iCrowds » technology http://www.icrowds.net The intelligence of Crowds put to work Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:58:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Personal, very personal http://www.icrowds.net/2007/12/personal-very-personal/ http://www.icrowds.net/2007/12/personal-very-personal/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:08:43 +0000 Martijn Kriens http://www.iCrowds.net/social-networks/personal-very-personal/ Personal

This morning I wrote about social networking and all the good things it may bring us. Stay in contact, meet old friends and things like that. After that I received this email from plaxo. One of my freinds, John will have his birthday on December 14th. Nice to get a reminder (I am terrible at reminding things like that) but where will this bring us? My first idea was: hey we could automate this and send the card by itsel so you will never forget another birthday. I can imagine being called by a friend: He Martijn, thanks for your card. Me: What card, what for?

I wonder where this will lead us …

And John, in case I forget: happy birthday …. :-)

]]> http://www.icrowds.net/2007/12/personal-very-personal/feed/ 0 Some things never change http://www.icrowds.net/2007/10/some-things-never-change/ http://www.icrowds.net/2007/10/some-things-never-change/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:18:36 +0000 Martijn Kriens http://www.iCrowds.net/uncategorized/some-things-never-change/ Some times it surprises me in a way how little things have changed. This week we had our network event where many of our customers join us for dinner and some interesting conversations. This time we organized it in the museum of communication. Before the meeting they gave a short tour and showed us an old telephone switchboard. You know, where they had to connect phone calls by wiring connections by hand.

Funny thing is , there were two features that already existed for a long time: voicemail and teleconference. When somebody was not reachable you could leave a message at the operator who would call the person at a later time. Also creating a teleconference call was easy but just wiring the different connections together. Pretty impressive 8-) .

Other functions that caught my attention: they checked if a line was busy by touching the connection in the switchboard with a plug: when they saw a small spark the connection was busy. Connecting somebody from Groningen to Maastricht worked a bit like a router through gateways: they connected to the next switchboard, they connected to the next switch board etc. Pretty failsafe since switches could easily fall while other routes could still be used. Though it did take half an hour to setup this connection, more than 8 hours for a foreign connection…

]]> http://www.icrowds.net/2007/10/some-things-never-change/feed/ 0 First life in 3D http://www.icrowds.net/2007/06/first-life-in-3d/ http://www.icrowds.net/2007/06/first-life-in-3d/#comments Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:09:18 +0000 Martijn Kriens http://www.iCrowds.net/tech/first-life-in-3d/ Sometime you see a piece of technology that really takes your breath away. A friend of mine, Maarten Vos, sent met this link about a lab site from Microsoft (yeah, they bought the company and technology …). Think of this in combination with Google Earth. Somehow they are capable of mapping all the flickr images in real world 3D about an area make them browsable based on location and point of view. Play a bit with it and you will be flabbergasted.

It is fascinating to see how more and more content is searchable based on location. This is after all a fairly intuitive way of finding much of the content that surrounds us. I do not know how far they can go with this technology but I think it is pretty impressive.

I wonder what is next. Being able to track a person by mapping all the Holiday pictures tourists take all over the world?

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