The difference between a news feed and an inbox

Over the recent months, I've seen much confusion between the "news feed" and an "inbox".

I would like to write this down for everyone to prevent confusion in some cases.

The "news feed" aka "the wall" is supposed to relay information that might be useful but is not obligating.

Ignoring it or missing it shouldn't come with a punishment.

You can't show items that require actions on a newsfeed.

An inbox can show actionable items like "Contract with Siemens is about to expire according to sourcing-software".

The reason that an inbox can show this type, and a news feed can't, is that it has a read/unread/deleted status to each item.

These different statuses make the items manageable and insure that everything you receive is still there until you handle it.

That’s also exactly why news feeds are so convenient for non-obliging information.

Foldable eyeglasses PC

A foldable clamshell personal computer / cellphone that can also be worn as virtual reality glasses.

The design has two retractable ear-handles that make it wearable like a pair of eyeglasses.

It has two touch screens to control and view content.

Limit the size of private ownership in companies that are not exporters

One problem with capitalism is private companies getting to rich. Such companies become monopolies or cartels and damage competition and the openness of the market for new companies and initiatives.

An obvious solution would be to create a tax or a maximum size for a company or income for one person or company. The problem with this solution is that it scares of big companies from investing in the taxing country.

Limiting only natively local companies
What if we would only limit and tax the companies that are natively local and have to be that way?

Telecom providers for example are companies that provide a service for local customers only, they dont do allot to contribute to the GDP and the export surplus, and they won't go to invest elsewhere because there is always a local need for their service. Maybe there should even be a law that they must be owned by the public through stocks.

Companies that do export and develop (like handset manufacturers) on the other-hand, should be allowed to grow and have private major stock owners.

To sum it up: companies that get their earning mainly from export should be allowed to have a single stockholder and companies that don't export and are mainly service providers or importers should be owned by the public.

Did Scott Adams try to create a new religion in "God's debris"?

While reading God's Debris By Scott Adams I came to think that he might be trying to create a new religion.

It seems that the creator of Dilbert is obsessed with religion and how it controls humans, a feeling I can relate to. Many believe that religion and bible-like books are the effects of smart people trying to improve humanity with stories (give and you shall receive).

In the book, he makes a fairly believable connection between god and the big bang (hence, god's debris) to bridge the gap between religion and science and also between different religions (all religions are looking at the same thing from different viewpoints).

Some parts I was less enthusiastic about like the notion that evolution must appear in big jumps and does not, and so it might not be real. I don't think evolution must appear in big jumps, I think the opposite, many small changes lead to big changes over a long period of time. Wings appeared after years of jumping animals that jumped farther and farther thanks to bigger and bigger membranes under their arms and eventually became wings.

He adds touch of "How to win friends and influence people"  when he write things like "Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics." to teach us some good.

All and all its written very well, and might actually change some people's minds and do good.

You can read the book for free here: http://nowscape.com/godsdebris.pdf

I'll probably read the sequel: The Religion War (couldn't find a free version)

Bomb Crater Theory of Desk Organisation applied to email

Can the Bomb Crater Theory of Desk Organisation be applied to email management?

Just a thought.

Necklace cellphone

No more " are you happy to see me? or is that your smartphone? "

I think it's time for a smaller, less intrusive, less- "are you happy to see me? or is that your smartphone?" bulging devices.

The quick-and-dirty sketch below depicts a wearable cellphone that is worn as a necklace. It uses voice commands and a tiny-winy touchscreen.

When you want to use the earphones, you rappel the device upwards which tightens the grip on your neck and frees up some wire so that the earphones can reach your ears. The sound is fed to the earphones by two conductive connections located in an optimal length location along the wires which the device clicks in to when the wires slide thorough it.

---

a close up:

The power of stories

I am listening to "the black swan" where the power of narratives and their persistence in humanity's memory are mentioned quite a few times. This reminds me how much the means of delivering thoughts through stories are emphasized by both David Snowden and Igal Hamish. Then I suddenly realize that most of the ideas in this blog would have been immensely easier to explain and understand if the story of how I thought of them would be included.

From now on I'll try to add the story of origin to any new idea.

The idea of using lasers and reflective objects to see behind corners, for example, came to me when I was looking for my car in the parking lot. I looked at the tall turned off street light that was towering the cars. Then I wished I had its perspective, and I thought : "what if I could bounce a laser off of it to see from there?".


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:אהרונוביץ',Tel Aviv District,Israel

The Prime Directive solution to the Fermi Paradox

This is not an original idea, the Prime Directive solution to the Fermi Paradox can be noted as the Zoo hypothesis. I'm just emphasizing what I think is the best reason for setting the Prime Directive.

Fermi Paradox

How come we've never been contacted by aliens? The universe is so big and old, that statistically, some civilization must have already developed the ability of star-travel.

Prime Directive

Never interfere with younger civilizations (from star trek).

The best reason for setting the Prime Directive

As far as I know, any contact between an advanced civilization and a native one in human history has always been disastrous to the native civilization (see: Chronology of colonialism).

The prospected visitors to earth have probably experienced these types of contacts within their planet before achieving interstellar travel. Hence, came to the conclusion that contacting less advanced civilizations can only hurt them.

Therefore, they set a rule (a "prime directive") to never contact less advanced civilizations.

Using lasers and reflective objects to gain urban warfare advantage

Imagine a handheld device with an advanced laser imaging system. Multiple lasers will be shot form the device to a reflective object. The object will reflect the laser to an enemy which would not be see-able regularly because of no direct vision angle.

I presume that most surfaces are reflective in some way or another or we would not see them, the trick is to have a strong or "smart" enough laser to visualize the second reflected object.

Also, some of the light waves of the laser are reflected and some are diverted, it's a matter of reading the ones that got diverted and than reflected back.

Not sure this is optically possible...

The ultimate iPhone pizza app

I would like to have a smartphone app for ordering pizza which will be so easy and fast that all you would do is launch it and wait for a phone call from the pizza shop.

This is how it would go down:
1. You find the link to the app on the home screen.
2. You launch it.
3. The app identifies your location.
4. The app gets your phone number.
5. The app sends them both to the nearest pizza shop.
6. The nearest pizza shop calls you and gives you their offer.
7. You say ok and wait for your pizza.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Automatically offer to sell the things you buy the moment you buy them - a better use case for blippy

Blippy is a service which you can use to advertise what you buy. Every time you buy something, Blippy blips it (by monitoring your credit card) and sends it into your twitter stream.

The guys at Blippy should make a search engine for all the products bought by their users.

For example, a prospective buyer would go into the search engine and search for "Harry Potter". The results would show:

• "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" book
  (56 people own this - make an offer)
• "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" DVD
  (43 people own this - make an offer)

Once you click "make an offer" blippy will show you a text box to enter a price.

Then, an email will be sent to all users who have bought the book in the past:

Hi Danielle,
John would like to buy your "Harry Potter" book for 5$.
Click here to sell it to him.

Algorithms can decide when is the owner of an object more likely to sell a product based on past sales. e.g. send the email only to people who own a book for more than 2 months.

Self cleaning, treadmill-like carpet

Imagine a carpet attached to a treadmill-like contraption, every time you would want to clean it, you can just press a button and the lower part of the carpet would reveal itself.

In the meantime, the dirty lower part will be automatically cleaned beneath with soap and mechanical brushes.

Or... you can just buy a Roomba

Predictive navigation prefetching

It doesn't matter how fast internet connections and server technologies get, there will always be bottlenecks. Either too many people are hitting a website or too many people in your neighborhood are downloading torrents.

A browser plugin that prefetches links or "next websites" on a page based on popularity can highly improve the browsing experience.

There are prefetching clients like fasterfox but they arbitrarily prefetch all links on a given page.

If such a plugin could monitor browsing habits and store them on a "suggestion" server. A service could do statistic calculations about what is the most likely link to be clicked or what website will the user go to next. This can improve the benefit of prefetching. In two words: Intent Crowdsourcing.

monetization
Such a plugin can make money for its creator in two ways:
1. selling statistics to websites and web marketers about which pages on the web lead to which pages, essentially a walkthrough or a path guide for the web.
2. Create a suggestion mechanism that will tell users "most users browsed to this page after reading this article", and selling ads in-between the suggestions.

undermining google
Potentially, this feature can undermine google. A big percentage of Internet searches are performed after some thought was sparked from a previous page. For example, you happen to read about the winter olympics and suddenly you think "let's go on a skiing vacation", you go to google and do a search for "vacation reservation".
This plugin with it's suggestion feature can make the searching part irrelevant. If enough people did that search, you could see the suggestion: "Today, 75 people who read this article searched for 'skiing vacation' on google and clicked on the Third result: snowventures.com".

Time control

Past is documentation
Present is propaganda
Future is statistics


inspired by 1984

Virtual privacy penitentiary

Prison's goal is to separate criminals from society to protect people from them.

What if we could "protect without separate"?

What if instead of putting criminals behind bars we make them wear a "witness bracelet"? A hand worn electronic device that will record the wearers every move by GPS, every word they say via microphone and most things that they do with a video camera.

The convicted criminals will not be able to do any more crimes without being caught and the cost for the authorities will be much lower than a regular prison.

Monitoring doesn't have to be in real time, it can be retrospective, algorithmic or even saved as evidence only. The fact that everything that you do is recorded is intimidating enough as it is.

The key is that the punishment is loss of privacy instead of loss of freedom. This method doesn't have to be a substitute to incarceration, it can be an alternative, cheaper one, for less severe crimes.

Too much big brother?