Archive for October, 2005
Beyond Human. “Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever larger part of adult life. For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, this is only the beginning. According to his new book “The Singularity Is Near,” we are approaching the age of “full-immersion virtual-reality.” Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, you’ll be able to design your own mental habitat. You’ll be able to sleep with your favorite movie star – in your head. (It is not lost on Kurzweil that you can already do that, but he insists it will be really, really realistic.) Those same technologies will help us “overcome our genetic heritage,” live longer and become smarter. We’ll learn how brains operate and devise computers that function like them. Then the barrier between our minds and our computers will disappear. The part of our memory that is literally downloaded will grow until “the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.”"
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up. “In interviews and surveys many parents say that their children spend too much time in front of computers and on cellphones. Some parents worry that long, sedentary hours spent at a computer may lead to weight gain, or that an excess of instant and text messaging comes at the expense of learning face-to-face social skills. Some complain of having to compete for their childrens’ attention more than ever. “
New York Times (may require free registration)
Jacket therapy. “A robotic jacket that helps stroke victims recover from partial paralysis has been developed in Japan.
Four pressure sensors in the jacket-like device detect the muscle movements in the healthy arm and wrist, the jacket analyzes this data and sends compressed air to the affected arm, where eight artificial muscles expand and contract in the same way as the movement in the healthy arm. Researchers hope repeated therapy will bring back the regular functioning of the damaged limb.”
we make money not art
Spanish ISP wants its customers to share WiFi. “Fon, a new Spanish company, is offering to build a service based on P2P principles for people to be able to access the Internet through other people connection using wireless networking. The system is based on 2 categories of users; — Bill who resell their connection to other members of the service — Linus who offer to share for free and in exchange can benefit from roaming on the whole network. the whole transaction is managed by the company (Fon) “
Boing Boing
Bingo Game For Shoppers. “A customer first need to sign up for the service, then she receives a QR code from a server. After shopping, she can display the QR code on her mobile phone and show it to a reader device. Then, she receives an SMS message that notifies her about the points she earned. Now she can open her home page on her phone to check the current status of her ongoing bingo game.
Everytime she earns some points, she gets an additional symbol and when she gets three identical symbols in row, she is rewarded with coupons. “
RFID in Japan
Digital Medical Records on the Go. “Global Care Quest is working in conjunction with the UCLA Medical Center to eliminate paper trail problems. The system they are installing is a patient retrieval system accessible wirelessly. There are two optional ways in which the hospital staff would be able to receive information; the first of which being through PDA’s and smartphones. It is done all real time to help eliminate room for updating error. For those staff who do not carry PDA’s or smartphones, there would be desktops, laptops, and wall-mounted machines scattered throughout the hospital for patient information access immediately and quickly.”
Gizmodo
Flock: First Look. “Flock is a new collaborative browser built on top of open source Firefox code. It integrates with del.icio.us, with blogging, with RSS management and with Flickr. It’s also very pretty.”
Lifehacker
Kodak announces 39 megapixel CCD. “much will 39 megapixels run you? No pricing is out yet, but Phase One’s current top model, the 22 megapixel P25, goes for about $30,000. That puts it at over $1,300 per megapixel, so don’t be surprised to see the P45 going for as much as $50K.”
Engadget
Smart sheets make your bed interactive. “WestPoint Home is shipping out this interactive Cinderella-themed comforter that lights up and makes fairy godmother sounds as the first offering in its line of washable interactive bedding. Conductive threads woven into the fabric of your sheets or comforter are designed to communicate wirelessly with your lights and appliances.”
Engadget
Creating the Global Hot Spot. “The I-4 satellites will serve as switchboards in the sky for Inmarsat’s Broadband Global Area Network, or BGAN, service, scheduled for rollout in 2006. Instead of cruising for a Starbucks, BGAN subscribers can hit the road with a portable terminal as small as their laptop computer and surf the web — or connect with the office LAN — at broadband speeds of up to 492 Kbps. “
Wired News
SureShotGPS brings GPS to golf course worldwide. “The SureShot has a 2.2-inch display, can hold data for 10 courses at once, and syncs with a PC via USB. The device will initially come preloaded with maps of a handful of Australian courses. The company aims to have all of Australia’s major courses added to a web site for free downloading within six months; international courses will follow”
Engadget
Swisscom offers remote digital TV programming via mobile phone. “Bluewin TV 300 customers can call up the electronic programme guide on their mobile phones, search for programmes and programme shows via their handsets. “
Digital Media Europe
Cellphones learn to recognize their owners’ faces. “Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. this week began marketing a technology that inexpensively adds face recognition to camera-equipped cellphones. Oki’s “Face Sensing Engine” (FSE) “middleware” decodes facial images within 280mS on a 100MHz ARM9 processor, and can restrict access to mobile devices by recognizing their owners, the company says.”
Device Forge
Tomorrow’s operating room to harness Net, RFID. “It’s hard to do most jobs without talking to your peers, but in the operating room, poor communication can cost a life.
In the operating room of the future, however, telling a doctor he or she is making a mistake could be as easy as pointing to a computer screen or “wall of knowledge”–a thoroughgoing summary of background data, vital signs and strategic information designed to prevent mistakes during surgery. “
CNET News.com
London Poster. “OpenStreetMap has put together all the GPS data it has in London and made a stunning poster from it. [...] Data submitted to OpenStreetMap of people walking, driving and cycling around London. So the thicker the lines, the more people travelled them. “
OpenStreetMap
Voice phone calls to be free within years: eBay CEO. “In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay’s chief executive said on Wednesday. “
Reuters.com
Balloon beams broadband internet from stratosphere. “A blisteringly fast data downlink provided by a stratospheric balloon floating 24,000 metres above the Earth has been tested for the first time. The untethered, 12,000-cubic-metre helium balloon was tested on 31 August for several hours. Analysis now shows the test was a success and sent data to the ground at 1.25 gigabits per second. That is thousands of times the capacity of a home broadband internet connection and the first time such a link has been tested from the stratosphere.”
New Scientist Breaking News
Finally, electronic paper big enough to use. “Start-up E Ink and LG.Philips LCD have created an “electronic paper” display measuring 10.1 inches across, the biggest one ever made, and the latest step toward the dream of e-books and magazines, according to the companies. The prototype screen measures less than 300 microns thick, making it about as thin and flexible as construction paper. Letters and images that appear on it resemble characters and pictures printed with ordinary ink on paper, the companies said. The screen can also be rolled up.”
CNET News.com
The EnterTrainer Excer-Tainment Accessory. “The EnterTrainer comes with a wireless strap-on heart rate monitor. The devices monitors you target heart rate. If you start missing the goal the volume of the remote controlled TV is going down. If you are not getting back inside the target the TV switches off, and the EnterTrainer gadget has won.”
I4U News
Tumblelogs. “On my web travels the other day, I came across a new (to me) kind of weblog, the tumblelog. [...] A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. [...] Different ways of displaying various types of content…remaindered links, regular posts, book reviews, and movie reviews are all displayed differently. I’m working on incorporating photo albums and perhaps a daily photolog…as well as a couple other different types of content. “
kottke.org
Send SMS Messages Via TV With Your Remote Control (Mobile). ” new SMS service sends text messages from TV to cell phone or from TV to TV. Infobank, a mobile solution developer announced the launch of Message on TV, the SMS based on interactive digital data broadcasting service.”
Lockergnome
Hospitals Save Costs, Time with Wireless Tags. “many hospitals are turning to RFID technology to keep track of pumps, as well as other expensive mobile equipment, including wheelchairs and patient monitors. According to a report by Spyglass Consulting, the number of hospitals using RFID tags to track assets will skyrocket from 10 percent in mid-2005 to 45 percent by the end of 2007. Such programs promise to cut not only costs, but also the time that clinicians and engineers spend searching for equipment, and the time patients spend waiting for it. “
CIO Insights
Mapping Households Reveals Immigrants Are “Us” Not “Them”. “Unlike previous researchers who have generated settlement patterns of individual immigrants using such markers as time and age, Ellis and Wright are part of a growing group of demographers who consider social and economic variables along with physical location. According to the team, ignoring the complexities of families containing both U.S.- and foreign-born members exaggerates subtle differences between them and creates a more pessimistic view of immigrant assimilation. For example, if home-ownership rates were compared between U.S.-born heads of households to immigrant-headed households, the results would show a higher rate of ownership among U.S.-born breadwinners. But if the rates were calculated again taking into consideration homes that may have an immigrant presence, such as a spouse who is not necessarily the head of the household, the rate of home ownership among immigrants would go up. “
Scientific American
Taiwan Tests Island-Wide WiMax. “Taiwanese government officials said on Monday they plan to make Taiwan the world’s largest testing ground for WiMax, and inked a pact with Intel to work together on the wireless broadband technology. “
PCWorld.com
Cyborg cells sense humidity. “Living bacteria have been incorporated into an electronic circuit to produce a supersensitive humidity sensor. “This is essentially a first step towards a biological computer, and would have many applications,” says Steve Ripp, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “If you detect a chemical with a biological device, you not only sense its presence but also its effect on a living system,” he says.”
we make money not art
Airtime. “Casual games have a few general principles, but the most important is simplicity. They’re games that are easy to learn, easy to play, and are well-suited to short bursts of gameplay rather than long sessions. They’re also suited to the physical characteristics of mobile handsets. Analyst firm NPD Group, which referred to mobile gaming recently as a “digital snack,” says the limited screen size and navigation options of phones make casual games a good fit.”
Gizmodo
3 UK lets cell users make, sell videos. “The smallest of Britain’s five mobile phone network operators said on Tuesday that customers could now use their mobile phone to make a 30 second video and upload it onto a “See Me TV” channel for others to view. Each time a clip is downloaded by one of 3 UK’s 3.2 million customers, the performer gets paid one penny. “
Reuters.com
Roll-Up Braille. “Basically, it’s “a sheet of tiny plastic paddles that bend in response to a voltage. It is designed to connect to a cellphone or laptop, and could also replace the liquid crystal screen of an ordinary PDA.” This looks to be a huge breakthrough because the only dynamic displays for the blind right now are about the size of a New York phone book.”
Gizmodo
’4G’ Leapfrogs Next-Gen Wireless. “Whether it’s Flash-OFDM, UMTS TDD, WiMAX or some other impressive-sounding acronym or buzzword, experts promise that such “4G” wonders will finally bring broadband mobility to the general public. “There are a lot of exciting possibilities out there,” said Max Weise, a principal at Adventis, a global consulting firm. “You could have your personal media repository that you use at home and on the road. Or handheld devices could control things at home, such as your TiVo.” “
Wired News
RFID Pocket Replacement. “To avoid being tracked by readers, Mikey Sklar is showing how to build a faraday cage around your RFID tags. Just rip out a pocket from a pair of jeans and replace it with a cotton like fabric which contains enough conductive material to block most RFID tag frequencies.”
we make money not art
Cellphones reshape Africa. “On a continent where landlines have long been costly and rare, cellphones have enabled communications and created an industry worth $25 billion, according to one service provider. Prepaid minutes have even become an alternate currency, since they can be transferred from one person to another via text. However, as with any boom, there’s been a dark side to the cellphone’s growth in Africa. Cellphone towers now mar the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and have had to be banned on cross-country buses in Nigeria, because highwaymen have used them to coordinate robberies.”
Engadget
Bracelet navigates Net. “The ReachMedia system consists of a bracelet that reads RFID tags to detect objects the user is holding, an accelerometer to detect hand gestures and a cell phone that connects to the Internet, plays sounds when objects and gestures are recognized, and provides audio information about the object in hand. A person could, for example, pick up a book to search for reviews of the book online. She would hear a sound from her phone indicating information was available about the book, and would use gestures — a downward flick and right and left rotation — to select or go to the previous or next menu item of available information.”
we make money not art
America’s biggest Wi-Fi cloud is in rural Oregon. “While cities around the country are battling over plans to offer free or cheap Internet access, this lonely terrain is served by what is billed as the world’s largest hotspot, a wireless cloud that stretches over 700 square miles of landscape so dry and desolate it could have been lifted from a cowboy tune.”
Boing Boing
Screw The Meter, Bill My Phone. “The “Phone2Park” system, developed by Parking Solutions, will automatically debit a customer’s pre-paid mobile phone account when they send a text to a shortcode, removing the need for parking meters or pay and display machines.” So as long as you’re hip with SMSing and don’t mind texting back and forth, you won’t have to worry about running 10 city blocks back to your car to feed it more coins. “
Gizmodo
Early adopters go mainstream. “Early adopters are the object of affection for technology and consumer electronics companies. They are also a lot more common than you might think, according to a study done by USA Today and market research firm Claritas. That research shows that 29 percent of US households are early adopters when it comes to technology, and that early adopters live in some surprising places–Kentucky, Iowa, and Minnesota, to name a few.”
Ars Technica
Symantec readies “Big Brother” database security monitor. “The software monitors all database queries and flags any that are deemed “suspicious” or inappropriate, then sends an immediate message to the network administrator. The software does not attempt to shut down the queries or prevent the sender from initiating further requests, although Symantec has not yet ruled out the idea of an automatic response to potential threats.”
Ars Technica
Meet the Life Hackers. “Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.”
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Millions of UK households at risk of ID theft. “A ‘bin raiding’ exercise by MEL Research found that 77 per cent of household waste contained at least one or more items which could assist fraudsters in stealing an identity. That means more than 18m UK (out of a total of 24.5m) households are throwing away sensitive financial documents such as bank statements and utility bills that might be useful to “dumpster diving” identity fraudsters.”
The Register
Breakthrough in printed electronics. “The Institute for Print and Media Technology at Chemnitz University in Germany has developed a new process that enables electronic circuitry to be produced with mass printing technology. The new process will enable the mass production of very cheap integrated circuitry in paper and cardboard and can be expected to have massive consequences in manufacturing, the future of RFID and the blurring of the line between printed objects and the virtual world.The first practical applications are expected to be electronic printed maps and printed paper keyboards, closely followed by labels for clothing, luggage, packaging, ticketing and after that … almost anything.”
gizmag
Confronting Bullies Who Wound With Words. “The new online dimension of bullying has grown to the point that Scope, a nonprofit group that provides educational services to school districts, convened the Island’s first conference on bullying in cyberspace at Stony Brook University on Sept. 28. Five hundred teachers, administrators, technology experts and students from 3rd to 12th grade took part. On the Internet, said Betty Kauffman, manager of Scope, “you can take a kid who is 4 feet 11 and thin as a rail, and be the biggest bully in the world, but in real life he couldn’t do it.” “
New York Times (may require free registration)
BBC To Start Using Viewers 3G Comments. “The BBC is trialling a new video messaging system for the venerable Match of the Day football show. Called ‘Your Shout!’, the system lets football fans send in 3G video messages with their opinions on the crucial England internationals and during Football Focus broadcasts.
The best content will then be broadcast on live TV during and after the matches, which are being covered live on Match of the Day.”
PSFK
Need to Get Nagged? “Remember the Milk”. “Remember The Milk is a free on-line to-do list management service. It has all the features you’d expect from this sort of site: multiple lists, priorities, due-dates, repeating tasks, etc. Then it adds the cool stuff. My favorite feature is the built-in nagging system that reminds you to get the job done. You can request reminders by E-Mail, IM or SMS. In addition, you can share and publish your to-do lists and create new tasks by e-mail.”
Lifehacker
Save your personal Web with Slogger. “Web pages change. They disappear. They move to new URLs. They get lost or they’re password-protected or they’re only available on private intranets. Firefox extension Slogger saves full, time-stamped web pages to your computer as well as social bookmarking services for convenient offline searching, browsing and archiving. With Slogger, you’ll never lose a Web page again.”
Lifehacker
Cell phone could identify its owner by their walk. “Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have developed a prototype of a cell phone that uses motion sensors to record a user’s walking pattern of movement, or gait. The device then periodically checks to see that it is still in the possession of its legitimate owner, by measuring the current stride and comparing it against that stored in its memory.”
New Scientist
In-car camera records accidents. “DriveCam is an onboard camera which continuously records a journey, discarding the data every 20 seconds. If an accident, swerve or emergency brake occurs it saves the 10 seconds beforehand and 10 seconds afterwards. “
BBC NEWS
Educational Sites Inform a Growing Audience. “A new report released by Internet statisticians Nielsen NetRatings contends that educational and reference-oriented sites are experiencing a dramatic increase in traffic, and currently reach nearly one-third of all Web users.
The New York-based research outfit said that educational destinations such as Wikipedia, Yahoo Education and eHow have seen a 22 percent jump in unique impressions since September 2004, and have been accessed by 31 percent of all Internet users.”
EWeek
Samsung demos 3D camera, display for cellphones. “Samsung recently demonstrated a working concept that incoporates stereoscopic cameras and a 3D-capable display directly into a cellphone, allowing for a more lifelike rendition of the subject. The stereo cams work under the same principle as human eyesight, while a parallax barrier LCD display gives on-screen images more depth and robustness. The new camera setup and displays should start appearing on foreign handsets next year, by which time we’ll hopefully be seeing 3 megapixel phones with optical zooms here in the technologically-backwards US.”
Engadget
Better mousetrap builders. “Mothers of invention have turned up here at the Yankee Invention Exposition in the old Armory. So too have some fathers and grandfathers, and not a few offbeat uncles and aunts.
They watch for corporate product scouts, venture capitalists, anyone who’ll inspect the whiz-bang widgets they have lovingly contrived.”
csmonitor.com
C’mon, Baby, Light My Brain Cells. “C’mon, Baby, Light My Brain Cells
Researcher Helen Fisher says we’re hardwired to be attracted to certain people. Now e-dating site Chemistry.com is putting her theories to the test”
Business Week
Cell Phones For Six Year Olds. “LeapFrog Enterprises, the educational toy company, teamed up with another wireless company, Enfora, to release TicTalk, a phone for children 6 and older. TicTalk, which retails for about $100, is filled with LeapFrog games and typical cell phone features like a stopwatch and speaker phone capability. (But because the phone is intended for a first-grader, users can only call friends approved by a parent.)”
Real Tech News
Inquisitor with Ajax: Not Your Father’s Search Engine. “Unlike your normal search engine like Google or Yahoo, Inquisitor has added some AJAX scripts to do your searching while you type, kind of like Google Suggest, but it gives you the actual search results not the search terms. According to the website Inquisitor is best used with FireFox, Safari, or Opera, so those of you who are still using Internet Explorer might miss out on some of the Ajaxian goodness.”
Real Tech News
School capsules. “Each factory built unit has a surface area of 100 m2 for a maximum of 30 students. Each unit is equipped with bathrooms, services and auxiliary areas which are independent of the main school structure. A terrace opens onto the entry of the unit. The unit’s exterior shell is in Glass Reinforced Plastic decorated with the drawings created by the schoolchildren themselves.”
we make money not art
Empathy Vest. “The garment allowed for the transmission of data that was converted into sensory affect. Two touch sensors and one voice relay sensor, gave the wearer a sense of experiencing informational stimulus mapped onto the body through the output modes – 4 x light channels and 1 x fan. These sensory impacts on the body questioned whether the fact that the wearer can feel the physical stimulus could make him/her develop an empathic connection with the remote space or person(s) from which the signals were being received.”
networked_performance
Tactic m2 video mixing instrument. “The m2 tactile console combines video triggering, scratching, source mixing and live camera manipulation, plus control over a slew of onboard effects. The control interface is intended to inspire creative multimedia performance via hardware and software integration, connecting to a Macintosh for processing and performance in real-time.”
Engadget
Subscribe to free, del.icio.us video in iTunes. “Two great tastes that taste great together: now that del.icio.us offers feeds by filetype and iTunes has full video support (including “vodcasts,” or video podcasts), you can load up iTunes with free video files bookmarked and tagged in del.icio.us.”
Lifehacker
New Search Engine Peers Behind Subscription Walls. “Taken in a broader context, Congoo is among a bevy of new “deep dive” search engines that could significantly change what you’d expect to see in a typical search result. Even as the major search engines have expanded their indexes of the Web to as many as 8 billion documents, they are increasingly acknowledging that much of the world’s information is nowhere to be found in search results. “
EWeek
A Marriage of Bookshelf and Phone. “Last week, though, commuters, exercisers and people sitting around for jury duty gained an ingenious new audio alternative: books on phone.
Its actual name is Audible Air, and it’s a way to download spoken recordings from Audible.com to the Palm Treo cellphone and other wireless gadgets – over the air, wherever you happen to be. But to appreciate its significance, you must first understand how Audible works.”
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Placing Voices. “Placing Voices, by Brian House, is a mobile-sound-blog software which uses the built-in sound recording feature of mobile phones (which is optimized for voice) and MMS messaging to place these fragments on a web-accessible map of the city as they occur. The objective is to express a map in terms of these experiences, to restore some claim to my memory of physical spaces over the transient voices heard within them.”
networked_performance
Are multiplayer online games more compelling, more addictive?. “Most players become intensely involved in the challenge of the game for a while, but eventually tire of it and move on to some other activity. But for a small minority, obsession with these games can lead to bad habits or worse. Some players have been known to avoid eating and sleeping for many hours at a stretch while lost inside the game. In August, a South Korean in his 20s died after he spent 50 hours, taking only short breaks, playing an online game at an Internet cafe.”
csmonitor.com
Machine Makes Dishes on Demand. “MIT Media Lab’s Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed.”
Wired News
Scan your taxi and feel safer. “Each taxi will have a unique cellphone readable barcode inside and outside the cab. The code is stored on the phone which can then be sent to “friends or family””
Engadget
SnapMail. “Unlike instant messaging, SnapMail uses peer-to-peer technology and does not rely on Internet servers to send mail within your local network. This makes SnapMail a very fast in-house messaging system that complements your Internet email. All of your messaging can be conducted without fear of accidentally sending mail out of your company.”
Lifehacker
Drive-on Movie Magic. “By attaching a video projector to the roof, hood or front your automobile, and popping a DVD player, or even a Mac mini in your car stereo slot, you may project your favorite flick onto the wall of your choice. Hell, why not invite a couple of friends, and use some kind of FM transmitting device to broadcast the sound over to their boogie-vans, too?”
Sponbustion
Making Electronic Health Records Consumer-Friendly. “Most Americans believe that electronic medical records will improve their health care. Four out of five people surveyed believe that if physicians kept electronic medical records on their patients, health care quality would improve and medical errors would be reduced, because authorized doctors would be able to retrieve a patient’s medical history in a matter of seconds. An equal number believe that the ability of researchers to review millions of records anonymously to determine best treatment practices would help all doctors improve the quality of medical care. “
CIO Insight
Young Males Leave The Flicks. “In a survey of 2,000 moviegoers by OTX, an online research company based in Los Angeles, American men under 25 said they had seen 24 percent fewer movies this summer than they did in the summer of 2003, when the same study was last conducted… Instead, young men aged 13 to 25 reported that they were busy surfing the Web, instant-messaging with friends and playing video games on consoles like PlayStation 2 and Xbox. “
PSFK
Missouri to use cellphone signals to monitor traffic. “The state is planning a program with a $3 million annual budget that will track vehicles using cellphone triangulation, silently measuring the speed of vehicles via the cellphones within, as they’re handed off from tower to tower. While the state insists that the system is designed to help motorists avoid traffic tie-ups by monitoring road conditions, privacy advocates point out that it can tie specific cellphone numbers to specific vehicles, and can be used to track individual drivers.”
Engadget
IBM’s Smart Stance on Genetic Testing. “On Oct. 10, IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano sent a memo to employees announcing the company was revising its policies to prevent the use of genetic information in making personnel decisions. Big Blue’s move prompts the question: Is a flood of gene-based health data about workers available right now?”
Business Week
MTV Creates User-Generated Channel. “”We are handing over an entire channel online to college students and everyone who wants new music. mtvU Uber gives them the power to create and program their own channel, and will remain in perpetual beta mode as they experiment and pioneer the digital future.”"
PSFK
Treating China’s online addicts. “Wang Yiming, 21, is a self-confessed internet addict, one of a growing number in China. He used to spend hours online each day, often going without food or sleep. His face is drawn and sallow.
He said addiction changed his whole life:
“A month or two after I started surfing the internet, I failed some of my school tests, but I was too afraid to tell my parents. When my father found out, he was very angry.”
BBC NEWS
New Input Concept: KeyWheel by Microth. “The KeyWheel differs from the Apple iPod TouchWheel in that it is using absolute and discrete positioning. The KeyWheel takes into account the starting position of the gesture and it’s length. “
I4U News
New Record Label: Starbucks. “Does Apple’s iTunes hold the key to the future of music distribution? Or does Starbucks with its Hear Music burning stations?”
PSFK:
FlirtSkirt. “User A wears her skirt and turns it on and her skirt holds the colours that have been initialized. On reaching a particular distance from user B the outfits start communicating with each other. They recognize the initial colors, mix them and display the shared color on both outfits. In addition when in range the outfits dim. When user A and B have separated from each other and moved beyond the range of frequency, they leave with the shared color ready for interactions with new users.”
networked_performance
Finance Gets the Message. “Once a novelty and always a favorite of young technophiles, not to mention the everlasting bane of the distraction-prone, IM has emerged as an essential application in the financial services industry, where brokers and underwriters have come to rely on the technology to stay in touch with customers and each other in an industry where information moves markets and timing is everything.”
EWeek
SMS kettle: best invention ever?. “PG Tips have invented the SMS kettle. You can now put the water on to boil at the flick of a switch.,..oh, sorry, touch of a button. Just text “switch on” to your kettle’s phone number (there are so many things wrong with this…do you want your kettle to have a phone number?) and it will oblige. A spokeswoman for PG told Ananova: “It could revolutionise tea-time. Now there is no excuse for not putting the kettle on.”
The Register
The Rise of the Body Bots. “The very first commercially available exoskeleton, scheduled to hit the market in Japan next month, is designed to help elderly and disabled people walk, climb stairs, and carry things around. Built by Cyberdyne Inc., in Tsukuba, Japan, this exoskeleton, called HAL-5, will cost about 1.5 million yen (around US $13 800).”
Spectrum
Hitachi’s prototype Bluetooth car toolkit. “But Project Bureau’s digital tool kit, designed at the request of Hitachi’s Milan Design Center, goes further than most, adding Bluetooth functions to everything from a warning triangle (to advise a driver of proper placement — EU laws require triangles to be placed 50 meters from a stalled car) to tools that are tracked within the vehicle (no more digging under the back seat for that wrench you think you dropped there). The warning triangle even includes a camera that links by Bluetooth to an onboard computer with software that lets it analyze road conditions, warning you if you’ve stopped in a risky spot.”
Engadget
Philips “Tune In” concept allows for anonymous music-sharing. “The “Tune In” is a flash-based player that both broadcasts its signal to nearby Tune In devices and can recieve tracks the same way. Philips envisions users becoming their own tiny radio stations, sharing their playlists on the subway, in the library, anywhere people congregate.”
Engadget
Netsukuku. “Netsukuku is a mesh network or a P2P net system that generates and sustains itself autonomously. It is designed to handle an unlimited number of nodes with minimal CPU and memory resources. Thanks to this feature it can be easily used to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or
authority controls.”
Netsukuku
Brattleboro community news and discussion for Brattleboro, VT. “Brattleboro, welcome to your only locally-owned participatory journalism site. Read and write your views, reviews, news, interviews, and more. It’s your town to talk about. Get involved and shape the debate.”
iBrattleboro
New reader comments system for BBC news. “The new system will rely mostly on “reactive moderation,” asking readers to report inappropriate content and material that breaches house rules, according to journalism.co.uk. Readers will also be able to rate postings and other users can browse comments either in chronological order or by those ratings.The BBC is moving to the new system because the site is currently overwhelmed by the volume of submissions, as every comment currently has to be individually approved before being published.An average 6,000 comments are submitted on a typical day, and up to 20,000 on a busy news day – but only around 10 per cent of those are published”. “
Smart Mobs
Ceatec shows off future gadgets. “Ubi-Wa has two meanings in Japanese – “Finger ring” and “Speak by finger” – which is exactly what it lets you do. In noisy places where you cannot hear who you are calling, you simply place the Ubi-Wa bearing finger in the ear.
The ring converts speech sounds to vibrations. These travel down the bone and into the ear canal, which obligingly turns them back into intelligible speech. “
BBC NEWS
Young blog their way to a publishing revolution. “On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do – as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online – most young people are using it to communicate with one another.”
Smart Mobs
China’s netizens. “A report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in July indicates that China has 103 million netizens, or Internet users, like Lu Li. That means one out of 13 Chinese uses the Internet. Ten years ago, there were barely 50,000 Internet accounts throughout China. A survey on some 2,400 people in five Chinese cities show that an average netizen spends 2.73 hours online daily, reading news, sending or receiving emails, playing games, downloading music, gathering background materials or chatting”
Smart Mobs
Tagging Help With Tagyu. “The basic premise of Tagyu is to let other people help you tag your content. Tagyu compares what you’re writing to what other people around the web are writing. It looks at how they’ve tagged their content and uses that information to give you some ideas about how to tag yours.”
Lifehacker
Dodgem Interactive Lighting. “The Dodgem Interactive Lighting, designed by Richard G Liddle, is a patented system that allow lighting to be physically manipulated and repositioned by hand, within a totally transparent screen.”
we make money not art
Share with Fallen Fruit. “West coast-based Fallenfruit.org provides maps that identify fruit trees that hang over public sidewalks. By law (depending on the town), these fruits are public property and you can harvest them freely. Although avocados are currently in season, the Beverly-to-Wiltshire map shows where you can find bananas, figs, grapes, lemons, loquats, peaches, oranges and more.”
Lifehacker
School plan for 364-day opening. “A school is to consult teachers and parents on the idea of opening for lessons 364 days a year. Teaching would take place throughout the year – even on weekends – but not everyone would be in at the same time.”
BBC NEWS
The intelligent door handle. “Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have combined and adapted all the cameras, buzzers, keypads, motion detectors, RFID readers and intercoms into a wireless integrated door station and combined it with the door handle which can integrate existing and planned infrastructure at low cost and high convenience.”
gizmag
Japan’s shy geeks boast huge financial clout-report. “According to a survey by Nomura Research Institute (NRI), a Tokyo think-tank, otaku — known for their obsession with aspects of pop culture such as comics, computer games and electronics — now number 1.72 million nationwide and power a market worth more than 400 billion yen a year. “The impact of geeks is really large,” said Takeshi Nomura, an institute spokesman. “They can no longer be ignored by businesses.”
Reuters.com
Americans who use the internet. “Thirty-two percent of American adults, or about 65 million people, do not use the internet and not always by choice. Certain groups continue to lag in their internet adoption, including Americans age 65 and older, African-Americans, and those with less education. For example:
26% of Americans age 65 and older go online, compared with 67% of those age 50-64, 80% of those age 30-49, and 84% of those age 18-29.
57% of African-Americans go online, compared with 70% of whites.
29% of those who have not graduated from high school have access, compared with 61% of high school graduates and 89% of college graduates. 60% of American adults who do not have a child living at home go online, compared with 83% of parents of minor children.”
Smart Mobs
Tag, You’re It: Best Bookmarker. “When it comes to finding and categorizing new web pages, Chanchal Gupta is the most trusted surfer in town. New experimental software has identified Gupta as one of the most influential social bookmarkers on the web. The software, CollaborativeRank, is a search engine that places great emphasis on results found by highly ranked web “
Wired News
Patent proposes RFID tags with VIN info. “The propsed system incorporates chips with a maximum range of eight inches, to allay privacy concerns, and are only activated during an accident. So even if a hit-and-run driver speeds away, their VIN number will have been recorded by the victim’s RFID tag reader, which can then be read by police. Guess this means that we’re gonna have to start leaving windshield notes every time we “brush up” against someone else’s ride from now on.”
Engadget
Intelligent Illumination. “This lamp shade, designed by Philips, changes to match any color you expose to it. How smart! The Chameleon has a built in camera that can copy the color of any object you show it, like this tie for example, just by approaching its sensors.”
PSFK
HandySinger. “The HandySinger system is a tool developed at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories to naturally express a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet. A singing voice morphing algorithm smoothes out the strength of expressions delivered with a singing voice. “
we make money not art
Korea’s U-city. “Public recycling bins that use RFID to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect a fall and contact help; phones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions. In New Songdo City, a “ubiquitous city” being built in South Korea, all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental, etc.) share data, and computers are to be built into the houses, streets and office buildings. When completed in 2014, the city’s infrastructure will be a test bed for new technologies, and the city itself will exemplify a digital way of life, the “U-life.” It starts with a resident’s smart-card house key. “The same key can be used to get on the subway, pay a parking meter, see a movie, borrow a free public bicycle and so on. It’ll be anonymous, won’t be linked to your identity, and if lost you can quickly cancel the card and reset your door locks,” aid John Kim who leads the U-city planning. “
we make money not art
Networking: A Special Section. “Companies are drawing on collaborative models that first blossomed in nonbusiness settings, from online games to open-source software projects to the so-called wiki encyclopedias and blogs to speed up innovation. This networked collaboration is creating new opportunities and disrupting industries. New styles of work and, in business schools, new theories of innovation are rising.”
New York Times (may require free subscription)
Finger Fone finger-mounted Bluetooth headset. “The Finger Fone is a small-for-a-headset but huge-for-a-ring device that, as the name suggests, allows users to make and receive calls by holding a hand against their ear. This 30-gram headset (handset? fingerset?) is worn on the finger, maintains a Bluetooth connection to a cellphone, and picks up audio through bone conduction technology.”
Engadget
Opening Up to Open Source. “Although startups still predominate, in the past year all the major technology vendors have made significant open-source moves, either by releasing their own software under free licenses or by acquiring smaller vendors to bolster their open-source support. Open source has not, as some predicted, been the death of the corporate software model. But it is indeed transforming it. “I firmly believe that the pressure from open-source projects has already upped the ante for large corporations to adapt” to opening up their businesses to open-source opportunities, said Greg Roy, senior systems engineer at Flight Centre North America.”
EWeek
Lessons learned: RFID Kids Tracking. “What’s unique about this pilot is the human network system for handling emergency situations: if a child presses an emergency button on the “tag”, adults will come running to help him/her– these adults not only includes professional security guards but also volunteers who are living near RFID readers. (The volunteers are selected from the kids’ parents) 188 kids participated. One of the major problem was false alarms. There were 53 cases of emergency alarms, however, all of them were false alarms. Because of frequent false”
RFID in Japan
The rCard: Fully Interactive Business Card. “The rCard is a card that plays video and comes with a 1.875” x 1.875” full color flat screen, speakers, a navigational button, 1 gig of memory, and a USB port. The battery on it is as thin as a postage stamp and lasts about 4 hours of continuous use, but there’s a rechargeable battery option, and you can power it off and on. The whole thing only measures 2” x 3” and weighs a measly 2 ounces.”
Gizmodo
