KAMEIR

CrowdOptic has patented the technology (U.S. Patent No. 8,527,340) that captures dynamic shifts in where people are looking through their electronic devices (think Google Glass). The technology should enable users to share their routes with each other (for a high-tech game of search and find), especially in complex multi-building environments such as universities campuses  or shopping malls, and allow people to reroute  in response to changing environmental conditions and the paths of other users.

Very cool and well positioned to get snapped up by you know who 😉

With RIM’s Blackberry dying a slow death, there seem to be two mobile paradigms left: iOS and Android. And many insiders see Apple sliding when it comes to innovation which is supporting by sales numbers of Android phone with have been exceeding those of iPhones for a while now.

The obvious conclusion seems to be that one clear leader in form of Google’s Android operating system will emerge. With Google already being a quasi monopoly and unhealthy development for the most visible element of the Internet – the world wide web – this should frighten anybody with a comprehensive understanding of evolution and the awareness of humanity in a global society (for more about this see this outline for building a better search engine).

So, that’s why I was very pleased to come across this Indiegogo project:

The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a must have software. The freeware utility retrieves your Product Key used to install windows from your registry. It also provides a community-updated configuration file that retrieves product keys for more than 300 other applications. Additionally the software enables you to retrieve product keys from unbootable Windows installations.

Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 are supported as well as all previous Windows versions, including Windows XP, 2003 Server, 2000, NT, ME, 98 and 95. The Keyfinder is not a key generator. It reads the registry and extracts the key that was used to install Windows.

It is free to download from this website.

NASA has deployed three smartphone satellites (PhoneSats) into orbit. PhoneSat is a nanosatellite, categorizing the mass as between one and ten kilograms. Additionally, PhoneSat is a 1U CubeSat, with a volume of around one liter. The PhoneSat Project strives to decrease the cost of satellites while not sacrificing performance. In an effort to achieve this goal, the project is based around Commercial Off-The-Shelf electronics to provide functionality for as many parts as possible while still creating a reliable satellite.

The satellites will send information about their health via radio back to Earth in an effort to demonstrate they can work as satellites in space. The spacecraft also will attempt to take pictures of Earth using their cameras.

PhoneSat satellites are emitting packets on the amateur radio spectrum to report different types of message. Amateur radio operators around the world can participate in the mission by monitoring transmissions and retrieving image data from the three satellites. Large images will be transmitted in small chunks and will be reconstructed through a distributed ground station network. More information can found on the on the PhoneSat website.

Did you know that one Google search creates CO2 emissions of at least 1g? And Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, even estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search to even be more like 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use). Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining an avatar in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

But what’s much worse is that Google through its business model (AdWords/AdSense) has created a never-ending pollution engine for the World Wide Web. Since there’s is is money to be made by having a page show up in Google’s search results an entire industry sprung up our off nowhere (SEO). And every single ‘contributor’ to that industry has only one goal in mind: how can I get my page to show up on top of Google’s result to sell what I have to offer. To this day the Google algorithm still employs a largely popularistic approach: mainly a page’s importance is measured by how many other pages/sites point (link) to it. Every other aspect of the logic just provides nuances.

So, just like 85% of all emails sent are SPAM, it is very likely that 85% of pages on the World Wide Web are SPAM and a lot of it is being presented to you by Google (and of course any other search engine) as legitimate content. Just ask yourself: if you search for ‘best cell phone’, ‘best car loan’ – what do you expect to find? A legitimate research paper?