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.
Onto play
Justin Hall's Passively Multiplayer Online Game concept is an interesting spin on some of the issues with data ownership and the transparent society that we have been blogging about recently. Hall's point is that one of the reasons the web experience is not nearly as absorbing or fulfilling as playing games, is that the web is in fact not paying…
Completely human free shopping
The "Get & Go Express" convenience stores aren't stores so much as giant vending machines – only done smarter with new technology. All shopping takes place on the outer surface of the box like stores (roughly the foot print of two 40ft shipping containers) from an array of smaller vending machines. The store takes up less space because it doesn't…
The Economist on Life 2.0
(Personal comment: I first wrote a draft for this post a week ago when I originally read the leader (Playing Demigods) for the Economist report in question. I'm now sitting in a delivery room at a Copenhagen Hospital, waiting for the arrival of my third child. Synthetic biology/life seems so akward in a situation like this, yet it just might…
Life hacks: SquidSoap
In the spirit of hacks: How do you make people spend the necessary 20 seconds to properly wash their hands? The way Squidsoap does it. SquidSoap works by applying a small ink mark on a person's hand when they press the pump to dispense the soap. The ink is designed to wash off after the hands are washed for about…
Registered Commons Launch
This weekend the is the launch of Registered Commons, a registry for fingerprinting and timestamping service for material with a creative commons license. Registered Commons is a secure timestamp service for the Open Content community. The point of the service is to offer creative commons licensers and licensees better identification of the author of particular material, of the publishing time,…
Transparent Society Linkfest
Tim blogged about the transparent society a few weeks ago (Suburban Mom Embraces The Surveillance Society and whocalled.us), and as so often before the blogosphere seems to hit a hivemind. During the last 48 hours several interesting stories have popped up — from Danish health survey mashups to sex baiting. Linkfest ahead: Waxy's account of a social experiment carried out…
Social Blog Aggregators Revisited
Recently, there's been a number of interesting posts on building personal blog aggregators. This really does seem like the next thing that is going to make some blog company succesful since just there's just too many feeds to read. Global aggregation and popularity engines like Digg and Techmeme only adds material to read. I'm sure hundreds of people have had…
Web Services for Bioinformatics
The University of Chicago's Rick Stevens has published a lengthy but interesting — even for an outsider — survey of how the use of web services is picking up in the realms of bioinformatics and computational biology. It's interesting how books, papers and journals, the traditional open wares of academia and the sciences are slowly being succumbed by first open…
Brussels Conference Mashup
The excuses for not heading Brussels on the week of September 18- 24 are rapidly vanishing. We've gotten a stellar line-up for EuroOSCON, including a day of inspiring tutorials. Meanwhile, an astounding three events have been put up in the wake of EuroOSCON — GovCamp, DrupalCon, and BarCamp. Book that airline ticket now, use euos06nnd35 for a 35% radar-reader…
Google Map-grab
On the Geowanking mailing list Ben Discoe has forwarded an email conversation with DigitalGlobe, operators of the QuickBird hi-resolution (0.61 meter) satellite. Apparently, portions of DigitalGlobe's imagery data has been licensed by Google for exclusive use in Google Earth/Maps. As Microsoft's acquisition of Vexcel earlier this year also confirms, this is unlikely to be the only or last case of…