Fenway Frank

ecoticotours:

Un Corteza Amarillo impresionante en medio del verano en Costa Rica.

A stunning Corteza Amarillo in the middle of summer in Costa Rica. 

Bankers and Bureaucrats vs. Internet Freedom
ieet.org

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The bankers and the bureau­crats have dis­cov­ered the Inter­net, 20 years too late, and they don’t like it

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee sub­mit­ted a pro­pos­al for an infor­ma­tion man­age­ment sys­tem to …

Waterfall (Taken with instagram)

futuramb:

As demand for e-books soars, libraries struggle to stock their virtual shelves - The Washington Post

Publishers are also struggling to cope with vast changes in the industry, as brick-and-mortar stores such as Borders go under and online vendors such as Amazon have started selling e-books for far less than the print editions.

“It is a fluid and dynamic time, and many publishers are reevaluating their business model as it relates to retail and libraries,” said David Burleigh, a spokesman for OverDrive Inc., which serves as an intermediary between publishers and libraries.

In the short term, libraries may not be able to meet customer demand for e-books, he said.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the major enemies threatening the future of the library are the publishers:

When the technology driven competition step by step is hitting the publishers and reducing their revenues, the publishers will pass on those losses to the only ones who the lowest bargaining power - the libraries.

When the publishers then is forced to reinnovate their business models as well as their offerings in order to secure their revenues - the libraries will most likely to be seen as a hurdle on their path to the customers who they will try to reach with a broader, more sophisticated and more interactive offerings around stories and worlds rather than just the sale of physical books.

smartercities:

Join the Mobility Revolution with These Five Apps - Technology Review

Just in time: When’s the bus coming? NextBus takes away the guesswork: the app tells you exactly how many minutes away your bus is. It works using GPS signals from devices installed inside city buses. Boston has signed on, and so has San Francisco, where the app also keeps track of trolleys and cable cars.

NextBus is a 15-year-old company, and it was “tough going” for many years, says chief technology officer Michael Smith. Originally, riders got updates by calling a number or consulting bus-stop displays. Now the rise of smart phones has made the system much more powerful. About 30 percent of NextBus’s 800,000 daily users access the app via iPhones or other smart devices.

NextBus charges transit agencies a few hundred dollars per bus per year to use its service, and more if the buses don’t have GPS yet. The fee Los Angeles pays to use the software in its 2,500-vehicle fleet: $1.5 million over three years. But that’s quickly made back in increased ridership. Bus-stop haters can now arrive just in time.

The mobility revolution with a mobile phone

futuramb:

infoneer-pulse:

Skype is killing long distance, one minute at a time

The Internet is a great deflator, squeezing out the middlemen and lowering prices. The shifting fortunes of Wall Street brokers and travel agents are good examples. However, the Internet’s deflationary impact is on full display in the international long-distance market, where Skype has started to take away any and all growth from the phone companies.

Skype (now a division of Microsoft), which at its very basic level is a people-to-people connectivity service, has become everything the phone companies feared it for. The latest data from research

» via GigaOM

It is interesting to see how slow and unstoppable technological changes transforms the world - long after the initial inflated expectations have evaporized the new ways of doing things step by step replace the old and makes it obsolete.

Skype is killing long distance calls from traditional carriers

The Muddy Charles Pub. Serving MIT since 1968. (Taken with instagram)