Category: Techno-babble

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Facial Recognition For A Facebook Stalker

I ran across a program the other day called FaceLook that after thinking about it is really kind of creepy. It let’s you take a picture of someone’s face and then the program goes on to mine all the pictures of Facebook with tags to identify the person.

Think about that for a second. There are currently over 800 million users of Facebook and they’re predicted to hit one billion by August 2012. That’s an awful lot of people out there that a $1.99 app can look through. If you haven’t done so you might want to think about changing your privacy settings of your photos so that only friends can see them unless you want people to find out who you are and possibly start stalking you.

If you own a Mac and have iPhoto installed that has facial recognition built in that gets better the more you use it, but that’s different because you keep those photos to yourself [until the entrance of iCloud]. Now I don’t know this for sure, but [time for the tin foil hat] what if someone hacked into Apple’s iCloud or the government is allowed access to it?

iOS and Android devices just keep getting better and better as time goes on and the software people are writing for them is as well. We’ve got 8 megapixel cameras going into these little phones now and they shoot 720p video as well. I’ve been amazed at the quality of the video I’ve shot with my iPhone. Especially when I’m in a good position to hold it still enough.

They’ve already got an app called Action Movie that adds wickedly cool effects into movies shot on the iPhone or iPad that look very realistic [Car Smash and Missle Attack are my favorites]. So you never know what’s possible. Man was sent to the moon using a room full of computers that were slower and dumber than a smartphone. Now we throw birds at pigs. What will be possible in the future my scare you more than what’s out there to scare you today.

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Venmo: The App That Will Kill Paypal

Many of you know I have a bit of a hatred for PayPal after they banned me for running a raffle that I didn’t know wasn’t something you were supposed to do with them. They didn’t tell me to stop they just told me I was banned for life along with anyone in my house or anyone who ever will live in my house if I decided to sell it. A friend of mine turned me on to Venmo today and I have to admit, it’s much better than PayPal and will probably shut them down.

First thing is that they have some major funding for a startup and they don’t take a cut of your payment. They’ve said in the future they will from businesses, but that’s only to keep people like you and me from using it without having to lose money. They have iOS and Android apps so they cover a large amount of the smartphone hipster world.

People like me who work as freelancers and are pretty much off the grid so to speak can use this electronic form of payment to transfer money between clients and myself and the best part is when the client pays you don’t have the 3-5 day wait and charge like you do with PayPal, it’s an overnight transfer to your bank account. OK, that’s a really good start.

They are working with businesses so that you can pay them like you would with a credit card only you use your smartphone. Oddly enough it hooks you up with lots of social media so that it can broadcast to the networks when you’ve paid for something and/or charged someone for something. I’m not too keen on that, but you can turn that off easily.

Currently they are in an invite only mode, but if you want to give them a try go to their website and use the promo code selfmag1 and you’ll get in. I’m predicting this company which unfortunately for a tech company isn’t based int he Bay Area will grow quickly. They’ve got the killer apps that are free and they don’t charge you to exchange money. This is going to be a big game changer for me. I’ve been billing people when I do virtual work for them and it takes time to get the money. If I’m in person I’ll swipe their credit card with my Square app [which I also love] which is also cheaper than PayPal, but still there’s a charge. Now I can virtually bill people and collect money free of charge. That’s pretty cool to me and it’ll give me a little more bang for my bucks that I’m earning.

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Electric Charging Stations In San Francisco

I went to my local Walgreen’s today and got a surprise. They had a charging station for electric cars. This was a first for me as I didn’t know that we had any set up yet, but had heard of talk about them being installed. All of these are owned by a company called Chargepoint.net and they charge $3 per hour to charge your electric car. While this is a cool idea, I think that when you charge your car at home and have to pay somewhere around 25¢ per KWh the price is a bit steep.

I’m not sure how many KWh hours a typical car needs to be fully charged, but I’m sure it’s less than the $65 I currently pay to fill my car up every month [we rarely need to drive outside the Sunset District, so most of our trips are short.] I also can’t exactly see why if I’m mostly driving in the Sunset District that I would need to fill up my battery on a trip to Walgreen’s less than a mile from my house when on average electric cars get about 100 miles on a charge [quoting the Nissan Leaf].

I could see if you were driving from SF to someplace outside the city that was at least a 50 mile drive and needed to be there for a couple of hours that a system like this would work well. Say we take the family out in our electric car for a drive down to San Jose for a couple of hours then it would make sense to charge up the car before we drove home, but the way we drive we would be able to do it much cheaper at home.

As you can see from the photo the charging station doesn’t have a solar panel which would make it even more green. The electric car brigade is still in its infancy and needs some fine tuning still. They’ll need to work the bugs out over the next few years, but at least it’s a good start. While people who live in the Sunset know that sun and this part of the city do not go hand in hand solar panels would still be a good addition.

I like the idea that there is a push in this city towards being more green since after watching a show last night on Hong Kong that the breathing the air there is similar to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day that I like our air quality here and if there’s people trying to make it better I’m all for that.

We still have the problem that not all electric cars have the same hook up so just because there’s a charging station there doesn’t mean you can hook your car up to it. Nissan has teamed up with chargepoint.net so that’s great if you buy a Leaf, but not so good if you’ve bought a car that hasn’t teamed up with them.  There are still some kinks to be worked out, but I think this is a good start.

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Forgive Me Apple, For I Have Sinned

I try to talk about San Francisco things during the week, but with the release of Apple’s iOS 5 yesterday I learned a few things that Apple doesn’t tell you so I have to give them a smack today.

My wife is not an early adopter. She is still using Tiger just as my workplace is using. I knew iOS 5 was to be released yesterday and was notified yesterday morning that there was an update to iTunes. I figured this was a tie in with iOS 5 since you went through iTunes to update your iOS devices previously. At work, we have a strict IT department so that wasn’t possible, but when I heard the announcement that iOS 5 was finally released I tried to update, but had to wait until I got home.

I get home and plug in the iPhone and try to update and was informed that it was having trouble contacting the update server. So I tried again, and again, and again with no luck. I figured everyone was doing it so that was the problem. I did check the suggestions to get around this and finally checked for new software updates and low and behold there was an update to OSX 10.7.2. After installing that I found out that I could update my iPhone to iOS 5. The only problem is that my wife’s iPad is hooked up with her computer and she is wary of updating because for some reason she always finds something that goes wrong. Well, it turns out that she can’t update to iOS 5 until she upgrades to Lion. Now I also have friends with mac’s that can’t upgrade to Lion because they’re computers don’t meet the specs who also have an iPhone or iPad. They’re out of luck completely.

On the plus side I have to say that both Lion and iOS 5 are nice, but there isn’t much shockingly different at first look. I say this to people who aren’t early adopters that feel like they’re missing out, you’re not really. There are a few new cool things, but nothing majorly WOW. I have noticed a few problems also, well one problem and that’s with the move from MobileMe to iCloud. First when you try to transition to iCloud you’re told to log into me.com to start the transition. This is wrong. You go to iCloud.com and enter your MobileMe user name and password and that is what starts the transition. After I transitioned I’ve found that while iCloud gets the mail it keeps telling me that my password is wrong and I need to re-enter it. This could be from the fact that many people are changing over to iOS 5 that it’s putting a strain on their new server farm. Also as I am typing this for some reason Safari has started to automatically hide itself under 10.7.2.

While I don’t totally understand the #OccupyWallStreet phenomena that’s going on, if you’re not an early adopter of Lion I suggest it’s time to go down to your Apple store and #OccupyApple and make them fix the problem. Yes, I know you need to have Lion installed in order to use iCloud, but if you have a mac that doesn’t meet the specs for Lion and you’ve been using MobileMe as of June next year it will all disappear on you. Which means that in moving forward you’ll have to get a new mac and switch to iCloud to continue to use your mac.com or me.com email address and all the other new features. You will be as useless as a Newton in a short time.

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Blockboard: Know Your Neighborhood

An old friend of mine who I haven’t seen in probably close to 30 years, Ian Kallen contacted me a few months ago about an iPhone app he was working on called Blockboard. It’s a type of social networking app, but more micro-social networking that helps bring together people in your neighborhood. At the time they were focusing on the Mission District because that’s where they were started, but now they’ve expanded to cover all of San Francisco and are moving on to cover other cities.

What’s nice about the app is that it’s just more than a Howdy neighbor and then you get back to browsing the web or playing some game by Zynga. People in your neighborhood can actually post about things going on that could be anything from police reports, suspected illegal activities or local street fairs and meet up parties. I can honestly say that in all my time with twitter and Facebook I’ve hooked up with some old friends and we’ve talked about the old times, etc, but I’ve only met face to face with about maybe 20 of the close to 1000 people I’ve amassed between the two.

I’m going to start checking daily with blockboard now after I received an email from my twitter friend [who I’ve yet to meet] Bre Lambert of ScoutMob. She wrote to me to remind me that Blockboard is running a contest where five neighborhoods can win $5000 by getting 500 members to sign up. That money will go to fixing up things in the area, making improvements, etc. So now I’m making my pitch to get you to join up in the Sunset. Well, since I cover all of San Francisco you all should download the app and join up actually, but I’m always a little partial to the Sunset seeing as I live here.

Checking in this morning I also found there were coupon offers for local businesses in the area that you could take advantage of through blockboard. The app also appears to aggregate relevant blog postings and articles from the web about the neighborhoods of San Francisco. I was kind of surprised that many of my articles actually had links there that I didn’t have to share with them. I wouldn’t be surprised if this article shows up there.

As I said before, I’m going to be paying more attention to this app as it looks like it has real promise for the districts of San Francisco and I hope you check it out because with your help you’ll help bring about some change within the city better than a bunch of people clogging up the Financial District chanting.

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Steve Jobs R.I.P.

Yesterday evening I happened to take a look at twitter and got hit by a ton of bricks. Steve Jobs died, October 5th 2011. I kind of felt like I lost my breath for a second or two, but then I realized I had seen it coming, we all did. I’m almost certain that Steve took his last medical leave because he knew he didn’t have much time.

It’s odd that sometimes you learn more about people after they die than when they’re alive. Steve Jobs and Cupertino were coupled together like Brangelina, yet Steve was born in San Francisco. I didn’t know that until I read that after the fact. He was always the big keynote speaker at the MacWorld’s at Moscone Center. My funniest memory of MacWorld was getting an hour off work to go to MacWorld and because it was so big way back then I found myself stuck behind some slowly meandering idiot in front of me talking to a woman. To myself I’m thinking, get out of my way moron, I’ve only got an hour to see the whole place and then the moron turned his head…It was Steve Jobs. I had heard some pretty bad things about him such his dismissive behavior of fans yet I still blurted out, Mr. Jobs! and he turned around. I just said Thank you and extended my hand thinking for a second that he might possible give me a smirk and turn and walk away. He extended his hand shook it and smiled at me.

That was my entire extent of meeting Steve Jobs. I quickly walked around him and continued on with the rest of MacWorld. I figure I got my 15 seconds of Steve Jobs and that was much more than most people got. I have always been a Mac evangelist even though I’ve never worked for Apple. If you think back to the year 2000 and how life was you may remember things were a little different. Mp3 were just coming on the scene, but there wasn’t any way to organize them. There was no iTunes or iPods. There was no super fast gigaflop G4 computers yet. No iPhones, iPads or Apple TV. Airport were around to offer WiFi, but wouldn’t get extreme for another three years. We did have the sleek all black powerbook that had a clock speed of 400Mhz that was fast for the time, but it didn’t have the power anywhere near my iPhone 4 does today. By comparison, my stove was purchased in the late 70’s and if we were to purchase a new one today it wouldn’t be too much different.

When Steve returned to Apple in 1996 things changed. He became an iconic figure to the company that was parodied on numerous television shows, Saturday Night Live being one of the funniest where he was shown giving a keynote speech as if he were a God.We have to remember something though, while Steve built the first Apple computer along with Woz, he wasn’t building and designing so much as time went on at Apple. He may have inspired others to come up with the designs and if you look now Apple has people like Jon Ive and Phil Shiller and Tim Cook who will inspire those at Apple to continue when Steve left off. Apple will continue in the manner Steve intended it to because he picked the right people to lead the company.

Oh, and I last thing…

I’m sure we’ll all warm up to Tim Cook almost as much Steve, we just need to give it some time.

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I’ve been nominated for the SF Weekly Web Awards!

Yes, yesterday I received an email from SF Weekly’s web editor Jake Swearingen informing me that I have been nominated by them for the Best Local Politics Blogger. I wasn’t really surprised because even though I like to write about all things San Francisco, when it comes to local politics I do like point my finger at the good and bad. I’m not sure what it was that earned me this honor, but I will gladly accept the challenge to see how I pan out.

It could have been all my talk dispelling the myths that the local and state politicians have been putting out about AB376 some of whom weren’t aware that sharkskin suits are made of out cloth and sharkskin wallets are made out of patterned cow hide. I am very against fishing for sharks period because of their place on the food chain that will change the food pyramid of the seas. When some of the people have said, why not ban all shark fishing and not just the fins? I totally agree. Sharks are full of mercury and are listed as a fish not to eat. You can barely find it anywhere in the first place even though Fiona Ma did a google search that I did as well and found that you aren’t finding much shark available for sale in the US, period and I talked about that here.

Maybe it’s the head scratching of politics such as the replanting of the Sunset Boulevard medians with golf course grass that is actually higher maintenance than was mentioned and needs to be trimmed regularly or it gets as unsightly as it is today. Much of it is starting to turn brown and it’s growing over 8″ in many parts of the small section of Sunset boulevard that received it.

Or maybe it’s when I talk about some of the good guys in San Francisco, like my article the other day on Mayoral Candidate John Avalos. As I’ve said before, he’s a good guy that makes you feel like you’re talking to a person, not a person with an agenda.

Well enough of the why’s and wherefores. I’ve been nominated and now it’s up to all of you to vote. I suppose it could be the fact that I’ve lived in San Francisco for over 48 years [which is all my life] and I’ve seen the way the politics have gone over the years that might have got me there. I believe you can vote daily if you like not just once. So you could click on the picture up above that will take you to the site to cast your vote for me, or if you don’t like clicking on pictures for some strange reason you can click on this: http://polls.sfweekly.com/polls/san/webawards11/index.php

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Empire Avenue: Stock Trading for Social Media

I don’t have lots of money to play around in the stock market as those who saw my broke-ass of the week feature on the brokeassstuart website. If I did, I’d put it into Apple because even when things suck, they go up. Now there’s a website for people who would like to buy stock in their social media friends and hopefully gain a profit. It’s kind of like fantasy football for the stock market lovers.

What you do is sign up and connect all your social media sites to it so they can check it out and see how much you’re worth. After I finished I had started at somewhere around $11e [e being, eaves, the name of the empire commerce currency] and noticed that people started buying shares in me. I’m hooked up in a lot of sites, not just twitter and Facebook, but instagr.am, youtube, foursquare, LinkedIn, etc so I guess that’s why it showed my value at an increase of +7.217. That’s a lot higher than some of the bigger names out there.

I’m still not sure what you can do with what you earn, but I started to buy shares in friends of mine who are on twitter and Facebook who have good increases. I’ve never had money to invest in the stock market, though I did have an great-aunt who gave me her shares in a steel company that was sold and cashed out and I got $10k with no money invested so I can’t complain there, especially since he put me through college way back when…

This seems like a very interesting experiment since after I joined klout.com within a week I was asked in five different interviews what my klout score was. Who knows, in the future people will be asking what your social media stock price is at. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll break 400 like Apple at the end of the month, but I have no idea what the highest valued social media geek is worth at the moment. I’ll need to do more research. If you join and want a good return on your investment with the e that they give you look up BBTB since that’s the abbreviation of my stock. It’s climbing quickly. Since I’ve started writing this article my stock has jumped over 10 points overnight.

 

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HearPlanet: Bring the World to your Ears

Last year I started working for a company here in San Francisco that writes apps for the iPhone and Android. Specifically there’s one app that’s their big seller and I’m going to tell you about HearPlanet today. It’s a cool little app that replaces those guidebooks you would need to use when you travel around and it does a very good job of it.

I should know, I did quite a few of the voiceovers for the app in my home studio. It uses GPS location and pops up the places around you and gives you a little background story on the places. Not only is there custom content that we created, but there’s also works drawn from Wikipedia and CitySearch to add to the list so that no matter where you are there’s something to hear. While there’s a large amount of data on San Francisco because the company started here, there are cities served around the world.

If you download the app for your iPhone or Android phone and you happen to be traveling around San Francisco or New York you might hear my voice pop up. [hint, the links are to samples I’ve done.] There are special featured places and they now have it set up so that you can join their site and upload your own content of places you like around the city, or whatever city you’re in.

The app itself costs $4.99 for iPhone [$2.99 for Android], but there is a free lite version of the app that has the banner ads on the screen. It’s well worth the price. Some of the businesses also offer special deals when you look them up in the app.

HearPlanet taught me a lot of things, like how to virtually run a company. We’d all meet up on Mondays or if we couldn’t we’d join in on a Skype conference call to see what our work was going to be for the week, then some of us at least, would go home and do the work. I learned the joys of using dropbox to transfer files that we were working on and how to work in the cloud. This was new to me and it was a really great innovation for a way to work.

I also learned how to better manage CSS and uploading the content to the backend of the system. It was a very cool process to be involved in and now you can be involved to. Everyone loves to tweet reviews of places, now you can actually write up a review of a place and upload a picture and audio. I think this is going to take off very soon. Check it out.

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