Mario’s World

Just imagine, you are walking around Italy with your wife and you come across a huge building with columns in the front. You have no idea what you are looking at since there are no sign boards around and you don’t understand if the Italian talking to you is helping you or cursing you.

LonelyPlanet to the rescue. Just point your phone at the building and a description of what you are looking at pops up.

Seems they worked with the team at Mobilizy to develop augmented reality travel guides for the Android. Good move picking an open source platform to start on. The app would be especially useful to last minute travelers like your truly.

I came across two very interesting articles on OpenBTS at EngineeringForChange and HookedOnMobile. This open source project allows anyone to setup their own GSM network for about $4,500 offering a 16KM radius of service. I believe this is a game changer.

It reminds me of the WiFi mesh I setup a few years ago in Goa covering a .5KM distance using 3 54G routers and a few signal boosters. It handled quite a bit of VoIP and LTSP terminal traffic and cost only the price of the routers.

I think this OpenSource GSM project could be adapted by many companies that work in clearly defined areas like taxis, food delivery and even sales. You can hand out your office land-line number and still be reached 16kms from the office.

I wonder what are the legalities of setting up your own GSM network. I’d love to setup one of my own, just for fun!

The picture below shows the tent hosting the test equipment at Burning Man.

I was quite amazed to see this recruitment kiosk outside one of Alshaya’s  outlets at the Avenues. It’s a great idea as such but the using it could get cumbersome for some.

The kiosk basically shows you a form from their recruitment portal. You need to fill it up. Then scan your resume onto the desktop. Select the scanned file using the browse option on the form and then submit. The average user would definitely need some help with this process.

As a solution for collecting potential resumes from the not-so-technical applicant, this is great.

But then, who walks around the Avenues with their resumes in hand?

Came across this sofa piece at Banta the other day. I immediately thought of this poem and the pic below of some real crooked houses that could use furniture like this.

“There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,

He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.

And they all lived together in a crooked Banta furnished house”

It all started when Ro and I were walking down Geant’s  baking section at the 360 mall. There were some great offers on these “out of a box” cake products and one thing led to another and I ended up promising to bake a cake. So we came home with Betty Crocker’s Super Moist chocolate cake mix and a few baking goodies.

The instructions are real simple and easy to follow. Al you really need for the cake is some water, oil, 3 eggs and the cake powder in the box. Mix them all together, put it in a baking tray and shove it in the oven for 30 mins.

First lesson learnt while baking… if the toothpick keeps coming out sticky every 5 mins for half an hour, then the oven is probably off. I have no clue how or when the oven went off, but it was pretty embarrassing to figure out the cake wasn’t baking since there was no heat. Anyway, about 25 mins later the cake was finally ready and the whole house was smelling of chocolate.

Ro helped make the chocolate Ganache topping. Again, a very simple procedure. 1.5 bag of Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate chips, some thick cream and a little milk mixed slowly over a double boiler. Took about 5 mins. And it tasted great. All I need is one of those pots with a candle below it and guess who ain’t going to  Chocolate Bar anymore for Fondue.

Second lesson learnt… although the chocolate is cool, the double boiler is HOT, very HOT! Use cooking gloves …or someone else’s hand at all times.

Topping the cake with the Ganache was fun … and messy, but worth it.

And finally, the serving. One slice of my oven fresh cake, one scoop of Tiramisu ice-cream and a generous topping of dark chocolate sauce all over … simply DELISH!

Amadeus‘ TravelTainment division came up with this multi-touch application for the Microsoft Surface. Unlike the Travel Touch experience I posted about yesterday, this does not have additional toys moving around the table. However on the down-side, the actual booking takes place on an agents desktop. This would mean more walking around the office with the client or having separate teams of agents for enquiry and booking.

“Travel Touch Experience” was developed by CEFRIEL for Alidays. Seems to be a great app that runs off the Microsoft Surface table and connects to Amadeus for air results.

It would be a great “show-off” tool for agents sitting down with their retail customers. I think it would work even better in the Middle East where customers love to sit for hours with their agents discussing their complex travel plans. Just keep the “kahwa” flowing and we can have the first Arabian Travel Cafe.

I came across this on the BBC news blogs section. For those who would like to create their own news websites or even blogs the article and slideshow give a good idea of what areas need a lot more attention to detail. I think its great of them to share this new functional design document.

Was checking out Expedia’s Hotel Ranking page and Al Manshar Rotana in Fahaheel – Kuwait came up as the 4th best hotel in the world according to their users. Guess everyone loves their huge rooms and corridors.

This video was forwarded to IT from the head of our military division with a clear and simple message… “Support us 24/7 … or else.”