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A new right-wing government will raise the national speed limit to 130 kph, the Telegraaf reports on Wednesday.
The immigration services has cancelled or withdrawn residency permits for 450 asylum seekers who made fraudulent applications under the 2007 amnesty, caretaker justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin has told MPs.
A bundle of Windows 7 joy
It looks like someone didn't get the deal done in time for the VMworld virtualization and cloud extravaganza last week. Today, server wannabe and networking giant Cisco Systems and virtualization player Citrix Systems will announce their first partnership, bundling up the XenDesktop Swiss army knife of desktop and application virtualization on Cisco's "California" Unified Computing System blade servers.…
BlackBerry chalks up another acquisition
BlackBerry maker RIM has apparently bought out DataViz, publisher of the popular Documents To Go, in a deal worth $50m in cash.…
Turning a tidy profit on the deal
Vodafone is planning to raise $4.3bn selling its stake in China Mobile, and will be handing most of the cash to its shareholders.…
Cultural heritage groups, including one which has queen Beatrix as its patron, have made formal protests about royal family plans to demolish two farms on their property in Wassenaar.
The Netherlands' 12 psychiatric prison units - tbs clinics - are planning to give some prisoners leave after as little as 18 months of treatment, the AD reports on Wednesday, quoting confidential documents.
Did dodgy battery cause £350,000 of damage?
A retired schools inspector is suing her former employer because her work laptop allegedly set fire to to her thatched cottage, causing £350,000 of damage.…
Much in demand, apparently
Nokia's N8 smartphone will go on sale at the end of this month priced at £429 for the SIM-free version, the Finnish phone giant said today.…
The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, has been slow to attract the attention of budding entrepreneurs. However, there has been some startup action in so-called "social objects." We've covered two companies in this domain in recent times, StickyBits and TalesOfThings. The New York Times profiled a third company in this space over the weekend, Itizen.
All of these startups are searching for a business model, but there is massive long term potential in this market. Leandro Agro, CEO of sensor data company WideTag (our review), says that by 2050 objects will be judged more for their 'sociality' than their aesthetic value. It's an intriguing notion, so in this post we imagine what a 'social' tennis racquet might look like in 40 years.
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Living Objects
In an interview for Wired Italy and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, transcribed on the WideTag blog by David Orban, Leandro Agro said that "tomorrow a social object might be associated with Italy not because of its aesthetic value but because of its level of 'sociality'." He sees an opportunity for his country, Italy, to take a leadership role in re-inventing the design of objects:
"Every object should tell its own story. The story of its past (what it is made of, where it was produced, how it is used) and its future (how to differentiate it, how to take it apart, how to recycle it). It should be actively self-aware (being sentient or at least having some idea of the time and place for its own use), be connected and social, in other words it should belong to us humans, "living" as part of our digital and social network. "
I expressed skepticism about social objects earlier this year, because the early startups in this domain were attempting to create new social networks on top of objects. I still think that's the wrong model. However, there is a lot of scope for online data from objects to contribute to your existing social networks.
A Social Tennis Racquet (Circa 2050)
Using Agro's vision, here is one possible scenario.
Imagine a tennis racquet with an RFID chip embedded in it. The chip specifies the materials the racquet was made with, which factory it was produced in and on what date, the strengths of that particular racquet compared to other models, and so on.
Then when the racquet is bought, the chip tracks the usage of the racquet. It will monitor for damage and wear, how often the strings are tightened or swapped out, and so on. It might also send to and receive information from other computing chips - in tennis courts, other players racquets, inside tennis clubs, etc. This would enable the tennis racquet to, for example, automatically track the tournaments its owner enters and the games it plays in (let's assume this is an amateur player, since professional tennis players swap racquets every set or so!).
This Internet-connected tennis racquet has a social element because it is being used by a person, who presumably uses the racquet to play tennis with other people. So that data from the racquet can be a contributor to social networks.
Using today's social networks to illustrate the point (although surely these will be seen as rather primitive examples of social networks in 50 years time), imagine your tennis racquet automatically checking you in to a tennis court on Foursquare. Or the racquet updating your Facebook page when you defeat your mate in a social game of tennis. Or the racquet sending you a DM on Twitter that it requires string tightening (!).
These and many other scenarios will occur over time, as objects get connected to the Internet and the resulting data meshes in with your social networks. So by extension, the tennis racquet will become a 'social object.'
While this is a future-looking scenario, are you aware of objects that are already 'social'? And do you think StickyBits, TalesofThings, Itizen and others are on the right track to realize this vision?
Image credit: Siddhartha Lammata
Discuss
Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy writes in a new report that "The Internet and the mobile Internet have effectively combined." Facebook users who access the social networking site through a mobile device are twice as active as users who don't. It's no surprise then to see the announcement of Salesforce.com's Chatter Mobile, a mobile client for the company's increasingly popular Chatter social networking and microblogging platform.
Chatter Mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and the new iPod touch will be available in late 2010, with Android support coming in the first half of 2011.
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Chatter's simple, Facebook-like interface accomplishes the goal of most enterprise 2.0 platforms: making enterprise technologies as accessible as consumer technologies. According to Kraig Swensrud, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter is its most successful product launch yet. The product, which came out of beta in June, is now in use by 20,000 companies. Many are Salesforce.com CRM customers, but many new customers are also picking up Chatter and using it independently of the company's flagship product. Some companies, like Nokia are even deploying Chatter enterprise wide.
Saleforce.com's mobile CRM app has also been successful, with over 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and over 100,000 from the BlackBerry App World.
Salesforce.com is aggressively targeting enterprise mobility and social networking as several competitors are eying the same space. Yammer recently announced it will expand beyond microblogging into general enterprise social networking and RhoLogic recently released a mobile SugarCRM client. Expect to see this space heating up more in coming months as mobility continues to mainstream.
See our coverage of Chatter from June for more information the service.
DiscussFive thousand fixes in three weeks
In the three weeks following its offer to replace the batteries in overheating first-generation iPod nanos, Apple Japan swapped out a total of 4,994 suspect cells.…
The above beauty (more of him below) is among today's "Guydar Italia" catches—thanks again to Italian spy G for capturing so many men in so little clothing...
All this shit needs is Carol Lynley lip-synching in the background.
Find out why Adam Lambert and Jake Shears are making out in the video after the jump...
Answer: For a laugh...
Another Hard Candy leak, this time the rumored track "Latte". Hey, looks like she was playing with the gypsy stuff prior to scotching this and resuscitating parts for her live "La Isla Bonita" extravaganza on Sticky & Sweet.
Pretty, unassuming little song. Also hear some "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" in there.
Project Runway's celibate Yoda Tim Gunn is out promoting his book Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work, and he's granted a juicy interview to TheFrisky.com. In it, he confirms this season's Gretchen is a psycho (albeit one he's come to appreciate). Of his confrontation with her, he says:
"I have never done that before and I will be honest with you, I asked permission to do it. I have a role in that scene [after the judging] saying, 'Go to the workroom and clean up your space.' That's why I said to A.J. [the designer who was sent home last episode instead of Gretchen], 'I want you to hear this.' Because I also wanted the whole team to know that I was disappointed in all their behavior. They allowed Gretchen to bully them and direct everything...The behavior that Gretchen demonstrated on the runway during that Q&A with the judges is about as close to psychosis as anything I have seen on the show. But I have to tell you something, too. I've learned to really love and adore her. I'm extremely fond of her. There are multiple dimensions of her."
Gunn also apparently believes his dad was a closeted gay man having an affair with J.Edgar Hoover, per this exchange:
TheFrisky.com: You book doesn't just criticize the behavior of celebs — you write about your own family, too, including where you say that you believe your father may have been a closeted homosexual in a relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. Are they going to be happy about that?
Tim Gunn: (In gloom-and-doom voice)They haven't read it yet.
TheFrisky.com: How do you think that's going to go?Tim Gunn: My deathly ill mother, if she's still alive next Tuesday, she won't be by Wednesday.
TheFrisky.com: Oh, I'm so sorry!
Tim Gunn: (laughs uproariously) She's not going to like it.
Lots of buzz about multiple Madonna demos that have leaked lately—even her manager Guy Oseary acknowledges them and seems perplexed:
Meanwhile, at least some are fakes. Though I'd blogged it earlier, "First Is a Kiss" aka "First There's a Kiss" is an intentional fraud, taking pieces of a Shana song (remember, I just blogged about her! I owned this CD but I only ever listen to "I Want You" by Shana):
And that "Holiday" demo that just came out wasn't—it's a mash-up between her vocal and this:
