MG Siegler writes about the original Macintosh for Venture Beat:

It had a 9-inch black and white CRT screen and featured a 400 kB, single-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The price? $2,495, which in today’s dollars would have been well over $5,000.

The computer featured the signatures of the entire Apple Macintosh division molded inside the case. Those name include Raskin, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and many others.

The Mac specs also included:

• Graphical user interface
• Mouse
• A built-in handhold on top
• 128 kilobytes of RAM
• 8 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor

Here’s the commercial that started it all…

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As you probably know, IM conversations are prone to the occasional missed step or dropped thread. I wondered briefly what she was talking about. A cute browser, I wondered? But I had faith… and then there it was, a link.  Here’s what I saw:

No denying, it’s cute. But I was still none the wiser. I knew that Margaret is a dog person and, in fact, has raised guide dogs. That’s a cute pup, I said. “What kind is it?” It’s a fennec, she told me. A little fox. (Comprehension was, you’ll be glad to hear, swift and, well, comprehensive: Big Firefox: full-sized fox mascot. Small verson: small fox mascot. Gotcha.)

At least at this point, the mobile adaptation of Firefox is named for a small, desert-dwelling fox. Here’s a video demo:

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All clear? Me too. Now I wonder what this week's IMs will bring...

~ Ivy Wigmore 

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

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Newsgator’s software was part of presentation by Lockheed-Martin on the results of its own 18-month project. “Project Unity” combined Google’s Enterprise Search Appliance (ESA), Newsgator’s Enterprise Server and Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). Newsgator powers their feed management and reading experience. I’ll be writing about Unity in a future post.

You can hear more about Social Sites 2.0 from Brian in this Social Sites 2.0 podcast. (MP3)

There has been a lot of talk about open source hardware lately and its potential effects on research and education. ETech 2008 showcased many examples of open hardware and offered an insightful presentation [PDF] to those who are new to the emerging technology. Likewise, popular sites like Slashdot and bloggers like Scobleizer have been discussing the growing movement.

The increasing popularity of open source software has already had a tremendous influence on education and the world as a whole. Not only are many schools now making the switch to open source programs, leading universities like UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are involved with developing large open source software projects.

However, we have yet to see open hardware really take off. Ryan Singel of Wired feels that 2008 could be the year and I second that opinion. Leading the pack seems to be open source robotics, which has been embraced by several major universities.

Just last month, Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins gave a keynote speech at ETech 2008 about open source personal robots, which has brought more attention to the subject. Willow Garage is a privately funded lab that experiments with various robotics platforms.

This open source robotics movement can be felt on many college campuses as well. Carnegie Mellon, which I previously stated is involved with open source software, is also building OS personal robots. The university has recently formed a joint project called the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

The IPRE is a joint project between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College, with sponsorship provided by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to help advance robotics research and computer science education. The IPRE is currently selling open source robot kits, which are geared toward educators and can be integrated with computer education curricula.

Instructions can be found RobotEducation.org if you are interested in building your own educational robot.

[Image credit: RobotEducation.org]

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From the show notes on YouTube:

As IC’s routinely include more than a billion transistors, the interactions between the design and the manufacturing communities now must handle atomic-level variability, dozens of new materials, and patterning techniques operating at their theoretical limit.

In this talk, we will present several facets of this problem and discuss emerging innovations at the IC design-manufacturing interface.

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My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

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While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

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As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

{angst}

Fortunately, a friendly colleague forwarded me a rather useful tool: Vector Magic. If you, like me, love to make your own gifts, including digital imagery, this tool will excite you as well.

Here’s a quick and clean summary. Vector Magic converts bit map images to vector graphics.

Why is this cool? Because a bit map uses a fixed or raster graphics method of specifying an image, the image cannot be immediately rescaled by a user without losing definition. A vector graphics graphic image, however, is designed to be quickly rescaled.

Instead of using commercial software, you can just upload your image to Vector Magic (essentially, a stanford.edu server) and they’ll vectorize it for you.

Here’s their example of the difference:

In other words, you can scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Savvy? Happy gift making!

Here’s a video that demonstrates how you how Vector Magic works:

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Check out this FAQ for more info. Vector Magic supports the JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF image formats as inputs and outputs them as EPS, SVG or PNGs.