Tagged: General
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Starting up – that would be the fourth
Well, well, well. I guess it’s some kind of a medical condition, but I’m leaving a great job at Síminn (Iceland Telecom) to start up a new company once again. This will be my fourth start-up, and I’m as excited as ever. It will be a relatively slow migration as I’m finishing off a few […]
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Adventures in copyright: Open access, data and wikis
I’ve just had a very interesting experience that sheds light on some important issues regarding copyright, online data and crowdsourced media such as wikis. I thought I’d share the story to spark a debate on these issues. For a couple of years I’ve worked on and off on a simple web based system f...
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Firehose aimed at a teacup
Dogbert to Dilbert: Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehose aimed at a teacup. Every company, organization and individual is continuously gathering and creating all kinds of data. Most of this data collection is happening in separated silos, with very limited connections between ...
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Dear Apple – may we pay?
Update (Feb 7): Updated the estimated number of iPhones in Iceland in light of more reliable data. As stated before: I live in a small country, nobody wants my money. In the couple of years since I wrote that post, I’ve been watching in awe as my fellow Icelanders – and in fact a lot […]
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The inevitable business model for music
There is a lot of turmoil in the music industry. The big publishers (usually dubbed “the majors”) are finally waking up to the fact that a decade of neglecting to come up with suitable business models for the web has bred a generation of consumers that have never paid for music. For them, music i...
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The Government API
A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference where there was a lot of talk about Business Process Automation (BPA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Disclaimer: Yes, I do lead a very exciting life, even if attending such a conference may indicate otherwise. You’re probably familiar with t...
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The Polar Express … for data!
I was at a nerd party last Friday and as it goes, ideas became wilder as the beer supply diminished. One of the wilder ones stuck with me: Jarl brought up the possibility of a submarine cable across the Arctic region, properly connecting East-Asia and Europe. This is certainly a wild idea, but as...
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Be right back…
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Books are too long
I love books, but I never have enough time to read. Most of my book reading is non-fictional except during the Christmas and New Year when I try to swallow the cream of the crop of the years’ fiction. A lot of the best non-fiction books are really communicating only one or two core ideas. […]
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The next Amazon web services
Jeff Bezos took the stage here at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, followed by a conversation with Tim O’Reilly. Bezos was talking about the current state and future vision for Amazon Web Services. He said that basically Amazon wants to give web applications developers of the world the tools they need to ...
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The world needs more people like him
This is a video of a presentation by Hans Rosling of Gapminder, the Swedish data visualisation organization that Google recently bought. Rosling has a great vision: To make the world a better place by improving access to and presentation of data about the world, such as statistics about poor coun...
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Who will kill Google?
Paul Graham wrote an interesting piece a few days ago about the “death of Microsoft”. Not death in the sense that Nietzsche proclaimed to God, but in the sense Microsoft “killed” IBM. IBM remained (and remains) a strong company through the Microsoft era, but they were no longer ruling the IT indu...
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Trends that shape the future Internet
I’m working on a document as a part of a study by Eurescom on the Future Internet – the Operator’s vision. Our part is on the applications of the future internet and as a starting point we’re identifying several trends that are likely to shape this future. We’re looking 10-15 years ahead in the s...
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Visited Countries – Revisited
When I read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book “A Short History of Nearly Everything“, one of the things that stood out, was a reminder that the world is still a really big place. Even though we feel that we can – with a credit card, and a solid visa – get pretty much anywhere in the […]
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The tipping point of long tail services
I couldn’t resist the title… Just a quick observation that I haven’t seen in the book or any of the online literature on the subject of The Long Tail. The moment that changed the way I use YouTube was the moment I started to assume that any video I might be looking for would be […]
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I come from a small country – nobody want’s my money
The long tail of countries Iceland has only 300,000 inhabitants. None of the “big guys” on the internet gives a damn about us. Yahoo! doesn’t care about us, neither does MSN. Google at least serves us a translated interface, but by using it we loose access to Google News, Google Maps, Google Vide...
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New blog
I’ve started a new blog directly under hjalli.com It will be a bit more general and there will be posts in both English and Icelandic as suits each subject. It’s still very fresh and immature, but I hope to post some interesting thoughts there on Spurl.net, web search and the internet as well as ...
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Successfully implemented CD purchase protection
My girlfriend bought me a CD yesterday. It was one I really wanted so it was a well appreciated gift. Now, we have our entire 5-600 CD collection ripped and stored on a server in our home. There is no stereo in our living room, only iTunes. So obviously the first thing to do with […]
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I’m waiting for the Trillian of Social Networking
This morning, the inevitable happened. I got an invitation from people that are starting to use Orkut, the latest fad in the Social Networking world. I joined, like I have to some 5 or 6 other such systems: Friendster Tribe.net LinkedIn Ryze The deceased Six degrees But this time I’d had enough. ...
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Nasty Google Rank Trick
I came across this site this morning: Search Subjects on AllofIceland.com – The Best Icelander Directory. The page is obviously designed to fool search engine robots to index links to “advertisers'” web sites. It’s quite easy to see that the page is automatically generated, but still some serious...
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Where’s the Spam?
I have only received one spam email today. By this time of the day I’ve on average over the last months received about 10-15 spam emails on my 3 web-exposed email addresses, sometimes more. I checked with some of my friends, and many of them have the same story. I’ve jokingly commented before tha...
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New Year, New Features
Happy new year everybody! To celebrate the new year I made some minor changes to the Wetware site. Most notable is the Trendwatch section. Instead of posting the news links I find once a week, I will be sending them directly to the Trendwatch as I come across them. There should be a couple of […]
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Money Flows: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph
A couple of years ago I visited the Science Museum in London. Of all the wonderful sights there, one item keeps coming to mind: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph; a “computer” that simulated a nation’s economics using flowing water. The Financephalograph was built in 1949 by Bill Phillips, an engi...
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Discoveries of the Camera
I went to see a presentation by Sir David Attenborough yesterday. He’s in Iceland for a couple of days as a translation of his latest book The Life of Mammals is being published, following the success of the TV documentary series with the same title. There’s only one word for Sir David – brillian...