NorthGeek

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.

NorthGeek Product Review: 6′ HDMI 1.3b cable from Optimized Cable Co.

Sorry for the delay, folks – but here it is!! Our first review of a product from http://www.optimization-world.com – here is the product page for the HDMI cable they sent me – a 6′ gold-plated HDMI cable, for just $12.99! And they ship to Canada!

Please don’t mind the lack of editing – I had to use iMovie and I haven’t used it in a while… Am waiting for the new FCP to come out!

Google Maps Street View car caught in the wild in Montreal!!

Great news!! Montreal’s Plateau area will be included in Google’s Street View!! I spotted the car in the wild, on Duluth and Hotel-De-Ville, not too far from the NorthGeek headquarters… Unfortunately, the car was parked and the camera was covered, so I will not be in Street View. I know you were all wanting that pretty badly. So was I.

Here she is, in full (sort of…) HD:

Enjoy every song from The Beatles in audio and video, with lyrics!!

I recently went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to visit the “Imagine” exhibition – inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Bed-in For Peace” of 1969, held in Suite 1742 of Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The exhibition woke up the inner Beatles fan in me, which had been sleeping since around 2007, when I had become all Beatled-out several months after acquiring the soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil and Apple Corps Ltd.’s (the label owning all rights to Beatles music) joint project, LOVE.

What perfect timing, then, for this to fall into my lap. This appears to be every Beatles song (or at least every song that made it to a publicly available album) in video, with accompanying lyrics! Amazing! Enjoy:

The Beatles Video and Lyrics from A-Z (courtesy: BeatlesTube)

A Day in the Life
A Hard Day’s Night
A Taste of Honey
Across The Universe
Act Naturally
All I’ve got to Do
All My Loving
All Together Now
All You Need Is Love
And I Love Her
And Your Bird Can Sing
Anna (Go To Him)
Another Girl
Any Time At All
Ask Me Why
Baby It’s You
Baby You’re A Rich Man
Baby’s in Black
Back In The USSR
Bad Boy
Because
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
Birthday
Blackbird
Blue Jay Way
Boys
Can’t Buy Me Love
Carry That Weight
Chains
Come Together
Cry Baby Cry
Day Tripper
Dear Prudence
Devil In Her Heart
Dig A Pony
Dig It
Dizzy Miss Lizzie
Do You Want to Know a Secret
Doctor Robert
Don’t Bother Me
Don’t Let Me Down
Don’t Pass Me By
Drive My Car
Eight Days a Week
Eleanor Rigby
Every Little Thing
Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey
Everybody’s Trying to be My Baby
Fixing a Hole
Flying
For No One
For You Blue
Free As A Bird
From Me To You
Get Back
Getting Better
Girl
Glass Onion
Golden Slumbers
Good Day Sunshine
Good Morning, Good Morning
Good Night
Got To Get You Into My Life
Happiness is a Warm Gun
Hello, Goodbye
Help
Helter Skelter
Her Majesty
Here Comes The Sun
Here, There And Everywhere
Hey Bulldog
Hey Jude
Hold Me Tight
Honey Don’t
Honey Pie
I Am the Walrus
I Call Your Name
I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party
I Feel Fine
I Me Mine
I Need You
I Saw Her Standing There
I Should Have Known Better
I Wanna Be Your Man
I Want To Hold Your Hand
I Want To Tell You
I Want You
I Will
I’ll Be Back
I’ll Cry Instead
I’ll Follow the Sun
I’ll Get You
I’m a Loser
I’m Down
I’m Just Happy to Dance with You
I’m Looking Through You
I’m Only Sleeping
I’m so tired
I’ve Got A Feeling
I’ve Just Seen a Face
If I Fell
If I Needed Someone
In My Life
It Won’t Be Long
It’s All Too Much
It’s Only Love
Julia
Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey
Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand
Lady Madonna
Let it Be
Little Child
Long Tall Sally
Long, Long, Long
Love Me Do
Love You To
Lovely Rita
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Maggie Mae
Magical Mystery Tour
Martha My Dear
Matchbox
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
Mean Mr. Mustard
Michelle
Misery
Money (That’s What I Want)
Mother Nature’s Son
Mr. Moonlight
No Reply
Norwegian Wood
Not a Second Time
Nowhere Man
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Octopus’s Garden
Oh! Darling
Old Brown Shoe
One After 909
Only A Northern Song
P.S. I Love You
Paperback Writer
Penny Lane
Piggies
Please Mister Postman
Please Please Me
Polythene Pam
Rain
Real Love
Revolution 1
Revolution 9
Rock and Roll Music
Rocky Raccoon
Roll Over Beethoven
Run For Your Life
Savoy Truffle
Sexy Sadie
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
She Loves You
She Said, She Said
She’s A Woman
She’s Leaving Home
Sie Liebt Dich
Slow Down
Something
Strawberry Fields Forever
Sun King
Taxman
Tell Me What You See
Tell Me Why
Thank You Girl
The Ballad of John And Yoko
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
The End
The Fool On The Hill
The Inner Light
The Long And Winding Road
The Night Before
The Word
There’s A Place
Things We Said Today
Think For Yourself
This Boy
Ticket to Ride
Till There was You
Tomorrow Never Knows
Twist and Shout
Two of Us
Wait
We Can Work It Out
What Goes On
What You’re Doing
When I Get Home
When I’m Sixty-Four
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Why don’t we do it in the road
Wild Honey Pie
With a Little Help From My Friends
Within You Without You
Words of Love
Yellow Submarine
Yer Blues
Yes It Is
Yesterday
You Can’t Do That
You Know My Name
You Like Me Too Much
You Never Give Me Your Money
You Really Got a Hold on Me
You Won’t See Me
You’re Going to Lose That Girl
You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
Your Mother Should Know

Beatboxing with a flute: Nathan "Flutebox" Lee and Beardyman rock Google London

This is one of the coolest and most original things I’ve seen in a while. At least i think it’s original! I haven’t seen anyone else do this. My apologies to Beardyman, as this post is really about Nathan Lee and his awesomely cool beatboxing with a flute!! Beardyman, you’re pretty awesome, too. This guy‘s not bad, either…

Man, working at Google must be awesome! Do they have shows like this all the time? Don’t forget to click on the “HQ” button when the video loads to watch and hear in high quality!

I love funny email!

My dad has a buddy who sends him about 17 emails a day.

Wait, before I continue – is pluralizing “email” with “emails” correct? Who knows? I’ll keep doing it, because this is my article.

Where was I… Oh, right, the 17 emails a day guy. So this guy sends my dad TONS of emails, and my dad reviews them and sends the worthy ones along to my siblings and I. Some of them are even good enough for me to send to my friends!

Here’s a collection of photos that have been sent to me in recent weeks. I think these are all worthy of a NorthGeek audience…

Think Google Maps is invading your privacy?

Google Maps’ street view is amazing. You can peruse new neighborhoods, potential dwellings, hard to describe stores, and so much more. Some have enjoyed showing their Googles, and some innocently sharing the road haven’t had such a pleasant fate. Others have attempted to catch images of the Google van to alert pedestrians and perhaps inspire them to do something special when it passes.

But maybe it’s just getting a bit too close for comfort: