Lawrence Chen
Lawrence will be a fifth-year senior at the University of Texas. He is studying Sociology, Economics, and Business. He is part of the nGenera intern team in Austin and is currently working on developing training materials for nGenera’s Strategy Design Suite of products. Before coming to nGenera, Lawrence worked at a property tax firm in Houston. Lawrence is an avid golfer and can regularly be found at the local golf course on the weekend.
July 26th, 2008, 03:46pm
What’s the solution for the ever-increasing gas prices? No, you don’t have to stop driving. With the help of a Finnish Internet community, you can convert your used gasoline-powered car to run on electricity. The Finnish-language forum, eCars – Now!, is taking a chapter out of the open source book to create a community where people can collaborate to start a mass movement toward electric cars. They’re encouraging the conversion from gas-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.
Their website is designed to provide a portal for buyers and sellers of suitable used cars and components, and mechanics who can make the conversion with an electric motor and lithium batteries. Users on the site share ideas on the message board and e-mail lists, with the best information being put into use by the nonprofit community.
The first conversion target of this community will actually be a Toyota Corolla which they say have a range of 93 miles and a top speed of 75 miles per hour. (As a Toyota Corolla owner, this news is exciting to me.) If this community can successfully convert full size gasoline-power cars to run on electricity, look for this trend to catch on in your area. I may even be one of the first to convert my car if this trend hits the USA.
July 17th, 2008, 08:13pm
As popular as wikis have become, they aren’t yet in use across all mediums. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.
Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.
RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.
July 12th, 2008, 05:14pm
Most of us use popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for staying in touch with friends and meeting new people, but have you ever heard of someone using one of these sites to free someone from jail?
That’s exactly what happened here. A photographer, James Karl Buck, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were jailed in Egypt back in April. Buck used his cell phone to post the message “Arrested” on Twitter. Within a day, his school hired an attourney, and Buck was released. However, his translator was detained for an additional 3 months. Buck again went to his Twitter network, now with over 570 followers, for help in getting his translator freed. Over 900 signed an online petition which was used to free Maree.
Whoever thought the power of Web 2.0 could have an impact like this? Web 2.0 enables people to get the word out about a certain issue or topic that needs exposure. My colleague Komail Mithani wrote an entry earlier this week on how Web 2.0 enables people to have their voices heard in regards to customer service issues.
Freeing people from jail via a social networking site or other Web 2.0 technology may not be something one can expect to increase in occurrence in the future but I do foresee more and more interesting and unique uses of Web 2.0. What are some ways you’ve used a Web 2.0 technology for a unique purpose or goal?
July 4th, 2008, 11:47am
Last week, The New York Times covered a new project by Google: having targeted, text-based advertisements that are influenced by past user search history. With this new program, a user who makes separate searches for “golf” and “shoes” is more likely to see ads for golf shoes during subsequent searches - reminiscent of how Amazon recommends products based on past searches and purchases.
Google, already owning two-thirds of the search market, has an advertising relationship with many businesses. These businesses only pay Google when their ads get clicked. So far the system has been beneficial and lucrative for both Google and their advertisers. By integrating past search data with current contextual advertisements, Google is greatly
expanding the context within which they can display ads. Google can therefore improve the relevance of ads, increasing the chance that users will click them.
If this model is successful, users become more than one-time search results; they could develop robust profiles of interests to allow very specific, tailored selection of advertisements. But does such a collection of user-interest data pose privacy concerns?
The argument in favor of new advertising approaches like this is that this data can be used to display advertisements that, far from being annoying or distracting, actually offer useful solutions and products to consumers at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. Personally, I don’t even notice a lot of ads on websites that I view just because I’m so used to seeing ads for products that don’t interest me at all. I’ve grown immune to ads but if they are going to be tailored to my interests, I may actually start noticing and clicking these ads now.
Is Google the right company to implement this? Already, people seem very quick to trust Google, but it seems to me that there should be limits on how much information any one company can have about their users, and those limits should be set by the users themselves. I get the feeling that many users just don’t comprehend or realize how much information of theirs can be tracked via programs like these.
What level of transparency are you prepared to offer up to Google?
July 3rd, 2008, 04:21pm
The Houston Chronicle ran a story recently about how major video game companies are allowing independent and amateur developers to create games. Being an avid Counter-Strike player back in my heyday, I’m very familiar with the fruits of fan customization and modification of games (like custom maps, player models & skins, and the like) but such customizations were usually the works of teams, and found exclusively on the PC gaming platform.
Consoles have traditionally been a completely different story, with efforts to open the platform to amateur developers being borderline illegal. The three console giants, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have now opened up digital distribution channels to their consoles. This is great news: after all, who knows what gamers want better than the gamers themselves? The openness empowers both gamers and amateur developers alike to get their feet in the door and generate new content.
This is a very sensible move by the video game companies; they greatly expand the developer talent base while incurring very little cost of their own. What’s more, often larger scale teams come together to collaborate on the development of more ambitious projects. With a larger collaborative community of game developers, the potential for creativity and quality games is sky high. This is also a way for video game companies to keep an eye out for up-and-coming talent.
Creating a game is by no means an easy task, but this shift makes things easier. It may take a while for this to catch on, but with ever-increasing technological advances and having the internet as a tool for cheap and effective distribution, I foresee a great influx of user-developed games within the next few years.
June 22nd, 2008, 04:02pm
Last week, The Washington Post published an article about potential privacy concerns that result from using Facebook applications. Facebook greatly increased their popularity by letting users add custom functionality to their Facebook profile by installing application widgets — of which there are nearly 30,000 available.
However, many people do not realize that by adding these applications, they’re giving the applications (and therefore the application’s developer(s)) access to their personal information — irrespective of any privacy settings that a user may choose. Given that Facebook is an open platform where anyone can write an application, users are effectively giving complete strangers a slew of personal information. Read More »
