Archive for the 'Technology' Category

(Chronologically Listed)



The iPhone is going to dominate the Web 2.0 world

The iPhone is probably the coolest and the most useful gadget I have ever owned. I have been playing around with the iPhone for several months now and mark my words when I say this, “by the end of 2009, everyone will have ditched their existing phones and convert to the iPhone”. Yeah, so that means you too, dear reader! Wink

I initially wanted to get an HTC phone, but after comparing the price and functionalities between these two “touch-technology” gadgets, I came to the conclusion that the iPhone is the better choice. And I was right. It’s wayyyyyy better.

Why iPhone? Well first of all, we all already know how cool the iPhone’s multi-touch technology works. The ability to enlarge pictures by stretching apart your two fingers on the screen, moving things around here and there, zooming in and out, flipping pages and stuffs, all by using the gestures of your fingers on the screen… plus the iPhone’s ability of knowing whether you’re holding the phone vertically or horizontally… these things has never failed to awe anyone who’s new to it. It is just unbelievably advanced and “intelligent” - and soooo cool…. again - that you’ll feel like you got hold of a device from the future. That’s right folks, The Future is Now.

Okay, enough of the sales talk. Three reasons why the iPhone is going to dominate the Web 2.0 world:

1. Browsing websites in the iPhone is exactly the same as like browsing websites on your PC/laptop

Yes! Thanks to the multi-touch technology, the Safari browser inside the iPhone will render webpages just as it normally would in a normal computer! No more impractical WAP-based pages and phones - they are so dead. I hate seeing broken pages and minimalist sites on a slow GPRS connection anyway. The iPhone connects to the Internet via WiFi (now even 3G!), so iPhone users can actually sit at Starbucks and browse the Internet without even needing to carry that heavy laptop. And remember, it renders the actual page! AJAX, Javascript, all will be working correctly. So that means Web 2.0 apps are going to be used for a long, long time ahead!

2. Affordable price

Priced at only USD199 for the new Version 2 iPhone, anyone can afford one these days. I am pretty convinced that the iPhone is going to be the next Windows PC of this era. Everyone is going to get themselves an iPhone, and once everyone starts using it, more and more web apps will be exposed to those people who previously was never really Internet-savvy users before.

3. iPhone apps can be developed

Lots and lots of ever-increasing number of apps can be freely downloaded from the net and installed in the iPhone. If you’re a Web 2.0 developer, it doesn’t hurt to build an iPhone app for your web app as well. More and more iPhone apps are being developed as we speak. The iPhone apps will help boost the functionalities and practicalities of your web app. Take it to your full advantage!

The iPhone is just too awesome that I’m warning other mobile providers like Nokia, Samsung and LG…… YOU GUYS BETTER START WORRYING! Cool

Tags: 


5000 Web Apps in 333 seconds

The Web 2.0 universe is getting bigger and larger every day. It’s a huge multi-billion industry with lots of passionate entrepreneurs and startups that want to make a change in the world. Hundreds of interesting web apps are being launched every day these days, from small apps to huge apps, simple to complex, mashups and social networks, brilliant new services emerge from every corners of the world.

Last August, SimpleSpark (a human-edited Web 2.0 directory) has indexed a total of 5000 major web apps in their directory, and they have put up together one nice video to present all of the 5000 Web 2.0 brands in one swipe which spans for over 5 and a half minutes. Sit back and watch:

Don’t you wanna have your own Web 2.0 brand to be listed among them? I do… Cool

Tags: 


Are we ready for Web 3.0?

Web 3.0I noticed that there has been quite a number of discussions over the Internet on the topic of what the future Web 3.0 is all about. Like the current Web 2.0 itself, it is predictable that the term “Web 3.0″ will never get properly defined as well, but the term will eventually be used and mentioned in numerous papers, documents and materials, in blogs and the mainstream media to describe web apps that exhibit some sets of characteristics, features and capabilities more advanced than that of the current Web 2.0. The question is, what kind of characteristics are we talking about here?

The truth is no one knows, and only time will tell. But some of the most notable implementations mentioned around the term “Web 3.0″ includes the following:

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence itself represents the future, so it is no surprise that AI is going to be one of the core implementation of the future web applications. AI is, in itself, a very broad field of study which consists of many distributed branches like Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Data Mining, Voice/Pattern Recognition, Probability Algorithms and Expert Systems. Although they sound complex, what these things do is basically trying to incorporate human intelligence into machines - or in our case - the Web. Some of the web apps around lately has already started using AI techniques in their applications. SpinVox for instance has such an impressive “Voice Recognition” engine that I’ve seen so far, and also Odiogo.com which does the exact opposite so elegantly! There are also plans to somehow “restructure” (see below) the Web as a database which can be “mined” to extract a collective human knowledge around the world. Since I majored in Artificial Intelligence back in college, the idea of implementing AI to the mainstream web gets me pretty excited. Laughing

Semantic Web

It doesn’t matter how many times I read about Semantic Web on Wikipedia, I will still have trouble understanding its concept as clearly. My understanding is that it tries to put the web information into an extensible sort-of way so that it can be “understandable” by machines (when I say machines, I mean computer programs) but at the same time can also be presented to human in a form that is described as “natural”. An easy example of this is RSS feeds, which have been widely used in content publishing. Today, the data that’s being published through RSS can be submitted to many different feed readers and websites. Web 3.0 may have higher ambition towards this by which the Web could even use, digest, understand, compare, and make decision based on all of the data being presented to them in certain formats. Semantic Web will turn the web into a so-called World Wide Database, realizing the concept of “intelligent web”. I could see that this is going to be closely related to the AI field above. Didn’t I mention that this is going to be hard to understand? Tongue out

3D Technology?

This can be quite ambitious, but with the recent invention of multi-touch technology, realizing 3D experience on the web might be just around the corner. A lot of this takes the Web beyond web browsers and using the SecondLife project as an example. However, something inside me tells that 3D stuffs just doesn’t cut it for the masses. We’ll just have to wait and see whether 3D is going to be the next big thing in the future web.

Open Technologies

OpenIDWeb apps providing open APIs and using open identities (such as OpenID) for authentication mechanisms. This will allow multiple apps to be pieced together and distributed into many different platforms and gadgets. That’s probably what Eric Schmidt tried to convey to the audience when asked about what he thinks of Web 3.0 is gonna be about. And this may also be the reason why Facebook is kicking off this year with their extensible app API feature that they provide.

The video below shows Eric Schmidt’s attempt in defining Web 3.0 even though it was not entirely what I had expected. I was hoping that he would’ve at least mentioned “AI” Innocent:

Sealed

Tags: 


Page 1 of 212»