iPhone 4.0 OS: event based modes, intellingent and scheduled communications » Unwired View

iPhone 4.0 OS: event based modes, intellingent and scheduled communications

Now that with 3.0 OS iPhone has basically caught up with the traditional smartphones in functionality, it may be time to look how Apple can make the next generation devices even smarter.

We’ve already seen some of the things, like integration between Mapping and Calendar app in recent Apple patent filings. Some new patent applications from Apple reveal even more.
iPhone event based modes

One such patent application, called “Event-based modes for electronic devices” describes how your iPhone 4.0 device could be able to automatically adapt to different locations and life events.

iPhone 4.0 event based modes

The “life events” can include such things as:

any location-based event (e.g., the device entering or exiting a specific geographical location, such as a country, or a specific type of location, such as a movie theater, etc.), any environment-based event (e.g., the device being subjected to a specific physical orientation, movement, temperature, sound, light, etc.), any calendar-based event (e.g., the device reaching a specific time of day, day of week, date, etc.), any usage-based event (e.g., the device being used for a specific function, for a specific period of time, the device’s battery having less than half of its capacity remaining, etc.), any news-based event (e.g., the device receiving information about a particular worldly occurrence, such as a weather forecast, news report, or sport score, etc.), and combinations thereof.

In reaction to these life events your iPhone would be able to to automatically reconfigure it’s settings – e.g. switch the sound off and turn on a voicemail when calendar shows that you are in the meeting; prioritize certain functions and assets based on your location and time – e.g.messaging functions, e-mail access and notifications during working hours and when device knows you are in your office, music and multimedia when you are out of your office in the evening; turn off or limit some power hungry functions -e.g active data connection – when your battery is running low, etc;
Scheduled communications on your iPhone

Another Apple patent app, called “User-programmed automated communications “ is somewhat similar to the one above, but describes a way for you to automatically schedule/preset communications activities based on calendar events, your location, caller id and other conditions.

iPhone 4 Scheduled communications

E.g. your iPhone can automatically send a birthday greeting SMS or e-mail to your friends on a certain date, play a specific message based on caller id, if you are unable to pick-up the phone at the moment, send another message to your colleague if your haven’t answered his voicemail message in an hour, set-up a call with John on specific time, if a calendar entry says “Call John”, or send an e-mail to your friends in LA when you arrive there.
Intelligent iPhone communication modes

Most of today’s smartphones are pretty dumb when it comes to setting up communications with others and reacting to communication requests. So it’s up to you to make it right.

Your phone doesn’t really care that you are in a meeting right now, so it’s your problem if you forgot to turn the sound off and some telemarketer calls. When you login on some IM service, all your contacts get an update that you are available, and it doesn’t matter that you only want to show that to your family and closest friends. And when your are unable to pick up the phone, people calling you are left wondering where the heck are you. And there’s no way to tell the boss that you are closing the deal with a client right now, without broadcasting this to everyone else.

Well, patent app called “Systems and methods for intelligent and customizable communications between devices” shows how Apple might be able to do something about that.

iPhone 4.0 intelligent communications

By that I mean:

select appropriate communication modes for incoming communications requests based on a user’s preferences and availability. In addition, the communications device can determine the communication modes of a user based on the current activity and allow the user to provide customized information to his contacts.

If implemented in iPhone OS, the new software will let to set up various communication modes, different reply messages, availability notifications and status updates to all your contacts and contact groups in an address book. These modes then can be turned on/off manually or automatically based on your location, time of day, calendar entries or current activities.

Of course, all of these are just patent apps. But most of these things, if implemented right can make your iPhone much more useful and capable device.

And Apple is not the only one working on the ways to make your next phone an intelligent device. Google also has some similar ideas in that direction, and I am sure Nokia ain’t sitting still too.

I guess our smartphones may actually become smart in a few years.

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iPhone 4.0 OS: event based modes, intellingent and scheduled communications

Digg Finally Admits the Auto-Bury Exists | Brent Csutoras

digg-bury Digg Finally Admits the Auto-Bury Exists picture

It has long been debated and rumored that Digg has an auto-bury feature that would automatically bury specific user’s submissions.

They have for a long time denied any such mechanism exists, but a recent incident with Digg user ‘Nitmeh3? shows evidence to the contrary… through Digg’s own admission.

It all started yesterday when Nitmeh3 submitted an graphic and NSFW image telling Digg what they could do with themselves.

The initial submission did not explain what had occurred but the submission was quickly buried (or as we now know probably auto-buried). Later the user was also banned.

Today, Nitmeh3 posted an article explaining why he was banned and what made him so upset.

You can read all the emails here, but what I noticed right away was a specific Digg’s response to Nitmeh3 after he asked if his submissions were spam (and thus being auto-buried).

“We appreciate that you have submitted quality stuff on Digg.com but because we must be vigilant in protecting against activities that compromise the Digg community we were forced to bury your submissions.”

Digg went on to say that they would not only auto-bury all his submissions, but that they would not allow him to digg any upcoming stories either.

“We appreciate your passion towards Digg and this is why we haven’t locked your account yet. But, unfortunately we would not to be able to feature you on the homepage anymore and prevent you from digging any upcoming stories though you can Digg Popular stories.”

These emails between Nitmeh3 and Digg were also submitted to Digg today, but the submission was quickly deleted.

So it would appear that Digg is taking an even stronger stance than ever on how they will control users activities and success… completely behind the scenes and without their knowledge.

I guess the whole MC Hammer algo in the closet is a little more accurate than we initially thought.

So much for their attempt to be more transparent.

*There is no way to know for sure whether these emails have been changed or doctored. The user in question is adamant that they are original though.

However, in a Digg townhall overview on Cnet.com, Jay Adelson talked about auto-bury:

“Adelson is talking about “auto-bury,” which he says is not quite as conspiratorial as some users have suggested. It’s really for spam control.”

EDIT: I received an email from Jen Burton at Digg indicating that although they do have email correspondence between Digg and Nitmeh3, “none of the communication indicates the existence of an auto bury list or his supposed place on it.”

They indicate the above referenced emails do not exist in their system.

A question was asked of the this statement from Digg on this submission page for this article, as to why Nitmeh3 would go off and get so mad if none of this occured.

Jen responded by saying, “I can say that folks are generally unhappy when we have to enforce our TOS.”

This does bring up an interesting question as to what enforcement measures where used against Nitmeh3. He was not banned until after this whole situation occurred and I am only aware of one enforcement that Digg has for violating their TOS and that is to ban the user.

Hopefully Digg will comment further and help clear this up, as there still seems to be some unanswered questions about this recent issue.

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Digg Finally Admits the Auto-Bury Exists

the world  has changed, in the space of a few tweets.

1. i can reach about a thousand people with one 140 character message
2. if im looking & am priced right i can find a project to work on in a matter of hours
3. if i have the following that has the following, i can get any peice of news out there in seconds, Robert Scoble follows me on Twitter, fancy that ! ( name dropping, sorry, but you get the point )
4. this is fundamentally differnt from YAHOO or MSN or GTalk
   ( to be cont ´d in a few mins )

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.. in the space of a few tweets?

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack and @Noah were assigned to build version 0.1 while the rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 31st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:

oh this is going to be addictive

Standing Room Only We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user. The userbase was limited entirely to the company and our immediate family. No one from a major company of any kind was allowed in. For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball. We operated using a “long code”, or a full 10-digit phone number linked to a small-potatoes gateway. The original product name / codename “twttr” was inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. We prototyped with “89887? as our shortcode. We later changed to “40404? for ease of use and memorability. Twttr probably had about 50 users in the long code days.

I was following everyone on the system. We had an admin page where you could see every user. As Head of Quality for the company, it seemed like my duty to watch for opinions or issues from our users. This caused confusion, though, when family members of our team were suddenly being followed by a seemingly random person. Thus, Private Accounts were born. @Jack and @Florian created a means for users to mark themselves private, and we admins had the ability to tell who wanted to be private so we’d know not to follow them. Actual, real privacy with secure protection came a bit later. I’d say there were about 100 users when Private was invented.

Later Twttr Design The interaction model and the visual metaphor for the service were constantly in flux. The meaning of being someone’s “Friend” versus “Following” someone changed regularly. At that point, you could either get all SMS messages or get none. There was no Twictionary back then; data in the system were referred to as “posts” or just “messages”. The lack of clear terminology led to some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Spring of 2006.

We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.

Twttr, directly. During this transition, Twttr.com launched to the public. Still, very few people understood its value. At the time most people were paying per SMS message, and so wouldn’t Twttr run up our bills? Also, how were we supposed to use this thing and who cares what I’m doing? Each one of us original users became a kind of personal evangelist for Twttr, trying to get our coworkers and friends to use it. At this point, Obvious Corp was born as an incubator with Twttr as its sole project.

Twitter Friends@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message. In February of 2007 @Jack wrote something which inspired me to get started on this project: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

Just in time for SxSW, @RayReadyRay rigged a very sweet Flash-based visualizer that ended up on display on the halls of the conference. I wasn’t working there, but I used to visit regularly to see how our baby was doing. I happened to be at the office in SF when the visualizer went live on site in Austin. I remember finding a bug just before showtime, as @Biz and @Jeremy talked over the phone. Everything miraculously fell into place by the time people filtered out of the sessions to see their comments floating along the hallway screens. Boom #1: Twitter won an award in the Blog category, and @Jack thanked everyone in 140 characters.

MTV Music Awards: Boom #2.

Apple WWDC 2007, and then TV, and then print and pretty soon Cable news: Boom #3.

@Jack became the CEO of a newly spun-off Twitter, Inc. during the Boom Times. People still didn’t quite “get it” but at least some people had heard about it. The team created permalinks and RSS feeds. @Blaine pushed for IM integration. Each major feature added tremendous gains in users, and in usage per user. Still small by social networking standards, Twitter delivered something immediate and vital that no other service could attain.

For a lot of people, the entire API launch was really the time when Twitter first left the nest. But that is another story, for another time.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy following me: http://twitter.com/dom

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How Twitter Was Born

3M showed off a prototype device using its mobile projection engine, a shipping component that device makers can OEM. This nifty little technology will let you project the image from your PDA, for example, onto a small or large surface area.

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3M?s Tiny Mobile Projector

A googol of Googlers published a paper at VLDB 2008, “Google’s Deep-Web Crawl” (PDF), that describes how Google pokes and prods at web forms to see if it can find things to submit in the form that yield interesting data from the underlying database.

An excerpt from the paper:

This paper describes a system for surfacing Deep-Web content; i.e., pre-computing submissions for each HTML form and adding the resulting HTML pages into a search engine index.

Our objective is to select queries for millions of diverse forms such that we are able to achieve good (but perhaps incomplete) coverage through a small number of submissions per site and the surfaced pages are good candidates for selection into a search engine’s index.

We adopt an iterative probing approach to identify the candidate keywords for a [generic] text box. At a high level, we assign an initial seed set of words as values for the text box … [and then] extract additional keywords from the resulting documents … We repeat the process until we are unable to extract further keywords or have reached an alternate stopping condition.

A typed text box will produce reasonable result pages only with type-appropriate values. We use … [sampling of] known values for popular types … e.g. zip codes … state abbreviations … city … date … [and] price.

Table 5 in the paper shows the effectiveness of the technique, that they are able to retrieve a significant fraction of the records in small and normally hidden databases across the Web with only 500 or less submissions to the form. The authors also say that “the impact on our search traffic is a significant validation of the value of Deep-Web content.”

Please see also my April 2008 post, “GoogleBot starts on the deep web“.

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How Google crawls the deep web

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Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

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the future of video : jeremy allaire

Facebook Connect and Apple’s iPhoto ’09

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Kick Mugabe out. Now.

There’s no script for running a company in this historic downturn. So what the heck do you do? Here are ten ways to weather the storm.

(Fortune Magazine) — Exciting as it is to be living through historic economic drama, you can’t just stand by and watch. You have to act – yet you have no script.

So much of today’s turmoil is unprecedented that we can’t find much guidance by looking to the past. For managers across the global economy, as well as for Team Obama on its way to Washington, today’s great question is, What do we do now?

Managing in any recession is difficult; managing through this one is especially hard because it’s different from previous ones in multiple ways. Most immediately significant, employment is plunging more steeply than in a long time – by more than two million jobs last year, more than during the previous two recessions, and this one is far from over.

At the same time, U.S. consumer spending is falling sharply. In the third quarter it sank at a 3.1% annual rate, the steepest decline since 1980 – meaning that managers who have made it through the past four recessions have never confronted anything like it. Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) president Brian Dunn said recently, “In 42 years of retailing, we’ve never seen such difficult times for the consumer.”

The drop is worrisome because consumer spending is more than 70% of America’s economy, and while it may rise quickly or slowly, it almost always rises. During the whole of the last recession (2001), consumer spending never declined at all; its growth only slowed.

Compounding the problem, consumers are more deeply in debt than ever, an immediate concern for companies that lend to consumers; American Express (AXP, Fortune 500) CEO Ken Chenault calls this “one of the most challenging economic environments we’ve seen in many decades.”

Longer term, consumers’ balance sheets are so ugly that many executives believe this recession may linger as people slowly rebuild their finances. Dunkin’ Brands chairman Jon Luther says, “This downturn will not have a typical V-shape, where it bounces right back. It could be a couple of years before consumer spending goes up again.”

Consumers aren’t the only ones deleveraging. Companies are too, and on a more massive scale than ever seen before. That means business-to-business firms are also suffering. Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) CEO John Chambers predicts that his company’s sales will decline for the first time in five years.

Deleveraging is typical in a recession, but because boom-time leverage had reached unprecedented levels, the reverse process may become particularly violent. Deere (DE, Fortune 500) CEO Bob Lane cites current deleveraging as a main difference between this recession and previous ones: “The U.S. economy has never been through anything like this, and we don’t know what the effects will be.”

Yet another important difference – the credit crunch – affects even those companies that are reducing debt, but especially those that aren’t. Virtually all firms depend on a constant flow of credit to carry them smoothly through the ups and downs of business fluctuations. While it’s entirely typical for lenders to get more cautious in a downturn, the near freezing of credit is something else again. Even companies able to pay higher interest rates may find that credit isn’t available from the usual sources at any price.

Making this recession unique above all is its sheer interconnected complexity. Consider this sequence: The U.S. housing bubble bursts, pushing U.S. consumer spending down, leading to less demand for imports from China, causing slower growth of the Chinese economy, thus decreasing demand for copper, pushing copper prices down to their lowest levels in almost three years, causing big problems for you and your warehouse full of copper. You can conduct pretty fancy scenario planning and still not be ready for that – and it’s safe to say we’ve barely begun to see the rippling effects of a recession in an information-based, truly international economy.

Yet that’s the environment in which you must manage. How? Insights and practices from global executives, consultants, and others suggest several steps you can take now.

As usual in these situations, much will depend on how quickly you move. It’s human nature to avoid confronting bad news and to imagine that today’s troubles will pass more quickly and easily than they really will. Virtually everyone Fortune spoke to recommends the opposite: Assume conditions will be worse than you actually expect.

“You identify areas where you think you can be more efficient by assuming the worst-case scenario,” says Intuit (INTU) CEO Brad Smith. “Then you end up saying, Why don’t we just do that anyhow?” Facing the coming reality before your competitors do can make a big difference in which of you stays healthy or even who survives.

It must be said that some of the most effective moves you can make for prospering through a recession are ones you established a long time ago. In times like these the strong get stronger and the weak get eaten. In the tumultuous third quarter, while Washington Mutual and IndyMac Bank were failing, Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) – which got out of subprime mortgages in 2001 – attracted $21 billion of new consumer deposits as consumers ran to safety. When the Wickes furniture retailing chain filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, more than 100 truckloads of furniture were on their way to its stores; a Milwaukee retailer that had remained financially solid, Steinhafels, bought the contents of several at bargain prices.

Remember that for next time. For now, what’s done is done. No matter what shape your business is in, it will benefit from following these ten recommendations.

• Reset priorities to face the new reality.
• Keep investing in the core.
• Communicate like crazy, balancing realism and optimism.
• Your customers face new problems, so give them new solutions.
• Don’t rush to cut prices.
• Focus on capital – how you’re getting it and where you’re using it.
• Reevaluate people – and steal some good ones.
• Reexamine compensation – what is it offering incentives for?
• Think twice about offshoring.
• Be smart about mergers and acquisitions.

It’s hard to be upbeat in a recession, but it truly is an opportunity. Marathoners and Tour de France racers will tell you that a race’s hardest parts, the uphill stages, are where the lead changes hands. That’s where we are. When this recession ends, when the road levels off and the world seems full of promise once more, your position in the competitive pack will depend on how skillfully you manage right now.

Reporter associates Steven Gray, Christopher Tkaczyk and Yi-Wyn Yen contributed to this article.

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How to manage your business in a recession

Putin-Dell slapdown at Davos

( hahaha ! way to go P Man, we love you out here in Austria, whats the plan for New Year 2010, how many of us do you want to see freeze ? )

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The Russian prime minister tells the Dell CEO: ?We don?t need help. We are not invalids.?

Windows kicks Linux to the curb

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Windows kicks Linux to the curb

Introducing Measurement Lab

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Introducing Measurement Lab

What Would Google Do?

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What Would Google Do?