We are surrounded with so much information that we need somehow help. We need tools and applications which are tailored to us, that know what we like and what we want (and what we do not like and do not want!).

“Personalization the most important part of Google’s expansion“, stated Google CEO Eric Schmid. Using the keywords we look for in Google, the websites we visit, the people we know it becomes quite easy to have a picture of who we are and what our interests are.

Greg Linden, the person that contributed to the recommendation system of Amazon has an interesting blog. Interesting is also his findory website, a site which provides personalized news.

You can now have also recommendations using bittorrent thanks to tribler.

And so on and on…

Yahoo research has just hired two scientist experts in social networks, Dr. R. Preston McAfee and Dr. Duncan Watts. I found this news through this post at search engine land

I know Watts’works. He is the author of several articles on social network analysis and the small world phenomenon. He has written also two books, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness and Six Degrees.

Duncan has also co-athored The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, a book written with two other world known experts in networks dynamics, Barabasi and Newman.

Barabasi has written the popolar book, Linked.

Mark Newman and Duncan Watts are both part of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.

If you are a sportman and you train seriously, you also have to monitor your training activities, health condition and performance.

In this field you can choose one of the leading devices and wristwatches made by:

• Polar
• Suunto
• Frwd technologies

These devices allow you to store data concerning the performance and conditions achieved in your sport activities. The data can then be downloaded in the computer and analyzed. Nowadays, the information that can be obtained are quite amazing.

The information include:

• GPS coordinates
• hearth rate
• distance
• altitude
• barometric pressure
• and many others

It is not by accident that all these innovations come from Finland. A country that spends heavily in research and at the same time has an exemplary welfare state. If you want to know more on how this can happen, see The Information Society and the Welfare State by Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen.

An interesting demo of Photosynt, presented last year at Web 2.0 conference by Gary Flake (director of Microsoft Live Labs) .

Another technology to take a look into, Sea Dragon.

The Nokia beta labs homepage has just been created. The scope is to provide novel applications for the mobile domain and get feeback from users.

There are only a few applications at the moment but some worth a try. For example, the Sport tracker has been ideated at the Nokia Research Center and now it has found a place to show how mobile devices can be used for many different purposes. You can export your training session routes in kml format and open them with Google Earth!

The idea of Sport tracker can ulteriorly be extended by adding services and/or additional sensors. For example, we could use wireless (Bluetooth) heart monitors like in Betelgeuse or we could add external third party services, like the Polar Personal Trainer.

In Nokia devices, you can write applications using J2ME, Python, and Symbian C++. Mobile devices can use external web services using simple HTTP GET and POST methods following the REST architectural style.

In summary, the possibilities in the area of mobile applications and services are infinite, only our creativity is needed.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it, Alan Kay

An easy way to backup and synchronize our data is to use the Unix command rsync. It is easy, it is fast and it works also under windows, just install cygwin.

When the data source is stored on the C drive and the backup directory is on the e drive.
You can use a command (from command line) like this:

rsync -i -v -a –delete ~/photos/ /cygdrive/e/backup/photos >> /cygdrive/e/backup/photos-rsync.txt

If you want to know more, just check Jilles´post.

A mobile phone is always with us. It has information about our location, it contains a lot of data about ourselves, such as pictures, music, the phonebook with the list of our friends, etc. Adding external sensors is also possible. We can connect external Bluetooth devices and add for example, a GPS device, sensors to measure the temperature, to misure our heart-bit, etc. The range of applications and the study that can be done using this platform are infinite and it is possible right now, not in the future.

I just would like to highlight one nice application, BeTelGeuse, developed at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).
With this application is possible to add a GPS device, a ECG monitor, and many other sensors. It is written in Java and the source code is available. A very good work!

Godel, Escher, Bach is a brilliant book. Now, Douglas R. Hofstadter, has just released a new book, I Am a Strange Loop, a must read.

Other interesting books:

The Computational Beauty of Nature, of Gary Flake. Flake was in NEC labs, then Yahoo research and he is now Director of Microsoft Live Labs.

The Quark and the Jaguar, written by the nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann. A nice video of one of his tallks from Google Eng Series.

Software in mobile phones is becoming more and more complex. Errors and bugs express this complexity. Fortunately, we can now update the software, correct the problems and in some cases add functionalities. Not for all models but the latest Nokia mobile phones offer this possibility.

Check Nokia – Phone software update.

Google scholar is a great tool to find scientific publications.
However, Google also offers lectures given in their labs about many and various interesting topics to a wider audience.
It is possible to see these videos from Google Video.

There are two series I am aware of, the Google engEdu Series and the Authors@Google Series.