Mashable: Carrier Pigeons beat ADSL, but Memory Card capacity growing even faster

'Winston' the racing pigeon after flying with a 4GB SD card in Durban, South Africa.(EPA/STR/Corbis, as per THE WEEK)

Mashable: "...Internet lines getting faster, but memory card capacity is getting bigger even faster. If you need your data to travel fast, use a carrier pigeon."

Of course, this is not the only situation where "low tech" wins over conventional methods... e.g. in some situations and for some audiences, email reliability (or lack thereof) cannot match the simplicity and immediate hardcopy accessibility of conventional fax transmissions. In any case, IMHO this is at least worth a smile :)

Full article from Mashable:
CARRIER PIGEONS: Still Faster Than ADSL

Hat tip: http://www.theweek.com/article/index/100380/Highspeed_Internet_vs_carrier_pigeon

HighlightCam Cuts Long Security Camera Videos Down to the Action

Mashable has a nice writeup today regarding HighlightCam.com :
HOW TO: Quickly Cut Long Videos Down to the Juicy Parts:
"...finding the important parts of these [security camera] videos is painful. That’s because there are hours of footage to sift through. Really, do you want to fastforward through a 12 hour video just to find out what your dog was doing? Yet if you don’t, then you’ve lost the point of having the camera in the first place.

Now a new YCombinator-funded company, HighlightCam, has built the software to take hours of video and compress it into just the minutes with the important stuff – you know, when the dog starts barking, the baby falls out of the crib, or the crook turns on the lights.

So how does HighlightCam pick out the juciest bits of long videos? The web-based software, which has both a free version and an $8.99 per month version, is able to detect movement, light changes, and any variations from the norm. You can pick out how far down the video should be cut – one minute, five minutes, ten minutes, whatever you’d like. You can even get the best parts of YouTube (YouTube) videos with the software, as was demonstrated to us today....

One hour of video, cut down to under a minute, with only the important stuff shown. It’s already caught employees stealing from cash registers, something you’d probably miss if you sifted through the full video. It’s cheap, accessible, usable, and from what we’ve seen, really accurate at pinpointing key events. And with a free version, you can start using it without spending a dime."

Also worth noting as per http://blog.highlightcam.com/ , in fact not only motion but audio is also used as a cue to detect the highlights:

"HighlightCam records your footage all the time, whether there’s motion or not. We then find the highlights using a bunch of different cues, including motion and audio.

A tiny mouse running across the floor, or a loud conversation held off-camera—if that’s the most interesting thing that happened in an hour, that’s what we’ll show you!"

Secure Enterprise Twitter-like microblogging from Socialtext - Webware.com 14-July-2009

I recently discussed whether project managers should use twitter.

With the new Socialtext corporate appliance that runs a Twitter-like app behind the firewall, business use of Twitter (or a similar type of "microblogging" capability) now appears to be a simpler issue. This solution seems especially relevant for large organizations wishing to enhance their internal communication, messaging and overall knowledge management. Nice to see that the issue of backup / DRP is apparently being addressed as well:

Socialtext offers enterprise microblogging in a box | Web Crawler - CNET News: "As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.

Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs and add new features...."

The doctor in your pocket & Health in the palm of your hand

Neil Seeman is the director and primary investigator of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell, based at Massey College at the University of Toronto. He has recently authored two excellent articles in the National Post, which IMHO suggest some very important uses of mobile technology in relatively simple ways, than can achieve quite meaningful healthcare improvements around the world:

• Health in the palm of your hand , which is a follow-up to his earlier
• The doctor in your pocket

Just 1 excellent examples among the many mentioned:

"Last summer, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service started a protocol to transmit electrocardiogram readings of their patients to cardiologists' mobile phones. The approach--Winnipeg EMS is part of the Strategic Reperfusion Early After Myocardial Infarction, or "STREAM" study -- allows doctors to work closely with paramedics through life-saving decisions as patients are transported by ambulance. It is reportedly lowering mortality rates and speeding up treatment times."

You can read more great ideas from Seeman and his colleagues (and share your own!) on the new myhealthinnovation.com website, designed for those who wish to "share, vote, and say thanks for low-cost, low-tech health ideas".

Should Project Managers Twitter?

Some interesting observations from the gantthead blogs about the potential relevance of Twitter to Project Managers:

Why Project Managers Should Twitter: "How many times have you heard that project management is all about communication? Communicating with your team is important, but so is communication with the outside world... you should at least become familiar with Twitter..."

I agree that PM's should become familiar with Twitter... However, the decision for any specific project would of course depend on the audience, sensitivity of the information being transmitted, overall environment and expectations of the customer, etc...

For those of us (including current or aspiring PMP's and CAPM's) familiar with the Project Management Institute's PMBOK, this basic issue is addressed as part of the Project Communications Management knowledge area, e.g. the Communications Planning process, for which the PMI observes that it is critical both to:

1. Identify stakeholder information requirements, and
2. Determine a "suitable means" to address those requirements.

Twitter may not be the most "suitable means" to communicate for all projects, but certainly could be effective and appropriate for some. For example, it would be out of the question to even consider Twitter for sensitive projects/customers (e.g. military or defense-related). Tweets are fully visible to anyone (even without a Twitter account!). However, Twitter could be both appropriate and effective if the project does not focus on proprietary or sensitive information and customer staff are already familiar with Twitter (e.g. if the customer's core business is the communications / public-relations field).

Similarly, there could be situations in which the risk of not communicating by Twitter is much greater than doing so. Think of an emergency natural-disaster evacuation scenario in which affected parties need to receive extremely urgent information... Some of them may be accessing Twitter on a very regular basis, but their cellphone number for SMS might not be functioning at that particular moment.

The Numerati by Stephen Baker + Google Tracking flu trends etc.

Interesting timing... The ambitious (and potentially life-saving) Google.org new initiative to help track flu as per Official Google Blog: Tracking flu trends has been announced within all of about 9 days after the New York Times Book Review covered The Numerati by Stephen Baker .

Seems the google Flu Tracking project fits right in to The Numerati's concepts, but in a much more altruistic way... Here is an excerpt from the aforementioned NYT review by Rob Walker:


'...the most interesting information comes from us, particularly by way of our online activities. Baker’s savants monitor our collective (if anonymous) Web surfing patterns for “behavioral clues” that, for example, help advertisers decide when to hit us with what pitch.

You probably already have a sense that this sort of thing is going on, but Baker uncovers some surprising details. A chapter on efforts to convert the information disclosed by bloggers and users of social networks is among the most interesting. Baker offers an anecdote about a firm called Umbria helping a cellphone company that’s decided to charge more for Bluetooth data connections, a move that “sent bloggers into a fury.” Umbria, which studies bloggers and divides them into tribes, concluded that all the spleen-venting was coming from the “power users,” whereas “the fashionistas, the music lovers, the cheapskates” did not care. “With this intelligence,” Baker writes, the company could placate the power users by offering them “free” service (while raising the prices on headsets) and “continue charging everyone else.” He goes on to describe Umbria’s efforts to teach its computers to interpret blogs and draw conclusions from different phrases, font choices, background colors and even emoticons.

On one level, this is just the low comedy of the profit motive: our finest techno-­wizards and their beautiful machines wrestling with the meaning of “:)” so that some cellphone company can micro-target its fee increases. But Baker also, in effect, offers a counternarrative to the usual story about the digital revolution. While millions of ordinary citizens have been em­powered to express their individuality with a panoply of new tools, a smaller number of people have been working out the most efficient ways to convert those individuals into numbers on a spreadsheet.

We used to go about our business and let marketers try to catch up with us. “Today,” he writes, “we spy on ourselves and send electronic updates minute by minute.” '

SMS robustness: Emergency - The Key is "Communications that work", Robert Paterson's Weblog

Some practical and tested suggestions re: how SMS can be more robust than vanilla cellphone/voice during true emergency scenarios. Security/privacy issues may be different for SMS than standard cell-phone voice calls (let alone SMS per-message charges depending on your carrier)... And SMS let alone Twitter may not be the most common corporate communications tools just yet. However, it is easy to agree that as mentioned by Robert Paterson below (quoting Debi Jones), in those situations, indeed, the key is something for SMS seems to have an edge: Communications that work":

Robert Paterson's Weblog: Emergency - The Key is "Communications that work": "...It is likely in a very bad situation that cell phone networks will get jammed - what we are learning though is that SMS tends to get through - so Twitter as a feed may be the core of a good plan

Advisories have been announced on CNN and local San Diego TV stations asking people to limit their mobile phone use as the networks are saturated. This is a common problem during emergencies as we’ve seen over and over. The one component that continued to provide communication during the London bombings, post Katrina flooding in New Orleans and now in San Diego is text messaging. Twice today my mobile calls have been rejected with the network reporting, “all circuits are busy”. And yet, I’ve continued to be able to send out SMS..."

Scalpel? Check. Google Book Search? Check.

The criticality of search capabilities in all computing environments is nothing new.... Here however, is a nicely presented YouTube clip of a physician explaining how efficient and effective search such as Google Book Search can directly save lives:

Inside Google Book Search: Scalpel? Check. Google Book Search? Check.: "...we were intrigued to read that Dr. Schwimmer had turned to Book Search as a teaching aid while in the emergency department with a group of students and residents.

We recently invited Dr. Schwimmer to share all the ways he’s found Google Book Search useful as a physician, and here’s what he had to say."

10 Tech Essentials for Emergency Evacuations - eWeek 17dec2007

GPS with live traffic-updates is listed as the very first of these 10 "tech essentials for emergency evacuations"... not merely a convenience to avoid traffic jams during the daily commute :-)

Other interesting items listed here include a cellphone signal booster kit; wind-up radio and phone charger; and portable fuel cell power pack:

• eWeek digital edition excerpt of "10 Tech Essentials for Emergency Evacuations" :

http://www.eweek-digital.com/eweek/20071217_esp/?pg=105&pm=2&u1=friend&cookies=1

• Slideshow, including specific brands that meet the requirements described:

10 Tech Essentials for Emergency Evacuations: "10 Tech Essentials for Emergency Evacuations

When the firestorm erupted in San Diego in October, there was a sickening feeling of déjà vu that descended on local residents. Almost exactly four years ago, similar wind conditions had blown a handful of wildfires into raging torrents of flame, burning..."

Getting Proactive on Disaster Communication, eWeek 27aug2007

The SaaS for alerts (provided by MessageOne's AlertFind) as described here seems interesting, definitely relevant beyond the academic world as well. But what seemed even more creative was the idea that you don't necessarily have to use your regular communications infrastructure for emergency alerts (ideally eliminating the "information overload" as suggested in the final sentence, if you use this ONLY for emergency alerts):

Colleges Getting Proactive on Disaster Communication: Page 2:

"Middlebury College, established 150 years ago, is in the process of installing AlertFind now. Located in Middlebury, Vt., Middlebury also operates the C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad at 28 sites in 12 countries. With students, faculty and staff in Middlebury and spread around the world, it would be difficult to deliver emergency instructions or account for college community members in the event of a crisis or disaster.

Once the new system is implemented, Middlebury will be able to rapidly and automatically communicate with faculty, staff and students in the event of any crisis or disaster. Administrators will no longer have to distribute critical messages manually through a broadcast e-mail or voice mail.

When an incident occurs, Middlebury crisis managers will be able to quickly and automatically send important notifications to affected community members. As long as the recipient has access to a landline, text messaging device, cell phone or e-mail, he or she can receive an emergency notification anywhere around the world. The system, which can differentiate between a real person and voice mail, is able to deliver a spoken electronic or recorded message and even ask questions such as, 'Are you OK?' in the event of a crisis. These responses will be available to crisis managers in real time....

Unlike free text message systems backed by advertising dollars, AlertFind is a dedicated tool for text and voice-based emergency communication. Since the system is only used in emergencies, AlertFind prevents the "message fatigue" associated with ad-based systems where users may ignore important notifications, assuming they are spam."

Kudos as well to a fellow blogger whose entire "Emeregency Notification" blog focuses on this topic, lots lots more on this topic :-)
Start here:

http://emergencynotification.blogspot.com/2007/08/middlebury-college-selects-messageone.html