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Lolcats on my google mobile appYesterday

Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around. We all remember the twitterfone and the cinch blogtalkradio concepts and we're still thinking on how huge their impact will be in the info-included community.

It's been over a year since Tim O'Reilly, the great web2.0 visionary and O'Reilly media books founder, noted that google was actually harvesting and harnessing precious voice-recognition data from their Goog-411 phone search. It's also been a year since Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned that 2008 was all about "mobile, mobile, mobile". Well, all those signs were foretelling the biggest thing I've

Sapo codebits 2008Yesterday

Last week I went to codebits, the 24/3 hackers contest organized by the portal sapo.pt. And it was awesome! I had loads of fun, learned tons of stuff, met a bunch of new and interesting people, worked on my tech social network, etc, etc...

The organization was perfect (some sapo team members are the organizers of the famous Shift conference). We had free wifi, free pizza for lunch AND for dinner, 24/3 free fruit, candy bars, chips, sodas, water, all inclusive and in abundance. Never was I found short on anything of those precious resources. That's pretty impressive in my book. Loads of puffs, loads of tables and chairs. We had xboxes, playstations and wiis to relax. All that with cool lighting in an open-space environment. All you had to do was to bring your laptop. Heck, that's a programmers paradise. The only single itch was that there only was two internet wires available per tables of six laptops. That combined with frequent wifi jams. But still, that wouldn't stop us from coding hard.

The main buzzwords tha

Location and social networks on the iphoneNovember 3

Here are some location based tools that I use on the iPhone. Some are social canvas, some are useful tools.

Google Maps

I use it to:

• Locate me.
• Search places.
• Bookmark places.
• Find routes.
• Navigate.

Unique features:

• Built in iPhone.
• Street view (coming to Europe, one country at a time).
• navigation system.

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Google Earth

I use it to:

• locate me.
• search places.
• do 3D earth exploration.
• browse nearby Wikipedia and Panoramio entries.

Unique fe

Post - Shift'08October 20

Last week I went to Shift.pt, a conference about new technologies, society and the web, organized and sponsored by Sapo.pt. There I've acquainted a bit more with Pedro Custódio and his team/friends, as well as a whole new bunch of very interesting people.

In particular I enjoyed the workshop über wireless technologies (organized by Tijmen Schep), where I had the opportunity to meet and work with ad-hoc shifters.

Our workshop project was to arrange a mobile phone number that shifters could SMS to, and shout their names and interests. The SMSes would be displayed live on a screen in the conferencem so other shifters could see and discover their peers. We called our project ShiftNetwork. The other projects from the other teams were also very interesting and some actually were implemented!

Though we didn't carried our project all to the end, we did had a nice looking iphone mobile page, that we changed a posteriori to rebroadcast the twitter updates stream on Shift08. Basically, we never managed to setup a working phone. But we did found interesting software to extr

Shift.pt starting tomorrowOctober 14

Here's an excerpt of a mail (addressee anonymacy kept) I wrote today that tells a long way about what are my expectations on shift, the web2.0 and society conference happening in Lisbon the 15th, 16th and 17th October 2008.

Dear Mr. Smith,

In short, I'm afraid I'm not available at all for this week. Can we schedule for next week?

I'd be delighted to apply to your interview and your programming tests. However, I'm afraid I will not miss the Shift conference (http://www.shift.pt/), which is probably the best conference on Web2.0 and society, happening this week, right here in Lisbon.

In the meantime I send you some code I did in C a while back in 2004[...]

Thank you,

Guillaume

By the way, that's official, I'm looking for an exciting job to start somewhere during 2009, 1st quarter. I hope to work in the mobile and/or web2.0 area.