The Australian Youth Climate Coalition has been formed to educate, inspire and mobilise young Australians to solve the climate crisis.

I was recently invited to build an interactive map for the AYCC homepage, to help people understand who else was active nearby, and to motivate people to join their local group.

Check it out below. You can see how many members are active nearby, or better still, join:

How does this work? Anonymous membership data is aggregated into a count of members per postcode, then each postcode is geocoded on Google App Engine. Marker clustering is done dynamically on the browser, depending on the zoom level of the map, using the excellent MarkerClusterer library from Luke Mahe over at Google Sydney.

There’s one twist that geo hackers might find useful; custom marker objects are used, which carry the count of members in each postcode, so that the clusterer can sum the total number of members in each cluster, instead of simply counting the postcodes or markers in each cluster.

If anyone wants to do this for another country, or globally, I’m in.

This guy is Kurt Lewin. He’s the daddy of social psychology.

In 1936, Lewin tweeted “behavior is a function of the person and their environment.”

That might seem obvious these days, but back then it contradicted most popular theories by placing importance on your momentary context in understanding your behavior, rather than relying entirely on your past behavior.

Incoming is about behavioral prediction.

We believe that personality patterns can be detected in the unprecedented data being captured by digital media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Groupon and Zynga.

And we believe that patterns of environmental context can be detected and learnt and predicted, on a smartphone.

We’ve even made an overly purple video to prove it:

It was my absolute pleasure to lead such a massively talented group of Engineers to build our mobile social networking platform. What a ride we shared!

From stealth mode, through private beta to market launch, then the crucial pivot from a direct-to-consumer model to one aimed at mobile operators and handset manufacturers, resulting in our acquisition by Myriad Group and the scaling of our delivery capability, and then achieving customer validation by selling our technology to mobile operators in over a dozen countries, with revenues estimated at USD 80 – 100 million.

But all good things must come to an end. It’s been around 12 months since the acquisition, and I have decided to move on to The Next Challenge…

I’m co-founding a business to commercialize and export some exciting intellectual property coming out of NICTA (National Information and Communications Technology Australia) that we believe will solve a big problem in the global mobile industry.

My partners in this new venture are Max Ott and David McKeague at NICTA. It’s great to be doing this with NICTA, the largest organization in Australia dedicated to ICT research, and the birthplace of Open Kernel Labs, which recently announced the deployment of its software in over one billion mobile handsets worldwide.

We are in stealth mode, so I am unable to share many details at this time. However, for now, the tag cloud includes: mobile, geo, social, big data, psychology, and machine learning.

I’ll be leading Engineering and Product, and I expect to be back & forth between Sydney and the Bay Area for the next several months as we progress through the initial stages of customer development and product development.

Stay tuned for more details.

The location results are supplied by the Geocoding Service built into Google Maps API v3.

A thumbnail of each suggested location is also presented, using the Google Static Maps API v2, to help you quickly choose the right location.

The feedback from sites using geo-autocomplete has been really positive. It has been used as a solution for users to check the spelling of foreign locations, and also as a solution to quickly re-locate a map, as seen on GeoMeme.

Since I wrote the first version of geo-autocomplete, about a year ago, there have been a few feature requests, and some developments in jQuery and the Google APIs that can be taken advantage of, so it’s time for an upgrade.

The new geo-autocomplete is built on the new jQuery UI framework, as a jQuery UI Widget rather than a jQuery plugin.

Adding geo-autocomplete to an input field is now as simple as adding one line of Javascript, plus there are some new customization options available for power users.

Here’s the code, and you can play with some examples below. Start by typing location names into the input fields:

1. Basic use case; check the spelling of a location

Location:

2. Fast map re-location

Location:

3. Restricted to Country Names within Africa

Location:

My recent running adventures have been motivated by the usual things; keeping fit, feeling healthy, living longer. And also an unusual interest in running gadgetry.

So I thought I would share some details of that gadgetry, in the hope that it will appeal to the latent runner inside some other gadget enthusiasts out there. It’s an Engineer’s approach to running a half-marathon.

Also I am finding it difficult to walk this afternoon without cursing like a pirate, so I might as well be productive while I sit here at the computer, alternating my feet between buckets of hot and cold water and hallucinating about apple pie and custard.

Fitbit

First up is Fitbit, a wonderful gadget that provides you with visibility of your calorific inputs and outputs. The Fitbit Tracker contains a motion sensor like the one found in a Nintendo Wii. It senses your motion in three dimensions, works out what you are doing, and provides useful information and advice about these daily activities.

Data is uploaded from your Fitbit device to your Fitbit website via a wireless base station connected to your computer. On the website, you can also detail everything that you eat, chosen from a large database of foods, to compare your calorific intake to your calorific burn.

Understanding calories is no longer a black art. I’ve long had a suspicion that sitting at my desk all day long was probably a bad thing. Now, my Fitbit shows me exactly how much of a bad thing.

You can also select activities from the Fitbit database, to help it understand what you are doing. Want to know how many calories it takes to change a light bulb? Fitbit will tell you; 5 minutes of light bulb changing activity consumes 12 calories.

And Fitbit will analyse your sleep patterns at night, helping you to understand how much quality sleep you are getting, which helps you understand the circumstances in which you get a good night’s sleep.

Personally I love the data mining that is possible. For example, I have discovered that I tend to road run at 150 steps per minute, no matter what speed or incline. If only I had one of those iPod gadgets I would use iTunes to filter my running soundtrack to just 150 bpm. Also the pie charts are great, showing what percentage of your time is “sedentary” vs. “active”. Mmmm pie…

And of course you can hook up your Fitbit account to Twitter and Facebook to share your fitness statistics. That might help people stick to a fitness regime.

My only gripe about Fitbit is that they are running late on the delivery of their API. Some interesting social fitness apps would become possible once Fitbit allows its data to be extracted by third party apps.

Treadmill

If we can see calorific input and output from Fitbit, a treadmill is the next gadget, to maximize calorific output to your advantage.

Yes we all know what a treadmill is, but here’s what else I have learnt about what can be done with this gadget…

High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, is IMHO the best possible workout on a treadmill. It’s cardio exercise performed at such intensity, way beyond your normal comfort zone, that your body will spend the rest of the day burning more calories to recover from the ass-kicking you gave it. This post-exercise state is called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption, or EPOC.

A HIIT workout on a treadmill lasts 20-30 minutes, and includes several short bursts of intense running to raise your heart rate to maximum levels, each followed by a short interval at a lower heart rate. This is well suited to a treadmill because you can control a repeating pattern of slow / fast speeds, and you can tweak the variables until it hurts just right.

Here’s the pattern that I settled into:

The grey area above shows how I also added an exponential climb, by steadily increasing the treadmill incline throughout the workout. So I would recommend a treadmill gadget with a decent incline motor. This helps build up your leg strength for road running.

Vibram FiveFingers aka Monkey Shoes

Regular training shoes encourage the foot to land on the heel, which releases unnatural pressure and shock to the legs and knees.

Motion studies show that when running barefoot instead, you naturally land on the forefoot, directly below your center of gravity. This results in optimum balance, increased stability, less impact on the knees, and greater propulsion.

The only problem is that running around barefoot is no good when you tread on sharp stuff.

Luckily, Vibram FiveFingers is a gadget that provides a good solution to this dilemma.

Vibram is an Italian company that has been making shoe rubber since 1937. According to their website, they are an undisputed leader in soling technology for a wide range of quality performance footwear.

Vibram FiveFingers is barefoot performance footwear. With a slot for each of your toes, they combine all the freedom and feel of running barefoot, and all the advantages of a proper forefoot strike, with tough rubber protection from sharp stuff on the road.

There are several varieties of Vibrams, I have the KSO which stands for Keep Stuff Out!

RunKeeper

The next gadget is RunKeeper, an iPhone or Android app that tracks your location using GPS as you run, so that your split times and pace / speed can be calculated.

And when the data is uploaded onto the RunKeeper website, you can share your running routes with others, and explore other nearby routes on a Google Map.

My favorite feature is (of course!) the use of the Google Maps Elevation API which displays an elevation view of your run, overlaid with your pace or speed, to help you understand how your running is affected by uphill or downhill stretches.

RunKeeper generally does a decent job of working out where you have run, except it struggles in dense road areas on a cloudy day. But that’s no drama, as the data can be manually tweaked on the RunKeeper website to remove any noise from your signal.

As an aside, it’s inevitable that the roles of RunKeeper and Fitbit will become combined into a single gadget. The Puma Phone gets an honorable mention at this point. It combines a GPS and pedometer and other innovations such as a solar charger, plus software supplied by Myriad Group, my current employer. Oh, and it makes telephone calls too apparently.

GU

Finally there is GU, dietary gadgetry, and a late addition to the field. I only heard about this stuff last week, and just managed to score some Strawberry Banana in time for the race today.

GU is an energy gel, squeezed directly into the mouth, and easily digestible so it can be eaten during endurance events, especially long distance running. The nutritional breakdown on the packet is all zeros apart from the carbs.

My RunKeeper map of the half marathon today reveals a noticeable spurt of speed at 11km and 15km which is when I slurped my Gu today. Great stuff and highly recommended.

That’s all for now. Time for some pie and custard.

Neal Stephenson is a Storytelling Engineer, uniquely mashing up his left-brain Engineering and his right-brain Artistry into what might be described as swash-buckling historical comedic post-cyber-punk speculative fiction.

Stephenson understands technology. He comes from a family of Engineers and Scientists, and his hacking toolkit includes Mathematica by Wolfram Reasearch. He wrote ‘In the Beginning… Was the Command Line’ (1999) as an essay on the evolution of computer operating systems.

Snow Crash (1992) was originally designed (that word chosen carefully) as an interactive computer game. The technology to deliver on that design had not been invented, yet, and so the story was re-factored into a linear narrative, and implemented using that popular storytelling technology of the time; the Gutenberg printing press.

Later, in a 2004 Slashdot interview, Stephenson clearly considers the printing press as merely an interim solution to storytelling:

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience.

Stephenson extrapolates, accurately. In Snow Crash (1992), he describes the Metaverse as a shared 3D virtual world, in which humans appear as Avatars. Sound familiar?

So we should pay attention when Stephenson extrapolates storytelling technology, which is exactly what he’s doing with his latest project. And because he’s an Engineer, he’s not just talking or writing about the future of storytelling technology, he’s building it.

Stephenson’s latest project is Subutai, a Bay Area tech startup, named after the military strategist and general of Genghis Khan, and focused on building a next-generation storytelling platform.

“The form of the traditional novel is a consequence of the technology of the printing press,” says Jeremy Bornstein, Stephenson’s co-founder and President of Subutai. “We wanted to explore what the novel could be now that it’s practical to use a platform more modern than paper.”

Or as only Stephenson could say, “[This] is what Gutenberg would have come up with if he hadn’t jumped the gun and released 600 years early.”

Stephenson is also leading the creation, or perhaps “curation” is a better word, of The Mongoliad, the first story being told using the technology. Stephenson also appears to be setting the company precedent for fascinating facial hair, but that’s probably another story altogether.

Anyhow, Subutai is an attempt to tackle the Napsterization of the printed novel. These days it is a trivial task to download a counterfeit digital copy of Snow Crash from the internet, because its linear narrative fits nicely inside a .txt or .pdf file.

The Mongoliad is not vulnerable to counterfeiting because it is an interactive non-linear narrative, with social networking tendencies, and a wiki and forums and reputation system to encourage a community of readers to augment and influence the story. A freemium subscription model is used, giving some content away for free and charging $10 for annual access to premium content.

Subutai also understands that the medium is the message. There is a deliberate blur between the message of the story, and the medium of technology used to deliver it. The story enjoys being presented on a website that is still in glorious Beta, and one wiki page still includes a discussion between founders on how much subscribers should be charged for access to the premium content.

Here’s hoping this blurring of boundaries extends to include the social and community features of the site, and allows the community to truly contribute to the ongoing message of The Mongoliad, and to the medium of technology built to deliver it.

So strap yourself in for the ride. “It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants…“

It will be fascinating to watch this evolve. The Mongoliad, and the printing press.

But what about the mobile browser on your phone?

Mobile Firefox is the only major mobile browser to officially support extensions, and that is currently only for Maemo and Windows Mobile.

I’ve decided that’s not enough!

According to this man below, the mobile browser that accounts for most of our browsing is the iPhone’s Mobile Safari, so let’s start with that.

The technique for extending Mobile Safari makes use of bookmarklets, which are small snippets of javascript stored as a browser Bookmark. This does not require you to jailbreak your iPhone, and this does not require the latest iPhone hardware or software.

What extensions might be useful for your iPhone? According to Comscore, social networking is the fastest growing mobile activity, so I’ve focused on five extensions to make your mobile browsing more social.

There’s a whopping 55 million people using the Facebook iPhone app, and I suspect there might be demand from those people for some social extensions while browsing the web on their iPhone. So included below are extensions that allow you to Like or Share *any* mobile web page, not just the sites which have so far implemented Facebook Social Plugins. And there’s another extension that shows personalized Recommendations powered by Facebook.

Also, my personal use case: I often find myself wanting to tweet about the mobile page I’m reading. But some sites do not include any way to do this, and other sites do not make it easy, or use third party tools which require too many clicks or take me too far away from the page I am reading.

Figuring all that out on a mobile browser is not fun, so one of the extensions below is an easy, quick, reliable, always-opens-in-a-new-window extension to simply pre-fill the status box on Twitter’s own mobile site with simply the title and URL of the page you are reading. Simple.

And last but not least, there’s an extension for Google Buzz users too. Enjoy…

Like!

Whenever you want to Like a web page, this extension will display a Like button powered by Facebook Social Plugins. No more searching high and low for the Like button, and no more waiting for developers to add Like buttons to your favorite sites.

Go to http://mbx.hitching.net/like on your iPhone to add this extension.

Tweet!

To tweet about any web page, use this extension to open Twitter in a new Safari window. Your status will be pre-filled with the title and URL of the page, ready for you to embellish before tweeting. Long URLs will be automatically shortened.

Go to http://mbx.hitching.net/tweet on your iPhone to add this extension.

Recommend!

This extension displays personalized recommendations of content, powered by Facebook Social Plugins.

Go to http://mbx.hitching.net/recommend on your iPhone to add this extension.

Share!

To share any web page on Facebook, this extension will open a share page in a new Safari window, showing the title and URL of the page. You can choose an image from the page, and add a comment, before sharing with your Facebook friends.

Go to http://mbx.hitching.net/share on your iPhone to add this extension.

Buzz!

To post on Google Buzz about any web page, this extension will open Google Buzz in a new Safari window, showing the title and content from the page. You can add a comment before submitting your post.

Go to http://mbx.hitching.net/buzz on your iPhone to add this extension.

If you’ve been using Google Buzz on a mobile phone recently, you would know that you can choose between two filters to the real-time stream of content:

• Social – choose ‘Following’ to filter the stream based on your social graph, or social ‘circle’ as Google prefers to call it. You will see posts from your friends, and also some public posts from friends-of-friends if the Buzz filtration algorithm thinks you want to flex your social circle.
• Geo – choose ‘Nearby’ to filter the stream based on your location, as detected by your mobile phone. You will see public posts from nearby Buzz users, as a chronological list, or located on a map. Most of the value here comes from the stream being updated in real-time.

Now, with the release of the new Google Buzz API from Google Labs, I have added the real-time stream of geo-located Google Buzz content to GeoMeme, my pet project.

GeoMeme detects real-time geo-located trends, now based on millions of daily posts from various Google Buzz and Twitter and MySpace mobile apps.

GeoMeme can detect, for example, that Justin Bieber beats Lady Gaga in New York City.

If you’re curious about Justin Bieber, or about the amount and contents of geo-located Buzz posts, compared to geo-located Twitter and MySpace posts, check it out and let me know what you think.

Today Facebook announced that over 50,000 websites have implemented Social Plugins in the first week since their launch.

My favorite Social Plugin is ‘Recommendations’ which lists the pages on a site which have enjoyed the most Sharing activity by Facebook users lately. It’s a good crowdsourced measure of quality.

But I couldn’t find the plugin on any of my favorite sites.

So here’s a handy bookmarklet that allows you to see Social Recommendations for any website, not just those sites which have implemented the plugin. You might call it a Facebookmarklet.

1. Drag this link up to the bookmarks bar of your web browser: FB-Recommended
   
   

2. Navigate to your favorite site, and click the ‘FB-Recommended’ button to see the pages on that site which are most recommended.

If you are worried about privacy, don’t be. The plugin does not require you to be logged in to Facebook. Here’s the anonymous recommendations on news.bbc.co.uk today. On the site homepage itself, there’s no mention of Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ gaff. But that story tops the list of recommended pages:

If you are logged-in to Facebook, the plugin gives preference to and highlights pages that your friends have shared:

This filtering-by-social-graph is hugely significant and valuable, for users needing to filter the signal from the noise, and for Facebook who can apply the same social filtering algorithms to improve their ad targeting.

Enjoy!

At the inaugural Chirp Conference this week, Twitter released its Places feature which instead allows Tweets to be approximately geo-located, within a ‘Place’ of chosen granularity; a city, or a neighborhood, perhaps a restaurant or a park.

This is a great option for users who have ‘geo-privacy’ concerns about revealing an exact latitude/longitude.

However, this approach presents a challenge to developers on the Twitter platform: how can approximately-located Tweets be displayed on a map?

Moreover, users need app developers to adopt a standard way of showing these approximately-located Tweets on a map. A consistent approach by developers will help users form a consistent understanding of this Twitter feature, in a similar way that @anywhere Hovercards provide a consistent approach to showing data about a particular Twitter user.

polytweet is a javascript library which displays approximately-located Tweets on a Google Map.

I hacked it together at Chirp, because I will need something like this for GeoMeme, and also to share it with other developers and encourage a standard approach.

Exactly-located tweets are represented by a profile image atop a blue pin.

Approximately-located tweets are represented by a semi-transparent profile image, placed along one of the edges of the Place polygon, at a consistent position so that zooming in and out does not shuffle the tweets.

Here’s an example, with thanks to the Twitter API team for sharing their geo-location. The tweet on the left hand side from @raffi is approximately located:

Hovering over a marker will trigger the display of any corresponding Place as a semi-transparent polygon. Hence the user can understand the area from which an approximately-located tweet was posted:

You can see the working demo at http://bit.ly/polytweetdemo which includes an added bonus of Hovercards.

See the source code for usage instructions and details of how to tweak the style of the markers and polygons.

Enjoy!

The awards were judged by Mike Jones, MySpace’s new Co-President, and Ron Conway, renowned angel investor, and David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google, and Robert Scoble, tech blogger and uber-geek.

GeoMeme uses the new MySpace Real-Time Stream API to tap into the flood of geo-located updates being posted by MySpace users all around the world.

Activity Streams from MySpace are mashed up with tweets from a number of mobile Twitter apps, and located onto a Google Map. Local trends are identified using semantic analysis services from Yahoo.

For example, GeoMeme knows that Rihanna beats Lady Gaga in New York and that Avatar beats Hurt Locker in Los Angeles.

Beyond the discovery and measurement of real-time local trends, GeoMeme also provides a unique view into local activity streams, as a way to discover new like-minded and nearby friends. You can then buy the t-shirt (really, you can!) to share your trends with your friends.

GeoMeme is a lightning fast web app, and is also available on iPhone as a mobile web app, optimized for mobile using Google Maps v3 API. GeoMeme is built on Google App Engine for massive scalability.

And congratulations to the other winners of the Challenge:

• Best New MySpace App: Paradise Paintball
• Most innovative use of the Real-Time Stream API: GeoMeme
• Most innovative use of the Open Search API: Social Mention
• Most innovative use of the Photos API: Browser Not Included
• Most innovative MySpace Integration on Mobile: iSkoot

GeoMeme uses the new Real-Time Stream API from MySpace to tap into the flood of geo-located updates being posted by MySpace users all around the world.

MySpace content is mashed up with tweets from a number of mobile Twitter apps, and located onto a Google Map. Local trends are identified using semantic analysis services from Yahoo.

A couple of example GeoMemes generated by all this real-time geo-located content: Rihanna beats Lady Gaga in New York, and Avatar beats Hurt Locker in Los Angeles.