Inveneo is a non-profit bringing technology to the developing world. They've got
several projects going in Africa to connect, train, and equip villages but their latest push is an interesting one:
The Thumb Drive Drive. In the era of $50 2Gb USB drives, many of us probably have discarded 16-128Mb drives sitting around. Send them to Inveneo and they'll get used in places where broadband isn't an option and quick storage is necessary.
posted by mathowie
on Dec 13, 2006 -
10 comments
A digital camera that plays mp3s? Convergence is a steam train that can't be stopped. In the future, will every piece of electronics priced over $100 include a mp3 player in it? Stuff like this makes me think the mp3 format will definitely surpass CDs and tapes as a delivery medium. Too bad the record companies still want to stop it, they're losing money everyday by not offering mp3 albums.
posted by mathowie
on Jun 4, 2000 -
0 comments
My Winamp Locker appears to be a free online storage space for your music files, hosted by Winamp. At 3Gb, and the offer of sharing and listening to your songs anywhere, how on earth do they expect to A) make any money back from all the server hardware they'll buy to support this, and B) not get sued by the RIAA? I thought it'd be a great service to exploit for my personal 2-3Gb collection, but it turns out you have to upload your files one at a time. ugh.
posted by mathowie
on May 31, 2000 -
6 comments
Not only can Kevin Mitnick not touch a computer, cell phone, or the Internet for three years, but
a judge is trying to bar him from the lecture circut because he's talking about hacking and technology. I wonder, if they get him to stop
talking about technology, are they going to bust him for
thinking about it too?
posted by mathowie
on Apr 28, 2000 -
4 comments
Convergence baby! Sony has released a Minidisc Player/Recorder, MP3 player with USB connectivity, and PalmOS PDA, all wedged into one small unit. Wow, that's enough buzzwords to kill a horse...
posted by mathowie
on Apr 4, 2000 -
4 comments
Web-related software patents are starting to look like the new cyber-squatting equivalent. People are patenting all sorts of mundane things like "electronic shopping carts" and "making secure purchases via the internet." My guess is in 3 or 4 years, after many of these silly patents have been awarded, we'll see a restructuring of the US patent system.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 22, 2000 -
2 comments
Bantu is the holy grail of instant messaging apps. The people behind it have been working on this for a while, and they're now offering a web-based, java client that can talk to
ICQ,
MSN, and
Yahoo instant message clients. If it were a client side application, I'd probably use it, I'm not a big fan of leaving a browser window open all the time. Another drawback is that it can't reach AIM users.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 20, 2000 -
3 comments
I often forget that there's still a community of visual basic developers out there building all sorts of goofy apps for windows.
This site has a whole bunch of useful utilities, including
Gribouille, a program that lets you draw all over your desktop,
Pubcruncher, an app that kills popup windows, and my favorite: "
Nap and Coffee", a fake app that lets you walk away from your computer and make it appear that you're copying large files, scanning for viruses, or setting up a program.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 6, 2000 -
1 comment
This article at zdnet is all about how wireless web devices aren't that handy, and how our lives would suck if wireless web access was everywhere. I heartily disagree. I have a wireless 2Mb LAN connection at work and it's liberating (it's possible to code, listen to shoutcast mp3 streams, and check email outside or down at the coffee house next door). My PCS phone is useful too, I can surf a few important websites when I don't have a laptop around, getting news, weather, and email. Wireless access is certainly a Good Thing, and should make our lives easier, but the article's author is blaming the possible deluge of information on wireless, instead of the user.
How would a wireless broadband connection make your life better or worse?
posted by mathowie
on Feb 1, 2000 -
8 comments
Paying for McDonalds drive-thru food without cash is the latest shameless marketing attempt to make things as "convenient " as possible. The sad thing is, what they're really trying to do is separate the notion of real money from "digital money" so you'll buy more stuff, thinking it's all monopoly money (credit card companies have built an industry on doing exactly this).
posted by mathowie
on Jan 26, 2000 -
1 comment
Odigo 2.0 is now out, and it
fully integrates with ICQ. I just installed it, and it imported a bit too much. All the ICQ users on my ignore list showed up in Odigo, and my renamed friends showed up as their original ICQ names. The status indicators seem to be broken too, but it's beta so I guess that's alright. Of course, nobody uses it, so I don't see any other people when I'm surfing even the most popular sites, but if everyone starts using this new release, perhaps that will change.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 24, 2000 -
0 comments
If you're in Arizona, you'll be able to vote online for your Democratic Primary candidate this year. Nuts! I can't wait to see how this works out. All I can think is that it will be a security nightmare and hell on server resources to do that many writes to a database in a short period of time. I hope it's a success, and spreads to my state, so I won't have to go through the trouble of finding my polling place, waiting in line, and getting to work on time. You want voter participation to go above 20%? Make it easier.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 18, 2000 -
4 comments
MovieFone (or 777film.com, or AOL/Moviefone if you want to be official) has long been my favorite place to look up movie showtimes, but lately I've been running into problems. The biggest one is this: if you search for movies by theater, then hit "more" a couple times, it reaches a limit of about 12 theaters. Here in LA, that limit corresponds to a 4-5 mile radius. The theater I want to look up movie times at is maybe 7-8 miles away, but no where in the interface is a real "search." It's all just lists and lists. Eventually, I found a list of local theaters (covering about a 20 mile radius) in the theater codes section, but it's not a real search engine, so looking up times at out of town theaters requires you to know the zip code of the place you're going to. I know they're trying to simplify their site by taking out a search engine, but what about the people that know exactly what they want? I use moviefone on the web because using it on a telephone requires you to navigate convoluted menu systems, but they've transferred the phone experience to the web quite well.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 16, 2000 -
2 comments
This is a good sign, as of 5am New Zealand time, there are *no* reported Y2K problems with any public utility. So what are people going to do with all their bottled water and extra food when nothing happens tomorrow?
posted by mathowie
on Dec 31, 1999 -
1 comment
Want to learn WAP (wireless application protocol) without buying a $300 PCS phone and paying for airtime?
WinWAP is a free WAP-capable browser that runs on win9x/NT and allows you to see pages built for cell phones.
posted by mathowie
on Dec 28, 1999 -
3 comments
Today on a web list I subscribe to, some members were complaining about spam and the need for sites to have privacy policies that promise not to sell your address. I have a hotmail address that I use whenever a site requires an email address and doesn't post a privacy policy. I hadn't checked my account in a month, but
I did today and look what was in it. 74 useless messages in 30 days. Thanks spammers.
posted by mathowie
on Nov 21, 1999 -
0 comments
(via /.) comes the much-rumored new
4.8 Gb personal mp3 player. I heard about this a long time ago, but it seemed like a fantasy. 4.8 gigs! That's hours and hours of mp3's! My entire collection at home and work is less than 4 gigs. They claim it's going to be released next week. If they can sell if for under $300, I bet they won't be able to produce enough for the demand. The revolution has begun.
posted by mathowie
on Nov 10, 1999 -
0 comments
Oh my god.
With this new site, Microsoft just crossed an invisible line of decency. Who are they kidding? Would you believe any pro-Microsoft commentary on the site came from a site visitor and not an internal MS employee? They've just lost what little credibility they had left.
posted by mathowie
on Nov 9, 1999 -
1 comment
This is most amazing traceroute app I've ever seen. It combines simple traceroute and ping capabilities with a simple GIS-like mapping component that resolves the location of network hops based on whois queries. Cool stuff.
posted by mathowie
on Aug 17, 1999 -
0 comments
I'd heard about these for a while now but it's good to see actual shots of them. Barbie and Hot Wheels branded PCs are on the way. This is another sign that computers are becoming ingrained into our daily lives, when I was a kid, all I remember wanting was a racecar-shaped bed.
posted by mathowie
on Aug 6, 1999 -
0 comments
