Archive for June, 2007
IBM triples performance of World’s Fastest Computer and breaks the “Quadrillion” Barrier
“It triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. Blue Gene/P scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one petaflop (one-quadrillion operations per second) and can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops. The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than a stack of laptop computers 1.5 miles high (dont try this at home folks).”
gizmag Article
TWISTER, a 360 Degree Rotating 3D display
“Researchers from the University of Tokyo, led by Susumu Tachi, have developed a unique display that allows viewers to be immersed in a 3D video environment. The Telexistence Wide-angle Immersive STEReoscope, a.k.a. TWISTER, is the worlds first full color 360 degree 3D display that does not require the use of special glasses to visualize the effect.”
Coolest Gadgets
Bracelet for moods
“An interesting, beautiful but difficult concept design idea, Sense by Patty Yuan, a wrist-based bluetooth device that senses your emotion by reading your heart rate, skin temperature.”
Architectradure
Movie Cards
“The system consists of the real cards made of paper. Each card is represented of a piece of video scene. Participants could get the way of thinking creative and critical through the process of making video with others. The finished moving images would be a new alternative independent media. It is a simple video editing tool and no need of any technical knowledges.”
networked_performance
Newly Declassified Window Film Keeps Out Hackers, Phone Calls, EMPs
“The two-millimeter-thick coating can block Wi-Fi signals, cell phone transmissions, even the near-infrared, yet is almost transparent, making it no more intrusive than conventional window treatments. It can keep signals in (preventing attempts to spy on electronic communications) or out, minimizing radio interference and even the fabled electronics-destroying electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear blast.”
Scientific American
Shifd: A Clever Mobile App From The NY Times
“Mobile application Shifd from the New York Times allows users to easily share any content, from web feeds, listings and maps to personal notes and data, between a desktop computer and a mobile phone. The prototype records presence through an RFID chip placed inside a mobile phone; when a user removes their phone the data is synced through a web interface.”
TechCrunch
how far can I go?
“an intuitive visualization illustrating how far an Air New Zealand customer can fly depending on the estimated price of a flight ticket, represented on a world map.”
information aesthetics
Video game follows your movements, adapts to your heart rate
“Using a “pulseoxymeter” sensor, users can control games by physical movement, while the difficulty and speed of the game are adjusted to the heart rate of the player. The system is meant to be used for maintaining the appropriate level of exertion during exercise, based on a physical response.”
Engadget
Complete Computer on a USB Key
“The entire rig measures in at only 1.4 x 3.3 and as you can imagine it lacks the gear normally assumed to go with a computer like optical drives for one. The CPU is meek at 190MHz. RAM is 64GB of SDRAM and 256MB of NAND flash is used for storage. The entire rig gets powered by a USB port, which brings one small issue to light. You need access to a real PC with a USB port to run this wee PC.”
I4U News
Computers read news, and trade on it quickly
“High-frequency investors such as hedge funds are using news mining platforms like those offered by StreamBase to troll through thousands of electronic feeds of streaming text to identify key phrases on which to trade. Popular phrases include “lowers its outlook” or “raises guidance” or even buzzwords like “stellar performance” that could potentially push a stock lower or higher. Hedge funds, with their rapid-fire trading style, often allow the news mining platforms to make trades on their own, capitalizing on the technology’s speed.”
Reuters.com
TwoStick text entry system speeds up console keyboarding
“The system assigns characters to a Sodoku-like 9×3 grid, letting the user select a quadrant with the left stick and select a letter from within the quadrant with the right. According to the developers, TwoStick users are around 2 words per minute faster than regular on-screen keyboarders after just a little practice.”
Engadget
How To: Whistle to control your computer“Use Linux or Microsoft Windows, the open source sndpeek program, and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events — literally whistling, humming, or singing at your computer — and run commands based on those tones. Give your computer a short low whistle to check your e-mail or unlock your screensaver with the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
Lifehacker
People in Hong Kong Gym Generate Electricity While Exercising
“When club members use certain exercise machines, the energy they generate is turned into stored electricity. To make the fluorescent tubes in the studio’s ceiling light up, they have to start pumping. The consoles of the exercise machines themselves were already powered by human energy. But about 90 percent of the energy produced during workouts was dissipated as heat.”
NewsVOA.com
It’ll Be Photographer’s Choice on a Web Site From Corbis
“Microstock sites take advantage of a phenomenon known as crowd sourcing, whereby thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers submit pictures and charge as little as $1 an image. Unlike some other microstock sites, SnapVillage will allow its contributors to set their own prices, ranging from $1 to $50 an image. Corbis is late with its microstock offering. Getty Images, its main competitor and the dominant company in the image-licensing market, last year acquired a site called iStockPhoto for $50 million. Rather than acquire an existing site, Corbis created its own.”
New York Times
Mayor to print photos to deter prostitution
“Cesare De Martin, mayor of the northern town of San Fior near Venice, said on Friday he planned to give local police digital cameras and instruct them to photograph any cars seen stopping to liaise with prostitutes on the side of the street. Advertisements in local newspapers with the number plates will then be published, he said.”
Reuters
Dreamcrowd Tracks Dreams
“Users post their dreams in a similar fashion to a blog or bookmarking site. Other users can then assess the meaning of your dream and the dreamopedia automatically provides analysis based on key words from your dream; for example the word kill gives a result of To dream of manslaughter, signifies fear and scandal.”
TechCrunch
NTT’s Tangible-3D prototype gives feeling to on-screen imagery
“Based around an improved version of the company’s original 3D display, this prototype system relies on a sophisticated array of cameras and an actuator-stuffed glove that can allow the wearer to “feel the image” that shows up on the LCD. As the object changes, the glove moves along in real-time to give the user a lifelike idea of what the on-screen matter actually feels like”
Engadget
Xcavator.net: Visual Stock Photo Search
“In laymens terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.”
TechCrunch
New York Public Library gets first Espresso Book Machine
“While it looks like it’s still a ways from setting up shop next to more traditional vending machines, those in New York CIty can now get their instant-book fix from the very first (non-beta) Espresso Book Machine, which has found a home in the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library. For the time being, most of the books on offer appear to be ones in the public domain, including over 200,000 titles from the Open Content Alliance database, which visitors to the library can print off books free of charge, the end result of which is supposedly “indistinguishable from the factory-made title.”
Engadget
1,000 Frames Per Second: CTX Imaging Shows 3D Bones In Fast Motion, Total Recall Style
“First, they do a complete tomography scan on the subject, which gets stored in the computer to get combined with “high-speed fluoroscopy” footage of the animal in motion. That generates a highly detailed 3D computer animated model that can be seen from any angle. So detailed that it can capture 1,000 frames per second with a precision of a tenth of a millimeter.”
Gizmodo
Simple Spark: A Catalog Of Web Applications
“New York based Simple Spark aims to make finding web applications easy through an extensive catalog of online application sites. Over 3000 web applications are tracked and categorized with screenshots, icons, feeds, reviews and concise summaries. Applications are indexed in over 70 categories including Spreadsheets, Workspace & Wikis, Education, Fashion, Green Living and Family & Kids”
TechCrunch
Lending Club Passes $100,000 Mark In Loans To Facebook Users
“Lending Club was an original Facebook Platform/ F8 partner having launched with F8 on May 24. The company closed its first loan on June 6, and has since closed 27 more loans for a total of $101,250. An additional $212,650 in loans will close in the next 12 days. More than $180,000 is currently available from 271 lenders with around 10-15 new lenders transferring money to Lending Club every day. The social networking angle of Facebook allows Lending Club to leverage trust by enabling lenders to find borrowers within shared networks. Lending Club uses technology to pair the two parties based on shared connections without giving lenders direct access to the borrowers Facebook profile.”
TechCrunch
Wiffiti’s Messaging Widget is Fun
“Anyone can post a message – just text “@crunch [message]” to 25622 and it will appear on the screen. The real use for something like this is projecting the widget up on a big screen at a party, or as a permanent source of entertainment at a cafe or bar.”
TextCrunch
Smartypants: SightFinder Uses Cellphone GPS to be Your Personal Tour Guide
“It works by grabbing pictures and text from the Interwebs according to your current location, along with Wikipedia articles that explain exactly what it is you’re looking at. Sheesh, it’s like having your own personal tour guide right there in your pocket for $19.99″
Gizmodo
Omniscient webcam to deter distance education cheating
“The webcam-based unit was crafted by Software Secure, and simultaneously freezes the test taker’s computer so he / she can only access the test module and records both audio and video whilst flagging “questionable” movements that the instructor can review for unpropitious behavior.”
Engadget
Craigslist meets YouTube
“Realpeoplerealstuff.com is equal parts Craigslist and YouTubea whole new way for customers to reach out to one another to sell their used appliances, automobiles, collectibles, concert tickets and countless other goods and services. Realpeoplerealstuff.com combines the hottest internet trends in one, easy-to-use site: e-commerce, snarky writing, funny videos, everyone’s desire to be a star and video sharing.”
Springwise
Consumers happy to pay ‘green premium’
“Slightly more than half – 55 per cent – of consumers agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “I would pay up to a 10 per cent premium for electronic products that were manufactured in a more environmentally conscious way.” The survey showed that there was very little variation in attitude across gender, income groups, or among respondents of different education levels.”
Channel Register
Imeem Now Officially Legitimate
“The pair and over 5,000 independent labels, like Nettwerk and Orchard, will pay artists on Imeem a share of the advertising revenue generated from ads that run along with the music. Artists previously allowed their music to be posted on the service for promotional purposes, but the new partnership provides greater incentives to join. Artists will be paid in proportion to the number of listeners they have with a to be determined revenue split with Imeem.”
TechCrunch
visual music search interface
“a visually impressive & fluid interface for discovering new music melodies. users can search, refine & explore new tunes according to style, mood or instruments.”
information aesthetics
Restaurant Reservations Go Online
“Making a reservation through OpenTable costs the diner nothing. And it reduces the inconvenience. Say you want a table on short notice at a busy Manhattan restaurant Danny Meyers Union Square Cafe. Placing a phone call there usually requires calling during business hours, enduring loud jazz for hold music, and talking with a reservationist for a while before finding an acceptable time. OpenTable might give you the same results, but it will do the work in 10 seconds.”
New York Times
PhotoShirt: BlueCotton Custom T-Shirts, Exactly The Way You Want Them
“BlueCotton Custom T-shirts has put together a sophisticated Photoshop-like web app to let you design your own shirt, resulting in a screen-printed or custom embroidered garment with a tremendous amount of control over the results. The company says it’s been working on its online design interface for the past six months, and it shows. The interface rocks. Even if you’re not buying a T-shirt, it’s fun to play with.”
Gizmodo
Light Dress: LED Fashion Makes You Look Groovy, in a NYC Skyline Kind of Way
“Looks like designer Hussein Chalayan and Swarovski have at last come up with LED clothing that doesn’t make you look like an alien (not too much, anyway) or an utterly fashion-blind dork. The dress has two layers, with a translucent fabric covering the LEDs.”
Gizmodo
Venezuelans set new WiFi distance record: 237 miles
“WiFi’s flame burns on in Latin America, however, where researcher Ermanno Pietrosemoli has managed to shoot an 802.11 signal 382 kilometers (237 miles) between two mountains in the Venezuelan Andes.”
Engadget
AI behind smart car wheels
“The steering wheels use microcomputers which perform 4,000 calculations per second and communicate with each other. Then the wheels use AI to learn as the car is being driven, making calculations and adjustments according to travelling speed and road conditions. These intelligent tires mark the first time AI has replaced fundamental mechanics within a motor vehicle. This means that we might some day ride safer and driver cars.”
Primidi
Woehburk CrystalLine turns Glass into Video Projection Screens
“German company Woehburk offers technology to give glass the ability to act as a rear projection screen. The material is as transparent as regular laminated sheet glass. Therefore the glass is not noticeable as a multimedia screen when not in usage. If a projector is pointing at the screen the glass turns into a visual screen that can display multimedia content.”
I4U News
Holographic Video for Your Home
“Bove’s new system, which is called Mark III, is scheduled to be completed by the end of the summer. It can run on a standard PC with a graphics card and will be small enough to fit on top of a desk. (In contrast, an earlier version of Mark II required whole racks of computers.) Although Bove doesn’t yet have any manufacturing partners, he predicts that a product based on Mark III’s design would cost just a couple of hundred dollars to manufacture and could become standard in doctor’s offices as a way to view magnetic resonance images and computed tomography scans in 3-D detail. It would also be within the price range of gamers and technology enthusiasts.”
Technology Review
When crops talk to farmers
“The farmers just need to clip a tiny sensor to their potato or corn leaves. When the plant feels it needs some moisture, data from the leaves will be sent wirelessly over the Internet to computers linked to irrigation equipment. This should save millions of dollars per year in Colorado only, and it will also be eco-friendly by reducing the amounts of water used for irrigation.”
Primidi
For her final project in a Media Lab class, Anita… (kottke.org)
“For her final project in a Media Lab class, Anita Lillie fastened three accelerometers to her body and tracked her movements while asleep. The data recorded allowed her to determine her sleeping positions and orientations (on her left side, on her back, etc.) and how they changed through the night.”
kottke.org
Web As Desktop: Zoho Creator is like Microsoft Access online
“Set up your database’s fields (like for an address book: Name, Address, City, State) and then build drag and drop custom entry forms with different input types like radio buttons, check boxes and dropdowns. Ambitious types can add custom logic to the application using the script builder, and the whole shebang can be added to your web site or blog (say, for a feedback form or survey). Looks like a nice way to create a powerful interface to customized data, instead of wrangling with boring spreadsheets.”
Lifehacker
HeyCosmo: Webcams Meet Group Collaboration
“HeyCosmo, a new online video community from Mountain View, CA based Arsenal Interactive launches today with a well rounded package that blends web cam interaction with group collaboration tools With HeyCosmo, users are able create channels that can include up to 10 live web-cam video participants in a group discussion. Additionally up to 50 people can listen, watch, and chat during the session on top of the 10 core participants.”
TechCrunch
Powerset To Launch Social Network Around Search Engine
“Powerlabs is more than a sandbox to show off new product ideas that arent ready for prime time. They are encouraging people interested in Powerset to sign up for Powerlabs and create what is effectively a profile. Once registered, users will be able to see new product ideas and vote on them, as well as submit their own ideas to the community. Later on, users will gain points and influence within the community.”
TechCrunch
The Multichanneling, Narrowcasting and SMS-alerts of a Police Force
“Dutch Regional Police Forces Groningen have implemented a new system to broadcast APBs via digital signage screens, PC screensavers and PDAs. The integrated system, provided by Netpresenter, resulted in seven arrests. [...]. 24/7, the system shows pictures, APB information and even video material of wanted and missing persons on big screens in secured areas in police stations, on the intranet and on officers’ PDAs. With the latter, GPS is used to offer location specific information.“
Smart Mobs
Bones to allow data swap through handshake
“Scientists from the Rice University in Houston are developing ways in which human skeleton will be able to transmit commands reliably and securely to wearable gadgets and medical implants. Scientist claim that the skeleton is a surprisingly accurate transmitter of digital data, the principle could be used in medical devices and handheld gadgets. Bone is a great conductor of sound and to see if it could transmit digital signals over longer distances, to a headset, say, from a sensor worn on the wrist, the team applied a small vibrator to various parts of the body. On measuring how well bone conducted these signals they found the skeleton conducted even low-power vibrations from one location to another with amazingly few errors.”
Medlaunches.com
Quantum leap – researchers achieve milestone for next generation computing
“The already breathtakingly rapid evolution of the computer is moving towards a completely new level with Researchers at Delft University of Technology successfully carrying out calculations with two quantum bits, the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer.”
Gizmag
Driver Not Included in This Performance Test
“Thursdays test was on an artificial course about the size of a small city block, and included a simulation of a four-way intersection. The robot car, which the Stanford team calls Junior, was limited to a speed of no more than 15 miles an hour by agency officials. It was required to pass four tests, including stopping at an intersection and waiting for other vehicles before proceeding. Junior stumbled once, when a misplaced traffic cone forced the vehicle to stop and wait for its human controllers. After completing all of the required tests, the vehicle, which bristled with eight laser range finders, was able to ace the failed test of passing a stationary car immediately after an intersection.”
New York Times
Kodak says camera sensor may eliminate flash
“The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light. Image sensors act as a digital camera’s eyes by converting light into an electric charge to begin the capture process.”
Reuters.com
Orange goes green for festival phone-fuelling
“Orange today launched a prototype wind-powered charger capable of delivering a constant supply of green juice despite “the unpredictable English climate”. How? The turbine charges a battery, and it’s from that power pack that the phone’s own battery is charged. It is, of course, a variation of one on humanity’s oldest devices, the windmill, though this time kitted out in suitable, sponsor-friendly colour. The windmil weighs a mere 150g – let’s hope it’s capable of being anchored against strong gusts – and is compact enough to be tucked into a rucksack.”
Reg Hardware
Nanotube Circuits Made Practical
“over the past several years, researchers have made transistors out of carbon nanotubes. However, it’s still difficult to make reliable circuits out of them. One problem is that the nanotubes, used for transistors that make up the circuits, tend to be fabricated in different directions, making it impossible to know which nanotube form which transistor. And such a chaotic arrangement can lead to electrical malfunctions. But now researchers at Stanford University have written a program that finds a working circuit layout, no matter how disorganized or misaligned the nanotubes.”
Technology Review
Vibration-compensated mini projectors
“German scientists from the Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Dresden have combined a compact laser projector system with inertia and yaw rate sensors to project vibration-compensated images. The sensor system detects the slightest motion and rotates the image to compensate for it, ensuring a steady picture, even in a moving vehicle. The system could be commercially available within two years.”
gizmag
Logitec intros digital recorder for consumer telephones
“The LIC-TRA056SD is a “private telephone recorder” that plugs right into your home phone and captures conversations conveniently on the built-in 128MB of storage. If those 50 hours of capacity aren’t enough to catch someone red handed, you can also throw in a spare SD card and create an audio archive of every phone call you’ll ever make.”
Engadget
New generation camera phones: smaller, cheaper, better
“their new modules are half the size of current mobile phone camera units, 30% cheaper to manufacture, and capable of supporting the high resolutions we expect from digital cameras. The company has also made some impressive aquisitions to sort out the traditional focus and zoom issues we’ve had on camera phones.”
gizmag
Virtual Sales Associates poised to harass interactively
“These so-called Virtual Sales Associates will be positioned near particular items of interest (“Steve recommends you only buy iPod-brand MP3 players: always look for the apple!”), and are said to be capable of holding limited “natural language” conversations about said product. To include window-shoppers in their diabolical advertising schemes, retailers can also mount a VSA behind the glass and offer browsers a phone number for chatting up the salesbot.”
Engadget
Computing with Light and Magnets
“The advance combines insights from two nascent research fields. In plasmonics, researchers are studying ways of guiding light along very thin metal wires to allow faster communication between devices on a chip. The other field, spintronics, involves manipulating a property of electrons called spin; in the past several years, spintronics research has enabled ultradense memory in hard drives. Now the Naval Lab and University of Alberta researchers have shown that by manipulating electron spin using magnetic fields, they can turn off and on light that’s being guided through metals.”
Technology Review
Eye-Tracking Device Lets Billboards Know When You Look at Them
“The eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-size video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet. A simple glance from a passerby scores an impression, providing a tally that enables new Google-like measurement metrics that real-world advertisers could only dream about until recently.”
Wired
The Honesty Box Facebook Application
“When you install it, you can send an anonymous message to any of your facebook friends. Only that friend sees the message, along with whether the sender is male of female.”
TechCrunch
Smart Brush: Oral-B’s Triumph Keeps Your Chompers Clean by Telling You How to Brush
“The $149 brush comes with a palm-size wireless display (it uses RF technology to communicate) that provides real-time feedback as you’re brushing so it lets you know how much time you’ve spent brushing and also what quadrant of your mouth you should be brushing.”
Gizmodo
German researchers create zooming liquid lenses
“French firm Varioptic has developed a system of 4 liquid lenses that can snap from 1 – 2.5x magnification at the touch of a button. The system isn’t quite ready for primetime yet — exposure times are still a little long, it can’t zoom continuously, and the assembly is a little big at 29mm — but the team is already considering solutions to those problems and is ready to go to the prototype stage.”
Engadget
Cellphones: Haptic Clock Tells You the Time via Vibrations
“It’s a small program for Java phones that tells you the time through a series of vibrations, allowing you to keep your phone in your pocket. Simply reach in your pocket and hit the 5 key to get it to tell you the time. How does it tell it to you? Long vibrations are the number of hours of the current time on a 12 hour clock, so 6pm and 6am are both 6 vibrations.”
Gizmodo
The Presentation as Shared Object
“One of Roeland Loggen’s big take-away’s from MobileMonday in Amsterdam came from, oddly, not the presentations themselves, but from a screen that was adjacent to the presenters’ screen – a companion screen displaying a live Jaiku feed that audience members were using for comments and whatnot, related or unrelated to the presentation itself. It’s called “backchannel.” Public backchannel. Or, as Loggen would have it, “G2P” – group to presenter. Or, as I would have it, the presentation as a shared object.”
Smart Mobs
Playground for all ages
“Among the four games available, the conquistador is a game of conquest, which gets people moving. Conquistador is played over the whole SmartUs field and players compete to be the first player or team to gain a specified number of different territories within the field. Territorial conquest is achieved by getting to the iPosts message poles and showing your iTag ID at the poles identification point. “It is especially suitable for players who are agile and alert. On the field, each player tries to conquer his/her own part of the game’s fantasy world, and helps his/her team towards a common goal. The game develops tactical ability and teamwork skills.”
Architectradure
US troops to scatter crawling Wi-Fi mini-droids
“The idea is that the diminutive, cheap, expendable droids would be scattered about by US troops on foot. They would then link up to form a wireless voice/data network which could penetrate into every corner of tricky urban non-line-of-sight environments. The net would use multiple pathways for resilience, and would be able to heal itself in the event of individual droids going down.”
The Register
Your Truman Show: Organized Life Blogging
“The service is a combination of personal blogging, user-generated video and social networking, delivering users an intuitive interface than enables them to catalog their lives. The V-link interface with in Your Truman Show visually connects related storylines making it easy for users to find and follow stories as they develop over time. Usual user rating systems are also provided with higher rating videos gaining preference at key navigation points.”
TechCrunch
Featured Firefox Extension: Add any web site to the Firefox search box with Add to Search Bar
“Add any web site search to the Firefox search box with the Add to Search Bar extension.”
Lifehacker
RIVER GLOW: Water Pollution Monitor
“Heres a brilliant idea that functions as both environmental pollution monitor and thought-provoking urban art installation: a floating LED light system embedded in bodies of water to warn of water pollution (in addition to creating an ethereal glow at nighttime).”
Inhabitat
Featured Firefox Extension: Visit unavailable web sites with Resurrect Pages
“The Resurrect Pages extension lets you visit offline websites that are unavailable for one reason or another. Resurrect Pages displays a list of options on the “Server Not Found” page in Firefox and links to popular cached pages like Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive, etc. that could let you check out the site even if the server is down.”
Lifehacker
Smart clothes to monitor health
“The “intelligent textiles” contain embedded sensors designed to monitor body fluids such as blood and sweat. The aim is to use the clothes to check on groups such as recovering hospital patients, people with chronic illnesses and injured athletes.”
BBC NEWS
Casio RFID Wristband Fitness Club Gadgetry
“With the Casio “mobile Check-Fit” system you can check-in to the club, track your training on the machines, pull up your training records on a PDA station or check your health parameters with a fully automatic hemadynamometer body constitution analyzers.”
I4U News
Pay by Voice
“People can shop online at participating stores by clicking on a Voice Pay icon on the store’s website and then entering their user name and password. Once the customer is logged into Voice Pay, the system will automatically dial the cell-phone number previously registered to the account. An automated attendant will then initiate a challenge-response procedure, asking the customer to repeat two randomly generated four-digit numbers into the phone. The system will then compare the utterances to the voice registered with the account and, if the two match, the automated attendant will list the details of the purchase and ask if the account holder wishes to proceed. To go ahead with the purchase, all the account holder needs to say is “yes,” says Ogden.”
Technology Review
Technology Review: Plastic That Heals Itself
“To test the material, the researchers bend it and crack the polymer coating. The crack spreads down through the coating and reaches the underlying microchannel. This prompts the healing agent to “whip through the channels and into the crack,” Sottos says. There, it comes into contact with the catalyst and, in about 10 hours, becomes a polymer and fills in the crack. The system does not need any external pressure to push the healing agent into the crack. Instead, the liquid moves through the narrow channels just as water moves up a straw.”
Technology Review
Boffins Develop Non-Reflective Surface
“The coating is made by growing nanorods on a surface. The rods point in different directions and reduce the distortion of light by bringing the refractive index of the material much closer to that of air. Effectively the angle of the rods controls the angle of the light. Think of the way a pencil seems to bend when you put it in a glass of water. That’s refraction. The tech will boost efficiency in LED panels by up to 40%, and also help solar panels convert more light to energy.”
Wired Blogs
The ring mouse from Global Link for convenient cursoring – Engadget
“Global Link is showing off a “Ring Mouse” which straps to your finger and allows for cursoring on pretty much any surface, including your thumb.”
Engadget
Gratis RFID umbrellas track movements, excite marketers
“the firm has landed eight partners that will toss logos on the stark white umbrellas and utilize the tantalizing tracking information that gets recorded each time a rainy day encourages patrons to grab some cover. Merchants are required to pony up $100 per month in order to receive the marketing intelligence, and can then use it to determine where umbrella carriers go once the downpour begins in order to better position future ads.”
Engadget
MSI’s Luxium external graphics solution spotted
“Details are a bit scant at the moment, but the device will apparently provide a PCI-e to ExpressCard interface to get your desktop GPU interfacing with your lappie, several USB ports, a “USB to LAN” connector, S/PDIF in / out, optical audio input, and 7.1-channel Dolby Digital support.”
Engadget
Chores Meet Web 2.0: PAYjr
“PAYjr offers an allowance and chore system that allows parents to assign household chores online, designate a money value for those chores, and provide a financial reward when chores are successfully completed.”
TechCrunch
Yourminis Delivering Triple Widget Play
“Today, with the assistance of Adobes Apollo platform and some clever thinking Yourminis delivers a triple play of widgets: online personalized desktop widgets, actual desktop widgets and blogs widgets.”
TechCrunch
Friday Fun: Turn your webcam into a photo booth with Cameroid
“The web site is basically a web version of Mac’s PhotoBooth program, offering you different effects for your pics, from colorful filters and scenes to the popular morph settings. After you take a picture, you can save the image to your desktop or their public page, email it, or print it out.”
Lifehacker
Sony’s geeky backside exposed in Tokyo R&D extravaganza
“the display that got most visitors gawking was a circular table known as ChatScape. The device was really just a laptop connected to a top-down projector in the centre of the table that threw rotating images onto the flat surface below, but the novelty of emailing it snapshots from your cellphone and seeing them appear on and swirl around the table was worth the trip alone.”
Digital World Tokyo
Virtual Weather Map gives snapshot of Internet health
“The Real-Time Web Monitor identifies the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density).”
gizmag
Make Your Own Internet Radio Station: ubroadcast
“User generated internet radio stations are far from being new. Live365 and Shoutcast have provided similar functionality for years. Where ubroadcast differs is the simplicity and cost: setting up and running a ubroadcast station is free and the learning curve is close to zero. Its more internet radio creation for the mass market. Setup takes no more than 5 minutes. The client is quick to download and registration options are built in. Users can immediately broadcast live content, upload music from MP3s, or select from music uploaded by other ubroadcast members.”
TechCrunch
Wireless Energy Lights Bulb from Seven Feet Away
“Researchers have successfully lit a 60-watt light bulb by transferring energy through the air from one specially designed copper coil to the bulb, which was attached to a second coil seven feet away [...]. The ultimate goal: to shrink the coils and increase the distance between them so that a single base station emitting “WiTricity,” as the inventors refer to the effect, could power a roomful of rechargeable gadgets, each containing its own small coil.”
Scientific American
Product Life Story Labels
“Dole Organic lets consumers travel to the origin of each organic product. By typing in a fruit sticker’s three-digit Farm Code on Dole Organic’s website, customers can find the story behind their banana. Each farm’s section on the website includes background info, shows photos of the crops and workers and tells consumers more about the origin of Dole’s organic products.”
Springwise
Bear robot rescues wounded troops
“The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers away from the battlefield. The Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR) can scoop up even the heaviest of casualties and transport them over long distances over rough terrain.”
BBC NEWS
Low-energy server hosting goes underground
“Built in what was a NATO command centre, 100 metres below the wilds of Lincolnshire, England, Smartbunker runs on wind and water-power and uses power-efficient kit such as IBM bladeservers – there’s none of that dodgy carbon-offset going on here, or so the company claims. The power – from renewable energy supplier Ecotricity – carries a “double-digit percentage price premium”, said Smartbunker MD Kelly Smith, but he claimed that the company’s been able to compensate for that through efficient data centre design.”
The Register
Where a Screen Isn’t an Option, a Hand-Held Uses Audio
“The Icon mobile manager has just about everything you would expect in a hand-held organizer, including a calendar, address book, clock, word processor, calculator, voice recorder, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. What it does not have is a screen, because this pocket-size device from LevelStar was designed for visually impaired users. Skip to next paragraph With its 30-gigabyte hard drive, the Icon can also store and play audiobooks, podcasts and digital music. An audio-based Web browser and an e-mail program are included in the suite of installed software.”
New York Times
Researchers Chart Internet’s ‘Black Holes
“Despite its robust appearance, more than 10 percent of the internet flickers out like a candle every day, according to researchers who unveiled on Wednesday an experimental tool that probes the network’s dark places. Ethan Katz-Bassett, a computer science Ph.D. candidate from the University of Washington introduced Hubble — a network of deep cyberspace probes scattered around the internet – at the meeting of the North American Network Operator’s Group in Bellevue, Washington. For two weeks Hubble queried a sample of 1,500 internet prefixes (a small subsection of the net) every 15 minutes. In the end it found that 10 percent of those prefixes couldn’t be reached from certain corners of the internet.”
Wired
In a Virtual Universe, the Politics Turn Real
“This specter of corruption has emerged most recently not in some post-colonial trouble spot but in the virtual nation of an Internet game called Eve Online (population 200,000) where aspiring star pilots fight over thousands of solar systems in a vast science-fiction universe every day. So now, in a sociological twist, the company that makes Eve, CCP, based in Iceland (population 300,000), says it will tackle the problem the way a democracy would. In what appears to be a first, the company plans to hold elections so that players can select members of an oversight committee.”
New York Times
A Step Toward a Living, Learning Memory Chip
“Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel have demonstrated that neurons cultured outside the brain can be imprinted with multiple rudimentary memories that persist for days without interfering with or wiping out others.”
Scientific American
Notebook Lust: Asus Wooden Laptop Prototypes Give Us Wood
“Asus opened up the doors to the woodshop to make three gorgeous laptops for the Computex Taipei 2007 show. Although company reps say they don’t have any specific plans to actually sell these PCs, they’re part of a skilled design exercise that shows an delicate interplay between craftsmanship and tech.”
Gizmodo
Chargepod Universal Six-Way Charging System Hands-on (Verdict: It Revolutionizes Charging)
“When we first heard about Chargepod’s six-way charging system with its custom adapters and all-in-one body, we were skeptical. Is it really worth the price premium to combine all our gadget charging into one place? After getting our hands on it and testing it out on just about every portable device we have, we’ve come to the conclusion that the Chargepod is the future of gadget charging.”
Gizmodo
Cool Fan with LED Image Display
“Think Geek has a great fan that displays images of your choice with color LED mounted on the rotating blades. The 5MB storage of the fan can store 128 image frames.”
I4U News
A New Display Lengthens Gadget Life
“Clairvoyante announced last month that it was introducing technology that could allow cell-phone, digital-camera, and laptop makers to develop power-saving displays that could dynamically adjust their backlight and color intensity based on the color and brightness of the content.”
Technology Review: A New Display Lengthens Gadget Life
Neural input device hints at gaming revolution
“Destined to radically transform gaming platforms, the prototype from OCZ enables up to 11 signals from an actuator worn around the forehead to be assigned to a specific keystroke or mouse button. The actuator takes its cues from neural signals based on permutations of brain, eye, and facial muscle activity via three sensor pads that rest on the forehead of the user. It takes only minutes to “train” the device which could be on the market as soon as the end of the year.”
gizmag
SpaceTime: 3D Browser Eye Candy
“SpaceTime allows users to map out their browsing progress in a visual timeline, treating each site as an object that can be manipulated and rearranged within the 3D environment. Users can alternate between a 3D and 2D perspective as required. SpaceTimes search functionality loads multiple search results as a stack of separate pages, simultaneously loading 10 results at a time, each in its own window. Users can the flip through results, re-arrange the pages or manipulate them.”
TechCrunch
Digital paper with interactivity and sound
“By combining paper with printed graphic codes and electronically conductive ink that is engineered to be sensitive to pressure. When the paper buttons are touched, the sound is played out via the printed speakers.”
gizmag
Tiny thermoacoustic engines pave the way for screaming gadgets
“a group of grad students led by professor Orest Symko at the University of Utah has unveiled an array of “thermoacoustic” engines that turn heat into sound, which can be directed at a piezoelectric mechanism to produce electricity.”
Engadget
New Service To Create One Of Those Picture-A-Day Movies
“Use the site to take a photo of yourself every day using a connected webcam or camera. Flickaday will organize the photos and will let you publish it as a Flash widget on another website.”
TechCrunch
Ehhhh: Facial Expression Robot Thinks Every Word Means “Creepy”
“The robot was designed to mimic facial expressions to make robots more relatable, and they hope to give him speech capabilities in the future so he can explain why he’s so uncomfortable with the word love.”
Gizmodo
Sony shows off range of enviro-friendly “odo” gear
“Sony’s showing off a whole range of new environmentally-friendly gear in Japan at the moment, all of which can be used without ever having to be plugged in for a recharge. One of the more interesting devices of the lot is the Spin N’ Snap digital camera (pictured below), which you charge up simply by placing your fingers in the two holes (which also double as a viewfinder) and spinning it around a few times.”
Engadget
Canon Creates 50-megapixel Sensor, Introducing New File Format to Hold Pics
“They’ve just created a prototype of a 50-megapixel CMOS sensor that’s twice as sensory as the closest competitor and small enough to fit into DSLRs. Them’s crazy talk.”
Gizmodo
Error-B-Gone: TomTom Go 720 Lets You Improve Maps As You Go
“You can say if a street is blocked (or unblocked), note a change in street’s direction, add a name or rename a street, add a point of interest, or remove or rename an existing point of interest. If there are other changes to be madesay you’ve discovered a new roadyou can report those in to TomTom with the touch of a button.”
Gizmodo
