Blogging & RSS

How many of you have noticed that most blogs consist of mainly links to other blogs? Which usually have links to other blogs, et cetera until you actually come to a blog that has some original content. This has been one of the key reasons for not blogging in the general sense but since e-mail is starting to be a sad media format for this sort of information delivery, I thought to finally listen to my readers and whip up my very own blog.

Since then, I've already found the world of blogging to be a rather elaborate place where thoughts are spread far and wide. But since a million other blogs are filling the ether with their own rambling, (many of you are very good though) there are easy ways to get lost.

Well, in comes RSS the Really Simple Syndication which surprisingly offers syndication really simply. Who would have thought that in 2005 there would be something simple. I won't go too deep with RSS since you can go google yourself. Still, eWeek had an interesting article regarding how RSS feeds are penetrating the corporate and social networks in a different way.

Read the eWeek article

I've been using RSS feeds for soothing my information hunger for a long time already and while the readers have been developed (I think readers are more effective than, say, reading through your browser - I like Firefox and it's live bookmarks though.) the sites are still lagging on the development. I would appreciate seeing more personalized data available with decent filters.

So, send e-mail to sites and ask that they incorporate RSS feeds to their sites if you see that necessary. That's what I do.

Telecoms in Latvia: Ericsson, Cisco & IBM aim for Latvian IP TV

Juris Kaža has updated his blog on Latvian Telecoms with an interesting topic relating for a IPTV triumvirate of techology in Latvia.

Telecoms in Latvia: Ericsson, Cisco & IBM aim for Latvian IP TV:

The Future of video rentals

Although the Internet has already provided a lot of possibilities to the video rental and pay-per-view industries: Electronic Program Guides (EPG), online movie catalogues and information services have helped movie watchers to enjoy more of their cinematic experiences.

Now, however, time being a very valuable resource – the tedious 30 minute movie selecting and driving to the rental store just to stand in line and notice that the movie you want is already rented out might not be a problem with the next generation of home cinema.

Currently the world is caught in a wind of change, making people more wary of new technologies and their spending habits. DVD has risen from the ashes of VHS to be the new victor, but Bluray and similar technologies are lurking behind the corner and a truly digital, unphysical medium solution is a near certainty in the future seen already in the appearance of hard disk recorders in our living rooms and the viral spreading of peer-to-peer exhange of (illegal) movie copies.

This next step in the digital evolution is already taken up by several traditional manufacturers, such as Philips’ Streamium and Microsoft’s Media Center products which have been hailed as something that might produce a working digital entertainment environment in normal houses. Having the services closer to the consumers we are able to see the subtle change of the consumer wave turning slowly towards a digital world.

This time is a promising era for introducing new services, such as our idea of a easy access, entry-level, low-cost digital video rental system that works through the broadband systems of our houses and delivers cinematic pleasure when demanded by the consumer. Since there already are a lot of video rental companies out there, such as Blockbuster – using the existing infrastructure and brand will help the penetration of a new service considerably.

The key issue is to return video rentals back to their position where they had a strong presence in the entertainment market before Internet and it’s piracy and fast moving sharing. Rental companies will have great benefits using their contacts to movie companies directly, being able to promise that their delivery channel is a legal one and through the co-operation with hardware manufacturers they are able to produce a hardcoded, working Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution that is both fast and easy to use for both the consumer and the movie encoder and secure enough to turn the movie executives heads from their Internet=Piracy point of view to a more open and developing direction.

On a strategic level, the effort must conquer the following aspects:

1. Movie encoding and quality issues
2. Co-operation with hardware manufacturers
3. Digital Rights Management
4. Very user-oriented User Interface
5. Co-operation with movie companies
6. Technical issues

Since DVD has taken over the market, video quality demand has risen to a new level and the consumers expect nothing less, the MPEG4 technology is a method to pack video to one tenth of the size with little loss in the quality. With specified hardware, this might be the optimal solution. Specific players having a decoding chip would offer system developers a platform to design and improve the output of the MPEG-technology.

The DRM is an issue that is standing in front of many doors: Investors are afraid to put their money to unsure ventures, movie companies dare not deliver their movies fearing that they will spill out of the box and be lost to the great void of the Internet, normal users don’t want to pay for something they think they might get for free etc. With a generally acknowledged DRM standard the market would be very approachable. Since networking equipment all have a specific MAC-address we will be able to decode user-specific systems, secure and flexible to both the intellectual property owner and the user.

Many people tell that setting the timer on the VCR is difficult, one might think that their fear is at least equal in speaking of digital movies downloaded to a small box under your television. The user interface (UI) is a key component in this venture, it has to be easily localised, very graphical and most important of all – logical. The systems of remote controls and our experience from web design research should be able to create a working system.

Having movie companies in the process is a very important, since that will give the marketing channels and resources available to the rental companies. The background structure of the service being similar to the idea of Apple’s iTunes music store. The largest problem with technical issues is the scalability, since users will require a fast service, we need to have enough resources to provide the rush of people all wanting to see Titanic 2 or some similar super-hype movie and the system cannot be too massive and expensive to maintain while a nice summer day when everybody is outside.

Profitability will come from the savings of physical locations: Renting premises, staff, physical media which we don’t have to think which will be a success and which not, since all products are available to everyone all the time. Also we can use advertising partners with the service and charge a premium from those who do not want to see any advertisement.

The competetive advantage on the service is it’s convenience and speed factors, plus having an online solution offers a virtually limitless selection available for the user. Another benefit for the users is to have access to a database such as offered by the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and similar cognitive solutions as used by the Amazon webstore which recognize the taste of the user and can offer a list of movies that is created from the previous selections and evaluation of the viewer.

The system can also be used in hotels, hospitals and other public places where the current systems can be replaced by a proxy server that replicates mainstream and popular movies to be available fast to the users. The whole system works as a streaming solution from a mosaic style network with local proxies available for larger communities or critical locations in urban areas.

As a project, the system design is mainly modular technically and network based with movie companies. The payment system can be done in several ways, credit cards, online bank systems, charging with the subscription and usage cards sold in retail chains which also work as great competition prizes adding more value for advertisers.

Wireless = Paperless = Personalized

Personalization can offer huge performance increase for education and also help to save in costs and the environment. A paperless school can teach students to use today’s technology naturally and effectively as a part of their own knowledge. The learning process as a whole needs to change to accommodate this availability of information by teaching the “on-demand deepening of knowledge” methodology to train people who are able and willing to use the technical advances as a direct part of their own knowledge.

Introduction

Remember the change from landline telephones to cellular phones? The time after we could answer everywhere, anytime and any place? This next phase of mobile communications of wireless availability and easily retrievable information will change and has changed everything.

Who needs libraries when you have a laptop in your bag full of information worth a hundred libraries? If you want to be really old school, you can pick up a DVD-version of the Encyclopedia Britannica or whip up your wireless net and log in to Wikipedia. Now you're probably asking how this will change anything?

The penetration of information availability

Well, more and more schools are having increasing numbers of laptops in their classrooms. Rooms with wireless Internet, with people who know how to search information from the net basically in real-time with the topics of the professor. When will this change turn from the teacher using this resource in teaching instead of students finding all the answers before the teacher finishes the question?

I’m checking my professors’ facts all the time regarding case studies and similar, so much actually that some professors are pretty annoyed about me knowing too much – since working with case studies sometimes requires people NOT to know too much in order to keep the discussion unbiased. But on the other side this enables me to benefit from my wide knowledge working together with my strong data retrieval skills – a method which I call “on-demand deepening of knowledge”. I can participate even deeper in to conversations; I can check facts and give valid information and thus enrich the conversation and the learning experience.

Teaching methods in general also need to be changed, since there is no need to make people transfer information to their heads but to make people understand and learn how to use that information for the required purpose. Since there is no need to remember every little detail from each fact, but the general layout of things and how they relate to each other. This means that also changes are required from the faculty’s side in terms of how subjects are taught and that data retrieval skills are more important than a good memory of details.

How could the system benefit from this?

This change will, of course, change the current system in total. Imagine a standardized environment – paperless school, where all students have a personal laptop with an open-source learning platform both in their personal units and the school in general.

There is no need for books, paper exams, or specific classrooms – all the books are in digital format available on the school platform in easily searchable databases with related topic linking and user contributed notes (which have been a great add-on to information if you look at technical manuals such as the one PHP offers, example), exams are held in a secure online environment with improved security, always the right amount of exams, automatic answer checking and just so many things that help the teacher concentrating in the main job of showing the students their mistakes, not just going through exams mechanically – leaving space for human errors.

Since there’s no need for specific classrooms, the classes can be held anywhere in the range of the internet connection – outside if it’s a nice day, home if one is sick but wants to study at home. No more forgotten study books, bent backs and spinal problems due to having to carry a 60 lbs backpack five days a week for 12 years, no more computer phobia since starting young would give a good learning curve and when the user interface would be designed logically the usability would be increasing productivity even further.

Personalized studying bring effective results

One of the largest problems with schools is the huge difference between students. I’ve had to suffer personally from this standardization of students where everybody is progressing at pace with the dumbest and slowest kid in the classroom – ironically this kid is probably seen slow and dumb just because the teaching methods used are wrong for the kid, therefore making all progress minimal.

The online learning platform would offer truly personalized, progressive teaching methods which not only adapts to the way the students learns but also would learn from the student how to portray information. Imagine a French class where the grammar tests would progress according to one’s skills, the more advanced students would have more advanced assignments and games like crosswords or charade style games to keep them occupied while the slower students would follow along.

Same goes with pronunciation: The students would have personal headphones with a microphone speaking directly to the platform that would have speech recognition and voice pattern matching to teach correct pronunciation and could give personalized topics for children to stay interested in. Just changing the subject from cars to ponies might make girls concentrate more to the text, even though the learning experience would be the same.

The students would have the chance to take all their notes to their own personal unit and they would have the chance to revisit old classes and their material directly in a logically usable search to find the important things. The search results would show all relating documents, such as the assignments regarding the day and mouse-hover translation of words.

The matter of personalization would also be another thing deepening the learning experience; every student would have the chance to personalize their own system with their own graphics, color and fonts most suitable for their eyes and just to make it more fun.

Too expensive or are the benefits larger than the initial investment?

The cost of having a personalized unit for every student with a life cycle of about four years would cost about the same as buying the books for each student and investing money to the school library. Economies of scale would join the game when the quantities would grow. Having a few extra laptops in case of something breaks down, with docks in classrooms where the computers would charge and automatically backup themselves to the storage servers inside the school network would ensure the integrity of data.

The amount of information gathered from the student’s progress would help the school to have concrete statistics in real time of different learning methods, failures and successes. The statistical data would also show the students teacher directly on the personal needs of the specific student and where they would need more exercise. In an example having Matt, who is a natural talent in mathematics do his math assignments quickly and then concentrate in his problems with English language while the others are focusing on the math problems.

Commercial education is already offering personalized learning plans and logically we can deduct that personalization will create better results: Studying is basically selling the information to the student so that our marketing effort stays in the students’ mind, we can see that having something to relate to eases the process of understanding. Online stores, such as Amazon are notorious with their personalized content but as we can see from their long history and good results, that they are doing something correctly.

So, before I will have time to do more accurate research, discussion and comments would be welcome to have other points of views on the topic and information on similar research would be appreciated.

On European Globalization

The European Union expanded almost a year ago to include the Baltic Countries among others. What changes have we seen as a result from the merger?

The European Union is currently the largest, most powerful Regional Organization in Existence known to man with an astounding GDP of 10 million million (or thousand billion) Euro, with an 22,300 Euro GDP per capita - Although the new participants are lagging behind with a GDP per capita closer to 10 thousand Euro than 15 thousand.

All European Citizens, as all citizens of EU member states have the right of free movement inside the union, in theory. In practise the grace period from the older countries has stopped the free movement of people as in workers, but since there is a loophole - it is legal to use foreign labor through work force rental companies, the elder member states are just doing harm to themselves by losing tax Euros from not having these people paying taxes where they are working in.

This will probably mean that in the near future, these limitations will have to be removed and true freedom of movement will come forth to create a more competitive and flexible workforce. I just hope that not only low-GDP countries' citizens leave to the higher-GDP countries, but the professionals move against the grain to the opposite direction to increase the GDP of the lower-GDP countries, since we can logically draw that when people who will work for lower wages go to a country with high wages, the GDP will respectively fall.

So how can we benefit from the coming change? Start up two-way recruitment companies? Start up companies that enable the higher infrastructure by using older technology from the higher-GDP countries who already have a very knowledgeable, saturated workforce readily available and with a large over 5% unemployment rate on average there should be need for people to move.

I as for one will be here in the "frontier" pioneering further the expansion and paving the way for my "more european" colleagues arriving in the Baltics, what will you do?

np: Weapon of Vanity from the album "Stabbing the Drama " by Soilwork

On blogs et al

Being some sort of a freshman regarding blogging, as I've done with several other "new technologies" it's taken a while for me to accept it a part of my life, including with RSS and even CSS (!) for heaven's sake.

I used to do a lot of web development and designing in end of 90's but when CSS came and I thought that "damn, I've done this for so many years and this new crap will mix me up totally" and I slowly drifted away from web design. Even though I feel to be on the edge of new technology, I seem to be more of on the Stable release cycle rather than cyber-surfing the nightly-development builds.

Recently I've had a lot of changes in my life, forcing me to take another point of view on how things work - even web sites. Even though I'm not a man of extremities, it tends to make a difference. While researching the available Open Source Content Management Systems for my work and other projects I found myself deep inside the world of the web. I took a crash course into CSS and found out how great it actually is! I refreshed my memory on PHP, since my last effort on it was to study the use of PHP in 2 days to help (make) a school final project for a female friend of mine. I think I learned more than she did from that effort, and still she got the diploma - well, isn't learning the point?

The point? Oh yeah, there's some point - I've found my interest in designing web again! Of course in this time it's nothing special, but still having nearly ten years of experience of webdesign should come in handy when starting off new projects.