11.03.07
seatguru
oh, and speaking of cool things: make sure you check out seatguru.com.
decent traffic.
"The ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities and airline information." - thats what they claim to be. It's pretty funny, you can check which is the right seat for you depending on airline and plane type ('will I sit too far from the entertainment display?').
Discovered via evan.
@spreadshirt: can somebody write them about a shirt shop? would love to be associated with 'em!
oh, and: if that's not viral I wann be called 'nickname'!
Posted by Lukasz at 18:54 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
10.10.06
supreme auction
cool tool produced by supreme-new media, a spin of from powerflasher: supreme auction. Allows e-bay sellers to easier set up their autions while having a much better presentation. pretty cool. I think supreme bills this on some rev-share basis with e-bay (people pay for premium features when presenting their products).
I think the site is noteworthy and very cool... ecspecially I like the grass on the bottom left. I mean, makes no sense at all to have it there, but it's a nice detail :)
Posted by Lukasz at 07:47 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
14.04.06
robots
wow, thats amazing, hitec has build a robot (robonova) with great motion abilities. This guy can dance, stand up when on the ground, etc.
see this video (via morten).
I wonder how many of thiese abilities the robot "learned" (neural network based) and which portion ist coded.
Posted by Lukasz at 08:33 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
23.02.06
TED
Attending TED in monterey, california.
TED stends for "technology, entertainment, design" and brings together people from various fields to hang out together, have fun, do business, get inspired and "change the world".
people like dave berg, nicholas negroponte or lisa randall give 20 minutes presentations about topics of their interests. + there is a google cafe that apparently simulates the anemnities google employees enjoy (free cookies & organic food, cafe and softdrinks).
I managed to ran into sergey brin, jeff bezos and peter gabrial today. not really that important, since there is little to do with tham at this point, but still nice. + there are tons of interesting and less prominet people among the roughly 1000 attendands.
todays highlights in my opinion:
- nicholas negroponte - telling about his education program, which is distributing 100 USD computers. probably at the inception they will cost a 130, but prices will come down, quick. in 2007 they plan to distribute 7 mio via education ministries to a handfull of countries.
some biggies are supporting the project, microsoft hates it - bill, shame on you! ultimately he will benefit from it, anyway.
however, thats really a very very neat product and I will definitely end up donating a few.
- hans roseling from gapminder
Hans is a professor in stockholm and started gapminder to fight some misconceptions/ prejudices the people (esp. western) have about some basic facts about the world we live in.
gapminder visualizes some data really neatly. insightfull. The broader vision for gapminder is to make tons of public-gathered data more accessible, searchable & to present it in easily understandable ways.
- One highlight in my view was Al Gores presentation. He focused on global warming. The pitch was great, if he would have done this one for his presendential campaign, he definitely would have won (or got shot ;). A lot of the US citizens attending have been really touched by the speech. Myself, too. To think about global warming is not part of my everyday life. But for the US guys it's even harder, since them are the ones that really suck in doing something about it (remember kyoto).
However, Al presented it really great and the (partly multimedia) slides have been outstanding. Apparently he is just about bringing some organizations together to widely "advertise" this issue in the US. Wish him all the best in this honorable endeavour!
Posted by Lukasz at 04:19 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
30.12.05
c3, ai, robocup...
I attended the 22nd chaos computer club convention in the last days. There have been a lot of interesting people and interesting presentations.
One that I particulary enjoyed was 'Robots for fun and research' by Verena.
I like AI and robots since I thnik they will contribute to a real sustainable development of mankind + my world view is not too anthropocentric (check authors like ray kurzweil to see what I mean). + robotics may be a nice field for future business endeavours, but that's at least 3 or 4 years down the road.
What I particulary like is the idea of the Robocup - it's a competition with the goal to have a robot-team beat the world-soccer champions by 2050. Seems to be modeled after things like the turing test or the famous chess-games of the grossmeister against IC's.
However, I hope that the human-players will be participating at all, since I imagine some of the robots will have pretty hard bones... on the other hand it might make the game much more interesting and bring new tactics to it... imagine the robot team just stealing the ball and play it somewhere to the back where some super skilled robot will just shoot from any angle and any distance excatly into one of the upper corners of the target area... while using all the other robots distributed in the field as sensors for measuring wind conditions and that like. Sounds funny....
If you like to check the progress of the competition, visit Bremen next summer.
Also interesting was the reaction of the audience to the presentation. All the people at ccc like tech a lot, but they seem also pretty sensitive about the threats and some seem not to like the idea of ai measuring up with human intelligence. So one of the questions from the audiance was, if 'anyone really believes, that robots can get to human intelligence levels'. Of course he hoped to get a 'no' as an answer, and he got it but slightly masquaraded... something like 'no, since human intelligence is inseperable interwined with it's hardware, which will be true for robots, too.' So, I guess this boils down to noting, that consciuosness and intelligence is the sum of the cuircuitry (neurons) as well as the hardware with all it's sensors. Robot's consciousness and intelligence will always be different. We will see superiority in some traits and inferirity in others, I guess.
Also note that Verna herself seems amazing - I'm not sure how old she is but seems pretty young - and look at some some of the publications she already did... currently she does research at the DAI Labor in Berlin, which seems to be well positioned in the AI/ robotics field.
Posted by Lukasz at 18:36 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
21.10.05
nice flicker app
Very cool memory game where you can defind the tiles yourself based on any flickr content out there... nice.
http://www.pimpampum.net/memry/enter.php
thank's for sharing to ami.
Posted by Lukasz at 06:35 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
16.10.05
Attendnig ETRE
Hello, just arrived at the ETRE conference in Athens, which will be till Wedenesday. Contact me, if you like to see me here :)
ETRE stands for "European Technologoy Roundtabele Exhibition" and is a conference with more then 500 high profile attendans. Most of them are CEO's of small-medium highly innovative tech companies or key people from the capital side of the game. ETRE is organized by DASAR - some of you might this company, since they akquired & revived the red-herring magazine. More about ETRE: http://www.etre05.com/etre/index.jsp
I'm just going through the 700 page who-is-who to check out who I like to meet. Also, I will give a brief elevotor pitch later today for spreading the word about spreadshirt at the conference :)
If I find the time, I might blog a little bit more as the event progresses.
Posted by Lukasz at 05:19 | TrackBack
04.10.05
Bubbles in NYC,,,
cool artsy project... some dude printed 15000 empty bubbles and sticks them on ad posters all over NYC. People write in their stuff and dude comes back to take pictures... bublishing them on his site.
Check it! http://www.thebubbleproject.com
Posted by Lukasz at 18:35 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
12.09.05
FSM Transmission
The mighty Flying Spaghetti Monster speaks to us!
See the video
Posted by Lukasz at 05:15 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
07.08.05
Wikimania 2005
Occassioanlly I do some minor edits on wikipedia (so far anonymus), also at spreadshirt we use mediawiki for collaboration.
Take this and add some general interest in all things that have to do with the internet and this is reason enough to visit Wikimania 2005, the worlds first global wiki conference.
Approximately 400 wikimaniacs gathered in Frankfurt am Main in Germany from the 4th to the 8th of August to celebrate the Wiki movement and to discuss further developments.
I don't know about other countries, but in Germany there was a lot of Media echo about Wikimania. Virtually all major Media covered the event. A great success for wikipedia and wiki in general!
I stayed at the conference Saturday and Sunday and enjoyed meeting the grassrooters as well as some of the wiki related movers & shakers.
Here are two of them:
Ward Cunningham - The originator of the wiki concept and therofer the first wiki engine (mediawiki being the most popular one, see moinmoin, twiki for other examples).
See wiki article about Ward.
Jimmy Wales (aka 'Jimbo') - Entrepreneur, founder and Chief visionary of wikipedia. See wiki article about Jimmy to find out more. 
Besides this I spotted also two cool business opportunities: a wikipedia mirror (revenue: keyword ads) and wikipedia offline distribution (DVD's).
Since the content is GPL lincensed, commercial use should be possible from a copyright point of view.
If anyone likes to pick up or comment these opportunities, feel free to do so. And if you get rich ´cos inspired by this blog entry, you´ll have to buy me dinner ;)
Posted by Lukasz at 17:10 | Comments (4) | TrackBack