Archive for February, 2011
bus shelter billboard and geotagged google map project by yen trinh
“a play on the ‘priority seating for the disabled’ signs posted in most public transit cars, trinh’s signage designates ‘priority seating for people who want conversation’, helping facilitate, as the designer says, ‘a culture of friendliness’. with a public installation currently in place in brisbane, australia, the project also encourages global crowd-sourced interventionism, through posting signs in public space and via a collaborative google map.”
DesignBoom
Dotdotdot, “Viva la Crisi”
“set design for a TV show. the scene is make of white carton boxes. it is videoprojected and depending on the themes of the show it change introducing the new topic. done for RAI educational in collaboration with Produzioni LUME”
Beyond The Beyond
iBike Dash CC turns your iPhone into a cycling computer
“The app allows the iPhone or iPod to act as a speedometer, odometer, chronograph, altimeter, GPS navigator, and all the smartphoney things one would expect, while also allowing users to place and receive phone calls without interrupting its iBike functions. It also includes 50 training programs, that are designed to keep riders within an optimum-but-safe heart rate zone and pedaling cadence.”
Gizmag
Make Sense Of Your Social Photos With VVall’s GRID
“GRID attempts to organize your social photos chronologically, separating your own and your friends’ online image trails by date and days of the week. In a wider scope than Twitter apps like Lookedon, GRID right now covers four platforms (Facebook, Twitpic, PiczPlz, and Dailybooth) but aims to add others like Instagram, Flickr and Yfrog as soon as technically possible. This feat is obviously challenging, as there are 82 different apps that post photos to Twitter alone and dealing with all the limitations of different APIs is akin to herding cats. Says creator Ray Chan Chin Ching, “Instagram is great, Picplz is great, Facebook photo is great, but still, your photos (memories) are still here and there on different platforms. There is not yet a place to build one’s complete memories. vvall hopes to fulfill such need.””
TechCrunch
DrChrono Makes The iPad A Doctor’s Best Friend In The Exam Room
“The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.”
TechCrunch
Humans Are Now Using Motor-Driven Power Knees to Kick Ass
“Germans are being fitted with the motorised knee by their national health system, along with money-rich Frenchies and American amputees. This is one limb with a difference—it’s actually the first to use motors and sensors to help bring life back into the old muscle, encouraging them to adapt to the new form of movement. An added benefit is that it can help lift users when trying to stand up.”
Gizmodo
Stretchable Solar Cells Power Ultra-Sensitive Electronic Super Skin
“researcher Zhenan Bao has developed a new stretchable, solar-powered “super skin” sensor that is so sensitive it can feel a fly touch down. The flexible electronic material harnesses polymer solar cells to generate electricity and can detect chemicals and sense various kinds of biological molecules. The technology holds potential for an incredible array of applications ranging from clothing, to robots, prosthetic limbs and beyond.”
Inhabitat
3-D Printing Brings Citroën’s Video Game Supercar to Life
“The Citroën GT only existed in the virtual streets of the Playstation game Gran Turismo — until 3D printing brought it to life. Yes, we’re serious: this is a street-legal, fully functional Citroën concept car made from a combination of hand-crafted and 3-D printed parts, based on the designs from a video game.”
Co.Design
Little Magic Stories by Chris O’Shea
“This is the first version of the project to test the idea and build the system. This story about the seasons was created entirely by the children, with the interactivity in the scenes built by me. Some scenes used motion detection in zones to trigger animations, such as catching Easter eggs, squashing sand castles or launching fireworks. Body tracking and basic physics were used in other scenes.”
CreativeApplications.Net
This is the World’s Teensiest Computer
“The device is designed to be implanted into glaucoma patients’ eyes in order to monitor internal pressure. It also comes packed with its own even-smaller radio and battery. Safe and awesome.”
Gizmodo
Copia – social media meets the eReader
“In addition to providing an online bookstore, the Copia platform allows members to annotate, highlight, make notes or otherwise draw attention to passages of particular relevance or importance in books they are reading. Those can then be shared with friends, family and colleagues via linked social networking profiles – like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – or to the wider Copia Community. Users can comment on entries made by other users, making books that can then exist as both an original work and as an annotated, highlighted and commented shared experience. Unlike other collaborative e-Reading approaches, the Copia platform also allows anyone who prefers to read paper versions of books to join in with community discussions.”
Gizmag
Lifelike Craig HD
“Lifelike Craig HD is a fully functional Craigslist browser that offers a fantastic visual interface. The app transforms your local Craigslist from the mundane list of links into an iPad browsable paper, complete with newspaper fonts and a classic layout. If something catches the eye you can add it to your favorites, circling it for later reference.”
Cool Hunting
When Photos Are Painkillers
“While lying inside a functional MRI machine, the participants focused on photographs of their partners or on pictures of similarly attractive acquaintances, or they played a word association game. During these distractions, the experimenters applied mild, medium or painful temperatures to the students’ palms. Images of attractive acquaintances were not very effective painkillers, but gazing at the faces of significant others and playing the word game reduced reported pain on average between 36 and 44 percent and high pain between 12 and 13 percent. Only photos of loved ones, however, sparked activity in reward centers within the amygdala, hypothalamus and medial orbitofrontal cortex. The faces of romantic partners also decreased activity in major pain-processing areas, such as the left and right posterior insula. Because the reward centers did not flutter in response to the distracting word game, the researchers argue that the salve of romantic affection is not mere distraction—it is a bliss as potent as that of drugs such as cocaine, which invigorate the same pleasure pathways.”
Scientific American
Twistory Puts Your Tweets In Your Calendar, Lets You Export Them For A Fee
“Ever tried to look up that hilariously funny, wicked smart or straight up historic message you tweeted at that birthday party about three weeks ago? Yeah, good luck finding it if you’re not using a tool like Twistory. As we wrote when we first featured the app nearly three years ago, the app lets you subscribe to (public) messages from any Twitter user, including your own, in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.). ”
TechCrunch
Creating posters, stickers and books from online photo albums
“The site creates posters generated from Facebook friends’ profile pictures, Facebook photo albums, Twitter followers, and even Tumblr accounts. Alternatively, these same pictures can be printed as stickers or turned into albums. Taking the idea one step further, Social Print Studio recently collaborated with social media blog Mashable, wallpapering an entire wall of their New York office using fans’ Facebook profile pictures, thereby creating the “world’s largest real-life Facebook wall”.”
Springwise
Scratch & Track Map by Yuree S. Lim
“The Scratch & Track concept enables you to log your travels with printable papers embedded with a scratchable surface. You print maps of your destination on the paper and scratch off where you’ve been to create an analog keepsake of your travels”
Yanko Design
Generative structures and sounds.
“Created by David Dalmazzo, Dazzled Project is an attempt to compose a generative particle environment that could at the same time create structures and sounds. The application uses both MaxMSP and Cinder via OSC bridge allowing sounds generated from max be fed directly into Cinder app which generates the visuals.”
CreativeApplications.Net
Construction kit for children to build their own robots or kinetic sculptures..
“Created by Kuan-Ju Wu, Giffi is a construction kit which allows children to build their own robots or kinetic sculptures. It consists of 3D printed moving parts supporting parts. Moving part include three types: rotating, linear actuating and sweeping with each part with its own micro-controller inside. By assembling them together and plugging in the power (battery box or wall plug box), the user can build a moving object. Included also are many passive kit parts that enable user to design different forms.”
CreativeApplications.Net
Back Track : mark it, go anywhere, get back
“BackTrack utilizes GPS technology in its most basic format, BackTrack has only two buttons and stores up to three locations – just mark it and forget it until it’s time to return. At the end of the day, select your location and the BackTrack displays direction and distance to travel. Use it to find your car in a crowded parking lot, your treestand or the trailhead, even to rendezvous with your group”
Pasta&Vinegar
Your Time Machine for the Web | About Memolane
“Memolane captures your entire online life in one timeline making it easy for you to travel back in time and re-live great memories. Whether you’d like to re-discover your holiday of a lifetime, re-live that great party last week or get all nostalgic about when the kids were little, now with Memolane it’s easy to keep the memories alive. With Memolane you can easily view and explore your photos, music, tweets, updates, check-ins, blogs and more from all of your favorite online services in one place. Simply search your history using the Memolane timeline to step back in time and re-live great memories. Share memories with friends, explore their Memolanes and invite them to contribute to your Stories. It’s easy to get started. Sign up and add the Internet services you use: Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Foursquare, Tripit, Spotify, and RSS feeds for any blog”
MemoLane
Most Tourists Take Pictures From the Same Spot
“Corinne Vionnet, an artist, has a set of images showing the most famous landmarks around the world. But she didn’t photograph or paint them. Instead, she superimposed hundreds of pictures taken by tourists to create one artsy, almost haunting, image. It’s sorta surprising how everyone seems to take pictures of landmarks the same way”
Gizmodo
New utility that breaks music down into its components
“The process for breaking down a track is fairly straightforward. An audio file is loaded up and then, after a rendering process, is displayed on screen into its component parts. However Mr Dawe was tight-lipped about the actual mechanics involved in breaking apart Mp3 and wav music files, saying – for now – it is a commercial secret. The developers say it takes about five minutes to ingest a three-minute piece of audio, although this will depend on how fast a PC you are using. The screen displays the various components of a track, which can be manipulated with a click of a mouse; pitch, tone, duration, pretty much every element of a composition can be tampered with.”
BBC News
Map Your Voice Helps You Learn Any Accent in the World
“If you’re curious about the nuances of speech or want to learn an accent to better understand it, Map Your Voice is a neat project that can help you do that. Upon visiting the site, you can just click a point on the map and click the play button to hear a person speaking. The text is, for the most part, consistent (you hear a passage about Mr. Tickle). If you want to contribute you can by uploading a sample of your voice.”
LifeHacker
Tiny MAME-CAM Camera Takes Photos But Won’t Play MAME Games
“Weighing in at 11g (or 0.011kg for the metrically inclined,) the MAME-CAM is a tiny device with a surprisingly full set of features for the package it’s in, and at 30x27x27mm (1.2×1.1×1.1 inches), that’s one tiny package. It takes photos at 1600×1200 resolution, shoots 640×480 video at 30 frames per second in AVI format, records glorious mono audio, and connects to your computer for file transfers via USB 1.1. Battery life is about 35 minutes or so while shooting video.”
GeekBeat.TV
Recompute Is an Environmentally Friendly Cardboard Computer
“The computer case itself is made out of cardboard. This recycle-friendly material means that when your computer finally bites the dust, you can literally throw it in your recycling bin (sans components). You can purchase a ready-made computer (complete with Windows 7 or Ubuntu) or build your own by buying the case and providing your own components (MATX motherboard).”
LifeHacker
Voyurl Is Climbing In Your Browser Window, Snatching Your Surfing History Up
“After all that time in stealth, the service finally launched in private beta recently. I’ve had a chance to test it out for a bit and it really is pretty amazing. By using a Chrome extension, they not only keep track of everything you browse on the web and publish it in a realtime updating list, but they can also publish your back-history of surfing as well. So who the hell would want to possibly use this? Well, first of all, it is kind of fun. If you only browse sites you don’t mind sharing, or just don’t care in general, this is a fun way to share those sites with others. And it’s a fun way to easily keep track of these sites. And to get/give recommendations. More importantly, with the extension, you can easily pause the tracking — or you can set it to be anonymous with the click of a button.”
TechCrunch
a-brilliant-swordfight-against-shadow-demons
“In the most compelling man versus shadow conflict since Peter Pan, Japanese actor Taichi Saotome does battle with vague clouds, then his own darkspace doppelgänger. It’s a light show built around darkness, and it’s pretty terrific.”
Gizmodo
A Decentralized Internet In The Freedom Box
“For Moglen, the social networks are “Too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.” A decentralized network of tens of thousands of small, low-cost, encrypted servers could provide communication service impervious to government or corporate shutdown, a goal Moglen think is feasible within the year if his Freedom Box Foundation raises the modest $500,000 needed to implement the software.”
PSFK
Game Closure Makes it a Breeze to Build Multiplayer, Cross-Platform Games
“Game Closure, which is essentially the gaming version of Heroku and Appcelerator, allows game developers to write a game in pure JavaScript and use standard HTML5 APIs. The startup’s SDK then compiles, deploys, and accelerates the game. No plug-ins are required, just a Web browser, and any old browser will do. When your game runs on non-browser platforms like mobile devices and tablets, the SDK creates an actual native app using APIs like OpenGL. Like their competitors, Game Closure offers developers everything they need to build, host, and deploy their games at warp speed.”
TechCrunch
3D Video Mapping Changes The Decor Of A Plain Living Room
“Employing 3-D video mapping, the Dutch group Mr. Beam have turned an ordinary white living room with bland furniture into a projection area, transforming it into several beautifully textured rooms with colorful patterns on the walls, furniture and the carpet”
PSFK
How Digital Presentations Are Replacing Physical Collections
“Websites like Things Organized Neatly and Collection A Day have come to replace tangible collections of stuff. The objects on these sites are often trivial; erasers collected from garage fairs or a pair of socks organized neatly, for example. But our need for stuff subsists, and it this way, we can collect stuff without actually having it clutter our living rooms, or our minds. He writes: Best of all, we don’t even have to deal with these collections as physical things; we can simply enjoy them as digital presentations. It is everything we love about stuff — but without the stuff. In a reversal of the desire to have your cake and eat it too, we can consume these lovely objects and not-have them, too.”
PSFK
google street art view
“the crowd-sourced website lacks the image clarity and clean functionality of the recently released ‘google art project‘ (previously covered in the designboom article ‘google art project’), but the interactive ‘street art view’ map nonetheless provides a broad and instantly updatable record of street art pieces captured by google street view. a small information box to the screen’s upper right includes the title, artist, and exact location of the work, when known by the user who has added that location.”
DesignBoom
Cool Hunting
“The “self-balancing electric unicycle” operates through gyroscopic technology, which a 1000-watt rechargeable lithium-ion battery powers. On a full charge (which takes about 45 minutes), the Solowheel lasts two hours—but the battery actually recaptures energy when going downhill.”
Cool Hunting
Pennant: an Interactive iPad Visualization of all Baseball History
“Pennant contains all the usual suspects of the current infographic style book: expect flip charts, circular bar graphs, and the kinematically-enhanced bubbles, now for your finger tips. The different visualizations provide an historical overview of any team’s complete overall history (since 1950) and contrasts any team’s season to the rest of the league. Alternatively, the app gives access to the result of every game within a season and every event within any selected game. Lastly, it features an interactive timeline, that recaptures each play in each game.”
information aesthetics
Pixelfari: Because Sometimes You Just Want to View The Web in 8-Bits
“The web browser didn’t really exist during the halcyon days of 8-Bit graphics. But if it did it would probably look something like Pixelfari, which makes all your web pages look chunky and pixelated”
Gizmodo
New type of light-emitting material could rival existing OLEDs
“researchers from the University of Michigan have created metal-free organic crystals that shine with phosphorescence – until now, only non- or semi-organic compounds have displayed this property. The crystals – or phosphors – glow white in visible light, while radiating blue, green, yellow and orange in ultraviolet light. Different colors can be obtained by altering their chemical composition.”
Gizmag
art. lebedev: flashkus disposable paper thumb drive
“their latest design still deals with the digital and comes in the form of a
disposable thumb drive called ‘flashkus’. made from a cardboard stock material, the sticks come in sets of four, divided by perforations which make them easy to separate and use. the paper surface allows one to hand-write labels directly onto the drives, indicating what is stored on the key. they come in 4GB, 8GB or 16GB storage capacities.”
DesignBoom
Viewdle Connects Real World With Social Media
“Viewdle sits between the camera and the user analysing faces in the camera stream, identifying them, then offering links to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. A user can identify and tag people in pictures & videos then pass the information to their social networks. As they tag others the software learns to recognize them, and can even share these new visual profiles with other users. The live view also offers an augmented reality tagging overlay that reveals information about the people around you.”
PSFK
WowWee Releases New Paper Jamz Pro-Series Guitars, Now With Downloadable Music
“Not content to totally rock your face off with their current Paper Jamz offerings, WowWee has created a new version of the paper-thin guitars complete with downloadable content, more power chords, and special waa waa function that bends notes when you shake the neck. The new guitars have downloadable songs as well as downloadable guitar sounds including heavy metal and twanging country. ”
TechCrunch
Online store helps equip Indian girls for school
“Encouraging visitors to help “buy a girl her life back,” in the site’s own words, The Girl Store gives shoppers around the world a way to buy Indian girls the pencils, uniforms, backpacks and other equipment they need to attend school. Numerous individual girls are pictured on the site, along with their school-supply needs, each of which can be purchased separately. Additionally, included free with every purchase is a tutoring service for 1.5 hours a day. Once everything has been purchased for a girl, her picture is labeled “off to school,” indicating that her needs have been met. Donations can be made through the site as well.”
Springwise
Roqbot Is A Jukebox On Your iPhone
“Something unusual happened last Friday night at Bar Basic here in San Francisco. When I walked in, the entire room was fixated on on a screen above the bar, which displayed what looked like a musical game but wasn’t karaoke. The game? Roqbot, a unique iPhone app that allows you to yes, pick the music playing at a bar. Like a combination Pandora and traditional jukebox, Roqbot allows you to control the tunes without getting up from where you’re sitting. […] With Roqbot you can check in at a participating venue as well as publish your checkins and music picks to Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm and Facebook. You can select a song to play using Roqbot credits that you can buy with Amazon, Paypal or your Credit Card through your phone. The app offers you a comprehensive list of popular music to choose from, including some that will please the cranky indie music snob you’ve dragged along. If you’re having trouble deciding what to play you can pick from curated lists like “Highest Rated of all time,” “Most Played of All Time” and yes “Top 80s.””
TechCrunch
The Wristwatch Looks For a New Use
“Mr. Migicovsky said that installing apps on the new watch will be a simple process. “It’s possible to get up and running with inPulse within five minutes,” he said, noting that you don’t need to be a programmer or developer to take advantage of the apps on the watch, but watch owners will have to rely on this community to build new applications. Some programmers are already using the new Allerta. One app offers the ability to control an iTunes music library from the watch. Another becomes an extension of a Blackberry smartphone and shows new e-mail messages and calendars on the phone through the watch’s display. And finally, a programmer recreated the popular videogame Doom, as seen in the video below.”
NYTimes.com
GeoPalz pedometers reward kids for walking
“When kids log onto their GeoPalz website account and update their total number of miles, an onscreen map will indicate how far they’ve walked to date through the cartoony “GeoPalz World.” Physical prizes and printable awards are available at different points along the virtual path that they follow, which they can claim by trading in the points that they earn for each mile walked. The types of prizes available include baseball equipment, hacky sacks, frisbees and other activity-based or educational items. Parents still have to pay for shipping.”
Gizmag
Joshua Davis Creates the Face of Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy Supercomputer
“Watson uses a slew of complicated algorithms to parse every “Jeopardy!” clue, gather possible answers, and weight each guess according to how “confident” it is that the guess is correct. Davis visually represents these patterns in 27 possible states that the avatar can be in. Generally, when Watson is confident in its guess, the particles swarm to the top of the globe and glow green; when Watson is not confident, they flow to the bottom and glow orange. And while Alex Trebek is making chitchat at the podium or reading off clues, the avatar pulses a cool IBM blue.”
Co.Design
Tiny Paper Accelerometer Points To A Future Of Pervasive Sensors
“A professor at Harvard University has developed a way to make motion sensors available to everyone. Using chromatography paper as a key component, George Whitesides developed a paper accelerometer using tiny sliver, carbon contact pads, and vinyl stencils”
PSFK
TV Shows Become Events Again: Twitter As Second Screen
“For instance, when Fox airs the show Glee, Twitter traffic increases by a factor of 30 and maintains that rate until the show is over. And during this year’s Super Bowl, users blasted out 4,000 tweets per second. “There are business implications of this trend: TV shows become events, meaning people watch them as they happen,” Costolo said. “We’re so used to creating experiences for our users, but now our users are creating experiences for each other.”
PSFK
Synaptics’ New Touchscreens Can Detect The Head Of A Pin
“What they’ve done is integrate the touch controller (basically, the tiny chip that detects and reports touch activity) with the display driver. This means they can rule out a lot of the noise that the display creates with the touch sensors — the result is vastly improved sensitivity, even when using something non-conductive like a glove or stylus”
TechCrunch
Innovative key fob brings NFC capabilities to all mobile phones
“To ensure users won’t need to shell out for a new mobile phone to make use of NFC technology, Simlink has crammed all the necessary bits and pieces, along with a Morpho NFC-enabled SIM card, into a key fob that connects wirelessly with any mobile phone via Wi-Fi. “Equipped in this way, the key fob can help to deploy any kind of Near Field Communication service – such as mobile payment, mobile ticketing or loyalty services – enabled by an NFC SIM card, with any kind of Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone right now,” explained Paul Naldrett, Senior Vice President for Telecoms at Morpho.”
Gizmag
‘Magnetricity’ Created in Crystals of Spin Ice
“A team of physicists in England has created magnetic charges — isolated north and south magnetic poles — and induced them to flow in crystals no bigger than a centimeter across. These moving magnetic charges, which behave almost exactly like electrical charges flowing through batteries and biological systems, could one day be useful in developing “magnetronic” devices — though what such devices would do is anybody’s guess”
Wired.com
Fisher-Price iCan Play Case Gives Your iPhone the Trappings of a Real Toy
“The iCan Play case, out later this year for $20, protects iPhones and iPod Touches from whatever sticky fingers may be poking their way (and hides the home button, keeping kids locked into the app of your choosing.) To that end, Fisher-Price has three kid-friendly apps ready for download—Where’s Puppy’s Nose, Let’s Count Animals!, and Animal Sounds—all of which have nice, bright graphics and respond variously to pokings, tiltings, and shakings.”
Gizmodo
Toy Design: Cubelets, modular robotic blocks
“Cubelets are modular, robotic little bricks that perform different mechanical and sensorial tasks. You snap them together and the Sense Blocks become the “input”–i.e. detecting proximity, responding to physical stimuli–and the Action Blocks provide the output, i.e. moving, rotating, making noise.”
Core77
Gemalto squeezes Facebook onto a SIM
“Gemalto has managed to get Facebook running on a SIM chip, making every GSM phone a Facebook phone and bringing social networking to the dumbest of handsets. The SIM-based client isn’t as pretty as its smartphone contemporaries – don’t expect picture streams or sliding interfaces – but it was developed with the help of Facebook, and provides text-menu-based interaction with Facebook – including status updates, pokes and friend requests – to any GSM-compatible handset through the magic of the GSM SIM Toolkit and Class 2 SMS messages.”
The Register
“Selective Memory Theatre” – teaching the non-forgetting digital memory to forget
“Created by Matthias ‘moka’ Dörfelt, Selective Memory Theatre is a machine-like perception and memory installation which receives the newest images from flickr that get distorted, mixed and blended to pursue notion of sensory noise and portray memory and perception. Simultaneously these images are mapped as “similar memories” to the secondary projection representing short- and long-term memory layer and their mutual relationships.”
CreativeApplications.Net
Multiplayer Environment Encourages Virtual Urban Development
“Betaville is an open-source multiplayer environment for real cities, in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development. The future of a street corner, a blank wall, a vacant lot, or an entire city can now be tinkered with on an ongoing basis at negligible cost by the full spectrum of subject matter experts: the people who know what it’s like to live there now, the people who know how to make new things happen… and people with great ideas to share, anywhere in the world, whenever they can and care to.”
PSFK
Time Traversing Art Transcends FlickR And Augmented Reality
“Abigail collects vintage tourist guides, then search for photographs taken from a similar vantage point and printed at similar scale. When she finds these matching book plates, she cuts and folds the pages into a single surface, arranging the images in chronological order based on the publication dates of the books, with the first serving as the “base” of the collage”
PSFK
Don Lehman’s MORE/REAL Stylus Cap
“Don Lehman just launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce an ingenious idea — a Stylus Cap that turns a standard pen or marker into a touchscreen stylus. The MORE/REAL Stylus Cap turns a Sharpie, a Bic, or a Pilot Fineliner into a touchscreen stylus that works with any capacitive touch screen. You get all the benefits of an marker that can write on paper with a stylus that gives you superior control to sketch and take notes on touchscreens such as the iPad”
Core77
App Automatically Tracks And Reports Potholes
“Street Bump is a free app that uses a phone’s accelerometer and GPS to identify potholes and note their locations while driving and send automatic service repair requests of all encountered bumps to the concerned officials, rather than having the locals call or email in order to report the problem areas on their roads.”
PSFK
First Measurement of ‘Wordquakes’ Shaking the Blogosphere
“Klimek and co say this clearly shows two types of event. The first is a sudden spike in word frequency triggered by a news event such as the nomination of Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate. Because these events are triggered from outside the blogosphere, Klimek and co call them exogenous. The second was gradual spike in which the discussion within the blogosphere reaches a crescendo and then dies away again. The use of the word inauguration before and after the inauguration of President Obama is an example, which Klimek and co call endogenous because they arise within the blogosphere. The main finding is that the distribution of event sizes and of fore-and after shocks is remarkably similar to those found by seismologists. “The intensity of fore- and aftershocks follows Omori’s law, the distribution of event-sizes is of Gutenberg-Richter type,” say Klimek and co.”
Technology Review
Actuated surface controlled by gesture recognition
“The table consists of an array of 120 individually addressable pins, whose height can be actuated and read back simultaneously, thus allowing the user to utilize them as both input and output. Building upon this system, we have furthered the design by placing a depth camera above the tabletop surface. By gaining access to the depth information we are able to detect basic gestures from the user. In order to provide visual feedback related to user interaction, a projector is mounted above the table and calibrated to be coincident with the depth camera. Computer vision is utilized to determine and recognize the position, orientation, and height of hands and fingers, in order to detect gestural input”
CreativeApplications.Net
Laser-Quick Data Transfer
“For the first time, researchers have grown lasers from high-performance materials directly on silicon. Bringing together electrical and optical components on computer chips would speed data transfer within and between computers, but the incompatibility of the best laser materials with the silicon used to make today’s chips has been a major hurdle.”
Technology Review
Fragments of time and space recorded with Kinect+SLR on NYC Subway
“Candid shots from Union Square NYC subway created using Kinect and SLR camera by James George in collaboration with Alexander Porter. Video is forthcoming but for now only images below. We couldn’t wait but post these 3D fragments of time and space recorded in public. So good!”
CreativeApplications.Net
You Want A Better Search Engine? Sortfix Suggests Better Search Terms
“Previously, SortFix tried concentrating its search functionality directly through its website and through its iPad app. But now SortFix has created a FireFox extension for Google which makes use of SortFix’s algorithms to generate suggested words to improve your search.”
TechCrunch
$1.5M Robbery of Bellagio Casino Foiled Thanks to RFID Chips
“The 29 year old suspect is accused of robbing the Bellagio on December 14th of 2010, stealing chips whose face value totaled around $1.5 million dollars. Their real value, however, was zero. Thanks to RFID tags embedded inside them, the chips with denominations of $100 to $25,000 could be immediately deactivated rendering them unredeemable for cash value.”
Singularity Hub
You have a regional dialect – even on Twitter
“He used geo-tagging to locate 9,500 users of Twitter across the US to see if, when comparing how we chat among our friends, people in the same places speak in similar ways. His study of over 380,000 tweets revealed that even with Twitter’s ultra-succinct limitations, people in Washington, for example, used different words and spellings to people in New York.”
BBC News
The Average Woman In Every Country Looks Like This
“The Faces of Tomorrow projects takes lots of photos of people in various countries and merges them into one “average” face. It’s interesting, because if you gave me the photo for the average face for say, China, Korea, Japan and some other Asian countries and asked me to guess where they were from, I could probably get it right. They really do look like the stereotypical person from that country”
Gizmodo
Counterfeit-proofing chips with digital fingerprints
“Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute, located in Garching near Munich, say that electronic components or microchips can be made counterfeit-proof using physical unclonable functions (PUF). Slight variations in thickness, length or density that occur during component manufacture, but which don’t affect functionality, can be used to generate a unique digital identification key.”
Gizmag
Citizen Cartography: Collectively Generated Archives Of Data From Historical Maps
“The New York Public Library is developing a tool that lets the public take information archived on digitized historical maps, and use it to tag a searchable interface built with Open Street Map. The Map Rectifier tool first overlays these historical maps onto the open, modern-day map, drawing from the library’s expansive map database that includes everything from maps of building types for fire insurance purposes to agricultural maps of droughts. Users are then able to go into the overlay, and match markings on the original cartographer’s key (see an example key below) with buildings or areas on the digital map, indicated through a simple digital drawing tool that associates drawn shapes with user-inputted attributes.”
PSFK
Vodafone Releases Webbox $100 Web-Surfing Keyboard For Emerging Markets
“The device is a keyboard with a standard set of RCA cables sprouting out of the back. You plug it into any TV, new or old, and turn it on. Instantly you have 2G or 3G access to an Opera Mini browser, locally relevant news, as well as games, a dictionary, and a text editor. Instead of a PC, a user would plug this in and use it as necessary, downloading data at 90% compression.”
TechCrunch
New record label hands decision-making over to fans
“By signing up as a Crowdband member for USD 25 a year, users are entitled to vote on major decisions in The Donnas’ career, from which songs are included on their albums, which artists they should collaborate with, where and where they tour, and even ideas for album cover art. In exchange, not only do members get to see their decisions implemented, they also receive the band’s releases before the general public, as well as special offers and deals on artist’s merchandise and concert tickets.”
Springwise
PSFK » Bio Scanning Body Suit Lets You Remix Your Inner Rhythms
“Karina Van Heck has designed a body suit that lets users tune into their interior rhythms, and sample, remix and listen to them live. Karina utilises sound capturing membranes to explore the many technological conduits into imaging and perceiving our inner states”
PSFK
Realtime API for Congress
“The Sunlight Foundation’s Real Time Congress API is now available for everyone to follow a range of Congressional activity as soon as it becomes available online. The feeds in the Real Time Congress API include floor updates, video from the House and Executive branch, bills, votes, hearings, amendments and more. This collection of live feeds is filterable, sortable and sliceable, giving developers a chance to customize the data to fit their needs in either JSON or XML format.”
Boing Boing
The sound of a TV through a wall
“Ambiance is, more or less, a slick front end for an audio archive called The Freesound Project, but it adds tons of value. It gives you the capability to download (for free) a large number of high-quality ambient audio clips, arrange them in playlists, and play them back in any order you choose. You can set them to shuffle and loop, and set a timer so the sounds fade away after a given period. The variety of clips on offer is staggering, and goes way beyond the usual waves and showers. As I write this I’m listening to a clip called “Sonoran Desert,” which features the dry whisper of wind over sand, bird sounds and — alarmingly — what sounds like the rattle of a rattlesnake really freakin’ close.”
Boing Boing
Watch Bones on TV, Follow Along With Your iPad
“Need to figure out what the hell Brennan is talking about? Go into the the jargon translator. Confused how Angela used X clue to discover Y killer? Check out sketches and photos of the crime scenes. Wanna know what song is playing? Go into the juke box. There are other features too, but if you have an iPad, you should just play around with it yourself.”
Gizmodo
Via NFC: Japanese Social Network Mixi First To Let Users “Share” Real-World Items
“Mixi Real Check In allows you to check in to places by tapping their Android phone on an NFC tag in the real world to share your location with your Mixi friends in real-time. These tags, which cost a few cents and can contain any kind of information (i.e. a URL or Twitter handle), can be attached to a wall or poster in a store or restaurant, for example.”
TechCrunch
Keep the kids on a virtual leash
“The receiver is attached to the child’s shoe or belt via an integrated mounting loop. The transmitter, carried by the parent, will chirp if the child wanders more than 30 feet (9 meters) away. At that point, if the parent can’t see where their child went, they can press a button on the transmitter. This will activate a 90 db beeping alarm on the receiver, as long as it’s still within a range of 150 feet (46 meters).”
Gizmag
Buzz Editor: Immersion Releases MOTIV Haptics Platform
“Their MOTIV platform offers programmers and carriers a new way to add vibrational feedback to phones. For example, instead of a curt buzz when something explodes on screen, you can add special “macro” vibrations that turn the motor on and off at various frequencies, recreating the vibrations associated with an explosion. It’s a bit hard to describe, but think of an audio editor for buzzing motors. ”
TechCrunch
Moullinex Uses Hacked Kinect To Create Innovative Music Video
“Moullinex takes it one step further by creating a music video for ‘Catalina’, a track off the Chocolat EP, using a hacked Kinect and a 3D capture script. The footage was captured with the Kinect, using Processing and Cinema 4D R12 (read more about the process here). The resulting video includes anaglyphic 3D graphics, allowing viewers to see additional features when wearing a pair of 3D glasses.”
PSFK
When Should I Visit?: Antisocial Social Media
“Though Foursquare is often used to find out which locations are most frequented by the people you know, a new website inversely uses it to determine when places are visited the least. When Should I Visit? uses data gathered from Foursquare to find the least busy times to visit the museums, galleries and theaters of London. It also displays the quietest days along with a graph to judge the relative popularity of different days”
PSFK
Ecologically Focused Information Dissemination
“Literacy Bridge worked for a period of 18 months to develop a solution to a problem facing Ghananian farmers. Small scale producers would receive advice from agricultural extension officers to help them improve their yield, but these visits were often infrequent and consequently content intensive. Illiterate farmers had no way to document or retrieve the information imparted to them during these visits. The Talking Book was the solution – a low cost, open – source software, digital audio computer which plays instructions in the local language. It is similar in appearance to Buddha Machines and it’s functionality is not dissimilar to a crude MP3 player, minus the screen:”
PSFK
.@Spotify Player
“In a nutshell the objects consists of Processing sketch, Arduino and an RFID reader. Each RFID tag can be assigned to a Spotify link, album, artist or search. When the tag is placed on the reader, an ID-12, it sends a trigger to Processing and triggers an AppleScript that will take over Spotify and play whatever is linked to that tag. The processing sketch can also retrieve the information about the track that is being played. For doing so, a packet sniffer is checking all the internet packets sent from the computer and whenever it finds something being sent to Last.fm, it grabs it and parses the track information (artist, album, title and length).”
CreativeApplications.Net
Fingerprints on touch interface as interaction pattern
“Because the primary input method of the iPad is a single piece of multitouch glass, developers have incredible flexibility to design unique user interfaces. It’s hard to appreciate the variety of UIs though, since turning the screen off removes virtually all evidence of them. To spotlight these differences, I looked at the only fragments that remain from using an app: fingerprints”
Pasta&Vinegar
Curated subscription service delivers 10 indie songs each week
“New York-based WeeklyIndie invites independent artists to submit songs to its site, and it screens through thousands of such songs every week. After selecting the ones it likes, it signs distribution deals with the artists involved. Then WeeklyIndie sends out links to its worldwide base of subscribers to enable them to download the 10 chosen songs. Customer subscriptions cost USD 7 per month.”
Springwise
Fooducate App Helps You to Eat Healthier
“Fooducate lets shoppers scan a product bar code in the grocery store for an instant read on a food’s health value, represented by a letter grade from A to D. Once a food has been scanned and recognized, the app offers healthier alternatives or can compare two products side-by-side. Fooducate allows users to compare products they see in the grocery store. Fooducate said its app used an algorithm that counted not just nutrients, but if the nutrients were added in processing, which results in a lower score. Sodium, sugar and saturated fats count against a food; fiber and naturally occurring nutrients count in a food’s favor.”
NYTimes.com
The Facebook Phone Inspired by Stormtroopers and Wall-E’s Girlfriend
“What really makes these two phones stand out however is that the whole experience is built around Facebook. While MWC is still a few days away, and might very well toss up the Facebook phone that’s been so-rumored, INQ’s phones are so far the closest we have to a Facebook phone yet. From the moment you slide the locked screen icon through the membrane, and launch the home-screen, you’ll see those familiar icons. From the home-screen you can easily start chatting; looking at your feed; see latest messages from your pals.”
Gizmodo
The Smallest Computing Systems Yet
“A team led by Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard, and Shamik Das, lead engineer in MITRE’s nanosystems group, has designed and built a reprogrammable circuit out of nanowire transistors. Several tiles wired together would make the first scalable nanowire computer, says Lieber. Such a device could run inside microscopic, implantable biosensors, and ultra-low-power environmental or structural sensors, say the researchers. ”
Technology Review
A vending machine for … golf lessons??
“While other putting machines rely on the user performing the swing to which the machine provides feedback, RoboPutt does the moving for you to reinforce a good swing. By repeating a perfect swing over and over, RoboPutt is designed to build muscle memory so you can repeat the swing out on the greens.”
Gizmag
Is This the Future of Cameraphones?
“GigaOM says the secret behind Pelican’s technology isn’t unlike the HDR feature found on the iPhone. the hardware captures multiple images (or sets of data), and then uses post-processing software to assemble it all into one high-quality photograph. Pelican is less obsessed with cramming more megapixels into the phone, and more interested in finding the best way to pair a sensor with a lens (or lenses, in this case).”
Gizmodo
Alex Posada ‘The Particle’
“A spectacle of light and sound, a seemingly simple wire frame studded with lights came to life. Posada writes of his piece “Experimenting with colour, sound and movement, the continuous rotation, speed and light create visual effects that define the spatial structure of the object.” The exhibit has a further layer of complexity, the regulatory mechanism of the design is based on the haphazard decision-making manner, forming new models. This means that the structures cannot be anticipated, but instead evolve through continual iterations involving the viewer. You simply must check out more pics and videos on the next page!”
NOTCOT
Save as WWF, Save a Tree
“The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don’t need printing out – then simply save them as WWF”
WWF
This Book Has Real Hyperlinks Sewn With Thread
“Maria Fischer, a German designer, created this book, “Thoughts on Dreams”. She sewed “hyperlinks” onto the book with thread so readers could follow a specific link, er, word or phrase. It was part of an art project to highlight key words amongst a bigger story and somehow visualize “the confusion and fragileness of dreams”.”
Gizmodo
Encode location data in the surface of manhole covers, help robots find their way
“In the latest edition of the Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, they reveal how the shape of each manhole cover in a locale can be used to give a robot a position fix. Why bother? Its critical to check your calculated position every now and then against a known GPS position – because robot wheels can slip (their rotations are counted to give position estimates) or a robot’s leg stride can be miscalculated, leaving dead reckoning dead in the water. But GPS, the researchers complain, cannot be received well in downtown concrete canyons. And cameras that compare buildings with Google Street View style databases are no good when the light is fading.”
Boing Boing
Robots to get their own internet
“European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world. Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones. Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.”
BBC News
Isn’t it tweet?
“Orange is turning people’s Tweets into little animated love stories for Valentine’s Day. Altogether now, “Ahhh…”"
Creative Review
arkwhat: arkcanary ii
“the trumpet-shaped device simply amplifies sound from the iPhone’s built-in speaker. it clips directly onto the phone, and is compatible for use with the company’s foam arkhippo cases.”
DesignBoom
Wifi-equipped tuk-tuks tour the streets of Phnom Penh
“The tuk-tuks were devised by agency OgilvyAction and launched at the end of last year, providing free internet access to anyone in the immediate area. In addition, the tuk-tuks served as a showroom for the company’s products and services, which can be purchased on the spot. Initially offering connectivity on the move to residents of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, the tuks tuks will also be rolled out to other Cambodian cities such as Siem Reap, Sihanoukville and Batambong, as well as coming together for one-off events.”
Springwise
New graphene transistor created with record high-switching performance
“Dr Zakaria Moktadir of the Nano research group at the University of Southampton discovered that by introducing geometrical singularities such as sharp beds and corners in bilayer graphene nanowires, the current could be turned off efficiently. According to Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, Head of the Nano research group, this engineering approach has achieved an on/off switching ratio 1,000 times higher than previous attempts.”
Gizmag
ahumanright.org plans to buy satellite and provide free Internet access for entire world
“Through his charity group ahumanright.org, Grammatis aims to set up a network of satellites that will provide free internet access to everyone in the world. He’s starting by attempting to buy a single used satellite that’s already in orbit and moving it to a location above a developing country. The spacecraft in question is the Terrestar-1 communications satellite. Given that the company that owns it, Terrestar, has recently filed for bankruptcy, it may soon be up for sale. Grammatis’s plan is to raise US$150,000, so that his group can put together a business plan for funders, process the legal and business aspects of submitting a bid, and hire engineers to figure out how to move and repurpose the satellite. ”
Gizmag
Researchers Already Have a Twitter Generator That Predicts How You’ll Tweet
Social Network Write Generator (SONG) generates data that closely replicates the behaviour of genuine tweeters. The team gathered 12 million tweets written by 2.4 million people between November 25 and December 4 2008. They cut out the 75% of users who didn’t send a single tweet during the 19 day period and filtered for spammers by looking for accounts with a high tweet-to-followers ratio, leaving them with a dataset of around 350,000 users.”
Gizmodo
Capo for iPhone: Learn to Play Any Song You Throw at It
“There are plenty of music makers for the iPhone, but how many apps will teach you to play the songs you already have? Capo says it will do just that, taking any song you give it breaking it down, and letting you master it on your own instrument. When you import a song in Capo (pronounced KAY-POE) it presents a waveform, where you can place song markers for quickly accessing certain parts of a song. While using the app, you can adjust pitch, learn chord progressions and loop sections of a song as you perfect your own playing. Capo will even help you tune your guitar or bass.”
Gizmodo
Konkreet Performer
“The heart of Performer is the control object, an abstract graphic element, made out of up to 10 nodes. Combine up to 3 graphical layers to design the look of this object. This object can be moved around as a whole. Zoom, turn, throw, distort and reshape it across the screen. The app also has the ability to save the shape of your objects (and hence the sound that they represent) into 8 snapshots, organised into 8 banks, i.e. 64 slots in total. In addition there is also ribbon controller allowing you to for example control pitch bend while simultaneously manipulating the other sound parameters using the Performer object”
CreativeApplications.Net
