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Showing posts from October, 2010

Cool Android app, turn your phone into a tiny wifi network mobile web file server

I recently purchased my first smart phone, an Android based Samsung Captivate. I've been having a blast exploring the new paradigm of touch enabled UI and the many orthogonal dimensions of sensation (eyes..via cameras, ears via microphones, location via GPS, accelerometers and attitude sensors) that the mobile device presents for application development that doesn't exist on a desktop. One cool app. I downloaded today is called File Share. The reason requires a bit of back story: So last week I downloaded an app called "Sketcher" to doodle on my Captivate using the touch screen, I quickly created a few bits of art that I want to share on Facebook. I could plug in the phone via micro usb and set it as usb storage but that doesn't always work as seamlessly as it should...thankfully Samsung packed removable ram via the tiny mmd flash slot, I could take that out and pop it in my adapter and into a USB stick ..instant files ready to upload to Facebook...that works rel

Why Facebook + comment ratings = a big F-ing deal.

Facebook has been quietly but consistently creating tools that enable the service to know normally difficult to capture metrics about what people are doing, who they know, what they know and now with comment ratings, how well their knowledge is valued by their peers. Prior to this upgrade Facebook was able to provide excellent data for their ad targeting algorithms to enable highly coupled ad placements to the desires of those users shown them. The use of user submitted information regarding their geographic location, their likes in movies, music and other interests enabled Facebook to target large swathes of users to show relevant ads that target to those particular topics...this in itself was a pretty big deal as no one before Facebook had as large an audience to mine for this data and ad targeting and no one had as many points of information from the users base. Google has a much larger user base arguably but their ability to infer the interests from those users is much less focused