Archive for May, 2009
Cellular Counter Brings Computer Programming to Life
“In an essential step toward programming cells as precisely as computers, synthetic biologists have finally learned to count. By linking a series of protein switches, researchers made prototype cell-level counters that could eventually be used to coordinate complex sets of genetic instructions running on biomolecular machines, from disease-hunting cells to intracellular computing networks. In the electronic world, basic counting functions underlie even the most powerful supercomputers.”
Wired.com
Introducing Typekit
“We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts.”
The Typekit Blog
Immersion’s New Haptic Touchscreen Tech Encourages Corny iPhone Romance
“Immersive Messaging, on the other hand, is a cornball idea that’s essentially text messaging gussied up with haptic feedback: You can send a heart design to your significant other, and he or she can feel it “beating,” which kind of sounds more scary than romantic to me. They dub such icons “Hapticons.” Even further, they announced “Twiddling,” which is essentially a separate app in which two people can “feel” each other through haptic feedback on their iPhones.”
Gizmodo
Electrolux Rendez-Vous: the kitchen table becomes the table kitchen
“The key to this concept design is its “energy shield” top which would transmit power wirelessly to any electrical appliance, so there’s no need to plug in your blender, toaster, or your mobile phone. The top also integrates an inductive cooking system across its whole surface that uses sensors to detect where a pan is placed so that any part of the table can become a hot-plate.”
Gizmag
Finally, Zensify’s iPhone app shows key word trends across your social graph
“…what sets Zensify apart is that it shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow. I’ve been wanting something similar for a while and I’m not alone. David Winer recently Tweeted: “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this. And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds.”
TechCrunch
Sensaris Lets You Wear the Air Quality on Your Sleeve
“Their GPS-equipped sensor gives you real-time air quality information including CO2 and ozone levels for wherever you are and then uses Bluetooth technology to transmit that information to a publicly available database where it’s mapped along with data from other sensors for the world to see.”
EcoGeek
In-Formed: Embedding Statistical Data into Everyday Household Objects
“”Caloric Consumption” shows the caloric consumption per capita in various countries and regions visualized on a plate and fork. The information allows for the comparison of one’s cultural eating habits with those from the rest of the world. For instance, the surface area of each of these plates is scaled in proportion to the amount of food consumed by the people who live in the region depicted on the plate. Each prong on the fork represents a different countries caloric intake per capita. “Water Usage” is a water faucet that shows the relative amount of water consumed each time the faucet is used. “Waste Production” consists of waste bin that measures the personal or household waste in terms of its weight in pounds. The weight of the garbage changes the angle of the waste bin, making it less inviting and giving one a visual cue as to how much trash has been thrown away.”
information aesthetics
Obama One People: Revealing the Emotional Flow of the Presidential Inauguration
“The map of Washington, D.C. is overlaid with a 3D color-coded animated surface of square tiles (1 tile represents an area of 150 x 150 meters). Each tile rises and turns red as call activity increases and likewise drops and turns yellow as activity decreases. On the left, a bar chart breaks down the call activity by showing the normalized contributions of calls from the 50 states and 138 foreign countries grouped by continent. The timeline at the bottom illustrates the overall trend of call activity in the city during the week of the Presidential Inauguration.”
information aesthetics
An ionic wind to cool laptops may blow fans away
“The Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) ionic wind pump technique involves applying a voltage to an electrode, which produces a high intensity electric field. Air molecules surrounding the electrode tip ionize and as they move from the corona electrode to the collector electrode, they collide with neutral air molecules and their momentum pushes these neutral air molecules across a hot spot, cooling it down. Such ionic-cooling systems have been demonstrated in research labs before, but Tessera is the first to test the technology inside a working laptop by replacing the standard rotary fans with EHD blowers.”
Gizmag
Time Bomb – Interactive Graffiti
“The final installation will feature two giant graffiti walls suspended in the museum. One wall will be the real painting, the other a projected film double. The visitors’ physical movements in the museum can then control this film, going backwards in time, revealing the now-covered layers of graffiti.”
StupidKrap & Holler
Gov’t to track citizens, prevent pandemic
“Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications hopes to find out this autumn by testing a mobile phone-based GPS tracking system that constantly monitors each individual’s location and sends text alerts to participants if they cross paths with anyone who is later identified as a flu victim. The proposed system relies on mobile phone providers to constantly track the subjects’ geographical locations and keep chronological records of their movements in a database. When a person is labeled as “infected,” all the past location data in the database is analyzed to determine whether or not anyone came within close proximity to the infected individual.”
Pink Tentacle
data.gov is Live
“”The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government“. However, while this means that the data has finally become freely available, it is certainly not yet accessible or even understandable for lay people. The huge homepage banner “Discover. Participate. Engage.” therefore seems a bit hollow, as long as there are no interfaces and visualizations to really allow the general audience to explore the knowledge and insights hidden within. We are therefore all curious when and what online data visualizations will soon exploit this opportunity to bring data closer to people!”
information aesthetics
Computer memory to last a billion years
“We have developed a new mechanism for digital memory storage with the potential to store data with both long lifetime and high density. Our memory device consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle enclosed in a multiwalled carbon nanotube. The nanotube can be reversibly moved through the nanotube by applying a low voltage, “writing” the device to a binary state represented by the position of the nanoparticle. The state of the device can then be subsequently read by a simple resistance measurement.”
Futurismic
MIT’s futuristic, networked bus stop design
“Riders can plan a bus trip on an interactive map, surf the Web, monitor their real-time exposure to pollutants and use their mobile devices as an interface with the bus shelter. They can also post ads and community announcements to an electronic bulletin board at the bus stop, enhancing the EyeStop’s functionality as a community gathering space.”
Boing Boing
Companies Want to Monitor Workers on Social Networks
“The professional services firm found that 60 percent of the executives interviewed believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organizations. Employees, on the other hand, bristle at the thought that employers would monitor their online activity. Overall, about 53 percent say their social networking activities should not be any concern of their employer, although about 74 percent recognize that social networks make it easier to damage a company’s reputation”
BusinessWeek
BlueGuard Opens Doors When You Get Within Bluetooth Range
“The $200 unit detects up to 10 separate cellphones at up to 33 feet (standard low-power Bluetooth range), and hooks up to the door-opening system to enable you to get hands-free entrance. The site says this is more of an industrial use, and attaches to “gates, overhead doors and parking barriers,” so it’s less of you getting into your home.”
Gizmodo
Smart thermostat is always online
“Installation involves hooking up the device to a customer’s existing wifi network and then registering it online, so that users can log in to Ecobee’s portal and control their thermostat from wherever they can access the web. While regular programmable thermostats stick to fixed routines, Ecobee’s online access means that users have flexible control over home heating and cooling, adjusting as needed if they’ll be home earlier or later than expected.”
Springwise
All your movies on a single DVD
“Discs currently have three spatial dimensions. By using gold nanorods Gu and colleagues were able to add two additional dimensions, one based on the colour spectrum, and the other on polarisation. Because nanoparticles react to light depending on their shape, it was possible to record information in a range of different colour’s wavelengths at the same physical location on the disc. Current DVDs record in a single colour wavelength using a laser. The fifth dimension was made possible by polarisation. When light waves were projected onto the disc, the direction of the electric field within the waves aligned with the gold nanorods.”
News.com.au
Spezify: An Inspirational Visual Presentation of Search Results
“The new visual search engine Spezify [spezify.com] collects search results in different media formats (e.g. definitions, images, Twitter messages, Flickr photos, quotes, wikipedia articles, …), arranges them on a desktop and allows one to drag it around as an (almost) infinite collage. Not sure of the visualization rules behind the layout. The search for infosthetics is interesting, but is it insightful? ”
information aesthetics
E&S’ 8K Laser Projectors Also Display 3D Content in HD
“Different from other lamp-drive projectors, the ESLP 8K laser projector displays quality that is apparently sixteen times 1080p HD resolution, with a 200% wider color spectrum, smoother playback and a miniscule environmental footprint. This laser projector is also the first one to display 3D content in 4K x 4K resolution, using only a single projector.”
Gizmodo
iRobot’s Tiny Ember Robots Scout Terrains in Swarms
“A tiny version of iRobot’s Packbot reconnaissance machine, the Ember, was made to scout hostile environments in swarms, compiling feedback from multiple machines instead of risking a single, bigger robot for the mission. The Embers, which are around the size of a paperback book, are said to weigh less than a pound and are also equipped with built-in cameras and side flippers to help them vault over any obstacles they might encounter in the field.”
Gizmodo
Sharp launches first notebook PC with optical sensor LCD pad
“According to Sharp, a pen can be used to input drawings and text, while finger gestures on the LCD pad can enlarge, shrink or rotate items on the notebook screen – all in addition to the conventional ways a mouse is used. Users can sign their name to a photo before emailing it, for instance; or they can use two fingers to zoom in and out of internet websites to adjust them for the best view.”
Gizmag
New Phosphor Watches Feature Curved E-Ink Displays and Non-Nerdy Style
“Much less conservative than Phosphor’s previous line, these watches have a cool kind of bold newsprint look to them, really using the retro-future style of e-ink at its best. They might be clunky on someone with svelte, girlish wrists (stop looking at my wrists), but if you like that oversized trend, these are worth a look.”
Gizmodo
Glympse: A Hassle And Worry-Free Way To Share Your Location, Minus The Social Network
“Glympse takes a different approach, instead asking you to create temporary connections with other people that last for a maximum of four hours. The service doesn’t have any concept of long-time friends – you establish a connection, and it’s gone four hours (or less) later.”
Techcrunch
Demy digital recipe reader puts a world of dishes at your fingertips
“Looks like the Key Ingredient Corporation is looking to be to recipes what Apple is to music. Instead of iTunes, it has the keyingredient.com website that lets people either share recipes publicly or store them privately and, instead of an iPod, it has the Demy – a digital recipe reader – with 7-inch touchscreen and “kitchen safe” casing – that syncs with your online Key Ingredient account.”
Gizmag
Swine Flu Cases Map
“Tracking Swine Flu Cases Worldwide”
NYTimes.com
Electricity to power ‘smart grid’
“Smart grids would allow devices to communicate with utility firms to give an accurate view of energy use that could cut CO2 emissions by 211m tonnes. Cisco believes the market could be worth up to $20bn a year. The basic premise is to link different parts of the electrical grid – from a single home to the largest of power stations – using a customised network based on internet protocol (IP).”
BBC NEWS
Web Stats as a Populated CityScape: VisitorVille
“VistorVille is a city based visualisation program for your webstats, each building represents a web page; each bus a search engine; and each animated character a visitor to the site”
Digital Urban
Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price
“In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.”
NYTimes.com
Graph of how #topics get played out on Twitter
“From The Guardian’s Meg Pickard, a graph that “compares ‘people talking about #topic’ and ‘people talking about talking about #topic’. Outside of Twitter, this applies to pretty much any popular newsworthy topic…the news quickly moves from ‘we’re telling you about Topic X’ to media coverage of the media coverage of Topic X.”
Boing Boing
Sigh Collector
“These are instructions for building a home monitoring system that measures and ‘collects’ sighs. The result is a physical visualization of the amount of sighing, for personal use in a domestic environment. The project is in two parts. The first part is a stationary unit, which inflates a large red air bladder upon receiving the appropriate signal. The second part is a mobile unit, worn by the user, which monitors breathing (via a chest strap) and communicates a signal to the stationary unit wirelessly when a sigh is detected.”
Make
ColoRotate
“ColoRotate has an intuitive interface that eliminates the need to memorize or jot down color combinations or numbers. Indeed, you can traverse across an open three-dimensional color space and choose (or design) the color palette that fits your needs. In the process, you can uncover color relationships that give your designs an aesthetic balance that will please the most discriminating eye.”
ColoRotate
Samsung Micro-Shutter Means Better Phone Cameras, Someday
“Most phone cameras don’t have shutters for the simple reason that there isn’t any room. Instead of relying on a traditional shutter exposure system, the tiny sensors simply activate for short periods of time, “scanning” a scene and returning a passable, if often blurry, image. That’s fine for certain uses, but makes capturing moving objects or shooting in low light nigh-on impossible. In an effort to sidestep these concerns altogether, Samsung is developing a micro-shutter, built with 36 pieces of curled film that can be opened or close by applying or withdrawing an electrical charge. The concept is just 2.2mm wide and easily compact enough for use in cellphones.”
Gizmodo
Tiny Machine Commands a Swarm of Bacteria
“The sensor meanwhile detects surrounding pH levels–the higher the pH concentration, the faster the electromagnetic pulses emitted by the micro-machine. The external computer uses these signals to direct a swarm of about 3,000 magnetically-sensitive bacteria, which push the micro-machine around as it pulses. The bacteria push the micro-machine closer to the higher pH concentrations and change its direction if it pulses too slowly. This is more practical than trying to attach the bacteria onto the micro-machines, says Martel, since the bacteria only have a lifespan of a few hours. “It’s like having a propulsion engine on demand,” he says.”
Technology Review
Effortless podcasting on iPhone with Audioboo
“Record iPhone audio directly to the cloud with the intuitive Audioboo app and have it automatically update facebook, twitter, and iTunes for effortless podcasting fun.”
Make
BBC Blast Studio
“Take the controls of a series of custom-built real world devices in this real time interaction experiment from BBC Blast. In this collaborative installation, visitors to the site can trigger sounds and lights and paint in real time to name just two of the pieces.”
FormFiftyFive
Subway Sparklines: Ridership of New York Subway Stations since 1905
“Each station is represented as a separate sparkline, located on the New York city map. The general idea it that the history of subway ridership tells a story about the history of a neighborhood that is much richer than the overall trend. An example shows the comeback of inner Williamsburg, and how the growth decays at each successive stop away from Manhattan on the L train.”
information aesthetics
Fake Txt’n'Walk iPhone App Is Now Real Email ‘N Walk iPhone App
“Remember Txt’n'Walk, the April Fool’s Day iPhone app that lets you see where you’re going? Well, Phase2 Media just released Email ‘n Walk, for free at the iTunes App Store. As you can see in the top shot, it’s a beautiful email implementation of the same idea, more attractive, in fact, than the Pocket-Lint gag app”
Gizmodo
Job applications in 140 characters or less
“Utrecht-based Energize is looking to hire an account manager and a strategic planner, and has designed an application form that looks exactly like a page on Twitter, including an empty text field. Candidates enter a short message—their “twillicitatie”, or twapplication—describing why they’re the person for the job, plus their email address and Twitter username. Uploading a resume is optional. For privacy reasons, Energize won’t publicly tweet the applicant’s message. While it might seem like a gimmicky way to recruit new staff members, the process highlights that Energize is looking for people who actively use social media. More importantly, by forcing them to be both engaging and succinct, it’s the perfect way to test a candidate’s writing skills.”
Springwise
Pics of real haircuts help consumers find a salon
“For those looking to get a new haircut, MopShots offers an online lookbook of real cuts on real people, with details on the salons that created them. Snapshots can be submitted by anyone (including hairstylists showing off their latest work), but not every photo is accepted. Before being featured on MopShots, photos are approved by the website’s ‘Dictators’—a group of 25 fashion bloggers, stylists and tastemakers. Engaging users as they contribute, and commenting on each cut, the Dictators look for models with character rather than ones cut from a glamour magazine. MopShots stresses that its curators aren’t sponsored by hairdressers or hair product companies.”
Springwise
Is that your power plant on my roof?
“Duke will own the solar panels and the electricity they produce. Property owners will get a nominal but so far undetermined rental fee, says Duke spokesman David Scanzoni. More than 500 businesses and homeowners have registered to be considered. “Very few are interested in it for the money,” he said. “No one will get rich doing this.” It’s the first time, as far as we know, that a utility has put part of its power-generating equipment on the homes of residential customers. A similar program in California places photovoltaic panels on commercial customers’ rooftops.”
Scientific American Blog
Pencasts let you spruce up your website with a few doodles
“That’s the reasoning behind Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen, a computer in the shape of a pen that not only digitally captures handwriting, but simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing to create what it calls “pencasts”. Now Livescribe is taking pencasts to the next level with a social media tool that enables them to be embedded within any website or blog. Pencasts take the form of interactive Flash videos that allow you to share notes, ideas, drawings and conversations from pen and paper with anyone who has a Flash player installed in their browser.”
Gizmag
Wearable Sensors Watch Workers
“The researchers outfitted workers in a Rhode Island call center with a wearable sensor pack that records details of social interactions. They discovered that those employees who had in-person conversations with coworkers throughout the day also tended to be more productive. The results aren’t yet published, but they support research published last December by the same team. This study showed that employees at an IT company who completed tasks within a tight-knit group that communicated face to face were about 30 percent more productive than those who did not communicate in a face-to-face network.”
Technology Review
New Panasonic floor-cleaning ‘bot: There ain’t enough Roomba in this town for the both of us
“Panasonic recently devised a new form factor for a floor-cleaning robot: Rather than a wheeled disc, this one crawls around on the floor like an inchworm, picking up dirt with its “super-absorbent nanofiber cloth” skin. Called the Fukitorimushi, or “wipe-up bug,” the device provides feedback by activating a Cylon-like red light when it detects dirt, so you know when it’s working. Because otherwise, as you can see in this video, it’s not very clear it’s doing anything at all.”
Core77
Geckos could hold the key to next-gen lenses
“The helmet gecko – a nocturnal lizard – is among a few living creatures that can see colors at night. The trick to this unique characteristic is a series of distinct concentric zones of different refractive powers, according to a recent study published by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. The research team hopes these studies may provide insight into creating better cameras and contact lenses.”
Gizmag
Cutting-Edge Robots Show Off in Japan
“Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania will present the latest version of RiSE, a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole. RiSE V3 was designed and built at Boston Dynamics–the company behind the four-legged military robot BigDog. It has four legs, and tiny claws made from surgical needles that can dig into a vertical surface. The robot’s front legs are long enough to hug a telephone pole, and it can climb at 21 centimeters per second.”
Technology Review
Analog and Digital Collide in a Burst of Text and LEDs at the ITP Spring 2009 Show
“Enabling a sort of virtual graffiti, Mitch Said’s Street Forms allows users to write on the Google Street View images for any available address. I’ve always wanted an Invader to call our own so I drew one next to the front door of CH HQ.”
Cool Hunting
SimMan 3G Patient Simulator Is One Creepy Way to Learn Medicine
“The SimMan 3G is a robot that can cry, bleed, convulse, go into cardiac arrest and do any number of other things that humans do when their bodies are malfunctioning.”
Gizmodo
Stretchable Displays
“Takao Someya, an electrical-engineering professor, and his colleagues make a stretchable display by connecting organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic transistors with a new rubbery conductor. The researchers can spread the display over a curved surface without affecting performance. The display can also be folded in half or crumpled up without incurring any damage.”
Technology Review
Foliage Field Guides for Cellphones
“THE traditional way to identify an unfamiliar tree is to pull out a field guide and search its pages for a matching description. One day people may pull out a smartphone instead, photographing a leaf from the mystery tree and then having the phone search for matching images in a database. A team of researchers financed by the National Science Foundation has created just such a device — a hand-held electronic field guide that identifies tree species based on the shape of their leaves, said Peter N. Belhumeur, a professor of computer science at Columbia and a member of the team.”
NYTimes.com
Color E-Paper That Rivals the Real Thing
“Color displays normally require four subpixels–red, green, blue, and white–to create each full-color pixel. “That costs you in terms of resolution,” says Pieter van Lieshout, head of product research and development for Polymer Vision, which was spun off from Philips Electronics three years ago to develop flexible electronic-paper displays. […] In contrast, Philips Research’s approach involves turning the traditional electronic-paper pixel quite literally on its side, in order to tune it to different shades of the spectrum. ”
Technology Review
As recession lingers, cell phones take over
“Twenty percent of US homes now rely exclusively on cell phones, while 17 percent use only traditional lines, the report found. Just five years ago, wireless-only represented 3 percent of American households, with 43 percent using only landlines. Households that are low-income, young, rented, and Hispanic have driven the mobile-only trend, according to he CDC.”
csmonitor.com
Stupeflix releases awesome API to generate 1,000s of videos on the fly
“Stupeflix has effectively come up with an API which describes video, text, using and pictures in flash video based on an XML description. So instead of actually editing the video you edit the XML. That means you can edit video just by changing a tag, or by telling their engine to run a different kind of effect for every video you wants to generate. iMovie would create just one video, and requires a meaty package to edit how it’s presented. With Stupiflix you just edit the XML, with tags like “rotate” or “fade left”. Today Stupeflix launches the web interface to its video editing web application. Because Stupeflix was built first as an API service, it is designed to create videos from any kind of content on the fly. The API was developed in a similar way to how video games are programmed – as much of the prgramming took place directly on GPUs. As a demostration of its power, they’ve generated over 1,000 videos direct from Wikipedia content, automatically, in under 60 minutes.”
TechCrunch
Xerox’s ColorQube Promises Cheap Color Printing With Solid Ink
“Xerox’s new ColorQube printer promises to revolutionize the pricey color-printing game using a waxy ink that can reduce the cost per page by as much as 62%. Like traditional multi-function printers, the ColorQube can print, copy, scan and fax—it can also be networked by several dozen people in an office. However, it’s the crayon-esque ink that’s the real star of the show. The ink is melted and sprayed onto a spinning drum which deposits the ink onto the page.”
Gizmodo
Ricoh CX1 Review: A Photographer’s Compact Point and Shoot
“The major selling point of the CX1 is its ability to take two exposures of an unevenly lit scene and combine them into a single shot that more accurately captures what your human eye sees. We did a guide to doing the exact same thing with Photoshop, but the CX1 joins just a few other cameras that do it automatically. And it works.”
Gizmodo
Map Motive Mashes Your Facebook Friends on a Google Map
“It’s more than just a series of red pins on a worldwide map, though. You can quickly locate friends by name with the “Friend Finder” list, add markers to the map to find the best in-between meet-up spots, and see a thumbnail profile of each friend on the map with their latest status update and other vitals. It lacks, fortunately/unfortunately, the ability to know exactly where your friends are, and might misplace a friend or two depending on how detailed their profile is, but seems to be generally correct in placing people in their respective burgs.”
Lifehacker
Kidlandia Custom Maps For Kids
“The easy-to-use site simply involves selecting one of the map styles and entering the name of the kid and anyone else you’d like, such as family, friends, pets, etc. The site automatically populates the map with towns and places named for variants on the names provided”
Cool Hunting
Supermap Puts Entire World On Military’s Fingertips – Global Situational Awareness
“Called Global Situational Awareness the system seamlessly puts together geographical information and schematics with material from countless sources in the battlefield: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, AWACs, satellites, ground-level radar, reconnoissance units… anything that is connected to the battle grid will be mixed into one single tactical plan. The result of this advanced information merging system—for a lack of a better term—is then shown in a touch display, which is used by the people in command to access all the information in a comprehensive way. To do it, the system has different applications that allow to show and mix this information with different levels of transparency, in 2D and 3D, all manipulated using gestures and simple icons.”
Gizmodo
Paying college students for good grades
“GradeFund lets students recruit sponsors—usually friends and family—who donate money for each good grade. Participating students upload their transcripts at the end of each term and GradeFund verifies them and then collects funds from the sponsors, who can set their own criteria such as sponsoring students from their alma mater or choosing specific grade levels to sponsor. They can determine donation amounts for each grade, from as low as USD 5. GradeFund also allows employers to find students anonymously through their performance record, potentially netting students job and internship offers. So far, over 16,000 people have signed up for the program.”
Springwise
Lucas Ordoñez – the first virtual-to-real race driver
“Lucas won the Nissan/PlayStation GT Academy 2008, a competition designed with the express purpose of taking a champion Gran Turismo gamer and turning them into a real life racing driver. Lucas had his first hit-out in the first round of the highly competitive European GT4 series at the weekend and ended on the podium, filling Gran Turismo’s 50 million devotees with hope that a new route to international motorsport is about to open.”
Gizmag
Google O3D: Web Based 3D
“New out of Google Labs is O3D – an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. The API is in it early stages aimed at being part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.”
Digital Urban
New Body Paint Conducts Electricity, Powers LEDs
“Students at the Royal College of Art in England have created a new type of paint which can conduct electricity and be applied directly to the skin. The paint is carbon-based, water-soluble, and can create electronic circuits when activated. The ink itself is able to produce enough electricity to power small devices like LEDs, and it’s creators hope it will one day be used to help with the dance and music performances, computer interfaces, and medical devices.”
PSFK.com
JVC launches flicker-free 3D TV
“Following the establishment of several full-scale 3D movie production and distribution companies in 2008, Hollywood has more than 20 3D movies in the pipeline this year. In the meantime, JVC has launched a 46-inch Full HD 3D LCD monitor – initially for professional use – that will deliver “a natural, flicker-free visual experience” in 3D. According to JVC, there is high demand for 3D monitors used in movie production, promotion and broadcasting test events. The GD-463D10 has been designed with this mind. ”
Gizmag
Virtual Currencies Gain in Popularity
“Web sites view alternative payment methods as a way to accelerate the sale of the virtual goods that are an important source of revenue, especially as demand for online ads slumps. On Apr. 3, social network Facebook announced that it is testing its own “credits,” which would let users carry out transactions in certain subnetworks. News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace is developing its own virtual currency and payment system.”
BusinessWeek
Unmasking Social-Network Users
“The researchers wanted to see if they could extract sensitive information about individuals using just the connections between users, even if almost all of the names, addresses, and other forms of personally identifying information had been removed. They found that they could, provided they could compare these patterns with those from another social-network graph where some user information was accessible.”
Technology Review
Evident to Display New Quantum Dot Enabled Lighting Products at LIGHTFAIR International 2009
“Using this technology, Evident is able expand the color gamut further than what is currently available in the LED market, including unique pinks, purples, aquas and high quality white LEDs. evidot® LEDs are available in lamp-type or surface mounted LED packages”
Nanowerk
Moving Data around the Clouds
“Cloudkick provides a unified, Web-based interface for monitoring data regardless of the cloud provider hosting it. Another feature launched recently by Cloudkick, called Cloudshift, lets customers transfer data between different cloud-computing providers with just a few clicks. It makes it possible to shift an application from Amazon’s servers to those of competitors, such as Rackspace, with surprising ease. This means that businesses using Cloudkick can avoid being locked into one provider–a feature that could help save money if a different provider suddenly offers a cheaper service.”
Technology Review
SMSGupShup (India’s “Twitter”) Grows To 20 million Users, $150,000/month Revenue
“The service can only be accessed via SMS, which works just fine for India’s 400 million mobile phone users (there are just 40 million broadband Internet users, Sheth says). Users sign up and use the service all via text messages. They never need to visit the website at all. The service’s main variable costs are fees for text messages, and Sheth says that they’ve had to implement caps to keep costs under control. But as the service grows, says Sheth, they are able to negotiate much better pricing. Already SMSGupShup accounts for 400 million monthly text messages, around “5%-6%” of the total Indian market.”
TechCrunch
Mind-Controlled Wheelchair
“A graphical computer interface displays a set of basic movement commands that the user concentrates on. Sensors covering the riders head pick up these control thoughts via unique changes in EEG waves, and tell the chair how to move. Laser sensors also scan the surrounding area to prevent collisions.”
PSFK.com
Sending Cell Phones into the Cloud
“It’s a trick not unlike the way that many Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, run on remote servers. The difference is that because CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone’s software, it can take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself, after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data. The big benefit of CloneCloud is battery-life extension, which would naturally follow from lower utilization of the phone’s CPU. Chun imagines that this could become a competitive advantage for vendors, like free voice mail or unlimited data plans.”
Technology Review
Hello Wembley, I’m on my iPhone
“Go, 24 – real name Gary Baker – has already written several tracks for his first album using software downloaded to the phone. He used it to recreate guitars, drums, piano and horn sections. All the demos for his album were laid down using a virtual four-track recording studio installed on his phone. “I think it’s pretty amazing that I’m going to be using a mobile phone on stage at Wembley Stadium in front of so many people. I grew up behind the stadium, and used to listen to concerts in my back garden, ” said Go, whose single Open Arms is released on 11 May. “My biggest worry is that my phone will ring mid-song.”
Evening Standard
Search Google Maps by Shape and Size
“Urban Spaces is a beta service from Holistic City Software that allows urban designers, architects, developers and planners to search for examples of public spaces of a specific size or shape.”
Digital Urban
Beautiful, but Dangerous
“The renderings sometimes evoke photographs of microscopic viruses that attack the human body, sometimes tentacled sea anemones that lie in wait deep underwater. But Mr. Dragulescu’s creations do not exist in the physical world. They are visual imaginings built from the raw stuff of computer programming — disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines. He assigns these things a quality and uses their appearance and frequency in the code as inputs that he feeds into art-generating algorithms and computer models that spit out three-dimensional shapes with vivid colors.”
NYTimes.com
Quick tasks via SMS for phone users in the developing world
“The service connects corporations with small tasks to be completed—currently, the most common ones include software localization and translation into local dialects for companies like Nokia—and native people who can complete them in minutes by cell phone. Tasks are sent to multiple phone users by text message—”translate the phrase, ‘address book’ into Giriama,” for example—and answers are accepted as accurate when the majority of users provide the same response. Compensation is determined by the number of times an individual’s response agrees with the consensus; penalties are imposed for wrong answers, while “don’t know” responses make no contribution. Over time the system learns a particular user’s expertise, and can actively select the most appropriate tasks for them.”
Springwise
Users choose ads for their social web pages
“Users begin by specifying their preferences and interests; advertisers and agencies, meanwhile, specify the corresponding characteristics of the consumers they’d like to target with their ads. Bomeiti then matches ads to user tastes and displays the relevant ads on the appropriate users’ pages. Users are rewarded with points for the ads that are shown on their pages and can donate those rewards to the social causes of their choice.”
Springwise
Debut for world’s fastest camera
“Their camera’s “shutter speed” is just a half a billionth of a second, and it can capture over six million images in a second continuously. Its “flashbulb” is a fast laser pulse dispersed in space and then stretched in time and detected electronically. The approach will be instrumental in imaging fast-moving or random events, such as communication between neurons.”
BBC NEWS
TwHistory
“We believe that history is filled with exciting stories. We also believe that these stories can be told through Twitter; through the people who lived and experienced them. We go through journals, diaries, letters, and other original sources to deliver the day-to-day lives of people who lived through some of histories most exciting times. We broadcast this information through Twitter, and feel this is a new and exciting approach to understanding history. Instead of reading about a month-long campaign in a few hours, you experience it over the course of a month, in small, 140 character ‘Tweets’.”
TwHistory
Panasonic climbs aboard Hollywood’s 3D roller coaster
“With their P2 camera, Panasonic is aiming to make capturing live 3D images a lot easier for 3D content producers who presently have to hand-build their own 3D production systems by physically connecting multiple 2D cameras. The Panasonic camera will feature no moving parts and is expected to be compact enough to allow more flexible 3D shooting. It will also enable recording of two channels of Full HD images on the P2 card. On the display front Panasonic’s 3D Drive System enables Full HD moving pictures to be shown for the left and the right eyes, so large screen 3D viewing will become possible.”
Gizmag
Carpet Cloaks Bring Invisibility to the Optical World
“Now Michal Lipson and pals at Cornell University, and Xiang Zhang and buddies at UC Berkeley, say that they have both built cloaks that are essentially mirrors with a tiny bump in which an object can hide. The cloaking occurs because the mirrors look entirely flat. The bump is hidden by a pattern of tiny silicon nanopillars on the mirror surface that steers reflected light in a way that makes any bump look flat. So anything can be hidden beneath the bump without an observer realizing that it is there, like hiding a small object under a thick carpet.”
Technology Review
Senseg: Amazing haptic technology that could be coming to a device near you
“Instead of using vibrating motors, the devices are completely motionless. Instead, the Senseg system stimulates your fingers or hand with an electrical field to simulate the feeling of friction or texture. The only way I can describe it as being a cross between rubbing soft sandpaper and getting a static electric shock.”
CrunchGear
NCR Tech Allows Check Deposits Using Camera Phone
“NCR has announced new technology that allows account holders at participating banks to deposit checks using their camera phone. With the technology customers take pictures of both sides of a check with the camera phone and then submit the pictures to their banks digitally.”
I4U News
