Month: July 2005

Joi Ito: “The PhoneGnome is box that you connect to your phone line and your Internet connection and attach a phone to. The magic happens when PhoneGnome figures out your phone number and auto-configures everything so that in the future, all calls to other PhoneGnome users go over the Internet instead of the phone line.”

Jeremy Faludi:

Flexible concrete might sound like a gimmick, but most concrete fails because it is brittle, so cracks develop over time, and eventually become catastrophic. U Michigan has reduced this brittleness to make a concrete “500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter.”

Larry Greenemeier: “Many open-source startups aren’t even creating their own software–they get off the ground by selling services to help businesses implement popular open-source projects.”

Kondra Systems: “Like any other small company attending a show, we wanted a bit more splash to set us apart but had a hard time justifying the booth costs. So instead of going with a collapable wall with some custom artwork, we took the $2000 and decided to see how far we could stretch it by building our own custom booth.” (via Make:Blog)

George Douglas:

“We have seen steady progress in photovoltaic concentrator technology. We are working with advanced multijunction PV cells that are approaching 38% efficiency, and even higher is possible over time. Our goal is to install PV concentrator systems at $3 per watt, which can happen soon at production rates of 10 megawatts per year. Once that happens, higher volumes are readily achieved,” Hayden, Solar Program Coordinator at APS, said.

Raymond Chen:

First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he’s not entirely pleased with the word “podcast” in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with “several Microsoft employees” who have coined the word “blogcast” to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story and says that the word “podcast” is a “faux-pas” on Microsoft campus.

Kevin Kelly:

This overpriced book [40 Principles: Triz Keys to Technical Innovation] contains a set of 40 design strategies for inventing. It is a summation of engineering design principles devised by a Soviet patent examiner in the 1960s who extracted these principles from a study of 200,000 patents. This guy, Altshuller, says that the 10% most innovative patents would use one of these 40 strategies for their novel solutions. Altshuller then went on to construct a system to help engineers consider these elemental strategies for the problems they were working on. His system is called TRIZ, and it has a cult following among process engineers.

Termite Lisp:

Termite is a language and system offering a simple and
powerful tool for expressing distributed computation. It
is based on a message-passing model of concurrency inspired
by Erlang, and on a variant of the functional language Scheme.

via Bill Clementson

Rashmi Sinha:

Joe Krause recently wrote that “Its a great time to be an entrepreneur“. Yes, it is. Joe talks about cheap hardware, free infrastructure software, cheap global labor markets, and search engine marketing. There is another reason that its a great time to be an entrepreneur – an excellent example of which is Joel Spolsky’s latest project: CoPilot.

David Weinberger: “On Wednesday, about 75 people crowded into a seminar room at Harvard Law to talk about H20 playlists, a Berkman project in beta that lets people build and share “lists” of online and offline resources. It grows out of projects started in 1998, including a structured forum (“Rotisserie”) for mutliple classes to discuss shared readings.”