Nikolaj Nyholm
Nikolaj Nyholm serves as a member of the board of directors of the people photo-identification service, Polar Rose. Past chair of EuroOSCON, he's working to connect European emerging tech and open source milieus, hoping to contribute to the creation of a vibrant cross-border tech sector. Nikolaj's background is as an entrepreneur, co-founding several startups picking at the loose ends of topics ranging from DNS to identity to Wi-Fi. In his spare time he channels his creative energy into Copenhagen-based collective 'Wheatpaste', and is co-organizer of reboot.
Luis von Ahn launches 'Games with a Purpose'
Luis von Ahn – father of noteworthy projects like the ESP Game (a.k.a. Google's Image Labeler. Radar post) and reCAPTCHA (Radar post) – has launched Games with a Purpose, in short GWAP. GWAP and the new games – Tag a tune, Squigl, Verbosity, and Matchin, puts von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon by a wide margin at the…
Why Wikia will change search
This morning Jimbo Wales' Wikia launched their search effort, Wikia Search. Wales & co. have been getting a lot of heat for this launch, most notably from Mike Arrington at Techcrunch who calls Wikia Search "an inexcusable waste of time" and "a complete letdown". I have to be honest that my first reaction to Wikia Search was lukewarm, and I…
Negroponte: "We're the World Food Program and they're McDonald's"
The title quote is Nicholas Negroponte's in a response to Intel quitting Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in an interview with David Kirkpatrick of Fortune. Intel has quit its support of OLPC citing that "OLPC had asked Intel to end our support for non-OLPC platforms, including the Classmate PC, a developing world low-cost laptop running Windows. Negroponte rebuts that…
"eBay went straight to the nuke"
The title above was makester Phil Torrone's gut comment on the radar backchannel to eBay's decision to cancel all their US-based ad$ on Google in response to Google's 'Freedom Party'. The Freedom party was meant as a friendly but prominent reminder of eBay's unwillingness to let Google Checkout onto their platform. Fellow Radar-blogger Marc Hedlund quickly pointed to the likely…
reCaptcha – Stop Spam. Read Books.
Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn's latest creation reCaptcha is yet another great example of bionic software on steroids. You'll remember Luis von Ahn as the creator of ESP Game (licensed to Google as their Image Labeler) and derivative works Phetch and Peekaboom, but what is less known is that von Ahn is the person behind captchas, version 1.0….
Angelina Jolie is a Geowanker
According to a story in the Daily Mail Angelina Jolie has taken geotagging to the extreme. The coordinates of her tattoo represent Cambodia, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Vietnam, all locations of birth of her four children. A quick search on Flickr shows that she's not the only one to sport geo coordinates for love (Jane McGonigal's engagement ring) or personal…
Seeing more with the blind camera
Berlin-based artist Sascha Pohflepp's Buttons is a camera that takes other peoples' pictures: "It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn't have any optical parts […] The camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other…
Joost is the iPhone of TV
The Venice Project, Dirk Willem van Gulik (of Apache fame) and Skype wonderboys Janus Friis and Niclas Zenström’s peer-to-peer IP TV project, today officially became Joost. I’ve been playing around with the Venice player (now Joost player) for the past couple of weeks after finally resolving some connectivity issues. While a bandwidth hog unlikely to work reliably on anything but…
TurkTunes?
Amazon's Developer Connection team is apparently out to take up the competition with music-recognition service Gracenote (formerly known as CDDB). They've released What's That Tune?, an amusing mashup of three Amazon Web Services: This proof-of-concept records audio from a microphone, saves it to Amazon S3, creates a HIT for [Mechanical Turk] workers to name the tune, then polls Amazon ECS…
Wengo Launches Voice Services Marketplace
France-based Wengo recently launched Wengo Services, a voice services marketplace. Wengo Services allows service providers to set up for-pay VoIP services just like traditional premium rate 1-900 services (known in other countries under other names including 90 and 900 services). Wengo runs a services directory and takes a 30% billing commission, probably not far from what telephone operators charge their…