Good night Nokia - Good morning Nokia Microsoft Mobile

Today Nokia officially belongs to Microsoft, and according to a leak so it seems a name change is imminent.

Nokia-Microsoft deal is going to close soon and a leaked Nokia’s letter to its existing Devices and Services business suppliers base reveals two interesting things. First revelation is about renaming of Nokia Oyj to Microsoft Mobile Oy, which will be a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary and may be the name of Microsoft’s mobile devices arm. Good thing for suppliers is that current terms and conditions that they have with the Devices and Services business will not change post deal-closure.

"Please note that upon the close of the transaction between Microsoft and Nokia, the name of Nokia Corporation/Nokia Oyj will change to Microsoft Mobile Oy. Microsoft Mobile Oy is the legal entity name that should be used for VAT IDs and for the issuance of invoices."

Nokia has already announced that 25th April will be the date of Nokia-Microsoft deal-closure. The deal faced hurdles in China due to local vendor’s apprehensions and in India due to the ongoing tax issues. 

In an interesting development, HTC has shown interest in buying Nokia’s Chennai plant, if it is up for sale!

This is an era that is being laid to rest today. It is a little sad especially considering that Nokia once dominated the world's mobile phone market. One cannot help but wonder how, and when everything went south... 

Ten 3D Printed Houses In A Day

2014 is looking to become the year of the 3D printer. There really doesn't seem to be a thing you cannot print. Adding "building a house in a day" to the list of accomplished projects may seem to be pushing it; 10 houses on the verge of impossible. 

However a Chinese company recently proved the skeptics wrong.

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. has printed 10 homes in 24 hours out of recycled materials. The houses, each covering an area of 200 square meters, are printed entirely in concrete.

This isn't the first attempt at 3D printing large structures in a short amount of time. Researchers in California are making a printer that can build a house in 24 hours.

In Amsterdam earlier this month, construction of a 3D printed house began. The house is made out of plastic bricks that fit together like Lego. It's also being printed onsite. The Chinese houses, on the other hand, weren't built onsite. They were printed in pieces and then put together in Shanghai's Qingpu district.

The pieces are made using recycled construction materials and industrial waste to form a concrete aggregate, Gizmodo reports. The 3D printer used to build the houses is 500 feet long, 33 feet wide and 20 feet high. Each home costs around $4,800.

"We purchased parts for the printer overseas, and assembled the machine in a factory in Suzhou," the company's CEO, Ma Yihe, said. "Such a new type of 3D printed structure is environment-friendly and cost-effective."

The final product. Needs some paint but essentially ready to move in to. 

WinSun plans to build 100 recycling factories in the country, one in every 300 km, to collect and transform the waste into materials for 3D printing through special handling, processing and separation technology. WinSun hopes their 3D printer and technology could offer "affordable and dignified housing" for the impoverished.

Do you think 3D printed houses are the way of the future. Please leave your comment below. 

60 years of being Boring

Every day, something significant to human history must happen … right?

Wrong. The computer program True Knowledge defined April 11, 1954 as the most boring of the 20th century – a day where absolutely nothing happened. Algorithms using weighted values for more than three million facts including historical events, birthdays of significant people, etc. made experts conclude that April 11, 1954, was really, really uneventful.

But why was it so boring? Usually in other days, someone famous was born, someone notorious died, or something significant happened. On this specific day apparently none of that went down. The leading scientist who came up with that date, William Tunstall-Pedoe, searched for a day where no result really popped up:

"It occurred to us that we are able to objectively measure the importance of every day in history. Some days are highly eventful and on some days far less happens and we can also objectively estimate the importance of these events. For fun we wrote the program and set it going. When the results came back the winner (or perhaps loser) was April 11, 1954 – a Sunday in the 1950s.”

The best the machine could muster for the day was the fact that Belgium had its fourth post-war general election and that a Turkish academic who taught electronics was born. But it could all have been so different for April 11. On April 12th history notes that Bill Haley and the Comets recorded Rock Around The Clock, forever inscribing this day in musical history. 

Other major events on April 12th 1954 include US forces organizing a major airlift of military supplies to forces in Indo-China, RAF bombers sweeping over the forests of Kenya, dropping tons of explosives on Mau Mau hideouts, and electricity finally being brought to the households of East Anglia, the UK, home of among other buildings the Cambridge University.

True Knowledge (now known as Evi), which provides a direct answer to a question instead of providing a list of links like other sites such as Google, was launched online in February 2007. The system can store hundreds of millions of facts about people, places, events and businesses.

The funniest thing is that the most boring day ever is now somewhat interesting, because of its status as the most boring day ever. So does that mean the second most boring day ever is now the most boring?

11 min funding

What are you able to finish in 11 minutes?

Most people would probably answer along the lines of grill a nice steak, bake a pan of cookies or play one round of Candy Crush. Not Micheal Armani and David Jones however. They would get their dream funded. 

Called the Micro, their personal 3D-printer smashed its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 and is now well on its way to becoming one of the most interesting projects on the site.

Created by a team in Bethesda, MD, the Micro originally sold for $199 for early birds and his since risen by $100. It’s a tiny printer, to be sure, with a 4.5 cubic-inch build volume and a special internal spool that holds the filament inside the printer’s case. It can build objects 4.5-inches high, which isn’t much but it’s enough to have a bit of fun.

The founders, Michael Armani and David Jones, have done something quite intelligent: they’re building a very bare-bones printer with some very interesting software. However the full success of this campaign this is not because they have a great product. 3D-printers have been around for a good long while now, and if you really wanted one you would have gotten it already. 

Instead, what they do have is a shown a well structured purpose and functional solution. There a few key take-aways from this success story:

• Affordable, consumer printer: Micro keeps repeating and showing this. The product is affordable, making it available for any consumer
• Effortless: It is super-easy to use. The technical problems that may arise for consumers (How do I get blue-prints? How do I hook it up? What programs do I need?) are already explained and solutions provided by the company. This puts the consumer at ease with the product, making it comfortable.
• Power efficient = lower cost: By using more energy efficient components they can produce a better and more efficient product, which in the end lowers cost. 
• Showing of functions: The video clearly shows and highlights different real-life, momentary problems where the product can be put to use. It shows a woman fixing a broken shower curtain, a man printing a prototype for a project, or even just printing a small espresso mug because the last one broke.
• Explaining why they need money: This may be the most important and best part of this video. They explain the project, the funding, and the plans they have for the funds expertly and simply. There is no doubt in my mind, why they are asking for my money, and where the money I contribute is going to end up should I choose to fund them.

In short, an expertly executed project. Please have a look and comment below!

Selfie Ban sinks Gym Chain

Earlier this week, Swedish new radio P3 News, reported that gym chain Friskis & Svettis introduced a "selfie ban" in the changing rooms at their gym in Stockholm . 

The decision came about because people were taking pictures and publishing in social networks, and other folks who were unfortunately unclothed in the background then inadvertently ended up on the picture online. To protect involuntary models from accidentally ending up on photos in social media so the chain has now introduced a policy prohibiting any photography from the the locker rooms. 

Problems arose however when the headliner at P3 News published the title "Selfies banned from Friskis & Svettis" which of course is not true. It is still allowed to take photos at the gym, just not in the locker room .

The news spread quickly on Twitter, and other news agenvies picked it up and ran the same error in the title. Even though the article itself set everything straight in the body, all to many people decided to just share and retweet the erroneous headline. The pictures below are from Swedens major news agencies; P3 News , DN, Metro and SVT.

Friskis & Svettis now have a small crisis on their throats, something they need to handle and explain quickly. I have already seen customers who want to refund their entire memberships just because they believe that the ban is just crazy. I myslef understand them, however I also wished they would have read the entire story, because I also understand and agree with Friskis & Svettis. 

When you see how fast a headline escalates in the media, and especially in social media, even though it is completely faulty and disproven in the article itself, it goes to show how damaging an uncontrolled spread like this really can be. I dont know how much revenue Friskis & Svettis has lost over this, but my guess is that it sure have dented their results, at least in their customer service department. 

As of right now Friskis & Svettis has yet to issue an explanation. 

Court Case eases up on Piracy

What is a downloaded movie worth? What is a reasonable punishment for a person who downloads a movie, and one that uploads a movie? Is piracy theft, or should it just be consider plagiarism?

Internet piracy is still a relatively new phenomenon, most countries are currently far from nailing down their legislation on the spectacle, and the debate is well under way on how piracy should be treated in the justice system. Sweden, being a fore runner when it comes to both Internet piracy, and piracy prevention, is still leagues from a solid answer.

Therefore, leading judgments are important, and since the Internet and information sharing is global, it is very interesting to examine how other countries deal with their cases of piracy. A case well worth putting under the microscope is a subpoena from the U.S.; Malibu Media Llc vs. John Does.

Malibu Media Llc saw how some of their movies (and other IP products) were leaked on the Internet. The company then tracked the IP-address used for sharing these files over a Bittorrent protocol, and based on that IP-address the company found the uploader. This time it happened to be a home user rather than a public hotspot. Subsequently geo-location was used to find the physical address, and the subscription service used, and thereby identified the physical person behind the uploads.

Or so they thought.

The law suit is as a classic example of what may cause many pirates to choose to hide their IP-address, i.e. example via VPN services, but interestingly enough, the judge in Florida decided to go a different route. The judge ruled that although the address was correctly identified, you cannot rule out the possibility that someone else used the computer. Home networks and home computers are after all often shared by several people.

Similar judgments have been identified previously in the U.S., and seems to be increasingly common. In Sweden we have had relatively few court cases of piracy that had been triad on the basis of IP-address, but this case may be setting the stage for how these cases can come to be interpreted.

What do you think about internet piracy? Please comment below. 

Google Taking Action for Free Speech

In an obvious nod to the recent controversy surrounding the freedom of speech on the web, Google is now taking a clear stand, advocating for a free and unsupervised Internet. It was on Wednesday, January 18th, that Americans stood up in opposition to PIPA and SOPA – bills that would have censored the Web and imposed harmful regulations on primarily U.S. businesses, but also the entire world.

Individuals took action and closed down their personal blogs, companies closed their websites, and thousands of US citizens called their elected representatives in Washington, voicing their mistrust. Their voices were heard. Washington recognized the damage these bills could inflict on the Internet, and as a result, PIPA and SOPA have been indefinitely postponed. However postponed is not good enough; these bills needs to be buried forever. Google recognizes this, and is not petitioning everyone to sign up for a free Internet.

This development follows quite expected from the recent year’s disclosure of Internet espionage. It may seem like ages ago now, but it has not even been a year since former CIA employee Edward Snowden ,in a series of exposés beginning on June 5, 2013, publicized thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA, and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.

Within the immediate days that followed Snowden had gotten his passport revoked, fled to and from several different countries, charged with espionage, and quickly seen himself go from patriot to traitor. However some people would say that he has made the exact opposite journey, and gone from traitor to patriot. Seldom has one man been called so many different polar opposites; a hero – a villain, a savior – an enemy, a patriot – a traitor.

The disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata, and most would argue that NSA have greatly surpassed their jurisdiction.

Espionage and terrorism have always been the dark side of freedom of speech, and will probably continue to be so until the end of man. The Internet has since the beginning been open and free, and has lately played pivot roles in aiding freedom around the world. Countries like Alger, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen would not have started their paths towards democracy had it not been for the Internet. The Internet has help to uncover racial prosecutions and injustices in Saudi, Oman., Iraq, Djibouti, Sudan and West Sahara, and has also recently shined a strong light on the homophobic nation of Uganda, leading to western countries boycotting the African nation.

I short the Internet was born, and shall remain, free.

Governments alone should not determine the future of the Internet. The billions of people around the globe that use it and the experts that build and maintain it should. A free society depends on free expression. The flow of ideas and open access to information on the web helps communities grow and nations prosper.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction/

This may be the most important stand we ever make, and Google is leading the way. Please read the petition and get opinionated.

Do you think governments should be able to restrict the Internet? Please comment below.