April 05, 2006
Sharing virtual experiences
3D virtual fish dissection. "This Digital Fish Library, which will take five years to complete and is supported by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), will allow scientists to look inside the inner workings of fish without destroying precious specimens. But it also will give you the opportunity to virtually dissect some rare fishes from your computer anywhere in the world."
Primidi
April 04, 2006
Voice recording and recognition
IBM's Magic Block: voice recorder with speech recognition. "The Magic Block is a concept for a digital voice recorder that includes a few handy features -- such as biometric security and an intriguing design that limits accidental recordings -- and one function that makes it unique: built-in voice recognition software that can recognize both spoken words and the actual speaker, allowing a user to search for text as well as for comments from specific speakers."
Engadget
Getting information on people in social situations
The Connection Glass facilitates and enhances meeting compatible people. "Computer Mediated Communication significantly increases the size of your usual social or business contact universe and can give you a far greater choice of prospects to mine. On the other hand, there’s no substitute for being there, so you can assess them in person. Computers hold great promise in matching us with particularly suitable partners and we’ve written up several such concepts over the last few years [...] All of these concepts offer communication both in a virtual world level and in a physical environment. Now there’s another viable idea IOHO - Priscilla Bernikowicz’s interactive glasses are designed to help us pick the right person in a room full of people."
gizmag Article
March 31, 2006
Gadgets talking to gadgets
Seiko Shows Cellphone-Friendly Bluetooth Watch. "The huge display shows you that little envelope indicating that you’ve received a new message, and then can also reveal who sent it and the message subject. Continuously communicating with your cellphone, the device can either make a noise or vibrate your wrist when a call comes in. Seiko says it will start shipping a watch like this “by 2007” but didn’t reveal how much it would cost."
Gizmodo
Tracking flights in 3D
Google Earth live flight tracking. "I’m a big flight tracking fan. When my bride travels on business I like to show our pre-schooler where Mom’s flight is on the map. This flight tracker has a Google Earth button labeled “NEW! Track this flight in 3D via Google Earth!” It downloads a Google Earth file and shows the flight as a location in Google Earth, updating every 1 minute. Perhaps not terribly useful, but fun for airplane and map geeks like me."
Lifehacker
March 30, 2006
Games for programming
Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure . "You're in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike. Now, thanks to a new software-collaboration tool, you and your intrepid party of fellow hackers can navigate your labyrinth of code and slay its dastardly bugs, all in a dungeonlike world similar to an old-school text adventure. Called playsh, the new tool is a collaborative programming environment based on the multi-user domains, or MUDs, so popular online in the early 1990s."Wired News
Phones for seniors
Cell Phone designed for Senior Citizens. "With all the emphasis on phones that are thinner and more feature-rich, Emporia is targeting a different demographic with the EmporiaLife handset. Think of it as the large-print Reader’s Digest version of the Razr. Big buttons and an easy to read LCD make it easy for someone with failing eyesight to operate the phone. Among the other features are a big red emergency button to call for help and the ability to run off AA batteries if the Li-Ion battery runs out of charge. The phone is even hearing-aid compatible."
Gizmodo
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
Connection through touch
Distance Touch Generator. "Lyta -commissioned for the science center Phaeno in Wolfsburg, Germany- consists of two kinetically-charged surfaces, placed 100 metres from each other, and linked telematically so that deformations induced by touching each one are transmitted to the other interactively: when the structure is touched on one site, the touch will be visible and touchable on another."
we make money not art
Mapping cellphone location
STAMPS. "STAMPS is a little program. It can run on your Mobile phone. Using this program you can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map."
Smart Mobs
March 23, 2006
Finding websites by browsing similarity
Find similar sites with Similicio.us. "It’s an experiment on my part to see whether I can quickly find relevant web sites based on people’s tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us, using the engine from easyutil.com. It answers the question “people who tagged this site also tagged what other sites”. I am using it mostly to find blogs that are similar to the ones I read, and to find new popular web sites that are in my area."
Lifehacker
Tracking friends on a GPS device
TomTom Buddies lets you track your friends on the road. "Back in the day, if you wanted to gather a group of drivers into a convoy, you kept in touch by CB radio. With TomTom's new Buddies feature, you can finally toss that relic and stay in contact with Sodbuster, Pig Pen and Rubber Duck via GPS. Once you add a Buddy, you can track each other in realtime, share points of interest and send instant messages (though we really hope you don't do a whole lot of IMing behind the wheel). And if you need a little privacy as you roll into Chi-town, you can hide your twenty and tell your good buddies they can catch you on the flip-flop."
Engadget
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
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
A network of medical implants
Picking Up the Pace. "By the end of the decade, electronic-device manufacturers say their implants should be able to track many more vital signs. This is important because most heart patients have other serious ailments on top of heart disease. As sensors become more refined and implants learn to communicate with one another, the next step will be linking devices within the body. For example, an implant might sense when a patient's blood levels are out of whack and tell a drug pump to inject a dose of corrective medicine."Business Week
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
March 20, 2006
Robotic emotions
The Art of Building a Robot to Love. "At Carnegie Mellon University, Rachel Gockley, a graduate student, found that in certain circumstances people spent more time interacting with a robotic receptionist — a disembodied face on a monitor — when the face looked and sounded unhappy. And at Stanford, Clifford Nass, a professor of communication, found that in a simulation, drivers in a bad mood had far fewer accidents when they were listening to a subdued voice making comments about the drive. "When you're sad, you do much better working with a sad voice," Dr. Nass said. "You don't feel like hanging around with somebody who says, 'Hi! How are you!' ""
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
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
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
Family organization online
Cingo - Where Families Click.. "Cingo is a simple, easy and powerful new way to experience the internet and organize your family in one great location! From the clean, uncluttered home page to feature-rich sections such as News, Movie Listings, and Shared Calendar and To-Do Lists, Cingo helps your family to easily stay connected online."
Cingo
Growth in online-only colleges
Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress. "It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid. That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones."
New York Times
Work for people with disabilities
Computer Technology Opens a World of Work to Disabled People. "Steven Singley, 41, who is quadriplegic as a result of a car accident 20 years ago, has a special setup that helps him take calls for Office Depot from his home in Centerville, Utah. His right arm, which has limited movement, is strapped to the armrest of his wheelchair, allowing his hand to pivot on a trackball and his pinky knuckle to tap a clicker. A splint with a rubber tip is hooked to his palm so he can type on a keyboard sitting on his lap. "You would think that typing one key at a time would be slow, but I can type 25 words per minute accurately," Mr. Singley said. He puts in 20 to 24 hours a week, requiring extended breaks so his girlfriend can give him his medication and prepare him for his meals."
New York Times
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
Managing Office documents online
Open, edit, and save Office documents online. "ThinkFree Office Online lets you open, edit, create, and save Microsoft Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) from any browser for, just as you thought, free. ThinkFree Office Online also boasts the ability to: Post documents directly to your blog without any conversion. Create powerful Web presentations using a familiar interface. Convert your existing documents to PDF format"
Lifehacker
March 08, 2006
Tools for hardware prototyping
Designer's DIY. "FTD today points towards the Stanford HCI Group who have developed a toolkit for designers of digital devices. D.tools enables product designers to try out the desired functionality themselves before handing it over to the engineers to have them cast all the nifty miniaturization-magic on the item. This they hope, will lead to products that are less flawed in terms of interface design since it's obviously very tedious and expensive to alter the position of a certain button when all the electronics have already been finalized."
we make money not art
Automated fast food
Touchscreens to order fast food. "I went to one of those Taco Bell/KFC hybrids in Morrisville, NC and all the ordering was done through the gigantic touchscreens. No humans take orders there. You go to the machines and you're presented by an animated Colonel and talking taco. Then you put in an order as if you were at amazon. You can pay with cash and credit"
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
Remote book signings
Margaret Atwood's LongPen for remote signatures. "Apparently she'll be "signing" remotely via video feed and robo-hand, which, while rather appropriate for one some authors, just has fans, publishers, and agents in a bit of a tizzy. Will the robot hand overturn the traditional book signing tour?"
Engadget
Learning non-verbal language with games
DARPA's 'Social Puppet'. "game designers from the University of Southern California (USC) have developed 'Social Puppet,' a computer engine to "help soldiers learn unfamiliar languages by interacting with animated characters." For this project, financed by DARPA, the researchers have used their expertise in previous videogames used by the armed forces, such as "Tactical Iraqi." But previous games were focused on teaching language and customs while 'Social Puppet' is giving on-screen characters human non-verbal communication behaviors."
Primidi
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
Searching for code
Here Comes a Google for Coders. "Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the "technical web" -- high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google's index covers about 11 billion pages.) "This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world," said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March."
Wired News
Online chat place
37 Signals Launches Campfire. "Campfire, the new 37 Signals product, launched yesterday. It is a dead simple way to create a robust, permanent (with URL) group chat. Key features include embedded images, permanent URL for chat, no client to download (chat is in the web page), and easy file sharing. I’m basically thinking of it as a real time wiki or an easy to use IRC product with enhanced features. They claim it takes 10 seconds to create a new chat, and they are correct. It is dead simple to use and has an incredibly intuitive interface."
TechCrunch
Exchanging money through the phone
Send and receive money with your cell phone. "Say you would like to send $15 to a friend with phone number (206) 555-1234. You would simply text: pay 15 2065551234. After your payment request, you will receive a phone call that reads back the recipient and the amount to be sent. Enter your PIN to authorize the payment. The sender and the recipient will each receive a confirmation message when the payment is processed."
Lifehacker
Collaboration without translation
Semantic Web tools for car design. "The semantic tools provided by the EU-funded WIDE project allow designers and engineers to collaborate over the Web even if they don't share a common technical language and come from various cultures. This approach is very different from traditional knowledge management ones which often force all the people involved to speak the same language."
Primidi
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
Reporting on your ex
(Name Here) Is a Liar and a Cheat. "Manny from Miami is not quite the sensitive single man he says he is. He is married with a kid, no less, and "he sleeps with women everywhere," according to his anonymous former girlfriend in a posting on DontDateHimGirl.com. [...] Framed in pink, the DontDateHimGirl.com site allows a woman to post the name and photograph of a man she says has wronged her, along with a short but often pungent synopsis of how precisely she was aggrieved. The suspicious or merely curious can hunt for a cheater by typing a name into the search engine. Women can also send e-mail messages through the site if they want to ask more pointed questions about a particular cad. In a slight nod to fairness, men who disagree with the characterization can write a rebuttal to be posted alongside their names."
New York Times
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
Sales motivation through games and blogs
Improving sales performance at Prentice-Hall with sales simulations, blogs and podcasts. "Companies that are serious about developing a customer focused field organization, like Prentice-Hall, are starting to rethink learning. The prevailing instructional dogma rooted in a 1,000 year-old academic tradition is giving way to a next-generation blended learning approach that takes full advantage of the power and cost-efficiency of new electronic technologies. Sales training is no longer about watching, reading and listening, but about doing, simulating, socializing, sharing and collaborating. The maturation of a new wave of online applications and tools, such as blogs, podcasts, online gaming, and wireless and mobile technologies, is driving ever-greater levels of sales and service productivity."The Intuitive Life Business Blog
Tracking for emergencies
Personal Panic Button. "t’s called the SKeeper by Tadiran LifeCare, and it’s a wearable personal communicator with distress alarm. With its easy-to-use controls, it lets its wearer immediately contact predefined telephone numbers, such as a relative or emergency services. When the alarm is triggered, the unit can also send text messages to designated e-mail addresses. It can also track location and sound an alarm if its wearer goes outside a designated neighborhood. Plus, it can be remotely programmed from the Web."
Gizmodo
Kissing the screen
My First Screen Kiss . "Walking through Tokyo's Ginza district one Friday evening last month I saw an extraordinary sight that will soon become an ordinary one: A businessman was talking into his keitai (the Japanese word for cell phone), holding it out in front of him rather than to his ear. Suddenly, smiling, he raised the device to his lips and kissed the screen. It wasn't hard to piece together an explanation -- the man was making a video call to his lover. His lover had asked for a screen kiss, or perhaps they'd synchronized one. It was my first glimpse of this behavior, and it happened in Tokyo, but I knew it wouldn't be my last. Soon enough we will see this scene repeated in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and San Francisco."Wired News
Online dating numbers
Europeans eager for love online. "Fewer people are signing up to costly dating websites in the US, but Europeans are still searching for love online, research shows. Thousands of people will spend this Valentine's Day with a date or partner they first met online. But while Europe's online dating market grew by 43% in 2005, the numbers of US subscribers fell for the first time. Some 5% of users in the US used paid dating websites in 2005, down 1% from 2004, according to Jupiter Research."
BBC NEWS
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
Wireless control
Wireless to Organize—and Maybe Save—Lives. "Imagine a warning on your cell phone that tells you when a parent in ill health needs help, when you've eaten too much, or that you should avoid your regular commute because of a biohazard danger. Forget mobile music and video. Wireless may end up running your life—down to when to wash your underwear. This may sound far-fetched, but laboratories around the world are exploring such scenarios as wireless networks become more robust and amid moves to miniaturize electronic chips to the point where they can be discreetly placed into any product."EWeek
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
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
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
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
Phone banking
Buying, paying bills and transfering money with your mobile phone. "Motorola has announced M-Wallet a new solution for mobile phone users that will enable paying bills, transferring money or making a purchase at a retail. M-Wallet features an easy-to-use mobile interface that gives the consumer wireless secure access to financial services -- eliminating the need to carry a credit or debit card in your wallet."
gizmag
Meeting online
Is World of Warcraft the New Golf?. "Overheard, at brunch: two tech entrepreneur types discussing World of Warcraft. What server are you on? What guild? Oh yeah, me too, I heard it's a good way to schmooze. Is that true? Has logging in to the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game replaced a few rounds on the links as the way to make the right business connections in a tech-driven culture? The particular Guild discussed by the brunchers above was started by Joi Ito, who became a WoW fan after embarking on the game to do some research on social networks."Extreme Tech
February 21, 2006
Making lists with others
Listible lists Web site. "Listible is a Web site that blends lists with community features. Listing combined with tagging and voting gives you a greater relevancy. Finding a list called “Resources related to IE browser CSS bugs” tagged with css is easier. In each list, community can provide any relevant URLs. The most relevant and popular resource will be sorted on the top, thanks to the voting system."
Lifehacker
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
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
Setting e-mail tone is not easy
Email tone isn't understood as much as we think. "A University of Chicago study shows that people overestimate their ability to convey tone in email messages. Study participants recorded messages vocally and wrote them in email messages. The message recipients’ success rate at understanding the tone of the message was significantly higher verbally than via email. The reason for this communication disconnect, the researchers find, is egocentrism–the well-established social psychological phenomenon whereby people have a difficult time detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them."
Lifehacker
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
Paying for e-mail delivery
Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail. "Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely."
New York Times
February 16, 2006
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
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
Old "new technology" finally dies
Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams. "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."
Smart Mobs
Communicating identity
Identity Card Concept Project. "The collection of sketch ideas uses the business card to explore and express possible future value systems. Themes explored include privacy, the value of the physical, experience, the moment of exchange, disposability, and customization."
IDEO
Medical equipment
Med Tech's Rising Stars?. "CyberKinetics Neurotechnology Systems has received FDA approval to market NeuroPort, a chip that monitors cranial electrical activity. It has potential research and diagnostic uses. But that's only the first step. CyberKinetics is now developing BrainGate. Using the NeuroPort technology, BrainGate would enable disabled people to use a chip implanted in their brain to communicate through a computer. In addition, it holds the promise of allowing them to operate other appliances through the computer as well."
Business Week
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
February 15, 2006
Teen memory sticks
Girls' encrypted USB stick locks parents out of diary and MSN Messenger. "The ThoughtSafe is an encrypted USB memory stick with its own version of MSN Messenger: it's marketed to young girls who want to keep a private diary and prevent their parents or others from spying on or controlling their IM activity."Boing Boing
Balloon networks
Lofting Balloons for Cell Service. ""To cover every square mile of North Dakota, it would take 1,100 cell towers," Schafer said. "We can do the whole state with three balloons." If successful, the hydrogen-filled balloons could be drifting across the stratosphere above North Dakota this summer, providing cellular coverage at a tiny fraction of the cost of building cellular towers. Jerry Knoblach, the CEO of Space Data, says that although the balloon technology, called SkySite, is new to the cellular industry, "the platform is very well proven" for other purposes."Wired News
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
Searching for evidence in e-mails
E-Discovery Is Big Business. "Increasingly, e-discovery customers are not just law firms enmeshed in big corporate cases. More and more, companies are working proactively with e-discovery vendors, getting a handle on their data troves so they can meet regulatory requirements -- or just in case they are sued. After all, 90 percent of U.S. corporations are engaged in some type of litigation, according to research by the law firm Fulbright & Jaworski. The average company bigger than $1 billion is wrestling with 147 lawsuits"Wired News
February 14, 2006
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
Voting away interruptions
Finger Ring, "Social Polling". "Finger Ring is a system in which a cell phone decides whether to ring by accepting votes from the others in a conversation with the called party. When a call comes in, your phone first determines who you're discussing with by using a decentralized network of autonomous body-worn sensor nodes. It then vibrates all participants' wireless finger rings. Although the alerted people do not know if it is their own phones that are about to interrupt, each of them has the possibility to veto the call anonymously by touching his/her finger ring. If no one vetoes, your phone rings."
we make money not art
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
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
Family management software
FIRCLE: software for managing the family. "We’ve previously written about personal life-coaching software named Life Balance and EasyChild’s behaviour modification software system designed to monitor, assess and encourage children to succeed in life. Now there’s a new system which incorporates some of both of these products and much more for computerising and managing the family – it’s called Fircle and it’s an internet-based system containing a shared family calendar, children’s allowance and chore management, family rules (set your own and set penalties for transgressions), a family address book, personal journals, family voting on topics of your choice, ToDo lists and so much more. So much in fact, that it scared us …"
gizmag
February 10, 2006
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
February 09, 2006
Trigger-happy investment encouraged by phones
How Cell Phones Roil Japan's Stocks. "...analysts think individual investors who dashed off trades from their online accounts had a hefty role in the three-day sell-off, which had dragged the Nikkei index down 7% by Jan. 18 and strained the Tokyo Stock Exchange's trading system to the breaking point. Many of those tech-savvy investors in their 30s and 40s were placing sell orders with the flick of a button on a clamshell cell phone with a speedy wireless connection. "Business Week
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
Tracking IOUs
BillMonk - Social Money. "BillMonk is a new service that allows people to easily keep track of financial debts among friends. It’s a simple idea and they’ve executed well. The idea is a user who wants to report a debt owed to him or her (such as a shared bill), or an IOU to another person, simply enters it on BillMonk. This is very easy to do on BillMonk, even for more complicated transactions like a bill shared among a lot of people. You simply input the amount of the bill and the email addresses for those who participated. There is also an SMS feature to allow users to text in bills on the phone."
TechCrunch
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
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
Distractions
11 minutes before the next interruption. "Constantly-distracted workers in busy offices are able to focus on a task for an average of 11 minutes before they’re interrupted, a new University of California study shows. Once they were interrupted, it took on average of 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they managed to do so at all that day. Workers in the study were juggling an average of 12 projects each, a situation one subject described as “constant, multi-tasking craziness”."Lifehacker
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
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
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
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
Statistical language translation
The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Repetez, en anglais, s'il vous plait. "Traditionally, machine translation software has depended on algorithms that sort through thousands of grammar rules for the two languages to be translated, Knight says. The problem, he explains, is that so many rules need to be written manually, as do the exceptions to these rules, and inaccuracy creeps in when complex sets of rules contradict each other. “If you write the 5000th rule, sometimes you break things,” Knight says. With Language Weaver and his research at USC, Knight, as well as a handful of other researchers throughout the world, approach the problem differently. Instead of following rigid grammatical rules, Language Weaver matches correct words and phrases across languages based on the probability that such words and phrases are correct in a given context. "Technology Review
Peer patent reviews
The Peer to Patent Project Blog. "The Community Patent Project aims to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents. The Community Patent system will support a network of experts to advise the Patent Office on prior art as well as to assist with patentability determinations. By using social software, such as social reputation, collaborative filtering and information visualization tools, we can apply the “wisdom of the crowd” – or, more accurately the wisdom of the experts – to complex social and scientific problems. This could make it easier to protect the inventor’s investment while safeguarding the marketplace of ideas."Smart Mobs
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
"Listening" to conversation
Conversation table. "As two people converse, LEDs, embedded along the center of the table, are activated by the pattern of the exchange. Microphones pick up the duration and the volume of the conversation at regular intervals, and trigger light animation from the end where one speaks toward the other. If both people speak simultaneously, the lights start animating from both ends."
we make money not art
Look at someone to talk to them
Navy Tests Look-to-Talk Device. "The U.S. Navy is field-testing a new short-range communications device called LightSpeed that could soon let sailors talk securely up to two miles away -- just by looking at each other. The device uses infrared, similar to that of a television remote control, to transmit audio and visual information. To overcome range limits, LightSpeed connects to ordinary binoculars and uses the optical lenses to amplify the signals. Then soldiers on either end can simply plug headphones and a microphone into their binoculars to talk to one another."
Wired News
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
GPS in emergencies
GPS Cellphones to Help with Disasters. "Using about 30 students equipped with GPS phones, a computer system actually figured out where they were located, searched for the five closest evacuation centers and sent them each a map. Not bad, especially considering GPS is fast becoming a service we expect in phones and other portable electronics."
Gizmodo
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
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
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
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
Digital arbitration
Solving conflicts in cyberspace. "When a project involves several companies working in various countries and using different languages, it's not unusual that conflicts arise. But it's not always easy to find a wise arbitrator to solve such a conflict. In "Conflict resolution in cyberspace," IST Results tells us that the EU-funded electronic arbitration system called e-Dispute will be able to help. The current prototype provides online arbitration, mediation and conciliation services. The arguing parties can be located anywhere in the world and use a variety of languages to securely send their messages to an arbitrator through software agents. This system should be available soon."ZDNet.com
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
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 health records
Easily sharing medical information. "Because of a lack of integration between proprietary health information systems, it's not easy today to exchange medical data about patients even in a single medical institution. And it's obviously worse between different hospitals or different countries. But, according to IST Results, this healthcare interoperability problem is about to be solved by Artemis, a EU-funded project. This system is using Web services on top of existing standards to exchange messages and medical records. A prototype should be demonstrated next month in San Diego. Read more for additional details and references."Primidi
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
January 30, 2006
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
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
January 27, 2006
Exchanging favors with strangers
The Favor Exchange. "The basic system is: register and post if you need a favor or have a favor to give. Things I see on the site now include a post for a free mattress, and a request for help writing a wikipedia article. After favors are completed, members are asked to make a rating of the other person. And if you help someone or are helped, the other person is automatically added to your network."
TechCrunch
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
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
Gender differences through activity
Gender gap alive and well online. "Gender divisions persist online but it is no longer about whether more men or women use the net, research shows. A study by the Pew Internet Project found that roughly the same percentage of men and women in the US are serious internet users. But the research found that men value the net for the freedom it gives them to try new ways of doing things. By contrast women like the opportunities the net gives them to make and maintain human connections. "
BBC NEWS
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
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)
Computers and healthcare in the home
How technology is aiding medicine. "Computers and mobiles phones are playing an increasingly valuable role in helping doctors and patients monitor conditions such as diabetes on a daily basis. And government ministers believe that new technology can also be harnessed to help elderly people live independently for longer."
BBC NEWS
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
January 25, 2006
Text conversations for the deaf
Real-time texting for deaf people. "The new software enables text conversations in real time Software has been developed which enables deaf people to have real-time text conversations using a mobile phone. But the charity that has created the service says some mobile operators have yet to fulfil a legal obligation to make their services accessible."
BBC NEWS
January 24, 2006
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
Share your PC cycles and earn cash now!
CPUShare - The Low Cost Supercomputer. "Feel free to join CPUShare now to start earning your first CPUCoins by helping testing the sell client and by growing the supercomputer with your otherwise wasted CPU resources."
CPUShare
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
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."
Robot-driven simulations
McMaster students to practise until perfect. "In a room on the first floor of the McMaster University Health Sciences Centre, the new training lab features computer-operated medical equipment hooked up to what appears to be a real patient on an operating room table. In fact, the patient is a $100,000 computerized, human-like robot that mimics bodily functions such as breathing, heartbeat, swelling and other changes in human conditions that might be experienced by an actual patient."
McMaster Daily News
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
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
January 18, 2006
Monitoring the earth
Eyeing Earth from cloud top to seabed. "Earth scientists are beginning to live what they once considered an impossible dream. They are establishing systems to monitor our entire planet continuously, from the outer fringes of the atmosphere to the deepest seabed. They even are beginning to track the grinding of rock upon rock that generates earthquakes. They are linking communications systems to shunt these data to whomever can work them into useful knowledge. Often this now can be done in minutes instead of hours, days, or weeks. An unprecedented cooperation is developing among nations so that earth scientists will no longer look at our planet in the old, fragmented way."
csmonitor.com
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
Machine-readable blogs
Structured Blogging. "Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews. These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don't look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications. Woven into the HTML of a blog post, this information travels with it through syndication feeds, readers, and aggregators. Ultimately, it can even be converted out to other formats our Structured Blogging tools support such as RDF in XML."
Structured Blogging
Cultural communication differences
Japanese Facemarks(smileys) |||. "The difference between Western Smileys(Emoticons)(1 byte) and Japanese ones(2 bytes): Apparently, Japanese Smileys(Emoticons) are read vertically while eastern Smileys(Emoticons) are read hosizontally. And Japanese Smileys have more variation than eastern ons. I think the reason is that while American(alphabet) letters in computer are 1 byte, Japanese letters in computer are 2 bytes, so Japanese letters can have more characters. And also, Japanese sentences contain Chinese characters which are phonograms, so it is easier to express and recognize something graphic with letters for Japanese people."
Hiroette.com
Personal adverts in public spaces
Moodblurbs: Cute-less Communication. "Probably designed with the local coffee house in mind, Moodblurbs are a laptop communication accessory. You attach a clip to your laptop’s screen and insert a Moodblurb with a message showcasing what you’re currently up to right now."
Gizmodo
January 16, 2006
The illusion of being in the same room
Videoconference system creates boardroom illusion. "A videoconferencing system that gives meeting participants in different locations the illusion that they are just across the table from each other has been developed by US company HP (Hewlett Packard). Each Halo Studio contains three large plasma screens fitted into the wall opposite a large conference table. A fourth screen hangs above these and can be used to display presentations to everyone simultaneously."
New Scientist
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
Sending money by SMS
TextPayMe enables mobile-to-mobile fund transfers. "Still in beta, the PayPal-like service allows a debtor to sign up on the website, and once he/she has an account, send money to others via text messaging."
Engadget
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
December 15, 2005
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
Phones for kids
Get the Kids Started Early with Teddyphone. "Excited about your little toddler eventually becoming a cell phoning, surly teenager? Why wait 15 years when you can get them wasting your plan minutes now. The Teddyphone is the ideal phone for small children. Actually this thing does have some useful parent features such as reverse listening, an SOS button, speed dial and even an optional tracking feature. "
Gizmodo
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
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
Distance meditation
Tele-Praying. "Kin, by cshool canade, is a system that allows people to give a prayer over the Internet. At Ryokusen Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, a network computer that controls Kin, a bowl-shaped sacred artifact (kind of like an upside-down bell that can be hit by a stick) is installed in the main building. One can connect to this computer from "anywhere" and hit the kin using a GUI slider."
we make money not art
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
December 13, 2005
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
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
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
December 08, 2005
Online trust
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar. "Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby." "Nothing was ever proven," the biography added. Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites."
New York Times
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
Devices that talk
Philips’ Q-CPR talking defibrillator. "The device keeps track of the patient’s vitals, displaying the stats on a large screen, and offering up out loud suggestions for better chest thumping action. Luckily it keeps quiet if you’re on track, and though it isn’t designed for a first timer, it should be quite the aid to paramedics who often become distracted with other CPR duties, neglecting the stopped-up ticker that brought them there in the first place."
Engadget
December 07, 2005
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
Physical messaging
Cuckoo IP. "Cuckoo IP is a voice messaging system. The clock's answer phone can be dialled from mobile or landline. Leave a voice message, select a time for the delivery of it. At that time, the cuckoo will emerge from the clock and broadcast your message. "
we make money not art
December 05, 2005
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
Wi-fi as an important communication tool
Connecting New Orleans. "To help get everyone communicating again, the ravaged city is starting up the country’s first municipally-owned wireless Internet system that will, thankfully, be free for everyone. Obviously a great perk for those living and trying to come back to their homes in the city, the hope is that this system will make business more attractive and, of course, help city government officials."
Gizmodo
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
November 30, 2005
Contacts synchronization across devices
Contacts Back-up. "So you never lose the contact information of the people important to you. Now save your contacts from your mobile phone into your Yahoo! account. Combine your contacts on your phone with those already in your Yahoo! Address Book. Synchronize your phone contacts with your Yahoo! Address Book as often as you like. Synchronize your calendar and tasks as well. "
Yahoo! Mobile
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
Collaboration displays
Coeno-storyboard. "Coeno is a computer enhanced presentation environment designed for presenting a storyboard using tabletop technology in combination with augmented content. The system allows multiple participants to interact easily around a shared workspace, while having access to their own private information spaces and a public presentation space."
we make money not art
Displays on any surface
Innovative Digital Display Mat creates New Advertising Medium. "The IntelliMat is a wireless computer embedded in a very thin mat made of a lightweight thermoplastic alloy with four LCD screens, creating a 30-inch diagonal display with full multi-media capability. IntelliMat is 1.5cm thick and designed to be used on the floor in retail environments to deliver multimedia and TV-quality advertisements with the potential to interact with customers. Most appealing about the IntelliMat is that it delivers these messages to consumers in environments where wall space is limited or in front of products where consumers are in a position to buy. "
gizmag
E-mail therapy
Internet May Aid In Treating Panic Sufferers. "The study compared the effectiveness of three types of treatment -- internet-based cognitive behaviour therapy sessions, face-to-face sessions, and the use of medication (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) monitored by a psychiatrist. Preliminary results, based on more than two years of research, showed that internet therapy was comparable with face-to-face treatment in reducing disturbing thoughts and improving stress and anxiety. When undertaking internet-based therapy, sufferers of panic disorder have an initial face-to-face consultation with a psychologist and are then in regular email contact with the therapist. "ScienceDaily.com
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
Videophone privacy
CCTVme. "CCTVme is an acessory that comes with 3 sets of cards. Whenever you feel the need of privacy, you can manipulate what the other person is seing during the video conference by attaching to your videophone the CCTV object and selecting a card to block the caller's view through your camera into your private space. "
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
The "death" of e-mail
E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago. "Since so much of what's received involves scams about millions languishing in nonexistent bank accounts, interoffice status contests, and people plopping unwanted meetings onto Outlook calendars, the e-mail blow-off factor is rising. That's imperiling the medium's former dependability. In the long run, perhaps the biggest death knell for e-mail is the anthropological shift occurring among tomorrow's captains of industry, the text-messaging Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e (over, done, whatever)." No surprise, then, that on Rangaswami's orders, e-mail at Dresdner is beginning to fade as the collaboration tool of choice. Instead, workers [...] are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); SS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams' use on projects."Business Week
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
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
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
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
Alternative handsfree devices
The Iqua Snake handsfree system. "Bluetooth focused Iqua now brings us the Snake Bluetooth 1.2 handsfree system. Designed to attach to the headrest of your ride, it features brushed aluminum and leather stylin’ and features a built-in mic and speaker, a status LED, up to 10 hours of talk time or 300 hours of standby, and 6 hours recharge with included car (and hopefully wall) charger."
Engadget
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."
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
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
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
November 21, 2005
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
November 18, 2005
VOIP conference calls
Chatterbox - Skype Speakerphone. "Chatterbox plugs directly into the USB port for easy access and features include full-duplex audio, 2.5mm headphone jack for optional headset, three status LEDs, volume and mute buttons, digital signal processing, and it should work from a distance of up to 12 feet. And all this for just $30."
Gizmodo
Online project management
Project management and task management software: Basecamp. "Basecamp is a unique project management tool. Unique because you'll actually enjoy using it. It's simple, fast, and web-based. You don't need to download, install, or configure anything — all you need is a web browser. And don't worry, your data is safe with us. How can Basecamp help us? Basecamp makes it easy to centralize group communication with co-workers and clients."
Basecamp
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
Paired technology
Embrace. "A concept proposal for an interactive bracelet with little informative displays, to provoke shared experiences between wearers in close proximity. Embrace stands for the 'brace'-lets fitting together & representing its users, who 'embrace' one another. The wearable display consists of several nodes: a LCD screen displaying wirelessly sent images, a battery, a camera lens that constantly records images until the user specifically shoots an image, & a scent-palette housing that emits 1 of 5 odors chosen by the owner of the device indicating an incoming image from their 'significant other'. "
networked_performance
Smells triggered by phone
Keitai KunKun’s smelltones. "Keitai KunKun had the bright idea to take advantage of our most sensitive sense by creating a device that releases various scents when you get a call. Yes, that’s right, smelltones. And you can get yours in a small variety of odors; ever wonder what Doraemon or Hello Kitty smells like? Yeah, neither have we."
Engadget
Drag-and-drop for compliant documents
Desktop Tool Eases e-Filing of Large PDFs. "APSplit DE is a drag-and-drop desktop application that enables users to deliver large PDF documents in compliance with an institution's sizing requirements. It is aimed at lawyers and other professionals who submit electronic documents that must be no larger than a specified size, the company said. "Legal professionals have asked for an easy-to-use PDF processing tool that doesn't rely on server-based software or Adobe Acrobat," said Appligent president Virginia Gavin. "
EWeek
Teens tech cocoons
Growing up with the wired generation. "Being sent to your bedroom used to be a punishment: now it's a teen dream. Through personal computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles, teenagers are spurning antisocial angst for a culture of "connected cocooning". It's a phrase coined by music channel MTV to describe how the current 16-to-24-year-old "MTV generation" is permanently plugged into a network of digital devices, bringing the world to their fingertips in a way no previous generation has ever experienced. Such limitless communication is having a revolutionary impact on the way young people interact, socialise, work and play. This tech-savvy teen tribe is united as never before, with the lonely search for identity set to become a vision of the past."Guardian Unlimited
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)
Owning data about what you spend your time doing
AttentionTrust.org. ""attention data" is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention. AttentionTrust and our members believe that you have the following rights: Property - You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL. Mobility - You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention. Economy - You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH. Transparency - You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust. "AttentionTrust.org
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
Tagging people
People Tagging with Tagalag. "Tagalag is a service that lets you tag people, via their email address. It’s not a “tribute” site like 43 people, because only people who know a person’s email address can add tags for that person. If you create a profile you can add personal and geographical information about yourself."
TechCrunch
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
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."
OUtsourcing business processes
Outsourcers Scramble for BPO. "You hear it everywhere: Today, the market for outsourcing is mainly IT outsourcing, but business process outsourcing is coming on strong and will grow faster than the venerable ITO. Just how will this happen?"EWeek
November 15, 2005
Push-to-photo
Walkie-Talkie-Picture. "Sprint has announced a new service called Nextel Direct Send Picture, which lets you to take, send and look at a photo instantly while using the push-to-talk features. And you don’t have to switch between voice and data services to use it."
Gizmodo
Conveying emotions
eMoto. "Emotional communication between people meeting physically in the "real world" make use of many different channels, such as facial expression, body posture, gestures, or tone of voice, little of this physicality of emotions is used in a similar digital context. In eMoto users therefore use affective gestures to convey the emotional content of their messages which are then translated and communicated in colors, shapes and animations. "
SICS
November 14, 2005
Online voice messaging
YackPack. "In a nutshell, YackPack is simple, web-based voice messaging for groups. Simple - Sending a message is as easy as 1-2-3: Click, Talk, and Send. Web-based - Access your YackPack from any computer with an Internet connection. No installation required. Voice messaging - Combine the power of voice with the convenience of email. For groups - Send a message to as many as you choose, within the privacy of your group."
YackPack
November 11, 2005
Physical representations of other people
Phone-less phone calls. "To start a conversation, the user touches the panel(s) corresponding to the person(s) s/he wants to talk with. The panel starts blinking and the volume of that channel is amplified. To talk in private mode, the user picks the orb. This simple hand gesture mutes all the speakers and the public microphone. To switch the connection off, the user drops the ball and the system returns to the initial state. "
we make money not art
Virtual presenters
Meet the virtual weather presenter. "Televirtual, based in Norwich, launched Metman and Metgirl initially for stations who cannot afford to have their weather presented by 'real' broadcasters. But managing director Tim Child said the implications for the future of broadcasting and the media in general were endless. He said the reason weather forecasting was chosen for the prototype was because of its relatively small knowledge base and its formulaic nature. The speech engine used for the voice is the most complex part of the creation and requires up to 30 hours programming input by reading sample forecasts."
EDP24
Better translation
Breakthroughs In Cross Lingual Communication and Speech-to-Speech Translation. "[...] Alex Waibel, [...], demonstrated domain-independent, speech-to-speech translation in a lecture, which was simultaneously translated from English to Spanish to German. Current speech-to-speech translation systems allow translation of spontaneous speech in very limited situations, like making hotel reservations or tourist shopping, but they cannot enable translation of large, open domains like lectures, television broadcasts, meetings or telephone conversations. The new technology developed by InterACT researchers fills that gap and makes it possible to extend such systems to other languages and lecture types."
gizmag
November 10, 2005
Collaborative audio annotating
On the BBC Annotatable Audio project.. "This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion."
plasticbag.org
Growth of VOIP
Internet phone calls on the rise. "A third of people in the US and Europe will abandon phone lines in favour of wireless and broadband telephony come 2009, say analysts Gartner. Broadband telephony is gaining ground among consumers as people become more confident users of their high-speed net connections. It offers a cheap alternative to fixed-line voice calls. By 2009, 70% of voice connections around the world will be wireless, the Gartner report found. This is due to falling mobile costs and greater penetration in countries such as China and India. "
BBC NEWS
Teen publishing
Pew study: Kids remix like hell. "American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey."Boing Boing
Controlled vocabulary for tagging
Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game. "Millions of Games is just what it suggests: A search tool for finding all manner of games on the internet. What makes it different from other similar sites is that users are encouraged to tag games (this is called "mogging" a game). And with Millions of Games, most of the heavy-lifting for creating tags has already been done by the developers of the site. The site uses controlled vocabulary (called "Gameology") to describe categories (arcade, shooter, puzzle, etc). Although you can also add your own free-form tags, these category tags are well known to most users, so there's little ambiguity about what the tags mean."Search Engine Watch
Distant lectures
Students to receive lecture notes on their mobiles. "STUDENTS at a Scottish university are to have their lecture notes sent to their mobile phones in a pioneering bid to replace paper handouts in classes. [...] The system, called AmbieSense, uses hi-tech chips in lecture rooms that are capable of beaming information to mobile phones nearby. If successful, the project could spell the end of the traditional image of students moving between lectures weighed down with piles of paper notes. Instead students will be able to download handouts, timetables and other work on to their phones. "Scotsman.com
Micro-loans
Loan tiny sums to micro-enterprises in the developing world. "Kiva.org is the world’s first peer-to-peer, distributed microloan website. A great idea where PayPal meets Gates Foundation. The site allows you to lend a small amount of money, say $25, to needy microenterprises in developing countries. You receive repayment at the end of the loan period (normally 6-12 months) without interest. If they default on the loan, your loan becomes a donation – though none of the businesses have defaulted yet. A great low-risk, high-reward idea."Boing Boing
November 09, 2005
Blogs as a business threat
Corporate reputations and blog relations. "Nearly two-thirds of businesses have not woken up to the threat posed to their brands and reputations by disgruntled bloggers, a survey of PR professionals revealed. While more than 60% of PR executives interviewed believed that web blogs by unhappy employees or exasperated customers can damage corporate reputations, but 58% said businesses were insufficiently aware of the threat."Smart Mobs
GPS & the visually impaired
MUKANA. "//MUKANA is wearable piece for the visually impaired. //MUKANA includes a mobile phone, a wireless headset, a GPS module and voice recognition software. Users can ask the system to tell them their location, to give information on what route would lead to their destination or on the timetables of public transportation."
we make money not art
November 08, 2005
Using phones to solve crime
Digital door-to-door. "This article in the IHT looks at how police used text messaging in their pursuit of soccer fans who rioted in Rotterdam last April. [...] ."We were really determined to arrest everybody involved," said Jeichien Degraaff, [...] .So "prosecutors decided to try using SMS for the first time in search of more witnesses. Investigators sent the SMS to 17,000 cellular subscribers,telling recipients that their phones were known to have been near the riot and to call the police with any information. The numbers were obtained from regional mobile carriers,whose records showed which phones were present in the riot area. Since the message was sent out in July,Degraaff said,arrests in the case have surpassed 130,with 100 suspects having begun court proceedings."Smart Mobs
Translation phone
Olympic visitors to get Chinese-speaking phone. "If the conversation gets beyond the scope of the phrase book, the user can press a button to talk to a call centre in his or her own language (registered when the phone was hired), and get specific phrases translated. "GPRS and call centres are mature technologies," said Dr Chen. "We plan to use Wi-Fi and 3G, and have location technology in future versions of the system.""Techworld.com
November 03, 2005
On-the-fly translation
Whisper in mandarin and the words come out in english. "Szu-Chen Stan Jou, at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a throat-whisperer device that can translate sentences in a language into another on the spot. The researcher recently demoed his gadget. 11 electrodes attached to his face and neck detected muscle movements, enabling a computer program to figure out what he was saying and then translated from Jou's native Mandarin Chinese into English and Spanish. The doctoral student envisions a day when people have implants in their faces and throats to be able to speak foreign languages."
we make money not art
Relating items through tags
Shadows 1.0. "If you choose to install their toolbar, you can click on “Shadow Page” from any web page and be redirected to that page’s Shadow Page. This page is a collection of metadata gathered from user bookmarks. For instance, here is the Shadow Page for Apple’s iPod Nano. The Shadow Page includes notes from users who have bookmarked the iPod Nano web page, a tag cloud of tags used to describe the page, users who’ve tagged it, etc. A user can choose to make any bookmark private, but any public bookmarks are included on the Shadow Page."
TechCrunch
My TV show
Telecommuting Video Blog. "This guy, Ravi Jain, is shooting a weekly video blog from the driver's seat of his car during his daily commutes between Jamaica Plains and Allston, MA (or five hours of "studio time," as he puts it). He has guests on (who are bumming rides), and when his wife commutes with him, they do a "Regis and Kelly" type show (or at least that's how Ravi fancies it), with some "marital banter to start the show" (oh joy!)."
Boing Boing
Posting management
Blummy means Bookmarklets Galore - Lifehacker. "Blummy provides quick access to all your favorite bookmarklets—those little JavaScript-based web utilities we all love—without crowding up your toolbar. Blummy creates an interactive window that floats over your web page. Use it to store and access bookmarklets as well as other web services."
Lifehacker
Direct UI feedback
Community-Driven EULA feedback. "Do end-user license agreements (EULAs) bother you? Do you want to know the hidden traps that lurk within your software’s EULA? Pop over to EULAscan, a EULA feedback community that’s just getting launched. There you can share your EULA issues and read what other people have found in the EULAs that apply to you."Lifehacker
November 01, 2005
Sharing travel plans
Plan a Trip in a Single Search with Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner. "Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community."
Yahoo! Search blog
Online creativity
Soundjunction. "Young people in the UK are being given the opportunity to create and remix music in order to inspire them to learn more about different types of music. The website, Soundjunction, has extensive video clips and audio for teenagers to listen to. In addition, there is some original music created for the site by Jason Yard, Tunde Jegede and David Horn. "
PSFK
Tracking your loved ones
"Working Late" Won't Work Anymore. ""I used to be worried when my boyfriend didn't answer my calls," says Shim You Sun, a 25-year-old accountant who pays 11 cents each time she checks up on him. "Now I can rest assured that he is at work or busy attending a seminar." She's one of more than 4 million Koreans who have signed up for various services using technology that can determine a cellular subscriber's location. One, costing $3 per month, will send a message with your coordinates to friends and family periodically while you're traveling. Another will automatically dispatch a text message to friends who get within a block or so of each other as they move around town. Yet another, costing 29 cents a day, will send a message if a person isn't at a specified place at a certain time and then allows the tracker to see the person's movements over the previous five hours."Business Week
Getting data quicker
ECG Transmission By Cell Phone Speeds Heart Attack Treatment. "By basing treatment decisions on the ECG performed by paramedics in the field, physicians at Providence Hospital have been able to cut to 44 minutes the average time from patient arrival at the hospital to inflation of the angioplasty balloon that opens the blocked artery (so-called door-to-balloon time). In the past, it took an average of 88 minutes to restore blood flow to the heart. "Science Daily
Distance teaching
E-Tutors: Outsourcing the Coach. "India has very good teachers, especially in math and science," says Kiran Karnik, who heads India's National Association of Software and Service Companies. "Also, these subjects are culture-free so it is comparatively easy for Indian teachers to teach them. Online tutoring is an area which shows enormous potential for growth."Wired News
October 27, 2005
Parental control of technology
Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up. "In interviews and surveys many parents say that their children spend too much time in front of computers and on cellphones. Some parents worry that long, sedentary hours spent at a computer may lead to weight gain, or that an excess of instant and text messaging comes at the expense of learning face-to-face social skills. Some complain of having to compete for their childrens' attention more than ever. "
New York Times (may require free registration)
P2P wireless access
Spanish ISP wants its customers to share WiFi. "Fon, a new Spanish company, is offering to build a service based on P2P principles for people to be able to access the Internet through other people connection using wireless networking. The system is based on 2 categories of users; -- Bill who resell their connection to other members of the service -- Linus who offer to share for free and in exchange can benefit from roaming on the whole network. the whole transaction is managed by the company (Fon) "Boing Boing
October 26, 2005
Wireless hospitals
Digital Medical Records on the Go. "Global Care Quest is working in conjunction with the UCLA Medical Center to eliminate paper trail problems. The system they are installing is a patient retrieval system accessible wirelessly. There are two optional ways in which the hospital staff would be able to receive information; the first of which being through PDA’s and smartphones. It is done all real time to help eliminate room for updating error. For those staff who do not carry PDA’s or smartphones, there would be desktops, laptops, and wall-mounted machines scattered throughout the hospital for patient information access immediately and quickly."
Gizmodo
Task-focused browsers
Flock: First Look. "Flock is a new collaborative browser built on top of open source Firefox code. It integrates with del.icio.us, with blogging, with RSS management and with Flickr. It’s also very pretty."
Lifehacker
Big displays for complex information
Tomorrow's operating room to harness Net, RFID. "It's hard to do most jobs without talking to your peers, but in the operating room, poor communication can cost a life. In the operating room of the future, however, telling a doctor he or she is making a mistake could be as easy as pointing to a computer screen or "wall of knowledge"--a thoroughgoing summary of background data, vital signs and strategic information designed to prevent mistakes during surgery. "
CNET News.com
Collaborative map-making through GPS
London Poster. "OpenStreetMap has put together all the GPS data it has in London and made a stunning poster from it. [...] Data submitted to OpenStreetMap of people walking, driving and cycling around London. So the thicker the lines, the more people travelled them. "
OpenStreetMap
Free phone calls?
Voice phone calls to be free within years: eBay CEO. "In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay's chief executive said on Wednesday. "
Reuters.com
Blogs with very short entries
Tumblelogs. "On my web travels the other day, I came across a new (to me) kind of weblog, the tumblelog. [...] A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. [...] Different ways of displaying various types of content...remaindered links, regular posts, book reviews, and movie reviews are all displayed differently. I'm working on incorporating photo albums and perhaps a daily photolog...as well as a couple other different types of content. "kottke.org
October 25, 2005
SMS from any device
Send SMS Messages Via TV With Your Remote Control (Mobile). " new SMS service sends text messages from TV to cell phone or from TV to TV. Infobank, a mobile solution developer announced the launch of Message on TV, the SMS based on interactive digital data broadcasting service."Lockergnome
Big test for wi-max
Taiwan Tests Island-Wide WiMax. "Taiwanese government officials said on Monday they plan to make Taiwan the world's largest testing ground for WiMax, and inked a pact with Intel to work together on the wireless broadband technology. "PCWorld.com
More "future wireless" technologies
'4G' Leapfrogs Next-Gen Wireless. "Whether it's Flash-OFDM, UMTS TDD, WiMAX or some other impressive-sounding acronym or buzzword, experts promise that such "4G" wonders will finally bring broadband mobility to the general public. "There are a lot of exciting possibilities out there," said Max Weise, a principal at Adventis, a global consulting firm. "You could have your personal media repository that you use at home and on the road. Or handheld devices could control things at home, such as your TiVo." "
Wired News
Dealing with interuptions
Meet the Life Hackers. "Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Online bullying
Confronting Bullies Who Wound With Words. "The new online dimension of bullying has grown to the point that Scope, a nonprofit group that provides educational services to school districts, convened the Island's first conference on bullying in cyberspace at Stony Brook University on Sept. 28. Five hundred teachers, administrators, technology experts and students from 3rd to 12th grade took part. On the Internet, said Betty Kauffman, manager of Scope, "you can take a kid who is 4 feet 11 and thin as a rail, and be the biggest bully in the world, but in real life he couldn't do it." "
New York Times (may require free registration)
October 21, 2005
Video participation
BBC To Start Using Viewers 3G Comments. "The BBC is trialling a new video messaging system for the venerable Match of the Day football show. Called 'Your Shout!', the system lets football fans send in 3G video messages with their opinions on the crucial England internationals and during Football Focus broadcasts. The best content will then be broadcast on live TV during and after the matches, which are being covered live on Match of the Day."
PSFK
Online task management
Need to Get Nagged? "Remember the Milk". "Remember The Milk is a free on-line to-do list management service. It has all the features you’d expect from this sort of site: multiple lists, priorities, due-dates, repeating tasks, etc. Then it adds the cool stuff. My favorite feature is the built-in nagging system that reminds you to get the job done. You can request reminders by E-Mail, IM or SMS. In addition, you can share and publish your to-do lists and create new tasks by e-mail."
Lifehacker
More research online
Educational Sites Inform a Growing Audience. "A new report released by Internet statisticians Nielsen NetRatings contends that educational and reference-oriented sites are experiencing a dramatic increase in traffic, and currently reach nearly one-third of all Web users. The New York-based research outfit said that educational destinations such as Wikipedia, Yahoo Education and eHow have seen a 22 percent jump in unique impressions since September 2004, and have been accessed by 31 percent of all Internet users."EWeek
Better dating
C'mon, Baby, Light My Brain Cells. "C'mon, Baby, Light My Brain Cells Researcher Helen Fisher says we're hardwired to be attracted to certain people. Now e-dating site Chemistry.com is putting her theories to the test"
Business Week
More cellphones for kids
Cell Phones For Six Year Olds. "LeapFrog Enterprises, the educational toy company, teamed up with another wireless company, Enfora, to release TicTalk, a phone for children 6 and older. TicTalk, which retails for about $100, is filled with LeapFrog games and typical cell phone features like a stopwatch and speaker phone capability. (But because the phone is intended for a first-grader, users can only call friends approved by a parent.)"
Real Tech News
Rethinking the school
School capsules. "Each factory built unit has a surface area of 100 m2 for a maximum of 30 students. Each unit is equipped with bathrooms, services and auxiliary areas which are independent of the main school structure. A terrace opens onto the entry of the unit. The unit’s exterior shell is in Glass Reinforced Plastic decorated with the drawings created by the schoolchildren themselves."
we make money not art
Connecting people through clothes
Empathy Vest. "The garment allowed for the transmission of data that was converted into sensory affect. Two touch sensors and one voice relay sensor, gave the wearer a sense of experiencing informational stimulus mapped onto the body through the output modes – 4 x light channels and 1 x fan. These sensory impacts on the body questioned whether the fact that the wearer can feel the physical stimulus could make him/her develop an empathic connection with the remote space or person(s) from which the signals were being received."
networked_performance
October 18, 2005
Online game addiction
Are multiplayer online games more compelling, more addictive?. "Most players become intensely involved in the challenge of the game for a while, but eventually tire of it and move on to some other activity. But for a small minority, obsession with these games can lead to bad habits or worse. Some players have been known to avoid eating and sleeping for many hours at a stretch while lost inside the game. In August, a South Korean in his 20s died after he spent 50 hours, taking only short breaks, playing an online game at an Internet cafe."
csmonitor.com
P2P e-mail
SnapMail. "Unlike instant messaging, SnapMail uses peer-to-peer technology and does not rely on Internet servers to send mail within your local network. This makes SnapMail a very fast in-house messaging system that complements your Internet email. All of your messaging can be conducted without fear of accidentally sending mail out of your company."
Lifehacker
Hacking together public media
Drive-on Movie Magic. "By attaching a video projector to the roof, hood or front your automobile, and popping a DVD player, or even a Mac mini in your car stereo slot, you may project your favorite flick onto the wall of your choice. Hell, why not invite a couple of friends, and use some kind of FM transmitting device to broadcast the sound over to their boogie-vans, too?"
Sponbustion
October 14, 2005
User-generated TV
MTV Creates User-Generated Channel. ""We are handing over an entire channel online to college students and everyone who wants new music. mtvU Uber gives them the power to create and program their own channel, and will remain in perpetual beta mode as they experiment and pioneer the digital future.""
PSFK
Emotive clothing
FlirtSkirt. "User A wears her skirt and turns it on and her skirt holds the colours that have been initialized. On reaching a particular distance from user B the outfits start communicating with each other. They recognize the initial colors, mix them and display the shared color on both outfits. In addition when in range the outfits dim. When user A and B have separated from each other and moved beyond the range of frequency, they leave with the shared color ready for interactions with new users."
networked_performance
October 13, 2005
IM in time-sensitive businesses
Finance Gets the Message. "Once a novelty and always a favorite of young technophiles, not to mention the everlasting bane of the distraction-prone, IM has emerged as an essential application in the financial services industry, where brokers and underwriters have come to rely on the technology to stay in touch with customers and each other in an industry where information moves markets and timing is everything."EWeek
Broadcasting to those around you
Philips “Tune In” concept allows for anonymous music-sharing. "The “Tune In” is a flash-based player that both broadcasts its signal to nearby Tune In devices and can recieve tracks the same way. Philips envisions users becoming their own tiny radio stations, sharing their playlists on the subway, in the library, anywhere people congregate."
Engadget
October 12, 2005
P2P "Internets"
Netsukuku. "Netsukuku is a mesh network or a P2P net system that generates and sustains itself autonomously. It is designed to handle an unlimited number of nodes with minimal CPU and memory resources. Thanks to this feature it can be easily used to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls."
Netsukuku
Community journalism
Brattleboro community news and discussion for Brattleboro, VT. "Brattleboro, welcome to your only locally-owned participatory journalism site. Read and write your views, reviews, news, interviews, and more. It's your town to talk about. Get involved and shape the debate."
iBrattleboro
Relying on self-moderation
New reader comments system for BBC news. "The new system will rely mostly on "reactive moderation," asking readers to report inappropriate content and material that breaches house rules, according to journalism.co.uk. Readers will also be able to rate postings and other users can browse comments either in chronological order or by those ratings.The BBC is moving to the new system because the site is currently overwhelmed by the volume of submissions, as every comment currently has to be individually approved before being published.An average 6,000 comments are submitted on a typical day, and up to 20,000 on a busy news day - but only around 10 per cent of those are published". "Smart Mobs
Wearing your phone
Ceatec shows off future gadgets. "Ubi-Wa has two meanings in Japanese - "Finger ring" and "Speak by finger" - which is exactly what it lets you do. In noisy places where you cannot hear who you are calling, you simply place the Ubi-Wa bearing finger in the ear. The ring converts speech sounds to vibrations. These travel down the bone and into the ear canal, which obligingly turns them back into intelligible speech. "
BBC NEWS
Young people publishing online
Young blog their way to a publishing revolution. "On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do - as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online - most young people are using it to communicate with one another."Smart Mobs
October 11, 2005
Sharing locations
Share with Fallen Fruit. "West coast-based Fallenfruit.org provides maps that identify fruit trees that hang over public sidewalks. By law (depending on the town), these fruits are public property and you can harvest them freely. Although avocados are currently in season, the Beverly-to-Wiltshire map shows where you can find bananas, figs, grapes, lemons, loquats, peaches, oranges and more."
Lifehacker
Changing school models
School plan for 364-day opening. "A school is to consult teachers and parents on the idea of opening for lessons 364 days a year. Teaching would take place throughout the year - even on weekends - but not everyone would be in at the same time."
BBC NEWS
October 10, 2005
Reputation through good tagging
Tag, You're It: Best Bookmarker. "When it comes to finding and categorizing new web pages, Chanchal Gupta is the most trusted surfer in town. New experimental software has identified Gupta as one of the most influential social bookmarkers on the web. The software, CollaborativeRank, is a search engine that places great emphasis on results found by highly ranked web "
Wired News
Networks built into future cities
Korea's U-city. "Public recycling bins that use RFID to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect a fall and contact help; phones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions. In New Songdo City, a "ubiquitous city" being built in South Korea, all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental, etc.) share data, and computers are to be built into the houses, streets and office buildings. When completed in 2014, the city's infrastructure will be a test bed for new technologies, and the city itself will exemplify a digital way of life, the "U-life." It starts with a resident's smart-card house key. "The same key can be used to get on the subway, pay a parking meter, see a movie, borrow a free public bicycle and so on. It'll be anonymous, won't be linked to your identity, and if lost you can quickly cancel the card and reset your door locks," aid John Kim who leads the U-city planning. "
we make money not art
New forms of collaboration
Networking: A Special Section. "Companies are drawing on collaborative models that first blossomed in nonbusiness settings, from online games to open-source software projects to the so-called wiki encyclopedias and blogs to speed up innovation. This networked collaboration is creating new opportunities and disrupting industries. New styles of work and, in business schools, new theories of innovation are rising."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
October 07, 2005
Interactive business card
The rCard: Fully Interactive Business Card. "The rCard is a card that plays video and comes with a 1.875” x 1.875” full color flat screen, speakers, a navigational button, 1 gig of memory, and a USB port. The battery on it is as thin as a postage stamp and lasts about 4 hours of continuous use, but there’s a rechargeable battery option, and you can power it off and on. The whole thing only measures 2” x 3” and weighs a measly 2 ounces."
Gizmodo
2 screens from one
Split-Screen DVD/TV Nav System. "Toyota has developed a dual-purpose navigation system that debuts on the Alphard minivan, making it possible for the driver to check a road map on the display while a passenger watches a TV program or a DVD."
we make money not art
Centralizing your public information
iDeeMee. "iDeeMee is a service for people to create a single profile with multiple links to their online profiles and webspaces. iDeeMee also allows users to search for profiles based on basic demographic information. iDeeMee collects basic information that the user chooses to supply so that they can be recognized by searchers. "
iDeeMee
Ambient devices
Sharing memories. "Momento makes it easier to share video memories. The glass ball will "wake up" when approached and play its store of movie clips when a person reaches out to pick it up. To change from one clip to another, simply shake the glass ball and its sensors will detect the movement prompting the existing clip to dissolve and another one to appear in its place."
we make money not art
October 06, 2005
Distant band members
eJamming. " If you're an accomplished musician, just plug your MIDI-enabled keyboard, electric guitar or bass, drum pads, or wind controller into your computer via the USB port and we'll connect you with as many musicians as you like so you can eJam over the Internet...in real time and totally in sync. You'll even be able to TALK to each other over eJamming™, just like you do in the studio and control room"
eJamming
October 05, 2005
Physical interfaces
The Contact Board. "The board comes with a series of magnets. Each one is embedded with an RFID tag and stores a contact's number. There are 3 areas on the board: one to make the calls, another to edit the number and the third one to listen to messages. The user can call one of their contacts or listen to a message from that person by putting the magnets on a specific area."
we make money not art
Simple, collaborative note-taking
JotSpot Live: Collaborative Pages. "JotSpot Live provides a light-weight Wiki-like solution to collaborative note-taking. Users create pages that can be edited in real time by others within an invited group. JotSpot aims—and succeeds to a point, although the site still has a fair number of bugs—to make the process easier and more transparent to the average business user than a traditional Wiki. The interactive editing tools feel like a word processor, which is a huge plus in my opinion."
Lifehacker
Voice SMS
Voice-Text Service Next Killer Ap?. "Unlike leaving a regular voice mail if a phone isn't answered, users of the "voice SMS" service aren't trying to talk directly to the people they call. Instead they just want to send a message in the form of voice instead of text. The recipient's phone doesn't even ring for a voice SMS; the recipient is alerted with a beep and can retrieve the voice message by pressing the star key."Smart Mobs
October 04, 2005
Using WiMax for local broadcasts
BBC, Telabria conduct live news broadcast over Wimax. "'Essentially we created our own giant Wimax wireless hot-spot which covered most of the city,' explained Andy Butterworth, the BBC technical co-ordinator who masterminded the project. 'This meant that we could broadcast live into our evening news programme at the same quality we’d usually achieve using a standard satellite truck.' The broadcast was encoded live in the Land Rover using MPEG-4 compression equipment from Tandberg, with the resulting stream taking up approximately 8Mbps of bandwidth. "Digital Media Europe
Slow to blog
Businesses must 'wake up to blog threat'. "Businesses have been slow to respond to the threats posed by weblogs and equally slow to capitalise on the opportunities they present, according to the results of a survey of public relations consultants released today. Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said that companies have not yet woken up to the risks, and 64 per cent said that a disgruntled employee or customer could cause significant damage to a firm’s reputation by posting damaging remarks on blogs - the online message boards and diaries which have become so popular in the past year. "Times Online
Renting the contents of your PVR
Rent my DVR. "Rent my DVR is an online marketplace for buying and selling TV programming. Buyers can scan online listings of available shows and download them via a proprietary P2P application for about 25 cents a pop. Providers in turn receive a 25 cent payment for delivering shows. "
Engadget
Picture dialing
Picture-phone eliminates the need for dialing. "Warren Goodland (a British masters candidate in Design Research for Disability), has noticed the difficulty that seniors often have in operating a telephone, mostly due to a diminished capacity for abstract thinking. His solution: a system where photographs of the user’s regular contacts are placed in a special peripheral attached to the phone; touching either the photo or the holder dials the desired number."
Engadget
Communication watches
Japanese Watchmakers Unite to Develop Mobile Email Wristwatches. "Citizen Watch, Casio Computer, Seiko Instruments and Seiko Epson are partnering with the Mobile Computing Promotion Consortium to define a new standard for enabling Wristwatches to display mobile email or SMS received by mobile phones. "
I4U News
October 03, 2005
Blogs for advice
Shoppers use blogs for bargains. "Consumers are starting to use weblogs, or blogs, as guides to what they should and shouldn't buy, finds a survey. More than three-quarters of those questioned in the research said they had consulted blogs before shopping. "
BBC NEWS
Employee predictions
At Google, the Workers Are Placing Their Bets. "In Google's system, employees can bet on how the company will perform in the future, forecasting things like product introduction dates and new office openings. It was devised under a program that allows engineers to spend one day a week on a project of their choice. "New York Times
Drawing on digital photos
Memorylane and Okitegami. "morylane, by Ryo Sanpei, Sadamitsu Azuma, Akiyuki Kayama, Yumiko Yoshimoto, and Naohito Okude, is a picture frame for digital photos, which allows users to draw on digital photos and exchange them with friends. The demo video illustrates a cute episode of a boy and a girl making up using memorylane. "
we make money not art
GPS and phones
Roamin' Holiday. "Imagine leaving your car at home and networking with other GPS-phone users to form impromptu car pools, or receiving Web pages on your phone about Pickett's ill-fated charge as you amble up Seminary Ridge in Gettysburg. Geo-aware devices that trigger location-specific services will become as natural as the very idea of wirelessness, and the Web itself will cease to be a placeless cyberspace and will be pinned at millions of points to the physical world we inhabit. "
Tech Review
September 29, 2005
Knowing when you lie
Brain imaging ready to detect terrorists, say neuroscientists. "Brain-imaging techniques that reveal when a person is lying are now reliable enough to identify criminals, claim researchers. Team member Ruben Gur points out that, unlike the polygraph, fMRI does not rely on controllable symptoms such as sweating or a fast heartbeat. Instead it monitors the central nervous system. When someone lies, their brain inhibits them from telling the truth, and this makes the frontal lobes more active. "A lie is always more complicated than the truth," says Gur. "You think a bit more and fMRI picks that up.""Nature
Tracking office workers with RFID
Tag notifies workers so secretaries don't have to. "RFID tags are worn by workers and RFID readers are placed throughout the company to keep tabs on their whereabouts and to send them information about meetings and other scheduled events via computer and celphone. When the time of a meeting nears, the system can notify all workers expected to attend. If a participant does not show up, the system will seek that person out and suggest the appropriate response, such as a phone call if he is at his desk or an e-mail message if he is in another meeting."we make money not art
September 28, 2005
Centralizing everything in your blog
Project Comet. "Community Aggregation: Gives you the ability to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way. Multiple Streams: Provides a single place to keep everything that is important to you. A record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own. "
Six Apart
Ubiquitous messaging
WiFi plastic bunny waggles ears when you get mail. "Thanks to me, your friends and family will have a totally new way of keeping in touch: through the web, text messages, their phone or email… plenty of different ways to send you messages, music, MP3 files that I'll read out to you… or sing out, or even dance. Your friends will no longer be confined to the depths of your computer or phone: they'll come alive in your home, in the noble guise of a rabbit. "
Boing Boing
Anonymous blogging
Blog censorship handbook released. "Included in the booklet, called The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents, is advice about how to blog anonymously, as well as how to identify the most suitable way to circumvent censorship. "
BBC NEWS
September 27, 2005
Mimicking humans
Brit's bot chats way to AI medal. "George is a "character" which has learned its conversation skills from the interactions it has had with visitors to the Jabberwacky website, and through chats with Mr Carpenter. Mr Carpenter thinks that in the not-too-distant future, it may be that programs or robots talk and act in place of humans, mimicking human behaviour. "
BBC NEWS
Cellphone saturation
World mobile subscribers top 2 bln: study. "The number of mobile phone subscribers in the world has surpassed the 2 billion milestone Wireless Intelligence, an information service set up by industry body GSM Association and consulting firm Ovum, said on Sunday. "The bulk of the new growth now is coming from large, less well-developed markets such as China, India, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa," Wireless Intelligence said in a statement. "
Reuters.com
September 26, 2005
Toys that support storytelling
The recording toy car. "The HotCam is a manual control toy car with an onboard video camera and microphone. The car enables children to record certain "scenes" in their own stories. They can then "play" the captured scenes through a TV, re-experience their stories and share them with parents, siblings and friends in a similar way to something as traditional and tangible as a painted picture or clay model. When the push button on top of the car is ON the headlights and rear lights come on and the car is recording. When the button is OFF the lights go off and the camera is not recording."
we make money not art
September 21, 2005
IM bots for information
TV listings IM bot. "Search the BBC 7-day TV listings with your IM client, and get SMS reminders sent to your phone. "
BBC backstage
Bluetooth hearing aids
Starkey ELI hearing aid takes calls from your Bluetooth cellphone. "For those who use hearing aids, digital cellphones can be a bit of an annoyance as they create electronic interference resulting in buzzing and feedback from the unit. Starkey Laboratories’ ELI hearing aid is designed to mitigate some of that by using Bluetooth to actually route the call audio into the hearing aid itself."
Engadget
Social networks and online services built in
Killer Buzz Flocks to New Browser. "Flock advertises itself as a "social browser," meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It's a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user. "Wired News
Multi-user interactive tables
DiamondTouch embeds a giant multi-user tablet into a table. "The MERL DiamondTouch is basically a ginormous touchscreen, embedded in a table, that supports multiple simultaneous inputs, so different users can be manipulating objects on the screen at the same time. This DiamondTouch is totally wasted on research and corporate meetings — all it needs is some cup holders and we’d ditch our coffee table in a second."
Engadget
Wireless neighborhood notice boards
Connect With Your Neighbors Online. "Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it. This means that with a Neighbornode you can broadcast a message to roughly everyone whose apartment window is within 300 feet of yours (and has line of sight), and they can broadcast messages back to you."
Lifehacker
Physical and virtual social networks
Superstar Tokyo. "To play, place your own stickers (with a star on it to recognize participants) wherever you want and collect the stickers of other players by shooting them with your phonecam. Whenever a player snaps a Superstar sticker both players earn points. A link is then created between the two players. From this point on, any time either player earns points (by shooting a new sticker or by having their sticker shot) the other one will also earn points (though not as many)."
we make money not art
September 20, 2005
More kid tracking with RFID
Train Ticket Gates to Track Kids. "PiTaPa is an RFID-based train ticket system that is used by railway companies (including Hankyu railways, Nosei railways, and Keihan railways) in the Kansai region of Japan. These three railway companies announced they together will test a service that uses their RFID-enabled train ticket gates for tracking kids. When a kid passes through RFID-enabled train ticket gates using an PiTaPa train pass, which is an RFID card, an SMS message is automaticaly sent to their parents. "RFID in Japan
September 16, 2005
Video Jockeys
Radio 1 Superstar VJS - Creative Archive Licence trial. "For the first time in our history the BBC is opening its video archives to the UK public. Download nearly 100 clips especially chosen with VJ's in mind. We've scoured the archives for skylines, sunsets, seascapes, wildlife, time-lapse photography & retro gadgets. We will be adding new clips/programmes and launching a major VJ based competition over the next few months so keep coming back for the latest updates. "
BBC
Capturing people you meet with
Recording who you met with at an academic conference. "At this year's ubicomp conference, RFID tags are used to record a person one met with. This could be used to either replace or augment our existing practice of exchaging business cards. A special table with embedded RFID readers read FeliCa RFID cards on it thereby identify people around the table. The table also takes a photo. "
RFID in Japan
Instant wireless networks
An instant and mobile wireless mesh network. " California-based start-up company, PacketHop, is about to launch a software to enable mobile and instantaneously reconfigurable mesh networks. If you have a 802.11-enabled laptop or PDA, you will be able to send, receive and route data. According to InformationWeek, this could be primarily used by police officers "caught in a dangerous situation that requires teamwork and fast communication." "
Primidi
Whole countries shift to VOIP
NZ Telecom plans $200m upgrade. "Telecom today announced a $NZ220 ($203) million project to switch every telephone line in the country to an internet protocol platform within seven years to replace the existing phone network."Australian IT
Religious podcasts
Missed Church? Download It to Your IPod.. "Mr. Lewis, who regularly attends services of the National Community Church in Alexandria, Va., listened to the sermon while he was at the gym, through a recording he had downloaded to his iPod. Instead of listening to the rock music his gym usually plays, he heard his pastor's voice. "
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Local tags give you latitude and longitude
denCity.net. "Places and objects of the city get a virtual identification in the form of a QR(bar)-code. This code contains - in digitally readable form - the most important information of the respective location: its tag-ID and GPS-coordinates. Shot and decoded on the fly using a common camera-cellphone, through the tags one connects to the dataweb, which consists of site-specific information."
networked_performance
Really social networking
Do You MySpace?. "Although many people over 30 have never heard of MySpace, it has about 27 million members, a nearly 400 percent growth since the start of the year. It passed Google in April in hits, the number of pages viewed monthly, according to comScore MediaMetrix, a company that tracks Web traffic. (MySpace members often cycle through dozens of pages each time they log on, checking up on friends' pages.) According to Nielsen/NetRatings, users spend an average of an hour and 43 minutes on the site each month, compared with 34 minutes for facebook.com and 25 minutes for Friendster."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Facilitating from a distance
Virtual facilitator could help teams solve problems faster, say UMR researchers. “Facilitation is in many ways related to therapy,” says Luechtefeld. “We help people to express ideas clearly, identify barriers, and understand the situation they’re facing. Our virtual facilitator could be used in chatrooms, e-teams, and educational situations right now.”"
UMR News and Research
August 30, 2005
Finding travelling companions
Booking A Flight Companion. "Peter Shankman has created a system that allows travellers to book the person they'd like to sit next to. He says, "I've created match.com meets expedia meets friendster. You register at AirTroductions, and create a profile. Enter in your photo, and various facts about you, depending on whether you're looking for a business connection or a personal connection or both. Once that's done, the next time you fly, you enter your itinerary at the site, and AirTroductions shows you who else has registered for your flight, as well.""
PSFK
Legitimate music sharing
Downloading Disrupted. "PlayLouder have signed a deal with Sony-BMG, one of the biggest record companies in the world, that will allow PlayLouder members to download music and then share it with their peers. The PlayLouder software analyses the sharing and works out what songs are being shared and how frequently. They then pay a fee based on this to the record label that owns the songs rights. This business model is truly revolutionary. It allows users to continue file sharing and actively encourage this whilst satisfying the record labels by compensating them based on actual figures. "
PSFK
Artists encouraging remixing
Beastie Boys release vocals-only tracks to encourage remixers. "The Beastie Boys are posting acapella tracks -- just the vocals, in other words, along with BPM info -- from their songs and encouraging their fans to make noncommercial remixes of them. A new track goes live every Friday. "
Boing Boing
More online borrowing
Online librarian is 'overwhelmed'. "The website asks its members to add a list of 10 books they own to its online catalogue. The listed books can then be exchanged between members for the cost of postage and packing. "
BBC NEWS
Cataloging everything
Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth. "Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at."The Guardian
Dual mode phones
Number of mobile/wi-fi handsets to reach 66m in 2009 - report. "Dual-mode mobile/wi-fi handsets will be the key driver to mass consumer adoption of VoIP. By 2009, over 66m mobile/wi-fi handsets will be in operation, according to a report from market research firm In-Stat. "Digital Media Europe
Lending people
Library lends out people. "A library in Holland is lending out people, as well as books, in a new initiative aimed at challenging stereotypes. People can borrow gay people, gipsies and Muslims for an hour and talk to them about their lives, reports Nu.nl. Jan Krol, director of the public library, in Almelo, said one of his assistants came up with the idea. He added: "It's a good way to challenge stereotypes. Clients can lend out a Muslim woman in a head scarf and ask her the questions they wouldn't dare to if they met on the street."Ananova
Smart toys
A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion. "the 18-inch-tall doll promises - right on the box it will be sold in - to "listen, speak and show emotion." Some analysts and buyers who have seen Amanda say it represents an evolutionary leap from earlier talking dolls like Chatty Cathy of the 1960's, a doll that cycled through a collection of recorded phrases when a child pulled a cord in its back. Radio frequency tags in Amanda's accessories - including toy food, potty and clothing - wirelessly inform the doll of what it is interacting with. For instance, if the doll asks for a spoon of peas and it is given its plastic cookie, it will gently admonish its caregiver, telling her that a cookie is not peas."
New York Times
RSS: Geeky or mainstream?
RSS failing to gain audience mindshare. "Nielsen/NetRatings polled 1,000 members of its research panel who read blogs. It found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents either never heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or did not know what the technology is used for. The study found only 11% of Web log readers use RSS to monitor blogs"ArsTechnica
Technology that connects two peope
Embrace. "Embrace is a concept bracelet that enables the user to be seamlessly connected to their significant other over periods of separation. "
we make money not art
Digital schools
Look, Ma, No Schoolbooks!. "Gypton said he assigns readings based on websites, lists postings to news articles, uses online groups and message boards to keep the students connected on weekends and asks them to comment on each other's work. "Wired News
August 25, 2005
Massively multiplayer games through the phone
Artificial Life announces First Massive Multi Player 3G Game. "Players of the game can select a virtual persona for themselves and inhabit and live in a simulated virtual city. When navigating through the virtual city, users can contact and interact directly with other players in real time, have live real time chats with other human players or chatter bots, enter and explore virtual buildings, use interactive objects and co-operate with others to solve certain tasks or to avoid certain threats."
gizmag
Smart tags
QR Code Gets Active for Lost Children. "Fujitsu developed a new technology that embeds IDs, IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, IP packets (both IPv4 and IPv6), and a "pulse signal" that can be directly sent out to the Internet into non-digital media including printed QR Codes. The technology for example allows for easily sending out notification messages by attaching QR Codes to things, people, etc. Using this technology, in a few days, the compay will test a system for notifying parents about their lost children at Shima Spanish Village in Mie Prefecture. QR Codes are attached to children -- if they are lost, someone can use a scanner to read their QR codes. The information encoded in the QR Codes includes the email address of a server machine. When it is scanned, the system automatically send email to the server, then the server notifies their parents using SMS."RFID in Japan
Emergency info through the phone
In case of emergency, put your cell on ICE. "A British paramedic came up with the idea of asking cell phone users to input an entry into their cellular phonebook called ICE for "in case of emergency." Accompanying that acronym would be the name and phone numbers of the person who should be called if something has happened to the owner of the phone. The ICE campaign was launched in Britain in April, but people really started paying attention after the July terrorist bombings in London that killed 56 and injured hundreds."
USATODAY
Selling your own goods
Etsy -- place to sell handmade goods. "Etsy is a website where people can sell anything they want, as long as it's handmade."
Boing Boing
Community lending
Ripple. "Ripple cuts the banks right out of the picture by allowing anyone to act as a bank and grant credit within the Ripple system to anyone they know. The system keeps track of the source of all IOUs, so that debts that are not repaid are automatically borne by the issuer."
Project Homepage
August 24, 2005
Making speech clearer
Speech-Slowing Phone. "NTT DoCoMo out of Japan are releasing a new phone later this month that is a small step in getting those chatty people of the world to shut up. The phone has the ability to slow down rapid speech of the callers. With the simple tap of a button mid-call the speech on the other end is slowed to almost two times its normal rate."
Gizmodo
Knowing how engaged you are
Jerk-O-Meter calls out your boredom on the phone. "Researchers at MIT are developing software for cellphones that analyzes speech patterns and voice tones and rates how engaged you are in the conversation. It measures the levels of stress and empathy in a person’s voice and, when your attention starts to drift, pops up warning messages to the effect of “Don’t be a jerk!” or “Be a little nicer now.”"
Engadget
Collaborative comics
Panel Junction. "Panel Junction combines the graphic novel with forms of shared authorship, merging spontaneous drawing with scripting and direction from online visitors. Participants from around the world can contribute dialog, graphics, caricatures, fonts, narrative ideas, internal monologues, jokes, backgrounds, puns, story-boards, coloring, anecdotes, and sketches."
we make money not art
Personal contact
Remember when mom's hug made you feel better?. "Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found that a hug from your significant other can reduce blood pressure and cut the risk of heart attacks. This is especially true for women. So the effect of human interaction is much stronger than anyone ever thought. So how you enhance those contacts to improve people's life experience?"
Innovation Blog
Leaving notes in locations
System for Tagging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics. "STAMPS is a little program that allows you to see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map."
Smart Mobs
Mixing up location technologies
Navizon’s P2P positioning system. "Navizon, a GPS, WiFi, and cellular peer-to-peer based mobile positioning system for Pocket PC devices. Of course, this system (like all other peer-based mobile software systems) only works well when you actually have a lot of people running the software, but they also claim to have the cellular/WiFi triangulation thing down by having those users who do have GPS sync to their servers with varying coordinates."
Engadget
People creating media
Citizens do media for themselves. "D Lasica's ourmedia is a place online where anyone can publish their own digital home movie, music, photos, or even plain old blog for free. [...] Since its inception in March 2005, not-for-profit Ourmedia has attracted more than 31,000 international members, and now plays host to 22,000 separate pieces of media, from travelogs to tastes of family life."
Smart Mobs
Growth in blogs
Visiting the blogs. "A new report out by a leading Internet research company has revealed that fully 30 percent of American Internet users visited blogs during the first quarter of 2005",this CNET news article says.According to it "almost 50 million--or one in six--Americans spent at least some time on blogs during that time frame.That's a 45 percent rise over the year before".Smart Mobs
Funding based on reputation
Vienna net.art community to distribute its own grants using social software. "The Commissioner For The Arts, a member of Vienna's Social Democratic Party, is supporting a consortium of more than 100 net.art groups, called Netznetz, in the development of a reputation-based software system that the group will then use to help decide how to distribute the grant money it receives from the government."
Boing Boing
Learning languages
Computers learn a new language. "Conventional translation software programs have all the rules of grammar coded into them. But the ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) program, developed by researchers at Cornell University in New York and Tel Aviv University in Israel, infers the building blocks of a language using statistical and algebraic processes. The software learns the grammar of a new language by searching text for patterns. The researchers think the program will be useful in cognitive science and bioinformatics, as well as in applications such as voice recognition."New Scientist
Mixing up services
Koreans Find Secret Cybersauce. "There's more to online social networks than matchmaking, and South Korea's Cyworld is showing the way. The online service blends homepage building and social networking with a host of other online activities, including Sims-like role-playing."
Wired News
August 23, 2005
Trust management
Preserving the value of a good reputation online. "By acting as a trusted third party recorder of customer feedback for all kinds of services, www.iKarma.com hopes to provide a go-to resource for online consumers before they make a purchase."
gizmag
Human attributes as data
HumanML, the Human Markup Language. "HumanML wants to represent human characteristics (cultural, physical, psychological, etc.) in such a formal way it can be delivered as machine readable subtext via the use of extensible markup language (XML)."Tech Trends
Tagging places that matter
Geominder. "Geominder allows you to create location-based reminders that stay attached to physical locations."
Ludimate
Distant directions
Remote-controlled humans. "The researchers outfit their subject with two electrodes behind the ears that "pull" her in one direction or another."
Boing Boing
Messages in the furniture
SMS Controlled Spy-Mirror. "The messages appear as luminous text, running on the mirrors’ surface when one gets close to the mirror."
networked_performance
August 10, 2005
Video booths
MYSQ: Video Purikura. "MYSQ (My Style So Qute) is an interactive "video booth" for shooting 30-second movies that can be viewed on mobile phones. [...] The booth can accommodate up to three people so you can shoot Prikura style video clips with your friends. Inside the booth is a fluffy thing called a MYSQ ring - you wear it on your hand. A camera detects the movement of your MYSQ ring. Also, floor sensors detect your foot movement. So, the system can control video effects based on your (and your friends') hand/foot movement."
we make money not art
Playing with video
Shapeshifter. "Shapeshifter is an installation for busy streets. People interact by standing in front of the large screen. A camera records the user one slice at a time enabling the user to compose strange bodies. The various slices are recorded and stored for other people to play with."
we make money not art
Open-source curriculum
After Wikipedia: free, collaborative, open kindergarten-uni textbooks. "The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer."Boing Boing
Screens in the kids room
Accenture's home of the future. "The LCD screen in the crib lets parents keep an eye on children, and even have a videoconference with them. Accenture's crib also contains sensors that monitor heart rate and other vital signs. (Intel has a similar "smart crib" experiment.)"
CNET News.com
Women using technology
Women more likely to text than men. "...young women are more likely than their male counterparts to use a computer and more likely to own a mobile phone and use it for text messaging."ElectricNews.net
Wireless devices in the classroom
Kenya pilots handheld education. "In the Eduvision pilot project, textbooks are out, customised Pocket PCs, referred to as e-slates, are very much in. They are wi-fi enabled and run on licence-free open source software to keep costs down."
BBC NEWS
August 08, 2005
Communication makes you quiet
Phones Make Korea a Silent Society. "If in an age of near-ubiquitous communication people have become paradoxically quiet, it is because means of communication that replace the spoken word, like chat programs and text messengers, are cheap, convenient to use and accessible everywhere. There are people who say they could live comfortably without saying a word all day, and who send so many SMS and chat online so much that sometimes they find it awkward to talk."
Digital Chosunilbo
IM and SMS popularity with teens
Teens spurn e-mail for messaging. "...instant messaging was proving the most popular way to chat with friends. Three-quarters 75% of online teenagers in the US have used IM, the survey found, with personalised features proving popular."
BBC NEWS
Collaborating with video
Video making for children. "In Shooting mode, the users insert a token in the camera and record a shot. They place the camera on the table and the video is transferred wirelessly to the computer. Once removed from the camera, the tokens can be used as a composition element on the table and the resulting video clips can later be combined by the group to achieve a common outcome."
we make money not art
Event-specific phones
The Eventphone. "Say you're at a big event, if the Eventphone DECT phone system is in place, just bring a compatible DECT cordless phone that conforms to the GAP standard and register it to DECT. If you have no such phone, you can buy one for 15 euros. Then you can use the phone to make internal calls to any other extension for free. No more crazy double roaming charges just to find your friends."
we make money not art
Constant connections
Social Machines. "Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis, photo-sharing sites, and other technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of commentary and interpretation by other participants--the "back channel" mentioned by Campbell."Tech Review
Some post-blog predictions
10 for 10. "Recently, a few people asked me over lunch: what's next after blogging and podcasting? [...] This has all got me thinking about what technology-driven trends will revolutionize how companies communicate. Here's my list of 10 trends to keep an eye on for the next 10 years."
Micro Persuasion
Collaborative tagging at work
Tagging and Participative Journalism. "Jon Udell has an interesting piece on (among other things) the use of del.icio.us tagging by InfoWorld editors as a way for them to work with each other and also interact with their readers. We're finding similar things at Nature. First, our social bookmarking service for scientists, Connotea, is proving useful as a collaborative tool for our journalists and editors. For example, editorial teams can use tagged links to communicate ideas and leads among themselves. Also, journalists researching particular stories can use the system to store and retrieve informative links under suitable tag names — and can choose to keep those links private, at least temporarily, if they're worried about being scooped."Smart Mobs
Fashionable hearing aids
Call for 'designer' hearing aids. "The ideas on display include a remote control to block out irritating sounds, a device to enable people to have a clear conversation in a noisy bar, and hearing aids designed as fashionable jewellery or must-have gadgets. Another concept, known as the Goldfish, instantly replays the previous 10 seconds of sound to the wearer in case they have failed to catch someone's name. It is based on the idea that goldfish only have 10 seconds of memory. "
BBC NEWS
Collaborative world tagging
Tagging the planet. "Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well."
Tagzania
August 06, 2005
Creative use of technology
Digital Citizens: The DIY DJs. "All this week the BBC News website is speaking to people whose creativity has been transformed in the digital age. From blogging to podcasting, millions of ordinary people are becoming writers, journalists, broadcasters and film-makers thanks to increasingly affordable and accessible tools."
BBC NEWS
RFID security
RFID's Infant Protection thwarts kidnapping. "Last week, the Hugs system sounded the alarm when an infant was removed from the hospital's seventh-floor nursery. Nurses and staff responded to the "Code Pink" alert, and security officials recovered the infant unharmed and returned him to the maternity ward. [...] Each infant wears a Hugs tag on his or her wrist or ankle that contains a tiny radio transmitter. Hospital exit points are electronically monitored to detect unauthorized removal of an infant."Smart Mobs
More tagging
Web Tags Gain Backers at AlwaysOn. "The phenomenon of tagging the Web appears to be gaining more converts, as another online startup embraces the metadata annotations and as even enterprises begin to take note of the trend."EWeek
Tagging instead of sending
del.icio.us links for: you and me. "The del.icio.us team released a fun new feature: tag a link for:username for bookmarks you want other del.icio.us users to see. I'll be watching for:ginatrapani, so if you're a del.icio.us user with a link for me, tag it up."
Lifehacker
Robotic companions
Gentle Purr of the iCat. "The iCat is another robot with facial expressions - designed by Philips to stimulate and study Human-Robot interaction. It's equipped with a camera, a microphone, a speaker, and a variety of touch sensors and multi-color LEDs, to help the robot interact more fully with its human counterparts and gain some semblance of a "personality."
Gizmodo
Citizen journalism
Watch Out -- TV Reporters Are Everywhere. "With the commercial launch of wideband-code division multiple access (W-CDMA), people will be able to video-record a scene and send it to broadcasters or upload it to the Web. It is the precursor of video-based citizen journalism."
The Korea Times
July 18, 2005
Collaborative filtering of news articles
a social bookmarking community for news readers. "1. browse the Web for news and blog posts. 2. bookmark your favorite stories as you go. Drag the Add to CommonTimes button to your browser bar for easy access. 3. visit our site for the most widely shared headlines"
CommonTimes
eBay-like donating
Aid Recipients Might Have the Best Ideas About Allocation. "Their base of operations is GlobalGiving, a company they set up three years ago to use the Internet to connect small donors with worthy international aid projects. So far, they've raised more than $1.5 million from about 2,000 donors to finance all or part of about 400 small-scale projects. They've already built, ripped up and rebuilt a consumer-friendly Web site. And they've developed partnerships with dozens of nonprofit organizations around the world that vet all projects."Washington post
V-Blogging
Blogging + Video = Vlogging. "Bloggers who previously wrote endlessly about everything from politics to tech tips to how to fry an egg on a hot sidewalk can now take their commentary, advice and random experiments to the next level by filming and broadcasting their work, thanks to the latest web trend -- video blogging."
Wired News
Digital flirting
Urbanseeder flirting service. "Urbanseeder is a flirting service that increases your chance of running again into people you find attractive. Using minimal digital technology, the game plays out unpredictably in real space and tries to preserve the spirit of flirting."
we make money not art
The ritual of e-mail
Email-forwarding networks. "Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough,but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications,say US researchers"Smart Mobs
July 16, 2005
People finding
The location-aware watch that locates your friends. "The FLORA (Fluorescent Light Organizing Radio Accessory) is a location-aware watch that helps people locate others, a mixture of a compass and the game "Hot and Cold".
we make money not art
Laptops instead of books
'Sims school' abandons books for laptops. "Instead of spending $600 per head on textbooks, Vail High School in Tucson will buy each of its 350 sophomores an $850 laptop. That shouldn't be too difficult - the school itself is located in a science park. But the Tucson school district's superinterindent, an enthusiastic technology evangelist called Calvin Baker, candidly admits he doesn't know quite how it will all work."The Register
Collaborative mapping
Bookmarkable Google Maps. "Web site BeenMapped.com lets users bookmark locations on Google Maps, rate them and leave comments."
Lifehacker
July 13, 2005
Continued SMS popularity
I'm Loving It: Indian Youth And SMS. "Over a billion text messages are sent every month by India's 56 million mobile phone subscribers. SMS is especially popular with young people for whom the mobile phone is a welcome and private channel of communication with members of the opposite sex. Especially important in a country where 'dating' still does not enjoy widespread parental sanction."
PSFK
July 12, 2005
Location based websites
PlaceSite. "Savage announced his latest project, PlaceSite, which combines online social networking with real-life networking in Wi-Fi cafes by providing computer users with a website unique to a particular Wi-Fi cafe."
networked_performance
July 07, 2005
Meeting strangers
YOU-WHO social networking cellphone game. "...after mutual consent to play YOU-WHO, one player acts as the "mystery person" feeding bits of information about their appearance to the other player who eagerly draws their cutesy image on their screen. The phones then "call" each other revealing the players' locations and identities."
Engadget
July 06, 2005
Modular extreme computing
Wearable system of mountaineering devices. "EasyTech SafeTrek is a system comprising modular devices (each offering a function like phoning, location or avalanche warning), a CPU "hub" linking these functions together, with or without wires, and a standardised power supply. These elements are wearable: distributed around the body, mostly in pockets attached to a harness. The whole system is controlled, via a single "intuitive interface protocol", by input controls designed for mountaineering conditions, such as the operable thumb of a thermal glove (the thumb acts as a joystick). A head-mounted display is the main output monitor. The hub automatically recognises any new element added and incorporates it in the system. For example, you can request the hub to take a photograph using the camera module, direct the GPS module to place the location on the picture and then direct the Satphone module to send the image to the your website in real time."
we make money not art
Blogging business
Blogging While Browsing, but Not Buying. "Online merchants are starting to test Web logs, which are akin to online diaries, in hopes of giving their stores more personality and giving customers a reason to return even when they're not in the mood to buy. But for companies like Bluefly.com, eHobbies, Ice.com and others, blogs are so far afield from typical retail functions that they will take time to master."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
June 30, 2005
Social content sharing
Yahoo! My Web 2.0 beta. "My Web lets you save, tag and annotate Yahoo! web search results and make them public or private. This latest release lets you search only pages your friends (address book, Messenger buddies or Yahoo! 360 contacts) have bookmarked and recommended. Similar to Google's move toward personalized search yesterday, it seems the web search heavyweights are moving away from spammable PageRanked results and toward creating little universes of trusted content for each user."
Lifehacker
Sharing stuff online
Web Content by and for the Masses. "I'm photo- and calendar-sharing services to "citizen journalist" sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
June 27, 2005
More google map hacking
Foundcity personal text and photo maps. "SMS a photo, tags, message and address to Foundcity from anywhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn in New York City and it appears on your map automatically. Check out a map of a particular tag (like "street art" or "gargoyles") or by user."
Lifehacker
Data vs. voice access
Airline passengers love inflight SMS, hate voice calls. "While the majority of respondents would not approve of passengers making voice calls during flights, some 64 percent of respondents indicated their approval of using mobile phones for data services such as SMS. Of the 11 specified wireless activities, in-flight messaging emerged as the most popular choice among respondents."The Register
Depending on friends
Close friends make longer life more likely. "The new study followed almost 1500 Australians, initially aged over 70. Those who at the start reported regular close personal or phone contact with five or more friends were 22% less likely to die in the next decade than those who had reported fewer, more-distant friends. But the presence or absence of close ties with children or other relatives had no impact on survival."New Scientist
Future workplaces
The Office of the Future - the skills you will need. "With Office of the Future: 2020, OfficeTeam, the sponsor of the research, examines trends that may impact the workplace in the next 10 to 15 years. In addition to interviews with workplace and technology experts, futurists, and trend watchers, OfficeTeam surveyed workers and executives at the nation's 1,000 largest companies."
gizmag
Games on the streets
Monopoly Live: London style. "...you're given (fake) 15m to invest in (real) London properties, and move around the "board" as 18 GPS transmitter-equipped cabbies pick up and drop off players accordingly. Chance and Community Chest bonuses are even sent via SMS."
Engadget
June 14, 2005
Devices as companionship
Philips' Smart Companion. "The device combines computer vision, speech and robotics to interact with users in a natural way, by understanding spoken requests, giving replies, recognizing faces and using body language such as facial expressions, head nodding and shaking or colored light. It even recognizes individual users and can turn its head to follow users as they move around in the room."
we make money not art
Phone-based photo sharing
fotochatter. "1. Jack sends a picture from his phone to his fotochatter posting address. 2. All ten of Jack's fotochatter friends get an SMS notifying them that he has added a photo (if they have this option turned on). 3. They view Jack's photo on their phones either via the fotochatter WAP site or J2ME(Java) application. 4.Some friends make comments on his photo. 5. 5 minutes later, Jack receives several comments (via SMS) on his photo, and can reply to each individually via SMS."
Smart Mobs
Central clearinghouses of information
Using Wikipedia entry as a pandemic-prevention clearinghouse. "An MD in the Canary Islands has decided to use Wikipedia's entry on Avian Flu as the central clearinghouse for breaking information on the virus, collecting and publishing info on pandemic prevention, mitigation and recovery."Boing Boing
Classes by phone
Get your next college lecture delivered to your video phone. "UK's Coventry University is broadcasting its lectures straight to the 3G handsets of its students. The lessons are filmed, whittled down into 15-minute edited segments and sent to the students' 3G phones "so they don't have to get out of bed in the mornings."
Engadget
Social pledge making
What is PledgeBank? Tell the world "I'll do it, but only if you'll help". "The way it works is simple. You create a pledge which has the basic format 'I'll do something, but only if other people will pledge to do the same thing'. For example, if you'd always want to organise a street party you could organise a pledge which said 'I'll hold a street party, but only if three people who live in my street will help me to run it' "
PledgeBank
IM shows employment status
Never IM in This Town Again!. "Instead of displaying simple "away from my computer" messages, Hollywood buddy lists now overflow with come-ons, from "need work" to "wrapping up shoot." Producers hiring for a new production can tell at a glance who's available now, who's not and who might be free in the near future."Wired News
Visualizing social relationships
Your social world on a phone screen. "A series of avatars on your phone screen represent your friends, acquaintances or relatives. The frequency of all digital communications (they can include voice calls, voice Messages, SMS, MMS, e-mail, Instant Messaging, VoIP, etc.) between you and each person, which the system monitors, determines that avatar's posture: an alert stance indicates frequent recent contact, for example; a lethargic posture or turned back means neglect. You can also register non-digital contacts manually."
we make money not art
One display, two images
Social hardware: the shareable display. "Jeremy Newton's thesis project is an interactive multi-view screen that lets more than one viewer see and interact with a moving image or application on the same screen at the same time. Now little Annie can play Halo 2 while nerd child Danny does homework without infighting"
Engadget
June 10, 2005
Interactive whiteboards
Boards Get Brains, Chalk Vanishes. "All across the country, chalkboards are being ditched in favor of interactive, computer-driven whiteboards that allow students and teachers to share assignments, surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens."
Wired News
June 08, 2005
Picking things based on someone elses opinion
Outfoxed in a nutshell. "My Mom is searching for a flight, so she types "Airline Flights" into a search engine. She gets back a lot of results, but how can she know which company is good? With Outfoxed, she can say that she trusts my opinions. I've used STA before and had good experiences, so I've given them a good report. Outfoxed shows my report next to STA in her search results, and moves it to the top of the list."
Outfoxed
June 07, 2005
Finding people who like the same things
TWINSUMER"...consumers looking for the best of the best, the first of the first, the most relevant of the relevant increasingly don't connect to 'just any other consumer' anymore, they are hooking up with (and listening to) their taste 'twins'; fellow consumers somewhere in the world who think, react, enjoy and consume the way they do."
Trend Watching
June 06, 2005
Conversations with RSS
Conversate. "Conversate lets you create instant online discussion spaces. It's totally free and ideal for talking about articles or websites and for organizing projects and events. You can use RSS to receive invitations and track conversations."Smart Mobs
June 03, 2005
Community through technology
Beyond Kiwanis: Internet builds new communities. "cell phones, e-mails, instant text messaging and Blackberries are helping mobile, busy Americans link up with neighbors on their commutes to work, in the middle of the night and on business trips."
USATODAY.com
Business podcasting
Podcasting Sneaks into Business. "Paradyne, the networking company, is diving into podcasts for internal communications. "We've seen such good results with podcasts," writes marketing manager Eric Knapp in an e-mail, "that we're thinking of issuing iPods to our entire sales force." Next up for Paradyne? Video podcasts for training within a month or two."Gizmodo
Doing your job in the field
Cleveland to Unwire Building Inspectors. "In Michigan, where state inspectors have been using Accela's wireline software since 2002, the Bureau of Construction Codes and Fire Safety has reduced the time involved in entering data and issuing permits from "days to minutes,"EWeek
June 01, 2005
Zones of privacy
No Privacy in Your Cubicle? Try an Electronic Silencer. "Danny Hillis of Applied Minds with the Babble, which attaches to a telephone and makes the caller's voice sound like a muffled cacophony to anyone within earshot."
The New York Times (may require free registration)
May 31, 2005
Broadcasting from your car
Watch for Roadcasting Rage. "Stuck in traffic and sick of Howard Stern, you may soon be able to tune in to the music collection of the person in the car in front of you. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing an ad hoc networking system for cars that would allow any driver to broadcast music to any other vehicle within a 30-mile radius."Wired News
Online confessions
Bless Me, Blog, for I've Sinned. "For PostSecret, you write, type or paste your secret on a postcard, and then, if you want, decorate the card with drawings or photographs. Next the stamp and then the mailbox. Yes, it's work to confess. And it should be, if only for the sake of the person who might be listening."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Spam problems for developing nations
Developing countries and spam. "Countries like Malaysia,Nepal and Nigeria lack the bandwidth,technical know-how and financial resources to effectively combat junk e-mail,the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in the report" and "as a result,web users in those nations endure more outages and less reliable overall service than people in more developed countries"Smart Mobs
Radio station of audio blogs
BlogRadio. "BlogRadio combines the most recent Blogger.com audio posts into one online radio station to provide an answerphone for the world."
BlogRadio
May 20, 2005
Searching for code
Open source search engine trawls free code. "The idea is that if I'm a Java developer and need to build a shopping cart for my website instead of reinventing the wheel, I can tell the search engine the type of application I want and limit my search to Java software,"The Register
Visual metaphors for social networks
GORI.Node Garden. "As a gardener, you decide which GORI from your mobile contact list you will plant and grow. It could be somebody from either your phone list or somewhere else. A flower planted at the edge of the garden, starts to grow when you exchange messages and it moves towards the centre. When it moves, it vibrates."
we make money not art
May 19, 2005
Tele-band
MusicGrid. "A new First Monday article explores an educational experiment for collaborating with music online among remote schools near the polar region. Apparently, the experiment has been declared a success, in terms of getting remote students to be more enthusiastic about participation in school music programs".
Smart Mobs
May 18, 2005
Visualizations of communications
Locket for iChat. "locket is a Dashboard widget that provides an ambient monitor for a single iChat user on your buddy list. When s/he is available, the locket opens. Otherwise, it is closed. Clicking on the open locket will start a new IM chat."
we make money not art
Push to talk for any phone
The Mobile-Talkie: Can You Hear Me Now?. "The company's core offering is called fastchat, a software application that turns a mobile phone into a walkie-talkie, allowing users to send and receive voice messages to other fastchat users, using voice-over-IP technology to deliver voice data over a cell phone's data channels."Tech Review
Social fund gathering
Fundable.org: New Sharing Economy Tool/Site. "Fundable is a new service that lets groups of people pool money for various purposes in what are called “group actions. Similar to an online auction, a group action has its own page, describing how much money will be collected and what the money will do. No participant takes a risk: if the collection for a group action falls short of its target on deadline, all money is refunded."
Smart Mobs
Media through direct connections
Haptic Gloves. "Each participant wears the gloves, headphones (through which they can hear their personal music) and a clip-on box housing circuits. As soon as they touch the gloved hand of another, they can hear their own music mixed with the other person's sound. The more people holding hands, the more sophisticated the track."
networked_performance
Connections while training
Mobile design for runners. "Buddy Run allows two or more people, running together but in different places, to share conversation and their current performance (to hear each other's pace for example); Actively Mobile trainer can help those training for a race to plan their workouts, analyze their results, and even provide remote coaching by tracking the runners performance online."
we make money not art
May 17, 2005
Negative technology uses
Messaging spreads office gossip. "In an online survey commissioned by security firm Akonix, a quarter of users admitted they see IM as the perfect vehicle for office gossip."
BBC NEWS
May 16, 2005
Subtle forms of communication
Networked Nightlights. "John Schimmel's Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars."
networked_performance
Technology providing social cues
Ambient social networking interface. "Before entering the Sparks environment, each user pre-selects a number of interests from a pool of keywords. Within the environment, Sparks projects the keywords in an aura on the floor around the user. The aura follows the user within the environment, and augments the visual cues people use to capture initial impressions about another person."
we make money not art
Mass tagging
'Tagging' helps unclutter data. "Tagging is something selfishly useful. It helps you understand and categorize something for yourself," Technorati founder David Sifry said. "But I can take advantage of the fact that you and hundreds and thousands of people have also tagged the things" for themselves."
CNN.com
Nutritional advice from a distance
MyFoodPhone "keeps dieters honest" with camphone food shots. "Customers use cameraphones to snap photos of their meals, send them to a web site and get back advice from a registered dietitian on how to modify the portions or selections to reach health or weight goals."
Engadget
Cellphone jamming
Invented for an MIT thesis, a gizmo defends against cellphone chatter . "Limor Fried got the idea when a friend with whom she was eating dinner broke off their conversation to answer her cellphone. Fried got mad. Then she got even, in the way a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, very well might. She built a gadget. She calls it the Wave Bubble because it creates a cellphone-free bubble of silence 4 meters in diameter. It does so by jamming the phones' radio-frequency bands with a junk signal of a few milliwatts."
Spectrum
Long distance health care
Technology Lets Patients Visit Doctors Without Leaving Home. "As part of remote diabetes care, a team travels to First Nations reserves, where the disease is endemic, to take photos of patients' retinas with a specially designed digital camera. Those images can be viewed via computer by an ophthalmologist hundreds of kilometres away to check for signs of diabetes-related eye damage."
CNN
May 12, 2005
Self created audio guides
Students make their own MOMA audio-guides. "Students at Marymount Manhattan College's Department of Communication Arts are recording their own audio commentary on the Museum of Modern Art's exhibits. They're also inviting others to make their own homemade audio guides to MOMA, which they'll collect and post online."Boing Boing
New models for publishing
Watt-Evans's next novel published under Street Performer Protocol. "Each week that he receives $100 worth of donations, he posts another chapter of The Spriggan Mirror, which is to be the ninth Ethshar novel. When it is completed, it will be published by small press if no major publishers are interested."Boing Boing
May 11, 2005
Proximity aware phones
See and be seen. "Nokia has launched Sensor, a software that uses Bluetooth to indicate and start proximity interactions - i.e. people within 10-30m of you. You create a folio - like a little web page - that others in your physical location can see. Then you can check out the folios of other Sensor users nearby, exchange messages, and share files."
Smart Mobs
RFID connections between customers and stores
"bookmark" this store right here. "A Tokyo-based company TechFirm is launching a service that connects consumers and small retailers using RFID. Consumers having RFID-chipped phones can "bookmark" their "favorite" stores by showing their phones to RFID readers installed in stores. Information about a "bookmarked" store is automatically transmitted to a mobile phone. Consumers can access information about all "bookmarked" stores using dedicated mobile application software."RFID in Japan
May 09, 2005
Physical representations of emotion
Web are you? - Networked emoticon device. "You set one up at home and plug it to your home network. Set the other one at your office location and plug it to your office LAN. Submit your mood state by pressing one of the icons and your home device will reflect and share it with your other significant. If there is only one home device, it can be accessed through a regular webpage or mobile phone."
we make money not art
Sharing between devices
InstantShareCam. "InstantSharecam is a service for sharing in real-time and on the spot high-res videos/photos with your friends or your crew right from your digital camcorder to other devices."
we make money not art
Fast 3D city models
Fast 3D city model generation. "Virtualised reality scans the urban landscape using lasers and digital cameras mounted on a truck or plane. A laser measures distances to objects such as lamp posts and building facades, while the camera takes 2D photos. Another laser calculates the movement of the truck and checks its position against data collected from the aerial laser. [...] The researchers recently created a model of downtown Berkeley in just 4 hours - 26 minutes of driving plus 4 hours of data processing."
we make money not art
Too many pictures
Stop Them Before They Shoot Again. "Edit your pictures, people," said Ms. Weber, a writer in Brooklyn whose pen name is Anita Liberty. She suggests no more than three pictures by e-mail, no more than 12 to an online "album," no albums more than twice a year. (Exceptions may apply for grandparents and best friends.) Ms. Weber is not alone in her plea for restraint. At a time when this country is indulging in an unparalleled binge of personal picture taking, and some digital photographers find themselves drowning in the product of their enthusiasm, the notion is dawning that even in a digital realm less may still be more."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Wiki + Blog + lists
Backpack personal organizer. "Backpack's a fun combination wiki, weblog, to-do list and calendar that's featureful but not overwhelming. Make a page that contains check-offable lists, images, dated notes, and files about a project or idea. Link pages and share them with others for collaborative editing. Set up reminders that get sent to your email or mobile device about project deliverables - or to water the plants or pay the rent. Subscribe to page changes in your newsreader, and reminders in your calendar applicaton."
Lifehacker
Virtually tagging a physical space
folkmapping your urban spaces. "It allows everyone in a city to map the interesting things they discover throughout the day to a dynamic online map, where they can then compare their points of interest with other people's points. In doing so they both share what they like about the city with others, and discover what other people find fascinating about the city."
foundcity
Cool ways to visualize your photos
Main >Comic life. "Comic Life for OS X makes digital comics a snap. Use Comic Life to create high quality comics for posting on the web, including in movies or printing out for friends."
plasq
Pairing up technology
loveJackets: Wearable Affinity Markers. "A pair of jackets emits, and polls for a particular signal. Once the pair finds each other, in at least 10 feet distance, facing each other, the two beep – emitting a sound akin to crickets mating, and a pattern of LEDs blinks (light emitting diodes; small, bright, energy efficient lights). Each jacket responds only to its unique pair."
Smart Mobs
April 28, 2005
Family connections
Re-connecting remote families. "FamilyScrapbook is a service and an application. It relies on a third party to provide storage space, to which different devices will be connected. On the user's side, it's an application -- for the computer, the cell phone or the television -- that allows a quick view of new postings, facilitates fast uploads and has browsing capabilities."
andreea chelaru
Blogging on TV shows
'Canadian Idol' Raises Its Profile. "Beginning next month, CTV will give bloggers the ability to offer their views about the show. "Each person will have their own space, and they can come back and actually comment on the show as the show plays out and the competition goes on," Smith said. "We will still have the administration that we can accept or reject blogs, but I believe the plan is to just let them loose. We are going to have to moderate it to see how it goes."
EWeek
Celebrity blogging
Celebrity Blog Set to Launch. "Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Walter Cronkite, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harold Evans and Tina Brown are just a few of the 250-plus names recruited by Arianna Huffington, commentator, one-time Republican and candidate for governor of California, to create an ber-blog that will offer a round-the-clock commentary on our life and times."
PSFK
Using blogs for commenting on documents
UK Election Manifestos annotated. "Mark Simpkins, Richard Pope and Gavin Bell have built a site that presents the UK election manifestos for the three main parties (Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats) in a way that allows anyone to comment on the content, right there, next to the content."Smart Mobs
Location-based services
What Happens When GPS Meets Your Cell Phone. "As peak allergy season envelops Germany, Vodafone is touting its "Lorano Polleninfo" service. Combining GPS data from a user's phone, national weather data, and a personalized allergy profile -- subscribers register what pollens they are allergic to -- the service sends daily alerts containing pollen forecasts and which areas to avoid. The service costs roughly $6 a month."
Business 2.0
General purpose open source
Wide Open. "From the formulation of public policy to more open forms of academic peer review, setting up mutual support groups for people facing similar health problems to collaborative forms of social innovation, the principles of open source promise to radically alter the we approach complex social problems."Demos
Communication addiction
'Infomania' worse than marijuana. "Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed. The study for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages."
BBC NEWS
April 26, 2005
International styles of blogging
Vive les Blogs!. "Spurred by a culture of popular expression and debate that can be traced back to France's 17th-century salons, the French are embracing weblogs with a greater zeal than anyone on the European continent."
Wired News
Remixing with permission
Nine Inch Nails + Garageband. "'What I'm giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for 'the hand that feeds' in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into."
Cool Hunting
April 25, 2005
Electronic company
Accessories and robots for lonely people. "Originally designed five years ago to be a substitute boyfriend for young single girls in the workforce, Primo Puel "My Special Partner" has become an unexpected hit with elderly people across Japan. The interactive doll talks, giggles and even asks for cuddles, providing a widow with much of the company she longs for, especially in the evening."
we make money not art
Spotting activities within communications
A 'Smart' Email Software Organizes Your Tasks. "Many structured activities are managed by email. For instance, a consumer purchasing an item from an e-commerce vendor may receive a message confirming the order, a warning of a delay, and then a shipment notification. Existing email clients do not understand this structure, forcing users to manage their activities by sifting through lists of messages. As a first step to developing email applications that provide high-level support for structured activities, we consider the problem of automatically learning an activity's structure."Tech Trends
Online dating for seniors
True Love: Finding a Second Act on the Internet. "Finding romance on the Internet is hardly new - younger singles have been doing it for more than 10 years - but it is on the upswing among people 55 and over. According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, the number of online dating site users 55 or older rose 19.4 percent in the last year."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
April 11, 2005
TV with viewer participation
The Vee Pee's New Tee Vee. "Audience members will be encouraged to not only watch but also shoot, edit and upload their own bite-sized digital video segments to the Current TV website. If the editors and web audience like the segments, they will then be broadcast to the channel's potential viewer pool of 19 million."Wired News
April 08, 2005
RFID with family and friends
The Echoes table. "The center of the TeleTable contains a slot for the Pitara. Placing it in the center activates a function which associates digital images on the TeleTable with the objects contained within the Pitara. Adding new artifacts to the Pitara queues up associated digital objects on the screen."
we make money not art
VOIP popularity
US to embrace VoIP. "Those clever boffins at IDC reckon the number of residential VoIP users will rise from three million at present to 27 million by the end of 2009. Despite its slow start, VoIP is beginning to take-off with punters hooked on the cheaper call charges on offer."The Register
Re-presenting some elses content
Website spinoffs. "As private and commercial Web portals begin to invite outside involvement and experimentation, new sites are being launched which, rather than offer any unique material of their own, offer an alternative method of viewing someone else's material."csmonitor.com
Detecting "tone" in a document
Software agents give out PR advice. "...a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party's policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it."New Scientist
April 04, 2005
Technology for group identity
the secret lives of teenagers . "BuddyBeads are techno-jewelry items that facilitate non-verbal and emotional communication among group members, through codes and signals which the group decided upon together."
interaction design - Ivrea
April 01, 2005
Sending messages with gesture
Japanese Research: 'Tossing' Data between PDAs. "Small movements mean the data is aimed at close-by receivers, strong movements mean a far toss. The system works with a light emitted from the PDAs that is registered by a camera that calculates the destination for the data exchange."
I4U News
2D barcodes in ink
Stamkey stamps transfer personal info to your cellphone. "Stamkey [...] allows you to embed information in a 2D tag called a QR code - essentially a bar code that encodes information in both the x and y axes instead of along the usual unidirectional strip. The Stamkey stamp is then readable by a cameraphone, enabling transmission of the encoded data into your phone."
Engadget
Newspapers become two way
A Bold Venture: Creating an 'Electronic Town Square' with Blogs. "There's a page for reader-submitted articles, another for letters to the editor and an online tips' form. The Web site hosts online forums on 23 topics, including safety at a local high school, FedEx Corp.'s move to the area and cameras at local stoplights. Traffic cams monitor local road conditions."Tech Review
Social networks for pets
SNIF: Social Networking In Fur. "...a system that allows pet owners to interact through their pets' social networks. SNIF comprises inexpensive hardware that can be unobtrusively and transparently affixed to pet collars and paraphernalia in order to augment pet-to-pet, pet-to-owner, and owner-to-owner interactions."
MIT
March 22, 2005
Assigning features to body parts
Biometric Speed Dialing. "For instance, touching the [sensor] with an index finger would dial Mom; touching it with a ring finger would dial Sweetie; touching it with the middle finger could dial the office."
Gizmodo
The effects of instant communication
For Troops, Home Can Be Too Close. "Learning the best use of e-mail, cellphones and other interactive devices is critically important to the military, where careless communication can cost lives. But experts say that even seemingly mundane exchanges have implications for troop morale and the emotional health of service families."
The New York Times
Blogging stats
Gallup on Blogs. "Some useful results ... about 75% of people in the US use the Internet ... just 12% of people read blogs at all ... and 56% of consumers dont appear to know what they are. Most of the results are regarding political blogs."IFTF's Future Now
Lending money through peer-to-peer
Peer pressure. "You can lend up to 25,000 through Zopa and your money is divided among 50 borrowers (who have already been screened to ensure they have good credit ratings) to minimise risks of default."Guardian Unlimited
March 14, 2005
Visualizations of cummunication
The Sound Fountain. "You clap your hands, speak up or make any other noise and the sounds are captured as bubbles. Over time they pass from one screen to the other till they are gone."
we make money not art
March 09, 2005
Future mobile communications
rb.log. "The video you are about to see portrays the kind of technological advances that could transform our world over the next ten years. The events depicted are fictional, but the potential of NTT DoCoMo's cutting-edge technology is very real. Our third-generation (3G) FOMA service is already operational throughout Japan; and by 2010, we hope to have fully brought our vision of advanced mobile communications to fruition."
DoCoMo
March 07, 2005
Emotion detection
The table that senses your mood. "The key table , part of Equator Weight Furniture project, gets a sense of people's emotions from the way they dump their key or wallet onto it when they get back home. The table even warns the rest of the family to be on their guard if your mood is not good."
we make money not art
Indispensible mobile phone
Mobile Phones Now Social Fabric. "A report by researcher Michael Hume about our relationship with mobile phones suggests that we're moving towards a real time of dependency, where if we lose our mobile we begin to feel cut off from our network of friends, cut off from our contacts, and absolutely disabled. Also, the mobile is very much a device of control. We are using it to control our relationships with others, how others contact us, and increasingly to control information."
PSFK
Haptic emotions
hugms"...once hugms is connected to your mobile phone all you have to do is send it the phone number of the person you'd like to hug and then squeeze. sensors inside the device read how long and how hard you have squeezed and will format a text message based on your hug. for example, a long squeeze would look like 'hhhhhhuuuuuuuuuuggggggg' while a short and hard squeeze would look like 'hhHHUUUUUUugg'"
mobjects
February 25, 2005
Wi-fi on the highway
VOIP At 80 MPH: RoamAD, WiVOD Claim World's Wold's First Wi-Fi Highway. "In a live demo users were able to make multi-party VOIP conference calls at over 80 miles per hour across the network. [...] Initially the network will serve police, fire, ambulance and US Border Patrol operations. Later, according to RoamAD, other "community agencies, schools, business and local residents" will be added as the network expands."Extreme Tech
Technology support for seniors
Talking dolls for Japanese senior citizens. "Talking toys have become such a hit that some elderly people have embraced them as substitutes for the children who have grown old and deserted entire neighborhoods in the rapidly greying country."
Boing Boing
Fear of losing your phone
Losing your phone: the fear. "Apparently one in three women surveyed by Intervoice believe if they lost their phones - their address books, in all reality - that they'd lose contact with people entirely."
Engadget
Changes in the use of language
The Web Not the Death of Language. "Traditional linguists fear the internet damages our ability to articulate properly, infusing language with LOLs, dorky emoticons and the gauche sharing of personal information on blogs. But some researchers believe we have entered a new era of expression."Wired News
IM bots for information
SmarterChild IM bot. "SmarterChild is an IM bot (automated responder) that can give you weather forecasts, word definitions, ASCII art, and foreign language translations, just to start."
Lifehacker
February 21, 2005
Wireless alert systems
ZigBee "Panic Button" Calls For Help. "The pendant, which is worn around the neck, includes an array of accelerometers, buttons on the front and back, and a low-power Zigbee radio. If a rapid acceleration is detected (such as when someone falls over), or the two buttons are pressed in tandem, the pendant connects to an intelligent controller - which then contacts one of four alerting and monitoring companies, or contacts a family member directly."
Extreme Tech
Cellphones and the neighborhood
Camphone Citizen Action in London. "As of today, anyone living in the south-east London borough can take a snap using their camera phone of the many problems that blight London's roads, such as graffiti or fly-tipping and send it to the council."
Smart Mobs
Robots in medicine
Domo Arigato, Doctor Roboto. "The 5-foot, 200-pound robot is equipped with a screen, zoom video camera, microphone and speakers that allow a physician to speak with and examine their patient and review charts, all while being remotely steered by doctors using videoconferencing and movement controls run through a secure Internet connection that is dropped into a wireless network at the hospital site where the robot is working."Tech Review
February 15, 2005
Kid-specific cellphone network
New Hasbro ChatNow Communicator Gadget. "ChatNow looks like a cell phone and lets kids "call" or "text" each other, with technology similar to a walkie-talkie. Each ChatNow comes with a seven-digit "Buddy Number" that can be used like a phone number so kids can call each other directly within a 2-mile radius."
I4U News
February 11, 2005
Location specific warnings
Osaka Police Use Goopas for Crime Prevention. "Osaka police started disseminating crime prevention information to commuters' mobile phones using RFID train passes. They are taking advantage of an existing information dissemination service called Goopas."
RFID in Japan
February 09, 2005
Shopping by scanning
Smart scanner helps elderly shop. "A barcode reader is used to scan items from a catalogue - or off tins - and then the order is sent to the supermarket via the phone line."
BBC NEWS
Telecommuting
U.S. Companies Move Call Center Work to the Home. "People who reach Esther DeJesus when they call Office Depot Inc.'s customer service center have no idea that she's sitting at home in a room decorated with pictures of Garfield and Betty Boop."Reuters.com
Group submissions
The Human Clock. "Many people viewing this website end up sending in their own clock pictures, be they in an airplane, installing brakes, or on a playground. There are clock pictures from all over the world ranging from Outback Australia to Canada to Pakistan to Antarctica to Italy to Brazil. Other people travel around the American Southwest and end up taking a clock photo on a corner in Winslow, Arizona."
HumanClock.com
Communities for home exchange
CouchSurfing - The world is smaller than you think!. "CouchSurfing.com helps you make connections worldwide. You can use the network to meet people and then go and surf other members' couches! When you surf a couch, you are a guest at someone's house."
CouchSurfing.com
Online, handheld gaming
PSP: 5 online titles available at launch. "All 5 games will feature two wireless multiplayer modes. The standard method will connect PSPs that are close together (i.e. in the same room), while the "infrastructure" mode makes use of the built in Wi-Fi to link players over the Internet via hotspots."
Joystiq
February 05, 2005
Growth in webcam chat
Webcams Transport Virtual Visitors. "As of December , MSN, Microsoft's online portal, logged an average of seven million daily video chat sessions, up from five million in May 2004, according to Logitech, one of the largest manufacturers of PC Webcams."The New York Times
February 02, 2005
Group tagging
Folksonomies Tap People Power"The job of tags isn't to organize all the world's information into tidy categories," said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr's co-founders. "It's to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there."
Wired News
Open source everything
Board game under CC license. "Andrew invented a strategy board-game called Dugi that looks like a fair bit of fun [...]. He's released it under a Creative Commons license and invites you to improve on it. Though I'm pretty sure that this isn't the first "open source boardgame," it certainly looks like it would be fun to play!"
Boing Boing
Losing subtleties in communication
Text messaging, email said to hurt deaf culture. "Lost to the new technologies of e-mail and text-messaging are the emotions and inflections of deaf communication," the Sentinel article states."
Engadget
Personalized message notification
cellphone ring notifier. "tom horsley got rid of his land line but didn't want to lug his cell everywhere with him when he was in the house. his solution was to hack together a light detection circuit, a wireless doorbell remote, and some paper mache into a giant incoming call noisemaker."
hack a day
February 01, 2005
Physical interaction
The Message Table. "When a message is left, a box representing that message slowly rises from the desk. The higher it rises, the longer the message. So when you return home, you know how many messages are waiting for you. To hear one, open the box's lid. Pushing that box back down into the desk deletes the message."
we make money not art
January 28, 2005
Objects that notify
SIMpill: Medicine Bottle with SMS Reminders. "A South African doctor has developed the SIMpill, a pill bottle that uses SMS to monitor how often pills are being taken and can send alerts to a patient's phone if they have missed a dose by mistake."
Gizmodo
Two-way internet
Information Wants to be Liquid. "Hegland's project, Liquid Information, is kinda like Wikipedia meets hypertext. In Hegland's web, all documents are editable, and every word is a potential hyperlink."Wired News
January 27, 2005
RSS driving phone alerts
feedbeep :: rss notification. "FeedBeep is the final link between you and the wealth of information published on the internet. Hundreds of thousands of data feeds are available in RSS format, and now you can receive alerts about events worldwide - as they happen - right on your SMS-capable phone."
Feedbeep
January 21, 2005
Still not simple enough
YOU'VE GOT MAIL, DEAR. "The programme can be installed by "children or grandchildren with average computer skills". It then "bypasses confusing Windows logon procedures, and simply dials the Internet and downloads email".The Register
GPS + wi-fi
Golf Courses Put Wi-Fi to Work. "Handheld and cart-mounted GPS units, which the company developed two years ago with the notion of helping golfers estimate distances and identify traps, greens and pins, today provide two-way communication with the clubhouse, hospitality services and even security to help course managers build revenue and provide a selling feature for golf resorts and golf communities."EWeek
January 13, 2005
Faking your location
Rogue Ambience Table. "Users select the background sound of their choice (in a disco, on the road, etc.) via one of the six sound cubes, phone friends, family and colleagues and let them know how full your life is."
we make money not art
January 05, 2005
Steady growth of blogs
Pew study: Blogs busted out in 2004. "Pew began surveying Internet users about blogs in the spring of 2002, and has charted a steady growth in blog readership since 2003, from 11 percent of U.S. Internet users to 27 percent in November 2004."InfoWorld
December 17, 2004
Internet library
Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database. "Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
IM & SMS pushing out e-mail
Online Communication And Collaboration: Teenagers Show The Future. "Since their kids are all using IM for personal reasons, a lot of adults are using it during the day...they can tell them 'do your homework, do your laundry.'" As new services like voice and video messaging get added to the IM programs, it will likely be kids who help promote the emerging technologies."
Robin Good's Latest News
Cellphone growth
Worldwide cellphone usage doubles. "The International Telecommunications Union has announced that global cellphone usage has doubled over the past four years, to nearly 1.5 billion customers. [...] China has 310 million cellphone users, or about a quarter of its population. Developing countries now account for 56% of all cellphone users, and for 79% of usage growth, according to the ITU."
Engadget
Wearables in the workplace
Wired and ready to wear. "Commercial inventions such as the Apple Computer iPod or personal data assistants (PDA) are the most well-known forms of wearable computers; everyone uses them, from grocery clerks to CEOs. The U.S. Armed Forces are adopting wearable computers rapidly as well, but their devices will tend to be more rugged than commercial wearables, and their missions more critical than just scheduling meetings or doing inventory."
Military & Aerospace Electronics
Adding social networks as a feature
Netflix adds social networking. "In its latest move to fend off competitive threats, Netflix will let subscribers invite friends to peek at DVDs they've watched and read their opinions of the movies. If the invitation is accepted, the sender automatically gets reciprocal rights to read the friend's lists and reviews."
Smart Mobs
December 10, 2004
Consuming mobile phones
Lifestyle 'governs mobile choice'. "Dr Bjorn said that although consumers do what they always did but use a phone to do it, the sheer variety of what the new handset technologies make possible does gradually drive new habits and lifestyles."
BBC NEWS
Cellphones everywhere
Cellphones Aloft: The Inevitable Is Closer. "Federal regulators plan next week to begin considering rules that would end the official ban on cellphone use on commercial flights. Technical challenges and safety questions remain. But if the ban is lifted, one of the last cocoons of relative social silence would disappear, forcing strangers to work out the rough etiquette of involuntary eavesdropping in a confined space."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
December 07, 2004
Ambient monitoring
Wearables for everyday objects. "This key-chain radio station broadcasts the sounds you make through regular FM radio and shares them with people hidden from your eye. It works only within a radius of about 20 meters. The sound quality is not very clear, but people can guess what you are doing. In addition, the lower sound quality reduces concerns about privacy issues."
we make money not art
December 06, 2004
Biometric association
Biometric Phone: Pantech GI100. "You can also associate each of your fingers (provided you don't have more than ten) to speed-dial numbers, so you just have to touch the sensor and your phone will discreetly place a call."
Gizmodo
Living online
Her So-Called Digital Life. "Hodder, a 37-year-old internet consultant, spends almost her entire life on-screen. She carries her laptop almost everywhere she goes, traipsing from cafe to cafe looking for Wi-Fi to hook into. She downloads pirated movies and even television shows off the net, shops there and pays all her bills, too. Her blog, Napsterization.org, explores how technology alters the media landscape. Although technically based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives, works and plays on the web."Wired News
December 01, 2004
The impact of new communications technology
New Forms of Online Communication Spell End of Email Era in Korea. "The ebbing of email is a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, an IT power. Leading the big change, unprecedented in the world, are our teens and those in their 20's. The perception that "email is an old and formal communication means"is rapidly spreading among them."Smart Mobs
Managing your communications
Virgin Mobile wants to help stop you from drunk dialing. "...starting tomorrow Virgin Mobile, or at least the Australian Virgin Mobile, is going to offer a new service to help stop you from drunk dialing your ex or your boss. You just call up a number, enter the number you want to make sure you don't call, and then you're automatically blocked from making calls from that phone until 6am..."
Engadget
RFID and customer needs
How One Cleaner Got the Lead Out. "So now, whenever Kelly brings in those shirts, the dry cleaner simply scans the tags to get a list of his instructions and ensure that his laundry is handled with extra care. "It's a feel-good kind of thing," Kelly says."Business Week
Virtual tradeshows
Virtual Tradeshows On the Rise. "In the past year, a handful of virtual tradeshows have taken place on topics ranging from nanotechnology to plumbing and heating supplies. These events function just like conventional tradeshows, with booths, plenary sessions and keynote speakers—but without the travel and expense that go along with terrestrial shows."Eweek
November 26, 2004
Augmented games
Human PacMan hits real city streets. "The classic arcade game PacMan has resurfaced on the streets of Singapore using "augmented reality" technology developed by military-backed scientists at the University of Singapore."
New Scientist
Multi-language texting
T9 Predicts Euro Speak. "Tegic's T9 Text Input version 7.2 offers enhanced multi-lingual support, which makes it easier for users to alternate between languages when texting. It is not uncommon for users to switch back and forth between languages when speaking or writing to friends and family."Smart Mobs
Cellphone message boards
Cell phone message board to be extended for disasters. "Within 30 minutes of a major disaster, such as a large typhoon or an earthquake of lower 6 or higher on the Japanese intensity scale, the message board will appear in the i-mode menu on DoCoMo cell phones. The user chooses his or her status, such as "okay" or "in a shelter," and can then leave a text message of up to 100 characters."Daily Yomiuri On-Line
Walk-around displays
The SeeLinder: Make 3D holographic video calls, at least eventually. "SeeLinder uses a 360-degree digital camera and cyliderical tube to create real-time three-dimensional holograms that'll let you view the person you're talking to from almost any angle (i.e. you can walk around them and stare at the back of their head while their talking, etc.)."
Engadget
Video-conferencing the family
Waving Hello, From a Distance. "But there is anecdotal evidence that face-to-face electronic communication is gaining a foothold beyond the executive suite, and that the typical home users are no longer the stereotypical geeks straining to see each other over crude Webcams connected by sluggish modems."
The New York Times
November 19, 2004
Corporate blogging
Google sees benefits in corporate blogging. "Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to," Goldman said. "It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents."InfoWorld
Paper/digital overlap continues
Pegasus Mobile NoteTaker. "In essence, the PC Notes Taker is a product that allows you to have a digital copy of all your hand written notes. The PC NoteTaker's biggest drawback is that it needed to be hooked to a computer during use. This, in turn, severely limited its usability. With that in mind, Pegasus introduces the Mobile NoteTaker."
ATrueReview.com
Working from home
Home working trial proves popular. "Run by net firm Telewest the trial tried to find out if workers can do their job better when at home. Those taking part said they did get more done but missed the chance to chat face-to-face with colleagues and contacts. Being at home also gave those taking part much more time to spend with their families."
BBC NEWS
November 17, 2004
Freeform Operating Systems
Croquet Project. "Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between large numbers of users. Croquet makes it possible to change and author virtual worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."
Croquet Project
Digitally knowing your neighbors
Letting the Internet Knock on the Door. "From that evolved his Web site, MeetTheNeighbors.org, begun last month. One person takes the initiative to register the building, pass out fliers and plan a get-together, enabling neighbors to create "real-life, in-person, face-to-face relationships." So far, about 500 people in more than 200 buildings have registered. Mr. Nissim estimates that 80 percent of the participants are in New York City, though buildings (and neighborhoods) elsewhere are welcome to join."
The New York Times (may require free registration)
Landline and VOIP phones
The DUALphone: Cordless landline phone that also makes Skype calls. "To make Skype calls you've gotta plug it into a USB port on your PC (and leave your PC on), but instead of dialing a number, the phone has a LCD display that shows which of your contacts are online. Just pick one of them, press a button, and you're connected. We're sold."
Engadget
Subtle phones
Ring phone concept. "He imagined a mobile phone encapsulated into a ring you wear on the finger. The microphone is placed on a retractable piece of string. You hold your hand up to your ear while talking in it."
we make money not art
Government RSS
RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy. "To date, RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more. However, many foreign governments, including England, France and New Zealand, are way ahead of those in the United States when it comes to RSS."Wired News
Working everywhere and all the time
Workers breaking office shackles. "A survey shows that 90% of firms are using flexible and remote working as part of their normal way of doing business. The same research reveals that 25% of all employees now use technology to stay in touch with the office and do their job while at home or on the road. But worries over cost, security and training are stopping firms freeing more workers from their desks."
BBC NEWS
Exchanging info through touch
iBand adds IR to the handshake. "By simply shaking someone's hand (assuming both are wearing iBands, which is another issue), you can transmit your data while receiving his. Each user has a unique led symbol that is also exchanged, and the more people you have met, the more your LED changes shape into those new friends' icons."
Engadget
Doing things from a distance
That moose may soon be just a mouse click away. "Underwood, an estimator for a San Antonio, Texas auto body shop, has invested $10,000 to build a platform for a rifle and camera that can be remotely aimed on his 330-acre (133-hectare) southwest Texas ranch by anyone on the Internet anywhere in the world."CNN.com
Tabletop displays
Tabletop that can display, input data for meetings. "A simple gesture such as drawing a circle on the screen can be programmed to zoom into the section encircled by the hand movement. The display could be a useful tool for collaboration, allowing multiple users to input data during meetings."
we make money not art
November 16, 2004
Leaving audio notes in places
MobileSCOUT, a sonic field guide. "MobileSCOUT [...] is a public art project that collects audio narratives of your local surroundings, personal rituals and public sightings. Using your mobile phone, you leave a voice message of your observations about the flora (landscapes), fauna (characters) or behaviors (events) that populate your surroundings."
we make money not art
Health checks in phones
'Well-Being' Fad Hits Cell Phone Market, Too. "A diabetes hand set released by LG Electronics back in July, the LG-KP8400, has won steady popularity. This handset, equipped to measure blood-sugar levels, not only manages blood-sugar level, diet, and medication prescriptions, but also provides long-distance medical consultations. Placing a litmus paper stained with one's blood on the device shows one's blood-sugar level."Smart Mobs
Sharing screens
Collaborative Games. "In a university course we recently supervised, students were given the assignment to create games for handheld computers that require players to share their displays with each other to advance in the game. The play area in the games was distributed across several screens, and players had to move their in-game character to the other displays to succeed."
Viktoria Institute
November 11, 2004
Social networking in the marketplace
Shopping With My Friendsters. "Late last month, Buy.com bought the social networking site Metails.com, with plans to sell items that people are buzzing about with their online friends. Analysts said more sites could follow, particularly as the cost of Internet advertising rises."The New York Times (may require free registration)
Neighborhood wireless message boards
Neighbornode: the extensible neighborhood network. "Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it. This means that with a Neighbornode you can broadcast a message to roughly everyone whose apartment window is within 300 feet of yours (and has line of sight), and they can broadcast messages back to you."
Neighbornode