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No it won’t run Crysis, but damn if the Avengina Project is not impressive. This Java-based graphics engine harnesses both the power of your Internet connection and your graphics card to run incredibly detailed 3-D environments right inside the confines of your browser. It integrates lighting and graphics filters that can scale up depending on the hardware quality of your system.

Avengina’s project page lets you take the engine for a run on your machine as long as you have a recent version of Java installed and meet the minimum hardware requirements. I found it to chug a little bit on my laptop, but that’s only because it has a pretty ragged graphics card. Users with gaming rigs should have it running as smooth as silk–or at least as well as the demo video on this page.

One of the things that makes it stand out among other browser-based graphics engines is that it handles lighting particularly well. You get things like halos around light bulbs, and shadows that move depending on where the light source is coming from–it’s very pretty, and the kind of stuff we’ve seen in install-based PC games for the last 10-15 years.

Daniel Seifert, the creator and sole developer for the Avengina Project insist it’s not being built for gaming purposes, but instead for “presentations.” As the demo shows off, you can cram a lot of text and billboards within one of these virtual worlds, but sorely missing was anything to shoot at, or platforms to jump on–two things that make first person environments immensely fun to be in.

Related: Java-based MMOG RuneScape goes HD

The Avengina enging adds things like drop shadows and graphics filters to make settings more realistic. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: mep3d.de)

Excerpt from:
Avengina Project puts gorgeous 3-D worlds in your browser

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an open-source, cross-platform program designed to track your packets and determine if your ISP is throttling your connection to torrents, VoIP, and other legal, high-bandwidth consuming communications. Called “Switzerland” and licensed under the GPL, it’s very much in an alpha state and is only a command-line tool at the moment. Also, you’re going to have to compile it yourself–that’s not the most challenging task, but this isn’t a simple self-extracting app.

According to the EFF, Switzerland works by spotting IP packets that have been forged or modified between clients, informing you of the change, and providing you copies of the modified packets. “The software uses a semi-P2P, server-and-many-clients architecture. Whenever the clients send packets to each other, the server will attempt to determine if any of them were dropped, forged, or modified,” says the Switzerland Web site.

As far as usage goes, the EFF says that Switzerland is compatible with NAT firewalls, although some NAT firewalls may have to be disabled to test the ISP in front of it, because of the modifications that some firewalls make to packets.

I do wonder at the logic of the name, though. Referencing the “neutral” country is cute, but what’s going to happen when somebody tries to find the program through a search engine? Googling “Switzerland” returns 234 million results, give or take.

Anyway, Switzerland is not the first packet-testing program around. What is special about it, though, is that unlike, for example, the plug-in for the Vuze/Azureus torrent client, Switzerland isn’t tied to any host program. The open-source license, combined with the backing of a visible group like the EFF and the building awareness in both politicians and the general public of what Net Neutrality is about, could have serious ramifications for combating false promises of Net Neutrality from ISPs like Comcast.

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EFF introduces Switzerland…the program

Personal organizer PageOnce has a great iPhone application that I think many will find to be incredibly useful. Like its desktop sibling, PageOnce for iPhone is a feed aggregator the likes of Netvibes or MyYahoo. The only difference is that you’re feeding it account information for utilities and services to get a quick overall view of your various balances and spending activity.

I’ve been using the application for the past few days, and have come to rely on it almost exclusively to keep track of bank accounts, mobile phone usage, and my Netflix queue. In fact, it’s currently the only way to track your Netflix account short of visiting Netflix.com or another Web-based queue manager in Safari (although this is coming soon), but will do far more if you’re willing to spend the time plugging in all your accounts.

PageOnce for the iPhone keeps each feed in its own container and opens it up like a nice large pop-up that can be scrolled through and dismissed with a quick touch on the screen. You can see all types of accounts that have been up through PageOnce on the Web. Missing, however, is a way to add new accounts from your phone. This will hopefully make it in later editions.

Privacy nuts should be a little wary of putting this much of their personal login information in the cloud, but the good news is the application can be set to forget your password every time you exit, keeping it safe if your phone is lost or stolen. Also, as mentioned in previous coverage, PageOnce uses bank-level security to keep accounts from being hacked.

Below is a demo of PageOnce for the iPhone and iPod Touch in action.

Read more:
PageOnce iPhone app organizes your bills, life

European telecom giant Vodafone announced Friday that its Vodafone Europe BV subsidiary has acquired ZYB, a Danish company that specializes in online contact and calendar management. The price, as stated by Vodafone, is 31.5 million euros, or $48.7 million.

“Using a Web portal as a link between the PC and the mobile device, ZYB provides an interactive way for people to nurture, contact, and develop their relationships with their most important friends and colleagues and builds links with those contacts’ wider networks,” Vodafone’s Internet Services Director, Pieter Knook, said in a statement. “This is Web 2.0 in action.”

ZYB is, in a broad sense, a lot like a more mobile-focused version of Plaxo, the contact management service that was acquired by cable giant Comcast earlier this week. It stores members’ address books and calendar data online and also connects them with friends who are also using the service.

Later this year, ZYB will be expanding its social-networking operations through a new project called Phonebook, which sounds a lot like Yahoo’s OneConnect. Members will be able to see their friends’ locations on a map, pull in feeds from external social services like Flickr and Facebook, and share calendars.

See more here:
Vodafone acquires contact management service ZYB

There is no business model behind it, but mesh WiFi company Meraki is offering free WiFi access to San Francisco, one neighborhood at a time, as I discovered when I passed by the company’s folksy demo table at my local farmers’ market last month (see report from local newspaper). But Meraki is not in the business of just blasting money out the door, which it appears to be doing in San Francisco, and there is a method to this program.

Meraki’s business is actually quite straightforward: It sells wide-area WiFi network hardware, and provides the management consoles to go with it. If you want to give a building, a street, a town, or a city access to WiFi, you buy some Meraki WiFi boxes, plug a few of them in to broadband connections, and they configure themselves to wirelessly share the connection among each other and among users.

Stick this free gizmo in your window in San Francisco to boost the Meraki signal, for yourself and others.

(Credit: Meraki)

Unlike other creative WiFi mesh companies Fon and Whisher, Meraki is not aiming to build a global free WiFi network. Rather, it’s simply a WiFi hardware company. If you run a mall and want to provide WiFi access to everyone in it, get Meraki equipment (or spend more for competing products from Cisco, Tropos, Skypilot, or Nortel). If you want to change the world by connecting existing broadband connections together into a giant mesh that anyone can use for free (and break ISP terms of service in the process), sign up for Fon.

That’s not to say that Meraki isn’t out to change the world. Its technology of relatively inexpensive WiFi access points coupled with its hosted management console can make it cost-effective for a community to light up wireless access for everyone. It’s like the OLPC of Wifi (and to be clear, OLPC devices have their own mesh WiFi routers built in).

User access to Meraki services can be free or paid. Meraki has the software for both, and doesn’t really care how its devices are configured, since it’s basically a hardware company. The hardware costs $150 for an indoor repeater and $250 for an outdoor-hardened router. You can also set up an ad-supported Meraki network, and get a discount on hardware.

Meraki co-founder Sanjit Biswas told me that one hardwire connection can be distributed to about 10 repeaters, and that each repeater can handle about 10 users at a time. And, of course, Meraki networks can multiplex multiple broadband connections together and share all their bandwidth with all their users. Most users will get about 2 megabytes a second of throughput.

Free Meraki nodes in San Francisco.

Which brings us back to San Francisco and the loss-leader network it’s building here. San Francisco is Meraki’s test kitchen. If you’re in one of the covered neighborhoods you can just hop on the network for free. If you can see the signal but want a stronger connection in your house, the company will send you a repeater you can set up in a window (thereby expanding the network’s footprint). If you’re in an expansion area for the San Francisco project but have no signal, you might be able to get Meraki to bolt an outdoor repeater on to your house; the company may connect it to a DSL connection that it installs and pays for (you’ll only have access to the Meraki signal, though, not the raw DSL link). Coming soon will be solar-powered repeaters, which will make Meraki’s build-out even easier.

Another thing Meraki is testing in San Francisco is how to work with municipalities. Meraki may just provide San Francisco the city-wide free WiFi access that the mayor, Google, and Earthlink together couldn’t maneuver into being. But this project is a one-off. Biswas says Meraki does not want to be the primary driver of a muni WiFi project. Rather, the company will sell its technology to whatever agency or company wants to sponsor the installation. Arguing the politics of public vs. private wide-area WiFi is not what a hardware provider needs to do. It wins no matter which way the wind blows.

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Meraki is offering free WiFi to San Francisco. Why?