Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

With airline ticket prices jumping around just as much as gas prices these days, you never know when the best time to buy is. It is so frustrating to buy your tickets one day only to find the next day or week later they’ve dropped in price. Airfare can become one of the most costly aspects of any trip or vacation, not to mention the hassle of constantly checking for lower prices. The site, www.farecast.com  is a great website that does a lot of the work for you and may even help you save some $$$ by telling you if they think the best time to buy is now, or if you should wait until later.

–How It Works–

To put it simply (although you can read the complicated version here), Farecast uses algorithms to make predictions based upon patterns. They will tell you how confident  they are on their prediction. Of course it’s not ALWAYS going to be 100% on the money, but they claim a 75% accuracy rate which gives you pretty good odds.  After you have searched for a particular fare, you will be shown a prediction of what the airfare will look like for the next 7 days.  This gives you a good indication whether or not to buy now or wait. According to their blog, the percentage of the time that they are right continues to increase.

–Track Your Airfare Using RSS–

I, like so many have found how useful RSS feeds are. It makes sorting through information that is important to me so easy.  I thought it was great that Farecast offers an RSS feed that will give you the ability to track airfares and predictions. You’re able to select your airport, a departure date,  the length of the trip, the number of passengers, and up to 3 destinations which will then be created into a customized feed to make searching for the lowest fare simple and nearly effortless.

–Other Information–

Farecast is in beta so there are a few limitations.  Currently they are able to make predictions for 55 home airports like Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc.  They have already had a great deal of success, and I can only imagine they will continue to grow and add additional home airports. Additionally, they’re only able to offer predictions for round trip airfare- again. They conveniently point out the limitations they think you may face using the product in beta which gives us an idea of what we can expect as far as improvements for the future.

–Overall–

Overall, Farecast helps you find the lowest price for many airlines (although not all) and from many departure cities. There are some kinks that need to be worked out, but that’s why it is still in beta. With airline prices changing in the blink of an eye, the RSS feed simplifies the process of trying to determine when to buy or when to wait it out. Hopefully they’ll be adding additional airports in the near future to accommodate more passengers. Unfortunately, I think I’ll be waiting a while for the Des Moines, Iowa airport where you could probably fit the entire airport into one parking garage at the Los Angeles airport .

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Effective Idea Management should bring to an organization a powerful source of new innovative ideas. But how to really share, rate and select ideas inside a team, a department or even cross department? Interested in Idea, Project and Portfolio Management, I have created a blog to share information and opinion on these subjects: http://idealmanagement.canalblog.com. Newly created. it only possessed few articles and will grow soon. Any feedback is welcomed.

To first introduce Idea Management, here are the main objectives:
-Inspire people by building inspiring work environment
-Share innovative ideas
-Manage ideas: review, rate, select and group best ideas
-Protect: protect important ideas
-Reward: reward appropriately people who brought ideas to your organization when these ones can be converted in projects

If you would like to extend discussion on this subject, I invite you to first visit my blog (http://idealmanagement.canalblog.com) and contact me if you have any question.

Thibaut

This article was written on January 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Bloggers are waving the victory flag after a California Court placed Apple responsible for paying all legal fees that resulted from a lawsuit which they issued. This brings up First Amendment rights among other things, but also brings to light the fact that bloggers have the same rights as journalists.

You really don’t hear much about lawsuits against bloggers, but they happen more than you think. Robert Scoble offers some insight as to why this is:

Unfortunately you don’t read about most of this kind of stuff — most bloggers who’ve talked with me have already been given a gag order. Break the gag order and they’ll increase their legal exposure and demonstrate that they aren’t operating in good faith. Remember, libel gets worse if there’s malice. So, if there’s a potential you’ve libeled someone, then going public about legal instruments can be used against you.

This lawsuit came after bloggers and other online journalists reported about an audio/video product which was code-named ‘Asteroid’(it’s under development). Apple claimed that this violated a California state trade secret law. After the legal battle, Apple was ordered to pay $700,000 in legal fees. Bloggers win, Apple loses.

There are several different sites talking about this (here, here, and here), and the number one thing that most people are saying is that hopefully this teaches some of the larger companies to think twice about going after bloggers and other online journalists. The court decided that bloggers and online journalists she be given the same Constitutional and state law protections as the traditional journalists, and as a blogger, I agree.

Apple has not appealed the decision, and paid the bloggers in full.

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This article was written on July 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Remember in May when we wrote about Google’s new Mapplets? The developer preview is over and it’s now live! Mapplets are mini-webpages served inside an IFrame within Google Maps that allows users to create their own mapping mash-ups. According to Google, ever since the official Google Maps API was released in June 2005, over 50,000 Mashups have been created. And ever since May when the preview version of Mapplets was launched, over 100 developers submitted Mapplets.

You’ll notice a “My Maps” tab on the Google Maps page, and this is where you’ll be able to select the content that you would like to layer on your map. There is a lot to choose from, so the “search” feature will come in handy if there’s something in particular that you want to add to your map like local real estate. If not, just browse around by clicking “add content.”

I created a map that displayed gas prices from GasBuddy.com, Google Real Estate Search, and weather from WeatherBug. This is what my map looked like:

As mentioned in our previous article about Mapplets, this gives developers the chance to get creative with their own mapplets and receive exposure. The list of mapplets available just continues to grow (back in May it was 23) which means there there’s a greater chance you’ll find relevant mapplets to add to your own map.

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This article was written on April 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

Here’s a new game for you to try out– Particles! It looks easy, and sounds easy, but it’s harder than you might think.  The object is to dodge the bouncing balls. You start with three red balls that you’ll need to avoid hitting with your mouse controlled blue ball.  The red balls continue to increase, and once you run into one of the balls, the game is over. 

I’ve only tried it on a laptop, but I think it would be easier with an actual mouse. Once the balls start hitting each other and picking up speed, it gets tricky. Try it and let us know what your best score is. My best so far, and it’s not all that great, is 91 seconds which earned me a B- (you get a grade). Enjoy!

Game Here

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