via Gawker by Jim Newell on 7/7/10
Thursday, July 8, 2010
#CNN Fires Correspondent of 20 Years for #Tweeting About #Hezbollah #sick
Who Will Control #Redistricting? #florida #politics
via The Eye on 7/7/10
From the department of What Happens Next: a piece with must-read immediacy for true political junkies from Louis Jacobson at Stateline.org.
It's a comprehensive look at this year's contests for seats in state legislatures, which you care about because of the impact control of those bodies will have on redistricting after the 2010 Census.
Hat tip: Swing State Project
#Jindal signs guns-in-church law #fail
via POLITICO Top Stories by Andy Barr on 7/7/10
The measure allows concealed-weapons permit holders to pack heat in houses of worship. 
#Location Data Gets An Important New Layer: The #Alcohol Layer #fun
via TechCrunch by MG Siegler on 7/7/10
Humorously, the app was built by Skyhook Wireless, the service that’s one of the largest providers of geolocation data in the world. They’re smart. They know that most end users couldn’t care less about this data, they just want fun apps that utilize it. And that’s exactly what iSwig is.
The iPhone app is simple. You load it up and pick out the drink you happen to be enjoying. There are thousands of drinks in the database, from vague (bourbon) to specific (Redheaded Slut). Drinks are broken up into five categories: Liquor, Mixed, Shot, Beer, and Wine. Once you pick the drink you have, the next page locates you on a map, and asks if you’d like to tie yourself (or more specifically, your drink) to a venue. These venues come from both Skyhook’s data and Foursquare’s venue data. You can then leave a comment if you wish, choose to post it to Facebook and/or Twitter, and you’re set.
The app doesn’t even require that you sign-in (or have an account) to use it. You can choose to use a nickname or not. But if you want to, you can also hook it up to Facebook via Connect or to Twitter. You can also hook it up to the aforementioned Foursquare so that you can check-in when you’re drinking. And you can hook it up to Flickr as well for any photos you take of the drink. All of this optional integration is actually quite impressive.
A Home stream allows you to see all the activity by other users on iSwig. But you can also narrow it down to see just what people around you are drinking. And you can easily alter time to see all the way back to the last year of drinks around you, or “just now.” Plus, you can see what the top drinks are at any given time. This works on a global level, and all the way down to a 5 mile radius of where you currently are (it’s a sliding scale). For example, globally, Dewar’s is the drink of choice this past month, followed by Absolut and margaritas.
You can also see data broken down by individual drinks. For example, you can see a timeline of all those drinking whiskey recently. And you can see a leader board of the top drinkers of each drink. Awesome. And you can add any drink to your “faves.”
Again, all of this is just a way to showcase some of Skyhook’s huge amount of data (as well as get them another layer — the alcohol layer). And it’s meant to show just how easy it is to build an app on top of their data. But it’s an ingenious way. Skyhook says it took them just a couple of days to build this with their Local Faves social location SDK.
I’ve complained before about check-in fatigue — that there are simply too many location-based apps out there right now. Unfortunately, that usually stops me from using most of them regularly. But iSwig is one I’m definitely going to be using. If nothing else, it will help me remember where I was and what I was drinking last night.
You can find iSwig in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
Information provided by CrunchBase
Web Services for Mother Earth: Living PlanIT’s Vision for Data-Driven Cities
via TechCrunch by Matylda Czarnecka on 7/7/10
Living PlanIT aims to bring high tech tools to the construction industry to help create sustainable, data-driven cities. We wrote about one such city in Portugal, where each building within the city will be able to plug into the network, tracking everything from water usage to traffic congestion.
Lewis was inspired when he noticed that while many large-scale manufacturing industries like aerospace and automotive had begun using technology to streamline manufacturing efficiencies, the construction industry seemed more focused on design aesthetics.
“We’re a classic tech company,” he says, “we just happen to be building a city.”
Lewis and co-founder Malcolm Hutchinson are Microsoft alumni, and Lewis often uses .NET as an analogy to illustrate how Living PlanIT operates. He sees the company like a web service platform developers (both the coder and brick and mortar types) can tap into to create smarter products.
Although building cities from the ground up is no small endeavor, Lewis says building with the networked sensor technology can be cheaper than retrofitting existing structures. More new cities and collaborations with existing cities are in the works, including Las Vegas.
Businesses within this kind of city could benefit from being tapped into the data grid. A store owner might not care about what technology powers his shop, but he does care about what his customers are doing. With Living PlanIT’s help, the physical space can be built to be interactive, collecting data from sensors and displaying content to customers. Store owners could find out where customers were before they entered the store, what brought them inside and what items they looked at.
The company chose not to take venture capital and makes the most of its money through intellectual property royalties it charges partners, as well as through renting out space in its future cities. Partners pay an annual fee that varies from €100,000 for major players to as low as €5,000 for smaller companies. Cities can serve as incubators, helping bring companies’ technologies to the market and sharing revenue.
Living PlanIT is not yet profitable, but although Lewis declined to share numbers, he said the company expects to break even in the third quarter of next year. 370 companies currently work with Living PlanIT, and Lewis expects the number to grow to 12,000 by the end of 2014. The company currently employs 70 people, planning to grow to 150-200 employees by year’s end.
Information provided by CrunchBase
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