Break

YouNote is a note taking application that lets you capture text, audio and images. Nothing special here, Evernote is better. ‘Nuff said.

Loopt is a location based social network application which let’s you tell your friends where you are and find out where they are.

The application itself is designed well it’s easy to tag your location. For me the novelty wore off after the first few weeks. I haven’t used it in months and am deleting it.

Two days in a row I’ve woken up to a dead iPhone. This isn’t so bad but I generally like to have a working phone while I’m on the road. The first day this happened, I wasn’t sure of the cause. Today, I’ve figured it out. It’s the Pandora client.

I don’t think that the client necessarily is doing anything wrong, I just think it’s not doing some thing right. I was listening to Pandora in my car, when I arrived home, I disconnected the iPhone from my aux jack and didn’t use my phone again until the next day. Pandora, I’m guessing, happily kept open the network connection which ultimately drained my battery.

It should behave more like the iPod client application. When the signal is lost on the headphone jack it should stop playing or in Pandora’s case stop streaming.

Anyone else having strange problems with the battery draining? Post them here.

It’s an idea that is so logical, it’s amazing that it wasn’t thought proposed sooner. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a physicist, has proposed that we start building white roofs and replacing black top with concrete colored blacktop in order to reduce global warming. Scientists say the idea has merit.

It’s great that we finally have an Energy Secretary that has his head in science rather than business.

I have found what has to be the coolest Firefox plugins ever. I often spend hours scouring the web for bits of information that I need to bring into other documents. Many times, I’ll want to bring in a web table to Excel. This is often met with frustration and a lot of manual tweaking. Well, no more. Thanks to OutWit Technologies. They have developed a cool plug-in that extracts various bits of data from websites including images, text, and tables.

In the two figures above you can see an example of the extraction engine at work. I’ve loaded a page from Wikipedia that includes a table. I run the extraction on the page and the table is automatically pulled out. I can then copy and paste this easily into Excel. What’s really cool about this software is if you’re a regular expression geek, you can tune the extraction so it pulls the right data.

If you ever needed to pull data out of web pages, get this Firefox add-in today.

John Winsor, Business Week contributor as solicited opinions from the twitterazzi about the phenomenom of crowd sourcing.

Some have predicted that the crowdsourcing phenomenon will accelerate creativity across a larger network. Others, meanwhile, have predicted the practice of opening up a task to the public instead of keeping it in-house or using a contractor will prove to be the demise of many industries. To accompany my piece on the future of the discipline, we decided to open things up. By canvassing opinions through Twitter and through my personal blog, I’m able to give you the crowd’s take on crowdsourcing.

Commentors include Shaun Abrahamson (@shaunabe), Brett T. T. Macfarlane (@macfarbt), Doron Reuveni (@doronr), Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3), Zeny Huang (@zenydala).

The trick with crowd sourcing is finding out the types of tasks that are appropriate for the crowd. Once you do that, the next challenge is figuring out a way to leverage the crowd in a cost effective way. Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to filter images for porn is a great way to effectively use the crowd to solve a problem that could not be solved as cost effectively in-house.

I read a post recently about how everything we publish online becomes a decision point for someone. The author, Scott Monty, was talking about this as it pertains to a businesses social media strategy but I think it’s great advice for our kids.

A few months ago, I met a young woman in her early twenties that was interviewing at our company. She presented herself very professionally and we brought her in to consult with us. After I met her, the first thing I did was search Google about her. Quite easily, I came across her Facebook page. There wasn’t anything particularly salacious on her page but it was easily found. As employers wrestle with this technology, I’ve often wondered about the future 10 years from now as our children have moved into the workplace. What influence will their social networking footprint have on their employment opportunities? Will the Facebook users of today understand that drunken frat party pictures do not necessarily reflect poorly on a 30 year old teacher looking for a job?

However it shakes out, it still is important to stress to the kids that are driving social media that there might be consequences to the digital footprints they leave behind.

Benjamin Wayne, CEO of Fliqz, a white label video streaming  service has lit up the blogosphere with his prognosis that YouTube is doomed and is currently on life support.

His opinion was based on a recent Credit Suisse report shed some light on how much money Google is using on YouTube and he believes that the search engine giant won’t continue to hemorrhage money indefinitely.

I find this interesting given the recent announcements about the ease through which the new iPhone 3GS and other devices can post content directly to YouTube. It would seem that because of the high operating costs of streaming video and the challenges of monetizing it, YouTube will become consumed by it’s own success.

So recently, I started recieving bonce back message in my inbox indicating of people complaining about spam messages getting sent to them. It would appear that someone has begun forging my domain name (cotellese.net) in order to send out spam.

How can this happen?

Well, it’s actually quite easy for spammers to replace the From and Reply to fields with an email address of their choice. If someone hits a reply it will come to whatever address is in either of those fields.

Where did the mail really come from?

Actually, I don’t know but I’m trying to figure it out. My guess is it’s one or more spam bots so tracking down the perps might be a challenge.

If you’ve received one of these emails, I apologize and I’m asking for your help. Please forward me the original email including the email headers. Inside the headers I can find the ip address of the computer sending the email.

What a pain.