Category: Technology

Here’s something that every supermarket shopper wishes was currently available. The Fresh Code is an intelligent barcode that doubles up as a graph, indicating the freshness of the vegetable that you’re checking out. The less fresh it is, the less the barcode is displayed, and when you don’t see a barcode, you’ll know that it’s not worth buying. It’s a cool concept, not to mention that when the barcode has disappeared, the cashier won’t be able to tag it to the point-of-sales machine, so they can’t really force you to buy old fruit or vegetables either. Neat huh?  What I think would be really cool is if the price went down with the age of the product automatically.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

The video goes quick so I jotted down the numbers below for us to analyze.  Here are some interesting facts about the state of the Internet:

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009)
  • 738,257,230 in Asia
  • 418,209,796 in Europe
  • 67,371,700 in Africa
  • 20,371,700 in Oceania / Australia
  • 179,031,479 in Latin America / Caribbean
  • 252,908,000 in North America
• 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009
• 247 billion is the average number of emails per day, 200 billion of those emails are SPAM (81%)
• 1.4 billion email users worldwide
• 234 million websites as of December 2009
• 126 million blogs on the Internet
• 84% – Percentage of social network sites with more women than men
• 27.3 million tweets per day on Twitter (November, 2009)
• Ashton Kutcher has 4.25 million followers on Twitter (@aplusk)
• Facebook serves up 260 billion page views per month (6 million page views per minute and 37.4 trillion page views in a year)
  • Page Views per month
    • Facebook 260 billion
    • MySpcae 24 billion
    • Twitter 4.4 billion
    • LinkedIn 1.9 billion
  • Facebook needs as many as 30,000 servers to run the site
  • 350 million people on Facebook
  • 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook (about 30 billion a year)
  • There are 4 billion photos hosted on Flickr (October 2009)
  • YouTube serves up 12.2 billion videos per month in the US
  • Hulu serves up 924 million per month in the US
  • The average person watches 182 videos per month on the Internet in the US (82% of us)
  • 148,000 new zombie computers created per day
  • 2.6 million malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc)

If you use Gmail to manage your contacts you will likely be happy to hear that they just added a find duplicates button which lets you find and merge your duplicate contacts.  I ran the tool tonight and found out I had 92 duplicates from my 733 contacts.  This was a huge time saver…

I found a great open source password management tool called KeePass which I wanted to share with you.  If you are like me you have tons of different passwords you have to remember.  KeePass organizes your passwords and encrypts them which makes storing your passwords very safe and secure.  The other nice thing is it works with Linux, Windows, and Macs.  The above screenshot is the application freshly installed from my home PC running Ubuntu but at work let me tell you it is a good long list!  It is also highly configurable and even allows for plugins.

Net neutrality is nothing new if you are a geek. We want the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of the Internet to be nothing more than a “dumb pipe.” What that means is we don’t want the ISPs to be able to control what we are able to access, how fast we can access what we paid for, and they should offer the service at a reasonable price. John Wilbanks in the above video says that net neutrality means it is our “rights as an Internet user and we should have a right as an Internet user to have access to a neutral architecture that lets us innovate with no more restrictions than fulfilling the technical protocols.”

I am against the Internet Freedom Act and that might surprise you if you are not familiar with what the act actually stands for. I mean I give credit for naming the act something that people would oppose just by the name of it. Who would want to vote against Internet Freedom right? Well John McCain, the  man who almost won the presidency has introduced legislation that would prohibit the FCC from regulating the Internet.  Yes, the man who doesn’t even know how to use the Internet (see the video clip below) has introduced legislation about your Internet experience. Not to mention he has received more campaign dollars than any other politician from telecommunications companies (hmm coincidence he is introducing this legislation to help empower telcos…?)

What he is essentially proposing is broadband providers could limit the traffic to certain sites and protocols if it so desired. For instance many of you probably use Skype to talk to your friends and loved ones online. Well media companies and ISPs don’t like Skype because it allows you to have something for free which they would love to charge you for. What some ISPs have done and are still doing today is throttling your connection and even dropping packets so your Skype call or BitTorrent connection is terminated sporadically.

Oh and yes Obama is for net neutrality. If you love the Internet and you want innovation of technology, we must stop this legislation.