Apple Store Opens On 4th Street Berkeley Caifornia!

image courtesy of RonPenndorf

Apple Store Opens On 4th Street Berkeley http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/

“The whole street will benefit from it financially,” said Manfred Kroening, co-owner of Bette’s Oceanview Diner, a place we spend some of our weekend mornings, of the Apple store opening 1823 Fourth Street, Berkeley CA. Sometimes we go to 4th street to buy our coffee from Pete's

This is great for all the Apple fans in Berkeley as it certainly make it easier to grab what ever hyped up of or generally good stuff from Apple.

The store will be open to public on August 20th and first 1000 customers will get a commemorative t-shirt.

I generally do not like the atmosphere of Apple stores, high pressure 20 something stores, I just go there with my list in hand, grab what I want and leave. But now I think UC Berkeley students have a place to kill their time. Oh wait with the amount they are paying for tuition now, they would not have any money left to spend so it will have to be Berkeley High students.

Good luck Apple and welcome to our 'hood.

Citizen Journalism At Work!The YouTube News Feed!

I was used to wait for the news hour to catch the news, in the mornings and in the evenings. Then I turned to sources like Google News, NYT Online and as such to feed my news needs. I was happy because I could catch up with the news from anywhere.
Yet there was something missing. One can read news as much as one wants but it is never the same as seeing the news.
Well here comes the solution, CitizenTube, the YouTube team will be working with the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track news as it breaks on YouTube. This will be a stream of breaking news from YouTube, uploaded by everyone from every walks of life.
The feed is on CitizenTube, and the YouTube team actually invites you to join in feeding the feed, become a Citizen Journalist:

if you’ve uploaded breaking news videos, please tweet them to us (@citizentube), and include as much context as you’re able to give. And we’d love to hear your feedback about this project in the comments sections of CitizenTube. Our goal with this news feed is to learn more about the news ecosystem on YouTube -- and who better to teach us than people like you.

YouTube Blog: The YouTube News Feed: What’s happening now?

Cloud Computing For Mobile Phones

cloudclone
With mobile phones providing more and more capabilities for us not to be tied to a desk, the shear amount of data that is processed by the Mobile devices tend to affect the battery life and send us back to the desk much earlier than we wanted to.
If we could use our mobile phones as a terminal to a much more powerful computer on the net will reduce the power requirements on the phone and at the same time provide much better processing power. Just like the old days with main frames and dumb terminals, transformed to today with cloud computing and intelligent terminals. But where and how do we do that? The answer comes from two Intel Research Berkeley scientists Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis. They have been working on a project called CloneCloud, which is a cloud computing service that provide external processing power to mobile phones.
With high speed connections available for mobile communication, handing over of a phones processing to a more powerful clone in the cloud might save a lot of processing power on the phone allowing the battery to last much longer.
At the same time the clone will be able to extend the processing power of the phone. For an example, the researcher Chun created a facial recognition application. The application required 100 seconds to run on the phone, while the same task took just one second once offloaded to the cloud.
But it is not all rosy with clonecloud and there are many hurdles to overcome. Network latency and bandwidth limitations will affect the operations and as I mentioned, it will be not much more than a dumb terminal once in an area where there is no connectivity. But then again in a dead zone you will be doing very little work.
Sending Cell Phones into the Cloud (MIT Technology Review)

Tags: cloudclone, cloud computing, UC Berkeley, Intel, mobile communication

Mobile Millenium Project, GPS, And Mobile Phones To Ease Your Commute.

http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/ (Download and project information link at the end of the report)

A new program by UC Berkeley, Mobile Millennium has been launched, in limited basis, to assist you with traffic information and ease your morning or evening commute. The program relies heavily on GPS enabled cell phones and traffic sensors already present or to to be placed in the future.
Once decided to participate in the program, Mobile Millennium project,(link below for downloading the program to your phone or mobile device) as you go driving around the city, GPS data will periodically and anonymously be sent to a collection of servers to be analyzed and presented to all the users. The data, which includes speed, location and other relevant information will be integrated with local maps to provide a traffic model consisting red, orange, yellow and green dots showing how the traffic moves on your friendly high ways. Which of course would have been green all over during the period of high gas prices, now becoming more of an orange yellow and red dots, with low gas prices.
The traffic information that you will be able to see on your mobile be just like those of morning news TV traffic reports.
Again community based project relies on the information provided by community and your participation will help a lot. If you are one of those civic minded people, you can download the program from project site, free of course, after registering. The program will work on most GPS-enabled cell phones that are capable of installing and running Java applications. The Web site mentions that it will be updated with a list of specific Nokia and non-Nokia phone models compatible with the software, continuously. (But with all those data flowing back and forth, a unlimited data plan will help a lot and is strongly suggested by the researchers).
The effort is a joint project by researchers from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto and UC Berkeley's California Center for Innovative Transportation and is a part of the Mobile Millennium project by . The new system uses digital mapping data from Chicago-based NAVTEQ, recently acquired by Nokia.
Mobile Millennium is supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation through the federal SafeTrip-21 initiative, which seeks technology solutions to improve safety and reduce congestion on the roadways, as well as by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).
Register and download the program

Tags: Mobile Millennium, UC Berkeley, GPS, Navteq, Nokia, California Center for Innovative Transportation, SafeTrip-21 initiative, CALTRANS