Born on the Web

I’m an avid public transportation user: train, bus, tube, … The only thing I hate is waiting too long for a train to come, or missing a train because you were seconds late.

This could be solved by a simple location based service. (I’m not completely sure, but I think both Mobistar and Proximus are already providing these kind of services, correct?) When you come close to a train station, say like in a range of 200m / 600m (you should be able to adjust this yourself). The service detects you are nearing a train station and simply sends you a message with the schedule for trains going to your home station. So a 100% push medium, which is triggered by your location. I wouldn’t mind paying like 50 cents per message, because it adds value. It let’s me know if I need to start running or can go grab a bite before catching my train.

But since the nmbs (belgium railway company) doesn’t even provide a mobile site. I’m guessing it’s going to take a while before seeing this kind of services …

I talked about this before, but if the NMBS would open up it’s train schedule database, a whole new range of services can exist:

• more services for the people who travel with the train, you make their lifes easier
• an extra business model if you charge for commercial use of the web service
• build an ecosystem around the brand NMBS

Really, somebody should wake them up … we live in the year 2008, not 1998. Damnit !!

Well the future lays in the browser, everybody knows that. And that is the exact reason that from today on, I'll change my standard music player on my computer. I've been long with Winamp. It is fast, responsive and has an incredibly cool classic skin, which I'm sure going to miss. But times change, just as my listening behavior has changed. I find myself listening less to my personal music library and more to last.fm radio, shoutcast stations or StuBru via streaming.

So since a few months I've been playing with Songbird, the music player based on Mozilla Firefox, which actually makes it a browser that can play music. And I have to say the more I use it, the more I really like the flexibility and openness open source alternatives bring. Just like Firefox their is an add-on ability. Where I recently found some cool powerfull add-ons.

But the real power of Songbird is in the way how it can handle online music. It plays MP3's as good from a website as it can play them from your hard-drive. Songbird is native web player. This allows you to just use the internal Skreemr MP3 search engine and start listening to your favorite band. Every time songbird finds a link to an audio file on a webpage it will automatically put it into a playlist. Which means you can immediately start listening, without downloading.

And the future of Songbird lays in integration with webpages. If you take a look at the functionalities of their webpage API. You'll see the direction they are going. Via Songbird, you will be able to play music from webpages but also the other way around. Webpages can get to know what you're playing. And for example give bring you other related music. (There's even a business model in that one)

Songbird, the music player for the net natives. Bright future ahead...

The biggest internet service provider in Belgium has a problem and the thing is, they initiated the shit they are in right now. They did a campaign for the wrong reasons on the wrong moment. And I'm pretty sure if they thought it trough they wouldn't have made this fault. They did a campaign "telenet drukt op de knop". Which revealed they would "upgrade" their download or upload speed... But people were getting excited telenet would upgrade their traffic limits which wasn't the case. It's still about 15 GB a month if I'm not mistaken (I'm not a telenet customer). So if it became clear Telenet would just upgrade the speed, but the datalimit would stay in place. It just fired up the whole discussion about the very limited traffic limit... And now it seems the discussion is more heavily than ever, I'm seeing blogposts, consumer initiatives, facebook groups, fake posters, ... Telenet reacted that just a very small part of the customers need more traffic volume, because there are only a few who cross the allowed limit. Well I'm pretty sure a lot of people just don't cross the limit just because they know there is a limit. And if they cross the limit they know you're going to be put on smallband (which is, believe me, hell!) or have to pay for an extra volume pack. Which is pretty ridiculous. And I'm really not sure people were waiting for faster internet... I'm sure with current download speeds, you can do pretty much everything. So most customers won't even notice something has changed. That makes it such a useless campaign ... and only harms telenet. Luckily there are alternatives, I switched to Dommel Cityconnect (currently only available in the centre of Leuven). No data limit, 23mbps download speed, 3mbps upload speed, fixed ip, ... And it is still cheaper than Telenet. Dommel gives you less service, but more no nonsense internet. Just what I need...

Thanks to the native interoperability between google maps and flickr. I can now embed maps with recent geotagged flickr photos on it. Sweet huh! Making mashups has become easy... Photos from Leuven:
View Larger Map Photos from Brussels:
View Larger Map Photos from Gent:
View Larger Map Or even my personal geotagged photo map:
View Larger Map

2 months ago I bought a Lacie Ethernet Big Disk, I needed some extra storage for  backups, to store movies, music, ... The biggest problem is that I'm constantly using a laptop in the couch, in the kitchen, in the train station, at work, ... It's not really handy if you need to carry an external HD with you all the time, just to listen to your music.  

But this wasn't the only problem. My roommate has a desktop computer and of course he also needed easy access to the external storage. It became clear to me that I needed some flexible network storage or NAS (Network Attached Storage). The more, the better. So after some surfing I've found that the LaCie of 1 TB would be my best match. It wasn't the cheapest storage available but certainly the most flexible.

And now I can't imagine a home without some decent network storage. These are the things I like most:

• This is definatelly the web interface. The LaCie has an easy to use web interface. You can access all your files trough your browser but also perform all kinds of administrative tasks.
  
• I configured my router so I can access my hard drive from the internet. I just type in the no-ip.com webadress and I can access all my files. Some greasemonkey scripting let's you even listen to all your music from your harddisk. Pretty nice huh !
  
• The software of the hard drive contains a small version of linux which also holds a UPnP media server. My Xbox 360 flawlesly detected the harddrive as a computer. The embedded media server can stream all your photos, music, videos (off course only WMV's) to your television screen.
  
• Gigabit network access... well this means it should be as fast as a regular USB 2.0 external HD. Currently I haven't got a gigabit network in place, so I haven't tested this yet. But for now 100 Mbit is a pretty decent speed.
  
• A lot of my friends can access the hard drive. Via the FTP access they can easily sent photos to us without the need for us to be online. The hard drive has a comprehensive user rights system, everything customizable through the admin interface.
  
• The LaCie has an USB interface. So it's possible to extend your HD with an extra USB external disk. My old external HD is now connected to it. This means I can also access that one from my browser. Which gives me around 1.25 TB of networked storage !!
  
• Off course it supports regular samba shares. So you can easily add it as a extra disk in the My Computer window.

It would be a nice extra if you could alter the web templates that display the files. If the directory contains a lot of MP3's for example it would be nice to automatically integrate the songs in a flash player. Now you need greasemonkey if you want to stream mp3's, which is pretty limited.

My second feature request is pretty obvious for people who want full flexibility: SSH access. I'm not sure this lays within the capabilities of this device, but it would be great if you could run small programs on your mini-server. Or have the capability to extend the functionalities of your administration panel, so a kind of plugin interface for the device would be ideal.

Conclusion

For me this was the solution I was looking for. Mainly because you can have access to all your data from anywhere and you keep the speed and functionalities of your local area network.

On the right you see the LaCie and the expansion USB harddrive from Medion. It can stream via my ethernet hub(below) media to my Xbox 360 (top), and it is connected to the internet via a cable modem(below left).

It's a great evolution to see a lot of web application also port part of their interface to the desktop. The most hot and newest technology to do this is definatelly AIR, a kind of flash for your desktop.

Pownce for example has a great AIR application which is a perfect addition to the web interface.

 I have the feeling a lot of other web applications will follow the example of Pownce. I have seen a demo of an ebay AIR app, an app to browse your flickr photos, ...

The only problem I have now with the Pownce app is that it's a small application and it's a bit stupid that it behaves like a full application. Especially because it is nothing more than a simple widget or gadget.

So where I'm getting at is: wouldn't it be nice to simply integrate the Pownce app into your vista sidebar or your MAC dashboard or Konfabulator. Now it behaves like an application but it is a widget.

Is there a simple way to make an AIR application part of your sidebar? I searched a bit but found nothing. So nobody tried it or is this simply impossible? It would fit perfectly next to my lastTV gadget and twitter gadget.