titan.as

Probably the worst PR move Mark Zuckerberg ever did. A video conference with the UK Prime Minister is one thing, a great honor, but reading stuff during the first half of the video conference is another. He wasn’t the Mark we all know, he wasn’t the almost half a billion people using Facebook leader we all know. Have a look at the second half of this “video conference”.

No guts

You need to have guts and balls to run a country. Period. Unfortunately, the state is doing anything at its power to punish lawful citizens and praise everybody else. Try to raise a kid by yelling when he does great in school and congratulate him when he breaks a vase and you’ll create a selfish moronic monster in no time.

Extra taxes

Heavy taxes especially in electronics and telecommunications is a recipe for failure. 19% VAT accounts to almost 1/5 of the price. 23% VAT accounts to almost 1/4 of the price. This is all happening in 2010 the year no one can think life without e-retailers like Amazon.com, a tipping point in history where shopping decisions are made with a click and in between half a dollar price range.

Media and politics

Taxing media is making certain people feel uncomfortable. Collecting those taxes is about to make things ugly. To do so you need to have guts and balls but we already know the answer to that. What happens next is the introduction of new and stricter laws about those uncollected taxes which very conveniently turn into a media manipulation tool with a backdoor: upcoming elections and the need for public brainwash.

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Anything in between Matt’s and Andy’s office view will do, Aeron included.

Try if you can and while you’re there spot the similarities between these three talks by Larry Page, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Continue reading »

It’s been only two months since Twitter came public about the volume of the tweets they deliver every day. Back then that number was 50 million tweets a day. Fast forward 8 weeks and that number grew up to 55 million tweets a day. Announced at Chirp, among other things, Twitter growth is phenomenal. That’s why the company is working on moving to its own data center.

55 million tweets a day is like every single Greek tweeting once a day, including the homeless and ones without access to the internet at all. If you were Finn (Finland is the home of Nokia and 39% global market share) you’d have to tweet at least 10 time a day to come up with 55 million tweets a day.

Twitter will grow exponentially along with more capable smartphones hitting the market and services like Google Search enabling access to Twitter’s archive. Add geo location services and the whole mash up idea of everything being connected with everything (Foursquare with Twitter, Facebook with Twitter etc) and you’ll soon be witnessing the real time revolution before the end of 2010.

Twitter (and Facebook later on) will leads to the need of effective, non fault positive filter and algorithmic tools for sorting out noise and the birth of the first software agents living in the cloud and within your pocket.

[photo by Lou O' Bedlam]

Kevin Rose was almost right when said: “My Foursquare data will tell my life story”. The truth is, Foursquare will save Kevin’s life not just tell a story about it. Location based social networking websites are on the rage right now. Twitter is doing it, Gowalla is doing it, Google Buzz is doing it, Facebook is about to it.

Geo tagged photos are cool, geo enabled status updates and tweets are helpful but geo information streams are links to the past, the present and the future of everyone’s life. Foursquare does a pretty god job connecting people, sharing information and stuff but it’s about to save a life and you’re going to pay for that.

Foursquare data will tell a story and save a life when each and every doctor and diagnostician has access to this date. Foursquare will add a stack of substantially critical and precise amount of information to each patient’s history. It will be easier than ever to suspect toxin exposure or overrule food poisoning just by looking at Foursquare’s check ins. Let’s examine a few examples of well know valley personalities. Continue reading »

Although a webmaster and someone making his living from an ad supported blog, i never thought Ad Blocking is devastating to any site. Ars is making a great point but they also have the balls to admit they failed in blocking content from users with a specific ad blocking software. Pretty interesting stuff in the age of CPMs, bandwidth consumption and hundreds of thousands page views.

Update: A very interesting follow up on ad blocking.

It was about time to move forward on cancer thinking and research. The Cancer Genome Project looks quite promising. Hopefully the reboot in thinking of cancer cure will help fight other diseases too. Genomes, protein folding research and hordes of engineers, poets, mathematicians, developers etc start thinking about cancer.

There is one thing and one thing only that made Nokia the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phonse and there is one thing and one thing only that is currently kicking Nokia’s ass. The company culture is engineer driven, period. Everything is build upon this very perception of reality, period. This is how Nokia introduced the world’s first mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman 900, and this is why Nokia is losing market share and market value for the last couple of years.

Fredrik Idestam, Nokia’s founder, was a mining engineer back in 1865. Fast forward 145 years and you will realize that every product Nokia ever made was build upon that engineer driven mentality and Finn influence. Engineers and particularly Finn engineers, combine great talent and technology to build amazing devices but that’s all they do. They build stuff based on the engineer assumption of efficiency and evolution but they totally toss the experience. Engineers are happy when stuff work and specs are pumped even if they have to struggle with 15 different clicks and settings to get the hardware running. Finns are a special specimen of engineering force who don’t give a damn about any of the “in between nonsense” at all.

Nokia is blessed to be the world’s largest handset maker or to put it in other words, engineer driven or not what they do brings €5 billion worth of food to the table. It’s really hard to argue against an operating profit of €5 billion as of 2008 but someone actually did. Apple and Google both set the standards for the next generation of smartphone OS while Nokia is yet not ready to officially announce Symbian Foundation phone and get over the engineer driven design of the powerful N900 beast. Apple is already working on the 4th version of iPhone OS for the new iPhone to be announced June-July 2010 while Google is on speed with 4 major release of Android OS already. As of now, Nokia is doomed to fail on the developed world. Continue reading »

There’s a new cool feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site and click on Labs > Site performance. “This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users”. That said what you get is a performance graph overview along with page speed suggestions. This is all nice and cool stuff. I love it.

Using Google’s words, this is an example page from my site and some suggestions on how to optimize it:

Details: Save up to 13.6 KB, 8 requests, 5 DNS lookups and here’s the break down. Continue reading »