NorthGeek

Layar: Augmented reality on your mobile

Have a look at a new “life browsing” experience, available now! Check out layar.com.

Google Streetview goes Snowview for Vancouver 2010

You’ve seen the streets around Vancouver and Whistler, and have been able to get up-close and personal with the various Olympic venues. But thanks to some really cool dudes and an awesomely high-tech snowmobile, now you can experience the snowy trails of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Check this out!

Miss NorthGeek 2010 – Win a new phone courtesy of NorthGeek and Sony Ericsson Canada!

It’s true! You could win this brand new, PINK, Fido-branded Sony Ericsson T715 phone. Win it for yourself or that special someone in your life – a perfect gift for this coming Valentine’s Day!

Miss NorthGeek 2010 is awarded to the most tech-savvy, geekiest (in the coolest way possible), awesomest femenita in the NorthGeekosphere. To win it, you can either nominate yourself, or nominate the Geekette in your life. She will win the T715 phone, the glory, and the respect of kajillions of adoring fans.

All you have to do, is tweet your story (be sure to include #NorthGeek) or comment in this post, with your best tech-enabled (so that means it could be a text message, an email, or some social media form of communication) romantic story. Maybe you asked someone out on a date by SMS, or perhaps you wrote a song, recorded it, and posted it to YouTube? Whatever it is, let us know, and you could be our lucky winner! Remember, the story has to involve the person you’re nominating as Miss NorthGeek 2010!

We’ll be announcing the winner – selected by an esteemed panel of NorthGeek judges and industry experts – on Valentine’s Day – February 14th 2010, at 12:00pm PST.

Good luck, internet lovers!!

Some info on the handset:
- 3G high-speed experience
- Quad-band phone
- 3.2 megapixel camera with video recorder
- Integrated Facebook application
- MP3 player
- External memory expandable(MicroSD)
- Bluetooth® technology
- Handsfree speaker
- Picture and Video Messaging (MMS)
- Flight mode, calendar, to-do list, calculator, unit converter
- World clock, alarm and note pad

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Zedmo secures substantial investment from local business

(digg this story!)

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA – February 4th 2009
John Stapleton, Business Tech, AP

“Thursday was a huge, huge day for us” exclaimed Noah Bloom, co-founder of Zedmo, a Vancouver-based startup developing the universe’s greatest location-based mobile social community.

“I was just going about my day as I normally would – checking my email, browsing the news stories on my America Online portal, and updating my eHarmony profile, when I received a phone call from an angel, who claimed his name was Mike” continues Bloom. “I didn’t believe Mike for a second, so I quickly looked around the room of 2010 cohort enemies – uh, I mean companies – to see who could be playing this evil trick on me. Anthony was sitting in his chair not on the phone, Jamie was busy tweeting his next publishable masterpiece, Mack was under his desk wearing a hood, and Team Romania was hard at work shining their Google pens. Daniel, my co-founder, was busy complaining about his recent ski accident, so it surely wasn’t him pranking me.”

What happened next, forever changed the face of Zedmo. A struggling startup duo of Bloom and Wolfe, who dropped everything to join the 2010 Bootup Labs Cohort, were, until yesterday, surviving off leftover sandwiches found in dumps around the city, and the occasional “fresh” peanut butter and tuna sandwich.

“Being a startup is very tough,” says Wolfe. “It’s not like in the movies where you can rub a lamp and a naked woman comes out of it. It’s tougher than that.”

As you can tell by now, the Associated Press mandates us writers to write our stories in such a way that the reader needs to read all the way to the end of a story to find out what the story is actually about. But, because I know my audience is fairly small, I will cut to the chase here.

Nester’s, a top-notch grocer (according to some, but not all… ANTHONY NICALO…) located just steps from the Bootup Labs office in one direction, and steps from Zedmo’s underground home lair in the other, has made a significant investment in Zedmo. Without acquiring any equity in Zedmo, Nester’s has injected $5,200 worth of groceries into the startup. Terms of the deal are still a bit shady, but a spokesperson for Nesters, Mr. Michael Grocerman, has told the Associated Press that, “…the orange juice cannot be diluted.”

So, how did Daniel Wolfe ever score such a great co-founder, with the ability to close investments so early in the game? We asked, and he explained.

“I have what’s called a silver tongue. That’s it.”

And you thought the Olympics were the biggest story out of Vancouver.

When asked what Zedmo plans to do with this influx of food, they were quick to point us in the direction of their appointed PR agency, for reasons of secrecy and not giving too much away to the competition:

“First, they supplied the 2010 Cohort with Odwalla juices, so as not to cause any unfriendly conflict or envy around the office. Further to this, Zedmo hopes to build on this investment by purchasing fancy foods and supplies, such as turkey, cheese and crackers, and non-generic cling wrap. No further comments, my clients are very tired from the celebrations last night.”

Although this recent investment has placed Zedmo founders Noah and Daniel in the spotlight among “everybody who’s anybody” from the Valley up to Vancouver, the dynamic duo promises to remain down to earth, although sources tell the AP that Daniel was spotted drinking Tropicana orange juice, while Noah was seen washing his hands with a bar of Lever 2000 – for all his 2,000 body parts (including hands).

For more information on Zedmo and their location-based mobile application, please contact info@zedmo.com

PLEASE NOTE: Zedmo is still accepting further investment, so don’t be shy.

Bud Light makes excellent commercials!

NorthGeek is very excited about Google’s Navigation

This is something that just makes you think, “well, duh” -- it had to happen, and finally, it has. Now shipping with all Android 2.0 phones (‘all’ being the Moto Droid for now, at least) is the new Google Maps Navigation which is an internet-enabled, voice prompting GPS navigation app that takes full advantage of all of Google Maps and Google Local’s network features, from business contact info to street view. Have a look:

I’m quite excited for more Android 2.0 phones to come out, especially a GSM one. My only question now: what to do with my Blackberry Bold?

Rolltop – laptop of the future?

Obviously, this is a computer rendering, but wow, I want one! This could very well be the future of portability -- a fully collapsable (and ‘rollable’) notebook computer/display. Sign me up -- and have a look:

How to download an entire website

If you’re looking for a way to download all the files from a website without having FTP access, here is your solution!

Sitesucker:
“SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet. It does this by asynchronously copying the site’s Web pages, images, backgrounds, movies, and other files to your local hard drive. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire Web site.”

How to choose a movie

It is the age old question. How can you find a movie to rent, in a world of polarizing opinions on movies, a plethora of terrible movies, and movies that are rarely less than a time-consuming 90 minutes? A terrible movie, and you will complain that you’ll never get those two hours back! But a great movie, and you will be captivated into a different world and wholly entertained for those two.

We’ve all tried to show up to Blockbuster or the local indie shop without a plan but a hope, and 45 minutes later, you’ve maybe finally got a movie, and you’re not even sure if you’re gonna like it. The video store has become a black hole for video selection. Perhaps the employee can decisively recommend a movie, or the employee picks beckon. But these are still risky and biased.

Here are some ideas for saving the frustration and watching only great movies, ordered with the best means towards the end:

1. Classics: You gotta see the classics. Check out the American Film Institute’s AFI 100, every Oscar winner for best picture, and the highest grossing films of all time. This is cool, but imperfect lists and ultimately not so helpful.
2. Friend recommendations: Reach out to your friends and/or social networks — yes, sometimes not the same eh — for some good ones. Ask your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, and see what you get. You’ll get their opinion. But who do you trust more?
3. Famous critics: Manohla Dargis and her crew at the New York Times put together reputable reviews of movies. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane is worth reading even if you don’t watch movies. Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek is great for the mainstream flicks. ReelView’s James Berardinelli knows his movies. And of course there’s also Ebert. (And a bunch more here or check out Quentin Tarantino’s top 20 movies since 1992.) However, critics are great at enriching your movie experience, but to find a movie to watch, you’re still left wading…
4. Ratings & aggregated sites: Metacritic (top) and Rotten Tomatoes do a great job at aggregating ratings, from both professional and amateur critics. IMDB’s got lots of user votes.
5. Online contextual recommendations and semantic labeling (THIS IS YOUR WINNER): Netflix just spent $1 million as a prize to a team that could improve the accuracy of predications about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences. Unfortunately, you can’t use that engine without a subscription! Another great resource is Nanocrowd, which defines movies by moods and memes, much like Pandora’s Music Genome Project to assign to songs fundamental attributes which give them their true essence. Nanocrowd looks like a great site in that realm.

And lastly, start building your list of movies to see, stick it on your mobile phone, and don’t roam the video store halls of abyss!

Towards a Personalized Mobile Experience

I worked on the following paper for Blueslice Networks, a telecom equipment provider based in Montreal, Canada. It is entitled Towards a Personalized Mobile Experience: How converged subscriber management will impact the life of end-users. It has also been submitted as a proposal for a presentation at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona.

How do you think you will use your mobile devices in 2015 and interact with other devices in your life? What would you like to be able to do in 5 years time? We’d love to hear — you can leave your comments below!

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Towards a Personalized Mobile Experience

The advances to come in personal communications in the next few years will be amazing.

In the five years to come, we will be far along in the interaction between the devices of our life. Many have considered how convergence would reduce the number of personal communications devices; however, the reality is quite different, as more and more ”connected,” purpose-built devices are being added to the standard household. We will inevitably still use and manage and interact with more devices in our life, as we will finally be able to connect with many pieces of information in our home and daily life that remain to be untapped.

This article will elaborate fully on the hyper-connected world of 2015, the role of operators, and the importance of mobile personalization and converged profile management. It will evaluate current practices and future opportunities for operators to offer mobile personalization for their subscribers, as well as how end users will interact and live in an evolving and resulting hyper-connected world.

TRANSFORMATIVE GROWTH

The size of the globally connected community is continuing its transformative growth. We have seen the four billionth mobile subscriber in 2009 , and yet “data” connections are projected to attain a 300% to 500% penetration rate . These data connections will make human subscriber numbers pale in comparison: they will allow consumers to lead a rich, informative, and hyper-connected lifestyle.

If we are able to link all the devices in your life, and not just most of them, we are slated for an amazing way to communicate and live, having access to exciting new services, anytime and anywhere. By harnessing subscribers’ historical data to predict their behaviors and converging information from all “connected” devices of their life to enhance and personalize their mobile experience, converged subscriber data management will be the key cornerstone of the 2015 end user experience.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

A day in the life of a typical connected person in just a few years time could sound something like the following:

The day would start with an interactive experience in home. REM sleep monitors, alarm clocks, lights fading on, and climate control are all connected to start your day in the most soothing way. As you pick up your mobile device, the phone emerges from quiet mode, and you are actively presented with the applications you’re most likely to use. You are presented with relevant information for your day, preferred information from news sources and other interests, and personalized streams from your social media networks. You have also formulated customized responses to any queries that have come into your real time inbox (finally now with short, two sentence messages!) and are prepared for your review. Through your real time inbox, you have access to all your documents, personal files, media libraries, and control over your devices. Fully integrated is your schedule interactive with maps, direction visualizations, and automatic timings for your meetings.

As you move through the house, you notice your picture frames with photographs from your most recent weekend getaway and your highest rated oldies. You pass your home PC, which knows to remain dormant on these mornings. Your kitchen alerts you about the groceries that are low in the fridge.

As you leave your house, your car is alerted to your meetings and offers visualizations of your directions. Your mobile device presents you with an update on your home electricity usage and automatically enables energy consumption mode while you’re away from the house.

At the office, the tasks underway on your mobile device are transferred to the PC, calls are routed to the office device, and your customized responses are ready for your review.

Arriving home at the end of the day, your calls are optionally routed to your home system, your reading tablet gives you suggestions for new books based on recent topics of the day and your friends’ recommendations, your DVD-less movie player gives you film suggestions, and you are connected to your relevant social network news.

What was previously known as Machine-to-Machine, or M2M, is now simply any embedded wireless devices that are increasingly part of your day-to-day life. They are all united under a centralized profile, so that they can interact in smart ways with you based on previous behavior, usage data analytics, and the centrally converged profile information. What makes this work elegantly and interactively is a cohesion in connectivity, devices, identities, and applications, all underpinned by a centralized view on all the information of a subscriber.

CONNECTIVITY: BRINGING ABOUT UNIFIED TRANSPORT

We are witnessing the emergence of many forms of access: HSPA is followed by 4G/LTE, WiFi, WiMAX, broadband, cable, DSL, Bluetooth, NFC, etc. each varying by data rate, mobility, and reach, and reflecting the requirements of the applications that use them. Access technologies are increasing, not reducing.

However, end users are generally unaware or do not care about the multitude of access networks and technologies. In the next few years, users will continue to buy more and more connected devices, such as the Amazon Kindle, without really thinking about how or why it is connected. In the case of the Kindle, they will just want it to buy books whenever they want.

DEVICES: TWO WAY INTERACTIONS

Some devices will continue to accumulate more and more access technologies, increasing their ability to access the network and unified profile anywhere and at any time. However, many devices will actually only use one or two, and that will be sufficient. Many devices will not be used as pervasively across different locations like some mobile devices.

The network will know how a user wants to be reached on their devices, where and when calls and messages are routed to a specific device, or that all devices should ring simultaneously. You will be able to connect with the devices that surround you: you will watch your video and audio library across multiple devices without physical storage drives, share multimedia with your picture frames, control home lighting, and manage your energy consumption and conservation. Any one of these devices can be actively accessed or passively through alerts of predefined behaviors.

IDENTITIES: SINGLE SIGN ON

As consumers continue to accumulate devices and applications, they are very quickly acquiring new identities. Many of the identities across different services are interacting with each other, so providing a trustworthy single sign-on will not only be convenient and leverage the different services, but it will also allow for the network to learn more about how and when the user wants to use their applications.

For example, today a user will post a thought, image, or video to multiple services at once, e.g. YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, their personal blog, Posterous, etc. Based on the type of media, they may want to spread it differently.

Many of today’s users can still manage several social applications, but as industry influencers continue aggregating multiple streams to simplify their communications, and as people will find different value to different services, all consumers will, by 2015 absolutely need to aggregate their streams. Their operator is the organization in whom the consumer has trust and a direct connection at all times. A smart operator will be able to offer a single sign-on and actively prompt the user for the applications they will want to use in certain situations.

By analyzing information about the subscriber, such as service preferences, usage, and personalization, an operator can further create an inconspicuous social network for each user. It is not one that rivals the very well established Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, but one built around their real connections: who they call, who they message, who they interact with constantly. Based on frequency and degrees of separation, this data-mining can create an intelligent network for the user, allowing automatic prompts of certain people’s location or behavior, predetermined sharing of information such as photographs, day-to-day scheduling and routine, and tracking of their social graphs.

APPLICATIONS: INNOVATION AND OPEN MODELS

No longer fighting Internet innovations, the operators’ walled gardens are coming down. Instead, operators are embracing innovative Internet applications, which are becoming less device and access reliant, and more contextual and location-based. Applications are prompted based on your previous behaviors and where you are now. You are encouraged to interact with your local environments and see what’s going on around you, such as businesses, attractions, and people nearby.

The progression from walled garden to an open model will continue further to open up opportunities with third party service providers. An operator could open up an API towards the converged subscriber profile databases, which would give innovative players the ability to build applications around the operator’s data. This also opens up new business models and revenue sharing between the user, third party services, and the operator.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS SUBSCRIBER DATA?

An operator offering mobile personalization reduces the likelihood of an end-user changing service provider. The information they have and can mine to promote a better user experience will lead to improved customer loyalty and reduced churn.

Subscriber data is changing. It is no longer just a collection of relevant routing information, such as a phone number and phone identity, enabled and disabled services, and current location. It connects multiple networks, multiple user devices, multiple applications, and multiple access networks into an intelligent heart of a network, and it is the diving board for connectivity and innovation of the future. The greatest tool to lead us to a hyper-connected world lies in this intelligent layer of subscriber data.