Evsion Lab

Filed under: Gaming

As should be clear by now, any talk of a successor to a still relatively new game console should be taken with a hefty grain of salt but, if word from Japan’s Impress is to be believed, it looks like we could possibly be getting a clearer indication of what might be under the PlayStation 4’s non-existent hood. Apparently, unlike the massive shift from the PS2 to PS3, the eventually PS4 will be a decidedly smaller leap, with it relying on a slightly speedier (and, likely, 45nm) Cell processor but not a completely new architecture. That would let Sony keep the cost down considerably while also easing development for the console since, by then, developers should finally have a handle on the PS3’s hardware. To further cut costs, Sony is also said to be considering a switch from the speedy Rambus XDR memory to more traditional DDR3 memory, which could apparently be tied directly to the processor to cut down on latency. Or the PS4 could be powered by a pink slime that feeds on negative energy, you never know.

[Via Electronista]

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Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Hitachi drug its oh-so-sexy 1.5-inch plasma to Japan after showing it off in Denver earlier this month, but what we didn’t see at CEDIA was this: a 15-millimeter thin 37-inch LCD TV. The “reference” set packed a 1,920 x 1,080 panel and a fittingly designed stand, though it won’t see mass production until “2009 or later.” Ugh, even 1-inch just seems so bloated now.

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Filed under: GPS, Transportation

From gas prices to the environment and being able to use the carpool lane, there are many reasons to start carpooling. The question is, how do you easily find people that happen to be driving to the same destination as you?  Luckily, as with almost everything in this day and age, there are Web apps to help you with this very query.

For a double whammy of savings, make sure to check out our list, Check Gas Prices Online: 11 Handy Tools to find the cheapest gas for you and your carpooling buddies to split.

General

Avego.com - Avego is a service accessible via the iPhone or an average cell phone that allows you to get rides at a moment’s notice. The service uses GPS to allow drivers and riders to find each other.  Via the GPS function you get exact directions indicating where to pick up and drop people off, and also get a running tally of how much the ride costs.  After the ride is over, both the driver and passenger can rate one another.

CarpoolConnect.com - Offers up international carpooling opportunities for people mainly in the USA, Canada and Europe.

CarpoolWorld.com - CarpoolWorld has been around since 2000, and continues to provide matching services for those looking for drivers and passengers. Also offers the ability to set up carpool groups for your company, club, sports team or just about anything else you can think of.

DivideTheRide.com - A carpooling site designed to get your children around to their activities. One person starts it, they invite people they trust, and then a calendar is created. Reminders are sent via email and text message.

eRideShare.com - Assists you in finding rides for daily carpooling, cross-country travel, running errands, or even to special events & club meetings.

GishiGo.com - A ride sharing system that charges $.99 for creating a post as either a driver or passenger, and allows you to post reviews of the experience after it’s over.

GoLoco.org - A social network style carpooling site that makes sure everyone pays their share of the expenses. Each mile of a proposed trip is calculated at $.50, then split between the number of people and then GoLoco receives a 10% share of the transaction.

GooseNetworks.com - A service focusing on corporate websites to allow your employees to find people they can share rides with, providing them with public transit schedules, and more.

iCarpool.com - Assists you with finding carpooling partners for work, long distance trips, events and more. Works for members in Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA.

NuRide.com - NuRide offers sponsored carpooling. Set up your ride, confirm that it actually occurred, and you can earn points towards rewards such as gift cards, discounts and more. All members must belong to a company or organization so as to remove some of the anonymity.

PickupPal.com - Sign up for carpooling for work, long trips, to events and more. Focuses heavily on reducing your carbon footprint on the Earth.

Pooln.com - A car pooling site with a social networking structure. Give it a try by entering the zip code where you live and the one for your office to see if there are any members who match up with your needs.

RideAmigos.com - Use the RideAmigo’s RideMatcher system to enter your trip or commute, and find people with a matching schedule that you can share a ride with. The service also shows the environmental impact reduction of the people sharing a ride. Also offers a corporate version, which restricts results to people within your company.

RidePro - A white label solution for companies and cities looking to set up their own carpooling site.

RoadSharing.com - Enter the route for your proposed road trip and find people to share the ride with and split the costs. Has lots of international members, and it’s easy to spot who has the vehicle and who is looking for one.

TrafficBulldog.org - Billed as a commuter advocacy site, TrafficBulldog offers up news and suggestions on reducing traffic congestion via carpooling and other suggestions.

Zimride.com - Zimride offers carpooling for just about any distance you can think of in the USA. They have a Facebook application and have already built an app to be released to work with Android.

Region Specific

511.org - The San Francisco based 511.org site provides a ride share area where you can find other commuters to pool with in the Bay area.  Carpoolers get free bridge tolls during peak hours, and if you start a Vanpool, you can receive up to $900 in gas cards.

Car-Pooling.com - Offers carpool matching for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Carpool.ca - Canadians get their own carpooling site with Carpool.ca.  Find rides, read up on carpooling etiquette, and other general tips.

CarpoolMatchNW.org - A carpool site focusing on Oregon and SW Washington.

Carshare.com - Carshare is a directory of carpooling services for the UK that you can look up by region or by just looking for ones that serve the entire country.

Liftshare.org - Focuses mainly on carpooling in the UK, but also offers up the chance to find walking and biking buddies.

MyRideSmart.com - Carpool matching service specific to the Atlana, GA area of the United States.

RideArrangers - In operation since 1975, RideArrangers is a program in Denver, CO focused on matching up people for carpools.

RideFinders.org - RideFinders is specific to the St. Louis area and provides an interesting incentive in the form of up to six free taxi rides a year.  These can be used in case you have unforeseen circumstances that keep you from meeting up with your ride.

TheCarpool.com.au - Set up carpooling for work, school and trips for people all across Australia.

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Filed under: Digital Cameras

JVC has hopped on-board the HD cam bandwagon and brought some tasty wares to the table at CEATEC today, with the next gen Everio HD Memory Camera. This SDHC based concept is expected to be AVCHD ready with an HDMI port. There wasn't much more info to go around, but we expect full disclosure and a review unit real, real soon (you listening JVC?) -- or at the very least a hands-on at the show. In the meantime, feast your eyes on the above photo.

Filed under: Cellphones

We already caught sight of KDDI au’s cellphone as musical instrument concept devices last month, but it looks like the company’s fanciful design group had plenty more than those to show off at CEATEC, as evidenced by Akihabara News’ slew of pictures from the show. Those include the satellite-like device pictured above, as well as a neat little minimalist number pictured after the break and another folding contraption (also after the break) that we’re still trying to wrap our heads around. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to check these out ourselves before CEATEC wraps up but, until then, you can hit up the read link below for some more pics.

Continue reading KDDI au concept phones invade CEATEC

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Filed under: Peripherals

Targus is making a big deal about how it’s launching its first-ever line of Mac accessories, but we’re not seeing much here that’s particularly platform-dependent — just a lot of gray and white plastic. The $70 Bluetooth Laser Mouse, $50 Wireless Mouse, and $80 Bluetooth Presenter all feature an interesting touch-sensitive scroll nub that switches to cursor control on the presenter and offers four-way scrolling on the mice. There’s also a $50 USB file-transfer cable that offers direct file transfers between PCs and Macs, a $30 four-port compact USB hub with wraparound cable, MacBook and MacBook Pro privacy screens that range from $50 to $80, and a $50 dual-fan cooling pad with a slight ergonomic tilt. All this should be available now — PC owners, you’ll just have to find something else to do with your useless, useless money.

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By Aaron Strout and Joe Cascio

Although experts in the social media space have been talking about how businesses might adopt microblogging tools like Twitter and Plurk, only recently have we started to see a series of new vendors cropping up in the enterprise microblogging space. This has been due in part to businesses needing to figure out how Twitter can benefit the enterprise. The fact that the mainstream press has started covering this topic has also helped to push things along (see Businessweek’s CEO Guide to Microblogging if you need proof).

Given the recent focus on business microblogging and the emergence of some new players like Yammer and Utterli (Formerly Utterz, Utterli has been around for a little over a year but just rebranded and is now becoming more enterprise-centric), it felt like as good a time as any to write a post about the business value of microsharing within the enterprise. Included in this post will be considerations for implementing microblogging and a few of the relevant players in the space.

Just to level set, it probably doesn’t hurt to define what microblogging is. For anyone that uses Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca or any of the multiple other microblogging tools, microblogging is in some ways like instant messaging or text messaging but instead of it taking place one to one, it’s often one to many or many to many. I could take this entire post explaining what it is, but friend and Commoncraft founder, Lee LeFever, has done a fantastic job in his quick Twitter in Plain English video. I’d also like to clarify that this post is focused on businesses using microblogging within their organization vs. having a corporate presence in the public (like @comcastcares on Twitter). How corporations are using microblogging publicly is an equally relevant topic, however, numerous posts have already covered this phenomena.

Business Value

One of the lessons we learned from Web 1.0 (and the subsequent bubble) was the fact that startups that create technologies in search of a problem fail, even when VCs are stupid enough to throw wads of cash at them. This time around, most companies don’t get funded unless they are solving a business problem or at least offering up a technology that can enhance existing business processes. To that end, here are a few ways companies can tap into the power of microblogging:

Emergency Broadcast System: First and foremost, any company needs a way to reach all of its employees quickly and efficiently. E-mail is obviously one way to do this but increasingly, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. With many folks receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, it can take minutes if not hours before we get to an e-mail from the CEO.

Knowledge Management: Here’s where things get interesting. One of the biggest failings of many companies is the fact that they trap their intellectual property in Powerpoints, spreadsheets and Word documents and store them on shared drives and e-mail inboxes. Once the creator of that content walks out the door, the odds of their years of work finding its way into anyone else’s life are slim. As companies start uploading more and more content onto wikis, or central file repositories, these files can be linked to and indexed by conversational tools like microblogs.

Training: Any company that has gone on a hiring binge quickly realizes how painful it is to train new employees. If a formal training program exists, the materials are often outdated almost as soon as they are created. By identifying a few key influencers and allowing new employees to see their daily “streaming,” information and best practices can be shared more easily and in real time with little burden on the “trainer.”

Expert Identification: Another area that many larger companies fall down is in making their resident experts easily findable. If you can see your company’s employees talking (possibly segmented by business unit or group within an organization), it wouldn’t take long to figure out who knows what about whom.

Seeing the Connectors: Good companies spend a lot of time on succession planning. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a good handle on who the true connectors are within their organization. By analyzing conversations and watching the conversations of employees, senior managers can easily identify who these connectors are and then ensure these employees compensation and titles match their internal value AND start to add additional connectors if too much information is flowing through any one individual.

Inclusion of External Stakeholders: Back in the early 2000’s, extranets were all the rage. There would finally be a way for companies to include partners, investors and even certain customers in their daily conversations. Portals obviously began to fill this roll to a degree but none were ever truly conversational. Enter enterprise microblogging with the ability to include these aforementioned stakeholders in the mix.

Key Considerations

Enterprises considering microblogging as an internal function will have some common requirements. Here is our take on several areas that corporations tend to look at when they are considering a new technology:

Single Sign-On (SSO): A growing problem in the social media world right now is identity proliferation. With some notable exceptions that accept OpenID, most sites still require you to create yet another account in their system (or identity domain). In most enterprises, a fair amount of effort has already been expended on establishing single sign-on through the intranets’ LDAP registry. It would be highly desirable to leverage this capability to enroll employees in the microblogging system. So, an enterprise microblogging solution must have flexibility in adapting to existing ID and sign-on registries.

Reliability: Initially, microblogging may seem like a non-essential, nice-to-have kind of tool, but our bet is that most businesses will find it very quickly becomes indispensable for keeping important lines of communication open. People, on their own, will invent many different uses for such a simple tool, as they have with Twitter. In a large corporation with geographically distributed sites, it would be best to have a solution that allows each campus to run its own server and not be dependent on a remote centralized service. These distributed servers would exchange data to unify the system as a whole. See Distribution below.

Analytics: Businesses will eventually want to analyze the traffic on their microblogging sites. They’ll want to know who follows who, who posts the most and to who and most importantly, a feature I’d love to have in Twitter, the ability to see and search all my posts and other posts selectively for important information, just like we can search our G-mail accounts now.

Security:This will probably be of paramount concern at least initially in most businesses. Most corporations are very aware of keeping internal communications safe from prying outside eyes. An enterprise microblogging solution must provide for fine-grained authorization and trustworthy security of communications. Management, through the IT department will want to be able to restrict who can see certain posts.

Scalability: The word Enterprise covers a huge spectrum of organizations. An enterprise microblogging solution should be scalable from less than 100 users to tens or even hundreds of thousands of users, spread across the globe. The ability to distribute and federate many local servers on the corporate intranet will help to satisfy this need.

Groups: Enterprises comprise many different groups within their walls. Not just departments, but project teams, ad hoc working groups, common interests, etc. An enterprise microblogging solution must provide for the easy definition of groups or tags, where any employee user can belong to many groups.

Distribution: This requirement has been touched on already, but it should be mentioned again because of its importance to other requirements. It refers to the ability of the enterprise microblogging solution to be decentralized, spread out across wide geographic areas, and hence to become fault tolerant, so the failure of any one node does not cause a failure of the whole system.

Interoperability: Clearly a distributable enterprise microblogging solution would require its various nodes to federate and interoperate, but a corporation wishing to allow interaction with its customer base outside its walls would require a solution that interoperates with other microblogging solutions that may exist, yet allows only some posts to be seen outside the corporate firewall.

Current Players

Until recently, most vendors in the community or social media space have either focused on delivering microblogging tools to the public while software providers that focused on the enterprise tools busied themselves with delivering better wikis and other collaboration tools. Not anymore. A slew of startups (and one or two more tenured companies) have now turned their attention to the less sexy but immediately more profitable enterprise microblogging space. Below you will find a list of some of the major players in this space along with a quick description, pros and cons of each. If we’ve missed a player, please feel free to add to the comments and we’ll strongly consider adding them into this post:

Yammer (from TradeVibes) Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”

PROS: Easy to turn on and screens out folks outside of the corporate domain. These guys have obviously learned a thing or two from where some of the existing microblogging tools fall down.

CONS: No single sign-on functionality (at least not that we could see). Tricky to add other “partners/contractors” that don’t have e-mail addresses matching the corporate domain. Hosted by outside company, can’t be deployed inside the firewall.

Laconi.ca (from Wikipedia) An open source microblogging tool written in PHP that implements the OpenMicroBlogging standard. Laconica was created as an open source, distributed alternative to Twitter, and was originally used by the identi.ca microblogging service.

PROS: Built on opensource software so it’s completely customizable. It also integrates with well-known Twitter client, Twhirl giving power users the ability to manage external and internal facing microblogging activity in a seemless fashion. It is based on the Open Microblogging protocol specification, so other implementations are possible.

CONS: As is the case with any opensource application, its greatest asset (flexibility) is also its biggest weakness (not super user-friendly out of the box). Scaling, federation and interoperation have yet to be seriously tested.

Utterli (from Utterli.com) Utterli helps you create and follow discussions with friends or new people with similar interests. You can create or join a discussion from any mobile phone or computer. Utters are cool because they can be audio, video, pictures and text, and it’s really easy to post to your other online profile pages.

PROS: Utterli’s two biggest strengths are easily its multi-media and mobile capabilities. It’s fairly easy to create a “group” on the fly and coming soon will be enterprise-friendly SSO and security capabilities. Stay tuned for more on this front.

CONS: The least “Twitter-like” out of any of the existing enterprise microbloggers. We’re not completely sure that’s actually a weakness.

Existing enterprise players like Jive , Awareness , Mzinga * and Drupal

PROS: These guys are in the business of working with enterprises and catering to their needs. Don’t be surprised to see some of these players (if they aren’t thinking about it already) jump into this game in the next 3-6 months. If and when they do, they will be forces to be reckoned with.

CONS: While none of the existing community providers are actively touting an enterprise microblogging tool, it wouldn’t be a stretch for any of them to create one based on existing tools. The fact that they haven’t created one yet does put them at a slight disadvantage on the learning curve.

Will They or Won’t They

As the corporate adoption of microblogging tools like Twitter continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before companies decide that there is something there worth exploring. Well-known startups like Mahalo have a 50% adoption rate of Yammer. Companies like IBM are using similar functionality on their Facebook-like internal communities. With so many potential benefits, why wouldn’t a company want to give this a try?

About the authors:

JOE: Joe Cascio is an independent software developer turned “social media enthusiast.” Joe is also the chief developer of an experimental social media identity site called SociaLogic.org. His “biggest” current interest, however, is Distributed Microblogging (i.e., Twitter).

*In full disclosure, I work for Mzinga as the VP of Social Media.

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