Music on every device
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Nintendo adds media playing to DS. “Nintendo is releasing an adapter for its DS handheld console so it can play music and video.”
BBC NEWS
Archive for December, 2004
Virtual sight
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Researchers working on ‘virtual canes’ for the blind. “Combining a laser pointer, digital camera and a specialized processor, the cane would analyze surfaces and provide auditory feedback on obstacles and surfaces such as stairs and curbs.”
Engadget
Technology fans
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Will technology ruin sports?. “Will game highlights over cellphones deepen fan interest or whittle away at viewership of games? Do Internet-based fantasy leagues broaden a sport’s appeal – or weaken loyalty to real teams? The technology is so new that it’s too early to draw conclusions. But the signs of change are unmistakable.”
csmonitor.com
High level wireless
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
US broadband blimp test flight planned next month. “Atlanta, Georgia-based Sanswire Networks will next month launch a base-station suspended beneath an 75m unmanned airship which will float around 20km (13 miles) up in the air, kept in place by ground-control and a GPS fix.”
The Register
Mapping photos to location
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
geo-location of tagged images on flickr.com. “Photos from flickr are often tagged with information that can be used to make educated guesses about their locations in the world. Mappr uses this data, which is provided by flickr users, to place their images on a map.”
mappr
Scanning in awkward places
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Flexible Plastic Book Scanner. “Tokyo University researchers have developed a scanner embedded in a flexible sheet of plastic that will allow archivers to get into the cracks of old and fragile books without cutting apart the spine.”
Gizmodo
Printing at home
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
PC photo printers challenge pros“Considering how inconvenient it can be to go to the High Street and how silver-halide prints can fade in the sun, we’re adamant that it’s now better, cheaper and more convenient to print at home,” he said.”
BBC NEWS
Painless home monitoring
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Airbee ZigBee wireless thermostat. “Installers and contractors will benefit from easier installs, because since this thing uses Zigbee there are no wires to connect up when setting up an HVAC system.”
Engadget
RFID Plus
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
RFID tags that sense conditions of liquid substances. “Hitachi announced on December 6 that they developed “RFID sensors” that sense temperature, ion concentration, and flexure of liquid substances and transmit data via wireless communication. Potential application areas include healthcare, bio sciences, and supply chains. Communication ranges are 10mm, 40mm or 75mm.”
RFID in Japan
Subtle comparison shopping
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
dont buy not knowing. “1) Dial the number below
2) enter the ISBN number (for books)
or UPC number (for CDs) 3) listen for prices, reviews, and recommendations courtesy of Amazon.com”
amabuddy
Internet library
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database. “Google, the operator of the world’s most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.”
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
Electronic clothing
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Burton’s Headphone Beanie reviewed. “The company, which has come up with such functional clothing as the first jacket with embedded iPod controls and a snowboarding helmet with built-in speakers, now offers a beanie-style hat with integrated earphones. The Gadgeteer reviewed the $39.95 hat and gave it props for warmth, functionality and ‘surprisingly awesome’ sound.”
Engadget
PC sales growth
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Worldwide PC Market Seen Doubling by 2010. “The number of personal computers worldwide is expected to double to about 1.3 billion by 2010, driven by explosive growth in emerging markets such as China, Russia and India, according to a report released on Tuesday by Forrester Research Inc.”
Reuters.com
IM & SMS pushing out e-mail
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Online Communication And Collaboration: Teenagers Show The Future. “Since their kids are all using IM for personal reasons, a lot of adults are using it during the day…they can tell them ‘do your homework, do your laundry.’” As new services like voice and video messaging get added to the IM programs, it will likely be kids who help promote the emerging technologies.”
Robin Good’s Latest News
Cellphone growth
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Worldwide cellphone usage doubles. “The International Telecommunications Union has announced that global cellphone usage has doubled over the past four years, to nearly 1.5 billion customers. [...] China has 310 million cellphone users, or about a quarter of its population. Developing countries now account for 56% of all cellphone users, and for 79% of usage growth, according to the ITU.”
Engadget
Converged devices
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Merry “Convergence Christmas”. “With just a few weeks to Christmas, newspaper circulars and store shelves across Europe are overflowing with snazzy electronic goodies that blur the lines between information, entertainment, and communication. “This is the first convergence Christmas,” says consumer market analyst Jaap Favier of Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ) in Amsterdam.”
Business Week
Predictive searching
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Google Suggest: The Movie. “Google just rolled out Google Suggest, which basically helps you find what you’re searching for by suggesting words based on popularity.”
Engadget
Built in connectors
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Lexar’s USB FlashCard. “…has one very important, major difference from every other flash memory card format out there: it has a built-in USB connector so you can plug it directly to your computer to copy over files, there’s no need for a separate card reader.”
Engadget
Simple PC terminals
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
PC Expansion Terminal: Make 10 PCs out of 1. “The PC Expanion is apparently the world’s first terminal unit that does not require a CPU, hard-drive, or CD-ROM yet executes as if it’s an ordinary Windows PC.”
I4U News
Medical monitoring
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Anger management wearable monitor. “It picks up on slight changes to help diagnose medical and behavioral conditions, such as anxiety disorders, neurological complications stemming from diabetes, attention deficit disorder, and even anger-management problems. For example, a patient in anger management therapy could observe his increased heart rate and blood pressure before he actually felt angry, learn to identify the causes of these reactions, and control his outbursts.”
we make money not art
Wearables in the workplace
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Wired and ready to wear. “Commercial inventions such as the Apple Computer iPod or personal data assistants (PDA) are the most well-known forms of wearable computers; everyone uses them, from grocery clerks to CEOs. The U.S. Armed Forces are adopting wearable computers rapidly as well, but their devices will tend to be more rugged than commercial wearables, and their missions more critical than just scheduling meetings or doing inventory.”
Military & Aerospace Electronics
Adding social networks as a feature
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Netflix adds social networking. “In its latest move to fend off competitive threats, Netflix will let subscribers invite friends to peek at DVDs they’ve watched and read their opinions of the movies. If the invitation is accepted, the sender automatically gets reciprocal rights to read the friend’s lists and reviews.”
Smart Mobs
Predicting business
December 17th, 2004 by rbanks
Physics Model Predicts Book Sales. “Exogenous shocks come from sources outside the system they affect, like billboards or newspaper articles; endogenous shocks are made up of very small exogenous shocks that happen in a coordinated fashion, like word-of-mouth recommendations.
The model predicts how sales will decline after they peak according to how the peak occurred. The decline after an exogenous shock is fairly steep, while the decay after an endogenous shock is more gradual. The model was 84 percent correct in the researchers tests.”
Technology Review
Information posters
December 16th, 2004 by rbanks
Hi-tech posters guide commuters. “When interrogated with a mobile phone, the posters pass on a number that people can call to get information about the safest route home.”
BBC NEWS
Brain control
December 16th, 2004 by rbanks
‘Brainwave’ cap controls computer. “Four people, two of them partly paralysed wheelchair users, successfully moved a computer cursor while wearing a cap with 64 electrodes.”
BBC NEWS
Cellphone tours
December 16th, 2004 by rbanks
Cell Phones Work as Tour Guides. “Weaver’s and Stiller’s voices pop up as narrators for Talking Street, a series of cell-phone tours that guide visitors through the Lower East Side, Lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center site.”
Wired News
Smart shoes
December 16th, 2004 by rbanks
The communicating and self-repairing shoes. “VectraSense Technologies, an MIT spin-off company, has developed a computerized shoe product “Verb for Shoe” that provides computerized shoe adjustments according to your movements and features a series of innovations…”
we make money not art
Interactive window shopping
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
“Brick and Click” shopping experience. “The ISW broadcasts images onto the shop window which is coated with tiny touch-sensitive sensors and acts as a giant computer screen, letting shoppers browse products by touching the window – as if they were online.”
we make money not art
Video interaction
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
The video snowglobe. “…what do you say to the idea of a snowglobe with an embedded motion sensor and internal screen, so the harder you shake it the more violently does the video gain momentum of a woman trapped inside the globe.”
Engadget
Virtual vacations
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Smell that holiday before you buy it. “In the UK, holiday retailer Thomson is now offering a virtual holiday experience with a 3D full-sensory guided tour of some of Egypt’s best known attractions.”
we make money not art
Facial identity
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
The New Face of Surveillance. “In Pinellas County, Fla., sheriff’s deputies armed with Hewlett-Packard digital cameras and laptops connected to a wireless data network can use software from Viisage to check the identity of suspects in a minute or less. The software was credited in a September arrest of a woman who was wanted on two felony warrants.”
Baseline Mag
The end of the “home” page
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. “Despite our long hours and good intentions, content aggregators throw this site-centric idea out the window. They allow users to bypass a large portion of the design, whose sole purpose is to get them to target content. In this way the information architecture the designer envisioned may go unused, with users never clicking on the carefully crafted navigation links, never using the location-specific breadcrumbs, and in some cases never even seeing the much-fretted-over home page.”
Digital Web Magazine
Consuming mobile phones
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Lifestyle ‘governs mobile choice’. “Dr Bjorn said that although consumers do what they always did but use a phone to do it, the sheer variety of what the new handset technologies make possible does gradually drive new habits and lifestyles.”
BBC NEWS
Watching corporate ethics
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
The Corporate Fallout Detector. “The device scans barcodes of goods, and makes a clicking noise based on the environmental or ethical record (selectable via the “sensitivity” switch) of the manufacturer. The more “click click” you hear, the worse are the ethics of the company.”
we make money not art
Biometric identities
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Passports go electronic with new microchip. “Next year, new US passports will have a chip slipped under the cover, containing biometric and personal data. But privacy advocates worry about surveillance.”
csmonitor.com
Changing face of the library
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Libraries Reach Out, Online. “For years, library patrons have been able to check card catalogs online and do things like reserve or renew books and pay overdue fines. Now they can not only check out e-books and audiobooks but view movie trailers and soon, the actual movies.
And they can do it without setting foot in the local branch.”
The New York Times
Carrying lots of digital stuff
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Britons growing ‘digitally obese’. “Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in “weight”.
Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found.”
BBC NEWS
Cellphone privacy issues
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Shut Up Already. “Two designers have made these warning cards for obnoxious cell phone users, available in convenient PDF download-and-cut-out form. It’s a good way to make it clear to people they’re talking too loudly, and a good way to eventually get into a good, American fist-fight.”
Gizmodo
Touch screen scrolling
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
No Mouse Wheel? Use a Virtual Scroll Ring. “A transparent ring appears on your screen. Touch it, move your finger clockwise, and the text will move down. And of course, counterclockwise motion scrolls up. According to their study, users actually preferred this virtual scroll ring to a mouse wheel, because it’s faster and the scrolling continuous.”
Primidi
Sensors for anything
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Siemens Working On All-Purpose Sensor Gadget. “MyAy will feature different applications you can tell it to run. For example, it can be left in a hotel room and notify you if someone enters. It can listen for a baby crying or car alarm, tell you if there’s a fire or if someone moves your cheese.”
Personal Tech Pipeline
Interactive toys
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Playing music with coloured toys. “You just have to place on a rotating glass disc any colored object, its colour value will be translated via the built-in scanner into sounds that vary also according to the distance of the object from the center of the dic (the closer to the center, the higher the pitch)”
we make money not art
Electronic paper
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Epson Eyes Electronic Paper. “The company is developing “e-paper” that can be rolled up and folded as a replacement for paper-based newspapers or magazines, says Tatsuya Shimoda, fellow and director of Epson’s technology platform research center. The electronic paper is expected to be on the market in five years, he says.”
PC World
Cellphones everywhere
December 10th, 2004 by rbanks
Cellphones Aloft: The Inevitable Is Closer. “Federal regulators plan next week to begin considering rules that would end the official ban on cellphone use on commercial flights. Technical challenges and safety questions remain. But if the ban is lifted, one of the last cocoons of relative social silence would disappear, forcing strangers to work out the rough etiquette of involuntary eavesdropping in a confined space.”
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
Continuing digital divide
December 8th, 2004 by rbanks
Millions to miss out on the net. “By 2025, 40% of the UK’s population will still be without internet access at home, says a study.
Around 23 million Britons will miss out on a wide range of essential services such as education and medical information, predicts the report by telecoms giant BT.”
BBC NEWS
Movies over the internet
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
Movie Downloads Hit Prime Time. “Now the reliable, easy-to-use service is quickly coming into its own. The selection is still pretty limited, with just 1,000 titles available. But that’s going to change quickly as movie studios gain confidence in the technology and the systems that protect them against piracy, according to MovieLink CEO Jim Ramo.”
Business Week
Video-casting
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
Video Feeds Follow Podcasting. “Already, there are rudimentary applications like Vogbrowser, which offers video feeds to which people can subscribe, much like they do with RSS feeds. There are more products like this on the way.”
Wired News
Ambient monitoring
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
Wearables for everyday objects. “This key-chain radio station broadcasts the sounds you make through regular FM radio and shares them with people hidden from your eye. It works only within a radius of about 20 meters. The sound quality is not very clear, but people can guess what you are doing. In addition, the lower sound quality reduces concerns about privacy issues.”
we make money not art
Ambient and wearable
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
When technology gets personal. “In 2020, whipping out your mobile phone to make a call will be quaintly pass. By then phones will be printed directly on to wrists, or other parts of the body, says Ian Pearson, BT’s resident futurologist.”
BBC NEWS
Phone home automation
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
Pantech & Curitel Shows Off First Zigbee-Capable Phone. “At their press showing today, P&C showed off the capabilities of the concept, which can communicate with Zigbee-standard sensors to control home appliances, check your mail, monitor your alarm system for trespassers—basically anything you’d expect home automation to be able to do, but controlled by a phone.”
Gizmodo
Major media events through cellphone
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
Indian Film ‘Rok Sako To Rok Lo’ to Premiere via Cellphone. “An upcoming Indian “campus caper” film called ‘Rok Sako To Rok Lo’ will be the first full-length feature film to premiere on a wireless cellular network.”
Gizmodo
Biodegradable technology
December 7th, 2004 by rbanks
CNN.com – From cellphone to sunflower – Dec 6, 2004. “Scientists said on Monday they have come up with a cell phone cover that will grow into a sunflower when thrown away.”
CNN
Cellphone personalization
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Cellphone ornaments raising a stink. “You know all those cellphone ornaments people like to hang off their phones, especially in Japan and Taiwan? Now they stink. Well, they smell. Err, they make a smell. Okay. What they do, is, when someone calls, they let off a scent of your choice.”
Engadget
Mobile gaming
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Mobile gaming takes off in India. “Mobile gaming is not just about fun; it also represents one key element of a rich mobile entertainment experience for consumers, and a lucrative market opportunity for industry players.”
BBC NEWS
Biometrics becoming everyday
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
How your face could open doors. “A few corporations are already scanning pictures of staff for access control or to tackle swipe card fraud. And six police forces have so far recognised its use in identifying CCTV pictures of suspects – one claims it to be the biggest forensic breakthrough since DNA.”
BBC NEWS
Kids wanting adult toys
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Babes in a Grown-Up Toyland. “A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that half of all 4- to 6-year-olds have played video games, a quarter of them regularly. Game makers are aggressively marketing to children as young as 3, while researchers report what parents already know: that children as young as 8 and 9 are asking for adult toys, like cellphones and iPods, rather than stuffed animals or toy trucks.”
The New York Times (may require free subscription)
Biometric association
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Biometric Phone: Pantech GI100. “You can also associate each of your fingers (provided you don’t have more than ten) to speed-dial numbers, so you just have to touch the sensor and your phone will discreetly place a call.”
Gizmodo
Home monitoring
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Wireless Water Submeters: It’s a ZigBee Thing.. “A self-forming, self-healing wireless mesh network of ZigBee-based Aqura submeters will provide real-time usage data – including the number of “flow events” (showers, toilet flushes, dishwasher cycles, etc.), flow-time in minutes, hot and cold water usage, domestic hot water energy, leak diagnostics and tamper detection – using a TV remote control-like meter reader. The readings will be automatically collected from the ZigBee network several times per day and uploaded to Wellspring’s data and billing center; then made available to residents, apartment owners and third party billing services on the Web.”
ExtremeTech
Made-to-fit car
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Design your own car parts. “The 3D profile of the client would be scanned at a dealership equipped with the RM machines now being developed at Loughborough University. These machines will build up the components in a layering technique similar to the way inkjet printers make images.”
Ferret.com
Living online
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Her So-Called Digital Life. “Hodder, a 37-year-old internet consultant, spends almost her entire life on-screen. She carries her laptop almost everywhere she goes, traipsing from cafe to cafe looking for Wi-Fi to hook into. She downloads pirated movies and even television shows off the net, shops there and pays all her bills, too. Her blog, Napsterization.org, explores how technology alters the media landscape. Although technically based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives, works and plays on the web.”
Wired News
Worldwide sensor networks
December 6th, 2004 by rbanks
Argo, a Robotic Network System that Watches Our Oceans. “And in 2007, when the deployment is completed, 3,000 underwater robots will help us to better understand the changes in our climate.”
Tech Trends
The impact of new communications technology
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
New Forms of Online Communication Spell End of Email Era in Korea. “The ebbing of email is a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, an IT power. Leading the big change, unprecedented in the world, are our teens and those in their 20′s. The perception that “email is an old and formal communication means”is rapidly spreading among them.”
Smart Mobs
Haptics in phones
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Haptics: Can You Feel the Buzz?. “Immersion’s VibeTonz is a development platform that uses a phone’s ordinary vibrate motor to enhance navigation, ringtones, chat and games. For instance, developers can use VibeTonz to make each item on a scrolling list click distinctively. Or they can add “kisses,” “slaps,” and “purrs” to chat emoticons. Or they can make the phone buzz and pulse along to the melody of a ringtone.”
TheFeature
Smarter relationships between search terms
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Searching Smarter, Not Harder. “…searching Google for “Franz Ferdinand” mixes results for the alternate rock group and the doomed Austrian archduke for whom the group is named. If topic maps were used to organize the data, the musical and historical links would be separated, Durusau said. “The payoff (of topic maps) from the user standpoint is that you are no longer confronted with everything in the world that is known about the subject,” Durusau said.”
Wired News
OCR on cellphones
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
The LG’s LG-KP3800 cellphone with OCR. “…LG is coming out with a new 1.3 megapixel cameraphone which has built-in optical character recognition software for scanning contact info off business cards.”
Engadget
Wireless technologies impacting urban spaces
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Urban renewal, the wireless way. “With a new generation of wireless devices, GPS locators, and ubiquitious networking, future-gazers claim, digital space will simply add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously described as “third places”: the communal public spaces where people interact with friends or strangers.”
Salon.com
Managing your communications
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Virgin Mobile wants to help stop you from drunk dialing. “…starting tomorrow Virgin Mobile, or at least the Australian Virgin Mobile, is going to offer a new service to help stop you from drunk dialing your ex or your boss. You just call up a number, enter the number you want to make sure you don’t call, and then you’re automatically blocked from making calls from that phone until 6am…”
Engadget
Interactive surfaces
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Table inhabited by squiggly luminous worms. “People can pick up the electronic worms, pet them, then let them go where they would navigate to the closest glass –or whatever else people fish out of their pockets and plonk into the “terrarium”– and spin colorful light streamers round its base.”
we make money not art
Realtime geographic visualizations
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
“SAME” enables users to see any place on the planet in real time . “York University Prof. Vincent Tao has developed groundbreaking satellite mapping technology that enables users to visually zoom in on – or fly over – any place on the planet in real time. Called SAME (an acronym for “See Anywhere – Map Everywhere”), it is an Internet-based technology that provides 3-D imagery with ground resolution of a half-metre to one metre – close enough to identify automobile makes, for example, but not the human face.
PhysOrg
RFID and customer needs
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
How One Cleaner Got the Lead Out. “So now, whenever Kelly brings in those shirts, the dry cleaner simply scans the tags to get a list of his instructions and ensure that his laundry is handled with extra care. “It’s a feel-good kind of thing,” Kelly says.”
Business Week
Virtual tradeshows
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Virtual Tradeshows On the Rise. “In the past year, a handful of virtual tradeshows have taken place on topics ranging from nanotechnology to plumbing and heating supplies. These events function just like conventional tradeshows, with booths, plenary sessions and keynote speakers—but without the travel and expense that go along with terrestrial shows.”
Eweek
information from the environment
December 1st, 2004 by rbanks
Billboards with infrared hypertags in the London subway. “…Transport for London is just now taking the plunge and putting up 25 posters embedded with “Hypertags” that via infrared can beam to cellphones the number for a hotline where tube passengers can get information about how to travel safely at night.”
Engadget
