BT acquires Ribbit

Ribbit has been acquired by British Telecom. According to BT Managing Director the Ribbit platform will enable BT to transform a telco to a platform based software driven services company.

The complete interview on ribbit

3D Facial scanning

We went to Eyetronics for a 3D scan of our team. It is done in a split second and is an experience. Eyetronics is a Belgian company who offers 3D scanning services, they are active in the film industry, tv series like Heroes, Smallville for Hollywood productions and the Canadian movie and game industry, to Kollywood industry in Chennai-India.

They slowly cover the world, and now also offer 3D scanning to the consumer, for profiling on Facebook and other social networks.  Avatars for online gaming…and more to come.

Here some snapshots during the scan. We receive the models in a few days, and then we can test in several environments.

Ribbit open platform for Telephony Innovation

Ribbit is a phone company reinvented. Combining the web, social networking features with voice.

Telephony has remained virtually unchanged for decades, while at the same time the Internet has revolutionized personal communications in the blink of an eye. Yet, these two worlds remain distinct; walled-off from each other and blocking the innovations that would surely emerge if they were allowed to come together.

Ribbit was created to break this stalemate. Ribbit is the result of a group of Silicon Valley phone and Web veterans coming together, in a distinctly new way, to create a distinctly new company.  View the ribbit website for more info, interesting to follow.

 

Delivering software and sharing idea

While reading Kevin Lynch his interview in eweek, I thought I should make a little post on it. Kevin is talking about the future of Adobe, the software service model, the whole idea of sharing. For those who don’t know it yet, we are in a sharing economy model right now. We had that also in the sixties, but then we shared different things

We already saw rich internet applications, like picknic.com, where you could link your flickr photos to a picnic account, manipulate your photos online, push them back to flickr, an so forth. Adobe also made premiere Express, which is video editing software in the form of a rich internet apllication, which is integrated in photobucket.com and you tube. The software is free of use, you can mix video etc… Adobe makes money on this by getting shared revenue from the adds placed on these sites.
It is a new way of distributing software, and getting the clients to know your software in a user generated content environment.

Adobe is also looking at hosting services, building more rich internet applications, for ex. a library where you could post your documents, share them with people you know, give access rights and so on, a whole working environment online, your virtual office one might say. I heard this a few years ago that Google was working on this idea, meanwhile it is there, still in beta but well…everything is lately.
I find it very interesting how the internet is getting a real service oriented collaborative platform, and at the same it is also scary…., sometimes I get a bit paranoid about all this social networking, social media and social computing…

But I guess it is only logic, that the internet goes trough this evolution, and that it immediately gets available on our mobile, so we have anything, anytime, anywhere.

Electronic software distribution is already a fact for a while, and software distribution in a service oriented way is a logic sequel. Imagine how many more people you can reach with different profiles, you otherwise never reach. And everybody can enjoy the quality of good products! At the same time you get all the info of the user, what their interests are and so on, and you give  the service, in pushing information that only him or her is interested in. All this is of course with opt in features. So it is not spamming!

I think it is an interesting vision, and I’m curious what this will bring in like 5 or 10 years. A different way of building and using software.

Kevin Lynch is chief software architect at adobe.

Iphone updates: from wordpress

I’m still doubting about buying an Iphone or Nokia N95 style…., I really don’t like the way Apple put there Iphone in the market…, so ratio says no, heart says yes…., time will figure it out I guess..

News from the wordpress front. 

First we’ve updated our mobile interface, which you can reach at m.wordpress.com, to be much more iPhone friendly. It’s still not sexy, but it’s quite snappy and is great for checking your stats, posting an entry, or posting a bookmark on the go.

Second we’ve updated the Prologue theme to be much friendlier to iPhones both for browsing and posting. We now have about half a dozen Prologues that we use internally at Automattic to coordinate our development, support, and even communication with contractors, so I’ve been testing this out pretty heavily over the last few days and it’s quite handy.

I think the iPhone is a pretty exciting new platform, and I think we’ll do more to embrace it in the future. Having such a powerful browser available on the phone really opens up what you can do. I recently picked up a N95 because I’ve heard people compare it favorably to the iPhone, but the web experience is terrible! Once you get used to that touchscreen, it’s hard to go back.

by Matt founder wordpress

CitySense San Francisco nightlife activity

Curious where everybody is hanging out in San Francisco? CitySense shows where the action is and where you need to be to have some fun!

You check if it is a good night to go out. CitySense keeps track of everything trough hotspots and feeds. Something to follow up. Available on Blackberry and soon on the Iphone.

After using citySense, the appliction will keep track of your interest, and push info where your bodies are, or where there are events that might interest you. Of course considering your privacy, read all about that on the citySense website.