First Impressions, Last Impressions

By | November 22, 2011
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What’s the first and last thing you’re likely to experience in a country you visit? And what kind of lasting impression is that going to leave?

Jaktoi

Cigarette-burn marked toilet paper dispenser (empty) at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta Airport, April 28 2007

Sintoi

Toilet paper dispenser at Singapore’s Changi Airport, April 28 2007

Investment in tourist attractions, advertising campaigns and big ticket infrastructure projects may lure visitors, but chances are they will remember what hits them first and last. If you want to win visitors over, bathrooms at airports might be a good place to start.

Travel tip: the practice in an Indonesian bathroom, by the way, is to yell out ‘paper please’ (‘minta tissu’) to the attendant once you’re perched in the cubicle. He’ll then hand you some under the door.

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The Next Web 2.0 Frontier?

By | November 22, 2011
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If you use software and want to share what you know, and find out what others know, then your prayers are answered. Below is my ten minute review of “software gone social”. Not for everyone, but worth a look. 
clipped from tenminut.es

Wakoopa-logoWhat is it: Wakoopa is “software gone social” — a sort of software equivalent of Last.fm. Share with the world what software you’re using and see what other people are using too. Official version here.

The Hotel Wi-Fi Pit

By | November 22, 2011
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Hotel

I’ve never had a really good experience with hotel Wi-Fi. The connections are slow, inconsistent and quite often just not there. Seems like I’m not the only one. Why is this? And why do hotels persist with offering only wireless when most of them are fully equipped with cable outlets too? How can you tell before you check in whether a hotel’s Internet connection is worth the name?

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Old Habits, or New Uses?

By | November 22, 2011
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Phonebooth3

Young hospital worker using her cellphone in a phone booth, Jakarta, April 2007

Either she uses the phone booth out of habit from her pre-cellphone days, or else she’s making use of a privacy feature of old technology — the sound-proofing booth — her new technology doesn’t offer.

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The Sound of the Crowd as Trigger

By | November 22, 2011
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British Telecom (BT) is working on software that picks out the best bits of a soccer game and puts it together as a presentation. The software – developed over four years – views a football match and produces a graph assessing each passage of play, saving only what it considers to be the most interesting moments.
It selects them based not on a sophisticated understanding of football but on “factors such as the volume and excitement levels of the crowd and the commentator, changes in camera views and the amount of motion and speed of play at any time.”
Clever idea, really, although I’m guessing you couldn’t do the same thing for tennis. Or chess. Or cricket. Or lawn bowls.

clipped from www.btplc.com
“If you’ve ever been in another room while a match is on you’ll get an idea how it works. You hear the volume rise with the crowd and you know something interesting has happened.”