Archive for January, 2011
Tracking The Taliban? Soldier Develops An App To Do Just That
“U.S. soldier, Captain Jonathan Springer, has contributed 26,000 dollars of his own money to launch an iPhone app for use in combat. Conceived by Springer, an artillery specialist stationed in eastern Afghanistan, Tactical Nav will help soldiers map, plot and photograph waypoints on a battleground as well as transmit coordinates to supporting units. The app’s main functions include a compass, camera and a gridded map that aids in accurately pinpointing exact locations down to a few feet. The information is then relayed to others soldiers linked into the app. Tactical Nav is also designed to be used to direct artillery fire or call in helicopter support for injured soldiers.”
PSFK
App turns desktop wallpaper into a changing photo collage
“To get started, users of Wallcast — which is now in beta — create an online account, upload at least five pictures and download the free desktop application. Wallcast then turns the user’s static desktop background into an array of photos that’s refreshed every three hours, or however often the user requests. Users can select a background image from among various options offered by Wallcast. Meanwhile, each Wallcast account gets a unique email address, so pictures can be added online, by email or via a separate iPhone app. Even friends and family can be invited to contribute photos to a user’s Wallcast account, and Wallcast will detect and display those new photos automatically.”
Springwise
Proximeter: an ambient social navigation instrument
“Would you know if a dear, but seldom seen, friend happened to be on the same train as you? The proximeter is both an agent that tracks the past and future proximity of one’s social cloud, and an instrument that charts this in an ambient display. By reading existing calendar and social network feeds of others, and abstracting these into a glanceable pattern of paths, we hope to nuture within users a social proprioception and nudge them toward more face-to-face interactions when opportunities arise”
Pasta&Vinegar
New Initiative Harnesses Smartphones To Help Keep Heart Attack Victims Alive
“Here’s the gist of the app: you launch it, and it prompts you to ask if you’ve been trained in CPR and would be willing to help a stranger in the event of an emergency. If you accept this, then the application will take advantage of the iPhone’s location monitoring to get a general sense of where you are (a new feature enabled with the most recent update allows this with a minimal amount of battery drain). Then, the next time a 911 dispatch center receives a call for an emergency that’s occurring near you, you’ll receive a push notification telling you that help is needed. The app will also tell if you if an automated external defibrillator (those electric paddles that can kickstart a heart) is nearby.”
TechCrunch
Private Funerals Now Streamed Online
“Several software companies have created easy-to-use programs to help funeral homes cater to bereaved families. FuneralOne a one-stop shop for online memorials that is based in St. Clair, Mich., has seen the number of funeral homes offering Webcasts increase to 1,053 in 2010, from 126 in 2008 (it also sells digital tribute DVDs).”
NYTimes.com
Devices for Aging
“Doro’s phones are great for just making calls, and some models even have pictures of who to call instead of a dial pad, such as the Doro MemoryPlus corded phone pictured above. This model and most of the others (including the mobiles) are hearing aid compatible and feature large keypad buttons. Nominated for a Red Dot Award, the PhoneEasy mobile phone (pictured top right) also comes with security functions like pre-recorded SMS alerts, an automatic “man down” alarm and an easily-activated emergency dialing button.”
Cool Hunting
LinkedIn InMaps Reveals your Professional Network
“Each color corresponds to a different group within the professional network, which can be labeled by the user. The graph should allow users to recognize connections that share mutual people, or indentify areas that might be underrepresented.”
information aesthetics
Listening Room Lets You Share Music in Real-Time Across the Web
“One person heads to Listening Room, creates a room with a name, then sends the link, or just the name, to anyone else they want to be listening. Click the record player, pick an MP3 from your system, and it starts playing as it uploads. Everyone else “in the room” hears the same track, too, at roughly the same time. You can chat about the track in the right-hand with your name attached, or post the link publicly and let folks jump in and heard you DJ”
LifeHacker
Computer memory heralds green PCs
“The device developed by Dr Franzon’s team – known as a double floating-gate field effect transistor – stores data in the form of a charge, like non-volatile memory but uses a special control gate to enable the stored data to be accessed quickly. Today’s flash memory devices use a single floating gate to store an electric charge, which represents data. “We realised that a second gate would allow us to transfer charges really quickly,” said Dr Frazon. His team have shown they can transfer charges – in effect change the data – in around 15 nanoseconds. “That’s comparable with DRAM speeds,” he added. When in non-volatile mode, the data will be stored safely for a couple of years.”
BBC News
Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million
“The service is pretty straightfoward: you sign in with your Twitter account and are shown a list of top-ranking movies. Next to each film is a set of relevant tweets from the people you follow. You can also choose to browse by sentiment, viewing a stream of positive or negative tweets about each movie.”
TechCrunch
An Even Smaller Pocket Projector
“Researchers in Germany have developed the world’s thinnest “pico” video projector. The prototype device contains an array of carefully shaped microlenses, each with its own miniature liquid-crystal display (LCD). The device is just six millimeters thick, but it produces images that are 10 times brighter than would normally be possible with such a small device.”
Technology Review
Bands offered a unique website for every song
“Currently in private beta, Montreal-based Viinyl gives musical bands an attractive landing page for each song they create. There’s currently no cost to bands, and each site comes with lyrics, artwork, videos, notes, various download options, promotional tools, analytics, and more. The site explains: “The viinyl platform turns your song into an interactive website — a digital version of the 45rpm single with artwork and videos. Viinyl sites are optimized to travel the web, engage fans, grow market demand for your band and increase customer loyalty using marketing techniques for the web.””
Springwise
air-purifying dress
“the dress incorporates pollutant-absorbing concrete to purify the air. although the designers have not released details on the workings of their project, it is suspected that ‘herself’ utilizes the same technology behind the pollution-absorbing concrete used in construction: making use of a titanium oxide coating, it can convert nitrogen oxides, like those released by automobiles, into harmless nitrate.”
DesignBoom
CompuLab introduces its smallest, most energy efficient mini-PC to date
“Israel’s CompuLab, makers of the fit-PC range of energy efficient mini-PCs, has announced a new miniature computer powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processing platform. The Trim-Slice computer is said to offer the rich multimedia capabilities and user experience of a full-size PC at only a fraction of the power draw. It benefits from a fanless design, Wireless-N connectivity, solid state memory and expansion via both a full size and a micro SD card slots.”
Gizmag
FCC May Allocate Bandwidth To Initiate Remote Patient Monitoring
“MBAN is an ambitious technology that allows healthcare professionals to remotely monitor patients through wireless devices, using short-length radio waves. The coming on board by the aeronautics council means that the Federal Communications Commission will hopefully approve this remote patient monitoring system and set aside bandwidth for it, an idea that FCC itself proposed as part of its National Broadband Plan.”
PSFK
Rethinking The Bible As A Social Book
“The apps makes it possible for readers to share their highlighted text from a book on Twitter or Facebook, along with their comments, related photos and videos. Private groups can also be created for more of a book-club feel. The first book to become socialized in this manner will be the Bible (published by HarperCollins). In this way, the Bible could be illustrated with depictions from paintings and other art, as well as video clips from Biblical movies. Of course, people could also upload clips from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but that’s what makes social media so much fun. Even personal photos or videos could add a fascinating layer of contemporary commentary and personal interpretations to the good book.”
TechCrunch
Vid.ly: One Short Link To Sort Through All The Video Encoding Mess
“Video formats on the Web are a mess right now. Apple supports H.264, but not Flash. Google recently declared that its Chrome browser will soon stop supporting H.264 in favor of its own WebM. To make a video play on an iPhone or iPad requires support for different formats than for an Android phone, and other phones require yet other formats. Today, Encoding.com is trying to simplify this mess by launching Vid.ly, a service which creates a single short URL for any video and plays it appropriately across 14 different browsers and devices. The vid.ly link can be shared via SMS, Twitter, or Facebook. If you would like to try Vid.ly, we have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers (use the beta test code: TCRUNCH2011).”
TechCrunch
Handyscope turns an iPhone into a digital dermoscope
“The handyscope features a case into which an iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 slides so that the iPhone’s camera aligns with the handyscope’s lens system. The device is then placed flush against the patient’s skin, which is illuminated by polarized light from the built-in LEDs. The device features a standardized zoom and auto-focus with images captured with a single tap using the iPhone app.”
Gizmag
ImpulsBauhaus
“The exhibition is an immersive yet highly-structured digital archive rich with historical details, where complex interrelationships are made more accessible through the implementation of an innovative graphical interface. All visualizations of the complex network are drawn directly from the research database and presented in an intuitive computer-generated form.”
visualcomplexity.com
Creator Of Million Dollar Homepage Makes Do Nothing For 2 Minutes
“Can you sit in front of your computer and not touch your mouse or keyboard for a measly two minutes? It’s actually not as easy as it sounds, especially if you work in a web-intensive field.”
TechCrunch
Yoostar 2: Karaoke Goes To The Movies
“The game – available in March for all major platforms – uses tracking technology to capture a person’s voice, image and movements, and then digitally inserts them into scenes from blockbuster movies. Once a scene begins, actors watch themselves onscreen as they are prompted through their lines, creating a brand new scene in real-time.”
PSFK
Music Created For Shuffle Mode
“The Music for Shuffle is an ongoing project by interactive designer Matthew Irvine Brown in which a series of short musical phrases compiled by him can be played in any random order, yet they will be heard as a continuous stream of music.”
PSFK
Japanese Fashion: LED. Lights for Your Teeth
“The LED smiles can easily be affixed to your teeth and glow different colors while you smile. The colors can be changed wirelessly through a computer interface. Of course they work best in the dark. ”
NYTimes.com
iChef+ Oven Touch Control by Gorenje
“Gorenje+ exclusive built-in appliances premiered at LivingKitchen 2011 featuring the unique iChef+ oven module with a large color display that makes cooking easier with a touchscreen interface. The interface lets you program exactly what it is you’re cooking. It’s designed to be simple but the brains behind the system is incredibly innovative. No cooking appliance has ever had an integrated computer this powerful.”
Yanko Design
New tech creates 3D faces from 2D images
“The system starts with a generic 3D “synthetic face,” the basic parameters of which are obtained from a number of 3D images of actual human faces. When a 2D image of a specific person is presented, the computer projects the synthetic face onto that flat image plane. The algorithm, compensating for the pose and illumination of the 2D face, transfers the subject’s features onto the synthetic face, to create a 3D approximation.”
Gizmag
The PiCycle: An Electric Bike You Can Sync Up to Your Smartphone
“The PiCycle is a clean, modern, hybrid/electric bike designed by Marcus Hays, the founder of PiMobility. It’s fast, quiet, dependable and can give you enough torque to keep up with motor vehicles in the city. It’s also equipped with PiFi, an embedded wireless technology that streams critical data to the PiCycle owner’s smart phone or iPod Touch via a native application. PiMobility can monitor battery health, battery charging frequency, battery cycle life, motor and controller experience and more. This also means that PiMobility can provide theft recovery services and more importantly, if something does go wrong with the PiCycle, take preventative measures such as shipping the replacement parts long before anyone has to trudge down to their local repair facility seeking services”
Inhabitat
A place to preserve and share mementos online
“Users of Sentemental begin by signing up with the site and uploading whatever materials they want to preserve; any they can’t digitize themselves can be sent to Sentemental, which will do it for them. Uploaded materials are then kept safe in a private area of the site that’s easily accessible to the user. Materials can also be shared with friends and posted via Facebook and Twitter. It is free to set up an account and share materials via Sentemental, while scanning services begin at GBP 9.99 for up to 50 items.”
Springwise
Sculptural Amplifier Is Pendulum Powered
“The Bounge Amplifier relies on an unusual system to project sound. Kinetic energy produced by manually swinging its pendulum is harnessed to power the minimalist wall-mounted speaker pod.”
PSFK
Electronic Deprivation: Disconnecting Teens From The Internet For Six Months
“The experiment, which she chronicled in her new book The Winter of Our Disconnect, had a significant impact on her children, who like most in the millennial generation, were born and live with everpresent gadgets. Not only were they able to rediscover the simpler pleasures of life such as having family meals, learning to play music and reading books, they also became more focused and improved their grades.”
PSFK
Safe-cracking robot “brute-forces” high end lock combinations
“Although the authors seem to be a bit vague about the important detail how long did it take, the robot they built to autodial the combination lock is impressively well-made and fun to watch”
@Makezine.
Researchers develop eyeball camera with zoom capabilities
“Developed by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the first of its kind curvilinear camera overcomes the problem of previous eyeball camera designs that were incompatible with variable zoom. This was because they used rigid detectors, but because the image changes shape with magnification, the detector must also change shape to keep the image in focus. To achieve this the researchers used an array of interconnected and flexible silicon photodetectors on a thin, elastic membrane, which can easily change shape. Additionally, the camera system also has an integrated “liquid lens” constructed by putting a thin, elastic membrane on a water chamber, with a clear glass window underneath.”
Gizmag
Twimon, I Choose You: the Fun Twitter iPhone App That Rips Off Pokemon
“This Twitter app is so bonkers, I don’t even know where to begin. *deep breath* Ok, so it has MONSTERS and like POKEMON, your monsters ATTACK your followers’ monsters and…oh god, I miss the days of Twitter SMS. The app itself is a free download, but you can pay for monster eggs inside the game for a buck each. It’s your duty to raise your egg, nurturing it by tapping on it or tweeting. Once the monster pops out of the egg, it starts attacking areas within your location (via Google Maps, naturally), every five minutes. If your monster gets attacked though, be prepared for some tears and lost points.”
Gizmodo
Toyota Weaves Auto Parts From Carbon Fiber
“Toyota has recently released a video that showcases a stunning new circular loom technology that is capable of weaving carbon fibers together into 3D structures. The loom was developed as a means of producing these lighter, stronger materials in a more precise, yet cost-effective manner. The parts generated from the machine will be injected with plastic resin to form elements of the chassis for the Lexus LFA. As this technology continues to evolve, the resulting materials and parts will find their way into more aspects of the vehicle’s design.”
PSFK
An Eyeball Camera, Now with Zoom
“Inside this experimental camera, a stretchable sensor array sits below a liquid lens. Water is pumped into both components to change the magnification of the image captured by the camera.”
Technology Review
LCD projector used to control tiny organisms
“The researchers are using components from ordinary liquid crystal display (LCD) projectors to control the brain and muscles of tiny organisms, namely worms. Using optogenetics the scientists have genetically manipulated the animals allowing them to stimulate and silence specific neurons and muscles using inexpensive LCD projectors. Red, green and blue lights from the projector activate light-sensitive microbial proteins that are genetically engineered into the worms, allowing the researchers to switch neurons on and off like light bulbs and turn muscles on and off like engines.”
Gizmag
All-Seeing Blimp Could Be Afghanistan’s Biggest Brain
“The idea behind the Blue Devil is to have up to a dozen different sensors, all flying on the same airship and talking to each other constantly. The supercomputer will crunch the data, and automatically slew the sensors in the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an upcoming ambush. The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in less than 15 seconds.”
Gizmodo
Immortalising Digital Ephemera [Pics]
“Tweet Rings resist the idea that all things digital are ephemeral and fleeting by providing a service to engrave your favorite Tweets into classy personal jewelry. You can have your 140 character tweet etched onto a ring of steel, titanium or silver.”
PSFK
Backupify Backupified 136 Million Tweets, 713 Million Emails In 2010
“Founded in 2008 by Rob May, Backupify backs up all your data on services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, and YouTube. The service keeps all the raw data for you and creates a downloadable PDF with, for instance, all your Tweets, direct messages, followers, people you follow, and profile info.”
TechCrunch
World’s first full HDR video system sees like the human eye
“HDR has been in development for some time – Sunnybrook Technologies unveiled a High Dynamic Range display system back in 2004, and just last year BenQ joined a list of several manufacturers to have released HDR still cameras. Even HDR video has been shot before, albeit on a limited, experimental basis. What the researchers at Warwick claim to have developed is the world’s first full-motion HDR video system, that covers everything from image capture through to display.”
Gizmag
Using Skype, UK ‘granny cloud’ helps teach Indian children
“On a trip to India a few years ago, Mitra — whose work is perhaps best known for inspiring the film “Slumdog Millionaire” — asked children there what they would most like to use Skype for. “Surprisingly, they said they wanted British grandmothers to read them fairytales — they’d even worked out that between them they could afford to pay GBP 1 a week out of their own money,” Mitra told the Guardian in a report last year. Accordingly, Mitra put out a call for UK grannies to do just that, and some 200 volunteers responded. “Many are retired teachers, who are now regularly on Skype teaching children in the slums,” Mitra explained.”
Springwise
3D Printing In Titanium
“Where most stereolithography (3D printing) production techniques produce layers of plastic-like resin, fabrication service i.materialize has developed what they call Direct Metal Laser Sintering to create objects made of titanium, layering powdered titanium and solidifying it with a high-temperature laser. While the technique is at this point relatively expensive and technical, it points to the evolution of the types of things that more and more people are able to produce as individuals.”
PSFK
Follow the leader: SARTRE road train technology successfully demonstrated
“Vehicles linked in a platoon are guided by a professional driver in a lead vehicle with each car constantly monitoring the distance, speed and direction relative to the car in front and automatically making adjustments to keep the road-train on track – in other words, you sit back and relax while the brakes, accelerator and steering wheel are automatically operated. Vehicles can also leave the platoon at any time.”
Gizmag
Mattel Video Racer Records the Hot Wheels’ POV
“The Video Racer‘s camera records its adventures at 30 to 60 frames per second, and you can view the footage either on a small LCD on the car’s underbelly or on your laptop via USB. There’s even a custom video editor, so you can splice clips together and add your own soundtrack.”
Gizmodo
Kindle Lending Club Is a Library of User-Contributed Kindle Ebooks
“Instead of buying new content for your Kindle, Kindle Lending Club lets you search for users willing to lend their Kindle ebooks to anyone with the desire to read. It’s easy pulling a book off a shelf and lending it to a friend, but until recently it was much harder to lend an ebook. Thanks to Amazon’s recent addition of Kindle lending, however, you can easily borrow or lend a book to family or friends for 14 days.”
LifeHacker
Scientists Create Real-Life Pac-Man Using Microorganisms
“The user control the paramecium by just moving the joystick, which is connected to a controller that “controls the polarity of a mild electrical field applied across the fluid chamber, which influences the direction the paramecia move.” I wonder how they make Pac-Mecium turn into super-Pac-Mecium. And who is chasing the poor Pac-Mecium, anyway? Evil amoebas? I sure hope so.”
Gizmodo
Trickle for iPhone
“Designed for in-dock usage, Trickle shows you your Tweets one at a time, as they come. You can tap one of two buttons to retweet or favorite a tweet, and you can swipe back through your timeline manually, but that’s about it. Perhaps not ideal for Twittermaniacs who follow people by the hundreds, but for monitoring a well-maintained list of followers (or even a single source) it’s pretty clever. And better than staring at your battery crawl up while your iPhone’s in the dock, in any event”
Gizmodo
Building robots building robot buildings…
“Behold the potential future of building; construction workers, you may want to start training for your second career NOW.”
Futurismic
Wall decals serve as eco reminders
“I’m sure makers will appreciate these charming wall decals, which serve as a reminder that the electricity we use comes from somewhere. Made by Hu2 Design, these stylish and eco-friendly home accents will hopefully make their owners a little more conscientious when they flip a switch or plug in a wall wart.”
@Makezine.com
Energy-Generating T-Shirts Could Someday Power Your Electronics
“Scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have discovered a way to create energy generating textiles from powder-infused carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes in use will be able to support superconducting particles, such as boron and magnesium powder, with a more manageable form without binders or lasers. If the scientists are successfully able to weave this energy-transmitting yarn into ready-to-wear material, you could soon bid adieu to all those jumbled up gadget chargers. Instead, this energy-transmitting yarn could be fashioned into lightweight batteries you can wear.”
Inhabitat
3D facemaking machine for dolls
“Here is a machine designed specifically to make tiny, 3D printed faces from photographs which you can then use in doll- and plushmaking of your choice.”
Wonderland
grey canada: global mood clocks
“each coloured dot along the clock’s interior represents a flickr photograph taken at that moment, its colour determined by those dominant in the image it represents. a mouseover brings up a thumbnail of the image, while a click opens the larger image and a link to the original. at the bottom of the screen, text displays the city’s top keyword for alternately twitter and google, each linked to the appropriate aggregator page.”
DesignBoom
Want To Know What Your Friends Think? Ask Polling Site GoPollGo
“The beautifully designed site is based on a freemium model. It’s simple to make an embeddable poll like this one, this one or this one. Users can then share it with friends via Facebook and Twitter, get comments or discover new polls. Premium subscribers can also access analytics on their polls, segment voting data and as well get reports like the one below.”
TechCrunch
Tiny Silicon Chip Uses Quantum Physics to Slow Light Down
“Scientists have built an optical device smaller than a dime that slows light down to 155 miles per second, the slowest ever managed on a chip. The tiny silicon chip works at room temperatures and can be mass-produced, with 32 chips on a 4-inch silicon wafer. Previous efforts slowed light to just 0.01 miles per second, but this required a roomful of equipment and temperatures near absolute zero.”
Wired.com
Planon releases credit card-sized scanner for receipts
“The Planon SlimScan SS100 is a credit card-sized high-resolution color scanner, designed for scanning and keeping track of receipts”
Gizmag
E-Ink To Make Tank Armor ‘Invisible’
“Scientists from BAE Systems, a British defense firm, are working on a new tank shell that uses electronic ink and a series of sensors to project the surrounding environment onto the shell of the tank. The sensors — which are built into the armor — allows the armor’s e-ink to change in real-time depending on the environment it is rolling through. ”
PSFK
This Bike Has Eyes In the Back of Its Treads
“This gorgeous bike not only turns heads, it makes sure you don’t have to turn yours. Because hidden away in its seat-stays lurks a rear-view camera that continuously records what’s behind you. Not only can you watch your tail with the Cervellum Hindsight in real-time via a 3.5-inch, handlebar-mounted LCD monitor, the camera also registers when there’s a crash, continuing to record for ten seconds. Anyone who’s ever been clipped in a hit and run now has access to hard evidence.”
Gizmodo
New Contact Lenses With LED Displays is Must-See TV, Literally
“A research team at the University of Washington has designed a contact lens that has the ability to project LED displays directly into the irises. The concept originated in 2008 when the UoW team developed a proof-of-concept contact lens embedded with electronics that gave diabetes patients the ability to monitor glucose levels in their tear fluid. The prototype contained a single red LED that would project feedback to the lens bearer. The team has since crafted blue miniature LEDs, leaving only green to be developed for a full-color display. The lenses are powered remotely by nearby “loop antennas,” which transmit electricity directly to the lens. ”
ExtremeTech
A Facebook life, rendered in book form
“SocialBook — also known as “The Facebook Book” — is a personalized, 8.5-by-11-inch book that can be created from the status updates, published pictures, wall messages and comments shared between the user and as many as 10 selected Facebook friends. Pages in the SocialBook follow the chronological order of the user’s Facebook account, and its Facebook-blue cover — available in paperback or hardcover — is customized with the user’s Facebook account name.”
Springwise
Boo! [Processing] – Curiosity, disgust and fascination.. interaction with blood-thirsty creatures
“The unusual component of this scene is the strange behavior of the zombies. When the viewer hides his face or turns his back to the image, the zombie who had been facing him takes a few akward steps forward. When the viewer looks again at the zombie, the latter stops dead in his tracks. It is as if a mere glance from the viewer—whether expressing curiosity, disgust, or fascination—were enough to awaken a feeling of shyness or shame in the breast of the blood-thirsty creatures. The esthetics of the installation are those of currently produced video games. The script, however, runs counter to the rules of the genre, providing an unusually negative ending.”
CreativeApplications.Net
Will You Tweet This?
“For example, if a blog breaks a story, the pattern tends to be different than when a story is broken by a traditional news media. The point at which blogs get involved in a story, Leskovec says, is a major factor in determining its longevity. For example, even if traditional media focus on a story for a brief time, blog discussion can keep it in the public eye longer.”
Technology Review
Fingerprints Go the Distance
“Now a company has developed a prototype of a device that can scan fingerprints from up to two meters away, an approach that could prove especially useful at security checkpoints in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The device, called AIRprint, is being developed by Advanced Optical Systems (AOS). It detects fingerprints by shining polarized light onto a person’s hand and analyzing the reflection using two cameras configured to detect different polarizations.”
Technology Review
MIT Researchers Unveil the EyeStop
“The EyeStop is partially covered with touch-sensitive e-INK and screens, and features state-of-the art sensing technologies and a variety of interactive services.”
materialicious
Cubeduel: Hot Or Not Meets LinkedIn. Your Darker Side Will Love It.
“After landing on the site, you’ll be asked to connect with LinkedIn via OAuth. Next, you’ll be presented with photos of two of your former or current coworkers, prompting you to choose who you’d prefer to work with. Click one, and the site will show you another pair. Then another. Vote 20 times and you unlock access to see how other people have ranked you. Yeah, you’re already hooked. But that’s not all. The site records the votes (which are all anonymous) and tallies them, allowing you to browse individual companies like Google or TechCrunch, to see which employees have won the most ‘duels’ based on votes aggregated from all users. In other words, it gives you a nice, easy to read ranking of the ‘best’ people in each company (more on that later). ”
TechCrunch
Triangle Draw – Simple drawing using only triangles
“Triangle Draw allows you to draw logos/patterns/typography using only triangles. Within the app you can keep track of all your drawings, export to photo album or by email. Other tools include ability to mirror, offset, flip axis, invert colours, randomise and more.”
CreativeApplications.Net
New Lithium-Ion Ultracapacitor Can Charge Tools In Under 60 Seconds
“With Ioxus’ new hybrid energy-storage device, which connects a lithium-ion battery to an ultracapacitor, everyday power tools could be fully recharged in less than a minute. Not just that, but the tools will be capable of receiving up to 20,000 charges. This means that the construction industry will no longer have to wait hours for electric drills or lathes to charge; they could be done in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.”
Inhabitat
Interactive Window Concept
“Interactive Window Concept made for the module Advanced Interface Design at Hyper Island hosted by North Kingdom.”
New Ways of Interaction
A Justin Bieber URL Shortener? Why Not
“You know how you used to plaster your locker with snaps of rock idols like The New Kids on the Block and Soul For Real? Well, kids today have it so much better than we did, folks. Now, thanks to a Justin Bieber-inspired URL shortener, rabid fans can see Biebs’s face wherever they look online — even more than usual. Every URL shortened by bieber.ly yields a website emblazoned with Bieber’s grinning face.”
Mashable
dyuri vishnevsky: weavesilk
“in its current, web-based form, the program waits for a user to draw on the screen–temporarily rendering the sketch as lines and stars in the night sky–and then uses these points as the starting input for its generative algorithm. the direction, density, and colours of the lines that are generated all vary within and across individual pieces. the algorithm can be set to run more quickly or more slowly, or played back after its completion.”
yuri vishnevsky: weavesilk
Trunk.ly Indexes The Links You and Your Friends Share on Social Networks “Know that you shared a great link, but can’t for the life of you remember it, or even how you shared it? Trunk.ly collects your Twitter and Facebook link history, making it easy to browse and search through your link-sharing history.”
LifeHacker
Djtxt Lets Your Party Guests Fix Your Boring Playlist via SMS
“Djtxt is, in practice, a bookmarklet you click when you land on Grooveshark’s music streaming service, and a number and short code you give to party guests. Once they text in the code and get a confirmation, they can start sending artists and songs to that number to fill up your virtual jukebox. The nice thing is that it’s not just your iTunes library they’re working with—it’s the entirety of pop music, as Grooveshark knows it”
Lifehacker
3-D Photo Printer Leaves a Lot to Be Desired
“The all-in-one printer will come with two paper-frame 3-D glasses in Kodak’s signature bright yellow design, along with special 3D-processing software and instructions. To create a 3-D image, users will be instructed to shoot the same scene twice, with the second offset about 2 to 3 inches from the first. A Kodak spokesman suggested a good way to do that would be to shoot the first looking through one eye, and the second through the other.”
NYTimes.com
Coiled nanowire key to stretchable electronics
“The first coils of silicon nanowire on a substrate that can be stretched to more than double their original length have been created, moving us closer to developing stretchable electronic devices”
Gizmag
PixelOptics to launch ‘world’s first electronic focusing eyewear’
“Relying on liquid crystals, the glasses, which PixelOptics will bring to market under the brand name emPower!, are able to switch focus in the blink of an eye and with no moving parts – unless you count the reorientation of the liquid crystals. Being electronically activated also allows for a neat feature. While the wearer is able to manually activate the change of focus by touching the arm of the emPower! glasses, thanks to an accelerometer embedded in the arm, with a swipe they can also set the glasses to change focus automatically when they look down to read”
Gizmag
Zimoun’s kinetic sound sculptures
“Ever wonder what 400 vibrating motors sounds like? Check out this compilation video of a number of Zimoun’s works, annotated by the materials used.”
@Makezine.com
Rocstor RocSecure Hard Drives
“My favorite is definitely the new RocSafe MX, with real time hardware encryption, and the need to authenticate via a pin number (and a card!) on the hard drive itself before the computer can even see it. Others look sleek and have usb key tokens that are required to boot the drives… Regardless of whether you are hiding secrets, or just your family photos and music, doesn’t it just seem more fun?”
NOTCOT
¡Increíble! Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conversation Interpreter
“there’s also one new feature they’re previewing in alpha mode. And it’s awesome: Conversation Mode. Essentially, this allows you to speak in one language into your phone and the app will read it out loud translated into the language of the person you’re speaking with. That person can then respond and it will translate it back into your language. Yes, amazing.”
TechCrunch
Intel Envisions The Future Of Retail With Connected Store Concept “Ideas brought to life included the Interactive Fashion Experience – a digital interface that enables shoppers to visually access thousands of fashion items, combine them into outfits, share them with friends virtually or even purchase them – and adiVERSE – a virtual wall for exploring adidas’ entire line of footwear – and the Digital Signage Endcap – an in-store gestural interface that tracks audience metrics, offers relevant information to consumers in the aisle and has the ability to integrate with a shopper’s smartphone.”
PSFK
CrunchGear Reviews The HP eStation All-In-One Printer With An Android Tablet
“part useful application of new technology, part marketing gimmick, the HP eStation is a solid all-in-one printer that uses a wireless Android-powered touchscreen tablet as its primary interface. The printer is about what you’d expect from HP these days, while the tablet presents some interesting new usability options. You certainly shouldn’t buy the eStation just because you want an Android tablet, but it makes a decent bonus if you’re looking for a functional all-in-one printer anyway.”
TechCrunch
Autonomous Robot Expresses Emotion Through Movement
“Stefan Schwabe and Burg Giebichenstein of the University of Art and Design Halle have created an emotion-simulating robot called Troblion, which expresses itself as a sphere that moves about an oval sandbox. The autonomous bot is programmed with various sets of rules that determine its movement, each set designed to be interpreted as a type of emotion. The designers have given Troblion additional characteristics that mimic living things, through layers of sand that harden over time as the robot moves through its environment; the bot must adapt over time, shedding layers of skin to change its appearance and continue moving.”
PSFK
Twitnictable – Twitter on Picnic Table
“When you need answers to specific questions, Google may be of some use but a dynamic collaborative environment demands instant answers from people with shared interests and valuable skill sets. Twitnictable is an wood table that reads any tweet with the hashtag #IDtable via LEDs embedded on the surface. The table becomes an interactive pool of knowledge where tweeted questions engage students in an interactive discussion.”
Yanko Design
New Metallic Glass Is The Toughest, Strongest Material Yet
“Materials scientists in California have made a special metallic glass with a strength and toughness greater than any known material, using a recipe that could yield a new method for materials fabrication. The glass, a microalloy made of palladium, has a chemical structure that counteracts the inherent brittleness of glass but maintains its strength. It’s not very dense and it is more lightweight than steel, with comparable heft to an aluminum or titanium alloy.”
Gizmodo
Pose: A Photo Sharing App For Fashion And Shopping That Just Raised $1.6 Million
“The premise is simple: when you’re in a store and you come across a neat jacket, or some nice jeans, Pose invites you to take a snapshot. Next, tag it with your current location and the item’s price, and share it with friends. Your friends can then leave their comments on the photo, and you can browse photos your friends have shared in the app’s style feed. In addition to the iPhone app, Pose has a web presence — every snapshot you take gets its own URL, which you can share via Twitter and Facebook.”
TechCrunch
Using the Moto Atrix Notebook-Slash-Smartphone
“The Atrix is a pretty great phone by itself—two 1GHz cores and 1GB of RAM makes things speedy—but it’s even more useful when you dock it into their laptop for heavy duty computering.”
Gizmodo
Using Nanotube Yarns For Durable Smart Clothing
“By drawing out nanotube fibers with a blade, forming them into webs, and then adding the selected “guest” particles that confer new capabilities (such as self-cleaning or conductivity), the researchers are able to create a fiber web that can be twisted into yarn. The yarns can then be woven into fabrics together with cotton & wool threads. Initial test runs indicate that the nanotube yarns showed no loss of guest particles when run through standard washing machine loads, both hot & cold. The team has since created yarns with titanium dioxide, various conductors, and high-temp super-conductors. Beyond smart clothing, researchers see many potential uses for such yarns, from batteries & super-conducting motors to hydrogen storage systems”
PSFK
This Amazing Full Feature Film Was Made with Footage Entirely from Grand Theft Auto IV
“French filmmaker Mathieu Weschler spent two years making The Trashmaster. And that’s not the crazy thing. What’s insane is that the film’s footage (an epic 88-minutes of sex, drugs and violence) is made entirely from scenes in Grand Theft Auto IV. From what I’ve seen, the film is a captivating dark tale that’s actually a joy to watch.”
Gizmodo
Revealing the Top Albums of 2010 from all Available Rankings and Charts
“End of Year Top Albums 2010 [zoho.co.uk] provides a visual summary of the most successful music albums in 2010, based on the aggregation of a large variety of music rankings and charts, ranging from Amazon.com‘s list, over the Daily Telegraph to Rolling Stone and The Times).”
information aesthetics
Visualizing the deletion process on Wikipedia
“Notabilia has visualized the hundred longest discussion threads at Wikipedia that resulted in the deletion of an article and the hundred that did not. The visualized threads take on shapes depending on whether the discussion was controversial, swinging, or unanimous. For those whose brains can process visualized information (as mine cannot), you will undoubtedly learn much. For the rest of us: Oooooh, pretty!They also have analyzed data using words. E.g., Delete decisions tend to be unanimous.”"
Boing Boing
ErgoSlider Plus+ is a groovy mouse alternative
“EKtouch, the makers of the ErgoSlider Plus+, say the device is clinically proven to reduce muscle strain by letting users move the onscreen pointer without overusing their wrists. With your wrists resting on the visco-elastic padding at the bottom, rolling the cylinder up and down moves the pointer along the Y-axis, while sliding the cylinder left and right moves it along the X-axis. There are five buttons located centrally between the padding and the roller with the middle one acting as a scroll wheel. The groove the roller sits in looks like it would attract more than its fair share of dust – on my desk anyway – so thankfully the roller just lifts out to allow for cleaning.”
Gizmag
Rrrewind is a Wayback Machine for Social Media
“Using Rrrewind is pretty simple. Upon visiting the site you’ll be presented with the popular posts from yesterday, currently defaulting to delicious. You can switch between different sites via the lefthand menu, or visit the archives by clicking the link in the upper righthand corner. Currently Rrrewind’s archives date back to June 29th, 2009 for delicious, but it varies depending on the site. If you’re looking for old, popular social media, Rrrewind is a great place to find it.”
LifeHacker
Web Pioneer Working On New Blogging Technology
“Dave Winer, the web pioneer behind several blogging features like RSS and podcasting, is now developing a new blogging tool that will output a series of RSS feeds and archive one copy of the user’s content to his servers for his own blog, while also giving him the option to post the content to Twitter, Facebook and many other current and in-future publishing platforms.”
PSFK
Horizon’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Power Packs
“But one product at CES 2011 actually did shock me. Horizon brought a whole line of hydrogen fuel cell chargers to the show, including a portable generator that uses water to charge dead cells. They have a handheld device that can take a variety of USB attachments (like a flashlight) or charge your smartphone. Since it generates 11 watt hours of power, you can even use this thing to trickle charge a tablet or laptop.”
I4U News
Acoustic, Underwater Cloak Makes Objects Invisible to Sonar
“To make this cloak, researchers used metamaterial, which is a class of artificial materials that are engineered to have altered properties. The cloak is two-dimensional and cylindrical, and has 16 concentric rings of acoustic circuits, where each ring has a different index of refraction. This allows the cloak to help guide sonar and other ultrasound waves. “Basically what you are looking at is an array of cavities that are connected by channels,” said Fang. “The sound is going to propagate inside those channels, and the cavities are designed to slow the waves down. As you go further inside the rings, sound waves gain faster and faster speed.”"
DailyTech
Device turns smartphones into satellite communicators
“SPOT Connect is a satellite communicator capable of sending messages over the Globalstar satellite network from a smartphone operating system. Smartphone users begin by downloading the SPOT Connect app. Then, when they’re out of range, they pair their phone with the SPOT Connect device using Bluetooth. SPOT is currently compatible with smartphone operating systems including Android; others will be incorporated later this year. In any case, once it’s connected, the SPOT device links the smartphone to communication satellites, enabling users to send text messages, short emails and SOS messages including GPS coordinates, as well as to perform tasks like updating Facebook and Twitter.”
Springwise
OnTime is a Location and Traffic-Aware Schedule App that Ensures You’ll Never Leave Late Again
“OnTime is a pretty neat app that tracks your current location and uses it to estimate the travel time necessary to get to your next appointment. Knowing this, it’ll alert you when you should leave to ensure you’re not late.”
LifeHacker
This Clever DIY Briefcase Only Opens When You’re at the Right GPS Coordinates
“The case is called a reverse geocache and it can only open when it’s in a certain spot in the world. It was made with a metal box, IKEA door handles, nixietubes to display distance, a GPS sensor and an Arduino. It looks like a pretty complicated project (the paint and IKEA door handles as bars do a good job to add to that), but I love the idea of reverse geocaching. It’s like the perfect gift box”
Gizmodo
CES 2011: The search-and-rescue snake
“Frederick Layton introduces an in-development product of his reasearch project at Carnegie Mellon university: a 16-jointed robotic snake that could be used in search and rescue”
guardian.co.uk
220 interactive pixel tiles that send information through your body..
“At the start of the day the pixel-tiles are packed together as a display and by the end of the day they will have migrated across the walls in the room. By transposing the pixel from the confines of the screen and into the physical world, focus is drawn to the materiality of computation itself and new forms for design emerge. The team have developed a new technology that makes the glass in the pixel-tile sense touch as well as send information through your body when you are touching it.”
CreativeApplications.Net
Gracenote at CES 2011: The Best Thing to Happen to Music Since the Cello
“The six devices in this car all have media libraries, each of which is collected together on the front console screen. Meaning you can stream music from any one of your devices, through those car speakers. And as soon as your song or movie starts playing, Gracenote’s audio recognition technology will identify the title and populate your display with album art, artist information and more.”
I4U News
CES 2011: Kitara synth-guitar
“Unlike keytars, which remain keyboards, or MIDI guitars, which are “too temperamental,” his Kitara keeps the frets but replaces the strings with an 8-inch multi-touch display. Inside is a polyphonic synthesizer, with 100 default sounds and 6 effect, each of which can be assigned to different ‘strings.’”
Boing Boing
Charge Your Electric Vehicle Wirelessly with Fulton Innovation’s eCoupled Technology
“Fulton’s eCoupled wireless charging tech was originally created for smaller electronics, and they say that this is the first time it’s been able to wirelessly charge a “high-powered device.” The company demonstrated the new technology, dubbed the PowerSpot, by powering up a shiny, red Tesla Roadster. The “spot” appears as a blue halo on the floor of your garage, and you can engage the accompanying adapter fitted to the underbody of your electric vehicle as long as you park it about 4″ (in the case of the Tesla) over the induction pad. ”
Inhabitat
