My Quest to have one Card in my Wallet is Over

From Mashable, a startup called Dynamics is aiming to replace the standard credit card with … a standard credit card that has a microchip in it.  It’s pretty cool stuff and in this video, the founder talks about what we’ll no doubt see in a year or two.  Imagine having one plastic card replace all your current cards and having a security code on your card so that if it’s stolen, it’s worthless.  Both shown here.  I have to imagine MasterCard and Visa are eating this up.  It’s definitely hot in the VC world, Dynamics won a $1 million prize based on their concept.

I’m not allowed to post this on Friday, so I’m setting it to autopost on Monday. 

Cool Trends in Web Stuff

HTML 5 is the new standard markup under development for web pages.  Based on some play areas demonstrated on this site, the HTML 5 should bring some cool new things to the web. 

For casual readers who just want to play, go here and here.  Don’t forget to draw on the screen and “pick up” the Google logo and play with it.

  

It’s not out there yet, but according to this site there’s only 4,193 days to go: http://ishtml5readyyet.com/. 

For deeper readers, HTML is the base language of web pages.  When companies build browsers, they use these standards to determine how to render things on the screen.  So Mozilla, Chrome, IE all read the standards and they all read "<a>” and say, I need to create a link.

Since the base HTML was released, there’s been lots of add-ons to make it more appealing and interactive.  CSS was added to give richer web pages and to simplify the coding.  You could specify a layout and then every page would use the same layout without having to specify the font for each paragraph.  JavaScript is the latest tool in basic interactivity.  It adds a layer to a standard HTML web page which can do interactive things.  If a menu pops, or something moves, chances are its done in JavaScript.  Ajax and Javascript combined help you so you don’t have to refresh all the time.  And then there’s the true plugins to web pages, which move you out of the rhelm of the HTML world: Java Applets, Flash, and now Silverlight.

Java applets are the oldest form of the out-of-HTML interactivity but they’re pretty sparse now.  Most people are use to Flash, which sits in a webpage but isn’t HTML.  The latest entry is Silverlight which sits in a browser like HTML and Flash, but is neither.  Combining a programming world and a rich graphical world, Silverlight is a plugin too.

Anyways, that was the primer for people who need primers.  Back to playing my HTML 5 games.

This will Change our World

Hello Hal.

Hello Mugaz reader.

Imagine a scenario where your computer knows who you are and can answer any question you ask. Think it's 100 years in the future?

Think again. IBM has developed Watson, a computer which can compete against past winners in Jeopardy! And it's not doing poorly. In fact, it can take the Jeopardy question "A ‘Green Acres’ star goes existential (& French) as the author of ‘The Fall" and return Who is Eddie Albert Camus. Not in minutes, and not like Google which returns similar pages where you might find the answer. You get the answer in seconds. The potential for this is enormous, and if you want to know what the future looks like, read this article.

And then there's the Kinect, the soon to be release Microsoft gaming system which recognizes faces (and motions of players). It can log you into your system and queue up your world without you ever entering a password.

What this means is that in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to logon to a computer and have the computer recognize you. It will bring up your medical history and combine it with all of its knowledge on symptoms and probabilities of your condition, then render a diagnosis on the spot. Add Netflix-like shipping of medications, and the doctor is the next horse and buggy. And this isn't science fiction.

In 1981 Time named the computer the machine of the year and it was no mystery what was about to change us in the 1980s. I suspect Watson should be this years' machine of the year, for he will certainly change our world.

Politics … well Sort of

Remember Am I Hot or Not, that tech-boom afternoon you spent rating people on looks, waiting for the ten after 3 hours of sixes.  Courtesy of Tom Scott, a self admitted geek comedian and blogger, we have Sexual Congress.  Make sure to look at winners, losers, and statistics after you play for a while.

Things I Learned in Kindergarten

This should be one of them.  Create geeks early I say.

Along the geek line, this popped up on a sociological website – what do you consider a luxury? a necessity?  I love that car is decreasing. 

Jim – 3% of people think an iDevice is a necessity.  No doubt do to Angry Birds. 

Bing Maps - Aaarghhh

Bing has a new Silverlight tool that let’s you stylize your destination maps.  This is the pirate map format for 300 Fore St, Portland Maine.  Go to Bing Destination Maps, enter a destination, give it a name, and keep clicking Continue.   I love the fold marks.

Posting from New Orleans

In the middle of the keynote presentation of the Microsoft Developers Network conference in New Orleans.  There’s a guy talking about “the cloud”.  It’s big here.

While he’s talking, I’m reading an awesome piece from Politics Daily on how evangelicals are coming around regarding the environment.  The best line :

We've had an inadequate view of human sin. Because we believe in free markets, we've acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he "believes in young people."

Thanks Grant for the recommendation on Blue like Jazz – finished it on the plane and tied in very well to this article.

Back to the cloud.  Viewing some Communicator 14 releases that seem to replace Live Meeting and Messenger and wraps together some enterprise apps into a single package.   Oh cool, people are tweeting on it from this room when I Google Communicator 14.  Whoa, stand down inner geek.

Facebook Thingamajig

Test your Facebook privacy.  This thing is cool.  Follow the instructions but basically you open Facebook and then click on the bookmark to this site and it scans your privacy settings. 

http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/