The New York Times picked up on this and wrote a good article explaining the achievement. They mentioned that this robot would be able to navigate any building designed to meet the Americans with Disabilities act as these buildings have ramps around all steps and doors with non-round knobs which simplifies the door opening process.

I wonder if the lawmakers who drafted ADA considered that easier access to public spaces would also allow easier robot access to these same spaces.

Apple may be known for its advertising prowess, but this little marketing coup is going to go down as one of the most hilarious ad placements in recent history. doubleTwist, the company co-founded by renowned software reverse engineer DVD Jon, has managed to place a banner for its product directly next to the main entrance to Apple’s flagship San Francisco store.
Read the rest on TechCrunch

In San Francisco, there is a BART entrance right below Apple’s flagship store. Its one of the more urban BART station entrances, it reminds me more of something you’d see in New York or London than SF with most stations having entrances in the middle of the sidewalk instead of embedded into a building.

Apparently, the window of this BART entrance hasn’t been used before for advertising, but with buget cuts, I’d imagine transit agencies are looking for new sources of revenue and every surface is a potential ad space. This space must be particularly valuable and I find it very impressive that the first ad that got put there was for a product that will allow moving of an itunes library to a non-apple device.

The ad is well done and blends nicely with the Apple store, i wonder how many Union Square shoppers will visit doubletwist.com thinking it has been sanctioned by Apple.

According to this story, a bunch of nerds at MIT found security vulnerabilities in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA)’s sort-of new fare card system, and were almost sued for daring to talk about it at a convention in Las Vegas. But like the good little engineers they are, they decided to cooperate with authorities and work to make the system better instead. I wonder what a bunch of Harvard kids would have done in the same situation?

I like this guy, who debuts around a minute thirty into the report.  I haz home computer too.

We’ve been working on a few secret projects at blinktag that use the Google Earth browser plugin.    The biggest drawback we found with the software was that it didn’t work for nerds running Mac OS X . . . . until now.

A couple of online applications have already been built using the platform, and we hope to include our own in the next few months.  Stay tuned.

An article about the future of the tech industry published in The Economist cites the often neglected converse of Moore’s law, which holds that computing power will double about every two years, to point out what we’ve been claiming since our inception as a company: the future of computing is doing more with less.  Maybe that sounds obvious, but, usually, the reverse has been true, with every version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Suite requiring an expensive new processor and fifteen frantic calls to the IT department.

For us, that means breaking away from bloated products like FrontPage and moving towards simple-to-use, open-source solutions that give our clients greater control.   It means making web pages that aren’t bogged down by crap flash introductions and the like.  Here’s what the smart people at Britain’s best business publication have to say about the shift:

“Firms have since [the first IT crisis] started to opt more for good-enough ‘cold’ wares, which save them money and allow for more flexibility: commodity hardware, open-source software such as the Linux operating system and programs accessed over the internet, or ’software as a service’ (SaaS).”

We couldn’t agree more.