Elanza, kind of sounds like a new Hyundai, but it's actually a consumer electronics company who has produced one of the most advanced portable Wi-Fi touch panels we have seen to date. The ElanzaWebpad is designed to be used as a portable Windows CE PDA, Internet terminal, television (built-in TV tuner), and as wireless telephone.

Specifications:
300Mhz CPU
16MB flash memory, 64MB RAM
Windows CE 3.0: Mail, IE 4.0, Media Player
10.4-inch (SVGA 800x600) LCD touch screen
Built-in speakers
802.1b connectivity
MP3, MPEG-1/2, TV support
2 to 3 hour battery life
Dimensions 13"x9"x0.9"
Weight 3.3 lbs.

Connectivity Options:
Wireless LAN Standards
Versatile Wireless Connectivity -Wi-Fi™
802.11b), Bluetooth™
GPRS/GSM compatibility
Wireless Phone (optional)
Support for local networks over the Internet or Intranet.
PCMCIA slot to support a range of wireless LAN cards and also to extend wireless support beyond the LAN into the WAN access.

Apparently a bunch of Japanese bloggers have discovered Laszlo's Photoblox's photo album component and embedded it into their blogs!  The Google results comes back with 1,500 hits.

I'm not that surprised that this has happened, as much as wondering "how did this happen?"

Via my blog?  Joi?  I don;t believe Joi even knows or notices anything about Laszlo, so i gotta wonder "hoe the hell did they find out about Photoblox?"

If anyone knows (Adriaan?) - let me know!  Thanks

UPDATE:  This just in from Lyndon Wong, Photoblox Product Manager....

Marc Canter on the Digital Be-In

Marc Canter has issued an initial salvo.

An opera singer at heart, Canter invented advanced multimedia authoring in his pursuit of neorockstardom, and then got bored with Macromind (now Macromedia) and moved on to The Media Band and other broadband adventures. Marc will speak at Be-In 13 on digital identity and personal publishing.

We will be putting up another BLOG on The Transparent Network theme soon, inviting our opinionated speakers and others to address their takes on the meme of the moment...

People are joining the Be-In Tribe on Tribe.net

Marc's bit....

The 13th Digital Be-In is this Saturday at the SOMArts.  I'll be speaking - amid the road and din of people who don't really care about digital anything, but they like a good RAVE.

And for some folks - who are looking for girlfriends who go to Burning Man - this is the place to be to meet them.

Chris Schmidt is the young man who brought FOAF to LiveJournal.  He's kicking ass right now - as we speak to bring FOAF to Drupal.

Right on - Chris!  Keep going!

FOAF Tools - Ah, the power of tools. Many people lately have been ragging on FOAF as a kind of tired standard, because there's no killer application for it. To a certain extent, I agree - there's no highly visible use of FOAF in the world right now for the general public. There are a lot of sites out there that offer some FOAF support, but very few of them actually do well at creating something that's useful to the general public. For a format which is so good at storing personal information about people, it seems that a large resource like this really could be used in a lot of ways. I've been working lately on a couple of different ways to make FOAF more usable to the world at large.

In the past, on the internet there were many annoying things. Pop up windows and ads were among them. However, recently I've resolved these issues in my own setup so I only have to deal with them when I have to be away from home. As a result, I've had time to find other annoying things on the internet - like the annoyance of filling out the same profile information on every website on the planet. I have accounts on so many sites that I can't even count anymore, and every time it's the same information: Name, email address, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Jabber, Address, Dog's name as a child. All these fields need to get filled out every time I go create an account at a new site. Now, this doesn't seem like the most effective use of the web. This information is out there! I store it in a machine readable format - yet machines aren't reading it. What's the point of keeping and maintaining an up-to-date FOAF file, if no one but me gets to look at it? This kind of thinking is what led a bunch of social software developers - people who run sites like Tribe, Ecadamy, PeopleAggregator - together. These people saw FOAF as a way to change this. By taking advantage of the formats already available, these sites can build on a strong, open source base of FOAF, and create distributed profiles from it. No longer do I have to type in all my messaging names at every site I sign up on. Simply drop in a FOAF URL, and let the backend take care of the rest. Eventually, you may not even need to do that - simply sign in as crschmidt@livejournal.com, and let authentication between the servers do the rest. It may sound like something that won't ever really happen, but it's happening now, even here on LiveJournal. LiveJournal has a need for this kind of thing as much as anyone else. Imagine no longer needing to fill out all your information every time you want to create an account at another site like DeadJournal or Blurty. Simply drop in your FOAF URL - already provided by LiveJournal - and your information will be filled out for you. I don't know about you, but that sounds cool to me.

Now take that idea a step farther. LiveJournal has friends lists - which FOAF provides. By using these lists, when you sign up at DeadJournal.com, DeadJournal may be able to go through and tell you who matches your data - offering you, from the get-go, a pre-built form of your Friends List at the new site. Never perfect - obviously, not everyone at the old site will neccesarily have an account on the new site, so you can't match everyone. However, such a tool may have the ability to email users and ask them to join their site, as do tools like Orkut now.

However neat distributed profiles and logins are, however, they aren't really a fun toy. Sure, it saves me some effort - and I like the idea, trust me - but it's not something that will really have a measurable affect on my daily life. FOAF is designed to describe relationships, so we should use it for that. One major thing that we use relationship for is to determine how well we know someone. A friend of my friend is most likely my friend. A friend of a friend of a friend may also be my friend. These may be people I communicate with on a regular basis. If I communicate with them online - via a mailing list, perhaps, or via email in general. One of the major problems with email today is spam - how to deal with it, and how to prioritize your email. If you think that you communicate mostly with people among people you know, then you may be able to use FOAF to help you sort your mail. Since FOAF typically includes a "sha1sum" of your email address - something that is unique to your email, but can't be used to find out what your email address is - you can build a database of who the people you know are. You can then use this information to do something to your emails to indicate who they are from. For example, I built a list of all my friends and their friends, along with an email address. Then, every time an email comes in, I check to see if it's from one of them. If it is, then I add something telling my email client to show me who it's from. If it's, for example, from "jessical", a level 1 friend, then I may want to highlight that, or give it priority. If it's from "allex", I may just want to flag it, but not treat it as important - allex is only a level 3 friend. In this way, I can prioritize my mail - people who I know are more important to deal with, while people who I don't know can typically wait. I have some simple example code of how this might work at http://foaf.crschmidt.net : the mbox-protector script builds a flat text database of users in you friends web, while the mailchecker checks an email coming in on STDIN for a match.

FOAF is a useful protocol for both profile data - useful for transferring between sites - and for relationships - building a web of who you know. This is just part of the reason why I took the time to add FOAF support to LiveJournal. As limited as it may be, it's still powerful enough to build these tools, and more powerful tools on the web to make your life easier are always a good thing. By crschmidt@livejournal.com. [Christopher Schmidt]

From Greed and Lock-in - we switch to people doing good things.

This time it's taking a standard web servcie (music downloading) and empowering folks to support good causes with their wallets.  RIGHT ON!

Oxfam's Charity Download Service.

Streaming and downloading music for a good cause, a cause that goes beyond label profit—that’s an idea with legs. British music service OD2 has partnered with global hunger-relief organization Oxfam to build a new music service that launches Wednesday of this week. Here are the specs—

• 30-second stream samples are free.
• Full-song streams cost one pence.
• Full-song downloads cost 75 pence (no info yet on DRM).
• 300,000 tracks.
• Coldplay is helping promote it.

It’s called Big Noise Music.

Investing in Linked In and some explosive growth numbers.

Last week I had another great dinner in San Francisco with Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked In. Reid is one of the most impressive and visionary friends I know.

I am very proud to join its investors list. Reid has secured Series A financing of $4.7 million in November last year. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital, the venture investors behind well-known Internet brands such as Yahoo!, Google and PayPal. A round with business angels that I participated in will be announced within a few weeks.

Here is some information about Linked In's recent growth, if you are interested:

600,000+ users (30,000+ growth per week)
28,000,000+ email addresses sent through Linked In (3,000,000+ growth per week)
12 months old

Within the 600,000+ users:
265,000+ international users
120,000+ senior management-level users
8,000+ entrepreneurs
10,000+ VCs
100% professional users

and 28,000+ in France only.

Congrats, Reid ! [Loic Le Meur Blog]

Oh goodey. 600,000 more locked in people.  Isn't the world a wonderful place to make money?

I wonder if Reid, Joi and Loic will be investing in military industrial complex companies next?

Sure LinkedIn is just a wonderful vehicle for meeting people - but at what price?  And who owns that data?  Who owns those people?  I wonder why Reid doesn't support FOAF or being open - at all?  What does that say?

And why would Loic invest in such a company?  To make money - that's why.  At our expense.

Oh - did I forget to say - Reid is just such a nice guy!

One way to solve your social networking needs is to acquire.

Congrats to James Currier et al.

Monster Acquires Tickle, Inc..

Thanks ever so much to Peter Caputa’s, Monster Buys Tickle, who in turn attributes to Rafat Ali’s PaidContent, for the heads up on this announcement—as I was totally distracted by other events in my life today!

According to the Business Wire press release that was also in my newsreader:

Tickle has also proven to be a strong viral marketing engine, as more than 200,000 e-mails from Tickle members are sent each day encouraging others to join.

 ”The acquisition of Tickle brings a powerful new dimension to Monster, contributing proven consumer revenue-generating subscription offerings and unique interactive content that should enhance every site in our network of properties,” said Andrew J. McKelvey, Chairman and CEO of Monster Worldwide. “Tickle’s expertise in career assessment testing, networking and matching, combined with the viral nature of those businesses, dovetails perfectly with Monster’s vast user base. With scientific research at its foundation, Tickle adds yet another layer to Monster’s screening and hiring tools, providing recruiters a window into a candidate’s personality and work preferences that goes beyond past achievements to who they are and their fit within the hiring organization. As part of our long-term strategy, we have been committed to diversifying our revenue streams and to expanding our consumer online services. Tickle is the ideal business to help us achieve these goals.”

 The addition of Tickle’s services will enable job seekers on Monster to access a variety of career assessment tests ranging from “Right Job, Wrong Job” and ” Career Personality” to “Career Interest Inventory” and “The Corporate Culture Test” to learn more about their aptitudes, job skills and career goals. Based on the test findings, job seekers will be able to better determine which job positions are the best fit based on their individual profiles.

Steve Hooker's Radio: kids, war, blogs, gadgets

Those little XML feed icons on blogs are important, but as the semantic web becomes reality they're going to be much more important, and much more powerful. Marc Canter says this: ..."The battle (or shall I say the cooperation) moves upstream - away from the protocols/plumbing aspects of syndication - to the schemas/details area where the new work is needed."

I have to agree. We've enough standards to sink a boat, and with the current RSS/Atom war we (us users) are in danger of missing the boat, before we've had fun sinking it.

As users, we need to start using this stuff. And to do that we, us users, need to write feeds, or at least be able to (human) read others' feeds. RSS is pretty human readable, Atom, just ain't.

If we can start producing RSS feeds with ENT, ESF or Reviews or FOAF, just chucking them out there, as we blog, don't you think Technocrati or Userland would start to use that XML? Of course they would. Of course I could search for reviews through my Radio aggregator, or through Technocrati or import local events into a nice table in one of my web pages. Or, call up a list of opinion leaders in my geographical region and find where they're going to be next.

This is the semantic web, and though TBL may want some other more complex data format, only readable by machines and, it seems controlled by big business, it is the users who are also the producers, just like HTML was so easy to read, and learn and rob.

Brian Dear says Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, will be distributed via BitTorrent:

In a stunning move, controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore announced today that his latest film, "Fahrenheit 9/11", will be released by BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

From Brian's Denounce.com.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Here's the full story!

Cannes, France /DenounceNewswire/ -- 24 May 2004 -- In a stunning move, controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore announced today that his latest film, "Fahrenheit 9/11", will be released by BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

"This film deserves the widest possible distribution," said Moore, whose film won the Palme D'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival this past weekend. "I had hoped I could achieve that with Miramax and Disney, but such was not to be the case. I'm thrilled to announce that I have an even better solution. BitTorrent!"

BitTorrent, written by programmer Bram Cohen, is a popular software application for trading movies, music, and television episodes over the Internet. BitTorrent differs from other peer-to-peer networks in that the program connects users to many different fragments of a digital file, only to be seamlessly pieced back together when the transfer is complete. The result is a much faster download and less clogging on the Internet.

"I'm very happy to be working with Michael on the release of this important documentary," said Cohen. "This is exactly the kind of thing BitTorrent was created for. I'm confident we're going to be able to reach more people faster than any conventional Hollywood distribution scheme. And it's going to cost a hell of a lot less than printing four thousand some odd prints of the film!"

The documentary, which contends that the Bush family has ties going back more than three decades with the Saudi royal family, leading to a questions about the Saudi involvement with 9/11, was originally bought by Miramax and Disney last year. Michael Eisner, head of Disney, announced recently that the company would not distribute the film due to is political content.

Cohen and Moore say that the film will be available through BitTorrent beginning July 3rd worldwide over the Internet. The film will be free. 

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I sure hope they ALSO release it traditionally as well. That's crucial to showing them that open source doesn't kill content, but market it.