Archive for July, 2005
Texting Is Too Slow? Draw Your Words!. “Instead of typing words on these ridiculous small keyboards, with the SHARK, an abbreviation for ShortHand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding, you use a grid and a stylus. The grid appears on the screen of your portable device. You put a stylus on the first letter of the word you want to type. Then you drag the stylus to draw a line connecting all the other letters of the word. When you release the stylus, the word appears almost magically.”
Usability In The News
Purdue findings support earlier nuclear fusion experiments. “Researchers at Purdue University have new evidence supporting earlier findings by other scientists who designed an inexpensive “tabletop” device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions. The technology, in theory, could lead to a new source of clean energy and a host of portable detectors and other applications.”
Purdue University
First human robotic arm implant. “The first implantation of robotic arms into a human being is to be performed at the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. [...] A microchip implanted into the patient’s brain will make it possible to control the prosthetics.”
gizmag
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
a social bookmarking community for news readers. “1. browse the Web for news and blog posts. 2. bookmark your favorite stories as you go. Drag the Add to CommonTimes button to your browser bar for easy access. 3. visit our site for the most widely shared headlines”
CommonTimes
Simulated society may generate virtual culture. “A society of virtual “agents” – each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate – is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve.”
New Scientist
Ear biometrics may beat face recognition. “Ears are remarkably consistent, he says. Unlike faces, they do not change shape with different expressions or age, and remain fixed in the middle of the side of the head against a predictable background. “Hair is a problem,” Nixon admits. “But that might be solved by using infrared images.”
New Scientist
Optimus OLED Keyboard. “The “Optimus” keyboard has tiny OLED screens embedded in each key, allowing it to display context information on the fly. In Photoshop? You’ve got Photoshop icons, complete with alt functions (at least in my head this is how it works).”
Gizmodo
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
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
Glowing temperature-sensitive sink-fixtures. “These sink-fixtures from Germany’s Hansa have temperature-sensors that light up different LEDs to indicate the water temp, and replace the traditional tube-shaped spout with a trough that exposes the water as it courses out.”
Boing Boing
Fujitsu Shows Unique Color Electronic Paper. “The thin and flexible electronic paper uses very low power to change screen images, thereby making it ideal for displaying information or advertisements in public areas as a type of new electronic media that can be handled as easily as paper.”
I4U News
Ribbon beam amplifiers could lower the cost of wireless transmissions. . “Apparently, the things are smaller, more efficient, require smaller backup batteries, generate less heat, cost thousands of dollars less than their solid-state counterparts and can do a mean cha-cha to top it all off.”
Engadget
Blogging + Video = Vlogging. “Bloggers who previously wrote endlessly about everything from politics to tech tips to how to fry an egg on a hot sidewalk can now take their commentary, advice and random experiments to the next level by filming and broadcasting their work, thanks to the latest web trend — video blogging.”
Wired News
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
Urbanseeder flirting service. “Urbanseeder is a flirting service that increases your chance of running again into people you find attractive. Using minimal digital technology, the game plays out unpredictably in real space and tries to preserve the spirit of flirting.”
we make money not art
Email-forwarding networks. “Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough,but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications,say US researchers”
Smart Mobs
Skype, Boingo, Samsung, LG Nudge Combination of Wireless and VoIP Calling Forward. “Internet telephone service tiptoed a few more steps into the wireless realm on Tuesday as Skype and Boingo unveiled a service to enable Voice-over-Internet calls over Wi-Fi hot spots, while Samsung and LG announced plans to develop mobile phones that combine cellular and Wi-Fi technologies.”
Tech Review
ECCO Design’s new concept phone. “You have to love it when someone gets really bored at a design firm – take ECCO Design, for example – and decides to mock up the “phone of tomorrow” based on industry-expert input”
Engadget
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
The location-aware watch that locates your friends. “The FLORA (Fluorescent Light Organizing Radio Accessory) is a location-aware watch that helps people locate others, a mixture of a compass and the game “Hot and Cold”.
we make money not art
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
‘Sims school’ abandons books for laptops. “Instead of spending $600 per head on textbooks, Vail High School in Tucson will buy each of its 350 sophomores an $850 laptop. That shouldn’t be too difficult – the school itself is located in a science park. But the Tucson school district’s superinterindent, an enthusiastic technology evangelist called Calvin Baker, candidly admits he doesn’t know quite how it will all work.”
The Register
South Korean’s prefer to click. “This Taipei Times editorial looks at South Korean “readers,who once leafed through morning newspapers,now prefer to click on to major portals like naver.com, yahoo or daum.net, where they can peruse articles from dozens of newspapers listed under these portal sites.”
Smart Mobs
Bookmarkable Google Maps. “Web site BeenMapped.com lets users bookmark locations on Google Maps, rate them and leave comments.”
Lifehacker
Ethertouch. “An array of Ethertouch sensors track the position and velocity of your finger or hand as it passes through the field and convert the data into a digital signal, which is then processed. This ability to measure velocity as well as position makes the technology particularly attractive to the computer games industry, where it could enable a new level of immersion in VR gaming. The touch-free interfaces could appear on the market by the end of next year.”
networked_performance
Wiring the Brain at the Nanoscale. “Researchers from NYU medical school, the University of Tokyo and the MIT have demonstrated a technique that may one day allow doctors to monitor individual brain cells and perhaps provide new treatments for neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s.”
we make money not art
Retina seeks novelty. “These findings provide evidence that the ultimate goal of the visual system is not simply to construct internally an exact reproduction of the external world, Meister and his colleagues write in Nature. Rather, the system seeks to extract from the onslaught of raw visual information the few bits of data that are relevant to behavior. This entails the discarding of signals that are less useful, and dynamic retinal adaptation provides a means of stripping from the visual stream predictable and therefore less newsworthy signals.”
Boing Boing
I’m Loving It: Indian Youth And SMS. “Over a billion text messages are sent every month by India’s 56 million mobile phone subscribers. SMS is especially popular with young people for whom the mobile phone is a welcome and private channel of communication with members of the opposite sex. Especially important in a country where ‘dating’ still does not enjoy widespread parental sanction.”
PSFK
An immersive existence simulator and telepresence apparatus. “Enter the Panoscope 360° to be fully immersed in a 3D world. A 3-axis joystick will let you and your friends (up to 8) fly through the space as in dreams. The immersive display uses a PC and a hemispheric projector to project in real time a rendering of your entire horizon onto the screen.”
we make money not art
New Electronic Currency. “As Jeremy Faludi points out, the most interesting topic in this encouraging BBC article on microlending is the establishment of a new form of currency in Kenya: unused cellular phone minutes.”
Futurismic
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
Podcasting set for ‘huge growth’. “Market researchers and analysts continue to buoy up podcasting’s future with latest figures suggesting a US audience alone of 56 million by 2010.”
BBC NEWS
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
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
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
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
Façade + Auto Mata. “This long-awaited one-act interactive drama, featuring a 3D environment and voice-acted, AI-driven characters, Façade has been a testbed for research in and development of new discourse-based NLP techniques, a new drama management framework, and new ways of allowing behavior hierarchies to interact.”
Networked Performance
Fingernail storage. “Japanese researchers are using femtosecond laser pulses to write data into human fingernails. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months – the time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.”
we make money not art
Lufthansa Tests Fingerprint Check-In. “At check-in passengers get their finger-print scanned and stored. Upon boarding the plane, the finger-print is verified. The Finger-Print Check-In should already be launched in 2006.”
I4U News
YOU-WHO social networking cellphone game. “…after mutual consent to play YOU-WHO, one player acts as the “mystery person” feeding bits of information about their appearance to the other player who eagerly draws their cutesy image on their screen. The phones then “call” each other revealing the players’ locations and identities.”
Engadget
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
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
Wearable system of mountaineering devices. “EasyTech SafeTrek is a system comprising modular devices (each offering a function like phoning, location or avalanche warning), a CPU “hub” linking these functions together, with or without wires, and a standardised power supply. These elements are wearable: distributed around the body, mostly in pockets attached to a harness. The whole system is controlled, via a single “intuitive interface protocol”, by input controls designed for mountaineering conditions, such as the operable thumb of a thermal glove (the thumb acts as a joystick). A head-mounted display is the main output monitor. The hub automatically recognises any new element added and incorporates it in the system. For example, you can request the hub to take a photograph using the camera module, direct the GPS module to place the location on the picture and then direct the Satphone module to send the image to the your website in real time.”
we make money not art
Anklebot for stroke recovery. “This heralds a transition of therapeutic robotics from research to practice, similar to when computers went from being specialized number-crunchers for engineering and science to the ubiquitous consumer appliances for word-processing and presentation that we use today,”
Boing Boing
New broadband “whispers” below the radar. “xMax, from xG Technologies, is a very quiet radio system that uses radio channels already filled up with noisy pager or TV signals. The system can emit signals that are too weak to be picked up by normal antennas, but that can be “heard” by special aerials which know where to “listen”, thus enabling dual usage of the same scarce radio spectrum.”
we make money not art
Surveying The Future… Digitally. “…EZ2CAD, has developed a new system which can measure accurately an apartment inside a building, without the limitations of the current (and more expensive) systems. [...] the new device is composed of two units, a base station and a lightweight mobile unit called Rover. [...] this device also creates a CAD model directly usable by a software such as AutoCAD to build a 3D model in real time.”
Primidi
Smart Trackerz. “These little truck things follow lines drawn on a white surface using patented “Opti-track” technology. Priced at $14.95, these things will be great for the kids. Hand them a marker, point at the kitchen tile, and let them go to work. You’ll have a veritable Trackerz rally going on in no time. Then they’ll draw on the dog.”
Gizmodo
Pronto? I’m Almost There. “As you get into your vehicle, Pronto synchronises wirelessly with the digital address and appointment books in your PDA, phone or laptop, thus learning the location and contact person of your destination. It plans the route, offers traffic updates, and adjusts its communication channel to give priority to the destination contact, later scheduled contacts, and your frequent contact list. So, without having to use an address book or search menus, you can phone the people you probably need to contact during the journey.”
we make money not art
Kids blow £1bn on mobiles. “Parents are so concerned about the spiralling cost of using mobiles they want operators to do more to help them control their children’s spending, while three in ten reckon cellcos aren’t interested in their concerns, according to mobile billing outfit Convergys.
Nine in ten parents have opted for pay-as-you-go services to try and keep a lid on their kids’ spending, Convergys says.”
The Register
Device Lets You Watch Shows on a Home TV, TiVo From Elsewhere. “I have been testing the Slingbox at home, in my office and on the road. In my tests, it worked exactly as advertised. At my office, about a dozen miles from home, I watched recorded episodes of “Charlie Rose” and “Desperate Housewives.” At an airport, I watched CNBC live on my laptop via a public Wi-Fi connection. And in a Boston hotel room, about 450 miles from home, I watched a live Washington Nationals baseball game unavailable in Red Sox country.”
The Wall Street Journal
