Bye bye Bill Gates

As everybody probably has known, Bill Gates' last full day at Microsoft was yesterday and there's been so much video, audio, posts, you name it, about Billy G leaving. Some of the CEOs and visionaries from other companies have made comments about Bill, his competitors and fiercest enemies. Gates gave his final speech to Microsoft employees.

Love him or late him, you must admire his drive, his passion, his motivation in forming Microsoft as the underdog and how he has been able to fight so many challenges by many companies like Netscape, WordPerfect, Lotus, IBM, Apple, Borland, Palm, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo just to name a few. Translating this same drive over to the Gates foundation will certainly make him probably one of the greatest philanthropic leaders of all time. It's good to see that he will be using his wealth and money for finding cures for diseases and for making the world a better place.

I've never met Bill Gates in person but I have heard his keynotes before at computer conferences (specifically Comdex in Toronto). I've read his books like Business@The Speed of Thought and many other books about Microsoft like Hard Drive, All I Really Need to Learn in Business I Learned at Microsoft, and The Microsoft Way.

Bill is an inspiring individual, he was definitely one of my role models and made me first get into the computer industry. Gates is now wanting to spend more time with his 3 daughters.

Best wishes for you Bill and for the Gates foundation.

On Technorati: Microsoft, Bill Gates

Plazes social networking service bought by Nokia

In an interesting move, Nokia has bought out Plazes, the social networking site for allowing users to mark places that they have been for others to look at. This creates location-based services and avoids the need to have GPS which provides absolute location. Plazes creates semantic location. As long as you have some kind of internet connection like Wi-Fi you can track where you are and write comments, put photos or mark what the location is. I've tried the service and I really liked how it worked, although I haven't been using it for a month. It is kind of like Intel's PlaceLab where location can be annotated and hotspots found contributed by people rather than having to provide GPS or radio-type location technologies (like triangulation).

This is a good acquisition for Nokia because Nokia does not seem to be very much in the social networking arena and the next step is social networking on mobile phones. Integrating Plazes with the Nokia phones would provide the next logical step to providing ubiquitous location-based services, and will be part of Nokia's vision of "Connecting people".

On Technorati: Plazes, Nokia

Journal paper submitted and Hypertext 2008

I finally submitted a journal paper today based on the latest results from my PhD thesis. Hypertext 2008 is on Friday of this week (June 20) and goes unto Saturday June 21 in Pittsburgh. I would love to be there but circumstances prevent me from doing so. Either way, I will track what's going on through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the blog. You can network virtually with Hypertext 2008 attendees. For those who are going, have a great time there and link with others!

On Technorati: hypertext08", ht08

iPhone 3G

It's finally here, which everyone has heard about, the iPhone 3G which was announced by Steve Jobs at his keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference. It will be rolled out in 22 countries on July 11 and finally, Canada will get one on the Rogers network. It has 3G, GPS, version 2.0 software with iPhone APIs for location-based services and for third party developer support, the apps will be downloadable over the air on App Store, and the really surprising part, the 8GB version is going for only $199! You can check out specifically the iPhone part of the keynote here:



If you see the keynote, the apps that some of the third party companies that demonstrated are just amazing. There are lots of games that make full use of the touch screen and the gyroscopes of the iPhone. This brings a new generation into mobile gaming and a new experience, just like the Nintendo Wii has done for console gaming.

Will I get an iPhone? Well, if it's only $199 I think I just might to finally replace my Palm Zire 71 that I've had for so long. I've also wanted GPS as well so I can find where I'm going. But wait there's also RIM's Blackberry Thunder which is also touch screen and is going to compete with the iPhone:



What about Nokia, the #1 cell phone vendor in the world? Well, don't count Nokia's socks off, they do have a touch screen concept phone called the Achieve:



Somehow, I don't like the Nokia Achieve, it seems really ugly compared to the beauty of the iPhone. So, hmm, which one to get? Well, in this tech world, you're never satisfied with what you get, since another one will come out the next second.

On Technorati: iPhone 3G, WWDC08

Goosh: A Unix-type interface to Google

Well someone either is a hard-core computer science person, has too much time on their hands, is doing this for a project, or all the above. This person has created a Unix-type interface command shell to Google called Goosh (Google shell named appropriately). It has all the same commands that you would issue to Google in a web browser or using the Google search API. This would make a good Computer Science web programming project, as all I can see is that this is just an interface that makes calls to the Google Search API and presents the results in a command-type interface.

On Technorati: Goosh,Google shell