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Posts Tagged ‘Inventor’

Apple power adapter foot cozy, by Seymour Burns (video)

The power adapter may become very warm during normal use. Always put the power adapter directly into a power outlet or place it on the floor in a well-ventilated location. If you are using your MagSafe adapter in a poorly ventilated area, or if the MagSafe adapter is covered by a blanket or other form of insulation, it may turn itself off in order to prevent damage to the adapter.

Here’s the best part: the inventor’s name is Rachael Burns… why yes, she just might. Video demonstration after the break.

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Apple power adapter foot cozy, by Seymour Burns (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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feature: The lost souls of telecommunications history

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva’s celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, he’d been hired to help replace the control systems for several of the lab’s particle accelerators. Almost immediately, the inventor of the modern Web page noticed a problem: thousands of people were coming and going from the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. 

“The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground,” he later wrote. “Much of the crucial information existed only in people’s heads.”

In his spare time, Berners-Lee was working on some software that might alleviate this fragmentation and spread more useful information around. It was a little program he named Enquire, and it allowed users to create “nodes”—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. 

Berners-Lee was pleased with what he eventually produced, but the PASCAL application ran on CERN’s obscure and proprietary operating system, so he didn’t take it with him when his contract expired.

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Jake Easton’s Better Mousetrap leaves no country for old mice (video)

If Cormac McCarthy was an inventor of gadgets instead of words then this better (measured in awesome) mousetrap might have been the result. Instead, honors go to Jack Easton, a man known to kill ordinary mice using compressed air. No, really. The device above feature a pneumatic cylinder that brings down the death hammer with a strike force of 102 pounds after it senses a nearby pest. Poor fake mouse: delivered a fortune that was not his own. See all the fun after the break.

Continue reading Jake Easton’s Better Mousetrap leaves no country for old mice (video)

Jake Easton’s Better Mousetrap leaves no country for old mice (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Swype raises $5.6M for novel text-entry technology

Swype has raised $5.6 million in a second round of funding and has shown further momentum in getting its new text-entry technology off the ground.

Swype lets you enter text more easily into a cell phone text message. You begin typing a message with a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen phone. The device suggests different words for you to choose, and you make your choice by swiping your finger through the right word on the screen. The company says that most users can type about 30 words per minute in normal text messages. With Swype, they can type above 40 words per minute.

The round was led by Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners and returning investor Benaroya Capital. The company will use the money to get its technology into more mobile phones and other devices.

Swype was founded in 2002 by Cliff Kushner, the co-inventor of T9, the predictive text technology that is used to guess at what you’re trying to write in text messages. T9 is used in billions of phones. Kushner created his new technology for the same reason he invented T9: to help the disabled use gadgets more easily. It took a long time to perfect the algorithms so that Swype could have 95 percent accuracy.

The Samsung Omnia II, launched this fall, is the first phone to use Swype’s technology. It’s no surprise, then, to see that Samsung is one of the new investors. The company says that Swype is faster than existing text-entry methods because it has built-in intelligence that doesn’t require users to hit each letter accurately. It works across a variety of operating systems and devices, from phones to game consoles.

The company started talking about the technology in 2008. It currently has 20 employees. Kushner self-funded the company for a long time, and it raised $1.7 million in angel funding earlier this year.

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Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009

2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Linked Data is a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We’ve gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data.

The 10 products we’ve picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more. These 10 products may not be the type of Semantic Web apps that the W3C envisaged in the 90s, but that no longer seems to matter. What’s important is that the Web is becoming more meaningful – more semantic.

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Google Search Options and Rich Snippets

In May, Google announced two significant additions to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. The two features notably extended Google’s core search product and the ‘rich snippets’ part in particular was based around structured content.

Rich snippets extract and show useful information from web pages. Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. It is inviting publishers to mark up their HTML (webmasters can find more details here).

Feedly

Feedly describes itself as "magazine-like startpage." When it launched in August 2008, we labeled it just “an alternative interface for Google Reader.” However with the launch of Feedly Mini, a mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become a much more inclusive blog reading companion.

Feedly Mini integrates Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Search, Mozilla’s Ubiquity, and more. A number of our writers love this tool – Sarah Perez went so far as to call it "a must-have tool" for anyone who uses services like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Apture

Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links, via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them.

In our February review, we came away impressed by Apture due to the amount of multimedia that can be packed into such a little pop-up. Also the end-user experience is sophisticated – readers on washingtonpost.com and other sites that use Apture can see rich, relevant, contextual content from the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr without leaving the host site.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a real-time semantic analysis tool that plugs into your blogging software. As we explained in April, Zemanta offers bloggers relevant links, photos and other assets to include in their blog posts. Zemanta’s API is also being used by startups. Over 2009, the company has continued to iterate and impress. For example in October Zemanta released a new engine and API.

Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It works well with the rest of the tech community and has some interesting tools for supporting non-profit organizations.

Note: We compared Zemanta to Apture in an August analysis post.

Open Calais 4.0

In January Thomson Reuters released their most significant update yet to the Calais web service and open API: Calais 4.0. Calais is a toolkit of products that enables publishers to incorporate semantic functionality within their properties – enabling them to categorize content as people, places, companies, facts, events, and more.

Calais 4.0 went beyond metatagging and enabled publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com and others. Calais 4.0 also let publishers share semantic metadata about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services and more

Next page: Semantic Web apps 6-10

Automattic Open Sources Natural Language Spell-Checker After the Deadline

Matt Mullenweg has just annouced on his blog that WordPress parent company Automattic will open source After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE that was only recently ushered into the Automattic fold.

Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline’s core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, “There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area.”

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AtD founder, former military researcher, and Y-Combinator reject Rafael Mudge noted at the acquisition that he intended to continue his natural language processing research and expand support to other languages. He wrote, “We hope to see others build on the service… We’re planning to open source the After the Deadline engine and the rule-sets that go with it. This will be the most comprehensive proofreading suite available under an open source license.”

The related API is the same one that powers a plugin from another Automattic property, Intense Debate. Mudge told Ostatic, “I’d like to see AtD spread as far and wide as possible. I’m an inventor first and have this desire to see my inventions help people.”

Interested parties can check out this demo or read the tech overview and grab the source code here.

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Three Things to Know About the Real-Time Web Summit (Just 50 Tickets Left at Current Price)

There’s just ten days left until the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. We’ve got an incredible group of people coming together to discuss the broad work being done across the real-time web and the deep consequences of this new way for information to be distributed.

We hope you’ll join us in person, there’s just 50 tickets left at the current price, but if you’re unable to come then please put it down on your calendar to watch the live video stream of selected sessions. Here’s three things you should know about the event.

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There’s a Lot to Talk About

Last week we published a post titled Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action. That collection illustrates the diverse and important ways people are leveraging real time on the web, from leveraging presence data to real-time reputation tracking and pushing financial data in banking. Sunlight Foundation’s Jake Brewer said about that post today, “Congress should study this list.”

There Are Incredible People Coming

People and companies from around the world are coming to the Summit. Here’s a list of highlighted participants. You’ll find the right people if you want to talk to big consumer vendors like Google, Yahoo and MySpace, enterprise startups like Atlassian and Kaazing or innovators like John Borthwick (BusinessWeek calls him “perhaps the real-time Web’s key articulator”), Ted Roden of the NY Times R&D Lab and the artsy social network EnjoysThin.gs or serial-inventor Leah Culver.

Want to talk to people building key protocols? Google’s Brett Slatikin is leading the development of Pubsubhubbub along with Brad Fitzpatrick, who insiders will tell you has been central to the birth of social networking, OpenID and a whole lot more. Both of them will be at the Summit.

There will be marketing people there, engineers, executives, independent innovators. It will be awesome.

The Agenda Will Be Created In Real Time

Convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion and ask big important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize value of the event and minimize hot air. That’s the recipe we’re following, with the capable guidance of professional “unconference” facilitator Kaliya Hamlin. Kaliya has been facilitating events like this all around the world for almost 10 years.

Martin Källström, CEO of real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly is bringing his team over from Sweden for the event. “Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin’s unconference events,” he told us. “We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. I’m really looking forward to the real-time web summit. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen, it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples’ minds to ‘this is about whatever we want it to be about’, they look at how they can create value.”

Or, as Google’s Brett Slatkin said last week in referencing the format of the elite FooCamp events to explain the Real-Time Web Summit: “Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks. See ya there!”

Here are some of the questions that early bird registrants said they wanted to explore.

After the event, all participants will also receive a professionally-produced eBook documenting all the conversation sessions that happened, so you’ll be able to get value from sessions you missed to go to another one.

Participants who purchase tickets will also receive a substantial discount on our forthcoming research report on the state of the real-time web market and directions it may go in the future, based on interviews with more than 40 companies building or using these tools.

So what are you waiting for? Go register now, before the current window of ticket pricing closes.

Photo of Kaliya Hamlin by Bill Johnston.

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Google Invented Reading Lists?

Well-known podcaster and RSS pioneer Dave Winer is livid about Google’s reading list patent. In a recent blog post, Winer explains how Google filed a patent laying claim to “a method of subscribing to a collection of feeds”. Winer’s own Scripting News discusses OPML file subscriptions or “reading lists” much earlier than the patent application and from what I understand, BlogBridge has also supported dynamic reading lists for years.

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The Google invention idea seems similar to the company’s Bundles product – a tool that allows users to create Google Reader lists and share them as either a link, widget or subscription.

Nevertheless, Winer asserts that Google should state the process of invention and apologize if the company is disproved as the inventor and found to have stolen from the RSS community. Given Winer’s prominence as a member of the RSS community, it’s understandable why he should feel slighted.

If you’ve got examples of “reading list” style references that pre-date the Google patent application, let us know in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Mykl Roventine

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