Razvan Antonescu » General

How to reduce information overload for IT news

Razvan Antonescu — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:49:28 +0000

If you are used to read IT news, in time you start suffering from information overload. You add sources on Facebook, Twitter, RSS reader and the information keeps coming. And then comes a moment when you start thinking that you need to make a clean up. But you have no idea where to start.

Well here a pro tip on how to clean up your sources and be more efficient:

When a source has articles that contain phrases like:

This is an Apple [InsertProductName] killer
The new Apple [InsertProductName] is a large disappointment
Apple stock is doomed
Sell your Apple stock now
Apple [InsertProductName]‘s hardware is behind competition
Android has Flash
etc

Drop it! Delete without remorse. Not only that you are not loosing anything but in time you will see that you will have a better view on the IT field. There are only 2 situations in which the above statements are possible:

1. Stupidity: The author is an idiot that has no freaking idea what is he talking about. More than that, who pays for those articles is a bigger idiot that most likely employs only idiots

2. Greed: The author and who pays him know that the above statements are not true but they use the momentum for link baiting. A legit business model but not a reliable source of information

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Stupid arguments: I own the comments

Razvan Antonescu — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:23:24 +0000

In the never ending debate of WordPress comments vs. Facebook comments one of the most idiotic arguments is: But I own the comments and I don’t want to give them to Facebook or any other entity.

Really? Do YOU own the comments made by OTHER people on your website? By proxy, does your hosting company own the blog posts you create?

Breaking news to you social media blogger expert: the comment creator is the most likely person to own the comments he makes. And FB comments are the easiest way to put the owner in control of his content.

How to use Airplay on your Android telephone

Razvan Antonescu — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:25:59 +0000

If you own both an Android telephone and an Apple TV, until now you must have been jealous on all the Iphone owners that could use Airplay to push multimedia content from their phones to the big screen.

Well, be jelaous no more because there is an app for that . An app for your Android phone.

Eye-C is an app available for both Android and Iphone that goes beyond sharing local media files from your phone. They allow you to connect your YouTube, Picasa, Twitter, Facebook and Soundcloud accounts into one unified multimedia timeline that you can play on your big screen.

Eye-C own description:

Play mixed playlists from YouTube, SoundCloud & more on your phone, TV & stereo.
Download Eye-C Taglists for free, and your timeline becomes your own personal TV channel, music player, or photo gallery. At any point, just push play, and the feed comes to life – on your phone, TV, Apple TV (even from an Android phone), PC and more. Add a hashtag (#tag) to any video, song or picture to build a taglist – a playlist that combines items from multiple sources – YouTube, Picasa, Facebook, or even your personal music library (see below for tech specs). More sources are coming every month, so play tags – it’s easy and free.

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How to geotag your camera photos

Razvan Antonescu — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:28:46 +0000

Geotagging your photos is not something new and can be done in various ways:

Most desktop apps include a mode that allows you to place your photos on a map through drag and drop and geotags will be automatically added (EX: Picasa / Iphoto). Unfortunately these are not very friendly with large number of photos and most likely you will be ending like me to drag all the pictures from a trip over a city.
Web based services: Flickr, Picasa and even Facebook allow you to place the photos on maps just like their desktop counterparts. The down side? Again, large number of photos.
Take pictures with your camera phone. Most of the new telephones (no matter of their operating system), if they have a GPS they most likely add geotags to your pictures. The downside? Even if the mobile cameras become more and more powerful, they still don’t compare with a dedicated camera
Buy a new camera or accessories for the current one that allow you to geo tag your images as you take them

But what to do when:

You don’t want to drag and drop hundreds of pictures over a map
You don’t want to buy a new camera or accessories
You have an Android smart phone or Iphone

Well, the answer is Geotag Photos, a mobile app that allows you to automatically geo tag your digital pictures after you have taken them. The app idea is quite simple but efficient: you start the app and synchronize the time with your camera and then you start taking pictures. Pictures will be automatically geo tagged on your desktop once you download them and the associated track.

What can you do after you geotag your images:

View or showcase your images in Google Earth. Here is how you can prepare a special file to open it in Google Earth. This is useful in many cases:

Your own viewing to browse through your memories using places
Showcase your vacations to others
If you are a real estate or a travel agency, showcase personalized offers

In flickr, you can browse sets/groups and streams in map mode. In addition, your pictures will appear on the city pages

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The tech world is broken by design

Razvan Antonescu — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:18:43 +0000

The tech world is broken by design will be a series of posts that cover different aspects of the tech world (hardware/software) that are obviously broken.

But what broken means in this context. Broken means that there is a huge difference between intention and implementation and this reflects on the user satisfaction, company’s revenue and progress. There are multiple levels unfortunately and all summed lead to a not so bright future:

User experience: what the user wants and what the user gets
Product development: the development cycle from the idea to the end product
Organizational culture: how companies function in order to transform an idea into a product
Marketing: what are the marketing department doing to get the product into the user’s home and the money from the user’s pocket to shareholder’s bank accounts

This series is inspired 99% by comparing how Apples does things and how the others do it. I started with this introduction to kill procrastination and have a start

Google Analytics reports missing 2 November 2010

Razvan Antonescu — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:13:54 +0000

This morning a client was panicked that we have been banned by Google because Google analytics was showing zero data for yesterday. A quick check on a few other accounts and everything was clear: a pretty nasty bug is causing this. From what people on twitter are saying it has been going for the past 10 hours.

No official reaction yet from Google Analytics blog but expect one soon. My estimate is that is just a reporting error and all the data should appear soon.

Summarizing, google analytics reports missing is just a display bug.

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How inception will be performed by brands on the near future

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 13:33:46 +0000

See below a 44 min presentation done by Aza Raskin on how inception could be performed by brands using our social streams. The presentation is focused around the idea that big companies, with our acknowledgement, may alter our past (tweets/images/personal videos) for a new breed of product placement.

Keynote for the John Seely Brown Symposium at University of Michigan from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

You’d might think that this sounds like fantasy and is never going to happen, but also people thought that 1984 is just another dystopic novel.

Yahoo Messenger video chat for Ipod Touch

Razvan Antonescu — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 06:57:29 +0000

The Yahoo Messenger team has kept their promise made when they launched the 2.0 version of their Iphone / Ipod Touch app and today they released version 2.0.1 that enables video calling for Ipod Touch users that have the latest (4th) generation.

This is a big step not only for Yahoo but for all the Iphone / Ipod Touch users that will benefit from the new standards imposed by Yahoo. Let’s see who’s going to be next:

Skype? They have the infrastructure as Fring used their API to do the same thing. It should be very easy for them to turn it on
Google? They don’t have a custom Gtalk Iphone / Ipod Touch app but would add value to their current IM offering

I know that there are other apps around that provide the same features, but let’s face it. Without multi platform integration and forcing the users to subscribe to yet another service is freaking epic fail.

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Startup mistakes: Etacts

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:21:09 +0000

A few days ago I’ve received a newsletter from the Etacts team regarding an update of their product. Today I wanted it to give it a try but surprise surprise is not compatible with the Firefox 4 beta. This is one of the most basic mistakes done by startups.

The idea is: when you have a young product targeted to early adopters, you make sure that you blend well in their environment. Otherwise, like in the case of Etacts, you are going to loose the momentum and all your PR and development efforts are going to be less efficient

Yahoo Messenger 2.0 for iOs: FAIL!

Razvan Antonescu — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:11:17 +0000

As was previously announced, Yahoo Messenger 2.0 is now live on the Apple Store. Unfortunately this is not the best app and is missing the basic things:

As an app specifically builty for iOS 4.1, the icons are not made for the retina screen and look like crap
Even though the Ipod Touch 4th gen has 2 cameras and works with Face time, Yahoo made this version compatible only with Iphone 3GS and 4

Hopefully, based on user pressure we will be seeing a new version pretty soon that fixes all this issues

UPDATE:

And here we have it, an official answer from the development team, on their official blog:

We’re working on support for video on iPod Touch 4 and hope to release an update very shortly. Appreciate your patience.

Sherrine
Yahoo! Messenger Team

So, I just hope that short means short