Technology Trends Talk at TiE Chennai

I gave a talk on Technology Trends and Gleaning Opportunities at TiE Chennai today. It was gratifying to hang out with the participants and swap stories. I just uploaded a copy of the presentation (in PDF format). Here is the link -  technology-trends-jun2008

I also uploaded a copy on slide-share. Here is the link to the presentation.

I would love to hear from you. I am going to keep updating this presentation and incorporate suggestions. I am also planning to spend some time expand my list as well as tools for tracking trends.

Invitation to Python Developers from Guido

Thanks to @reddit here is the invitiation (dated May 1, 200

I'm inviting the Python developer community to try out the tool on the
web for code reviews. I've added a few code reviews already, but I'm
hoping that more developers will upload at least one patch for review
and invite a reviewer to try it out.

To try it out, go here:

    http://codereview.appspot.com

LinkLog: Cool Mashups

It took a while for me to get back to my Google reader. I was going through the list of mashups from Programmable Web  and here is what I found.

Complete Schools

Education reference site based on US Department of Education data embedded with Yahoo Answers to deliver relevant questions and answers about colleges and universities in the United States.

The really cool thing  about this mashup is that I discovered a bunch of other “Answers” applications, notably one for Facebook.

Trendite

Aggregates search trends from Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz. A complete list of the trends is supplemented by Google Search Results, Blog Search Results, News Results, Image Results, Book Results, Yahoo Search Results, and MSN Live Search Results.

Mashup of LinkedIn Questions and Answers 

This is a RSS feed that contains mashup of Linkedin Questions RSS feed and Linkedin Answers published on the Linkedin website.

Search Exploder

This uses two Yahoo pipes chained together. The first searches a default list of RSS feeds for terms you provide. The results are processed and an extra link is added that calls a pipe to run a Yahoo Search to give more details about the article topic.

It is a cool Yahoo pipes app.  There is a great idea in it somewhere. I can imagine some interesting possibilities with some recursion thrown in.

Pipelicious

A mashup of del.iciou.us tags with a Yahoo Pipe containing aggregated results from Blogger, Technorati Google Blog Search and several others. Click on a tag to see what people in the blogosphere are saying about that topic today

Does sound delicious (no pun intended). One of the coolest mashups I have seen in a while. I just wish it had a language filter so that I can see just English language blogs.

Knowledge Maps

I was browsing through facebook today (a facebook user visited my blog and I clicked on the incoming link to take a look). I found moneylet, a social bookmarking site for financial news. There was an item on Forbes report on the wealthiest men. More interesting, there was a of Knowledge Map of Warrren Buffet. Unfortunately, you can view these only on Internet Explorer.

Knowledge Maps are a special application of Mindmaps. While I have seen and used mind maps before, I have not seen this particular product. IntellectSpace provides a free trial and your own way to create and share Knowledge Maps on the web. The Intellispace seems to be a cut above simple mind maps. It has several features. You can filter entities and relationships and navigate and browse nodes in the map.

How do you build a knowledge map? Here are a few thoughts.

• Manually - Take all the facts and enter them into a mind mapping tool (define nodes types, connection types)
• Semi-Automatic - Generate a wiki mind map from a wiki (like Media Wiki) and annotate or modify the map
• Automatic - This may be in the future. It requires the ability to map concepts, links and additional semantics (how do you recognize people, places, things)? Microformats and Semantic Web technologies (like GRDDL) may help here.

I wonder what the next step in the evolution of these maps would be? Social Knowledge Maps? Seems like a cool Social Networking Application waiting to happen. Imagine the ability to generate a Knowledge Map and let people share and improve it. For that we may need something more than a drawing tool. Some kind of meta language for knowledge maps may be useful.

SketchCast: Value vs Complexity in Product Development

Here is a nice sketchcast on Value vs Complexity.  I took the liberty of altering the title a bit.

Here is a teaser screen capture from the original.

Got this from Jon’s blog entry on PodScreenMathSlideSketchCasting.

A few really nice sketchcasts from sketch basement.

Tools for Building Semantic Applications

Simile is probably one of the coolest projects which simplifies how you can use Semantic technologies. An easy starting point is Exhibit:

a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

I have been looking at Simile for a while and more recently at TimeLine. So I was happy to read the Interview with David Karger, a professor at MIT and a Principal Investigator on the Simile Project at Dr.Dobb’s Journal. A few fragments from the interview:

One of the hardest problems is how much variety there is in the data. Traditional libraries solved the problem by mapping all the catalog data into one standard form. That won’t work in the face of this new tidal wave of information.

How can you see the connections between the results from separate sources — e.g., that a book from MIT talks about a painting at the Getty? It’s unlikely the site owners have coordinated their collections to fit together, so how can they be mashed up after the fact? Historically, the only answer has been to do lots of special-purpose systems engineering. But given the exploding variety of collections and usages of them, we need a different answer now.

The Web has been incredibly successful at making huge amounts of new information available to many people. But it still has a long way to go in depth and breadth. Regarding depth, there’s plenty of awareness of the “deep web” — stuff that doesn’t show up on the web search engines because it is buried in special-purpose databases. We think some of our tools can help bring that information to light. As for breadth, while the Web has made it much easier for people to contribute textual information through tools like blogs and wikis, it’s still not really possible for the lay person to contribute rich structured information collections. We think our tools can dramatically lower the barriers for a broader group of contributors to share the rich structured content they know.

We are looking at Exhibit and playing a bit with TimeLine for a couple of our projects.

Little Innovations: Math Lab in Your Cell Phone

From ZDNet’s Emerging Technology Trends

Israeli scientists have decided to put a math lab in your pocket. They developed a library of math modules which can be installed on almost cell phones available today. So you’ll be able to see graphs or solve equations on your phone while on a train or a bus ride. You’ll also be able to send graphs or formulas by SMS to other students — and to send the results of your exercises to your teacher.

This may just be the beginning. With cameras, ability to play flash, SMS and GPRS, these may become the new devices for augmenting learning.

Wiki Mind Map

I just discovered Wiki Mind Map on LifeHacker. I tried a couple of maps. It is a cool way to visually browse information from Wikipedia. It may be a nice tool for presenting information, as well. You can click on the link and see the new mindmap of the topic or head over to the wikipedia page. Links are specially marked.

Here is a map of The Semantic Web .It takes a bit of time to draw but worth the wait.

And another map of Mathematics. I just clipped part of it for display here.

Using Concept Map as an Assessment Tool

I am currently building a learning portal and a few courses. Our motto is Learning by Doing. So the courses do not have a lot of material. A set of projects and the skill requirements for each project. We point to some good sources of information - tutorials, documents, wikis, videos on the web. Our core value addition is the mentoring and guiding students with a set of challenging projects. We plan to turn some of those implementations into open source products ultimately.

To do well, students need to understand the core concepts and how they are inter-related. They also need to associate each feature with modules that implement features. A typical assessment may consist of a quiz, a test, asking students to write some text.

I have been toying around with the idea of asking the students to draw a map of concepts and associations. After each lesson the student would develop a concept map using an open source tool made available. This will not only tell us what they thought the major concepts were, but also find what most of them missed. Will help tune the content a bit or add more examples.

I wonder whether any one tried this. Any input, thoughts, comments will be greatly appreciated.

Cool Tools/Resources - May 5th 2007

I changed the title from Cool Tools for the web to broaden it a bit and include the date in the title.

Wink - Tutorial and Presentation Creation Software
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
People Search
This is a great way to search for people. If you want to know more about them, check out ZoomInfo too. I only wish they added another field to the search where you can add keywords in addition to name, city etc.

listible - list of web 2.0 products and services
They call it a complete list. I would say “comprehensive list”. Some of the resources listed here come from this list.

Rolobiz - link to your contact information
Make your business cards as vcard to work for you and be remembered by your peers. Your business cards will not go wasted anymore. I like the idea of creating one card and keeping links to it everywhere. vcard is a good choice since it can also be imported/exported from/to several popular address books. But then there is FOAF which in addition to getting your contact information, can also provide a friends network.

Wikibooks
a Wikimedia project that was started on July 10, 2003 with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Since our founding, volunteers have written about 25,219 modules in a multitude of textbooks.