Web review

Waze is born from a simple and smart idea: connecting cars together, to automatically create a new “social network” that detects and gives alerts about traffic conditions, police traps and accidents.

You’ve only to install the Waze client, free and available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile, starting it everytime you’re driving your car. It will anonymously record your track  to inform other drivers about traffic (Waze collects speed informations from all the phones and it creates statistical alerts). You can also send “human” messages to the community, reporting speed cams or dangerous events on the road.

In addiction of this, Waze is a “normal” car navigation system, with a “not-so-normal” feature: also the maps are drawed and updated by the community! When you drive with Waze running on your phone, it records every your move and it sends it to Waze servers, where the centralized system merges this data with the existing maps. When several phones record a difference (because, for example, of a change of a road) this part of the map is updated.

People from United States are luckier than Europeans, because USA government gives maps of the territory for free, so there’s a complete base to start with. Anyway it’s also possible to start from scratch: we just started to draw maps here in Italy, and major cities like Rome or Milan are already half-mapped. Let’s call Waze the Wikipedia of streets

www.waze.com

Raneri Web Design released a new free online service, thinking about eBay users: eBalert is able to create RSS feeds from any eBay search, on the fly. eBalert is for people that is looking for something in particular: it allows users to avoid the annoying activity to check daily on eBay, monitoring the same search, to discover which new bids have started.

You can do the search once (it works also with advanced filters, like geo-distance or the ordering by criteria), then copy and paste the URL of the results’ page to eBalert: it will instantly create your feed, updated every 12 hours and ready to be added to your preferred feedreader. The service doesn’t require any signup.

Songza is an online free jukebox. Users can search music by keywords and listen songs directly from the web page, without having to download them. Results often offer good quality and large choice, it’s amazing how many songs are indicized.

The “about” page doesn’t explain how the search engine exactly work, and doesn’t give informations about sources… anyway the service is very good and is worthwhile!

http://www.songza.com/

MD5 (Message Digest 5) is a popular way to encrypt passwords (or anything else).

Its security is based on the fact that it is a destructive algorithm: if you MD5-encrypt a string, you’ll get an another 128 bit (16 characters) expression that is the unique checksum of the original string, and it’s impossible to go back. The result can be compared to the MD5 of another string (e.g.: entered by a user); if the two checksum are exactly alikes, the input received is correct.

This is a good way to securely store users’ sensible information (like passwords), making them not understandable by anyone but still usable to verify user authentication. leggi tutto »

Who doesn’t know what FON is? I already talked about this amazing project that tries to create a worldwide network of free Wi-fi spots, thanks to FON users sharing their bandwidth in a relationship of (free) mutual trade.

FON Maps is a Google Maps application that helps users to find the nearest FON access point, but what I can do if I’m going to move to a foreign city and I want to connect to a FON spot? I can’t use FON Maps if I’m not online, but I can’t go online if I don’t know where is the nearest FON access point!

Raúl Ochoa did something for me: FON Maps Liberator is a web mashup that uses FON Maps to export the position of access points in .GPX format, to add them to the “Point Of Interest” of our GPS. leggi tutto »

(vai alla versione italiana di questo articolo)

Finally, the official italian tourism portal is open.

Roberto Falavotti, the managing director of “Sì Innovazione Italia” said that Italy “invested” 45 millions of Euros to see it completed:

• 21 millions to make italian deparments insert contents;
• 4 millions to aggregate the centralized informations;
• 8 millions to IBM;
• … and the rests to “finalize it”.

For a person like me (I work as web developer), this is a real insult to my intelligence: how a nation can spend 45.000.000 euros (of our money) for a single site? In addition, now it’s really slow (and it doesn’t respect accessibility rules!)… how many servers you can buy with 1 million of Euros?

… and this site (ITALIA.IT) is on U.S. servers.

Versione Italiana dell’articolo

Google Calendar has (finally!) reactivated SMS notifications for Italian cellular operators.
You’ve just to go to Settings -> Notifications and enter your mobile phone number, to receive the verification code (it has to be entered on the same page to activate notifications).

Thank you Google!

PS: and about other countries? Are there other nations where SMS notification were deactivated?

The FON Website launched an interesting promotion, for the first purchase of any user: they’re sending “La Fonera“, a little Wi-fi Router, for 5$ or 5€ (shipping cost is 8$ for USA and 10€ for Europe).

“La Fonera” is a FON router and it allows to join the FON network; it connects to your existing modem or router, with an ethernet cable, and it gives two Wifi streams: the first one is private, for personal navigation, the second is shared, available for any other FON user that is close to you (you can adjust the available bandwidth for the two streams).

FON users can use others’ Wifi spots everywhere, without paying anything (for example when you’re on holiday with your notebook). Access is restricted throught a personal login/password, so FON can inform authorities in the case of abuses.
Users can navigate a World map to discover where’s the nearest FON Wifi spot (you can also download a part of the map to your GPS device).

Joining the FON network is the key to get free internet access everywhere.

If you’re not interested in mobile internet you can also choose to give Wifi to others, and to get paid from FON (they will share with you money they get from FON users that, on the contrary, don’t give out Wifi, but they pay for using it throught others’ FON spots).

http://www.fon.com

Just a little curiosity: today I opened www.google.it in Opera browser mobile version, on my Nokia 6680, and I noticed that its logo was divided in 4 different parts, and with “Italia” rendered as text:

The old version was a single image, with the text “Italia” embedded:

This change seems to be also in other international Google website.

The old version is visible, for example, in one of the cached pages by Archive.org.
Bandwidth optimization?

Think about anything (an object, an animal…) and answer to 20 (or max 30) questions that 20q.net will ask you. This website will try to guess what are you thinking, and it often do it!

20 Questions is a nice game, based on a web application that computes what users answer and then tries to associate questions, answers and what people thought, to improve its guess ability.

I tried with “Nutella” and “Modem” but it didn’t have success (even if it went near: “chocolate” and “computer hub” ).

It’s funny to come back often, to discover the status of it’s guessing ability…
Also hardware versions are available (one of these is in the little picture above), to bring 20 Questions with you

www.20q.net