Modular Robot Platform

An interesting project - Linkbot

Bad Java hosting

DailyRazor.com is getting worse as Java hosting. The second big failure during the short time. And support does not exist on practice.

Any recommendation for good Java hosting?

Spotique: A New Approach to Local Messaging

Our new paper: Manfred Sneps-Sneppe and Dmitry Namiot "Spotique: A New Approach to Local Messaging", 11th International Conference, WWIC 2013, St. Petersburg, Russia, June 5-7, 2013. Proceedings, pp. 192-203

This paper describes a new approach to local messaging. Our application combines passive monitoring for smart phones and cloud based messaging for mobile OS (operational system). Passive monitoring can determine the location of mobile subscribers (mobile phones, actually) without the active participation of the users. Mobile users do not need to mark own location on social networks (check-in), they do not need to run on their phones the location track applications. In the same time, Cloud Messaging allows interested parties to directly deliver their information to mobile users who find themselves near a selected point. This is the main content of the service - how to combine the monitoring and notifications.

Free science books

A huge collection of free science books:

http://physicsdatabase.com/book-list-by-title/
Gutenberg Project
Open Culture
Computer Science
Math
Physics
Economics
Electrical/Computer engineering
Gatech Math

Deep Learning

This tutorial will teach you the main ideas of Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning. By working through it, you will also get to implement several feature learning/deep learning algorithms, get to see them work for yourself, and learn how to apply/adapt these ideas to new problems - from Stanford tutorial

Guide to Mobile

Comprehensive overview of mobile telecoms and smartphones business opportunity, from end-users to service and apps, to handsets, to the business of mobile. This free edition has the full 350 pages of original content including the Foreword by Raimo van der Klein, CEO of Layar. This free edition includes over 100 pages of samples including several reviews and chapter-length excerpts from several of Mr Ahonen's previous books. - free ebook

The future of technology

The Future Of Technology Isn’t Mobile, It’s Contextual - an interesting article.

Temporal classification

An interesting paper about temporal classificaion. It proposed a new temporal data classification method. This method seems applicable in general for temporal phenomena that exhibit major trends that develop gradually over time also contain significant fluctuations in the measured values between adjacent time instances.

Killing application

Technology investor and actor Ashton Kutcher predicted a large-scale shift to Wi-Fi-enabled VoIP and data services - a move that will put huge pressure on operators - and questioned Facebook’s potential to evolve on mobile. - from CTIA

Location is who, not where

"Marketers should keep in mind that targeting power comes from understanding what location reveals about the user, not just the location point itself. It is who, not where, that more strongly impacts CTRs and SVRs. The power of mobile location data lies in extracting context and meaning from historical location patterns to interpret meaningful insights about users; not the fleeting, real-time moment that a consumer enters a geo-fence." - from here

Mobile Services and Network Proximity

Dmitry Namiot and Manfred Sneps-Sneppe. "Mobile Services and Network Proximity." arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.4348 (2013)

This paper discusses several practical use cases for deploying network proximity in mobile services. Our research presents here mobile services oriented for either discovering new data for mobile subscribers or for delivering some customized information to them. All applications share the same approach and use the common platform, based on the Wi-Fi proximity. The typical deployment areas for our approach are context-aware services and ubiquitous computing applications. Our own examples include proximity marketing as the model use case.

Twitter Group Chats Wiki

We wrote recently about Twitter Group Chats and our Twicus tool for creating Group Chats. Here you can try Twicus.

And here is an interesting collection of Twitter Group Chats

Stats for programmers

Statistical Formulas For Programmers. An useful compilation from Wikipedia.

Local Messages for Smartphones

Our new paper on arXiv: Dmitry Namiot and Manfred Sneps-Sneppe "Local Messages for Smartphones". arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.4163 (2013).

This paper describes a new model for local messaging based on the network proximity. We present a novelty mobile mashup which combines Wi-Fi proximity measurements with Cloud Messaging. Our mobile mashup combines passive monitoring for smart phones and cloud based messaging for mobile operational systems. Passive monitoring can determine the location of mobile subscribers (mobile phones, actually) without the active participation of mobile users. This paper describes how to combine the passive monitoring and notifications.

Local area messaging for mobile users

Web mashup combines passive monitoring for mobile phones and cloud messaging. As a result we can send local area messages to mobile users. Our presentation for CFIC 2013 conference.

Local Messages for Smartphones from Coldbeans Software

About Group Chats on Twitter

An interesting article from WWW 2013 conference: Group Chats on Twitter.

Authors report on a new kind of group conversation on Twitter they call a group chat. These chats are periodic, synchronized group conversations focused on specific topics and they exist at a massive scale. The groups and the members of these groups are not explicitly known. Rather, members agree on a hashtag and a meeting time to discuss a subject of interest.

Group chats are similar to virtual communities in that the primary venue for communicating is online. As with other communities, the purpose is to exchange knowledge, to share experiences, to provide empathy and generally feel part of a community. Also, groups chats can be sprawled out geographically and thus they en- able a way to meet that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. However, they differ from virtual communities in that they use the Twitter platform as a real-time mechanism to communicate in groups. The real-time nature of these conversations imparts a live feeling that is hard to duplicate in other online venues such as forums. Another key difference is that these groups are implicit and therefore not easily discoverable.

In this connection we would like to point attention to our Twicus application. Actually, this application creates Group Chats on Twitter. One of the obvious applied areas is the second screen application for discussing TV show.

WWW 2013

We continue to share links for monitoring the interesting events in Twitter. Now it is WWW conference, Rio de Janeiro 2013



/via Geo Messages

P.S. and the same in Twi-gazeta:   WWW 2013

Directory of mashups

Our mashups directory has been updated. A huge collection of applications: Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, LBS, QR-codes, mobile HTML5 etc.

The latest release includes for example our new web mashup Spotique.

Google I/O

We continue to share links for monitoring the interesting events in Twitter. Now it is Google I/O, SF 2013



/via Geo Messages

P.S. and the same in Twi-gazeta:   Google I/O 2013

From SlideShare

Coldbeans Software, thank you! Your 31 SlideShares have been viewed a total of 22,638 times.

Mobile Analytics

Analytics for mobile users from Coldbeans Software

P.S. And here is demo for Spotique.

Bayesian Way for ranking comments

The most simple, and most popular, form of moderation of cooments is to rank according to a simple difference, score = #upvotes - #downvotes. However, this scoring function significantly over-weights comments that have a high number of views, typically comments that were posted within the first hour of a submission. In this paper, author points out that this ranking task is very similar to the multi-armed bandit problem, and that there are a number of alternative approaches developed in this area that likely outperform this lower bound approach.

You can see Java code for this algorithm

Secrets of the Big Data Revolution

Free book on Amazon: Secrets of the Big Data Revolution. Kindle edition.

Discussions in Twitter

You are welcome to check out an updated version for our Twicus - discussions in Twitter mashup.

Discussion here is a flow of messages (statuses) with some hash tag. Mashup lets users add a special status for the own timeline during the first visit. It is like check-in. This check-in record contains hash tag for the discussion. So, user can switch to search right with one click right from your new post. Additionally, user's timeline will keep check-in record (read - description to hashtag), so it is easy to return back to that discussion. For subsequent visits mashup simply redirects user to Twitter search page for the given hash tag.

You can set your own parameters for the discussion. Basic URL proceeds the following parameters:

tag - tag for discussion
title - explanation for your discussion
checkin - check-in message to be published in user's timeline
via - Optional. Twitter's account to follow for the check-in message
init - Optional. 0 value lets you skip an initial screen. Default value is 1.

For example: http://twicus.linkstore.ru?tag=mytag

Such way you can add links to your site/blog: 'Discuss in Twitter'

How it could be used? For example, second screen application for social TV.

MMA Forum 2013

We continue to share links for monitoring the interesting events in Twitter. Now it is Mobile Marketing Forum, NY 2013



/via Geo Messages

P.S. and the same in Twi-gazeta:   Mobile Marketing Forum 2013

Senate as Facebook network

A great visualization for soical network: "For every member, I calculated which other senators voted the same way at least 75 percent of the time. In effect, this organizes the Senate as a mini-Facebook of 100 users, in which any given pair of senators are friends if they meet this 75-percent threshold….Visualizations like this one work by treating the senators as particles that repel one another, and treating the connections between them as springs that hold them together. Because the Democrats vote so cohesively, with few defectors, they are held together by a large number of springs."

/via Facebook Directory

Money from checkins

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt that his company does, in fact, know how to make money. Key moments are: checkins retargeting and post check-in units.

In this connection - pay attention to our customized check-in products. For example, Places from Facebook lets any small business create own "Foursquare" on the existing base of Facebook's users.

For Google Scholar

It looks like a parser in Google Scholar has got some problems. Two missed papers:

Dmitry Namiot, Manfred Schneps-Schneppe "Smart Cities Software from the developer's point of view", International Conference on Applied Information and Communication Technologies (AICT2013), 25-26. April, 2013, Jelgava, Latvia, pp.238-245.

Alla Qoussini, Yousef Daradkeh and Dmitry Namiot "Location Sharing Without Central Server", IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol. 10, Issue 2, No 3, March 2013, pp. 138-144

Missed papers

Technical stuff - some missed papers in IJCSI Volume 10, Issue 2, March 2013. E.g. could not find our own paper Location Sharing Without Central Server

Wi-Fi monitoring and real analytics

Passive Wi-Fi monitoring service can tracks unique mobile users as they move through a mall, for example. It relies on Wi-Fi to do this, so it can track users who have their Wi-Fi turned on on their phones. Because it does not rely on GPS, it can track people indoors. Here is a demo version of dashboard for statistical service: Spotique. It is a-la Google Analytics, but for the real place and real visitors.

Snapshot illustrates registered mobile devices:

DIY Phone

DIY $12 phone. An interesting site.

Twitter and IoT

"Twitter created the clock, called #Flock, last month in partnership with London-based technology consultancy Berg; the clock responds to incoming tweets, @-messages, and retweets by animating small wooden puppets.

The Berg Cloud dev kit includes two small circuit boards and microcontrollers with access to a set of Web APIs, allowing the microcontroller to send and receive data from Internet applications. Another device in the kit, called a Bridge, provides wireless connectivity, and a built-in mobile user interface called Remote can access, manage, and control the system via iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone devices." - from MIT review

It is a time for Twitter bots. In this connection check out again our T411 service. It is our old idea about using Twitter as a transport layer for applications. You can see some our publications about twitter bots