May 12, 2006
Alternative mice
The Combimouse. "Their concept is quite simple: reduce the repetitive and arduous task of moving your hand from keyboard to mouse and back again a few thousand times a day. They accomplish that by splitting the keyboard and making the right half into a full fledged mouse."
Engadget
Online image editing with others
kollabor8. "An online environment that allows artists, designers, photoshop junkies, pixel pushers, collage artists & photographers to collaboratively design & edit a single image."
networked_performance
Flying billboards
The Interactive Lightsign. "The A-170 Video Lightsign airship marks a new era of outdoor advertising, one that has been long heralded by scifi writers – flying electronic billboards. It has a high quality colour LED screen measuring 30' X 70' that can be used to broadcast live TV, Internet sites, stock tickers, slide shows or any other media. "
gizmag
Feeling your surroundings
Wearing Tactile Space. "Palpable City is a location aware garment that allows walkers to feel the spatial form of the urban grid as vibro-tactile rhythms on their body. The rhythms of the city space are parameterized by local conditions as the walker encounters them, reflecting the influence of time, light, temperature and humidity on the experience of space."
we make money not art
Virtual to real ATMs
Entropia Universe Players Can Cash Their Online Earnings at the A.T.M.. "today the makers of Entropia Universe, a popular online science-fiction game, plan to introduce a real-world A.T.M. card that will allow players instantly to withdraw hard cash automatically converted from their virtual game treasury. So a player with, say, 2,000 spare P.E.D.'s (Project Entropia Dollars) left over after purchasing a new laser rifle in the game could withdraw $200 and take a date to a real-life ballgame."
New York Times
Online exams
Pupils to sit first online exams. "The first exams to be sat this year will be Standard Grades in administration and Italian. A total of 575 different exams will be taken at Standard Grade, Intermediate 1 and Intermediate 2, Higher and Advanced Higher levels between now and 9 June. SQA national qualification exams will also be sat in 11 other countries, stretching from Argentina to Hong Kong. "
BBC NEWS
May 09, 2006
Instant music showcase
YouTube Idol. "YouTube is creating an instant medium for aspiring singers and musicians to showcase their work. With a webcam aimed at them, they can instantly broadcast their latest tune to hundreds of thousands of YouTube users. And those users can vote for you. Where are the Judges, you say? Oh - the comments section gives enough drama in the 'praise and criticism' section to compete with Paula and Simon."
PSFK
The language of blogs
State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 2: On Language and Tagging. "Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year."
Sifry's Alerts
Helping clothes fit
Online Store Trying On New Model to Fit Women. "MyShape gathers information from participating brands and designers regarding the measurements and design of their clothes, including factors such as cut, fabric and patterns. The information is plugged into a computer, creating a database of prospective styles for a wide range of women. Online shoppers are queried about their body measurements and how they like their clothes to fit, as well as their preferences in style, brands, fabrics and colors. These results also are plugged into the computer, allowing the company to play matchmaker."
Los Angeles Times
Wi-Fi in any camera
Eye-Fi to Combine Wifi, Flash Memory. "Their first product will be a 1GB SD card with built in Wifi. For about the same price as a 1 GB flash card sells for today - $100. You’ll be able to upload photos, or whatever, directly from your device to a computer using the built in storage wifi capabilities."
TechCrunch
Predicting browsing
WebIC --- Complete Web Recommender System. "Our goal, WebIC, is a client-side Web recommender system that predicts the user's information need based on his browsing patterns, then points him to webpages, from essentially anywhere on the Web, that contain information useful to that user."
WebIC
Movies made with games
What is BloodSpell?. "BloodSpell is Strange Company`s first feature-length Machinima animated film. It is a story of a world where men and women carry magic in their blood, and spilling it can unleash terrible power. [...] It is made using the game Neverwinter Nights, and is written and directed by Machinima pioneer Hugh Hancock."
Strange Company
Webcam games
Flight over the Sahara. "This is my first webcam game. To control the plane, you must move in front of your web cam. Make noise to fire the rocket. Fly over petrol station to refill fuel. The further from your web camera you will be, the more accurate movements you'll get."
Motion games
Importing events
Add common events to your calendar with Mark This Date. "You can search for a specific calendar or browse by category or country. There are a lot of sports calendars, like important Major League Baseball dates, and an official US holiday calendar looks pretty useful."
Lifehacker
May 08, 2006
Backchannel chat through drawing
Using Pictochat as a Backchannel in conference. "Yesterday at the student presentation (Interactive Media Program at the Annenberg), there was a guy who briefly talked about the use of Nintendo DS’ pictochat as a backchannel device during conferences."
pasta and vinegar
L.E.D. environments
LED Wallpaper. "Ingo Maurer presented two very large lighting objects at Spazio Krizia 2006 in Milan earlier this month: LED wallpaper (above with a luminous table in the foreground) and a magic carpet of green circuit boards and LEDs suspended from the ceiling, both with adjustable colored LEDs."
MoCo Loco
Memorial spaces
Rituals of Grief Go Online. "Like many other 23-year-olds, Deborah Lee Walker loved the beach, discovering bands, making new friends and keeping up with old ones, often through the social networking site MySpace.com, where she listed her heroes as "my family, and anyone serving in the military — thank you!" So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming."
New York Times
Teaching languages with RFID
RFID tags used to teach English. "Their Merlin's Magic Castle (MMC) software uses RFID tags technology that the students embedded in toys. For example, when a child holds a toy firetruck with an embedded tag, MMC computer screen displays "fire*ruck" and asks the child to supply the missing letter. The MMC software is currently compatible with several games including Trivia Game or Scavenger Hunt. And now the two students plan to sell licenses to big game companies."
Primidi
Reminders by RSS
Beeplet RSS reminders. "Enter a reminder - like “Mom’s birthday” - and tag it how you like (say “birthday,” “buygift,” “tocall”). Beeplet creates a feed you can subscribe to in your newsreader or publish to your Web site."
Lifehacker
Scanning and tagging old photos automatically
Commercial Kodak scanner digitizes, tags old photos. "According to Kodak, the scanners use software which is able to identify different photographic paper for estimating the decade in which the picture was shot, and can even group pictures featuring like individuals through facial recognition. Future versions of the application will also incorporate OCR capabilities for reading watermarks or handwritten notes on the back of photos, further improving the accuracy of the tagging engine."
Engadget
May 05, 2006
Street communication
Park and write. "homeless woman in London has been living in a car since last summer. But by writing a blog she has put herself in touch with an international audience. It's a tale of our time - about being cut off from everything around you but still connected to people thousands of miles away."
BBC NEWS
Digital newspapers
One Day Soon, Straphangers May Turn Pages With a Button. "This month, De Tijd, a Belgian financial newspaper, started testing versions of electronic paper, a device with low-power digital screens embedded with digital ink — millions of microscopic capsules the width of a human hair made with organic material that display light or dark images in response to electrical charges. This is only one test of new e-paper devices competing to become the iPod of the newspaper business. Other e-paper trials are being undertaken by the paper Les Echos, which is based here, by the newspaper trade group IFRA in Germany and, in the United States, by The New York Times."
New York Times
May 03, 2006
Local bookmarks
A Look at Plum. "One key way that Plum is different than other bookmarking site is that it allows users to bookmark items on their computer, not just on the web. A file that is open in certain desktop applications (things like photos, power point presentations, iTunes playlists, address book entries, email, etc) can be added to Plum by clicking a button on the Plummer, a small downloadable application for Windows or Mac"
TechCrunch
Online scrapbooks
Scrapbooking meets blogging. "The only site that merges the creativity and storytelling capabilities of scrapbooking with the publishing and sharing functionality of blogs."
Lifehacker
Online games for kids
Mom, can you power-level my avatar for me?. "In Korea, the latest fad is Maple Story, an MMO played predominantly by children ages 6 to 13. If you do not play Maple Story, you may be considered uncool (sounds familiar). Of course, school children have hours and hours upon homework (I never did, but of course I went to public school), so how can one keep their online avatars in top condition? Simple, they get their parents to power-level! According to an article translated by GameStudy.org, some parents are spending upwards of 3 or 4 hours each day building their son or daughter's character up."
Joystiq
April 28, 2006
Offline bookmarks
Geek to Live: Save and annotate the Web with Scrapbook. "It’s no wonder why the Scrapbook Firefox extension was a winner in the recent Extend Firefox contest. Scrapbook saves bits and pieces of the Web to your local disk, lets you add comments and annotations, arrange the content in folders, and makes it all fully searchable without ever leaving your browser. A must-have tool for Internet researchers, students, writers and voracious bookmarkers, Scrapbook could change how you save and search bookmarks and Web content forever."
Lifehacker
Hidden displays
Stealth Tabletop from Design Concepts. "This design concept of a Stealth Tabletop looks like a designer coffee table, but boot up the multimedia PC hiding underneath, and there’s a screen that magically appears."
Gizmodo
Personal text services
Mozes: Secure Your Keyword. "Hear a song on the radio that you like and want to bookmark? Text the radio station (ie, KROQ) to 66937 (which translates to “Mozes”). Mozes will note the time and station name and bookmark the song title in your Mozes page (and sms you the song information). Meet someone who has a Mozes keyword? SMS their Mozes keyword to 66937 and store whatever personal information they’ve elected to share. And online advertisers can use a Mozes keyword to give you more information on the product."
TechCrunch
Music through motion
Skateboard music interface. "The project, Skatesonic, uses the motions and sounds of skateboards and explores their inherent ambient rhythm to create music. In a way, each move translates to musical parameters and the rider ends up skating through a landscape of music (which s/he influences over time)."
we make money not art
Mood tagging
Software tracks mood swings of blogosphere. "About 250,000 new LiveJournal posts are created every day and roughly 150,000 of these include a label for one of hundreds of different moods. Moodviews keeps track of these labels and generates a graph, revealing emotions shifts across all LiveJournal blogs over time."
New Scientist
Color e-ink
Fujitsu demos color e-ink LCD. "it's going to be a little while before anyone tops Fujitsu's bezel-tastic QVGA color LCD e-ink display, which holds color images steady in perpetuity without power."
Engadget
Tamagotchi V2
Tamagotchis seek second wave of virtual pet owners. "The pets can grow into adults that hold down jobs and even get married to someone else's tamagotchi. Once the couple has babies -- always twins so each owner gets a baby -- the parents disappear to Planet Tamagotchi, which the children can visit via a personal computer."
Reuters
April 27, 2006
Projectors for phones
Phone to Carry Video Projector. "A South Korean company developed a coin-size laser video projector module that can fit into portable gadgets such as mobile phones and digital cameras. [...] ``We expect about five percent of all mobile phones to have the video projector function by 2010. That is more than 60 million units. And we aim to grab about 30 percent of the market at least, or 530 billion won a year."
The Korea Times
Broadband adoption
Global broadband population to double by 2010. "Boffins have totted up the numbers and reckon there are now some 200 million broadband lines around the world. And according to researchers at In-Stat this number is expected to top 400m by the end of 2010."| The Register
Challenging headsets
Multimedia headset with attitude. "The Synapse has twin earpieces with individual touch-sensitive controls, is mutable with a single tap and volume adjusts with the swipe of a finger. It has twin throat microphones to enable discrete conversations via your mobile phone and it isn’t going to come loose because the pretensioned arms provide a secure fit that moves with you"
gizmag
Internet by phone
Mobile browsing becoming mainstream. "In 2005, 28 percent of those mobile phone owners used their phone to browse the Internet, up from 25 percent the year before. More significantly, the increase is driven by adults aged 35 and older joining younger users in this habit."CNET News.com
Concept convergence device
C'ALL Future Phone: Phantasy for All, Technology for None. "The C’ALL future phone is a series of drawings and fanciful artwork by designer Dima Komissarov that envisions the all-in-one device that we’re craving, with a cellphone, MP3 player, GPS, hand-held Mac and PC, and everything else all crammed into a credit card-sized device. One of its most intriguing ideas is its chameleon-like credit card mag strip “player,” where you dial up your chosen credit card and it virtually turns into that card."
Gizmodo
Bogging power
Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers. "Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends."MediaGuardian.co.uk
RFID in the home
Read Without Flipping. "If you have a book, desk, and a display equipped with RFID chips, now you can read the whole contents through a large display just by putting the book on the desk ; antenna reads the chip information and delivers them to the display. Of course, you can actually use your hands - if you want - for a touch screen or a remote control."
RFID in Japan
Scanning with your phone
ScanR: Turn your camera phone into a scanner. "If you have a camera phone with at least one megapixel of resolution, ScanR is great for turning things like whiteboard images and paper drawings into something more usable. This is particularly interesting for heavy travellers who do not have a scanner handy. To use it, you simply take a picture and email it to scanr. They supply you with an enhanced pdf version by email."
TechCrunch
April 25, 2006
Playing games with your pet
VR Games Pit Pets Against Owners. "As in a traditional video game, players navigate a virtual world in a bid to stay alive. The twist? Computerized movements in Mice Arena are mapped to and from the real world, where an actual predator (your hamster) gives chase to a digital avatar (you) by pursuing a real piece of bait. The avatar's movements in the virtual environment direct the bait around a small tank fitted with actuators that mold and twist an elastic latex floor into the changing terrain of the game map. The hamster's pursuit in the tank is monitored by infra-red sensors that relay its position to the computer screen."
Wired News
Tracking popular downloads
Most Popular P2P Files: PeerMind. "t’s a regularly updated list of the most popular music, movies, games, software and ringtones being downloaded on theEDonkey 2000 and Gnutella networks. Once this includes BitTorent, which is apparently coming soon, PeerMind’s lists will be a much more interesting indicator of consumer demand for media than other top lists determined by more indirect methods."
TechCrunch
Brands moving into virtual worlds
Marvin from HHGTTG moves to Second Life. "A resident of the Second Life virtual world who owns a UK branding company has started to move the characters he represents into the game, starting with those managed by Disney, one of his clients. The first into the virtual world is Marvin, the Paranoid Android, from the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy movie."
Boing Boing
Mimicking through video
The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz. "I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds. It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him."
Wired News
Annotating video
A "photoshop" for dance. "Rotosketch is an intuitive tool for sketching, doodling and notating on top of video, such that the marks that are made are linked in time with the video. This allows the user to draw strokes along the the axis of time, as well as the normal x and y axes, and for those strokes to augment, analyze, interpret, or even obliterate a video sequence."
we make money not art
April 24, 2006
Neutral interfaces
Music Thing: Monome Controller. ""The wonderful thing about this device is that is doesn't do anything really," say the developers of the Monome, a minimalist-but-clever button-covered box. "It wasn't intended for any specific application. We'll make several applications, and others will make more. We hope to share as many of these as possible. Drum machines, loopers, 1-bit video transformers, physics models, virtual sliders, math games, etc.""
Engadget
Data embedded in music
Sound QR Code. "NTT DoCoMo has developed the acoustic OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) technology, which can embed URLs and text data in broadcast music/audio. Consumers' mobile phones "listen" to the music/audio and extract the embedded URLs/data. About 100 characters can be transmitted in a second."we make money not art
Digital artifacts for kids
Tangible Flags: collaborative field trip for kids. "Our goal was to see the impact of the Tangible Flags concept on children’s collaborative effort and ability to re-locate or elaborate on their findings. These initial flags were not computationally enhanced, so adult researchers helped the children correlate Tangible Flags with various media, such as notes taken or pictures drawn by the children, or audio and video recordings created by the children."
pasta and vinegar
to read webpage by e-mail
E-mail based bookmarking. "As you receive your “toread” websites by email, you can save them in your local disk and browse them at any time, with no online connection required."
Lifehacker
Coupons by RSS
Local Coupons via RSS from Zixxo. "Silicon Valley based Zixxo has launched a great service that I asked for last year (#4 on this list) - local coupons via RSS. This is a very big market. Last year, 323 billion coupons were distributed in the U.S., and of those 4.5 billion were actually used (Zixxo has more coupon stats here)."
TechCrunch
April 23, 2006
Displays in furniture
PixelShade. "Details are sketchy at this point, but this PixelShade lets you create digital patterns and then it projects them on the inside of its cylindrical shape. The phosphorescent lamp shade can display images, text, or anything else on its surface, and it’s easily modified, too."
Gizmodo
Disposable MP3 players
The 'Disposable' Media Player. "It's as if the device from Evergreen is a key fob with simple buttons - all you have to do is slip in your SD drive full of your favorite songs and away you go. Oh - and all for $9! Cheaper than a disposable camera - and more fun!!"
PSFK
Subtle switches
Intelligent Tiles. "Apparently these tiles act as switches and can be embedded in walls and floors (??)."
Gizmodo
Wall messages
"Electronic Board" displays messages on walls. "It apparently displays text, voice and video messages on a wall, and includes smart cards that can be used to send canned responses. Of course, it's probably part of some "smart home of the future" demo, which means it'll never be produced in Korea or anywhere else"
Engadget
April 22, 2006
Digital music stand
The paperless environment for musicians. "The MusicPad Pro Linux-based tablet PC weighs a tad under five pounds and displays music notation on a low-glare LCD screen, overcoming the distractive and disruptive task of page turning. Musicians "turn" the on-screen pages using a foot pedal, leaving both hands free to perform while a "look ahead" feature a half-page preview of upcoming music."
gizmag
Cellphone bullying
Pupils use mobiles to 'bully' teachers. "TEACHERS have complained of “bullying” by pupils who use mobile phones to film them losing their temper and then send the videos to their friends for amusement. Often, the pupils goad staff into “ranting for the camera” to make the video as entertaining as possible."Times Online
MySpace replacements
Just face it, girls: MySpace is like so totally over. "The technology magazine .net recently proclaimed Faceparty to be 'best community site'. Its editor, Lisa Jones, explains: 'It's really grown under the radar. Since Murdoch bought MySpace, everyone's heard of it. But Faceparty has got this underground appeal.' Gemma, 17, joined after a friend's recommendation. 'I only checked it out because one of my friends made me and now I'm hooked. It's the best way to kill time at college.' The director of Faceparty, David Bamforth, says: 'The grown-ups know all about MySpace, but very little about us. Their kids get home from school and spend hours on it. We try really hard to keep out of the press.'"Guardian Unlimited
Free online TV shows (with ads)
Disney to make TV shows available free on Web. "Top ABC shows such as "Commander in Chief" and "Alias," along with "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," will be available on the Web at ABC.com in May and June, starting the day after they are first broadcast, the network said. They will only be available to users with a U.S. Internet address to protect foreign broadcasting rights. Viewers will be able to pause and move between "chapters" in an episode, but not skip ads that are technically embedded."Reuters.com
April 21, 2006
sharing your virtual life
Sharing in-game screenshots. "Multitap.net is a service that allows you to share your in-game screenshots with your friends. You can rate, discuss and categorise your screenshots as you see fit. Do something funny, interesting, bizarre or impressive in a game, and share a screenshot!"
pasta and vinegar
Hidden displays
Seura Television Mirror. "If you can’t be without your TV for even a few minutes, the Seura Television Mirror gives you an LCD HDTV display magically hiding behind a bathroom mirror. Available in a variety of screen sizes from 26 to 45 inches, it’s an easy retrofit with a surface mount unit, or it can be recessed. It uses a 1920x1080 Sharp flat panel, equipped with an CableCARD-enabled HDTV tuner."
Gizmodo
April 20, 2006
MP3 player for babies
iTod MP3 Player for Infants. "Things must be pretty good if companies can devote time and resources to developing items such as the iTod, an MP3 player from Fisher-Price designed exclusively for tiny babies—infants, if you will. The iTod includes a pair of volume-restricted headphones so as not to harm your pride and joy’s hearing."
Gizmodo
Spotting songs
Music fingerprinting system is fastest yet. "To make a fingerprint, MusicIP quickly scans the first 2 minutes of a track and records frequency data every 185 milliseconds, before compressing the results into a 512 byte file. It also measures records the four most dominant tones in the first 30 seconds of the music. The program uses information about these dominant tones to narrow the search before searching the song database using the frequency information. Dunn says this allows the company to perform hundreds of searches each second and that the service is sensitive enough to distinguish between different versions of the same tune, such as live and studio recordings."
New Scientist Tech
Wireless speakers
Bluetooth Wireless speakers can redefine the living space. "The Parrot system is very clever in its design. Each speaker is independent with its own built-in amplifier. The first speaker to detect a Bluetooth source becomes the master speaker and reproduces stereo channel 1. The second speaker pairs up with the master speaker and reproduces stereo channel 2."
gizmag
Street games
Street Sudoku. "Two days ago, I spotted a girl in Lausanne, Switzerland, solving a Sudoku on a street poster; It’s actually an advertisement for a swiss game but some folks seem to like doing the Sudoku on much bigger dimensions than a newspaper format. I spotted this picture in Geneva, it’s the second street-sudoku that I saw solved"
pasta and vinegar
Scanning pen
When You Can't Take It With You, a Scan Saves the Pages for a Later Look. "This $300 pen-shaped device can be dragged down the length of a page to create a file that can be transferred to a Mac or PC through a U.S.B. connection. The text can also be edited using character recognition software that comes with the $350 "professional" package. Unlike previous models of the pen, the RC800 can scan in color, useful for photos and brochures."
New York Times
Podcasts on the phone
Podcasts Calling. "a shift is afoot in the usage of podcasts, which are home-brewed audio or video broadcasts of everything from rap to religious services. Long tied to PCs or iPods (hence the name), podcasting fans are moving on to mobile phones, which increasingly boast more computer-like features. Plus, new software recently available from outfits such as Pod2Mobile and UpSnap allows users of basic phone models to download and listen to podcasts wirelessly, cutting the PC and portable music player out of the equation."Business Week
April 19, 2006
flattering pictures
HP R927 Camera Adds Slimming Effect, Makes Girlfriend Happy. "It’s a pretty subtle change we’ve built into the camera,” Karl Wardrop, HP’s digital imaging product manager told the New York Post. “It’s not dramatic. It slims the center of photos and slightly widens the outside to maintain perspective. It’s like the (fun-house) mirror from the fair, but not as exaggerated."
Gizmodo
Furniture PCs
Lamp, Computer Merge, Transformers Style. "This is a computer that can double as a basic table lamp. Don’t expect this computer to be able run F.E.A.R. at a full resolution—it seems more like a functional art piece. But the ultimate question still remains: Is it a lamp inside a computer or a computer inside a lamp?"
Gizmodo
Webserver on a cellphone
Mobile Web Server. "As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the "administrator" to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites."NRC
April 18, 2006
Face tracking on cellphones
FACE TRACKER locks into faces in camera phones for optimal focus, exposure, and white balance. "Face Tracker for camera phones uses a radically new approach to identify and lock onto human faces in a camera phone’s preview image, tracking them as they move around within the frame and automatically adjusting focus, exposure, and white balance before the image is captured, ensuring that faces are optimally taken and that skin tones are reproduced with exceptional accuracy."
gizmag
Shorter shows, published online
TV enters a new universe. "Mike Stickle has been in love with TV ever since Edith Bunker asked Archie to tell her she was "somethin'." These days, the former magazine executive is trying to break into the business, creating a show of his own, tentatively dubbed "Floaters," a comedy about three young women in New York. It launches in May. But don't look for it on any network. Rather, it will appear on the website phoebeworks.com. And don't expect a "Friends"-style half hour. His will be broken up into eight-minute daily blocks for Internet streaming and smaller two- to three-minute chunks for cellphones or iPods, because, says the neophyte producer, the new generation wants "portable, quick entertainment.""
csmonitor.com
Flat mounted projectors
LG's Concept Wall Mounted Projector. "This device won the 2006 iF Design Gold Award, it is a flat-designed projector for wall-mounting purposes. There is a remote-controlled lens door, auto focus, zoom and ventilation is not a problem in the thin-metal housing."
Gizmodo
Virtual member of a real community
Tribewanted - Another Unique Million Dollar Idea - It Will Work. "This is not just an online community. You actually become part of a Tribe on a real Fiji Island. Basically you buy yourself a 2nd life. During vacation you actually can visit the Island for real. The other time of the year you live in the Tribe online and share decisions and so on. "
I4U News
Podcasts yet to hit mainstream
Podcast study shows current and future trends. "That's not to suggest that there is little value in producing original content. Forrester is projecting that the number of households using podcasts will grow from 700,000 to 12.3 million over the next four years in the US alone. Even if time-shifted content retains the greatest percentage of use, the massive growth rate alone should account for a huge increase in users seeking stuff they haven't yet heard of, meaning that podcast you were planning to celebrate the musical contributions of Wayne Newton may yet find an audience."Ars Technica
Objects that blog
Blogject front-end using the Xbox360 XML data feeds.. "While at eTech I had an idea to build a Blogject front-end using the Xbox360 XML data feeds. Steve and I have been working on it a few weeks on and off and here is what we have so far. The next step is putting it into a linear blog format so that you can have an RSS feed for your Xbox and it will tell you each day what happened to it."
pasta and vinegar
Digital scrapbooking
Scrapbooking With Video and Sound, Minus the Paper and Glue. "For many scrapbookers, all that messy glue and paper is part of the fun. For others, it's just a mess. MemoryMixer, digital scrapbooking software from Lasting Impressions for Paper Inc., not only helps keep things neat and tidy, but also lets scrapbookers add video and sound to their collections of memorabilia."
New York Times
Web better then print
I'm canceling my Times subscription. You should, too.. "I'm canceling because the redesign of your Web site, which you unveiled yesterday, bests the print edition by such a margin I've decided to pocket the annual $621.40 I currently spend on home delivery."
Slate
Mapping your life
Geek to Live: Map yourself. "Map your first kiss, your elementary school or the best place to buy local fresh mangos. Use your personalized map as a travelogue, restaurant recommender or simply as a reference for all those great yarn stores you - or your knitting group - don’t want to forget to visit next time you happen to pass through Marietta, Ohio."
Lifehacker
Bookmaking content within a web page
Pixrat Bookmarks Photos. "Functionality is straightforward: add their bookmarklet to your browser, and when you are on a page with photos and you’d like to bookmark one of them, click the bookmarklet and follow the steps to choose the photo and tag it. Photos can be sorted by recency or popular, or searched by tag. If you see a picture bookmarked on Pixrat that you like, you can click to bookmark it in your account and add your own tags."
TechCrunch
Making connections between songs
New Features at MusicStrands. "The service watches what you listen to, and starts to draw associations based on those behaviors. If you have a number of songs included in a playlist, they become associated. If you listen to a group of songs, they become associated, etc. “We are building a huge matrix of correlations between songs and artists” Gabriel said in explaining it to me. And users can use that matrix to discover new music and build playlists."
TechCrunch
April 17, 2006
Online video editing
Eyespot: A Web-Based Video Editor. "Like most of the other services, Eyespot lets you upload your clips and share them with friends, but Eyespot also lets you edit your video clips: trim them, mix them, and add soundtrack. You can then post your video to your blog and even send them to your cell phone, if supported."
Lifehacker
Gadgets in the home
Study Shows Average House has 26 Consumer Electronics Products. "This study was conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association. It showed that the average household has 26 “non-discreet” CE products and upwards of $1,200 was spent on said CE products. The top five growing products are MP3 players, digital cameras, car video systems, in-dash CD players and laptop computer. The study also showed that the five most owned products are televisions, VCRs, cordless phones, DVD players and cell phones."
Gizmodo
pockets for teaching
Education Podcast Network. "The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century."
The Landmark Project
Sharing random video
Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone. "It's not semi-nudes or celebrity satire or kittens' antics that dominate the most-viewed list at YouTube.com, the popular clearinghouse for international homemade video. So exactly what videos are drawing viewers to this ascendant site, which, less than a year after its launch, averages around 25 million hits each day? YouTube makes this question easy to answer by giving users several ways to sort the videos, including by "most discussed," "most recent" and, handily, "most viewed." It turns out that most of the videos that get millions of looks are humorous posturings by kids who in other places and at other times might be collecting near-mint X-Men comics, or practicing Metallica licks."
New York Times
April 16, 2006
Laser TV
Mitsubishi Harnesses Colored Lasers to Produce New-Generation Lightweight HDTV. "At the heart of the first generation of this new television is an existing rear-projection technology called digital light processing. In the past, this technology, developed by Texas Instruments, used white-light mercury lamps as the television's light source. With laser television, separate red, green and blue lasers are used in conjunction with an HDTV chip, said Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi. He and Mitsubishi engineers said this provided a new look in large-screen units, signaling a move to lighter, slimmer profiles for rear-projection television. In terms of performance, Mr. DeMartin said, laser television promises a greater range and intensity of colors."
New York Times
April 15, 2006
Download music charts
Crazy song makes musical history. "Crazy by Gnarls Barkley has made pop history as the UK's first number one song based on download sales alone. Until this month, download sales could only count towards a chart position if the song could also be bought in shops. But under new rules, downloads can be counted as long as physical copies go on sale the following week."
BBC NEWS
April 14, 2006
Emergence of robotics
In a Wired South Korea, Robots Will Feel Right at Home. "South Korea, the world's most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life. The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society. By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers."
New York Times
April 12, 2006
Adsense in developing nations
Google's hidden payroll. "Deepesh Agarwal, who runs a small cybercafe in Rajasthan state, India, draws about 90% of his income, or $1,500 a month, from his Adsense earnings. It is a princely sum in a state where the average income is just $300 a year. "Adsense has changed my life," Mr. Agarwal says. "I can afford things that I was not able to before. I am planning to buy a new car. I can save for my future.""USATODAY
Bigger storage
Holograms Break Storage Record (Hardware). "Holographic storage company InPhase Technologies announced this week that it has broken a storage density record by writing 64.3 gigabytes of data onto a single square inch of disc space. This advance could eventually lead to a holographic disc that can hold more than 100 DVD-quality movies, according to the company. By comparison, magnetic disks, such as those in the hard drives of computers, can manage a storage density of about 37.5 gigabytes per square inch of disk."Lockergnome
Sharing photos
Albert’s Got A New Bar: The BubbleBar. "This little piece of code displays a filmstrip of your Bubbleshare albums, including albums that others have shared with you, on your desktop. Mouse over any photo, and it will expand. Now you can watch all of your latest photos on your desktop while you work! [...] The really neat thing about this is the sharing feature. When you share an album with someone else, your photos just start appearing in their BubbleBar, which makes it super easy to discover new content. No surfing to a website, or opening emails and saving attachments — the photos just appear."
Alec Saunders
Virtual shopping tied to real shops
Social Bookmarking From Inside Second Life?. "Stylehive, which is a a collaborative shopping community purchased land and built their virtual showroom inside of Second Life several weeks ago. Since then they have populated their space with items that users have bookmarked in the hive. These products that they feature in their showroom are not just the user submitted images, they have been rendered in a 3-D program to be exact replicas of the original products. [...] What's even more amazing than just viewing the objects in 3-D is that all of these objects are links back the original bookmark that someone posted in Stylehive. So as you tour the virtual Hive most of the objects that you see you can walk around them, sit on them and touch them virtually. Then you can click on them and go the original post in the Stylehive and find our more information about that particular object."
Max Kiesler
Growth of video posting
YouTube: Way Beyond Home Videos. "In 11 months the site has become one of the most popular on the Net. It shows 30 million videos a day and drew 9.1 million people in February, says Web measurement service Nielsen//NetRatings. That makes the upstart one of the biggest providers of videos on the Net, ahead of Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG ) and just behind Microsoft (MSFT ), according to the Nielsen//NetRatings estimates. Why has the site caught on so fast? Chen and Hurley designed it so people can post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. The result is something like the TV station you always dreamed of"Business Week
Free webcast popularity
CBS's Slam Dunk on the Web. "CBS' Sportsline Web division says it drew a total of 5 million visits to March Madness on Demand, instead of the 2.5 million forecast. Most of the visitors came on the first weekend of the tournament, when up to four games were being played at once but only one at a time was broadcast on any given CBS-TV affiliate. The audience exploded this year when CBS and the National Collegiate Athletic Association put the games online for free. Last year, it cost $20 to see the Webcasts."Business Week
DRM-less music
Download of the Day: allTunes. "Everyone’s favorite *technically* legal Russian music store, AllofMP3, has just released a snazzy new version of their client software called allTunes (allTunes - now why does that sound familiar?). The allTunes client lets you search AllofMP3’s broad catalog (the as-you-type search is actually very nice) and download your music at the low price of $.02 per MB, which amounts to around $.04 to $.10 per song (assuming you don’t decide to go lossless). And, of course, the songs you download are unprotected, meaning you can use them anywhere you want."
Lifehacker
Websites recommended by librarians
What can you trust on the Internet?. "Librarians have long been seen as arbiters of quality and credibility. These librarians are now answering the questions of their users online through digital reference services. Reference Extract shall mine these questions and answers to create a new type of search engine. This search engine builds on the expert judgments of librarians in a modern, easy to use interface. Imagine searching the bookmarks of thousands of librarians and scientists."Ars Technica
Digital plumbing
Kohler DTV Touchscreen Shower Controller. "The DTV also links up to Kohler’s sophisticated multihead shower systems, its touchscreen allowing you to individually control pressure and temperature on up to eight shower heads. Better save up your money, though, because the controller alone costs $2000, not including a rather involved installation of all those shower heads and plumbing hardware. And then you’ll have to pay for all those millions of gallons of hot water."
Gizmodo
April 11, 2006
GPS units that take photos
Navman launches three GPS units with NavPix picture navigation: iCN750, iCN720, and iCN530. "Navman announced three new GPS unit today in addition to a new web-based, navigation-by-picture service called NavPix. At the top-end is the 4GB disk drive-totin' iCN750, which features a 1.3 megapixel rear-mounted shooter allowing users to snap location-mapped photos of peeps or places which can then be uploaded to the NavPix service for sharing with your stalker buddies."
Engadget
Online clip storage
ClipClip.org: bookmarklet preserves look of visited sites. "ClipClip is an online bookmarklet service for clipping (bookmarking) a portion of a web page you've visited. What's new about it: the clip captures and preserves the look and feel of the visited website. Your clips are saved to a central server, so you can go back to them later as reference thumbnails, or share them with friends."
Boing Boing
April 07, 2006
Mixing video
NuVJ Video Controller For DJs. "The NuVJ allows DJs to incorporate images and video clips in much the same way as mixing music. With the NuVJ, the VJ can trigger images and video clips, add effects to them, mix them through an onboard DJ style cross-fader and tweak them in order to create unique and spectacular shows."
I4U News
Throwing the webcam
The EyeBall tossable surveillance device. "The Eye Ball is about the size of a baseball (roughly 3.25 inches), weighs less than one pound and is encased in a rubber and polyurethane housing that enables it to be thrown through windows or doors and bounced off walls. It’s when the Eyeball lands that it becomes incredibly useful as it can capture video up to 25 metres distance and audio up to five metres, and then wirelessly send that real-time info up to 200 metres to handheld device."
gizmag
LED carpets
Light-up Rug. "Apparently this is some sort of illuminated rug but if you look at it wrong it looks like the dog has disappeared. Created by Johanna Hyrkas, the entire rug is full of embedded LEDs can stand up to most foot traffic… hopefully."
Gizmodo
Distributed search engine
Majestic-12. "To develop a community-led alternative [to Google],the Birmingham-based Russian programmer is building a new type of search engine.By harnessing the power of distributed computing,he's already managed to build an index that covers 1bn web pages.He has called his venture Majestic-12,possibly a reference to the alleged secret committee formed after the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.His passion for technically challenging work stems from worries about Google's iron grip on the market,its tight control of search results,and even whether some sites are indexed at all"
Smart Mobs
Cellphone TV on the subway
Free Mobile Broadcasting Starts on Inchon Subway. "Roughly 200,000 daily commuters who take the Inchon subway lines will be potential customers of terrestrial DMB offerings thanks to the expansion of the service-enabled areas"
The Korea Times
Credit cards for real AND virtual money
Gaming credit cards could offer virtual rewards. "It's not a matter of if, just when - credit card companies, Pay Pal, Amazon, eBay and the individual 'gaming' companies eventually bridge the real and virtual currencies with loyalty programs and private label credit cards—there's too much money out there to not to do this."
Ars Technica
Storing saved TV with the cable company
New PVR Will Store Video On Server. "Digital video recorders made by such companies as Cisco Systems Inc.'s Scientific-Atlanta and TiVo Inc. allow subscribers to pause and rewind live television programs and store programs on hard drives included on their home set-top boxes. The Cablevision service, by contrast, will allow customers to store programs on servers located at Cablevision's facilities."Extremem Tech
Digital textiles
Artist makes fabric with voice. "An Australian digital artist is using his voice to design textiles. Pierre Proske has developed computer software that translates different frequencies in someone's voice into spiral patterns, producing what he calls 'voiceprints'."
MAKE
Holographic storage hitting the marketplace
Holographic Drives on the Way This Year?. "What’s the catch? The first wave of products will use a red laser, not the blue or green laser that will give us the most incredible densities. First out of the gate will be 300GB disks with a disappointingly slow 20MB/second transfer rate. And of course, this technology will be expensive at first. Even so, we can’t wait to see those red green and blue laser multi-terabyte holographic disks, small and lightning-fast."
Gizmodo
Alternative audioguides
Invisible-5 Audio Project. "Invisible-5 is a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It uses the format of a museum audio tour to guide the listener along the highway landscape."
networked_performance
3D haptic input device
the Novint Falcon haptic interface device. "Roll your cursor over a ball, and the controller pushes back just the right amount, giving you the tactile sensation that you're actually touching it. If the ball is pitted, the controller dips in and out of the contours. If it's abrasive, it moves slower with just the slightest amount of rumble. Other demos included a Barney-shooting FPS, a bow and arrow simulation, a tethered bouncy ball, and a basketball freethrow."
Joystiq
April 06, 2006
Software film-editing
A Filmmaking Robot. "Douglas Bagnall's Filmmaking Robot can edit short films. The computer software programme can select from a range of video footage, and even has an in-built ability to make aesthetic decisions. The robot is programmed to "get bored" and it endlessly shifts its decision-making, choosing footage based purely on the colour blue, for example, or focussing on people and movement."
we make money not art
Video-heavy websites
A Web Site So Hip It Gets Laddies to Watch the Ads. "Heavy is honed especially for young men. It mixes animation, music, video games, grainy home movies of oddball characters, supermodels in bikinis and pop culture parodies. Often, all of these elements are squished into a single two-minute clip. Advertising is everywhere. This potent stew drew 5.5 million users to Heavy.com in February, according to comScore Media Metrix, nearly triple the audience of a year earlier."
New York Times
Digital communications
E-mail and text 'replace writing'. "The decline of handwriting and the rise of e-mail and text messaging has been highlighted in a new survey of media consumption in the digital age. It suggests that half of written communication is by e-mail, 29% by text message and just 13% by pen and paper. Among the over-65s, pen and paper remained popular at 39%, but among the young, the figure was much lower."
BBC NEWS
Blogging as non-fiction
Blogger up for non-fiction award. "An anonymous blog by a young woman in war-torn Iraq has been longlisted for BBC Four's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Baghdad Burning, a first-hand account written under the pseudonym Riverbend, is one of 19 books in contention."
BBC NEWS
Reading on the phone
Japanese comics go mobile. "Japan is a very literate country. Literacy is a lot higher than in many Western countries. "People read newspapers and novels a lot, they actually consume the written word quite strongly. Certainly you might not be putting on a full 10,000 word novel onto a phone. "But when you've got shorter stories, comic books, manga, anime, the colour design, something you can actually look at as well as read a story along with it, it's a great way to spend your morning commute."
BBC NEWS
Managing kids gadget time
Bob: Children Hate Him, Parents’ Best Friend. "Bob lets mom and dad assign each of their kids a pin number, and when parents install this timer in between an AC power source and anything that plugs in such as computers, TV or games, it will precisely control the amount of time those devices will run."
Gizmodo
Lots of ways of getting mobile TV
Japan's NTV shows future of mobile TV. "Of the items on display, the one that looked most useful and almost ready for prime time was Sharp's media player with video-on-demand functions (above). The device is designed to pull down VOD broadcasts via wireless IP, and then store them for later viewing on a hard drive or memory card."
Engadget
Specialised media players
Jobo Giga Vu Pro:evolution for Pro Photogs. "Bring images in via CF card, and this player is able to review them using a histogram, can detect dust and blown highlights, and has a crosshair readout for RGB values."
Gizmodo
Ad-on camera phone lenses
Gummi Lenses Expand Cameraphone Capabilities. "Take that camera phone to the next level with the Gummi Lens Full Selection Pack, a collection of six stick-on lens attachments, some of which could actually be useful. There’s a wide angle attachment that could come in handy in close quarters, and a macro lens lets you get in a really close. Mildly useful is the vignette attachment which has a clearly focused area in the middle surrounded by soft focus effects, and then things get silly with the stretch, kaleidoscope and starburst effects, probably good for some tipsy fun. The collection of lens attachments is $26."
Gizmodo
By a physical copy, get the digital one for free
Film fans get permanent downloads. "Film fans in the UK will soon be able to legally download and keep blockbuster movies for the first time, according to film studio Universal. Fans will pay £19.99 for a DVD of their chosen film plus two digital copies to keep indefinitely - one for their home computer and one for a portable device. Universal said it could "completely revolutionise" how people watch movies. However users will not be able to burn copies of the films to DVD themselves and the files will be compatible only with PCs and Windows software."
BBC NEWS
Photo projectors
As Cameras Increasingly Go Digital, Can the Home Slide Show Be Far Behind?. "Now Panasonic has a compact three-pound digital projector that can show your photos on 38- to 300-inch screens without a computer hookup: just pop in an SD memory card (the most popular type) and it turns itself on and shows whatever images are on the card. The PT-P1SDU projector, available next month for $1,199, has a few features not available on slide projectors, like the ability to add movielike wipes, fades and other transitions between images; to show images in random or preprogrammed order; and even to show movies shot with digital cameras. It adjusts its brightness to match the ambient lighting and lets you adjust white balance to match either incandescent or fluorescent lighting."
New York Times
Getting your news online
For many home broadband users, the internet is a primary news source. "By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years. For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day."Pew
Playing games for mental health
Study shows games keep you sane. "According to the report, research indicates that people who maintain “healthy cognitive loads” like playing chess, doing crosswords and other activities appear to have lower rates of dementia, Alzheimer�s Disease and other cognitive problems."
Lifehacker
Tiny PCs
'Municator: Micro Linux PC. "The ‘Municator is a $146 computer designed to surf the web, get email, and listen to audio and video. It weighs about a pound, has 256MB RAM and 40GB hard drive, a 800-MHz Godson (???) processor and TV output. Four USB ports, VGA-out, and PS2 port make this uber-micro PC just about as useful as any $2,000 portable tablet."
Gizmodo
April 05, 2006
Displays in walls
Chronos Chromos Concrete. "Chronos Chromos Concrete is a system that is able to dynamically display patterns, numbers and text in concrete surfaces. "
Chromastone
Barcodes to speech
Speechio: listening to paper documents. "Speechio is an information appliance that reads a 2D barcode printed on a paper document and reads the document with a synthesized digital voice. It's designed for people with visual impairments and the elderly. The system uses a 2D barcode called SP Code that can encode a larger amount of information in a small space. So, a page of text information can be encoded and compressed in a small square at a corner of a document."
RFID in Japan
Following a trip
Upload Every Mountain. "Released in February, the newest generation called Contact 4.0 GEO has multi-layered, 3-D flash maps created from photos and models of Everest. Armchair adventurers can follow an expedition's route, zoom in on specific camps and positions, and look at weather forecasts and live satellite images. Comparatively, Google Earth is blurry and brutally slow over the Himalayas."
Wired News
April 04, 2006
The pros and cons of kids multitasking
Are kids too plugged in?. "Although multitasking kids may be better prepared in some ways for today's frenzied workplace, many cognitive scientists are positively alarmed by the trend. "Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long run," says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. On the positive side, Gen M students tend to be extraordinarily good at finding and manipulating information. And presumably because modern childhood tilts toward visual rather than print media, they are especially skilled at analyzing visual data and images, observes Claudia Koonz, professor of history at Duke University."
Smart Mobs
Media visualizations
iBloks 3-D personalized entertainment demo. "Using the Windows Presentation Foundation, the iBloks software enables people to mix any type of media assets including music, photos, video, or games to create personalized entertainment™ experiences. People can use their own content or connect to the iBloks shop to purchase licensed digital content from top media companies. After they create their personalized iBlok model, game or card they can easily share their iBlok with friends via email, IM, or on their own web pages or blogs."
Virtual MIX
Emotions through recorded media
Instant Feeling Messages. "emosive is a service for mobile devices which allows capturing, storing and sharing of fleeting emotional experiences. Based on the Cognitive Priming theory, as we become more immersed in digital media through our mobile devices, our personal media inventories constantly act as memory aids, "priming" us to better recollect associative, personal (episodic) memories when facing an external stimulus."
we make money not art