Headworx

Social Networks are on the rise. Actually they are going ballistic... with Facebook leading the pack with 300M visitors... And a lot of activity happens from their mobile applications. Facebook on iPhone, Facebook on BlackBerry... Twitter would not make much sense if it was accessible only from laptop or desktop computers. They are about the beat... A status an hour old is... well... old :). The Web is now real-time . So in your opinion - where are people using their mobile social applications? Driving a car? Shopping? Last week we had an interesting presentation by Edward Kershaw from Nielsen at Mobile Monday Poland . The meeting was revolving around mobile usage trends and of course Nielsen is the one you turn to for answers :). What Edward pointed out as striking, as illustrated on Page 16, was more than 50% users use their mobile Internet at home. Surprised? You should not be... Even at home most of us have our almighty mobiles in our pockets. There are applications popping out let

Rumors of the finally upcoming Mac Tablet (or whatever it will be called) have been aloud all week. To be honest this is no the iTablet itself anymore that draws my attention. I wonder if Apple will once again try to redefine the way we use Internet devices (from desktops to laptops to MID's). A couple of months ago I posted a short review of the Lenovo X10S I got myself as a temporary replacement machine. There was a list of applications installed locally: Wireless driver for my Canon IP5200R printer USB driver for the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner Primo PDF virtual PDF printer (to be able to create PDF documents from any application) Google Talk and Skype messengers WWAN driver for my GSM/HSDPA USB modem Today I went through what is installed on my Vista - based Lenovo X200s and the list is not that very much longer. There are a few more applications, and it looks like almost all of them are used to manage transfer of data to other devices: iTunes (to manage music on an iPod

Last week we had country - level finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition and again I was one of the judges. Our work starts much earlier, as in April we have to select 10 teams that will be competing during May finals. When I was working through this year's set of submitted projects, my first impression was 2009 students show less of the "imagination factor" than they used to in previous years. However, when the general level seems to be lower, there are still some diamonds hidden and our job (as a jury) is to find them. I have been especially impressed by one project, submitted by the Nosoi Fighters team . What they do is complex network modeling, simulation and prognosis of various factors. Based on the underlying knowledge and technology they presented the CARE application. The primary goal of the CARE is to predict how various diseases are going to spread, and then to estimate vaccination strategy, including distribution of vaccines, how much and where will b

Green is in. And solar energy has always been green. It used to be expensive and thus not very popular. And we did not have too many things to power with solar. They were not portable enough or consumed too much energy. Today I can buy a small garden lamp for $2 retail. This is a small lantern, with white LED inside. It also contains a small rechargeable battery and a solar cell. It charges during a day and stays lit during a night. $2 retail means it has to cost virtually nothing to manufacture. Are solar cells that cheap now? Yes and no the answer is, it all depends, especially on the expected efficiency. But if you are fine with just an average, something you would call a value solar cell - it is cheap. There are many technologies promising to make solar cells even cheaper. Like ink jet printing them . Or using polymers instead of silicon . We have plenty of surface. Why an LCD cover in a laptop could not be covered with solar cells? Or my jacket... it should be constantly rechargin

We have not touched base on Google here for a while... It has become a commodity. Really, people take it for granted. It seems like the Internet has always been indexed and searchable. And barely somebody really realizes how much of an effort it has taken. All the Web without search and indexes would not be worth even half of what it is today. We take many things for granted. Calling somebody's mobile on the other side of the Planet for few cents. Flying close to the speed of sound with a chair at 30 thousand feet for less than a hundred dollars. Using a personal GPS and digital maps to navigate to the nearest sushi bar... Speaking of GPSes. I love the one in my BlackBerry, together with Google maps. First, there is no maps to install - they are downloaded on demand. Second, the so - called time to fix (time needed for a GPS to acquire necessary satellite signals and calculate position) is very fast, thanks to A-GPS (Assisted GPS) functionality. A-GPS uses cell ID to deliver coarse