The end?

This blog was maintained as part of my masters degree course, which is now completed. As such there won't be any new posts appearing here.

However the existing posts have links to some interesting content so I'm going to leave them up for posterity. :)

IBM - The Internet of Things

Apologies for the lack of content over the last month. I'm in the final month of lectures in college and I'm up the walls with assignments.

This is a nice video from IBM talking about how data can be used to improve our daily lives by using the internet as a kind of central nervous system for the planet. It's worth a watch. If you want to see more stuff like this visit IBM's A Smarter Planet blog.

TisMe.com

Apologies for the lack of content recently. Since the start of the new college term I've been very busy with assignments, one of which is a mock-up of website I had to produce for one of my courses IS6116 Programming for Web Applications and Services.

The mock-up can be viewed at this link. The site is little more than a facade at the moment, with limited functionality due to the fact that we were only allowed to use client-side scripting for this phase of the project. The javascript for the login and registration work but they're not linked to anything yet and won't store any information.

The next phase of the project will involve using PHP to give the site more functionality with server-side scripting.

I'd welcome any feedback or comments.

Web 3.0

I came across a ZDNet blog post a couple of days ago that featured a nice video on Web 3.0. It's an interesting and concise explanation of how the agents might work and, at just under 4 minutes long, it's well worth a look.

Google Data Centre

I was looking over some material for an assignment for one of my masters modules, EE6162 Telecommunications Technologies and Applications, and I remembered a video I saw on Google's data centres. It's an interesting video featuring a tour of a one of these data centres and an explanation how some of the technology works.

Nexus One

The Guardian has an interesting article on Google's upcoming Nexus One smartphone.

It looks pretty cool. I'd be eager to try it out if and when it's released here.

e-Books Outsell Hard Copies on Christmas Day

I came across an article through Digg claiming that e-books outsold hard copy books on Amazon on Christmas day.

I bought a Sony Reader recently so I've been keeping an eye on developments with e-books. Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading The Long Tail, and there's a lot of material in the book on the advantages of digital distribution for retailers. It'll be interesting to see whether this was just an anomaly or the beginning of a move towards consumers buying e-books more than hard copies.

Calais

I've been doing some research for a report I have to do on the semantic web and I came across this ZDNet blog post on how Oracle will be offering support for Thomson Reuter's Calais service. Calais is a service that generates semantic metadata. It looks interesting and the site is worth a visit.

This video gives a brief overview of the service.

No Bricks-and-Mortar Stores for Amazon

I posted earlier in the week on Amazon's plan to open bricks-and-mortar stores. Silicon Republic carried a story on Tuesday reporting that Amazon have made an offical denial in response to the Sunday Times article.

It's too bad that this doesn't seem to be going ahead - it would have been interesting to see how opening bricks-and-mortar stores would have impacted on their business model.

Murdoch vs. Google - Sunday Business Show/Wall Street Journal

Today FM's Sunday Business Show had a short piece yesterday on Rupert Murdoch's conflict with Google.

The whole show is nearly an hour long so you may want to skip forward to the relevant bit at around 54 minutes in. (The first few minutes might be worth a listen too, because Amazon gets a mention in the show's investment advice section.)

They refer to a Wall Street Journal article that Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote during the week outlining his take on the future of media (interestingly, the WSJ is owned by Murdoch).