JamesCRR | 12 years ago | on: Why no one is looking for ‘rockstar programmers’
JamesCRR's comments
JamesCRR | 12 years ago | on: Searching for Cicada Song: a crowdsourcing project
Another example of Android being used for highly specialised crowdsourcing projects, (and also in the woods!)http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829205.600-old-smart... - use of phones to listen out for illegal logging.
JamesCRR | 12 years ago | on: Fermi calc: What percentage of available data does the NSA capture?
Things actually look at lot worse when you consider the level of data collected in certain countries. For instance, in Jordan 12.7 billion datapoints were collected in one month concerning a population of 6.1 million. 2000 datapoints per person. According to my Fermi calc that's pretty much all the digital metadata generated by an average citizen.
JamesCRR | 12 years ago | on: 3.5% of Android phone clocks are wrong by more than an hour
Actually 3.5% of android clocks ARE out by one hour or more... the 15s bug effects some phones, but the problem of being more than an hour out is very general and does effect 3.5% of phones - sorry if that's not clear!
JamesCRR | 12 years ago | on: How to win like Waze: turn users into contributors
One thing I missed out from the article: Waze contributors get direct access to the Waze devs once their data collection is high enough. This is a fascinating model that doesn't condescend to app users, but elevates them to having an active role in improving the app.
JamesCRR | 12 years ago | on: On Android innovation: How temperature & humidity sensors made it into the S4
I'd be interested to know of other stories of submissions to the Android Open Source Project buy 3rd parties that were adopted and became part of core Android. Anyone?
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: TechStars London brings access to UK visa
Great post, but I think that Startup Chile was the first accelerator program to guarantee a Visa, though whether that counts as a top-tier program is subject to debate. Whatever the case, it's great to see the UK leading the US here.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: White House Response to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal”
As a Brit, I'm pretty stunned by the efficacy of the We The People Platform here. Good work democracy.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: Africa’s Mobile Explosion
One thing I've found interesting that I'd love to see explored in depth, is the lack of interplay between the tech used in US/Western Europe (traditional tech hubs) and Africa. It seems the apps that are important to one market are not the same that matter in another - even in similar sectors (e.g. Square vs MPesa) perhaps this is because one set of apps targets smartphones and fast internet connections (not to mention processors) while another is targeted at feature phones. As smartphones reach higher levels of adoption I'd love to see African built apps taking on Western markets.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: Making $1 million from affiliate links on "Ad-Free" blog
It's a little more subtle than this I think: he's arguing that across a year maybe 1/10th of the 1.2m monthly unique visitors will buy something. So overall conversion is 1/(10*12) or roughly 1%. Would love to hear from someone who runs a literary b,log though and has better figures.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: The State of LTE
Sorry we missed this one, yep HTTP download from Cloudfront - so we use those servers. Others e.g. SpeedTest.net use the servers of the local ISPs which is better for measuring the max possible speed a user can get, but our focus is on the speeds users are more likely to get while actually browsing/downloading so Cloudfront works pretty well as a lot of global traffic is served through it - would love to see the % if anyone knows.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: The State of LTE
That's part of the very cool M:Lab project, other apps running M:Lab http://measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: The State of LTE
As a rule of thumb anything that's not standardized on iPhone is even less standardized on Android afaik there will be Android phones on all the bands that netwroks offer.
We're releasing an iOS app soon - hopefully within two weeks - and will be interesting to see how the LTE experience varies on exactly the same device across networks and countries.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: The State of LTE
Yep, it includes public Wi-Fi, though we are trying to distinguish between public and private for the purposes of making hotspot maps, anyway could also be cool to look at the breakdown in speeds between the two.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: The State of LTE
Thanks for the comments, I agree we the key for the map could be clearer (yep it's those lines!). I'm also with you on the bar chart.
The pings are on google.com (which resolves to it's local site). And, extra clarification, we're using cloudfront CDN for the download tests.
OK will makes some changes then. Thanks!
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: The State of LTE
This was my first attempt at Data-visualisation using d3. I've done a few things with GoogleVis and R, the one is awesome for the web the other is awesome for its flexibility, D3 is awesome for both. I was also pretty much a novice to JS and CSS, I highly recommend AlignedLeft's tutorials http://alignedleft.com/ if like me you start from scratch with this.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: Mapping the world via cellphones
(disclosure I'm James Robinson, CTO at OpenSignal) openBmap and openCellId are both great projects, I also recommend Wigle.net
We don't consider ourselves competing with these companies, although we collect similar data. Our business model is to collect data, use it to provide analysis that can help carriers improve their networks and from that revenue stream continually improve this project, while always being committed to providing free and independent coverage maps. Our competitors in this space are Rootmetrics and Sensorly, and we're trying to be as open as possible within this space: we have a free API (network rank) and we share data with academics as well.
I love the opensource model, but it's not the route we've taken with this project, that said this is a project undergoing continuous development and if we can do it without undercutting our business model we will release more and more data.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: Mapping the world via cellphones
Good question. That was the prize for winning CrowdHack that year - way back in 2011.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: When One-Way Latency Doesn't Matter
There has been a long debate in Special Relativity over whether the one way speed of light is even measurable in principle, with some claiming ingenious experimental setups are able to gauge it while others criticise those for making some assumption about synchronising clocks that presumes the result.
Then: if one accepts the one way speed of light is indeed not measurable and that only two way speed of light need be homogenous, it will follow that any one way speed is a result of convention in synchronizing clocks and we thinking in terms of 2 way speed is unphysical.
JamesCRR | 13 years ago | on: We just launched OpenSignal 2.0 for Android
Hehe good to hear. We use a hashed version of phone IMEI as a unique identifier for proper weighting and cleaning of the data. You can also stop this without LBE by turning off data-sharing in the app, but then you won't be contributing to the world' largest and most open coverage maps.
However my experience of programmer rockstars is just as bad, their stage presence is pitiful. Instead of cutting it with wild guitar solos they tend to spend to much time StackOverflowin', when we're wailing out a tune they often grimace and put on their sound cancelling headphones.
Please, everyone stick to your profession.