JB

J. Briganti

Thanks to advanced technology, you know longer need to be a professional photographer to capture a unique moment in time.  Although it is true that photography is an art, even those of us just snapping away as a hobby can achieve exceptional photographs with the right camera in hand.

The Olympus SP-59OUZ will provide you with photographic pleasure.  It is an affordable camera appropriate for someone taking up photography as a hobby and can also be easily enjoyed by all members of the family.  It comes complete with lots of valuable shooting features such as optical zoom, shadow ADJ for brightening the subject against backlight, exposure compensation for adjusting the brightness and macro shooting for taking great close ups.   And let’s not forget the self timer so that all of your family or friends can be in the picture.

Taking a good photo is not really as difficult as you may think.  You don’t need years of experience or the most expensive camera.  What you do need is inspiration.  Where to find it?  It’s all around.  Take time out to notice your natural surroundings including your own garden, local parks or distant landscapes.  Family pets or small animals like birds, squirrels and rabbits make wonderful photos too.   Zoom in on your own family members when they’re not looking for photos with a natural complexion.

Here are some simple steps that you can follow and you’ll be on your way to photographic bliss.

• Get up close and personal to your subject, when possible.
• When shooting animals get down low on their level.
• Hold your camera in a vertical position for a change.
• Look for a simple, uncluttered background.
• Shoot with the sun behind you.
• If your outdoor subject is in the shade, turn on the flash.
• Use a tripod for extra steadiness.
• Make use of macro shooting for great close ups.

In addition to these simple tips, take the time to read your camera’s manual; by doing so you will learn how to operate the different camera modes available.

Have fun and enjoy your photographic journey!

Dr. Regina Dugan, Director of DARPA

Just two months ago, DARPA, headed by Dr. Regina Dugan, conducted an interesting challenge to find ten red balloons strategically “hidden” throughout the United States. Seekers had a time frame of nine days to correctly map-out the whereabouts of those balloons. In nine hours, an MIT team had located all of the balloons—that was just with real-time social networking technologies—no augmented-reality mapping involved.

Microsoft's augmented-reality mapping at TED Talks 2010

Two months later, social networking has new pal. At the annual TED Talks gathering, Microsoft unveiled its latest augmented-reality mapping. This technology will take social networking and seeking & find projects to a new level.

For education, all I can say is that if school districts don’t take this summer to get their teachers up to snuff with technology skills, there will be more of us teachers retiring as parents can create national and global networks of real-time information exchange (For educators: check out Natasha’s post below). Students no longer have to wait until gets dark to experience Orion or wait until their parents can take them to a famous landmark in a foreign country, with an iphone, internet, and augmented-reality mapping, they will be well on their way.

Though I have my hesitations about safety and privacy issues, the potential advantages to rescue missions, law enforcement, education and network publications could far outweigh the cons of such a technology. I just wonder if Dr. Dugan is willing to create another $40K DARPA Balloon challenge using augmented-reality mapping—maybe the nine hour search will become nine minutes!

Nevertheless, Microsoft has taken social networking to a new level, and it’s quite impressive!

J.B.

I’d like to introduce Jane, GIT Athens’ latest blogger. We are happy to have another brave soul come on board here in Athens.  One by one we are getting women into tech!

Technology Trekking by J. Briganti

It doesn’t require special clothing or special shoes but if you’re 40 something and haven’t been doing much technology trekking then it can be a bit perplexing.  I recently was invited to preview Google Wave.  Interesting I thought, so I clicked whereas instructed and hoped for the best.

Not having a Google account I was prompted to create one.  I paused for a few seconds and then thought to myself, why not.  I proceeded to follow the step by step instructions, clicking away here and there and before I knew it, I had myself a Google account.  Hurray, so far so good, I thought.   Feeling inspired, I then decided to download something called Google Chrome, which I would later learn is a web browser aiming to improve security, speed and stability.  What a great tool to have, I thought.

The idea of having real-time communication and collaboration is very exciting and I was eager to send a wave.  So, without further hesitation I clicked on contacts, choosing the only name which was in my box, proceeded to write a brief message in the window provided and then finally clicked on done, located at the bottom of the text window.  I was pretty sure that my wave went but was not totally convinced.  The absence of a confirmation in the form of sent left me with a little uncertainty.

Randomly clicking away at the various options available in the navigation, inbox and text windows, I soon realized how important it is to be able to utilize all of these different tools in order to endure all that Google Wave has to offer.  So, I decided to browse through the Google Wave Help and am I glad I did.  It was very user friendly and I found a “how to” explanation for every transaction that I would soon be interested in using.  Needless to say, I am ardently waiting to fill my contact box with fellow wavers.

My accomplishments may seem trivial to some, I’m sure, but for me it was exhilarating.  Technology and I are still a union in the making and I am excited about venturing into new territories.  I personally plan to hike over one small hill at a time, enjoying the scenery as I go.  Many thanks to Google Wave Help for supplying the answers to questions that I hadn’t yet thought to ask.

With $110 million in revenue last year and selling for only $40, the YMax Corporation’s Gen2 MagicJack allows cell phone users to bypass their carriers’ charges for long-distant calls. The product plugs into a computer which then communicates with recognizable cell phones in range (even locked phones); enter a code and then your long-distance calls are ready for routing over the internet!

In running a startup, every penny counts and since most of us have been ripped off by huge cell phone charges at some time or another, MagicJack sounds cool and like a new paradigm that companies will begin following. Though femtocells preceded this Gen2 MagicJack, the cell phone companies were still charging big bucks for this technology as much as $250 per unit. By allowing callers to circumvent big company charges, the YMax product is more like the Napster of the cell phone industry.

Let’s just hope that its engineer, Dan Borislow, won’t face the same fate that programmers Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker had to face after being featured on the cover of Wired ten years ago.  For the time being, Borislow’s forty-dollar-a-unit technology is legal. So, enjoy free long distance calls as long as you can—move over Skpye!

Just before the Christmas holiday commenced, I attended a monthly event called Open Coffee. Open Coffee was started in England and now has several global chapters, but having a chapter in Athens is particularly noteworthy as there seems to be relatively few gatherings of tech entrepreneurs and potential investors.

In the packed Benaki Museum hall, attendees were able to listen to the processes and milestones of recent startups and garner advice from the most senior successful of businesses in Greece, such as Liberis Publications.  However, the most impressive in the area of technology was AthensBook.

AthensBook was started by two young entrepreneurs who have a vision of bringing Greeks online via mobile devices. Greece, as an emerging market economy, finds itself in an advantageous position in that much of the hardware infrastructure that often hinders technological changes is not engrained here. Therefore, getting the masses to depend on information dissemination and retrieval via wireless hand-held devices will not be hard to achieve. Therefore, AthensBook has positioned itself well for future success in the area of monetization via mobile advertising. So, when coming to Greece, download the AthensBook app to keep abreast of latest exchange rates, best gas station prices, local shop hours of operation and much more.

Another company to keep an eye on is Niobium Labs.  They are an R&D company that specializes in creating innovative solutions for mobile and geolocation technologies.

The format of Open Coffee was well organized, the presentations were professional and the speakers held the audience’s attention quite well. See the Open Coffee link to attend their next event or if you have a start up in the Athens’ area, get yourself out there and present your products!

Associate Dean Magda El Zarki of UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences is now the Executive Director of the newly established Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds.

It’s a Far Cry (pun intended) from digital circuitry design and electromagnetics, but Dr. Magda El Zarki, professor of Information and Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, will head up UC Irvine’s Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds.

By next fall, UC Irvine will open admission to 50-100 eager students who will be able to declare a four-year major in Game Science. With access to a 4,000 sq.ft. cyber-interaction observatory, students will study everything from anthropology in virtual worlds to brain-computer interface sciences. If you are not a student, don’t fret, the Center will open its doors to visiting scholars, offer workshops, and partner with other virtual world and computer game science centers worldwide.

Though the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds will focus on research and development, companies like Irvine-based Blizzard and French-based Ubisoft, creators of the Far Cry series, will eventually have access to employees with degrees in game science giving the gaming world a bit of needed legitimacy.

Since the UC system just closed its application process for Fall 2010 on November 30^th, be ready for the following year when the cyber observatory will open its doors!

What an irony: With the 20th year milestone celebration of the Berlin Wall’s fall, the building of virtual walls and putting employees behind an iron curtain appears to be gaining ground. The Iron Fist approach to monitoring and removing communication rights seems to be a bit ironic in pro-capitalistic settings.

A recent study by the Morse Consulting firm reveals that UK employees spend about 4O minutes a week Tweeting. The firm concluded that this lost time is the equivalent of $2.39-billion of lost productivity. Not only do reports like this support the idea of enterprises shutting down access to information, they can potentially kill creative marketing opportunities. I imagine that similar data was the catalyst behind McCain’s support of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009.

So how about using the free market and simply changing with the times? John Sviokla of Diamond Management Consultants pointed out at Net Week’s Fourth Annual IT Directors’ Forum that getting rid of social networking could be a huge mistake for companies. To use his words, “incredible opportunities” may be overlooked. Instead of building walls via proxy blockers, citing Metcalfe’s Law, enterprises can use social networking not only to build their value, but for learning and experimenting.

So, how can enterprises capitalize on their Tweeting twits?

• As the Brits once practiced “teatime,” maybe it is time to change that to a more relevant slogan: Twitter Time (TT). TT could replace the American lunchtime. There is profit to be made—not walls to be built.

• Businesses could revamp their cafeterias with netbook docks and give a new meaning to “Internet cafes”. Employees might opt to stay onsite—saving time lost travelling to various eateries. In the long run, this may save a company money.

• From the learning aspect, I know firsthand that I had the most successful interaction from my middle and high school IT students when I decided to meet them where they congregate—Facebook. Instead of choosing to reprimand them for being engaged in social networking, I chose to meet them in their territory and teach them there. In terms of engagement and learning, I had over an 80% performance towards product completion. Not surprisingly, my stats didn’t stop the proxy wall from going up!

• Give employees something to talk about—content, content, content.

• Create a new IT position that specializes in providing interesting information that can draw the attention of your company employees and their followers—good test to see who is reading what.
• Post new content at the time of day that coincides with lunch.

• Build that database!

• Increase the company database by pulling in friends of employees to an informative company community that provides compelling content. Companies never know when a particular type of talent may be needed, so having a ready pool of individuals with similar interest can build brand awareness and improved image management for a company.

Hmmm. In the end, I have to wonder what former President Reagan would have said to businesses that seek to build walls to communication: Mrs. CIO, tear down this firewall!

Those of you with young children, watch out! With computational information at their fingertips they will learn everything they need to know about the 3Rs (Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic) within six years. No Joke. In six years or so, expect to see more 11-year-olds graduating with same knowledge it took us years to acquire. This is the power of rapid cognition. The current tool that could make such a phenomenon possible: The search engine, Wolfram Alpha. On October 21st 12PM-2AM Central Standard Time, it will make its grand debut. This 12-minute screen capture and voiceover link says it all.

I know that I have blogged about the creative genius, Stephen Wolfram, but his invention accesses the ability of students to use their natural skills of rapid cognition. Combine this skill with a teacher’s knowledge and you will get students leaning collective concepts in two-days time that may have taken an entire semester to absorb. Wolfram Alpha is an educational tool worth using. (Yes, I am partial to this tool because it is the closest thing out there to what I pitched for funding a few years back—there were no business models at the time to make investors understand such a concept, but now there is, so have your children take advantage of it!)

Jing: Have you ever wished that your lessons could teach themselves. Well, Jing makes that possible. Create your introductory lesson plans with active screen capture and voiceovers and sit back. Let your computer do the talking and you and your students do the watching. And, Jing is free—within the budget of our teacher salaries!

Ning: I used to use Facebook as a teaching and homework support tool, but since our school—like many schools—blocked it, I had to find another social network. This past spring I introduced Ning to my staff. Ning is a great way to create a social network for your school community. It can be monitored by the community and have the same codes of conduct of your school: No cursing or writing foul remarks on the walls! Ning will also be featured in Wolfram Alpha’s debut on the 21st of October (see link for event listings).

W3Schools: Though this has been out for some time, it is a great way to offer your students a fun avenue to certification in HTML, JavaScript, XML and more. Forget the students, but an entire IT staff could become certified by learning simple coding at their own pace.

Until we teachers become obsolete, these are just a few tools that will keep your students loving your class and maybe even homework.

Finally, something exciting to blog about: The months of September and October have been great months for the advancement of information technology in Greece. (If Athens residents read this before October 11th is over, they just may have time to attend Athens’ 1st Annual e-learning Expo behind Lallabai in the Aegli Zappio.)

According to Business Development Manager, Nikos Panagiotidis of Intel Hellas, the five pillars of creating a technologically literate society include the access to devices, training of the trainer, training of the users, broadband, and content. For starters, Greece is on the right foot.

Devices: In September, Greece initiated a grass-roots tech project for which all public school 7th grade students received laptops. The concept is very similar to the commencement of the 2003 Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) in which 17,000 seventh graders received laptops—unprecedented until that time.

Training: Greece’s national initiative is intended to facilitate the huge acquisition of tech skills needed to jumpstart the nation’s future economic mobility in the technology sector. Equipping and training the first cohort of 7th graders with computers necessitates the training of educators as well. Greek students, girls and boys alike, will now have an opportunity to compete in the innovative thinking that spurred the growth of places like the Silicon Valley and Pudong—and maybe make Athens interesting enough to draw the attention of Geeks-on-a-Plane ten years from now when they make their rounds to Europe’s emerging tech cities.

Broadband: With the aforementioned national initiative, the demand for broadband usage is bound to grow.

Content: C-Media (which has already staked a claim in the virtual world of learning via Second Life), Intel, Ote, and many other educational companies, sponsored Athen’s first ever e-learning expo this weekend. The event served as an opportunity for e-learning companies to connect and create on-going business partnerships that are productive for all parties as noted by presenter Dr. Mike Jackson.

As far as educational content is concerned, it was Intel’s freeware launch, Skoool™, that caught my attention. The academic content was first developed by innovators in Ireland. Initially, it focused only on the internationally understood subjects of math and science. It has since grown to incorporate many more learning modules. Greek children will now have over 200 learning modules from which to choose.

So, with all the right things in place: computers, training, broadband and a flurry of new content, this 7th grade national initiative is on its way to closing the digital divide that exists between Greece and its northern EU partners. Furthermore, GIT will be on the scene to cheer on Greece!

aSc Award-winning Timetabling software

How do you convince a population that is comfortable with tools that still exist to put them down and instead use something that is totally foreign to them—a new software product? It is nearly impossible.

Here at GIT we often talk about the Gender Divide, which is very prevalent in a male dominated country such as Greece; but, the biggest surprise to me has been my experience with an entire staff who was accustomed to doing time schedules by hand—paper and pencil. I had the unfortunate experience of introducing aScTime Tables (a scheduling software) to my school’s staff this year.

So, if you find yourself in a similar situation of trying to convert pencil and paper lovers to software usage, below are some tips for making the impossible possible or just a bit smoother:

1. First, make sure all human processes are in line and as accurate as can be. If not, despite the reality of pre-existing poor enterprise communication and poor practices of streamlining and creating a reusable content…the software will be seen as the culprit of enterprise malfunction.
2. Paper products: Sorry trees, unfortunately, seeing is believing. As with marketing, simply having a product that the older population can see can make all the difference.
3. Color laser printer: Producing a colorful output with familiar logos and/or designs instantly helps with appeal of product.
4. Accuracy in product: Make sure your output products are accurate and presentable. As programs only do what they are programmed to do, there are often inaccuracies in hidden data or human err that will standout when a printed document is produced.
5. No viewers: Learn your product well and magically produce outcomes.
   1. Showing a reluctant population the fallacies of a software and the procedure of entry may give your observers other reasons to avoid using advancing technologies:
      1. i.      Software glitches and that is why there are new versions, next gens, improvements, etc., but that is not always understood by those who do not use new software products regularly.
      2. ii.      Data entry can be confusing and what looks normal and “clear” to us, may appear incomprehensible and confusing to new viewers.

Though these steps could apply to any computer reluctant population, the goal in the end is to have your target population understand the mission. The end goal is to create consolidated systems, easily accessible information, reusable content and an easier mission of delivery the next time around—and eventually, less paper usage! Good luck, because creating change is not easy.