To brush up on this topic, I decided to pull out an old audio book I had from Al Ries & Jack Trout’s 1981 book “Positioning: The Battle for your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout” — an awesome time tested reference from two thought leaders on branding and marketing. Ries and Trout explain that while positioning begins with a product, the concept really is about positioning that product in the mind of the customer. This approach is needed because consumers are bombarded with a continuous stream of advertising, with advertisers spending several hundred dollars annually per consumer in the U.S. The consumer’s mind reacts to this high volume of advertising by accepting only what is consistent with prior knowledge or experience.

Positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization. Positioning is about selling, marketing, branding, packaging but NOT changing your product — it’s changing your prospect or audience’s minds to identify and remember the value of your offer.

Positioning is not to create something new or different but to re-tie what exists as perception of value in a prospect’s mind. Don’t overstate the potential in your message, instead be selective — practice segmentation and positioning of your copy.

It turns out that when you’re writing copy on a webpage, advertisement, magazine, product data sheet, branded materials, presentation or proposal — you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Therefore it’s important to consider the position of your message that you want your audience to consider.

The truth is that we’re an over communicating society. Consumers are exposed to too much noise and marketers are fighting for some of the same spots in the consumer’s mind. The number of products for consumers or organizations in existence is enormous. Just to give an example, 12000+ food products exist for food consumers. There are 100,000 prescription drugs on the market. There are 80,000 companies in industrial sector. There are over half a million trademarks with 25000 new trademarks yearly with hundreds of thousands of new unmarked products being offered yearly.

The average person can’t be told they are wrong. The average person is continuously already a dripping sponge of information. A person is capable of receiving only a certain amount of information — sensory overload is happening often. Only a tiny fraction of the information ends up in the receiver from your message. You need to get your message accepted by the receiver. Focus on the prospect not the product to greatly increase the communication effectiveness.

It used to be that product features or benefits would be enough to position your product, then focusing on the image of your offer, brand, product was also important but as more ‘copy cat’ or ‘me too’ and the internet became pervasive, positioning on your unique focused value to the right target prospect or audience became paramount.

Before you sharpen your public positioning, consider positioning against competition and consider building a positioning statement for your internal clarity that will help lead you to the ideal messages for your public positioning. Ask questions to brainstorm your positioning statement like :

1. Who is your ideal customer?
2. What are your ideal customers’ pain points?
3. What is the general category of your product?
4. What is the primary benefit of what you are offering and the key reason your ideal customer would buy it?
5. What is your unique selling proposition?

To build a positioning statement use a template like this :

target customer that Needs/cares about, company/product/service is a category/solution that benefit. Unlike competitor, company/product/service is unique differentiator.

The ideal goal is to over-simplify the message! Less is more! Sharpen your message and especially your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to cut into the mind. Simplify it, simplify it, simplify it — oversimplification is a necessity in all communications!

Look for the simplification of the problem inside the prospect’s perceptions of the value — not the reality or features of the product. Look for ways to position your product against existing known leading products such as “unleaded gas” or 7-ups “the uncola drink”.

Test what works and what doesn’t by getting out of the building as Steve Blank suggests — talk to people and advisors and customer prospects — be a marketer to learn how to frame it — find out who your customers are, how they work, and what you need to do to sell them. If you’re a entrepreneur, remember to keep spending about 50% of your time out of the building.

Once you have some theories for your startup or offer that you’d like to launch a test or begin marketing for setup a website. Be sure to pick a good name to brand your idea, startup, product or offer — this can’t be stressed enough and probably deserves it’s own blog post. Once your site is up with branding and messaging, it’s easy to use tools like Optimize.ly to perform A/B test experiments to optimize your messages or positioning with web site landing pages for your product (a form of MVP – minimum viable product) possibly even before you create your product. This also generates potential beta testers for your app or product and a potential list of early adopters.

Spinnakr, founded by #dctech folks @adamsfallen and @mmayernick, allows you to target your website’s visitors to more clicks & conversions for your business goals through analytics and engagement action use cases. Normally, your website looks the same to everyone, but different people are looking for different things. Spinnakr makes it easy to reach and engage the different segments of users — not just analyze them like most people already do.

If you use wordpress, check out this plugin on github https://github.com/omaruddin/simple-spinnakr.

I appreciate your feedback and comments about your usage of the plugin and Spinnakr.

I threw together this blog post and WordPress plugin based on Dashboard.io tracking integration and AARRR standard to save time on applying the code on wordpress sites and to eventually make the plugin seemlessly integrate for all stages of the conversion funnel proposed by AARRR.

So far Dashboard.io is working well for me on my sites like Music.com and is helping people understand relevant metrics and conversion goals for their websites.

If you’d like to fork this plugin or download it for now I just have it on github. I’ll publish to WordPress.org CODEX if there’s demand for it.

I welcome feedback and kudos to Paul Singh for releasing this analytics app.

Innovation is the process of trying something new and if it works or survives, you keep it, otherwise throw it away or tweak it until it grows and changes things for the better. Andy Singleton, from Assembla.com, writes about the Theory of Innovation requiring exploration, observation and optimization. People and companies who don’t challenge themselves to innovate themselves as well as provide a culture of team innovation are likely to fall by the wayside and be beaten by competition. Whether you are looking for a new job or whether you’re looking to grow sustainable advantage against your business’ competition, innovation mindsets are the key to success.

Re-invent, pivot, tweak, learn and optimize are alternative actions that I think of for innovating myself and my businesses. Out with the status quo and in with better ways, tools, methods and thinking.

The successive waves of innovation over the last century has taken us from electricity to telecommunications to microchips all the way into the ubiquitous nature of the Internet and has changed the way humans live and continue to advance into the future.

Science fiction has also inspired researchers, engineers and scientists alike to take visions of the future and attempt to innovate these visions into reality. From Star Trek’s communication devices to cell phone technology, human kind undoubtedly has an innate backbone and curiosity to innovate.

I wrote this post because I often come across a common theme in various sectors of our technology driven world — resistance or ignorance to innovation.

Working as a hive mind, an organization or business of any shape or form, must work to better themselves, achieve their shared vision and hopefully do good in the process for the world.

Whether driven by shareholder value demands or passionate social good there are many reasons why innovation isn’t in every nook and cranny of society.

Just as one example, cloud computing as an innovation has helped to reduce costs, reduce waste, increase profits, increase scalability and make better use of our energy resources. At the same time, ignorance and resistance to change have led to common beliefs that cloud computing is inherently insecure. With the right strategy and execution cloud computing can be highly secure, it just depends on your situation and needs.

I’m a firm believer that each and every person in this world should work towards betterment of themselves and so should the organizations where they work. Corporate values and social goals alongside innovation is paramount to everyone’s future. Eliminating disease, war, hunger along with conserving resources and capital waste are all very good reasons for leaders of society to innovate.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people innovating throughout the government, business sectors and even non-profits, but having an understanding of why you may not be innovating may be the first step in continuing to advance the progression of innovation — whether incremental or game changing.

Here are some reasons that you should look for in your organization or team to understand why you may not be innovating!

Lack of internal support or buy in

• Resistance to change
• Management discourages innovation in it’s culture
• Lack of focus, vision and direction from leaders
• Lack of association of innovation and differentiation with growth
• Leaders defensive to new ideas that challenge status quo

No common definition of innovation and how to measure success

• Lack of understanding of the types of innovation
• No key metrics and tracking for baseline and targets

Lack of innovation processes

• No idea management
• No new ideas, new problems or learning opportunities
• No process to bring idea from vision to growth
• No research and development
• Lack of effective communication between team on innovation process
• Failure to execute projects effectively
• Lack of measurement and tracking on projects
• Lack of user and stakeholder analysis
• No monitoring or communication on innovations

Lack of Customer Focus

• Lack of listening and talking to customers
• Lack of understanding of market and customer development interaction

Lack of long term goals

• A focus on risk mitigation and risk adversity
• Short term focus with no time spent on long term
• Focusing on unrealistic financial returns or short term gain

Lack of resources

• Lack of adequate funding
• Lack of prioritization of resources

Lack of teamwork

• Lack of challenging your team
• Lack of effective communication between team on new ideas
• Lack of knowledge management
• No perceived incentive to be innovative

For the benefit of any nerds, admins, developers, entrepreneurs and CTOs alike, I’ve put together this Google Spread Sheet template to help you forecast your potential hosting budget impact as it relates to your hosting configuration and metered usages.

If you’d like help with this template applied to your business or with your hosting solution, let me know and I’d be glad to help. Also I’ve made this a free template at Google Docs but I welcome feedback and suggestions on improving it.

I hope you will find it as useful as my clients and I do to help forecast costs for your shiny new, contract-free cloud at Rackspace

Check out the template and feel free to modify and use it as you please — Rackspace Cloud Infrastructure Hosting Budget Planner

This particular mind map may not make sense to every #nptech person out there, regardless I hope you will find it useful.

If you would like any help or advice on cloud computing for your non-profit or business including government, I’d be happy to help, just reach out to me through the blog or contact form.

I plan to release more mind maps on variety of topics for the benefit of interested audiences. I also welcome your feedback and suggestions on mind maps you’d like to see or consider for discussion.

Here’s a PDF Download :
Mind Map : Cloud Computing for Non-profits by Omar_Uddin

A good example of these debates are like this one — which I will warn that you not read too much into as well!

Considering PHP is dominant due to it’s default installation with Apache on Linux web servers – the most dominant server distro on the web — this debate could greatly be ‘closed’ if these folks look through a magnifying glass for specific scenarios, or if they look to people that have worked on both sides of the debate — such as me.

My web projects across businesses, non-profits & government are currently using both .NET and PHP in various ways. I personally love open source technology especially PHP, MySQL, Apache and I contribute to open source projects like GeoMashup, a plugin for WordPress that among other projects. We also use a bit of Java when there is a simple way to integrate it through say web services and if we have expertise to work with it.

What I’ve learned from other experts and from my own experience over the years that technology is a commodity and the experts that are fluent in different technologies, may feel that they are better at PHP than Perl, or better at PHP then Java etc. So it’s sort of biased to say that one technology is better. Facebook, Yahoo and other big internet businesses are using PHP and are doing it well. PHP is not as ‘fast’ as C/C++, Java, .NET or any compiled language but unless you’re a web developer or software architect, you don’t need compiled languages for your website. You need compiled code for back end stuff a lot of the times and Perl can be compiled.

If you can still continue reading this article and aren’t bored out of your mind (to those reader’s that are not techies), you’ll realize that having these argument’s may be pointless.

When I build web application or website prototypes, I almost immediately go to PHP because of good frameworks or platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Symfony and others because I have an infinite amount of functionality and customization options as well as pretty cheap hosting solutions already where PHP/MySQL cost me a lot less than running say Microsoft SQL Server. I also use my Mac Book Pro most of the time I’m in my lab where I build and deploy many sites from my local XAMPP stack that gives me a web development stack that includes Apache, PHP, MySQL etc. When I need to work on .NET I fire up a virtual machine, Remote Desktop into a Windows box or use Mono – the open source .NET Runtime for Linux. But I can even be disconnected from the web and go to the coffee shop and continue developing.

Focusing on specific needs and the ‘right tool for the job’ are probably more realistic so I think developers and technology folks shouldn’t waste time with the “versus” debate. What matters most is what your folks are good at, documentation, having a pool of resources in case you need to grow (PHP has a lot!), whether or not you plan to integrate something that uses a certain technology, licensing concerns (Windows is not free), operating or hosting costs, scalability, and possibly acquisition concerns if you’re planning to sell your business.

Also I should note that if you have an existing investment then there a lot of CTOs and decision makers in organizations do not want to consider adding PHP into the mix even for certain things, like intranet, collaboration, content management due to their reliance on Microsoft. I just advise those folks to stick with their vendor-lock if they don’t understand open source’s benefits since they already have invested too much say in a pure-Microsoft environment including Exchange, Sharepoint etc.

I look forward to seeing what other great applications, frameworks, solutions and products come out but I can bet that these debates will always be alive. New technology from HTML5, CSS3 and more what will continue to push (new and old) developer’s into learning new technology both to build their resume and continue to scratch their learning itch!

There are many sites out there that I probably haven’t covered but here are some:

• simpyhired.com
• www.jobfox.com
• www.theladders.com
• www.jobsradar.com
• www.indeed.com
• jobs.jsninja.com
• job-hunt.com
• www.authenticjobs.com
• careers.com
• careers.yahoo.com
• hotjobs.com
• usajobs.gov
• jobs.37signals.com/jobs
• monster.com
• careerbuilder.com
• dice.com
• craigslist.com

Freelance or Gig Sites

• elance.com
• www.odesk.com

More Job Sites and articles that you may find of use.

• The Top 50 Job Hunting Sites for Job-Seekers, 1-10
• Recession Job Hunting Tips
• ZipRecruiter – Post your job to many sites!

• Get your friends or colleagues and professional recruiters to tell you what they would recommend changing on your resume, cover letters or your job seeking in general
• I recommend you use Google Reader and subscribe to RSS feeds if available from sites that provide RSS especially if the RSS is broken down by category.
• Create some canned cover letters ready to attach to your resume for any job that requires you to submit a letter.
• Try to focus your job search to jobs that you are highly suited to and that are using the right keywords that head hunters or recruiters are looking for.
• If you are seeking a technical position, more than one page is acceptable (many people think that anything more than one page is too much) so try to condense your most recent 5-years of job experience history to 2 pages total..
• Some of the sites above allow you to set search agents and multiple resumes.
• Some of the sites above are not meant for every type of job.
• Consider volunteering your time to a non-profit that may need volunteer help.

If you need to run multiple-separate domains and one base master WordPress template theme with multiple children themes (like what I needed was a product site, 2 blogs, a community and a corporate site) without the need for wildcard subdomains or subfolders per blog/site then running a single instance of code and database on Rackspace Cloud Sites is possible using their domain alias feature.

I recommend you follow these steps to setup WordPress MU:

1. Download and install WPMU Multi-Site Plugin
2. Setup your different domains, sites blogs locally with the help of this plugin on your dev installation and get everything working the way you want like content, themes, plugins etc.
3. Deploy to the core or ‘first’ site as you would normally do to the Rackspace Cloud Site
4. Test to see if this core site is working

Then follow these steps to setup the other Rackspace Cloud Sites & DNS:

1. Setup the actual core domain in DNS to point to the matching Cloud Site IP that should have an appropriate database for the instance
2. Deploy the local developer instance files and database to this core domain
3. Setup domain aliases with the help of this Help guide at Rackspace Cloud support
4. Test that wordpress mu is serving the core and new alias domains that you have set up in the multi-site configuration

It’s that easy and I was pleasantly surprised when it was working so easily in addition to not having to get a server or other dedicated vm/box for running WPMU in this way!

I had some trouble getting things working but found an excellent article that should help you .NET developers looking to use Rackspace Cloud Sites as solution to host your ASP.NET web sites, web apps or WCF services.

Since cloud hosting has different conditions for security and reliability, there are some other considerations that you should check out at the Help support area of the Rackspace Cloud:

• Overview of modified Medium Trust
• How do I add impersonation to my ASP.NET site?

Cheers to the folks at Rackspace Cloud! PS When can I expect Cloud Servers to run Windows in a vm ?

• Ableton Live Packs Downloads
• The Covert Operators
• Free Ableton Live Pack by Composer Dennis DeSantis
• Five Dollar Bass, Atmosphere Expansion Packs for Ableton Live
  If you’re finding massive soundware libraries to be a little overwhelming on your hard drive, your brain, and your wallet you’ll like the idea of the new expansion packs from Tone Research. The first two are 13MB downloads priced at US$4.99 each. They work with Live 5 and get bonus features from Live 6. I’m still waiting on my copies, so I can’t yet comment on sound quality yet, but I’ll report back once I’ve thrown these into some songs.
• Ableton Synthtopia
• PureMagnetik
  Great Deal.. pay a $5/monthly subscription and get a great Live Pack every month

Learning Resources

• AskVideo.com
• Ableton Live 6 101
• Ableton Live 6 102

VST / Plugins

• Native Instruments Komplete 5
  KOMPLETE 5 is the high-end collection of 11 ground-breaking synthesizers, samplers, emulations, and a virtual guitar studio. Perfect for both studio and stage – this is the industry-standard bundle for serious musicians, producers and sound designers. KOMPLETE 5′s instruments can be heard on platinum-selling records and in underground clubs alike, all over the world.
• Major Malfunction
  A sweet plugin for mangling, glitch, distortion and and much more in a easy to use interface.
• Sounds Online
  A top site for massive collection of samples from many sample studios with most of the tools available via VST or other host plugin technologies and sometimes also raw samples .
• KVR Audio
  I check this site to stay up to date on the latest trends in Audio Plugin technology.
• Dblue Glitch Freeware Plug-in: Free .wav Deconstruction

Cool Hardware

• Sonica Labs
  I recently purchased the high end HUSH-QR Quadcore after doing research on all the top tiered custom DAW vendors around the world. Sonica Labs’s price point for a QuadCore Xeon loaded with memory, disk and expansion abilities has been a great replacement for my old DAWs. Talk with ‘Guy’ at the company to find out more, I was sold even before I asked them a thousand questions which they gladly answered to satisfy my curiousities about investing in their products.
• MonoTouchLive
  A brilliant tool to allow you to control your DAW with your TabletPC’s remote touch MIDI interface application!

To be honest with you, I don’t think I have time to list every tool that I use on this post since there are so many but I’ll try to do a follow up post or possibly create a dedicated page so you can come back to it for updates. Enjoy.

For those of us wishing the iPhone included GPS receiver built in, this is a short term solution that’s a hack at best but even if it is ‘off’ by 100 yards, I can at least avoid the time wastage that occurs with putting a starting address into the driving directions feature of the iPhone Google Maps application!

Find out more from Gizmodo.

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

If you find yourself repeatedly running the same user flow tests on a website or web application, try out this extension today!

In the recent past I’ve posted about Google Maps mashups with heat map technology but there are many powerful tools out there (some web based, others not) that intrinsically yield powerful trends that may not even have been discoverable with simple charts, graphs and basic visualization tools of the past era.

An article in SmashingMagazine.com has catalogued and captured screenshots of the most amazing and beautiful data visualization models out there including everything from 3d heatmapping/contouring, content clouding, to mind mapping.

One of my favorites is a 3d visual population hill/spike density map from Time Magazine:

If you are in the business of analysis of any kind, you should definitely read this article and check out the screen shots. You might find the technologies that these companies are creating useful to your endeavor.

I firmly believe that if you work hard on something and achieved success, your reputation will be increased naturally because word will get around eventually. So keeping modest and being humble of one’s success is not a bad thing at all. The author suggests that a potential combination of ambition, ideas, and healthy ego drives one’s success. So as with many things in life, finding the right balance is something one may just have to learn by making mistakes.

Several obvious tell tale signs of breaking the barrier to becoming an egomaniac that I found interesting in the article:

• Seeing someone you work with as a rival and think about how to beat them.
• Taking disagreement with your ideas personally.
• Compulsively following a competitors lead so they’re not doing anything you’re not.
• Criticizing competitor’s strategies and prematurely discard them as irrelevant.
• Disagreeing with someone’s point just because they’re the one who said it.
• Feeling worse about where you are when you see what others achieve.
• Seeking acceptance: desiring respect and recognition interferes with success.

So now you’re probably wondering what might be considered a “healthy ego”? The following interview excerpt might enlighten you:

Genuine confidence; confidence that doesn’t have to exert itself to prove it’s confidence. Healthy ego keeps us from thinking too highly or too little of ourselves and reminds us how far we have come while at the same time helping us see how far short we are of what we can be. But to understand what healthy ego is, you have to understand the relationship between ego and humility. For most people, tradition holds that the opposite of excessive ego is humility, when in fact having too little ego is just as dangerous and unproductive as having too much.

There are also those people who say that extremely confident and ambitious people can also show signs of being an egomaniac. I can’t argue with this idea either, but if you can balance the image of the ego with your humility and remembering how you achieved success in your life (if you started with humble beginnings), then you might just live a more harmonious life.

In addition to the recent price drop from Apple for the 8GB iPhone model, an open letter from Steve Jobs gives any first-to-buy iPhone owners a $100 offer towards other Apple gear.

Are you loving apple yet?

These mistakes can easily be made by design firms and other outsourcing companies as well so this doesn’t just apply to potential freelancers.

A lot of it is common sense but the gist is as follows:

1. Missing deadlines.
2. Charging too little.
3. Lack of preliminary research.
4. Choosing the wrong clients.
5. Getting too personal.
6. Letting off steam.
7. Not proposing a follow-up idea.
8. Not having multiple income streams.
9. Allowing yourself to slack.
10. Failing to be yourself.

If you’re interested in what you’ve read so far, I recommend you check out the original blog post.

In addition to this post, there are several other good articles at FreeLanceSwitch.com:

• The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling To Clients
  

  Do you have loads of clients fighting with each other for the chance to hire you? If so, you can skip this article. If not, you likely spend some time selling yourself to potential clients. So read on, because we’re going to talk about the dos and don’ts of selling.

• Balancing Employment and Freelance Work
  

  Not all of us have the guts to freelance full-time right away and you can count this intrepid journalist as one of the cowards.

  As self-employment can be slow to begin, some of us do prefer the security of a steady pay-cheque while making the transition, so here are some of the ways I’ve found to make it work while working for The Man.

• 10 Essential Habits for Freelance Workers
  

  The key, I’ve found, is to develop certain habits that will keep you not only disciplined but successful. Simple habits, to be sure, but ones that can go a long way towards taking you from a broke freelancer to a happy and productive one.

Also if you’re not yet a TabletPC lover and are thinking about getting a laptop PC in the near future, I recommend you review and compare the prices / features of your choice notebooks and also the top TabletPC’s out there. I own the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 TabletPC which I believe to be the best TabletPC out there by far in comparison to the others.

Now here are your tools. Enjoy!

My Favorite TabletPC Software

• ArtRage – It’s free (limited features), and it’s amazing. Kids, adults alike have loved this application that I’ve had on my tablet they love the ability to be able to paint on a canvas just like an artist would do. You can create some AMAZING art with an organic quality I’ve just never seen on a PC. Try installing it now and use the “Load Tracing Paper” feature and show off your masterpiece to everyone
• Microsoft OneNote – This is the most used tool on my TabletPC. I use it for meeting recordings and notetaking. I use it for brainstorming ideas, designing business requirements and workflows for my ventures. I love the ability to OCR anything (screen clippings from other apps or websites, and even what I doodle or jot down). The software allows you to organize yourself in hierarchical groups of tabs so you can organize your notes the way you want. Honestly I’m not trying to make a sales pitch here, but just try it out, whether you’re a student, a doctor, or engineer you’ll appreciate OneNote’s power.
• Alias SketchBook Pro (now owned by Autodesk)- It’s not free, but it is different from ArtRage. The tool is more for penciling, concept drawings, sketches, illustrations, fine art, drawings, annotation, education. Check out what people are doing with Sketchbook Pro.
• Mindjet MindManager Pro – MindManager software, a mind mapping tool that’s also optimized for the TabletPC, inspires people and businesses to align individuals and teams, engage and excites employees, accelerate business processes and win new business faster.

TabletPC Software Directories

• Microsoft TabletPC Powertoys – All of Microsoft’s Powertoys made just to take advantage of the TabletPC
• TabletPC Post
• TabletPC2.com Software Directory

TabletPC Enthusiast Related Blogs, News, and Forum Sites

• Scott’s List of Great Tools for your TabletPC
• TabletPC Buzz
• Student TabletPC Blog and News Site – An excellent blog for students to keep up to date on the TabletPC world
• TabletPc2.com –
  The Place for Tablet PC and UMPC Comparisons, News, Reviews and Information

TabletPC Developer Resources

• TabletDev.com – Essential information for Tablet PC developers and users.
• TabletUML.com – A UML tool for Tablet PCs (that I highly recommend if you’re a software engineer or architect)
]]> http://omaruddin.com/2007/08/19/essential-tabletpc-tools-and-software/feed/ 2 http://omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/ http://omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:18:45 +0000 omar http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/
Read on...]]> Technion Israel Institute of Technology researchers have developed a theoretical model of a time machine that, in the distant future, could possibly enable future generations to travel into the past. An article on this research was published last week in the scientific journal Physical Review.

By tweaking Einstein’s space time and general relativity models these researchers are becoming more confident with the idea of travelling back in time, something that most scientists believe to be improbable because of the paradoxes and other reasons that could happen if one did so. Curving space time, as is the basis for wormholes to travel instantaneously from one point in space to another, is the basis for this research. So instead of going to another space point in your time, you go from your point in time to another point in time.

Several issues with the stability of such a curve of space time that can cause disturbances are at the forefront of the research which the scientists hope one day the world will be able to solve.

Many people believe that if a time machine using such technology were ever possible, then why isn’t there any evidence of people coming back and telling us about it? If the positive benefit of time travel into the past is to undo our own mistakes in this world, why hasn’t it already been done, or would we even feel the effect in our reality?

The arguments on all sides of the subject bring up good points, but if we are to expect any evolution in this technology we should continue the discussion until these theories can be completely thrown away, by doing scientific research to rule it out.

]]> http://omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/feed/ 2 http://omaruddin.com/2007/08/07/the-fun-begins-on-the-iphone/ http://omaruddin.com/2007/08/07/the-fun-begins-on-the-iphone/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:39:22 +0000 omar http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/07/the-fun-begins-on-the-iphone/
Read on...]]> Here are some great tools, tweaks, hacks, and other cool stuff for your iPhone.

I’ll probably be posting more stuff like this so stay tuned.

If anyone has any good tools that may be useful, feel free to drop a comment with the url(s).


• 199 wallpapers for the iPhone by ^manicho on deviantART
  
• iWeathr – iPhone Doppler Radar
  
• MacMost iPhone Games
  
• iPhonify – Google Reader
  
• iPhone RingtoneMaker
  
• iPhone TadaList
  
• AppMarks
  
• iFuntastic – Tweak for your iPhone (requires OSX)
  
• NES Emulator (Native for iPhone)
  
• iPhone Fluther -Tap the collective
  
• FastApps
  
• FlickIM
  
• BBSNews for iPhone
  
• i.del.icio.us
  
• iChess
  
• iPhone Music Discovery
  
•