gooeysphere
This is an exploration of sorts, delving into that gooey yet addictive substance that brings us all together - aka the Internet/web. We'll delve into web analytics, a subject I quite fancy these days. Here we'll also dabble into social media, a bit of art/photography, culture, and fun!
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Cornelius Smith
Cornelius Smith
Visiting Japanese attend first obon rite since disaster - Hawaii News
Visiting Japanese attend first obon rite since disaster
Survivors of Japan's double catastrophe honor the victims
POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Jul 17, 2011
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Japanese visitors who are recovering in Hawaii from the destruction of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami remembered their deceased friends and family Saturday at their first obon service since the disaster.
Obon season typically begins in mid-July in Japan and marks a time when people honor their ancestors.
Saturday's ceremony marked the "hatsubon" for the Japanese visitors, or the first obon after a family member dies. Dozens lit incense under a small tent and recited a sutra chant as a tiny bell rang intermittently at the Makiki Cemetery on Pensacola Street.
Misaki Suzuki, 18, of Fukushima prefecture came to Hawaii with the Aloha Initiative, a nonprofit program that organized home stays to help Japanese citizens heal from the March disaster that killed more than 15,000 people. Suzuki asked her host family to bring her to the rite so she could honor her friends who died.
The ceremony also marked the 25th annual ceremony at the Imin Yosebaka or the common grave for the first Japanese immigrants who came to Hawaii under an 1885 treaty. Of those immigrants, 289 died without family in the islands and their graves were neglected.
In 1985, 100 years after the first contract workers came to the islands, a local group received approval to put their graves into one tomb, and the Imin Yosebaka monument was unveiled a year later.
David Arakawa, president of the United Japanese Society of Hawaii, said having Japanese visitors attend the Imin Yosebaka's 25th anniversary embodied the ties between Japan and Hawaii that are recognized annually at the cemetery.
"In the past, we always looked past," he said. "This brings things home. This reinforces that the ties still exist."
Mayumi Shinkawa, who came to Oahu with her 15-year-old daughter, Aika, through Aloha Initiative, commemorated her sister-in-law, friends and other family members who were killed by the tsunami. She said she still wishes she could go back to the day before the earthquake struck.
Gail and Delbert Nakaoka of Pacific Palisades attended at the request of Suzuki, their home-stay guest. Gail Nakaoka, who worked five years on a military base in Japan, volunteered as a host to give back to the country.
But as a host, she said, she finds herself gaining more from her guest, such as when Suzuki encouraged her and her husband to go to a bon dance Friday night. They stayed for hours.
"It's a blessing," Nakaoka said. "She's helping us learn, too. It's enjoyable."
Tsunami in Japan Caused Damage to Ice Shelves in Antarctica | ThirdAge
The tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 created waves that hit an ice shelf in Antarctica a little over 8,000 miles away, breaking large parts of it into huge icebergs, the European Space Agency said on Tuesday.The ESA's Envisat Earth-monitoring satellite spotted icebergs that had broken from the Sulzberger ice shelf, and on March 16, it observed the pieces floating into the Ross Sea.
The largest iceberg was nearly six by four miles, making it slightly bigger in surface area than Manhattan, and it likely had a depth of about 260 feet.
Japanese estimates published a week after the event noted that the tsunami was about 76 feet high, generated by an underwater earthquake with a 9.0 magnitude.
Despite the fact that the waves probably only reached about 18 inches in height by the time they had crossed 8,100 miles of ocean to impact with the ice shelf, the rhythmic up-and-down movement was enough to stress the shelf's structure and cause chunks of it to break off, the ESA said in a press release.
Ice shelves are floating beds of ice attached to the coastline. Huge, thick masses, ice shelves are created by glaciers whose ice is discharged to the sea.
Nikkei Firm, Holds Near 9,100 On Higher Asia Stocks
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Nikkei Firm, Holds Near 9,100 On Higher Asia Stocks
TOKYO (NQN)--Tokyo stocks were steady midway through Wednesday morning as the bounce on Wall Street and European markets helped improve market sentiment, encouraging investors to buy stocks that look undervalued.
South Korean, Taiwanese and other key Asian markets opened higher, which also pleased investors.
The Nikkei Stock Average climbed about 160 points early on and is staying near 9,100, almost erasing Tuesday's 153-point loss.
But buying is limited as many investors wait for more data on European and U.S. economic performance, as well as the yen's direction.
The broader Topix index of all first-section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange gained about 1.5%.
Advancers include Fanuc Ltd. (6954), Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) and Softbank Corp. (9984).
Bridgestone Corp. (5108), GS Yuasa Corp. (6674), and Sumco Corp. (3436) are all lower.
Why did Apple choose Twitter over Facebook?
Apple will deeply integrate Twitter into iOS 5 when it releases this Fall, but not Facebook. Now why is that? Facebook is the largest social networking platform on the planet, with more than 500 million users, according to the company (Hell, I thought it was closer 700 million based on multiple -- and unconfirmed -- press reports and blogs). Surely Apple already greatly benefits from the the social network's iOS app. Why not do more?
I can't speak for Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his executive team, obviously. Perhaps the major reason is nothing more complex than Apple and Facebook failing to reach terms either could agree to. After all, there would be more to it than just leveraging APIs. However, I see some very good reasons why deep Facebook integration into iOS would be a bad move for Apple.
Conflicting Objectives
Conceptually, it's easy to see why Apple might want to give Facebook preemo placement in iOS -- it's not rocket science. The average Internet user spent 12.3 percent of his or her time online at Facebook in 2010 -- that's about one out of every eight minutes -- according to ComScore. Another metric: U.S. Internet users spent an average 6 hours and 23 minutes on Facebook in April 2011, says Nielsen. AOL Media Network was a distant second with average 2 hours 33 minutes. From the perspective of where people spend most of their time -- and looking at everybody else trying to align with Facebook somehow -- it would be easy to see Apple doing the same.
But Apple and Facebook actually have several conflicting strategic objectives, and their platforms are juxtaposed. Apple wants to push users' content to the device, whereas Facebook wants to pull content to the cloud. The differences will be starker when Apple rolls out iCloud, presumably concurrently with iOS 5 and iPhone 5 in the Fall. Contrary to some Net punditry and commentary, iCloud is not an online storage service. It is fundamentally a synchronization service, using the cloud to help Apple customers better manage their content on iOS and Mac OS X devices.
User-generated content is important to both companies, but in dramatically different ways that create, in some respects, incongruous customer priorities. Apple wants user content flowing freely among the devices it sells, while Facebook's priority is content going into the service -- and not easily coming out. Apple and Facebook also seek to lock in customers through necessary utility, but the means are different and largely incompatible. Facebook locks in customers through relationships (where friends, family and anyone else hang online) and access to content, which goes easily into the social network but comes out with greater difficulty -- if at all. Apple wants content to flow freely (at least among devices running its operating systems). Synchronization, and the convenience of it, will hold Apple customers.
Platform Competitors
Another difference in priorities: Apple makes the majority of its revenue from selling hardware -- 90 percent during fiscal 2011 second quarter, based on the quarterly report. By comparison, Facebook derives the majority of its revenue from advertising and cloud services. As such, the companies' revenue -- and, related, customer content -- priorities couldn't be more different. Twitter's revenue model is also content in the cloud, but with stark differences to Facebook, one of the more important being platform approach.
In a September 2007 post at Microsoft Watch, I explained how Facebook is more like Windows than it is cloud platforms/services like Google:
Facebook is not a Web 2.0 operation; rather it's more like Desktop 1.0 than Web 2.0. Since May [2007], when Facebook opened up to outside developers, the service increasingly has morphed into an Internet operating system. Like Windows, Facebook is an enclosed platform, and one where people can install applications, post and share digital content and communicate with friends, families or others in ways they might do with Windows on PCs...Facebook and Google both take platform approaches, but Facebook's way is more like Windows than Web 2.0.
In the post, I described Facebook as an "operating system in the clouds." Nearly four years later, little has changed. Developers write applications for Facebook's largely closed cloud OS. Whereas, Apple developers create apps for iOS and Mac OS X running on devices. From a platform perspective, Apple and Facebook are competitors. Yes, there is mutual benefit from the Facebook app, but from platform and app development perspectives, the companies are competitors. The developer incentives are different, too -- Apple's revenue sharing being the major one and the number of Facebook app developers using the social service to mine data and target customers being others.
Twitter is not an applications platform, per se. That may change in the future. But Twitter is unlikely to become anything like Facebook, which is more a closed community. Twitter is more open from the perspective of APIs and design.
It's All About Status
Facebook and Twitter do share something important in common that makes tweeter-dee more attractive to Apple than Like-dum: Status. Both services are really about status -- what people are doing, where they are doing it and with whom. Facebook and Twitter provide tools for sharing photos and videos about these engagements and relationships. Twitter restricts sharing to 140 characters and uses more of a broadcast model, where people chose to subscribe to someone rather than join their network as friend. Facebook's relationship approach is more exclusive. Twitter's is not.
Apple can provide its customers the benefits of status, essentially using Twitter as part of a social networking framework, without taking on Facebook baggage and becoming dependent on a growing competitor for customers' time and content. Twitter setup will be part of iOS 5 settings and allow iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users to tweet from Google Maps, Safari, YouTube and other apps; the camera and photo library, too. Twitter becomes the important social status mechanism for iOS, also providing location information and offering integration between @ Twitter users and the devices' contact list. Some of this capability is available today from the Facebook app. It will be pervasive within iOS 5 for Twitter.
Still, some analysts, bloggers journalists or other commentators will insist that Apple really needs Facebook, if for no other reason than time online. Poppycock. For all the time people spend online at Facebook during any given month, they spend so much more time on their iOS or Mac OS X device(s). I don't need analyst data to quantify it. If you're an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch user, ask yourself how much time you spend per day on the device(s). For some people, it's more than 6 hours and 23 minutes a day!
From that vantage point, Apple's priority is clear: Maximize the customer experience on its devices rather than look to Facebook benefits, which are sufficient enough with the social service's iOS app.
Perhaps Apple will in the future embrace Facebook like it plans to with Twitter in iOS. I sure hope not.
Japan recreates the sensation of buttons on a touchscreen phone
Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI is developing a smartphone which can accurately recreate the sensation of using physical buttons on a touch panel.
Using fingers to swipe, press and flick to perform certain actions on touchscreens is a new and easy way to interact with devices. The problem with it, however, is that the glass is unresponsive and doesn’t provide any feedback to the user, which makes it hard to tell if they have already selected a button. Even though some devices offer simple Haptic vibrations to notify input, it is still practically impossible to touch-type.
The new clicking function is achieved by a combining a vibration function and a pressure sensor in a Haptic touch panel. When users input letters, in addition to the visual feedback, they now get a feeling of having pushed something. KDDI claims that it actually feels as if you are touching or moving across buttons, and if you press lightly, you get a stronger clicking feeling as you select an application.
Japanese operator demonstrates real-time, automatic translation service
While people around the world have been struggling to learn foreign languages, Japanese operator NTT Docomo just demonstrated a cloud-based automatic interpretation service that interprets voice in real-time.
During the demo, the Docomo staff read a newspaper article in Japanese, which is then interpreted to English in real-time, which is to a receiving device. It was made possible by integrating of a range of the best existing technologies from around the world – such as voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis.
Voice recognition and translation accuracy is still not 100% but the level of inaccuracy is pretty much acceptable. Docomo plans to recruit people to monitor the service and offer it on a trial basis within the year.
Seagate Unveils Wireless Mobile Storage and iOS App
Even with a 64 GB iPad, I find myself wishing I had more storage at my disposal for my iOS mobile devices. My home media collection is probably in the terabyte range thanks to extensive digital backups of disc-based media, and though remote streaming is sometimes an option, it isn’t an ideal solution. Hence the idea behind Seagate’s new GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage.
The 500 GB portable hard drive wirelessly connects to any Wi-Fi enabled mobile device, and can be used to store music, movies, pictures and documents of various types. iOS users can then access that media using a free companion app from the App Store designed specifically for use with the GoFlex hardware. If you’re using an Android or other device, you can access your media using a web browser. The GoFlex Satellite can stream media to up to three devices at a time (great for family road trips), has a battery life of 5 hours of continuous streaming (or 25 hours in standby mode) and retails for $199.99.
This is a smart device for a mobile world where continuous cloud-based streaming of multimedia content simply isn’t a realistic possibility yet. Connection quality can degrade remote streaming experiences, and bandwidth caps mean that any significant streaming could result in costly overages. The GoFlex provides local Wi-Fi streaming, so no connection to a remote server is necessary, and changes in signal quality shouldn’t be an issue. Plus, you’re not using your phone’s data plan, either.
Prospective buyers should be wary of two things: media has to be in a format that your iOS device can read natively, and if you’re using the browser-based media player on an Android or other device not made by Apple, streaming doesn’t seem to work so smoothly as of yet based on early reviews. Still, if you’re an iOS device owner who finds themselves running up against either storage or bandwidth limits fairly often, and who also consumes a lot of media, this is probably a pretty good investment.
Anyone have better/more sophisticated suggestions for those looking for a portable media server device?
