I saw an interesting article in the San Jose Mercury News about Voice over IP (using the Internet for telecommunication). The article talks about some of the functionality behind it and emerging business trends.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/8358167.htm

I thought to myself.. sure we could just read about it.. but wouldn’t it be cool if ISIS labs did a project on voice over ip phones and integrating that with existing applications? Just a thought. and while i was writing up this post, i also thought a nice motto for isis labs might be “wouldn’t it be cool if…”

The walls in the Blender are conspicuously bare. I was thinking of getting some things to put on them, but then I thought “why trust my aesthetic opinion?” Based on what I saw today at Art Affair, there are tons of talented visual artists, photographers, etc. at Stanford who don’t get to exhibit their work much. What if we contacted a few of them and invited them to have their work displayed in the Blender for a quarter more-or-less. I know some of the people on the ISIS team have done “art spaces” or some such project before, so what do you guys think? Then when people come to the blender they could see beautiful Stanford art as well as brilliant Stanford social innovators.

In response to one of the ISIS “Brilliant Ideas” on the homepage, and copying from my own comments RSS feed, here is an RSS feed for the comments on this blog:

ISIS Blog Comments RSS

Link should work in most newsreader programs…

This is really neat–basically a treemap visualization of Google News… Click on the link, and then (for example), click on the little box next to “UK” in the upper right.

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

Now there are two boxes (left=UK, right=US) with a bunch of different news stories in them. The height of each colored bar (the different colors are categories, key at the bottom) represents the relative size of each category (as represented by the total number of articles Google News puts in that category for that country), and the width of each story represents the relative “importance” of that story vs. others (again by number of articles)… Lets you see cool things, like the red bar (world news) is thicker in UK vs. US–so the UK news media focuses relatively more on the world than the US media.  This is totally nerdy, but really neat…

I’m looking for good shopping suggestions. Some interesting things I’m scoping out this week so far: Primate Evolution (AnthSci), and Human Diversity: A Linguistic Perspective (AnthSci)–3 units and covers the o-so-elusive GER 4a.

Anybody know of any hidden gems this quarter?

Welcome back from spring break. Just before I took off, I saw a few cool projects at the senior CS project fair:

Atlas (by Steve Garrity et al) was awesome (steve, got a link to that?). Bascially it was an app that figures out where you are using WiFi triangulation and tells you who else is nearby and what events are going on there. Similar to a concept we discussed a while back.

Photos@Stanford (http://photos.stanford.edu) is a pretty nice online photo album which they claim Julie Lythcott-Haims is interested in. Could potentially work with groups@stanford?

Zonic (http://zonic.stanford.edu) is a collaboratively filtered music recommender that runs as a WinAmp plugin. Worth checking out.

Yahoo has hooked up a screen in Times Square that anyone can play a game on by dialing an 800-number on their phone.

You end up with lots of people, both playing and just watching, standing in the middle of Times Square fixated on your billboard. Pretty cool…

http://webmaster1.stanford.edu/logs/events/: let me know if you find any interesting patterns.

When you just need some more screen real estate. 9X Media Home of Modular Multiple Monitors, Multiple LCD, Multi-Monitors, Multi-Screen Computers and Video Wall

Google has been showing a new layout to its search engine to a small sample of its Internet users. Read the rest by the incomparable Aaron Schwartz

“May the Schwartz be wit you!”