Ali Kuru

According to the Next Web, Google is about to launch a third-party commenting system that is very similar what’s been offered by Facebook.

Obviously, this is not a surprise. But, it is also probably the most important update for the company since their “Social Search” implementation.

With on-by-default social search, Google literally forced site owners to create Google+ profiles for their businesses and for themselves. And, since Google highly values “+1″ interactions on both its search engine and third-party sites, this new feature gets late adapting webmasters attention to optimize for Google+ and adopt +1s, too.

Because Google is still dwarfing all the competition, I believe the soon to be released third-party commenting system of the company will also be welcomed with mass adoption rates. Comments will be indexed by Google, most probably with their +1 values, and this will bring the SEO power on the most powerful search engine of all times.

Unless Google somehow manages to ridicule itself, no one will miss this.

RIKEN, a natural sciences research institute in Japan, and Tokai Rubber Industries designed a robot which can pick a person off the floor to his/her wheelchair, or vice versa. This is useful in Japan, where people often sleep on futon floor bedding or relax on floor tatami mats. “Riba II” named robot is able to lift off a person weighing as much as 176 pounds (approx. 80 kg for us, the SI system users).

Aging population is a serious problem especially for developed nations, and developers of the robot are hoping to help caregivers with the problems of nursing of elderly. According to RIKEN, caregivers on average lift patients from floor bedding into wheelchairs 40 times a day, adding that the elderly nursing-care population in Japan will hit 5.69 million by 2015.

RIKEN is set to test Riba II at nursing homes in Japan, and eventually bring the bear to market with price tag around $70.000, says CNET. Most important thing here is, this could be the first robot ever find its way into our houses! Japanese might just have been invented the very ancestor of T-800; the Homo erectus of Skynet :)

Check out the video after the break to see how Riba II operates.
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I visit Android Market almost everyday, but never saw this till today. Looks like Google is trying to improve the search experience with filters on the Market. It is a nice touch, but it would be really great to see some other filters like download count or star rating.

And, it’s really weird not seeing anything related to “run free”, which obviously is my search term, on the result page. Apparently, they need to tweak their search algorithm a bit too :)

Our ridiculous consistency about nuclear energy as a nation despite the recent events finally made its way to international mainstream media :)

Wish the article published today on New York Times was a fine piece of satirical humor. On the contrary, it contains the sad but true facts about our ignorance on nuclear energy, from top government officials to the average Joe.

I quote:

“Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in 25 years,” Mr. Gurbuz said Monday during an interview, referring to the Turkish government’s response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, fallout from which hit Turkey’s Black Sea coast.

According to a Greenpeace report published in 1996, Cahit Aral, the trade minister at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, coaxed Turks to drink tea from the contaminated harvest, telling them that “a little radiation is good for you.” Mr. Aral, now 84, drank the tea on television to persuade compatriots to follow his example. The then-prime minister, Turgut Ozal, proclaimed that “radioactive tea tastes better,” while Kenan Evren, then president, claimed radiation was good for the bones.

Even without a nuclear reactor, Turkey in 1999 rated a level 3 incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event scale, classified as “serious,” when a container of highly radioactive Cobalt-60 turned up at an Istanbul junkyard, Mr. Gurbuz said.

You can read the full article here.

Looks like Google has won their data liberation slapfight with Facebook at last. When I was checking my Facebook settings to see if there is something related to new messaging system, I found something more interesting: there is now an option to download your user data from Facebook, which includes all your data (updates, photos, posts etc.) as well as your friend list!

Facebook still says that “Your download is currently being generated. You will receive an email when it’s ready”, I will inform you once i got their zip.

Update: Downloaded the zip file generated by Facebook. Unzipping it produced a directory tree containing HTML files and hotlinked stuff in separate directories. When you browse your friend list using the sidebar navigation at “index.html”, you only see your friends names, without any other information about them, no emails! Also, no email’s in the “friends.html” page code either.

Looks like nothing is over :)

According to official DLNA web site, Arçelik is going to be the first Turkish manufacturer to offer a DLNA certified product: an LCD TV in an unknown size with a LAN connection, which will act as a “digital media player”.

According to DLNA, the model of the certified product is 32SXCR6 and certificate date shows 8/30/2010, yet couldn’t find any news about the new LCD TV neither on Arçelik’s official web site, nor on Google.

No wireless network interface according to certificate, wonder if it is going to have an internal drive.

Here is the given certificate (PDF).

Update: Seems like Arçelik won’t be the only Turkish electronics manufacturer with DLNA certified goods in their product line. Vestel says (Turkish, sorry) that they’ve already demonstrated their “DLNA TV” at IFA 2010. It’s really interesting to hear that they’ve demonstrated their DLNA capable product before they got the certification though :)

Radikal, a Turkish newspaper with a name coming from the adopted English word “radical”, overhauled its physical form and welcomed readers with its new tabloid-ish size today.

I say tabloid-ish because the papers’ new size is little bigger than the tabloid standard. According to their new editor in chief Mr. Can, they choose this format – the “Radikal Size” – because it suits better for Turkish readers needs (comparing it with the tabloid size) and, combined with contextual changes, this represents “a radical revolution in media”.

I have to admit that I liked the new size. It’s now much easier to read the paper, i.e. you don’t need think if you’re going to disturb the by-sitter on the bus while turning the page. However, contrary to the Mr. Can’s idea, I think they choose this size not because of the limitations of the tabloid, but because of the newspaper stands here in Turkey.

Since all newspapers in Turkey use the traditional “broadsheet format”, stands have pockets for holding broadsheet newspapers folded in two. If they would have gone for tabloid instead of their current format, Radikal would fell short in size when presented with traditional newspapers in conventional stands and, to the untrained eye, image of Radikal would seem more like a magazine than a newspaper, which obviously would affect their sales in return.

Radikal’s new size is equal to a traditional broadsheet newspapers’ size when folded in two and, as you can easily see in the picture I took on the top left, the first thing a reader probably recognize would be its layout, rather than its size. I think what Radikal doing here is trying to soften the switch by mimicking the traditional.

I hope their clever marketing trick will ease the consequences of their revolution bold move :)

Moore’s Law assumes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years, which means chip makers have to squeeze an increasing number of transistors onto every chip. According to Wired Gadgets, IBM is experimenting DNA Origami to create smaller chips;

Researchers at IBM have made a significant breakthrough in their quest to combine DNA strands with conventional lithographic techniques to create tiny circuit boards. The breakthrough, which allows for the DNA structures to be positioned precisely on substrates, could help shrink computer chips to about a 6-nanometer scale. Intel’s latest chips, by comparison, are on a 32-nanometer scale.

“The idea is to combine leading edge lithography that can offer feature size of 25 nanometers with some chemical magic to access much smaller dimensions,” says Robert Allen, senior manager of chemistry and materials at IBM Almaden Research. “This allows us to place nano objects with 6-nanometer resolution. You don’t have a hope of doing that with lithography today.”

Giving DNA to our computers? I guess we can start counting down for Skynet after that :)

Good news first; according to VentureBeat, Prezi will open its gates to the masses next month, at 5^th of April. You can check my prezi review if you want an early look of the upcoming service.

Here comes the bad news; pricing scheme seem to be surfaced with the launch plan and there will be three plans available to the users. Which are; Free (on-line only, all information shared), Enjoy ($57 per year, only works online) and Pro ($160/year, on-line and down-loadable).

Sharing what you’ve created might not be problem for most of the users but being not able to download and use your presentations offline will definitely hurt free users. Anyways, Prezi is a really innovative tool for creating slick presentations and definitely worth a try.

Update: It looks like its not the presentations that free users are not able to download, but the new “offline editor”. See comments for details.

Apparently, Google Calendar has an offline mode just like Gmail. Although I didn’t like the way Gmail handles your offline data, since it dumps every mail and attachments’ to your hard disk in an un-encrypted fashion, I like the idea of always accessible Google Calendar.

As always, you’ll need Google Gears to be installed in the first place.