Yet another Skype crack team

Phil Wolf tracked a recent news about another team which demoed their mobile skype-less skype application. This team(TalkPlus) is reported the 3rd one after China and Russian team, but be more open than previous two. From their CEO's remarks, they did have a good interaction with Skype engineering team recently and filed some patent to make the finding more useful in public market.

I applaused for their actions. Though cracking of Skype protocol seems a high barrier task to common people, I believe the most successful team will be the one being most open of their findings. Till now, the TalkPlus team seems more open than the previous two teams.

Prototyping Wiki

I need a prototyping wiki, which can help all my teams working on business and social works to collaborate on some web site ideas with quick prototype method. The idea is very simple. (Simple is often beautiful, right?) A team of people can share and co-edit a site layout together to design some ideas of the web site either in graphical way or HTML way(but WYSIWYG). You can always invite other people to join and improve the design and eventually evolve it into a final design. I wonder any entrepreneurs can implement this idea, especially in China. More and more Chinese entrepreneurs are now running world level services instead of just C2C(Copy to China). Like the cool idea of Anothr.com.

Actually, I supposed Google Page Creator can help do this, but unfornitely, they didn't. :( Google are always ignoring the social power, though they have acquired JotSpot recently.

Micropipeline and information re-revolution

We are all familiar with the term RSS, however, maybe only few percent
of people really touch the spelendid potential of RSS though it touted
as "the next killer App on Internet". It's not the fault of RSS. The
simple data format was designed with a great mission, that makes any
sites feedable to information aggregators. The problem is on Aggregator
part. The mindset of Aggregator is only an "endpoint" of information,
but not a information pipeline component that people really need it.

The idea of "Micropipeline" is also simple. We need a standard data
format first, maybe not RSS, but the next generation, like ATOM. Also
we need more standard pipeline components that can integrate those data
feeds together not only as a informaiton aggregator but also as
informaiton transmitter(like route on internet). Thus the information
can flow to any direction we like, with automatic rules.

Anothr is a great step to help people understand they are involving in
information re-creation and reaggregation. Anothr, started with a
Skype-based feeder, will then evolve into wider information creation
and remixing arena. In that way, people can publish/share/mashup and
"talk" with information to dispatch their information to right
directions easily and effectively. The pipeline, will eventually be
built up by people themselves, which will be more profound than today's
internet. Now we are in such a dawn of new generation of information
age.

Yet "Anothr" Feed Reader/Notifier

Yes, it's Anothr, not typo.

Anothr.com is a new service based on Skype "that can provides just-in-time alerts for your favorite feeds. It can simplify your blogs/news eading experience and improve the effectiveness of your daily information flow." I experimented this service for a while before its formal launch. It's simple and ease of use because you can just "add" and "chat" with the "Skype Robot" to learn how to use it. Its much smarter than other RSS/ATOM readers online or offline especially for those Skype fans.

Who really hacked Skype?

Got a new message fro Jan's blog that another team in Russia leaked news(with pictures of a mock-up skype client) that they have cracked skype protocol. However, yet to find the real application downloadable. So there are someone commented on Jan's story that "Without working functionality (sing-in, speech), its nothing. I can create the same UI in 15-30mins :-)". Whereever the comments from, there raised some questions like "Who really hacked skype in depth, China team or Russian team?" and "How valuable to crack the protocal of skype?"

The first question seems weird but its true. I knew some of China crack team members, but I know they are very low key( because of shy, or?) to disclose details of their work. So the dilema is they either want people to know them or don't want people know them well. The acted very professional like a big company to carefully deal with the public relations. However, the drawbacks are very clear, their competitors catched up in the same direction, but more agreesive.

I won't doubt on the truth that they may all find the core algorithm of Skype already. But just like any other businesses around the world, they have to utlize the findings carefull and smartly. I hope there are fair competition between Skype and others. Also I hope there are fair competitions between Skype crack teams. Whoever develops good applications based on their findings, who can win the market. Instead, if anyone of them just wants to tease and leverage from capital market, the market will forget him someday in the future.

So I may not care who is now the real cracker, I just want to see how many benefits can end users get from the cracking.

Add Gmail contact automatically

via Lifehacker

When sending a message, type the name of the recipient you want to appear in your Contacts and then place the email address inside <>. That will auto-add the name to your address book formatted.
For instance, rather than: stewart@example.com in the To: box, use Master Stewart Rutledge, the Wonderful <stewart@example.com>

Gmail system problems?

I found there are some of my emails to my gmail account(isaac.mao) seems not normal in these two days. Some of my subscription messages didn't come, also there are some functional email messages didn't appear as normal(e.g. Toread.cc). I wonder any others had same feeling too.

update: Gmail subsytem notify me that they delayed my emails, but didn't tell the details. :(

Kenna phenomenon

After reading the good selling book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, I decided to explore an interesting sample in the book talking about an intersting story about a pop singer, Kenna. The story told us that Kenna was ever ranked high by many professionals in music industry, however, his songs can't be accepted by common social rating system. Malcolm wanted to use this story tell us that some blink feeling from professional may not be correct.

You know, I may not got to have a try to listen to Kenna's songs if I read the book two years before. But today, I'm so ready to have a try with many new web 2.0 services including those music services. I decided to create a Channel on Pandora.com to explore why Kenna's songs can't be adopted by popular mass. Actually, I like the tunes of this guy, however, the music really can't attact me too much. Instead, it even make me somewhat depressed. The fancy Pandora service helps me to find that I don't have such appetite and eventually help me switch to more open and high emotional songs in this channel.

Pandora and Blink, has such an interesting connection that everyone can try. It's also the power of web 2.0 services, which can bring real personalized taste into a mass social filtering system. Someday, Pandora maybe the most powerful rating system in the world on any musics, to predict and do statistics.

CnBloggerCon Badge

Volunteer Yining created a cool web 2.0 application to support the registration of Chinese Blogger Conference. I'm late to register it in first group, but its not late to spread the totally-grassroots-organized conference. Maybe the best collective intelligence conference we ever heard. "It looks somewhat messy because you can't find the real executives for the conference, but eventually it works with our surprises", said a famous Chinese blogger commenting on last year's conference. So there are reasons expect higher to this year's one. Are you ready for this cool webitiviy? Just add this badge to you blog like me! (tag:cnbloggercon)

Why there are opportunities in Central Asia blogosphere?

In a long journey backed from Almaty to Shanghai(via Delhi and Bankok), I was thinking of the big potential for blogging in Central Asian countries, now I can eventually tell who they are(Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), heh-heh. I did Wikipedia them before I headed to KZ, but i can't really do perceptions on those countries until I talked with them face to face in last days.

Frankly speaking, the roundtable meeting about blogging was the least internetworked one ever in my recent years though other life facilities were as same as other countries. I didn't expect the expense of internet there are still a key issue to such a international conference. Blogging is still luxury fashion here. We can't always grant things to be everywhere. We should also try to think in context all the time.

But, just like I said in my last post, the landscape of blogging in these countries are realy open and promising. I can imagine the current attendees of the conference will become prominent bloggers in their countries soon by building their fames online. But first of first, the local government/grassroots should co-compete to improve their connectivity first. It's a time issue, I believe. Then with affordable and even free infrastructure, the blogosphere can boom like in China. So I can also see the potential of the blog related business and social changes in this area that worth venture capitalists to consider investment there. Anyway, any venture investment should be well evaluated before accomplishment, we still need many interactivities with local teams to examine their capabilities on enterpreneurship and dilligence.

The advantages of those countries are also obvious. People there are facing big changes similar to China. They are eage to find new tools and hopes to change their social life. The democracy system is shaping itself better than in China, freedom of speech is almost ready(may differ within those countries). So they are really ready for adopting blogging and new web 2.0 concepts. They can also learn experiences and lessons from China(though they talked more about US and EU as sample) on censorship, language barriers and and internet ethics. Whatever, they are in golden time to develop their own blogosphere.

That's why I'm thinking how can someone can promptly register some interesting domain names in those countries, like kzblog.org, youarefool.ru, etc. :D

Roundtable on blogging development in Kazakhstan

Farid
Originally uploaded by Isaac Mao.

I'm in travelling in Kazakhstan majorly for "Roundtable on blogging development in Kazakhstan". The event is really neccessary to me to understand how blogosphere developed in this coutnry, as well other central Asian countries. Basically, it's very difficult to blog becuase the internet infrastucture is really poor here(though its said KZ is the best developed country in Central Asia area on IT intrastructure). So I'm now using the only two/three cables in conference room to upload these fotos and text(Of course, there is no Wifi).

Many topics and discussions focued on the relationship between journalism and blogging. It's, of course, not a new topic to those developed blogosphere, but it's still a time-to-prove thing in this area. I'm happy to see that more and more people here also realized the potential of blogging and started to become bloggers.

In these countries, whehter they are still "socialism" coutries or not, people still have many concerns and free thinking barriers to become open content sharer---blogger. They questionsed a lot why they need blog in their mind with different kind of hesitations.

Another big issue here is accessibiiliy. With very expensive broad band service, blogging is definitely a luxury thing to common people. So I think we are still lucky living in China. We can anyway have relatively low service plan from the monoply telecom though we are facing another access problem, GFW.

It's really interesting to study another blogosphere as an observer. I will continue to talk tomorrow and get more knowledge about this courtry, beautiful but low paces.

Skype-based VPN?

We ever used Hamachi for a longtime to collaborate online with some applications like Gobby. It's supposed to be secure by building private network within some circles. However, hamachi is UDP-based application, so the NAT admin can easily block the application by disabling UDP packets. Since I'm also a longtime skype user, I believe Skype's NAT-free capability can do something on software VPN. If we can leverage skype's p2p traverse functions and VPN features, can we have a stronger soft VPN solution?

Maybe its another over-expectation?

Meta