08

Sep

24 Hours Sans Internet

I’ve just flown from Mumbai to New York City, a total travel time of about a day. The big apple greeted me not only with rain and jet lag but a massive internet backlog that needed attending to. I had 321 unread items in Google Reader and 21 FB notifications (5 of which required a reply/action). I missed news about blasts in Dehli and raids in Syria. I didn’t bother counting the new articles in Flipboard and Zite. In short, I was overwhelmed. My chronic Internet addiction has made it necessary to check my streams every hour or two. Perhaps I follow too many things. Perhaps I need to find a better way of organising. Perhaps international airlines need to get some Internet going on their flights. While I prefer the lattermost solution, I don’t think that’s coming soon. It took me about 70 mins to get through my stream and there a few articles that I still need to read.

You all might not be as hooked as I am, but you may be soon. I will defend the merits of Internet addiction 95% of the time, but today I was tempted to hit “Mark All as Read” and go to sleep.

625 days ago Short URL Comments

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04

Sep

Web 3.0? Here’s the Semantic Web

A good slideshow that summarizes where the Internet is headed next. Take it with a very minor pinch of salt, as with anything that tries to outlines the future in tech.

629 days ago Short URL Comments

01

Sep

Feature: India’s Aadhaar Project

Two years ago, the Government of India began undertaking one of the the most ambitious (and tech-centered) public policy projects in the world, Aadhaar. The goal of this enterprise is to assign a unique, 12-digit number to every Indian that will serve as the primary form of identification nationwide. This in of itself is a major challenge considering the size, population, and infrastructure of India. While Aadhaar may resemble something like the American social security system, here’s the kicker: the Aadhaar number is linked with a resident’s 10 finger prints and iris scans.

12-digit unique number + biometric = access to services, public and private

^ To understand how revolutionary this idea is, the Indian context must be fully acknowledged. The vast majority of people do not have a formal ID, a bank account, or a valid address, making it incredibly difficult to receive subsidies, rations, driver’s licenses, aid, and other government services. Furthermore, India’s endemic corruption causes “leakages” throughout the bureaucratic system, resulting in almost half of the money spent by the government on welfare several services not reaching the poor.

The Aadhaar project has the potential to make a serious dent, if not solve the issues above. When a resident enrolls for an Aadhaar number, they are automatically prompted to create or link a bank account to their identity. That would conceivably mean that every Indian, even the poorest of the poor, would have a bank account. By wiring aid, subsidies, and rations directly to bank accounts, the small-scale corruption in the government services sector gets eliminated in one, fingerprint-laden swoop. Getting anything from the government, from licenses to passports, is as simple as entering a number and providing a fingerprint or eye image. Private companies can get in on the Aadhaar action too. New products and industries like Micro-ATMs and cellphone-to-cellphone financial transactions are coming out of private-public partnerships.

You could write a book on the plethora of ways this will revolutionize the country (see: Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani), but I have mentioned a few here. When we think about how technology is changing the world, we imagine a screen with enhanced communication and information access, but these changes are largely first-world phenomena. The Aadhaar project demonstrates how technology is resulting in genuine development, leapfrogging all ID projects worldwide as it does so. And it’s only the beginning.

Visit the UIDAI site here. (Full disclosure: I just completed a one month internship at the UIDAI, but I am in no way promoting or speaking on behalf of the Government of India.)

633 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

28

Aug

Smart Mobile And The Thin Cloud

Smart post from Keith Teare. I happen to agree with his assessment of the mobile and web landscape:

When HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that the company was seeking options for its consumer PC business and abandoningthe hardware mobile business its stock dropped 20%. When Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, after a 12 hour pullback, the stock rose to go above the previous close within 48 hours.

 

 

637 days ago Short URL Comments

24

Aug

The Future of the Internet

An interesting set of survey results from the world’s leading Internet experts:

You can’t talk about the future without talking about the thing that’s shaping the future the most. Some 20 years on, the Internet has upended entrenched business models, opened up a world of information to people all over the globe, and possibly even helped topple a dictator or two. But is the open web in danger? As 24/7 connectivity becomes an ever more inextricable part of our daily lives, FP asked some of the world’s top experts to tell us where the Net is headed next.

641 days ago Short URL Comments

22

Aug

Order to the Internet Chaos


One of the great and obvious boons of the Internet is the content it produces. Your favorite magazines and newspapers have websites that you can visit anytime and anywhere. The smartest people in the world have blogs that you can read. YouTube contains a whole spectrum of videos, from educational Khan Academy clips to the mind-numbing stylings of Rebecca Black. Whether you read Paul Krugman’s NYT Op-Eds or look at pictures of cats in human clothing on icanhascheezburger.com, the Internet has something for everyone. The best (or worst) part of Internet content is that there is always more of it with new stuff to consume every second of everyday. To keep up with what’s happening, a lot of people browse through news sites and their other favorite destinations to see if there’s anything new or interesting. If you’re really a fan, you visit the website every chance you get in order to not miss out on the latest content.

If this is how you conduct your Internet consumption, you are doing it wrong. Completely, utterly, 20th-century-ly, wrong. Here’s why:

1. You have to go to a bagillion different places to get fully in the loop. That wastes time.

2. You may have not visited a site in a while and missed something interesting. That’s pretty irritating.

3. If you do find something interesting that you want to mark or read later, there isn’t an easy way to do that with this method (bookmarking is passé for this particular task).

4. There isn’t a way to organize your different sources (Obviously, since you are still going to different sites to access them.)

5. Ads. Who needs them?

Ok, I’ll retract the claws a bit. Visiting the sites are nice because they layout is usually well designed and the reading experience more relaxed. But with the amount of information that you should be internalizing, it’s too inefficient. So how are you supposed to organize and consume your content? Some people like getting articles sent to their email inbox, but I dont’ like that because of the clutter and sheer quantity of my sources. If you think this fits your needs, most sites have a “Subscribe” button sitting somewhere (Ctrl/Cmd + F “Subscribe” on the page if you can’t find it). Some people use Twitter and in order to follow their favourite people and publications, but this is less organised and not conducive to reading. In my opinion, the best way to manage your “river of information” is with an RSS reader. It is a service that receives and displays the article lists of websites into a consolidated feed. The individual article lists are called RSS feeds.

RSS Reader (Google Reader)

I recommend Google Reader for your RSS needs and will use it for my explanation. After going to the link and signing in with your Google Account, you’ll be taken to something like what you see above, minus the content. It’s dead simple. Add your sources up top (enter a search term or URL), they appear on the bottom left, and the content they generate shows up on the right. That’s it. You don’t even have to be on Reader to subscribe to something, just find the RSS logo at the top of any website and that should let you send the site’s feed to Reader. You can create folders for different topics and star items for later reading/viewing. Yeah, it’s awesome.

This is the first step to organising your digital consumption. After setting up your RSS Reader, you have a bunch of cool options to upgrade your experience. There are services that let you save articles for later reading, analyze your Google Reader/Twitter stream to suggest other content, and present your different streams (Reader, Twitter, FB, etc) in one place, but I’ll save that for another post.

Here’s the point. There is so much fantastic content being posted on the Internet. It will be (or already is) unpractical to consume most of what you want to internalize as you run into more and more content providers. Get a handle on it. Otherwise, you will either miss out or be unable to keep up with the mass of information. Induct RSS Readers, Twitter, and other tools into your daily Internet ritual.

643 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

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20

Aug

Show your Parents the Light

In the last two decades, the way we live our lives has drastically changed because of technology. The Internet and all of its accomplices, from Google to Facebook, have permeated into every part of our lives. We intuitively share, IM, tweet, and search like they’re extensions of ourselves and we are more connected, organized, informed, and open-minded because of it.

Actually, not all of us are any of those things. Some of us don’t have Facebook, don’t Google when they want to find something out, love music but can’t sync an iPod, and have messy desktops with seemingly no organized file system. These people, often enough, are your parents. While you ride comfortably on the wave of progress made courtesy of information technology, the people who raised you are slowly drowning in it. This is a rather dramatic metaphor, but I really do think that individuals (parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, grandparents) who grew up before the tech boom and haven’t kept up are genuinely missing out. And it’s your job to make sure that they don’t.

In my experience, there are three common excuses, made by digital native and immigrant alike, why not to teach or learn about computers, smartphones, and the web. They don’t need it, they just don’t get it, or they can’t be bothered.

Sure. You didn’t need Facebook, until you realized that walls, chats, pictures, and keeping in touch was amazing. You didn’t need a smartphone until you took pictures of everything, Google-d compulsively, and played Angry Birds. 3 years ago, my parents had basic phones, no Facebook, messy desktops, and no digital music collection (cringe). In 2008, I wanted an iPhone 3G. The way I manipulated my parents into thinking that this was a good idea was by making sure they each got one too. They “didn’t need them.” The plan sort of backfired when I had to fix iTunes sync problems, frozen apps, and email configurations. They didn’t get half the things that were coming out of my mouth. I didn’t want to help them half the time. They didn’t want to listen to me for the rest. But going through that crap made me start teaching my parents seriously about good tech habits and the new tools that were going around.

Today, my dad takes his phone out at least once in every conversation or meeting, but not to reply to text or check his mail. He shares pictures of a recent trip or whips out Google Maps to show where he’s looking to invest. Half of the time, he’ll brag about how his son taught him all of that (pride). My mom, who loves music and Filipino soap operas, now syncs music like a pro and watches more YouTube than regular TV. Try taking any of these tools away from them now. The teaching-learning process doesn’t stop either by the way. When I got onto Dropbox, I made sure my mom got one too. When Facebook introduced the @FriendsName function, I walked across the hall and gave them a heads up.

We are living in fast-paced world that’s only moving faster. Being a digital native means that interacting with a digital interface is natural and learning with it intuitive. That level of comfort is not to be expected from your digital-immigrant parents, but they should not be in the dark either. Talk to your parents. Understand where they’re coming from, and help them understand why this is the way forward. Teach them. Encourage them. Be patient with them. In the stumbles you may have in this process, you will get to know your parents better.

There is a rich digital world out there, filled with knowledge, connections, and experiences to be had. Your parents want and need to be brought into it (even if they don’t know it yet).

644 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

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19

Aug

Set For College

As September comes closer day by day, new freshmen like myself are scrambling to figure out what they need to sort out all their college stuff. While I may be of little help with regards to the color of your dorm bed sheets, I can tell you what devices and software I’ll be packing to college. I’ll be fair and include Windows and Android choices along with my Mac and iOS preferences.

Laptop

In my opinion, 13 inch laptops are the sweet spot for portability and performance in laptops today. The screen size is adequate for everything from browsing to movies while still being light in the laptop bag, which it needs to be since you’ll be taking the machine to class daily. Below are my recommendations for specific models. If you insist on shopping around, look for a 13-inch screen, a Sandy Bridge processor, 4GB of RAM, 2+ USB ports, and a Solid State Drive (pricey!). This should do for anything short of hardcore photo and movie editing (hardcore = a hour or so daily editing media).

Macbook Air 13-inch (My Configuration: 256 GB SSD, 1.8ghz i7)

It’s thin, fast, and sexy, with a dozen or so Windows machines trying to match its looks and failing. Great screen and best touchpad in the biz. Do know that there isn’t a CD drive here, but with the Mac App Store and in the digital world, that’s less of a problem for me. Get an external CD drive and keep it in the desk drawer.

Toshiba Portege R830 (My Configuration: 128 GB SSD, i7)

This is probably the best value for money machine in the industry. While it’s looks are bland, you can customize this baby to what ever your price range can absorb. You’ll get performance and stability with the R830 and it has the elusive CD drive as well.

Phone

If you’re not carrying a smartphone, you’re not living in this century. Period. And no, a Blackberry is not a smartphone in my opinion. It is a messaging, email, and phone platform, but not a mobile computing platform. iOS and Android fit that bill. I’m not recommending phones running Windows Phone 7 yet because the app infrastructure is pretty weak as of now. On the iOS side, there is just the iPhone. It’s fantastic, has the best user interface, and is so simple that my 55-year old parents rock iPhone 4s like pros. Android is great platform as well, with enough apps to make you not jealous of how pretty the iPhone apps are. If you’re one to customize most aspects of the device and do not mind a decent learning curve, it may very well be for you. Below are my top picks, but you are open to lots of alternatives on the Android side (another advantage).

Apple iPhone 5/4S (You want to wait for this, Sept-Oct ’11 arrival; here’s the iPhone 4 in the meantime)

Yes, I’m recommending a phone that’s not out yet. Why? Because it’s almost out and it’ll be better than the iPhone 4. Its predecessor has the highest pixel density screen in the industry, a super 5MP camera, and the best app platform out there. There is no simpler and more elegant device out there, and you won’t sacrifice performance for it. The iPhone 5 will almost certainly have a faster processor and better camera, but a bigger screen and slimmer profile have been rumored.

Samsung Galaxy SII 

This thing is a beast. It’s got a massive 4.3 inch screen, 8MP camera, and is crazy thin. There are more features in this thing than worth mentioning, and if you’re going Android you probably can’t get better.

Software

While the devices are one aspect of the package, the software is where you will actually be working and being productive (or not). You’ll be writing long papers, taking notes, IMing, listening to music, and watching movies among a long list of digital activities. I’m not going through the basics like Microsoft Office. We’re in college now; it’s time to step it up. You’ll also need to get your life organized. Mom won’t be there to remind you of a deadline or do your laundry. I’ll be using every single thing I recommend in this section, as should you.

Scrivener (Mac and PC) – Writing

There’s going to be a lot more writing in college. And those papers are going to be long. Scrivener is an app with that in mind. You can write, organize, format, and visualize your work like never before. Just go to the link and look around and you’ll think the $40 is a steal.

Evernote (Mac, PC, iOS, Android) – Notes

If you’re still taking notes with Microsoft Word, you need to get with it. Evernote let’s you have different notebooks, clip web pages, sync with the cloud, take notes from your other devices (phones, tablets) and much more. And it’s free.

Wunderlist (All platforms) – Tasks

Homework, deadlines, laundry, meetings, calling home. There’s so much to keep track of now that you’re on your own. My memory sucks but even people with good memory need a way to keep track of stuff. Wunderlist is my task manager of choice. Elegant design + cloud syncing to all devices + shared tasks + free = win.

Dropbox (All platforms) – Backup and Sync

This app is a lifesaver. Get an account and you have folder with a 2GB limit on your computer. Put all your work in there and forget about it. It will auto backup that folder to the cloud and have it accessible from any device you like. For work files, 2GB is adequate and you can opt for the paid plans if you want to put everything. If your laptop gets stolen or crashes, you’ll be thankful that you have everything important on Dropbox.

Google Calendar (All platforms) – Calendar

If you’re handling multiple devices like any dutiful Techizen, you’re going to want to have your calendar wherever you are. Google Calendar will do that without making you think to hard about how to do it. The design is clean, it’s free, and you don’t have to worry about losing stuff when you switch machines/platforms.

Spotify (All platforms, select countries) – Music

Only recently landing in the US, this is the future of music. Pay $5 or $10 a month and get access to what is more or less the equivalent entire iTunes Store. Awesome right? Stream unlimited to your devices and save your favorite playlists locally for offline listening. It’s really as good as it sounds (no pun intended).

Netflix (All platforms, select countries) – Movies

Unlimited movies and TV shows streamed to your computer. Legally. There are a whole host of reasonable monthly plans, but it’ll be totally worth it with late nights in dorms. Tip: Split the plan with your roommate.

Whatsapp (All phone platforms) – Messaging

AT&T just cut it’s cheapest $10 texting plan, leaving you with $20 being your only monthly option. WTF. Get data on your phone and pick up Whatsapp. It’s a one time download charge ($1-$2) and that’s it. It works across pretty much every phone platform (the main advantage of SMS) but it’s faster, better for multimedia, has group chat, along with a whole host of other features. If you want to keep in touch with HS friends while making strong, new connections with college friends, you need a robust IM system. This is one.

While this is a college-centric post, these are really some the devices and tools for life. You’re going going to need a great mobile computer in your pocket, a great computer, and great software to do good work and get the most out of fruits that the digital world bear. With the tools above, you should be set to learn, create, and connect.

645 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

19

Aug

Problems Will Be Global — And Solutions Will Be, Too

Multilateralism, sustainability, the rise of non-state actors, and behavior-changing crises. According to Anne-Marie Slaughter for FP, these will be the themes that make up the next 14 years. A great and thought-provoking read on what may come our way.

646 days ago Short URL Comments

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19

Aug

Josette Sheeran: Ending hunger now

Whether you’re sitting in Mumbai or Madrid, Palo Alto or Palermo, having the internet connection to read this post probably means you have enough eat. Hunger seems like such a perennial issue, one that has plagued mankind for millennia. It is this ever-present nature that fosters a sense of apathy and perhaps lack of emotion when we hear of problems related to hunger. There are two reasons why hunger should penetrate are mental bubble today: the devastating famine in the horn of Africa and the real possibility of ending hunger in our time. In this TED Talk from Josette Sheeran, she presents the modern face of hunger and how technology is providing new solutions to an age-old problem.

646 days ago Short URL Comments

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