Archives for October 2005

Google Maps mash-ups are getting more interesting all the time. Now it’s being used for a game. Remember playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” as a kid? Well now the new game Brewster Jennings Protects America
brings this classic adventure into the 21st century by merging the game play with Google Maps technology. In
the web-based Brewster Jennings Protects America game you race around the globe as a government agent trying to
stop a deadly terror attack from taking place.

The story so far: You are an undercover CIA agent claiming to work for the fictitious “Brewster Jennings & Associates”
company. You were just awoken at three in the morning by a phone call from The Chief telling you to report to
your office immediately. From what he told you it looks like a terrorist is set to attack today and you are the
country’s last and only hope. It’s time to save America. Check out Brewster Jennings Protects America.

Timeshifting TV using a DVR like Tivo is pretty well understood. Record TV, then watch it when it’s convenient. Timeshifting also lets you skip through the commercials, or pause playback when the phone rings. It’s one of those technologies that once you’ve used, it’s difficult to imagine giving it up.

Now a product called Slingbox introduces placeshifting, allowing you to watch whereever you want. This $250 device cuts the cords and lets you watch your TV from any networked Windows PC — even over the Internet.

My home office, affectionately referred to as Room Five, needs to be de-cluttered. There are currently three desks, four desktop computers, a printer/scanner/copier, a television, a laptop computer and a couple of dogs. My goal is to simplify and get the room back to order, and that was one of my reasons for the Slingbox. I’m replacing the three desks with two, adding drawer storage and bookshelves. I’m replacing the old CRT monitors with LCD panels. And now with Slingbox, I can move the TV out of here.

So I brought a Slingbox home from the local BestBuy and gave it a try. I opened the box at noon, installed the device on my Dish Network DVR and hooked everything up. This was my concern, as I have three routers. The primary router connects to our FIOS fiber optic connection. From that, I have two other routers, a wireless router for my laptop and iPAQ, and one for my CallAdvantage VoIP service. The trick was to reconfigure things so that the Slingbox could be connected to the primary router.

Configuration was automatic and painless. Everything just worked exactly the way they said it would. I handled some IMs and some emails, but in less than an hour I was watching TV on my PC. In a few more minutes I had my laptop and my son’s computer also setup to watch TV.

The sound and picture quality is great — not perfect, but quite good — better than any other streaming options I’ve seen. There are two minor weaknesses. First, if someone is watching the TV that you’re watching through Slingbox, you’ll have to watch the same programming. You could have fun with this, as you can change channels and have complete remote control of the DVR from the Slingbox connection. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I was disappointed to see that you can only have one concurrent connection to your Slingbox. So if I’m watching TV on my PC in Room Five, my son upstairs couldn’t watch it on his PC at the same time — we’d have to take turns. Not a huge deal, but it would’ve been nice to allow 2 or 3 simultaneous connections.

All in all, I’m impressed with Slingbox. My next test will be from Starbucks via wireless.

Buy Slingbox on Amazon.com

The folks over at Flock have released a developer preview of their much-anticipated social browser. You can get Flock for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux.

So what the heck is Flock, and why should you care?

Well, it’s a browser, first and foremost. And the browser market is a tough one to break into. But at the same time, there hasn’t been much really new or exciting in the browser world in the past five years or so. Enter Flock.

First of all, Flock is a good browser. The interface is simple and uncluttered. It offers tabbed browsing, it’s highly configurable and it uses the same keystroke combos I’d expect (i.e. Ctrl-Tab opened a new tab).

What makes it interesting is the social aspect. They’ve integrated Flock with blogging, photo sharing and favorite sharing.

The blog button opens an edit window that lets you draft and publish entries to most popular blogging systems, including Movable Type. I’m composing this very blog entry using Flock. You can also use it to edit your existing blog entries. And of course, you can drag-and-drop content from any website to your blog window to add it to your entry or quote it. Wicked cool.

While I’m blogging, I can click on the Flickr topbar (like you see in the screenshot above) and drag images directly from Flickr into my blog entry. It doesn’t get any easier, and easy is good.

As for favorites (bookmarks, or whatever you prefer to call them), Flock integrates with del.icio.us, giving you integrated management of all your bookmarks and even the tags. I recently wrote about the virtues of del-icio.us — Flock makes del.icio.us even tastier.

So how does Flock run? So far, no serious problems. The blog editor sometimes gave me a little grief when I tried to drag an image to the left of a paragraph, but otherwise it’s running great! Flock integrates with all the tools that I’m already using, and does so very elegantly. Up until now, I’ve been using a combination of Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox (with much more emphasis on Firefox of late), but Flock just might make me rethink that.

Website: www.flock.com

Seth Godin maintains that to succeed in today’s market you need to standout — to be a purple cow. And now, it’s not enough to stand out — you need a big moo. His latest book, The Big Moo, brings together 33 purple cows — everyone from Mark Cuban to Daniel Pink; Robin Williams to Dave Balter. Each contributor adds a pearl of wisdom to the strand, making for a lot of little sound bites on how to be remarkable.

I had pre-ordered the book on Amazon, got it Wednesday and opened it last night. It’s a very quick read. The Big Moo is not steeped in deep theory, just gut-level advice from people how are out there being remarkable in their own way.

Each of the 33 entries are uncredited. You know who contributed, but you don’t know what they contributed, so you get to guess who wrote what.

And all of the proceeds go to charity, with proceeds going to go JDRF, Acumen Fund, and Room to Read.

Amazon: The Big Moo

Managing bookmarks (“favorites” for those of you raised on Internet Explorer) has long been a pain in the ass. The problem is compounded by running multiple computers and multiple browsers. I routinely use two computers, a laptop for work and a desktop at home. On top of that I use both Firefox and Internet Explorer (don’t ask). If you’ve ever seen the look of total frustration on my face via the webcam, now you know why — I’m searching in vain for some site I ran across, but now cannot find.

Well I’m happy to report that those frustrating days are completely over (leaving me more time to be frustrated by other problems). I’ve found del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us isn’t new. I heard about it quite awhile ago but never really checked into it until recently. I wish I had jumped on it earlier, because this site has completely changed the way I view bookmarks.

What is Del.icio.us? Besides the clever name (yes, the URL really is http://del.icio.us), it is a fabulous way to store, retrieve and even share bookmarks. To use it most effectively, you add to shortcuts to your Links bar in the browser(s) of your choice. Post to del.icio.us saves a website address for future retrieval. Rather than require folders or categories, del.icio.us uses tags. You can create tags on-the-fly and use as many as you like for an entry. my del.icio.us lets you browse your saved bookmarks, regardless of what browser you’re using or what computer you’re on.

This is where it gets even more interesting…

You can share your bookmarks. In fact, to see mine, click to http://del.icio.us/bigblueball. By default, this shows the most recently added sites. Beneath each link you’ll see how many other people have also bookmarked that particular site. Over on the right, you’ll see all the tags I’ve used. You can view them as a list or in the cloud view that has been popularized by similar sites that support folksonomy-style tagging.

It gets better. To view all the links for a given tag, just click the tag (try spanish). Notice the URL format. Now if you want to see all sites tagged with “spanish” across all users, change the URL to simply http://del.icio.us/tag/spanish. Nice, eh?

Finally, you can retrieve any of these pages as RSS for use in an aggregator, portal or blog. Yep, it’s as simple as http://del.icio.us/rss/bigblueball. So go sign-up for del.icio.us, then swing back here and let me know what you think.