Boosting Biometrics. “Now, corporate and academic labs worldwide are tackling these weaknesses by merging multiple biometrics into systems that are flexible, accurate, and virtually spoof-proof.”
Tech Review
Innovision R&T launches world’s smallest, lowest cost RFID reader. “For example by passing your MP3 player with its built-in io reader over an NFC-enabled music poster, you could download a sample track from the advertised album instantly or even purchase the entire CD.”
Innovision
Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. “Imagine a system that managed their Home LAN, devices, cell phones and videogames while providing a virtual file system to give them access to all of their content and data – whether they were at home, the office or on the road.”
Always On
TowerStream Takes the Empire State Building. “TowerStream announced today that it has added a wireless Point-of-Presence (PoP) 800 feet above NYC on the Empire State Building.”
Internet News
Prospective “hot-spot” maps show where criminals are going to be active “It is a cliché to say that crime spreads like a disease, but previous work by Dr Bowers and her colleagues found that this is exactly how crime does spread.”
The Economist
The First Persian Weblog Festival. “Regarding the everyday increase of use of internet in Iran and the wonderful statistics for the number of Iranian weblogs, which involve a great large amount of the web’s Persian content, we decided to hold the first festival for Persian weblogs and internet magazines.”
weblogfestival.com
An Architect in the City of Bits. “Once you have location awareness combined with sensing, all of the automobiles in a city can operate as part of a giant distributed scanner that builds a real-time model of the city and keeps it updated.”
TheFeature
BEA rethinks the browser for mobile workers. “Dubbed Alchemy, the technology extends the idea of a Web browser by adding an additional memory cache for fetching and storing information that a user might want to view offline.”
InfoWorld
Cell phones to show medical info . “NTT DoCoMo Inc. will start in July the nation’s first service to enable patients to view their medical records on mobile phone screens, the company said Wednesday.”
Daily Yomiuri On-Line
Army To Deploy Hand-Held Devices To Make Every Soldier Into A Sensor . “This would bridge the [information] gap … Information goes directly to the soldier and the soldier’s information goes directly to the enterprise.”
Aviation Now
The Way We Eat Now. “After tens of thousands of generations of human evolution, flab has become widespread only in the past 50 years, and waistlines have ballooned exponentially in the last two decades.”
Harvard Magazine
On a Mission: The New Internet Mom. “Nine out of 10 new Internet moms agree that the Internet helps them simplify their lives. 68% visited sites for food and cooking. 61% visited sites for news information. And 56% visited sites for parenting and children’s education information.”
Fast Company Now
When is perfect too perfect? (5/31/04). “Nascent technologies like genetic engineering, stem-cell therapy, and neuropharmacology promise not only to cure our diseases but to enhance our bodies, even to turn us all into the Six Million Dollar Man–better, stronger, and faster.”
USNews.com
Commentary: Getting to the bottom of grid. “Firms are confused about what “grid” computing means, but that hasn’t stopped them from rolling it out.”
CNET News.com
Wi-fi lifeline for Nepal’s farmers. “They are taking advantage of a wi-fi network set up in a remote region of the mountain kingdom where there are no phones or other means of communication.”
BBC NEWS
Wireless Pill Camera“…the world’s only swallowable camera capsule for diagnosis of disease of the gastrointestinal tract, is now using an ultra low-power transmitter chip from Zarlink Semiconductor in its M2A capsule endoscope.”
Daily Wireless
Toshiba to display new mobile screens. “Toshiba said it will unveil a prototype of a color 3.5-inch Quarter Video Graphics Array “system on glass” input display that can capture images directly via sensors within a thin film transistor LCD,”
CNET News.com
New mobile phone subscriptions booming in China. “China, the world’s largest mobile-phone market by users, said subscriptions rose to 296 million last month, exceeding the US population for the first time…”
Taipei Times
The Virtual Tectonics of Renascent. “Joost Korngold is an independant dutch graphic/motion graphic artist.”
Archinect
Sun to share 3-D stash with developers. “At the JavaOne conference next month, Sun will release a developer kit for its Project Looking Glass 3-D software. This will be the first time Sun has let anyone outside of the company fiddle with the dadaist code, and the move confirms that Project Looking Glass is heading toward a general release on Linux and Solaris.”
The Register
Use your cameraphone as a scanner for online grocery shopping. “…everytime you take something to eat out of your refrigerator or kitchen cabinet, you snap a picture of its barcode with your Bluetooth-enabled cameraphone, then that info gets beamed back to your computer, where it’s automatically uploaded into your PeaPod shopping list for reordering.”
Engadget
Books get interactive makeover. “The 3D images are seen via a handheld viewer that watches where a reader is looking.
With a flick of a switch the viewer can also plunge readers into an immersive virtual world that lets them explore the book’s subject in more depth.”
BBC NEWS
How’s Your Digital Dinner? Restaurants Go Hi-Tech. “Seasons 52, a restaurant owned by casual dining company Darden Restaurants Inc., is testing such devices, which transmit orders and help wait staff provide customers with the nutritional content of meals and suggest wine and food pairings.”
Reuters.com
Nomad Expert Technician System. “By superimposing test and repair data into the technicians’ vision, the Nomad Expert Technician System allows them to stay focused on the task itself.”
Microvision
Baby Security and Monitoring Tech Gadgets Round-up. “This noise detection software will call your phone if noise is detected in the room the monitoring phone is placed in.”
I4U News
An intimate look at me. “I have been having weird, persistent chest pains for about a month. I figured I had best have them checked out so my doctor sent me to Inner Imaging for a some electron beam tomography of my heart, lungs, and chest to see what was up. It took 5 minutes to do these scans.”
gould.weblogsinc.com
Biological Visualization: Motion Synthesizer. “This interactive Flash dataset allows you to manipulate three essential variables of a human walking: Weight, Sex, Rleaxed/Tense, Happy/Sad while visualizing 14 light points outlining its body movement and expressivity.”
BioMotionLabs
Bluetooth watch. “It is rumored that Seiko is coming out with a Bluetooth watch phone they call the Phatch. A Bluetooth enabled pocket dialer allows the watch to stay at a normal size. The watch has some contact functionality and a small Bluetooth headset is included.”
WASTEOFBRAIN
Mobile Phones Move Beyond Voice. “Currently a cultural phenomenon in the UK, text messaging is catching on with U.S. mobile phone users. More than one-third, or roughly 38 million, of U.S. wireless phone owners use SMS [define], and increased usage will likely spur further adoption.”
ClickZ
sass magazine / premiere edition / saving the world in style. “From Giorgio Armani’s latest hemp fashions to Lexus’ entry into the gas-electric hybrid market to Aspen Skiing Company’s declaration that global warming is real and affecting their industry, a new phenomenon is promising to revolutionize the sustainability world: style.”
sustainablestyle.org
Clubbers choose chip implants to jump queues. “The Baja Beach Club in Barcelona offers people signing up for VIP membership a choice between an RFID chip and a normal card. VIP members can jump the entrance queues, reserve a table and use the nightclub’s VIP lounge.”
New Scientist
Bibster. “Bibster introduces a system which assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network.
The advantage of the system is it provides the possibility to search on a distributed peer-to-peer network using Semantic Web technologies. It provides an easy way to share data with other researchers.”
Presidential campaign contribution search. “Use the location search (on your home address) to find those who live near you that have made presidential campaign contributions. You can also search for friends or celebrities by name.”
BT Project Bluephone. “BT said on Tuesday it will offer customers a handset which will hook on to its own fixed-line system when used at home or in the office but elsewhere would switch automatically to Vodafone’s wireless network.”
Reuters
Web veteran turns to world of work. “Through the On Instant software, firms can manage customer contacts and sales leads, recruit staff, find funding, publicise what they do, search for partners and talk to staff and other network members.”
BBC NEWS
Inside track. “Will giving customers a little inside information keep them loyal or let them take advantage of you? The immediacy and interaction of blogs have caught the imagination of employees who want to talk about their work with peers, customers and anyonewho’s interested.”
Guardian Unlimited
Berners-Lee extols Semantic Web at WWW Conference:. “The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, to allow it to be readable by machines. That context would enable automation of a variety of interactions. An online catalog could, for instance, connect to a user’s order history and preferences, and to a calendar, to automatically pick out available times for a product delivery.”
Inforworld
Mobile Phone and Asset Tracking Services . “Welcome to the revolutionary web based system that enables registered users to identify and track the location of consenting mobile phone users.”
VeriLocation
Linksys’ Wireless-B Media Link for Music is out. “The Wireless-B Media Link for Music (which can also tune in to Internet radio stations) actually gives you two options: you can either hook it up to your stereo or attach a couple of speakers to it and use it like a boombox to listen to music anywhere in the house.”
Engadget
Poll suggests ID card backlash. “Up to 5 million people (28%) would demonstrate against ID cards the survey conducted by online research firm YouGov found. One million would be prepared to go to prison rather than register for a card.”
BBC NEWS
The Effects of Mobiles on Everyday Life. “The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life is a new report by Dr. Sadie Plant, prepared for Motorola.
The Table fo Contents includes: rituals, contexts, men, women and mobile displays, speeches, emotions, mobile minds…”
Josh Rubin: Techetiquette
How does Zipcar work?. “First, you choose and reserve one of our hundreds of cars. You can do that online in about two clicks. (You can also use a phone, if you’d rather. We’re easy.) Then you walk to your car’s nearby location. Next, you use your Zipcard to unlock the car.”
Zipcar
Under 30s ‘shun saving’. “The majority of young people fail to save regularly and spend their money on alcohol, fast food and mobile phones instead, research claimed today.”
Guardian Unlimited
Checking out IXI’s Personal Mobile Gateway. “Rather than offering a combination cellphone/PDA/camera that does tries to do everything in one device, a company called IXI is pushing their idea that people should instead carry a whole bunch of gadgets that use Bluetooth to connect together in a little network via a Personal Mobile Gateway, or PMG.”
Engadget
Smart homes offer a helping hand. “To help people cope, Accenture researchers are concentrating on five main projects: Persuasive mirrors; Connective tables; Shared scrap books; Interactive pictures; Activity monitoring”
BBC NEWS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS. “TEXTJAM links a vehicle’s number plate to a driver’s email address and sends sms text messages to the owner’s mobile phone in real-time. You can send and receive email and sms text messages along with other drivers, knowing only the other
driver’s number plate.”
TextJam.com
In-flight Internet access takes off. “Flight 452 from Munich, Germany, to Los Angeles this week became the first commercial aircraft to offer travelers high-speed Internet access, the Boeing subsidiary announced. With the service, passengers can wirelessly access e-mail and the Web through a network set up on the plane.”
CNET News.com
Researchers demonstrate wearable electronics to aid health and fashion. “The biometric bodysuit shows how electronics and fluidics can be incorporated into clothing to perform a wide range of tasks, from highly functional (like dispensing medicine, detecting pathogens or providing environmental awareness for personal safety and protection) to the aesthetic (clothes that change colors or display patterns as downloaded from a website to change the fashionable motifs and designs of a garment).”
News-Medical.net
Camera Phones Link World to Web “Businesspeople could put Semacodes on their business cards to link to constantly updated contact information. Museums could tag exhibits with Semacodes to provide information in multiple languages. And yes, Woodside said, stores could mark their merchandise with Semacodes.”
Wired News
Tiny computers will bend to browse
. “When computers become too small to be operated by buttons, how will we control them? The only option will be to gently bend them, according to engineers at Sony’s Interaction Lab in Tokyo.”
New Scientist
Gartner Says Web Services Ready for Prime Time. “The new focus, he said, will be on high-value business applications that either have to process high data volumes – such as credit-card validation, order status, inventory and Social Security benefits – or that have to process complex proprietary code and business algorithms, such as loan risk assessment.”
EWeek
OurPictures How It Works. “Effortless Sharing To Anyone – Select the photos you wish to share and with one click, pictures are delivered to all of your friends and family. Those with the OurPictures software will receive photos directly to their PCs. Those without OurPictures will be notified by e-mail to view the photos on a private web page.”
OurPictures.com
400 Channels: Here’s the dish on in-car satellite TV. “Right now it’s mostly TV,” said Delphi’s Ross Olney, noting the system we watched had access to 400 channels. “But we think the real bang for the buck is the Internet.”
AutoWeek
The Virtues of Chitchat – Making I.T. Work. “Why wouldn’t it make sense for an IT project manager to post a blog – or “plog” (project log) – to keep her team and its constituents up-to-date on project issues and concerns?”
CIO.com
FCC proposes that unused TV spectrum goes to wireless. “Wireless signals using the TV band can travel farther and penetrate buildings easier than signals in the current bands used by wireless devices, according to the FCC.”
InfoWorld
IBM’s Bisconti: Under the Hood with IBM Workplace. “We’re trying to marry the low-TCO, centralized-management qualities and ubiquitous access qualities of traditional Web apps with the rich-function offline support user experience and other qualities of traditional thick clients.”
EWeek
Injectable Medibots: Programmable DNA could diagnose and treat cancer. “Scientists have created a miniature medical computer out of DNA that can detect cancer genes in a test tube and respond by releasing a drug. Proving what had been only a concept, the feat offers a vision of how medicine might look in the future.”
Science News Online
eyeBlog. “ECSGlasses and eyeBlog are a video recording and publishing system that responds to human social interaction. It uses a wearable, wireless Eye-Contact Sensor (1.3MB .jpg) to gauge when the user receives eye-contact from an onlooker.”
HML Blog
Parks Associates. “Home computers specifically designed for entertainment applications – so-called ‘Media-PCs’ – will account for 40% of home computer sales by the end of 2008…”
Parks Associates
Server running on a smartcard. “What you see here is web information from the actual Webcard smart card Web Server whose URL is http://smarty.citi.umich.edu/”.
citi
Whispering Windows. “Whispering Windows turns the surface of a store window into a massive sound radiator. An amplifier and automatic gain control system has been designed to allow the volume generated by the window to remain at a fixed level above ambient sound eliminating noise pollution.”
Feonic
Exam cheats reveal MMS killer app. “Students in the UK are generally stripped of all belongings short of a blunt pencil before sitting exams. Even so, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, one of the bigger exam boards, reported 254 cases of mobile phone cheating in 2003. In some cases, kids had received answers by text from their parents.”
The Register
3D online church. “Welcome to Church of Fools, the UK’s first web-based, 3D church, which opened this week on May 11th. Please read our house rules, and then click here to enter the church. Created by Ship of Fools and digital media agency specialmoves as a three-month experiment, Church of Fools promises to be one of the most ambitious attempts yet to do church on the internet. Click and read below for news and info.”
Church of Fools
Cell-Phone Camera Snoop Ban Advances in Congress. “The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill on Wednesday that would outlaw “upskirt” photos and other forms of video voyeurism made possible by cell-phone cameras and other miniaturized technology.”
Reuters.com
Wearable Wireless Displays Are In Sight. “Imagine having a 17-inch screen constantly at your disposal that lets you look up information online, check your e-mail or watch a movie–and that isn’t attached to a laptop. Soon, thanks to the burgeoning microdisplay industry, you probably will.”
Forbes.com
Building a wireless nervous system. “The devices are expected to dwindle to the size of an aspirin or grain of rice over the next several years, at which point they could be dropped into waterways to detect pollutants or embedded into asphalt in roads to monitor traffic patterns. Imagine scattering thousands of these minute devices around buildings, bridges, factories and fields, giving people the power to observe the world on a finer scale than ever before.”
CNET News
Picture messages slow to take off. “Euro 2004 and the Athens Olympic Games could prove the turning points for the technology in Europe, it believes. There is some evidence to support this theory. MMS adoption in Asia rose on the back of the 2002 football World Cup.”
BBC NEWS
Broadband worth 52 days a year to UK.biz. “UK businesses that upgrade to broadband recover a massive 52 days in year in lost productivity, according to new research. The study, conducted by ntl, found that small firms which replaced dial-up connections with broadband significantly improved their productivity and communication.”
The Register
MIT Aims for the Bottom Line. “Negroponte was speaking Monday during an announcement of the Media Lab’s new initiative, CELab, or consumer electronics lab, which will capitalize on the convergence of new technologies and consumer demand for easy-to-use devices.”
Wired News
Study: Portable gamers to nearly double by 2009. “The audience for handheld game players will grow to 43 million in 2009 from 23 million last year, with revenue also heading upward to $2.7 billion, according to Jupiter Research.”
CNET News.com
RSA launches identity manager. “RSA Security has released a new product designed to help companies securely share the digital identities of their customers with partners and other enterprises.”
CNET News.com
Internet Archive: Petabox. “The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).”
Internet Archive
Technology News Article | Reuters.com. “A new mobile phone service is challenging big Internet search engines by providing exact answers to any question, such as the number of steps of the Empire State building, the 1928 manager of British football club Chelsea or which color hat to put on in the morning.”
reuters
VAIO pocket G-Sense interface. A non-interactive flash demo (in Japanese) of the G-Sense interface on the Sony Vaio Pocket digital music player.
Sony VAIO
London cabs switching to Pocket PC Phones. “London cabs are getting rid of their two-way radio links and replacing them with XDA II Pocket PC Phones so they can do all their dispatching over the Internet or even do things like have a photo of the person being picked up sent directly to the phone.”
Engadget
World’s Smallest Fuel Cell. “What Casio has succeeded in doing is to miniaturize a PEFC so that it is similar in size to a conventional lithium-ion battery.
However, the PEFC battery has a capacity nearly four times that of a lithium-ion battery. Laptop computers should be able to run on PEFC power for 8-16 hours.
GearBits
SAN FRANCISCO / Despite privacy fears, library board approves microchips to track books. “The San Francisco Library Commission — despite concerns over privacy and civil liberties — approved a plan Thursday to use microchips to keep track of books and other library material.”
sfgate.com
Web Search: On to “Sense-Making”. “Instead of scouring Web pages for keywords and links, as most search engines do, WebFountain aims to spot the opinions presented on the pages. Rather than merely asking for information about a Sony (SNE ) CyberShot digital camera, for example, a Web surfer could feasibly ask: “What do people think about the new Sony CyberShot digital camera?”
BW Online
IBM Launches Alternative To Microsoft Office. “Part of IBM’s Lotus Workplace strategy, the software includes email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Unlike Microsoft’s products, however, the applications are not tied to Windows or Mac systems, and can run on Linux, Unix or proprietary operating systems used in handheld computers and cellular phones.”
CRN
WiFi.Bedouin. “WiFi.Bedouin is a wearable, mobile 802.11b node disconnected from the global Internet. It forms a WiFi “island Internet” challenging conventional assumptions about WiFi and suggesting new architectures for digital networks that are based on physical proximity rather than solely connectivity.”
techkwondo
Sony’s 1TB digital video recorder with seven TV tuners – Engadget – www.engadget.com. “…one more from Sony today: a massive digital video recorder called the Type X with more than 1 terabyte of storage and not one, not two, and not even three TV tuners, but SEVEN TV tuners for recording up to seven different shows at the same time…”
Text Message Your Tent. “While you can’t get them in stores quite yet, a new ‘Text Me Home Dome’ tent has a built-in phone receiver and phone number, allowing you to send a special text message that will cause your tent to flash orange so you can pick out which one is yours”
gizmodo
Wi-Fi Phones Could Be Next Trend in Thrift. “Many college campuses also have extensive Wi-Fi networks. Dartmouth College, a leader in campus Wi-Fi, now gives students software for making free long-distance calls over the wireless network.”
Yahoo! News
Sony unveils tiny wireless pen PC. “The consumer electronics giant is billing the Vaio VGN-U70 as the world’s smallest full-function Windows PC. The unit measures 16.7 x 10.8 x 2.6cm and weighs just 550g. Much of the machine’s face is taken up by an 800 x 600 transflective colour LCD. The display can also operate at up to 1600 x 1200, but at this stage it’s not clear if that’s a native resolution.”
The Register
E-serenity, now! | csmonitor.com. “The information age, it seems, is data-contaminated. And it’s not just the volume of information that’s worrisome; it’s the lack of context in which it’s delivered. At least that is the argument of a new and growing group of people some call “information environmentalists.”
csmonitor.com
Web system used in London to give homeless households access to services. “Through NOTIFY, local services will have constant access to information about homeless families and single people moving in and out of their area. In particular, they will be able to ensure that – during this traumatic and unstable period in their lives – babies are immunised, children have school places and vulnerable children don’t slip through the net.”
PublicTechnology.net
Text Messages Killing Radio Star. “The growing “thumb generation” posed the greatest new challenge to traditional media, with cell-phone text messages conveying news, rumors and gossip, said Pedro J. Ramirez, editor of Spain’s El Mundo.”
wired
Kid Robot and the World of Tomorrow. “…every scene is at least partly computer-generated. The actors are real, but just about everything else, from city sidewalks to exploding zeppelins, is digital. “A lot of filmmakers would find it limiting, but I find it strangely liberating,” Conran declares. “You wish you could just move that actor over an inch? Well, we can.”
Wired
Reuters RSS. “Reuters news and television is now available through the Reuters RSS service. With Reuters RSS you can take Reuters world class news and television headlines, free of charge, and incorporate them into your preferred newsreaders and web logs. We hope you enjoy this new service from Reuters.com.”
Reuters
the merchants of cool. “Understanding how to sell to teens has become a highly competitive industry all its own. If companies can get in on a trend or subculture while it is still hidden, they can be the first to bring it to market. So cool hunters”–those who can track down the latest cool trends in teen life–can make a lot of money marketing their expertise to companies marketing to teens.”
PBS
What will it take to boost computer games to cinematic levels?. “Today’s game systems expend around 10 GPU cycles per vertex on average; the next generation will be able to expend 100 or more. This amount of processing per pixel will allow shading effects as complex as those we see in special-effects-rich feature films or animated films such as those produced by Pixar Studios.”
ACM
Mobile court photo sentence upheld. “A 12-month jail sentence has been upheld on a man for taking photographs with a mobile phone in a courtroom.”
BBC NEWS
NextFest: The Shape of Things to Come. “They’re as small as your cell phone, more powerful than your desktop, and packed with 10 years of future tech. Five design giants build the supergadgets of 2014.”
Wired
Wiki and the Perfect Camping Trip. “This entry should provide an easy-to-understand (but fictional) example of a wiki at work for people new to the technology/concept. While this use of a wiki may be unconventional, I think it provides a foundation for understanding how wikis can be used to accumulate and organize group information.”
commoncraft.com
Wikis Described in Plain English. “You may have seen the word ‘wiki’ used to describe a website used by a group to collaborate. My intent with this post is to describe wikis and the basics of how they work- in plain English.”
commoncraft.com
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