Ubiquity - You control the data

Notch up another interesting project for Mozilla. As I'm sitting here at my desk I've installed a new app called Ubiquity to my firefox browser. This little app allows you to take any information on a web page, highlight it and do something with it. For instance, I see an address, I highlight it and then hit ctrl spacebar and type map. Instantly, I get a map of that location and as I learn more commands I can do more things, like an amazon search or yelp a resturant I read about or I could even create my own commands. It's a great concept to think about taking information on any page into more useful, relavant information for you. While it's still version 0.5 I think its got great potential and can't wait to see where they go with it.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The Luke Arm

It's always cool when you see something you know is going to change peoples lives. When I saw this video on the Luke Arm that Dean Camen and his team have put together, it really blew me away. It always amazes me what a small team of people can do with a little money and a year worth of time. It will be great to see this technology come to market and really make a difference in amputees lives.

A New Way of Looking at Maps

I found this new map concept great as it uses 50 year old technology to actually make maps useful again. While using your phone works ok, it's often hard to see the entire picture of where you are and where you're going to. This at least gives you multiple dimensions of the same geography so you can explore it in entirely new ways. Part of me things why don't we have pictures like this, like a picture of house at different seasons of the year or a picture of your kid throughout the years. Looking forward to actually seeing this on the market.

Microsoft Photosynth - Talk about Picture Sharing

It amazes me sometimes that Microsoft can actually come out with a piece of technology I actually like. After spending 6 billion dollars on building Vista and ending up with what they did just amazes me. So I was pleasantly surprised today when I read this article on Techcrunch. I've seen older demos of Photosynth and have always been impressed. They take huge libraries of images and make sense of them by creating 3d environments based on pictures on the web. If you think about trying to organize the massive amount of pictures out there it can be a real problem and this is an amazing solution. More importantly it makes all the picture you take worth while because they can be part of the cloud of pictures.

Very Cool Exoskeleton

When you think about how technology is really going to change peoples lives in the next decades, I like to look at project like this.



This man was confined to a wheelchair for 20 years and now his entire life has changed with the ability to walk with this exoskeleton. It's hard to imagine how different things must be, including just reaching up to a shelf that you couldn't do before, or walking with someone down the street at eye level. I can see how in a few years they'll probably figure out how to get him to move without the crutches and make it so he can activate certain muscles to cue the legs to make a movement.

Pandora Radio Closing Shop?

What a bad way to start a Monday morning. By far, my favorite streaming radio station has to be Pandora Radio, it puts together the best stream of music no matter what my mood is (I'm actually listening to it right now). While I think this points directly back to the music giants continuing to fight the battle of protecting all their music instead of finding ways of making more money from it. What I find more surprising is what doesn't Pandora start charging for their service. I'm a huge fan of subscription based services, i.e. Netflix, and can imagine Pandora doing the same thing. I would be more than happy to pay 5 or 10 bucks a month for their service. Obviously, they could continue to make it free and have advertising every few songs and then have a commercial free paid version. Let's just hope they don't shut their doors.

Pandora Possibly Closing Shop

Clay Shirky Cognitive Surplus

This is probably one of the best talks I've seen in a long time. Clay Shirky really makes the case for more crowd sourced projects like Wikipedia. With over 2,000 Wikipedia projects wasted each year on just watching TV, we could be adding all that Cognitive Intelligence to make society a better place.

What's it all about

Over the last few months I've really felt the need to start writing and sharing my ideas with people. I wanted to start a blog on Practical Innovation after reading about a MIT professor working in Peru to help improve the quality of life for the village people by coming up with simple solutions to every day tasks, she noted that she calls her type of innovation "practical innovation" and after reading the article I felt that it's definitely something the world needs more of. Sometime incredibly simple solutions are often the best. To put it another way, one of my co-workers says that the best type of software systems are extremely complex behind the scenes but deliver a simple solution for the user on the front end. I think the best example is to think about Google and the simple little text box they created to allow you to do search, yet behind the scenes there is an army of people and servers trying to deliver the worlds information to you and make it searchable. So if you pick up this RSS feed I hope you enjoy my thoughts and I'd love your ideas and comments too!