Author: kosso

WUSB for ‘07 – Cutting the cord next year

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I think one of the big breakthroughs we’ll see in mobile devices in 2007 will be Wireless USB. It’s apparently faster than ‘normal’ WiFi and uses less power (good news for mobiles). With a 10 metre range, it could provide all sorts of interesting sharing abilities rather like the Zune, or a ‘wiPod’.

Next year will be all about cutting the cord and going mobile, while staying connected to your network and free to copy what you want, where you want or allow.

Now, how about that cordless VR headset eh? ;p WiiHii!

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Neuronet – ‘Worlds First’ Real-Time Virtual Reality Network

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Rezzing soon to a visual cortex near you, Neuronet is preparing to launch next year.

Set up by the IAVRT – “The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) is a not-for-profit professional organization dedicated to fostering scientific research and business development in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) technology for the benefit of society.” – wants to create a network of virtual reailty spaces, which will apparently be accessible/marketable via two top level domain names (TLDs) .vr and .cin

It looks like they care about alot of the important things which need to be under control and understood for this to all work.

They will surely make good money selling domain names under the .vr domain, but I don’t know too much about .cin (cinematic virtual reality neurosites). Who knows, it might get traction eventually.Domains names from both will cost $100US .

I have recently been suggesting to people that Linden Lab contact on organisation called ‘Sierratel‘ who appear to the people in charge of selling domain names with the .sl TLD. The trouble is, this company does not seem to reply to emails, so should really look for an agent/organization to handle the job. I think Second-Lifers would no doubt swarm to these and would provide decent income in other ways than rising land prices beyong many people’s reach.

Back to the Neuronet though, I am very much looking forward to the evolution of ‘truly’ immersive environments. I have always been closely watching the rise in speed in power of home PCs and their graphics capabilities, along with the rising speeds of internet connectivity. It will be interesting to see how the fantasy of a truly global 3D VR world lives up to the actuality of it. Will it scale? Is it secure? etc. Situations which LL are constantly dealing with. It appears that you will get a ‘development neurosite’ with your domain name for $2500US a year (wow), so I wonder if this means that people will be able to host their own nerusite systems on their own servers. No idea what the requirements and costs might be yet.

Pre-orders for names (The Sunrise Period) looks set to start in February 2007, with the General Registration period, which they call the ‘Land Rush’ period (already!) starting on June 4th 2007. MY BIRTHDAY!!! Ha! I want koz.vr 😀

I will also be keeping a close eye on an Australian/UK company called Inition (with a shop in London! W00t!) as they appear to sell just about everything you could want for an immersive existence in a 3D world. Great stuff! Some of the kits there looks prohibitively expensive, but some are certainly affordable for the hardcore pixelvertex junkies out there/here! 😉 I thoroughly recommend browsing through their huge range of products, as it really taught me alot about all the amazing VR devices which are now on the market, along with their current value. They sell kit for VR HUDs (heads up displays), headsets, glasses, gloves, motion capture kits, 3D digitizing/scanning and even 3D printing (rather like a friend, Mike Buckbee’s Fabjectory, which will ‘print’ a 3d sculpture of your Second Life avatar – amazing, and I still need to get one 😉 )

Unfortunately, this cool little device, ‘The Monkey’ has been discontinued. If anyone else out there knows of any motion (or pose) capture desktop mannekins out there, please do let me know. Thx 😉

It looks like 3D is not going to go away next year. On the contrary, it’s going to get deeper – much to the chagrin of many a 3D/SL-widow/widower out there already! :p

More discussion on 3pointd

Also, the rebang blog seems highly suspicious of a potential scam!

Second Life

Is Microsoft Trying To Kill Us?

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What on earth are Microsoft trying to do here? This is the US Software Patent office at its most ridiculous ever!! It has filed a patent on the Windows RSS Platform. Does this apply to Europe?

Part of the application appears to be describing the auto-discovery methods of detecting feeds in a page, but what about the rest of it? Is it for desktop Windows applications? Is it web aggregators? Time to call the lawyer.

If granted, one proposed patent would cover “finding and consuming Web subscriptions in a Web browser.” The invention, for example, could allow a user to “subscribe to a particular Web feed, be provided with a user interface that contains distinct indicia to identify new feeds, and…efficiently consume or read RSS feeds using both an RSS reader and a Web browser.”

I’d like to know what effect this is going to have in Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, PageFlakes, etc, etc and OF COURSE, podcast.com (which is nearing the end of a major overhaul with regards to feed reading and feed folder organisation – and ‘amplification’) !!! The whole podcast industry (yes, there is one) relies on this so-called invention.

The application was made in July 2005, so surely there’s plenty of prior art? I don’t get it?

Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon apparently does not want to call Microsoft ‘evil’ just yet, but personally I feel like we just had a major shot across our bows. Friendly fire? I think not.

Is this just a way for lawyers to make money? I sometimes I think these departments just sit around working out ways to make eachother money while screwing consumers in the process. A little bit like a nation’s defence department working out ways to keep us on the brink of mass destruction in order to keep their budgets up and brass polished.

Foul!! Microsoft, I denounce thee!!

I just had an idea : Get every web developer in the world to write an RSS reader and post it up online. Let’s see how they deal with that. 🙂

feeds, rss

5 Things You Didn’t Know about Me

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It has only just occurred to me what this post from Bre Pettis was all about. Something to do with a post by Jeff Pulver here 😉

OK here goes:

1. I used to love acting. Probably still would if given the time/chance 😉 That’s me in the photo aged 17 in a Vaudevillian role. I had over half the lines in the play which I learned the night before dress rehearsal by recording my cues and lines to a tape cassette and falling asleep with headphones on. It worked 🙂

2. I’m half German, but don’t speak it. I should learn (again after lessons at school). It’s strange, sometimes I understand it spoken and I can get the gist of it when reading, with a little help from dictionaries, but I can’t speak it fluently.

3. I have attended 13 years of Glastonbury Festival – the best festival in the world (and only 25 mins drive from where I grew up – hehe!)

4. The name ‘Kosso’ is a nickname derived from my surname, which is ‘Kossmann’. When I was at school, people called me ‘Kossy’. When I was at college I was known as ‘Kossa’. People tend to call me ‘Koz’ alot these days. Can’t think why 🙂

5. I believe that so-called extra-terrestrial visitors are actually inhabitants of Earth from the future, coming back to obtain various resources since depleted. Sightseeing time-travelling tourists too! If we do manage to survive on this planet for another couple of thousand years, we will have gone through many changes caused by the increase in radiation levels from the sun, over time. This could include natural eye protection and potential lack of genitalia. Ouch! 😉

Nanoo-Nanoo! 🙂

OK. So, let’s see then. How about Tom, DrFran, Mark, Chris and Jerry

[edit: I just swapped out Dave for Dr Fran who (still) reads this blog ;p ]

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Dana Gardner Has Second Thoughts

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What makes Second Life eerily powerful is the zero-distance between thinkers and technology by ZDNet‘s Dana Gardner (and the ‘Briefings Direct’ podcast)– There is an egalitarian equalizing effect when your avatar IMs with another … even if you know who they are. There’s a comfort level with being virtual, and the IBMers seemed eager to chat with lots of folks. I can see getting better access to executives and the creative minds at IBM in Second Life than I do in real life, and that’s a good thing.

—–

He’s right. But people also said that the internet and computers themselves take away a certain amount of the human experience too. I was told this ever since I fell in love with ‘playing’ on a computer as a child. I was told I was wasting my time and ‘missing out’. I sat and thought that I was seizing an opportunity to learn about these things, as we’d soon be surrounded by them everywhere we went. Whether for business or pleasure.

Then, when the Web and interent came along, I immediately connected and communicated with people all around the world (this totally blew my mind). Some of these people have become good friends who I go to stay with, or vice versa, in the ‘real world’.

Communication like this is so unbelievably powerful and incredibly resourceful, it almost brings a tear to my eye. Just about all the fundamental knowledge in various programming languages I know came from information from people on the internet, directly or indirectly. (I owe them all big time – and try to share knowledge back to this new ‘community resource’ as much as possible – and more in the future, in a more structured way).

I was invited to this IBM event too. Who me? Little old me? Sat at home on a computer? Yes. Me. How cool is that!? Unfortunately I couldn’t make it. We know the world is round, but sometimes we forget the time differences in a global forum. 😉

I had the pleasure of having lunch with Dana back in the summer too. All through connections made through work, which in themselves are a product of my online world. A great, smart guy. A pleasure to talk to.

Second Life provides us with a feeling of ‘proximity’ to people we communicate with and gesture to. It’s hard to explain. It’s not like the odd feeling you get having a video conference with someone, where you look into the camera or not. It kind of feels more natural in a virtual world. (For me, anyway)

This platform is so powerful it must not be ignored. The interfaces will become more stable and realistic as time goes by. The landlord of the metaverse of the future might not be Linden Lab. It could be you. It could be the person sat next to you. Whoever it is, I promise you it’s not going to go away. It’s going to get BETTER.

Embrace it. You will thank yourself for it in the future. And who knows, you might actually make some money and new friends and have some fun on the way! 😉

ideas, Second Life, secondlife, technology, web

Dave Heals

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Let’s try seeing if we can send out some positive energy here, seeing as it appears to be in the air. 😉 Happy Dave Heals Day!


Wow. I just caught up on all this TechCrunch UK – Sam getting fired – LesBlog/LeWeb/LeWhatever – hoo haa. Looks like we need more positive energy, man. Welcome to the bickersphere™
There are plenty of good London-based bloggers out there who could fill Sam’s shoes.

The first time I met Sam a while ago, he said he was working on an ‘OPML Exchange Server’ for Microsoft. Never heard any more about that since then. Seemed like a nice guy, but was little up himself, imho. He also had quite along heated debate with my partner outside Kettners, as Hugh McLeod and I stood around and talked bollocks to kill time 😉

The last time I saw him, at the Chris Anderson Geek Dinner, he was pissed as a newt! ( you might be bale to see him wobbling in the doorway behind Chris) ;}

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The New York Times Homepage

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I was just having a look at the New York Times homepage – which I rarely go directly to, to be honest, though I follow deep links to stories and articles.

Was this page designed for Google/Yahoo/MSN/a.n.other search engine, or for ACTUAL HUMANS to view? How can anyone find anything on this page? It’s so unbelievably cluttered!! I’m totally shocked.

NYT small

Another case of being designed by committee?

Sheesh! Thank goodness for RSS!

Compare this with the BBC News homepage

BBC sml

rss
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