The University of AberdeenDepartment of Computer Science hosted the inaugural TechMeetUp – Aberdeen last night. People started turning up around 6.30 and tech chat soon started, Physics, NLP researchers, Engineers and those hacking away at private projects in their space time all shared their ideas and work. Bruce Scharlau from the University had arranged for beer and pizza to arrive around seven and once that was scoffed we headed to Measton 6 lecture hall to listen to a couple of talks, the first by Gavin Maclean of OpenPlanet Software, on OpenCL and the second was on mepath.com.
OpenCL was a new topic to me but I had done some searching on it before hand. I am sure this is an oversimplication but we all have CPU and Graphics cards in our PC or Mac. Now these graphics cards can contain many more, quantum more processing power than on the CPU. However, the whole computer is focused on using the CPU. OpenCL is a frame work that can be used to tap into graphics card’s processing power. Gavin told how the CEO of Nvidia sees a future for mobile devices without a CPU. To finish his presentation Gavin demonstrated a fractal type equation being run in one thread, CPU and OpenCL, the time savings were impressive using openCL.
It was an apt. link to my talk, as every day mepath is creating more demand for processing power. Here are the slides I presented and a video of the talks are coming soon. Cheers to all those that turned up, asked questions and to those that organized the event.
Adrian Chan has written an insightful post, Activity Streams – Realtime and Streamtime. Realtime is the talk of the moment but I support his view that this is just one side of the equation. Streamtime is where an individual’s attention is focused from the world of real time authored information. Adrian, talks about information and communication as being distinctive but I see communication being information with a flow pattern. With increasing amounts of realtime authoring, but stuck in the reality of an individual only have one realtime attention then Adrian says, “Social tools to help with the demands of interacting and communicating may be an area still ripe for innovation”.
Here at mepath.com we are developing a streamtime focused service. Yes, we need to be plugged into the real time world to deliver the service but the value to an individuals attention is a streamtime full of the best information they demand.
mepath.com started it’s evolution to a lifestyle magazine user interface today with our before Beta0.7 release. The home page, opens with five sports where daily photos, videos and blog posts are displayed. To select a different sport, click on a lifestyle sport. Don’t see your favorite sport? Click on the Add/Edit link to select from a range of sports. If you still can not see the sport you are after, why not use the feedback button located on the right hand side of the screen to tell us the sport that you would like to see listed.
The feedback service is provided by GetSatisfaction . Not only does it give us, mepath the opportunity to communicate more effectively with users of the website, fellow mepath community members can learn or answer questions, potentially faster than me, the developer of mepath.com .
Thank you to all those users that have tested our OpenID and Facebook Connect log in pages. Your feedback has been invaluable and we look forward to receiving more of your feedback. It’s much appreciated.
The activity stream on mepath.com has expanded to include video. Each sporty activity stream starts with photos, then video and then a list of blog posts, all are up-dated on 24 hour cycle. The mashup of content types has made each sport stream more instantly identifiable and while you can go to flickr and youtube to view the same content having it all aggregated in one place provides a convenient way to discover information on a daily basis from the world of sport.
Triathlon is a new-ish sport that consists of three other sports, swimming, cycling and running. A triathlon is usually run with those sports in the order written. Being made up of other sports gives mepath both a challenge and opportunity. The challenge, a triathlete maybe blogging about their swimming and a pure swimmer will also be blogging about swimming. While a triathlete will have an interest in all swimming the post from triathlete swimmer maybe more relevant, for example, triathlete have to swim in chopper and usually outside harbours, loch/lakes or rivers etc. And that is the opportunity we will start to bring to the site, give users the ability to filter blog posts on the context they would ideally like to priorities their reading on. Of course we call this lifestyle linking.
My swimming activity stream today brought a post on swimming technique . What I really find beneficial about this information is that it is authored by a fellow swimmer and in this case a triathlete too. He sets the background that us fellow master swimmers recognise and the post acts as a reminber on what to concentrate on next time we hit the pool.
I’m a month or so into viewing the skiing activity stream on mepath. While skiing is my favored winter sport, it is freeskiing that gets me full of excitement. Skiing away from a ski resorts, the effort of hiking up to the top and the thrill of skiing virgin snow etc. The skiing activity stream has provided me with blog posts of fellow enthusiasts. Not only are there so many skiing opportunities away from the big ski resorts the bloggers also usually document the local guide they know or have found. And we can all share from the excitement and thrill of viewing the photos and videos posted and posted in context.
Having all the information on tap when planning a vacation must hold great opportunity, location, guide to social activities.
Swimming is one of my favorite sports and mepath picked that up when I uploaded my blog url to the site. This means I have two lifestyle feeds to read every day, swimming and open water swimming. Over the last month I have picked up on the big swimming news stories, Phelps got himself some attention for his non swimming activities and I read about the lady swimming across the Atlantic (BTW, I then read about it again a few days later on the bbc.co.uk website). What I have enjoyed the most is the posts from the individual swimmers out their in the blogosphere. I have picket up a video of freestyle technique and learnt about how popular open water swim meets can be in Taiwan.
mepath.com is running in pre beta mode right now so the volume of post is low but I am looking forward to discovering what else is going on in the world of swimming as we scale the site and to lifestyle linking me to the best posts.
The ‘me’ and ‘make’ idea is at the heart of mepath.com. ‘me’ is the lifestyle we choose to live, and that is being captured in an increasingly digital form due to the great range of web2.0 websites, tools and devices. This is our data, owned by us, it can also work for us in all aspects of our life. ‘make’ is looking to the future to create personalized products our future lifestyle will use. The personalization uses the right lifestyle context data to work for us, and work for ‘me’ under our full control.
More on this as we implement more of the ‘me’ and ‘make’ functionality.
