What’s the difference between RubberSquid and a blog?

No, it’s not a riddle, it’s a frequently asked question.

On the face of it, RubberSquid looks very similar to a blog because both are made up of sequential articles, but that’s really where the similarity ends.

Blogs are usually intended for public consumption and are the equivalent of publishing a newspaper column; one that may never get read by anybody, or one that may represent an authoritive and widely quoted expert opinion on a given topic. The key point here is that the author wants people to read his or her pearls of wisdom; and the more people that do, the better.

As a consequence of this, numerous peripheral technologies are emerging that help blogs reach more readers. including ”feeds” (or RSS) as well as various websites offering bookmarking and blog recommendation services.

So, blogs are all about global online publishing.

RubberSquid on the other hand is private and secure. RubberSquid allows you to record your private thoughts and ideas and to get access to them anywhere, anytime. RubberSquid also gives you the option to share your information securely and privately with a specified set of people – acquaintances, family, club members, fellow thinkers, intimate (and less intimate) friends, etc. It even lets you control whether people that are sharing your information can add to it or invite other people to share it.

Blogs don’t work like that.

Then there’s the intelligence, RubberSquid has it, blogs don’t – it’s as simple as that. Sure, you can do a word search on a blog, but only RubberSquid will answer your questions and give you back relevance ranked answers. This is of immense value on any system, but particularly on the small, difficult to navigate screens of mobile devices  - which brings me onto the next big difference: blogs work on computers, RubberSquid works on anything.

In the jargon of the Internet, RubberSquid is “cross-platform” or, in the language of earth, it works on almost any device that can connect to the Internet. Blogs can’t. True, you can read blog feeds on some mobile phones, but you don’t get much else in the way of interactivity, searching, data input capabilities, etc.

So, in summary, the differences between a blog and RubberSquid are:

• A blog is public, it involves opening the kimono. RubberSquid is intimate, secure and private
• RubberSquid has intelligence behind it that helps make it really powerful on any device, particularly mobile. Blogs aren’t smart.
• RubberSquid lets you get at your information (and other people’s stuff that you’re sharing) via any Internet connected device including mobile phones, PDAs, Internet TVs, etc. Blogs are for computers with a nice big screen, a mouse and a keyboard.

Blogs have their place, and RubberSquid has its place; they are different tools for different jobs. Vive la difference.

Getting RubberSquid on Your Mobile Phone

So just how do you get RubberSquid onto your mobile phone? It’s actually a lot easier than you might think because there are several ways, so here’s an easy to follow guide.

Method 1: Type the Address

This is exactly the same method that you probably use when you visit a website on your PC, i.e. simply type the website address (or URL) into your browser’s address bar and press [return].

Of course, the first challenge on your mobile phone is to find the browser. Each phone is different, even phones from the same manufacturer may have different approaches to accessing the browser. On all the phones we come across, the browser is a top level menu item with a title such as “web” or “Internet”. Increasingly, the mobile phone operators are trying to make mobile Internet services feel more friendly by giving them proprietary names such as “Vodafone Live!” or “O2 Active”, so you might find one of these in your phone’s menu instead.

Once you’ve found your browser, the next challenge is to locate the address bar. Although different on each phone, this is usually quite easy to find through the browser’s menu by selecting something like “Go To” or “Open Page”.

Now you’ve got this far, you can type in the RubberSquid website address which is http://www.rubbersquid.com and then select “Go”, or whatever option takes you to the page (that’s usually pretty self evident).

A bit messy isn’t it? That’s why we have a couple of much easier methods.

Method 2: Send Yourself a Link by Text Message

Sounds impossibly techie? Not at all. Here’s how:

1. Sign-in to your RubberSquid account on a PC and go to your home page.
2. At the top of your home page, you’ll see a link [Send sign-in link to mobile phone]. Click the link.
3. You’ll be taken to a page asking for a mobile phone number – this is the mobile number of the phone that will receive the link
4. Press [Send] and RubberSquid sends a text message to the mobile number (actually, it may send two text messages)
5. Wait for the message to arrive on your phone (it can take several minutes). When it does arrive, open it and follow the link (how you do this depends on your phone but is usually quite simple). If you find your phone won’t let you follow the link, then look for the second message, and try following the link in that one.
6. Once you’ve followed the link, you should be taken to the RubberSquid login page where you will be asked for your PIN.
7. The link that you just used tells RubberSquid your mobile phone number which makes signing-in on a mobile phone a bit quicker because you don’t need to type your mobile number each time, just your PIN. You can bookmark this initial page (the one you arrive at from the link) to make it easy to find in future.

Method 3: Invite a Friend

Like method 2, this involves sending a text message to a mobile phone with a link to RubberSquid. The Invite a Friend function is provided to allow users to securely share RubberSquid channels. It works like this:

1. Sign-in to RubberSquid and go to the channel that you want to share.
2. Look for the [Channel Link] menu on the left side of the screen (you might have to click the down arrow icon to open the menu) and select [Invite a Friend]
3. You’ll be taken to a page asking for the friend’s mobile phone number – this is the mobile number of the phone that will receive the link
4. Press [Send] and RubberSquid sends a text message to the mobile number (actually, it may send two text messages)
5. Wait for the message to arrive on the phone (it can take several minutes). When it does arrive, open it and follow the link (how you do this depends on your phone but is usually quite simple). If you find thephone won’t let you follow the link, then look for the second message, and try following the link in that one.
6. Once she’s followed the link, your friend should be taken to the RubberSquid login page where she’ll either be asked for her PIN (if her phone number is already registered on RubberSquid), or invited to register.
7. After signing in or registering, she’ll be taken to her RubberSquid home page where she can access your channel in the Channel Links list.

International Access to RubberSquid

RubberSquid is now fully enabled for international users. Anywhere RubberSquid needs a mobile phone number, such as signing in, sending an “invite a friend” message by SMS, etc., users are now asked for a country code too. Where possible, RubberSquid guesses the country code and pre-fills the appropriate field. In some cases, the user’s country code cannot be resolved from the IP address (some operator gateways use IP addresses in IANA reserved ranges), in which case the user is required to enter the code.

Standard country codes are given below:

Country	Code
Afghanistan	93
Albania	355
Algeria	213
American Samoa	1684
Andorra	376
Angola	244
Anguilla	1264
Antigua	1268
Argentina	54
Armenia	374
Aruba	297
Ascension	247
Australia	61
Australian External Territories	672
Austria	43
Azerbaijan	994
Bahamas	1242
Bahrain	973
Bangladesh	880
Barbados	1246
Barbuda	1268
Belarus	375
Belgium	32
Belize	501
Benin	229
Bermuda	1441
Bhutan	975
Bolivia	591
Bosnia & Herzegovina	387
Botswana	267
Brazil	55
British Virgin Islands	1284
Brunei Darussalam	673
Bulgaria	359
Burkina Faso	226
Burundi	257
Cambodia	855
Cameroon	237
Canada	1
Cape Verde Islands	238
Cayman Islands	1345
Central African Republic	236
Chad	235
Chatham Island (New Zealand)	64
Chile	56
China (PRC)	86
Christmas Island	61
Cocos-Keeling Islands	61
Colombia	57
Comoros	269
Congo	242
Congo, Dem. Rep. of (Zaire)	243
Cook Islands	682
Costa Rica	506
Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)	225
Croatia	385
Cuba	53
Cuba (Guantanamo Bay)	5399
Curaçao	599
Cyprus	357
Czech Republic	420
Denmark	45
Diego Garcia	246
Djibouti	253
Dominica	1767
Dominican Republic	1809 and 1829
East Timor	670
Easter Island	56
Ecuador	593
Egypt	20
El Salvador	503
Equatorial Guinea	240
Eritrea	291
Estonia	372
Ethiopia	251
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)	500
Faroe Islands	298
Fiji Islands	679
Finland	358
France	33
French Antilles	596
French Guiana	594
French Polynesia	689
Gabonese Republic	241
Gambia	220
Georgia	995
Germany	49
Ghana	233
Gibraltar	350
Greece	30
Greenland	299
Grenada	1473
Guadeloupe	590
Guam	1671
Guantanamo Bay	5399
Guatemala	502
Guinea-Bissau	245
Guinea	224
Guyana	592
Haiti	509
Honduras	504
Hong Kong	852
Hungary	36
Iceland	354
India	91
Indonesia	62
Inmarsat	870
Iran	98
Iraq	964
Ireland	353
Israel	972
Italy	39
Jamaica	1876
Japan	81
Jordan	962
Kazakhstan	7
Kenya	254
Kiribati	686
Korea (North)	850
Korea (South)	82
Kuwait	965
Kyrgyz Republic	996
Laos	856
Latvia	371
Lebanon	961
Lesotho	266
Liberia	231
Libya	218
Liechtenstein	423
Lithuania	370
Luxembourg	352
Macao	853
Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Rep of.)	389
Madagascar	261
Malawi	265
Malaysia	60
Maldives	960
Mali Republic	223
Malta	356
Marshall Islands	692
Martinique	596
Mauritania	222
Mauritius	230
Mayotte Island	262
Mexico	52
Micronesia, (Federal States of)	691
Midway Island	1808
Moldova	373
Monaco	377
Mongolia	976
Montenegro	382
Montserrat	1664
Morocco	212
Mozambique	258
Myanmar	95
Namibia	264
Nauru	674
Nepal	977
Netherlands	31
Netherlands Antilles	599
Nevis	1869
New Caledonia	687
New Zealand	64
Nicaragua	505
Niger	227
Nigeria	234
Niue	683
Norfolk Island	672
Northern Marianas Islands	1670
Norway	47
Oman	968
Pakistan	92
Palau	680
Palestinian Settlements	970
Panama	507
Papua New Guinea	675
Paraguay	595
Peru	51
Philippines	63
Poland	48
Portugal	351
Puerto Rico	1787 or 1939
Qatar	974
Réunion Island	262
Romania	40
Russia	7
Rwandese Republic	250
St. Helena	290
St. Kitts/Nevis	1869
St. Lucia	1758
St. Pierre & Miquelon	508
St. Vincent & Grenadines	1784
Samoa	685
San Marino	378
São Tomé and Principe	239
Saudi Arabia	966
Senegal	221
Serbia	381
Seychelles Republic	248
Sierra Leone	232
Singapore	65
Slovak Republic	421
Slovenia	386
Solomon Islands	677
Somali Democratic Republic	252
South Africa	27
Spain	34
Sri Lanka	94
Sudan	249
Suriname	597
Swaziland	268
Sweden	46
Switzerland	41
Syria	963
Taiwan	886
Tajikistan	992
Tanzania	255
Thailand	66
Timor Leste	670
Togolese Republic	228
Tokelau	690
Tonga Islands	676
Trinidad & Tobago	1868
Tunisia	216
Turkey	90
Turkmenistan	993
Turks and Caicos Islands	1649
Tuvalu	688
Uganda	256
Ukraine	380
United Arab Emirates	971
United Kingdom	44
United States of America	1
US Virgin Islands	1340
Uruguay	598
Uzbekistan	998
Vanuatu	678
Vatican City	418
Venezuela	58
Vietnam	84
Wake Island	808
Wallis and Futuna Islands	681
Yemen	967
Zambia	260
Zanzibar	255
Zimbabwe	263

RubberSquid Compared with Social Networking Sites (SNSs)

Recently, I was watching a video of the keynote speech given by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to 800 developers at the San Francisco Design Center about Facebook Platform (it’s here if you’re interested), and thought a few words might be in order about how RubberSquid fits with the whole social networking thing.

Zuckerberg’s F8 (that’s Facebook to you and I) keynote is quite a long session, so I’ll para-phrase. Facebook is an SNS that’s growing rapidly in terms of active users (i.e. ones that have logged into their accounts within the last month), and a key part of its strategy for attaining the status of most trafficked website, a position currently occupied by rival SNS MySpace, revolves around Facebook Platform. Facebook Platform, a mechanism by which developers create “applications”, or widgets, that plug into a Facebook profile, could be the first mainstream sign of a paradigm shift in the way software and users interact. On the other hand, it might just be a massive marketing ploy. Probably, it’s somewhere in between.

So just how does RubberSquid differ from SNSs?

The first difference is in orientation – SNSs are ego-centric whereas RubberSquid is information-centric. At their core, SNSs are about the account holder and connecting him or her with a network of friends, some of whom he or she may never actually meet physically. For most users, this involves exchanging messages in one form or another (email, chat, “walls”, etc.), something they could easily achieve outside the SNS; what the SNS gives them is a ready made network of people coupled with a centralized tool bag of communication and personalization capabilities.

RubberSquid, on the other hand is all about making information available anywhere, any time, and, optionally, sharing that information in a controlled way with a specific set of people. In RubberSquid, the person behind the information has full control over it, but does not feature as anything more than a just screen-name – the RubberSquid account holder can be as anonymous or as public with their personal information as they want. Controversially,  most SNSs track, or “stalk” as some would have it, their users - RubberSquid does not and is therefore considerably more private than a typical SNS.

This fundamental difference in orientation means that RubberSquid can be a natural extension to SNSs for users with information to share amongst a specific subset of their social network, and the need to deliver that information via devices other than PCs such as mobile phones, PDAs, etc. – real world examples include sports team coordinators, club organisers, collectors and hobbyists, holidaymakers, even groups of people organising a night out – basically, any individual or group doing activities involving shared information and that may be away from a PC.

This brings me onto the second major difference – ubiquity – or the ability to access information anywhere, any time. RubberSquid uses a series of techniques to determine how best to deliver information to the user’s browser – a more feature-rich page for a PC with its large screens, full keyboard and mouse; a compact, easily navigated page for a small screen device such as a mobile phone with its limited keypad and low precision joystick.

There are other technology differences as well, the vast majority of PCs support the use of one or more scripting language (such as Javascript) for example, whereas scripting support on mobile phones may be patchy at best – amongst other things, being able to leverage scripting gives the developer scope to present the user with a richer user interface such as the roll-down menus you’ll see when using RubberSquid on a PC. SNSs, on the other hand, tend to use rich, and to some eyes cluttered, user interfaces totally unsuited to a small screen with no mouse; MySpace for example allows users to unleash user interface anarchy onto their profile pages by enabling total customization. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a fun capability that clearly appeals to the MySpace demographic, but it would be very difficult to replicate on a mobile phone say, as would the user experience of the Facebook Platform applications that we started out with. That’s why SNSs will need to come up with new ways of delivering their services in a compelling way if they are to migrate successfully to mobile.

One way for a service to remain as compelling on mobile as it is on the desktop is to use of intelligence to deliver information selectively – and that’s my third difference; RubberSquid uses a barrage of sophisticated natural language processing techniques (which may also be tagged “Artificial Intelligence”) to help users find and read information. It is RubberSquid’s intelligence that allows it to generate indicative summaries of information that give users the opportunity to decide whether they want to download the full version of a document, as well as the ability to deliver focused summaries in response to user queries. And we’re not talking about simple keyword searches – RubberSquid’s intelligence allows it to infer relationships between the terms being used in user information and queries.

So, in conclusion, RubberSquid has three key features when compared with SNSs: it is information-centric instead of user-centric; it is fully adapted to working on any class of device; and it has intelligence. These features equip RubberSquid for its primary role of information management and sharing, and make it the ideal information delivery extension to any SNS account - RubberSquid doesn’t compete with SNS, it compliments it.

Conversations about RubberSquid with a Geek

RubberSquid is a personal Wiki that works on your mobile phone, PC, PDA – anything. Use it for work stuff, play stuff, naughty stuff. Share stuff with mates. It’s the only way to be cool and a geek – register for RubberSquid here – it’s FREE

I talk to a lot of people and almost all of them turn out to have at least one application for RubberSquid; many of them have lots and go on to use it voraciously.

But there is one type that just refuses to get it – the geek – the hardcore, die-hard techie that thinks it knows absolutely everything about everything. You know: vintage T-Shirts; issues with personal hygiene; incapable of understanding how all the other fools in the world could possibly be so stupid as to not agree with their point of view. It is, thankfully, a rare breed - and indeed, unlikely to breed owing to its substantial defficiency in social skills.

Nevertheless, it is with the geek that I most enjoy talking about RubberSquid. It challenges; it sneers; it scorns - it wants me to know that it knows all about machine intelligence – it is, after all, a geek!

So, I thought I’d take the opportunity to explore some of the questions I get asked by the geek as a way of expanding on RubberSquid’s artificial intelligence without trying to wrap it all up in fluffy marketing and sales speak. Here goes.

What do you mean by intelligence?

Intelligence is simply the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of logical activity; it is an aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 

What do you mean by Artificial Intelligence?

The term AI In the context of RubberSquid refers to the system’s ability to process unstructured natural language text without the need for human intervention. The key here is the fact that the text is unstructured – no need for anybody to pre-process it with tags, or to create a domain specific dictionary and no need for the author to write the text to any particular semantic or structural rules – RubberSquid AI can extract meaning from unstructured text. Period.

But, there are plenty of more advanced AI based systems out there…

True. There are some highly sophisticated systems out there such as that delivered by Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) to name but one. 

These high-end systems often have the capability to analyse the semantics of the type of complex sentences found in legal, scientific and medical texts; information domains that require very high levels of accuracy. As a consequence, these systems are very expensive to purchase and to own. They need a team of knowledge engineers to bring them online and configure them to understand the application’s particular information domain, and they need powerful and expensive computing resources to run them.

They are, in short, not for us mere mortals. RubberSquid on the other hand is, and makes simple, pragmatic, meaning-based computing available to everybody

So you’re saying that RubberSquid’s AI is  primitive?

If you mean that it’s simplified in order to make it FAST, EASY to use and AFFORDABLE, then I suppose the answer is yes.

But think on this: is it better to have primitive intelligence that boosts your productivity by say one-third than no intelligence at all? And actually, what percentage boost do you need to make an intelligent system useful? 50%? 75%? It could be argued that a low-cost system capable of boosting information management performance by as little as 10% is useful and earning its keep.

Prove that RubberSquid is “Intelligent”

No. You prove that it isn’t.

The more information you load into a RubberSquid channel, the more intelligently it behaves. Users find that their queries are answered fast and efficiently, and that they can more easily find and extract the information they need. It’s impossible to quantify the value of this performance boost to a user, but it certainly represents a substantial qualitive improvement in their ability to access information.

Ok then, what type of AI does RubberSquid use?

Well, that’s our secret sauce.

All we can say is that by combining a set of relatively simple concepts in a very particular order, we are able to demonstrate a type of emergent intelligence that delivers tangible results.

***

So, geeks back-off! We created RubberSquid for people with things going on in their lives, people who don’t think it’s cool spending night and day in front of a screen. People that don’t get turned on by a water-cooled Cray-wanabe built out of old slot machine parts, and with real friends in the real world.

Be the coolest geek on the block – register for RubberSquid here – it’s FREE