spruiked: jakarta style

Anis is one of the many children who have received cranio-facial reconstruction surgery courtesy of the Australia New Zealand Association and the Priscilla Hall Memorial Foundation.

Check out the result! What a fantastic smile. Thank you to @leonniefm and the sponsors and everyone who made this possible. Please support our cause...

We are witnessing a profound change in the media... Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million to Bloomberg, Foursquare’s pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake.

These are the words of Seth Goldstein over at TechCrunch. His article is actually about the shift of media and what to expect in 2010. It's worth a read. I just liked the above bit.

There are still 20 days left to the year, but Wired has compiled a list of the best iPhone apps of 2009 -- according to Wired Readers. It's an interesting list of 5, not least of all because only one is NOT a game.

Wired has a fascinating article about the origins of our atmosphere that almost reads like a the script of a science fiction movie.

Scientists have been analysing the trace gases in Earth's atmosphere and have come to the conclusion that the thin protective layer that we are slowly destroying did not originate from the interior of the earth, but from space!

The researchers analyzed gases contained in a natural reservoir of carbon dioxide that lies several hundred metres below the surface of the crust. The gases that accumulated there when the Earth was cooling billions of years ago do not match the ratios seen in today’s atmosphere.

This means that it is unlikely that our atmosphere came from within the Earth. Instead, our atmosphere may have been delivered to Earth by comets.

Cool, eh?

Saturday morning Evan, Aulia and I trundled along to the first BarCamp Indonesia.

According to Wikipedia, Barcamp is "an international network of user generated conferences (or unconferences) - open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants."

According to Aulia, Barcamp is "basically a gathering of like minded people to share ideas and discuss about things that interest them."

It's a pretty cool concept. Attendees choose and present the topics they want to discuss. The whole thing is very fluid and relaxed. Evan said that in the US, these things are often held in bars -- hence the name. To make up for the lack of liquor, Ramya brought along a tent.

It was a good event -- I will definitely be attending future ones.

This is exciting! Google has made it official -- it will be launching the "Google Phone" in one month. It won’t be sold by a carrier like AT&T or TMobile, but will be unlocked -- this means we will probably get it here in Indonesia pretty soon. The details... 

• Android 2.1 
• Snapdragon chip 
• It has a high-resolution OLED touchscreen 
• thinner than the iPhone 
• a voice-to-text feature is supposed to let you dictate emails and notes by speaking directly into the phone