Magic Mirror Replaces Your Mug with an Ad. ‘The Magic Mirror is a small attachment that can change any mirror into a billboard. So when left alone, it’s a billboard. Walk up to it, and it’ll become a mirror.’
Gizmodo
Negative stereotypes make women worse at maths. ‘Women told that female under-achievement in mathematics is due to genetic factors perform much worse on maths tests than those told that social factors are responsible.’
New Scientist
Splice Lets You Mix and Mash on the Net. ‘Everyone wants to be a producer nowadays, but not everyone has the talent, so the folks at Splice are letting you dip your toes into music production with their online flash-based audio sequencer which lets you edit, mix and mash up beats.’
The long tail lives: Universal sells 250,000 out-of-print tracks. ‘The project began back in February, when Universal uploaded 3,000 tracks from out-of-print (and mostly European) recordings to online music stores across the continent. In the eight months since, Europeans have responded by snapping up more than 250,000 downloads of the new music. The most popular track in the list was Gun’s “Word Up” from 1994, while the most popular album was Big Country’s Steeltown from 1984. Based on total number of tracks downloaded, the most popular band was French rockers Noir Desir.’
Ars Technica
BBC Radio Player | Last.fm Yahoo! widget. ‘Our experimental / prototype / beta (sorry, but we can’t guarantee the quality of service) widget asks you to sign in to your Last.fm account and choose a BBC Radio station (only Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1Xtra are available at the moment). The currently playing song is retrieved and is added to your profile (unless you decide to add songs manually) and other recommended artists are displayed.’
backstage.bbc.co.uk
Scientists stitch up cloaking device. ‘Metamaterials can be designed with very specific properties that allow scientists to control the path of electromagnetic radiation very precisely. Electromagnetic waves would flow around an object hidden inside the cloak, he noted, just as water in a river flows virtually undisturbed around a smooth rock.’
The Register
Net_Derive, the city as instrument. ‘Participants are given a kind of scarf with a mobile phone in each end and off they go to explore the neighborhood. One of the phones takes pictures every 20 secs and collects sounds, the other talks to the GPS (also in the scarf) and to the server inside the gallery space. On a radar they can see themselves pictured as dots but also the images they’re taking. The sounds and pictures collected in the streets are sampled and mapped to a 3D city map in the gallery. As users are walking they can hear some voice instructions through a pair of headphones.’
We Make Money Not Art
You Talk to It. It Usually Does What You Ask. Oh, and It Burps.. ‘Resembling a large egg, the Radica Jibbi TV is a $35 voice recognition toy that lets children give verbal commands to a smiling creature named Jibbi. After you install the four AA batteries and plug the toy into your TV set’s AV ports, you meet Jibbi, who burps, talks, giggles and responds to short spoken commands like “let’s play” or “do chores.”’
New York Times
Optimus Upravlator keyboard. ‘The Upravlator keyboard is an input device of a new type. Within the case, a 10.8″ LCD screen with a resolution of 800×600 pixels is enclosed. Over the screen, there is a board with 12 transparent buttons. Every button features four contacts (at the top, at the bottom, on the left, and on the right). Pressing the button in the middle is possible, too (“fifth contact”).’
Artlebedev
Samsung’s ultra-thin 17-inch AMOLED display. ‘At a mere 12mm thick, the display rocks a 1,600 x 1,200 resolution, less than 0.01ms response time, 400 nits of brightness and a 1,000:1 contrast ratio. Of course, it’s all conceptual for now, and there’s no telling when this kind of display will make it to market, but it sure will be a welcome sight when it does.’
Engadget
Presto Printer, Delivering E-mail to Geezers Everywhere. ‘This sucker instantly prints incoming e-mails so grandma-ma can focus on drinking her prune juice instead of having to remember her screenname and password.’
Gizmodo
mySupermarket Lets You Directly Compare Prices, Save Money. ‘A UK company has figured out a way to keep online supermarkets as competitive as possible with mySupermarket, a website that lets you pick out items and then compare the prices for that shopping cart full of food between the four major online supermarket chains in the UK. A running total shows you the price of the goods as you choose them, directly comparing the four supermarket prices.’
Gizmodo
Drop Spots. ‘A dropspot is a kind of alternative mailbox. It’s a hiding place in a public space, where people can leave things for exchange. Anything. It’s a weird and wonderful way to add personal character to the streets that we live in. Stash something fun and see what you get back.’
pasta and vinegar
Virtual Tour from Romania. ‘Inspired by some of the work on Digital Urban (its nice to know we have some readers!) he has used High Dynamic Range for each of his images and more interestingly rendered 3D spheres superimposed on each scene to provide links between each node. The result is a stunning tour and well worth a look, you can check out his site from here.’
Digitally Distributed Environments
Yobbos? just hit E for eject. ‘Cricket Australia yesterday confirmed it was considering a proposal to have fans text message a security hotline to have unruly fans removed. The dob-in-a-yob system would allow fans who felt threatened by misbehaving patrons to anonymously dob them in without fear of reprisal.’
NEWS.com.au
Gabriel Re-Shocks the Monkey Online. ‘As the Shock the Monkey remixes came in, users could rate their favorites. There were well over 700 entries, testament to the proliferation of music-processing software and home recording equipment. Gabriel then picked winners from the top dozen chosen by listeners. “I was amazed at the number and quality of remixes,” Gabriel says in an e-mail. One remixer managed to credibly combine Gabriel’s vocals with music from the opera Carmen. Another dispensed with the vocals altogether and reengineered the tight, high-energy original into New Age mood music. Gabriel, who says he got tired of listening to his own voice while judging contest entries, gave it an honorable mention.’
Business Week
Fujitsu Ten unveils DREC1000 in-car accident recorder. ‘Similar in function to TruScene’s TS-1L, this in-car sentry keeps a keen eye on your vehicle’s surroundings, and if sudden braking / acceleration is detected, a 20 second video clip (complete with the bevy of expletives you’re likely to spew) is recorded onto a 128MB CF card for insurance purposes. The sensor box also reacts to jolts and sudden changes in driving patterns, activating the wide-angle CCD camera to capture the moments before and after a presumed incident;’
Engadget
Zizzle Zoundz: Music or Noise?. ‘Stop playing with your food and start playing with your music, with Zounds, a weird musicmaking device that uses colorful and oddly-shaped objects to play different musical phrases depending on where you place them on the board, which lights up with psychedelic colors at the same time. Using touch-sensitive buttons on the base, you can bend notes, and change the tempo, echo, reverb and volume of all that racket as well.’
Gizmodo
Use LogMeIn for remote tech support. ‘Just have your friend or family member create a LogMeIn account and install the software (both are free, though the company does sell various paid versions)–preferably before a crisis occurs. When it does, head to the LogMeIn site and sign in using their username and password. In a few seconds you’ll see what they see. You’ll also gain full control of their PC, so you can investigate, troubleshoot, and (hopefully) fix the problem.’
Lifehacker
Interactions under the city. ‘The project imagines that you will be able to add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls, and download tracks on the platforms. Because of the architectural configuration of the stations undersound users would have to congregate at certain locations for the purpose of interacting with the system.’
We Make Money Not Art
It’s a Shipping Container. No, It’s a Data Center in a Box.. ‘The expandable computer system, called Project Blackbox, is based on a standard 20-foot shipping container and can be deployed virtually anywhere there is electricity, chilled water and an Internet connection. Sun will introduce a prototype at its headquarters here on Tuesday. The system is planned for commercial availability in the second half of 2007, with prices beginning around $500,000.’
New York Times
Blog records Britons’ daily lives. ‘The National Trust is encouraging people to record a diary of their day on a website, as part of what is being called “Britain’s biggest blog”. The trust says it will create a “fascinating social history archive” of everyday life for future generations.’
BBC NEWS
Saudi Arabia’s bold young bloggers. ‘There are now between 500 and 600 Saudi blogs – in English as well as Arabic – and the bloggers are women as well as men. “I think young people see the internet as a way of expressing themselves easily and in an uncensored fashion,” says Mr Abou-Alsamh.’
BBC NEWS
Meet MAYA-II, the new DNA computer that can play Tic-Tac-Toe. ‘In what appears to be an early proof-of-concept for DNA computing, scientists at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico have created a basic computer, called the MAYA-II, which has a molecular array of YES and AND logic gates made up of 100 DNA circuits. This allows the MAYA-II to play a complete game of Tic-Tac-Toe against a human opponent, and apparently nearly always win.’
Engadget
Tanita Scale Records Your Weight on USB, Graphs Your Fat. ‘The included drive can track four users for 30 days, which then gets uploaded to your Windows PC to graph your weight. If you’re one of those people who don’t find motivation in losing weight unless there’s some kind of gimmick or gadget, this may help keep you alive for another 20 years.’
Gizmodo
Find photos by following your nose. ‘A team led by Stephen Brewster at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, UK, has created software and hardware to let computer users attach distinctive smells – the scent of fresh-cut grass or the whiff of chocolate – to a batch of images. The system, dubbed Olfoto, then lets users sort through their image collection simply by following their noses.’
New Scientist
Bubble Helmet Makes You Look Like Bigger Dork Than You Really Are. ‘We’re all for enhancing our TV-viewing experience, but this 6-pound helmet looks more like a prop from SpaceBalls than something we’d wanna wear. Still, Toshiba claims the helmet will give its wearer a 360-degree panorama when watching TV or playing games.’
Gizmodo
A car that knows the speed limit. ‘Siemens VDO now supplies a whole host of such electronic gadgetry to the automobile industry. Last month, for instance, it introduced a Driver Attention System targeted at truck drivers. The DAS uses a small camera and an infrared light to continuously illuminate the driver’s features, while software evaluates factors such as head movement and number of eye blinks to determine whether the driver is growing sleepy. If so, the system vibrates the seat. If drowsiness continues, the truck sounds a tone that swells in volume until the driver becomes more alert.’
Ars Technica
MyDreamApp.com : Whistler : Richard Whitelock. ‘Whistle, hum, tap or drum your music straight into your Mac – Whistler will do the rest. Using advanced technology to make music production feasible and fun, Whistler is both a unique new studio tool for professionals and a musical instrument for us all.’
Whistler
Screenshot Tour: Instant photo movies with Tracking Shot. ‘Upload your photos and music to TrackingShot and it’ll mix up a Ken Burns-style digital photo movie to the beat of your song automatically. Mark which photos are more important, and select interesting sub-areas of particular photos for zooming.’
Lifehacker
Online world to get news bureau. ‘Reuters has opened a virtual news agency in the Second Life online world. The bureau will be staffed by Reuters media correspondent Adam Pasick who will report on the lives and business dealings of Second Life’s residents.’
BBC NEWS
“The Device” displays computer data, analog-style. ‘From what we can tell, “The Device” connects to your Windows machine (Mac / Linux support is coming soon, apparently) and displays some piece of data generated from your computer or culled from the internet. David Glickman, the Device’s creator, hasn’t listed a release date nor a retail price for his creation, but we’re hoping that one of the dials on his prototype is ticking down to when he’s shipping us one.’
Engadget
AuraOrb: Socially Aware, But Still Doesn’t Care About Your Problems. ‘Its specialty is to use social awareness cues, such as eye contact, to determine when it should light up its 360-degree display with your latest information updates. Touching the orb transfers messages directly to your computer screen. In our opinion, the orb makes a lot of sense for appearing anywhere other than right next to your computer.’
Gizmodo
STORYTRON – Interactive Storytelling. ‘We are the world pioneer in interactive storytelling – the most engaging, artistic and people-oriented form of interactive entertainment. In interactive storytelling, you get to bring your own personality and imagination into a virtual dramatic storyworld. There, you can interact with incredibly authentic computer-controlled Actors in an adventure that combines the best aspects of traditional stories with the unprecedented experience of controlling the story’s flow by being the protagonist.’
Storytron
Welcome to Limbo – Text 41414 to Play. ‘The lowest unique bidder is the person who has bid the lowest amount that no other person has bid. When two people place the same bid, that number is no longer unique. When a person has a unique bid but there are others that are lower, then it’s not the lowest. To win a Limbo Auction, you must be the one with the lowest AND unique bid at the auction’s end – the lowest unique bid. ‘
Limbo
Haptic radar system has got your back. ‘It essentially works like a giant set of virtual whiskers, or antennas, providing a tactile sensation to the wearer when an object comes within range — the closer it gets, the more intense the vibrations.’
Engadget
Find your sport with the International sports calendar. ‘Sports fans looking for international competitions any month of the year will love the International Sports Calendar, a simple database that keeps track of anything from archery in Algeria to wushu in Zimbabwe.’
Lifehacker
New research car will watch you while you drive. ‘According to MotorAuthority, the new cameras will be trained on the driver’s eyes and will flash a warning light and will sound an alarm if it finds that the driver’s eyes aren’t staring at the right places at the right times. Furthermore, as New Scientist reports, these new sensors — developed by researchers at University of Southampton in the UK– are also able to determine what other cars and objects around the car are doing, all of which could lead to safer road design and a more thorough understanding of driving behavior.’
Engadget
Wikipod: Install some (possibly all) of Wikipedia to your iPod’s Notes folder. ‘User specifies a size limit, say 10 MB, and a starting word, and Wikipod spiders from there, installing a subset of Wikipedia around your favorite topic. Article hyperlinks work quickly (on my nano, at least), and a moderate-sized topic listing is suprisingly browsable via scrollwheel.’
Boing Boing
iFrogz Tadpole Case for Little Kids. ‘Since it’s for little kids (the target audience seems to be children 5-years-old and under), the handles should work great. You do have to wonder, though, what kind of society wants its children glued to an iPod’s screen for long periods of time.’
Gizmodo
SkyCeiling Brings The Outside In. ‘Install a SkyCeiling from The Sky Factory and it’ll feel like you’ve blown the roof off your house. You can choose from a Luminous SkyCeiling with its own backlighting system, or an Ambient SkyCeiling that uses existing light in the room. The company offers a tremendous variety of images for wall or ceiling applications, or you can design your own in almost any shape or size.’
Gizmodo
Removable laptop water cooling. ‘[Bard] just sent me a nice water cooling hack. He built a simple water cooling system that can be manually inserted into the cooling system of his laptop. He wanted it for watching movies sans annoying fan noise.’
Hack A Day
YouMail: Unique Voice Greetings for Your Cellphone. ‘YouMail is a free service that lets you change your cellphone’s voicemail greeting according to who’s calling. You could record a separate personalized voicemail announcement for every entry in your phonebook. So now you can sound businesslike when the boss calls but get jiggy with the troops when they peep.’
Gizmodo
free SMS to RSS converter Project. ‘I’ve noticed a lot of interest in the discussion groups about SMS applications. This script converts an SMS (text message) to a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It’s developed using a free textback service offered by www.aql.co.uk .’
backstage.bbc.co.uk
Ingram MAC-10 Just $1,208 on CSS. ‘The cost of weapons and equipment that you purchase in Counter-Strike: Source are now based on an algorithm that calculates the global market demand for various weapons. As more people purchase a certain weapon, the price will rise and other weapons will become less expensive. Starting October 11th, the prices you pay for weapons in Counter-Strike: Source will be updated every Monday based on the volume of purchases over the previous week.’
Gizmodo
Synaptics Onyx Mobile Concept. ‘Just to recap, this phone comes equipped with a touch-sensitive LCD panel instead of a regular keypad, allowing you to answer the handset “by simply holding it to your cheek, messages sent by swiping them off the screen with the whole finger.’
TechEBlog
Perspecta Display 1.9. ‘No-Goggles Spatial 3-D for the Workgroup’
Actuality Systems
Sunlight Direct Hybrid Lighting: Install It, Get a 30% Federal Tax Credit. ‘Once inside, that solar light automagically combines with your choice of the fluorescent lighting you see here, direct halogen lighting, or greenhouse lighting. On cloudy days, the electric lights are faded in, with a microprocessor monitoring the situation, keeping the light level steady whether you’re using piped-in sunlight, electrical light or a combination of both.’
Gizmodo
Covert spy cameras lift lid on nuisance neighbours. ‘Councils in London, West Yorkshire, Northumberland and Dundee are supplying householders with covert spy cameras so that they can amass evidence against nuisance neighbours. The devices can be hidden in pot plants, between the covers of books on windowsills facing the street or squeezed between door frames and brickwork. They provide 24-hour surveillance to capture evidence of vandalism, threatening behaviour or abuse.’
We Make Money not Art
Cellphone disables itself when its owner strays. ‘Made by Panasonic, the handset will be sold with a wireless ID card that fits inside a wallet or handbag and lets the phone detect when its owner moves more than a few metres away. “Once the signal between the two objects stops transmitting, because they are too far apart, the telephone blocks itself,” a Panasonic spokesman told AFP.’
New Scientist
Race Tracker Wins Going Away. ‘The tracking technology utilizes 3-ounce radio tags in each horse’s saddlecloth. Antennas positioned around the racetrack receive digital information from each sensor chip as horses pass by. The resulting information can be displayed concurrently in numerous ways, such as showing horses’ positions during the live running with colored and numbered tiles. The tile color matches the saddlecloth color.’
Wired News
Boeing Makes Item-Level RFID Fly. ‘As those components get replaced, “it’s hard to keep track of what the accurate record is. In the past, people would write them down on a piece of paper and give it to someone to type into a database. You can understand the human error potential. People can type in wrong. Touch typists make a mistake about one in every 30 keystrokes, by the way,” Porad said. With item-level tagging, Porad said Boeing is hoping to get close to 100 percent accurate information passed along when the airplane is sold.’
EWeek
Preezo Enters Online Office Race. ‘Preezo clones the PowerPoint interface very well (see screen shot below), and assigns a permanent URL to the presentation. Presentations can also be embedded into other websites. At this point though it’s more of a demo than a working product. Only a few users have been let in to test it, there is no import feature to upload PowerPoint files and there are no tools to create animations or drawings. These are all features that are being built, but there’s no release schedule.’
Techcrunch
Apple claims 30 inch cinema display boosts productivity. ‘A controversial new study funded by Apple shows that an upgrade from a 17-19 inch monitor to a 30-inch screen results in these extreme increases in productivity: Testing showed time savings of 13.63 seconds when moving files between folders using the larger screen — 15.7 seconds compared to 29.3 seconds on the 17-in. monitor — for a productivity gain of 46.45 percent.’
Lifehacker
HP’s shiny new concept devices. ‘Other non-working prototypes include a smart coffee table with built-in interactive displays and slots for a tablet PC, rollable multi-purpose display mats, and a digital wallet that’ll keep track of your online transactions.’
Engadget
Glass Micro-Rings Show Their Worth as Quantum Test Bed. ‘A mass-producible, toadstool-shaped piece of glass may be just the thing for developing future technologies that harness quantum weirdness. Researchers have managed to control the flow of light through such toadstools by touching atoms to them, demonstrating that the devices could serve as nodes of a quantum network in which information is traded between atoms and light.’
Scientific American.com
Teenager plays Space Invaders with only his brain. ‘The headgear boasted a grid of sensors that monitored “electrocorticographic activity” from the brain’s surface to detect signals based on thought processes that were going on. By calibrating his thoughts with video game triggers, the teenager was able to learn the ropes “almost instantaneously,” and had no qualms demolishing the competition while twiddling his thumbs.’
Engadget
Ybox: the set-top internet box in an Altoids tin. ‘Dubbed the Ybox, the device works a bit like an Atari 2600-era Konfabulator, delivering a constant stream of stock quotes, weather forecasts, and other customizable information in ultra low res-fashion, controllable with nothing more than your standard TV remote. Currently, the Ybox requires an ethernet cable to get that info, though the developers say WiFi’s a possibility in the future.’
Engadget
Mobicharger Gives You Disposable Power in a Pinch. ‘Mobicharger disposable batteries will give you 60 minutes of talk time on a cellphone and 480 minutes of standby, and they’re available in a variety of connectors that will fit most cellphones.’
Gizmodo
Huckleberry Uses Mirror to Make MacBook More Versatile. ‘That’s how the Huckleberry works, using a small mirror to let you use that little iSight camera on the MacBook as a forward-facing video camera, too.’
Gizmodo
Coghead Goes Live: Build Applications Visually. ‘Coghead has a unique and very visual user interface which lets tech-savvy, yet non-coders, easily add business logic to create or modify applications. Coghead says the sweet spot for their product is between packaged software solutions and custom programming, a market that is very large and one that has not yet been fully addressed.’
Techcrunch
Warning over ‘broken up’ internet. ‘”If I look at the internet in five years from now there are going to be very, very, very more internet users in Asia than Europe or America. “There will be more Chinese web pages than English pages. “The types of uses for the internet in India and China are very different from western countries – they are not commerce or media; they are essentially public service applications.”‘
BBC NEWS
Tagcrowd: visualize texts as tag clouds. ‘Visualize word frequency in any document up to 100 kb: upload it or paste it into Tagcrowd, and voila.’
Smart Mobs
Zotero – The Next-Generation Research Tool. ‘Zotero, a Firefox extension that automatically extracts and organises bibliographic metadata for items from web pages’
Zotero
Handheld printer made from a toner cartridge. ‘This “handheld printer” was made from a repurposed HJ inkject cartridge — because it’s handheld, it can print on odd surfaces like balloons’
Boing Boing
DigitalSpectrum MemoryFrame MF-8104: WiFi Digital Pic Frame. ‘The DigitalSpectrum MemoryFrame MF-8104 Premium is a 10.4-inch digital photo frame that can connect to your home network wirelessly via WiFi and is IP addressable. That’s right, here it is, a picture frame that can match the feature set of the ill-fated eStarling frame that appeared early last year and then mysteriously vanished.’
Gizmodo
More details emerge on HP’s Memory Spot chips. ‘The magic is in the 2.45GHz operation frequency, which allows for about 1000 times the storage and 100-1000 times the data transfer rate of RFID. The reading distance is considerably shorter, though, at roughly 1mm, which does allow for improved security, along with location-specific operation, but provides an unfortunate lack of juicy memory theft opportunity.’
Engadget
Interview with Burak Arikan. ‘We developed Pinkies for artists and designers to easily and intuitively prototype ideas about networked objects and space. When we use a Pinkie to control a sensor, the data sensed from the world can immediately be online. So with Pinkies, the physical world is connected to the informational one by default. Starting from this default situation, we can focus more on the quality of relationships – protocols – among machines, people, objects, and space’
We Make Money Not Art
Jacket for gadgets. ‘CAB visualizes our dependency on mobile technology. We carry in our pockets and handbags all kinds of gadgets; we are systems of sorts – a set of draws, a storage box, a showcase for our collections of digital data plus their extension with the outside world. Both the garment’s apearance and use play with this fact that we spend every day within close proximity of electronic devices, within the flow of electricity around our bodies.’
We Make Money Not Art
The SportCommand wireless fabric remote control for an iPod. ‘The Belkin SportCommand for iPod lets you wirelessly control your music while your iPod stays protected. Strap the fabric remote to your arm, store your iPod in your backpack or jacket, and then listen to your audio while you get extreme’
gizmag
Radio-Frequency ID: Asian Impediments. ‘In the U.S. and Canada, growth in this tracking technology is being powered by demand for tighter security, improved manufacturing logistics, and more efficient supply-chain management. Those same needs exist in Asia, but slow adoption of workable standards and a dearth of necessary airwaves have been a huge impediment, particularly in China, where the RFID tag market was all of $60 million in 2005.’
Business Week
Arbitron’s Portable People Meter bags FCC approval. ‘The wearable/pocketable device, for those not up to speed, will supposedly monitor an individual’s daily media diet, sending all the juicy details back to Arbitiron at the end of the day so they can crunch the numbers. It can’t pick up every bit of content you consume, of course, just that from cooperating radio and TV stations, who are required to encode special signals into their programming — but if it works as claimed, you can bet that more broadcasters will be quick to sign up.’
Engadget
Working out of a ‘third place’. ‘You’ve surely seen this crowd while popping in for that morning macchiato. They claim prime tabletops and battle for electrical outlets, all with the zombie-like gaze of people who physically are there but mentally are engaged with phantoms at the other end of a wireless signal. Just who are these people, and what are they so tuned into? Some e-mail new clients, others process incoming orders. A few surf the Web. Occasionally, there’s a game of Solitaire. All in all, a wild array of mostly 40-and-under folks working in an impressive range of fields.’
USATODAY.com
Digital sun. ‘A yellow field moves on the computer screen, reflecting the sun movements in the sky. Of course the movement can hardly be seen. When the sun rises a yellow field starts to move. At mid-day the whole screen is yellow.’
We Make Money Not Art
Bar Z Adventures unveils educational GPS Ranger. ‘Multimedia tidbits describing statues, animals, battlefields, and essentially anything associated with a given attraction can be triggered when approaching a given landmark, and the device also packs support for a multitude of languages to cater to those international visitors.’
Engadget
Mediastation Multimedia System Lets You Work in the Bath. ‘The touch-screen system is waterproof, thankfully, so you can access the internet, listen to the radio, watch a DVD, listen to a CD, write text messages, or do just about anything you can do with a regular computer—all in the comfort of your bathtub.’
Gizmodo
Gartner: Consumer Tech Is Next Wave of Enterprise IT. ‘A plethora of consumer technologies, ranging from podcasting to blogging, VOIP (voice over IP) and video on demand, will penetrate the enterprise workplace by the year 2012, spearheaded by a new generation of workers raised on the technologies—what Gartner analysts are calling “digital natives.”‘
EWeek
Nokia Wants to Be Touched. ‘The cell phone ditches a traditional keypad for a touchscreen display you can caress with your delicate fingers. It’s different than Nokia’s previous keyless phone and seems like it’d make less of a bulk in your front pocket than Synaptics’ Onyx phone we wrote about last week.’
Gizmodo
‘Smart’ table could boost brainstorming. ‘The Blue Eye table consists of a glass surface with a camera overhead and a projector and a mirror underneath. A user places an object on the glass surface and presses a button to copy it to the screen beneath. Once imported, the images can then easily be moved, stretched and even animated by a user.’
New Scientist
True Me: Who Am I? Swipe My Finger. ‘True Me is a system for Internet-based authentication using fingerprints, and it’s said to be the first on-demand authentication system to be released. It has a cool-looking fingerprint sensor that plugs into your PC, and eliminates the need for entering passwords, user names, or anything else.’
Gizmodo
Digital Putter Digifies Your Game. ‘This digital putter may be able to help out your struggling miniature golf game. The DiXX (ha, dixx…) Blue Digital Instructor Putter has a digital screen that will display a green dot when you are lined up on the ball correctly. Once lined up correctly, just give it a whack and hope it goes through the uprights.’
Gizmodo
FeedVision Mister Tipster: Skims RSS Feeds for Your Favorite Keywords. ‘Here’s the FeedVision Mister Tipster, a little watchdog that lets you go on about your business while it watches out for your favorite keywords in all of your RSS feeds. Plug it into a USB port, map a keyword to each of its three blinking lights, and a light will flash when that word floats down your chosen river of info.’
Gizmodo
Sooloos: Music-Everywhere System for Kazillionaires. ‘The Sooloos music system is quite the fancy setup, with a 3TB server controlled by touchscreens all around your mansion. Tell the company about your music collection, and all those tunes will be pre-loaded onto your Sooloos server, controlled by a main 17″ panel. Then, choose how many additional 7″ touchscreen controllers you’ll need, and you can have different music playing in up to 32 zones around your abode. Plus, you can subscribe to the company’s service and they’ll help you find new music, expertly selected by professional music critics and conductors. Systems start at $12,000.’
Gizmodo
Genealogy for the Living, the Dead, the Far Away. ‘GENEALOGY sites have long helped their customers reconnect with long-dead ancestors. Now, in keeping with the social networking trend, some of these sites are trying to connect living relatives, as well. Ancestry.com, a division of MyFamily.com in Provo, Utah, has spurred interaction between close and distant relatives by letting them more freely share information about their forebears and post old photos, and it is also considering a family subscription service.’
New York Times
Steven Johnson on Spore. ‘Spore flips that model [MMORPG] on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore “massively single player.”’
pasta and vinegar
Netflix Prize: Review Rules. ‘We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. (Accuracy is a measurement of how closely predicted ratings of movies match subsequent actual ratings.) If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works.’
Netflix
Tactile passwords thwart snooping, facilitate old-fashioned muggings. ‘To enter a password, the user must manipulate the mouse so that a cursor moves through nine different boxes on the display, with each box sending a different, random tacton back to the mouse. Once the user feels the proper tacton correlating to the first element of his/her password, he/she then clicks the mouse button in the appropriate box and proceeds to repeat the process until the requisite number of codes have been entered.’
Engadget
FWDitOn’s Digg Model for Emails. ‘FWDitOn is a site that allows users to submit and rate emails that they find interesting, and higher rated emails go to the top of the popular area. The idea is to allow people to see the most popular fowarded jokes and other emails, and there are some good ones on the site. An email can be added to FWDitOn by simply forwarding it to submit@fwditon.com – and you do not need to be a registered user to do so.’
Techcrunch
SoundFlavor DJ: Smarter iTunes Playlists. ‘You start by picking one song or playlist in the style you wish to hear, and then use a “Flavorizer” slider to control how closely you want the songs in the SoundFlavor playlist to resemble that song or playlist. To the right of the SoundFlavor DJ control module, you’ll see the next songs SoundFlavor has chosen to play, along with their album art. Everything plays through iTunes, although you can control playback from the SoundFlavor DJ module.’
Listening Post
Some Tech-Gen Youth Go Offline. ‘For some, it would be unthinkable — certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account. No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he had accumulated were really just acquaintances. He’s also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos — all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.’
Wired News
Intel reveals wireless connectivity roadmap. ‘Intel has long made it clear that it will support WiMAX in its next generation onboard radio chips, but is now also adding a 3G HSDPA option, in collaboration with Nokia. This will mean that sometime in 2007 top end Intel laptops will be able to work with the new 802.11n Wi-fi system, with WiMAX and with cellular networks, straight out of the box.’
The Register
CanestaVision™ Chips. ‘Fundamentally, the chips work in a manner similar to radar, where the distance to remote objects is calculated by measuring the time it takes an electronic burst of radio waves to make the round trip from a transmitting antenna to a reflective object (like a metal airplane) and back. In the case of these chips, however, a burst of unobtrusive light is transmitted instead.’
Canesta, Inc.
Hot nightclub, minus global warming. ‘The club they envision will feature energy-generating dance floors (excellent way to extract kilowatts from energetic clubbers), toilets that flush with rain water, walls that change colour as a reaction to temperature changes, a rooftop garden and other elements that combine to create a sustainable clubbing environment.’
Springwise
Mitsubishi CM-7200 screen to replace rear-views in trucks. ‘The screen displays the rear-mounted camera in your truck, which according to Mitsubishi’s press release, have been available in Japan since 1970. The CM-7200 ships on November 1 for �65,100 ($553) — even at that somewhat elevated price, we’re willing to bet that before the end of the year someone will figure out how to hook up a computer, DVD player, or console to the monitor.’
Engadget
Simply Better Concepts. ‘A massive section of London’s ExCel conference center was transformed into a sleek, futuristic showcase for a range of new design concepts and a sample of potential new products that aim to improve quality of life and contribute to a healthier lifestyle. Here’s a look at Philips’ vision of the consumer electronics, lighting, and medical systems of the future.’
Business Week
Hidden rooms on the rise. ‘The NYT reports on the increasing trend to building secret rooms in contemporary houses: not just fortified “safe rooms” for the home-invasion paranoids, but also playful rooms hidden behind bookcases, stairs and others that speak to our inner Bruce Wayne.’
Boing Boing
Single-pixel camera could simplify imaging. ‘A conventional digital camera focuses light onto a rectangular array of sensing elements, called pixels, which measure light. The single-pixel camera developed by researchers Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly at Rice University in Houston, Texas, US, takes a completely different approach. It reflects light from 1024 x 768 micro-mirrors onto a single photodiode. Then it changes the arrangement of micro-mirrors and repeats the process – all in a split second.’
New Scientist
Remote XT: Make Your Phone Scream. ‘When your mobile phone gets stolen you just call Remote XT and they remotely backup your phone and then disable it by making the phone literally scream. The thief can remove the SIM card and the phone still screams. ‘
I4U News
5.1 Surround Cellphone: As Awesome as it Sounds. ‘NTT DoCoMo is currently working on a cellphone that delivers block rockin’ ringtones in 5.1 surround sound. Why would somebody ever want 5.1 on a cellphone? Well the real question is why wouldn’t somebody want 5.1 on a cellphone? Okay, this has a little more application overseas where the DMB television runs free on cellphones, but still, wouldn’t regular stereo sound be sufficient?’
Gizmodo
Philips Simplicity Event 2006 shows off conceptual shiny toys. ‘Philips is currently demoing various concept products at its Simplicity Event 2006 expo this week in London, some of which may or may not see the light of day. Among our favorites that we’ve spotted are the new Drag Draw (pictured above), a new light-emitting pen that will let you make crazy illustrations on any surface, so you can unleash that fantasy of scribbling up your bedroom wall — without doing any permanent damage.’
Engadget
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