”That said, with the growing number of actual revenue-making business deals, Foursquare will have to address this sooner rather than later. The point of every game is to win it. And sadly, where there’s a game, there’s a person willing to cheat at it.”

Click here for the article.

Here is my thought on this:Without knowing the latest development in GPS technology and just by reading publications out there, the technology is not ready yet due to the fact that currently the precision of civilian GPS is 65 feet, so it is hard for Foursquare to reliably use GPS to find out accurate customers’ locations. Given the situation, Foursquare might have to choose to go with something simple like dynamic QR codes at the venues where customers check in by scanning the QR codes with their mobile devices or a device to bump against with their mobile phones.

The challenging part with this approach would be obviously making it available everywhere, but if you look back at the history, that’s the way it is, until the technology is ready and massively available,  we need to find a solution from what we have now - of course, actively patenting currently-not-solvable ideas due to the current technology limitations for the future I am guessing the solution would be a hybrid model between GPS and QR code type validation, but I am hoping that Foursquare team come up with an innovative solution to surprise me and the world.

“Nooka is one of our favorite brands and these guys created a new way to try on a Nooka watch at home. By using augmented reality technologies – albeit technology that may not work quite yet – you can try on any watch just by putting on a specially coded bracelet. The system senses the position of your hand and lets the Nooka watch appear in 3D right on your wrist. It’s honestly an amazing idea and someone better patent it before Trojan and Victoria’s Secret get their hands on it.”

Click here for the article.

 “In 1854, the U.S. President made an offer for a large area of Indian land and promised a “reservation” for the Indian people. Chief Seattle’s reply, published below, has been described as the most beautiful and profound statement on the environment ever made.”

I am a member of these three user group and meetup.

If you live in the San Francisco bay area, please join:

The International Macintosh Users Group

Silicon Valley iPhone iPad Business Meetup

Bay Area Machine Translation User

http://www.statmt.org/moses/“Moses is a statistical machine translation system that allows you to automatically train translation models for any language pair. All you need is a collection of translated texts (parallel corpus). An efficient search algorithm finds quickly the highest probability translation among the exponential number of choices.”

Who’s using Moses?

I heard many companies in the valley and Europe are building their solutions around it, and Google is also one of the companies using it. However, I heard it is very complicated to set it up and needs to build web services around it to make it more user friendly. Also in Europe there might be some companies in the near future that will be providing consulting services or even solutions using this system.

As more and more companies are adapting MT as their new sources of cost cutting and translation improvement tool - although I heard there has been some improvement but not obvious groundbreaking innovation around it for a long time, I think it will provide MT community with fresh impetus for better future development prospects.

I was there at Innovate 2009 and it was interesting to see how simple and powerful it is to integrate PayPal APIs to a website. Here are Keynotes and Breakout Sessions from Innovate 2009. Enjoy.

https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1584