliar with Mobile Monday, it is an open community that organizes gatherings every first Monday of the month to promote and bring together people from the mobile industry. The first chapter was formed seven years ago in Helsinki, Finland and today there are over 35 chapters spanning across the globe from New York, Paris, Istanbul to Beijing.
This first monday (March 5) would be, well, today. So there should be time to organize the next Monday (April 2). Here's the Mobile Monday Ann Arbor event on upcoming.org - collect your favorite mobile social software tools, bus schedules, and the like and join us.
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