A while back I Dugg a story about how astronauts in space took a photo of this volcano in the midst of an eruption.  As it turns out, they took a bunch of photos and someone morphed them into a video.  Granted, the video gets a little crazy with it’s repetition, but you have to admit it’s a cool snapshot in time of this event. 

Hit the HD button and go full screen… Enjoy!

This amazing new technology called Layar is currently available on Android devices, but is supposedly being developed for the iPhone 3G S as well.  What is it?  Point your phone at a location and see what it's all about.  For example, you're on a city street and you want information about the 4 restaurants in front of you...point your phone at 'em and check out the info as it's overlayed on the preview your camera is displaying!  Great looking demo in the video below.  I want one.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CenterBeam Awarded Cisco Channel Customer Satisfaction Excellence Designation

Highest Distinction within Cisco Channel Partner Program

SAN JOSE, CA—06/16/2009—Today, CenterBeam, Inc., a leading managed service provider (MSP) to the mid-sized market, announced it has been awarded Cisco Channel Customer Satisfaction Excellence—the highest distinction a partner can achieve within the Cisco Channel Partner Program.  A result of Cisco’s independent client survey and assessment program, this designation identifies CenterBeam as having maintained outstanding customer satisfaction.

As a Cisco Silver Certified Partner, CenterBeam is recognized for its broad technical capabilities, its advanced specializations and its ability to incorporate Cisco technologies as part of its innovative managed service solutions to mid-sized organizations. In addition, as a Silver Certified Partner, CenterBeam has integrated Cisco Lifecycle Services into its offerings and demonstrated a measurably high level of customer satisfaction.
 
“While there are many providers out there who can build or manage pieces or parts of my infrastructure, CenterBeam manages the entire value chain. There is incredible value in having the consistency and accountability of the same people who built my systems be the people who manage and support those systems. Add to this their Cisco Silver certification, which assures me that CenterBeam is committed to managing and supporting these systems for the long-term. All of this translates to our being a satisfied and loyal customer,” states Don Blake, Director, Information Technology at Mental Health Systems, Inc.

”CenterBeam considers its commitment to customer satisfaction as one of our major market differentiators.  We are pleased to have earned this designation from Cisco, as it demonstrates the importance we place on providing quality services, and the high satisfaction marks we have received in this assessment are a direct indication from our clients that we are indeed achieving this goal,” comments Matthew Stoyka, Senior Vice President, Technical Operations and Professional Services at CenterBeam. 

CenterBeam continues to meet the rigorous demand of specializations, personnel, and customer satisfaction requirements to maintain the Silver Certification.  As a part of this honor, CenterBeam will be given a “Gold Star" distinction in the Cisco Partner Locator tool, which enables customers, partners, and the Cisco sales teams to identify the top performing partners in terms of customer satisfaction per the Cisco worldwide assessment process.

CenterBeam’s Cisco certified services are available as part of its turnkey managed IT service portfolio or individually as a way to extend in-house IT resources.

About CenterBeam
CenterBeam is an award-winning managed IT services provider with a rich service portfolio including PC management, hosted Microsoft® Exchange email, helpdesk support, and network and server management. Since CenterBeam’s inception, its focus has been providing mid-sized businesses with Fortune 500-class IT management and services for a fixed monthly fee. As a pioneer of cloud computing services ten years ago, today, more than 140,000 daily services are delivered in an integrated software as service (SaaS 3.0) architecture to clients with end users working in six continents, across fifty countries. Visit CenterBeam online at www.centerbeam.com.

###

A while back, I posted about some Amazing Human-Computer Interfaces.  Today, I'm adding a couple of big-name entries into this space.

Microsoft and Sony both announced some new controller technologies at E3 a couple weeks back, and I've included promotional videos from both.  The PS3 motion controller solution appears to be a little closer to prime time and uses a hand-held device.  The Xbox motion controller concept (named Project Natal) is void of any physical device and simply uses your body movement, but this seems to be more of a "vision" at this point than anything tangible.

I find this incredibly fascinating, and not just for the video game industry.  The interactivity potential is limitless here when these types of products come to market.  Immediately, I can picture training for surgeons or other health-care personnel...or heck, any hands-on profession for that matter.  If Sony or Xbox ever come to the television table with anything worthwhile, imagine the interactivity!  Who needs a remote, when you can just gesture what you want to see on TV?  How about swiping your hand to the side for a new angle while watching your favorite sport?  The possibilities will keep me up at night...  <smile>

Enjoy the videos...

SONY PS3 CONTROLLER CONCEPT:

MICROSOFT XBOX (lack of) CONTROLLER CONCEPT:

Yet another installment of links that are hopefully not indicative of the title…

Google announced a few new search features last week, allowing you to further drill-down into your search results based on type (Video, Forums, Reviews), time (recent, 24 hours, week, year), style (standard, with images, more text), and view (related searches, timeline, and the “wonder wheel”).  Give it a shot by clicking on the “Show Options” link after entering your search terms.

Click this page.  Follow the instructions.  A very cool collaboration of sounds, music, and spoken word…but you get to choose how it plays out.  Click this page.

Looking into the past, we were recently able to see a supernova that happened 13 billion years ago.  That’s with a “B”, billion.  13 of them.  13,000,000,000 years ago.  Just for reference sake, we’re living in the year 2,009.  If we were to live from year zero to 2009 over and over, it would take 6,470,881 times before we’d reach 13 billion.  Makes ya feel young, don’t it?

Finally, check out this beatbox guy!  Holy cow, that’s some talent right there…

Wolfram|Alpha – Could it be the next “Google Killer”?

Every so often, a new technology comes about that changes the way we do things.  Electricity, Television, the Refrigerator, the Dishwasher, the Internet, Google, Personal Computing, Microsoft, the iPhone…these are all fair examples of world-changing inventions.

Looking at what Google has done to the many industries they’ve touched (Internet search being just one…and our focus here), who could possibly trump what they’ve done?  To date, I’d say no one comes close.  The ones who have tried are simply replicating what Google does and slapping a couple new features on top of it…which is not a game-changing solution.

Today, I was introduced to a new website, which appears to be launching in varied locations today.  The company is called Wolfram Research (and the site appears to be taking a bit of a beating right now).  Regardless, have a look at this Wolfram | Alpha Video to get an amazing look into what this new search technology is capable of.  Yes, this part is bold *and* italic.  Click it.

Other links:
Wolfram|Alpha Website – Going Live Today
Wolfram|Alpha Launch Webcast

I’m a bit of a stats junkie, so this site really caught my eye.  The possibilities for this type of search engine are amazingly complex and deep, and I can’t wait to play with it…let alone see where this heads long term!

Enjoy…

UPDATE 5.13.2009:  Trying to find out why the counter is not incrementing, I know there's at least two out there...and other posts seem to work fine.

UPDATE 5.15.2009:  Appears Tweetmeme might have lost some Tweets and not aggregated them into the system, they did an upgrade and things seem to be better...  (their support response was admirably quick, too!)

Ran across a nice article on Daily Cycle called Re-Tweet Counter For BlogEngine.NET that shows how to add a TweetMeme Button to your site or blog.  This shows how many times your post has been re-tweeted, as well as allowing your readers to easily re-tweet your article.

As you can see, I’ve added the “button” to the left of the body text within each post.  As stated in the Daily Cycle post, all it takes to get up and running is a quick modification of the TweetMeme code and the PostView.aspx file in your theme.  Voila, you’re good to go.

My code is slightly different than that posted on Daily Cycle, so I’ve included it here.

<div style="float: left; padding: 10px;">
  <script type="text/javascript">
    tweetmeme_url = <%="'" %><%=Post.AbsoluteLink %><%="'" %>;
    tweetmeme_source = 'ALBsharah';
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>
</div>

You can also add the following line for a more “compact” version of the button:

tweetmeme_style = 'compact';

Enjoy… Oh, and go click the Re-Tweet button while you’re at it!

One of the many projects I’ve been focused on over the past 6 months is integration of the old Network Insight portal that I created into the existing CenterBeam portal framework.  Not only did we successfully do this, but we also launched a completely redesigned portal framework in the process. 

Within just a couple months of acquisition, we not only had both companies on the same internal business infrastructure (email, file systems, etc) but we integrated our on-line web presence into a single pane of glass for all of our customers (launched Feb 2009).

Took me a while to post this, as it all happened between November and February, but below is the official CenterBeam Press Release text:

----

Midmarket Gains Window to its IT Services Through Single Pane of Glass

SAN JOSE, CA - 04/07/2009

CenterBeam today announced its next generation online customer interface, My CenterBeam. This enterprise mashup represents a significant evolution of its key information and support tools into one seamless window pane for organizations to manage their IT services. Combining information from messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions, My CenterBeam delivers critical service information to a single pane of glass, clean and standardized.

With My CenterBeam, the company addresses a significant issue for midmarket businesses, the ability to inspect, verify and manage, in one pane of glass, its IT service performance, security and availability information. With this data typically coming from numerous vendors, systems and platforms, each with its own proprietary console or reporting portal, there has been no coherent way to easily or cost effectively aggregate and correlate the information.

Traditionally, IT teams have to draw information from disparate data sources, each tracking and reporting data in their own way. CenterBeam’s operational data store forms the nucleus of My CenterBeam, leveraging Web 2.0 techniques and CenterBeam-developed API’s to collect and transform that information into consumable or “mashable” assets. My CenterBeam presents the correlated assets in a standardized format, allowing users to gain valuable insight into service metrics. This includes patch and configuration management data, anti-virus and anti-malware statistics, case and satisfaction metrics, service requests, server and network availability and performance and mailbox usage – all in a single pane of glass.

“Until now, an IT executive had to keep track of statistics and information from possibly dozens of different vendors to figure out the health and performance of its IT systems. This makes inspection close to impossible and exposes the business to risk if, for example, they don’t notice that a significant patch has been missed, or if backups aren’t happening the way they are supposed to,” states Shahin Pirooz, Executive Vice President and CTO, CenterBeam. “My CenterBeam eliminates the confusion and delivers clarity by rolling up all service and information into one standard view, giving the business or IT executive, for the first time, one place to go for comprehensive and actionable information.”

“My CenterBeam provides invaluable insight into the performance of our IT operations,” states Curtis Helsel, Vice President, Information Services at University of Colorado Foundation. “To gain this level of information on my own, I would have to access several different reporting consoles and attempt to translate and reconstruct the data to provide a holistic view of our systems. This is something I don’t have the time or resources to manage or maintain.”

My CenterBeam aggregates information for all CenterBeam services including hosted email, PC security, network and server management and help desk statistics.

About CenterBeam
Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., CenterBeam is an award-winning managed IT services provider with a rich service portfolio including PC management, hosted Microsoft® Exchange email, helpdesk support, network and server management and consulting services. More than 140,000 daily services are delivered in an integrated software as a service (SaaS) architecture to clients with end users working in forty-five countries. For more information, visit www.centerbeam.com.

# # #

Stumbled across this video today from percussionist David Kuckhermann (FrameDrums.net) outlining a number of exercises to combat drumming pains and/or carpal tunnel issues. 

Being the geek that I am, I’m constantly on a PC or some type of computing device.  Over the years, I’ve converted myself to using my left hand for mouse activities because the right gets tired quickly.  Also…about 11 years ago, I got a wrist injury that that keeps me from doing any stick-based percussion. 

So, I’m anxious to give these exercises a try and see what happens.  I don’t expect any miracle cure for my injury, but I do expect some level of relief and extended “durability”.  I’ll keep you posted on my results…

Enjoy the video:

Just upgraded my blog from v1.4.x to v1.5.  New features include better Windows Live Writer support (this is actually my first post using it) via the Metaweblog API, an updated TinyMCE Editor, nested comments, speed improvements, and various other benefits.

BlogEngine.NET Version 1.5 Announcement

BlogEngine.NET v1.5 Download Here

Setting it up with Windows Live Writer was surprisingly easy.  Simply fire up the app, put your URL in, username and password, and it figures out the rest!  I’m excited to see if I like this better than the built-in TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor.

Cheers!