Archive for April, 2009
Lip-reading computers can recognize different languages
“Researchers at the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia conducted statistical modeling of the lip motions of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers. The languages tested included English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Polish and Russian, and the system was able to identify with very high degree of accuracy which language was spoken by an individual speaker. “This is an exciting advance in automatic lip-reading technology and the first scientific confirmation of something we already intuitively suspected - that when people speak different languages, they use different mouth shapes in different sequences,” said Professor Cox who, along with PhD student Jake Newman, led the team.”
Gizmag
Mapping the World’s Photos: Extensive Flickr Photo Analysis
“For instance, their findings show that the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, which opened in May 2006, is more popular than many other well-known tourist sites such as St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Washington Monument in the US capital. Interesting visualizations include diagrams for Manhattan and the San Francisco Bay area that illustrate the movement of photographers by plotting the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. “The figures are striking in the amount of detail they reveal about these cities. For example, one can clearly see the grid structure of the Manhattan streets, caused by users traveling and taking photos along them. The Brooklyn Bridge, in the lower center of the figure, is clearly visible, as are the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges just to the north. One can even see the route of the ferries that take tourists from Lower Manhattan to the Statue of Liberty”
information aesthetics
Touch Screens with Pop-up Buttons
“The screens are covered in semitransparent latex, which sits on top of an acrylic plate with shaped holes and an air chamber connected to a pump. When the pump is off, the screen is flat; when it’s switched on, the latex forms concave or convex features around the cutouts, depending on negative or positive pressure. To illuminate the screens and give them multitouch capabilities, the researchers use projectors, infrared light, and cameras positioned below the surface. The projectors cast images onto the screens while the cameras sense infrared light scattered by fingers at the surface.”
Technology Review
Megan Fox Esquire Cover Shot In Video, Not Stills
“Rather than click and endless series of stills, photographer Greg Williams shot the cover with the 4K Red ONE video camera. Fox essentially acted out a scene for 10 minutes, the best moment of which will appear on the June 2009 cover. (Not to be wasteful of Megan Fox footage, the video will also be uploaded to Esquire’s site, of course.) It’s fascinating that as digital cameras evolve, so will the roles of photographers, models and publications. I can’t see traditional photography ever dying, but whether photos will always be captured in photographs is another question.”
Gizmodo
G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc
“In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.”
NYTimes.com
Tracking Internet Chatter Helps Spot Swine Flu Outbreak
“Veratect, a Seattle-based biosurveillance startup, claims they alerted the Centers for Disease Control to the situation in Mexico — where health officials suspect swine flu has killed up to 149 people — on April 16, before even the Mexican health authorities declared a problem. How’d they get ahead of the outbreak? By monitoring and analyzing the flow of social media traffic along with more official reports, the company’s CEO said. “We started picking up the early indicators of social disruption, whether it shows up on blogs or Twitter,” said Bob Hart, the CEO of Veratect. “We can pick up the first indicators of behavioral changes”
Wired Science
A New E-Paper Competitor
“In their pixels, the researchers use aluminum layers that reflect light and carbon black ink for a deep black color. First, a polymer layer is patterned with wells that contain the black ink. An aluminum film is deposited on the polymer and topped with an indium tin oxide (ITO) transparent electrode layer. A voltage applied across the aluminum and the ITO electrode pulls the ink out of the well and spreads it over the entire pixel area. The pixels are as small as 100 micrometers wide, giving the display a resolution of 300 dots per inch. This is higher than many e-readers on the market, Heikenfeld says. Putting red, green, and blue color filters on top of each pixel would create color displays.”
Technology Review
Manson MB-1 Guitar Has an Integrated, Touch-Controlled, X-Y MIDI Pad for Effects
“It lets you run any plug-in you want for effects manipulation, and use it to make your shred sessions even more awesome. The video on Music Radar shows how the guitar fundamentally works—strumming out a chord, then hitting the MIDI pad with your fingers alters the sound of the guitar”
Gizmodo
Succeed or Else! Motivates You Through Extortion
“The service works like this: You tell them what you want to accomplish and when you want to have completed your goal. They review your goal and tell you what the “fine” is for not succeeding. You send the site the money they request, and they hold onto it until you reach your agreed upon goal. If you don’t? They keep it.”
Lifehacker
Zappos Launches Realtime Ordering Map
“Want to know what shoes people are buying in Montpelier, Vermont? Then just watch the realtime map on the Zappos website long enough and you just might find out. With this new feature, the popular online retailer is giving consumers even more reason to keep up with the Joneses, as users are granted the ability to zero in on their home towns and wait to see what items pop up.”
PSFK.com
TuneGlue°
“Explore relationships between music genres and artists using TuneGlue° by Onyro. This sort of visualisation/explorer has been done a lot before, but this is a really nice, intuitive execution. Lovely stuff.”
FormFiftyFive
AlloSphere: Interpret Scientific Data in a 3 Story High Metal Sphere
“Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara, demos the AlloSphere [ucsb.edu] at a TED talk, and show an entirely new way to see and interpret scientific data, in full color and surround sound inside a 3-story high, massive metal sphere.”
information aesthetics
Amazing 3D immersion technology
“The cave (or iCube, as we’re told they would prefer we call it) is comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames. The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.”
IDEO Labs
Virtual jogging through Google Maps mashup
“Created by software engineer Ryo Katsuma, Tokyo Jogging functions much like Wii Sports Jogging. Users begin by downloading free server software from the site. They then connect their Wiimote to Google Maps’ Street View, and hold the Wiimote while jogging in place in front of their computer. Google’s Street View guides them along the streets of Tokyo, giving the impression of a brisk jog through the city.”
Springwise
Unlocking online assets in event of death
“Legacy Locker lets people store details for every online account they use, from Gmail and Facebook to eBay and PayPal. They can assign different digital assets to different beneficiaries, who are entrusted with access details in the event of the customer’s death or disability. Users can also prepare letters for the loved ones to whom they’ve entrusted their accounts. Legacy Locker, which launched last week, uses a multi-step verification process to ensure that the digital assets are as secure as a real safety deposit box.”
Springwise
Synchronous Objects
“This project aims to create a large set of data visualization tools for understanding and analyzing the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of William Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing, reproduced” (2000). These systems were quantified through the collection of data and transformed into a series of objects – synchronous objects – that work in harmony to explore those choreographic structures, reveal their patterns, and re-imagine what else they might look like.”
Synchronous Objects
Narratives 2.0
“Narrative 2.0 visualises music. The different music tracks were segmented into single channels. These channels are shown in a fanlike structure where lines move away from the centre with the flow of time. The angle of the line changes according to the volume, and when reaching a higher level, the channel becomes highlighted in orange. The visualisation does not necessarily return exact information, however, the order and uniformity of the song can still be perceived”
visualcomplexity.com
BBC airs its first Creative Commons licensed TV show
“For now, the experiment is extremely limited. A single program, called R&D TV, will be released for download to anyone, regardless of whether they’re located in the UK or not. So far, only one episode is done, and a second is in the works; more may be made if these prove to be reasonably popular. Episode one can be downloaded from a BBC FTP server, where Flash, Quicktime, and Ogg versions are available, either as a five minute series of excerpts or in its full, half hour glory. […] But it’s not so much the ready availability of this material that makes it a bold step forward, but the license under which it’s released: the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license, v2. As the accompanying Read Me file (complete with the old-school ASCII BBC logo) says, “you can watch, rip, redistribute and remix all the contents of this package.” As long as you don’t try making money from the videos, you’re set.”
Boing Boing
Woman to publish book of e-mails sent to dead husband
“Although the couple used to talk of visiting foreign countries when they got older, Motoo’s death put an end to their plans. Overwhelmed by her sense of loss, Fukuda began sending messages to her husband’s cell phone. […] On sleepless nights and mornings, she continued sending the messages. Every time she did, his cell phone she had placed in front of his portrait vibrated as if her message had reached him. “My heart aches every time I remember your illness, and I feel like I’m getting sick. But it’s okay. If I die, I can be with you sooner.” The message was sent on Dec. 30. Her message on Jan. 1 read, “I don’t have that much time left, so I want to live more positively and freely.” Fukuda has never forgotten to charge her husband’s cell phone. But one concern is that the messages received on his phone will eventually disappear as new ones come in. Hoping to keep them as a record, she has compiled about 50 messages and a written memoir about the days they spent together.”
Asia Daily News Online
Kyocera’s flexible, folding phone concept
“Appealing to our haptic senses, a soft, semi-rigid polymer skin surrounds a flexible OLED display. The metaphor of a “living” skin was used for its notions of protection and constant evolution, providing a heightened user experience. Shape memory allows keys to morph up from its surface when needed and fade away when not in use. The flexibility of the screen allows for greater adaptability of form and interaction – it maintains a compact shape (the size of a small wallet) for simple phone calls, and unfolds to reveal a large widescreen display.”
Core77
Mapping the Geography of Cultural Buzz in LA and NY
“Elizabeth Currid from University of Southern California
and Sarah Williams from Columbia University, have surveyed about 300,000 snapshots taken by the photo agency Getty Images at more than 6,000 parties, openings and premieres in 2006 and 2007 and conducted GIS and spatial statistics, to analyze macro geographical patterns to map the cultural epicenters of Los Angeles and New York. The resulting maps show the density of different types of cultural events in New York and Los Angeles. The researchers quickly found clusters around celebrated locations: the Kodak Theater, where the Oscars are held, for example, or Times Square.”
information aesthetics
A Clever Use for Baby Snapshots
“Baby Steps is a computer program that collects and organizes photos and other information on a child in a virtual baby book and baby calendar. Importantly, the software also encourages parents to record key developmental milestones–significant moments in the first five years of life, such as a baby’s first step, first word and the like. Parents can also use the software to send customized newsletters to friends and family.”
Technology Review
tweenbots
“Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.”
kacie kinzer
On the Lookout, With a Digital Security Camera
“The camera, the Digital Window D7, uses five 1.3 megapixel sensors just like the ones in camera phones, each aimed at its slice of the total view. Ingenious programs and a controller chip synchronize the five images as they are received, stitching them simultaneously into a panoramic stream that transmits at 15 frames a second. To be released this year, and to be sold for about $800, the camera is a good example of what’s ahead in the field of computational photography, said Paul Worthington, a senior analyst at Future Image, a consulting firm in San Mateo, Calif. Computational photography, he said, draws on the power of computer software and processing to extend the capabilities of digital imaging.”
NYTimes.com
Troika: Smart, Multifunctional Identity Card of the Future?
“Made of lightweight aluminum, the Troika card is durable but also flexible. A multifunctional screen allows users to switch between driver’s license, passport, and Social Security card. Thumbprint identification serves as protection against identity theft. “By combining the familiarity and proportions of a standard ID card with the durability of a water-resistant, flexible screen and the security of biometrics, [a card like this] could revolutionize the future of identification,” Richardson says.”
Design Mind
GPS-Enabled Inhalers Help Doctors Pinpoint Asthma Triggers and Causes
“With this technology, every time asthmatics use their rescue inhalers, the inhalers—with built-in GPS—will be able to pinpoint exactly where they are. This lets doctors and researchers know where to study, allowing them to detect what is triggering the attacks and possibly even uncovering why people suffer from the lung disease in the first place. So basically, frequent asthma attacks at a local park could mean an excess of allergens and pet dander.”
Gizmodo
3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix
“The ceramic printing follows from Utela’s work. Three-dimensional printing was already possible for engineering-grade ceramics that have high firing temperatures. This is one of the first 3-D printers to use artist-grade ceramics, which fire at lower temperatures. Creating the actual formulas was a process of experimentation and sometimes trial and error. Graduate student Ian Blanch spent six months perfecting the procedures and formula for a single powder-and-binder combination, Ganter said. Much progress has been made since then, and the team continues to experiment with new materials, including rice flour”
Science Daily
MOY concept car by Elvis Tomljenovic
“The idea behind MOY koncept is that everyone can design their own car on their own computer and then apply the design to the vehicle using wireless data transfer or share it with other people through web-site, forum, e-mail etc. To those who lack the necessary skills or time to create their own design, we offer the option of downloading ready made designs. The vehicles are interconnected, so the change is possibble in motion. Movement recognition technology enables us to draw on the car in real time. Since MOY can display both static images and videos, it can be used as a new medium of promotion.”
Core77
Sweet Dreams Gradually Lowers Your System Volume on a Schedule
“I’m sure it works for other purposes, but this is the most obvious use I can think of—and a use that I personally love. Anyone in the habit of going to sleep to the sweet sounds of their iTunes library has probably also woken up at some point during the night to a not-so-sweet sound from your computer. With Sweet Dreams, just set the timer based on the total duration of the fade, how long you’d like it to wait before it starts reducing your volume, and the baseline volume that you’re aiming for.”
Lifehacker
The Vending Machine That Sells Luxury Cars
“The fancy retail machine, called a Semi-Automatic stocks a list of over the top items including golden handcuffs, land and condos. For anything that can’t fit inside the vast, auto-mat-like contraption, customers trade in a voucher at the front desk to receive their goods. Though the ultra high-end nature of this machine is a bit questionable and gimmicky, the concept behind it is interesting.”
PSFK.com
Visible Energy UFO Power Strip Gets Its Commands From Your iPhone
“The UFO features four color-coded outlets, a lidded bowl on top to store your gadgets (or chips—whichever you prefer) and a festive color changing light that visually reminds you about how much power you are currently using. The device itself has no switches—instead, the unit is controlled via the iPhone using a free app. It allows you to turn each of the four outlets on or off as well as monitor your power consumption remotely.”
Gizmodo
Riiflex Dumbbells for Wii Fit Get Priced
“The Riiflex Dumbbells will be sold in pairs to start with, at a price of $34.95 for a set of two, two-pound weights that fit both controllers. A pair of 4-pound weights will also be available for $39.95 per set. The two-pound weight set will ship this summer with the ship date for the four pound set coming later.”
Gizmodo
SickCity: Realtime Disease Detection at the Local Level
“SickCity provides realtime disease detection capabilities at the local level by mining popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to find key words such as flu, fever or chicken pox that indicate that an individual is ill, under the guise that increasingly people are turning to these networks to tell their friends how they’re feeling. The results are then plotted on chart showing 30-day trends for a particular city, giving a snapshot of the overall health of a localized population. A sudden spike in sickness can provide an early warning to health officials that action needs to be taken, perhaps preventing a widespread outbreak.”
PSFK.com
Zooming In On ClosR And Zoomorama
“Both ClosR and Zoomorama enable you to upload images and transform them into zoomable widgets, which comes in handy when you need to embed or share very large, high-resolution images.”
TechCrunch
A Hybrid Nano-Energy Harvester
“Now researchers have combined a nanogenerator with a solar cell to create an integrated mechanical- and solar-energy-harvesting device. This hybrid generator is the first of its kind and might be used, for instance, to power airplane sensors by capturing sunlight as well as engine vibrations.”
Technology Review
No Doubt’s premium concert tickets come with free love
“No Doubt is giving away a free download of its entire digital audio catalogue, comprising more than 80 songs from the band’s seven studio albums. Tickets for the tour, which kicks off May 2 in Atlantic City, went on sale earlier this month, and pricing varies with the venue. The free download offer applies only to top-ticket price levels, however—those priced higher than USD 42.50 before applicable ticketing-related fees. In addition to the band’s past songs, the download will also include “Stand and Deliver,” a brand-new song that will be performed for the first time in May.”
Springwise
Hitomebo GPS Cellphone App Allows You To Record Where You Spot Hot People
“So, if one guy spots a hot girl sitting on the subway he records it. If the girl spots him and records that she thinks he’s hot then, by God, we have a match. It can also let you know if someone else is making a play for your lady. Apparently, entering in characteristics allows you to identify one another and it will send a notification to both phones to open up lines of sexy communication.”
Gizmodo
BackType Connect For WordPress Brings The Web’s Conversation To Your Blog
“Today BackType has launched a new WordPress plugin that allows bloggers to integrate BackType Connect functionality into all of their posts. This means that every relevant comment from FriendFeed, Reddit, Digg, Twitter, and even comments from other blogs that link to the original post can be automatically imported, allowing readers to follow the conversation on your blog no matter where it is taking place on the web.”
Gizmodo
Range Rover 2010′s 12-inch Dual View Touchscreen Satisfies Two People at Once
“The 510 HP 2010 Range Rover will have a dual view touchscreen, meaning the driver and passenger sees two different images based on their respective angles. This seems like one of the first (if not the first) production vehicles to incorporate dual view, and allows the driver to use the GPS while the front passenger checks out a movie.”
Gizmodo
With Online Tools, Lost-and-Found Gets an Upgrade
“Ernesto Alonso, the terminal operations agent in charge of the service, has used Google and the online White Pages to return a laptop to a traveler from Australia, a locker full of satellite equipment to a company in Washington, and an urn of human remains to a cemetery in New Jersey. (A family member of the deceased had inexplicably left the urn on top of a trash can at a departure gate.) “We used to return about 30 percent of the items we got,” Mr. Alonso said. “With the Internet available to us, that total number is now over half, and you have to remember that a lot of the other stuff we get is junk.”
NYTimes.com
SLAP Widgets: virtual controls you can touch
“SLAP Widgets are real live plastic and silicone objects that are used in conjunction with a multi-touch table to allow users to control interface values through physical push buttons, sliders, knobs, keypads and keyboards. When a widget is placed atop the surface projection, a camera can read markers located underneath it in order to identify and locate where it is. The system then projects a contextually appropriate virtual control (such as a color-coded button, slider, dial locations or querty keyboard) onto the surface, and the clear plastic widget comes to life with the bright, animated forms that appear illuminated on the screen underneath it.”
Core77
Intelligent car door clams up when danger’s about
“The current prototype looks like a normal car door, but an extra metal bar runs through its centre and connects to the car’s frame between the hinges. In normal mode, the bar moves freely and doesn’t affect the door’s movement. However, if sensors detect a nearby obstacle at the same time as an accelerometer detects an attempt to open the door, the door’s swing is restricted by a linear motor attached to the bar. To pass on more information to the user, the amount of door resistance is in proportion to the proximity of an object – for example, you might swing a door halfway open without problems before it gets stiffer as it nears a lamp post.”
New Scientist
Video: NanoCamo Is the Next Small Thing in Fashion
“By using specially-designed proteins as nanomotors, Sandia National Laboratory researchers have created a system that can assemble quantum dots into bright, fluorescent rings. In this video, you can watch the formation of those rings, which are about five microns across, less than a tenth of the width of a human hair. If these quantum dots were embedded on the surface of an object, the formation of the rings would cause the object to change color to the naked eye. Reverse the process and the color would change back. That raises the possibility of fast color changes of the sort that some animals use to blend in with their environments. ”
Wired.com
Experts begin to translate over 10,000 Arabic inscriptions adorning walls of Alhambra palace in Granada
“The intricate Arabic inscriptions carved into the ceilings, columns and walls inside the imposing hill-top fortress have long fascinated visitors. They contain everything from snatches of poetry and verses from the Qur’an to clever aphorisms, pious wishes and boastful slogans. There are so many of them, however, that nobody has ever managed to study each and every one. Now a team of researchers armed with 3D laser scanners and digital imaging software is slowly working its way around the complex recording, transcribing and translating every inscription.”
The Guardian
Graffiti for Wii Video Shows 100% Silly Fun, 0% Mess – Wii Spray
“You can pick colors pointing at patches, and even use stencils.”
Gizmodo
OECD eXplorer: Online Tool for Analyzing Regional Statistics
“The new online geographic visualization is unique because of its focus on regional and states (versus national) statistical data, its large amount of features (from the choice of the color scale to deciding a percentile or uniform distribution) and its slick visual design. The data is based on OECD Regional Database, containing 30 indicators measuring demography, economic and labour market performance, education, healthcare, environmental outputs and knowledge-based activities.”
information aesthetics
Google Makes It Easy for Blind to Dial on Touschscreens
“Instead of making the user find the right place to press their finger, the engineers made the software find the user’s finger. Wherever the user touches when dialing becomes 5, and from here things are pretty obvious. Swipe up for 2, down for 8 and way down for 0.”
Gizmodo
Honda’s Brain-Machine Interface: controlling robots by thoughts alone
“Wearing a headset containing both electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) sensors, the user simply imagines moving either his right hand, left hand, tongue or feet – and ASIMO makes a corresponding movement. The system is still huge and slow, and the commands are quite crude and imprecise – but Honda’s baby steps represent a huge leap in technology. The next step is to refine the system to work with fine motor controls, add the ability to decode non-motor brain signals and speed it all up.”
Gizmag
Implantable Telescope for the Eye
“A miniature telescope implanted into the eye improves vision in people with macular degeneration. The four-millimeter-long implant contains two wide-angle glass lenses, which magnify images onto the retina.”
Technology Review
The SpiderMac Desktop
“Reader zackshackleton’s desktop takes a comic book panel and blends system stats into text bubbles, adding a useful touch to a really fun desktop.”
Lifehacker
Electronic business card forges online connections
“The MingleStick is a single-button device with an infrared sensor on one end and a capped USB connector on the other. When two users meet, they both point their MingleSticks at each other and click the button to create a successful connection, which is indicated by a small green light. At the end of the day, they can each plug their device into their computer; the Mingle360 website automatically launches and they can log into their account to view the connections they made that day. Address book, calendar, messaging, group organization and content sharing features are all available through the company’s MingleManager application, as are privacy controls that let the user decide how much information to share with each new acquaintance.”
Springwise
Fabien Nauroy’s concept phone: Now that’s an iPhone killer
“Parisian ID student Fabien Nauroy’s Nokia concept phone looks pretty killer. The dual-orientation phone would have a pull-out LED screen so you could pass a photo around the old-fashioned way.”
Core77
Clear Spot Portable WiMax Wi-Fi Hotspot – Clearwire clear spot
“I tested it on the outskirts of Portland, at a Burgerville right off of I-5 in Vancouver, WA, essentially becoming a totally unwired, totally portable wireless hotspot for anybody with a computer or smartphone in the vicinity. Anyone can see the hotspot itself, as it has a standard Wi-Fi SSID, but once on, you have to enter a password, like you do in hotels or airports where the Wi-Fi network itself is technically public. I can’t make enough of the experience, and how much it could change businesses, sales forces or mobile bloggin’ teams like Gizmodo. You don’t even have to be plugged in, you can just all hop on and work as usual for up to four hours, more if you can find an electric socket.”
Gizmodo
eyePlorer: Explore and Process Search Knowledge from Wikipedia
“Keywords related to a user-chosen topic are placed in a circle, which once selected, reveals the nature of the relationship. The granularity of these keywords can be tweaked by a zoom slider at the bottom, and double-clicking a keyword reveals the relationships with its neighbors by connecting lines. Keywords can also be combined as multi-faceted queries by simpe drag and drop actions, and knowledge stores by dragging keywords to the notebook on the right.”
information aesthetics
Tinker Gives Twitter Its Long Awaited Events Firehose
“There have been a number of sites that have offered one-off Twitter pages for events, like the Presidential election and The Oscars. These are great, but there still hasn’t been an easy way to create similar pages for smaller events or breaking news stories. Tinker solves this problem, allowing users to build these pages in seconds. And it’s very well done, with a polished intuitive interface that may well make the site the de facto standard for Twitter events. At a high level, each Tinker event can be described as a persistent search for multiple keywords on Twitter. Each Event is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and presents in a single stream. For example, a Tinker Event for March Madness might present tweets that included the terms ‘NCAA’, ‘Basketball’, and ‘Final Four’.”
TechCrunch
