Month: May 2008

Live Mesh

Tech, Web

I’ve only just heard about this. Live Mesh looks very exciting as a way of keeping your own data local but being able to access it in a variety of ways.

A key design goal of the Live Mesh data synchronization platform is to allow customers to retain the ownership of their data that is implicit with local storage while improving on the anywhere access appeal of the web. The evolution of the web as a combined experience and storage platform is increasingly forcing customers to choose between the advantages of local storage (privacy, price, performance and applications) and the browser’s implicit promise of data durability, anywhere access and in many cases, easy sharing. A side effect of the competition to store customer data in the cloud and display it in a web browser is the fragmentation of that data and subsequent loss of ownership. Individual sites like Spaces, Flickr and Facebook make sharing easy, provided the people you are sharing with also use the same site. It is in fact very difficult to share across sites and equally difficult to work on the same data across the PC, mobile and web tiers.

Web 2.0 fails to produce cash

Tech, Web

From the FT

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

Shops track customers via mobile phone

CRM, Tech, Thought Provoking

The Times reports signals given off by phones allow shopping centres to monitor how long people stay and which stores they visit

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

Now this is what I call responding to your market.

In the case of Gunwharf Quays, managers were surprised to discover that an unusually high percentage of visitors were German – the receivers can tell in which country each phone is registered – which led to the management translating the instructions in the car park.

Natascha Kampusch Purchases Kidnapper’s House

Thought Provoking

From Spiegel

Austrian kidnapping victim Natascha Kampusch has purchased the home in which a man held her captive for over eight years in a cellar dungeon. “I know it’s grotesque — I now have to pay the electricity, water and taxes on a house I never wanted to live in,” she told the German magazine Bunte. But she said she would prefer to own the home herself to protect it from vandals and keep it from being torn down to build row houses.

The questions I’m asking are
Where did she get the money?
Who got the house after her kidnapper killed himself?

It’s all over

Football, Germany, Munich

Normally, I would jump at the chance of a ticket for a Bayern game. Not tonight. The race for the Bundesliga title is already over and while the game is interesting for the relegation battle that Armenia Bielefeld are involved in, I’m just not interested enough to spend €20 to see it.