Category: Networking

Apple Rumored to be building Mini into a set-top-box

Think Secret – Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room
The living room is HOT!

From the site:
Apple’s Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.

is Apple’s remote control and television like display functionality that they are currently building into iMac’s.

Java + BitTorrent Library

TorrentSniffer – TorrentSniffer
TorrentSniffer is a Java library for reading BitTorrent information. TorrentSniffer currently implements the following sections of the BitTorrent Protocol Specification 1.0: Metainfo File Structure, Bencoding and Tracker ‘scrape’ Convention. The primary purpose of this library is to retrieve the number of seeds and peers of a torrent. This is done by using the Tracker ‘scrape’ Convention.

Shelly’s on to something here..

Emmy Advanced Media – Television Business News: The WiMax Price Club

A nice idea…

From the site:
They’re popping up all over America — in backyards everywhere — it’s the latest do-it-yourself craze – the WiMax Price Club. Want free Internet access for life? No problem. Just go to http://www.WiMaxPriceClub.com and order your tower kit online. When it arrives, get your building permit (if required by local zoning laws) and erect your new 80’ antenna tower in your back yard or on your rooftop. Just plug in the included WiMax repeater and you’ll be online in a jiffy! Imagine over 70 megabits up and down, FREE for life! Nothing else to buy

SMS signup via phone in

ChristDaily.com Television Commercials by Shelly Palmer
Content aside, the ability to phone in and signup for SMS is great. Such a simple idea, I am surprised that it has been overlooked till now. It would be easy to setup Asterisk to grab caller-id and pump out an SMS message.

Excerpt from site:
these two direct response television commercials show off a new way to subscribe to a brand new information service. The spots offer the audience an opportunity to purchase a subscription to an SMS (short message service) cell phone service via an IVR (interactive voice response) system. This is important because so many cell phone users don’t know how to send a text message – but they can easily dial a toll-free number.

Ninjamonkey on Instant Mobile Social Networks

Ninja Monkey Party 411 : Instant Mobile Social Network Or; Listserv + Email-to-SMS Gateway = LOVE
Ninjamonkey describes a service he setup for his birthday party a couple of weeks ago using off the shelf components. Of course the magic sauce was that his crowd includes some tech savvy and highly motivated social drinkers.
From the page:
Social networks and mobile applications are obvious bedfellows, but aside from a few noteables like dodgeball almost nothing has been done to exploit them. The thing that many people may be missing is that SMS is pretty much like email, except with extreme size restrictions (160 characters/message) and controlled solely by the telcos (which is sort of like having a draconian ISP with terrible, terrible service). This means that as long as you can find a way to translate between email and sms (with, say, a publicly available email-to-sms gateway) you can pass messages between them.

The Participatory Generation

The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries – New York Times
NY Times is running an article about a recent Pew survey that is demonstrating that teenagers have embraced publishing media online. From myspace and the like to creating their own websites featuring music remixes, videos and so forth.

They have become the participatory generation.

From the article:
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online – about 12 million – create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own Web logs.

That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa’s case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will undoubtedly have profound implications for the traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.

[Later in the article]

The Pew survey shows “the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content,” said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. “They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it.”