The Kev Blog

Last week I made one of the best decisions of my life…I downloaded Miro, a free internet media player, with thousands of channels and tons of crisp, clear HD action.

Simply an RSS feeder for high quality video content, Miro allows you to subscribe to video channels, keeping you updated on new episodes and automatically downloading the latest and greatest of what you subscribe to.

On my channels list:

-TED talks

-Google Video

-Webnation with Amber Mac

-The Economist (my apartment smells like rich mahogany…)

-National Geographic

The quality is incredible, the selection keeps me busy for hours, and it’s FREE! A while back I had a conversation with a friend and we were talking about splurging on buying a nice LCD or Plasma TV. The way things are going, we think we’d be much better off buying a beauty of a monitor, as there seems to be enough content (and growing like crazy) on the web to watch. Now, with Miro, I don’t even have to hop around the web to see what’s new.

Oh, did I mention it’s open source, lets you download YouTube videos (sometimes vixy.net just wasn’t cutting it), and integrates with BitTorrent?

From the Miro site:

“As television moves online, we face a crucial decision. Will it be open like the internet? Or will it be controlled by a small number of gatekeepers like cable and broadcast television? We think the answer should be obvious: let’s make television more open and exciting than it’s ever been.”

That’s a beautiful thing.

Hans Rosling, professor, doctor, and founder of Gapminder, presents his statistics analyzing software, completely bringing data to life and giving his audience a visualization of changes that have occurred in human development. According to Wikipedia, “In March 2007 Google acquired the Trendalyzer software with the intention to scale it up and make it freely available for public statistics”, however I have had a little trouble getting my hands on it.

“Hans co-founded Gapminder, whose remarkable interactive graphs help deliver profound insights about global trends and dispel myths about the “developing world”. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few of those myths in this presentation delivered at the 2006 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference.

To live in “extreme poverty” - with less than 1 dollar a day - means you wake up hungry, you go to bed hungry and you have to use all your resources just to acquire food.

How has the Global Economy effected the income of people across the world? Although the percentage of poverty has gone down, the number of poor people is still very high. Still, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has gone down from around 40 percent 30 years ago to todays number of around 20 percent.

The good news is that the eradication of poverty is within human range.”

Check out the incredibly cool Gapminder here.

Hans Rosling’s full-length TED Presentation here.

This from TED:

“To power his family’s home, young William Kamkwamba (19 yrs old) built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap.

19-year-old William Kamkwamba, from Malawi, is a born inventor. When he was 14, he built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap, working from rough plans he found in a library book called “Using Energy” and modifying them to fit his needs. The windmill he built powers four lights and two radios in his family home.

After reading about Kamkwamba on a blog (which picked up the story from a local Malawi newspaper), TEDGlobal Conference Director Emeka Okafor spent several weeks tracking him down (though his home has electricity, William’s family had neither a phone nor email access) and invited him to attend TEDGlobal on a fellowship. Invited to the stage, Kamkwamba talked about his invention, and shared his dreams: To build a larger windmill to help with irrigation for his entire village, and to go back to school.

Following Kamkwamba’s moving talk, there was an outpouring of support for him and his modest but hugely promising work. Members of the TED community got together to help him improve his power system (by incorporating solar energy), and further his education through school and mentorships. You can read the ongoing details on his blog (which he keeps with help from his mentor).”

http://www.ted.com

New from Microsoft, a unique architecture allowing images to be put together in order to recreate a real space. Use the space bar to scan from image to image, use your scroll button to zoom; its incredible. Combined with Microsoft Surface Technology, or what has until now been labeled as “Project Milan”, there are some really unique applications; retail, navigation, education, ebooks…

Check out the beta version of Photosynth and play around with it! You can’t yet add your own photo collections, but you can play around with collections uploaded by Microsoft.

“In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor. A Photosynth experience begins with nothing more than a bunch of digital photos. They might all have been taken by one person, or they might be a mixture of images from many different cameras, shooting conditions, dates, times of day, resolutions, and so on.

Each dot represents an extracted feature

Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Photos that share features are then linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It’s similar to depth perception - what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth’s 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space.”

Check out the initial unveiling of Photosynth at a recent TED conference: