It must be stylus month on Kickstarter, with first the Cosmonaut and now the Flow appearing on the funding website. Like the Nomad Brush, the Flow by Joystickers is modeled after a paintbrush. The Flow has capacitive bristles rather than the traditional foam tip to more closely match the tactile experience of painting with real paint.
One of the things that’s always frustrated me when painting on the iPad is that the friction from both my finger and any of the styluses I’ve tried isn’t quite right. It can work very well for sketching, but when I open up ArtRage and start using a paint tool, there always seems to be a bit of a tactile disconnect from what I’m doing. A paintbrush that works with the touchscreen seems like the best possible solution short of pulling out real paint and using your iPad as a canvas — which we definitely do not recommend.
If this week’s Where 2.0 conference is proof of anything, it’s that developers are excited about creating location aware mobile apps. One of the biggest barriers to creating a place-aware app, however, is getting the ball rolling – you need place data.
Place and location, though hand-in-hand, are two different things and SimpleGeo, a geolocation data storage and platform service, announced this week that it has put data for more than 20 million places into the public domain to make it easier than ever for developers to create location-aware applications.
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"It is our belief that facts should be free, as in freedom," SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan wrote yesterday on the company’s blog. "We wanted to see the proliferation of places data that developers could easily use, reuse, or basically do whatever they wanted with, so we took matters into our own hands and began building our own database of places that were free of the existing restrictions in the market."
When it comes to location, an app can use any number of signals, from triangulating with WiFi signals to using the in-phone GPS, to determine the device’s exact coordinates. But coordinates are just numbers that relate to a point on a map. When we check in to a place on Foursquare, we don’t check in to GPS coordinates, we check in to the coffee shop or the baseball stadium. How does Foursquare do this? It takes our coordinates and relates them to place data. Place data can involve a number of different data points, but at its most simple level, place data attaches a name to geographic coordinates. It can go well beyond that, however, including coordinates to define a place’s shape and size, the zip code, the city, state and county that place is located within, and so on.
With this week’s announcement, SimpleGeo is saying that the data for nearly 20 million places that it owns are now available, to use freely, under the Creative Commons Zero, or "No Copyright," license.
"Developers want to do a multitude of different things with data," explained Galligan. "There is a future we want to get to when facts are free. We're trying to force that hand a bit."
Galligan acknowledged that some of this data, which is often crowdsourced from multiple sources a la OpenStreetMaps, isn’t as good as propriety data quite yet, but it’s on its way.
Joe Francia, editor in chief of Directions Media, acknowledged the effect this move could have, but also looked to data quality as the primary weakness.
"Certainly, 'free data' under CC0 shakes up the business model of those who for years have invested in collecting data under a proprietary (read expensive) model," said Francia. "What remains to be seen is if their own sourced data can be maintained and updated in a timely manner. People want good data, regardless."
Nonetheless, a 20-million-strong set of place data could be a great jumping off point for any developer who wants to get into creating place-aware applications without being beholden to the terms of service of companies like Facebook or Foursquare. Galligan encourages developers in his blog post to "take our data, use it, make it your own, and make it better."
Today, he told us simply, that "the developer needs to have the freedom to do whatever the heck they want."
With RIM promising that the BlackBerry PlayBook is going to be an “iPad killer” (yeah, right), what do the geniuses in Cupertino have in the queue to make everyone else play catch-up again?
According to the highly authoritative tech news source TeamCoco, spearheaded by none other than Conan O’Brien, it’s the iDea. Take a look at the first ad for the new product on the next page.
This is my attempt at a radiation dosage chart in response to a couple others that have been posted recently.
Randall Munroe of XKCD posted the widely circulated chart below. In it, the relationships within each section are very clear: you can easily see how eating a banana compares to a cross-country flight (two blue boxes vs. 320 blue boxes). However, in order to compare eating a banana to severe radiation poisoning, that relationship isn’t as direct. You must follow the size conversions from blue boxes to green boxes to red boxes since there is no immediate relationship.
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David McCandless of Information is Beautiful also created a radiation dosage chart, shown below. Visually it is easier to navigate, as it lists each dosage vertically in sequence. The tradeoff here is that there isn’t an accurate visual relationship between the numbers. There is as much space between .4 microsieverts to 1 microsievert as there is between 50 millisieverts to 100 millisieverts. The color shifts also vary in their relationship to dosage. In the space of .9 microsieverts, the color shifts from yellow to green. A similar shift in color from blue to purple though, spans 90 millisieverts.
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In my version (top), the goal was to show a clear relationship between the smallest and largest dosage. In order for that chart to fit on one screen/page, I needed to visualize doses using volume. I also aimed to make the color relationships consistent. To do this I used a gradient from yellow to red and plotted all the points from zero to 8,000 millisieverts. As a result, there is minimal color shift between the smaller doses, and significant jumps between the larger ones. I had to make tradeoffs as well. It was a struggle to find a size that kept all the doses at least somewhat visible while aiming to fit the whole image (or most of it) on one large screen. This affected how the captions were displayed and how many dosage examples I could show.
Notes: All my data was aggregated from David and Randall’s charts, with the addition of the TSA blog. Keep in mind there is some controversy (via DF) about the backscatter emission tests.
The goal? Startup Weekend is an intense Thursday through Saturday event (the weekend in Egypt) where the team gathers entrepreneurs and helps them form teams, taking their business concepts from idea to launch in just 54 hours.
Our congratuations go out to the team that organized Startup Weekend Cairo. For more information, make sure to visit the site. And for those of you launching your business during the weekend, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line.
