Joel Dehlin: 2010

Creepy Google Gmail Security Hole

There aren't a lot of details, but apparently Gmail had a security hole where a web site could grab your email address if you were logged into Gmail at the time you went to the web site. I assume the vulnerability is a weak SSO token on the computer or maybe something stupid left behind in a cookie. Whatever they're doing, yikes!

Google has reportedly fixed the problem.

Liquid Zoom

According to Gizmag, Samsung has filed a patent for a new type of lens made of liquid. The principle is similar to that of looking at magnified images through a glass of water. Layers are created using different liquids and shapes of the layers may be changed using a small electric current. No moving parts – so faster, more efficient and less prone to break. This is particularly useful for adding optical zoom to small devices like cameras.

Is HTML 5 Killing Silverlight?

Microsoft is shifting its strategy on Silverlight. It's coming out in support of HTML 5, but maintains that it will still support Silverlight—especially it's "streaming media" capabilities.

Is HTML 5 ready for prime time? Thoughts?

Organic Transistors

Researchers have claimed to create organic transistors that mimic brain synapse functionality. It will be interesting to see what developments the next generation in human-machine interaction technology will bring.

Wireless Power from Space

The idea of transmitting electrical energy without wires has always fascinated scientists. All the way from Nikola Tesla to the current endeavor of Japan planning to send its first solar paneled satellite into space this decade. Check it out!

Car - AR

GM Develops Augmented Reality Windshield - Check it out here.

Multipliers

October 2010's book is Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. More information on the book can be found here.

Love

I warn you. This post has nothing to do with my job or really IT.

But I think I'm in love.

Indoor and outdoor hulls
Four propellers
468Mhz ARM9 processor and 128MB of memory with Linux
Brightly colored stickers for augmented reality games
Two cameras (front-facing 15fps and downward-facing 60fps)
WiFi router
iPhone controller app

Let's see, $300 for kids' college expenses or the "Parrot AR Drone." Hmmmm. What should I choose?

Top five uses for the drone?

Excuse for buying more tools
Golf ball finder
Viable alternative to video games for the kids
Additional support for the "coolest guy in the neighborhood" award.
Reason for living (maybe not…)

What other uses could you find for this?

Google’s Cars Drive Themselves?

No, this is not the Jetsons.

Google is actively working on, and testing on the roads, a car which drives itself. A human is always in the car, in case something goes wrong, but so far the cars have logged tens of thousands of hours.

So far, there has been only one accident: one of the Google cars was rear-ended. Google isn't hinting about its plans to monetize this.

Here are a few links with additional information:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370518,00.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/google-car/

Is this exciting? Does this creep you out?

Conference Weekend - #ldsconf

For the last few years, Twitter users have been using the #ldsconf hashtag to have a global conversation during General Conference. In normal speak, a hashtag is a tag or a keyword prefixed by a hash (#) symbol that accompanies a Twitter post (tweet). The posts containing the relevant hashtag can be searched and indexed efficiently. Here are some stats for the conversation this General Conference.

The conversation using #ldsconf was ranked as high as #2 on Twitter in the US

There were 24,600+ individual tweets, made by over 2,000 different Twitter users

1,123,500+ Reach (Total # of Twitter Users who follow those Tweeting)

Top Cities outside Utah that participated in the conversation in the US are the Washington DC Area, Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale, Houston, Sacramento, Orlando, and Los Angeles

Top Countries outside US that participated in the conversation are Canada, Philippines, Mexico, Chile, UK, and Guatemala

The most discussed session was Sunday Morning with more than 6100 tweets

Morning Sessions appeared to be a popular time to discuss

Mice are Falling!

Read this. Kinda crazy. The US Navy gets points for creativity, for sure.

Whatever you think about the approach, you've got to admire their courage for being "out there."

When was the last time your organization tried something this creative?

Improving Language Skills

This General Conference we will have the proceedings translated in some 92 languages. Someday, we may be able to draw upon technology like the kind Google is building to solve our on-the-fly translation/interpretation needs. More info found here.

Disaster Relief Outsourced

Check out this free open-source platform that aggregates twitter, texts, internet feeds, etc. on a map to display real-time disaster relief related information. The platform was used most recently for the Haiti quake and has been found useful in multiple applications like voting, public works, roads, etc.

Call For Photos

Visit the Church’s official Flickr group to submit images for use in web and traditional media publication. Member submitted photos were selected for the new.lds.org temple site! Excellent way to involve members in the work. Do you have a way for the Church to harness abounding member talent? Do share!

Big Tech Firms Settle on Not Allowing Anti-Poaching Deals

Article on TechCrunch about DOJ's involvement in an investigation into recruiting practices at Silicon Valley firms and on the resultant settlement.

iPad to Open Newstand

Bloomberg reports that Apple is apparently working on an iPad "digital newsstand," similar to its book reader, but for magazine and newspaper publishers.

Hans Rosling - Health Expert & Datacaster

Data is fascinating!

Well, at least when Hans Rosling presents it. Dr. Rosling is a professor of global health and has worked around the world to fight hunger, HIV and other problems which plague developing nations. When he speaks, he presents data in a visual, creative way that engages the viewer in a way we're not used to. He is asking the world to serve up data in a way that would allow us all to build queries and present them like this.

Here is his talk at Ted and here is a web site with many more of his presentations. Are there uses for this type of data visualization in your enterprise?

Google Realtime Search

Google recently announced a dedicated page of tools for its realtime search functionality. According to Google, the new search capability lets you search/view real-time updates from social sites, blogs, and news articles. Check it out!

new.lds.org Now Available!

new.lds.org is now available!

Some new features:

Great new search (try out the facets!)

Prophets and Apostles Speak Today

Church News and Events

Church Organization

Temples

Humanitarian Service

"Our Heavenly Father's Plan"

New e-store

New Ward Calendar (with Google Calendar integration) and Ward Directory

My Notebook (this is amazing and will sync with your mobile device in about a month or so). To try it out, login and go to scriptures or general conference. When you mouse-over a paragraph, you can tag and mark stuff and type in your own notes.

And so on, and so on...

The team was up all night against harrowing opposition and went live at 5:00am or so. Conference, magazines and manuals go back to 2002 or so, but we'll be loading more content each day, eventually reaching back to the 1970's. We will have Spanish and German versions available before October conference.

We're finding and fixing bugs so please give us feedback.

Enjoy! (And spread the word...)

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR)

MAR apps are becoming more popular ever since Yelp snuck in a hidden feature for iPhone 3GS users which combined GPS overlayed markers for businesses on the camera view of the phone. Layar, one such platform lets users build custom layers atop the camera view for a mobile device.

Twitter SAP Tools

Combine Twitter with PowerPoint! A set of tools available here can help you view tweets and lots more as you present.

WiTricity

Wireless electricity! We’ve all seen wireless toothbrush charging and this is the next generation in efficient power transmission. WiTricity's technology however goes a step further by embedding the coils under the ceiling, a wall, or even a desk and whatever device is within the range gets powered without wires. The technology was developed by an MIT team for which the leader won the MacArthur (a.k.a Genius) award. With efficiency reported over 90% - it seems like a promising technology. Read more here.

Safe Plug

This is a fun piece of simple technology to save power and increase safety of electrical outlets.It uses small little slip on RFID tags on the plugs themselves and are plugged in to the “safe plug” outlets. Plugs cannot work otherwise and can potentially be remotely monitored or even controlled. These could be used to save energy, monitor individual and specific devices, prevent fires, etc. Think of all the meetinghouses that could be rescued from power siphoning and potential fire hazards. The gentleman who invented this was a featured speaker on TED.

New Spice

The BYU Library made a video that parodies the well-known Old Spice commercial. The video went viral and to date has received almost 2 million views on YouTube.

Go BYU Library!

Green!

Energy cost-cutting begins at home. According to this article, local city administrators in England, Scotland, and Belgium have posted maps that contrast heat escape in homes, offices, and industries. A creative way to pin-point and address rising energy costs. Only time before this comes to the US – may be an extra hot edition of Google or Bing maps.

Group Think City

Interesting article on why groups fail to share information effectively. I thought the article would claim that in some environments people horde information intentionally to benefit themselves in some way. But no, the point was that people typically withhold information which isn't already agreed to or well known by the group they're with

(?)

Seems bizarre, but the research they cite claims this is true.

Malware Primer

Lifehacker has a pretty good description of the different flavors of malware (viruses, trojan horses, spyware, scareware, and worms), although they leave out phishing attacks and probably a bunch of others you security folks could point us to.

AT&T iOops

Up to 114,000 iPad users (including Michael Bloomberg and Diane Sawyer) unwittingly exposed their email addresses to the public through a security gaffe. Apple products have never been recognized as the CISO's products of choice, but this one looks to be primarily AT&T's goof. Read about it here.

AT&T responds.

Space Weather is a Potential Havoc Wreaker

Modern Socity: Get ready. The Sun is waking up.

Google in the Enterprise

Google is trying to make its way into the Enterprise. Google has primarily been a consumer company, trading information for advertising attention. It is now gearing up for a new revenue stream. Google's aim is for online enterprise apps to be an annual billion dollar business.

Its value propositions is price and simplicity. Google is definitely cheap. A company pays $50 per user per year and gets email, IM (text, voice and video), group calendaring, online apps (basic spreadsheet and word processor), spam filtering, server virus filtering, and mobile integration. If you want super basic functionality, this is great. Many of our employees would be just fine with Google Apps.

Many employees need more sophisticated tools, however. Sophisticated Excel stuff. Powerpoint presentations. Macros. Functions. 3rd party software integration. We use Microsoft Office and Exchange to satisfy those needs.

The problem is that the Google and Microsoft worlds don't co-exist well. Being a mixed shop can be difficult, but we're trying it out where it makes sense. Recently we replaced the email system used by 52,000 missionaries worldwide with a white label version of GMail. We're currently mirgrating another 20,000 people who are associated with the Church in various ways. We still use Microsoft Office and Exchange internally, but are watching carefully how things go with the missionaries. So far we've been very happy with Gmail, but aren't ready to replace employee email and productivity apps with Google apps yet.

Most of the CIOs I talk to are concerned with security. Google is aware of these concerns and trying to take steps to resolve them. This isn't a huge concern for us. We feel that Google is secure enough for our use cases.

I'm interested to see how well Google makes inroads into the enterprise.

Gospel Library for iPad

Gospel Library is now available for iPad. This version includes the ability to rotate the screen and also better readability than the iPhone version on the iPad.

Look for new features in both platforms in the future!

Link to the Gospel Lbry

Here is a link to the iPhone Gospel Library (Lbry). Thanks for the feedback so far!

As I mentioned in the comments of the last post, we're working on versions for Android, WinMo, Palm and Blackberry.

Church's Second iPhone App Available

[joel (10:50pm, 4/10): I mention a May beta release of lds.org, but these features actually come in the June release.]

We've just released our second iPhone app: Gospel Lbry. [joel: corrected.]

It's on the iPhone app store now. You can download and access the scriptures, hymns, various manuals, proclomations and so forth. It's got some pretty nifty features that some of the main scripture apps out there don't have. And it's free.

When the May beta.lds.org comes out, you'll be able to sync annotations with your online gospel study experience.

This, like our Mormon Channel app, was developed in cooperation with community developers. Thanks all!!

Download it and try it out. And rate it!! :)

Google Changes Search Algorithm

Google has changed its search algorithm. Site speed will now play a part in how your web sites rank.

LDS Developers Conference

The first LDS Developers Conference is to be held on April 1-2. You'll meet members of the team, see a sneak preview of the new web sites which will be coming this Summer, and get hands-on training in how to design, write and test code for those web sites and for our new mobile device offereings.

We need help with our MobileMember and Scriptures apps for Palm Pre, iPhone, Android, WinMobile and iPhone.

We need a team to re-write our Interactive Music App for the new web platform. We haven't started this project and would really like to Beta test in May and ship in June.

You can help with many other ongoing projects (local unit directory, local unit calendar, YSA web site, etc.)

Or you can help us think of new ideas!

If you're interested in helping with our community efforts and you can get here, then get here!

More information on our web site.

Botnet for Hire?

Interesting article on the growing "economy" of mal-services.

The Power!

Scientists find new way to generate electricity.

Creator of "The Man" Dies in Seattle

A good friend, Gene Porter, died in Seattle this week. If you've been to Dixie's Bar-b-que in Bellevue, WA (underneath 520), then you've met Gene. He met nearly every customer in his garage-turned-restaurant and encouraged us to "meet the man!" The man, of course, was his homemade bar-b-que sauce which was so hot that it rendered your taste-buds nearly incapacitated. I can deal with pretty hot food, and just a toothpick taste was painful.

Just a few months ago, I talked to him in his wheel chair, sitting in the back of the restaurant. Such contrast from the vibrant, loud, in-you-face restaurateur we all willingly paid to torture us.

Goodbye Gene. We'll miss you.

"Yeah baby!"

Tech Talk in Palo Alto

We will be having a "tech talk" in Palo Ato this Thursday night (March 4) at 7pm. These tech talks are intended to gather software developers and designers who are interested in contributing to our community development efforts.

Details here.

Hope to see you!

Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

TechCrunch says yes!

Aardvark service purchased by Google

The Aardvark answering service has been purchased by Google. If you haven't used this service, give it a try. It allows you to ask questions which are routed through your network to people who have tagged themselves as having some level of experience on the topic you've asked about.