Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.

Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.

Check this out... I think that it will become my default media lib. and player because it's tight integration to music blogs like 'the hype machine'...

check it out... :)

Songbird Media Player

In 1982, Home Box Office (HBO) had a problem on their hands. HBO used satellites to distribute their programming to cable companies across the US. Cable companies would pick up HBO with a large dish, then scramble the signal and distribute it to paying cable subscribers. The subscribers, who paid $8/month (in 1982 dollars) for the privilege of receiving HBO, received a set top descrambler box for HBO. The problem was the two to three million people with backyard satellite dishes who received HBO without paying. A bigger problem yet was that hotels and other establishments in Caribbean and Latin American countries that received HBO at no cost, and then freely redistributed it. The paying customers became resentful of all the freeloaders. HBO was plagued by complaints, and knew they must take action. They decided to scramble their original signal at their head end. HBO released a Request for Proposal for a scrambling system.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: HBO IMPLEMENTS SCRAMBLING

eyeOS is a new kind of Operating System, where everything resides on a web browser. With eyeOS, you will have have your desktop, applications and files always with you, from your home, your college, your office or your neightboor's house. Just open a web browser, connect to your eyeOS System and access your personal desktop and all your stuff just like you left it last time.

Cool...

eyeOS | Web Desktop - Web OS - Web Office - your files and applications everywhere

uBrowser is an open source test mule that renders interactive web pages onto geometry using OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla® rendering engine. Its primary purpose is to help me integrate Gecko into my company's software - a 3D virtual world called Second Life.

The first version, released in February 2006 was implemented as a single application and was only able to render a single Web page at a time. The current version can be thought of as a unit test for a newly developed library called LLMozLib that makes it easier to embed Gecko into applications. As well a providing this standalone library that can trivially be included in other applications, the notable improvements are support for rendering multiple simultaneous pages and support for page updates as and when required rather than via the old timer based model. There is still a lot of work left to do and by releasing the source, I'm hoping that others will benefit from what I've learnt and perhaps even help fix some bugs. You are able to interact with the page (mostly) normally and visit (almost) any site that works correctly with Firefox® 2.0.

Check it out... :P

LLMozLib & uBrowser

Findory was a personalized news site. The site launched in January 2004 and shut down November 2007.

A reader first coming to Findory would see a normal front page of news, the popular and important news stories of the day. When someone read articles on the site, Findory learned what stories interested that reader and changed the news that was featured to match that reader's interests. In this way, Findory built each reader a personalized front page of news.

Below is a screenshot of an example personalized Findory home page. Articles marked with a sunburst icon are personalized, picked specifically for this reader based on this person's reading history.

Hey this sounds like a niche market...

Geeking with Greg

Googlers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have an article, "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters", in the January 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM.

It is a great introduction to MapReduce, but what I found most interesting was the numbers they cite on usage of MapReduce at Google.

Jeff and Sanjay report that, on average, 100k MapReduce jobs are executed every day, processing more than 20 petabytes of data per day.

More than 10k distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented. In the month of September 2007, 11,081 machine years of computation were used for 2.2M MapReduce jobs. On average, these jobs used 400 machines and completed their tasks in 395 seconds.

What is so remarkable about this is how casual it makes large scale data processing. Anyone at Google can write a MapReduce program that uses hundreds or thousands of machines from their cluster. Anyone at Google can process terabytes of data. And they can get their results back in about 10 minutes, so they can iterate on it and try something else if they didn't get what they wanted the first time.

It is an amazing tool for Google. Google's massive cluster and the tools built on top of it rightly have been called a "competitive advantage", the "secret source of Google's power", and a "major force multiplier".

By the way, there is another little tidbit in the paper about Google's machine configuration that might be of interest. They describe the machines as dual processor boxes with gigabit ethernet and 4-8G of memory. The question of how much memory Google has per box in its cluster has come up a few times, including in my previous posts, "Four petabytes in memory?" and "Power, performance, and Google".

Update: Others now have picked up on this paper and commented on it, including Niall Kennedy, Kevin Burton, Paul Kedrosky, Todd Huff, Ionut Alex Chitu, and Erick Schonfeld.

Update: Let me also point out Professor David Patterson's comments on MapReduce in the preceding article in the Jan 2008 issue of CACM. David said, "The beauty of MapReduce is that any programmer can understand it, and its power comes from being able to harness thousands of computers behind that simple interface. When paired with the distributed Google File System to deliver data, programmers can write simple functions that do amazing things."

MapReducing 20 petabytes per day/ Google's guts!

Electric car pioneer ZAP says that owners of its ZAP Xebra electric city car commuting into London can save so much on parking, charging and tolls that it could help pay for the car within a year.

London is expanding the number of charging stations, according to recent news reports. The London Evening Standard said that Westminster council is putting in 10 roadside posts following a trial of two in Covent Garden. About 50 more will be installed in 13 of its car parks. Funded by Transport for London, the Energy Savings Trust and EDF Energy, users have to register with the council and pay a one-off fee to cover administration costs after which charging is free. Colliers International estimates parking in London to cost US$55 per day. With free parking, charging and no congestion tolls, the incentives start adding up.

"If you do some quick math on the incentives for electric cars, the numbers are staggering," said ZAP CEO Steve Schneider. "Assuming there are no parking, charging or congestion toll charges for your electric car, the car will be saving an estimated $50-80 per day and could pay for itself within one year."

ZAP Electric Car Gets a Free Ride in London...

For months, Sony's (SNE) PlayStation 3 video game console has seemed like a high-profile boondoggle for the Japanese giant. While Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox 360 took an early lead that it later forfeited to Nintendo's Wii machine, the PS3 always lagged behind. Worse, the machine's next-generation Blu-ray DVD player and other pricey high-tech parts, which pinched Sony's profits last fiscal year, look likely to weigh on earnings again this year and next. And analysts are skeptical as to whether Sony can meet its sales forecasts for the console this year.

But you won't hear Chairman and Chief Executive Sir Howard Stringer badmouthing the gaming machine. That's because the millions of PS3s the company has sold since late in 2006 likely clinched Warner Bros. Entertainment's (TWX) exclusive support for the Blu-ray format.

Blu-ray takes a market jump... What make it better over HD-DVD...

Sony's Blu-Ray Breakthrough

Nikita Ivanov and his 14 employees are working on an application that would harness the processing power within millions of cell phones to create one big supercomputer. The idea is to enable companies and government agencies to exploit all the idle computing power in their employees' mobile phones and perhaps even handsets belonging to non-employees who have agreed to lease that spare capacity.

To create this "grid" computing application, Ivanov's startup firm has chosen a mobile software platform that doesn't yet run on a single commercially available phone. Rather than Windows Mobile or the Symbian operating system, GridGain is using Android, a platform spearheaded by Google (GOOG) that has drawn scores of software developers with its promise of flexibility to create unusual applications.

GridGain is one of thousands of Android-based projects in the works. Another would enable users to record and share audio tours of museums or galleries. One is a music player that can connect a cell-phone user with people who have similar musical tastes and happen to be nearby. All underscore the ways that developers hope to use Android to take phones in new directions with greater ease than today's prominent wireless platforms. To succeed, though, they, along with Google and its partners, will need to work some kinks out of the system.

Read on... Shows some highs and lows of this new phone OS... Like NO Bluetooth!?

A Warm Welcome for Android

Analysts are mulling over Apple's iPhone sales numbers and are alarmed at a perceived discrepancy in the figures.

Apple claims slightly over 3.7 million iPhones were sold in 2007 -- yet AT&T this week revealed it ended the year with "just at or sightly under two million iPhone customers".

That two million has been boosted somewhat by an estimated 300,000-400,000 sales in Europe, analysts believe.

The discrepancy is that the 3.7 million iPhones Apple says it has sold and the estimated 2.4 million sold by its network partners still leaves 1.3 million of the devices unaccounted for.

That implies that around one in three iPhones are being purchased in order to unlock the device for use on other networks and/or for use with unapproved third party applications.

While it's possible some iPhones were sold over the Christmas period but not activated immediately as new users (perhaps) worked to cancel their existing mobile contracts, the discrepancy still implies an active market for unlocked iPhones.

Hello Apple... ditch at&t and sell the device out-right!

Where Are Apple's Missing iPhones?