"skype" entries

Four short links: 7 October 2011

Four short links: 7 October 2011

Telco-less Mobile Calls, Videogames, Open Source Hardware, Facial Recognition

  1. Viber — more and more people are wanting to talk to me via this, rather than Skype or direct phone call (req. wifi). Can’t tell whether massive disruptor or toy.
  2. Who Killed Videogames“The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
  3. Visual Diffs for Open Source Hardware — just what it says.
  4. Facebook Face Recognition Study — take profile photos from dating sites, facial-recognition match against Facebook photos to find identity, use to predict interests and social security numbers.
Four short links: 20 May 2011

Four short links: 20 May 2011

Digital Forex, Blasts from the Past, Mobile Web Performance, Skype at Conferences

  1. BitCoin Watch — news and market analysis for this artificial currency. (If you’re outside the BitCoin world wondering wtf the fuss is all about try We Use Coins for a gentle primer and then Is BitCoin a Good Idea? for the case against) (via Andy Baio)
  2. Time Capsule — send your Flickr photos from a year ago. I love that technology helps us connect not just with other people right now, but with ourselves in the future. Compare TwitShift and Foursquare and Seven Years Ago. (via Really Interesting Group)
  3. HTTP Archive Mobile — mobile performance data. The top 100 web pages average out at 271kb vs 401kb for their desktop incarnations, which still seems unjustifiably high to me.
  4. Skype at ConferencesThe two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference which stuttered into a dalekian half life without really quite making the breakthrough into comprehensibility. After various attempts to rewire, reconfigure and reboot, we gave up and had what turned into a good conversation among the dozen people round the table in London. Conference organizers, take note: Skype at conferences is a recipe for fail.

What did Microsoft get for $8.5 billion?

Microsoft shelled out a lot of cash for Skype. Here's what they'll get in return.

Why would Microsoft pay so much for a company that doesn't have vastly superior technology or great financials? Here's five reasons.

The military goes social

Letters from the front have been replaced with Facebook updates

For most of the 20th century, a soldier in the field could only communicate with their family and friends via letters that might take weeks or months to make their way to the recipient. But as the battlefield goes high tech, so have the ways soldiers can talk to the outside world. Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, talked to Radar about how the public face of the military is changing.

You Become what You Disrupt – (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop….