A note on my job and passion at Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc. (DRSI):
We’ve made a couple of important announcements this month:
I’ll let the Battelle announcement speak for itself, except to say that of course we are very excited about the opportunities for our partners and customers.
As for GeoLocator, it is the first product I’ve worked on at DRSI. Put simply, it scans unstructured text (email, blogs, web sites, internal documents, you name it) to locate populated places and provide their geocoordinates. And it just works, extraordinarily well. I’m very proud of GeoLocator and am looking forward to all the possbilities we have for applying it to solve important, previously ill-addressed, problems.
To monitor the latest news on DRSI, you can perform a Yahoo news search or add a Y! News RSS feed on DRSI to your news reader of choice. Or watch this space, as I’ll have much more to say in weeks to come.
Om Malik notes in GigaOM that it appears Apple has done well again this year with Christmas iPod and iTunes gift card sales.
As for me, I “gave” myself my first iPod as an early Christmas present. Up until now I’ve happily listened to my music on my laptop, but as my air travel has picked up again and it’s a royal pain to use a laptop on short haul flights in coach, I’ve seen more and more need for a dedicated digital audio player. And thanks to security theater, an iPod is more useful than a cellpod for US domestic air travel IMO.
So what did I get? A shiny black 8GB Nano (no, it wasn’t a Shuffle) which nicely holds just about my entire music collection plus an iSkin for protection and a pair of Sony MDR-NC6 headphones for a little bit of entry-level noise canceling love.
I guess if I’m any indication, it was indeed a very iPod Christmas.
Update: iPods topped Amazon’s 2006 charts, too.
I have added discussion forums to my site.
I opted to do this to enable a more free flowing discussion than my previous, moderated Y! Groups lists allowed. This change also enables new features such as private messages between community members without requiring them to necessarily make their email addresses publicly visible. Go to BillDay.com/discuss to join the conversation.
Current forums include:
I am also taking this opportunity to rename my archive to be the “Java ME Archive” to reflect the rebranding of “J2ME” as “Java ME”. As a part of this re-launch of sorts, I have made a number of updates and edits to the (now) Java ME Archive so that it contains the latest links to tools and information for mobile Java and related wireless development.
I may add additional forums over time as community interest reveals demand for them. Please let me know what you think about the new forums or if you’d like to see something added.
AOL is giving away one free movie download per visitor today, according to PVR Wire.
This might be a great way to snag a movie for an upcoming trip. I say “might” because I haven’t used AOL Video before, so don’t know if there are any gotchas lurking beneath the surface of the offer. I’m going to check it out and see for myself, which I guess is all AOL really wants out of this anyway (desperately seeking relevance).
Visit AOL Video for details.
