Alex Reid

If you’ve been tracking Hurricane Sandy via social media or other sources, you might want to check out Instacane. It’s a mashup of photos from Instagram covering the hurricane, giving it a decidedly human touch.

The site is by Chris Ackermann and Peter Ng. It was originally developed last year for Hurricane Irene.

It’s been a busy season for Facebook.

They bought Instagram, they introduced their own app store (for both Android and iPhone), they went public, and last week, they introduced their own camera app. Now Facebook says they may be ready to take on Google and Apple in the mobile phone market.

For the past few months, they have been quietly preparing to enter the mobile phone market. Facebook has already hired former Apple software and hardware engineers, and one engineer who worked on the iPad, the New York Times reported yesterday. They have an open working alliance with HTC and it is expected the phone operating system will be a customized version of Android. The project name is Buffy, named after the vampire slayer TV series.

The rumour is that Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg believes that they need to enter the mobile phone market to ensure they aren’t left behind as just a web site that makes money from ad revenues. Owning the hardware to show the software is a key step to their survival.

Apple has never been welcoming to alliances, so they will be a natural competitor, while Google has been making their own moves to not only create their own phone set, but are pinning hopes on being an ISP operator in years ahead.

Meanwhile, Microsoft – which owns a tiny share of Facebook – has already integrated many features of Facebook. Motorola and HTC have already made phones with a Facebook button built in. There’s also a chance that Facebook could purchase struggling handset RIM down the road.

I believe photography sharing will be at the core of this media challenge.

Chinese telecommunications provider ZTE have announced today that they held a field demonstration of an optical network capable of transmitting 1.726 Tbps. They used Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) to separate data into different wavelengths (8 different channels, each transmitting 216.4Gbps) and transmitted those wavelengths over the same standard fiber-optic cable over 1750 KM in China.

While the company has no plans to provide a terabit-network, they say the purpose of their experiment was to prove that “a seamless upgrade from a 100G transmission system to a 200G system is possible.”

Pretty interesting stuff.

Rick Mercer says it true:

Stephen Wiltshire is a British architectural artist.

He draws detailed panoramas from memory.

In this short excerpt from the film Beautiful Minds: A Voyage into the Brain, Wiltshire takes a helicopter ride over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw.