Archive for November, 2004
Entelligence: The real reason for home networks. “Consumers with home networks have an overwhelming propensity to want to take advantage of the functionality offered by their networks. And it’s not just about sharing that broadband Internet connection. While shared internet access is a priority among 26% of the population, listening to music stored on a PC and streamed to a stereo, home automation and streaming video content to a TV set all rank in higher priority for consumers.”
Engadget
M-Learning 4 Generation Txt?“Michele Forman, the 2001 National Teacher of the Year in the United States, notes that her high-school students became very attached to their wireless laptops. They significantly increased their personal writing and composition. Such machines become prosthetics for information, memory and creativity.”
TheFeature
Hospital uses cutting edge telemedicine. “Donning 3-D glasses, doctors at a medical conference in India resembled an audience at an IMAX movie Monday as they watched the live broadcast of a Henry Ford Hospital doctor performing prostate surgery.”
Detroit News
New modern phenomenon of gadget addiction ruins families. “Gadget-addicted people have a bouquet of psychological symptoms, such as: euphoria and ecstasy from buying a new gadget, inability to stay away from appliances for long, the feeling of emptiness and depression that develops when a person does not purchase gadgets on a regular basis, disregard for family members and friends. Gadget mania can be harmful to health too: addicts suffer from dryness in the eyes, headaches and sleeping disorder.”
PRAVDA.Ru
iPod-crazed youths invade London station. “Welcome to the world of Mobile Clubbing. Simply, mobile clubbing is turning up at a pre-arranged public place on mass where you begin to dance to the sound of your own personal stereo.”
The Register
How SMS Could Save Your Life. “Fortunately, the woman got treatment in time. Using an experimental cell phone-based software program called Cell-Life, Thobela alerted the clinic staff to the problem, and arranged for the woman to see the clinic doctor the next day — all in a flurry of text messaging.”
Wired News
Not so White Walls interactive wallpaper. “…Dario Buzzini says that he’s going to be commercializing his Not so White Walls interactive wallpaper that you can hook up to a PC and display low-resolution images and even use for reading emails and text messages.”
Engadget
From cells to bells, 10 things the Chinese do far better than we do. “…for this list we were looking for truly brilliant ideas, the forehead-slapping kind, the ones that make you say: Now why didn’t we think of that?”
workopolis.com
Domestic Environments: Drift Table. “The Drift Table allows people to float slowly over the British landscape from the comfort of their own home. The distribution of weight on
the table controls the slow scroll of aerial photographs displayed on a central viewport. Progress is slow, but the Drift Table can be used to visit favorite places, look at geographical features, or simply watch
the world go by.”
Equator
A Mobile Web That Knows All About You. “Recently, a group of students at CMU developed an application for MyCampus called InfoBridge, which lets users post and read “virtual posters” about upcoming events. For example, say a user has indicated that she likes track and field events. She’ll be notified about events as soon as another person makes a virtual poster about it, unless she’s sitting in class. If that’s the case, she won’t be notified until class is over.”
TheFeature
Cell Phones Increasingly Used to Snap the News. “Twice in one month the biggest Dutch newspaper published front-page pictures shot by amateur photographers using their mobile phones, showing how advances in technology can assist traditional media in gathering news.”
Reuters.com
The anywhere display. “A new IBM display can turn any surface into a virtual, interactive touchscreen computer, by removing the physical screen so that interactive images can be cast onto almost any surface.”
we make money not art
Inuit language finds home on net. “Browser settings on normal computers have not supported the language to date, but attavik.net has changed that.
It provides a content management system that allows native speakers to write, manage documents and offer online payments in the Inuit language.”
BBC NEWS
The Best Free Desktop Linux . . . and how to make it better. “Examining the various components that constitute a complete system, Barnes provides practical advice and instruction on how to improve your desktop experience and productivity with freely available software. He reviews desktop environments, communications using voice-over-IP, common applications, and more.”
desktoplinux.com
Building The Muscle To Be A Tech Player. “Ukraine also has a budding technology sector, and — after the U.S., India, and Russia — the fourth largest number of computer programmers in the world. It was a main center of the Soviet programming industry.”
Business Week
NYX Wearable Displays. “The display is quite flexible and is not raised from the surface of the fabric. To show scrolling text or a graphical animation, just plug in your a Palm Pilot loaded with the NYX software and enter whatever you want. From club kids to traffic cops, wearable displays will soon be fun, informative and sometimes annoying.”
Cool Hunting
Wireless Weather Forecaster. “Operating on the same wireless network that gives the Orbs their information, the $100 device will show weather forecasts for five days at a time, updating about every 15 minutes.”
Gizmodo
BT heralds satellite breakthrough. “British Telecom has announced that it has developed a satellite modulation technology that can use existing satellites and triple their existing capacity. If this is a genuine breakthrough, it could improve satellite competitiveness globally overnight.”
The Register
Online identity theft: Many medicines, no cure. “But as problems like phishing scams change from e-crime phenomenon to endemic online threats, technology companies — both large and small — are bringing products and services to market that they claim can end, or greatly reduce, the threat of online identity theft.”
InfoWorld
New Category of Portable Media Devices Announced. “Several new portable media devices are expected to hit the market this year, all powered by the Sigma Media Processors, these devices create a new category of portable entertainment products. They differ from current portable media players on the market since they have no screen. These are designed for people that would like to bring entire multimedia collections with them anywhere.”
MobileMag
Global Teams. “One big surprise: These virtual teams, largely composed of people who have never met, were not only productive but also more innovative than “face-to-face teams.”
Fast Company Now
Consumers ‘snub portable video’. “The report concluded that the driving force behind the growth of Europe’s portable player market was likely to be music, rather than films or any combination of the two. Barely 5% of those questioned said they wanted a player that could play back both music and movies. Only 7% wanted a player that could handle games and video.”
BBC NEWS
Vintage car with a digital twist. “Its sun visors feature make-up mirrors on the back, with TV cameras to film and/or photograph the crew, while the rear windows are screens on which you can draw or write emails and text messages to be sent in real time. “Through wireless networks and with GPRS connections”, says Natasha, “messages, sketches and images are stored on the car’s website”.
we make money not art
Adroit Droids. “This summer, one of the world’s most advanced robots passed an important test at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. The dexterous humanoid robot learned to use tools to tighten bolts on a wheel. Rather than having to be separately programmed for each of several possible situations, the robot showed it could recover if a tool slipped from its grasp or was moved around – and that it was flexible enough in its routine to tighten the bolts in any order requested.”
Technology Review
Backchannel Notes – Bleecker. “Last night we ran an experimental “backchannel” during Julian Bleecker’s talk in the Zemeckis Media Lab. Backchannel refers to making the crowd chatter public, the idea that the students or audience can discuss during a lecture in a way that becomes part of the shared intellectual space.”
just in teractive
Video dating can be great but you have to find the right signals. “My date with Yara Khalife does not go well. I thought that opening the call with a shot of a garden gnome was amusing. She looks confused.”
Telegraph
Citris Allows 3-d Interactions. “Bajcsy’s technology takes pictures of a subject in her laboratory from 48 different cameras and combines them into a 3-D image. The image can then be placed into historical Sicily, one of the three cyberspace environments created so far.”
The Daily Californian
Teenage Kicks. “Rebecca Weeks of iMedia Summits has been kind enough to share the knowledge from the second annual “WHAT TEENS WANT: Marketing to Teens Using Music, Movies and the Media”
PSFK
Thinking Machine 4. “A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.”
we make money not art
Wiki startup JotSpot draws crowd for product beta. “JotSpot seeks to make wikis more accessible by adding a “what you see is what you get” editor that even novice users should be able to work with. Additionally, to make wikis more useful as a collaboration tool, JotSpot gives each wiki page that it hosts an e-mail address, allowing users to add an archive of e-mail messages to pages.”
InfoWorld
