Common Paradox Tech Blog

Envision a web service that lets you record and share your entire life online: That’s the lofty goal LIFEmee wants to achieve. The eponymous Tokyo-based startup behind the service (which is available in both English and Japanese) relaunched its site today with a redesigned interface and a set of new features. (LIFEmee launched back in September this year as a TechCrunch50 DemoPit company.)

To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their “lifestream” (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.

LIFEmee is still loaded with too many buttons and icons, but the new site is much simpler to use than the TechCrunch50 version. The site’s co-founders say after having collected feedback from early users all around the world, they tried to make it more accessible, integrate it with existing social networks and redesign the entire layout. A Japanese version was added a few weeks after TechCrunch50, too (at the event, LIFEmee launched in English only).

A 22-year-old woman from Chicago recently spent two nights in jail and could face up to three years in prison for taping four minutes of the new movie Twilight: New Moon. Samantha Tumpach and family threw her sister a surprise birthday party at the theater and captured much of it on video. Unfortunately, two “very short segments” were enough to make theater managers want to press charges. “Tumpach insisted she recorded no more than three minutes while in the theater — and said not all of the video she shot was of the movie. There’s footage of [Tumpach] and her relatives singing to her sister, she said. ‘We sang “Happy Birthday” to her in the theater,’ Tumpach said. She also took pictures of family members in the theater before the film began, but an usher who saw the photo session never issued them a warning, Tumpach said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A woman is potentially facing three years in jail for recording three minutes of New Moon, the sequel to Twilight. Three years. In Jail. Over Twilight.

Samantha Tumpach claims that she should not face the harsh punishment intended for bootleggers, because all she was doing is recording family members signing “Happy Birthday” to her sister in the theater. Any footage of the movie screen was completely accidental, according to Tumpach.

I honestly don’t care about whether she was trying to bootleg the movie or not, I just plain think she should be jailed for considering a surprise birthday party at a showing of New Moon a wise idea. [Sun Times via Digg]

Photo by Squidoo

Most serious family history software supports a detailed approach to chronicling your ancestors. Popular examples are Family Historian, RootsMagic and the program we have chosen to review, Family Tree Builder 4.

Unlike these, though, you won’t find Family Tree Builder in shops – it’s only available by download, as are other respected programs such as Ancestral Quest, Genbox and Master Genealogist.

Just like its peers, Family Tree Builder offers several advantages over drawing family trees on rolls of wallpaper and keeping your creased notes in hidden away in a box.

You only have to enter names, dates and places once, and you don’t have to redraw diagrams and rewrite notes to accommodate new family members. Both of these factors save a lot of time and help eliminate copying errors.

Read all about it

The beauty of using family-tree software is that after entering as much information as you can lay your hands on – including relationships, events, images and facts – you can use the PC to produce detailed reports.

These are much more interesting to share with other members of the family than dry spider diagrams. Reports fall into four categories: ancestral, descendant, statistical and administrative. Each type of report concentrates on different things.

Narrative descendant reports, for example, track all of a person’s descendants (and their spouses), printing all associated facts, events, notes and photographs. Other types of report include things like family group sheets and timelines.

Family Tree Builder can produce professional-looking PDF reports, though the wizard-driven process has been licensed from The Complete Genealogy Reporter (and thus sadly has fewer options). But despite the limitations, this immediately elevates Family Tree Builder up several levels for those for whom presentation of their research is important.

The contents can include lists of all relations, family trees, your notes and sources, plus indices of places, dates and people. However, there’s no room to add existing pre-printed material, and unfortunately you can’t edit sentence construction.

The application can produce a similarly varied range of charts. Standalone charts include drop-line trees (the type of cascading format everybody visualises when you say ‘family tree’), as well as ‘waterfall’ and ‘fan’ variants, a ‘close relatives’ tree and an all-in-one tree. All of these can be displayed on-screen, though printing your work out can be a little challenging.

As you can imagine, it often involves using reams of paper that then have to be glued together.

Roots in the cloud

The free basic Family Tree Builder program comes with access to private MyHeritage web pages where you can publish your own family history. This will cope with up to 250 individuals and 250MB of photos.

The app can also export your data in the industry standard GEDCOM format, which can also be uploaded to MyHeritage to produce a full online family tree. Be aware, though, that the GEDCOM format can sometimes lose data, so using Family Tree Builder’s own format is often preferable.

MyHeritage pages let you share your family tree with other family members, who can upload their own photos and comments. Your data is only visible to you and the people you invite to view it, though information on deceased ancestors can optionally be made available to all so that relatives can find you online.

Being tightly integrated with Family Tree Builder, your online tree is fully graphical (instead of the collection of HTML reports you may get elsewhere). And unlike some other site operators, MyHeritage doesn’t lay claim to your uploaded data.

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MeatballCB writes “Hey folks. Being the ‘technical’ guy of the family, I often get calls from friends and family members when they’re having PC issues. Most of these folks are not technical, so trying to troubleshoot problems over the phone can often be a challenge. Anyone know of a simple-to-use and (preferably) free service that would allow for remote viewing/control of their PCs? I know there’s WebEx and GoToMyPC, but I hate to pay for something I’d use once every two months. I also know about VNC, but trying to walk someone through opening up ports on their router that thinks their Internet is broken when their homepage gets changed is not realistic. Anyone know of anything that would be easy to set up and use?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired writer Evan Ratliff spent 27 days in constant fear of getting caught as a small army of amateur and professional investigators hunted him. He had a bounty on his head and the Internet nipping at his heels.

Vanish, a combination of a manhunt and an experiment, began at 5:38 pm on August 14, 2009 as a bold headline on Wired proclaimed “Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.” We would discover if someone could disappear in today’s world, or whether the electronic trails from ATM, email, and cell phone usage would give him away.

Of course, in Evan’s case it wasn’t just a few concerned family members or police officers looking. It was any person on the Internet whose curiosity was aroused, either by the sheer challenge or by the bounty. Any and all traceable information would be shared over the next few weeks. Soon Evan’s phone records, credit card statements, IP dumps, interviews with friends, and anything that his hunters could dig up would be posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Wired’s own site.

The end goal for the hunters was to locate Evan, photograph him after giving the codeword “fluke,” and then submitting that photo along with a codeword Evan would provide to Wired. And after 27 long days, someone did just that. Evan was caught.

You can read the entire tale here. As you do, consider whether Evan made any genuine mistakes or whether his capture was simply inevitable. Is there a way to disappear, without giving up travel and technology? How would you do it? [Wired]

I’ve suffered much when it comes to digital photo frames. I purchased a number of frames from multiple manufacturers for multiple members of my family with the expectation that I would, for time immemorial, be able to email said frames images, thus allowing family members the opportunity to see new photos without having to drag them over from the computer. Alas and alack each one of these frames (Damn you, SmartParts!) has failed and their attendant services have gone out of business.

I’m an optimistic fellow, however, and they say digital picture frame usage after being burned by picture frames in the past is a triumph of hope over experience. Well fool me again, picture frames, because I’m going to talk about the eMotion Social-Connect Digital Photo Frame with LifeGoRound.

Even in the age of the Internet, shopping for cars can be a chore. There are so many different models to choose from that comparing reviews for current models, past models, looking at stuff like fuel efficiency and maintenance costs can be confusing, and that can happen before you ever even visit a showroom.

Because most of us enlist advice from friends on their experiences when shopping for cars, it makes sense to bring social networking into the car rating and car buying process. That’s what Honk, which bills itself as a social platform for car shoppers, aims to do.

Not Another Social Network

Honk makes it clear that they don’t want to be another social network. Instead, they want to leverage the existing social networks, like Facebook and MySpace for organized opinion gathering. By using apps for both platforms (the first Facebook app, “Cars I’ve Owned” goes live next week), users can tap into opinions from their friends and family members on the social networks they already use.

Even when you sign up to Honk, you can use Facebook Connect, which is nice for those of us who hate having to add one-more login to our already login filled lives.

Social Recommendation Engine

The center of Honk is its “Explore Cars” engine. You can select new or used, put in your price range and select some demographic information (like are you single or do you have a family, what stage in life you’re at, what is your personality type) that will help Honk give you recommendations for cars that fit your personality and budget.

You can further drill down by selecting or deselecting types of cars or car manufacturers. This can get you an even more accurate overview of what cars you might like to take closer look at. If you see a car in your list that you know you like (or don’t like), you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down.

My only real complaint with the recommendation engine is that it doesn’t remember any of your preferences. I don’t like having to re-enter my couple status and life stage every single time I want to look at cars. Furthermore, I always have to deselect the types of cars I would never buy (for me this means SUVs/minivans, pickup trucks) just so those results won’t show up in my listings.

It would also be nice if I could just choose to exclude a car manufacturer rather than having to click on every manufacturer I like and not select those I don’t want to look at.

Reviews from Real Owners With Accurate Local Pricing

I liked seeing the reviews from real people who either own the car, know an owner, or have taken it for a test drive. You can see who the people are, read about their experiences, and see their car history if they choose to share it.

The pricing section is really nice, because you can configure the details you want and see the lowest pre-negotiated price for your area. Even if you don’t end up buying a car from one of those dealers, it’s a nice way to see what MSRP is on the car and to see what kind of deal you can pre-negotiate before you head out shopping or making phone calls.

What Do You Think?

Overall I like the idea behind Honk and I think that the information it gathers from users has the potential to be a very powerful recommendation engine. Because it is still in beta, I don’t think the system is quite as robust as it could be, but I expect that to change.

The ability to see what your friends recommend and what they are saying about a car — just by virtue of being connected through Facebook — is a great idea and something I really hope takes off. Car shopping is rarely a stress-free experience, but maybe using social engines like Honk can make the process a little more tolerable.

What do you think of using social networking to shop for cars? How do you currently get your information when looking for a new vehicle? Let us know!

Reviews: Facebook, MySpace

Tags: automobiles, car buying, car shopping, cars, facebook, honk

Ekahau’s T301W Wi-Fi Bracelet can pinpoint the exact location of anyone wearing it, without the use of GPS. But there’s a catch.

While cellphones often use Wi-Fi to triangulate a person’s position in the world, the T301W only works on preconfigured Wi-Fi networks that are coupled with additional beacons. In other words, you sort of build your own Wi-Fi triangulation network in a smaller area.

But the idea is still pretty handy. The $60 waterproof wristband operates up to a month between recharges, and it would allow hospitals to keep tabs on troubled patients, family members to locate one another on cruise ships and, when coupled with a remote detonation device, could make anyone capable of running their own forced labor camp. [Ekahau via Engadget]

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Plurchase

Quick Pitch: Plurchase lets you shop with friends on sites like Amazon and Zappos. See what friends are shopping for, and chat with them.

Genius Idea: Plurchase brings the social act of window shopping to e-commerce. With Plurchase, you can invite friends to join you while you shop and discuss with them the items you’re looking at before you buy.

As convenient as online shopping can be, one of the downsides is that unless you happen to have someone with you while you’re online, the communal aspect of “are these shoes cute” or “is this dress too expensive” is lost. Sure, you can send friends or family members an e-mail pointing to the item you are looking at, but the real-time aspect gets buried in the shuffle.

Plurchase is attempting to change that by brining a social kick to e-commerce sites like Amazon and Zappos. Go to Plurchase.com, choose where you want to shop and then send your friends a URL (or post connect with Facebook and send a request or share an item that way) and they can join you in real-time and see what you’re shopping for and chat.

Plurchase loads as a sidebar on the standard Amazon.com or Zappos site and there are no plugins or registration required. You can choose to publish an item to Facebook and ask others to join you, but what you share and with whom is totally up to you.

Plurchase also works cross-site, so if I’m shopping for Blu-ray discs at Amazon.com and my friend Sang is checking out some kicks at Zappos, we can share our results with each other and continue to chat in the little sidebar window.

It’s a pretty neat idea to be able to communicate while you shop. In addition to Amazon/Zappos, Plurchase also supports Craigslist and is looking to add more sites, as well as Twitter and voice chat integration in the future. It’s also a free service — they make their money off of affiliate payments from the sites they support.

We can see Plurchase being useful for individuals wanting to shop for a gift for someone together. For instance, my sister and I often get into argument if we actually go shopping together, however, if we could browse the web for a gift for our parents for Christmas or their anniversary, the world might be a more civil place and our parents might even get a joint gift for once.

What do you think about socializing e-commerce? Let us know in the comments!

Spark of Genius Series Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: Blu, Craigslist, Facebook, PHP, Twitter

Tags: amazon, ecommerce, plurchase, Zappos