April 06, 2006
Gaze control
Gaze Communicator - Eye Movement Interface. "Using a camera, the user’s head is recorded continuously. Segmentation and face detection algorithms analyze the images and detect the position of the users face and eyes. A pattern recognition algorithm based on Hough transform extracts the shapes that relate to the human eye in order to locate the center of the pupil. Analyzed in real-time, the position of the eye in an incoming image will be interpreted as the reference position of a mouse cursor on the users monitor."
I4U News
Flexible and disposable batteries
Enfucell's SoftBattery gets thin and flexible. "Besides the usual thin n' flexible selling angle, Enfucell's batteries, while still in development, are apparently anticipated to be particularly cheap and environmentally friendly due to a more off-the-shelf materials and manufacturing process of metals in a paper and laminate sandwich. Sure, it may not produce a huge amount of juice, but when you're talking about very low-energy applications like e-ink, cheap, flexible batteries could be power the digital newspapers of tomorrow before being thrown away with the day's rubbish."
Engadget
Mixing wired and wireless networks
New network architecture delivers super-broadband wired and wireless service simultaneously. "Telecommunications researchers have demonstrated a novel communications network design that would provide both ultra-high-speed wireless and wired access services from the same signals carried on a single optical fiber. The new hybrid system could allow dual wired/wireless transmission of the same content such as high-definition television, data and voice up to 100 times faster than current networks. The new architecture would reduce the cost of providing dramatically improved service to conference centers, airports, hotels, shopping malls – and ultimately to homes and small offices."
GATech
Big changes in computing and science
NATURE looks ahead. "In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work. From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?"
Smart Mobs
Communication devices
Tango! Communication Device. "It’s a communication device for people who have communication-related impairments with pre-loaded phrases as well as enough extra features to warm the heart of geeks worldwide. It’s the first device of its kind to incorporate a digital camera along with a flash to capture life’s less well-lit moments. The Tango! can also alter the pitch of voice to make it seem like a child (or adult) is talking, as the situation merits."
Gizmodo
Quick 3D faces
3D face imaging in 40 milliseconds. "Computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, have developed a new face recognition software which can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds. A pattern of light is projected on your face, creating a 2D image, from which an accurate 3D representation is generated. This technology should speed airport check-ins, but it could also be used in banks or for checking ID cards as it allows full identification in less than one second."
Primidi
Managing kids gadget time
Bob: Children Hate Him, Parents’ Best Friend. "Bob lets mom and dad assign each of their kids a pin number, and when parents install this timer in between an AC power source and anything that plugs in such as computers, TV or games, it will precisely control the amount of time those devices will run."
Gizmodo
Leaving home with all your stuff
RFID-based Alert when you leave home. "DNP and NICT developed a RFID-based memory assistant that alerts a person if she is leaving her house without carrying the things she will need."
RFID in Japan
GeoSensor networks
The Emergence of GeoSensor Networks. "Tracking objects in a single camera (to identify whether a car is speeding, or has become disabled, for example) is a simple and standard application. The challenges tackled by a geosensor network include tracking a specific car across multiple camera feeds, recognizing convoys that move together, identifying traffic patterns across wider areas, relocating some mobile sensors (e.g. located on-board helicopters) to better cover an emerging situation, and even collaborating with other sensor networks, to identify for example the ATM locations where a specific car may have stopped while it was moving from point A to point B. "
Location Intelligence
Software based on the loose communication of a small island
Island Wisdom, Coded in Java. "If Friday's boat from St. Mary was canceled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge. From studying how this and other situations played out, Armstrong formulated a set of fundamental principles on how people communicate. Now Armstrong is readying a productivity tool that he hopes will put those precepts into action. Called Trampoline, the program will integrate with a company's existing desktop and enterprise server applications, sitting quietly on a company's network and vacuuming in e-mail, files, spreadsheets and anything else it can find."
Wired News
Specialised media players
Jobo Giga Vu Pro:evolution for Pro Photogs. "Bring images in via CF card, and this player is able to review them using a histogram, can detect dust and blown highlights, and has a crosshair readout for RGB values."
Gizmodo
Ajax Office competitors
Introducing ajaxWrite. "The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word, in a completely web-based AJAX platform. Try ajaxWrite today, and experience first-hand how AJAX applications are changing the way the web works, and redefining the software industry."
ajaxwrite
Photo projectors
As Cameras Increasingly Go Digital, Can the Home Slide Show Be Far Behind?. "Now Panasonic has a compact three-pound digital projector that can show your photos on 38- to 300-inch screens without a computer hookup: just pop in an SD memory card (the most popular type) and it turns itself on and shows whatever images are on the card. The PT-P1SDU projector, available next month for $1,199, has a few features not available on slide projectors, like the ability to add movielike wipes, fades and other transitions between images; to show images in random or preprogrammed order; and even to show movies shot with digital cameras. It adjusts its brightness to match the ambient lighting and lets you adjust white balance to match either incandescent or fluorescent lighting."
New York Times
Opensource only
Kwangju Becomes Linux City. "The Korean government plans to pick Kwangju this month as the nation's first ``Linux City,'' where open-source software will become the mainstream programs."The Korea Times
Emotion devices
DeFIBulator, Portable Lie Detector. "There are two ways to describe the DeFIBulator: a portable lie detector, if you’re feeling sensational, or a portable tension detector, if you’re feeling honest. Developed in Singapore, it purports to measure varying degrees of vibration in someone’s voice to 65% accuracy."
Gizmodo
Wireless medical data
Wireless Transmission of ECGs Saves Lives. "While the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association recommend that heart attack patients have their arteries opened within 90 minutes of arriving at the hospital, the NorthEast Medical Center team was able to cut that time to 50 minutes. The national average is about 100 minutes, the researchers said. "We found that the pre-hospital wireless transmission of an ECG directly to a cardiologist's hand-device significantly reduced the time," said the lead researcher, George Adams, M.D. "When the cardiologist can directly see an ECG, it clarifies the decision to mobilize all the personnel necessary for the cath lab to be ready to go when the patient arrives.""EWeek
Easy to make transparent solar cells
Transparent Solar Cells. "Shuzi Hayase, a chief research scientist at Toshiba's Power Supply Materials & Devices Laboratory in Kawasaki, says the cells achieve a respectable 7.3 percent solar-energy conservation efficiency and should be easy to manufacture. "We do not need expensive production lines and sophisticated vacuum systems currently employed in the manufacture of silicon-based cells. The new cells could be manufactured by [silk-screen] printing technologies.""
Transmaterial
Transparent electronics
World's First Transparent Integrated Circuit. "Researchers at Oregon State University have created the world's first completely transparent integrated circuit from inorganic compounds, another major step forward for the rapidly evolving field of transparent electronics. The circuit is a five-stage "ring oscillator," commonly used in electronics for testing and new technology demonstration. It marks a significant milestone on the path toward functioning transparent electronics applications, which many believe could be a large future industry."
gizmag
Managing wireless sensor networks
Comprehensive Wireless Sensor Networking Solution. "One that caught our eye at the National Manufacturing Week (NMW) Conference in Chicago this week was a system that integrates sensors, software, and mesh networking devices into a turnkey solution offering plant/building managers instant actionable measurements of key operational levels (temperature, power, voltage, steam, water, air, flow, and pressure)."
gizmag
Mapping utilities
Pipe network to be mapped in 3D. "We will be producing an 'underlay' to the [map], to show you what's down there. We'll combine all the historical data from the utilities with the in-street data found with location-sensing technology. We want to merge this information dynamically and put it on some kind of handheld unit." The project could result in mobile devices or displays in street diggers that would present streetworkers with a 3D picture of the pipe and cable layout in front of them. This would give workers the confidence to dig without the fear of accidentally cracking a water main or causing a major gas leak."
BBC NEWS
Tiny PCs
'Municator: Micro Linux PC. "The ‘Municator is a $146 computer designed to surf the web, get email, and listen to audio and video. It weighs about a pound, has 256MB RAM and 40GB hard drive, a 800-MHz Godson (???) processor and TV output. Four USB ports, VGA-out, and PS2 port make this uber-micro PC just about as useful as any $2,000 portable tablet."
Gizmodo
April 05, 2006
Laser computing
Laser chips could power petaflop computers. "Laser communications chips capable of pumping data through the veins of gargantuan "petaflop" supercomputers have been demonstrated by NEC in Japan. The communications chips can transfer information through optical fibres at a blistering 25 gigabits per second (a gigabit is a billion bits). This is a record for such components, according to NEC, and is many times faster that the purely electronic interconnects used in today's supercomputers."New Scientist
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
Barcodes to speech
Speechio: listening to paper documents. "Speechio is an information appliance that reads a 2D barcode printed on a paper document and reads the document with a synthesized digital voice. It's designed for people with visual impairments and the elderly. The system uses a 2D barcode called SP Code that can encode a larger amount of information in a small space. So, a page of text information can be encoded and compressed in a small square at a corner of a document."
RFID in Japan
Following a trip
Upload Every Mountain. "Released in February, the newest generation called Contact 4.0 GEO has multi-layered, 3-D flash maps created from photos and models of Everest. Armchair adventurers can follow an expedition's route, zoom in on specific camps and positions, and look at weather forecasts and live satellite images. Comparatively, Google Earth is blurry and brutally slow over the Himalayas."
Wired News
April 04, 2006
Media visualizations
iBloks 3-D personalized entertainment demo. "Using the Windows Presentation Foundation, the iBloks software enables people to mix any type of media assets including music, photos, video, or games to create personalized entertainment™ experiences. People can use their own content or connect to the iBloks shop to purchase licensed digital content from top media companies. After they create their personalized iBlok model, game or card they can easily share their iBlok with friends via email, IM, or on their own web pages or blogs."
Virtual MIX
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
The history of your clothes
Second hand garment vibes. "A radio frequency identification (RFID) chip to which the wearer can save information about himself/herself is sewn into each garment. When the item of clothing—for instance, a jacket, pair of pants or T-shirt—is sold at a special second-hand shop, the buyer can access this information online and find out about the garment’s past."
Smart Mobs
Clouds of sensors
Sprinkling RFID sensor tags from the Sky. "The Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) started developing a system that allows for detailed information gathering about a disaster area by sprinkling RFID sensor tags from the sky (possibly using helicopters.) The sensor tags will be used to collect various information about a disaster -- perhaps most importantly, if anyone is alive. The tags are about several centimeters wide/high and equipped with heat, infrared, and vibration sensors."RFID in Japan
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
Emotions through recorded media
Instant Feeling Messages. "emosive is a service for mobile devices which allows capturing, storing and sharing of fleeting emotional experiences. Based on the Cognitive Priming theory, as we become more immersed in digital media through our mobile devices, our personal media inventories constantly act as memory aids, "priming" us to better recollect associative, personal (episodic) memories when facing an external stimulus."
we make money not art
Temperature input
ThermoPainter: painting with temperature. "ThermoPainter can detect temperature change regions on a sensing surface as touch regions when objects hotter or colder than the surface touch it. In the system, users can use a physical paintbrush with hot water and an airbrush with cold water in spite of paint as they use in the real world, and even use their own fingers, hands, and breaths directly because of their own body heat."
we make money not art
Judging ease of reading
Book, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words. "When Amazon gets the right from a publisher to let readers "search inside" a book, Text Stats tallies the average length of a sentence and amasses little piles for each word used. (Or big piles, as in the case of the King James Bible, for example, where the count for "loin" is 1,548; "behold," 1,426; and "lord" 7,082.) The software then ranks a book for clarity and ease of reading on a variety of indexes. For example, "The Story of Babar" has a Flesch-Kincaid Index score of 6.1 (sixth-grade level), the same as "Everything Is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer. Their "fogginess" quotients, an index similar to Flesch-Kincaid, are very close, too, though the Foer book is slightly less clear — 8 percent of its words are "complex," compared with 7 percent for "Babar." Text Stats also produces concordances, lists of the 100 most-used words in a book."
New York Times
March 31, 2006
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
Non-Roman hand writing recognition
HP India's gesture "keyboard" for pen entry. "People using non-Roman characters never forget that these keyboards weren't designed for them, and have spent decades searching for alternatives. The latest, developed by HP Labs India, is the gesture-based keyboard, which is actually a pen tablet that uses a stroke-based system to recognize characters in non-Roman languages. It was designed specifically to deal with languages in use in the subcontinent, such as Tamil and Kannada, but has potential for other Asian languages as well. The system was designed to be rugged, and to be usable by people with no prior experience with keyboards or the Roman alphabet."
Engadget
Better satellite imagery
Satellites Will See More, Faster. "GeoEye says its next-generation satellite, GeoEye-1, will be capable of acquiring each day approximately 270,000 square miles of imagery, an area about the size of Texas. That's about seven times the area covered by Ikonos, the best imaging satellite the company has running today. DigitalGlobe, the satellite imagery supplier for Google Earth, plans to launch its next orbital, WorldView 1, later this year. The company says it will be capable of collecting up to 193,000 square miles of imagery per day."
Wired News
Capturing virtuoso motion
Video-game tech hits classical music. "Best known for bringing characters to life in video games as well as in such films as "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Polar Express," motion capture will allow researchers to create an animated model of Rabbath's techniques for an instructional DVD titled "Art of the Left Hand." "Francois is to classical music what Michael Jordan was to basketball," says Hans Sturm, a double-bass professor at Ball State, who counts Rabbath as both mentor and close personal friend. "Nobody else does what he does. And I doubt anyone ever will." The state-of-the-art technology will preserve Rabbath's bowing and fingering techniques - his "fingering gymnastics," as Mr. Sturm calls them - so that others can analyze the master's approach to the double bass."
csmonitor.com
New forms of instrument
Samchillian Keyboard Concept. "Israeli industrial designer Eitan Shefer has created the Samchillian keyboard, taking a novel approach to a musical instrument where you don’t play specific notes but select how they relate to the ones before them. For example, if you’re playing a C and then want to play a D, you just push the 1 key. There are two directional keys, 16 relative keys and eight finger positions, and when you want to bend the pitch or manipulate the filters, you tilt the unit from side to side."
Gizmodo
March 30, 2006
Hidden or easy wi-fi
Cool Wireless Router Bulb. "Liteon Technology Corp. apparently came up with an interesting design concept for home networking dubbed the Orb. It combines data transfer over power lines with wireless network access. The wireless router component can be screwed into standard light bulb sockets to connect to the data network available on the power lines - neat idea."
I4U News
Art on the TV
Turning the Television Into an Electronic Easel for Future Mondrians. "The role of the TV screen continues to expand with the V.Smile Art Studio, a large battery-operated children's drawing tablet. The $30 device, made to work with the V.Smile TV Learning System (sold separately for $50), also includes one software "smartridge." Plug everything in and your TV screen turns into a large blank easel surrounded by 15 color selections, plus icons for all the basic drawing functions like erase, fill, cut and paste."
New York Times
Reserving your parking spot
Using smarts to find parking. "Within a few years, it will be common to reserve a parking space online before leaving home. If you haven't booked in advance, the navigation screen in your car's dashboard will display the nearest available street or garage parking. When you find an open space at a meter, you won't have to fumble for coins. Instead, you'll punch the meter's ID number into your cell phone. A sensor in the pavement will detect when you leave, and your credit card will be charged for exactly the number of minutes your car was parked. No more running to feed the meter when your appointment runs long, or overpaying and involuntarily giving a gift to the next driver in your spot."
MercuryNews.com
Visual search
Download of the Day: Quintura Search. "Freeware program Quintura Search is a web search tool designed to build powerful keyword-based web searches with a visual interface. The visual semantic map is a graphical map that shows contextual relationships among words in the query. This map helps build a search query by giving hints or words to define the context of the query. The map shows only those words that have close contextual relationships with the keywords in your query. Click a word to change your query and get relevant results that will comply with your new query."
Lifehacker
Digital instruments
Digital Trumpet. "This trumpet is able to generate a wide variety of sounds including eight brass instruments, five woodwind and even a synthesized human voice. Best of all, it comes preloaded with 10 teaching songs that are learned via illuminated LEDs. Don’t fret, parents. There is even a headphone jack. Now if only brass instruments could include one of those. This high-tech trumpet retails for $400."
Gizmodo
A tool for random things
Download of the Day: Caboodle. "Freeware program Caboodle collects and organizes the information you don’t know where to put. Everyone comes across information that they want to refer to later. Maybe gifts you’ve received or sent, product serial numbers, recipes, directions to someone’s house, a photo of your pet, or anything else. Caboodle is a tool to help store and organize such random bits of information."
Lifehacker
Objects that blog
The new world of 'blogjects'. "With "Why Things Matter," Julian Bleecker, a researcher at the University of Southern California, has written a "Manifesto for Networked Objects" (PDF format, 17 pages, 939 KB). In this document, he describes what he calls "blogjects" or "objects that blog." The three major characteristics of a blogject are its sense of space combined with its ability to track where it has been, its knowledge of its encounters and previous experiences, and more importantly, its ability to participate in an assertive way to social networks."Primidi
Waking up to media
Hitachi DVL-7TV Wakes You Up to Lots-O-Media. "This Hitachi DVL-7TV will expose you to your choice of media the first thing in the morning, with TV, DVD, FM, MP3, or even JPEG stills to ease you out of your hung-over haze. There’s a 7-inch screen that’s just about the right size for bedside, and oh yeah, it also has an alarm to jar you awake if all that entertainment doesn’t do the trick."
Gizmodo
Citizen maps
Mapping pickpockets and dog poo. "Chinastic (via Virtual China) reports on a map, maintained by local citizens, which tells you which areas in the Chinese city of Hangzhou to avoid if you want to avoid purse snatchers. On the online map developed by Sun Haitao, citizens mark the spots where they've run across pickpockets."
we make money not art
Setting up web pages to print
Make any page printer friendly with Click2Zap. "The Click2Zap bookmarklet lets you remove whatever elements you want from a web page to help make it printer friendly. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, go to the page you want to print and click the bookmarklet. Then you can go through the page and click which elements you’d like to remove. If you accidentally remove one you’d like to keep, just undo it. Finally, when you’re finished, click print."
Lifehacker
Flexible tags
First Bendable RFID Tags. "The prototype is 800um thick and process improvements look to move the thickness of the RFID compnents closer to 100um which would cut the final size in half. Since paper is commonly over 300um, the tag could be embedded in documents and would not alter the shape or texture of the paper. This would allow for RFID-enabled business cards and contracts can be made RFID tamper-resistant—perhaps moving DRM into the analog world of contracts."
Gizmodo
Tracking the history of foodstuff
Maintaining Sake Temperature With RFID. "Sake bottles would be tagged with RFID tags, which would then send temperature data to sensors on the truck transporting the sake. The sensors relay this information 3G-style to the sake’s home base. The point of all this? When the customer checks out the sake at the store, he can read the bottle’s temperature history, indicating whether or not the sake had any temperature irregularities in transit."
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
Tracking your travel
Sherelog: Suica Mashup. "Sherelog is a system that fetches data from Suica (an RFID train pass) and visualizes personal train-ride records on a large public map (or Google Map)."
we make money not art
Getting rid of game UI
Tunnel Vision . "Recently, several new games have renounced the HUD. In Doom 3, the ammo count for your chain gun is displayed not in a floating bar, but on the headstock of the gun. Peter Jackson's King Kong doesn't offer a scrap of onscreen artificial data: Adrien Brody's voice calls out the ammo count each time you reload, and low health is denoted by shaky, blurry vision. In a column called "Off With Their HUDs!" for the game-design site Gamasutra, Greg Wilson argues that losing the HUD helps increase the sense of immersion. "Nothing screams 'this is just a game' louder than an old-fashioned HUD," he writes. The fewer HUDs we see, the more we'll feel we're inside a holodeckian piece of cinema."
Wired News
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
Huge, huge displays
Virginia Tech's 24 display workstation. "Say hello to Virginia Tech's 31 million pixel-pusher friends, their 24 display array "workstation" runs at 10240 x 3072. Apparently it takes 12 Linux servers running distributed computing software to operate, and can play Quake III at 15-30FPS. Well done, sirs, well done."
Engadget
Fuel cells can be used in flight
Fuel cells to change laptop use"The first versions of the methanol-using units should keep a laptop going for up to nine hours. Fuel cell technology got a boost recently when international air flight regulators changed rules that banned passengers from carrying flammable methanol onto aircraft. Linnet Tsai, deputy marketing manager for Antig, said the first fuel cells to go on sale would marry familiar lithium-ion batteries with the methanol-based technology."
BBC NEWS
Software for color blindness
Software: See in Living Color. "Move the PC's cursor over an item, and eyePilot reports what the color is. If the user clicks on a color name, all instances of it on the page will flash. Or one color can be made to stand out by converting the rest of a page to gray and white. EyePilot also offers the software equivalent of a TV hue knob, allowing users to adjust the overall spectrum of a page until telling contrasts are more easily viewed."Wired News
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
Pen-like mouse
CeBIT '06: Anti-Carpal Tunnel Wowpen. "This is a pen-shaped mouse with scroll wheel and two buttons on the front. It was actually very responsive. Although I wasn’t able to sign my name with any fidelity, I was able to make curves and circles, which are pretty difficult using a standard mouse."
Gizmodo
Fun with video editing
Potentially Someth;ng. "The Doodle TV application doodles over live images on TV recognising faces and drawing glasses and mustaches over them, or drawing decoration around the image. It works exceptionally well with news programs as you can see in the image."
we make money not art
Online application creation
DabbleDB: Online App Building For Everyone. "DabbleDB is a platform that allows you to create applications online using a web interface. The sort of applications you would create and then use are what most of us normally hack together in a spreadsheet or using some other database application that is often complex. Example applications that I created in DabbleDB are a contacts list, where I can store, share and categorise my contacts, and also an issue tracking system where I can track bugs and change requests. Other examples on the DabbleDB website are a expense report application, a conference organising app, a scheduling app and a client invoicing application."
TechCrunch
March 23, 2006
Fast file access
IBM breaks speed records with new version of file system. "Project Fastball achieved a new speed record of over 102 gigabytes per second of sustained read/write performance to a single file. The record was achieved using 416 individual storage controllers combined with 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes (each p575 node has eight dual-core 2.2 GHz POWER5 processors)."Ars Technica
Figuring out your "real" age
What's That in Dog Years?. "The H-Scan uses software and various gizmos to assess 12 biomarkers of aging, including memory, eyesight, hearing, and lung capacity. I felt sure I would ace the test, and in the process garner much-needed assurance that I'm really much younger than my numerical age. After the hour-long test, the computer spat out what it thought was my real age: 45. My heart sank. I'm not 45. I can't possibly look 45."
Business Week
Projectors that work close up
Toshiba Announces Projector with Integrated DVD Player and “Super Close” Lens. "Toshiba introduced its et20 projector at CeBIT 2006 that includes an integrated DVD player, 5.1 channel sound and a unique lens that can produce a six-foot image from three feet away, and a 4.5-foot image from just 27 inches away."
Gizmodo
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
Web-based OS
Web Based Desktop System. Taking your data and applications everywhere.. "Welcome to eyeOS, a web based desktop system. With eyeOS you can access your data and your applications anywhere, anytime. A virtual office in your hands, no need to install anything in the computer. Everything lives in the browser, for you and your work colleagues. eyeOS is open source and free software. Set up freely an account on our servers or, if you prefer it, install it in your server. Make your life easier with the virtual word processor, calendar, file manager, messenger, browser and other applications. And if you want more applications, just visit the eyeOS Application Database!"
eyeOS
Personal maps
Platial social mapping . "Web site Platial maps your life, your neighbhorhood and your interests with shared annotated Google Maps. Build your “Autobiogeography” map (“here’s where my first kiss happened”) or pinpoint the locations of your bowling team’s venues or be an online tour guide to your hometown. Platial tracks your geographical friends and tags your places. The two-month old startup has just passed 10,000 places in its collaborative “social atlas.”"
Lifehacker
Movie editing through printed cards & QR codes
Tangible movie editing for kids. "1. Film your story with a digital camera. 2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed. 3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera. 4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be. 5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided. 6. Preview on your monitor! Done."
we make money not art
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
Laptop palm scanning
Fujitsu's PalmSecure reads your palm: outlook good. "Privacy fiends, rejoice! If you're not yet satisfied with iris scanning, fingerprint reading, and voice recognition, it looks like Fujitsu's finally bringing a new smaller 35 x 35 x 17mm version of their palm-vein scanning PalmSecure biometrics system to a laptop near you. "
Engadget
GPS clothing
Know Where jacket phones home with GPS data. "Sure, there are already jackets designed to include integrated controls for your audio player, cellphone and other devices. And some of them even look better than the Know Where jacket from Germany's Interactive Wear (which, face it, isn't exactly hard). But how many of them have an integrated GPS unit that can phone home with realtime tracking data?"
Engadget
Plenty of visualizations
Visual Complexity. "Visual Complexity is a listing of nearly 300 different information mapping projects. Compiled by Manuel Lima, a Portuguese information designer who recently finished his MFA at Parson's School of Design in New York, each entry includes a project overview and a link for more detail."
Cool Hunting
Foot switches
Thanko USB Boss Switch Underfoot. "The tricky accompanying software lets you customize its settings to your liking, so you can hide a current window, or hide every window except for one that you designate, such as something busy-looking like Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook. The software is password protected so your secrets are safe."
Gizmodo
Brain input
The Brain Computer Interface. "The system reads brain-waves from 128 scalp electrodes -- very slowly, mind you -- and apparently over the last couple of years they've already honed the device to control a pointer and enable trained users to actually write a sentence with their mind alone (even though it may take between five and ten minutes to do so)."
Engadget
Persistence of vision visualizations
Light up animated Pac-Man bicycle wheels. "Ladyada writes about her Pac-Man wheels - "The technology here is "persistence of vision"...when LEDs move fast enough they can "draw" an image when the wheel spins. That's the basis behind both the MiniPOV and SpokePOV toys that I designed last year. I rode this design around last burningman, obviously ive adjusted the image so they're "upside down" here for better photographing! "
MAKE
Simple web homepages
SiteShuffle: dead simple way to keep track of your favorite pages. "SiteShuffle is a just-launched, bone-simple way of keeping on top of your favorite sites aimed at novice and casual Internet users. The UI is a set of arrows at the top of a browser window that you click to scroll through a list of your favorite "homepages" -- click on one to load it in your browser. A simple, stripped-down recommendation system recommends other sites you might add to your rotation based on your similarities with other users."
Boing Boing
Virtuality on a cellphone
Augmented Reality on a Cellphone. "Viennese computer scientist Daniel Wagner has figured out a way to show a virtual character on an i-mate SP5 cellphone, and when you move around with the cellphone, it appears that you’re floating around this virtual character in 3D. Other people with cellphones can also see this character from their points of view. "
Gizmodo
Businesses NOT in search engines
Firms 'invisible' to online shoppers. "Nearly half of small businesses could be missing out on their share of the growing online market due to poor knowledge of search engines. A new report from Fasthosts shows that 49 per cent of small firms fail to submit their company’s websites to search engines. Two-thirds of internet users told researchers that they only look at the first two pages of their online search results, Fasthosts said, meaning that many companies will never be discovered online."The Register
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
March 22, 2006
Smart containers
Shipping container with a mind of its own. "One of the many applications for the new RFID tags is that of locating goods and containers in transit. German scientists have developed the “IFF Smart Box”, a container equipped with a scanning device that can check its contents by means of RFID. The data are forwarded to a small computer unit. A software combines them with the current geographical location determined by a GPS receiver. Various sensors can be integrated in the box, too, in order to measure parameters such as pressure, temperature or vibration. The information is transmitted to a database by mobile radio."
gizmag
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
Shopping with RSS
Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.. "The system, in the case of eBags at least, appears simple enough. Starting later this month, consumers who visit either the company's main site or its shoe site, 6pm.com, will see R.S.S. icons near the sites' products, with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, black, size 11 Cole Haan shoes, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page, then confirms the request by signing into that page. If the user directs eBags to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page, eBags will send the alert — typically an item description with a photo — only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified items."New York Times
March 20, 2006
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
Things to do with you camera phone
Top 50 Emergency Uses for Your Camera Phone. "About has a list of top emergency uses for your cameraphone compiled by Paul Purcell, a security analyst and preparedness consultant : Just a few: Record parking spot locations; Engine repairs. Send a pic to a mechanic who may talk you through a quick fix; Child custodian. If you can't get to your kids at school or other function, relay a picture of the person who is coming to pick them up..."Smart Mobs
Digital reproduction
Digital Methods Help Replicate Artworks. "The subtle aspects of Japanese paintings, which often include fine line work on delicate materials, could be lost or muted during reproduction. So the process involves creating high-resolution images of the originals with a scanner or camera that can capture images with more than 100 megapixels (compared with, say, the 5 or 6 megapixels of most consumer-oriented digital cameras). Using a combination of software and the human eye, the colors in the digital image are matched to the original work. The image is then printed out on a large-format Hewlett-Packard Designjet 5500 UV inkjet printer with fade-resistant inks. The printer is able to produce the image on washi, a traditional Japanese paper made from the inner bark of trees."
New York Times
March 17, 2006
ID implants
ID card in a tooth. "Dr Thevissen and his team have adapted an RFID tag which vets inject routinely into animals. It can carry information including a person's name, nationality, date of birth, gender and national ID code. Experiments showed that the tag withstood normal biting forces and worked after being heated to 450C and cooled. But repeated expansion and contraction of the tooth due to heating and cooling is a problem. So the design might be modified to include an insulating layer."
we make money not art
Digital metaphors
NEC's "KotoHana" LED flower knows how you feel. "It's pretty hard to tell what's going on here, but there seems to be a "Sensibility Technology" that recognizes the user's feelings, and then tells the flower over a wireless connection. The system works over the Internet, so even from far away the flower's LEDs can light up to reflect your true feelings to that special someone."
Engadget
Big screen interaction
Panasonic shows hugemongous interactive display. "hey paired a couple of 110-inch screens to create the largest interactive display we've ever seen, if not the largest display, period. Their tech isn't as crazy interactive as NYU's Multi-Touch stuff, but Panasonic sure has the right idea about size. Check the read link for a video complete with funny accents and imagery of some sort of "desktop of the future," which, of course, involves tossing around bits of video larger than our respective refrigerators."
Engadget
Getting more information on items in stores
DNP Develops an in-store information clipping system. "As shown in the photo, the system uses QR codes and consumers take a pic of QR with their camera phones. Consumers may use this system for creating a wish list or compare similar sales items. Retailers can collect detailed information about consumers because this system can capture which product a customer clicked (it's recorded even when the consumer doesn't actually buy the product). So, a potential new marketing tool."
RFID in Japan
Closer to fuel cells in laptops?
Antig's Fuel Cells For Laptops Showing At CeBIT Next Week. "Taiwan’s Antig Technology and AVC Corp will be showing off a fuel cell for laptops at next week’s CeBIT Trade Show. They’re saying their fuel cell is production-ready and can go into laptops by the second half of this year."
Gizmodo
Stick-on watches
Timeflex: Oh, That It Were Real. "The Timeflex is a mock-up of a stickable watch. Using some sort of epaper—not yet invented—and an ultra-durable time IC—not yet invented—and the stuff they put on sticky notes, you’ve got yourself a watch you can stick anywhere."
Gizmodo
Copying the real world in online worlds
U2 Rocks Second Life. "A team of fans have recreated a U2 rock concert in Second Life, BrandsInGames reports. While music was streamed in to the arena, a recreated Bono and gang were animated to rock like they're real-life counterparts. Merchandise stalls sod T Shirts and even beer from brands like Sam Adams. After the show, the band came out from their backstage room to give autographs!"
PSFK
Sharing playlists
Downloading Empathy to Your iPod. "IMixes -- as well as playlists on other services such as Rhapsody, Musicstrands and Soundflavor -- are the online cousins of amateur cassette-tape and CD mixes created over the years by countless music collectors as soundtracks for parties and road trips. Many of the playlists focus on a theme -- and many of those on a personal one, whether the subject is a lost love, a class reunion, a nasty breakup, duty in Iraq or a new romance."
Washington Post
Clocking-in digitally
NEC NeoFace time clock keeps workers in line. "The system replaces the classic punch-card reader with facial recognition software, so that old canard of getting someone else to clock in for you is useless. For the ultimate in worker subservience, the time clock can also control access to the company locker room. Try to leave early, and you can forget about grabbing your street clothes; you'll have to sneak out wearing your grubby uniform, letting the whole world know you're pwned."
Engadget
Rich, online photo features
BubbleShare adds Ajax Zoom feature. "The feature is available on every picture hosted by BubbleShare - simply click on the BubbleZoom button and have a 3x zoom view on any area of the photo. Very slick."
TechCrunch
Virtual visitation rights
'Virtual' visits pushed in several states. "Divorce put David List and his 2-year-old daughter on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and he worried that she would soon forget him. She hasn't, though. List's divorce agreement guaranteed him "virtual visitation" — the chance to talk with his daughter through an Internet video connection — and he and Ruby Rose, now 5, usually connect at least twice a week. The chats sustain them in between their in-person visits, which come only a few times a year."
USATODAY.com
Exercise while working
The DIY exercise office. "My boss bought a treadmill for his office, and built a table on top of it to use as a desk. Now he spends his entire workday walking about half a mile an hour. He's hoping to be in shape by spring"
MAKE: Blog
Facial recognition in phones
Vodafone 904SH Cellphone with Face Recognition. "Vodafone has rolled out an unusual 3G and GSM cellphone that gets to know you as well as your dog does. It performs this magic trick with an OKI face recognition sensor that does away with the need for entering a pin number."
Gizmodo
Smart toys
Arcade racing brought to life. "Designed for 7-10 years old boys, Floor it! is arcade car racing brought to life. The radio controlled cars sense and react to course conditions like oil slicks, turbo power-ups, water hazards, etc. The cars are controlled through a free floating steering wheel. When the wheel is turned left and right the vehicle acts accordingly. Tilting the steering wheel forward and back controls the throttle and direction of the car. Optional throttle and brake buttons can be used in place of the throttle tilt control."
we make money not art
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
Searching for podcasts
Podzinger: search the full text of podcasts. "Podzinger is a service that aggregates hundreds of thousands of episodes of podcasts, converts the entire text of the casts to text, and then delivers a searachable index. You go to Podzinger, search for a search, and you get back all the podcasts that have mentioned that term -- along with embedded players that can play you back the whole podcast, or just those segments where the keywords are mentioned."
Boing Boing
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
Networked objects
Manifesto for Networked Objects. "Julian Bleecker has finally posted his "Manifesto for Networked Objects" in which he discusses "Why Things Matter". Julian elaborates on a variety of issues connected to the "Internet of Things", populated by "Blogjects" or "Spimes" that collect and disseminate information, making us eventually rather live "in" than "on" the internet."
we make money not art
Sharing security between bars
BioBouncer Might Make Bars Safer. "Its camera snaps customers entering clubs and bars, and facial recognition software compares them with stored images of previously identified troublemakers. The technology alerts club security to image matches, while innocent images are automatically flushed at the end of each night, Dussich said. Various clubs can share databases through a virtual private network, so belligerent drunks might find themselves unwelcome in all their neighborhood bars."
Wired News
Online applications
Thumbstacks online presentation builder. "Create and edit slides online with Word-like rich-text editing controls and with images and drawings from anywhere on the web. Launch and view your presentation right from the Thumbstacks site and edit it from any ‘net-connected computer. Thumbstacks is still in alpha so expect a bit of wonkiness; free to sign up."
Lifehacker
More competition for IE
Maxthon: the browser that rocks. "The key strength of Maxthon is that it enables you to customize totally your browsing experience with extreme simplicity. A few examples: URL shortcuts. Instead of typing a URL or clicking a bookmark (ok it takes less than 2 sec but still) you can set up a URL alias (”2″ for instance) and type directly in the URL bar which will lead you to the URL of your choice (eg: your flickr page). You can change easily skins, a wide choice is offered. Mouse gesture is also great just like super drag and drop features to save an image or initiate a search on a given word within web page."
TechCrunch
Soft robots
RI-MAN, the soft and cuddly robot. "With a Pillsbury Doughboy pucker sure to delight any granny, RI-MAN is the latest lifestyle-support robot destined to care for Japan's elderly. The 5-foot 2-inch, 220-pound RI-MAN features plush arms and chest perched atop a wheeled base."
Engadget
March 16, 2006
Getting rid of background noise
Download of the Day: Noise. "Noise plays a continuous, static/waterfall “pink noise” that does a surprisingly effective job of killing annoying co-worker, roommate and downstairs neighbor sounds."
Lifehacker
Flexible RFID
NICT Develops Flexible Fabric RFID Tags. "NICT (National Institute of Information and Communication Technology) developed a flexible RFID tag (2.45GHz) that is mostly made of a fabric material."
RFID in Japan
QR codes for verifying your location
Vending Machines as Location Markers for Calling Taxicabs. "The service can also be used with QR codes that encode location information. Vending machines that bear such location-encoded QR codes are being installed in varous places in the prefecture so that people can easily call a cab just by taking a picture of a QR code with their camera phones and connecting to the K-cabs' taxicab dispatch website."
RFID in Japan
Post-production advertising
Digital product placement alters TV landscape. "Unbeknownst to them, the image of Kellogg's Club Crackers had been digitally painted onto the top of a coffee table after the scene was filmed, launching the latest advance in a growing marketing practice known in the industry as product placement but derided by critics as "stealth advertising.""Reuters.com
March 08, 2006
Setting shortcut keys
Download of the Day: Qliner hotkeys. "Just hold the Windows key for three seconds and up pops a Onscreen Keyboard with icons on the keys that are configured. This you can you use , not only to remind you of hotkey combinations, but also for Drag and Drop Configuration."
Lifehacker
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
Robotics for kids
Huggy robot for hospitalised children. "The Robotics & Multibody Research Group (a research group within the VUB - Brussels University) is working on Anty, an intelligent huggy robot that will entertain long-term hospitalised children. When developed the robot will walk, talk and show feelings. Besides, Anty will be able to develop different personalities, so kids don't get bored with him."
we make money not art
Biological computing
Enzyme computer could live inside you. "Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have built a molecular calculator that uses enzymes to perform calculations. The team believe enzyme-powered computers could eventually be implanted into the body and used to, for example, tailor the release of drugs to a specific person's metabolism."
we make money not art
Tiny PCs
Shuttle X100 Ultra-Small Media PC. "The Shuttle X100 Ultra-Small Media PC is a design concept that’s so tiny you’d think it was a FireWire drive, but even though it’s small, inside there’s a full-scale computer powered by an Intel Core Duo mobile processor. "
Gizmodo
Touchscreens everywhere
Acer MP-500 touchscreen portable media player. "This one comes as something of a surprise, but it's certainly the kind of surprise we'd like to get more often. Acer is apparently on the verge of releasing its MP-500 media player, and the specs include a 3.5-inch touchscreen display, 20-40GB hard drive, support for most common audio and video formats, video out and a battery life of 4-8 hours. It's expected out in Europe next month at a price of between $350 and $415."
Engadget
Computer-controlled design
Space Antenna Design Evolved by Hive of Borg. "Eighty PCs running artificial intelligence software used “survival of the fittest” principles to evolve a tiny antenna that will be used on a space mission next month. NASA called the group of computers a “Borg computer collective.” After starting with a random antenna design, the hive of computers spent just 10 hours going through millions of possibilities for a space antenna. The group settled on a design that looked pretty much like a bent paper clip, determining that shape as the most efficient for the mission. According to NASA, the odd-shaped antenna perfectly matches the performance that NASA specified."
Gizmodo
Richer peripherals
Logitech NuLOOQ controller: iPod meets PowerMate. "The NuLOOQ's touch-sensitive, circular control wheel can be customized to work with just about any app, and includes an onscreen interface (also available separately) that shows you what your NuLOOQ is doing at any moment. The idea is that you can use the NuLOOQ to get precision control over things like zooming in on graphics and selecting tools in apps like Photoshop."
Engadget
Putting the CPU in another room
New Matrox Extio F1400 is world's first remote graphics unit. "The Matrox remote graphics technology enables a new physical layout for computers and is ideal for environments like audio studios, broadcast studios, dispatch centers, control rooms, and public spaces using digital signage. With this product, the critical parts of the computer like the disks, memory, and processors can be kept in a separate, safe, secure room. This saves space at the display station, removes a potentially noisy computer, and allows system administrators to access and maintain the system at a separate location."
gizmag
Image processing on a phone
CamReader - software for doing many things with camera phones. "Mediaseek's CamReader is feature-rich image processing software. It's based on the barcode decoder engine adopted by major mobile telcos in Japan (i.e., KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, and Vodafone). When we talk about camera phones and barcodes in Japan, it's usually about QR codes, but CamReader supports varieties of barcode formats including: JAN8/13, EAN, UPC-A/E, CODE39, QR Code(model2), Micro QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF417, OCR."
RFID in Japan
Strange effects of quantum computing
Quantum computer solves problem without running program. "A quantum computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has solved a problem without running the actual problem -- one of the weird-ass outcomes of building and running a quantum computer. Reportedly, this particular effect can't scale up much beyond a very simple problem, but the people responsible indicate that there are similar effects that might be usable at larger scales"Boing Boing
Screensaver window
Download of the day 3: Holding Pattern Screensaver. "Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence."
Lifehacker
Tabletop computing
HP Misto Coffee Table PC. "P celebrated its 40th anniversary of selling overpriced printer ink by revealing Misto, a concept from its labs that combines a coffee table with a touch-screen PC. The giant screen, of undetermined resolution, would be used by a group, which would gather around and play board games, look at maps, or arrange pictures for viewing. Since it’s just a concept, there is no indication of when or if it will be developed, and if so how much it will cost. No question, it certainly won’t be cheap—this is a coffee table that doesn’t exactly invite you to put up your feet."
Gizmodo
PCs built into furniture
Desktop And Desk Finally Marry. "A UK design company has at long last developed the Powerdesk, “The world’s first truly effective integration of computer and workstation.” That means put away the Office Depot particle board, ‘cause this PC is integrated into the desk it comes with."
Gizmodo
Temporary tracking
RFID Tagged Party. "SF's MoMA held a RFID party with 180 Tags handed out to visitors. During their stay the visitors location and movement were roughly tracked and projected onto a screen. A nice way to have people interact with visuals. "
PSFK
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
Fashion gaming
Wearable game weaves clues into cloth. "If you find yourself wearing clothes from a new company called Edoc Laundry, beware: Strangers may walk up to you on the street to examine the intricacies of your shirt's patterns. That's because Edoc Laundry's first line, expected to launch March 1, literally weaves an episodic, multimedia game into the fabric of the garments. The Seattle-based company is believed to be the first to attempt such a fashion feat."
CNET News.com
Time-lapse desktop
Download of the Day: TimeSnapper. "Freeware program TimeSnapper takes screenshots of your desktop every few seconds to give you an accurate picture of what exactly you’ve been doing with your time."
Lifehacker
One UI for all your stuff #2
KIT. "Keep It Together - is a new application for Mac OS X that lets you keep your stuff in one place, organize it in different ways and find it again in an instant."
Reinvented Software
Wind power for gadgets
The Micro Windmill Mobile Charger. "This tiny collection of tubines converts wasted wind into useful talk time (a la certain Japanese taxis) with blades just 5-centimeters long, and is also said to be capable of charging laptops, portable game consoles, and DAPs. So far the MWMC is still in the development stage, but if you start seeing an unusual number of people walking around wearing propeller beanies with cables snaking down their faces, you'll know that this device has made it stateside."
Engadget
Gathering your data into one UI
Foldera: Never organize your inbox again. "You create a dedicated Activity Folder for each distinct project or activity. Email, instant messaging, and all your other applications are now accessed from within this folder instead of their original disconnected and unstructured state. This organizational structure also keeps everything in context; for example, all your email conversations and instant message dialogs stay right inside that specific Activity Folder, so everything related to that project stays grouped together. Doesn’t that make more sense?"
TechCrunch
Visualizing the best time to fly
Flyspy Brings The New Web To Airline Ticketing. "Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent."
TechCrunch
Petabytes of storage
Petabyte disks coming in 5 years?. "Thomas has succeeded in coaxing electrons to spin in the same direction as opposed to current data storage methods which are hapless in the face of electron flip. Controlling the spin allows for smaller, higher capacity devices with prototypes expected in two to three years and commercial products in five. Perpendicular schmerpendicular, bring us spintronics!"
Engadget
Music Tamagotchi
iPod to meet Tamagotchi. "Japanese company Konami will issue this summer a curious LCD-based portable game in which the player "raises" virtual characters by giving them a "steady diet" of music. "When the game, called Otoizm, is connected to a MP3 player, various characters appear according to the type of music being played. The game classifies music into 19 types, and the growth and type of character produced changes according to the type of music it listens to. More than 30 kinds of characters can be created.""
we make money not art
Visualizing the news
What's Up? News Map. "New stories are highlighted on the map, and a balloon appears with a headline; clicking on the balloon sends you to the source of the story."
Cool Hunting
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
Automated book scanning
ATIZ BookDrive: The World's First Portable Automatic Book Scanner. "The ATIZ BookDrive is the world's only scanner featuring a page turning mechanism to digitize a whole book completely automatically. Art Sarasin, President of ATIZ, tells us that there are only two other fully automatic book digitizers, which use cameras (Kirtas and 4Digitalbooks), but these are huge machines. I guess Google and Amazon are using those for their book ripping ventures. "
I4U News
Car radar driving
Mercedes' new S-Class rocks Distance Plus urban cruise control. "Unlike current radar-assisted offerings from companies like Infiniti, Distance Plus can control the vehicle in both highway and city driving conditions, meaning you can commute from Harlem to Wall Street down the West Side Highway while sipping your coffee and reading the Post Engadget on your mobile, glancing up occassionally to steer."
Engadget
Add 3D to maps
Maya 2 Google Earth. "It's an open-source, cross-platform tool that allows you to export 3D models as a single Google Earth Placemark (KML) file. [...] Some of the potential uses for Maya2GoogleEarth are: -Remix or augment city architecture, with your own creations. -Extract your in-game character with OGLE and bring them into Google Earth. -Design buildings and then show them at their correct geographic location"
Cool Hunting
March 02, 2006
Quick installation of new tech using fluorescent lamps
Lamps converted to power outlets. "NEC Corp has developed two types of miniature gadgets that convert fluorescent lamps into power outlets. It's the first step towards producing data emitters and other power-consuming electronics machines to be fixed to the ceilings in stations and shopping centers without having to conduct costly electrical wiring work. One of the two gadgets — a ring-shaped component around the lamp — generates electricity by converting faint pulses of electromagnetic energy radiated by fluorescent lamps into electric currents. The other — a thin round plate-shaped component at either one of the two metal ends of a fluorescent lamp — siphons off part of the usual electricity that is supplied to the lamp to make it fluorescent."
we make money not art
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
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
Laser projection
Mitsubishi develops laser-powered projection TV. "Mitsubishi has announced that it's developed the world's first rear-projection TV powered by a laser instead of the mercury lamps typically used in other projector TVs. According to the company, the laser projector offers higher picture quality and a greater color range than plasma or LCD sets. No word on when these will be out or how much you'll have to shell out to get one."
Engadget
Audio in appliances
The new stove from Sanyo that talks back. "Sanyo is busting out a new 200V Built-In IH Cooking Heater stove in Japan with "voice navigation" to guide you through your dangerous kitchen adventures. The stove sounds off musical tones when it's done cooking or boiling water, and can get tones off the Internet or from your phone via infrared. If you're just completely lost, the induction heat stove can also talk you through some recipes, but we're just hoping it can put its vocal powers to good use and talk you down from that ledge."
Engadget
Podcasts of bands coming to your area
Podbop - Information. "Old way: Looking up concerts in your town on an event site, googling 100 different bands, tracking down an MP3 for each band, and then deciding which show you want to go to. The Podbop way: Type in a city, get MP3s, discover a band you like, and go see them."
Podbop
Commitment through RFID
Couple's implant chips take love to a new level. "ennifer Tomblin and Amal Graafstra have made the most modern declaration of their affection for each other, with implanted electronic chips that allow them unfettered access to each other's lives. It's called Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID. Both have had a small electronic chip embedded under their skin that grants access to each other's front doors and home computers."
CTV.ca
Technology in mirrors
Mirror Weather Station. "From our wacky friends at Oregon Scientific, this Mirror Weather Station may take the prize on combo products that make little sense. For just $130, you too can own a mirror that tells you the outside temperature. You know, in case listening to the radio or turning on the TV or the Internet is too tough for you."
Gizmodo
Technology built into the home
Eat and type. "This retro decorative tablecloth contains a textile keyboard. The electronic is woven into a fabric, which finds itself between layers of water resistant felt as sandwich material. The TIDY TIPIST NO.2 is washable."
we make money not art
Rotating camera
360 Camera Remains Stationary While Top Rotates. "Cedric Tay of Yanko Design has dreamed up this 360 Camera, a cylindrical digital camera whose top section rotates to take a series of panoramic pictures while its bottom section remains stationary. Since the bottom part doesn’t need to move, it’s possible to secure the camera on a tripod and take an accurate series of shots to be stitched together later. The camera’s design even includes a built-in inclinometer which helps you make sure it’s level before you begin shooting."
Gizmodo
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
Homes of the future?
Imagine the Home in 2020 Design Competition. "12 winners were selected from more than 3,000 entries, which included a portable/collapsible refrigerator, vacuum slippers and a water-free, waterfall-shaped washing machine. Dozens of entries from designers around the world are posted and are certain to entertain and inspire you."
Cool Hunting
Sync your songs and your exercise
Interval running iTunes playlist. "Interval runner Jeff Welch developed a script which creates an iTunes playlist in which songs stop and start at timed intervals so he knows when to switch from running to walking without checking his watch. The script only works on Windows with iTunes, and it inserts a little DING! noise between songs signalling you to switch gears."
Lifehacker
RFID interfaces
RFID to help women pick makeup. "Customers visiting Japanese drugstore chain Seijo will soon be able to try on makeup without having to actually put it on, thanks to a new RFID-enabled makeup simulator developed by NTT. The customer just has to sit down in front of a terminal, where a video camera snaps pics of her face. The customer can then just smear makeup on a pad with an embedded RFID reader, which checks the chip in the makeup and automatically applies it to the onscreen image using facial recognition algorithms to avoid, say, applying lipstick to cheeks "
Engadget
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
Real versions of virtual stores
The temporary physical Virtual Store. "A spectacular initiative from American department store retailing institution J. C. Penney yesterday might cause everybody to rethink how e-commerce and the future of retailing might unfold though. The company will construct a 15, 000-square-foot physical manifestation of the virtual store at One Times Square on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, New York. In our humble opinion, the opening of this temporary virtual store from March 3-26, in which shoppers can purchase the company's full range of merchandise at interactive kiosks, marks a significant development in the history of retail. We believe that traveling virtual superstores could be a part of retailing’s future."
gizmag
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
Anti-consumerism
The Compact: group vows not to buy anything new but food, underwear, and medicine in 2006. "About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear. "We're people for whom recycling is no longer enough," said one of the members of the fledgling movement, John Perry, who works in marketing at a high-tech company. "We're trying to get off the first-market consumerism grid, because consumer culture is destroying the world.""Boing Boing
Tiny projectors with "infinite focus"
New PVPro mini projector has no moving parts. "The projector is targeted at eventual use with cellphones and the video iPod, and includes no moving parts, skipping over prisms and glass to use lasers for imaging. The unit also has "infinite focus," which purports to need no adjustment to optics for the image to be in focus, no matter what the distance."
Engadget
Knowing what you're doing
Surveillance Video Entertainment Network. "SVEN - Surveillance Video Entertainment Network, aka "AI to the People," is a real-time video performance system that takes a humorous but critical look at artificial intelligence surveillance algorithms by developing techniques that detect when people look like rock stars instead of criminals, terrorists, or other "undesirable passersby"."
we make money not art
Adaptive furniture
Flat Table by Flo Design. "Flo Design's Flat Table was inspired by synesthesia (a sense of "seeing" a color when hearing a sound, for example). The table top has an LED light source which shifts colors based on environmental changes. "
Cool Hunting
Shopping robots
First pictures and video of the RFID shopping assistant robots. "NTT Communications and Tmsuk have begun testing the RFID-guided shopping assistant robots at a shoping mall in Fukuoka. The robots read RFID tags embedded in the floor to get information about their location . They also carry your shopping bags and provide related sales information when they arrive at their destination."
we make money not art
Games in school
Class, Take Out Your Games. "These days, computer games are usually pilloried for excessive violence and sex. Yet teachers across the country are bringing certain games into their schools as a way to pique students' interest in everything from history and politics to physical fitness and music theory. Among the most popular are Firaxis Games Inc.'s Civilization games, Take2's Railroad Tycoon, and Carte's new favorite, Dance Dance Revolution from Konami Corp."Business Week
Video bookmarking
Dabble: Media Bookmarking Sweetness. "According to Mary there are 97 different video hosting services - including Google, Youtube, etc. I can certainly believe this, and I’ve written on a bunch of them already. Many of these services are quite popular, and people have a number of favorites at different services. Dabble will allow people to gather all of these favorites in one place, using standard bookmarking tools like tagging, comments, etc. And there is a big focus on sharing. Simply drag and drop a video from a friend (or anyone) to your area and you have it bookmarked."
TechCrunch
Tagging employees
US group implants electronic tags in workers. "An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them. CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police."FT.com
Night vision
Road-Ready Night Vision at Last. "Mercedes and BMW hope to make night driving safer with dashboard monitors that expose what the naked eye is unable to see lurking in the dark. During exclusive test drives near the carmakers' headquarters in Germany, Wired News experienced the night-drive systems firsthand in the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class and the BMW 7 Series. The sedans are set to launch in the United States this year."
Wired News
New battery technologies
Nanotech promises the first viable alternative to batteries in 200 years. "Using nanotube structures, the LEES invention promises a significant increase on the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at an atomic level. "
gizmag
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
Smart, networked objects
Everyday gadgets go 'smarting' off. "A lot of technology companies focus on making computers more powerful and Internet connections faster. But a major trend is pushing in another direction — toward getting cheap computer chips and limited networking capabilities into products that never used to have such technology. It lets companies turn commodity products into premium products that cost more and stand out in the marketplace. The trend is analogous to the electrification of products 100 years ago, when inventors found ways to use that technology to change everyday items. Hand-turned drills became power drills. Ice boxes became refrigerators. The same thing is happening now, but with computer chips and tiny radio transmitters. And there's a fascinating twist this time: When you add information and communications to a product, it doesn't just improve that product — it allows that product to become part of a network. Which means those products can talk to other products, or to websites, or to you through your cellphone or PC — creating layer upon layer of new possibilities."
USATODAY.com
February 24, 2006
Display art
Makroskop. "The installation consists of a spiral-shaped array of screen-strips on which a continuous collaged image is projected. The image is slowly grinding towards the center of the spiral. There is also sound and as a whole creates a very maelstrom-esque appearance of the piece that is quite beautiful. Apparently, there is also some degree of interactivity which allows one to touch a part of the collage in order make more images from the same context appear, thus rendering it a kind of macroscope for the pool of images."
we make money not art
Smart shopping lists
SmartShopper - the voice-activated shopping list device (or should that be memory assistant). "SmartShopper is an automated grocery shopping list device that will use voice recognition technology to store, and intelligently aggregate lists for shopping and errands, then print the list. According to the company's co-founder Richard G. Brindisi, "the user simply presses a button on the unit and says the name of a grocery item they will need on their next visit to the store. The unit has an LCD and an embedded thermal printer that actually prints the list right out of the unit. The list will be printed according to the categories in the grocery store, i.e. all of the produce items will be listed together, frozen foods together, etc."
gizmag
Audio through the body
New iPod nano uses human skin to transmit audio. "Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) took up the latter approach yesterday by unveiling an iPod nano which communicates with earphones via your body's ability to pump electrical signal. Oh sure, the prototype requires the user to keep a finger pressed to the iPod to close the circuit and there's always risk of a nasty infection after implanting the 10-microwatt/2Mbps chip in your forearm but hey, prototype or not think of the time you'll save not having to untangle your headphone cables every morning. "
Engadget
Touch payment
Pay By Touch Online. "Using the same scanners that are already showing up on PCs and some USB drives, Pay By Touch uses a fingerprint to generate a unique numerical algorithm. That pattern is then stored on Pay By Touch's servers and associated with a credit or debit card, enabling the fingerprint to be used to make a purchase."
Business Week
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
Pixels in your eye
Super Vision Sans Bionics. "At the heart of PixelOptics' technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer -- a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision -- and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities."
Wired News
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
Housing estimates
Curious About Your Home’s Value? Zillow Knows. "The site says it has data and valuations (Zestimates) on 60,000,000 homes in the U.S., and there are an estimated 85 million single-family homes in the country [...]. We tested this and the key to adding in home improvements like new windows, a bathroom remodel, and even small items like new faucets are done by pressing the “Next” button at the top of the page. ( I was able to get my total value up another $31,000 this way.) This is hard to understand when you first try the program. Once you hit next - it will walk you through many screens where you can add in everything you’ve ever done to your home."
Real Tech News
Personalized clothing
If the shoe fits, print it. "A new manufacturing process looks set to bring mass production to tailor-made shoes that can be built layer by layer from a 3-D footprint. First to benefit will be professional soccer players, who are to be given tailor-printed boots offering more protection. London-based company Prior 2 Lever, launching the system in April, will first scan a player's feet by laser to obtain a digital model."
Reuters.com
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
Connecting people, places and time
MemoryMiner. "MemoryMiner is a brand new application that represents the first step towards a long term goal: the creation of the world's most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. Like all big ideas, it starts with a simple premise and a mass appeal for participation. MemoryMiner is an application used to organize and share digital media using a simple, yet powerful metaphor, namely "People, Places and Time." "
MemoryMiner
"Real" 3D displays
Japan's "real" 3D image projector. "A special projector can cast three-dimensional shapes of white light between 2 and 3-meters into the air -- previous devices only tricked the eyes into thinking the image was 3D. The images are created by blasting the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at fixed points resulting in glowing plasma emissions which hang-out just long enough to etch an ephemeral image. The 3D images are, gulp, accompanied by a series of satisfying "tiny explosions" from the expanding air."
Engadget
Visualizing network traffic
Visitorville: A 3D view of website traffic. "I was intrigued to hear about Visitorville -- an application that takes a website's traffic information and renders it as a Sim-City-like world, where each page in a site is a building, and visitors appear as human avatars that travel to and fro. As the Visitorville site describes it: Buses deliver your visitors to their landing pages. There's a bus for every major search engine; plus, you can create your own custom buses for any other referrer! Watch realistic-looking people move around your page. Different avatars exist depending on the type of visitor (commercial, academic, military, etc.). To move between pages, your visitors take taxis, ambulances, fire trucks -- or any other vehicle you like. They each have their own distinctive sound, so you can alert yourself when a particular page is accessed (or even a particular person accessing a page!)"
collision detection
Projection from phones
Digislide’s Digismart. "It's offering a way to project from PDAs, cell-phones and similar devices onto a wall. Unfortunately, without powered illumination you almost need to be in complete darkness to benefit from its display technology."
Lockergnome
February 21, 2006
Robots in the playground
Wakamaru's latest job: guarding your kids. "Deathly threatening as ever, the bright yellow plastic robot will be standing sentry at a primary school in Tokyo, monitoring students movement and demanding IC-chip based identification. No ID? Watch out, because Wakamaru will take a picture of you and totally tell a teacher (literally, all the Wakamaru can do is ring the administration to come help if it thinks something unsavory's going down)."
Engadget
Using many fingers on a display
Multi-Touch Interaction Research. "Multi-touch sensing enables you to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such system can also accommodate several users simultaneously, which is useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. The sensing technology is force-sensing, and provides high resolution and scalability, allowing for sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users. The drafting table style implementation on the images measures 36"x27", is rear-projected, and has a sensing resolution of ~0.1" at 50Hz. Applications receive events and stroke information using the lightweight OSC protocol over UDP."
we make money not art
Robots on the street
Floorcleaning robot. "RIDC01, by Temsuk , cleans streets and can give people directions using an embedded video projector (the projector can also be used to screen DVDs). The robot, which is just over 4 feet tall (1.3m), will start selling for 10 million yen ($85,000). Via Cnet."
we make money not art
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
Flexibile displays getting more realistic
Paper-Like Display In 2 Years. "The new 5-inch PV-QML5 rollable display has a decreased radius of curvature, improved operational and mechanical lifetime and paperlike viewing contrast. These are major steps forward compared to the world's first rollable display prototype introduced by Polymer Vision in February 2004. The company says that current process and yield improvements will enable production within two years."
PSFK
Petabyte storage
World’s first Petabyte storage array. "if your MP3 collection is getting unwieldy, or you have another burgeoning digital archive you just positively need access to at all times, here’s the answer - the world’s largest storage array. Announced last week by information management and storage specialist EMC Corporation, is a new high-end configuration its flagship EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 storage array, which can scale beyond a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. That's it at right - what a ripper heh?"
gizmag
GPS trackers
LAPD to throw GPS at fleeing cars. "The LAPD will outfit cars with a device that propels and sticks a GPS onto a fleeing car. The department will mount the StarChase LLC device in the grill of some squad cars. "Officers in the car would control a green lazar light, similar to an aiming device that fixes on your target," said LAPD Lieutenant Paul Vernon on Friday. "A small dart-like device is propelled from the officer's car.""
we make money not art
Hacking your car
Toyota Prius Hax0rz Pwn That Thang. "Besides being green-friendly and oh-so-trendy, the Toyota Prius is also becoming a favorite of ha><0rz everywhere. First, some brilliant master of digital prestidigitation figured out how to disable a couple of annoying noises the Prius makes with a few odd button pushing combinations on the odometer controls. Now the l33t have learned how to tap into the diagnostic port that’s used to service the popular hybrid vehicle. "
Gizmodo
Wearable sensors
Smart Shirt. "The Sensatex Solution utilizes a groundbreaking electro-optical textile, the Wearable Motherboard Smart Shirt, to seamlessly incorporate sensory capabilities with radio and computing devices, representing a highly effective and unobtrusive means of integrating broad-based sensors with the human body."
Transmaterial
More realistic navigation systems
VW and Google team to explore future vehicle navigation systems. "Volkswagen, Google, and graphics chipmaker, nVidia, are working on an in-car navigation map system and display that is 3-dimensional and more realistic than anything currently available. Users will instinctively recognize their location in relation to the surrounding topography, especially in urban areas that are depicted with depth and accurate size relationships between buildings and roads."
gizmag
February 16, 2006
Predicting the future
The business of future gazing. "The problem is that if you're a futurologist there's no point in playing it safe. You have to be revolutionary and radical, you have to sell a big idea, or else what's the point of you? The problem is revolutionary, radical, big ideas very rarely come true."
BBC NEWS
Cameraphone and game intergration
Siemens launches "Kick Real" cameraphone game. "The company's "Kick Real" game provides cameraphone users with a virtual soccer field; point the camera at your foot, and you can kick a virtual ball that you view on the phone's LCD. We can't wait for this to catch on, so we can get our own kicks watching gamers staring into their phones and kicking the air."
Engadget
Smart bathrooms
The Type-A Bathroom. "When Mr. Shenkman answers the speaker-phone in his shower, the water automatically shuts off. He can open the front door for deliveries while shaving. He's also put the finishing touches on a waterproof computer that will let him answer emails from his sauna. "I took Gates a little too literally," he says. "The flow of information never stops.""
WSJ.com
Multiple force-feedbacks
Proactive Desk II: Advanced Force Feedback. "Media Information Science Labs, is a "digital desk with force feedback" that can simultaneously apply different forces on multiple physical objects on it."
we make money not art
RFID in art
Artists Burnish RFID's Image. "A far cry from Big Brother scenarios, RFID technology has recently become a medium for artists like Meghan Trainor, whose work offers a glimpse of a future in which computers will be able to scan any item and know something about it. She sculpts objects out of plaster, rubber and other materials, and embeds them with RFID chips and tags. "The idea of objects no longer being anonymous -- that's incredible to someone who makes objects," the New York artist said."
Wired News
New tools for building web apps
Join the Flex Revolution. "If you are not familiar with it, Flex is a compiled language that allows you to build rich interfaces quickly and easily. Flex apps are written in MXML, but they compile into SWF files. The best thing is that, starting with Flex 2, these SWF files can be deployed just like regular Flash movies. They don't require any special servers. A lot of people like Flex because it lets you build flashy interfaces with transitions and animations and all kinds of fancy stuff. But the real power of flex is not in the eye candy, but in how easy it makes the process of building a rich internet application. It is conceptually simple, easy to get started with, and it delivers incredible results with just a few lines of code."
Hotwired
Portable applications
Download of the Day: Portable Apps Suite. "Portable Apps Suite™ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, web editor, office suite, word processor, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client and FTP client, all preconfigured to work portably and be easy to back up. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go."
Lifehacker
Animals and sensors and blogs
Pigeons to Help Monitor Air Pollution with “Own” Blog. "No, they won’t be pecking the entries into the blog with their beaks. But in August 20 pigeons each carrying a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone will be released into the skies above San Jose, CA. Text messages on air quality will be beamed back in real time to a special pigeon “blog,” a journal accessible on the Internet. Miniature cameras slung around the pigeons’ necks will also post aerial pictures"
Independent Tech
Keyboard interfaces
Download of the Day: Colibri (not quite yet) Quicksilver for Windows. "The documentation is sparse and it’s got a LOOOONG way to go to justify any kind of legitimate Quicksilver comparison. However, for people with the QS-launcher burned into their muscle memory (like me!) Colibri is a great way to start up programs. Now, can we have append to text, pipe to email/IM/URLs, etc? Pretty please?"
Lifehacker
Finally time for home automation?
Lights. Mood. Video. All at the Touch of a Screen.. "The promise of a remote control home has buzzed around consumers' ears for decades, but never seemed to materialize for mainstream households. Most Americans have had to behold home automation from afar, featured in magazine spreads on televised tours of the homes of the well-heeled. But just as flat-panel television prices have significantly fallen in the last year, so have the costs of putting a home's operations under a fingertip's control, many home automation makers and installers say. Even basic functions — like central control of all of a home's music, movies and television, with atmospheric lighting — now cost hundreds rather than thousands of dollars"
New York Times
The end of paper money
Is It Time To Say Goodbye to Paper Money?. "The e-money trend began there roughly four years ago as a service for busy, on-the-go train commuters. Today, specially equipped mobile phones and smart cards are used to purchase items from convenience stores, department stores, restaurants, newsstands, supermarkets, and other retailers. The Japan Research Institute estimated that by 2008 some 40 million Japanese, roughly one-third of the country, will be using electronic money."
Yahoo! News
Physical point and click
Mapion lets users point and click around Japan. "Want to know whether there are any good restaurants in that building up ahead? Just point your phone at it, click the building's icon and find out. That's the idea behind Mapion Local Search, a service launched by GeoVector Corp. and Japan's Mapion. The service uses a database of local information, combined with a phone that includes both GPS and an integrated compass (currently just Sony Ericsson's W21S), to provide realtime point-and-click data to customers throughout Japan."
Engadget
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
Desktop 3D scanning
NextEngine scans 3D on the cheap. "We're not experts in the whole 3D scanning, printing, and modeling arena or anything, but it seems to us that a $2,500 USB 3D desktop scanner could come in handy for more than a few -- especially those who might want to make a contribution to our Keepin' it real fake series. For this may we point your attention to SolidWorks, and their NextEngine Desktop 3D Scanner, which features multiple optics arrays and dual three megapixel CMOS sensors and some laser triangulation technology for capturing models of objects, which rotate on a platter out in front."
Engadget
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
Biometric access
BioKnob fingerprint-activated lock interchangeable with a standard door knob. "Here’s a big chance for technophiles to be the first in their apartment building to have a BioKnob – the first doorknob with fingerprint recognition. The BioKnob replaces your existing doorknob, and registered users just brush their fingerprint across the knob to unlock the door."
gizmag
Self-parking car
The car that parks itself (sometimes on the kerb). "Siemens VDO in Germany is working on a vehicle which not only parks itself, but even scans the street to find a space. Once it has spotted a space, Parkmate works out the geometry, and makes a melodic chime to tell the driver to stop and let the car steer itself into the gap. Then, the steering wheel turns and the car can squeeze into the space, even if it means mounting a kerb."
we make money not art
Breathing underwater
Artificial gills extract oxygen from water. "An Israeli scientist has developed an "artifical gill" that is able to extract oxygen from seawater, potentially allowing divers to breathe underwater without a tank."
Engadget
Using other senses
Brands must come to their senses. "Brands are passing up the chance to establish emotional connections with consumers because they insist on communicating visually, according to sensory communications group Brand Sense Agency. 83% of all commercial communication is visual although 75% of our emotions are influenced by what we smell (there's even a patent project out there that would allow US Army officers to use coded smells to give orders), while there is a 65% chance our mood would change when we hear a new sound (given the irritating soundtrack of their website, i feel that the agency should work harder on the sound concept.)"
we make money not art
RFID tracking in hospitals
Bangkok Hospital to Introduce RFID. "Bangkok Hospital completed its RFID pilot project and now plans to fully implement RFID this year before expanding it to 13 hospitals in its group in Bangkok and provinces countrywide within three years. Patients wear RFID wristbands that carry basic information about patients such as name, sex, age, and possibly drugs."
RFID in Japan
February 15, 2006
Learning music composition
Harmony Line Music. "Hyperscore is the first and only software application that teaches students the essentials of music composition, without having to engage in years of music theory training."
MIT
Meetings in virtual worlds
Avatars Among Us. "In exchange for insights on the concept of the dynamic knowledge repository, audience members watched a speech delivered by a gray-haired, suit-and-tie clad avatar bearing a more than passable resemblance to the man best known for inventing the computer mouse. The talk, held at a virtual locale known as Democracy Island in the multiplayer online world Second Life, drew a less realistic audience. Some in the crowd weren't even human, sporting features like antennae, fur and wings."
Wired News
Better QR Codes
Color Barcodes in TV commercials and DVD contents?. "ColorCodes can be read by camera phones from farther away (than QR codes.) So, the company intends to leverage this feature to promote the use of ColorCodes in television and commercials and DVDs. "Viewers will be able to simply point their camera phones at the screen to capture the codes and get directed to Internet sites where they can purchase goods or learn more about the programs they are watching.""
RFID in Japan
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
Tourism podcasts
iWalks Rolling Out in Dublin. "The Official Online Tourist Office for Dublin has begun publishing free podcast audio guides that tell the story of Dublin. The guides are written and narrated by Irish historian-author Pat Liddy. Each talk will have a downloadable brochure. Talks and brochures can be downloaded from the tourism website."
Smart Mobs
February 14, 2006
Transparent displays
Researchers developing transparent OLEDs. "esearchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on the next generation of OLED technology, including the ability to create displays that can become completely transparent and be turned on and off at will. Uses envisioned for the displays include OLED overlays on top of LCDs that could be used to display specific information without interfering with the main picture and automobile windshields with built-in displays that can display information as needed and turn off when not in use. Of course, what we really want is a transparent window that turns into an HD display when we flick a switch, but that may just be a little too much to ask for at this point."
Engadget
Asynchronous video messages
"Good Morning" pillows for distant families. "Scenario: Living in San Francisco, Martha glances at her CASY picture frame, showing the portraits of her grandchildren. She decides to leave video messages to Maya and Aden. She touches Maya’s portrait and records a "good morning" message that Maya, who is currently asleep in Amsterdam, will find when she wakes up."
we make money not art
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
Portable power generation
Power Plastics to provide electrical power to packaging and intelligent clothing. "We first wrote about Konarka’s light-activated plastic power supply for the battlefield, but in more recent times we’ve seen the company announce a joint development program with Textronics to create prototype garments and fashion accessories with portable, wearable power generation capabilities and more recently comes the news that the Konarka’s Power Plastic materials are being developed to extend and enhance packaging and display applications. Imagine a can or bottle with dynamic content, boxes that light up or containers that serve as power sources for their contents."
gizmag
Smart magnets
Fridge magnets tinker with poetry. "Each fridge magnet consists of 16-character liquid crystal display, rather than a magnetic strip with a printed word, Proske says. The magnets can randomly generate a word, categorise that word (as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb) and transmit the category to any words they are placed next to. As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using. Once they are 'trained', the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don't fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function. "
ABC
Sharing running routes
Exersize routes at WalkJogRun. "WalkJogRun is a site where you can plan and share your walking, jogging or running routes. It uses Google Earth to plan routes and calculate distance, but what really makes WalkJogRun cool is its community features. You can save your maps by clicking on any of your markers and hit “Save Your Route” to add it to the database. Next time you or anyone else looking in your neighborhood is looking for a route, they will see your pin."
Lifehacker
Browser thumbnails
Download of the Day: Reveal. "Firefox extension Reveal creates thumbnails of your tabbed pages, allowing you to select, reorder, or even sort through pages in the session history. Pressing F2 will bring up your thumbs, at which point you can even search through them with a Find feature. Beyond that, Reveal shows thumbnails of your page history if you rest your mouse over the Back and Forward buttons, and allows you to zoom in on the page you’re visiting with a triple click."
Lifehacker
Phones that look like cameras
New Pics of Samsung 7.7 MP phone. "We told you all about Samsung’s crazy-ass 7.7 megapixel cameraphone with optical zoom, but now we have a proper pic. So here it is in all its glory. Also includes DMB TV reception, TV-output, landscape view, MP3 audio playback, and microSD memory card storage."
Gizmodo
Replacing knobs with tasks
Your goals control home electronics. "Instead of knobs and menu items for each function, the software presents the user with a list of goals -- for example, record a movie on a DVD -- and either automatically carries out the steps required to accomplish the task or guides the user through them."
we make money not art
Robotic receptionists
Hello Kitty Replaces Your "Most Important Employee". "WMMNA points to a new trend in Japan that replaces receptionists with robots. A company called People Staff (!) sends over a Hello Kitty Robo as a receptionist every time your regular receptionist is feeling a little poorly and not coming in today - or her/his boyfriend Dave has another court appearance she/he has to attend as a witness. When Hello Kitty Robos detect visitors with sensors, they say "Welcome!", capture the image/voice of the visitors using cameras/microphones, and send the data to a personal computer. WMMNA suggests that they can work at offices, hospitals, and hotels (at night)."
PSFK
Radar of your friends
NJIT implements SmartCampus people-tracking program. "Limited initially to only 100 participants, the ultimate goal of the SmartCampus project is to eventually allow everyone to see exactly where everyone else is at any given time (hmm, can't really forsee any socially awkward situations arising out of this omniscience). The NJIT system [...] requires users to carry around tracking devices, as opposed to a similar system at MIT which seems to rely on users' laptops for locating them (but maybe not- can anyone from these two schools clear this up?). Luckily the SmartCampus gear allows users to turn "invisible" whenever they want, so would-be stalkers will have to leave their notebooks at home and continue trailing their victims the old-fashioned way."
Engadget
February 13, 2006
Smart supermarket carts
Fujitsu's RFID and LCD equipped Shopping Navis Wagon. "Fujitsu has played around with smart shopping carts before, but this time they're throwing RFID into the mix to ensure the least possible interactions with any humanoid lifeforms during your trip to the supermarket. The Shopping Navis Wagon sports an LCD to display in-depth information for products you scan, along with the usual store directory and promotional info, and we're guessing the cart can ring up your price as you go, so now all they'll need to add is an on the go blink card reader and your shopping experience can have all the fun of shoplifting, minus the cost effectiveness."
Engadget
More powerful GPS
Government turns up volume on GPS. "The US government flicked the switch today on a new GPS signal, known as L2C. The signal, according to the government, is transmitted at a higher effective power, allowing it to "work better in urban areas and indoors." The new signal, being transmitted by the IIR satellite launched in September, can also be received using less power, potentially allowing better GPS reception by smaller devices such as cellphones. However, most current devices may not be able to make use of the new signals without upgrades."
Engadget
Visualizing nature
Computers show how plants grow. "Computer scientists in Canada have worked with botanists in Switzerland to build a 3D computer model which simulates how plants grow and develop beautiful shapes. Their model was able to accurately show how plants achieve phyllotaxis, this regular arrangement of lateral organs around a central axis. According to the researchers, this model will be used by botanists to complement and interpret laboratory experiments. But it also could be used as a basis for models of how other organisms, including animals, develop from primordial stem cells."
Primidi
Reminders by RSS
ReminderFeed - Your RSS Reminder Service. "ReminderFeed is a FREE reminder service that delivers reminder messages right to your feed reader. Simply fill out the form, then use the subscribe buttons."
ReminderFeed
Mapping trash
GarbageScout. "If you like to snoop around garbage and dig up something good, snap a picture of it with your camera phone, add a description location and email it to GarbageScout. It will be added on a Yahoo Maps for others to go and fetch it (treasures include so far: a rowing machine, a mirror, candy canes an electric heater, etc)."
we make money not art
Playing with music
Otoizm: Yo-Yo, Pet and Music Player in One. "Want a new pet that listens to your favorite music and dances with you? Meet Otoizmu (or Otoizm) from Konami. You connect this 2.2-inch yo-yo-like device to your music player and a character inside will start growing according to the genre of music you listen to. Not only does it grow by listening to your music, but it memorizes phrases and composes tunes that you can listen to. Meet up with a friend who also owns an Otoizm and the two will have a dancing session. Or, you can record your friend’s voice and a new character—Kotobaizm—appears to play with you."
Gizmodo
Tackling childhood obesity with computer games
West Virginia fully adopts Dance Dance Revolution fitness program. "Not even the first time we've seen it done, but you've got to give it up for Charleston, West Virginia -- a state heralded for its rampant obesity problem -- which went from study to practice in using Dance Dance Revolution to work that body. Last year 85 kids participated in a survey that used Dance Dance Revolution and diet changes to shed excess poundage, which apparently also went to the heads of the school administration of the state, since started a pilot program and are now rolling DDR out to all of West VA's 157 middle schools, in addition to another 753 public schools expecting it in the next three years."
Engadget
RFID in mundane situations
Well - RFID in Beijing. "Beijing's Haidian District City Planning Administration recently installed 1,000 RFID scanners in 1,000 wells in the area. If the cover of a well is lost, an RFID scanner can quickly find the proprietor of the well by scanning the e-tags inside the well. The City Planning Administration has chosen 15 streets in its Shangdi area for the RFID pilot. They may test different RFID applications within the city soon."
RFID in Japan
Caring about anonymity
Privacy for People Who Don't Show Their Navels. "Increasingly, consumers appear to be downloading free anonymity software like Tor, which makes it harder to trace visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms back to their authors. Sales are also up at companies like Anonymizer.com, which among other things sells software that protects anonymity. "I get the feeling it's going up," said Roger Dingledine, Tor's project leader. "But one of the features I've been adding recently," he said, enhances anonymity protection by making it harder to count downloads of the software. Still, the number of servers forming layers in the Tor network has risen to 300 from 50 in the last year, Mr. Dingledine added."
New York Times
Terrestrial TV on a phone
Hitachi TV Phone. "One-segment broadcasting is a service that allows you to watch terrestrial digital broadcasts from mobile phones and other devices. It will be available in Japan starting April 1. And Hitachi has produced a mobile phone to capitalize on this, it’s the W41H, and will be supplied by au. It has a 2.7-inch LCD display that can be twisted around and folded over. This is called "view style" and when it is placed on the charging stand, the one-segment TV tuner starts automatically."
Gizmodo
Chameleon devices
E-Ink Cellphone Concept. "This is a concept phone that uses E-Ink. The idea is that the user can customize the front face, phone pad, turn it into a QWERTY keyboard, MP3 player or whatever. I think the thinness of this device is a bit much to expect given the proposed functionality, but not outside the realm of the one-day possible."
Gizmodo
3D screengrab
Michael Frumin's screen grab for 3D data. "My friend Michael Frumin is a researcher director at tech/art gallery Eyebeam's OpenLab. His latest project is the OpenGLExtractor (OGLE), essentially a "screen grab" application for 3D data. For example, Frumin used his software to capture a World of Warcraft character from within the game and physically rendered it using a 3D printer. He also mashed up characters from SecondLife and Google Earth, and imported chunks of Google Earth data into Maya."
Boing Boing
February 10, 2006
Things to do with cellphone bandwidth
Phones Above and Beyond the Call. "The latest mobile devices aren't just conversation pieces. Check out the high-tech multimedia and communications functions they offer. Wireless carriers have spent billions of dollars upgrading networks so customers can use cell phones for a variety of services beyond phoning home and shooting text messages to friends. The payback has been slow in coming, and most people still use their handsets mainly for making calls. In the U.S., data accounts for only about 6% of overall wireless-service sales. Service providers, equipment vendors, and other companies are eager to change that. "
Business Week
Printed codes that can "store" megabytes
New 3D Barcode able to Store Videos for Mobile Devices. "Content Idea of Asia Co. has developed a printable 3D code that can store between 0.6 to 1.8 MB, enough for watching short video commercials on mobile phones. The 3D code is based on the 2D QR Code [...]. Content Idea of Asia Co. calls it PM Code. The PM code consists of up to 24 layers using different colors. A usage example is for instance to watch a commercial on a mobile phone scanned from a perfume ad in a magazine. "
I4U News
More and more megapixels
The world’s first 39 megapixel digital SLR camera. "Hasselblad is creating a new standard of digital image quality for professional photographers with the announcement of a new camera and three camera backs based on the combination of Hasselblad’s new, true 39 megapixel CCD sensor and its unique Digital APO Correction (DAC) technology."
gizmag
February 09, 2006
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
Extreme pedestrian safety
Cars saving pedestrians' lives?. "The project, which officially ended in August, set out to develop an innovative pre-impact sensing platform that operates three different technologies of sensors simultaneously, and then fuses their data to protect cyclists and pedestrians under different weather and light conditions. The system comprises a radar network composed of several 24 GHz sensors working in parallel and an imaging system composed of passive infrared and colour video cameras."
ZDNet.com
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
Stickies on websites
Bookmarking with sticky notes. "To put it simply, Mystickies allows you to place little yellow squares of digital paper anywhere and everywhere you feel like in the whole wide web. Along with the ability to put sticky notes on webpages mystickies offers a powerfull interface to browse, search, sort, edit and generally have a wonderfull time with your sticky notes from any computer that has internet access."
Lifehacker
Human area networks
Don't have a LAN connection, use your body. "Japanese company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) has developed technology that uses the human body as a high-speed network. What's more, it also forms a communications link between people and electronic devices. Next time you have a problem transferring files, here’s how to go about it. All you need is RedTacton. This is the first viable Human Area Network (HAN) device, enabling fast data transfer between devices using the human body as a conduit. The transceivers - called RedTacton - uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path."Indiatimes Infotech
Remembering where you were
Download of the Day: Page Bookmarks. "Firefox extension Page Bookmarks adds an entry to the right-click context menu that allows you to save your place on a long text document so that next time you open that page, you can pick up reading right where you left off."
Lifehacker
Online hiring
Hire anything at Just4hire. "Australia’s biggest hire companies. Put simply, anything you might possibly wish to hire can be sourced through the site, from rotary hoes, limousines, clowns, aeroplanes … Australia-wide."
gizmag
Easy dev platforms for mobile phones
bluepulse. "What is bluepulse? * The best way of taking the internet with you while mobile, it's fast, easy and works on most regular mobile phones. * A free program for mobile phones that allows you to run tiny, useful widgets for a variety of uses, such as instant messaging and RSS. * Open and free developer tools - build your own bluepulse widgets and reach a global mobile audience"
Bluepulse
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
QR Code popularity in Japan
Half i-Mode Users Use QR Codes. "7,905 users of DoCoMo's i-Mode cell phones responded to the servey that was conducted last month. The gist: (1) more than 50% use the barcode (QR code) function. (2) more than 80% use alarm, still camera, and ringtone functions."RFID in Japan
3D avatars on phones
Meet the New Breed of Avatars. "Ring tones, shmingtones. The next wave in cool applications for mobile phones promises to be 3-D animated avatars that serve as your alter-ego during a conversation. Think beyond the cartoony stand-ins available now in Asian markets, like those in Japan known as Chara-den, which users control via handset keypads."
Business Week
February 07, 2006
Toys that communicate over a distance
Dolls communication. "PlayPals are wireless figurines with their electronic accessories that allow children aged 5-8 to communicate between remote locations. When a child at one location moves one doll’s hands, the remote synchronized doll moves its hands in the same way. The dolls alone communicate only by gestures. Each child has a set of tokens that are used as the dolls’ accessories. When a token is placed in a doll’s hands, it functions as a different communicating tool: adding a “walkie-talkie” token to the doll, enables synchronous voice communication, a microphone for asynchronous is used for voice communication, a video camera for synchronous audio-visual communication, a digital camera for asynchronous visual communication, etc."
we make money not art
Building apps on top of Firefox
Search Amazon from a Firefox browser. "The Mozilla Amazon Browser makes use of Firefox’s XUL (XML User Interface Language) to create a unique browsing experience with Amazon. Mab is a Rich Web Application to search products on all 6 Amazon-branded sites (com, ca, co.uk, fr, co.jp), showing results in a handy interface, typical of desktop programs. MAB lets you search within one window without distracting you with plenty of images and texts not concerning what you are effectively looking for. MAB can make you feel like the world’s most powerful bookstore clerk!"
Lifehacker
Visual passwords
Graphical passwords for better security. "Jean-Camille Birget, a professor of computer science, and his team have developed graphical passwords. Instead of entering a password consisting of numbers and letters, the user selects areas of a picture, called "click points," which are easier for the user to remember and, due to the somewhat random selection process, more difficult for someone else to guess. "You can let users even choose the picture," says Birget of the new computer security program, which would help users remember their original click points. The selected picture must be complex, like a landscape or cityscape, to be a secure system so that there are many possible click points."
Tech Trends
High-convergence objects
Battle Of The Bulge: Future Phone. "Imagine a device that unites everything that you carry along: a mobile phone, a player, your credit and discount cards, your apartment and your car keys."
PSFK
Alternative forms for the remote control
Remote Control Beads Could Be TV Future. Or not.. "Imagine, instead of holding a remote control to surf channels, you have a set of beads. Each bead is embedded with a different set of instructions for controlling your TV. The concept is called Remobeads and its designed by Dima Komissarov. As you can see, it would certainly look better in the living room than all those nasty black remotes. All you have to do is slightly press the bead to change a channel, and you can even add sound "
Gizmodo
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
Overview of digital television
Digital Television, Part I: Making Sense of it all. "First, prepare yourself for a pig’s breakfast of acronyms son, there’s just no way around it: DAB, T-DMB, DVB-T, DVB-H, ATSC, and ISDB-T. At least these are the tastiest of the morsels under global mastication. Come on, don’t sweat it, you managed PCMCIA didn’t you, and that’s six whole letters! Besides, you really only need to learn the couple selected by the country you call home to effectively talk down to your local hi tech sales goon, mkay? So do join us as we take an extensive, in-depth look at what's really going on with the world of digital television."
Engadget
Boosting storage densities
Perpendicular storage coming in 2006. "This month Seagate is letting the perpendicular storage dogs loose. Today they have announced the release of the first perpendicular storage products designed for end users. The Momentus 5400.3 is the first notebook hard drive to use the technology, and offers 160GB of storage in the same amount of space as previous 120GB options—a boost of over 30 percent, offering 132 Gbits per square inch."Ars Technica
"Inteligent" machines
BCS Machine Intelligence Prize. "A mobile robot (Khepera) demonstrates intelligence as it encounters a new object in its world. It reacts initially in an 'instinctive' way to its first perception of the object - but subsequently it learns that, as this is not a necessary response and as there is evidence to support a more positive one, it can adapt a different interpretation for its purpose, and use it in the future. The acquired knowledge combined with modest innate knowledge is used for uncertain reasoning. "
IFOMIND
Cheap color calibration
Pantone hopes to make calibration mainstream with $89 huey. "Pantone hopes to bring the calibration experience to mainstream consumers, with the huey, an $89 device that the company says is targeted at "digital photo enthusiasts, gamers and any computer user wanting absolute color and clarity.""
Engadget
Internet command line interface
Revisiting YubNub. "It is an “Internet command line” that allows anyone to create a new function and access other web services from the YubNub command line. A command consists of at least two pieces of information - an application identifier and a specific command. Some of the more popular commands are here. Don’t see the command you need? Create your own. Want to use YubNub without going to the site? Install the plugin and skip a few steps."
TechCrunch
Computers sensing our emotion
Computers that feel our mood. "How can the computer possibly find out anything about its human operator’s frame of mind? Emotions are given away by peripheral physiological processes. Some of these, such as posture, fidgeting or frowning, are easy to detect and can be observed and classified by a camera with image analysis software. Heartbeat and breathing rate, blood pressure, skin temperature and electrical resistance of the skin, on the other hand, are rather more subtle factors. "We have developed a glove that has sensors for measuring parameters like these," says Christian Peter. "It is connected to a device that evaluates and saves the data. We are also working on techniques that will enable computers to interpret facial expressions and extract emotional elements from voice signals.""
ZDNet.com
Human-like web crawlers
Covert Crawler Descends on Web. "Hoffman's program downloads everything that comes with a page -- images, JavaScript and components like ActiveX and Flash -- instead of just hitting the page itself like traditional spiders do. It also simulates a full web browser, keeping a cache and requesting only new material. To select which links to click on, Hoffman has settled on a solution somewhere between a masterful AI and completely random selection. "In some ways it's a very simplified Turing test -- you can assign the different threads a personality. This crawler, you're the slow reader, you read the entire page." Another thread may spend less time on a page before it starts clicking on different links. "Each individual crawler has its own browser habits," he added."Wired News
"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
Making snap judgements online
In less than 500 milliseconds. "Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal.Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds,roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage,their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.In the crowded and competitive world of the web,companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice, the researchers say."Unless the first impression is favourable,visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,"Lindgaard warns".Smart Mobs
RFID cooking
RFID Cooking. "VistaCrafts RFIQin, available in Japan, comes with 24 recipe cards. The pan reads the card you show and "tells" the cooktop what to do 16 times a second to perfectly monitor each cooking step and perfectly reproduce the most difficult recipes. Each pan handle is embedded with an RFID chip that uses a proprietary signal to communicate with coordinated chips in the cooktop and special recipe cards that monitor each cooking step for a partcular dish."
we make money not art
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
Batteries for implants
Nano-size battery could one day be implanted in eye to power artificial retina. "The bio-batteries will be used for implantable devices, starting with an artificial retina that has already been developed at the Doheny Eye Institute. The artificial retina and the nanobattery will be used to correct certain types of macular degeneration."
we make money not art
Voice-commanded entertainment
The VOCO Voice Commander "personal voice assistant". "If you're ready to enter that snazz 21st century we keep on hearing about and start using your voice to control your entertainment, VOCO has your back with their handheld "personal voice assistant," the VOCO Voice Commander. When bundled with a Vzone player, which can hook up to a stereo, you create a "Vzone" which can pump out the music you request with your Voice Commander, Sonos style. You can also get news, stocks, and sports info on your screen, with everything flowing over WiFi. You could of course be boring and just use the buttons to get the same results about twice as fast, but what's the fun in that?"
Engadget
Online fitness equipment
Turn your living room into the Tour de France. "FitCentric (fitcentric.com), a California firm, has sold Web racing software for stationary bikes, treadmills, and other machines as well. Their NetAthlon software uses video-game technology to re-create such real-world courses as Olympic venues and Boston's Head of the Charles. Hooked up to a big-screen TV, you can sense everything but the wind in your hair. In the coming weeks, the company plans to release a new system that will retrofit any piece of fitness equipment, bringing the technology to a much wider audience. It will retail for $169.95."
csmonitor.com
GPS in anything
New Zealand's Rakon develops world's smallest GPS receiver. "Get ready for a new generation of even smaller GPS devices, ranging from wristwatches to slim cellphones to -- and we just know this is coming -- implants. That's the promise held forth by what is being billed as the world's smallest GPS receiver, which was developed by New Zealand-based Rakon, a company affiliated with GPS-make Navman. According to Rakon, the chip is about the size of a baby's fingernail, and should be available in a range of devices within the next two years."
Engadget
Podcast anything
Turn your feed into a podcast. "The podcast uses one of those text-to-speech engines that are popular among the fitter, happier, and more productive crowd. You can listen to the podcast in a streaming flash player, or you can subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed. Feed2Cast is a very cool way to get started in the podcasting world without all that pesky talking."
Lifehacker
Magnetic transistors
Nanoscale magnets promise more-shrinkable chips. "Nanoscale magnets can be cajoled into performing the same digital arithmetic as the transistor-based logic gates in computer chips, according to a new study. The research suggests that today’s transistors, which will approach their limits of miniaturisation sometime in the next couple of decades, could eventually be replaced by more shrinkable nanomagnet technology – allowing ever more powerful, faster processors to continue to be constructed."New Scientist
HUGE, interactive screens
Panasonic Digital Wall (Total Recall Pt. 1). "In the special presentation room is a wall-size, huge screen (twice the size of a 110-inch display), and it’s a touchscreen. The images on the screen change as you touch them (it’s online, of course), and you can choose from an extensive menu of options and tools. It functions not only as a TV and PC, but also as interior decoration by changing the image from a bookshelf for the living room to a graffiti space for the kids’ room. It is supposed to appear on the market around 2010 and the price will be horrendous."
Gizmodo
Remembering touch
An affectionate scarf. "TapTap is a scarf that can record, distribute and play back affectionate touch for emotional therapy. Based on haptic devices, taptap can be re-configured to record and play back the touch that is most meaningful to each user. It is made from felt in two layers: one grey one that faces the public and a pink layer that touches you and contains the haptic modules in specially designed pockets. Taptap can be worn as a regular scarf, and custom touch modules can be placed in powered pockets within to record and play back touch where and when you want it. "
we make money not art
Smart kitchens
The Kitchen of the Future. "You are at the office and decide to invite friends over for dinner that night. What's for dinner? Just pick up the phone and call home. Your kitchen can give you a heads up on what foods you have in the refrigerator and pantry, suggest menus that use some of those foods, and once you've selected the menu, it will supply a grocery list for other items you need to pick up. Use the same call to leave a message for your spouse to put some wine in the refrigerator to chill."
gizmag
The challenges of home networking
Network Babel in the Living Room. "The dream, as described at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, is to allow devices like TVs, computers and audio receivers to share audio and video around the home, with a single remote control running the show. But where some see the industry awakening to a bright new future, others see an ongoing interoperability nightmare. "The Japanese still do not understand networking," said one senior engineer employed by a major Japanese electronics maker, citing a litany of obstacles to digital nirvana -- from a lack of technology standards to tunnel vision exhibited by separate divisions within a single company."
Wired News
February 02, 2006
Swallowing medical monitors
Thermometer pill for football players. "Once swallowed, the multivitamin-size pill acts as an internal thermometer, providing continuous readings of a player's body temperature, which can be picked up by a sensor placed against the small of the player's back."
Boing Boing
2 inch square PC
Ultra small PC from Shimafuji. "Shimafuji’s SEMC5701 is a palm-sized Linux-based PC. The size is 2-inches by 2-inches by 1.7 inches, and it has all the necessary functions of a PC. It has the VR5701CPU processor from NEC, 64MB SDRAM, and 16MB flash ROM. The kernel has to be downloaded and installed from a Linux site. It carries a CF card slot, 5V power source, speaker output, microphone input, LAN, USB, RGB (CRT), DIP SW etc. It is sold for about $1330, ouch."
Gizmodo
PC power conservation
This Just In: Power Strip Smarter than Tara Reid. "See that big blue plug? That’s where your main PC power cable goes. The other red ones? That’s for stuff like your monitor, printer, and speakers. When you turn off the PC (or whatever is connected to the blue plug), it shuts off power to the red sockets as well, to help you conserve energy and not rack up your electric bill because you forgot to turn off your monitor when leaving your apartment."
Gizmodo
More online word processing
Zoho Writer online word processor. "Web service Zoho Writer is an online word processor that edits, stores and shares your documents from anywhere. Import your existing Microsoft Word or OpenOffice documents and start editing using an impressive WYSIWYG editor. Zoho Writer saves multiple versions of your document, and generates PDF, HTML and DOC files from it. Tag Zoho documents and share with a link (instead of a pesky document email attachment). "
Lifehacker
Adding charts to your blog
Chart your progress with Bellygraph. "Web site Bellygraph creates line charts that track your progress on a goal or task and lets you publish them to your web site."
Lifehacker
Finding photos of yourself
Photo Search In 2006 - Face Recognition Has Arrived!. "Competing with Photobucket and Flickr, is the new start-up Riya. One step ahead of its rivals - Riya has developed face and text recognition technology that it applies to photo search. You can identify people in your photos through the Riya software and also track every photo of yourself on the web! "
PSFK
Digital binoculars
Sightwave's Digiviewer digital binoculars. "Binocular manufacturers are tacking digital cameras onto their products left and right, but the Sightwave Digiviewer is the first product that we've seen to use a CCD and LCD as the actual mechanisms for magnified viewing (but not capturing pics). Although the internal screen could use a bump in resolution, being able to zoom in and out like a digicam seems like quite a useful feature, and cushioned eye opening felt better than most traditional models we've used."
Engadget
Mapping sounds
NYSoundmap. "What kinds of sounds can you find in New York City? With sound-seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for sounds with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps. Click on hot spots to listen to the recorded sounds of a location pin-pointed by GPS. Sound-seeker was created using GoogleMaps and isn't viewable in all browsers."
networked_performance
Audio guidebook popularity
The death of the guidebook?. "Is this the end for the guidebook? Publishers are reporting huge demand for their newly launched 'podcasts' - audio guides to foreign destinations which you download from the internet onto your iPod or MP3 player. Lonely Planet, which released its first podcast three months ago, claims that one of its audio guides proved so popular that it reached number 12 in the download chart, beating a single from Madonna."
Guardian Unlimited
E-Ink displays in consumer devices
Weather Wizard e-ink forecaster. "Ambient Devices and E Ink have teamed up to deliver a weather forecaster, called the Weather Wizard, which displays info from Ambient's nationwide network on a low-power electronic ink display. You may remember Ambient as the company that manufactures devices like the Orb, which glow with different colors correlated to predetermined metrics (stock market, national terror level, our stress levels at CES). The Weather Wizard reportedly lasts for an impressive two years with just a pair of AAA batteries, although the E Ink display seems capable of only lackluster graphics."
Engadget
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
Unique visualizations
Weather controlled video. "The video is affected by the weather and local time of the viewer's localisation. Every little change in their environment ensures that they will never see the same video twice. The look of the video might slightly change within an hour, but will have a whole new character in a few months."
we make money not art
Iconography for touchless interactions
Graphic language for touch. "There is also a growing collection of existing iconography in contactless payment systems, with a number of interesting graphic treatments in a technology-led, vernacular form. In Japan there are also instances of touch-based interactions being represented by characters, colours and iconography that are abstracted from the action itself."
elastic space
Blogs as a shopping resource
Toshiba to Push Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers. "There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product. The data the service returns? From blogs. Yep, Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed."
TechCrunch
Clickable text adventure
Clink. "The story line of Clink, which begins with you standing on your own front porch, is gradually revealed as players "literally" move around by clicking on words within the story. While there is a definite beginning, middle, and dramatic ending to the game, every person who plays Clink will have a unique experience because there is no pre-determined sequence of navigation. The story is constructed in a way to allow a smooth continuity of content, regardless of the order it is encountered."
networked_performance
Cheap VR
In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually. ""V.R.'s original promise, to construct a ghostly realm where consciousness could roam free of the constraints of flesh, became socially obsolete." But there was a bigger, more concrete problem: while cellphones with all the whistles cost as little as $99, virtual reality environments, like medium-priced New York condos, could set you back about $1.5 million. Until now. Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices."
New York Times
Wearable storage
Wearable data storage market evolves. "One wonders what we might carry with us “digitally” a decade or two from now, with memory and storage capacity getting larger and much more affordable every day. Imation got us thinking about this by showing several interesting concepts for carrying digital files at the CES – the 256 Mb Flash Wristband and the 4Gb Micro Hard Drive."
gizmag
Wi-fi laptop displays
Toshiba's WiFi-screen Tablet PC laptop. "Toshiba was showing off that concept laptop we saw earlier this year -- you know, the one with a detachable display that communicates with its body by way of WiFi. It's also DLNA compliant so you can cruise around while watching video or interacting with your machine (so long as you don't get out of signal range). We got to handle the actual display part of the unit, and we have to confess, we fell a bit in love."
Engadget
January 31, 2006
Sharing barcodes visually
Ringtone garments. "Industrial designer Christopher Glaister and fashion designer Michelle Shakallis's barcode textiles are decorated by a pattern that translates a piece of music (When the Saints Go Marching In) into a barcode. The pattern can be turned back into real music or a ring tone by scanning it with a modified camera phone. The tune can then be used as the ringtone for that mobile phone."
we make money not art
Driver tracking
new breed GPS vehicle tracking system provides detailed analysis of driving behaviour. "Because the information is tracked off-line, DriveSync eliminates the high monthly service fees associated with other GPS vehicle tracking systems. Results can be viewed by detaching the data key from the receiver unit and inserting it into a computer USB port. The vehicle tracking results are uploaded to a DriveSync server where the data is interpreted and consolidated into customized reports. These reports, including trip logs, route maps and usage alerts, are viewed via a secure, password-protected website. The results provide a detailed analysis of vehicle use and driver behavior."
gizmag
Displays in everything
A-Data SD cards with capacity display. "The LC display uses power from a host while inserted and indicates the remaining capacity on the card. Pop the card out and the display retains the information until you reinsert it, so you can manage your data needs."
Engadget
Webcams in motion
SatuGO: 3 megapixel camera in a ball concept...yeah, it's bouncy. "The 3 megapixel camera has a timer for delayed snaps and built-in accelerometer allowing it to sense bounces, max altitude, and such for capturing a variety of unusual shots or recordings. The camera, battery, 1GB of memory and diodes (for flash photography) are housed in a rugged, rubber-wrapped casing for protection while being tossed about. It can also double-up as a webcam for those more restful moments."
Engadget
Running apps from USB drives
OpenOffice supports U3 'portable Home folder' Flash drives. "OpenOffice 2.0 can be run from any U3-branded Flash disk. The software automatically ensures that any preferences files and documents it creates are stored on the removable disk and not on the host PC. The upshot - the software can be used on any compatible computer without the need to install the application first."The Register
Game ads better then TV ads to get to teens
Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game. "Two main avenues are open for advertising through games: in-game advertising and advergaming. The former is an extension of the product placement common in movies and television, and can range from graphical representation of a product in a game to wholesale sponsorship of a gaming title. With the increase in open-ended gaming that allows a player to wander around a virtual world (such as the Sims or Grand Theft Auto), opportunities for product placement are numerous. Advergaming refers to a game, usually online, that is wholly intended as a promotional device."Boing Boing
Finally, a small in-ear headset
Motorola H5: Headset or Butt-Plug - You Decide. "Motorola is showing off their tiny, in-ear headset at CES. The wee fella is about as big—and cute—as a button and doesn’t have a strange boom mic hanging off of it to add to my “moron on the go” look."
Gizmodo
Digital board games
Video games meet board games with the Entertaible. "While we all love video games, sometimes there are moments when you want to get a little more analogue. Philips are clearly banking on our secret board game urges with a new product called the Entertaible, an electronic tabletop device which will apparently let you enjoy both the interactivity of electronic games and the social aspects of board games."
Joystiq
Conducting gloves
Tavo gloves for the iPod. "No they're not little gloves for your iPod, they're actually for you. These gloves from Tavo keep your mitts warm but also have electrically conductive channels running to the fingertips. Why is that important? Just try to use that iPod click-wheel with any other pair of gloves and you'll get the picture (but no sound)."
Engadget
Media PCs redefining PC shape
Kapsel Media Center ceramic PC with Intel Viiv. "This tiny (10.6 x 9.1 x 3.0-inches) ceramic shelled PC can be positioned horizontally, vertically, or hung on the wall and throws down 7.1 surround and hi-def video playback. Expect this and other Viiv-centric media centers to ship first quarter 2006, price not yet disclosed."
Engadget
Websites publishing paper versions
Call It Gutenberg's Revenge. "When babycenter.com was born in 1997, the parenting e-zine reveled in the cost savings to be found in cyberspace. No postage rates or paper bills to worry about. Ink? So yesterday. So it comes as quite a surprise that eight years later, at a time when the magazine industry is falling over itself to boost its presence online, that BabyCenter has launched a version of its popular Web site on -- gasp -- paper."Business Week
January 30, 2006
It looks like this
The Retrievr Flickr Tool. "Retrievr has a Flash sketch pad built into the site. Draw something - anything - and it will fetch Flickr images that are similar. My very rough drawing of a black line intersecting with a red blog brought up some nice results (see image)."
TechCrunch
Collaborative bargain hunting
Find a Deal with Clipfire.. "I like Clipfire , which allows users to submit ecommerce deals, and other members can vote the best deals to the top of the site, and add appropriate metadata, like tags, to the links."
TechCrunch
Cameras with multiple lenses
Kodak's Latest CES Goodies. "Kodak will be debuting the world’s first dual-lens digital still camera, the EasyShare V570. Why two lenses? The real question is, why not? One lens is a 23mm ultra wide angle lens and the other is a traditional 3x optical lens."
Gizmodo
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
Tiny, tiny PC
The All in One Card: credit-card thin-client concept. "The All in One Card (or the AIO Card, as he calls it), is a credit-card sized gadget that Chandan envisions as a thin-client device with an e-ink-like display, which could be used as a media player, web appliance and even GPS unit. The card would be powered by solar cells, would include integrated Bluetooth and WiFi for data transfer, and could be slotted into a smart card reader to hook up to a full-size display and keyboard."
Engadget
Non-invasive autopsies
? Virtual autopsies. "Traditional autopsies are considered as invasive procedures by many faiths and even violate religious laws, such as is the case for Muslims and Jews. This is why the concept of virtual autopsy, which relies on computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies, has been developed in the last two years."
ZDNet.com
Aternatives to credit cards for online shopping
Big Plastic's Online Challenger. "Marino is making progress at creating another option. He runs a 150-person outfit called I4 Commerce, whose Bill Me Later payment system is catching on with online merchants and shoppers. Some million consumers have used his alternative, which permits them to shop online without providing credit card numbers or filling out lengthy applications, at 230 e-commerce sites including Wal-Mart, Priceline, Overstock.com, Expedia's Hotels.com and airlines such as American and Continental."Business Week
January 27, 2006
Cameraphone --> Scan, copy, fax
Turn Your Camera Phone Into A Mobile Scanner. "scanR is simple to use: • Take a picture of a document or whiteboard. • Send the picture to scanR. • Receive the scanned image in email or fax."
scanR
RSS over Instant Messenger
The MAKEbot is here!. "The MAKEbot is a AIM/iChat buddy you add to your list. When you type latest, he will give you the latest headlines from Makezine.com. You can type subscribe 1 and he'll deliver the latest news each hour, lastly - if you type keywords like psp, welding, ipod or whatever he'll search the Makezine.com site and pages from MAKE and give you a link from our search engine to help you find what you're looking for"
MAKE
GPS for bikes
Yamaha Motorcycle Navigation System. "The product is basically a Garmin, but with some tweaks by Yamaha. It has a sound guidance system that wirelessly transmits (via FM) to a receiver inside the helmet (“turn left in 100 feet… and do a wheelie”). "
Gizmodo
Pushing scrolling
The Mile Wall. "Travis aims to build the internet’s longest page. The page will stretch for 1 mile ( 1.6 km ) horizontally and be made entirely of public posted material. It will be the first, or at least one of the first, pages to go entirely horizontal for such an incredible distance."
Smart Mobs
Self-implanting
S&M Tech, DIY RFID Implants. "It appears there are a handful of people, primarily engineers, who are taking the plunge and implanting RFID chips into their hands. Purpose? For automation, of course. Having an RFID chip implanted can save time doing things such as logging onto computer work stations, unlocking electrically-locked doors, ordering pizza and buying porn."
Gizmodo
Wireless sensors
Hitachi AirSense (The Sequel). "This time around the watch has readouts for temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure (no big deal, I’ve got a watch that does that, too). But this one also senses vibrations (earthquake! run!). This watch is not meant for your average Weather Channel addict, though. It’s supposed to be for indoor monitoring of, say, kitchens and food warehouses. That’s why it is capable of sending its data to a wireless receiver that can be used as part of a monitoring network."
Gizmodo
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
Virtual diagnosis
Virtual reality helps diagnose heart defects. "Dutch doctors are using a virtual reality system to visualize the heart in three dimensions and detect if it is healthy or not. In a pilot study, ten doctors were able to move around virtual three-dimensional animated images or 'holograms' of the heart and to make correct diagnosis after a ten-minute training."
ZDNet.com
Civilian GPS
Europe’s satellite navigation venture launches. "The first test satellite of Europe’s €3.8 billion Galileo navigation system was launched on Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The system will rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Russia’s GLONASS system. Galileo is a civilian project and promises the permanent provision of a navigation system – the US and Russia systems are both run by the military and could in theory be turned off at any time"
New Scientist
Cartography in a truck
Explorers Map World's Offramps. "From the outside, save for a global positioning system antenna that resembles a police siren on top, the Escape looks like any other SUV. But in the back is a bolted cabinet containing a GPS receiver attached to the antenna, a laptop docking station, power supply and cables snaking through the vehicle's interior to connect with the computer display and video camera up front. The GPS setup feeds latitude and longitude information several times a second, plotted on the display as green arrows that connect to form digital roads. The camera captures three frames a second, enough to reconstruct road signs and other details. In the databases, roads are broken into line segments, each carrying as many as 160 attributes -- such things as road quality (ranging from 1 for major arteries to 5 for local streets), presence of a divider or center turn lanes, speed limits and addresses of buildings along each side."Wired News
January 26, 2006
Exoskeletons
RL Mechs on the Way. "This is the Berkeley lower-extremity exoskeleton (Bleex). The Bleex 1 has been in the works for a while and it seems they have begun work on the 2nd prototype, the Bleex 2. The exoskeleton system has two hydraulic leg braces that include 40 electronic sensors, a monitoring computer and an internal-combustion engine. The exoskeleton is attached to the legs of the soldier and allows for backpack loads upwards of 220 lb. to be carried with ease."
Gizmodo
Adding metadata to blog entries
Structured Blogging,The "Del.icio.us Lesson", Personal Datamining and The Knowledge Commons. "Structured blogging is an initiative to add structure to blog posts of similar content. For example, let’s say that I write a review of a piece of software on my Wordpress blog and someone else writes a review in their Movable Type blog. Not only are these two posts structured differently, with the blogging platforms writing different code, but each tool has customizable templates so that the blogger can write any code they want. So even though the content is nearly the same, the probability that the code in the end results looks anything similiar is very small."Smart Mobs
Text plugins
The Hyperwords Plugin. "Hyperwords gives users a number of choices whenever a piece of text is selected. The options simply pop up - right click functionality remains unchanged. Options include searching various engines, looking up text in wikipedia and dictionary.com, emailing text, searching on Google Maps, translation, and searching on Amazon and other commerce sites."
TechCrunch
Robots in Japan
Japan's humanoid robots | Better than people. "HER name is MARIE, and her impressive set of skills comes in handy in a nursing home. MARIE can walk around under her own power. She can distinguish among similar-looking objects, such as different bottles of medicine, and has a delicate enough touch to work with frail patients. MARIE can interpret a range of facial expressions and gestures, and respond in ways that suggest compassion. Although her language skills are not ideal, she can recognise speech and respond clearly. Above all, she is inexpensive. Unfortunately for MARIE, however, she has one glaring trait that makes it hard for Japanese patients to accept her: she is a flesh-and-blood human being from the Philippines. If only she were a robot instead."
Economist.com
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
Magazines everywhere
On-product magazines could change the media landscape. "The media mix is about to have a new and very viable form of print publishing – on-product magazines will hit the market for the first time in early 2006 and we suspect this innovation is capable of changing the world of print media as we know it."
gizmag
Vein authentication
First library system using palm vein authentication. "Fujitsu is to construct a system utilizing its biometric palm vein authentication technology for Naka city's new public library, in Japan. The contactless palm vein authentication technology will eliminate the use of library identification cards to check out books."
we make money not art
OS hacks
Download of the Day: Taskbar. "Free program Taskbar allows you to rearrange the taskbar buttons on your Windows PC. After installing, just press and hold the ALT key while your mouse is hovering over the taskbar - Taskbar will switch to sort mode, allowing you to reorder until you release the ALT key."
Lifehacker
Organizing your home - sort of
PDA for your pet. "Enter your pets schedule (vet appointments, medication schedule, playdates in the park) , phone contacts (vet, groomer, the shitzu with the cute owner), even their picture - and you'll be the most organised pet owner at the dog park. And if you've got a globe-trotting pet, Pet Master will help you locate pet-clinics and pet-friendly motels while you travel."
The Register
Concept tablet
Lenovo Yogatop. "The laptop has a detachable keyboard and a screen that can be flipped around to different angles to replicate standard laptops. Pointless? Pretty much. Still looks cool, though, and will be purchased by uptight business execs anyway."
Gizmodo
Mapping out free wi-fi
Free ride data acquisition vehicle. "Frida V. is a computer-enabled bicycle that allows riders to map open WIFI nodes in urban spaces. It carries a small computer, GPS device, 802.11 wireless network transciever and a basic audiovisual recording unit. The system enables automated mapping of stumbled wireless networks, easy creation of location-tagged media and opportunistic synchronization with a server resource on the internet. "
we make money not art
Interactive maps for showing local reports
New York Transit Strike - Readers' Commuting Reports . "A collection of reports from readers about their commutes during the strike. Click on the map below to browse by ZIP code. Click and drag to move to a different area."New York Times
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
Visualizing your heartbeat
Heart beat bracelets. "In something of a Helmut Lang meets Rammstein moment, we bring you three prototype heart-beat bracelets. On top we have the "continuum" which displays the beating hearts tempo via white light pulses. Next we have the "alteration" which changes from red (fast) to green (slow) based on the heart's intensity. And finally, the er, "finality" which reminds your azz to carpe diem by displaying the number of beats remaining in your pawn shoppe heart."
Engadget
Little solar panels
Solar Powered Cellphone Charms. "Cellphone charms are available in all kinds of shapes. Now there are also little display plates powered by solar, that you can hang on your mobile phone. "
I4U News
Making RFID checkouts a reality
Here It Comes - Totally RFID Checkout. "FamilyMart, Itochu, and Toshiba Tec unveiled a checkout system that identifies all purchased items at the same time using item-level RFID tags. If customers use RFID payment cards such as SUICA, the checkout process can be done very quickly with this system - it takes only several seconds (more than twice as fast as the conventional checkout processes.)"
RFID in Japan
January 24, 2006
eReader tied to content
Tomorrow's paper will be digital. "Belgian daily De Tijd is to be distributed electronically in what is claimed to be the first complete solution for portable electronic reading and writing. Available from April 2006, the Iliad platform allows for customised versions of an electronic reader that can be created for special markets."
The Register
Continued storage growth
Unlimited storage on the way.. "Those of us who can just never have enough portable digital storage will be heartened to hear that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is working on a 5 terabyte 3.5 inch hard drive aimed at the PC market. Though it’s not due until 2010 – less than five years from now – it’s a reminder that the technological bar is being raised significantly every day, regardless of the industry."
gizmag
Smart meters
PhotoViolationMeter takes cash, cards... and your picture. " The PhotoViolationMeter is a new smart parking meter that includes most recent smart-meter innovations, such as accepting payments via smartcard or cellphone, and adds a new twist: a camera that can take pictures of your car and upload them to authorities, store them locally, and make decisions based on how long you’ve been parked."
Engadget
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
Dynamic music making
TransPose. "Computer vision technology captures the performer's physical actions captured and translates them to audio in real time. The performer sits in front of a camera, and his or her silhouette is projected in front of them in relation to a number of predefined trigger areas called "noteboxes." Using his/her silhouette to overlap the noteboxes, the performer triggers various tones. "
we make money not art
Computer-controlled flight in 3D
New Airline Navigation System Is Displayed. "Until now, an autopilot could only fly a plane in a straight line or around a gentle curve. But the one shown off Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration was following a path as sinuous as the river beneath, a route that planes use to control noise when they approach the airport from the north. "
New York Times (may require free subscription)
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
New PC form factors
Microsoft/IDSA Design Competition highlights. "Contestants were asked to “envision how form factor influences the digital lifestyle” in four categories: personal productivity, entertainment, communication & mobility, and living & lifestyle."
Engadget
Physical actions with a cellphone
RFID based spatial address book. "He then recorded different actions to each tag and placed a corresponding Post-It note liable on the desk surface above each tag. So, by resting the phone on “call Jack” the phone would load the number. When he walks into the office he can set the phone down on “I’m in the office” and a text message will be sent."
hack a day
Cellphone = passport
Japanese college to put ID cards on cellphones. "College students may be absent-minded enough to leave their student ID cards at home, but they wouldn’t dare go out without their cellphones. That’s the idea behind a plan being implemented at Japan’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology, where IDs will be stored on cellphones beginning this spring."
Engadget
Flexibile batteries
Gel battery boost for radio tags. "Japanese company NEC has developed a lightweight, flexible battery that is less than a millimetre thick and can be recharged in half a minute. It is called the Organic Radical Battery (ORB) and is based on a type of plastic that exists in a gel state."
BBC NEWS
January 23, 2006
Technology-assisted walking
A Walker With a Mind of Its Own. "Grandma and Grandpa aren’t as spry as they used to be. Why not help them out by getting them a walker that employs enough tech to make you want to give it a whirl? It’s got GPS and sensors onboard that help guide the user around the house. It will attempt to avoid stairs and other obstacles in order to give the user a more comfortable, carefree walk."
Gizmodo
Wireless manipulation
3DID Wireless MIDI Glove Kicks Total Ass. "Twenty-four-year-old computer engineering graduate and musician Shaduz from Bologna developed a MIDI glove which can be used to manipulate music and sounds. The 3DID MIDI glove just isn’t any glove, though—it’s wireless and was built for about 150 euros, or $180. The glove features three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and 18 hours of battery life. It also has five “bend” sensors in the fingers for bending and manipulating musical instruments. Perfect for softsynths."
Gizmodo
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
Using metadata to create vertical search engines
Edge Of Network Reviews - KritX. "kritX is combinging blog reviews and microformats with a vertical search engine to present these edge reviews to users. It has a long way to go. Authors must use microformats and tell kritX that they want their posts included (neither of these things are really necessary). But it is a good idea that can grow into something incredible. All the data is just sitting out there on the open internet, ready to be harvested."
TechCrunch
Solar hitting the mainstream
Honda’s new business venture: solar power. "Describing itself as “the first automaker to enter into solar cell business,” Honda Motor Co. said on Monday it plans to start mass-producing solar cells in 2007, eyeing growing demand for environmentally friendly energy sources."
MSNBC.com
Multi-gadget gadgets
DualCor cPC merges XP PC with smartphone. "Can you merge a fully loaded Windows XP PC with a Windows Mobile-powered smartphone without coming up with something so bulky, cumbersome and power-hungry that it doesn't work well as either? The folks at startup DualCor Technologies seem to think so, and they aim to prove it with their cPC, a $1,500 hybrid handheld "
Engadget
Active clothing
Firefighter Suit Chock-Full of Tech. "the I-Garment makes use of numerous technologies, including satellite communications and WiFi. Satellite usage would be beneficial in more remote locations, as local communications infrastructure often becomes damaged during quickly-moving fires. Sensors inside the suit monitor the wearer’s vital signs, a potentially life-saving feature sure to appear in future emergency response personnel’s suits. "
Gizmodo
Merging wearable and mobile computing
What Would You Do with a Wearable Computer?. "The whole wearable-computing space is folding into the mobile-computing environment these days, and it is becoming tough to draw any lines of distinction between the two," he said. This ongoing convergence makes sense, especially given the fact that the operating system, memory, processing power, and all the other assets that fulfill the needs of the wearable computing industry are now available on small compact devices"
NewsFactor Network
Photoshop-like effects on 3D objects
Morphovision - Hacking Photon. "In front of a physical 3D miniature house (placed in a glass box) is a touch screen that allows a user to select different visual effects. According to the user's selection, the house may become soft or even break apart. This all happens between your naked eyes and the miniature house - no special goggles or screens needed. I can't help saying that we are a step closer to "photoshopping the real world.""
we make money not art
Ways of visualizing networks
A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. "VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web."
visualcomplexity.com
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
Wireless stylus
EPOS Digital Stylus for non-touchcreen cellphones. "The setup consists of a "base station," (actually just a chip) which can either be embedded in the phone or attached as a peripheral, and a special powered stylus that relays its position to the base station. Besides enabling on-screen writing and interactive buttons, the EPOS system can also be used for drawing on regular surfaces within a certain proximity of the base station, and also act as a Jackal-style (the Bruce Willis one) joystick for playing videogames or aiming a remote-controlled machine gun."
Engadget
Portable HDTV
Pixela's HDTV On the Go. "Apparently, the Japanese just can’t stop watching their awesome HDTVs, so much that they need to do it on the go. So in comes the H.264 Pocket TV by Pixela, released only in Japan. Yes, now you will be able to enjoy stunning HDTV-quality programming on the go in the form of a long candybar-esque pocket TV. The device not only does television, but also FM radio and music playback. You can enjoy your tunes with digital 5.1 as well, since this little TV offers it all."
Gizmodo
Finding out about the current page
Follow discussions about a webpage with Talk Digger. "Talk Digger helps users track conversations about a webpage. If you’d like to know who is talking about a news story or blog post and what they have to say about it, simply enter the URL of the page into Talk Digger."
Lifehacker
Emotional analysis
Mona Lisa's emotions decoded. "Scientists used a new algorithm to analyze the emotion reflected in Mona Lisa's smile. New Scientist reports that the software, developed by the University of Amsterdam and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, measures lip curvature and eye wrinkles and then rates the face based on six emotions. Apparently, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry."
Boing Boing
"Background" energy generation
Ramp generates power as cars pass. "Dorset inventor Peter Hughes' Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp generates around 10kW of power each time a car drives over its metal plates. More than 200 local authorities had expressed an interest in ordering the ?25,000 ramps to power their traffic lights and road signs, Mr Hughes said."
BBC NEWS
More glasses with displays built in
Orange France touts video spectacles. "Fed up with having to squint at movies, photos, emails and text messages on your mobile's microscopic display? Then Orange France is offering the full heads-up experience, courtesy of its "video glasses". The slimline shades hook up to Samsung's D600E mobile phone by cable to display whatever's on the screen. The glasses also sport a pair of integrated earphones. Orange premiered the goggles at a French Sci-Fi channel event earlier this month, presumably hoping to attract all those Star Trek nerds who'd like a visor like Geordi LaForge's. Except, of course, he doesn't wear one any more."
The Register
Windows as displays
zaZen shows new ways to automotive enlightenment. "The entire roof dome from the belt line up is made of a single sheet of transparent Bayer polycarbonate which can be switched from transparent to opaque at the press of a button. This property also enables any superfluous knobs and displays on the dashboard to be “faded out” so the driver can concentrate on what is most important."
gizmag
Flexibile displays for mundane tasks
Citizen's flexible e-ink wall clock nears release. "Citizen's upcoming flexible digital wall clock, which measures 21-inches high by 52-inches wide and can wrap around corners, so you'll always know either the hour or the minute depending on where you sit."
Engadget
Tagging systems for the home
More on Loc8tor personal tracking system. "some more details on the Loc8tor are starting to trickle out (ah, those PR folks; they love to trickle that info), including the fact that the device can work with up to 24 tags simultaneously, the tags themselves (pictured, above) are about the size of a postage stamp (also pictured, above), and tags can be affixed to both objects and people, the latter of which can use a panic button to alert the person holding the base unit."
Engadget
Cheap e-paper
E-Paper's Killer App: Packaging. "Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios."
Wired News
Stretchable electronics
Stretchable silicon. "Functional, stretchable and bendable electronics could be used in applications such as sensors and drive electronics for integration into artificial muscles or biological tissues, structural monitors wrapped around aircraft wings, and conformable skins for integrated robotic sensors"
Boing Boing
Software prediction
Neural network sorts the blockbusters from the flops. "Using data on 834 movies released between 1998 and 2002, Sharda found that the neural network can judge a film based on seven key parameters: the "star value" of the cast, the movie's age rating, the time of release against that of competitive movies, the film's genre, the degree of special effects used, whether it is a sequel or not, and the number of screens it is expected to open in. This allowed it to place a movie in one of nine categories, ranging from "flop" (total takings less than $1 million) to "blockbuster" (over $200 million)."New Scientist
Portable payments
iPod-based payment system. "They're using an iTrip FM transmitter to send the payment information, which is embedded in an MP3, and say that in the future we might be able to download a whole airplane boarding pass on MP3, including biometric information to ensure you are, in fact, that one guy who bothered to download an MP3 boarding pass."
Engadget
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
Active RFID tags
Ubiquitous ID Center's Cool New Stuff. "Ubiquitous ID Center unveiled some cool stuff at a recent trade show. First, they developed something called Sensing Dice, which is an active RFID tag with varieties of sensing capabilities. It's about the size of a postage stamp and it can have temperature, acceralation, light, or infrared sensing capability, and functions as a sensor network node. They are also developing so-called Responding Dice, which can respond to a query from a base station by lighting itsLED."
RFID in Japan
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
Continuous browser history
How'd I Get Here Firefox extension. "The How’d I Get Here Firefox extension tracks your clicktrail to every web page in your browser history and provides a back button that works even after you’ve closed a tab."
Lifehacker
January 16, 2006
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
RFID museum interaction
Museum with Many Tags. "Okayama City Digital Museum is introducing RFID based services for visitors. 7,000 tags are embedded under the floor of an exhibition room (a large birds-eye photo of the city is printed on the floor.) Visitors walks around on the floor, pushing an information display device called Korotto . The device displays historical/cultural information related to the user's current postion on the photo."
RFID in Japan
Hacking a search engine
Roll Your Own Google. "Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that is best known for its traffic rankings, on Monday unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform, a set of online tools for searching, indexing, computing, storing and publishing vast quantities of net data. [...] To illustrate the new service's potential, Alexa developed a photo search engine that allows users to query photo metadata normally hidden from standard keyword searches, such as the date the photo was taken or the camera used. Musipedia, another Alexa prototype, provides users with the ability to search the web by melody. Give the engine a keyword or melodic contour, and it returns similar music. Musipedia allows users to input their own whistling as a query."Wired News
Cool future tech
A Peek at Tomorrow's Coolest Tech. "Among those that offer a glimpse into what's way beyond the next generation of gotta-have gizmos are devices ranging from a magic wand that serves as a remote control to a bracelet that translates your body movements into text messages. Take a peek at some playful concepts that are being cooked up in labs and brainstorming sessions around the world."
Business Week
Multi-tasking takes time
Gamers are better at multitasking. "There are individual differences in the costs of multi-tasking, Lien said. In her lab studies, a typical response to a single stimulus might take 300 milliseconds. Adding a second task increases the response to about 800 milliseconds. A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, so the delay may not seem like much – until you extend the difference to a car driving 60 miles an hour and realize the response rate more than doubles, Lien said. In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others. "Boing Boing
Online office applications
Writely Is Kicking A**. "Writely (profiled earlier) continues to lead the pack in online ajax word products. Writely has had great features from day 1: import and export into Word format, embedded images, a wysiwyg editor, drag and drop functionality, sharing with others, and tagging of documents."
TechCrunch
Accessible calendar
Auditory calendar application for the visually impaired. "Users navigate their calendars with a combination of simple voice commands, gestures and the universal keypad (up, down, left and right arrows plus an enter key). Calendar information is represented through a spatialized soundscape that uses a variety of audio icons (sounds that represent kinds of calendar items), human speech that is a navigable 3D model of a user’s calendar. Users are able to navigate to different "views" of their calendar from a month to a week to a day to an individual calendar item."
we make money not art
December 15, 2005
Books that can be "read" by mobile phone cameras
High Tech Phone Books, Finally (maybe). "Upcodes of the smart phone book can be read with a mobile phone camera. The user is automatically directed to the Internet pages indicated by the Upcodes."
Gizmodo
Low power photography
New digital camera chip slashes power consumption 50x. "They’re only in the design prototype phase right yet, but a couple of dudes by the names of Mark Bocko and Zeljko Ignjatovic at the University of Rochester have apparently worked out a way to digitize photography at each pixel of a CMOS sensor, the results of which are actually nothing less than fifty times less power consumption in taking a shot, and ten times the dynamic range of light captured — on chips expected to be smaller and less expensive than current devices."
Engadget
Sharing recordings of places
soundtransit :: book. "SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. In the “Book” section of this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world. And in the “Search” section, you can search the database for specific sounds by member artists from many different places. If you are a phonographer, you can also contribute your recordings for others to enjoy."
soundtransit
Outsourced game playing
Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese. "For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day." He and his comrades have created yet another new business out of cheap Chinese labor. They are tapping into the fast-growing world of "massively multiplayer online games," which involve role playing and often revolve around fantasy or warfare in medieval kingdoms or distant galaxies."
New York Times
Physical and virtual gaming
RFID turns you into a real-life action hero. "You've been sent to a 31st-century prison, where puzzles will help you crack the security system and escape. There are ventilation shafts to crawl down, secret doors, ladders, dead ends and hidden bonuses. This games is not on your PC or PlayStation but in a three-storey building in Madrid. In Negone, created by Differend Games, each player has a wrist console displaying your score, your character's health and tools obtained in the game. You select your mission (they range from "inoculate the virus" to "steal the secret weapon") and difficulty level. Security guards then escort you to your cell."
we make money not art
Simple online spreadsheets
JotSpot Tracker Furthers Office Online Experiment. "As more office applications move online, JotSpot Tracker joins NumSum and the open-source TrimSpreadsheet in the spreadsheet space. While Jotspot Tracker is clearly the most polished of the three, funcionality is very limited and the small visable area leaves a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, this is an excellent way to collaborate on simpler, smaller spreadsheets and bypass the hassle of email and chaotic version numbers. And the inport function was flawless. "
TechCrunch
Browser history
How'd I Get Here (Firefox extension). "Use this extension to go to the page on which you first clicked a link to the current page. For example: Go "back" even after opening a link in a new tab and closing the original tab. Remember how you found a site you bookmarked yesterday. When you are sent a link you have already seen, astound the sender by responding with a statement more precise than "I saw that on some blog a few days ago". "
How'd I Get Here
Album covers
CoverFlow. "CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection. It allows you to browse your albums complete with beautiful artwork pulled from any sources it can find, whether that’s buried in your song tags, collected via Synergy, or looked up on Amazon."
Lifehacker
December 14, 2005
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
Home product scanning
IntelliScaner Kitchen Companion 100 keeps track of groceries. "The Kitchen Companion 100 is the same basic scanner, but adds a database of over 300,000 grocery items, along with nutrition data from the USDA. Scanned info can be downloaded to a PC, Mac, PDA or cellphone, letting you compile detailed grocery lists."
Engadget
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
Smart-looking viruses
'Talking' internet worm wins victims' trust . "Worms that target IM services have been seen before. However, the latest, dubbed "IM.MySpace04.AIM" by IMlogic, the internet security company that discovered it, is the first known to chat with computer users in a bid to dupe them into downloading its malicious program."Times Online
More and more interactive homepages
Create a personalized homepage with Protopage. "Protopage is an Ajax-built web app designed to bring your RSS feeds, sticky notes, and bookmarks into one pretty package."
Lifehacker
RFID games
Smart Jigsaw Puzzle Assistant. "First, we describe several advantages of employing RFID technology for the development of gaming applications. Then we present the Smart Jigsaw Puzzle Assistant, a fully operational augmented jigsaw puzzle game which we have developed and prototypically implemented using miniature RFID tags and a palm-sized RFID scanner."
networked_performance
Finding things
Finding a needle in a haystack of data. "Finding useful information in oceans of data is an increasingly complex problem in many scientific areas. This is why researchers from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have created new statistical techniques to isolate useful signals buried in large datasets coming from particle physics experiments, such as the ones run in a particle collider. But their method could also be applied to a broad range of applications, like discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud or identifying the carrier of a virulent disease among millions of people."
ZDNet.com
Enabling features through scripting engines
Y!Q context search meets Greasemonkey. "After installing the script, all you have to do is highlight text, then click on the little Y!Q icon that pops up, and… tada! Contextual search results!"
Lifehacker
December 13, 2005
Storage in everything
LG 42" Xcanvas With 160GB Of PR()|\|. "The TV can do 13 hours of HD recording, 63 hours of SD recording, and you can even pull in pics through the built-in 9 in 1 card reader. This of course means you can do your photo viewing, movie viewing, MP3 playing, etc. through the same TV interface."
Gizmodo
Parents restricting game time
PlayLimit token-based video game and TV viewing timer. "..they’ve hardly had to bother begging quarters off of mom and pops to hit the arcades ever since they got that fancy “Nintendo” hooked up to the tube. Well, now they can know your pain with the PlayLimit, a token-based system that locks up their system’s composite connector and sets a timer to playtime. It comes with 40 tokens that each represent 15 minutes of play, so after 10 solid hours of Halo 2 vegging, Junior is going to finally know how it feels to be all out of change."
Engadget
Exciting PC design
Lenovo wins design awards for concept PCs. "The first award is “Best of the Best for Highest Design Quality,” and it was won by the company’s “Yoga” concept, which consists of a laptop with an LCD that can be twisted all the way around such that the notebook stands up like an a-frame. The other award for “High Design Quality” was won by their “Sundial” concept, involving a slimline all-in-one PC on a stick that has some kind of whacky 3D scroller interface."
Engadget
Chameleon clothing
New Scarf. "According to Nikkei, a group of researchers at Keio University has made a scarf that changes color to match that of the wearer's clothing by using 100 optical fibers, light-emitting diodes and a color sensor."
we make money not art
Executive toys
Tyco designer track for bored execs. "Showing how far executive toys have come from Newton’s swinging balls (what?), we bring you the $1,500 Designer Tyco Track for bored-rooms everywhere."
Engadget
December 09, 2005
Cellphones for pets
Fido's First Cell Phone. "The ability to track a lost pet has most dog lovers excited. The PetCell has a "call owner" button in case Rover strays. It also includes assisted GPS, or A-GPS, which works indoors, allowing dog owners to map their pup's coordinates from any web-enabled device or by dialing a voice-enabled call center."
Wired News
Task management systems
Do Not Forget doorhanger. "The Do Not Forget doorhanger, a lined notepad that hooks onto your your doorknob, reminds you of stuff you need on the way out the house or office."
Lifehacker
Satellite map sensitivity
Al-Qaeda probes enemy on Google Earth. "Amid all the kerfuffle of late regarding Google Earth and its possible threat to the national security of several jittery nations comes an interesting snippet from an email purporting to be from a US Marine who served in Iraq. In it, he suggests that al-Qaeda is using Google Earth as a intelligence tool in its fight against the US military."
The Register
Cameras that print?
Shake it like a Polaroid cameraphone picture. "Images of a “Polaroid Camera Phone” have surfaced on Mobile Korea, and the device looks more like a “hey, wouldn’t this be cool?” type concept than anything, so we’re not expecting to be popping a SIM card into one anytime soon."
Engadget
Using technology to tell presence
Mobile is the Key. "Auto-Txt have launched a new car security system, which uses your mobile a supplementary key. The car won't start unless the owner's mobile phone is also present - identified by Bluetooth. "
MobHappy
Keyboard for restricted input
F.O.S.K. your PSP. "Requiring only two keystrokes to enter in any given character, this definitely looks like it could help out in bringing you that much closer to a dedicated attachable keyboard, minus the attachable part. Divided up into seven blocks, each block holds nine characters (3x3)."
PSP Fanboy
Bigger flexibile displays
Plastic Active-Matrix SVGA flexible e-paper Display. "Plastic electronics developer Plastic Logic has developed the world's largest flexible organic active matrix display. The display consists of a flexible, high resolution, printed active-matrix backplane driving an electronic paper frontplane from E Ink Corporation. The display will be publicly shown at the 12th International Displays Workshop in Takamatsu, Japan tomorrow. The displays are 10" diagonal SVGA (600 by 800) with 100ppi resolution and 4 levels of greyscale. The thickness of the display when laminated with E Ink Imaging Film is less than 0.4mm."
gizmag
Smart lights
RGBy, the One-Pixel Camera. "Shinya Matsuyama and Makoto Hirahara have designed a cube-shaped lamp that can sense color and then recreate that color. It is technically not a camera, but it is being described as a simple one-pixel camera anyway. "
Gizmodo
Visualizing data on maps
GAP - Global Attention Profiles. "The map above shows what countries CNN is paying the most attention to today. Countries in deep red are experiencing the most attention, yielding more than 3.2% of the stories detected by GAP scrapers. As the red fades and blues deepen, countries are experiencing less and less media attention."
Harvard
Sensitivity over contactless payment
Poll: Should I use my new blink card?. "There have been reports of problems in the testing of contactless RFID credit cards, however, that lead to additional security concerns. In some cases, if two or more terminals were close together, not only did both terminals read the card, but the read range of each terminal increased to as much as 30 feet (9 m). "
Engadget
USB as a gadget standard
Designer USB. "Essentially, if you’re going to have to use USB peripherals, you may as well make sure they’re not horrifically ugly right? That’s what Boynq thinks, and has brought out a nice selection of attractive designer gadgets in time for the holidays."
Gizmodo
Background communication information
Girls Ambient Room. "data is gathered from different chat services, email & comment entries to their personal online journals. when the user (the Taiwan teenager) is in her room & receives a message on MSN chat, she hears audio signals that are in tune with one another, & sees bubble-like visual animations are created on the wall. Email traffic is represented by lines on the screen which start to animate & vibrate. the more email the more vigerous the animations."
networked_performance
Alternative interactions for games
SenToy. "In this paper, we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an intial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending on the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions."
networked_performance
December 08, 2005
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
Prosthetics that learn
The Rheo Knee from MIT adjusts and learns on the go. "Hugh Herr, a researcher at MIT, has developed a computer controlled artificial knee that learns your walking style over time and can adapt to short term terrain changes. It’s called the “Rheo Knee,” and the prosthetic works to provide resistance and walking control by stiffening and relaxing a magnetic fluid in the joint."
Engadget
Media spending vs. industry performance
Wired's page count as Nasdaq tracker. "You’ll note that the Nasdaq (red) lags Wired’s page count (blue) by a few months. I’m not suggesting you go an buy technology shares, but gee, I’m thinking the reports of money pumping back into technology companies might just be true given the big up-tick in this months page count (294)."
Boing Boing
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
Search terms as evidence
Search Terms Are a Witness for the Prosecution. "Petrick used Google to search the Internet for references to "body decomposition," "rigor mortis," "neck" and "break" in the days before and after he murdered his wife, Janine Sutphen, then dumped her body in a lake, said Durham County assistant prosecutor Mitchell Garrell. By "Googling" his wife's murder, Petrick was inadvertently supporting the prosecutor's time line of events. For instance, the jury learned that Petrick searched for and downloaded a topical map of a lake bed in the days before he dumped the woman's remains in the same body of water. "EWeek
December 07, 2005
Personal weather maps
Weather Underground and Google Maps. "Weather Underground has a neat use of Google Maps. They’ve got maps that show where their stations are and by clicking on them you can get all kinds of weather information about that local area."
Lifehacker
Re-representing a service
Pretty up del.icio.us with Delancey. "Delancey is an online bookmark manager that enhances the popular del.icio.us social bookmarking application. Delancey keeps track of how frequently you click on each of your bookmarks and presents them to you in order. The interface is nice, and content load-times (after an initial cache of your bookmarks) are decent. Also, sorting bookmarks by popularity is a cool idea. If you’re one of those people who loves del.icio.us but hates the way it looks, try making it all purdy with Delancey."
Lifehacker
Visualizing music albums
TuneBooks™ Digital Liner Notes and Interactive Booklets. "TuneBooks provide the visual content fans crave by bundling online albums with a collection of unique and innovative media highlighting the band and their visual sensibility. TuneBooks combines traditional visual elements - liner notes, cover art and band collateral - with custom-designed interactive art and media to create a new visual experience. And each TuneBook integrates artist discography and label catalog browsing, creating a natural means for fans to sample, explore, and buy new music."
TuneBooks
Automatically putting together information on people
ZoomInfo people search. "Directory and search engine ZoomInfo aggregates information about individuals for companies to research potential job candidates. ZoomInfo’s information listings on people, culled from the Web, are not particularly mind-blowing. However, you can “claim your name” and create a personal profile with info you want to share. ZoomInfo publishes your page for other search engines to find as well as potential employers."
Lifehacker
Playing music without instruments
Virtual Air Guitar. "Using a computer to monitor the hand movements of a "player", the system adds riffs and licks to match frantic mid-air finger work. By responding instantly to a wide variety of gestures it promises to turn even the least musically gifted air guitarist to a virtual fret board virtuoso."
networked_performance
Energy monitoring
Energy diary helps correct bad habits. "BY OFFERING consumers instant feedback on the amount of energy they are using, a system trialled in Japan is helping people cut their fuel bills and carbon emissions. The Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Tokyo set up monitors in 10 houses in Kyoto and Osaka to gauge electric power use and check on room temperature every 30 minutes. Residents were able to monitor their overall consumption of electricity, gas and in some cases kerosene for heaters, via a linked PC. The computer also displayed the power consumption of individual appliances. "We wanted to see if the installation of such a system would have an influence on the energy saving awareness of the householders," says Ueno Tsuyoshi, who led the project. And as they had hoped, residents quickly became accustomed to checking on their consumption and regulating their energy use accordingly. "New Scientist
Portable network-dependant devices
NEC introduces “PC Parafield” hard disk-less notebook. "NEC has announced what they claim is the world’s first commercial hard drive-less laptop, the 12.1-inch (1024 x 768), 1.73 GHz “PC Parafield.” Targeted almost exclusively at corporate customers, the Parafield aims to combine the security of network-dependant thin-client systems with the flexibility of regular notebooks by including 3GB of flash ROM for Windows XP Pro and application storage along with 512MB of RAM. This 2.8-pound road warrior’s delight can be had immediately (in Japan, that is) for $3742."
Engadget
Quantum computing
Flying Cars Can't Be Far Behind. "Austrian scientists have created the world’s first quantum byte! Yes, you read right. The byte, which is comprised of 8 calcium ions, is said to be a first step to creating the elusive quantum computer, a sort of holy grail in computing. These quantum computers are supposed to solve a litany of computer problems in addition to being, you know, really fast. (They’re quantum!) "
Gizmodo
e-paper in general use
E-Paper Bendie Watch From Seiko. "The braclet-wristwatch features a thin, bendable e-paper trimmed in stainless steel which makes it a high-tech accessory without the geeky look. A black-and-white pattern of stripes on the watch changes every hour.”"
Gizmodo
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
Digital gemes the use physical objects
Neon Racer. "Neon Racer is a multi-user Augmented Reality racing game on an AR tabletop setting. The game displays only the players’ racing vehicles and the checkpoints. The active setting for the game is provided by the physical world, and all its parts can influence gameplay. Physical objects act as collision obstacles and influence the course of the race itself. Participants have to interact with both the virtual and real objects to succeed."
we make money not art
Visual representations of energy use
Power-aware devices. "The Interactive Institute has unveiled new STATIC! prototypes that explore how everyday products might be designed to better express – and stimulate reflection on – energy use. Power-Aware Cord displays the energy consumption of the appliances that are connected to it. The blue light in the cord displays the intensity relative to the watts. In a primary stage, the cord can be used as an experimental tool to examine household products and in the long run it turns into an ambient display of everyday energy consumption. The cord has been patentent and they are now looking to take it into production."
we make money not art
December 05, 2005
Moving teens on
What's the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don't Want to Hear It. "The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Mr. Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away. "
New York Times
Smart UI for small screens
Nokia defines The Mobile Web. " Nokia's new browser sets a high bar for the mobile web with an astonishingly smart use of the zoom and fish eye UIs. These screenshots demonstrate what Nokia accomplished through cooperation with Apple and using WebCore and JavascriptCore components which form the basis of Apple's Safari browser. First here's the zoom UI example."
mobile jones
Tagging and finding anything
Loc8tor lojacks your life. "Lost your keys or wallet again? Tag them to work with the Loc8tor, and the radar-like device will track them down in no time, within a 500-foot range. Tags can even be attached to children and pets, in case you’re too lazy to give a yell or check their known hiding places. "
Engadget
Recognizing humans
Cyclops cam can distinguish between humans and blow-up dolls. "In an effort to thwart drivers from using mannequins and blow-up dolls to pay cheaper fares when crossing the UK’s Forth Road Bridge, officials are testing a new system that can detect the number of passengers in a car from up to 160-feet away. The Cyclops is based on technology developed at Loughborough University, and employs the fact that human skin contains a unique and measurable amount of water. In field tests the infrared Cyclops camera was able to measure vehicle occupancy with 95% accuracy, compared to 65% for human observers."
Engadget
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
Self analysing car
Cars to predict their own breakdown. "The researchers' test car sat on top of an automatic shaker that simulates the bumps and jolts of a car ride. They attached sensors that measure vibrations to the bottom of the car's strut, steering knuckle-control arm connection, and at other places within the suspension. Then they introduced "damage" into the system by loosening a bolt that connects the steering knuckle to the control arm. The vibration data was analysed by a software that identified the damage and quantified it. The vibrations are almost like human heartbeats, in that a specialist can detect what sounds healthy or not. Any change can be used to determine which part is not working properly, as well as revealing the extent of the damage. In two to three years, Adams believes the technology could be integrated into a car's design."
we make money not art
Bionics
The Cyberhand bionic hand feels and flexes. "The bionic hand not only has individually functioning digits, including an opposing thumb for the multitude of actions that require one, but those fingers should be able to feel, yet still only take a relatively small number of nerves to control. It works in much the same way as a real hand; by using synthetic tendons that run through each finger, the artificial hand only needs 6 motors to control motion. So far they’ve created a touch sensitive prototype, and now it looks like their next task is to attach the hand and fire it up. Though what’s really got us excited is the wireless communication between the nerve endings and the hand, opening up a whole realm of possibilities for hot-swapping arm attachments."
Engadget
Vein recognition
Hitachi Vein-Recognition Laptop. "The FLORA Se210 Finger Vein-Recognition Internal Equipment model, a recent addition to its notebook line, features a security measure that recognizes the specific veins in somebody’s finger. This, they believe, is harder to falsify than a thumbprint. Using a finger vein recognition pattern to verify the owner’s ID, the pattern is read by an LED sensor that diffuses light through the veins of the user’s finger. The user’s vein pattern is stored on a “KeyMobile’ USB key—in order to verify that person’s ID, the vein pattern on the USB key must match what is being read in the sensor."
Gizmodo
Better mind control
Walking from Thoughts: Not the Muscles Are Crucial, but the Brain Waves!. "Researchers from Graz University of Technology in Austria, University College of London in England, Guger Technologies OEG in Austria and the University of Graz in Austria have expanded the amount of control available via external electrodes with a means of detecting changes in brain signals when users imagine moving their feet and translating the effect into walking motion within a virtual reality environment."
networked_performance
Tag management
Tags Sort Out Music Mess. "Tags that are complete and well-organized make it possible to find the perfect song to fit the mood of your intimate dinner party or Dionysian rager. Anything short of that and your guests will long have departed by the time you've located the tune. Soon enough, my hobby as a music collector morphed into one of a librarian. Fixing faulty tags requires what's known as a tag editor. One of my favorites is MP3 Tag Studio, a free program with many powerful features. The application allows you to select an unlimited number of MP3 files and manipulate them in any number of ways."Wired News
Blogging while travelling
Wishyouwerehere.com: Blogs From the Road. ""My friends and family would write e-mails back commenting on my adventures," said Mr. Watters, who was interviewed by e-mail from an Internet cafe in Koh Samui, Thailand. "Like two-way electronic postcards, but with as many images as I could post and no limit on the amount of words - plus no two-week wait." That was the beginning of TravelBlog.org, a site that is host to travel journals, allows users to post text and photos and even offers maps that show where users are writing from and where they have been. TravelBlog is one of numerous sites that offer - many at no charge - travelers the ability to share a journal of their journeys and allows readers to leave comments. "
New York Times
Encouraging remixing of content
Washington Post asks readers to remix it. "The Washington Post has created a blog for highlighting mash-ups of Post content. Current remixes include: a news keyword cloud viewer, a world map interface to Post stories, and a dynamic news quiz. Although a bit skimpy on implementation details (or implementations, for that matter), the idea's surprisingly hip."Boing Boing
Better iris recognition
Foolproof iris recognition technology?. "For almost twenty years, the iris recognition research field has been hampered because of a broad patent covering it. As this patent recently expired, many teams around the world are again working on new technologies in this field. Iris recognition is in fact seen as the most accurate biometric recognition technology because no two irises are identical. And researchers at the University of Bath in England have developed new computer algorithms which are 100 per cent accurate in initial trials. Now the researchers are putting online a database of 16,000 iris images collected mainly from students. The source code is also available if you want to further improve the algorithms. Read more for other details and references."
Primidi
Virtual phone pets
Trident: Tamagotchi meets Barcode Battler?"Earlier this month, Preamble Corp. released Trident, a virtual pet game for camera phones. . Players feed their virtual pets by scanning QR codes. Then, in "battle mode," the pets fight with each other. In order to win a battle, players should feed thier pets the right food (or QR code) and thereby raising/strenghening the pets and collecting key items. For example, if a fight can last long, you may want to feed lots of good food before the fight. "
RFID in Japan
November 30, 2005
Simple play
The sitting computer game. "Their midi-sofa allows you to interact with the game on the screen in front of you. You control the movement of your avatar by changing the seating position on the sofa, bouncing on it or pressing harder the back of the furniture. The more physical action used the faster the ball gets. Both, the "strategy of power" and the "strategy of minimal movement" lead to success. More images."
we make money not art
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
Holographic storage
Holographic-memory discs may put DVDs to shame. "A computer disc about the size of a DVD that can hold 60 times more data is set to go on sale in 2006. The disc stores information through the interference of light – a technique known as holographic memory. The discs, developed by InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, US, hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD. The company, along with Japanese partner Hitachi Maxell announced earlier in November that they would start selling the discs and compatible drives from the end of 2006. "Unlike other technologies, that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light," says Liz Murphy, of InPhase Technologies. "This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices." "
New Scientist
Home network management
The brain for your intelligent home. "Every self respecting technophile has probably been eyeing up what’s available in home automation, home security and home entertainment systems, but each comes with an array of microprocessor-controlled functions and a network. The aim should be to have one network and the SecureGen HTVR offers the chance to combine all three of those networks with one unit – the brain of your intelligent home. "
gizmag
Organic digital devices
Living camera uses bacteria to capture 100 megapixel photos. "Apparently they have modified E. Coli bacteria to act as together as a de facto photosensitive sensor and produce astounding 100 megapixel-per-square-inch monochrome images. Before you get too excited, besides only being capable of black-and-white photography, this living camera needs four hours to take a photo and only works in red light."
Engadget
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
Digitizing everything
The automatic book scanner is here. "As the technology to automatically scan and digitize books is put to work it will multiply the speed at which libraries can put collections online. The vision of all the books ever written being accessible globally is made manifestly more realistic by the automatic scanner. Kirtas introduces its scanner here with an video of the process. Kirtas says the machine “automates the scanning of bound documents at a capture rate of 1200 pages per hour, while using a page turning process that is more gentle than the human hand.""
Smart Mobs
Technology black boxes
Black Box to avoid software crashes. "Identify’s AppSite Black Box does what it says. It works just like a black box flight recorder in an aircraft. The information that can be stored is configurable but it can include external events such as keyboard presses and mouse movements, as well as the synchronised source code statements that are being executed. You can configure internal events within Black Box that can direct the recording"The Register
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
Ad exposure
Glasses track eye movement, ad exposure. "Analysis showed that during a 45-minute journey, the journalist had been exposed to more than 130 different advertising "elements" showcasing more than 80 brands. He was "looking" at adverts for 29 minutes but couldn't recall a single brand without prompting. When prompted, it emerged that just over half of the adverts had made an impression, those for products he was interested in and to which he was exposed for more than 10 seconds."
we make money not art
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
Fashion and data
Readable. "The bracelets "Kontinuum" and "Ver䮤erung" (change) take the wearer's heartbeat as a reference and convert it into light that either pulsates or glows in different colors, thus displaying some information about the assumed state of the person. The bracelet "Endlichkeit" (finiteness) features a countdown to your last heartbeat, based on the calculation that an average male person's heart has beaten 2.3 billion times at the end of his life. Similar to Life Counter (Via Designboom) by Ippei Matsumoto, both projects having a certain memento mori notion of communication towards the user."
we make money not art
Haptic feedback in small devices
Does yours vibrate when touched?. "Sony is starting to ship samples of their new tactile input device called Touch Engine Module, which can be used to make touch panels, etc. vibrate in responce to a touch. Touch Engine uses piezoelectric vibrators that can be operated using a low voltage electric power source. Therefore, it could be easily integrated with mobile devices such as digital still cameras, PDAs, etc. "
we make money not art
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
Small, powerful projectors
A movie projector in a cell phone?. "The reduction in size comes from a technique invented by Upstream for channeling the light from LEDs to a display in thousands of small beams. Light, whether from a candle or an LED, naturally shines in every direction. Upstream has built a complex micro-optical system that collects that light close to the source and sends a huge proportion of it to an intended target. The so-called "photon vacuum" optical system surrounds the LED like a shell. As a result, a tiny optical package can provide roughly the same level of illumination efficiency that larger systems can. "
CNET News.com
Auto karaoke
Download of the Day: EvilLyrics. "EvilLyrics is a free lyrics fetching program designed for use with most popular music players (iTunes, Winamp, WMP, etc.). In addition to displaying lyrics of the song currently playing (which it handles with aplomb), EvilLyrics also has a cool karaoke mode that highlights lyrics line-by-line. If karaoke isn’t available for your song, it’s easy to create your own karaoke "
Lifehacker
Blurring inappropriate images
PixAlert Foils Office Porn Surfing. "Using high-speed image analysis software to scan images, the most recent version of PixAlert Monitor will now blur any image it considers inappropriate or illegal, as it comes up on the screen. So, instead of just trying to block these images from your screen, PixAlert lets you get them, just pretty much unwatchable. And if you do try to get some of this stuff up (again we know YOU wouldn’t, but there are some pervs out there!), a thumbnail copy is made and sent to the central server, which is the brains of the system."
Gizmodo
Projecting on to real objects
Fishbowl Pixile. "A Pixile is a projection onto spherical objects suspended in space. The projection consists of a realtime 3D environment which mimics the shape and size of the objects it is projecting onto. The result is a holographic illusion. You can play with the pixile using a mouse, clicking and dragging objects as if they existed in real life. For the fishbowl Pixile, a fish bowl shape is projected onto 3 spheres, creating a virtual opening on the physical sphere. The user can rotate the individual bowls around in all directions. Small physics based cubes are placed inside the bowls and the user is able to pour the cubes from one bowl into the other. The cubes start off as primary colours once they are mixed with other coloured cubes they are averaged out to form a new mixed shade."
we make money not art
Customization on a smartcard
Smart card to open up computing. "The Special Needs Application Program Interface, or Snapi, puts a user's preferences on a smart card. The cards can be used in cash dispensers, ticket machines and public access computers. Once a Snapi card is removed, the machine automatically returns to its default settings. "
BBC NEWS
Hotels setting home trends
In 'smart' hotel rooms, everything is just right. "At the Mandarin and other high-end hotels, new computer systems which connect individual rooms to network servers can now keep track of guests' preferences and change the room conditions automatically. These "smart" systems can learn whether a frequent guest likes the lights dimmed, the curtains closed or the room toasty warm. They can also personalize the electronics in the room so that the music of John Coltrane, for instance, greets jazz buffs when they enter their rooms. Meanwhile, sensors in refrigerators alert maids when the minibar is running low on Coca-Cola. While much of the underlying technology is not new, it is still rare in private homes because the cost of the equipment is relatively expensive. As a consequence, luxury hotels are the first to embrace it.
International Herald Tribune
DVRs not a threat
TV networks say digital recorders raise viewership. "Far from being the TV doomsday machines that some have predicted, digital video recorders that allow viewers to skip advertising and watch shows at their leisure will actually boost television audiences, the major networks said on Wednesday. That was the principal finding in a report issued by the six major networks -- CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, the WB and UPN -- that sought to allay concerns in the media industry that DVRs will undermine the commercial value of broadcast television."
Reuters.com
November 23, 2005
Better text editing with the browser
Turn Firefox into a web writer. "If you use web-based e-mail like Gmail, or if you post to forums or write a blog, you’re using a “browser” to author documents as well as browse them. A plain, tiny web page textarea is not very conducive to writing. If you spend a lot of time writing the web with Firefox, soup up your “browser” with a few extensions that will turn it into a powerful text editor."
Lifehacker
Picking a voice for your GPS
Mr. T wants you to use GPS “navtones,” fool. "If you want your directions to be delivered with attitude, why not have Mr. T show you the way? Or, for that “Easy Rider” experience, let Dennis Hopper rev you up. The two are just some of the celebrities whose voices are being digitized as downloadable “navtones” for use with GPS systems."
Engadget
Dual-mode input devices
Synaptics Dual Mode Touchpad adds media controls. "In normal mode it works just like any other touchpad, but flick a switch, and the pad is illuminated with a series of blue LEDs indicating media functions, which can be accessed with a tap. These include a volume control, fast forward and rewind controls, and application launchers."
Engadget
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
Electronics for kids
High-tech child's play. "The real economic trend behind changing tastes for toys, market analysts say, is the precipitous decline in the price of electronics. Low-cost technology has turned items that once cost hundreds of dollars a few years ago into kids' stuff. For example, Hasbro's VCam Now gives kids a digital video camera experience for $79. So whereas toys have always imitated grown-up items, low prices have led to the creation of fully-functioning, lower-quality replicas of adult electronics. Sean McGowan, a toy market analyst for Harris Nesbitt, calls the phenomenon "the juvenilization of electronics.""
csmonitor.com
November 22, 2005
Sharing map information
Map your travels with Wayfaring. "We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other."
Lifehacker
Recommendation lists
Yahoo! Shoposphere - Yahoo! Shopping. "Pick Lists let you share the stuff you love and the stuff that matters to you with everyone or your friends... on the Shoposphere, throughout Yahoo! Shopping, by email, and even through RSS feeds. Make a good one and it could even show up as one of the most helpful Pick Lists on the Shoposphere."
Automatically capturing significant events
StartleCam. "Attention and memory are highly correlated with what psychologists call arousal level, and the latter is often signaled by skin conductivity changes; consequently, StartleCam monitors the wearer's skin conductivity. StartleCam looks for patterns indicative of a ``startle response'' in the skin conductivity signal. When this response is detected, a buffer of digital images, recently captured by the wearer's digital camera, is downloaded and optionally transmitted wirelessly to a webserver. This selective storage of digital images creates a ``flashbulb'' memory archive for the wearable which aims to mimic the wearer's own selective memory response. "
networked_performance
Vector drawing on maps
VGMap. "VGMap is a new library created by Eyebeam R&D that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. It is called VGMap because it adds vector-drawing capability to the already-awesome GMap API. [...] This VGMap library is simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly."
networked_performance
Maintstream tagging
Amazon Tags. "Amazon is integrating user tagging into product pages (see image below). Tags are public by default and can be managed under a “your tags” area that I am failing to find. You must first select a “Real Name” (odd choice of names given the old company called RealNames). Once you’ve signed up and started adding tags, you can delete them or make them private in the management area."
TechCrunch
Urban technology gaming
Shoot me if you can. "Replace a gun with fun, and shoot the opposing team with a cellular phone equipped with a digital camera. Participants; shooters are given a team color and phone number printed on the sticker. Shooters have to take a picture of the opposing team. If successful, she/he sends the picture to the opponent team member, via multimedia SMS system. Different rules exist for variations in game. Tactics are an important part as well as team work and understanding of the urban environment."
networked_performance
Better virtual reality
The VirtuSphere: full body immersion Virtual reality at last. "The VirtuSphere is a large hollow sphere that sits atop of a base of rollers enabling the sphere to rotate 360 degrees. Wearing a wireless, head-mounted display, users can walk, jump, roll, crawl and run in any direction over unlimited distances without encountering real-world physical obstacles. The Virtisphere is a fundamental step forward for the entire science as it offers six degrees of freedom. "
gizmag