Here is a cool video of the history of Twitter’s development.
As the video shows, the vast advance in Twitter development and the usage has dramatically increased, especially in the last few years
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I really thought that Google Wave would be a great tool for using to get people together and collaborating. But it has seemed to peter out after all the initial buzz.
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Here is an interesting application and add-on for Firefox.
Prism is an application that makes a webpage an application on the desktop, so it is not run in a browser.
So why is this a good thing??? Well, it takes the website out of the browser, so if you are working on something and the site crashes, it does not crash all of the sites you are viewing. Also with Prism, you can use it as any application and you can minimize it into the desktop tray. You can also have it alert you when an action has happened on a website, such as a new email on Gmail, or a new post on a blog.
Here is the Why on Prism's website:
Prism is designed to create a better environment for running your favorite web-based applications. Much of what we used to accomplish using an application running locally on our computers is moving into the web browser. Thanks to advances in web technology, these apps are increasingly powerful and usable. As a result, applications like Gmail, Facebook and Google Docs are soaring in popularity.
Unfortunately the web browser, which was originally designed for reading documents, is not an ideal environment for running applications. It is frustrating and time-consuming to wade through a mass of browser windows and tabs just to find your email client. Unstable applications can slow down or crash your entire browser. And many of the conveniences offered by modern operating systems are unavailable to web apps running in the browser.
Here is a short little clip of how it works:
via ghacks.net
The Best of Both Worlds
This is where Prism comes in. Instead of running all your web apps in the browser, Prism lets you run them in their own window just like normal applications. A single faulty app or web page can no longer take down everything you are working on. In the future, we will be releasing web app bundles from the Prism developer community that let you customize your application to use many of the operating system features common to a desktop application.
Prism is based on the same world-class browsing engine as Firefox to ensure maximum compatibility with the entire range of applications available on the web, today and in the future.
It is always astonishing to hear how the powers in Washington are bemused by the failure of Porkulus to stimulate the economy. Guys, the consumer has been the traditional powerhouse of America’s growth, not the government. So to understand the malaise that besets us, look at the state of the consumer.
Consumers depend on credit to propel their economic activity. As the chart above indicates, the nation’s consumer credit is in freefall. (Fourth quarter estimates, not shown, look even worse.) It is a double whammy as 1) overleveraged consumers have been cutting back on their spending as the recession deepens, and 2) overextended banks have been curtailing consumers’ access to credit, depressing economic activity further.
The latter is a particularly aggravating factor. Banks are under tremendous pressure by the government (which ennabled their mortgage excesses in the first place) to improve their capitalization ratios. But as they retrench, the process eats into the lush profits they enjoy from consumer lending, which border on the usurious. And as profits decline, capitalization is hurt, and the cycle repeats.
One way banks can make up the difference is to jack up fees on the intact portion of the consumer economy. And they have been doing so with a vengeance. Credit card processors are charging retailers a discount of 2% on processed sales, the aptly named “swipe fee”. As credit card transactions have largely replaced cash in the consumer economy, the fees represent an enormous overhead cost that businesses must pass on to their customers.
The costs fall particularly hard on small businesses. And they have had enough. Consumers for Competitive Choice, Inc. (C4CC) is organizing to protect their interests, and to educate the public on the swipe fee phenomenon on their website thecreditcardcon.com.
This Thursday, I will be interviewing Bob Johnson, the president of C4CC, on the Italian Tomatoes show on BlogTalkRadio. Tune in Thursday, Feb 4 at 10PM Eastern by following this link or call in at 646-478-0004
That is if you buy a HTC phone, but not the Nexus One it looks like.
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The White House announced today that it projects a deficit of $1.6 trillion for the new fiscal year, up from $1.4 trillion for the prior year. Despite an orgy of spending and stimulus, the economy is sluggish and tax revenues are depressed.
Barack Obama and the Congressional leadership justified last year’s spending as the means to jump start the economy, bringing down unemployment and reducing further deficits. The whole Obamenomics enterprise has been one colossal flop, mercifully uncompounded (to date) by the Administration’s failure to pass health care reform. And we hope they get the credit they deserve.
The deficits must be financed. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the elephant in the room that is largely ignored by the mainstream media. The cumulative impact of successive deficit whoppers will transform the credit markets for a generation.
Who will get the credit as we proceed down this path? With the government gobbling up an increasing share of credit resources, what will be left over for the consumer, who after all has been the driving engine of our economy for most of the postwar era?
The Democratic medical team has committed fundamental malpractice in treating our economic malaise. They diagnosed the recession in the traditional Keynesian way, as something caused by falling demand, which could be fixed by massive doses of government spending. As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
But falling demand did not cause the recession. The massive dislocations in the credit system did. The government made those dislocations possible by failing to do its regulatory job properly. (But man were those sweetheart mortages GREAT!) As financial institutions deleveraged, they not only withdrew credit from unhealthy and frothy speculative activity. They have shrunk credit across the board, forcing consumers and small businesses, many of whom entered the recession in robust health, to drastcially retrench.
Bottom line, there is an ongoing redistribution of credit from private (and productive) uses to public (and deadwood) ones. And that is not a pretty picture.
Sorry for the lack of posting here, but I have been learning how to move a website form Drupal to Word Press
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If you know me, you should know I am not a fan of anything Apple (iPod, iPhone, iAnything).
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Technology Review is reporting that new Flexible Sheets Capture Energy from Movement – Material could charge portable electronics with every step.
Researchers at Princeton University have created a flexible material that harvests record amounts of energy when stressed. The researchers say the material could be incorporated into the soles of shoes to power portable electronics, or even placed on a heart patient’s lungs to recharge a pacemaker as he breathes.
Flex your power: A Princeton researcher holds a square of silicone embedded with a ribbon of a crystalline material that generates an electrical current when flexed.
Credit: Frank WojciechowskiThe energy-harvesting rubber sandwiches ribbons of a piezoelectric material called PZT between pieces of silicone. When mechanically stressed, a piezoelectric material generates a voltage that can be used to produce electrical current; a current can also be converted back into mechanical movement.
The rubber material can harness 80 percent of the energy applied when it is flexed–four times more than existing flexible piezoelectric materials.
Flexibility could prove vital if energy-harvesting technology is to take off. For example, the military tested stiff-soled piezoelectric shoes as a power source, but soldiers complained of foot pain. And previous flexible energy harvesters–based on piezoelectric polymers, nanowires, or other types of crystal–put out little electrical current.
PZT is the most efficient piezoelectric material known, but its crystalline structure means that it must be grown at high temperatures, which normally melt a flexible substrate. The Princeton researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Michael McAlpine, got around this by making PZT at high temperatures and then transferring thin ribbons of the material onto silicone.
The possibilities of charging your electronic devises or as used in medical patients with this material is truly astounding.
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Ford provided some good news on the earnings front today. The only one of Detroit’s fabled Big Three that managed to avoid bankruptcy, the company earned $2.7 billion in 2009. This is quite an achievement during one of the most turbulent economic environments in US history. The company also picked up market share for the first time since 1995, during the era of the fabled Taurus.
While its $34 billion debt load remains a concern, Ford is looking at a favorable market environment. Rivals GM and Chrysler must deal with the shrinkage that is inextricably linked to bankruptcy, while rival Toyota is dealing with bad publicity and potentially damaging lawsuits on product recalls.
Check out more on this story at
DailyFinance.com
