Bruno Unna

Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit - Seneca

Archives for: January 2006

01/12/06

Permalink 04:39:44 pm, by Bruno Email , 353 words, 1696 views   English (US)
Categories: Society, Technology

Today's podcast (Vinod Khosla)

Web 2.0 is coming of age and facilitating collaboration, participation and communication between users. It has opened up opportunities in media distribution and what Vinod Khosla calls media mangling. Personalisation has also started to fulfil its potential on the web and new startups are using this opportunity to launch businesses by pursuing VC funding. However, startups need to use the capital raised judiciously to avoid making the same mistakes associated with the growth of Web 1.0.

Vinod Khosla points out that mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous globally. Mobile phones are being used to help people learn English in India, China and France. Taking the topic of education further, Khosla proposes that all textbooks should be open source and easily editable - like Wikipedia - so that children can look at different versions of the same topic depending on their level of comprehension. He believes that this will help imbue the virtue of critical thinking in children. Khosla thinks that the open source idea can be extended to many things outside its traditional scope, such as seeds. Seeds can be specifically engineered to suit a region's particular environment and population requirements. This is not feasible today, however, because of patent protection.

When asked during the short Q&A session at the end of the show whether Google's relevancy of search results can be improved, Khosla responds by saying that this can be achieved through the collaborative filtering of search results. In response to other questions he explains why he suspects that the successful companies of Web 2.0 will be those that can increase the size of their audiences rather than those which try to control content.

Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Vinod serves on the boards of Agami, eASIC, Indian School of Business, Infinera, Kovio, Metricstream, Spatial Photonics, Xsigo and Zettacore.

Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, a Master's in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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01/05/06

Permalink 10:49:51 pm, by Bruno Email , 113 words, 1054 views   English (US)
Categories: Mathematics, Technology, Art, Entertainment, Popular culture, Applied sciences, Information science

Today's podcast: Computational Origami

Robert Lang

Origami Artist and Theorist

The last decade of the twentieth century saw a revolution in the development and application of mathematical techniques to origami. Robert J. Lang describes how geometric concepts have led to the computer solution of a broad class of origami folding challenges and, as a consequence, enabled origami designs of astonishing complexity and realism to be developed.

As often happens in mathematics, a theory originally developed for its own aesthetic value has led to some surprising practical applications. In addition, it has shed light on long-standing mathematical questions and solved practical engineering problems. Lang gives examples of how origami has enabled safer airbags, Brobdingnagian space telescopes, and more.

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Permalink 08:09:05 pm, by Bruno Email , 117 words, 1859 views   English (US)
Categories: Computing

Eureka! Unit testing using STI in Rails

Agile Web Development with Rails, version 2005-9-13, page 152. Used without permission. :)

The CartTest class highlights another case where the setup() method is useful. Both of the test methods need a Cart object. Cart is a model, but it's not actually stored in the database since it's not a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base. That means we can't use fixtures to load Cart objects because fixtures load objects into the database. Instead, we can initialize a @cart instance variable in the setup() method for all the test methods to use.

def setup
  @cart = Cart.new
end

So I have modified the automatically-generated unit tests for the inheriting models, removed the fixture invocation and replaced it with setup() methods.

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01/02/06

Permalink 05:09:18 pm, by Bruno Email , 10 words, 3383 views   English (US)
Categories: Geography, Entertainment, Tourism, Communication, Internet

A9 maps

Impressive what intelligent people can do with money and motivation.

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Bruno Unna

"Music is the space between the notes." Claude Debussy

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  • El reto de exportar servicios

    México tiene al menos tres oportunidades para ascender del 7° lugar del mercado offshore outsourcing de TIC: Select

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  • Futo...comprar y vender en España Permalink
  • Technology Business Accelerator

    Programa de Secretaría de Economía administrado por la Fundación México-Estados Unidos para la Ciencia para dar apoyo a Empresas Mexicanas de Alta Tecnología.

    Proximamente: Inauguración TechBA Austin el día 5 de diciembre, 2005

    Interesante Tutorial:
    Conoce como puede estar lista tu empresa para el Mercado Global con el Tutorial "Getting Ready for the Global Market"

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  • Valley-Mexico mentoring grooms firms for growth

    By Matt Marshall
    Mercury News

    When Alberto Herrera started his own tech company in Tijuana two years ago, he was confident he had the knowledge to take on the risk.

    His team had worked at Panasonic's office in the Mexican border city and had the technical expertise to craft a new kind of wireless sensor network -- one that can be used for hotel room key cards and turn on the heating system once a customer has entered his or her room.

    But Herrera didn't have contacts with venture capitalists and didn't know how to spiff up a business plan.

    That changed last year, once his company, Medida, started working with the Mexico-Silicon Valley Technology Business Accelerator (TechBA for short) in San Jose, funded by an annual $6 million grant from the Mexican government.

    TechBA assigned a special adviser to Medida, to mentor it in Silicon Valley's arcane ways.

    The help is part of an effort by the Mexican government to jump-start its technology economy -- in part through better connections to leading tech centers like Silicon Valley and their entrepreneurial cultures and practices.

    Mexico's domestic information technology and software market totals more than $3 billion a year and has 2,095 companies, according to its economics ministry.

    Mexico exports about $400 million in technology services each year to the United States, about half in business process outsourcing, half in software outsourcing. But Mexico wants to do more than supply its northern neighbor with a cheap source of labor, says Jorge Zavala, chief executive of TechBA. ``The question is, how do we switch from low value-added services and move into information technology?''

    The goal of TechBA, he said, is to help create Mexican companies that own their own technology, and to export $5 billion in technology and other services by 2012.

    In Herrara's case, TechBA appointed a mentor -- Adolpho Nemirosky, an Argentine entrepreneur who has worked in the valley's semiconductor and telecom industries for 13 years. He had co-founded a venture-backed company, Xtreme Logic, and was eager to help others. He is paid a stipend by TechBA.

    His help has already gone a long way. Nemirosky taught Herrera how to make an elevator pitch -- that is, a two- to five-minute synopsis of his company, tailored for impatient investors. He advised him to focus on specific areas, such as sensor systems for hotels and for entertainment software. And he took Herrera to meet with some professors at the University of California-Berkeley, where Herrera was able to secure a technology adviser.

    To top it off, Nemirosky groomed Herrera to present to venture capitalists Tuesday evening at an event hosted by TechBA and an angel group called Silicom Ventures. Besides the investors, a live audience of more than 200 people looked on. And Herrara performed well enough that three of four venture capitalists invited him to talk with them further. ``I'm very pleased with him,'' Nemirosky said of his protege.

    Currently, 40 companies participate in the TechBA program, and the group recently announced its first tangible success: Mexican company JackBe. The company, which has created Web sites for Sears and Citigroup's Mexico operations, raised $6.5 million in venture capital funding in November -- the first Mexican tech company to raise venture capital from the United States, according to TechBA's Zavala.

    There are other signs of late that the U.S. venture capital market is waking to not only to Mexico, the world's ninth largest economy, but also to the fast-growing Hispanic market in this country.

    Sausalito venture firm Sienna Ventures is now raising $100 million for its newest fund to focus on the Hispanic market.

    Herrera's company, Medida, meanwhile, is expanding in the United States. It has $1 million in revenue after a year's work, 10 employees and an office in San Jose, where employees can drop in from Tijuana. Silicon Valley is a good place to develop contacts for customers, said Herrera.

    ``We've gained visibility that would otherwise be very hard to get,'' he said.

    One of his customers is XaviX, which makes interactive sports games and also has offices in San Jose. Medida provides XaviX wireless sensors for its newest fly-fishing game -- where the sensor detects when game players flick their wrists and feeds information back to the game.

    Mexico is just the latest country trying to develop a network here in Silicon Valley.

    Gadi Behar, managing director of Israeli-focused Silicom Ventures, has reached out to groups from Canada, Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands and Hawaii, offering help such as crash courses on Silicon Valley's business culture. ``They all want access to Silicon Valley,'' agreed Michelle Messina, a public relations professional who has also helped companies in these groups.
    Contact Matt Marshall at 408-920-5920 or via his blog at www.SiliconBeat.com

    © 2006 MercuryNews.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
    http://www.siliconvalley.com

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  • What Are Google AdWords

    A nice article Sebastian found and sent.

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Software development

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  • Novell Learning Center

    Creo que deberíamos familiarizarnos con este material antes de embarcarnos más a fondo en la aventura de dar servicios alrededor de Novell.

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Interesting blogs

  • Finding Signals in the Noise

    Finding Signals in the Noise
    Digg, Memeorandum, Findory, Blogniscient, and other startups promise to manage news overload on the Web.

    Few would dispute that we live in an age of information overload. In the last few years alone, blogs have increased the torrent of information each day to unmanageable levels.
    This would explain, then, why a corresponding torrent of startups has surfaced recently to help us filter, manage, and control this flood of information. Some rely on insightful algorithms that understand popularity to filter the news, while others rely on the preferences of readers.

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  • Big Media, Little Blogosphere

    There aren't yet enough quality pages to satisfy advertisers' hunger for a blog presence

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