Preview of 3Bubbles. “They have created a very easy to integrate Ajax based chat interface that can be added to every blog post automatically. By simply adding a code snippet into the blog template, a link will be included in every post (think comments, trackbacks, and now chat) to open a chat window where readers can debate and discuss the post.”
TechCrunch
Study: ‘Power Users’ drive pedagogy. “Students who excel in the use of technology are driving change in classroom instruction, according to a new survey of educators. Dubbed “Power Users,” these ultra tech-savvy students have a growing influence over what–and how–teachers now teach, the survey said.”
eSchool News
Makroskop. “The installation consists of a spiral-shaped array of screen-strips on which a continuous collaged image is projected. The image is slowly grinding towards the center of the spiral. There is also sound and as a whole creates a very maelstrom-esque appearance of the piece that is quite beautiful. Apparently, there is also some degree of interactivity which allows one to touch a part of the collage in order make more images from the same context appear, thus rendering it a kind of macroscope for the pool of images.”
we make money not art
SmartShopper – the voice-activated shopping list device (or should that be memory assistant). “SmartShopper is an automated grocery shopping list device that will use voice recognition technology to store, and intelligently aggregate lists for shopping and errands, then print the list. According to the company’s co-founder Richard G. Brindisi, “the user simply presses a button on the unit and says the name of a grocery item they will need on their next visit to the store. The unit has an LCD and an embedded thermal printer that actually prints the list right out of the unit. The list will be printed according to the categories in the grocery store, i.e. all of the produce items will be listed together, frozen foods together, etc.”
gizmag
New iPod nano uses human skin to transmit audio. “Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) took up the latter approach yesterday by unveiling an iPod nano which communicates with earphones via your body’s ability to pump electrical signal. Oh sure, the prototype requires the user to keep a finger pressed to the iPod to close the circuit and there’s always risk of a nasty infection after implanting the 10-microwatt/2Mbps chip in your forearm but hey, prototype or not think of the time you’ll save not having to untangle your headphone cables every morning. “
Engadget
Pay By Touch Online. “Using the same scanners that are already showing up on PCs and some USB drives, Pay By Touch uses a fingerprint to generate a unique numerical algorithm. That pattern is then stored on Pay By Touch’s servers and associated with a credit or debit card, enabling the fingerprint to be used to make a purchase.”
Business Week
Polyvision’s Thunder. “For about $100,000, Polyvision will turn a bare meeting room into a “Thunder-capable” room. The white board is replaced by a large touch-sensitive screen connected to a series of digital projectors. Sketch ideas with a finger or virtual pen onto an easel, and each resulting page is projected on the screen. Photos and even videos can be added to sketches and pages easily rearranged in a drag-and-drop manner. All that, with none of the chemical stench of dry-erase pens.”
Business Week
Super Vision Sans Bionics. “At the heart of PixelOptics’ technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer — a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision — and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.”
Wired News
Edgeio Edges Toward Launch–and a Clash with E-Commerce Giants?. “The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.”
Business Week
Video Bomb. “Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the internet: people submit links to the ‘Incoming!’ page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page.”
Video Bomb
Your taste in music is shaped by the crowd. “People like a song more when they think other people like it too, a new study suggests. But the interactions between individual and group opinions are so complex that it is impossible to predict whether a good song will be a hit or a flop, according to researchers who asked people to rate the quality of music by unknown bands.”
New Scientist
The Data Fortress. “A spry tipster just pointed us towards the Data Fortress, a steel-encased hard drive that can hold up to 640 GB and is completely fire-, water-, impact-, earthquake-, and ninja-proof. It can withstand heat up up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes and looks like a great way to keep backup data safe and sound in deluge, mudslide, and fire-prone areas.”
Gizmodo
Web suicide pacts surge in Japan. “Police said 91 people died in the pacts in 2005, compared with 55 in 2004 and 34 in 2003, when the records started. Alarm at the rise has led to increased vigilance by internet service providers, who now report suspected suicide pacts to the authorities. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and the pacts may appeal to those scared to die alone.”
BBC NEWS
Music System Taps Wires in Your Walls to Pipe the Sound. “The system pairs a Marantz ZR6001 audio-video receiver with a remote set of speakers and controls called the ZC4001 client. Each component uses AC power lines to send high-frequency signals that the other unit can recognize, so music and remote controls can be added in any room by plugging in a client. The system can handle up to six clients.”
New York Times
Curious About Your Home’s Value? Zillow Knows. “The site says it has data and valuations (Zestimates) on 60,000,000 homes in the U.S., and there are an estimated 85 million single-family homes in the country [...]. We tested this and the key to adding in home improvements like new windows, a bathroom remodel, and even small items like new faucets are done by pressing the “Next” button at the top of the page. ( I was able to get my total value up another $31,000 this way.) This is hard to understand when you first try the program. Once you hit next – it will walk you through many screens where you can add in everything you’ve ever done to your home.”
Real Tech News
Mobile email set to explode. “Mobile email is on the verge of mass adoption, according to industry analysts Datamonitor. A new report from the company claims that there are roughly 650 million corporate email inboxes worldwide today, at least 35 per cent of which could be mobilised. Datamonitor estimates the global addressable market for enterprise mobile email at around 260 million subscriptions, while global mobile operator revenues from mobile email and personal information management are expected to surpass $600m by 2009, over three times those of 2005.”
vnunet.com
Buying, paying bills and transfering money with your mobile phone. “Motorola has announced M-Wallet a new solution for mobile phone users that will enable paying bills, transferring money or making a purchase at a retail. M-Wallet features an easy-to-use mobile interface that gives the consumer wireless secure access to financial services — eliminating the need to carry a credit or debit card in your wallet.”
gizmag
If the shoe fits, print it. “A new manufacturing process looks set to bring mass production to tailor-made shoes that can be built layer by layer from a 3-D footprint. First to benefit will be professional soccer players, who are to be given tailor-printed boots offering more protection. London-based company Prior 2 Lever, launching the system in April, will first scan a player’s feet by laser to obtain a digital model.”
Reuters.com
Is World of Warcraft the New Golf?. “Overheard, at brunch: two tech entrepreneur types discussing World of Warcraft. What server are you on? What guild? Oh yeah, me too, I heard it’s a good way to schmooze. Is that true? Has logging in to the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game replaced a few rounds on the links as the way to make the right business connections in a tech-driven culture? The particular Guild discussed by the brunchers above was started by Joi Ito, who became a WoW fan after embarking on the game to do some research on social networks.”
Extreme Tech
MemoryMiner. “MemoryMiner is a brand new application that represents the first step towards a long term goal: the creation of the world’s most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. Like all big ideas, it starts with a simple premise and a mass appeal for participation. MemoryMiner is an application used to organize and share digital media using a simple, yet powerful metaphor, namely “People, Places and Time.” “
MemoryMiner
How the mind senses movement. “Now Simon Gandevia of the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues have devised a technique which clearly demonstrates that the brain only has to send a command to a limb to create the sensation of movement. Their discovery goes some way to resolving the enigma of whether motor commands or receptors in the skin, joints and muscles are more important for creating a feeling of movement.”
New Scientist
Japan’s “real” 3D image projector. “A special projector can cast three-dimensional shapes of white light between 2 and 3-meters into the air — previous devices only tricked the eyes into thinking the image was 3D. The images are created by blasting the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at fixed points resulting in glowing plasma emissions which hang-out just long enough to etch an ephemeral image. The 3D images are, gulp, accompanied by a series of satisfying “tiny explosions” from the expanding air.”
Engadget
Visitorville: A 3D view of website traffic. “I was intrigued to hear about Visitorville — an application that takes a website’s traffic information and renders it as a Sim-City-like world, where each page in a site is a building, and visitors appear as human avatars that travel to and fro. As the Visitorville site describes it: Buses deliver your visitors to their landing pages. There’s a bus for every major search engine; plus, you can create your own custom buses for any other referrer! Watch realistic-looking people move around your page. Different avatars exist depending on the type of visitor (commercial, academic, military, etc.). To move between pages, your visitors take taxis, ambulances, fire trucks — or any other vehicle you like. They each have their own distinctive sound, so you can alert yourself when a particular page is accessed (or even a particular person accessing a page!)”
collision detection
Digislide’s Digismart. “It’s offering a way to project from PDAs, cell-phones and similar devices onto a wall. Unfortunately, without powered illumination you almost need to be in complete darkness to benefit from its display technology.”
Lockergnome
Listible lists Web site. “Listible is a Web site that blends lists with community features. Listing combined with tagging and voting gives you a greater relevancy. Finding a list called “Resources related to IE browser CSS bugs” tagged with css is easier. In each list, community can provide any relevant URLs. The most relevant and popular resource will be sorted on the top, thanks to the voting system.”
Lifehacker
Podcasts reach Peruvian villages. “In Chanta Alta, the podcasts concentrate on cattle-raising husbandry and on dairy production. In nearby Chilete, podcasts are being used to give tips to farmers who have no experience of growing grapes.”
BBC NEWS
Wakamaru’s latest job: guarding your kids. “Deathly threatening as ever, the bright yellow plastic robot will be standing sentry at a primary school in Tokyo, monitoring students movement and demanding IC-chip based identification. No ID? Watch out, because Wakamaru will take a picture of you and totally tell a teacher (literally, all the Wakamaru can do is ring the administration to come help if it thinks something unsavory’s going down).”
Engadget
Multi-Touch Interaction Research. “Multi-touch sensing enables you to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such system can also accommodate several users simultaneously, which is useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. The sensing technology is force-sensing, and provides high resolution and scalability, allowing for sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users. The drafting table style implementation on the images measures 36″x27″, is rear-projected, and has a sensing resolution of ~0.1″ at 50Hz. Applications receive events and stroke information using the lightweight OSC protocol over UDP.”
we make money not art
Floorcleaning robot. “RIDC01, by Temsuk , cleans streets and can give people directions using an embedded video projector (the projector can also be used to screen DVDs). The robot, which is just over 4 feet tall (1.3m), will start selling for 10 million yen ($85,000). Via Cnet.”
we make money not art
Podcast From the Heart. “Wheatley, a cardiovascular surgeon at the Arizona Heart Institute in Phoenix, recently launched a podcasting series to educate patients he believes is among the first of its kind. He has produced podcasts, from two minutes to an hour long and contain video and audio content, that keep clinic visitors informed about the procedures they’ll undergo and brief them on ways to lead a healthy lifestyle afterward.”
Wired News
Email tone isn’t understood as much as we think. “A University of Chicago study shows that people overestimate their ability to convey tone in email messages. Study participants recorded messages vocally and wrote them in email messages. The message recipients’ success rate at understanding the tone of the message was significantly higher verbally than via email. The reason for this communication disconnect, the researchers find, is egocentrism–the well-established social psychological phenomenon whereby people have a difficult time detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them.”
Lifehacker
Paper-Like Display In 2 Years. “The new 5-inch PV-QML5 rollable display has a decreased radius of curvature, improved operational and mechanical lifetime and paperlike viewing contrast. These are major steps forward compared to the world’s first rollable display prototype introduced by Polymer Vision in February 2004. The company says that current process and yield improvements will enable production within two years.”
PSFK
World’s first Petabyte storage array. “if your MP3 collection is getting unwieldy, or you have another burgeoning digital archive you just positively need access to at all times, here’s the answer – the world’s largest storage array. Announced last week by information management and storage specialist EMC Corporation, is a new high-end configuration its flagship EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 storage array, which can scale beyond a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. That’s it at right – what a ripper heh?”
gizmag
Web Readers Hit the Books Less Frequently. “Internet users are more likely to cut back on reading books than to curtail their magazine consumption, according to a recently released survey by Jupiter Research. The finding contradicts the long-held assumption that periodicals are more vulnerable than books to competition from the Internet.”
New York Times
LAPD to throw GPS at fleeing cars. “The LAPD will outfit cars with a device that propels and sticks a GPS onto a fleeing car. The department will mount the StarChase LLC device in the grill of some squad cars. “Officers in the car would control a green lazar light, similar to an aiming device that fixes on your target,” said LAPD Lieutenant Paul Vernon on Friday. “A small dart-like device is propelled from the officer’s car.”"
we make money not art
Toyota Prius Hax0rz Pwn That Thang. “Besides being green-friendly and oh-so-trendy, the Toyota Prius is also becoming a favorite of ha><0rz everywhere. First, some brilliant master of digital prestidigitation figured out how to disable a couple of annoying noises the Prius makes with a few odd button pushing combinations on the odometer controls. Now the l33t have learned how to tap into the diagnostic port that’s used to service the popular hybrid vehicle. "
Gizmodo
Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail. “Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.”
New York Times
Smart Shirt. “The Sensatex Solution utilizes a groundbreaking electro-optical textile, the Wearable Motherboard Smart Shirt, to seamlessly incorporate sensory capabilities with radio and computing devices, representing a highly effective and unobtrusive means of integrating broad-based sensors with the human body.”
Transmaterial
VW and Google team to explore future vehicle navigation systems. “Volkswagen, Google, and graphics chipmaker, nVidia, are working on an in-car navigation map system and display that is 3-dimensional and more realistic than anything currently available. Users will instinctively recognize their location in relation to the surrounding topography, especially in urban areas that are depicted with depth and accurate size relationships between buildings and roads.”
gizmag
The business of future gazing. “The problem is that if you’re a futurologist there’s no point in playing it safe. You have to be revolutionary and radical, you have to sell a big idea, or else what’s the point of you? The problem is revolutionary, radical, big ideas very rarely come true.”
BBC NEWS
Siemens launches “Kick Real” cameraphone game. “The company’s “Kick Real” game provides cameraphone users with a virtual soccer field; point the camera at your foot, and you can kick a virtual ball that you view on the phone’s LCD. We can’t wait for this to catch on, so we can get our own kicks watching gamers staring into their phones and kicking the air.”
Engadget
Software-defined radio could unify wireless world. “A device capable of skipping between incompatible wireless standards by tweaking its underlying code has been given the go-ahead for outdoor trials in Ireland. [...] The device can impersonate a multitude of different wireless devices since it uses reconfigurable software to carry out the tasks normally performed by static hardware. “I’m interested in a future where a single device can use every possible frequency,” says Linda Doyle, who heads up the CTVR project, which is one of several competing projects worldwide.”
New Scientist
The Type-A Bathroom. “When Mr. Shenkman answers the speaker-phone in his shower, the water automatically shuts off. He can open the front door for deliveries while shaving. He’s also put the finishing touches on a waterproof computer that will let him answer emails from his sauna. “I took Gates a little too literally,” he says. “The flow of information never stops.”"
WSJ.com
Proactive Desk II: Advanced Force Feedback. “Media Information Science Labs, is a “digital desk with force feedback” that can simultaneously apply different forces on multiple physical objects on it.”
we make money not art
Artists Burnish RFID’s Image. “A far cry from Big Brother scenarios, RFID technology has recently become a medium for artists like Meghan Trainor, whose work offers a glimpse of a future in which computers will be able to scan any item and know something about it. She sculpts objects out of plaster, rubber and other materials, and embeds them with RFID chips and tags. “The idea of objects no longer being anonymous — that’s incredible to someone who makes objects,” the New York artist said.”
Wired News
Join the Flex Revolution. “If you are not familiar with it, Flex is a compiled language that allows you to build rich interfaces quickly and easily. Flex apps are written in MXML, but they compile into SWF files. The best thing is that, starting with Flex 2, these SWF files can be deployed just like regular Flash movies. They don’t require any special servers. A lot of people like Flex because it lets you build flashy interfaces with transitions and animations and all kinds of fancy stuff. But the real power of flex is not in the eye candy, but in how easy it makes the process of building a rich internet application. It is conceptually simple, easy to get started with, and it delivers incredible results with just a few lines of code.”
Hotwired
Download of the Day: Portable Apps Suite. “Portable Apps Suite™ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, web editor, office suite, word processor, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client and FTP client, all preconfigured to work portably and be easy to back up. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go.”
Lifehacker
Pigeons to Help Monitor Air Pollution with “Own” Blog. “No, they won’t be pecking the entries into the blog with their beaks. But in August 20 pigeons each carrying a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone will be released into the skies above San Jose, CA. Text messages on air quality will be beamed back in real time to a special pigeon “blog,” a journal accessible on the Internet. Miniature cameras slung around the pigeons’ necks will also post aerial pictures”
Independent Tech
Download of the Day: Colibri (not quite yet) Quicksilver for Windows. “The documentation is sparse and it’s got a LOOOONG way to go to justify any kind of legitimate Quicksilver comparison. However, for people with the QS-launcher burned into their muscle memory (like me!) Colibri is a great way to start up programs. Now, can we have append to text, pipe to email/IM/URLs, etc? Pretty please?”
Lifehacker
Schools grapple with policing students’ online journals. “This winter, teenagers at a Chicago high school used their Xanga websites to post obscene and threatening comments about a teacher, in one case suggesting her neck be “slit like a … chicken.” Last spring, a girl at a different Chicago high school outraged students when she posted derogatory comments about gay marriage and blacks on her Web log. The school district dealt differently with the two situations, defending the girl’s freedom of speech in the latter while reportedly disciplining the three teens in the first.”
csmonitor.com
Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams. “Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.”
Smart Mobs
Lights. Mood. Video. All at the Touch of a Screen.. “The promise of a remote control home has buzzed around consumers’ ears for decades, but never seemed to materialize for mainstream households. Most Americans have had to behold home automation from afar, featured in magazine spreads on televised tours of the homes of the well-heeled. But just as flat-panel television prices have significantly fallen in the last year, so have the costs of putting a home’s operations under a fingertip’s control, many home automation makers and installers say. Even basic functions — like central control of all of a home’s music, movies and television, with atmospheric lighting — now cost hundreds rather than thousands of dollars”
New York Times
Is It Time To Say Goodbye to Paper Money?. “The e-money trend began there roughly four years ago as a service for busy, on-the-go train commuters. Today, specially equipped mobile phones and smart cards are used to purchase items from convenience stores, department stores, restaurants, newsstands, supermarkets, and other retailers. The Japan Research Institute estimated that by 2008 some 40 million Japanese, roughly one-third of the country, will be using electronic money.”
Yahoo! News
Mapion lets users point and click around Japan. “Want to know whether there are any good restaurants in that building up ahead? Just point your phone at it, click the building’s icon and find out. That’s the idea behind Mapion Local Search, a service launched by GeoVector Corp. and Japan’s Mapion. The service uses a database of local information, combined with a phone that includes both GPS and an integrated compass (currently just Sony Ericsson’s W21S), to provide realtime point-and-click data to customers throughout Japan.”
Engadget
Teen tech survey. “The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index… found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past. Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent)”
Boing Boing
Remote for Control Freaks. “With the OpenPeak SimpleRemote you can avoid that pesky USB cable, and simply grab codes and program guides from its mother ship website via WiFi.”
Gizmodo
Identity Card Concept Project. “The collection of sketch ideas uses the business card to explore and express possible future value systems. Themes explored include privacy, the value of the physical, experience, the moment of exchange, disposability, and customization.”
IDEO
NextEngine scans 3D on the cheap. “We’re not experts in the whole 3D scanning, printing, and modeling arena or anything, but it seems to us that a $2,500 USB 3D desktop scanner could come in handy for more than a few — especially those who might want to make a contribution to our Keepin’ it real fake series. For this may we point your attention to SolidWorks, and their NextEngine Desktop 3D Scanner, which features multiple optics arrays and dual three megapixel CMOS sensors and some laser triangulation technology for capturing models of objects, which rotate on a platter out in front.”
Engadget
Med Tech’s Rising Stars?. “CyberKinetics Neurotechnology Systems has received FDA approval to market NeuroPort, a chip that monitors cranial electrical activity. It has potential research and diagnostic uses. But that’s only the first step. CyberKinetics is now developing BrainGate. Using the NeuroPort technology, BrainGate would enable disabled people to use a chip implanted in their brain to communicate through a computer. In addition, it holds the promise of allowing them to operate other appliances through the computer as well.”
Business Week
BioKnob fingerprint-activated lock interchangeable with a standard door knob. “Here’s a big chance for technophiles to be the first in their apartment building to have a BioKnob – the first doorknob with fingerprint recognition. The BioKnob replaces your existing doorknob, and registered users just brush their fingerprint across the knob to unlock the door.”
gizmag
LCoS Display Technology Shootout Part A. “Liquid Crystal on Silicon, LCoS, is a relatively new and obscure display technology that is now making its grand entrance into the HDTV marketplace. What is really impressive is that instead of taking the traditional path of entering at the ground floor with mediocre performance compared to the established technologies and then trying to percolate up to the top tier in picture quality, it is starting out right at the very top. Already, LCoS provides the highest resolutions, the highest non-CRT Contrast Ratios, and the most artifact-free images of any display technology. For people that are sensitive to flicker and eye-fatigue, LCoS operates at the highest refresh rates (120 Hz) for the smoothest, most flicker-free images.”
Extreme Tech
The car that parks itself (sometimes on the kerb). “Siemens VDO in Germany is working on a vehicle which not only parks itself, but even scans the street to find a space. Once it has spotted a space, Parkmate works out the geometry, and makes a melodic chime to tell the driver to stop and let the car steer itself into the gap. Then, the steering wheel turns and the car can squeeze into the space, even if it means mounting a kerb.”
we make money not art
The Online Storage Gang. “The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features – effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well.”
TechCrunch
Artificial gills extract oxygen from water. “An Israeli scientist has developed an “artifical gill” that is able to extract oxygen from seawater, potentially allowing divers to breathe underwater without a tank.”
Engadget
WiFi MBridge Coming Soon. “So not only does it play media, but you can also use it for data transfer, chatting with instant messengers and even buying music from online stores. Also lets you connect with online photo services. With a 3.5-inch screen, two USB ports, a high speed USB mini OTG, internal SD card slot and IR port, this little device kind of rocks.”
Gizmodo
Cellphone Jammers on the Way?. “This is a little Japanese gadget that will make living life day-to-day so much nicer. It’s a simple device with an on-button. It has two modes, one mode will disable all calls within a area for 70 seconds, the other will fade away the call with “natural atmosphere” to assist ending that call with Aunt Rita. It retails for $71 or so and should be coming to the U.S. once the FCC passes an act that allows cellphone jamming in movie theaters. Hooray!”
Gizmodo
Brands must come to their senses. “Brands are passing up the chance to establish emotional connections with consumers because they insist on communicating visually, according to sensory communications group Brand Sense Agency. 83% of all commercial communication is visual although 75% of our emotions are influenced by what we smell (there’s even a patent project out there that would allow US Army officers to use coded smells to give orders), while there is a 65% chance our mood would change when we hear a new sound (given the irritating soundtrack of their website, i feel that the agency should work harder on the sound concept.)”
we make money not art
Bangkok Hospital to Introduce RFID. “Bangkok Hospital completed its RFID pilot project and now plans to fully implement RFID this year before expanding it to 13 hospitals in its group in Bangkok and provinces countrywide within three years. Patients wear RFID wristbands that carry basic information about patients such as name, sex, age, and possibly drugs.”
RFID in Japan
Harmony Line Music. “Hyperscore is the first and only software application that teaches students the essentials of music composition, without having to engage in years of music theory training.”
MIT
Girls’ encrypted USB stick locks parents out of diary and MSN Messenger. “The ThoughtSafe is an encrypted USB memory stick with its own version of MSN Messenger: it’s marketed to young girls who want to keep a private diary and prevent their parents or others from spying on or controlling their IM activity.”
Boing Boing
Lofting Balloons for Cell Service. “”To cover every square mile of North Dakota, it would take 1,100 cell towers,” Schafer said. “We can do the whole state with three balloons.” If successful, the hydrogen-filled balloons could be drifting across the stratosphere above North Dakota this summer, providing cellular coverage at a tiny fraction of the cost of building cellular towers. Jerry Knoblach, the CEO of Space Data, says that although the balloon technology, called SkySite, is new to the cellular industry, “the platform is very well proven” for other purposes.”
Wired News
Avatars Among Us. “In exchange for insights on the concept of the dynamic knowledge repository, audience members watched a speech delivered by a gray-haired, suit-and-tie clad avatar bearing a more than passable resemblance to the man best known for inventing the computer mouse. The talk, held at a virtual locale known as Democracy Island in the multiplayer online world Second Life, drew a less realistic audience. Some in the crowd weren’t even human, sporting features like antennae, fur and wings.”
Wired News
The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Interplanetary Broadband. “Now a nanotechnology-based device, reported this week in the journal Optics Express, combines efficiency and speed, promising to make such interplanetary communication more practical. The detector might also allow long-distance, secure communications, perhaps for collecting data from unmanned military aerial vehicles such as the Predator. “The detection of extraordinarily low levels of light with high bandwidth has been a challenge for many years,” says Karl Berggren, an electrical engineering professor at MIT who helped develop the new device. “This demonstration illustrates what nanotechnology, and in particular nanofabrication, can do when applied to a problem like this.”"
Technology Review
Color Barcodes in TV commercials and DVD contents?. “ColorCodes can be read by camera phones from farther away (than QR codes.) So, the company intends to leverage this feature to promote the use of ColorCodes in television and commercials and DVDs. “Viewers will be able to simply point their camera phones at the screen to capture the codes and get directed to Internet sites where they can purchase goods or learn more about the programs they are watching.”"
RFID in Japan
E-Discovery Is Big Business. “Increasingly, e-discovery customers are not just law firms enmeshed in big corporate cases. More and more, companies are working proactively with e-discovery vendors, getting a handle on their data troves so they can meet regulatory requirements — or just in case they are sued. After all, 90 percent of U.S. corporations are engaged in some type of litigation, according to research by the law firm Fulbright & Jaworski. The average company bigger than $1 billion is wrestling with 147 lawsuits”
Wired News
iWalks Rolling Out in Dublin. “The Official Online Tourist Office for Dublin has begun publishing free podcast audio guides that tell the story of Dublin. The guides are written and narrated by Irish historian-author Pat Liddy. Each talk will have a downloadable brochure. Talks and brochures can be downloaded from the tourism website.”
Smart Mobs
Researchers developing transparent OLEDs. “esearchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on the next generation of OLED technology, including the ability to create displays that can become completely transparent and be turned on and off at will. Uses envisioned for the displays include OLED overlays on top of LCDs that could be used to display specific information without interfering with the main picture and automobile windshields with built-in displays that can display information as needed and turn off when not in use. Of course, what we really want is a transparent window that turns into an HD display when we flick a switch, but that may just be a little too much to ask for at this point.”
Engadget
“Good Morning” pillows for distant families. “Scenario: Living in San Francisco, Martha glances at her CASY picture frame, showing the portraits of her grandchildren. She decides to leave video messages to Maya and Aden. She touches Maya’s portrait and records a “good morning” message that Maya, who is currently asleep in Amsterdam, will find when she wakes up.”
we make money not art
Finger Ring, “Social Polling”. “Finger Ring is a system in which a cell phone decides whether to ring by accepting votes from the others in a conversation with the called party. When a call comes in, your phone first determines who you’re discussing with by using a decentralized network of autonomous body-worn sensor nodes. It then vibrates all participants’ wireless finger rings. Although the alerted people do not know if it is their own phones that are about to interrupt, each of them has the possibility to veto the call anonymously by touching his/her finger ring. If no one vetoes, your phone rings.”
we make money not art
Power Plastics to provide electrical power to packaging and intelligent clothing. “We first wrote about Konarka’s light-activated plastic power supply for the battlefield, but in more recent times we’ve seen the company announce a joint development program with Textronics to create prototype garments and fashion accessories with portable, wearable power generation capabilities and more recently comes the news that the Konarka’s Power Plastic materials are being developed to extend and enhance packaging and display applications. Imagine a can or bottle with dynamic content, boxes that light up or containers that serve as power sources for their contents.”
gizmag
Fridge magnets tinker with poetry. “Each fridge magnet consists of 16-character liquid crystal display, rather than a magnetic strip with a printed word, Proske says. The magnets can randomly generate a word, categorise that word (as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb) and transmit the category to any words they are placed next to. As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using. Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.
“
ABC
Exersize routes at WalkJogRun. “WalkJogRun is a site where you can plan and share your walking, jogging or running routes. It uses Google Earth to plan routes and calculate distance, but what really makes WalkJogRun cool is its community features. You can save your maps by clicking on any of your markers and hit “Save Your Route” to add it to the database. Next time you or anyone else looking in your neighborhood is looking for a route, they will see your pin.”
Lifehacker
Samsung develops super-reflective LCD for outdoor use. “Addressing the needs of countless cellphone and digital camera users, Samsung has unveiled a super-reflective LCD screen that the company says can be read outdoors in bright sunlight. The 1.72-inch display uses silver instead of aluminum as the reflecting metal, relies on a new reflective lens, and uses transflective panel technology, which makes greater use of natural light.”
Engadget
Download of the Day: Reveal. “Firefox extension Reveal creates thumbnails of your tabbed pages, allowing you to select, reorder, or even sort through pages in the session history. Pressing F2 will bring up your thumbs, at which point you can even search through them with a Find feature. Beyond that, Reveal shows thumbnails of your page history if you rest your mouse over the Back and Forward buttons, and allows you to zoom in on the page you’re visiting with a triple click.”
Lifehacker
New Pics of Samsung 7.7 MP phone. “We told you all about Samsung’s crazy-ass 7.7 megapixel cameraphone with optical zoom, but now we have a proper pic. So here it is in all its glory. Also includes DMB TV reception, TV-output, landscape view, MP3 audio playback, and microSD memory card storage.”
Gizmodo
Your goals control home electronics. “Instead of knobs and menu items for each function, the software presents the user with a list of goals — for example, record a movie on a DVD — and either automatically carries out the steps required to accomplish the task or guides the user through them.”
we make money not art
Hello Kitty Replaces Your “Most Important Employee”. “WMMNA points to a new trend in Japan that replaces receptionists with robots. A company called People Staff (!) sends over a Hello Kitty Robo as a receptionist every time your regular receptionist is feeling a little poorly and not coming in today – or her/his boyfriend Dave has another court appearance she/he has to attend as a witness. When Hello Kitty Robos detect visitors with sensors, they say “Welcome!”, capture the image/voice of the visitors using cameras/microphones, and send the data to a personal computer. WMMNA suggests that they can work at offices, hospitals, and hotels (at night).”
PSFK
NJIT implements SmartCampus people-tracking program. “Limited initially to only 100 participants, the ultimate goal of the SmartCampus project is to eventually allow everyone to see exactly where everyone else is at any given time (hmm, can’t really forsee any socially awkward situations arising out of this omniscience). The NJIT system [...] requires users to carry around tracking devices, as opposed to a similar system at MIT which seems to rely on users’ laptops for locating them (but maybe not- can anyone from these two schools clear this up?). Luckily the SmartCampus gear allows users to turn “invisible” whenever they want, so would-be stalkers will have to leave their notebooks at home and continue trailing their victims the old-fashioned way.”
Engadget
RadioHandi(TM) Beta – The Party Line for Planet Earth. “Welcome to RadioHandi, the party line for Planet Earth. This breakthrough service, built from the ground up around open standards telephony and instant messaging technology, will enable people around the world to create voice communities about any subject, location or peer group, all for the cost of a local phone call. With it, people can post messages and engage in live group conversations with people calling in from fixed, mobile and VoIP phones from around the world.”
RadioHandi
Fujitsu’s RFID and LCD equipped Shopping Navis Wagon. “Fujitsu has played around with smart shopping carts before, but this time they’re throwing RFID into the mix to ensure the least possible interactions with any humanoid lifeforms during your trip to the supermarket. The Shopping Navis Wagon sports an LCD to display in-depth information for products you scan, along with the usual store directory and promotional info, and we’re guessing the cart can ring up your price as you go, so now all they’ll need to add is an on the go blink card reader and your shopping experience can have all the fun of shoplifting, minus the cost effectiveness.”
Engadget
Government turns up volume on GPS. “The US government flicked the switch today on a new GPS signal, known as L2C. The signal, according to the government, is transmitted at a higher effective power, allowing it to “work better in urban areas and indoors.” The new signal, being transmitted by the IIR satellite launched in September, can also be received using less power, potentially allowing better GPS reception by smaller devices such as cellphones. However, most current devices may not be able to make use of the new signals without upgrades.”
Engadget
Computers show how plants grow. “Computer scientists in Canada have worked with botanists in Switzerland to build a 3D computer model which simulates how plants grow and develop beautiful shapes. Their model was able to accurately show how plants achieve phyllotaxis, this regular arrangement of lateral organs around a central axis. According to the researchers, this model will be used by botanists to complement and interpret laboratory experiments. But it also could be used as a basis for models of how other organisms, including animals, develop from primordial stem cells.”
Primidi
ReminderFeed – Your RSS Reminder Service. “ReminderFeed is a FREE reminder service that delivers reminder messages right to your feed reader. Simply fill out the form, then use the subscribe buttons.”
ReminderFeed
GarbageScout. “If you like to snoop around garbage and dig up something good, snap a picture of it with your camera phone, add a description location and email it to GarbageScout. It will be added on a Yahoo Maps for others to go and fetch it (treasures include so far: a rowing machine, a mirror, candy canes an electric heater, etc).”
we make money not art
Otoizm: Yo-Yo, Pet and Music Player in One. “Want a new pet that listens to your favorite music and dances with you? Meet Otoizmu (or Otoizm) from Konami. You connect this 2.2-inch yo-yo-like device to your music player and a character inside will start growing according to the genre of music you listen to. Not only does it grow by listening to your music, but it memorizes phrases and composes tunes that you can listen to. Meet up with a friend who also owns an Otoizm and the two will have a dancing session. Or, you can record your friend’s voice and a new character—Kotobaizm—appears to play with you.”
Gizmodo
BBC report on UK gamers from 6-65. “BBC Creative Research and Development have just released a stellar research report on gamers’ habits in the UK — how people from six to 65 play, what they play, why they play, and how they got to playing. It’s a real eye-opener — and chock full of stats-candy in sweet charts. Contrary to popular belief, the gender split between gamers is fairly even across all age groups. Although female gamers never overtake their male counterpart, the figures are particularly even in the youngest and oldest gaming groups. Between the ages of 16-35 the ratio of males to females is slightly higher, but the stereotype of a large gender gap in gamers – in any age group – is untrue.”
Boing Boing
West Virginia fully adopts Dance Dance Revolution fitness program. “Not even the first time we’ve seen it done, but you’ve got to give it up for Charleston, West Virginia — a state heralded for its rampant obesity problem — which went from study to practice in using Dance Dance Revolution to work that body. Last year 85 kids participated in a survey that used Dance Dance Revolution and diet changes to shed excess poundage, which apparently also went to the heads of the school administration of the state, since started a pilot program and are now rolling DDR out to all of West VA’s 157 middle schools, in addition to another 753 public schools expecting it in the next three years.”
Engadget
FIRCLE: software for managing the family. “We’ve previously written about personal life-coaching software named Life Balance and EasyChild’s behaviour modification software system designed to monitor, assess and encourage children to succeed in life. Now there’s a new system which incorporates some of both of these products and much more for computerising and managing the family – it’s called Fircle and it’s an internet-based system containing a shared family calendar, children’s allowance and chore management, family rules (set your own and set penalties for transgressions), a family address book, personal journals, family voting on topics of your choice, ToDo lists and so much more. So much in fact, that it scared us …”
gizmag
Well – RFID in Beijing. “Beijing’s Haidian District City Planning Administration recently installed 1,000 RFID scanners in 1,000 wells in the area. If the cover of a well is lost, an RFID scanner can quickly find the proprietor of the well by scanning the e-tags inside the well. The City Planning Administration has chosen 15 streets in its Shangdi area for the RFID pilot. They may test different RFID applications within the city soon.”
RFID in Japan
Privacy for People Who Don’t Show Their Navels. “Increasingly, consumers appear to be downloading free anonymity software like Tor, which makes it harder to trace visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms back to their authors. Sales are also up at companies like Anonymizer.com, which among other things sells software that protects anonymity. “I get the feeling it’s going up,” said Roger Dingledine, Tor’s project leader. “But one of the features I’ve been adding recently,” he said, enhances anonymity protection by making it harder to count downloads of the software. Still, the number of servers forming layers in the Tor network has risen to 300 from 50 in the last year, Mr. Dingledine added.”
New York Times
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