All I have to say is cool – geo stuff is just getting down right sexy. This news from Yahoo at Where 2.0 today about adding yet more geo tools to its line up. Why? Cause geo anything is the new frontier. By making this API Placemaker, Yahoo wants to open up the deep geo web – moving from a web of pages to a web of objects.
Developers can feed Placemaker any kind of structured and unstructured data, including feeds and web pages, and the app will analyze the text and extract location data from it. This enables tagging of content with location data and creates hyper-local products based on this data. This opens the door to maturing geo targeted advertising which makes everyone happy.
So we
finally got the chance to talk with Mans Adler, the uber-talented Swede behind
Bambuser.
Tattletech: Bambuser – what is it? It sounds like something you would get from the Flintstones.
Mans Adler: Bambuser is a service that gives the user the opportunity to stream live video from a mobile phone or web-cam to the web by using EDGE, 3G or WiFi network.
The simplicity of the application and the unlimited mobility gives you the opportunity to instantly share your experiences with your viewers and the extremely low latency enables interaction with the audience through the web-to-mobile chat.
To add even more context to the live-stream, we’ve added Real-time Geo-tagging that is enabled via cell-id or GPS. Bambuser has users in more than 100 nations.
In Swedish, bambuser is an old word which if directly translated would mean a sailor which only manage to do easier tasks. Meaning that bambuser should be so simple that even my grandmother could do it. But also mobile on the seven seas.
TT: There is a lot of competition out there for live broadcast streaming from the mobile, what is going give you legs and keep you around in the long term?
MA: Bambuser have developed a slightly different technology compared to our competitors, our untraditional way of sending the data makes us keep latency down to only a second. Our competitors many times can have a latency of 30-40 seconds. But thats just technology, what is interesting with keeping latency down is the magic of real-time – INTERACTIVITY and a feeling of presence. As I always use to say it is hard to be present in history. When you stay with low latency people can actually communicate in a meaningful way. Just ask yourself how easy it is to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the globe with a 3-4 second delay.
TT: The idea for Bambuser was tucked away from your childhood, can you tell us that story?
MA: When I grow up my best friend moved from
Sweden to indonesia since his father had to work there. I was about 4 and even though I am smart I hadn’t learned to write just yet, but I still wanted to stay in touch with my best friend. Calling was heavily expensive, so that was not an alternative. But back then the postal service in Sweden had a magic service, you recorded stuff on a little yellow cassette tape and put that in an yellow envelope and send it across the world. My friend then listened to my side of the tape and then recorded an answer on the other side and sent it back to me. The iteration took about a month and the half an hour of recording was filled with me and him singing songs and a lot of illogical chatter but it didn’t matter that the content was meaningless cause it gave me that feeling of presence. I felt Petter, my friend’s name, was close to me even though he was geographically on the other side of the planet.
TT: We have seen telecommunications change so much in the past 10 years alone with one constant need to connect, where do you see the future?
MA: I cannot say that much about the future without looking back into history. I think Jeff Bezos have a great point when he talks about our belief in bringing light back in the 19th century actually we did something else, we actually brought electricity. We have only seen the first days of the web and we do not have any clue of where it will be taking us. Our technology will only enforce our basic needs as human beings and that is wonderful. I think together with many other that the next revolution will be in biology. Connect your cells to the web and magic will happen, we just need to figure out some good interface between the cell and its wireless communication.
TT: So you always have a smile on your face and a positive outlook on everything you talk about – what’s up with that?
MA: Maybe it is my different approach to life and my belief in freedom of choice. I read a philosopher called Spinoza (Einstein’s favorite) once. His philosophy is based upon that we do not ourselves have freedom of choice but that every choice you make is made for the best of everything. It is a great comfort to have knowing that every decision you make is made for the best for everything otherwise that choice wouldn’t be possible. Also I am living the dream of my life and I love it.
TT: Let’s talk about nuts — in your opinion, what’s the king of all nuts?
MA: All those people talking about how you should do stuff and they havent done jack shit themselves. It is like listening to the second straight hour of lecture from the expert in how often we need to have a break which is about every half an hour. It just does not make sense it is nuts.
I really don’t like voice mail. It’s annoying. This recent article in Slate said exactly what i have been saying at parties, over cocktails, when my mom leaves really long messages about Aunt Betty who was married to Uncle Peter and what they did at Saturday Steak dinner night.
Which is why I love Google Voice -basically it gives you one number that connects all your phones and lets you be the boss about who can call which phone when. Again, with Choice! These companies today are giving us users choice – oh my god! Long gone are the days when we gotta take cause that is ATT made us do.
It’s only in the US now and I live in Europe so I can’t access it all the time, but I hear through the grapevine that they are working on this. I normally don’t get up and do a little dance about anything Google does, but this time, I am dancing baby. See me dance.
Tags: Google Voice, GrandCentral, Telephony
If you have a blog, then you know about comment spam. If you are anything like us here at Tattletech, you must hate it as much as we do. Imagine if you are SonyBMG who manages celebrity websites or if you are an online news service or news paper. A reporter posts a great article on discovering some scrolls in the Dead Sea and the comments that accompany the story are about Viagra and other enhancements, profanity and maybe some unrecognizable characters. That reduces the quality of the article and devalues the comments of your community, costing you advertising due to lost eyeballs.
But even if I am not SonyBMG or the NY Observer, but I run a tech news blog (like I do) and I have to spend all my time reading ridiculous moderator que of spam that obviously should have been dumped before it even got there. It takes up so much time and reduces the quality of these fine editorial exposes if there is spam from a Russian night club in the story about the FCC.
Imagine spam protection that is just plain smarter than what’s out there now — comment spam protection that learns from its mistakes improving its accuracy all the while catching more obvious spam so you don’t have to spend extra time in the moderator window reviewing spam that obviously should have just been removed.
We found it - Mollom.
There are a lot of reasons why Mollom is the next generation for spam protection, but one main reason is that the people that created it came from Drupel which should tell you about the quality of the product they have made. API’s that are maintained by experts, not Joe Random when he feels like it. The product is technically superior to anything out there and is built with the future of the semantic web in mind. They also have a commercial model that currently protecting some big publishing SonyBMG, NY Observer, FastCompany, IDG, JupiterMedia to name a few. Bottom line? Smarter, more accurate and easy to use moderator tools increase the quality of UGC online.
It’s your choice too — with WordPress they automatically make you use their product, Akismet. You don’t even know you are using it and its not as accurate or as easy to use as Mollom is. We like choice – we think it’s choice is a good thing. You can download the plugin for WordPress here.
Did we mention that it’s free too?
Tags: Dries Buytaert, Drupel, Mollom
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