I'moving to Zurich

One of the wonderful features of the internet is that it should not matter where in the world you are located. The protocols of the internet were designed to treat all traffic fairly so once you have a connection to the internet you should be able to get at any internet resource.

However, there are a number of industries (primarily music and movies) who continue to try an pretend that the internet is not a global phenomenon and continue to try and limit availability of their products and services to particular geographies. As I wrote before, these services are doomed to obsolescence - partly because such a business model is seen by consumers as unfair, but also because it is a technically difficult task to restrict your internet service to a particular country or set of countries.

There is an advertising series running on Irish Radio stations at the moment with the punch line "That's it, I'm moving to Zurich". The "joke" is that the speaker is actually planning to change pension providers to Zurich Life rather than actually emigrate to Switzerland. However, it seems that the administrators of our work network are planning a similar move.

It used to be the case that we could not access any Irish related web sites from work because most internet geo-location serviced (such as Where is my IP) seemed to be of the opinion that we were based near Portsmouth in the South of England (presumably since we used an internet service provider who was based near there). My colleagues didn't mind too much because it also meant that we got a chance to try out services which were supposedly only available in the UK. However, a recent change in our network configuration means that most internet servers now thing that I am based in Switzerland (not too far from Zurich).

I wonder are there any interesting TV shows running in Switzerland that I should try to catch up on?

Where are the readers of this blog located

I think Google Analytics is a really great tool. I have enabled it for this blog and it allows me to find our all sorts of interesting facts about the people who visit the site. For example I recently was looking at the data for what countries the visitors to the blog are coming from. The darker colours indicate countries from which more visitors came.

I was not surprised to see that 41% of the visitors came from Ireland. The next most common country of origin was the UK (24%) and USA (15%) which wasn't surprising either. However, I was surprised to see how widely dispersed the visitors were. I have visitors for virtually all of the world apart from Greenland, and some countries in Africa, South America and Asia which might not have many internet users. Another notable exception was China which I suspect could mean that my site is blocked by the Great Firewall of China. I doubt if any Chinese censor has read my blog and found it objectionable, but perhaps all blogger based sites are blocked.

What will be the most important mobile platform

One of the most interesting talks at Blogtalk 2010 conference a few weeks ago was the presentation "Apps are bad" by Ronan Skehill. The basic point that the speaker was making was that the best choice of target platform for the developers of mobile applications was the web rather than developing a "native application" for any particular mobile device platform. His reasons for saying this were the fact that there are too many different mobile platforms to keep up with andf in any case it is now possible to develop very high quality web apps that give just as good a user experience as any native application.

As part of the discussion thast followed the presentation some people raised the fact that you would categorise platforms differently depending upon whether you are a developer or a user.

From the developers point of view of developers they might categorise platforms based upon one of these:

• Operating system: Windows, Linux, Mac OS ..
• Browser: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera ....
• Device Form Factor: Desktop, Laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone ....

However, comsumers might be more likely to categorise using one of these critereon:

• Price
• Size/Weight
• Colour
• Brand

People used to speak of Linux as a potential target platform, but this is not really a single operating system. For example, if you read the list of Linux distributions on wikipedia it is several pages long. To make thinks even more complex, there is a complex set of ways to view the dependencies between these distributions as you can see from the page which compares the various Linux distributions which typically gets several edits per day.

Ronan's advice is to develop as much as possible of your application using web programming methods and only use native interfaces when absolutely necessary. There exist a number of application development environments such as Appcelerator Titanium which allow developers to develop applications for mobile platforms that combine the portability and ease of development of web applications with the power of a native application.

Blog Talk 2010 | Apps are Bad

View more presentations from Cauwill.

By co-incidence I also heard a talk recently from the Velocity conference (via IT conversations) which was talking about the MITE platform which seems like a very impressive system that allows people to monitor how the performance of their mobile applications are performing as seen by a number of different device types on a number of networks. I have not personally used this tool, but I have experienced applications which theoretically work on a particular device but in practice they don't actually work for users on 3G networks because the network is so slow that the application keeps timing out.

Applying the network roaming model to electricity

Before the invention of GSM phones it was not possible for people to use their mobile phones outside the area covered by the network operator from whom they had purchased their phone.  People who travelled very frequently to another country might have considered purchasing another phone and getting an additional service contract in the second country, but for the vast majority of users did not consider this worth the cost and hassle. Consumers were thrilled when GSM operators introduced roaming services, now they could have a single account with a phone provider and make and receive calls wherever they were in the world. It was also a boon for phone service providers who were delighted with the additional income from foreign users who were roaming onto their network.

Now that network access has become much more widespread, users are still left with the problem of where they can get access to electrical power to charge up their devices. Many businesses such as cafés are willing to allow customers to plug-in any device they want, but there are situations where the number of customers wanting to take advantage of such a facility forces the business to be more restrictive about who they allow plug in devices and run up their electric bill. For example in Heathrow airport all of the electric sockets in public areas have deliberately been converted to use an unusual plug type to avoid travellers running up a huge electric bill for the airport as they charge up their various devices.

People whose batteries are running low while they are away from home, would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for access to electric power. Unfortunately the small amount of money that is considered reasonable to charge for access to an electric socket means that the cost of collecting the fees would almost outweigh the money taken in and such paid charging stations are still a rarity.

What I think we need is a convenient way of allowing consumers to pay for the electricity they use away from their home by having the charge added to their home electric account in much the same way that the charge for calls made on other networks is added to the bill from their home network (or deducted from their call credit if it is a pre-pay phone). For this to work, we need something equivalent to the SIM card in a GSM phone which identifies which account the phone is associated with. Luckily there is already a mechanism defined by the RightPlug Standard where the plug associated with a device can be uniquely identified to the socket into which the device is plugged in. The RightPlug Alliance which is promoting this standard seems to mainly envisage that the standard would be used for safety monitoring, but I think it could have even more potential if adapted for use in a billing system.

I would love if someone offered such a service and I am sure they could find it quite profitable. I would definitely subscribe to such a service if it existed, but I don't think I personally would be interested in getting into this business.

Can MT help you have Twitter interactions across langauge barriers

IBM has been involved with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) which is is a research group funded by Science Foundation Ireland. However, this is not an ivory-tower research group. They are tacking very practical problems about how to improve translation and localisation technologies so that they can be applied to new challenges that are emerging in the modern world.

For example, many machine translation systems only perform better on long texts where the words are appearing in context, but Tweets posted to Twitter are very short with no obvious context. Furthermore, they may contain abbreviations, mis-spellings and specialised terminology. As a result the GNGL team have launched a special project to tackle the issues that arise in this specific context.

They are now looking for volunteers to test out their system and even better provide them with feedback. Ideally they would like testers who follow people who tweet in different languages from their target set (English, French, German, Spanish and Italian).

Here are the instructions directly from the author:
My name is Declan Dagger and I work on DCM3 in Trinity College with Vincent Wade. We have built an application called twanslator on top of the twitter micro-blogging network that allows you to translate tweets into different languages. Initially we are looking to collect user centric data on the capabilities and limitations of text analytics and MT in limited character/context environments such as twitter.
 
I would appreciate your help in conducting this research. You can get involved by doing the following:

1. Go to http://www.myisle.org/twanslate and login in using your twitter account details (if you don’t have an account you can sign up at http://twitter.com).
2. When your tweets arrive there is a simple drop down menu of languages available which the tweet can be translated in to. When you translate a tweet, a rating system is then available (thumbs up / thumbs down) to indicate whether the translation was accurate or not. You can also add comments to the translation using the comment feature. Please rate all the translations you invoke as this is critical to our research.
3. We appreciate any feedback, comments and/or suggestions you may have on how to improve the twanslator application. To leave general feedback, please click on the “app feedback” icon on the left of the page. You can also make suggestions by tweeting them to “@myisle #twanslator”.
4. We will be adding new features to the application over time and ask that you follow @myisle so we can keep you informed of any updates.
5. As we need a relatively large user base to conduct our research, we would be grateful if you could suggest to your followers and colleagues to also use twanslator.
6. We would encourage you to suggest tweeters to @myisle that you recommend following for CNGL regardless of the language they tweet in. For example “@myisle you should follow @joe_bloggs [a French expert in localisation]”.
   

 
Part of the MyISLE goal is to build an open research platform for CNGL members within the social networking space. As such, twanslator has been developed using web services, workflow and customisable interfaces. So for those in CNGL interested in using twitter as part of a research study, please contact me at Declan.Dagger@cs.tcd.ie and I would be more than happy to make these services available to you.

The initial user interface is somewhat rudimentary, but I am sure it will improve over time. I have sent some feedback to Declan and I would encourage all of you to do the same (the more people who ask for the same feature the more likely it will be implemented).