impoint. “The locale conference table will be seamlessly integrated in a virtual conference scene including other remote participants represented on a large display and under correct perspective.”
The Heinrich-Hertz-Institute
CRM: Trickle-Down Tech. “Not only can it tie each customer’s information together all in one place — making it easy to track complaints, billing problems, order changes and the like — outfits can also set it up to monitor trends, such as shifts in buying patterns in different regions. The temptation is to try to do it all.”
BusinessWeek
Computers to be ‘oxygen of the future’. “By the year 2010, scientists predict we will be immersed in a sea of miniature computers.”
BBC NEWS
Tangible Bits Exhibition. “I/O Brush is a new drawing tool aimed at young children, ages four and up, to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them.”
tangible.media.mit.edu
DoCoMo develops controller to run appliances with handsets. “The controller enables operations such as programming the recording of a TV program and then viewing the playback on the phone, turning air conditioners and lights on and off, and viewing live video from the controller’s built-in camera, including automatically if the unit’s built-in motion sensor detects movement,”
Japan Today
Reciva’s Wireless Household Internet Radio. “A new wireless Internet radio from Reciva that doesn’t need a PC to work, all it needs is WiFi and a broadband Internet connection.”
Engadget
Concern over biometric passports. “Civil rights campaigners have voiced concerns over plans to implement a global biometric identity system for air travellers.”
BBC NEWS
Surveillance Nation. “Ultimately, surveillance will become so ubiquitous, networked, and searchable that unmonitored public space will effectively cease to exist.”
technologyreview.com
newsmap. “Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator.”
marumushi.com
Learning goes Mobile “IDC expects e-learning and traditional learning to become indistinguishable in the near future.”
Smart Mobs
New album only available for purchase by SMS “A rock band says their new release – and all future releases – will only be available for purchase by text message – because CD prices are too high.”
Smart Mobs
a handheld ad-hoc radio device for local music sharing “tunA is a mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices. Users can “tune in” to other nearby tunA music players and listen to what someone else is listening to.”
medialabeurope.org
Parents may soon decide whom kids call “And it could designate “always” and “never” phone numbers: Always allow a call to or from this number (Dad’s or Mom’s office or cellphone), never to or from this number (bad-influence school troublemaker, loser former boyfriend), and if a parent or an authorized adult is calling from a non-”always” phone number, allot a personal code to make sure the call still goes through.”
Boston.com
Concept Mobile Phone by Proekt
“Just how thin can a mobile phone be? The #1 phone, a new concept mobile phone by Proekt, is only 2mm in thickness.”
mobile9.com
Ergodex DX1
“You can place the keys in any order or manner. Spacing is flexible and entirely up to the user. Each key offers slight tactile feedback and the underlying pad can differentiate between key presses and key releases.”
Extremetech
India sells inexpensive handheld computers
“A cheap handheld computer, designed by Indian scientists for use by the poor, went on sale Friday for $220 after a delay of nearly three years.”
Boston.com
Video Game Industry Faces ‘Crisis of Creativity’. “Last summer, the Entertainment Software Association, an industry trade group, found that the average age of gamers had risen to 29 years old, dispelling the view that gamers consist mainly of teenagers. “Core gamers are advancing in age and they are becoming more conservative,” Hasegawa told a panel.”
Yahoo! News
F u t u r e M e . o r g. “Create an e-mail to send to the future”
futureme.org
Downloading
“It would not be unusual for an aspiring musician to download a tune from, say, an obscure techno band in Japan. That would have been impossible two or three decades ago; that kind of music could not be found in the bins at the neighbourhood Sam the Record Man.”
CBC News Indepth
Want to buy this single? Just touch your mobile to the poster. “The technology has three main applications: secure mobile payments, peer-to-peer communication, and access to information on the move. The idea is that it will let you get content and services and transfer data simply by touching a smart object, or by bringing two devices close together.”
Independent.co.uk
What Was I Thinking?.
“We have built a ‘memory prosthesis’ that can be used to amass such data for the purpose of helping people with common, everyday memory problems.”
MIT
Speech Making Enterprise Inroads, Top Vendors Say “For enterprises, speech has become less of a passing interest and more of a necessity as they look to reduce costs and improve customer experiences in call centers, Berger said. Two years ago, however, the speech industry was still questioning whether speech had entered the mainstream.”
eweek.com
Digital paper makes device debut “The display has a resolution of 170 pixels per inch, which E-Ink says is comparable to the print quality of newspaper.”
BBC NEWS
Identity theft is on the rise, FBI agent warns “Warning signs of identity theft are unauthorized charges on accounts, phone calls from unknown creditors, bank or credit card statements that don’t arrive on time and new or renewed credit cards that aren’t received in the mail when expected”.
Smart Mobs
‘Web stalker had me fired’ “A TOP secretary sacked by the Co-op for allegedly posting offensive and racist messages on the internet, claims she was the victim of an on-line “stalker”.”
Manchester Online
Being Wireless
“Nicholas Negroponte explains why Wi-Fi “lily pads and frogs” will transform the future of telecom.”
Wired
Smart places. “Tom wasn’t sure exactly where he was: he looked at the screen of his mobile phone, but the map showed several streets and no red dot to say “You are here!” Luckily, there was a pub nearby, so he waved the phone past its front door to pick up his co-ordinates, which naturally came along with special offers on beer prices, a bar menu, and a singing commercial, which he cut off at once.”
Guardian Unlimited
For Some Internet Users, It’s Better Late Than Never. “She exchanges e-mail messages with two dozen relatives in Finland, keeps her language skills polished by reading a Finnish newspaper online, and collects chicken and eggplant recipes.”
NYTimes
Graphical User Interface gallery. “Welcome to guidebook, a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces.”
GUIdebook
Calculating your tab the RFID way. “About 120 sushi bars so far are now using a new speedy system called “Oaiso” (meaning check), which uses RFID tag-embedded sushi plates to tally the bill.”
Engadget
The Future Of News: The Digital Information Librarian “New tools to aid the information gatherer and explorer are news aggregators, RSS feeds, AI based reasoning systems and knowledgeBases, and niched bots/intelligent agents.”
masternewmedia.org
New social-networking startups aim to mine digital connections to help people find jobs and close deals.
.”Companies like Spoke Software of Palo Alto, CA, are building applications that automatically sort through this data and then apply social-networking-analysis techniques to weight connections and generate corporate sociograms showing the strongest paths to target customers.”
Ageist attitudes rampant. “In the absence of tough legislation, ageism continues to be the ‘poor relation’ among forms of workplace discrimination. A new survey finds 80 percent of London over-50s claiming to have experienced it when applying for jobs.”
The Nub
Toshiba unveils wearable concepts for 0.85-inch HDD at CeBIT 2004.
“Toshiba today will preview several concepts, a Wristwatch PDA, Digital Wallet, Intelligent Eye Display System, and MP3 Headset.”
MobileMag
Talkative future for every gadget. “Near Field Communications helps gadgets work out the best way to swap data when they are brought within a few centimetres of each other.”
BBC NEWS
Online Business Networks Blog. “Can people really develop trusted business relationships over the internet? And are these new social networking sites actually helpful in identifying and building those relationships?
In a word, yes.”
Online Business Networks.com
The Honesty VirusWe fib less frequently when we’re online than when we’re talking in person.
NY Times
Sketchy Information “Where the newer approaches differ is in complexity, because they can show intricate relationships among items.”
Tech Review
Hoping for a Knee-Jerk Reaction “Ward now sports the world’s first wireless electronic knee prosthesis. His new knee will transmit information about its inner workings to scientists in real time as Ward walks, climbs stairs, exercises and performs other basic activities.”
Wired News
RFID chips watch Grandma brush teeth
. “Tiny computer chips that emit unique radio-frequency IDs could be slapped on to toothbrushes, chairs and even toilet seats to monitor elderly people in their own homes.”
New Scientist
Starbucks Opens First Music Cafe in U.S.
“Starbucks Corp on Tuesday unveiled a new kind of coffee shop serving up custom music CDs along with foamy coffee drinks.”
Reuters.com
Beware of geeks bearing ‘presence’. “True presence, where everybody who needs to contact you knows where you are and what you’re doing, is years off and requires surmounting a host of technical, business and behavioral challenges.”
CNET News.com
Oh My! News by Million Camera Phones
“The World Cup 2002 Korea-Japan, the first World Cup ever co-hosted by two countries gave socio-cultural analysts in both countries an unusual opportunity to compare the behavior by peoples of the two historic rivals.”
ohmynews.com
30 minutes to database disaster. “If a fire or terrorist attack destroyed the building or if there was a black-out which lasted more than 30-minutes, every computer record held by the council would be lost.”
ic Liverpool
Wireless in-car hi-fi. “Digital Music in Your Car Wirelessly transfer CD-quality digital music, audio news and information updates from PC or Internet to Omnifi™, making it the most powerful and convenient way to play audio files while you’re on the road.”
Omnifimedia
Onfolio. “Onfolio is a PC application for collecting, organizing and sharing information you find online. Fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office, Onfolio has tools for capturing a wide range of content including links, text snippets, images, web pages, and documents.”
Onfolio.com
The SimCar-100. “Just like the real thing, it uses a Bluetooth connection to control the car on your PC screen from your phone”
Engadget
Mobile Phone Companies Compete to Offer Security Services . “During an emergency the user rings the alarm bell and the phone sends text messages and automatically calls the three numbers selected as the mobile phone user’s guardians.”
Chosun.com
Gunslingers. “By using SingTel’s location positioning technology, gamers can turn Singapore into a virtual game arena, allowing them to compete against others in their vicinity by using their mobile phones.”
geekzone.co.nz
One Person, One Phone. “The use of cell phones is likely to expand even further this spring when all U.S. residents gain the ability to transfer landline phone numbers to their mobiles.”
MIT Tech Review
Log your life via your phone. “The Lifeblog software automatically arranges all the messages, images, videos and sound clips people capture with their phones.”
BBC News
General Micro Systems Announces Industry’s Smallest SBC. “Occupying 30% less space than a credit card, and consuming as little as 4W of power, the Spider’s tiny footprint, standalone operation and hot swappability makes it ideal for a broad range of embedded applications, from distributed control systems and scalable telecom blade servers, to handheld computing, in-flight entertainment and defense/homeland security.”
Linux Electrons
Matrix Expands to Wisconsin. “With access to the Matrix database, Wisconsin law enforcement officials can look up vast amounts of personal information culled from government and commercial databases. The information includes driver’s license pictures, addresses, professional licenses, names of neighbors and relatives, and even domain-name registration filings and hunting licenses.”
Wired News
Robot builder could ‘print’ houses “A robot for “printing” houses is to be trialled by the construction industry. It takes instructions directly from an architect’s computerised drawings and then squirts successive layers of concrete on top of one other to build up vertical walls and domed roofs.”
New Scientist
In search of the deep Web “The “deep Web” is the great lode of databases, flight schedules, library catalogs, classified ads, patent filings, genetic research data and another 90-odd terabytes of data that never find their way onto a typical search results page.”
Salon.com
China.Net “More than 22 million newbies piled on to the Web last year, bringing the total number of Chinese online to 80 million. That makes China second only to the U.S. in Internet subscribers…”
Business Week
Projector for cellphones “First in the world, Upstream Engineering introduces a revolutionary optical technology that will enable video projection from matchbox-sized device running on batteries.”
Upstream Engineering
Adobe adds bar codes to PDF forms “The technology, announced Monday, will allow faster processing of forms ultimately intended for printing. Early backers include the Internal Revenue Service, which will experiment with adding bar code capacity to several PDF-based tax forms this year.”
CNET News.com
Chameleon Card Changes Stripes. “Chameleon Network, in Concord, Massachusetts, plans to replace the stacks of credit, bank and customer-loyalty cards burdening modern consumers with a single, rewritable Chameleon Card, which works just like an ordinary card with a magnetic strip.”
Wired News
Cheap 3D scanner nearing the desktop
. “As the object turns on the table, the system builds up a complete picture of the object’s shape. Colours captured by the camera are applied to the virtual object once the complete shape has been generated.”
New Scientist
The Emirate 1 – The first Pocket PC Phone to help you pray towards Mecca. “Comes with built-in GPS navigation (which they tout as being able to help you find Mecca when it’s time to pray)”
Engadget
Canyon or mirage?. “A new paper questions the notion of a worsening digital divide between rich and poor”. “Even though developing countries have fallen behind economically over the past decades, they managed to catch up digitally”.
Economist
Artificial exoskeleton takes the strain. “In addition to its own weight, it will carry a 32 kilogram payload within the backpack. To the pilot this would feel like they were carrying just 2 kilograms, says Kazerooni.”
Predictions for 2030 from CBS show ‘Century City’. “The world is more interconnected than ever before, thanks to high-resolution holographic projections beamed across the fiberoptic net and scramjets that make weekend trips to other continents commonplace. The wealthy can even visit the lunar colonies on vacation.”
CBS
For New Buildings, Digital Models Offer an Advance Walk-Through “While nothing could replicate the open-air spectacle of actually being there – the crack of the bat, the cheering fans, the aroma of hot dogs and peanuts – thousands of people toured the park, in a sense, long before it existed. They visited it virtually, gliding through a finely detailed, three-dimensional digital model.”
NYTimes
15 percent of people use same password for all systems. “Some 63 per cent of respondents considered themselves to be “more informed” on the issue of identity theft, but of these nearly half (49 per cent) do not consider themselves to be any safer now than they were last year.”
The Register
SounderCover “SounderCover gives you the ability to add a background sound to any incoming or outgoing call, giving the impression that you really are in the environment where the background sound is normally heard.”
Simeda
Dynamo: a communal, multi-user surface that supports cooperative sharing & exchange of digital media. “Dynamo is a situated display system, normally configured to use two large, publicly visible wall displays. Dynamo is multi-user. This means that each user has their own pointer on the communal display. This may be via their own laptop, tablet PC, or via wireless mice & keyboards provided.”
Dynamo Interactive
Robo-talk helps pocket translator “Users can talk into the device and it will talk back in almost-perfect Japanese in a second.
It has voice recognition, digital voice translation and a voice synthesiser to talk to users, explained Chris Shimizu, NEC’s corporate relations manager, and the quality of the voice spoken back to users is much more human than robotic.”
BBC NEWS
Suspended kids log on to Web class – 03/01/04 “Cameras record every minute of Beverly Pearson’s day as a high school English teacher. When Pearson strides to the blackboard, a lens swivels to track her movements. A microphone captures each word.
It’s all piped electronically to a nearby building at Coffeeville High School where students stuck in suspension can follow Pearson’s class or any other lesson at the school by logging onto a computer and tracking the classes on the Internet.
Detroit News
Americans get personal online “The report, entitled “Content Creation Online”, notes that “while blogs or personal online journals have captured the attention of the technology community, most of those who have made contributions have done so in less cutting-edge ways”.”
The Register
Got a Book in You? More Companies Than Ever Are Willing to Get It Out “It’s easy to publish your own book!” the “Borders Personal Publishing” leaflets proclaim. Pay $4.99. Take home a kit. Send in your manuscript and $199. A month or so later, presto. Ten paperback copies of your novel, memoir or cookbook arrive.”
NYTimes
Mirror/display “When the screen is switched on, anyone standing in front of it sees only the picture. With the television switched off, the surface behaves like an ordinary mirror.”
New Scientist
Hitachi sees consumer devices pushing storage market “Hitachi Ltd. sees a bright picture for the future of its hard-disk drive business, a sizable portion of which was purchased just over a year ago from IBM Corp., thanks to the increasing demands for physically small, high-capacity drives for use in consumer electronics equipment.”
InfoWorld
QRIO “It is the product of cutting edge artificial intelligence and dynamics technology. An entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy. Its name is QRIO. QRIO can gather information and move around on its own accord. QRIO not only walks on two legs, it can also manage uneven surfaces, dance, recognize people’s faces and voices, and carry on conversation. QRIO is eager to be friends with people.”
See also this video (WMV).
Sony
Intel envisions TiVo-like wireless PCs “Intel wants desktop PCs to double up as network hubs and video recorders, a move that could make life tough for the companies that produce those standalone products.”
CNET News.com
Wi-Fi catches on at construction sites “Webcor Builders, the company constructing the 42-story hotel complex, created a wireless network so that engineers and crews could instantly view blueprints and coordinate projects.”
ZDNet UK
Organize, borrow, loan, and share books, CDs, DVDs, and video games “Mediachest is a social software site that allows users to inventory their collection of physical media items and search the collections of their friends and friends-of-friends for items such as DVDs or books that they would like to borrow.”
mediachest.com
Toymakers Bet Big on Microchips “…there were very few toys that didn’t include computer chips somewhere in their innards. But vendors promise the singing, puking, engine-revving, chatting, TV-interacting toys will be easy to assemble and play with, and won’t torment kids with blue screens of death and other technology-related traumas.”
Wired News
Your Daily Digital Doctor “The InterMed project will combine patient education, daily in-home monitoring of blood glucose levels, and advanced analysis of the wealth of resulting data. It will also alert clinical staff as needed, and provide patients with daily, individualized feedback.”
technologyreview.com
Microsoft Sets March Launch for Speech Server “It includes server software for handling speech recognition and text-to-speech conversions as well as a set of tools for building speech applications in Visual Studio .Net”
eweek.com
TiVo’s watching you. But who’s watching TiVo? “The company swears that no demographic information ever gets relayed, but we’re nonetheless left hoping that the folks who make that pledge live up to their word.”
CNET News.com
Less than half will primarily use traditional PCs by 2006 “By 2007, the average user will interact regularly with at least four distinct computing devices — a personal home PC, smart digital entertainment system, corporate computer, and mobile information device”
deviceforge.com
3D mall. A nice example of virtual real estate. Processor hog, though, and the navigation gets frustrating REALLY quickly.
artificialinfluence.com
640KB ought to be enough for anyone “Without going as far as MyLifeBits, it’s not difficult to imagine saving, on your PC’s disks – all interlinked at least in terms of who, what, where, when, and why; and subsets of which will be replicated across many devices”
Ray Ozzie
DiGiMatrix Entertainment PC
“Quiet, Cute, Quality PC
Supports CD//Karaoke/Picture-CD Playback
High quality TV output (Supports HDTV display output)
TV/Video Recorder
Enjoy and record FM Radio”
Asus.com
Sony Develops PS2 Videophone “Sony is developing a system to convert the PlayStation 2 into a video communication terminal, IT Media Lifestyle reports today. At the IPv6 Business Summit 2004, held yesterday in Tokyo, Sony showed off a PS2 using a USB digital camera to send video communications via the Internet.”
1up.com
German Airport Testing Iris Scan “Passengers in the six-month program still go through regular security controls, but can bypass conventional passport checks. They can simply put their passport though a scanner, take a quick look at a camera and a few seconds later enter the country, airport officials said.”
Yahoo! News
eBay to Expand Developer Access “eBay’s announcement meshed with one of the key themes outlined during the opening day of the conference: that major Web players such as eBay, Amazon and Google are increasingly becoming platforms themselves as they provide connections into their services and databases.”
eweek.com
Notebooks to dial up built-in phones “Manufacturers plan to start selling notebooks with integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) this year and plan later to offer notebooks with built-in cell phone capabilities”
CNET News.com
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