March 22, 2006
Lightweight businesses
Going Bedouin. "Going Bedouin is a term that is being buzzed in Silicon Valley that describes the format of low-cost, highly mobile set of companies leading the Web 2.0 revolution. Greg Olsen says: "The goal of "going Bedouin" is to create a low inertia business that takes less capital to get started and that can react with greater agility to changing conditions....Given peoples' experience with telecommuting and distributed team projects from the open source community, a neo-Bedouin approach is not as hard to envision as it once may have been."PSFK
March 17, 2006
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
Sharing your tastes
Lib.rario.us media bookmarking. "Bookmark, review, tag and share your books, music, DVD’s and games with automatically-supplied cover images and links to Amazon. RSS feeds are available by user and media type, and it looks like an item discussion feature is in the works."
Lifehacker
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
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
Growth in online-only colleges
Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress. "It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid. That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones."
New York Times
Work for people with disabilities
Computer Technology Opens a World of Work to Disabled People. "Steven Singley, 41, who is quadriplegic as a result of a car accident 20 years ago, has a special setup that helps him take calls for Office Depot from his home in Centerville, Utah. His right arm, which has limited movement, is strapped to the armrest of his wheelchair, allowing his hand to pivot on a trackball and his pinky knuckle to tap a clicker. A splint with a rubber tip is hooked to his palm so he can type on a keyboard sitting on his lap. "You would think that typing one key at a time would be slow, but I can type 25 words per minute accurately," Mr. Singley said. He puts in 20 to 24 hours a week, requiring extended breaks so his girlfriend can give him his medication and prepare him for his meals."
New York Times
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
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
Mixing digital brands
Sony Ericsson puts Cybershot brand on photo phones. "Sony Ericsson unveiled six new mobile phones on Tuesday and said that two of them have cameras good enough to carry Sony's Cyber-shot digital camera brand. It is the second brand transfer by Japanese consumer electronics parent Sony to its mobile phone joint venture with Sweden's Ericsson. A year ago Sony Ericsson, the world's number five handset maker, adopted the Walkman brand for its music phones."Reuters.com
Shops as art galleries
The curated shopping experience is an antidote to big-box blues.. "Curated shopping--the concept of offering a selection of products as carefully edited as a museum collection--has become a retail buzzword in recent years (see "Shopping Etc.," March 2005). Colette, in Paris, and Moss, in New York, helped pioneer the concept, and both still set the standard for others. Now every major North American city seems to have at least one independently owned store with a decidedly unique approach to shopping."
Metropolis Magazine
March 16, 2006
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
Cheap, massively multiplayer games
MMO startup making waves in game world. "Hollywood producers are taking notice of Multiverse, a startup that makes a massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game possible for a tiny fraction of what they typically cost."
Reuters.com
Knowing where stuff is in a hospital
Big Brother at the Hospital. "Cool little system for hospitals. Ekahau, Inc. has already created some sort of “panic button” to contact hospital staff at a moment’s notice. Now they have location-aware IV pumps. If you’ve ever watched nurses and doctors shuffling gear back and forth between rooms, you’ll realize how important this is. When the wife was in for the wee one, orderlies kept coming in to pull out chairs, bedpans, and all kinds of junk that they needed in other rooms. This system uses Wi-Fi to create a network of items that can be found in real-time and real-space."
Gizmodo
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
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
Viewing and publishing TV from your desktop
Democracy: a new platform for making and seeing TV on the net. "Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS (so you can pull a "channel" of programming), BitTorrent (so you can download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can watch video no matter how it's encoded). Combine that with Broadcast Machine, a simple tool for publishing channels of video, and Videobomb, a social video service a little like Digg or delicious, and you've got a tremendously exciting development in democratic access to media."
Boing Boing
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
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
Publishing blog content
BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. "BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication. Blogs that apply and are accepted are categorized (TechCrunch would be “science and technology”. BlogBurst editors choose great content from those blogs for republication"
TechCrunch
Automated book scanning
ATIZ BookDrive: The World's First Portable Automatic Book Scanner. "The ATIZ BookDrive is the world's only scanner featuring a page turning mechanism to digitize a whole book completely automatically. Art Sarasin, President of ATIZ, tells us that there are only two other fully automatic book digitizers, which use cameras (Kirtas and 4Digitalbooks), but these are huge machines. I guess Google and Amazon are using those for their book ripping ventures. "
I4U News
What's a blog?
That Which We Call a Blog... . ""The State of the Blogosphere" presented at sifry.com this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog search site, shows just how complicated things have become. According to Mr. Sifry's data, mainstream media sites, as measured by the number of blogs linking to them, are trouncing news-oriented blogs by a growing margin. Bloggers link to The New York Times Web site about three times as often as they link to the technology-oriented Boingboing.net. Only four blogs show up in the top 33 sites."
New York Times
March 02, 2006
Self-publishing your music
Singing Beyond The Shower. "First, the Digital Revolution gave us inexpensive recording gear and easy-to-use software, helping amateur musicians record professional-sounding works. Now, the Internet has democratized how music is distributed and even sold. Leading the charge are social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, and FaceBook, which have built communities around music and other shared interests. Members appreciate recommendations from friends on the sites, notes Rishon Blumberg, a partner at Brick Wall Management, a traditional music company that handles Marc Broussard, Citizen Cope, and other artists. "Putting an artist on MySpace is like opening a store in a heavily trafficked shopping mall," he says. Here are some of the best places to get your own music heard."
Business Week
Searching for code
Here Comes a Google for Coders. "Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the "technical web" -- high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google's index covers about 11 billion pages.) "This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world," said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March."
Wired News
Online chat place
37 Signals Launches Campfire. "Campfire, the new 37 Signals product, launched yesterday. It is a dead simple way to create a robust, permanent (with URL) group chat. Key features include embedded images, permanent URL for chat, no client to download (chat is in the web page), and easy file sharing. I’m basically thinking of it as a real time wiki or an easy to use IRC product with enhanced features. They claim it takes 10 seconds to create a new chat, and they are correct. It is dead simple to use and has an incredibly intuitive interface."
TechCrunch
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
The end of monolithic releases?
The Big Release is Dead - Continual Development is King. "It used to be that developers and publishers could slave away on a piece of software for a year or two and push it out the door, take a little vacation, and start working on the next big release. Of course, the Internet has made it easy for us to get software, but the ramifications of this haven't been fully realized by everyone in the software-making world. It's not about a new way to buy those Big Releases, it's about freedom from them. In a world where software updates are just a few clicks away and a few minutes' wait, making people excited about your product means promising continual development."
Extreme Tech
Cross-promoting blogs
Blog Ad Exchange at Rojo. "FeedShare is a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other. As a blogger participant you give exposure on your site to other blogs in the network, and in return your blog will be promoted on similar sites in the network. You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see examples) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers."
TechCrunch
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
Quick online app creation
Build your own social web app with Ning. "Browse the social apps on Ning. No sign in required. When you see an app you like, you can make it your own in a few easy steps. Follow the Clone this App button to clone and customize your app. It’s that easy. You now have your very own social app! We host it, secure it, promote it, add new features, and manage accounts."
Lifehacker
Sales motivation through games and blogs
Improving sales performance at Prentice-Hall with sales simulations, blogs and podcasts. "Companies that are serious about developing a customer focused field organization, like Prentice-Hall, are starting to rethink learning. The prevailing instructional dogma rooted in a 1,000 year-old academic tradition is giving way to a next-generation blended learning approach that takes full advantage of the power and cost-efficiency of new electronic technologies. Sales training is no longer about watching, reading and listening, but about doing, simulating, socializing, sharing and collaborating. The maturation of a new wave of online applications and tools, such as blogs, podcasts, online gaming, and wireless and mobile technologies, is driving ever-greater levels of sales and service productivity."The Intuitive Life Business Blog
Free books (with advertising)
Ad-supported books arrive at last. "The book is divided up into small sections of only a page or two, and each section is displayed on a web page with a Yahoo contextual ad on the left side. There are no weird Javscript tricks to prevent you from copying text, and the snippets are not so short as to be utterly infuriating. All told, it looks like a pretty decent (if non-slick) implementation. The site does have a few drawbacks: the text of the book is searchable, and there is an index, but it isn't clickable. Also, in what seems a bizarre oversight, there appears to be no simple way to return to the table of contents from any given page. HarperCollins is watching this trial closely to see whether releasing ad-supported books makes business sense. As it stands now, the plan seems to be to release a book in "windows" (much like the movie business). Judson's hardcover was released in 2004, the paperback in 2005, and the free version in 2006. The publishing business wants to maintain this sort of control over their product, which explains why they (and the Author's Guild) are currently suing Google over Google's plans to index the content of copyrighted books."Ars Technica
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
Easy reading
TENBot - Automated RSS to TEN Conversion. "The Electronic Newsletter (TEN) standard developed by Headstar is emerging as a common and useful format to make email based newsletters more accessible to visually impaired users. TENBot is a hosted service that allows web site owners to provide their RSS feeds in the TEN format for use by blind and visually users."
Daden Limited
Real versions of virtual stores
The temporary physical Virtual Store. "A spectacular initiative from American department store retailing institution J. C. Penney yesterday might cause everybody to rethink how e-commerce and the future of retailing might unfold though. The company will construct a 15, 000-square-foot physical manifestation of the virtual store at One Times Square on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, New York. In our humble opinion, the opening of this temporary virtual store from March 3-26, in which shoppers can purchase the company's full range of merchandise at interactive kiosks, marks a significant development in the history of retail. We believe that traveling virtual superstores could be a part of retailing’s future."
gizmag
Streaming movies
As an Alternative to a Trip to a Video Store, Movies Through a Set-Top Box. "MovieBeam is built around a technology that broadcasts movies slowly over unused portions of the television signals to set-top boxes that store them on a hard disk. Users will have a choice of 100 movies — mainly those that have been recently released on DVD's — with 10 new titles replacing old ones each week. Consumers will buy the MovieBeam box for $250 from electronics stores. They can send for a $50 rebate, but must also pay a $30 activation fee, making the effective upfront cost $230. The service does not charge a monthly fee, but movies cost $3.99 each for current titles and $1.99 for older ones."
New York Times
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
Games in episode format
Half-Life 2 turning to episodic installments. "What does it mean to say that Half-Life 2 is turning episodic? While Valve has given no details, a few things can be easily surmised. First, episodic content means more frequent content, but less of it in each installment. That much is obvious. But how much, and for what? SiN Episodes, another episodic title coming soon, is expected to sell for $20-$25, and feature at least 6 hours of game play. While none of this is official, it is also believed that there will be new episodes every 9-12 months, hence the term "episodic." Half-Life 2 may be heading in the same direction."Ars Technica
February 24, 2006
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
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
Phone banking
Buying, paying bills and transfering money with your mobile phone. "Motorola has announced M-Wallet a new solution for mobile phone users that will enable paying bills, transferring money or making a purchase at a retail. M-Wallet features an easy-to-use mobile interface that gives the consumer wireless secure access to financial services -- eliminating the need to carry a credit or debit card in your wallet."
gizmag
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
February 21, 2006
Podcasting job information
Podcasts reach Peruvian villages. "In Chanta Alta, the podcasts concentrate on cattle-raising husbandry and on dairy production. In nearby Chilete, podcasts are being used to give tips to farmers who have no experience of growing grapes."
BBC NEWS
Podcasting medical procedures
Podcast From the Heart. "Wheatley, a cardiovascular surgeon at the Arizona Heart Institute in Phoenix, recently launched a podcasting series to educate patients he believes is among the first of its kind. He has produced podcasts, from two minutes to an hour long and contain video and audio content, that keep clinic visitors informed about the procedures they'll undergo and brief them on ways to lead a healthy lifestyle afterward."Wired News
Books suffer more then magazines
Web Readers Hit the Books Less Frequently. "Internet users are more likely to cut back on reading books than to curtail their magazine consumption, according to a recently released survey by Jupiter Research. The finding contradicts the long-held assumption that periodicals are more vulnerable than books to competition from the Internet."
New York Times
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
Paying for e-mail delivery
Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail. "Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely."
New York Times
February 16, 2006
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
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
Old "new technology" finally dies
Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams. "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."
Smart Mobs
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
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
Online storage services
The Online Storage Gang. "The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features - effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well."
TechCrunch
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
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
February 13, 2006
VOIP party line
RadioHandi(TM) Beta - The Party Line for Planet Earth. "Welcome to RadioHandi, the party line for Planet Earth. This breakthrough service, built from the ground up around open standards telephony and instant messaging technology, will enable people around the world to create voice communities about any subject, location or peer group, all for the cost of a local phone call. With it, people can post messages and engage in live group conversations with people calling in from fixed, mobile and VoIP phones from around the world."
RadioHandi
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
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
February 10, 2006
Users dealing with DRM
The Year of Living DRMishly. "This year may be the year that gadget makers finally conquer the living room, replacing DVD players, VCRs and personal video recorders with all-in-one media devices that serve up HDTV, pre-recorded movies and digital music. If so, it will likely also be the year that people learn the meaning of DRM, an acronym the industry says stands for digital rights management, but critics say should stand for digital restrictions mongering."Wired News
Getting access to a book before it's finished
Roughcuts: Read tech books as they're being written. "'Reilly and Associates, my all-time favorite tech-book publisher, has just launched Roughcuts, a service that sells you access to tech books as they are being written; once the book is done, you get a copy of it, too. This is an amazing idea: many of O'Reilly's books cover brand-new technical ideas for which little or no documentation exists; putting even rough editions of their material into readers' hands while it's being finalized is a brilliant way to extend and increase the value of O'Reilly's titles."
Boing Boing
Printed codes that can "store" megabytes
New 3D Barcode able to Store Videos for Mobile Devices. "Content Idea of Asia Co. has developed a printable 3D code that can store between 0.6 to 1.8 MB, enough for watching short video commercials on mobile phones. The 3D code is based on the 2D QR Code [...]. Content Idea of Asia Co. calls it PM Code. The PM code consists of up to 24 layers using different colors. A usage example is for instance to watch a commercial on a mobile phone scanned from a perfume ad in a magazine. "
I4U News
February 09, 2006
The Millennial Generation
A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target. "The eldest of the millennials, as those born between 1980 and 2000 are sometimes called, are now in their early to mid-20's. By 2010, they will outnumber both baby boomers and Gen-X'ers among those 18 to 49 - the crucial consumers for all kinds of businesses, from automakers and clothing companies to Hollywood, record labels and the news media. The number of vehicles through which young people find entertainment and information (and one another) makes them a moving target for anyone hoping to capture their attention."
New York Times
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
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
Cellphone becoming your music player
Yamaha's Mobile Phone Stereo System. "Chaku-uta furu (“receive music full”)—mobile phones in Japan are used for playing real music and have become a competitor to the iPod and its ilk. Yamaha is capitalizing on this trend with a compact speaker system (NX-A01) and a Bluetooth receiver unit (TRX-RO1BT) in cooperation with the mobile phone provider au. This cubic form speaker is white (3.3x 4.6x 3.3 in.) and the wireless receiver is black (1.7x 1.8x 1.7 in.) and together they give you decent sound quality from a mobile phone."
Gizmodo
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
Digital book clubs
Book Clubs Get the Message by Reading Online. "E-mail book clubs are part of the nightmare scenario that book publishers envisioned starting five years ago, when major universities and other interests began making entire books available on the Internet."EWeek
Participatory film making
This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans. "as the Beastie Boys set out to commemorate a concert at Madison Square Garden, the hip-hop group had a different idea. Why not smash the model? They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory. The result of this brainstorm is "Awesome ... ,"
New York Times
February 07, 2006
P2P Tivo
Download of the Day: Ted. "Ted (torrent episode downloader) keeps track of torrents of your favorite TV shows and automatically downloads them for you whenever a new episode is available. When ted finds a new episode, it will announce this to you by a little balloon in your system tray. Then ted will fire up your favourite bittorrent client and your client will start downloading the episode."
Lifehacker
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
All that matters is the feed
FeedXS - RSS for Everyone. "The idea is to allow anyone to publish an RSS feed. Skip the blog. Go right to a feed, perhaps as a replacement to email to distribute personal news about yourself. The company feed is here, for instance. It’s more of an administrative interface and the content is designed to be read via the actual feed only. The publishing interface has a few formatting helpers but is in need of an overhaul. But there is something really unique here - you can publish directly from MSN messenger. Once you are registered on the site you simply add “msn@feedxs.com” as a contact. You have to authenticate yourself (log in) the first time, and after that publishing is very easy."
TechCrunch
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
Peer patent reviews
The Peer to Patent Project Blog. "The Community Patent Project aims to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents. The Community Patent system will support a network of experts to advise the Patent Office on prior art as well as to assist with patentability determinations. By using social software, such as social reputation, collaborative filtering and information visualization tools, we can apply the “wisdom of the crowd” – or, more accurately the wisdom of the experts – to complex social and scientific problems. This could make it easier to protect the inventor’s investment while safeguarding the marketplace of ideas."Smart Mobs
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
February 06, 2006
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 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
Getting rid of reference material from papers
Papers Begin To Lose Financial Pages. "The Chicago Tribune has announced that it will stop printing its stock agate (or stock market pages) because its readers are going online for that information. There will still be a summary on Saturday and the 'top movers' will be reported daily."PSFK
Smart kitchens
The Kitchen of the Future. "You are at the office and decide to invite friends over for dinner that night. What's for dinner? Just pick up the phone and call home. Your kitchen can give you a heads up on what foods you have in the refrigerator and pantry, suggest menus that use some of those foods, and once you've selected the menu, it will supply a grocery list for other items you need to pick up. Use the same call to leave a message for your spouse to put some wine in the refrigerator to chill."
gizmag
February 02, 2006
In-context chat rooms
Let's Chatsum. "Chatsum is a Firefox extension that lets you chat and leave messages on any website for other Chatsum users to see and interact with. The Chatsum sidebar houses a fully-fledged chatroom, specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes automagically. If you open a page in a new tab, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re viewing."
we make money not art
Tag clouds for advertising
1000Tags - Another Stupid, Brilliant Idea. "1000Tags is different enough from MillionDollarHomePage that I think it will have a lot of sucess, too. They call it “the first commercial tag cloud”. And that’s exactly what it it. You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result."
TechCrunch
Sharing and charging for video
Google Video store launches. "Looks like many episodes are priced at $1.99 and can be viewed with the Google Video Player. Now users who submitted videos via Google’s Upload program can charge viewers through the Video Store, and non-copy-protected content can be put on your iPod or PSP using the “to go” option."
Lifehacker
Exclusive video on phones
2006 when TV capitalizes on mobile phones. "Now in 2005 we've seen first signs of real innovations - you have to see MTV's Head and Shoulders to really "get it" - what we can do and what can really sell - on mobile TV. When Robbie Williams promoted his new CD, he had his concert simulcast to 3G phones. At the MTV Europe Awards the mobile MTV channel went back stage and shot exclusive footage that was only seen on mobile phones. At Big Brother houses around Europe it is now commonplace to have exclusive cameras - and latest innovation from Finland this Autumn, exclusive microphones - that viewers of the show can get more through their 3G phones."Communities Dominate Brands
Tracking cars with RFID
Smart License Plates. "The ministry started developing RFID-chipped license plates around the year 2000. They hope to alleviate traffic jam problems and increase security by tracking precise locations of vehicles using antennas installed at roadsides etc. This April, taxicabs in the city of Chiba will use smart license plates as part of a pilot test program. Lessons learned from this pilot test will be reported to a exploratory committee that will propose a plan for introducing smart license plates. This plan may be finalized by the summer of this year. "
RFID in Japan
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
Music downloads
Music downloads growing faster than reported. "The week between Christmas and New Year's saw a record-breaking 20 million songs downloaded through services like iTunes and Rhapsody (single tracks only, mind you, but more on that in a moment), which brought up the full-year totals to 352 million songs downloaded. That's a very healthy 149 percent increase over last year's 141 million. Meanwhile, CD sales huffed and puffed their way to 620 million units sold, down 7.2 percent from 666 million (no, really) in 2004."Ars Technica
February 01, 2006
Blogs as a shopping resource
Toshiba to Push Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers. "There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product. The data the service returns? From blogs. Yep, Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed."
TechCrunch
Business blogs
Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. "This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products. The navigation sidebar to the right lists all the Fortune 500 companies. If a company name has a solid underline, it means that some information has already been entered on it, perhaps discussing web efforts that don't seem to be proper blogs. If it's dashed, it means that it's a blank page awaiting your input!"Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
January 31, 2006
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
Sharing health records
Easily sharing medical information. "Because of a lack of integration between proprietary health information systems, it's not easy today to exchange medical data about patients even in a single medical institution. And it's obviously worse between different hospitals or different countries. But, according to IST Results, this healthcare interoperability problem is about to be solved by Artemis, a EU-funded project. This system is using Web services on top of existing standards to exchange messages and medical records. A prototype should be demonstrated next month in San Diego. Read more for additional details and references."Primidi
Game ads better then TV ads to get to teens
Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game. "Two main avenues are open for advertising through games: in-game advertising and advergaming. The former is an extension of the product placement common in movies and television, and can range from graphical representation of a product in a game to wholesale sponsorship of a gaming title. With the increase in open-ended gaming that allows a player to wander around a virtual world (such as the Sims or Grand Theft Auto), opportunities for product placement are numerous. Advergaming refers to a game, usually online, that is wholly intended as a promotional device."Boing Boing
Citizen journalism
Citizen Journalism In Africa. "One of the dubiously nice things about living in Africa is that you’re never short of a news story or two. This might explain why home grown journalism is taking off in a huge way. So much so that Johnnic, one of the largest local media groups (they publish the Sunday Times and Sowetan), are launching their own citizen written online newspaper www.reporter.co.za. The site, which launches next week from what I can gather, is edited by a fulltime editorial team and there is the added novelty that those with articles that get selected get paid… Not that anyone will be giving up their day jobs just yet as it is the equivalent of about 3 pound a story."
PSFK
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
Peer-to-peer file sharing built into the browser
AllPeers Is The FireFox “Killer App”. "AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files - If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive. AllPeers will work even when the sharer is offline - AllPeers is a bittorent client, and will allow files to be pulled from multiple sources. When downloading, the file may be grabbed partially or fully from others you have shared it with (or who shared it with you). So a user just clicks on a file, and waits for it to eventually download."
TechCrunch
Using the web to cut out the realtor
Owners' Web Site Gives Realtors Run for Money. "Ms. Miller, 38, a former social worker who favors fuzzy slippers, and her cousin, Mary Clare Murphy, 51, operate what real estate professionals believe to be the largest for-sale-by-owner Web site in the country. They have turned Madison, a city of 208,000 known for its liberal politics, into one of the most active for-sale-by-owner markets in the country. And their success suggests that, in challenging the Realtor association's dominance of home sales, they may have hit on a winning formula that has eluded many other upstarts. Their site, FsboMadison.com (pronounced FIZZ-boh) holds a nearly 20 percent share of the Dane County market for residential real estate listings. "
New York Times
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
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
DRM-less
Magnatune’s Answer to the Music Problem. "There are two key business model issues to note that make Magnatune different. The first is that Magnatude allows buyers to download music completely free of DRM and in the format [...] and quality of their choice (very similar to grey market allofmp3.com, but in this case with the artist’s express permission). [...] The second business model difference is how Magnatune treats its artists. They share a flat 50% of gross proceeds (before any costs) from music sales with artists. They also share 50% of merchandise sales profits, although they have not started selling merchandise yet."
TechCrunch
Politics and podcasting
The Podcast Shaking Up French Politics. "Not only is it the first-ever podcast by a French political leader, it also marks a startling break with customary etiquette, as Sarkozy and Le Meur address each other with the familiar "tu" rather than "vous" during their 30-minute meeting. "Bravo!" read many of the hundreds of viewer commentaries posted on Le Meur's blog over the past few days. Many are heralding the interview as a watershed event, showing that French politicians can no longer afford to ignore the growing importance of nontraditional media"Business Week
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
Free audiobooks
LibriVox Offers Free Audio Book Downloads. "LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project."
TechCrunch
Adding metadata to blog entries
Structured Blogging,The "Del.icio.us Lesson", Personal Datamining and The Knowledge Commons. "Structured blogging is an initiative to add structure to blog posts of similar content. For example, let’s say that I write a review of a piece of software on my Wordpress blog and someone else writes a review in their Movable Type blog. Not only are these two posts structured differently, with the blogging platforms writing different code, but each tool has customizable templates so that the blogger can write any code they want. So even though the content is nearly the same, the probability that the code in the end results looks anything similiar is very small."Smart Mobs
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
Connecting authors with readers
A Chance to Meet the Author Online. "Shoppers looking to pick up Meg Wolitzer's latest novel, "The Position," on Amazon.com last week found the usual readers' comments and excerpts from reviews. They also found something unexpected: posts on the subject of literature from Ms. Wolitzer herself. The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Video affiliation
Reuters video to get mass distribution. "International news agency Reuters is launching a pilot program on Tuesday that will allow blogs, news organizations and other online publishers to show Reuters news video on their Web sites. The video affiliate network program will enable Web site operators to place a video player on their Web site and show up to 20 of Reuters' breaking news stories from around the world that will be updated throughout each day"CNET News.com
January 25, 2006
Magazines everywhere
On-product magazines could change the media landscape. "The media mix is about to have a new and very viable form of print publishing – on-product magazines will hit the market for the first time in early 2006 and we suspect this innovation is capable of changing the world of print media as we know it."
gizmag
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
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
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
Mainstream cameraphone images
Cameraphone Picture makes Times Best Photos of the Year 2005. "Time Magazine have chosen Adam Stacey's cameraphone picture as one of the Best Photos of the Year 2005 - of his experience on the london underground during the attack in London on the 7th of July 2005."
Smart Mobs
January 24, 2006
Recently released movies on your phone
Italians Get Good Movies on Cellphones. "If you’ve got a 3G phone, the company will soon let you view first-run movies just 10 days after they’re released in theaters. Looks like Memoirs of a Geisha will be available on December 27th! Not bad. Of course, you’ll be paying $10.50 for this experience, so the next question would have to be: why not just go to the movies and see it on the big screen?"
Gizmodo
eReader tied to content
Tomorrow's paper will be digital. "Belgian daily De Tijd is to be distributed electronically in what is claimed to be the first complete solution for portable electronic reading and writing. Available from April 2006, the Iliad platform allows for customised versions of an electronic reader that can be created for special markets."
The Register
Get a cut if your webpage is in search results
Gravee Takes a New Approach to Search. "Gravee soft launched tonight. It has an interesting business model. In addition to pulling in search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo (Alexa coming soon), Gravee also allows publishers to claim their site and, theoretically, get a piece of Gravee’s revenue. With Gravee’s AdShare program, when a user clicks an ad on Gravee, up to 70% of the ad revenue generated as a result is divided between the 10 sites included in the natural search results on the page (i.e. 70%/10 = 7% of ad revenue to each Web site on the page - for every ad that is clicked). Register your site now to start collecting your share of Gravee’s ad revenue."
TechCrunch
Context-sensitive IM
ajchat - AJax Instant Messaging on the Fly. "...ajchat is an ajax instant messaging on the fly, that allows you to log in or type anonymously. It’s free. The ajchat blog is here. [...] There is also an option to share a chat directly on a webpage, and against my better judgement that is exactly what I am going to do here. If it works, it will appear below. This to me, is a compelling feature that starts to encroach on some of the stuff that Userplane is doing."
TechCrunch
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
Extending the wikipedia model
Yellowikis. "Welcome to Yellowikis - The first Open, Free and Global business listings directory. Our aim is to be the biggest, friendliest, most up to date, most predictable, least-discriminatory collection of basic business information in the world. Compiled, edited and checked by people like YOU! "
Yellowikis
One-person journalism
KRON-TV: everyone in the newsroom is a one-man-band.. "San Francisco's KRON recently became the first major-market TV station in the US to supply much of its newsoom staff with laptops and digital video cameras, then train them to shoot, write, and produce stories on their own. KRON calls them VJs. Others in the biz sometimes refer to the combo role as "sojo" (solo journalist) or "one-man-band," while a producer editor mashup is a "preditor.""
Boing Boing
January 20, 2006
Portable HDTV
Pixela's HDTV On the Go. "Apparently, the Japanese just can’t stop watching their awesome HDTVs, so much that they need to do it on the go. So in comes the H.264 Pocket TV by Pixela, released only in Japan. Yes, now you will be able to enjoy stunning HDTV-quality programming on the go in the form of a long candybar-esque pocket TV. The device not only does television, but also FM radio and music playback. You can enjoy your tunes with digital 5.1 as well, since this little TV offers it all."
Gizmodo
Finding out about the current page
Follow discussions about a webpage with Talk Digger. "Talk Digger helps users track conversations about a webpage. If you’d like to know who is talking about a news story or blog post and what they have to say about it, simply enter the URL of the page into Talk Digger."
Lifehacker
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
Software prediction
Neural network sorts the blockbusters from the flops. "Using data on 834 movies released between 1998 and 2002, Sharda found that the neural network can judge a film based on seven key parameters: the "star value" of the cast, the movie's age rating, the time of release against that of competitive movies, the film's genre, the degree of special effects used, whether it is a sequel or not, and the number of screens it is expected to open in. This allowed it to place a movie in one of nine categories, ranging from "flop" (total takings less than $1 million) to "blockbuster" (over $200 million)."New Scientist
January 18, 2006
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
Saving notes online
Web-based text files with Yahoo! Notepad. "Rarely-mentioned Yahoo! Notepad’s been around for ages, and it does everything Windows Notepad does, except that it saves files on the web associated with your Yahoo! ID. Now, lots of webapps save your info and make it accessible from anywhere, but Yahoo! Notepad’s nice because there is no prescribed data structure (the files are just plain text), and now there’s a slick new way to manage and edit your Notepad files without a web browser."
Lifehacker
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
January 16, 2006
Merging blogs and media
Boltfolio media sharing. "Clearly influenced by Flickr (and who hasn’t been), the neat thing about Boltfolio is that all your media types - photos, videos, audio and blog entries - are stored in one place. Surf everyone’s media by tag or search by keyword, make contacts, set your blog posts to public or private, and get RSS feeds of every media type by user."
Lifehacker
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
Hacking a search engine
Roll Your Own Google. "Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that is best known for its traffic rankings, on Monday unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform, a set of online tools for searching, indexing, computing, storing and publishing vast quantities of net data. [...] To illustrate the new service's potential, Alexa developed a photo search engine that allows users to query photo metadata normally hidden from standard keyword searches, such as the date the photo was taken or the camera used. Musipedia, another Alexa prototype, provides users with the ability to search the web by melody. Give the engine a keyword or melodic contour, and it returns similar music. Musipedia allows users to input their own whistling as a query."Wired News
Digital books
HarperCollins to begin digitizing books. "U.S. publisher HarperCollins said Monday that it plans to convert some 20,000 books in its catalog into digital form in a bid to rein in potential copyright violations on the Internet. Under the plan, HarperCollins will hold all the digital copies of its books in a digital warehouse and it will allow companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com to crawl the server to create an index, Murray said. This will allow Google and other search systems to offer what, in effect, amount to electronic card catalogs to help users locate the full work. "ZDnet
Keeping websites private
Secret sites. "someone asked their readers how many secret sites/blogs they maintained. That is, sites that no one knows you're the author of (written anonymously or with a nom de plume) or sites to which the general public does not have access. If I remember correctly, a large number of the respondents not only maintained a secret site, but had several. I have one secret blog, published under my own name, that only a small group of friends can read."kottke.org
Sending money by SMS
TextPayMe enables mobile-to-mobile fund transfers. "Still in beta, the PayPal-like service allows a debtor to sign up on the website, and once he/she has an account, send money to others via text messaging."
Engadget
Why turn up for class?
The advent of iPod U. "Taking the technology even further, UC Berkeley is currently beta testing a service that allows keyword searching of recordings, so it might be possible one day to not have to listen to a class you don't have to show up for. This could be one reason why Stanford University is taking a slightly more cautious approach to podcasting. Partnering with Apple to create Stanford on iTunes, the service provides a publicly accessible site which includes "Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and more." The access-restricted site provides "course-based materials" to students. "Some faculty are concerned with intellectual property. There are also faculty concerns about students [not] coming to class," said Victoria Szabo, Stanford's academic technology manager, in a telephone interview."Ars Technica
Stealing business models
NetFlix Type ''Borrow and Return'' Retail concept. "Internet-based Frombagstoriches is finding enormous success with the model of 'borrowing or renting' designer handbags. This designer emporium will let anyone borrow a purse by the week, month or longer and then exchange it for another, making it a NetFlix for handbag addicts."
gizmag
Self-deleting text messages
This SMS will self-destruct in 40 seconds. "StealthText is a new service in the UK that allows you to send messages that will be deleted from the recipient's cellphone after they've read it, to address that nagging problem of all your top-secret SMS messages falling into enemy hands."
Engadget
Video blogging
TV Stardom on $20 a Day. "Amanda Congdon is a big star on really small screens - like the 4?- inch window she appears in on computer monitors every weekday morning or the 2? inches she has to work with on the new video iPod. Ms. Congdon, you see, is the anchor of a daily, three-minute, mock TV news report shot on a camcorder, edited on a laptop and posted on a blog called Rocketboom, which now reaches more than 100,000 fans a day."
New York Times
Online office applications
Writely Is Kicking A**. "Writely (profiled earlier) continues to lead the pack in online ajax word products. Writely has had great features from day 1: import and export into Word format, embedded images, a wysiwyg editor, drag and drop functionality, sharing with others, and tagging of documents."
TechCrunch
Embedding one kind of media in another
BET promotes ringtone sales with videdo pop-ups. "BET has begun embedding text-messaging codes into its music videos, encouraging viewers to order a download of each song's ringtone directly from their mobile phone, reports Reuters/Billboard. "While such cross-marketing is a common practice in Europe, this is the first time a U.S. video channel has integrated mobile messaging on air to sell ringtones."
ringtonia.com
December 15, 2005
Books that can be "read" by mobile phone cameras
High Tech Phone Books, Finally (maybe). "Upcodes of the smart phone book can be read with a mobile phone camera. The user is automatically directed to the Internet pages indicated by the Upcodes."
Gizmodo
Simple online spreadsheets
JotSpot Tracker Furthers Office Online Experiment. "As more office applications move online, JotSpot Tracker joins NumSum and the open-source TrimSpreadsheet in the spreadsheet space. While Jotspot Tracker is clearly the most polished of the three, funcionality is very limited and the small visable area leaves a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, this is an excellent way to collaborate on simpler, smaller spreadsheets and bypass the hassle of email and chaotic version numbers. And the inport function was flawless. "
TechCrunch
December 14, 2005
Religious podcasts
"Godcasts” becoming more popular. “I would say probably anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent of the podcasts available online have some dimension of religion or spiritual life to them,” estimates Lee Ranie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Godcasts are created by houses of worship from every denomination, and from around the world. The wide selection is good news for web worshippers."Smart Mobs
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
Fake websites
US warns of fake net domain data. "More than 5% of the net's most popular domains have been registered using "patently false" data, research shows. A US congressional report into who owns .com, .net and .org domains found that many owners were hiding their true identity. The findings could mean that many websites are fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals. The report also found that measures to improve information about domain owners were not proving effective. "
BBC NEWS
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
More and more interactive homepages
Create a personalized homepage with Protopage. "Protopage is an Ajax-built web app designed to bring your RSS feeds, sticky notes, and bookmarks into one pretty package."
Lifehacker
Shifting away from physical media
DVD sales likely nearing global peak: report. "Movie sales on DVD are likely nearing their peak worldwide as more people look to computer downloads and video-on-demand to watch their favorite programming, according to a report released on Wednesday. [...] DVD sales growth is slowing, according to several recent reports. A study released by Adams Media Research in October forecast DVD sales of about $17.3 billion this year, a 12 percent rise from 2004. Adams forecast a 9 percent rise to $18.9 billion in 2006."
Reuters.com
RFID games
Smart Jigsaw Puzzle Assistant. "First, we describe several advantages of employing RFID technology for the development of gaming applications. Then we present the Smart Jigsaw Puzzle Assistant, a fully operational augmented jigsaw puzzle game which we have developed and prototypically implemented using miniature RFID tags and a palm-sized RFID scanner."
networked_performance
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
Video on demand
Brits Get Satellite on their PCs. "Called skybybroadband, the service promises a good mix of films, including Hollywood blockbusters and classic movie titles, as long as they’re available on its Sky Movies channels. All you need is a PC running Windows XP and a broadband connection. And all this is being done through third-party software by Kontiki, so it looks like you won’t be able to then download any of the content to any other PMPs you may have handy."
Gizmodo
December 13, 2005
Setting yourself up as an expert
Explore Lenses. "Everyone's an expert at something. Spread your ideas, make yourself known, and earn a royalty. What's your topic?"
Squidoo
Worldwide TV by phone
Watch HBO in Europe on Vodafone global Mobile TV. "Vodafone announces a global Mobile TV service enabling for instance Europeans to watch HBO on their 3G mobile phone. Hit series Sex and the City, Six Feet Under or Curb Your Enthusiasm will be available on Vodafone Live! globally."
I4U News
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
Extending Wikipedia
Wikitravel. "Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. So far we have 6150 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe."
Wikitravel
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
Trust issues with public collaboration
Wikipedia Tightens the Reins. "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Florida-based website, said Monday."Wired News
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
December 08, 2005
Online trust
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar. "Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby." "Nothing was ever proven," the biography added. Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites."
New York Times
Interactive TV on a phone
Ericsson, NRK launch interactive mobile TV. "Swedish telecoms supplier Ericsson and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) are conducting the world's first live trial of interactive mobile TV. The trial demonstrates a way of using mobile TV which allows mobile phone users to vote, chat and communicate with a television presenter while watching a TV show simultaneously on their handsets. "Digital Media Europe
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
December 07, 2005
Printing from digital
Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!. "Can CSS be used for serious print jobs? To find out, we decided to take the ultimate challenge: to produce the next edition of our book directly from HTML and CSS files. In this article we sketch our solution and quote from the style sheet used. Towards the end we describe the book microformat (boom!) we developed in the process."
A List Apart
Personal weather maps
Weather Underground and Google Maps. "Weather Underground has a neat use of Google Maps. They’ve got maps that show where their stations are and by clicking on them you can get all kinds of weather information about that local area."
Lifehacker
Getting out of contracts
Get out of your cellphone contract by “sub-leasing”. "A company called CellTradeUSA thinks they have the solution to this problem, in the form of a website where people post their remaining contract obligations to be “leased” by someone else (they will also begin offering advertiser-sponsored contests wherein they will buyout your contract for you). Usually the person pawning off the contract will throw in a free phone as well as some accessories to sweeten the deal, although most carriers require a credit check before this type of switch is allowed, so not all bidders will end up being eligible."
Engadget
Re-representing a service
Pretty up del.icio.us with Delancey. "Delancey is an online bookmark manager that enhances the popular del.icio.us social bookmarking application. Delancey keeps track of how frequently you click on each of your bookmarks and presents them to you in order. The interface is nice, and content load-times (after an initial cache of your bookmarks) are decent. Also, sorting bookmarks by popularity is a cool idea. If you’re one of those people who loves del.icio.us but hates the way it looks, try making it all purdy with Delancey."
Lifehacker
Online photo editing services
Edit photos online with PXN8. "PXN8 is a free online image-editor. And while we’ve mentioned online image-editing tools before, PXN8 has a lot to offer. Along with a slew of nice editing features, PXN8 also integrates with Flickr, allowing you to edit your Flickr photos with the click of a bookmarklet, then save the edits back in Flickr. For the Flickr-addicted, PXN8 gives you the opportunity to tweak your photos anytime you’re bored and at a browser."
Lifehacker
Visualizing music albums
TuneBooks™ Digital Liner Notes and Interactive Booklets. "TuneBooks provide the visual content fans crave by bundling online albums with a collection of unique and innovative media highlighting the band and their visual sensibility. TuneBooks combines traditional visual elements - liner notes, cover art and band collateral - with custom-designed interactive art and media to create a new visual experience. And each TuneBook integrates artist discography and label catalog browsing, creating a natural means for fans to sample, explore, and buy new music."
TuneBooks
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
Growth in PC to PC syncing
Access and sync your data from anywhere. "But for consumers who open their laptop on the road only to find that a critical file is back at home - or who are frustrated by having different sets of contacts and browser bookmarks on every computer they use - there are some simple alternatives. They take somewhat different approaches to the job, but all use the Internet to some degree, and are best put to use with a high-speed connection."
Lifehacker
December 05, 2005
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
Leaving stuff somewhere for other people to find
BookCrossing. "Morgwn emailed in to tell us about a community service that lets folk swap books. Once you've read the book version of the film Jarhead, for example, simply tell the site where you're going to leave it. Then another user looking for the war-story book can search the site and find that it's available on a bench or in an office on Broadway, NYC. BookCrossing has 422,443 members since it launched in 2001."
PSFK
Huge, shaped displays
The 360 degree LED television. "The first time you see one of the screens you’ll understand what the fuss is about – the quality, colour, contrast and definition is extraordinary and the screen is absolutely huge – the third generation of the new LED screens is being introduced at present with the largest being a 2.5 metre high, 5.46 metre circumference screen and capable of being viewed clearly from 30 metres away. Interestingly, the screens can actually display one image around the full 360 degrees, so it would be possible to use them as output for a 360 degree camera."
gizmag
Wi-fi as an important communication tool
Connecting New Orleans. "To help get everyone communicating again, the ravaged city is starting up the country’s first municipally-owned wireless Internet system that will, thankfully, be free for everyone. Obviously a great perk for those living and trying to come back to their homes in the city, the hope is that this system will make business more attractive and, of course, help city government officials."
Gizmodo
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
Any domain name
Company Takes Internet Address Names Beyond Dot-Com. "Technology provider UnifiedRoot, based in Amsterdam, has begun leasing Internet addresses that can end in any word, rather than in .com, .org, .net or other top-level domains. For instance, Brinks Home Security could replace its collection of different Web addresses with just one: home.brinks, according to an example the company cites on its Web site. "EWeek
Limitless channels
Man gets 5,000 channels on 12 dishes. "Al Jessup of Beckley, West Virginia, has 12 cheap satellite dishes stuck to his house, which pull in over 5,000 free-to-air channels from satellites all over the sky. He is retired, and delights in odd and foreign programming. Because the programming is free, it changes regularly, he noted. Sometimes, a program he likes will disappear and something he dislikes will be put in its place, or vice versa. For example, he once had three ABC stations from Wyoming only to have it reduced to one. "
Boing Boing
Mini-mini-PC networks
? Spray-on computers. "Last week, the Discovery Channel gave us an update on this project of the Speckled Computing consortium, a collaboration between researchers from several universities in the U.K. They are building the Specknet, a network of small computers (5 x 5 x 5 mm), which also contain sensors and can communicate wirelessly with the other specks. But it will probably take ten years before such dynamic sensors can be used in real applications, like detecting structural failures in aircraft wings or helping victims from strokes."
ZDNet.com
Young still won't pay for songs
Young 'prefer illegal song swaps'. "Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan said: "The digital youth of today are being brought up on a near limitless diet of free and disposable music from file-sharing networks. "When these consumers age and increase spending power they should become key music buying consumers. He added: "Unless the music industry can transition these consumers whilst they are young away from free consumption to paid music formats, be they digital or CDs, they may never develop music purchasing behaviour and the recording industry could suffer long-term harm." "
BBC NEWS
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
November 30, 2005
Contacts synchronization across devices
Contacts Back-up. "So you never lose the contact information of the people important to you. Now save your contacts from your mobile phone into your Yahoo! account. Combine your contacts on your phone with those already in your Yahoo! Address Book. Synchronize your phone contacts with your Yahoo! Address Book as often as you like. Synchronize your calendar and tasks as well. "
Yahoo! Mobile
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
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
Ad exposure
Glasses track eye movement, ad exposure. "Analysis showed that during a 45-minute journey, the journalist had been exposed to more than 130 different advertising "elements" showcasing more than 80 brands. He was "looking" at adverts for 29 minutes but couldn't recall a single brand without prompting. When prompted, it emerged that just over half of the adverts had made an impression, those for products he was interested in and to which he was exposed for more than 10 seconds."
we make money not art
Review anything
Why I don’t like Riffs. "Riffs, a review site for anything, launched quietly last week. It takes a hybrid wiki/social bookmarking approach. Any user can add a URL to begin a discussion (or just begin a discussion without a URL), and the Riffs community votes on the thing and discusses it in wiki fashion. All pages have RSS and the clean interface has some great Ajax features. Riffs also has tagging, including “common tags”, which I think is interesting."
TechCrunch
November 25, 2005
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
GPS sensitivity in the workplace
Queer Eye for the News Guys. "While they're out chasing the news, employees at a local television station are wondering if anybody is tailing them. The news trucks at WABC-TV were recently equipped with Global Positioning System transmitters, raising concerns among the station's union workers about privacy. It's a small but growing workplace topic as companies increasingly embrace the GPS technology already in use to track everything from wayward teens to sex offenders. "We're concerned about the possible misuse of the information that these systems can supply," said Gene Maxwell, head of Local 16 of the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians. "In particular, we wanted to make sure that it really wasn't going to be used as a disciplinary tool.""Wired News
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
Movies for cellphones
Sony Goes Ahead With Movies For Cellphones. "Thank you Sony. It’s about time somebody came out with movies made for your mobile. I mean, let’s face it, with the Video iPod and multimedia phones popping up everywhere, it should definitely be easier to get content for these devices. So Sony Pictures has decided to start introducing movies on 128 MB MMC cards. If you have a cellphone that plays multimedia files and has a card slot, you’re in. And I’m shocked, shocked I say, that the company is being so kind about not putting all this on Memory Sticks!"
Gizmodo
DVRs not a threat
TV networks say digital recorders raise viewership. "Far from being the TV doomsday machines that some have predicted, digital video recorders that allow viewers to skip advertising and watch shows at their leisure will actually boost television audiences, the major networks said on Wednesday. That was the principal finding in a report issued by the six major networks -- CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, the WB and UPN -- that sought to allay concerns in the media industry that DVRs will undermine the commercial value of broadcast television."
Reuters.com
November 23, 2005
Better text editing with the browser
Turn Firefox into a web writer. "If you use web-based e-mail like Gmail, or if you post to forums or write a blog, you’re using a “browser” to author documents as well as browse them. A plain, tiny web page textarea is not very conducive to writing. If you spend a lot of time writing the web with Firefox, soup up your “browser” with a few extensions that will turn it into a powerful text editor."
Lifehacker
Video on demand
Nintendo's Pay-Per-View Vending Machine. "Taking the form of an old-school “Gashapon” (toy capsule) machine, this device allows you to insert your GBA movie player flash memory card, crank a handle and instantly download anime episodes to watch on your GBA. Episodes are around 25 minutes each and priced at 300-yen to download, with popular shows being offered, such as Pokemon and Detective Conan. There even appears to be a “free content” button, presumably giving you trailers, etc. "
Gizmodo
Music streamed to the cellphone
Cingular announces MobiRadio streaming music service. "Following Sprint’s recent rollout of it’s Sirius-over-Vision option, Cingular has announced that it too will begin offering a streaming music service, to be known as MobiRadio. Cingular is partnering with MobiTV (who also provide a wireless video service) and Music Choice to give customers 40 stations of pretty standard fare that they can listen to on their Nokia 6620 or Sony Ericsson S710 and Z500a. "
Engadget
Using the web to scale down
He Figured That Business Is So Good, Who Needs a Store?. "Like most small-business owners, Mr. Truran first viewed the World Wide Web as an opportunity to grow. But as time went by, he came to see it as the opposite - a way to close up his Cambridge, Mass., retail store, move the business to his home in this Vermont village and accomplish his real goal: spending time on the things he wanted to do rather than running CourierWare. "The Web part of the business was growing," said Mr. Truran, whose company is known for its high-quality, durable messenger bags. "It was the only part of the business that was truly growing." CourierWare, which also stopped publishing its mail- order catalog in 2001, now takes only phone or online orders. "
New York Times (may require free subscription)
November 22, 2005
Sharing map information
Map your travels with Wayfaring. "We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other."
Lifehacker
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
Making a business out of new technology
Profits May Rock Podcasting World. "But nifty products and gizmos were ultimately a sideline at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference, where attendees wrestled with a far more fundamental point: whether this podcasting thing is -- or even should be -- a business. "If somebody gives you money, you owe them something," said keynote speaker Leo LaPorte, who appears in ad-supported radio and TV shows but eschews commercial promotions for his popular This Week In Tech podcast. "I listen to my listeners, but I don't want to listen to advertisers.""
Wired News
Tracking the relationship between people and objects
Airport security keeps eye on left luggage. ""We [will] just track them while they are walking and track the relationship with these objects that they carry," Piccardi says. "And we will raise an alarm only if the object is being left and the original carrier has left the area nearby." Tracking people using surveillance cameras is a challenge and currently only works when the area under surveillance is not crowded. Piccardi also plans to catalogue certain objects that are likely to be safe, like abandoned courtesy wheelchairs and trolleys at airports. "But if someone is leaving a suitcase on a wheelchair then that suitcase can be as dangerous as a suitcase left on the floor," he says."
we make money not art
Book rental
Google gauges interest for online book renting. "Web search leader Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) has approached a book publisher to gauge interest in a program to allow consumers to rent online copies of new books for a week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The proposed fee is 10 percent of the book's list price, the Journal reported, citing an unnamed publisher. "Reuters.com
November 21, 2005
TV over the network
AOL launches free vintage TV, Nickelodeon dumps slime on Apple. "In2TV will have six "stations" that users can tune into using their computers, ranging from comedy to action to drama, but users won't be able to obtain TV shows for use on their computer or portable media device. Streaming video from AOL's In2TV portal will be the only allowed method of access. Don't be too glum, though. AOL claims that their new streaming video format, dubbed AOL Hi-Q, offers DVD quality video. More on that in an upcoming report. The major draw for In2TV will be quantity. The service is aiming to "air" 300 episodes each month. If Nick at Nite brings back old memories, just wait until In2TV actually offers up 100 series over the course of the year—we'll be lucky to remember half of them."Ars Technica
Computing on demand
Appro to Open Compute on Demand Center. "Appro International next quarter will open an on-demand supercomputing service aimed at the oil and gas industry. The Compute on Demand Center, in Houston, will enable businesses to access large amounts of compute power for their compute-intensive applications without having to invest in more systems. The center also will be available for businesses in other industries that need additional computing capacity, Appro officials said. Businesses will be able to sign up for the service in blocks of time, paying only for the compute resources used during that time. The number of nodes will ramp up to 2,000 during the first half of next year and will be based on dual-core technology from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel."EWeek
Connecting objects to the network
The Internet of Things. "At the dawn of the internet revolution, users were amazed at the possibility of contacting people and information across oceans and time zones, through a few clicks of their mouse. In order to do so, however, they typically had to sit in front of a computer device (PC) connected to a global network. Today, they can also use mobile phones and portable laptops. The next logical step in this technological revolution (connecting people anytime, anywhere) is to connect inanimate objects a communication network. This is the vision underlying the Internet of things. The use of electronic tags (e.g. RFID) and sensors will serve to extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks, as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as razors, shoes and packaging. Advances in nanotechnology (i.e. manipulation of matter at the molecular level) will serve to further accelerate these developments. "
ITU Internet Reports 2005
Standard features for Web 2.0?
A Profile of Tagworld. "The site is going to try to own just about every web 2.0 experience of its users - blogging, bookmarking, photos and other media files, file storage, and tagging. They say they are going to have open data in and out, meaning if a user is really attached to say, Flickr, they’ll be able to integrate with those photos seemlessly. And they’ll have RSS and APIs to send data out. But their clear goal, as Fred said when we met, is to replace del.icio.us, flickr and blogger (among other services) for its users. All features are free to users (other than extended file storage); Tagworld makes its money from integrated advertising."
TechCrunch
November 18, 2005
Virtual file systems
FUSE: Filesystem in Userspace. "There has been a lot of buzz this week about Flickrfs the virtual filesystem for Flickr. Using Flickrfs you can interact with Flickr tags and photos just like your regular filesystem. A similar service is GmailFS which lets you mount a Gmail account as a large virtual filesystem. Both of these services are built on top of FUSE. FUSE makes it easy to build fully functional filesystems inside of a userspace program. Users can script and manipulate files just like their regular files. FUSE is now part of the main Linux kernel with release 2.6.14. Check out the list of other interesting filesystems built using FUSE. Of particular interest: WikipediaFS, SMB for FUSE is similar to Network Neighborhood, SSHFS, btslave to mount torrent files, and djmount is a UPnP AV client."
hack a day
Online project management
Project management and task management software: Basecamp. "Basecamp is a unique project management tool. Unique because you'll actually enjoy using it. It's simple, fast, and web-based. You don't need to download, install, or configure anything — all you need is a web browser. And don't worry, your data is safe with us. How can Basecamp help us? Basecamp makes it easy to centralize group communication with co-workers and clients."
Basecamp
November 17, 2005
Drag-and-drop for compliant documents
Desktop Tool Eases e-Filing of Large PDFs. "APSplit DE is a drag-and-drop desktop application that enables users to deliver large PDF documents in compliance with an institution's sizing requirements. It is aimed at lawyers and other professionals who submit electronic documents that must be no larger than a specified size, the company said. "Legal professionals have asked for an easy-to-use PDF processing tool that doesn't rely on server-based software or Adobe Acrobat," said Appligent president Virginia Gavin. "
EWeek
Barcodes built into photos
MIG - hidden barcodes. "Fuji Xerox developed the technology called MIG, which can embed barcode information or URLs in product labels. The technology slightly changes photos and illustrations printed on product labels. It's printable like barcode,s but it's "invisible" like RFID tags. MIG technology can embed typical barcode information within a 1cm^2 space. The MIG-encoded labels can be read by using mobile phones (like QR codes). "RFID in Japan
Online shopping a day behind physical shopping
Mondays key for Web retailers in holidays: study. "Holiday shoppers tend to follow up their weekend store visits by researching comparative pricing and purchasing on Mondays, according to the study released by Atlas, [...]. Atlas forecast that December 12 will be the peak Internet shopping day this year in what has become an estimated $26 billion business for online retailers like Amazon as well as traditional store chains such as Gap Stores. Online shoppers also remain active after the holidays in January with the growing popularity of gift cards and Internet exchanges of merchandise. "Reuters.com
Continuing e-mail overload
Got 2 Extra Hours for Your E-Mail?. "Dealing with e-mail - filing it, cataloging it, prioritizing it - has added hours of extra work a week, much of it done by people in the late evening and early morning. In a recent survey by America Online and Opinion Research Corporation, 41 percent of the respondents said they checked their e-mail in the morning before going to work. More than 25 percent said they had never gone more than a few days without checking e-mail, with 60 percent saying they check it on vacation. Four percent looked at e-mail in the bathroom."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Owning data about what you spend your time doing
AttentionTrust.org. ""attention data" is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention. AttentionTrust and our members believe that you have the following rights: Property - You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL. Mobility - You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention. Economy - You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH. Transparency - You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust. "AttentionTrust.org
Aggregating your services, not just your feeds
Aggregate your feeds with SuprGlu. "SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and maybe even your friends to-be. With the advent of so many fun to use applications, it is a shame for us to not use them. So keeping that in mind, what would be even better is to blog them."
Lifehacker
Trading on virtual land
Virtual property market booming. "A gamer who spent ?13,700 on an island that exists only in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers. The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year. The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia. He made money by selling land to build virtual homes as well as taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island. "
BBC NEWS
TV shows for download
CBS, NBC To Launch 99-Cent On-Demand TV. "A pair of separate deals announced Monday between CBS and Comcast, as well as NBC Universal and DirecTV, soon will allow viewers to pay to watch current primetime broadcast hits just hours after they air for free. CBS and NBC will be charging 99 cents per episode to access such series as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and the "Law & Order" spinoffs putting a twist on the traditional TV business model that will have untold implications for industry sectors ranging from affiliates to advertisers for years to come. "Extrememe Tech
November 16, 2005
Social TV sharing
Tape It Off The Internet. "A global TV guide, Torrent tracking, your favourites and recommendations plus an innovative social layer to hang it off. You want it, we want it, let's build it."
OUtsourcing business processes
Outsourcers Scramble for BPO. "You hear it everywhere: Today, the market for outsourcing is mainly IT outsourcing, but business process outsourcing is coming on strong and will grow faster than the venerable ITO. Just how will this happen?"EWeek
Casual RFID
The Philips RFID-enabled Herbarium. "The Herbarium detects which herb you’ve planted in its tagged pots in order to produce ideal growing conditions, so you can easily and conveniently harvest your own fresh parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme without those annoying trips to Scarborough Fair (or Whole Foods)."
Engadget
November 15, 2005
Tracking people on the network
MIT maps wireless users across campus. "Red splotches on one map show the highest concentration of wireless users on campus. On another map, yellow dots with names written above them identify individual users, who pop up in different places depending where they're logged in. "With these maps, you can see down to the room on campus how many people are logged on," said Carlo Ratti, director of the school's SENSEable City Laboratory, which created the maps. "You can even watch someone go from room to room if they have a handheld device that's connected.""
CNN.com
Automated advertising
Podcast Advertising with Fruitcast. "Fruitcast automates the process of inserting ads into podcasts. We download a podcast’s MP3 audio files, add the advertisements on the fly, and then send them to the podcast’s subscribers. Each time a podcast episode is downloaded, the advertiser is charged a certain amount, and a significant portion of that amount is credited to the podcaster."
Lifehacker
Remote access by phone
GLOOLABS demonstrates the missing link. "Using GlooNet, consumers can access their home audio collection while at work, select pictures stored on their home PC from a print shop kiosk or share pictures and videos with friends and family without sending bulky email or waiting for lengthy uploads. Additionally, GlooNet includes features for enabling mobile phones to be used as wireless MP3 players without the need for significant local storage capacity."
gizmag
Tracking with RFID
Proximity Lab. "The 8-foot by 16-foot walkable surface is fitted with RFID technology. Participants wear shoes fitted with RFID tags, enabling the system to track and record their positions in real-time. Images projected directly onto the floor are accompanied by stereo sound as a continuous response to the actions and interactions of participants."
we make money not art
RFID in the home
TAGGED! Stolen Things. "The installation consists of a large shelf and tagged everyday objects in it. When one of the objects is placed in the central empty cubicle of the shelf, associated information (picture, movieclip, sound or music collages) are being displayed on the screen above."
we make money not art
Cheap displays
Siemens Develops Flexi-Screens. "Siemens has developed a flexible color display screen that can be printed on something as thin as paper, cardboard, foil, or even plastic. It’s also affordable enough — about $52 for 3.2 feet — to be included in everything from books and magazines to tickets and instructions on packaging labels. Apparently this flexi-tech uses “electrochromic substances that change color when an electrical charge is administered, absorbing other light wavelengths than in their original state.”"
Gizmodo
November 14, 2005
Making use of more accurate GPS
Smart directions for green ideas. "Electro-car public transport and a scheme to track the proper disposal of waste are two of smartest ideas for using satellite-navigation technology. The applications have just triumphed in an international competition seeking novel ways to employ Galileo, Europe's soon-to-launch sat-nav system. "
BBC NEWS
November 11, 2005
Embedding one app in another
Internet Explorer in a Firefox tab!. "IE Tab, an extension from Taiwan, features embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox. This extension is derived from the famous extension IE View, but they are quite different. While IE View always open IE-only pages in newly launched windows of Internet Explorer, IE Tab can open them in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox."
Lifehacker
Physical representations of other people
Phone-less phone calls. "To start a conversation, the user touches the panel(s) corresponding to the person(s) s/he wants to talk with. The panel starts blinking and the volume of that channel is amplified. To talk in private mode, the user picks the orb. This simple hand gesture mutes all the speakers and the public microphone. To switch the connection off, the user drops the ball and the system returns to the initial state. "
we make money not art
Virtual presenters
Meet the virtual weather presenter. "Televirtual, based in Norwich, launched Metman and Metgirl initially for stations who cannot afford to have their weather presented by 'real' broadcasters. But managing director Tim Child said the implications for the future of broadcasting and the media in general were endless. He said the reason weather forecasting was chosen for the prototype was because of its relatively small knowledge base and its formulaic nature. The speech engine used for the voice is the most complex part of the creation and requires up to 30 hours programming input by reading sample forecasts."
EDP24
Consumer analysis
The codification of humanity. "Utilising footage from a department store manipulated through motion tracking and screen overlays that graphically represent the goods bought, The Catalogue places the viewer into the position of a remote agency, observing humanity as a series of trackable units whose value is defined by their spending capacity and future needs. "
we make money not art
November 10, 2005
Buying books by the page
Amazon to sell chapters of books. "Online retailer Amazon.com has unveiled "two innovative programmes" to allow readers to access parts of books rather than buying the complete work. It says Amazon Pages will let customers purchase online "just the pages needed" be it a section or chapter, while still offering the whole book up for sale. And a second scheme, called Amazon Upgrade, will also allow online access to those buying a hard copy of a book. "
BBC NEWS
Teen publishing
Pew study: Kids remix like hell. "American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey."Boing Boing
Distributed storage
Sun's 128-bit ZFS file system to ship this month. "Administrators can use ZFS to spread a common file system across numerous storage boxes, getting rid of volume and partitioning management and ending the need to grow and shrink individual file systems for certain applications. ZFS also has sophisticated checks for preventing data corruption, ways to improve I/O performance and of course 128-bit support. More technical information is available here. A number of storage companies, both large and small, have extensive file system work going on in the efforts to deliver a "pool" of boxes to customers. "
The Register
Phone TV
New Nokia N92 - World's First Mobile With a Built-in DVB-H. "Users can set reminders to watch their favorite TV programs, create personal channel lists and subscribe to TV channel packages. The Electronic Service Guide (ESG) contains information about the available TV channels, programs and services. Other mobile TV features include watching time of up to four hours, recording and 30 seconds replay. The Nokia N92 is also an XpressMusic device, with up to 2 GB memory card support, offering storage for up to 1500 songs delivered through the built-in stereo speakers or a stereo headset. "
I4U News
Computers for verticals
Ford to offer TabletPCs in F-Series pickups. "Ford introduced what it’s calling the “mobile office” at the Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Vegas, which includes the Stargate-manufactured TabletPC, cellular broadband, GPS, and a printer. The PC certainly isn’t cutting edge, sporting a 1 GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, 256MB RAM, 4GB flash memory (no hard drive here, folks), 8.4-inch SVGA screen, and PCMCIA and CompactFlash slots. However, since Ford is targeting this not at mobile programmers and designers but at construction contractors, the setup should suffice for basic bidding, ordering, and invoicing tasks."
Engadget
Tagging everything
Predicting Human Activities Using RFID. "At WPC EXPO 2005, Tagged World Project was demoing a system that captures human behavior patterns using RFID tags, stores them in an XML format, and uses the data for predicting users' future behavior patterns. The system then provides services proactively. [...] At the expo, they've tagged business card holders, perfume bottles, dumbells, etc. Using a PDA and a small RFID reader, the system generates alart messages like "Please turn off the TV" etc."
RFID in Japan
Distant lectures
Students to receive lecture notes on their mobiles. "STUDENTS at a Scottish university are to have their lecture notes sent to their mobile phones in a pioneering bid to replace paper handouts in classes. [...] The system, called AmbieSense, uses hi-tech chips in lecture rooms that are capable of beaming information to mobile phones nearby. If successful, the project could spell the end of the traditional image of students moving between lectures weighed down with piles of paper notes. Instead students will be able to download handouts, timetables and other work on to their phones. "Scotsman.com
Posting TV online
Must-Surf TV. "Starting Monday, November 7, the executives behind the NBC Nightly News want you to feel free to change the channel. Not to a competing newscast, mind you, but to their own newscast online at MSNBC.com. This offering will make NBC the first network to provide an entire newscast online. It will available 10 p.m. EST on the day of the broadcast. To long-time Web viewers, this news might sound, well, not particularly newsworthy. But in the tradition-bound world of major television network executives, it's a bold step."Tech Review
Archives of content online
The BBC's programme catalogue (on Rails). "In the early part of next year, you can look forward to a public beta with extensive programme details and broadcast histories. There are "On This Day" schedules that go back to 1933. It's got full contributor histories, and Really Good Search. I can't begin to describe the depth of this dataset - it had an entry for the one time in the 1990s when my dad was on local TV news as a spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council. The cataloguers have worked hard on this stuff for years, and it deserves a wide audience."
hackdiary
Digital QR codes
QRick Card System. "DigiSonic developed a secure user authentication service using a credit card that is equipped with a display (they may use the e-paper technology). The display shows differnt QR codes with encrypted information (passwords, ID, server URLs) every 5 seconds or so. Users use their mobile phones to take a picture of the QR code and send it to a server."
RFID in Japan
November 09, 2005
Media through Bluetooth
Music trial taps into Bluetooth. "Handset maker Nokia and music label EMI have started a project to let coffee shop customers listen to music sent to their phone via Bluetooth. As well as music, customers will be able to get hold of ringtones, wallpaper, video clips and vouchers. The first free tests of the service will be in six coffee shops and music stores in Helsinki, Finland. "
BBC NEWS
Blogs as a business threat
Corporate reputations and blog relations. "Nearly two-thirds of businesses have not woken up to the threat posed to their brands and reputations by disgruntled bloggers, a survey of PR professionals revealed. While more than 60% of PR executives interviewed believed that web blogs by unhappy employees or exasperated customers can damage corporate reputations, but 58% said businesses were insufficiently aware of the threat."Smart Mobs
November 08, 2005
Translation phone
Olympic visitors to get Chinese-speaking phone. "If the conversation gets beyond the scope of the phrase book, the user can press a button to talk to a call centre in his or her own language (registered when the phone was hired), and get specific phrases translated. "GPRS and call centres are mature technologies," said Dr Chen. "We plan to use Wi-Fi and 3G, and have location technology in future versions of the system.""Techworld.com
Pet locating
GPS PRO Dog collar with SMS. "Simply strap the collar around your beloved’s neck, and as long as the built-in receiver can pull in both GPS and GSM signals, you can call the collar from anywhere in the world and get texted back with its exact location (or view a map on a smartphone)."
Engadget
November 03, 2005
My TV show
Telecommuting Video Blog. "This guy, Ravi Jain, is shooting a weekly video blog from the driver's seat of his car during his daily commutes between Jamaica Plains and Allston, MA (or five hours of "studio time," as he puts it). He has guests on (who are bumming rides), and when his wife commutes with him, they do a "Regis and Kelly" type show (or at least that's how Ravi fancies it), with some "marital banter to start the show" (oh joy!)."
Boing Boing
Wearable scanners
The Cordless Ring Scanner: wearable bar code reader with Bluetooth. "Socket Communications just announced a tiny new bar code scanner which can be worn on the index finger. The lightweight Cordless Ring Scanner transmits scanned data via Bluetooth to mobile computers thereby freeing up the users’ hands for increased productivity (read: more heavy lifting)."
Engadget
Posting management
Blummy means Bookmarklets Galore - Lifehacker. "Blummy provides quick access to all your favorite bookmarklets—those little JavaScript-based web utilities we all love—without crowding up your toolbar. Blummy creates an interactive window that floats over your web page. Use it to store and access bookmarklets as well as other web services."
Lifehacker
RFID in action
Smart Mobs: Wal-Mart and RFID. "Wal-Mart said its fast-growing use of radio-transmitting inventory tags has helped boost sales by keeping shelves better stocked with key merchandise",wired news reports.RFID, or radio-frequency identification tags, has reduced out-of-stock merchandise by 16 percent at the company's stores that have begun to use the technology over the past 12 months.Wal-Mart (WMT) has been able to restock RFID-tagged items three times as fast as non-tagged items".the article says Wal-Mart "has more than 130 major suppliers shipping merchandise to its distribution centers with RFID tags attached, with about 5.4 million tags received at Wal-Mart distribution centers during the past year.The company expects to add another 200 suppliers to the list by January,with about 1,000 stores and warehouses ready to receive their tagged goods"Smartmobs
Direct UI feedback
Community-Driven EULA feedback. "Do end-user license agreements (EULAs) bother you? Do you want to know the hidden traps that lurk within your software’s EULA? Pop over to EULAscan, a EULA feedback community that’s just getting launched. There you can share your EULA issues and read what other people have found in the EULAs that apply to you."Lifehacker
November 01, 2005
Sharing travel plans
Plan a Trip in a Single Search with Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner. "Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community."
Yahoo! Search blog
Online database of anything
Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us. "Google Base is Google's database into which you can add all types of content. We'll host your content and make it searchable online for free. Examples of items you can find in Google Base: • Description of your party planning service • Articles on current events from your website • Listing of your used car for sale • Database of protein structures. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local."Ars Technica
Dedicated bandwidth for mobile TV
AU’s new Hello Messenger and single segment services. "“Single Segment” refers to terrestrial digital broadcasts intended solely for mobile devices such as PDAs and cellphones. KDDI’s “EZ TV (Single Segment Support)” adds support for these signals to their existing TV service, “EZ TV.” What good does that do you? Not only is further information about what’s being shown on TV displayed on your screen, but KDDI has integrated the new service with GPS functionality. If, for example, a program on TV is talking about the grand opening of a new store, you’ll be able to follow a link that’s displayed on your screen, and you’ll be taken to directions of how to get to the store from wherever you may be."
Engadget
Physical interaction
Tiles as graspable window for digital information. "Tagged transparent acrylic tiles are embedded with RFID tags. These tiles serve both as physical windows for digital information and to trigger specific actions (to launch an application, or submit a query) when placed on a sensor-enhanced display surface. When a tile is placed on the tray, its associated function is automatically triggered. For example, placing a weather tile onto the tray retrieves the current weather forecast information from the Internet and displays the processed results on the region of the screen under the tile."
we make money not art
Tracking your loved ones
"Working Late" Won't Work Anymore. ""I used to be worried when my boyfriend didn't answer my calls," says Shim You Sun, a 25-year-old accountant who pays 11 cents each time she checks up on him. "Now I can rest assured that he is at work or busy attending a seminar." She's one of more than 4 million Koreans who have signed up for various services using technology that can determine a cellular subscriber's location. One, costing $3 per month, will send a message with your coordinates to friends and family periodically while you're traveling. Another will automatically dispatch a text message to friends who get within a block or so of each other as they move around town. Yet another, costing 29 cents a day, will send a message if a person isn't at a specified place at a certain time and then allows the tracker to see the person's movements over the previous five hours."Business Week
Distance teaching
E-Tutors: Outsourcing the Coach. "India has very good teachers, especially in math and science," says Kiran Karnik, who heads India's National Association of Software and Service Companies. "Also, these subjects are culture-free so it is comparatively easy for Indian teachers to teach them. Online tutoring is an area which shows enormous potential for growth."Wired News
October 27, 2005
Playing with your food
Bingo Game For Shoppers. "A customer first need to sign up for the service, then she receives a QR code from a server. After shopping, she can display the QR code on her mobile phone and show it to a reader device. Then, she receives an SMS message that notifies her about the points she earned. Now she can open her home page on her phone to check the current status of her ongoing bingo game. Everytime she earns some points, she gets an additional symbol and when she gets three identical symbols in row, she is rewarded with coupons. "
RFID in Japan
October 26, 2005
Wireless hospitals
Digital Medical Records on the Go. "Global Care Quest is working in conjunction with the UCLA Medical Center to eliminate paper trail problems. The system they are installing is a patient retrieval system accessible wirelessly. There are two optional ways in which the hospital staff would be able to receive information; the first of which being through PDA’s and smartphones. It is done all real time to help eliminate room for updating error. For those staff who do not carry PDA’s or smartphones, there would be desktops, laptops, and wall-mounted machines scattered throughout the hospital for patient information access immediately and quickly."
Gizmodo
Leisure GPS
SureShotGPS brings GPS to golf course worldwide. "The SureShot has a 2.2-inch display, can hold data for 10 courses at once, and syncs with a PC via USB. The device will initially come preloaded with maps of a handful of Australian courses. The company aims to have all of Australia’s major courses added to a web site for free downloading within six months; international courses will follow"
Engadget
Programming your TV on the go
Swisscom offers remote digital TV programming via mobile phone. "Bluewin TV 300 customers can call up the electronic programme guide on their mobile phones, search for programmes and programme shows via their handsets. "
Digital Media Europe
Face recognition in devices
Cellphones learn to recognize their owners' faces. "Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. this week began marketing a technology that inexpensively adds face recognition to camera-equipped cellphones. Oki's "Face Sensing Engine" (FSE) "middleware" decodes facial images within 280mS on a 100MHz ARM9 processor, and can restrict access to mobile devices by recognizing their owners, the company says."
Device Forge
Blogs with very short entries
Tumblelogs. "On my web travels the other day, I came across a new (to me) kind of weblog, the tumblelog. [...] A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. [...] Different ways of displaying various types of content...remaindered links, regular posts, book reviews, and movie reviews are all displayed differently. I'm working on incorporating photo albums and perhaps a daily photolog...as well as a couple other different types of content. "kottke.org
October 25, 2005
Using RFID to track items
Hospitals Save Costs, Time with Wireless Tags. "many hospitals are turning to RFID technology to keep track of pumps, as well as other expensive mobile equipment, including wheelchairs and patient monitors. According to a report by Spyglass Consulting, the number of hospitals using RFID tags to track assets will skyrocket from 10 percent in mid-2005 to 45 percent by the end of 2007. Such programs promise to cut not only costs, but also the time that clinicians and engineers spend searching for equipment, and the time patients spend waiting for it. "CIO Insights
Selling your videos
3 UK lets cell users make, sell videos. "The smallest of Britain's five mobile phone network operators said on Tuesday that customers could now use their mobile phone to make a 30 second video and upload it onto a "See Me TV" channel for others to view. Each time a clip is downloaded by one of 3 UK's 3.2 million customers, the performer gets paid one penny. "Reuters.com
RFID "protection"
RFID Pocket Replacement. "To avoid being tracked by readers, Mikey Sklar is showing how to build a faraday cage around your RFID tags. Just rip out a pocket from a pair of jeans and replace it with a cotton like fabric which contains enough conductive material to block most RFID tag frequencies."
we make money not art
Wearable RFID readers
Bracelet navigates Net. "The ReachMedia system consists of a bracelet that reads RFID tags to detect objects the user is holding, an accelerometer to detect hand gestures and a cell phone that connects to the Internet, plays sounds when objects and gestures are recognized, and provides audio information about the object in hand. A person could, for example, pick up a book to search for reviews of the book online. She would hear a sound from her phone indicating information was available about the book, and would use gestures -- a downward flick and right and left rotation -- to select or go to the previous or next menu item of available information."
we make money not art
Database security
Symantec readies "Big Brother" database security monitor. "The software monitors all database queries and flags any that are deemed "suspicious" or inappropriate, then sends an immediate message to the network administrator. The software does not attempt to shut down the queries or prevent the sender from initiating further requests, although Symantec has not yet ruled out the idea of an automatic response to potential threats."Ars Technica
Printed electronics
Breakthrough in printed electronics. "The Institute for Print and Media Technology at Chemnitz University in Germany has developed a new process that enables electronic circuitry to be produced with mass printing technology. The new process will enable the mass production of very cheap integrated circuitry in paper and cardboard and can be expected to have massive consequences in manufacturing, the future of RFID and the blurring of the line between printed objects and the virtual world.The first practical applications are expected to be electronic printed maps and printed paper keyboards, closely followed by labels for clothing, luggage, packaging, ticketing and after that … almost anything."
gizmag
October 21, 2005
Video participation
BBC To Start Using Viewers 3G Comments. "The BBC is trialling a new video messaging system for the venerable Match of the Day football show. Called 'Your Shout!', the system lets football fans send in 3G video messages with their opinions on the crucial England internationals and during Football Focus broadcasts. The best content will then be broadcast on live TV during and after the matches, which are being covered live on Match of the Day."
PSFK
Online task management
Need to Get Nagged? "Remember the Milk". "Remember The Milk is a free on-line to-do list management service. It has all the features you’d expect from this sort of site: multiple lists, priorities, due-dates, repeating tasks, etc. Then it adds the cool stuff. My favorite feature is the built-in nagging system that reminds you to get the job done. You can request reminders by E-Mail, IM or SMS. In addition, you can share and publish your to-do lists and create new tasks by e-mail."
Lifehacker
Archiving online files
Save your personal Web with Slogger. "Web pages change. They disappear. They move to new URLs. They get lost or they’re password-protected or they’re only available on private intranets. Firefox extension Slogger saves full, time-stamped web pages to your computer as well as social bookmarking services for convenient offline searching, browsing and archiving. With Slogger, you’ll never lose a Web page again."
Lifehacker
More research online
Educational Sites Inform a Growing Audience. "A new report released by Internet statisticians Nielsen NetRatings contends that educational and reference-oriented sites are experiencing a dramatic increase in traffic, and currently reach nearly one-third of all Web users. The New York-based research outfit said that educational destinations such as Wikipedia, Yahoo Education and eHow have seen a 22 percent jump in unique impressions since September 2004, and have been accessed by 31 percent of all Internet users."EWeek
October 20, 2005
Feeds of video
Subscribe to free, del.icio.us video in iTunes. "Two great tastes that taste great together: now that del.icio.us offers feeds by filetype and iTunes has full video support (including “vodcasts,” or video podcasts), you can load up iTunes with free video files bookmarked and tagged in del.icio.us."
Lifehacker
Searching "beneath" the web
New Search Engine Peers Behind Subscription Walls. "Taken in a broader context, Congoo is among a bevy of new "deep dive" search engines that could significantly change what you'd expect to see in a typical search result. Even as the major search engines have expanded their indexes of the Web to as many as 8 billion documents, they are increasingly acknowledging that much of the world's information is nowhere to be found in search results. "EWeek
Audio books - direct to phone
A Marriage of Bookshelf and Phone. "Last week, though, commuters, exercisers and people sitting around for jury duty gained an ingenious new audio alternative: books on phone. Its actual name is Audible Air, and it's a way to download spoken recordings from Audible.com to the Palm Treo cellphone and other wireless gadgets - over the air, wherever you happen to be. But to appreciate its significance, you must first understand how Audible works."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
October 18, 2005
Location-based podcasts
Placing Voices. "Placing Voices, by Brian House, is a mobile-sound-blog software which uses the built-in sound recording feature of mobile phones (which is optimized for voice) and MMS messaging to place these fragments on a web-accessible map of the city as they occur. The objective is to express a map in terms of these experiences, to restore some claim to my memory of physical spaces over the transient voices heard within them."
networked_performance
Making and recycling physical objects on demand
Machine Makes Dishes on Demand. "MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed."
Wired News
Barcodes for security
Scan your taxi and feel safer. "Each taxi will have a unique cellphone readable barcode inside and outside the cab. The code is stored on the phone which can then be sent to “friends or family”"
Engadget
P2P e-mail
SnapMail. "Unlike instant messaging, SnapMail uses peer-to-peer technology and does not rely on Internet servers to send mail within your local network. This makes SnapMail a very fast in-house messaging system that complements your Internet email. All of your messaging can be conducted without fear of accidentally sending mail out of your company."
Lifehacker
Hacking together public media
Drive-on Movie Magic. "By attaching a video projector to the roof, hood or front your automobile, and popping a DVD player, or even a Mac mini in your car stereo slot, you may project your favorite flick onto the wall of your choice. Hell, why not invite a couple of friends, and use some kind of FM transmitting device to broadcast the sound over to their boogie-vans, too?"
Sponbustion
October 14, 2005
Perceived value of electronic records
Making Electronic Health Records Consumer-Friendly. "Most Americans believe that electronic medical records will improve their health care. Four out of five people surveyed believe that if physicians kept electronic medical records on their patients, health care quality would improve and medical errors would be reduced, because authorized doctors would be able to retrieve a patient's medical history in a matter of seconds. An equal number believe that the ability of researchers to review millions of records anonymously to determine best treatment practices would help all doctors improve the quality of medical care. "CIO Insight
Tracking by cellphone
Missouri to use cellphone signals to monitor traffic. "The state is planning a program with a $3 million annual budget that will track vehicles using cellphone triangulation, silently measuring the speed of vehicles via the cellphones within, as they’re handed off from tower to tower. While the state insists that the system is designed to help motorists avoid traffic tie-ups by monitoring road conditions, privacy advocates point out that it can tie specific cellphone numbers to specific vehicles, and can be used to track individual drivers."
Engadget
Genetic decision making
IBM's Smart Stance on Genetic Testing. "On Oct. 10, IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano sent a memo to employees announcing the company was revising its policies to prevent the use of genetic information in making personnel decisions. Big Blue's move prompts the question: Is a flood of gene-based health data about workers available right now?"Business Week
User-generated TV
MTV Creates User-Generated Channel. ""We are handing over an entire channel online to college students and everyone who wants new music. mtvU Uber gives them the power to create and program their own channel, and will remain in perpetual beta mode as they experiment and pioneer the digital future.""
PSFK
Other ways of distributing songs
New Record Label: Starbucks. "Does Apple's iTunes hold the key to the future of music distribution? Or does Starbucks with its Hear Music burning stations?"PSFK:
October 13, 2005
IM in time-sensitive businesses
Finance Gets the Message. "Once a novelty and always a favorite of young technophiles, not to mention the everlasting bane of the distraction-prone, IM has emerged as an essential application in the financial services industry, where brokers and underwriters have come to rely on the technology to stay in touch with customers and each other in an industry where information moves markets and timing is everything."EWeek
Finding stuff with Bluetooth
Hitachi’s prototype Bluetooth car toolkit. "But Project Bureau’s digital tool kit, designed at the request of Hitachi’s Milan Design Center, goes further than most, adding Bluetooth functions to everything from a warning triangle (to advise a driver of proper placement — EU laws require triangles to be placed 50 meters from a stalled car) to tools that are tracked within the vehicle (no more digging under the back seat for that wrench you think you dropped there). The warning triangle even includes a camera that links by Bluetooth to an onboard computer with software that lets it analyze road conditions, warning you if you’ve stopped in a risky spot."
Engadget
October 12, 2005
Community journalism
Brattleboro community news and discussion for Brattleboro, VT. "Brattleboro, welcome to your only locally-owned participatory journalism site. Read and write your views, reviews, news, interviews, and more. It's your town to talk about. Get involved and shape the debate."
iBrattleboro
Relying on self-moderation
New reader comments system for BBC news. "The new system will rely mostly on "reactive moderation," asking readers to report inappropriate content and material that breaches house rules, according to journalism.co.uk. Readers will also be able to rate postings and other users can browse comments either in chronological order or by those ratings.The BBC is moving to the new system because the site is currently overwhelmed by the volume of submissions, as every comment currently has to be individually approved before being published.An average 6,000 comments are submitted on a typical day, and up to 20,000 on a busy news day - but only around 10 per cent of those are published". "Smart Mobs
Helping with tagging
Tagging Help With Tagyu. "The basic premise of Tagyu is to let other people help you tag your content. Tagyu compares what you’re writing to what other people around the web are writing. It looks at how they’ve tagged their content and uses that information to give you some ideas about how to tag yours."
Lifehacker
October 11, 2005
Door access
The intelligent door handle. "Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have combined and adapted all the cameras, buzzers, keypads, motion detectors, RFID readers and intercoms into a wireless integrated door station and combined it with the door handle which can integrate existing and planned infrastructure at low cost and high convenience."
gizmag
October 10, 2005
Reputation through good tagging
Tag, You're It: Best Bookmarker. "When it comes to finding and categorizing new web pages, Chanchal Gupta is the most trusted surfer in town. New experimental software has identified Gupta as one of the most influential social bookmarkers on the web. The software, CollaborativeRank, is a search engine that places great emphasis on results found by highly ranked web "
Wired News
RFID for "accidents"
Patent proposes RFID tags with VIN info. "The propsed system incorporates chips with a maximum range of eight inches, to allay privacy concerns, and are only activated during an accident. So even if a hit-and-run driver speeds away, their VIN number will have been recorded by the victim’s RFID tag reader, which can then be read by police. Guess this means that we’re gonna have to start leaving windshield notes every time we “brush up” against someone else’s ride from now on."
Engadget
New forms of collaboration
Networking: A Special Section. "Companies are drawing on collaborative models that first blossomed in nonbusiness settings, from online games to open-source software projects to the so-called wiki encyclopedias and blogs to speed up innovation. This networked collaboration is creating new opportunities and disrupting industries. New styles of work and, in business schools, new theories of innovation are rising."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Adjusting to open source
Opening Up to Open Source. "Although startups still predominate, in the past year all the major technology vendors have made significant open-source moves, either by releasing their own software under free licenses or by acquiring smaller vendors to bolster their open-source support. Open source has not, as some predicted, been the death of the corporate software model. But it is indeed transforming it. "I firmly believe that the pressure from open-source projects has already upped the ante for large corporations to adapt" to opening up their businesses to open-source opportunities, said Greg Roy, senior systems engineer at Flight Centre North America."EWeek
RFID security false alarms
Lessons learned: RFID Kids Tracking. "What's unique about this pilot is the human network system for handling emergency situations: if a child presses an emergency button on the "tag", adults will come running to help him/her-- these adults not only includes professional security guards but also volunteers who are living near RFID readers. (The volunteers are selected from the kids' parents) 188 kids participated. One of the major problem was false alarms. There were 53 cases of emergency alarms, however, all of them were false alarms. Because of frequent false"RFID in Japan
October 07, 2005
Interactive business card
The rCard: Fully Interactive Business Card. "The rCard is a card that plays video and comes with a 1.875” x 1.875” full color flat screen, speakers, a navigational button, 1 gig of memory, and a USB port. The battery on it is as thin as a postage stamp and lasts about 4 hours of continuous use, but there’s a rechargeable battery option, and you can power it off and on. The whole thing only measures 2” x 3” and weighs a measly 2 ounces."
Gizmodo
Content providers as "virtual operators"
Airtime . "ESPN and other big brands don’t want to take a backseat to mobile operators, and they certainly don’t want to get into the business of buying spectrum and building out their own wireless networks. Their strengths are in content and marketing, not setting up and maintaining a cellular network. So they become a virtual operator—they buy airtime wholesale from a traditional carrier, then package it, market it and sell it however they want."
Gizmodo
RFID ID cards
Companies to Standardize RFID Student ID Cards"35 Japanese companies including Sony Broadband Solution, DNP, Hitachi, Fuji Xerox, Ohji Seishi together established a non-profit organization for standardizing RFID sutudent ID cards. [...] Potential applications of standardized RFID student ID cards: access control (campuses, labs, libraries), attendance, using shared PCs, digital money and transportation (includes off-campus services), attendance of online courses, authentication for student discounts and issueing certificates"RFID in Japan
Miometric security
Eyes and fingers airport security. "Lufthansa and Siemens has successfully tested a biometric process for check-in and boarding at the Airport. The system identifies passengers from their fingerprints. After a passenger’s finger is rolled over an optical reader unit, the system converts the fingerprints’ characteristics into a 2D code which the reader prints on the boarding pass. Just before boarding, the fingerprints are again scanned by a reader and compared with the barcode. The data is erased after the passenger checks in. "
we make money not art
Digital music purchasing hits maintream
Digital music revenue 'triples'. "Digital music sale revenue tripled in the first half of 2005 compared with 2004, figures have suggested. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimated 6% of record industry sales were digital, worth $790m (?450m). "
BBC NEWS
Video search & browse
New Video Search Sites Offer Glimpse of Future TV. "The most recent version of this customized Internet TV idea comes from Blinkx, a San Francisco online search company that plans to activate MyBlinkx TV today at www.blinkxTV.com. The site is supposed to work much like a standard search engine, prompting users to type words or phrases into a search box. But when the user types in, say, "big wave surfing," instead of displaying links to Web pages, the site starts rolling a string of video clips most relevant to that topic. Users can fast-forward, rewind, pause the video and click a button to save the channel. When they return to it, the technology refreshes the channel with newer, more relevant clips."
New York Times
October 05, 2005
Physical interfaces
The Contact Board. "The board comes with a series of magnets. Each one is embedded with an RFID tag and stores a contact's number. There are 3 areas on the board: one to make the calls, another to edit the number and the third one to listen to messages. The user can call one of their contacts or listen to a message from that person by putting the magnets on a specific area."
we make money not art
Simple, collaborative note-taking
JotSpot Live: Collaborative Pages. "JotSpot Live provides a light-weight Wiki-like solution to collaborative note-taking. Users create pages that can be edited in real time by others within an invited group. JotSpot aims—and succeeds to a point, although the site still has a fair number of bugs—to make the process easier and more transparent to the average business user than a traditional Wiki. The interactive editing tools feel like a word processor, which is a huge plus in my opinion."
Lifehacker
RFID physical security
RFID Key Cabinet. "Another story from AutoID Expo Tokyo is Teraokaseiko's key cabinet. The cabinet is unlocked by a contactless smart card and each key is RFID-tagged. The cabinet can be configured to allow different users take out different keys. The system tracks who took which keys and when. The cabinet can be connected to security systems or varieties of applications running on PCs. "
RFID in Japan
Searching just the sites you want
ROLLYO. "Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others. "
Rollyo
October 04, 2005
Bringing back old content for enthusiasts
Information Design Classic Back In Print After Two Centuries. "While until now bringing to the press again an out-of-print book meant only spending more money, today, thanks to power of the infinite shelf-space offered by online clearinghouses like Amazon, the market is re-defined by user preferences and recommendations, search and affinity engines, and by the negligible costs of digital printing and inclusion in online virtual catalogs. "Lockergnome
Making money from podcasts
Podcasting Gold Rush Is On. "GrapeRadio podcaster Brian Clark is now gulping down about $1,000 a week from sponsors of his show for wine hobbyists. Grant Baciocco of the fiction serial The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd sells show-themed buttons and T-shirts and offers guest-voice roles for $50. Josh of Josh in Japan is asking for PayPal donations from fans of his tales of expatriate life, though so far only $14 has rolled in. And Jimmy Diggs uses his Vegas-based Daily Noise as a traffic generator for his internet radio site, LVRocks.com, where sponsors pay for banner ads."
Wired News
Using WiMax for local broadcasts
BBC, Telabria conduct live news broadcast over Wimax. "'Essentially we created our own giant Wimax wireless hot-spot which covered most of the city,' explained Andy Butterworth, the BBC technical co-ordinator who masterminded the project. 'This meant that we could broadcast live into our evening news programme at the same quality we’d usually achieve using a standard satellite truck.' The broadcast was encoded live in the Land Rover using MPEG-4 compression equipment from Tandberg, with the resulting stream taking up approximately 8Mbps of bandwidth. "Digital Media Europe
Slow to blog
Businesses must 'wake up to blog threat'. "Businesses have been slow to respond to the threats posed by weblogs and equally slow to capitalise on the opportunities they present, according to the results of a survey of public relations consultants released today. Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said that companies have not yet woken up to the risks, and 64 per cent said that a disgruntled employee or customer could cause significant damage to a firm’s reputation by posting damaging remarks on blogs - the online message boards and diaries which have become so popular in the past year. "Times Online
Renting the contents of your PVR
Rent my DVR. "Rent my DVR is an online marketplace for buying and selling TV programming. Buyers can scan online listings of available shows and download them via a proprietary P2P application for about 25 cents a pop. Providers in turn receive a 25 cent payment for delivering shows. "
Engadget
Picture dialing
Picture-phone eliminates the need for dialing. "Warren Goodland (a British masters candidate in Design Research for Disability), has noticed the difficulty that seniors often have in operating a telephone, mostly due to a diminished capacity for abstract thinking. His solution: a system where photographs of the user’s regular contacts are placed in a special peripheral attached to the phone; touching either the photo or the holder dials the desired number."
Engadget
Streaming audio to your phone
Airtime. "Sprint’s had a lot of announcements in this area in the last few weeks, with services on the way from well-known brands like Sirius and Rhapsody. Some radio stations, like the UK’s Virgin, are developing their own custom applications to allow people to listen live over mobile networks. Meanwhile the rise of 3G in Europe sees more and more users listening in on stations’ existing Web streams. "
Gizmodo
October 03, 2005
Blogs for advice
Shoppers use blogs for bargains. "Consumers are starting to use weblogs, or blogs, as guides to what they should and shouldn't buy, finds a survey. More than three-quarters of those questioned in the research said they had consulted blogs before shopping. "
BBC NEWS
Employee predictions
At Google, the Workers Are Placing Their Bets. "In Google's system, employees can bet on how the company will perform in the future, forecasting things like product introduction dates and new office openings. It was devised under a program that allows engineers to spend one day a week on a project of their choice. "New York Times
GPS and phones
Roamin' Holiday. "Imagine leaving your car at home and networking with other GPS-phone users to form impromptu car pools, or receiving Web pages on your phone about Pickett's ill-fated charge as you amble up Seminary Ridge in Gettysburg. Geo-aware devices that trigger location-specific services will become as natural as the very idea of wirelessness, and the Web itself will cease to be a placeless cyberspace and will be pinned at millions of points to the physical world we inhabit. "
Tech Review
September 29, 2005
Tracking office workers with RFID
Tag notifies workers so secretaries don't have to. "RFID tags are worn by workers and RFID readers are placed throughout the company to keep tabs on their whereabouts and to send them information about meetings and other scheduled events via computer and celphone. When the time of a meeting nears, the system can notify all workers expected to attend. If a participant does not show up, the system will seek that person out and suggest the appropriate response, such as a phone call if he is at his desk or an e-mail message if he is in another meeting."we make money not art
September 28, 2005
Centralizing everything in your blog
Project Comet. "Community Aggregation: Gives you the ability to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way. Multiple Streams: Provides a single place to keep everything that is important to you. A record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own. "
Six Apart
Adapting old games for new platforms
BREW-ing Up DoomRPG. "Got a hot cellphone that can run Java or BREW apps? Then you know you need DoomRPG, a turn-based role playing version of the popular Doom series. It looks extremely well done and is designed to play like everyone’s favorite favorite FPS. You can get UAC credits and buy ammo and health, interact with scientists, and level up your character."
Gizmodo
Checking and deleting P2P software
Anti-music swapping tool launched. "The International Federation of Phonographic Industries has released Digital File Check to help people remove unwanted file-sharing programs. The program is also designed to help firms detect if staff are using work computers for illegal file swapping. "
BBC NEWS
Anonymous blogging
Blog censorship handbook released. "Included in the booklet, called The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents, is advice about how to blog anonymously, as well as how to identify the most suitable way to circumvent censorship. "
BBC NEWS
RFID + ePaper
E-Paper RFID Tag. "At the Auto-ID Expo that recently took place in Tokyo, Epson unveiled a passive RFID tag (13.56MHz; ISO 15693) that has a display. The display component is implemented by using E-ink's EP Sheet. The display works without batteries, by using the electrophoretic effect. "
RFID in Japan
Comparison shopping for doctors
To Find a Doctor, Mine the Data. "As their out-of-pocket health care expenses continue to grow - through rising medical costs, higher insurance premiums and heftier co-payments - many people are using consumer skills well honed by online research on everything from digital cameras to S.U.V.'s. And their employers and insurers, intent on getting the best value from their own health spending, are arming those consumers with increasingly detailed searchable databases. "
New York Times
Clever, RFID shoes
Location Tracking Geta Sandals . "RFID is used to correct some positioning errors. The GETA sandals track a user's location using a footprint-based method. The footprint-based method uses location sensors installed underneath the GETA sandals to continuously measure the displacement vectors formed between the left and right sandals along a trail of advancing footprints."
RFID in Japan
"Interactive" billboards
This billboard is talking to you. "Ogilvy Belgium has launched this week a talking billboard in their campaign for Ford. The interactive poster reacts to their presence of who's standing in front of it. The voice and facial expressions of the guy in the poster are controlled by an actor hidden in a booth nearby. "
we make money not art
September 27, 2005
Connecting the physical and virtual
Semapedia: Real-World meets Wikipedia. "Imagine a world where you could visit a castle in Austria, press a button and read a Wikipedia article about the castle’s history and occupants. With Semapedia, now you can. This isn’t about public Internet kiosks, it’s about using your cellphone as an active travel guide and it’s about physical annotation meeting up with information access."
Lifehacker
Running apps off external storage
U3 Preps PC on a USB. "U3 LLC is readying its new USB drives, based on a “smart computing platform,” allowing you to basically carry around your entire PC on a USB drive—independent of any other storage device, and not tied to any specific computer. Vendors such as SanDisk and Verbatim are looking to supply the hardware, and software companies including AOL and Mozilla are planning to announce products that “run directly off the USB smart drives.” "
Gizmodo
September 26, 2005
TV over IP
Reinventing TV: Network TV Signs Off. Networked TV Logs On.. "Plugging TV into IP rather than into a terrestrial cable system or a fleet of geosynchronous satellites, could redeem - or at least reinvigorate - the medium. The hermetically sealed world of television is about to be cracked open and rewired, transformed into an open publishing platform as a variety of new devices and services emerge to make independent video content easier - and perhaps even profitable - to produce and distribute to smaller subsets of the population. "Release 1.0
Tiny remote control devices
Tiniest remote-controlled robot created. "Powered by a grid of electrodes underneath a surface layer and steered by its tiny silicon paddle, the bot crawls around at a speed of about 200 micrometres per second and can push specks of dust, or other “dead” robots. "
New Scientist
Big pixels on buildings
Light Emitting Roof Tiles. "Lambert Kamps's Light emitting roof tiles allows you to add huge texts, animations and logos on the roof of your building. The translucent polyester roof tiles are illuminated with LEDs and each tile can act as a pixel and be controlled by a PC. "
we make money not art
September 21, 2005
IM bots for information
TV listings IM bot. "Search the BBC 7-day TV listings with your IM client, and get SMS reminders sent to your phone. "
BBC backstage
RFID wallet phones that receive information
Toruka: a new feature for wallet phones. "NTT DoCoMo will introduce a new feature called Toruka for thier RFID-chipped wallet phones. Toruka allows wallet phones to receive information from RFID readers. This feature can be used to get discount coupons, store information, ads, etc. that are sent from reader devices. The received information is then stored in a special "folder" on a mobile phone. Once stored in the folder, the information can be exchanged with others by using a infrared port, external memory device, or email. "
RFID in Japan
Social networks and online services built in
Killer Buzz Flocks to New Browser. "Flock advertises itself as a "social browser," meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It's a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user. "Wired News
Hacking the phone
Embracing The Mobile Hacker Ethic. "First is Nokia’s release of the Python programming language for its Series 60 smartphone environment. The port of Python is a full implementation with a high degree of portability from the desktop environment, opening mobile development to a whole new class of programmers—which was its primary goal, says Erik Smartt, the program manager of Python for Series 60. “By choosing a developer-friendly, easy-to-learn language, Nokia is making it possible for casual developers to tinker with their mobile phones and innovate without the typical investment costs for embedded system development,..."
Gizmodo
Taking risks at work
Users play fast and loose with corporate PCs. "Users are more likely to engage in risky internet behaviour at work because they reckon their IT department will protect them against viruses, worms, spyware, spam, phishing, and other security threats. That's according to a recent online survey of 1,200 corporate end users in the US, Germany, and Japan conducted by net security firm Trend Micro."The Register
Uptake of cashless payment
Japan sees first-ever decrease in coins. "...coin usage in Japan is down for the first time ever, and the decrease is blamed on cashless payment systems. All interesting stuff, but most interesting to me is the idea that for the first time in history, purchases of small items like cigarettes, newspapers, soda and snacks are not undertaken anonymously. "Boing Boing
Location awareness in the home
Nukunukukey. "The Peltier device produces 3 different levels of heat according to how many people are present in a house. The LED emits light differently according to people's locations in the house -- whether they are in a living room, a kitchen, or a dining room. An apron-shaped device was also conceptualized for sending yes/no questions (such as "Will you have dinner at home?" or "Are you coming back home today?") to a nukunukukey. "
we make money not art
Tagging real places virtually
Virtual post-its. "The Siemens system could do everything from helping highway department personnel label pothole locations for road crews to allowing a city's residents to craft personalized guides for visiting friends."
Tech Review
September 20, 2005
Smart objects (too smart?)
Weather-Predicting Clothes Pegs. "Oliver MacCarthy, a Product Design student from Brunel University in the UK, has designed an intelligent clothes peg, which predicts the weather and locks itself shut if it forecasts rain, preventing you from hanging clothes out if they are likely to get wet. Two symbols on the holder – ‘clear sky’ and ‘rain’ – indicate the outlook and are positioned so they can be distinguished from inside. "
gizmag
More kid tracking with RFID
Train Ticket Gates to Track Kids. "PiTaPa is an RFID-based train ticket system that is used by railway companies (including Hankyu railways, Nosei railways, and Keihan railways) in the Kansai region of Japan. These three railway companies announced they together will test a service that uses their RFID-enabled train ticket gates for tracking kids. When a kid passes through RFID-enabled train ticket gates using an PiTaPa train pass, which is an RFID card, an SMS message is automaticaly sent to their parents. "RFID in Japan
RFID in construction
RFID Bolts + Digital Torque Wrench. "KRD Corporation in the city of Zama (Kanagawa Prefecture) developed RFID bolts. Using special digital torque wrenches, one can maintain records about each bolt: when it was fastened and how much force was applied while fastening, etc. Potential application areas include airplane assembling factories where lots of parts and bolts are used since RFID bolts may make be used to make sure that all bolts are fastened."RFID in Japan
September 16, 2005
Video Jockeys
Radio 1 Superstar VJS - Creative Archive Licence trial. "For the first time in our history the BBC is opening its video archives to the UK public. Download nearly 100 clips especially chosen with VJ's in mind. We've scoured the archives for skylines, sunsets, seascapes, wildlife, time-lapse photography & retro gadgets. We will be adding new clips/programmes and launching a major VJ based competition over the next few months so keep coming back for the latest updates. "
BBC
Barcodes that change with time to hold more data
3D Barcode (dude!). "The 3rd dimension is not Z but time. These are 3D barcodes for fortune telling:"
RFID in Japan
Capturing people you meet with
Recording who you met with at an academic conference. "At this year's ubicomp conference, RFID tags are used to record a person one met with. This could be used to either replace or augment our existing practice of exchaging business cards. A special table with embedded RFID readers read FeliCa RFID cards on it thereby identify people around the table. The table also takes a photo. "
RFID in Japan
Secure RSS
Secure RSS Courts Enterprise Adoption. "Two enterprise RSS providers are teaming with XML security company Reactivity to provide secure RSS features that could allow the technology to be used for everything from notices of credit card transactions to supply chain management, according to Andrew Nash, chief technology officer of Reactivity Inc., which makes secure XML infrastructure products. "EWeek
Tagging objects against tampering
Hands On Luggage passport prevents bag tampering. "The HandsOn Passport is designed to record the checked-in weight of luggage, and this can be compared with the weight at the collection point. Any discrepancy will show a removal of or addition to the luggage while it was "out of sight". This can be reported and investigated before passing through the customs hall, thereby removing the committal of any offence. "
gizmag
Physical interactions
Memory Ball Alarm and Radio. "...at each intersection of the quilted grid on top of the radio, is actually a preset radio station. You change the station by rolling the magnetized ball to another grid intersection."
Gizmodo
Local tags give you latitude and longitude
denCity.net. "Places and objects of the city get a virtual identification in the form of a QR(bar)-code. This code contains - in digitally readable form - the most important information of the respective location: its tag-ID and GPS-coordinates. Shot and decoded on the fly using a common camera-cellphone, through the tags one connects to the dataweb, which consists of site-specific information."
networked_performance
Connecting people and objects
Smart Medical Wristband. "This wristband contains a memory chip that stores all of the drug information for any patient. Chips are also placed on drug containers, when the sensors are near each other the wristband determines whether the drug is the correct one. Now while this isn’t a fool proof system, it is definitely a step-up in dosage mistakes. "
Gizmodo
Facilitating from a distance
Virtual facilitator could help teams solve problems faster, say UMR researchers. “Facilitation is in many ways related to therapy,” says Luechtefeld. “We help people to express ideas clearly, identify barriers, and understand the situation they’re facing. Our virtual facilitator could be used in chatrooms, e-teams, and educational situations right now.”"
UMR News and Research
August 30, 2005
Live TV online
BBC TV channels to be put on net. "The BBC's TV channels will be made available on the internet, BBC Director General Mark Thompson has confirmed. He announced plans for the MyBBCPlayer - which will allow viewers to legally download seven days of programmes [...]. A simulcast of BBC One or BBC Two, letting UK viewers see programmes on the web at the same time as they go out on TV, is also planned as part of MyBBCPlayer . "
BBC NEWS
Middleware game creation tools
Unity game engine adds Windows support. "Well, we support anything that makes developing games easier, because that’s going to ultimately mean more diverse games that break the stultifying parade of sequels that plague the industry. There are thousands of guys (and maybe dozens of girls) out there right now that have always dreamed of making a game but have been put off by the ever-escalating costs of doing so."
Joystiq
Online/Offline hybrid OS
GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?. "I'm looking at the rest of the most commonly used apps on my Powerbook and there's not too many of them that absolutely need to be standalone desktop applications. Text editor, IM[3], Word, Excel, FTP, iCal, address book...I could imagine versions of these running in a browser."kottke.org
Legitimate music sharing
Downloading Disrupted. "PlayLouder have signed a deal with Sony-BMG, one of the biggest record companies in the world, that will allow PlayLouder members to download music and then share it with their peers. The PlayLouder software analyses the sharing and works out what songs are being shared and how frequently. They then pay a fee based on this to the record label that owns the songs rights. This business model is truly revolutionary. It allows users to continue file sharing and actively encourage this whilst satisfying the record labels by compensating them based on actual figures. "
PSFK
Artists encouraging remixing
Beastie Boys release vocals-only tracks to encourage remixers. "The Beastie Boys are posting acapella tracks -- just the vocals, in other words, along with BPM info -- from their songs and encouraging their fans to make noncommercial remixes of them. A new track goes live every Friday. "
Boing Boing
Bluetooth advertising
Billboards beam adverts to passing cellphones. "Ignoring adverts is about to get a lot tougher with the development of billboards and advertising posters that use Bluetooth to beam video ads direct to passing cellphones. As people walk past the posters they receive a message on their phone asking them if they wish to accept the advert. If they do, they can receive movies, animations, music or still images further promoting the advertised product."New Scientist
New music publishing models
Warner Music readies CD-free 'e-label'. "Warner Music Group is creating a new music-distribution mechanism that will rely on digital downloads instead of compact discs. Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, said Monday that the new mechanism will be called an "e-label," in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years."CNET News.com
More online borrowing
Online librarian is 'overwhelmed'. "The website asks its members to add a list of 10 books they own to its online catalogue. The listed books can then be exchanged between members for the cost of postage and packing. "
BBC NEWS
Cataloging everything
Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth. "Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at."The Guardian
Growth in commerce through cellphone
Wireless purchases, in Japan it works. "Mobile commerce over cell phones jumped 25 percent last fiscal year to around 971 billion yen ($8.8 billion) according to a survey on e-business just released by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry [.pdf in Japanese]. Covering all of fiscal 2004 (which in Japan ended March '05), the survey showed wireless purchases of books and music had grown by 85 percent from virtually nothing the previous year to 330 million yen ($3 million). Shopping for clothing and accessories over the smallest screen accelerated 79 percent, taking in 150 hundred million yen ($1.3 million)."All about Mobile Life
Mainstream P2P
File Share and Share Alike. "To publicize its new series "Gilgamesh" and "Goddanar," it is releasing promotional packages - not in stores, but via the dreaded BitTorrent. "BitTorrent has been used extensively in a kind of underground environment up until now," said David Williams, a producer at ADV, in a telephone interview from the company's Houston headquarters. "There's a large group of people who have it on their systems. Since this core group already exists, we figured why not give them legitimate material to download that would help them learn about some of our products.""
New York Times
Display tags
Try Tacking This to a Wall. "Fuji Xerox plans to start selling these E-Paper Visual Index Cards sometime next year. The e-paper is ultra-thin and does not need electricity for its display, according to CNet."
Gizmodo
Language becoming an issue online
A Language Barrier to Sales. "IT seems impossible to believe, when you realize that just about every call to a toll-free number asks if you want to proceed in English or Spanish, but the vast majority of retail Web sites are English only. That decision - or oversight - is costing merchants tens of billions of dollars in sales a year, according to the current issue of Forrester Magazine, published by the research company of the same name."New York Times
RSS: Geeky or mainstream?
RSS failing to gain audience mindshare. "Nielsen/NetRatings polled 1,000 members of its research panel who read blogs. It found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents either never heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or did not know what the technology is used for. The study found only 11% of Web log readers use RSS to monitor blogs"ArsTechnica
New biometric methods
Computer Recognizes Humans by their Walking Patterns. "a system developed by University of Tokyo's Center for Spatial Information Science (site) that can identify individuals based on their walk pattern in crowds. The walk pattern recognizer combines floor-level laser beams with overhead cameras to isolate and track individuals. Tests showed that monitoring 600m2 of a crowded train station, the system succeeded in isolating 80% of 150 poeple."I4U News
Digital schools
Look, Ma, No Schoolbooks!. "Gypton said he assigns readings based on websites, lists postings to news articles, uses online groups and message boards to keep the students connected on weekends and asks them to comment on each other's work. "Wired News
Non-active tracking
Fujitsu to test kid-tracking system using QR codes. "if a child is lost, his QR Code can be read by an Internet-enabled scanner, which can automatically forward the child’s information to a specified server, which will in turn notify the parents. Unlike RFID, of course, there’s no active transmissions being sent by the child, but the QR-based system has the advantage of being cheap to implement."
Engadget
August 25, 2005
Smart tags
QR Code Gets Active for Lost Children. "Fujitsu developed a new technology that embeds IDs, IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, IP packets (both IPv4 and IPv6), and a "pulse signal" that can be directly sent out to the Internet into non-digital media including printed QR Codes. The technology for example allows for easily sending out notification messages by attaching QR Codes to things, people, etc. Using this technology, in a few days, the compay will test a system for notifying parents about their lost children at Shima Spanish Village in Mie Prefecture. QR Codes are attached to children -- if they are lost, someone can use a scanner to read their QR codes. The information encoded in the QR Codes includes the email address of a server machine. When it is scanned, the system automatically send email to the server, then the server notifies their parents using SMS."RFID in Japan
Selling your own goods
Etsy -- place to sell handmade goods. "Etsy is a website where people can sell anything they want, as long as it's handmade."
Boing Boing
Insurance cover for patent worries
Lloyds of London to offer insurance for corporate open source users. "Venerable, rock-ribbed insurer Lloyd's of London is planning on offering liability insurance to users of Open Source software who are worried about getting slapped with patent and copyright suits."Boing Boing
Checks finally dead?
Cheques 'extinct by 2025'. "Paper cheques could be extinct within the next 20 years as consumers and businesses switch to more convenient forms of payment, a new study reveals. The rise of electronic payments, debit cards and telephone and internet banking are sounding the death knell for the cheque, which research from Halifax, the UK bank, shows has dropped in use in the UK over the last year by seven per cent to 2.1 billion."The Register
Community lending
Ripple. "Ripple cuts the banks right out of the picture by allowing anyone to act as a bank and grant credit within the Ripple system to anyone they know. The system keeps track of the source of all IOUs, so that debts that are not repaid are automatically borne by the issuer."
Project Homepage
Anyone can start a music store
BurnLounge Makes Anyone a Music Download Retailer. "The Web-based service provides the music library, e-commerce tools and business management software for virtually anyone to own and operate their own digital download store. The company’s founders hope to recruit everyday music fans, allowing each to decide which acts they want to feature and promote, as a sort of digital guerrilla marketing play."
Realtech News
August 24, 2005
Super security cameras
CCTV video mixes maps and images. "Smart software is taking CCTV into the domain of 3D gaming by combining graphics, map data, and different camera views in one composite image. The system automatically tracks and stitches 3D images with CCTV video, maps and other real-time information. It automatically alerts operators to intruders, unusual behaviour, left objects or anything it is told to spot."
BBC NEWS
Downloadable TV
NerdTV. "PBS Launches NerdTV, the First Downloadable Web-Exclusive Series From a Major Broadcaster. A Whole New Kind Of Television For Niche Audiences. Beginning Sept. 6, PBS will make available - exclusively over the Internet - broadcast television's first entirely downloadable series, featuring PBS technology columnist and industry insider Robert X. Cringely's interviews with personalities from the ever-changing world of technology"
PBS
Booting off an external device
IBM’s SoulPad portable virtual computing environment. "With SoulPad, not only would your user environment be persistent, but so would be your session. Imagine suspending said user session—open windows, multimedia, active (and inactive) data, etc.—to a portable drive-enabled device (the demo video uses an iPod photo as an example) and booting back to this session independently another machine. When you’re done you resave your session to your device and the host machine returns to normal."
Engadget
Electronic books
Coming to campus: E-books with expiration dates. "Alongside the new and used versions of Dante's "Inferno" and "Essentials of Psychology" will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy. That's not a bad deal for a cash-strapped student facing book bills in the hundreds of dollars. But there are trade-offs. The new digital textbook program imposes strict guidelines on how the books can be used, including locking the downloaded books to a single computer and setting a five-month expiration date, after which the book can't be read."CNET News.com
Internet TV
DTV Beta: Internet TV. "DTV is a new, free and open-source platform for internet television and video. An intuitive interface lets users subscribe to channels, watch video, and build a video library. Our publishing software lets you broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost. The project is non-profit, free and open source, and built on open standards."
Lifehacker
People creating media
Citizens do media for themselves. "D Lasica's ourmedia is a place online where anyone can publish their own digital home movie, music, photos, or even plain old blog for free. [...] Since its inception in March 2005, not-for-profit Ourmedia has attracted more than 31,000 international members, and now plays host to 22,000 separate pieces of media, from travelogs to tastes of family life."
Smart Mobs
Reformatting RSS
Convert RSS to PDF. "RSS 2 PDF is a free online service that lets you turn an RSS or OPML newsfeed into a PDF. It’s lightning fast and creates a very readable and nicely formated PDF for your offline reading pleasure. [...] I can think of a few reasons to dig this. For example, linking type blogs that don’t utilize permalinks could use this to create a nice permanent content archive."Lifehacker
Tracking vehicles
Brits to get RFID-chipped license plates. "Unlike passive RFID which only transmits over short distances, the e-Plate licenses use active RFID technology to transmit vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers over 300 feet away. Not surprisingly, US officials will be monitoring the trial closely with an eye toward bringing mandatory RFID-tagged plates to the States."
Engadget
Machines on the network
Giving Machines the Gift of Gab. "As raw material heads down the line, each production machine connects to a central server via an Ethernet cable and automatically downloads a specific program for the job, then cuts the metal as specified. Once finished, the machine then downloads another program for a new job, letting the production line build many different models without a hiccup. It's part of a manufacturing trend growing as both wireless and wired network technology drops in price: Machines on the assembly line are becoming more interconnected, giving manufacturers tight control over every part of their shop floors."Business Week
August 23, 2005
Human attributes as data
HumanML, the Human Markup Language. "HumanML wants to represent human characteristics (cultural, physical, psychological, etc.) in such a formal way it can be delivered as machine readable subtext via the use of extensible markup language (XML)."Tech Trends
Tagging places that matter
Geominder. "Geominder allows you to create location-based reminders that stay attached to physical locations."
Ludimate
August 10, 2005
Tiny RFID tags
Super tiny with anti-collision. "ASTAR's IME (Institute of Microelectronics) in Singapore developed a very small RFID tag (1mmx0.5mm) with on-chip antenna. Hitachi's mu-chip is smaller (0.4mmx0.4mm), however, it doesn't have anti-collision functionality, which means multiple tags can't be read "at the same time."
RFID in Japan
Visualizations of services
Del.icio.us Visualization with Vox Delicii. "Vox Delicii is a really cool Web application that lets you view a "heat mapped" visualization of the current week's popular content on Del.icio.us. As you can see in the small shot above, you can mouse over different nodes and it'll highlight and tell you the name of the post that node represents."
Lifehacker
Bookmarking physical locations
Bookmark shops with Town Pocket RFID. "... Japan's new Town Pocket system, which is currently being deployed at 153 local shops in Harajuku, where you'll be able to whip out your RFID-enabled cellphone (or QR-code reader, depending on what you've got), and bookmark various stores."
Engadget
Open-source curriculum
After Wikipedia: free, collaborative, open kindergarten-uni textbooks. "The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer."Boing Boing
Smaller chunks of content
Shorter, faster, smaller. "Music: Consumers are moving from albums to singles. TV: Networks are looking for short video that works as well online as on broadcast. Movies: Online distribution is creating a big new audience for short films. Videogames: Between cellphone games, "casual" web games and downloadable content, smaller games are on the rise. Magazines: Reflecting the pace of a browse-and-skim culture, articles are getting shorter."
Longtail Post
Scripting web applications
Ajax: The New Web Interface Design Development Approach Everyone Talks About. "Most of Ajax's benefits mirror those of sophisticated screen-based applications. However, there is a big hurdle to creating these sophisticated applications: they are full-fledged programming environments that require advanced programming skills and a long-term commitment to proprietary technology. This makes creating interfaces in this way expensive and time-consuming. Because Ajax applications are built using nothing more than current web standards, they are relatively easy to create."Robin Good
Remote medicine
Surgery Via the Interweb. "This thing, called the RoboLase, allows you to cut into human flesh from across the room or around the world. What you see in this image are a series of microscopic holes etched into a single cell by doctors a the University of Queensland. The cells were stored in Southern California."
Gizmodo
Fingerprints in objects
Paper Beats RFID. "These fingerprints raise the possibility of securing documents without resorting to controversial solutions like RFID tags. In the future, every passport, driver's license and birth certificate could be scanned for its unique speckle pattern by the issuing agency. Portable scanners at border crossings or police stations would read the pattern on the document in question and match it to the baseline database. A standard desktop PC could check 10 million entries per second."Wired News
Wireless devices in the classroom
Kenya pilots handheld education. "In the Eduvision pilot project, textbooks are out, customised Pocket PCs, referred to as e-slates, are very much in. They are wi-fi enabled and run on licence-free open source software to keep costs down."
BBC NEWS
August 09, 2005
Setting kids boundaries with RFID
Apparel Maker Tags RFID For Kids' Sleepwear. "Lauren Scott of California will launch a line of kid's pajamas sewn with RFID tags. Readers placed in a house will be able to scan the tags within a 30-foot radius and trigger an alarm if boundaries are breached."
InformationWeek
Barcoding against theft
3D barcodes to identify stolen valuables. "DIAMONDS and valuable works of art could be protected against theft using a microscopic barcode that stores encrypted information about the provenance of the items, making ownership easy to prove if they are stolen."
New Scientist
August 08, 2005
Figuring out where you are, physically, on the net
Net addresses come down to Earth. "Sites such as Yahoo, MSN, Google and 192.com have started pushing local search services that link what you are looking for to shops and services near where you are in the real world. To do this they try to link the net address, or IP number, of the computer you are using to browse the web to a physical location."
BBC NEWS
Collaborating with video
Video making for children. "In Shooting mode, the users insert a token in the camera and record a shot. They place the camera on the table and the video is transferred wirelessly to the computer. Once removed from the camera, the tokens can be used as a composition element on the table and the resulting video clips can later be combined by the group to achieve a common outcome."
we make money not art
Buy stuff like this
Amazon Associate and QR Code. "...you can also use QR Codes to sell stuff and get commission. Let's say you just got a really cool shirt. Then, get a special URL for selling the same shirt on Amazon using the service, convert it to a QR code, print and paste it on the shirt. Next day you are strolling in Harajuku with your famous walk, then someone walks up to you and quietly scans the code on your shirt. You feel a bit unconfortable but stay calm and talk to yourself "that's okay, I'll probably get some money."RFID in Japan
Constant connections
Social Machines. "Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis, photo-sharing sites, and other technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of commentary and interpretation by other participants--the "back channel" mentioned by Campbell."Tech Review
Collaborative tagging at work
Tagging and Participative Journalism. "Jon Udell has an interesting piece on (among other things) the use of del.icio.us tagging by InfoWorld editors as a way for them to work with each other and also interact with their readers. We're finding similar things at Nature. First, our social bookmarking service for scientists, Connotea, is proving useful as a collaborative tool for our journalists and editors. For example, editorial teams can use tagged links to communicate ideas and leads among themselves. Also, journalists researching particular stories can use the system to store and retrieve informative links under suitable tag names — and can choose to keep those links private, at least temporarily, if they're worried about being scooped."Smart Mobs
Payment security
Pay that bill On Time - or your car won't start. "So while used car dealerships may have been rolling with Payment Protection Systems' On Time device for a while now, we can understand why since at least one dealer's delinquent payment rate went from down from 35% of customers to an astounding 5%."
Engadget
Collaborative world tagging
Tagging the planet. "Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well."
Tagzania
Weather by phone
Wireless Alarm Option For Hobo Weather Stations. "SolarStream is a new solar-powered, wireless transceiver designed for HOBO Weather Stations that provides alarm notification of weather conditions via cell phone text messaging or email."
gizmag
August 06, 2005
Wi-fi ePaper
Now Hitachi’s talking up their WiFi e-paper. "...while it's not color like some of those other, fancier guys', Hitachi's 13.1-inch sheets do have a leg up with it's 100dpi definition and WiFi connectivity. Are we going to be reading our newspapers on these things next year?"
Engadget
Phones + location
BBC offers mobile seaside service. "Mobile phone users visiting Britain's seaside will soon be able to access local information via the BBC. By pointing their mobile phones at plaques placed in 100 coastal locations, people will be able to access material from the new BBC Two series Coast."
BBC NEWS
"Real" tagging
Tattooed fruit en route. "A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance. [...] A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin..."
Boing Boing
Biometrics at work
No more "buddy punching" with the Kronos 4500 Touch ID. "...their 4500 Touch ID [...] uses biometrics for punch-ins, so unless you want to graft some skin on your friend's finger (not that we'll put it past some of you out there), you're actually going to have to, you know, work for that scratch."
Engadget
SMS alerts
SIMpill Medicine Bottle Monitor. "The SIMpill medicine bottle uses SMS tech to monitor patients - medicine-taking habits, alerting patients or their caregivers via text message when they miss a prescribed dose."
Iconoculture
Physical interaction models
Book Radio. "Each page of the Book Radio represents a frequency. You flip pages to scan the frequency spectrum; open to a specific page to listen to a station; place the bookmark on a desired page to listen and store the station; and slide the bookmark up or down to control the volume. Besides you can scribble in it, place stickers or take notes while listening."
networked_performance
Vertical computing
A Computer Aimed At Rural Users. "All the software in the computer is designed to meet the specific demands of the rural areas. For example, farmers can search for information on how to grow crops and they can also locate agricultural experts to help them."Smart Mobs
Citizen journalism
Watch Out -- TV Reporters Are Everywhere. "With the commercial launch of wideband-code division multiple access (W-CDMA), people will be able to video-record a scene and send it to broadcasters or upload it to the Web. It is the precursor of video-based citizen journalism."
The Korea Times
July 18, 2005
Tangible media
moo-pong. "...is a technology that allows people to capture, share and view video images using Tangible User Interface. When a camera captures video images, they are associated with physical tokens using RFID technology. "Users can edit and browse among moving images by dropping moo-balls into the moo-scope. Mirrors the in moo-scope produce visual effects like a kaleidoscope."
we make money not art
Foiling theft
New Retail System Peeks Under Shopping Carts. "Using visual pattern recognition - which considers the colors, shapes and images on the product but not its barcode or RFID tag - the system tries to identify the product and then automatically puts that product into the point-of-sale system. If it works, the item automatically appears on the display just as if its barcode had been scanned by hand"CIO Insight
eBay-like donating
Aid Recipients Might Have the Best Ideas About Allocation. "Their base of operations is GlobalGiving, a company they set up three years ago to use the Internet to connect small donors with worthy international aid projects. So far, they've raised more than $1.5 million from about 2,000 donors to finance all or part of about 400 small-scale projects. They've already built, ripped up and rebuilt a consumer-friendly Web site. And they've developed partnerships with dozens of nonprofit organizations around the world that vet all projects."Washington post
Tangible interfaces to media
MusicCube. "Users can physically interact with their music collections via the MusicCube using gestures to shuffle music and a rotary dial with a button for song navigation and volume control."
we make money not art
Physical interactions
Living Jukebox. "The horizontal display provides a unified gateway to access music from different digital sources. To select the music, you just have to place a cursor object and move it on the surface of the display. Each object signifies a different way to browse the music collection, and the interface changes accordingly when a different object is placed onto the display."
we make money not art
July 16, 2005
Comparison shopping by phone
Amabuddy - Comparison shopping by mobile phone (888) 937 4462. "You are in a bookshop or a record shop. You find something that interests you. You can't decide whether to buy it now or online later. What you need is a price check and a quick review, perhaps some ideas of something similar that others might recommend. Amabuddy can help! Grab a book off your shelf and try it!"
Amabuddy
July 12, 2005
Selling your photos for news
the citizen journalist's photographic agency, selling mobile phone and digital camera pictures to the press and media.. "If you photograph a newsworthy event, you could have a valuable scoop on your hands. Scoopt represents you, making sure the right people see your photo and ensuring that you get a good deal."Scoopt
Exchanging money through your phone
Exchanging Digital Money across Wallet Phones. "Edy to Edy is a new service from BitWallet, which will allow users of RFID-enabled Wallet Phones to exchange digital money easily."RFID in Japan
Using data to pick locations
The New Science of Siting Stores. "Ever wonder why sometimes you see two Starbucks coffee shops located within the same block -- or right across the street from each other? It's not by chance. Site selection has been fine-tuned to a digital art. A retailer can now closely analyze all of the sales information that it has to understand the lifestyles and preferences of its customers. Then, companies can combine that info with mapping and demographic software to decide whether it's worthwhile to open a store at a given location."Business Week
Smart labels
Talking wine label to chat up Italian consumers. "Who needs a sommelier? A "talking" wine label could soon tell consumers in Italy everything they want to know about a particular bottle -- from its production history to the kind of food it should accompany."Reuters
Location based websites
PlaceSite. "Savage announced his latest project, PlaceSite, which combines online social networking with real-life networking in Wi-Fi cafes by providing computer users with a website unique to a particular Wi-Fi cafe."
networked_performance
July 07, 2005
Hooking up with appliances
Fluidtime - make a date with a washing machine via SMS. "...for those of you still negotiating wash-time with fellow students or apartment-dwellers, here's a new way to do it: Fluidtime, a social app that lets you reserve a time slot for the machine via SMS, and even negotiate with others to get your reservation bumped up if you need the machine in a hurry...".
Engadget
July 06, 2005
Securing objects through RFID
RFID Bicycle Parking Going Well. "A system called Perfect Gate [...] uses two RFID tags, one embedded in a "stick key" and the other embedded in a front wheel of a bicycle. The stick key is used to open the gate to the parking area -- one can take a bike out of the parking only when encrypted code on his/her stick key matches the encrypted code stored in the bike's RFID tag. Maruyoshi Cycle introduced the system in April, 2004. Until then about one bike was stolen every month. No bike was stolen after the introduction of the system. They also saw a dramatic decrease of illegally parked bikes and illegal garbage dumping. Since the introduction of the system, the parking service is operated for 24 hours a day, the number of human workers at the parking was reduced from 3 to 1."RFID in Japan
Blogging business
Blogging While Browsing, but Not Buying. "Online merchants are starting to test Web logs, which are akin to online diaries, in hopes of giving their stores more personality and giving customers a reason to return even when they're not in the mood to buy. But for companies like Bluefly.com, eHobbies, Ice.com and others, blogs are so far afield from typical retail functions that they will take time to master."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
Legally downloadable movies
Forget the Bootleg, Just Download the Movie Legally. "After years of avoiding it, Hollywood studios are preparing to let people download and buy electronic copies of movies over the Internet, much as record labels now sell songs for 99 cents through Apple Computer's iTunes music store and other online services."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
June 30, 2005
Social content sharing
Yahoo! My Web 2.0 beta. "My Web lets you save, tag and annotate Yahoo! web search results and make them public or private. This latest release lets you search only pages your friends (address book, Messenger buddies or Yahoo! 360 contacts) have bookmarked and recommended. Similar to Google's move toward personalized search yesterday, it seems the web search heavyweights are moving away from spammable PageRanked results and toward creating little universes of trusted content for each user."
Lifehacker
Digital content
Publishing makes shift to digital. "The vast majority of UK research material will be available in electronic form by 2020. According to a study commissioned by the British Library, 90% of newly published work will be available digitally by this time."
BBC NEWS
Sharing stuff online
Web Content by and for the Masses. "I'm photo- and calendar-sharing services to "citizen journalist" sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way."
New York Times (may require free subscription)
June 27, 2005
New UI for existing services
del.icio.us on crack - Del.icio.us Direc.tor. "Newly-released bookmarklet Del.icio.us Direc.tor turns the Del.icio.us bookmark service into a gorgeous, lively, dynamic application that just about popped the eyeballs right out of my head."
Lifehacker
Changes in the tech sector
Computer Jobs Lose Luster as Young Techies Aspire To Other Careers. "The research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that up to 15 percent of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010, not including those who retire or die. Most will leave because they can't get jobs or can get more money or job satisfaction elsewhere. Within the same period, worldwide demand for technology developers -- a job category ranging from programmers people who maintain everything from mainframes to employee laptops -- is forecast to shrink by 30 percent."Tech Review
Cars and infrastructure
on-board automotive computers could interact with traffic lights in the future. "...speed recommendations could be transmitted to a vehicle as it approaches an intersection, enabling it to move through green lights or make the best possible use of phased traffic light systems. Functions for monitoring the immediate vicinity of an intersection are also particularly useful. Drivers can be warned of an increased accident risk in cases where it looks like another road user is likely to jump a red light because of excessive speed."
gizmag
Future workplaces
The Office of the Future - the skills you will need. "With Office of the Future: 2020, OfficeTeam, the sponsor of the research, examines trends that may impact the workplace in the next 10 to 15 years. In addition to interviews with workplace and technology experts, futurists, and trend watchers, OfficeTeam surveyed workers and executives at the nation's 1,000 largest companies."
gizmag
June 23, 2005
Controlling games with RFID
RFID Arcade Games. "This game is unique in the way how it combines Arcade Games, Trading Cards and RFID cards to provide new gaming experiences. There are two different kinds of cards used in this game. One is Trading Cards whose movements are detected by so-called Flat-Reader (see below). Players control their own armies by simply moving the cards on the surface."
RFID in Japan
Teleporting copies of 3d objects
'Teleporting' over the internet. "Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic "atoms"."
BBC NEWS
RFID security for objects
RFID prevents power tool theft. "They'll be a bit more expensive than their non-tagged counterparts (by two to five percent), but considering the construction industry lost between $300 million and $1 billion to equipment theft last year, it may end up being a very small price to pay. The serial number of the RFID tags ties into an inventory database of asset-tracking records."
Engadget
June 15, 2005
RFID + posters
Just Show Your ID to Make a Reservation for "My First Love"" J-POP artist Shogo Hamada's new album "My First Love" can be reserved simply showing SUICAs, which are RFID train passes widely used in the Tokyo metropolitan area, to special "digital posters" installed at some train stations including Tokyo Station, Shinagawa Station, and Ueno Station. The digital posters have speakers that play songs from the album; they read SUICAs and issue album researvation coupons."RFID in Japan
June 14, 2005
Central clearinghouses of information
Using Wikipedia entry as a pandemic-prevention clearinghouse. "An MD in the Canary Islands has decided to use Wikipedia's entry on Avian Flu as the central clearinghouse for breaking information on the virus, collecting and publishing info on pandemic prevention, mitigation and recovery."Boing Boing
Classes by phone
Get your next college lecture delivered to your video phone. "UK's Coventry University is broadcasting its lectures straight to the 3G handsets of its students. The lessons are filmed, whittled down into 15-minute edited segments and sent to the students' 3G phones "so they don't have to get out of bed in the mornings."
Engadget
June 10, 2005
Location aware tasks
Place Mail location-sensitive to-do list for cellphones. "The app, called Place Mail, can send a reminder whenever you're near a particular location. So, for instance, if you're near the video store, it can remind you of a movie you wanted to rent."
Engadget
Focus on protecting data
The Scramble to Protect Personal Information. "Combating the crooks requires a holistic approach to data security, said Mike Gibbons, a security consultant for the global technology services company Unisys, and the former chief of cybercrime investigations for the F.B.I. That includes creating more secure online access methods, robust customer authentication, hiring dedicated data security staff, and improving the way large amounts of consumer data are stored or moved."New York Times (may require free subscription)
Tracking your clothes
Digital Wardrobe. "This system is made of an RFID tracking system, a database, and an interface. First, users take a picture of the garment, put an RFID tag to it and map the picture and the tag number in their database. When users get dressed and walk out the door, an RFID reader detects the tags in each piece of clothing and sends the information to the PC. Users can view the garment narrative on their PC: when the item was last worn, how it was accessorized, how much it cost and, according to how often the piece has been worn, what's the $ per use, etc."
we make money not art
Full time encryption
Seagate Introduces Hardware-Encrypted Notebook Hard Drive. "Based on the Momentus 5400 family of notebook hard drives announced in April, the new version, dubbed the Momentus 5400 FDE, eventually will be inserted into notebook computers, tablet PCs and external storage products from various vendors."EWeek
June 08, 2005
Digital photography in your job
USES: From Broken Bones to Decayed Buildings. "When a patient is brought into the emergency room with, say, severe skeletal trauma, caused by a car accident or a shooting, one of the first steps for Dr. Olson's medical interns is to photograph the crushed bones and shredded tendons. The medical team then realigns the bones and applies a sterile dressing as a prelude to surgery. In years past, Dr. Olson said, surgeons would have removed the dressing each time they wanted to study the damage to plan the surgery. Now, the resolution of the images taken with the camera is enough to provide fine detail of the injury from various angles."
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
June 07, 2005
Tags that tell you what to do
Firms tag workers to improve efficiency. "Under the system workers are asked to wear computers on their wrists, arms and fingers, and in some cases to put on a vest containing a computer which instructs them where to go to collect goods from warehouse shelves. The system also allows supermarkets direct access to the individual's computer so orders can be beamed from the store. The computer can also check on whether workers are taking unauthorised breaks and work out the shortest time a worker needs to complete a job."Guardian Unlimited
June 06, 2005
Conversations with RSS
Conversate. "Conversate lets you create instant online discussion spaces. It's totally free and ideal for talking about articles or websites and for organizing projects and events. You can use RSS to receive invitations and track conversations."Smart Mobs
June 03, 2005
Business podcasting
Podcasting Sneaks into Business. "Paradyne, the networking company, is diving into podcasts for internal communications. "We've seen such good results with podcasts," writes marketing manager Eric Knapp in an e-mail, "that we're thinking of issuing iPods to our entire sales force." Next up for Paradyne? Video podcasts for training within a month or two."Gizmodo
Doing your job in the field
Cleveland to Unwire Building Inspectors. "In Michigan, where state inspectors have been using Accela's wireline software since 2002, the Bureau of Construction Codes and Fire Safety has reduced the time involved in entering data and issuing permits from "days to minutes,"EWeek
June 01, 2005
Wireless body monitoring
Zarlink Unveils Wireless Chip for Medical Implants. "The Ottawa-based company said it has the world's first chip designed specifically for in-body communication systems, which wirelessly links implanted devices via base stations to a doctor or hospital."Reuters
May 31, 2005
Broadcasting from your car
Watch for Roadcasting Rage. "Stuck in traffic and sick of Howard Stern, you may soon be able to tune in to the music collection of the person in the car in front of you. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing an ad hoc networking system for cars that would allow any driver to broadcast music to any other vehicle within a 30-mile radius."Wired News
May 20, 2005
Nano-tagging
Cornell Dots. "By surrounding fluorescent dyes with a protective silica shell, Cornell University researchers have created fluorescent nanoparticles with possible applications in displays, biological imaging, optical computing, sensors and microarrays such as DNA chips."
Cornell University
Technology time saver?
Contest Pits Electronic Medical Records Against Pen and Paper. "On Tuesday and Wednesday, nineteen companies selling EMRs (electronic medical record systems) were each given seven minutes - the time clinicians generally need to document a patient visit - to show their product. The event, called the Clinical Documentation Challenge, is now in its sixth year."CIO Insight
May 19, 2005
Easier phone downloads
Sound start for handset downloads. "Israeli firm Ki-Bi has invented a card-based system that it claims makes downloading content much easier. When held against a phone's speaker the chunky cards play a series of tones that connects the handset to an operator's portal."
BBC NEWS
May 18, 2005
Physical connections to history
What trees tell you in marunouchi. "Marunouchi is an area located at the center of Tokyo. QR codes are now attached to 94 roadside trees in the area so that visitors can use their camphones to get information "from the trees." Scanning a QR code leads you to a mobile website that shows historical or sightseeing information related to the location of the tree. For example, the code may tell you the history of a building behind the tree or show you a map and dining/shopping information."
RFID in Japan
Do-it-yourself hardware
The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy. "Yahoo Groups make it easier for people to trade ideas and learn quickly; free or cheap computer-aided-design (CAD) programs allow users to cobble together blueprints; and inexpensive manufacturing in China allows the idea to go from file to factory. There are even websites like Alibaba.com that will help these small-timers find Chinese factories eager for their work, meaning that the amateur nation has its own Match.com."FORTUNE
May 17, 2005
Negative technology uses
Messaging spreads office gossip. "In an online survey commissioned by security firm Akonix, a quarter of users admitted they see IM as the perfect vehicle for office gossip."
BBC NEWS
May 16, 2005
Bookless libraries
College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age. "By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library's 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country."
New York Times (May require free subscription)
QR codes for checking food origins
Japanese Use Cell Phone QR Bar Code Readers to Check Food Safety. "In the supermarket, consumers use camera equipped cell phones to scan the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content percentage (as opposed to chemical), use of pesticides and herbicides and even the name of the farm it was grown on."
Wireless Watch Japan
Long distance health care
Technology Lets Patients Visit Doctors Without Leaving Home. "As part of remote diabetes care, a team travels to First Nations reserves, where the disease is endemic, to take photos of patients' retinas with a specially designed digital camera. Those images can be viewed via computer by an ophthalmologist hundreds of kilometres away to check for signs of diabetes-related eye damage."
CNN
May 12, 2005
Self created audio guides
Students make their own MOMA audio-guides. "Students at Marymount Manhattan College's Department of Communication Arts are recording their own audio commentary on the Museum of Modern Art's exhibits. They're also inviting others to make their own homemade audio guides to MOMA, which they'll collect and post online."Boing Boing
RSS TV
torrentocracy. "Torrentocracy (pronounced like the word democracy) is the combination of RSS, bit torrent, your television and your remote control. In effect, it is what gives any properly motivated person or entity the ability to have their own TV station. By running torrentocracy on a computer connected to your television, you not only become a viewer of any available content from the internet, but you also become a part of a vast grass roots media distribution network."
torrentocracy
New models for publishing
Watt-Evans's next novel published under Street Performer Protocol. "Each week that he receives $100 worth of donations, he posts another chapter of The Spriggan Mirror, which is to be the ninth Ethshar novel. When it is completed, it will be published by small press if no major publishers are interested."Boing Boing
Music stores from anyone
Channel 4 launches download store. "Tracks will be shortlisted by music industry experts before a public vote selects their favourite band, with the winner appearing on Channel 4. The site, the first download store from a terrestrial broadcaster, offers 350,000 tracks starting at 79p."
BBC NEWS
May 11, 2005
APIs for media providers
BBC Backstage: tools for remixing the Beeb to your spec. "BBC Backstage is a collection of feeds, APIs, and other tools for remixing the BBC's digital offerings, to "make your stuff using our stuff." They want the world to convert the BBC's raw material into individualized, idiosyncratic and wildly imaginative applications. It's the Flickrization of the Beeb and it's so exciting I can scarce contain myself."
Boing Boing
Productivity management
Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki. "GTD TiddlyWiki tracks all your Getting Things Done lists - Next Actions, Projects, and context lists - in a you-won't-believe-your-eyes dynamic web page made up of editable chunks."
Lifehacker
Networks of sensors
A Web of Sensors, Taking Earth's Pulse. "They are linking up more than 100 tiny sensors, robots, cameras and computers, which are beginning to paint an unusually detailed portrait of this lush world, home to more than 30 rare and endangered species. Much of the instrumentation is wireless. Devices the size of a deck of cards - known as motes, after dust motes - can measure light, wind speed, rainfall, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, detecting the presence of a warm body or tracking the progress of a chill wind up the canyon."
New York Times
Running apps from USB keychains
Thin Firefox optimized for USB keychains. "Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers."Boing Boing
RFID connections between customers and stores
"bookmark" this store right here. "A Tokyo-based company TechFirm is launching a service that connects consumers and small retailers using RFID. Consumers having RFID-chipped phones can "bookmark" their "favorite" stores by showing their phones to RFID readers installed in stores. Information about a "bookmarked" store is automatically transmitted to a mobile phone. Consumers can access information about all "bookmarked" stores using dedicated mobile application software."RFID in Japan
May 09, 2005
Fast 3D city models
Fast 3D city model generation. "Virtualised reality scans the urban landscape using lasers and digital cameras mounted on a truck or plane. A laser measures distances to objects such as lamp posts and building facades, while the camera takes 2D photos. Another laser calculates the movement of the truck and checks its position against data collected from the aerial laser. [...] The researchers recently created a model of downtown Berkeley in just 4 hours - 26 minutes of driving plus 4 hours of data processing."
we make money not art
Small businesses outside of the community
Small firms surfing web to non-local markets. "In the age of internet commerce and long-distance transactions, a growing number of small businesses feel less a part of their local communities, according to a new survey. Research from NatWest shows that a fifth of UK small firms say they concentrate their business beyond their local community."The Register
Gesture control
The MouseField. "The MouseField, by Koji Tsukada, Toshiyuki Masui and Itiro Siio, combines an RFID reader and motion sensors to detect an object and movements after the object is placed on it. The system can interpret the user's action as a command to control the flow of information, without using special controllers."
we make money not art
One-off books
One-off coffee table books - the democratisation of book publishing. "A new web-based service that offers personalised single-copy high-quality coffee-table books could give the humble book a new life in the digital age."
gizmag
Digital archives of culture
Support for EU 'digital library'. "A plan to create a vast digital library to preserve Europe's cultural heritage has received strong backing from European Union (EU) culture ministers. Six EU nations said they supported the initiative at culture talks, which were also attended by more than 800 artists."
BBC NEWS
Wiki + Blog + lists
Backpack personal organizer. "Backpack's a fun combination wiki, weblog, to-do list and calendar that's featureful but not overwhelming. Make a page that contains check-offable lists, images, dated notes, and files about a project or idea. Link pages and share them with others for collaborative editing. Set up reminders that get sent to your email or mobile device about project deliverables - or to water the plants or pay the rent. Subscribe to page changes in your newsreader, and reminders in your calendar applicaton."
Lifehacker
Visualization overlays
MenuVista. "MenuVista, the thesis project of ITP student Chia-wei Chang, gives restaurant customers a preview of their orders by projecting photos of the meal on their empty plates. Besides, the system allows them to modify their orders by using a projected menu with a touch sensor interface which includes menu text and food images."
we make money not art
April 28, 2005
Celebrity blogging
Celebrity Blog Set to Launch. "Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Walter Cronkite, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harold Evans and Tina Brown are just a few of the 250-plus names recruited by Arianna Huffington, commentator, one-time Republican and candidate for governor of California, to create an ber-blog that will offer a round-the-clock commentary on our life and times."
PSFK
Using blogs for commenting on documents
UK Election Manifestos annotated. "Mark Simpkins, Richard Pope and Gavin Bell have built a site that presents the UK election manifestos for the three main parties (Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats) in a way that allows anyone to comment on the content, right there, next to the content."Smart Mobs
Communication addiction
'Infomania' worse than marijuana. "Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed. The study for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages."
BBC NEWS
Mimicking nature
The Eco pods. "One pod represents the wind, another the sun's heat, a third one the light and the last one represents the rain. Each pod can be manipulated with a movement or action characteristic of the natural element it represents. If you blow on the "wind" pod, you'll see on the computer screen the effect wind can have on a flower, if you pour water onto the "rain" pod, the flower will be watered as well, etc."
we make money not art
Real world pointers to content
Forget QR code, here comes the ColorCode. "This time, the information is not in the barcode itself, but on a remote server accessible through the code. So when you scan a ColorCode with your mobile phone, it connects to a server and downloads information, then presents it to you. The little code could "contain" an URL, a ringtone, or an mp3 for instance."
we make money not art
Offshore coding
Sweat Ship: offshore coding operation planned in San Diego. "Three San Diego entrepreneurs plan to start a cut-rate outsourcing plant for software development three miles off the coast of Los Angeles aboard a used cruise ship moored in international waters."Boing Boing
April 26, 2005
Trading virtual items
Sony opens game goods marketplace. "The Sony Station Exchange will open in late June and will let EverQuest players buy and sell in-game cash, magical items and characters. The move is a surprise because for the last six years Sony has battled to stop the trade in game items and characters."
BBC NEWS
Remixing with permission
Nine Inch Nails + Garageband. "'What I'm giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for 'the hand that feeds' in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into."
Cool Hunting
Moving natural light around
Skyport & Bjork. "...Skyport is a light collecting panel that sits on your rooftop to transmit light into your home. It uses a fibre-optic wire, called SunWire, to send the light to specially designed 'lamps'..."
MoCo Loco
Home security risks
Home workers 'pose security risk'. "Working from home could pose a security threat to British businesses, costing an estimated 8.5bn a year, an IT security company has warned."
BBC NEWS
April 25, 2005
Mixing up web services
Google Maps Meets Craigslist. "The cross pollination of two of the best resources available on the internet-- Google's new mapping service, and the classified listings page, Craigslist."
Cool Hunting
360-degree cameras
The Eye Ball R1 for a 360-degree view of the crime scene. "The Eye Ball R1, a wireless camera and microphone in a baseball-sized casing, can be tossed into a crime scene to give police watching a TV screen embedded in a handheld a 360-degree view of what the bad guys are up to."
we make money not art
April 17, 2005
RFID connections with objects
UchidaProjection Table. "Uchida Yoko's Projection Table system includes transparent acrylic cubes (==>icon cubes) containing small physical objects (e.g., mini-models, small graphical images, etc.) and RFID tags, a shelf for storing the icon cubes, and a table that reads the tags and displays relevant digital contents."
RFID in Japan
April 13, 2005
Smart ways of storing
The intelligent data storage imperative. "The world produced about 5 exabytes of new data per year (that's five million terabytes) and the rate of growth is about 30 per cent - at least that's what Hal Valarian's researchers at the University of Berkeley in California tell us."The Register
April 11, 2005
Interchangeable smartcards
The mbracelet. "The mbracelet, developed by Studio 5050, is a wrist accessory capable of withdrawing money from prototype ATM machines. The mbracelet stores, shares and collects information. It has 3 slots that can receive interchangeable iButtons to enable the wearer to customize the information they want to carry with them."
we make money not art
Digitizing printed books
The Infinite Library. "Once the knowledge now trapped on the printed page moves onto the Web, where people can retrieve it from their homes, offices, and dorm rooms, libraries could turn into lonely caverns inhabited mainly by preservationists. Checking out a library book could become as anachronistic as using a pay phone, visiting a travel agent to book a flight, or sending a handwritten letter by post."
Tech Review
Digital price tags
Bridgestone's e-Paper Price Tags. "Using "Electro Liquid Powder", the displays have a quicker refresh time than earlier-generation e-paper solutions and are able to be printed on a substrate just 0.12mm thick."
Gizmodo
Object recognition
Tasting music. "Tasting Music is a table, developed by Michihito Mizutani, allowing people to listen to music without using any sophisticated device. You simply put the CD in the center of the table, a menu appears and you can pick up the track you want to listen to by placing a coin over it."
we make money not art
April 08, 2005
Mobile banking grows
CNN: Almost a million Koreans bank by cellphone. "Almost a million Koreans now do their banking via 3G cellphones, according to CNN. The service was first offered by Koomkin, South Korea's largest bank, about two years ago, and now all of the country's major banks offer mobile banking services."
Engadget
Dynamic posters
Escalators get moving advertising posters. "Companies can refresh messages daily and even hourly. A newspaper advertiser could update ads to promote breaking news, for example and prices will rise and fall according to traffic patterns."
we make money not art
Re-presenting some elses content
Website spinoffs. "As private and commercial Web portals begin to invite outside involvement and experimentation, new sites are being launched which, rather than offer any unique material of their own, offer an alternative method of viewing someone else's material."csmonitor.com
Detecting "tone" in a document
Software agents give out PR advice. "...a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party's policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it."New Scientist
April 04, 2005
Networks of wireless sensors
Smoothing the Ride with Tiny Sensors. "Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley are developing tiny wireless sensors that become part of a car's steel frame. With these devices, they hope to prevent rollovers, increase driver control, even provide a smoother ride."Business Week