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
Temperature input
ThermoPainter: painting with temperature. "ThermoPainter can detect temperature change regions on a sensing surface as touch regions when objects hotter or colder than the surface touch it. In the system, users can use a physical paintbrush with hot water and an airbrush with cold water in spite of paint as they use in the real world, and even use their own fingers, hands, and breaths directly because of their own body heat."
we make money not art
Judging ease of reading
Book, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words. "When Amazon gets the right from a publisher to let readers "search inside" a book, Text Stats tallies the average length of a sentence and amasses little piles for each word used. (Or big piles, as in the case of the King James Bible, for example, where the count for "loin" is 1,548; "behold," 1,426; and "lord" 7,082.) The software then ranks a book for clarity and ease of reading on a variety of indexes. For example, "The Story of Babar" has a Flesch-Kincaid Index score of 6.1 (sixth-grade level), the same as "Everything Is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer. Their "fogginess" quotients, an index similar to Flesch-Kincaid, are very close, too, though the Foer book is slightly less clear — 8 percent of its words are "complex," compared with 7 percent for "Babar." Text Stats also produces concordances, lists of the 100 most-used words in a book."
New York Times
March 31, 2006
Capturing virtuoso motion
Video-game tech hits classical music. "Best known for bringing characters to life in video games as well as in such films as "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Polar Express," motion capture will allow researchers to create an animated model of Rabbath's techniques for an instructional DVD titled "Art of the Left Hand." "Francois is to classical music what Michael Jordan was to basketball," says Hans Sturm, a double-bass professor at Ball State, who counts Rabbath as both mentor and close personal friend. "Nobody else does what he does. And I doubt anyone ever will." The state-of-the-art technology will preserve Rabbath's bowing and fingering techniques - his "fingering gymnastics," as Mr. Sturm calls them - so that others can analyze the master's approach to the double bass."
csmonitor.com
New forms of instrument
Samchillian Keyboard Concept. "Israeli industrial designer Eitan Shefer has created the Samchillian keyboard, taking a novel approach to a musical instrument where you don’t play specific notes but select how they relate to the ones before them. For example, if you’re playing a C and then want to play a D, you just push the 1 key. There are two directional keys, 16 relative keys and eight finger positions, and when you want to bend the pitch or manipulate the filters, you tilt the unit from side to side."
Gizmodo
Tiny cameras
Sharp's New Camera Module is Smaller than a Ladybug. "The Sharp LZ0P396D has a volume of only 0.07cc. The measurements are 5.5�5.5�2.43mm. Despite its small size it also supports 30fps enabling video capture. The new Sharp camera module is aimed at mobile phones to be used as secondary camera."
I4U News
March 30, 2006
Hidden or easy wi-fi
Cool Wireless Router Bulb. "Liteon Technology Corp. apparently came up with an interesting design concept for home networking dubbed the Orb. It combines data transfer over power lines with wireless network access. The wireless router component can be screwed into standard light bulb sockets to connect to the data network available on the power lines - neat idea."
I4U News
Chinese Online Role Playing Game
Socialist glory a stitch away in new Chinese game. "Doing good deeds, volunteering on building sites and obtaining Chairman Mao's autograph are some of the objectives of "Learn from Lei Feng," a new online game starring the Chinese Communist Party's legendary hero. The plot revolves around Lei Feng, a humble selfless People's Liberation Army soldier who, the myth goes, spent all his spare time and money helping the needy and serving the Party until tragically dying in an accident in 1962. "For beginners, sewing and mending socks is the only way to increase experience and upgrade," said Jiao Jian, a young pupil and online game fan from the southern city of Guangzhou."
Reuters.com
Art on the TV
Turning the Television Into an Electronic Easel for Future Mondrians. "The role of the TV screen continues to expand with the V.Smile Art Studio, a large battery-operated children's drawing tablet. The $30 device, made to work with the V.Smile TV Learning System (sold separately for $50), also includes one software "smartridge." Plug everything in and your TV screen turns into a large blank easel surrounded by 15 color selections, plus icons for all the basic drawing functions like erase, fill, cut and paste."
New York Times
Portable video
Army Reinvents Bullet-Time. "This is the Israeli Smart Arrow which embeds itself into a surface and begins transmitting video for up to seven hours. The arrow sends video to a handheld device and can swivel around to grab shots through a door or window. The range is 300 meters and can transmit with a 60-degree field of view at 25 fps. The handheld device lasts for 3 hours on one charge."
Gizmodo
Digital instruments
Digital Trumpet. "This trumpet is able to generate a wide variety of sounds including eight brass instruments, five woodwind and even a synthesized human voice. Best of all, it comes preloaded with 10 teaching songs that are learned via illuminated LEDs. Don’t fret, parents. There is even a headphone jack. Now if only brass instruments could include one of those. This high-tech trumpet retails for $400."
Gizmodo
Preserving stuff online
Ephemeral films, resurrected on the Web. "From long-forgotten product packaging and period postcards to family photos and even East German Paper Shopping Bags, the Web is jammed with items that would have been lost forever to attics and museum warehouses without the advent of online distribution. Probably the most entertaining exhibits in this category feature ephemeral films - ads and movies produced for a specific time and purpose, with little or no thought to long-term relevance or preservation - and this week we look at two central repositories of the transitory in motion pictures."csmonitor.com
A tool for random things
Download of the Day: Caboodle. "Freeware program Caboodle collects and organizes the information you don’t know where to put. Everyone comes across information that they want to refer to later. Maybe gifts you’ve received or sent, product serial numbers, recipes, directions to someone’s house, a photo of your pet, or anything else. Caboodle is a tool to help store and organize such random bits of information."
Lifehacker
Objects that blog
The new world of 'blogjects'. "With "Why Things Matter," Julian Bleecker, a researcher at the University of Southern California, has written a "Manifesto for Networked Objects" (PDF format, 17 pages, 939 KB). In this document, he describes what he calls "blogjects" or "objects that blog." The three major characteristics of a blogject are its sense of space combined with its ability to track where it has been, its knowledge of its encounters and previous experiences, and more importantly, its ability to participate in an assertive way to social networks."Primidi
Waking up to media
Hitachi DVL-7TV Wakes You Up to Lots-O-Media. "This Hitachi DVL-7TV will expose you to your choice of media the first thing in the morning, with TV, DVD, FM, MP3, or even JPEG stills to ease you out of your hung-over haze. There’s a 7-inch screen that’s just about the right size for bedside, and oh yeah, it also has an alarm to jar you awake if all that entertainment doesn’t do the trick."
Gizmodo
Setting up web pages to print
Make any page printer friendly with Click2Zap. "The Click2Zap bookmarklet lets you remove whatever elements you want from a web page to help make it printer friendly. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, go to the page you want to print and click the bookmarklet. Then you can go through the page and click which elements you’d like to remove. If you accidentally remove one you’d like to keep, just undo it. Finally, when you’re finished, click print."
Lifehacker
March 29, 2006
Rich statistics for your website
See What Your Website Visitors Are Doing With Crazy Egg. "The above screenshot shows the heat overlay, which is where users are clicking and focusing their attention. Other parts of the application will show you where users click, and how many times."
TechCrunch
Getting rid of game UI
Tunnel Vision . "Recently, several new games have renounced the HUD. In Doom 3, the ammo count for your chain gun is displayed not in a floating bar, but on the headstock of the gun. Peter Jackson's King Kong doesn't offer a scrap of onscreen artificial data: Adrien Brody's voice calls out the ammo count each time you reload, and low health is denoted by shaky, blurry vision. In a column called "Off With Their HUDs!" for the game-design site Gamasutra, Greg Wilson argues that losing the HUD helps increase the sense of immersion. "Nothing screams 'this is just a game' louder than an old-fashioned HUD," he writes. The fewer HUDs we see, the more we'll feel we're inside a holodeckian piece of cinema."
Wired News
Selling homemade media
Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous. "Increasingly, the new, new thing in media is getting paid for the homemade. Reflecting the surge in the popularity of user-created material, both online and traditional media companies are opening their wallets to make sure that the best of it finds its way onto their television shows and Web sites. Even Yahoo, the nation's most-visited Web site, has signaled a change in its strategy by moving away from creating its own professional content in favor of user-generated material — and it appears willing to pay for anything its users deem worthy."
New York Times
Fun with video editing
Potentially Someth;ng. "The Doodle TV application doodles over live images on TV recognising faces and drawing glasses and mustaches over them, or drawing decoration around the image. It works exceptionally well with news programs as you can see in the image."
we make money not art
March 23, 2006
Gadgets made of wireless components
SAMSUNG VP-X210WL. "It has a lens that can send images wirelessly over a short distance to the main body of the gadget. Maximum range for the lens is about 4 metres. Having a separate lens could be a real boon in those moments when you want to film yourself but also want to have both hands free. The lens comes with an armband so it can film while you get on with your extreme sports."
BBC NEWS
Gadget concept cars
Concept phones feature in iF Design Awards. "Amongst the winners though, were three concept phones – one from BenQ and two from Pantech. Now one concept phone does not a sustainable trend make, but three gives it a bit of credence. Let’s hope so. All three are beautiful and ever so clever in their design."
gizmag
Projectors that work close up
Toshiba Announces Projector with Integrated DVD Player and “Super Close” Lens. "Toshiba introduced its et20 projector at CeBIT 2006 that includes an integrated DVD player, 5.1 channel sound and a unique lens that can produce a six-foot image from three feet away, and a 4.5-foot image from just 27 inches away."
Gizmodo
Clothes that play music
Dada unleashes "Code M" MP3 shoes on an unsuspecting populace. "Basically what we have is some shiny "Code M" sneakers from Dada footwear that pump the tunes to the included wireless headphones or out of built-in speakers while you're busy being that baller you are. They charge via USB, sport built-in controls, and yes they are actually a pair of shoes, too. Seriously, what's not to love? "
Engadget
Personal maps
Platial social mapping . "Web site Platial maps your life, your neighbhorhood and your interests with shared annotated Google Maps. Build your “Autobiogeography” map (“here’s where my first kiss happened”) or pinpoint the locations of your bowling team’s venues or be an online tour guide to your hometown. Platial tracks your geographical friends and tags your places. The two-month old startup has just passed 10,000 places in its collaborative “social atlas.”"
Lifehacker
Movie editing through printed cards & QR codes
Tangible movie editing for kids. "1. Film your story with a digital camera. 2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed. 3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera. 4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be. 5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided. 6. Preview on your monitor! Done."
we make money not art
Home concerts
Coming Live From My Basement. "Londonist has picked up on a story about singer Sandi Thom who plays to a crowd of 200,000 people each night over the web from her room in the basement of a South London house. [...]. An invite says: Sandi will be on stage at 9pm from Tooting. Anyone wanting to come to the venue physically and not watch it on the web, please note that the room capacity is a maximum of 10 people including the band. Tickets from info@sandithom.com. Please bring your own refreshments. There is a sofa bed in the living room and a blow up mattress in the basement, if anyone wants to stay over, but please bring your own sleeping bag."
PSFK
Huge, hi-definition displays
LG.Philips Show Off 100-Inch LCD Display. "LG.Philips is claiming a resolution of 6.22 million pixels, which puts it well over the resolution necessary to support full HDTV. We don’t actually expect LG.Philips to make a commercial product at this size for a while, but it’s lovely to behold in the meantime."
Gizmodo
Netflix-like music swapping
Music swapping through the mail. "A new startup plans to announce a CD-swapping service today that tries to find a middle ground between ripping off music and paying full price for it. La la Media will announce its own online swap shop, where consumers can find discs and arrange for trades with other members online. The service will use prepaid envelopes (like Netflix) for sending the discs through the mail, and will charge users $1.49 per swap, with a dollar going to La la Media and the rest set aside to cover shipping."
Ars Technica
Sharing text snippets through the web
ShortText instant web publishing - Lifehacker. "Web site ShortText publishes snippets of text online and provides a public or private permanent URL for quick information-sharing. Sort of like a blog with no commitments past one, less than 7500-character post, ShortText could come in handy for swapping code snippets, directions, anonymous tips and stories."
March 22, 2006
High-tech sports
Soccer World Cup promises forefront of live sport services. "The portal is amazing, with a range of innovative features such as personally-tailored information systems and personal diary pages, but the highlight is the 3D reconstruction of scenes from the soccer match that enables the viewer to view a replay of key scenes from any point in the stadium – from the referee's perspective or the eyes of the goalkeeper. To make this possible, the team constructed 3D models of stadiums and compiled catalogs of players. An ingenious software program manages to generate the scenes from TV images."
gizmag
Phone replacing radio for in-car entertainment
Drive Time Increasingly Means Talk Time. "A recent study confirms a fear long held by radio broadcasters: cellphone use is cutting into radio listening by commuters. The study, done by the firm Bridge Ratings, found that commuters who use their phones in the car and drive an hour or more a day listened to the radio for 32 minutes a day in 2003, compared with 26 minutes today."
New York Times
Shopping with RSS
Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.. "The system, in the case of eBags at least, appears simple enough. Starting later this month, consumers who visit either the company's main site or its shoe site, 6pm.com, will see R.S.S. icons near the sites' products, with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, black, size 11 Cole Haan shoes, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page, then confirms the request by signing into that page. If the user directs eBags to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page, eBags will send the alert — typically an item description with a photo — only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified items."New York Times
March 20, 2006
Using someone else's wireless
Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless. "Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture. "I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment. "I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it,""
New York Times
Things to do with you camera phone
Top 50 Emergency Uses for Your Camera Phone. "About has a list of top emergency uses for your cameraphone compiled by Paul Purcell, a security analyst and preparedness consultant : Just a few: Record parking spot locations; Engine repairs. Send a pic to a mechanic who may talk you through a quick fix; Child custodian. If you can't get to your kids at school or other function, relay a picture of the person who is coming to pick them up..."Smart Mobs
Digital reproduction
Digital Methods Help Replicate Artworks. "The subtle aspects of Japanese paintings, which often include fine line work on delicate materials, could be lost or muted during reproduction. So the process involves creating high-resolution images of the originals with a scanner or camera that can capture images with more than 100 megapixels (compared with, say, the 5 or 6 megapixels of most consumer-oriented digital cameras). Using a combination of software and the human eye, the colors in the digital image are matched to the original work. The image is then printed out on a large-format Hewlett-Packard Designjet 5500 UV inkjet printer with fade-resistant inks. The printer is able to produce the image on washi, a traditional Japanese paper made from the inner bark of trees."
New York Times
March 17, 2006
Digital metaphors
NEC's "KotoHana" LED flower knows how you feel. "It's pretty hard to tell what's going on here, but there seems to be a "Sensibility Technology" that recognizes the user's feelings, and then tells the flower over a wireless connection. The system works over the Internet, so even from far away the flower's LEDs can light up to reflect your true feelings to that special someone."
Engadget
Big screen interaction
Panasonic shows hugemongous interactive display. "hey paired a couple of 110-inch screens to create the largest interactive display we've ever seen, if not the largest display, period. Their tech isn't as crazy interactive as NYU's Multi-Touch stuff, but Panasonic sure has the right idea about size. Check the read link for a video complete with funny accents and imagery of some sort of "desktop of the future," which, of course, involves tossing around bits of video larger than our respective refrigerators."
Engadget
Sharing your tastes
Lib.rario.us media bookmarking. "Bookmark, review, tag and share your books, music, DVD’s and games with automatically-supplied cover images and links to Amazon. RSS feeds are available by user and media type, and it looks like an item discussion feature is in the works."
Lifehacker
High tech board games
Deflexion - the board game with a high-tech twist. "After each move, the player presses the button to fire up the laser beam, which bounces from mirror to mirror around the playing field. The challenge is to protect one's own pharaoh while maneuvering to "light up" the opposing player's pharaoh."gizmag
Copying the real world in online worlds
U2 Rocks Second Life. "A team of fans have recreated a U2 rock concert in Second Life, BrandsInGames reports. While music was streamed in to the arena, a recreated Bono and gang were animated to rock like they're real-life counterparts. Merchandise stalls sod T Shirts and even beer from brands like Sam Adams. After the show, the band came out from their backstage room to give autographs!"
PSFK
Sharing playlists
Downloading Empathy to Your iPod. "IMixes -- as well as playlists on other services such as Rhapsody, Musicstrands and Soundflavor -- are the online cousins of amateur cassette-tape and CD mixes created over the years by countless music collectors as soundtracks for parties and road trips. Many of the playlists focus on a theme -- and many of those on a personal one, whether the subject is a lost love, a class reunion, a nasty breakup, duty in Iraq or a new romance."
Washington Post
Rich, online photo features
BubbleShare adds Ajax Zoom feature. "The feature is available on every picture hosted by BubbleShare - simply click on the BubbleZoom button and have a 3x zoom view on any area of the photo. Very slick."
TechCrunch
Virtual visitation rights
'Virtual' visits pushed in several states. "Divorce put David List and his 2-year-old daughter on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and he worried that she would soon forget him. She hasn't, though. List's divorce agreement guaranteed him "virtual visitation" — the chance to talk with his daughter through an Internet video connection — and he and Ruby Rose, now 5, usually connect at least twice a week. The chats sustain them in between their in-person visits, which come only a few times a year."
USATODAY.com
Exercise while working
The DIY exercise office. "My boss bought a treadmill for his office, and built a table on top of it to use as a desk. Now he spends his entire workday walking about half a mile an hour. He's hoping to be in shape by spring"
MAKE: Blog
Social networks in many forms
Niche Networking by the Numbers. "You want to kick off an online social life -- but don't want space on MySpace? Fret not. There are scads of alternative social networking sites aimed at plugging you into a community of like-minded Web surfers."
Business Week
Searching for podcasts
Podzinger: search the full text of podcasts. "Podzinger is a service that aggregates hundreds of thousands of episodes of podcasts, converts the entire text of the casts to text, and then delivers a searachable index. You go to Podzinger, search for a search, and you get back all the podcasts that have mentioned that term -- along with embedded players that can play you back the whole podcast, or just those segments where the keywords are mentioned."
Boing Boing
March 16, 2006
Getting rid of background noise
Download of the Day: Noise. "Noise plays a continuous, static/waterfall “pink noise” that does a surprisingly effective job of killing annoying co-worker, roommate and downstairs neighbor sounds."
Lifehacker
Location-based cellphone photos
Yahoo! ZoneTag 2-click-uploads location-tagged photos to Flickr. "Yahoo! has just rolled out a new application for Nokia Series 60 handset owners that allows them to not only 2-click upload their cameraphone photos to Flickr, but actually tag them with general location data for personal reference and providing viewers with context."
Engadget
March 08, 2006
Cheap, massively multiplayer games
MMO startup making waves in game world. "Hollywood producers are taking notice of Multiverse, a startup that makes a massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game possible for a tiny fraction of what they typically cost."
Reuters.com
Tiny PCs
Shuttle X100 Ultra-Small Media PC. "The Shuttle X100 Ultra-Small Media PC is a design concept that’s so tiny you’d think it was a FireWire drive, but even though it’s small, inside there’s a full-scale computer powered by an Intel Core Duo mobile processor. "
Gizmodo
Touchscreens everywhere
Acer MP-500 touchscreen portable media player. "This one comes as something of a surprise, but it's certainly the kind of surprise we'd like to get more often. Acer is apparently on the verge of releasing its MP-500 media player, and the specs include a 3.5-inch touchscreen display, 20-40GB hard drive, support for most common audio and video formats, video out and a battery life of 4-8 hours. It's expected out in Europe next month at a price of between $350 and $415."
Engadget
Putting the CPU in another room
New Matrox Extio F1400 is world's first remote graphics unit. "The Matrox remote graphics technology enables a new physical layout for computers and is ideal for environments like audio studios, broadcast studios, dispatch centers, control rooms, and public spaces using digital signage. With this product, the critical parts of the computer like the disks, memory, and processors can be kept in a separate, safe, secure room. This saves space at the display station, removes a potentially noisy computer, and allows system administrators to access and maintain the system at a separate location."
gizmag
Screensaver window
Download of the day 3: Holding Pattern Screensaver. "Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence."
Lifehacker
Tabletop computing
HP Misto Coffee Table PC. "P celebrated its 40th anniversary of selling overpriced printer ink by revealing Misto, a concept from its labs that combines a coffee table with a touch-screen PC. The giant screen, of undetermined resolution, would be used by a group, which would gather around and play board games, look at maps, or arrange pictures for viewing. Since it’s just a concept, there is no indication of when or if it will be developed, and if so how much it will cost. No question, it certainly won’t be cheap—this is a coffee table that doesn’t exactly invite you to put up your feet."
Gizmodo
PCs built into furniture
Desktop And Desk Finally Marry. "A UK design company has at long last developed the Powerdesk, “The world’s first truly effective integration of computer and workstation.” That means put away the Office Depot particle board, ‘cause this PC is integrated into the desk it comes with."
Gizmodo
Temporary tracking
RFID Tagged Party. "SF's MoMA held a RFID party with 180 Tags handed out to visitors. During their stay the visitors location and movement were roughly tracked and projected onto a screen. A nice way to have people interact with visuals. "
PSFK
Fashion gaming
Wearable game weaves clues into cloth. "If you find yourself wearing clothes from a new company called Edoc Laundry, beware: Strangers may walk up to you on the street to examine the intricacies of your shirt's patterns. That's because Edoc Laundry's first line, expected to launch March 1, literally weaves an episodic, multimedia game into the fabric of the garments. The Seattle-based company is believed to be the first to attempt such a fashion feat."
CNET News.com
Viewing and publishing TV from your desktop
Democracy: a new platform for making and seeing TV on the net. "Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS (so you can pull a "channel" of programming), BitTorrent (so you can download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can watch video no matter how it's encoded). Combine that with Broadcast Machine, a simple tool for publishing channels of video, and Videobomb, a social video service a little like Digg or delicious, and you've got a tremendously exciting development in democratic access to media."
Boing Boing
Learning social skills online
Teens gain valuable social skills online. "Instead of steering them away from their computers, parents should recognise that teenagers sharpen important social skills online, say psychologists and anthropologists studying internet behaviour. They stress that many of the traditional teenage hangouts, such as convenience stores and parks, have banned these youngsters or become viewed as unsafe. Danah Boyd, at the University of California, Berkeley, US, and other experts see this as a leading reason why children turn to the web to communicate with their peers."New Scientist
Music Tamagotchi
iPod to meet Tamagotchi. "Japanese company Konami will issue this summer a curious LCD-based portable game in which the player "raises" virtual characters by giving them a "steady diet" of music. "When the game, called Otoizm, is connected to a MP3 player, various characters appear according to the type of music being played. The game classifies music into 19 types, and the growth and type of character produced changes according to the type of music it listens to. More than 30 kinds of characters can be created.""
we make money not art
Visualizing the news
What's Up? News Map. "New stories are highlighted on the map, and a balloon appears with a headline; clicking on the balloon sends you to the source of the story."
Cool Hunting
The growth of the self portrait
Here I Am Taking My Own Picture. "one particular kind of image has especially soared in popularity, particularly among the young: the self-portrait, which has become a kind of folk art for the digital age. Framing themselves at arm's length, teenagers snap their own pictures and pass the cameras to friends at school or e-mail the images or upload them to the Internet. For a generation raised on a mantra of self-esteem, striking a heroic, sultry or brooding pose and sharing it with the world comes naturally."
New York Times
Publishing blog content
BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. "BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication. Blogs that apply and are accepted are categorized (TechCrunch would be “science and technology”. BlogBurst editors choose great content from those blogs for republication"
TechCrunch
Automated book scanning
ATIZ BookDrive: The World's First Portable Automatic Book Scanner. "The ATIZ BookDrive is the world's only scanner featuring a page turning mechanism to digitize a whole book completely automatically. Art Sarasin, President of ATIZ, tells us that there are only two other fully automatic book digitizers, which use cameras (Kirtas and 4Digitalbooks), but these are huge machines. I guess Google and Amazon are using those for their book ripping ventures. "
I4U News
What's a blog?
That Which We Call a Blog... . ""The State of the Blogosphere" presented at sifry.com this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog search site, shows just how complicated things have become. According to Mr. Sifry's data, mainstream media sites, as measured by the number of blogs linking to them, are trouncing news-oriented blogs by a growing margin. Bloggers link to The New York Times Web site about three times as often as they link to the technology-oriented Boingboing.net. Only four blogs show up in the top 33 sites."
New York Times
March 02, 2006
Self-publishing your music
Singing Beyond The Shower. "First, the Digital Revolution gave us inexpensive recording gear and easy-to-use software, helping amateur musicians record professional-sounding works. Now, the Internet has democratized how music is distributed and even sold. Leading the charge are social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, and FaceBook, which have built communities around music and other shared interests. Members appreciate recommendations from friends on the sites, notes Rishon Blumberg, a partner at Brick Wall Management, a traditional music company that handles Marc Broussard, Citizen Cope, and other artists. "Putting an artist on MySpace is like opening a store in a heavily trafficked shopping mall," he says. Here are some of the best places to get your own music heard."
Business Week
Hanging out online
One third of US Internet users "hang out" online. "Did you go online yesterday just for fun? If so, you're in good company. A new survey (PDF) out from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that nearly one-third of all Internet users in the US regularly go online just to "pass the time." While the Internet is still most often used with a purpose in mind, it is gradually becoming a primary recreation destination as well."Ars Technica
Laser projection
Mitsubishi develops laser-powered projection TV. "Mitsubishi has announced that it's developed the world's first rear-projection TV powered by a laser instead of the mercury lamps typically used in other projector TVs. According to the company, the laser projector offers higher picture quality and a greater color range than plasma or LCD sets. No word on when these will be out or how much you'll have to shell out to get one."
Engadget
Taking photos everywhere
Keitai 'til you die: phonecams at funerals in Japan. "Japan's obsession with camera-equipped mobile phones has taken a bizarre twist, with mourners at funerals now using the devices to capture a final picture of the deceased. "Some can't grasp 'reality' unless they take a photo and share it with others ... It comes from a desire to keep a strong bond with the deceased," social commentator Toru Takeda told the paper."Boing Boing
Cross-promoting blogs
Blog Ad Exchange at Rojo. "FeedShare is a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other. As a blogger participant you give exposure on your site to other blogs in the network, and in return your blog will be promoted on similar sites in the network. You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see examples) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers."
TechCrunch
Audio in appliances
The new stove from Sanyo that talks back. "Sanyo is busting out a new 200V Built-In IH Cooking Heater stove in Japan with "voice navigation" to guide you through your dangerous kitchen adventures. The stove sounds off musical tones when it's done cooking or boiling water, and can get tones off the Internet or from your phone via infrared. If you're just completely lost, the induction heat stove can also talk you through some recipes, but we're just hoping it can put its vocal powers to good use and talk you down from that ledge."
Engadget
Podcasts of bands coming to your area
Podbop - Information. "Old way: Looking up concerts in your town on an event site, googling 100 different bands, tracking down an MP3 for each band, and then deciding which show you want to go to. The Podbop way: Type in a city, get MP3s, discover a band you like, and go see them."
Podbop
Technology in mirrors
Mirror Weather Station. "From our wacky friends at Oregon Scientific, this Mirror Weather Station may take the prize on combo products that make little sense. For just $130, you too can own a mirror that tells you the outside temperature. You know, in case listening to the radio or turning on the TV or the Internet is too tough for you."
Gizmodo
Quick online app creation
Build your own social web app with Ning. "Browse the social apps on Ning. No sign in required. When you see an app you like, you can make it your own in a few easy steps. Follow the Clone this App button to clone and customize your app. It’s that easy. You now have your very own social app! We host it, secure it, promote it, add new features, and manage accounts."
Lifehacker
Technology built into the home
Eat and type. "This retro decorative tablecloth contains a textile keyboard. The electronic is woven into a fabric, which finds itself between layers of water resistant felt as sandwich material. The TIDY TIPIST NO.2 is washable."
we make money not art
Rotating camera
360 Camera Remains Stationary While Top Rotates. "Cedric Tay of Yanko Design has dreamed up this 360 Camera, a cylindrical digital camera whose top section rotates to take a series of panoramic pictures while its bottom section remains stationary. Since the bottom part doesn’t need to move, it’s possible to secure the camera on a tripod and take an accurate series of shots to be stitched together later. The camera’s design even includes a built-in inclinometer which helps you make sure it’s level before you begin shooting."
Gizmodo
Free books (with advertising)
Ad-supported books arrive at last. "The book is divided up into small sections of only a page or two, and each section is displayed on a web page with a Yahoo contextual ad on the left side. There are no weird Javscript tricks to prevent you from copying text, and the snippets are not so short as to be utterly infuriating. All told, it looks like a pretty decent (if non-slick) implementation. The site does have a few drawbacks: the text of the book is searchable, and there is an index, but it isn't clickable. Also, in what seems a bizarre oversight, there appears to be no simple way to return to the table of contents from any given page. HarperCollins is watching this trial closely to see whether releasing ad-supported books makes business sense. As it stands now, the plan seems to be to release a book in "windows" (much like the movie business). Judson's hardcover was released in 2004, the paperback in 2005, and the free version in 2006. The publishing business wants to maintain this sort of control over their product, which explains why they (and the Author's Guild) are currently suing Google over Google's plans to index the content of copyrighted books."Ars Technica
Homes of the future?
Imagine the Home in 2020 Design Competition. "12 winners were selected from more than 3,000 entries, which included a portable/collapsible refrigerator, vacuum slippers and a water-free, waterfall-shaped washing machine. Dozens of entries from designers around the world are posted and are certain to entertain and inspire you."
Cool Hunting
Sync your songs and your exercise
Interval running iTunes playlist. "Interval runner Jeff Welch developed a script which creates an iTunes playlist in which songs stop and start at timed intervals so he knows when to switch from running to walking without checking his watch. The script only works on Windows with iTunes, and it inserts a little DING! noise between songs signalling you to switch gears."
Lifehacker
Easy reading
TENBot - Automated RSS to TEN Conversion. "The Electronic Newsletter (TEN) standard developed by Headstar is emerging as a common and useful format to make email based newsletters more accessible to visually impaired users. TENBot is a hosted service that allows web site owners to provide their RSS feeds in the TEN format for use by blind and visually users."
Daden Limited
Real versions of virtual stores
The temporary physical Virtual Store. "A spectacular initiative from American department store retailing institution J. C. Penney yesterday might cause everybody to rethink how e-commerce and the future of retailing might unfold though. The company will construct a 15, 000-square-foot physical manifestation of the virtual store at One Times Square on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, New York. In our humble opinion, the opening of this temporary virtual store from March 3-26, in which shoppers can purchase the company's full range of merchandise at interactive kiosks, marks a significant development in the history of retail. We believe that traveling virtual superstores could be a part of retailing’s future."
gizmag
Streaming movies
As an Alternative to a Trip to a Video Store, Movies Through a Set-Top Box. "MovieBeam is built around a technology that broadcasts movies slowly over unused portions of the television signals to set-top boxes that store them on a hard disk. Users will have a choice of 100 movies — mainly those that have been recently released on DVD's — with 10 new titles replacing old ones each week. Consumers will buy the MovieBeam box for $250 from electronics stores. They can send for a $50 rebate, but must also pay a $30 activation fee, making the effective upfront cost $230. The service does not charge a monthly fee, but movies cost $3.99 each for current titles and $1.99 for older ones."
New York Times
Beautiful displays
Gorgeous Flat Panel Alchemy. "Here’s a guy who took a four-year-old 15-inch flat panel display and turned it into a work of art he calls “TransTFT.”"
Gizmodo
Adaptive furniture
Flat Table by Flo Design. "Flo Design's Flat Table was inspired by synesthesia (a sense of "seeing" a color when hearing a sound, for example). The table top has an LED light source which shifts colors based on environmental changes. "
Cool Hunting
Games in school
Class, Take Out Your Games. "These days, computer games are usually pilloried for excessive violence and sex. Yet teachers across the country are bringing certain games into their schools as a way to pique students' interest in everything from history and politics to physical fitness and music theory. Among the most popular are Firaxis Games Inc.'s Civilization games, Take2's Railroad Tycoon, and Carte's new favorite, Dance Dance Revolution from Konami Corp."Business Week
Video bookmarking
Dabble: Media Bookmarking Sweetness. "According to Mary there are 97 different video hosting services - including Google, Youtube, etc. I can certainly believe this, and I’ve written on a bunch of them already. Many of these services are quite popular, and people have a number of favorites at different services. Dabble will allow people to gather all of these favorites in one place, using standard bookmarking tools like tagging, comments, etc. And there is a big focus on sharing. Simply drag and drop a video from a friend (or anyone) to your area and you have it bookmarked."
TechCrunch
eBay for money lending
It's Like Lending to a Friend, Except You'll Get Interest. "Prosper's users lend money to and borrow money from other people on the site at what the company says are better interest rates than those available through traditional financial institutions and without some of the risk that comes from typical person-to-person loans. "We looked at eBay and said, 'Why can't we do this for money?' " said Chris Larsen, Prosper's chief executive."
New York Times
Games in episode format
Half-Life 2 turning to episodic installments. "What does it mean to say that Half-Life 2 is turning episodic? While Valve has given no details, a few things can be easily surmised. First, episodic content means more frequent content, but less of it in each installment. That much is obvious. But how much, and for what? SiN Episodes, another episodic title coming soon, is expected to sell for $20-$25, and feature at least 6 hours of game play. While none of this is official, it is also believed that there will be new episodes every 9-12 months, hence the term "episodic." Half-Life 2 may be heading in the same direction."Ars Technica
February 27, 2006
Live chat on blog entries
Preview of 3Bubbles. "They have created a very easy to integrate Ajax based chat interface that can be added to every blog post automatically. By simply adding a code snippet into the blog template, a link will be included in every post (think comments, trackbacks, and now chat) to open a chat window where readers can debate and discuss the post."
TechCrunch
February 24, 2006
Display art
Makroskop. "The installation consists of a spiral-shaped array of screen-strips on which a continuous collaged image is projected. The image is slowly grinding towards the center of the spiral. There is also sound and as a whole creates a very maelstrom-esque appearance of the piece that is quite beautiful. Apparently, there is also some degree of interactivity which allows one to touch a part of the collage in order make more images from the same context appear, thus rendering it a kind of macroscope for the pool of images."
we make money not art
Smart shopping lists
SmartShopper - the voice-activated shopping list device (or should that be memory assistant). "SmartShopper is an automated grocery shopping list device that will use voice recognition technology to store, and intelligently aggregate lists for shopping and errands, then print the list. According to the company's co-founder Richard G. Brindisi, "the user simply presses a button on the unit and says the name of a grocery item they will need on their next visit to the store. The unit has an LCD and an embedded thermal printer that actually prints the list right out of the unit. The list will be printed according to the categories in the grocery store, i.e. all of the produce items will be listed together, frozen foods together, etc."
gizmag
Audio through the body
New iPod nano uses human skin to transmit audio. "Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) took up the latter approach yesterday by unveiling an iPod nano which communicates with earphones via your body's ability to pump electrical signal. Oh sure, the prototype requires the user to keep a finger pressed to the iPod to close the circuit and there's always risk of a nasty infection after implanting the 10-microwatt/2Mbps chip in your forearm but hey, prototype or not think of the time you'll save not having to untangle your headphone cables every morning. "
Engadget
Digital whiteboards
Polyvision's Thunder. "For about $100,000, Polyvision will turn a bare meeting room into a "Thunder-capable" room. The white board is replaced by a large touch-sensitive screen connected to a series of digital projectors. Sketch ideas with a finger or virtual pen onto an easel, and each resulting page is projected on the screen. Photos and even videos can be added to sketches and pages easily rearranged in a drag-and-drop manner. All that, with none of the chemical stench of dry-erase pens."
Business Week
February 23, 2006
Blogging tools and tagging
Edgeio Edges Toward Launch--and a Clash with E-Commerce Giants?. "The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word "listing" (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the "listing" tag and index them on Edgeio.com."
Business Week
Group voting on media
Video Bomb. "Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the internet: people submit links to the 'Incoming!' page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page."
Video Bomb
Peer-pressured music taste
Your taste in music is shaped by the crowd. "People like a song more when they think other people like it too, a new study suggests. But the interactions between individual and group opinions are so complex that it is impossible to predict whether a good song will be a hit or a flop, according to researchers who asked people to rate the quality of music by unknown bands."New Scientist
Protecting your memories
The Data Fortress. "A spry tipster just pointed us towards the Data Fortress, a steel-encased hard drive that can hold up to 640 GB and is completely fire-, water-, impact-, earthquake-, and ninja-proof. It can withstand heat up up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes and looks like a great way to keep backup data safe and sound in deluge, mudslide, and fire-prone areas."
Gizmodo
Hi-Fi through the power circuit
Music System Taps Wires in Your Walls to Pipe the Sound. "The system pairs a Marantz ZR6001 audio-video receiver with a remote set of speakers and controls called the ZC4001 client. Each component uses AC power lines to send high-frequency signals that the other unit can recognize, so music and remote controls can be added in any room by plugging in a client. The system can handle up to six clients."
New York Times
Mobile e-mail for the masses
Mobile email set to explode. "Mobile email is on the verge of mass adoption, according to industry analysts Datamonitor. A new report from the company claims that there are roughly 650 million corporate email inboxes worldwide today, at least 35 per cent of which could be mobilised. Datamonitor estimates the global addressable market for enterprise mobile email at around 260 million subscriptions, while global mobile operator revenues from mobile email and personal information management are expected to surpass $600m by 2009, over three times those of 2005."
vnunet.com
Personalized clothing
If the shoe fits, print it. "A new manufacturing process looks set to bring mass production to tailor-made shoes that can be built layer by layer from a 3-D footprint. First to benefit will be professional soccer players, who are to be given tailor-printed boots offering more protection. London-based company Prior 2 Lever, launching the system in April, will first scan a player's feet by laser to obtain a digital model."
Reuters.com
Connecting people, places and time
MemoryMiner. "MemoryMiner is a brand new application that represents the first step towards a long term goal: the creation of the world's most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. Like all big ideas, it starts with a simple premise and a mass appeal for participation. MemoryMiner is an application used to organize and share digital media using a simple, yet powerful metaphor, namely "People, Places and Time." "
MemoryMiner
Projection from phones
Digislide’s Digismart. "It's offering a way to project from PDAs, cell-phones and similar devices onto a wall. Unfortunately, without powered illumination you almost need to be in complete darkness to benefit from its display technology."
Lockergnome
February 21, 2006
Podcasting job information
Podcasts reach Peruvian villages. "In Chanta Alta, the podcasts concentrate on cattle-raising husbandry and on dairy production. In nearby Chilete, podcasts are being used to give tips to farmers who have no experience of growing grapes."
BBC NEWS
Using many fingers on a display
Multi-Touch Interaction Research. "Multi-touch sensing enables you to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such system can also accommodate several users simultaneously, which is useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. The sensing technology is force-sensing, and provides high resolution and scalability, allowing for sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users. The drafting table style implementation on the images measures 36"x27", is rear-projected, and has a sensing resolution of ~0.1" at 50Hz. Applications receive events and stroke information using the lightweight OSC protocol over UDP."
we make money not art
Podcasting medical procedures
Podcast From the Heart. "Wheatley, a cardiovascular surgeon at the Arizona Heart Institute in Phoenix, recently launched a podcasting series to educate patients he believes is among the first of its kind. He has produced podcasts, from two minutes to an hour long and contain video and audio content, that keep clinic visitors informed about the procedures they'll undergo and brief them on ways to lead a healthy lifestyle afterward."Wired News
Petabyte storage
World’s first Petabyte storage array. "if your MP3 collection is getting unwieldy, or you have another burgeoning digital archive you just positively need access to at all times, here’s the answer - the world’s largest storage array. Announced last week by information management and storage specialist EMC Corporation, is a new high-end configuration its flagship EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 storage array, which can scale beyond a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. That's it at right - what a ripper heh?"
gizmag
Books suffer more then magazines
Web Readers Hit the Books Less Frequently. "Internet users are more likely to cut back on reading books than to curtail their magazine consumption, according to a recently released survey by Jupiter Research. The finding contradicts the long-held assumption that periodicals are more vulnerable than books to competition from the Internet."
New York Times
More realistic navigation systems
VW and Google team to explore future vehicle navigation systems. "Volkswagen, Google, and graphics chipmaker, nVidia, are working on an in-car navigation map system and display that is 3-dimensional and more realistic than anything currently available. Users will instinctively recognize their location in relation to the surrounding topography, especially in urban areas that are depicted with depth and accurate size relationships between buildings and roads."
gizmag
February 16, 2006
Cameraphone and game intergration
Siemens launches "Kick Real" cameraphone game. "The company's "Kick Real" game provides cameraphone users with a virtual soccer field; point the camera at your foot, and you can kick a virtual ball that you view on the phone's LCD. We can't wait for this to catch on, so we can get our own kicks watching gamers staring into their phones and kicking the air."
Engadget
Trying out every frequency to get a connection
Software-defined radio could unify wireless world. "A device capable of skipping between incompatible wireless standards by tweaking its underlying code has been given the go-ahead for outdoor trials in Ireland. [...] The device can impersonate a multitude of different wireless devices since it uses reconfigurable software to carry out the tasks normally performed by static hardware. "I'm interested in a future where a single device can use every possible frequency," says Linda Doyle, who heads up the CTVR project, which is one of several competing projects worldwide."New Scientist
Smart bathrooms
The Type-A Bathroom. "When Mr. Shenkman answers the speaker-phone in his shower, the water automatically shuts off. He can open the front door for deliveries while shaving. He's also put the finishing touches on a waterproof computer that will let him answer emails from his sauna. "I took Gates a little too literally," he says. "The flow of information never stops.""
WSJ.com
New tools for building web apps
Join the Flex Revolution. "If you are not familiar with it, Flex is a compiled language that allows you to build rich interfaces quickly and easily. Flex apps are written in MXML, but they compile into SWF files. The best thing is that, starting with Flex 2, these SWF files can be deployed just like regular Flash movies. They don't require any special servers. A lot of people like Flex because it lets you build flashy interfaces with transitions and animations and all kinds of fancy stuff. But the real power of flex is not in the eye candy, but in how easy it makes the process of building a rich internet application. It is conceptually simple, easy to get started with, and it delivers incredible results with just a few lines of code."
Hotwired
Keyboard interfaces
Download of the Day: Colibri (not quite yet) Quicksilver for Windows. "The documentation is sparse and it’s got a LOOOONG way to go to justify any kind of legitimate Quicksilver comparison. However, for people with the QS-launcher burned into their muscle memory (like me!) Colibri is a great way to start up programs. Now, can we have append to text, pipe to email/IM/URLs, etc? Pretty please?"
Lifehacker
How should schools handle blogs?
Schools grapple with policing students' online journals. "This winter, teenagers at a Chicago high school used their Xanga websites to post obscene and threatening comments about a teacher, in one case suggesting her neck be "slit like a ... chicken." Last spring, a girl at a different Chicago high school outraged students when she posted derogatory comments about gay marriage and blacks on her Web log. The school district dealt differently with the two situations, defending the girl's freedom of speech in the latter while reportedly disciplining the three teens in the first."csmonitor.com
Finally time for home automation?
Lights. Mood. Video. All at the Touch of a Screen.. "The promise of a remote control home has buzzed around consumers' ears for decades, but never seemed to materialize for mainstream households. Most Americans have had to behold home automation from afar, featured in magazine spreads on televised tours of the homes of the well-heeled. But just as flat-panel television prices have significantly fallen in the last year, so have the costs of putting a home's operations under a fingertip's control, many home automation makers and installers say. Even basic functions — like central control of all of a home's music, movies and television, with atmospheric lighting — now cost hundreds rather than thousands of dollars"
New York Times
Wi-fi remote
Remote for Control Freaks. "With the OpenPeak SimpleRemote you can avoid that pesky USB cable, and simply grab codes and program guides from its mother ship website via WiFi."
Gizmodo
New display technologies
LCoS Display Technology Shootout Part A. "Liquid Crystal on Silicon, LCoS, is a relatively new and obscure display technology that is now making its grand entrance into the HDTV marketplace. What is really impressive is that instead of taking the traditional path of entering at the ground floor with mediocre performance compared to the established technologies and then trying to percolate up to the top tier in picture quality, it is starting out right at the very top. Already, LCoS provides the highest resolutions, the highest non-CRT Contrast Ratios, and the most artifact-free images of any display technology. For people that are sensitive to flicker and eye-fatigue, LCoS operates at the highest refresh rates (120 Hz) for the smoothest, most flicker-free images."
Extreme Tech
Online storage services
The Online Storage Gang. "The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features - effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well."
TechCrunch
Wi-fi portable media devices
WiFi MBridge Coming Soon. "So not only does it play media, but you can also use it for data transfer, chatting with instant messengers and even buying music from online stores. Also lets you connect with online photo services. With a 3.5-inch screen, two USB ports, a high speed USB mini OTG, internal SD card slot and IR port, this little device kind of rocks."
Gizmodo
Using other senses
Brands must come to their senses. "Brands are passing up the chance to establish emotional connections with consumers because they insist on communicating visually, according to sensory communications group Brand Sense Agency. 83% of all commercial communication is visual although 75% of our emotions are influenced by what we smell (there's even a patent project out there that would allow US Army officers to use coded smells to give orders), while there is a 65% chance our mood would change when we hear a new sound (given the irritating soundtrack of their website, i feel that the agency should work harder on the sound concept.)"
we make money not art
February 15, 2006
Learning music composition
Harmony Line Music. "Hyperscore is the first and only software application that teaches students the essentials of music composition, without having to engage in years of music theory training."
MIT
Meetings in virtual worlds
Avatars Among Us. "In exchange for insights on the concept of the dynamic knowledge repository, audience members watched a speech delivered by a gray-haired, suit-and-tie clad avatar bearing a more than passable resemblance to the man best known for inventing the computer mouse. The talk, held at a virtual locale known as Democracy Island in the multiplayer online world Second Life, drew a less realistic audience. Some in the crowd weren't even human, sporting features like antennae, fur and wings."
Wired News
Better QR Codes
Color Barcodes in TV commercials and DVD contents?. "ColorCodes can be read by camera phones from farther away (than QR codes.) So, the company intends to leverage this feature to promote the use of ColorCodes in television and commercials and DVDs. "Viewers will be able to simply point their camera phones at the screen to capture the codes and get directed to Internet sites where they can purchase goods or learn more about the programs they are watching.""
RFID in Japan
Tourism podcasts
iWalks Rolling Out in Dublin. "The Official Online Tourist Office for Dublin has begun publishing free podcast audio guides that tell the story of Dublin. The guides are written and narrated by Irish historian-author Pat Liddy. Each talk will have a downloadable brochure. Talks and brochures can be downloaded from the tourism website."
Smart Mobs
February 14, 2006
Transparent displays
Researchers developing transparent OLEDs. "esearchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on the next generation of OLED technology, including the ability to create displays that can become completely transparent and be turned on and off at will. Uses envisioned for the displays include OLED overlays on top of LCDs that could be used to display specific information without interfering with the main picture and automobile windshields with built-in displays that can display information as needed and turn off when not in use. Of course, what we really want is a transparent window that turns into an HD display when we flick a switch, but that may just be a little too much to ask for at this point."
Engadget
Asynchronous video messages
"Good Morning" pillows for distant families. "Scenario: Living in San Francisco, Martha glances at her CASY picture frame, showing the portraits of her grandchildren. She decides to leave video messages to Maya and Aden. She touches Maya’s portrait and records a "good morning" message that Maya, who is currently asleep in Amsterdam, will find when she wakes up."
we make money not art
Smart magnets
Fridge magnets tinker with poetry. "Each fridge magnet consists of 16-character liquid crystal display, rather than a magnetic strip with a printed word, Proske says. The magnets can randomly generate a word, categorise that word (as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb) and transmit the category to any words they are placed next to. As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using. Once they are 'trained', the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don't fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function. "
ABC
Sharing running routes
Exersize routes at WalkJogRun. "WalkJogRun is a site where you can plan and share your walking, jogging or running routes. It uses Google Earth to plan routes and calculate distance, but what really makes WalkJogRun cool is its community features. You can save your maps by clicking on any of your markers and hit “Save Your Route” to add it to the database. Next time you or anyone else looking in your neighborhood is looking for a route, they will see your pin."
Lifehacker
Browser thumbnails
Download of the Day: Reveal. "Firefox extension Reveal creates thumbnails of your tabbed pages, allowing you to select, reorder, or even sort through pages in the session history. Pressing F2 will bring up your thumbs, at which point you can even search through them with a Find feature. Beyond that, Reveal shows thumbnails of your page history if you rest your mouse over the Back and Forward buttons, and allows you to zoom in on the page you’re visiting with a triple click."
Lifehacker
Phones that look like cameras
New Pics of Samsung 7.7 MP phone. "We told you all about Samsung’s crazy-ass 7.7 megapixel cameraphone with optical zoom, but now we have a proper pic. So here it is in all its glory. Also includes DMB TV reception, TV-output, landscape view, MP3 audio playback, and microSD memory card storage."
Gizmodo
February 13, 2006
VOIP party line
RadioHandi(TM) Beta - The Party Line for Planet Earth. "Welcome to RadioHandi, the party line for Planet Earth. This breakthrough service, built from the ground up around open standards telephony and instant messaging technology, will enable people around the world to create voice communities about any subject, location or peer group, all for the cost of a local phone call. With it, people can post messages and engage in live group conversations with people calling in from fixed, mobile and VoIP phones from around the world."
RadioHandi
Reminders by RSS
ReminderFeed - Your RSS Reminder Service. "ReminderFeed is a FREE reminder service that delivers reminder messages right to your feed reader. Simply fill out the form, then use the subscribe buttons."
ReminderFeed
Mapping trash
GarbageScout. "If you like to snoop around garbage and dig up something good, snap a picture of it with your camera phone, add a description location and email it to GarbageScout. It will be added on a Yahoo Maps for others to go and fetch it (treasures include so far: a rowing machine, a mirror, candy canes an electric heater, etc)."
we make money not art
Playing with music
Otoizm: Yo-Yo, Pet and Music Player in One. "Want a new pet that listens to your favorite music and dances with you? Meet Otoizmu (or Otoizm) from Konami. You connect this 2.2-inch yo-yo-like device to your music player and a character inside will start growing according to the genre of music you listen to. Not only does it grow by listening to your music, but it memorizes phrases and composes tunes that you can listen to. Meet up with a friend who also owns an Otoizm and the two will have a dancing session. Or, you can record your friend’s voice and a new character—Kotobaizm—appears to play with you."
Gizmodo
Gender and age facts in gaming
BBC report on UK gamers from 6-65. "BBC Creative Research and Development have just released a stellar research report on gamers' habits in the UK -- how people from six to 65 play, what they play, why they play, and how they got to playing. It's a real eye-opener -- and chock full of stats-candy in sweet charts. Contrary to popular belief, the gender split between gamers is fairly even across all age groups. Although female gamers never overtake their male counterpart, the figures are particularly even in the youngest and oldest gaming groups. Between the ages of 16-35 the ratio of males to females is slightly higher, but the stereotype of a large gender gap in gamers - in any age group - is untrue."
Boing Boing
Tackling childhood obesity with computer games
West Virginia fully adopts Dance Dance Revolution fitness program. "Not even the first time we've seen it done, but you've got to give it up for Charleston, West Virginia -- a state heralded for its rampant obesity problem -- which went from study to practice in using Dance Dance Revolution to work that body. Last year 85 kids participated in a survey that used Dance Dance Revolution and diet changes to shed excess poundage, which apparently also went to the heads of the school administration of the state, since started a pilot program and are now rolling DDR out to all of West VA's 157 middle schools, in addition to another 753 public schools expecting it in the next three years."
Engadget
Terrestrial TV on a phone
Hitachi TV Phone. "One-segment broadcasting is a service that allows you to watch terrestrial digital broadcasts from mobile phones and other devices. It will be available in Japan starting April 1. And Hitachi has produced a mobile phone to capitalize on this, it’s the W41H, and will be supplied by au. It has a 2.7-inch LCD display that can be twisted around and folded over. This is called "view style" and when it is placed on the charging stand, the one-segment TV tuner starts automatically."
Gizmodo
February 10, 2006
Users dealing with DRM
The Year of Living DRMishly. "This year may be the year that gadget makers finally conquer the living room, replacing DVD players, VCRs and personal video recorders with all-in-one media devices that serve up HDTV, pre-recorded movies and digital music. If so, it will likely also be the year that people learn the meaning of DRM, an acronym the industry says stands for digital rights management, but critics say should stand for digital restrictions mongering."Wired News
Things to do with cellphone bandwidth
Phones Above and Beyond the Call. "The latest mobile devices aren't just conversation pieces. Check out the high-tech multimedia and communications functions they offer. Wireless carriers have spent billions of dollars upgrading networks so customers can use cell phones for a variety of services beyond phoning home and shooting text messages to friends. The payback has been slow in coming, and most people still use their handsets mainly for making calls. In the U.S., data accounts for only about 6% of overall wireless-service sales. Service providers, equipment vendors, and other companies are eager to change that. "
Business Week
Getting access to a book before it's finished
Roughcuts: Read tech books as they're being written. "'Reilly and Associates, my all-time favorite tech-book publisher, has just launched Roughcuts, a service that sells you access to tech books as they are being written; once the book is done, you get a copy of it, too. This is an amazing idea: many of O'Reilly's books cover brand-new technical ideas for which little or no documentation exists; putting even rough editions of their material into readers' hands while it's being finalized is a brilliant way to extend and increase the value of O'Reilly's titles."
Boing Boing
Printed codes that can "store" megabytes
New 3D Barcode able to Store Videos for Mobile Devices. "Content Idea of Asia Co. has developed a printable 3D code that can store between 0.6 to 1.8 MB, enough for watching short video commercials on mobile phones. The 3D code is based on the 2D QR Code [...]. Content Idea of Asia Co. calls it PM Code. The PM code consists of up to 24 layers using different colors. A usage example is for instance to watch a commercial on a mobile phone scanned from a perfume ad in a magazine. "
I4U News
More and more megapixels
The world’s first 39 megapixel digital SLR camera. "Hasselblad is creating a new standard of digital image quality for professional photographers with the announcement of a new camera and three camera backs based on the combination of Hasselblad’s new, true 39 megapixel CCD sensor and its unique Digital APO Correction (DAC) technology."
gizmag
How marriage changes web surfing
The Finger on the Keyboard Wears a Ring. "Married women are about a third more likely than single women to use the Internet at least occasionally. For men, marriage contributes roughly half as large a bounce in online rates, according to a recent study of gender differences in Internet use conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow with the project, said that parenthood explains some of the increase; the same report found that parents of children under 18 were a third more likely to be online than people with older children or none. Also, married women tend to have higher household incomes than single women. "Being married has economic advantages," Ms. Fallows said. "The higher your income, the more likely you are to be online.""
New York Times
February 09, 2006
The Millennial Generation
A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target. "The eldest of the millennials, as those born between 1980 and 2000 are sometimes called, are now in their early to mid-20's. By 2010, they will outnumber both baby boomers and Gen-X'ers among those 18 to 49 - the crucial consumers for all kinds of businesses, from automakers and clothing companies to Hollywood, record labels and the news media. The number of vehicles through which young people find entertainment and information (and one another) makes them a moving target for anyone hoping to capture their attention."
New York Times
VOIP home phones with features
VoIP Videophone from Philips. "As far as features go, the VP-5500 comes with a built-in VGA camera that rotates up to 240 degrees, letting you check yourself out as you chat with a friend. Not only that, but you can hook it up to a TV and have it output a slideshow of all the photos you’ve taken. To make it future-proof, Philips designed the phone to be updatable via Wi-Fi, opening up all sorts of neat, Linux-powered possibilities."
Gizmodo
February 08, 2006
Blogs for lists of stuff
junklog. "Welcome to junklog! It's a site for logging and rating what you've read, watched, listened to and played."Junklog
Stickies on websites
Bookmarking with sticky notes. "To put it simply, Mystickies allows you to place little yellow squares of digital paper anywhere and everywhere you feel like in the whole wide web. Along with the ability to put sticky notes on webpages mystickies offers a powerfull interface to browse, search, sort, edit and generally have a wonderfull time with your sticky notes from any computer that has internet access."
Lifehacker
Remembering where you were
Download of the Day: Page Bookmarks. "Firefox extension Page Bookmarks adds an entry to the right-click context menu that allows you to save your place on a long text document so that next time you open that page, you can pick up reading right where you left off."
Lifehacker
Outsourcing your homework
Students Using Rent-A-Coder.com to Outsource Programming Homework. "For years people have been using the Internet to buy up pre-written essays and term papers on various topics. Before that, many term papers services advertised in print publications like Rolling Stone. But outsourcing your actual homework to India? Turns out the popular coding-for-hire website, Rent A Coder has a bunch of homework bidding going on if you search on the term “homework.”"Real Tech News
Cellphone becoming your music player
Yamaha's Mobile Phone Stereo System. "Chaku-uta furu (“receive music full”)—mobile phones in Japan are used for playing real music and have become a competitor to the iPod and its ilk. Yamaha is capitalizing on this trend with a compact speaker system (NX-A01) and a Bluetooth receiver unit (TRX-RO1BT) in cooperation with the mobile phone provider au. This cubic form speaker is white (3.3x 4.6x 3.3 in.) and the wireless receiver is black (1.7x 1.8x 1.7 in.) and together they give you decent sound quality from a mobile phone."
Gizmodo
Another new display technology
Latest Display Technology: SED. "The next big thing is called Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, or SED for short. Basically it combines the terrific contrast, responsiveness and sharpness of conventional CRT monitors with the power efficiency, size, and thickness of LCDs or Plasmas. Like any new display technology, it will probably cost an arm and a leg."
Gizmodo
Wi-fi slow to take off (in the UK)
Wi-fi slow to enthuse consumers. "According to a survey for electronics giant Toshiba, only a handful of people use a laptop to go online when they are outside of the home. Just 11% used laptops in hotels, 7% on trains and 3% in coffee shops, compared to 55% who used them mostly at home. There are over 10,000 wi-fi hotspots in the UK but not everyone is aware of them. The survey found that 15% thought there were not enough wireless locations for them to use the technology."
BBC NEWS
Digital book clubs
Book Clubs Get the Message by Reading Online. "E-mail book clubs are part of the nightmare scenario that book publishers envisioned starting five years ago, when major universities and other interests began making entire books available on the Internet."EWeek
Wireless displays
The Wireless VGA Extender eliminates some other wires too. "Every fanboy has a diagram stashed somewhere detailing some level of wire-free desktop nirvana, but if only he could eliminate that pesky VGA cable (and those annoying power cables, still working on that one) then he would be truly happy. Well the Wireless VGA Extender is here to help, and not only does it take your VGA signal wireless, up to a 1024x768 resolution, but it can transmit your PS/2 plugs for a keyboard and mouse, and an audio jack across the room with it."
Engadget
Participatory film making
This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans. "as the Beastie Boys set out to commemorate a concert at Madison Square Garden, the hip-hop group had a different idea. Why not smash the model? They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory. The result of this brainstorm is "Awesome ... ,"
New York Times
3D avatars on phones
Meet the New Breed of Avatars. "Ring tones, shmingtones. The next wave in cool applications for mobile phones promises to be 3-D animated avatars that serve as your alter-ego during a conversation. Think beyond the cartoony stand-ins available now in Asian markets, like those in Japan known as Chara-den, which users control via handset keypads."
Business Week
3G taking off (finally)?
Advanced 3G mobile phones gain momentum in Asia. "At the end of December, 47.7 percent of Japan's 90 million mobile users were on 3G networks. KDDI Corp., the country's second-largest mobile operator, has led the trend with about 95 percent of its customers on 3G, while No. 1 NTT DoCoMo Inc. ended the month with 40 percent of its 50.4 million customers on its 3G network. In South Korea, the dominant mobile operator SK Telecom Co. Ltd. has also signed up about 40 percent of its customers to its 3G network."Reuters.com
February 07, 2006
Toys that communicate over a distance
Dolls communication. "PlayPals are wireless figurines with their electronic accessories that allow children aged 5-8 to communicate between remote locations. When a child at one location moves one doll’s hands, the remote synchronized doll moves its hands in the same way. The dolls alone communicate only by gestures. Each child has a set of tokens that are used as the dolls’ accessories. When a token is placed in a doll’s hands, it functions as a different communicating tool: adding a “walkie-talkie” token to the doll, enables synchronous voice communication, a microphone for asynchronous is used for voice communication, a video camera for synchronous audio-visual communication, a digital camera for asynchronous visual communication, etc."
we make money not art
P2P Tivo
Download of the Day: Ted. "Ted (torrent episode downloader) keeps track of torrents of your favorite TV shows and automatically downloads them for you whenever a new episode is available. When ted finds a new episode, it will announce this to you by a little balloon in your system tray. Then ted will fire up your favourite bittorrent client and your client will start downloading the episode."
Lifehacker
High-convergence objects
Battle Of The Bulge: Future Phone. "Imagine a device that unites everything that you carry along: a mobile phone, a player, your credit and discount cards, your apartment and your car keys."
PSFK
All that matters is the feed
FeedXS - RSS for Everyone. "The idea is to allow anyone to publish an RSS feed. Skip the blog. Go right to a feed, perhaps as a replacement to email to distribute personal news about yourself. The company feed is here, for instance. It’s more of an administrative interface and the content is designed to be read via the actual feed only. The publishing interface has a few formatting helpers but is in need of an overhaul. But there is something really unique here - you can publish directly from MSN messenger. Once you are registered on the site you simply add “msn@feedxs.com” as a contact. You have to authenticate yourself (log in) the first time, and after that publishing is very easy."
TechCrunch
Ads on your phone
Mobile carriers to test out tiny ads for tiny screens. "Well, it was inevitable really, but get ready for a whole new world of phone based advertisement. Verizon and Sprint Nextel are tiptoeing around the idea of opt in video ads, with plans to test the functionality in March but fears of upsetting consumers, while ESPN is jumping into the fray with Visa, Nike, and Hilton Hotels all lined up to provide video ads to accompany their service."
Engadget
Alternative forms for the remote control
Remote Control Beads Could Be TV Future. Or not.. "Imagine, instead of holding a remote control to surf channels, you have a set of beads. Each bead is embedded with a different set of instructions for controlling your TV. The concept is called Remobeads and its designed by Dima Komissarov. As you can see, it would certainly look better in the living room than all those nasty black remotes. All you have to do is slightly press the bead to change a channel, and you can even add sound "
Gizmodo
Overview of digital television
Digital Television, Part I: Making Sense of it all. "First, prepare yourself for a pig’s breakfast of acronyms son, there’s just no way around it: DAB, T-DMB, DVB-T, DVB-H, ATSC, and ISDB-T. At least these are the tastiest of the morsels under global mastication. Come on, don’t sweat it, you managed PCMCIA didn’t you, and that’s six whole letters! Besides, you really only need to learn the couple selected by the country you call home to effectively talk down to your local hi tech sales goon, mkay? So do join us as we take an extensive, in-depth look at what's really going on with the world of digital television."
Engadget
Boosting storage densities
Perpendicular storage coming in 2006. "This month Seagate is letting the perpendicular storage dogs loose. Today they have announced the release of the first perpendicular storage products designed for end users. The Momentus 5400.3 is the first notebook hard drive to use the technology, and offers 160GB of storage in the same amount of space as previous 120GB options—a boost of over 30 percent, offering 132 Gbits per square inch."Ars Technica
Cheap color calibration
Pantone hopes to make calibration mainstream with $89 huey. "Pantone hopes to bring the calibration experience to mainstream consumers, with the huey, an $89 device that the company says is targeted at "digital photo enthusiasts, gamers and any computer user wanting absolute color and clarity.""
Engadget
Send a digital camera through the mail (concept)
Snap & Send Postcard Camera. "A Kiwi industrial design student has 'created' a disposable digital camera that is so light and inexpensive it can be sent in the mail as a postcard. The camera will have a screen that allows the recipients to watch a slide show of the pics you send. You could go on holiday, take a dozen snaps, stick it in the mail and your loved ones can see what you got up to on your last visit to Vegas!"
PSFK
February 06, 2006
Random file swapping
Swap random files for fun. "File-swap.com is meant to be fun. It acts as a big black box. You put in one file and you will receive a different file in exchange which someone swaped earlier. If many users swap cool files many other users recieve cool files."
Lifehacker
RFID cooking
RFID Cooking. "VistaCrafts RFIQin, available in Japan, comes with 24 recipe cards. The pan reads the card you show and "tells" the cooktop what to do 16 times a second to perfectly monitor each cooking step and perfectly reproduce the most difficult recipes. Each pan handle is embedded with an RFID chip that uses a proprietary signal to communicate with coordinated chips in the cooktop and special recipe cards that monitor each cooking step for a partcular dish."
we make money not art
Games in the classroom
Computer games 'motivate pupils'. "A third of teachers are using computer games in the classroom and a majority believe they improve pupils' skills and knowledge, a survey suggests. The survey of 1,000 teachers in England and Wales suggests a quarter also personally use them in their free time. Over half of the 1000 teachers questioned by Nesta Futurelab said they would use them in future and believed they were a "good motivational tool". But two thirds expressed concerns they could lead to anti-social behaviour. "
BBC NEWS
Voice-commanded entertainment
The VOCO Voice Commander "personal voice assistant". "If you're ready to enter that snazz 21st century we keep on hearing about and start using your voice to control your entertainment, VOCO has your back with their handheld "personal voice assistant," the VOCO Voice Commander. When bundled with a Vzone player, which can hook up to a stereo, you create a "Vzone" which can pump out the music you request with your Voice Commander, Sonos style. You can also get news, stocks, and sports info on your screen, with everything flowing over WiFi. You could of course be boring and just use the buttons to get the same results about twice as fast, but what's the fun in that?"
Engadget
Online fitness equipment
Turn your living room into the Tour de France. "FitCentric (fitcentric.com), a California firm, has sold Web racing software for stationary bikes, treadmills, and other machines as well. Their NetAthlon software uses video-game technology to re-create such real-world courses as Olympic venues and Boston's Head of the Charles. Hooked up to a big-screen TV, you can sense everything but the wind in your hair. In the coming weeks, the company plans to release a new system that will retrofit any piece of fitness equipment, bringing the technology to a much wider audience. It will retail for $169.95."
csmonitor.com
Podcast anything
Turn your feed into a podcast. "The podcast uses one of those text-to-speech engines that are popular among the fitter, happier, and more productive crowd. You can listen to the podcast in a streaming flash player, or you can subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed. Feed2Cast is a very cool way to get started in the podcasting world without all that pesky talking."
Lifehacker
HUGE, interactive screens
Panasonic Digital Wall (Total Recall Pt. 1). "In the special presentation room is a wall-size, huge screen (twice the size of a 110-inch display), and it’s a touchscreen. The images on the screen change as you touch them (it’s online, of course), and you can choose from an extensive menu of options and tools. It functions not only as a TV and PC, but also as interior decoration by changing the image from a bookshelf for the living room to a graffiti space for the kids’ room. It is supposed to appear on the market around 2010 and the price will be horrendous."
Gizmodo
Getting rid of reference material from papers
Papers Begin To Lose Financial Pages. "The Chicago Tribune has announced that it will stop printing its stock agate (or stock market pages) because its readers are going online for that information. There will still be a summary on Saturday and the 'top movers' will be reported daily."PSFK
Smart kitchens
The Kitchen of the Future. "You are at the office and decide to invite friends over for dinner that night. What's for dinner? Just pick up the phone and call home. Your kitchen can give you a heads up on what foods you have in the refrigerator and pantry, suggest menus that use some of those foods, and once you've selected the menu, it will supply a grocery list for other items you need to pick up. Use the same call to leave a message for your spouse to put some wine in the refrigerator to chill."
gizmag
The challenges of home networking
Network Babel in the Living Room. "The dream, as described at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, is to allow devices like TVs, computers and audio receivers to share audio and video around the home, with a single remote control running the show. But where some see the industry awakening to a bright new future, others see an ongoing interoperability nightmare. "The Japanese still do not understand networking," said one senior engineer employed by a major Japanese electronics maker, citing a litany of obstacles to digital nirvana -- from a lack of technology standards to tunnel vision exhibited by separate divisions within a single company."
Wired News
February 02, 2006
More online word processing
Zoho Writer online word processor. "Web service Zoho Writer is an online word processor that edits, stores and shares your documents from anywhere. Import your existing Microsoft Word or OpenOffice documents and start editing using an impressive WYSIWYG editor. Zoho Writer saves multiple versions of your document, and generates PDF, HTML and DOC files from it. Tag Zoho documents and share with a link (instead of a pesky document email attachment). "
Lifehacker
Adding charts to your blog
Chart your progress with Bellygraph. "Web site Bellygraph creates line charts that track your progress on a goal or task and lets you publish them to your web site."
Lifehacker
Finding photos of yourself
Photo Search In 2006 - Face Recognition Has Arrived!. "Competing with Photobucket and Flickr, is the new start-up Riya. One step ahead of its rivals - Riya has developed face and text recognition technology that it applies to photo search. You can identify people in your photos through the Riya software and also track every photo of yourself on the web! "
PSFK
In-context chat rooms
Let's Chatsum. "Chatsum is a Firefox extension that lets you chat and leave messages on any website for other Chatsum users to see and interact with. The Chatsum sidebar houses a fully-fledged chatroom, specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes automagically. If you open a page in a new tab, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re viewing."
we make money not art
Losing a love of music
Downloads, iPods make music more 'disposable'. "In the 19th century, music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near-mystical powers of human communication... Because so much music of different styles and genres is now so widely available via portable MP3 players and the internet, it is arguable that people now actively use music in everyday listening contexts to a much greater extent than hitherto. However, the degree of accessibility and choice has arguably led to a rather passive attitude towards music heard in everyday life: the present results indicate that music was rarely the focus of participants' concerns and was, instead, something that seemed to be taken rather for granted, a product that was to be consumed during the achievement of other goals"The Register
Digital binoculars
Sightwave's Digiviewer digital binoculars. "Binocular manufacturers are tacking digital cameras onto their products left and right, but the Sightwave Digiviewer is the first product that we've seen to use a CCD and LCD as the actual mechanisms for magnified viewing (but not capturing pics). Although the internal screen could use a bump in resolution, being able to zoom in and out like a digicam seems like quite a useful feature, and cushioned eye opening felt better than most traditional models we've used."
Engadget
Mapping sounds
NYSoundmap. "What kinds of sounds can you find in New York City? With sound-seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for sounds with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps. Click on hot spots to listen to the recorded sounds of a location pin-pointed by GPS. Sound-seeker was created using GoogleMaps and isn't viewable in all browsers."
networked_performance
Sharing and charging for video
Google Video store launches. "Looks like many episodes are priced at $1.99 and can be viewed with the Google Video Player. Now users who submitted videos via Google’s Upload program can charge viewers through the Video Store, and non-copy-protected content can be put on your iPod or PSP using the “to go” option."
Lifehacker
Exclusive video on phones
2006 when TV capitalizes on mobile phones. "Now in 2005 we've seen first signs of real innovations - you have to see MTV's Head and Shoulders to really "get it" - what we can do and what can really sell - on mobile TV. When Robbie Williams promoted his new CD, he had his concert simulcast to 3G phones. At the MTV Europe Awards the mobile MTV channel went back stage and shot exclusive footage that was only seen on mobile phones. At Big Brother houses around Europe it is now commonplace to have exclusive cameras - and latest innovation from Finland this Autumn, exclusive microphones - that viewers of the show can get more through their 3G phones."Communities Dominate Brands
Audio guidebook popularity
The death of the guidebook?. "Is this the end for the guidebook? Publishers are reporting huge demand for their newly launched 'podcasts' - audio guides to foreign destinations which you download from the internet onto your iPod or MP3 player. Lonely Planet, which released its first podcast three months ago, claims that one of its audio guides proved so popular that it reached number 12 in the download chart, beating a single from Madonna."
Guardian Unlimited
E-Ink displays in consumer devices
Weather Wizard e-ink forecaster. "Ambient Devices and E Ink have teamed up to deliver a weather forecaster, called the Weather Wizard, which displays info from Ambient's nationwide network on a low-power electronic ink display. You may remember Ambient as the company that manufactures devices like the Orb, which glow with different colors correlated to predetermined metrics (stock market, national terror level, our stress levels at CES). The Weather Wizard reportedly lasts for an impressive two years with just a pair of AAA batteries, although the E Ink display seems capable of only lackluster graphics."
Engadget
Music downloads
Music downloads growing faster than reported. "The week between Christmas and New Year's saw a record-breaking 20 million songs downloaded through services like iTunes and Rhapsody (single tracks only, mind you, but more on that in a moment), which brought up the full-year totals to 352 million songs downloaded. That's a very healthy 149 percent increase over last year's 141 million. Meanwhile, CD sales huffed and puffed their way to 620 million units sold, down 7.2 percent from 666 million (no, really) in 2004."Ars Technica
Shared museum tours
Marking Your Way for Ubiquitous Gaming. "Marking Your Way, by Idumi Sakuma, is a visual information display for museums and exhibition spaces, which allows users to view personal as well as collective trajectories of visitors. [...] Visitors use a personal device called wall stone that automatically detects its location by receiving beacons from hundreds of infrared devices mounted on the ceiling. [...] On its small LED display is a virtual creature "digi-mon" that asks questions to visitors when they are in front of certain exhibition items. Visitors then answer questions by tilting and shaking it. If their answers are right, the device glows. The rewards are digi-mon cards - cool. "
we make money not art
February 01, 2006
Blogs as a shopping resource
Toshiba to Push Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers. "There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product. The data the service returns? From blogs. Yep, Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed."
TechCrunch
Clickable text adventure
Clink. "The story line of Clink, which begins with you standing on your own front porch, is gradually revealed as players "literally" move around by clicking on words within the story. While there is a definite beginning, middle, and dramatic ending to the game, every person who plays Clink will have a unique experience because there is no pre-determined sequence of navigation. The story is constructed in a way to allow a smooth continuity of content, regardless of the order it is encountered."
networked_performance
Cheap VR
In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually. ""V.R.'s original promise, to construct a ghostly realm where consciousness could roam free of the constraints of flesh, became socially obsolete." But there was a bigger, more concrete problem: while cellphones with all the whistles cost as little as $99, virtual reality environments, like medium-priced New York condos, could set you back about $1.5 million. Until now. Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices."
New York Times
Business blogs
Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. "This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products. The navigation sidebar to the right lists all the Fortune 500 companies. If a company name has a solid underline, it means that some information has already been entered on it, perhaps discussing web efforts that don't seem to be proper blogs. If it's dashed, it means that it's a blank page awaiting your input!"Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
Multimedia messaging growing in popularity
Mobile users finally get the picture. "Over the past 12 months MMS usage levels have increased most among the 18-34 age group, and doubled in all age groups above 34 years old. Around 33 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women now use the medium to send and share pictures. Men are bigger users of the mobile internet, however, at 38 per cent compared to 26 per cent of women."
vnunet.com
January 31, 2006
Sharing barcodes visually
Ringtone garments. "Industrial designer Christopher Glaister and fashion designer Michelle Shakallis's barcode textiles are decorated by a pattern that translates a piece of music (When the Saints Go Marching In) into a barcode. The pattern can be turned back into real music or a ring tone by scanning it with a modified camera phone. The tune can then be used as the ringtone for that mobile phone."
we make money not art
Displays in everything
A-Data SD cards with capacity display. "The LC display uses power from a host while inserted and indicates the remaining capacity on the card. Pop the card out and the display retains the information until you reinsert it, so you can manage your data needs."
Engadget
Webcams in motion
SatuGO: 3 megapixel camera in a ball concept...yeah, it's bouncy. "The 3 megapixel camera has a timer for delayed snaps and built-in accelerometer allowing it to sense bounces, max altitude, and such for capturing a variety of unusual shots or recordings. The camera, battery, 1GB of memory and diodes (for flash photography) are housed in a rugged, rubber-wrapped casing for protection while being tossed about. It can also double-up as a webcam for those more restful moments."
Engadget
Game ads better then TV ads to get to teens
Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game. "Two main avenues are open for advertising through games: in-game advertising and advergaming. The former is an extension of the product placement common in movies and television, and can range from graphical representation of a product in a game to wholesale sponsorship of a gaming title. With the increase in open-ended gaming that allows a player to wander around a virtual world (such as the Sims or Grand Theft Auto), opportunities for product placement are numerous. Advergaming refers to a game, usually online, that is wholly intended as a promotional device."Boing Boing
Citizen journalism
Citizen Journalism In Africa. "One of the dubiously nice things about living in Africa is that you’re never short of a news story or two. This might explain why home grown journalism is taking off in a huge way. So much so that Johnnic, one of the largest local media groups (they publish the Sunday Times and Sowetan), are launching their own citizen written online newspaper www.reporter.co.za. The site, which launches next week from what I can gather, is edited by a fulltime editorial team and there is the added novelty that those with articles that get selected get paid… Not that anyone will be giving up their day jobs just yet as it is the equivalent of about 3 pound a story."
PSFK
Digital board games
Video games meet board games with the Entertaible. "While we all love video games, sometimes there are moments when you want to get a little more analogue. Philips are clearly banking on our secret board game urges with a new product called the Entertaible, an electronic tabletop device which will apparently let you enjoy both the interactivity of electronic games and the social aspects of board games."
Joystiq
Media PCs redefining PC shape
Kapsel Media Center ceramic PC with Intel Viiv. "This tiny (10.6 x 9.1 x 3.0-inches) ceramic shelled PC can be positioned horizontally, vertically, or hung on the wall and throws down 7.1 surround and hi-def video playback. Expect this and other Viiv-centric media centers to ship first quarter 2006, price not yet disclosed."
Engadget
Websites publishing paper versions
Call It Gutenberg's Revenge. "When babycenter.com was born in 1997, the parenting e-zine reveled in the cost savings to be found in cyberspace. No postage rates or paper bills to worry about. Ink? So yesterday. So it comes as quite a surprise that eight years later, at a time when the magazine industry is falling over itself to boost its presence online, that BabyCenter has launched a version of its popular Web site on -- gasp -- paper."Business Week
January 30, 2006
It looks like this
The Retrievr Flickr Tool. "Retrievr has a Flash sketch pad built into the site. Draw something - anything - and it will fetch Flickr images that are similar. My very rough drawing of a black line intersecting with a red blog brought up some nice results (see image)."
TechCrunch
Peer-to-peer file sharing built into the browser
AllPeers Is The FireFox “Killer App”. "AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files - If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive. AllPeers will work even when the sharer is offline - AllPeers is a bittorent client, and will allow files to be pulled from multiple sources. When downloading, the file may be grabbed partially or fully from others you have shared it with (or who shared it with you). So a user just clicks on a file, and waits for it to eventually download."
TechCrunch
Collaborative bargain hunting
Find a Deal with Clipfire.. "I like Clipfire , which allows users to submit ecommerce deals, and other members can vote the best deals to the top of the site, and add appropriate metadata, like tags, to the links."
TechCrunch
Cameras with multiple lenses
Kodak's Latest CES Goodies. "Kodak will be debuting the world’s first dual-lens digital still camera, the EasyShare V570. Why two lenses? The real question is, why not? One lens is a 23mm ultra wide angle lens and the other is a traditional 3x optical lens."
Gizmodo
Using the web to cut out the realtor
Owners' Web Site Gives Realtors Run for Money. "Ms. Miller, 38, a former social worker who favors fuzzy slippers, and her cousin, Mary Clare Murphy, 51, operate what real estate professionals believe to be the largest for-sale-by-owner Web site in the country. They have turned Madison, a city of 208,000 known for its liberal politics, into one of the most active for-sale-by-owner markets in the country. And their success suggests that, in challenging the Realtor association's dominance of home sales, they may have hit on a winning formula that has eluded many other upstarts. Their site, FsboMadison.com (pronounced FIZZ-boh) holds a nearly 20 percent share of the Dane County market for residential real estate listings. "
New York Times
On-the-fly translation
The Ajax Language Translator. "I saw Joel Parish’s Ajax Translator on Ajaxian last week. It’s an on-the-fly Ajax application that creates real-time translations between English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and French. Very slick. Ajax Translator, like Babel Fish, is useful for crude communication that translates one word at a time or that has the same grammatical structure in both language, but it does not allow for grammatical inconsistencies."
TechCrunch
Convergence in the home? Finally?
Data, Music, Video: Raising a Curtain on Future Gadgetry. "For more than a decade, manufacturers of consumer electronics like televisions and audio gear have talked about blending their products with personal computers, so that consumers can enjoy a seamless stream of data, video and music anywhere. It has not happened, because the two industries do not have compatible technology standards and the requisite high-speed Internet connections have not been widespread enough."
New York Times
Aternatives to credit cards for online shopping
Big Plastic's Online Challenger. "Marino is making progress at creating another option. He runs a 150-person outfit called I4 Commerce, whose Bill Me Later payment system is catching on with online merchants and shoppers. Some million consumers have used his alternative, which permits them to shop online without providing credit card numbers or filling out lengthy applications, at 230 e-commerce sites including Wal-Mart, Priceline, Overstock.com, Expedia's Hotels.com and airlines such as American and Continental."Business Week
January 27, 2006
Cameraphone --> Scan, copy, fax
Turn Your Camera Phone Into A Mobile Scanner. "scanR is simple to use: • Take a picture of a document or whiteboard. • Send the picture to scanR. • Receive the scanned image in email or fax."
scanR
RSS over Instant Messenger
The MAKEbot is here!. "The MAKEbot is a AIM/iChat buddy you add to your list. When you type latest, he will give you the latest headlines from Makezine.com. You can type subscribe 1 and he'll deliver the latest news each hour, lastly - if you type keywords like psp, welding, ipod or whatever he'll search the Makezine.com site and pages from MAKE and give you a link from our search engine to help you find what you're looking for"
MAKE
Community security cameras on TV
London estate broadband offers 'spot the ASBO suspect' TV channel. "Alongside video on demand TV services from Homechoice, the SDB will offer a "Community Safety Channel" which will allow residents "to monitor estate CCTV cameras from their own living rooms, view a 'Usual Suspects' ASBO line up, and receive live community safety alerts. [ASBOs are a way of tackling persistent anti-social behaviour]"The Register
Pushing scrolling
The Mile Wall. "Travis aims to build the internet’s longest page. The page will stretch for 1 mile ( 1.6 km ) horizontally and be made entirely of public posted material. It will be the first, or at least one of the first, pages to go entirely horizontal for such an incredible distance."
Smart Mobs
Fast/Short games for busy lives
Games accelerating for faster-paced lives. ""In today's world, if there's a new entertainment experience, it's got to be quick to learn and quick to play," he said. Tait said Cranium is coming out with a DVD version of its Hullabaloo game that will be in stores in 2006. Hullabaloo, for children 4 years and older, is a cross between Twister and Simon Says and can be played in 15 minutes. The DVD will feature a host who guides the children through the game."Reuters.com
Text messaging brevity
Life and Romance in 160 Characters or Less. "Compared with an ink-and-paper letter, messages may seem disposable. The relative inconvenience of typing out words using a numeric keypad -- the letter "c," for example, requires three presses of the "2" button -- and the brevity of the message may seem a hostile environment for heartfelt discussion. But the discipline of having to distill thoughts into short bulletins, then waiting to receive the response, allows users to pour more meaning into the writing, some text-message users say."
Washington Post
DRM-less
Magnatune’s Answer to the Music Problem. "There are two key business model issues to note that make Magnatune different. The first is that Magnatude allows buyers to download music completely free of DRM and in the format [...] and quality of their choice (very similar to grey market allofmp3.com, but in this case with the artist’s express permission). [...] The second business model difference is how Magnatune treats its artists. They share a flat 50% of gross proceeds (before any costs) from music sales with artists. They also share 50% of merchandise sales profits, although they have not started selling merchandise yet."
TechCrunch
Politics and podcasting
The Podcast Shaking Up French Politics. "Not only is it the first-ever podcast by a French political leader, it also marks a startling break with customary etiquette, as Sarkozy and Le Meur address each other with the familiar "tu" rather than "vous" during their 30-minute meeting. "Bravo!" read many of the hundreds of viewer commentaries posted on Le Meur's blog over the past few days. Many are heralding the interview as a watershed event, showing that French politicians can no longer afford to ignore the growing importance of nontraditional media"Business Week
Website summaries
Revamp of Gawker RSS reader Kinja launched. "Gawker quietly released a new version of their RSS reader Kinja last week, with some handy new features -- most notably, site results returned as "cards." "
Boing Boing
January 26, 2006
Free audiobooks
LibriVox Offers Free Audio Book Downloads. "LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project."
TechCrunch
Adding metadata to blog entries
Structured Blogging,The "Del.icio.us Lesson", Personal Datamining and The Knowledge Commons. "Structured blogging is an initiative to add structure to blog posts of similar content. For example, let’s say that I write a review of a piece of software on my Wordpress blog and someone else writes a review in their Movable Type blog. Not only are these two posts structured differently, with the blogging platforms writing different code, but each tool has customizable templates so that the blogger can write any code they want. So even though the content is nearly the same, the probability that the code in the end results looks anything similiar is very small."Smart Mobs
Connecting authors with readers
A Chance to Meet the Author Online. "Shoppers looking to pick up Meg Wolitzer's latest novel, "The Position," on Amazon.com last week found the usual readers' comments and excerpts from reviews. They also found something unexpected: posts on the subject of literature from Ms. Wolitzer herself. The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Digital dashboard
New Mercedes S-Class dashboard goes LCD. "AutoSpies caught a glimpse of a new Mercedes S-Class where all the regular analog gauges have been replaced with a configurable LCD dashboard that can display different gauges, data, or even video. Not sure how much it'll cost as an option, but the dudes over at AutoSpies seem pretty floored by what they saw."
Engadget
Video affiliation
Reuters video to get mass distribution. "International news agency Reuters is launching a pilot program on Tuesday that will allow blogs, news organizations and other online publishers to show Reuters news video on their Web sites. The video affiliate network program will enable Web site operators to place a video player on their Web site and show up to 20 of Reuters' breaking news stories from around the world that will be updated throughout each day"CNET News.com
January 25, 2006
Magazines everywhere
On-product magazines could change the media landscape. "The media mix is about to have a new and very viable form of print publishing – on-product magazines will hit the market for the first time in early 2006 and we suspect this innovation is capable of changing the world of print media as we know it."
gizmag
Very high resolution display support
11 companies join effort to promote new, high-definition display standard. "UDI, or Unified Display Interface, will combine compatibility with existing standards such as the current digital display connector DVI and the high-definition standard HDMI, with an increased bandwidth suitable for driving very high resolution displays. UDI will have a bandwidth of 16 Gb/s in its first incarnation. This is in contrast to single-link DVI's bandwidth of 3.96 Gb/s."Ars Technica
Quickly saving text clips
Save to Yahoo! Notepad bookmarklet. "Lifehacker reader stripoljub publishes a bookmarklet that posts selected text on a web page to Yahoo! Notepad. This is a pretty neat way to “remember” bits of text you happen across on the web. What I’d love to see next is the ability to append text to specific documents in your Yahoo! Notepad, so you can easily add to your “gift ideas,” “quotes I like” or “places to visit someday” lists."
Lifehacker
Interactive maps for showing local reports
New York Transit Strike - Readers' Commuting Reports . "A collection of reports from readers about their commutes during the strike. Click on the map below to browse by ZIP code. Click and drag to move to a different area."New York Times
Mainstream cameraphone images
Cameraphone Picture makes Times Best Photos of the Year 2005. "Time Magazine have chosen Adam Stacey's cameraphone picture as one of the Best Photos of the Year 2005 - of his experience on the london underground during the attack in London on the 7th of July 2005."
Smart Mobs
January 24, 2006
Recently released movies on your phone
Italians Get Good Movies on Cellphones. "If you’ve got a 3G phone, the company will soon let you view first-run movies just 10 days after they’re released in theaters. Looks like Memoirs of a Geisha will be available on December 27th! Not bad. Of course, you’ll be paying $10.50 for this experience, so the next question would have to be: why not just go to the movies and see it on the big screen?"
Gizmodo
eReader tied to content
Tomorrow's paper will be digital. "Belgian daily De Tijd is to be distributed electronically in what is claimed to be the first complete solution for portable electronic reading and writing. Available from April 2006, the Iliad platform allows for customised versions of an electronic reader that can be created for special markets."
The Register
Continued storage growth
Unlimited storage on the way.. "Those of us who can just never have enough portable digital storage will be heartened to hear that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is working on a 5 terabyte 3.5 inch hard drive aimed at the PC market. Though it’s not due until 2010 – less than five years from now – it’s a reminder that the technological bar is being raised significantly every day, regardless of the industry."
gizmag
Get a cut if your webpage is in search results
Gravee Takes a New Approach to Search. "Gravee soft launched tonight. It has an interesting business model. In addition to pulling in search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo (Alexa coming soon), Gravee also allows publishers to claim their site and, theoretically, get a piece of Gravee’s revenue. With Gravee’s AdShare program, when a user clicks an ad on Gravee, up to 70% of the ad revenue generated as a result is divided between the 10 sites included in the natural search results on the page (i.e. 70%/10 = 7% of ad revenue to each Web site on the page - for every ad that is clicked). Register your site now to start collecting your share of Gravee’s ad revenue."
TechCrunch
Context-sensitive IM
ajchat - AJax Instant Messaging on the Fly. "...ajchat is an ajax instant messaging on the fly, that allows you to log in or type anonymously. It’s free. The ajchat blog is here. [...] There is also an option to share a chat directly on a webpage, and against my better judgement that is exactly what I am going to do here. If it works, it will appear below. This to me, is a compelling feature that starts to encroach on some of the stuff that Userplane is doing."
TechCrunch
Dynamic music making
TransPose. "Computer vision technology captures the performer's physical actions captured and translates them to audio in real time. The performer sits in front of a camera, and his or her silhouette is projected in front of them in relation to a number of predefined trigger areas called "noteboxes." Using his/her silhouette to overlap the noteboxes, the performer triggers various tones. "
we make money not art
New PC form factors
Microsoft/IDSA Design Competition highlights. "Contestants were asked to “envision how form factor influences the digital lifestyle” in four categories: personal productivity, entertainment, communication & mobility, and living & lifestyle."
Engadget
January 23, 2006
Extending the wikipedia model
Yellowikis. "Welcome to Yellowikis - The first Open, Free and Global business listings directory. Our aim is to be the biggest, friendliest, most up to date, most predictable, least-discriminatory collection of basic business information in the world. Compiled, edited and checked by people like YOU! "
Yellowikis
Wireless manipulation
3DID Wireless MIDI Glove Kicks Total Ass. "Twenty-four-year-old computer engineering graduate and musician Shaduz from Bologna developed a MIDI glove which can be used to manipulate music and sounds. The 3DID MIDI glove just isn’t any glove, though—it’s wireless and was built for about 150 euros, or $180. The glove features three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and 18 hours of battery life. It also has five “bend” sensors in the fingers for bending and manipulating musical instruments. Perfect for softsynths."
Gizmodo
One-person journalism
KRON-TV: everyone in the newsroom is a one-man-band.. "San Francisco's KRON recently became the first major-market TV station in the US to supply much of its newsoom staff with laptops and digital video cameras, then train them to shoot, write, and produce stories on their own. KRON calls them VJs. Others in the biz sometimes refer to the combo role as "sojo" (solo journalist) or "one-man-band," while a producer editor mashup is a "preditor.""
Boing Boing
New living patterns driven by technology
PSFK: The Rise Of The Exurb. "The New York Times last Sunday write a lengthy article bout the growth of the 'exurb' - the growth of new commuter communities spreading out from established suburbs. The article points to the growth of these areas near Dallas and other areas with high immigrant populations. New houses, new schools, new roads, new traffic. Two key factors driving this trend, the NYT suggests, is stay-at-home parenting and technology. The cheaper housing allows families to cut back to one income and allow one parent to stay at home. Technology has allowed others to work from home much of the week."
Photoshop-like effects on 3D objects
Morphovision - Hacking Photon. "In front of a physical 3D miniature house (placed in a glass box) is a touch screen that allows a user to select different visual effects. According to the user's selection, the house may become soft or even break apart. This all happens between your naked eyes and the miniature house - no special goggles or screens needed. I can't help saying that we are a step closer to "photoshopping the real world.""
we make money not art
Sharing sounds
Silence of the Lands. "Silence of the Lands enables participants to collect ambient sounds, then to create and share individual and collective cartographies. These sounds represent subjective interpretations of the soundscape of the urban or natural settings that affect the everyday life of the community, and act as conversation pieces about natural quiet."
we make money not art
January 20, 2006
Portable HDTV
Pixela's HDTV On the Go. "Apparently, the Japanese just can’t stop watching their awesome HDTVs, so much that they need to do it on the go. So in comes the H.264 Pocket TV by Pixela, released only in Japan. Yes, now you will be able to enjoy stunning HDTV-quality programming on the go in the form of a long candybar-esque pocket TV. The device not only does television, but also FM radio and music playback. You can enjoy your tunes with digital 5.1 as well, since this little TV offers it all."
Gizmodo
Finding out about the current page
Follow discussions about a webpage with Talk Digger. "Talk Digger helps users track conversations about a webpage. If you’d like to know who is talking about a news story or blog post and what they have to say about it, simply enter the URL of the page into Talk Digger."
Lifehacker
Cellphone interruption
Sentenced to a cell(phone). "study in the December issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that cellphones and pagers interfere with family life by bringing job worries and problems home. Interviews with working couples - many with children - revealed that cellphone use tends to decrease family satisfaction and increase distress. "People felt they couldn't turn them off," says Noelle Chesley, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who conducted the study. "I couldn't find evidence of benefits."
csmonitor.com
Emotional analysis
Mona Lisa's emotions decoded. "Scientists used a new algorithm to analyze the emotion reflected in Mona Lisa's smile. New Scientist reports that the software, developed by the University of Amsterdam and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, measures lip curvature and eye wrinkles and then rates the face based on six emotions. Apparently, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry."
Boing Boing
More glasses with displays built in
Orange France touts video spectacles. "Fed up with having to squint at movies, photos, emails and text messages on your mobile's microscopic display? Then Orange France is offering the full heads-up experience, courtesy of its "video glasses". The slimline shades hook up to Samsung's D600E mobile phone by cable to display whatever's on the screen. The glasses also sport a pair of integrated earphones. Orange premiered the goggles at a French Sci-Fi channel event earlier this month, presumably hoping to attract all those Star Trek nerds who'd like a visor like Geordi LaForge's. Except, of course, he doesn't wear one any more."
The Register
Windows as displays
zaZen shows new ways to automotive enlightenment. "The entire roof dome from the belt line up is made of a single sheet of transparent Bayer polycarbonate which can be switched from transparent to opaque at the press of a button. This property also enables any superfluous knobs and displays on the dashboard to be “faded out” so the driver can concentrate on what is most important."
gizmag
Cheap e-paper
E-Paper's Killer App: Packaging. "Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios."
Wired News
Software prediction
Neural network sorts the blockbusters from the flops. "Using data on 834 movies released between 1998 and 2002, Sharda found that the neural network can judge a film based on seven key parameters: the "star value" of the cast, the movie's age rating, the time of release against that of competitive movies, the film's genre, the degree of special effects used, whether it is a sequel or not, and the number of screens it is expected to open in. This allowed it to place a movie in one of nine categories, ranging from "flop" (total takings less than $1 million) to "blockbuster" (over $200 million)."New Scientist
January 18, 2006
MP3 voicemail
Download your voicemail with GotVoice. "GotVoice is a free service that allows you to access your voicemail over the Internet, meaning you can download, listen to, and save your voicemail messages as MP3s from any browser."
Lifehacker
Saving notes online
Web-based text files with Yahoo! Notepad. "Rarely-mentioned Yahoo! Notepad’s been around for ages, and it does everything Windows Notepad does, except that it saves files on the web associated with your Yahoo! ID. Now, lots of webapps save your info and make it accessible from anywhere, but Yahoo! Notepad’s nice because there is no prescribed data structure (the files are just plain text), and now there’s a slick new way to manage and edit your Notepad files without a web browser."
Lifehacker
Continuous browser history
How'd I Get Here Firefox extension. "The How’d I Get Here Firefox extension tracks your clicktrail to every web page in your browser history and provides a back button that works even after you’ve closed a tab."
Lifehacker
January 16, 2006
Merging blogs and media
Boltfolio media sharing. "Clearly influenced by Flickr (and who hasn’t been), the neat thing about Boltfolio is that all your media types - photos, videos, audio and blog entries - are stored in one place. Surf everyone’s media by tag or search by keyword, make contacts, set your blog posts to public or private, and get RSS feeds of every media type by user."
Lifehacker
RFID museum interaction
Museum with Many Tags. "Okayama City Digital Museum is introducing RFID based services for visitors. 7,000 tags are embedded under the floor of an exhibition room (a large birds-eye photo of the city is printed on the floor.) Visitors walks around on the floor, pushing an information display device called Korotto . The device displays historical/cultural information related to the user's current postion on the photo."
RFID in Japan
Hacking a search engine
Roll Your Own Google. "Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that is best known for its traffic rankings, on Monday unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform, a set of online tools for searching, indexing, computing, storing and publishing vast quantities of net data. [...] To illustrate the new service's potential, Alexa developed a photo search engine that allows users to query photo metadata normally hidden from standard keyword searches, such as the date the photo was taken or the camera used. Musipedia, another Alexa prototype, provides users with the ability to search the web by melody. Give the engine a keyword or melodic contour, and it returns similar music. Musipedia allows users to input their own whistling as a query."Wired News
Digital books
HarperCollins to begin digitizing books. "U.S. publisher HarperCollins said Monday that it plans to convert some 20,000 books in its catalog into digital form in a bid to rein in potential copyright violations on the Internet. Under the plan, HarperCollins will hold all the digital copies of its books in a digital warehouse and it will allow companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com to crawl the server to create an index, Murray said. This will allow Google and other search systems to offer what, in effect, amount to electronic card catalogs to help users locate the full work. "ZDnet
Keeping websites private
Secret sites. "someone asked their readers how many secret sites/blogs they maintained. That is, sites that no one knows you're the author of (written anonymously or with a nom de plume) or sites to which the general public does not have access. If I remember correctly, a large number of the respondents not only maintained a secret site, but had several. I have one secret blog, published under my own name, that only a small group of friends can read."kottke.org
Cool future tech
A Peek at Tomorrow's Coolest Tech. "Among those that offer a glimpse into what's way beyond the next generation of gotta-have gizmos are devices ranging from a magic wand that serves as a remote control to a bracelet that translates your body movements into text messages. Take a peek at some playful concepts that are being cooked up in labs and brainstorming sessions around the world."
Business Week
Why turn up for class?
The advent of iPod U. "Taking the technology even further, UC Berkeley is currently beta testing a service that allows keyword searching of recordings, so it might be possible one day to not have to listen to a class you don't have to show up for. This could be one reason why Stanford University is taking a slightly more cautious approach to podcasting. Partnering with Apple to create Stanford on iTunes, the service provides a publicly accessible site which includes "Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and more." The access-restricted site provides "course-based materials" to students. "Some faculty are concerned with intellectual property. There are also faculty concerns about students [not] coming to class," said Victoria Szabo, Stanford's academic technology manager, in a telephone interview."Ars Technica
Self-deleting text messages
This SMS will self-destruct in 40 seconds. "StealthText is a new service in the UK that allows you to send messages that will be deleted from the recipient's cellphone after they've read it, to address that nagging problem of all your top-secret SMS messages falling into enemy hands."
Engadget
Video blogging
TV Stardom on $20 a Day. "Amanda Congdon is a big star on really small screens - like the 4?- inch window she appears in on computer monitors every weekday morning or the 2? inches she has to work with on the new video iPod. Ms. Congdon, you see, is the anchor of a daily, three-minute, mock TV news report shot on a camcorder, edited on a laptop and posted on a blog called Rocketboom, which now reaches more than 100,000 fans a day."
New York Times
Online office applications
Writely Is Kicking A**. "Writely (profiled earlier) continues to lead the pack in online ajax word products. Writely has had great features from day 1: import and export into Word format, embedded images, a wysiwyg editor, drag and drop functionality, sharing with others, and tagging of documents."
TechCrunch
Accessible calendar
Auditory calendar application for the visually impaired. "Users navigate their calendars with a combination of simple voice commands, gestures and the universal keypad (up, down, left and right arrows plus an enter key). Calendar information is represented through a spatialized soundscape that uses a variety of audio icons (sounds that represent kinds of calendar items), human speech that is a navigable 3D model of a user’s calendar. Users are able to navigate to different "views" of their calendar from a month to a week to a day to an individual calendar item."
we make money not art
Embedding one kind of media in another
BET promotes ringtone sales with videdo pop-ups. "BET has begun embedding text-messaging codes into its music videos, encouraging viewers to order a download of each song's ringtone directly from their mobile phone, reports Reuters/Billboard. "While such cross-marketing is a common practice in Europe, this is the first time a U.S. video channel has integrated mobile messaging on air to sell ringtones."
ringtonia.com
December 15, 2005
Books that can be "read" by mobile phone cameras
High Tech Phone Books, Finally (maybe). "Upcodes of the smart phone book can be read with a mobile phone camera. The user is automatically directed to the Internet pages indicated by the Upcodes."
Gizmodo
Low power photography
New digital camera chip slashes power consumption 50x. "They’re only in the design prototype phase right yet, but a couple of dudes by the names of Mark Bocko and Zeljko Ignjatovic at the University of Rochester have apparently worked out a way to digitize photography at each pixel of a CMOS sensor, the results of which are actually nothing less than fifty times less power consumption in taking a shot, and ten times the dynamic range of light captured — on chips expected to be smaller and less expensive than current devices."
Engadget
Sharing recordings of places
soundtransit :: book. "SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. In the “Book” section of this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world. And in the “Search” section, you can search the database for specific sounds by member artists from many different places. If you are a phonographer, you can also contribute your recordings for others to enjoy."
soundtransit
Outsourced game playing
Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese. "For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day." He and his comrades have created yet another new business out of cheap Chinese labor. They are tapping into the fast-growing world of "massively multiplayer online games," which involve role playing and often revolve around fantasy or warfare in medieval kingdoms or distant galaxies."
New York Times
Physical and virtual gaming
RFID turns you into a real-life action hero. "You've been sent to a 31st-century prison, where puzzles will help you crack the security system and escape. There are ventilation shafts to crawl down, secret doors, ladders, dead ends and hidden bonuses. This games is not on your PC or PlayStation but in a three-storey building in Madrid. In Negone, created by Differend Games, each player has a wrist console displaying your score, your character's health and tools obtained in the game. You select your mission (they range from "inoculate the virus" to "steal the secret weapon") and difficulty level. Security guards then escort you to your cell."
we make money not art
Simple online spreadsheets
JotSpot Tracker Furthers Office Online Experiment. "As more office applications move online, JotSpot Tracker joins NumSum and the open-source TrimSpreadsheet in the spreadsheet space. While Jotspot Tracker is clearly the most polished of the three, funcionality is very limited and the small visable area leaves a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, this is an excellent way to collaborate on simpler, smaller spreadsheets and bypass the hassle of email and chaotic version numbers. And the inport function was flawless. "
TechCrunch
Browser history
How'd I Get Here (Firefox extension). "Use this extension to go to the page on which you first clicked a link to the current page. For example: Go "back" even after opening a link in a new tab and closing the original tab. Remember how you found a site you bookmarked yesterday. When you are sent a link you have already seen, astound the sender by responding with a statement more precise than "I saw that on some blog a few days ago". "
How'd I Get Here
Album covers
CoverFlow. "CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection. It allows you to browse your albums complete with beautiful artwork pulled from any sources it can find, whether that’s buried in your song tags, collected via Synergy, or looked up on Amazon."
Lifehacker
December 14, 2005
Religious podcasts
"Godcasts” becoming more popular. “I would say probably anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent of the podcasts available online have some dimension of religion or spiritual life to them,” estimates Lee Ranie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Godcasts are created by houses of worship from every denomination, and from around the world. The wide selection is good news for web worshippers."Smart Mobs
Interactive toys
Plush Toy Interacts with DVD Movie - Supposedly Supports Child Development. "This interactive plush toys are aimed at babies to become more active when watching TV. The plush toy are synchronized with scenes shown on a DVD movie. A signal triggers the plush toy to start giggling, singing, and flashing its integrated light. The DVD plush toy comes as lamb, dog or cow. The plush animal have a somewhat weird look, a hint of Teletubby."
I4U News
Word of mouth sales
What Did He Say? - A Cockney gangster film becomes a DVD phenomenon.. "Layer Cake is a phenomenon that we're likely to see more of in the future, the word-of-mouth DVD hit. As such, it raises interesting questions about the future of movies in a business increasingly dominated by the home-video market—not just whether movies can perform markedly better in home video than in theaters, but what kind of movies are likely to do so."
Slate
Collaborative answer-finding
Ask questions, get Yahoo! Answers. "Yahoo! launches a question and answer service called, surprisingly, Yahoo! Answers. Submit a question about anything for free and other Yahoo! users will post answers. Two questions posted now include “What are the best windsurfing locations around SF Bay area?” and “Can you recommend a book for a 70-something conservative man?” Users vote on how good each answer is, and questions can be “resolved” when the asker determines the best answer to the question."
Lifehacker
Reading feeds anywhere
RSStroom Reader concept prints up toilet paper news. "We can’t quite tell if it’s outputting some two-ply quilted feeds, or if it plans to keep us up to date with that generic single-ply brand, but with wireless connectivity, RSS 2.0/Atom compatibility, and a browser based control panel, it should get the job done. Sure, this gag isn’t for reals, but c’mon, you know you want one."
Engadget
External/secondary displays
Pertelian’s External LCD Display keeps fraggers informed. "It can display e-mail headers, IM messages, the weather, RSS feeds (like ours), CPU stats, media player data, and more. You can even set up hotkeys to control all this info without ever leaving the game, including quick responses to IMs and skipping through and searching your songs to keep the tunes pumpin’."
Engadget
Home product scanning
IntelliScaner Kitchen Companion 100 keeps track of groceries. "The Kitchen Companion 100 is the same basic scanner, but adds a database of over 300,000 grocery items, along with nutrition data from the USDA. Scanned info can be downloaded to a PC, Mac, PDA or cellphone, letting you compile detailed grocery lists."
Engadget
Satellite broadband
Satellites bring broadband to world. "Internet-bereft travellers in some of the world's furthest-flung corners could soon be able to log on thanks to a new satellite broadband offering. The BGAN service, which is being offered by satellite communications firm Inmarsat, could help bring the internet to some of the world's most remote areas. The company claims that it will be able to deliver satellite broadband connections to 98% of the planet's population by using two of its hi-tech communications satellites."Guardian
More and more interactive homepages
Create a personalized homepage with Protopage. "Protopage is an Ajax-built web app designed to bring your RSS feeds, sticky notes, and bookmarks into one pretty package."
Lifehacker
Shifting away from physical media
DVD sales likely nearing global peak: report. "Movie sales on DVD are likely nearing their peak worldwide as more people look to computer downloads and video-on-demand to watch their favorite programming, according to a report released on Wednesday. [...] DVD sales growth is slowing, according to several recent reports. A study released by Adams Media Research in October forecast DVD sales of about $17.3 billion this year, a 12 percent rise from 2004. Adams forecast a 9 percent rise to $18.9 billion in 2006."
Reuters.com
RFID games
Smart Jigsaw Puzzle Assistant. "First, we describe several advantages of employing RFID technology for the development of gaming applications. Then we present the Smart Jigsaw Puzzle Assistant, a fully operational augmented jigsaw puzzle game which we have developed and prototypically implemented using miniature RFID tags and a palm-sized RFID scanner."
networked_performance
Video on demand
Brits Get Satellite on their PCs. "Called skybybroadband, the service promises a good mix of films, including Hollywood blockbusters and classic movie titles, as long as they’re available on its Sky Movies channels. All you need is a PC running Windows XP and a broadband connection. And all this is being done through third-party software by Kontiki, so it looks like you won’t be able to then download any of the content to any other PMPs you may have handy."
Gizmodo
December 13, 2005
Storage in everything
LG 42" Xcanvas With 160GB Of PR()|\|. "The TV can do 13 hours of HD recording, 63 hours of SD recording, and you can even pull in pics through the built-in 9 in 1 card reader. This of course means you can do your photo viewing, movie viewing, MP3 playing, etc. through the same TV interface."
Gizmodo
Setting yourself up as an expert
Explore Lenses. "Everyone's an expert at something. Spread your ideas, make yourself known, and earn a royalty. What's your topic?"
Squidoo
Parents restricting game time
PlayLimit token-based video game and TV viewing timer. "..they’ve hardly had to bother begging quarters off of mom and pops to hit the arcades ever since they got that fancy “Nintendo” hooked up to the tube. Well, now they can know your pain with the PlayLimit, a token-based system that locks up their system’s composite connector and sets a timer to playtime. It comes with 40 tokens that each represent 15 minutes of play, so after 10 solid hours of Halo 2 vegging, Junior is going to finally know how it feels to be all out of change."
Engadget
Getting e-paper in front of people
E-Paper Display In Tokyo Station. "Six A4 sheets of e-paper are on display for commuters in a snazzy transparent blue housing — allowing them to see how thin the e-paper is. The sheets of e-paper are being fed with the latest news stories via a wireless Internet connection and are updated with new content every five minutes."
Gizmodo
Exciting PC design
Lenovo wins design awards for concept PCs. "The first award is “Best of the Best for Highest Design Quality,” and it was won by the company’s “Yoga” concept, which consists of a laptop with an LCD that can be twisted all the way around such that the notebook stands up like an a-frame. The other award for “High Design Quality” was won by their “Sundial” concept, involving a slimline all-in-one PC on a stick that has some kind of whacky 3D scroller interface."
Engadget
Educating parents about technology
Games website to educate parents. "It is a response to controversy over the type of content children may be exposed to in games. A recent survey found that parents often let children play games, even though they knew they were 18-rated. "
BBC NEWS
Worldwide TV by phone
Watch HBO in Europe on Vodafone global Mobile TV. "Vodafone announces a global Mobile TV service enabling for instance Europeans to watch HBO on their 3G mobile phone. Hit series Sex and the City, Six Feet Under or Curb Your Enthusiasm will be available on Vodafone Live! globally."
I4U News
Chameleon clothing
New Scarf. "According to Nikkei, a group of researchers at Keio University has made a scarf that changes color to match that of the wearer's clothing by using 100 optical fibers, light-emitting diodes and a color sensor."
we make money not art
Executive toys
Tyco designer track for bored execs. "Showing how far executive toys have come from Newton’s swinging balls (what?), we bring you the $1,500 Designer Tyco Track for bored-rooms everywhere."
Engadget
December 09, 2005
Extending Wikipedia
Wikitravel. "Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. So far we have 6150 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe."
Wikitravel
Cameras that print?
Shake it like a Polaroid cameraphone picture. "Images of a “Polaroid Camera Phone” have surfaced on Mobile Korea, and the device looks more like a “hey, wouldn’t this be cool?” type concept than anything, so we’re not expecting to be popping a SIM card into one anytime soon."
Engadget
Keyboard for restricted input
F.O.S.K. your PSP. "Requiring only two keystrokes to enter in any given character, this definitely looks like it could help out in bringing you that much closer to a dedicated attachable keyboard, minus the attachable part. Divided up into seven blocks, each block holds nine characters (3x3)."
PSP Fanboy
Bigger flexibile displays
Plastic Active-Matrix SVGA flexible e-paper Display. "Plastic electronics developer Plastic Logic has developed the world's largest flexible organic active matrix display. The display consists of a flexible, high resolution, printed active-matrix backplane driving an electronic paper frontplane from E Ink Corporation. The display will be publicly shown at the 12th International Displays Workshop in Takamatsu, Japan tomorrow. The displays are 10" diagonal SVGA (600 by 800) with 100ppi resolution and 4 levels of greyscale. The thickness of the display when laminated with E Ink Imaging Film is less than 0.4mm."
gizmag
Trust issues with public collaboration
Wikipedia Tightens the Reins. "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Florida-based website, said Monday."Wired News
Background communication information
Girls Ambient Room. "data is gathered from different chat services, email & comment entries to their personal online journals. when the user (the Taiwan teenager) is in her room & receives a message on MSN chat, she hears audio signals that are in tune with one another, & sees bubble-like visual animations are created on the wall. Email traffic is represented by lines on the screen which start to animate & vibrate. the more email the more vigerous the animations."
networked_performance
Alternative interactions for games
SenToy. "In this paper, we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an intial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending on the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions."
networked_performance
December 08, 2005
Cameras mounted everywhere
Guncam offers accountability and understanding. "...weapon mounted camera records video in firefights, grants accountability, helps training and avoids risky body exposure of the user. One of the main problems in the use of firearms, in firefight incidents, is not knowing how they were used and how the missions were executed, which generates a problem in terms of accountability of actions. That is why it is fundamental for officers in command to easily retrieve as much accurate information as is available in order to analyze the events."
gizmag
Interactive TV on a phone
Ericsson, NRK launch interactive mobile TV. "Swedish telecoms supplier Ericsson and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) are conducting the world's first live trial of interactive mobile TV. The trial demonstrates a way of using mobile TV which allows mobile phone users to vote, chat and communicate with a television presenter while watching a TV show simultaneously on their handsets. "Digital Media Europe
Big antennas
WirePlus Broadband uses phone lines to extend WiFi range. "Florida-based SercoNet has developed a system it calls WirePlus Broadband, which recruits your phone lines to act as super-antennas, carrying your signal from one access point to the next. It may sound like the powerline-based HomePlug, but SercoNet insists the technology is completely different. “It is strictly RF, physical layer,” the company’s Mike Harnack told WiFi Planet. “It’s like an extension of the antenna… the copper is the medium that the shifted signal flies on.”
Engadget
December 07, 2005
Printing from digital
Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!. "Can CSS be used for serious print jobs? To find out, we decided to take the ultimate challenge: to produce the next edition of our book directly from HTML and CSS files. In this article we sketch our solution and quote from the style sheet used. Towards the end we describe the book microformat (boom!) we developed in the process."
A List Apart
Personal weather maps
Weather Underground and Google Maps. "Weather Underground has a neat use of Google Maps. They’ve got maps that show where their stations are and by clicking on them you can get all kinds of weather information about that local area."
Lifehacker
Re-representing a service
Pretty up del.icio.us with Delancey. "Delancey is an online bookmark manager that enhances the popular del.icio.us social bookmarking application. Delancey keeps track of how frequently you click on each of your bookmarks and presents them to you in order. The interface is nice, and content load-times (after an initial cache of your bookmarks) are decent. Also, sorting bookmarks by popularity is a cool idea. If you’re one of those people who loves del.icio.us but hates the way it looks, try making it all purdy with Delancey."
Lifehacker
Online photo editing services
Edit photos online with PXN8. "PXN8 is a free online image-editor. And while we’ve mentioned online image-editing tools before, PXN8 has a lot to offer. Along with a slew of nice editing features, PXN8 also integrates with Flickr, allowing you to edit your Flickr photos with the click of a bookmarklet, then save the edits back in Flickr. For the Flickr-addicted, PXN8 gives you the opportunity to tweak your photos anytime you’re bored and at a browser."
Lifehacker
Visualizing music albums
TuneBooks™ Digital Liner Notes and Interactive Booklets. "TuneBooks provide the visual content fans crave by bundling online albums with a collection of unique and innovative media highlighting the band and their visual sensibility. TuneBooks combines traditional visual elements - liner notes, cover art and band collateral - with custom-designed interactive art and media to create a new visual experience. And each TuneBook integrates artist discography and label catalog browsing, creating a natural means for fans to sample, explore, and buy new music."
TuneBooks
Playing music without instruments
Virtual Air Guitar. "Using a computer to monitor the hand movements of a "player", the system adds riffs and licks to match frantic mid-air finger work. By responding instantly to a wide variety of gestures it promises to turn even the least musically gifted air guitarist to a virtual fret board virtuoso."
networked_performance
Cellphone remote
lipii Beam Station turns mobile phone into mouse. "For 1,980 yen (about $16), you can pick up their “lipii Beam Station,” a small USB device that accepts infrared signals from your mobile phone. Using a special iAppli on the phone, which is currently supported by pretty much all FOMA handsets, you’re able to control various functions of your PC by using only the phone’s keypad."
Engadget
Living online and offline
The MySpace Generation. "Although networks are still in their infancy, experts think they're already creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinctions between online and real-world interactions. In fact, today's young generation largely ignores the difference. Most adults see the Web as a supplement to their daily lives. They tap into information, buy books or send flowers, exchange apartments, or link up with others who share passions for dogs, say, or opera. But for the most part, their social lives remain rooted in the traditional phone call and face-to-face interaction. The MySpace generation, by contrast, lives comfortably in both worlds at once. Increasingly, America's middle- and upper-class youth use social networks as virtual community centers, a place to go and sit for a while (sometimes hours). While older folks come and go for a task, Adams and her social circle are just as likely to socialize online as off. This is partly a function of how much more comfortable young people are on the Web: Fully 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet, vs. two-thirds of adults, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project."
Business Week
Growth in PC to PC syncing
Access and sync your data from anywhere. "But for consumers who open their laptop on the road only to find that a critical file is back at home - or who are frustrated by having different sets of contacts and browser bookmarks on every computer they use - there are some simple alternatives. They take somewhat different approaches to the job, but all use the Internet to some degree, and are best put to use with a high-speed connection."
Lifehacker
Digital gemes the use physical objects
Neon Racer. "Neon Racer is a multi-user Augmented Reality racing game on an AR tabletop setting. The game displays only the players’ racing vehicles and the checkpoints. The active setting for the game is provided by the physical world, and all its parts can influence gameplay. Physical objects act as collision obstacles and influence the course of the race itself. Participants have to interact with both the virtual and real objects to succeed."
we make money not art
Gaming for everyone
BBC study reveals the facts about gamers. "Most people play games. (59% of 6-65 year olds). All kids play games. (100% of 6-10 year olds). The average age of all gamers is 28. Older gamers outnumber non-gamers. (51% of 31-50 year olds play games.). Gender gap? What gender gap? (48% of gamers are female.). Consoles pwn PCs. (21.4 million console gamers versus 19.9m PC gamers.). People actually play interactive TV games. (8.1 million of them.). Puzzles and quizzes are the most popular game type. (63% of gamers love them.) "
Joystiq
Visual representations of energy use
Power-aware devices. "The Interactive Institute has unveiled new STATIC! prototypes that explore how everyday products might be designed to better express – and stimulate reflection on – energy use. Power-Aware Cord displays the energy consumption of the appliances that are connected to it. The blue light in the cord displays the intensity relative to the watts. In a primary stage, the cord can be used as an experimental tool to examine household products and in the long run it turns into an ambient display of everyday energy consumption. The cord has been patentent and they are now looking to take it into production."
we make money not art
Internet addiction
Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way. "The patients, including Mike, 34, are what Dr. Cash and other mental health professionals call onlineaholics. They even have a diagnosis: Internet addiction disorder. These specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical that heavy use of the Internet qualifies as a legitimate addiction, and one academic expert called it a fad illness. "New York Times
December 05, 2005
Smart UI for small screens
Nokia defines The Mobile Web. " Nokia's new browser sets a high bar for the mobile web with an astonishingly smart use of the zoom and fish eye UIs. These screenshots demonstrate what Nokia accomplished through cooperation with Apple and using WebCore and JavascriptCore components which form the basis of Apple's Safari browser. First here's the zoom UI example."
mobile jones
Leaving stuff somewhere for other people to find
BookCrossing. "Morgwn emailed in to tell us about a community service that lets folk swap books. Once you've read the book version of the film Jarhead, for example, simply tell the site where you're going to leave it. Then another user looking for the war-story book can search the site and find that it's available on a bench or in an office on Broadway, NYC. BookCrossing has 422,443 members since it launched in 2001."
PSFK
Huge, shaped displays
The 360 degree LED television. "The first time you see one of the screens you’ll understand what the fuss is about – the quality, colour, contrast and definition is extraordinary and the screen is absolutely huge – the third generation of the new LED screens is being introduced at present with the largest being a 2.5 metre high, 5.46 metre circumference screen and capable of being viewed clearly from 30 metres away. Interestingly, the screens can actually display one image around the full 360 degrees, so it would be possible to use them as output for a 360 degree camera."
gizmag
Any domain name
Company Takes Internet Address Names Beyond Dot-Com. "Technology provider UnifiedRoot, based in Amsterdam, has begun leasing Internet addresses that can end in any word, rather than in .com, .org, .net or other top-level domains. For instance, Brinks Home Security could replace its collection of different Web addresses with just one: home.brinks, according to an example the company cites on its Web site. "EWeek
Limitless channels
Man gets 5,000 channels on 12 dishes. "Al Jessup of Beckley, West Virginia, has 12 cheap satellite dishes stuck to his house, which pull in over 5,000 free-to-air channels from satellites all over the sky. He is retired, and delights in odd and foreign programming. Because the programming is free, it changes regularly, he noted. Sometimes, a program he likes will disappear and something he dislikes will be put in its place, or vice versa. For example, he once had three ABC stations from Wyoming only to have it reduced to one. "
Boing Boing
Young still won't pay for songs
Young 'prefer illegal song swaps'. "Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan said: "The digital youth of today are being brought up on a near limitless diet of free and disposable music from file-sharing networks. "When these consumers age and increase spending power they should become key music buying consumers. He added: "Unless the music industry can transition these consumers whilst they are young away from free consumption to paid music formats, be they digital or CDs, they may never develop music purchasing behaviour and the recording industry could suffer long-term harm." "
BBC NEWS
Tag management
Tags Sort Out Music Mess. "Tags that are complete and well-organized make it possible to find the perfect song to fit the mood of your intimate dinner party or Dionysian rager. Anything short of that and your guests will long have departed by the time you've located the tune. Soon enough, my hobby as a music collector morphed into one of a librarian. Fixing faulty tags requires what's known as a tag editor. One of my favorites is MP3 Tag Studio, a free program with many powerful features. The application allows you to select an unlimited number of MP3 files and manipulate them in any number of ways."Wired News
Blogging while travelling
Wishyouwerehere.com: Blogs From the Road. ""My friends and family would write e-mails back commenting on my adventures," said Mr. Watters, who was interviewed by e-mail from an Internet cafe in Koh Samui, Thailand. "Like two-way electronic postcards, but with as many images as I could post and no limit on the amount of words - plus no two-week wait." That was the beginning of TravelBlog.org, a site that is host to travel journals, allows users to post text and photos and even offers maps that show where users are writing from and where they have been. TravelBlog is one of numerous sites that offer - many at no charge - travelers the ability to share a journal of their journeys and allows readers to leave comments. "
New York Times
Encouraging remixing of content
Washington Post asks readers to remix it. "The Washington Post has created a blog for highlighting mash-ups of Post content. Current remixes include: a news keyword cloud viewer, a world map interface to Post stories, and a dynamic news quiz. Although a bit skimpy on implementation details (or implementations, for that matter), the idea's surprisingly hip."Boing Boing
Virtual phone pets
Trident: Tamagotchi meets Barcode Battler?"Earlier this month, Preamble Corp. released Trident, a virtual pet game for camera phones. . Players feed their virtual pets by scanning QR codes. Then, in "battle mode," the pets fight with each other. In order to win a battle, players should feed thier pets the right food (or QR code) and thereby raising/strenghening the pets and collecting key items. For example, if a fight can last long, you may want to feed lots of good food before the fight. "
RFID in Japan
November 30, 2005
Simple play
The sitting computer game. "Their midi-sofa allows you to interact with the game on the screen in front of you. You control the movement of your avatar by changing the seating position on the sofa, bouncing on it or pressing harder the back of the furniture. The more physical action used the faster the ball gets. Both, the "strategy of power" and the "strategy of minimal movement" lead to success. More images."
we make money not art
Smart streetlights
What is StarSight. "It is a system which allows the provision of multiple services including Wireless Internet, Wireless Street Lighting, Wireless Electricty, Wireless Security, Wireless CCTV, and Wireless Surveillance. The StarSight solution combines a unique set of powerful benefits, including solar power, battery back-up, low maintenance, wireless set-up, cost-effectiveness, lighting of dark and/or remote areas, access to wireless broadband services and an ever-evolving number of add-on applications. "
StarSight
Home network management
The brain for your intelligent home. "Every self respecting technophile has probably been eyeing up what’s available in home automation, home security and home entertainment systems, but each comes with an array of microprocessor-controlled functions and a network. The aim should be to have one network and the SecureGen HTVR offers the chance to combine all three of those networks with one unit – the brain of your intelligent home. "
gizmag
Virtual objects for sale
Objects of virtual desire. "We have collected a series of objects produced and owned by inhabitants in the online world Second Life and will sell physical reproductions of these objects via our web shop. Each chosen object has a strong sentimental value for the avatar (a persons virtual identity) who made or owned it. We have acquired (copies of) these objects, along with their owner’s personal story, within the in-world economy of Second Life."
Objects of virtual desire
Digitizing everything
The automatic book scanner is here. "As the technology to automatically scan and digitize books is put to work it will multiply the speed at which libraries can put collections online. The vision of all the books ever written being accessible globally is made manifestly more realistic by the automatic scanner. Kirtas introduces its scanner here with an video of the process. Kirtas says the machine “automates the scanning of bound documents at a capture rate of 1200 pages per hour, while using a page turning process that is more gentle than the human hand.""
Smart Mobs
Search vs. e-mail
Search usurping email as top internet activity. "Search is catching up to email as the internet's number-one activity, according to a new poll. Forty one per cent of US adults who surfed the internet on a "typical day" in September 2005 used a search engine, up from 30 per cent in June 2004, according to the latest Pew Internet & American Life survey of consumer behavior. Email continues its online reign, though. Fifty two per cent of Americans online sent or received email on a typical day in September 2005 - up from 45 per cent in June 2004."The Register
Collaborative fiction-making
The Saga of The Saga. "Four days isn't a lot of time to weave an entire fantasy world of whole cloth. Yet in less than a week, scores of people from all across the world have crafted the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga, a detailed history of the world of Battal, where powerful wizards seek adventure with ambulatory furniture at their side. Spanning more than 1,400 articles, the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs -- or as fans have unpronounceably abbreviated it, ELOTH:TES -- has all the trappings of modern fantasy franchises: a rich history that spans thousands of years; a contentiously out-of-canon cartoon offshoot, The Wizbits; as well as a crazed, seizure-ridden chief creative director, James Langomedes (an obvious caricature of mad comics genius Alan Moore). But despite references to 28 years of "real world" history, The Saga never really existed, at least in the conventional sense."
Wired News
Ad exposure
Glasses track eye movement, ad exposure. "Analysis showed that during a 45-minute journey, the journalist had been exposed to more than 130 different advertising "elements" showcasing more than 80 brands. He was "looking" at adverts for 29 minutes but couldn't recall a single brand without prompting. When prompted, it emerged that just over half of the adverts had made an impression, those for products he was interested in and to which he was exposed for more than 10 seconds."
we make money not art
Review anything
Why I don’t like Riffs. "Riffs, a review site for anything, launched quietly last week. It takes a hybrid wiki/social bookmarking approach. Any user can add a URL to begin a discussion (or just begin a discussion without a URL), and the Riffs community votes on the thing and discusses it in wiki fashion. All pages have RSS and the clean interface has some great Ajax features. Riffs also has tagging, including “common tags”, which I think is interesting."
TechCrunch
November 25, 2005
Advanced electronic toys
Korean Magic Pen Reads Books to Kids. "This is perfect for parents who do not have time (they should though) to read books to their kids. The 'magic pen' has a camera based scanner built-in that reads codes hidden in the book. It matches the code with the data on the corresponding cartridge and reads the text or triggers sounds. "
I4U News
Small, powerful projectors
A movie projector in a cell phone?. "The reduction in size comes from a technique invented by Upstream for channeling the light from LEDs to a display in thousands of small beams. Light, whether from a candle or an LED, naturally shines in every direction. Upstream has built a complex micro-optical system that collects that light close to the source and sends a huge proportion of it to an intended target. The so-called "photon vacuum" optical system surrounds the LED like a shell. As a result, a tiny optical package can provide roughly the same level of illumination efficiency that larger systems can. "
CNET News.com
Auto karaoke
Download of the Day: EvilLyrics. "EvilLyrics is a free lyrics fetching program designed for use with most popular music players (iTunes, Winamp, WMP, etc.). In addition to displaying lyrics of the song currently playing (which it handles with aplomb), EvilLyrics also has a cool karaoke mode that highlights lyrics line-by-line. If karaoke isn’t available for your song, it’s easy to create your own karaoke "
Lifehacker
Blurring inappropriate images
PixAlert Foils Office Porn Surfing. "Using high-speed image analysis software to scan images, the most recent version of PixAlert Monitor will now blur any image it considers inappropriate or illegal, as it comes up on the screen. So, instead of just trying to block these images from your screen, PixAlert lets you get them, just pretty much unwatchable. And if you do try to get some of this stuff up (again we know YOU wouldn’t, but there are some pervs out there!), a thumbnail copy is made and sent to the central server, which is the brains of the system."
Gizmodo
Movies for cellphones
Sony Goes Ahead With Movies For Cellphones. "Thank you Sony. It’s about time somebody came out with movies made for your mobile. I mean, let’s face it, with the Video iPod and multimedia phones popping up everywhere, it should definitely be easier to get content for these devices. So Sony Pictures has decided to start introducing movies on 128 MB MMC cards. If you have a cellphone that plays multimedia files and has a card slot, you’re in. And I’m shocked, shocked I say, that the company is being so kind about not putting all this on Memory Sticks!"
Gizmodo
Hotels setting home trends
In 'smart' hotel rooms, everything is just right. "At the Mandarin and other high-end hotels, new computer systems which connect individual rooms to network servers can now keep track of guests' preferences and change the room conditions automatically. These "smart" systems can learn whether a frequent guest likes the lights dimmed, the curtains closed or the room toasty warm. They can also personalize the electronics in the room so that the music of John Coltrane, for instance, greets jazz buffs when they enter their rooms. Meanwhile, sensors in refrigerators alert maids when the minibar is running low on Coca-Cola. While much of the underlying technology is not new, it is still rare in private homes because the cost of the equipment is relatively expensive. As a consequence, luxury hotels are the first to embrace it.
International Herald Tribune
DVRs not a threat
TV networks say digital recorders raise viewership. "Far from being the TV doomsday machines that some have predicted, digital video recorders that allow viewers to skip advertising and watch shows at their leisure will actually boost television audiences, the major networks said on Wednesday. That was the principal finding in a report issued by the six major networks -- CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, the WB and UPN -- that sought to allay concerns in the media industry that DVRs will undermine the commercial value of broadcast television."
Reuters.com
November 23, 2005
Better text editing with the browser
Turn Firefox into a web writer. "If you use web-based e-mail like Gmail, or if you post to forums or write a blog, you’re using a “browser” to author documents as well as browse them. A plain, tiny web page textarea is not very conducive to writing. If you spend a lot of time writing the web with Firefox, soup up your “browser” with a few extensions that will turn it into a powerful text editor."
Lifehacker
Video on demand
Nintendo's Pay-Per-View Vending Machine. "Taking the form of an old-school “Gashapon” (toy capsule) machine, this device allows you to insert your GBA movie player flash memory card, crank a handle and instantly download anime episodes to watch on your GBA. Episodes are around 25 minutes each and priced at 300-yen to download, with popular shows being offered, such as Pokemon and Detective Conan. There even appears to be a “free content” button, presumably giving you trailers, etc. "
Gizmodo
Collaborative search training
Hyper-Contextual Search Results with Swicki. "A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you’re interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community."
TechCrunch
Music streamed to the cellphone
Cingular announces MobiRadio streaming music service. "Following Sprint’s recent rollout of it’s Sirius-over-Vision option, Cingular has announced that it too will begin offering a streaming music service, to be known as MobiRadio. Cingular is partnering with MobiTV (who also provide a wireless video service) and Music Choice to give customers 40 stations of pretty standard fare that they can listen to on their Nokia 6620 or Sony Ericsson S710 and Z500a. "
Engadget
Electronics for kids
High-tech child's play. "The real economic trend behind changing tastes for toys, market analysts say, is the precipitous decline in the price of electronics. Low-cost technology has turned items that once cost hundreds of dollars a few years ago into kids' stuff. For example, Hasbro's VCam Now gives kids a digital video camera experience for $79. So whereas toys have always imitated grown-up items, low prices have led to the creation of fully-functioning, lower-quality replicas of adult electronics. Sean McGowan, a toy market analyst for Harris Nesbitt, calls the phenomenon "the juvenilization of electronics.""
csmonitor.com
Using the web to scale down
He Figured That Business Is So Good, Who Needs a Store?. "Like most small-business owners, Mr. Truran first viewed the World Wide Web as an opportunity to grow. But as time went by, he came to see it as the opposite - a way to close up his Cambridge, Mass., retail store, move the business to his home in this Vermont village and accomplish his real goal: spending time on the things he wanted to do rather than running CourierWare. "The Web part of the business was growing," said Mr. Truran, whose company is known for its high-quality, durable messenger bags. "It was the only part of the business that was truly growing." CourierWare, which also stopped publishing its mail- order catalog in 2001, now takes only phone or online orders. "
New York Times (may require free subscription)
November 22, 2005
Sharing map information
Map your travels with Wayfaring. "We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other."
Lifehacker
Recommendation lists
Yahoo! Shoposphere - Yahoo! Shopping. "Pick Lists let you share the stuff you love and the stuff that matters to you with everyone or your friends... on the Shoposphere, throughout Yahoo! Shopping, by email, and even through RSS feeds. Make a good one and it could even show up as one of the most helpful Pick Lists on the Shoposphere."
Automatically capturing significant events
StartleCam. "Attention and memory are highly correlated with what psychologists call arousal level, and the latter is often signaled by skin conductivity changes; consequently, StartleCam monitors the wearer's skin conductivity. StartleCam looks for patterns indicative of a ``startle response'' in the skin conductivity signal. When this response is detected, a buffer of digital images, recently captured by the wearer's digital camera, is downloaded and optionally transmitted wirelessly to a webserver. This selective storage of digital images creates a ``flashbulb'' memory archive for the wearable which aims to mimic the wearer's own selective memory response. "
networked_performance
Extremem collaboration
Glypho: Collaborative Novel Writing. "Glypho a service that facilitates collaborative novel writing via the web. Here is how it works. Jot down your story idea. People around the world give character and plot ideas. Chapter contibutions are written. People review and vote for their favorite chapters. The story goes on… "
Lifehacker
Maintstream tagging
Amazon Tags. "Amazon is integrating user tagging into product pages (see image below). Tags are public by default and can be managed under a “your tags” area that I am failing to find. You must first select a “Real Name” (odd choice of names given the old company called RealNames). Once you’ve signed up and started adding tags, you can delete them or make them private in the management area."
TechCrunch
Urban technology gaming
Shoot me if you can. "Replace a gun with fun, and shoot the opposing team with a cellular phone equipped with a digital camera. Participants; shooters are given a team color and phone number printed on the sticker. Shooters have to take a picture of the opposing team. If successful, she/he sends the picture to the opponent team member, via multimedia SMS system. Different rules exist for variations in game. Tactics are an important part as well as team work and understanding of the urban environment."
networked_performance
Making a business out of new technology
Profits May Rock Podcasting World. "But nifty products and gizmos were ultimately a sideline at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference, where attendees wrestled with a far more fundamental point: whether this podcasting thing is -- or even should be -- a business. "If somebody gives you money, you owe them something," said keynote speaker Leo LaPorte, who appears in ad-supported radio and TV shows but eschews commercial promotions for his popular This Week In Tech podcast. "I listen to my listeners, but I don't want to listen to advertisers.""
Wired News
Open source games
Dance Dance Revolution as free software/free culture. "Stepmania is a free, open source Dance Dance Revolution lookalike for Mac, Linux, and Windows. [...] Fans repackage all the official DDR songs as Stepmania files, so you can find these on your favorite p2p searcher (say, Limewire) with a search for "stepmania". Or use Dancing Monkeys, a student project that takes any mp3 and turns it into a Stepmania file, complete with appropriate dance steps (Windows only, unless you have Matlab). Another fun feature: you can run random .AVI movies in the background while you're playing...very surreal".jpg)
Boing Boing
Book rental
Google gauges interest for online book renting. "Web search leader Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) has approached a book publisher to gauge interest in a program to allow consumers to rent online copies of new books for a week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The proposed fee is 10 percent of the book's list price, the Journal reported, citing an unnamed publisher. "Reuters.com
Wi-fi on the move
Daily News in English About Korea. "Samsung Electronics will unveil a mobile phone allowing access to the mobile wireless broadband Internet service WiBro, the world’s first according to the company. [...] WiBro enables wireless Internet access on the move at speeds of up to 120 km/h. Korea will become the first country to start the service commercially in the first half of next year. "
Digital Chosunilbo
November 21, 2005
TV over the network
AOL launches free vintage TV, Nickelodeon dumps slime on Apple. "In2TV will have six "stations" that users can tune into using their computers, ranging from comedy to action to drama, but users won't be able to obtain TV shows for use on their computer or portable media device. Streaming video from AOL's In2TV portal will be the only allowed method of access. Don't be too glum, though. AOL claims that their new streaming video format, dubbed AOL Hi-Q, offers DVD quality video. More on that in an upcoming report. The major draw for In2TV will be quantity. The service is aiming to "air" 300 episodes each month. If Nick at Nite brings back old memories, just wait until In2TV actually offers up 100 series over the course of the year—we'll be lucky to remember half of them."Ars Technica
Standard features for Web 2.0?
A Profile of Tagworld. "The site is going to try to own just about every web 2.0 experience of its users - blogging, bookmarking, photos and other media files, file storage, and tagging. They say they are going to have open data in and out, meaning if a user is really attached to say, Flickr, they’ll be able to integrate with those photos seemlessly. And they’ll have RSS and APIs to send data out. But their clear goal, as Fred said when we met, is to replace del.icio.us, flickr and blogger (among other services) for its users. All features are free to users (other than extended file storage); Tagworld makes its money from integrated advertising."
TechCrunch
Mesh technology providing wi-fi hot zones
Macedonia leads world with wi-fi. ""What we have is an ability to transmit wirelessly throughout the country, and then put a piece of equipment at the school anywhere in this country. "Those people, once they have that piece of equipment, will have internet connectivity." By using what is called mesh technology, Macedonia Connects is creating not wi-fi hot-spots, but hot-zones which stretch 15 kilometres over a city. "
BBC NEWS
Earbud jewelry
Plantronics Versa: Wireless Earbuds. "The design uses a miniaturized base outfitted with Bluetooth to connect to your cellphone, and RF to connect to the actual earbuds. Plantronics claims this technology is only “a year or two out from being ready to launch,” but don’t chuck your old buds just yet. The design comes in three styles: long, slim and metallic for men; a chrome necklace design for women; and a universal necklace/clip combo with colored anodized aluminum for teens."
Gizmodo
November 18, 2005
Mobile phone remembrance
Poppy goes high-tech. "Britain's remembrance poppies have gone high-tech -- digital versions of the red paper flowers are now available for downloading to mobiles. The poppies' move into cyberspace is a bid to get younger Britons aware of the sacrifices made by those who fell in battle, the Royal British Legion charity said on Friday. "
Reuters.com
Better digital imaging
Powerful Image Sensor Developed. "A Korean research center developed a super-sensitive image sensor with applications likely to dramatically enhance medical or military equipment such as endoscopes or guided missiles, as well as household electronics. The new sensor can record high-quality video images under moonlight, as it is about 500 times more light-sensitive than current versions, the Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) said. The researchers expect the sensor will be used for military equipment such as long-range missiles, night vision goggles, unmanned aircraft and surveillance cameras."The Korea Times
November 17, 2005
Multi-language text-to-speech
Epson Chip Can Read Text to You in Multiple Languages. "The chip can read text and speak it in US English, French, German, Castilian Spanish, and Latin American Spanish. Other languages are in the works. The Epson chip S1V30100 contains Fonix DECtalk v5.0* as its TTS engine. Applications for the chip are in portable devices for instance to read emails to users. The chip also supports MP3 and AAC audio decoding. "
I4U News
Continuing e-mail overload
Got 2 Extra Hours for Your E-Mail?. "Dealing with e-mail - filing it, cataloging it, prioritizing it - has added hours of extra work a week, much of it done by people in the late evening and early morning. In a recent survey by America Online and Opinion Research Corporation, 41 percent of the respondents said they checked their e-mail in the morning before going to work. More than 25 percent said they had never gone more than a few days without checking e-mail, with 60 percent saying they check it on vacation. Four percent looked at e-mail in the bathroom."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Aggregating your services, not just your feeds
Aggregate your feeds with SuprGlu. "SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and maybe even your friends to-be. With the advent of so many fun to use applications, it is a shame for us to not use them. So keeping that in mind, what would be even better is to blog them."
Lifehacker
Trading on virtual land
Virtual property market booming. "A gamer who spent ?13,700 on an island that exists only in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers. The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year. The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia. He made money by selling land to build virtual homes as well as taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island. "
BBC NEWS
Hacking games
Play Risk With Google Maps. "For some reason I decided a bit after the API for Google Maps came out that it would be awesome to be able to play Risk on it. About a month later it became apparent that everyone using the API was doing it for more useful things, such as gas price tracking and ::cough:: hotornot placement. I’ve always been a gamer and thought this was the perfect step."
Lifehacker
TV shows for download
CBS, NBC To Launch 99-Cent On-Demand TV. "A pair of separate deals announced Monday between CBS and Comcast, as well as NBC Universal and DirecTV, soon will allow viewers to pay to watch current primetime broadcast hits just hours after they air for free. CBS and NBC will be charging 99 cents per episode to access such series as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and the "Law & Order" spinoffs putting a twist on the traditional TV business model that will have untold implications for industry sectors ranging from affiliates to advertisers for years to come. "Extrememe Tech
November 16, 2005
Social TV sharing
Tape It Off The Internet. "A global TV guide, Torrent tracking, your favourites and recommendations plus an innovative social layer to hang it off. You want it, we want it, let's build it."