Archive for March, 2011
Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know
“Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts. The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.”
NYTimes.com
T-Box Harnesses Wind Energy from Speeding Trains
“A passing train travelling at 200 kph would produce a wind speed equivalent to 15 m/sec. The T-Box would be able to catch this wind and produce about 3,500 W of power. If the train was 200m long, going at a speed of 300 kph and travelled 1km in 18 seconds, the T-Boxes would be able to produce about 2.6 KWh. This energy could then be utilized to power remote areas that don’t have electricity or rail sub-systems.”
Inhabitat
Zapd Creates Themed Websites Right From Your Phone
“Zapd is an iPhone app that lets you create a themed, well-designed, mobile-friendly website in 60 seconds. You pick a theme, snap a photo, add a caption, and if you want you can even write a little text (don’t strain yourself). When you publish the site or a new entry, you can share a short URL with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, or email. (You can also sign in with your Facebook ID). I tried it and it literally took me a few minutes to create these two sites, Seeking and The Truth.”
TechCrunch
Infographic of the Day: Solo Charts Your Freelance Finances
“Solo is a project-management tool for freelancers, and it is gorgeous. It’s got all the requisite templates for self-organization, from invoices to contact sheets, stuffed into a single program, and with its grids and elegant Clarendon type, it looks like a beautifully executed print page.”
Co.Design
Max Battaglia’s Touch Guitar
“Designer, Max Battaglia, has come up with a multi touch screen guitar. At the “Giving Shape Design Studio, this string less guitar can be adjusted for the number of strings and frets of conventional guitar.”
materialicious
Multitouch gesture controlled microscope – the ‘iPad on steroids’
“Researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) have collaborated with Finnish company Multitouch Ltd to create a giant touch and gesture controlled microscope. The Multitouch microscope uses a combination of web based microscopy and a 46-inch multitouch display to create what researcher Dr Johan Lundin calls “an iPad on steroids.” A useful tool for interactive teaching and learning, the microscope allows users to zoom in or out with a two handed stretch or pinch gesture – all the way down to 1000x magnification.”
Gizmag
SmartBird
“This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start, fly and land autonomously – with no additional drive mechanism. Its wings not only beat up and down, but also twist at specific angles. This is made possible by an active articulated torsional drive unit, which in combination with a complex control system attains an unprecedented level of efficiency in flight operation. Festo has thus succeeded for the first time in creating an energy-efficient technical adaptation of this model from nature.”
Festo Festo Corporate
Utopian AR Concept Video
“This one treats AR as a private little wonderland without intrusion from a world trying to get you to buy stuff. I’m all for the Utopian vision, but I expect the corporate spam-mongers to find ways into our idyllic little islands.”
Games Alfresco
Honeywell’s Augmented-Reality Display (Almost) Gives Pilots X-Ray Specs
“The live feed from an infrared camera in the nose of the plane — which can “see through” certain kinds of bad weather to reveal runway landing lights or other pertinent ground features — is perfectly registered via GPS on top of a 3-D graphical view of the terrain, creating a “blended image” that gives pilots “enhanced situational awareness in low visibility conditions,” says Bob Witwer of Honeywell’s Advanced Technology group. In English, that means they can see what they’re doing even when they can’t actually see what they’re doing. Think of it as something like X-ray vision, minus the titillating applications.”
Co.Design
Bracelet features built-in GPS and security alarm system
“Designed by Oscar Magnuson and Efva Attling, and produced by Elcoteq, the jewelry appears at first glance to be little more than a bracelet consisting of 6 blocks. Inside the bracelet, however, is a GPS device which sends a tracking signal and an alarm to the wearer’s “shields” when the bracelet is pulled. With the Basic service these “shields” will be the wearer’s three most trusted friends, who can then call the wearer to check whether they are in danger. If the wearer does not pick up, these friends can track them using the PFO app on their smartphone or notebook. Alternatively, with the Premium service, pulling the bracelet will send an alarm to the security company G4S.”
Springwise
Creepy shoulder-mounted telepresence robot
“TEROOS lets a distant friend accompany you and see/hear through the robot’s camera and mic. A mini directional speaker allows the robot to whisper in your ear, which is even more weird.”
Make
Twimal: Super-Cute Twitter Toy Pet Reads Tweets For You
“Japan is crazy about Twitter, and today local toy maker Takara Tomy has announced Twimal (short for “Twitter Animal”) [JP], a super-cute toy “pet” that can reads out tweets loud for you. The white version does this with a female voice, while the blue Twimal uses a male voice.”
TechCrunch
App facilitates communication for users unable to speak
“Designed to make communication as easy as possible, the app’s keyboard can switch between different modes to speed up conversations. For example, as well as a standard letter keyboard for spelling out words, there is a keyboard loaded with a list of 50 commonly used words and up to a dozen commonly used phrases to select from. The app will also generate word predictions as users type, similar to predictive texting on mobile phones, with a key difference being that it can import names, cities and company names from users’ address books and add these into the word prediction bank. To communicate with others, users of the app can then choose to have the entire phrase read out by a male or female voice, or to have individual words read out as they enter or select them. For those struggling to attract attention, there is also the option to sound a chime, or to repeat the last phrase spoken.”
Springwise
The First Plastic Computer Processor
“Researchers in Europe used 4,000 plastic, or organic, transistors to create the plastic microprocessor, which measures roughly two centimeters square and is built on top of flexible plastic foil. “Compared to using silicon, this has the advantage of lower price and that it can be flexible,” says Jan Genoe […] The processor can so far run only one simple program of 16 instructions. The commands are hardcoded into a second foil etched with plastic circuits that can be connected to the processor to “load” the program. This allows the processor to calculate a running average of an incoming signal, something that a chip involved in processing the signal from a sensor might do, says Genoe.”
Technology Review
Chartwell, the infographics font
“Chartwell is a type family you can use to build all kinds of graphs and charts. Stringing letters and numbers together into ligatures, you can make things like this:”
Kottke
Placebook: How Facebook Users Are Distributed around the World
“Placebook [geographics.cz] aims to provide a visual overview on how Facebook users are distributed around the world. As a unique feature, any Facebook users can log into the system, in order to receive a map and all relational statistics about their own personal friend network.”
information aesthetics
MimioVote Lets Teachers Give Quizzes in Real Time, So Students Never Lag
“Teachers give a quiz, either orally or on paper, and students use Gameboy-like voting boxes to plug in their answers. The answers are then dispatched directly to the teacher, cutting back on the time he has to spend scoring tests and entering grades. Perhaps more importantly, it means that the instructor can measure in real time how deftly the class grasps the material. As Manny Perez, chief engineer of DYMO/Mimio Interactive Teaching Technologies, tells it: “Let’s say you go over some math problem or history of Abe Lincoln. You get instant feedback. So if only 50 percent of your class got something right, why move forward?” It also helps the teacher laser in on learning gaps of individual students. If 31 kids get the quadratic equation, and two don’t, Joe Professor knows it immediately and can use the remainder of the class to tutor those who are struggling.”
Co.Design
Internet-Enabled Contact Lense Could Bring You Eye To Eye With Web Surfing
“All of these components combine to form a circuit that is grafted onto a contact lens, powered by the vibrations of radio waves. The research uses cutting-edge optoelectronic components, which are also semi-transparent–a crucial factor in creating the augmented reality effect: Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. So far the team has accomplished an 8 x 8 pixel LED array within the contact lens, making the current research a far cry from an augmented vision matching say, the Terminator’s cyborg perception. Nevertheless it solidifies bionic eyesight a matter of “how soon” rather than “if only.””
PSFK
Color App Shares Photos With People Around You, And Just Those People
“The NYT explains that you can see other Color users’ photos—provided they’re geographically around you—and see yourself in those photos. But is this useful on a day-to-day basis? It’s unclear. Also confusing are the app’s icons, which are unlabeled. What is clear is that you really need other people to be around you to make use of the app. Right now there is nobody around me, so all I’m seeing are my own photos. But I could see this being neat at a party, where people take quick snapshots of fun events throughout the night, and others can share or browse through the timeline. This would be one nerdy party. Or at an office, where you and your coworkers want to document your shared misery.”
Gizmodo
Erase the social network past with Last Night Never Happened
“Last Night Never Happened is an iPhone app that, when given access to your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, will delete or replace any social network postings that you happen to regret. The app will go back up to 48 hours, and as you can see in the demo, will clear out any photos, tweets, or Facebook posts you need to delete, optionally replacing them with a much nicer message. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t do any more than Twitter or Facebook, so all of those OK Cupid messages you sent are there to stay. And according to the fine print on the app, it doesn’t do Facebook’s status updates either, so you’ll have to go deal with those yourself.”
TUAW
Augmented Reality: String real light detection
“String Augmented Reality for Unity3D can detect the natural color values returned from the markers it detects. This data can be used to manipulate your augmented scene in real-time to further enhance realism by making your scene’s overall color matches the actual tone of light color in the real world.”
Beyond The Beyond
Quantum computing device hints at powerful future
“One of the most complex efforts toward a quantum computer has been shown off at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas in the US. It uses the strange “quantum states” of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers. The 6cm-by-6cm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four “quantum bits” that do the calculations. The team said further scaling up to 10 qubits should be possible this year. Rather than the ones and zeroes of digital computing, quantum computers deal in what are known as superpositions – states of matter that can be thought of as both one and zero at once.”
BBC News
The Path of Protest: an Interactive Timeline of Middle East Protests
“The Guardian forms a literal interpretation of a path-as-a-visualization, as it aggregates and represents the recent flood of pro-democracy rebellions in the Middle East. The interactive timeline starts with the self-burning of a single man around December 2010 in Tunesia, and then follows the chain of events along parallel country-specific paths, until today. The color of the event flags posted along the way denotes different categories, such as political moves, regime changes, local protests or international responses. ”
Information aesthetics
Tracking Your Wi-Fi Trail at the Airport
“The officials can use this information to improve the design of the airport, direct the flow of passengers or shift employees to improve the efficiency of security or immigration checkpoints. On Mr. Cheikh’s laptop, the tracking program showed different colored dots to distinguish arriving from departing passengers. Travelers can download the associated Copenhagen Airport iPhone application to receive location-specific information on their devices about things like where to find the shortest security line or special deals being offered by nearby stores. ”
NYTimes.com
Minimals: Digital Assembly Meets Art
“MINIMALS, which is currently being exhibited at Boston’s Axiom Gallery, is a work by my friends and labmates Jonathan Bachrach and Jonathan Ward. In the academic world, they both research “digital assembly,” or the idea that in “the future,” we will be able to make anything out of reusable, discrete blocks of interesting and varied geometries and materials. I think it’s pretty cool to see that research applied to an art piece about the resolution limits of perceiving familiar things (in this case, animals) in an increasingly digitized world.”
Make
Nerve-Electronic Hybrid Could Meld Mind and Machine
“Nerve-cell tendrils readily thread their way through tiny semiconductor tubes, researchers find, forming a crisscrossed network like vines twining toward the sun. The discovery that offshoots from nascent mouse nerve cells explore the specially designed tubes could lead to tricks for studying nervous system diseases or testing the effects of potential drugs. Such a system may even bring researchers closer to brain-computer interfaces that seamlessly integrate artificial limbs or other prosthetic devices.”
Wired.com
New battery technology may allow for complete recharging within minutes
“The speed at which conventional batteries are able to charge or discharge can be dramatically increased by changing the form of their active material into a thin film, but such films have typically lacked the volume to be able to store a significant amount of energy. In the case of Braun’s batteries, however, that thin film has been formed into a three-dimensional structure, thus increasing its storage capacity. Batteries equipped with the 3D film have been demonstrated to work normally in electrical devices, while being able to charge and discharge 10 to 100 times faster than their conventional counterparts.”
Gizmag
On Twitter, Conservative (or Liberal) by Association
“The idea that someone could divine the political ideology of someone who is using Twitter as a political tool is hardly a surprise. But Mr. Sparks said what was surprising about their study was that even public figures who are not openly political, and private citizens who use the site primarily as a social tool, reveal their political leanings through whom they choose to follow, and who follows them. “If we included your Twitter account,” he told a reporter, “we could come up with a scaling for you.” Much of the discussion about over-sharing on social networks has focused on users not being able to escape from something they have said online. But a person’s connections are also revealing, as this research found.”
NYTimes.com
Strategies For Subverting Ubiquitous Computing
“For those of us wary of the surveillance undertones of this vision, Steffen Fielder’s wonderfully old school contraptions will be a welcome sight. As part of T-Mobiles “e-Etiquitte” project she designed machines which deliberately fool context aware devices and services. By cranking the handle of one device (pictured above): “you can simulate something like a pattern of ‘walking’ in the accelerometer data of the phone, so if you told someone you were out running errands (when in fact you were lazing on the sofa) your data-trail wouldn’t catch you out…””
PSFK
Visualizing Wikipedia’s Version of World History
“Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin show us in 100 seconds of blips and blops the locations and dates of 15,500 world events, as recorded in the world’s largest crowd-sourced knowledge warehouse.”
Gizmodo
GiftRocket Lets You Send Gifts That Can Be Redeemed At Specific Locations
“GiftRocket lets you send money to a friend or relative in a snap, but also see to it that the transaction is effectively made only when the recipient ‘checks in’ to a certain location. Hence, you could use GiftRocket to send $15 to a friend to sway him or her into checking out the breakfast offering at that coffee place you’ve been raving about, or you can gift your mother a $50 bouquet of flowers but only if she visits that new flower shop a couple of blocks away.”
TechCrunch
About gestures and mobile phone conversations
“Mobile phone design can also respect existing research that suggests gestures are more meaningful to the speaker than the listener, and thus focus on innovations that aid the speaker. An example of this kind of design would be a mobile phone that senses gestures or other nonverbal behaviors and compares them with the words being spoken. If the words being spoken match the amount and nature of gesturing, then the phone might alert the user that she is performing well. Light could be used in such an interface: if the user is gesturing and speaking very animatedly, then a light on the phone might hold steady to indicate appropriate activity. If there seems to be a disconnect, for example, where the user is not saying anything but still gesturing, then the phone could alert the user with a pulsing light that she might appear odd to others.”
Pasta&Vinegar
Yearly Leaf: “It’s A Coffee Table Book Meets A Moleskine For The Facebook Set!”
“Yearly Leaf is a coffee table book meets a moleskine for the Facebook set! Through the Yearly Leaf Facebook app you can turn posts, pictures, status updates and check-ins into a printed luxury bound book.”
TechCrunch
Listen Closely: Broadcastr Brings You An Audio Guide To The Whole Wide World
“I give you Broadcastr, a new platform that allows anyone to record or upload audio, and then “pin” it to physical locations. Broadcastr then indexes and curates that audio for playback via Web or smartphone, where it can be filtered and shared in the usual ways. Think of it as a crowdsourced audioguide to anywhere and everywhere, as if the whole world was a museum: restaurant reviews straight from diners’ mouths, mix tapes for memorial sites, citizen journalism, etc. It also provides the infrastructure for a whole new era of collective oral history; if Broadcastr takes off, its big data will be fascinating.”
TechCrunch
iTwin promises easy remote file access
“To use iTwin, after establishing a link between the two computers by interlocking the sticks, you just pull them apart and leave them in the machines’ USB ports. As long as both computers have internet access, they will have access to each other’s complete hard drives via an AES 256-bit encrypted connection.”
Gizmag
Now Coming to Market: Sifteo Cubes Reinvent How We Play
“The Cubes, which come in a series, communicate wirelessly with each other and a computer. You download a game or learning tool, and its course is determined by how you manipulate the cubes, whether you’re stacking them up to practice your spelling and math or jostling them to navigate a penguin through a treacherous world. Their genius is in externalizing the computer process — in giving concrete form to a logic we all know but never see.”
Co.Design
App provides real-time instant messaging translation service
“Once a user has connected the app to their Google Chat, TransFire will automatically translate any incoming chat messages in real-time. For example, in a conversation between an English language speaker and a Japanese language speaker, the app would translate all incoming messages to English for the English language speaker, and all outgoing messages to Japanese. The app can also be used to help users learn foreign languages by sounding translated text aloud, and there are options to store favorite translated phrases. Nor does the app need to be used exclusively with Google Chat – users can copy in text from any source, such as a website, and ask TransFire to translate”
Springwise
Volkswagen iPhone App Test Drives A Print Ad
“Volkswagen have released an iPhone application which allows users to ‘test drive’ the latest models and innovations on a print ad. Claiming to be the first of its kind, the car manufacturer ran the ads in a number of popular Norwegian publications, and also released a digital version online. The augmented reality application also offers ‘Lane Assist, Adaptive Control and Adaptive cruises light’ options.”
PSFK
In Augmented Reality Film, Your Smartphone Solves the Crime
“The Witness” works like a smartphone-centered fusion of a traditional thriller and an interactive ARG: German viewers applied to participate online, and the “winners” got to enter a real-life version of the movie in which they play a role, using their phones to watch snippets of the film that play out like a virtual layer over the physical scene they’re standing in. For example, when the “film” begins in a Berlin hotel at the scene of a kidnapping, the player/viewer is literally standing in the same room where the scene took place, holding their phone up over it like a window to watch how it plays out — and then interact with it like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, as The Visual News explains. ”
Co.Design
Tiny iron oxide particles promise big benefits for display technology
“Chemists at the University of California, Riverside, are developing a future display technology using nanoscale-sized iron oxide rods that shine when exposed to an external magnetic field. Though in its early stages, the research could pave the way for producing magnetically responsive, ultra high-res displays with significantly reduced dimensions and power demands.”
Gizmag
Pixelate 2.0 For iPhone Shows You How Colors Will Look On Your Clothes, Walls
“With Pixelate you can either grab images from your phone or snap a picture, choose a color from the Color Matrix or by selecting one from an image. Once you’ve decided on what you want to replace and with what, use the Update Image button to automatically paint over the colors selected. It usually takes a couple of iterations of color selection to cover the whole wall. Select Erase to erase away any color spill over and select Paint if you’d like to manually color in smaller areas through touch. You can then send the final product to someone via email, or save it to your photo library.”
TechCrunch
Frenzy Is a Private, Dropbox-Based Social Network for You and Your Friends
“People that are part of the shared folder can share files from Finder, photos from iPhoto, music from iTunes, or URLs from any browser with messages attached with everyone else. All the social networking out there can get overwhelming these days, but Frenzy makes it simple by constraining to just you and a few of your friends, which makes it really, really cool (and more user-friendly than trying to handle a huge email thread). Plus, it’s a clever way to use Dropbox that we had never even thought of. Hit the link to check it out.”
LifeHacker
Rick Borovoy’s Junkyard Jumbotron: Turning Our Screens Into a Collective Display
“The Junkyard Jumbotron is a project developed by Rick Borovoy at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media that lets you take a bunch of cell phones, tablets, iPods and what have you, arrange them in a layout of your choosing, and turn the whole thing into a singular display”
Core77
Soxels Uses 1,000 Tiny Speakers to Create “Sound Images” That Move
“Phil Spector may have invented the “wall of sound” concept, but it took Simon Schiessl and Felix Hardmood to make it into a literal wall. Their interactive installation, Soxels uses a matrix of 1,000 tiny speakers (or “sound pixels”) to create a dynamic sound-image that moves around the wall like a video projection.”
Co.Design
Wearable Scanner Opens New Frontier in Neuroscience
“A tiny wearable scanner has been used to track chemical activity in the brains of unrestrained animals for the first time. By revealing neurological circuitry as the subjects perform normal tasks, researchers say, the technology could greatly broaden the understanding of learning, addiction, depression, and other conditions. The device was designed to be used with rats—the main animal model used by behavioral neuroscientists. But the researchers who developed the device, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, say it would be straightforward to engineer a similar device for people.”
Technology Review
Pinger’s Textfree Exchanging 1 Billion SMS Messages A Month, 1 Million Voice Minutes A Day
“For those that haven’t used it, Textfree gives users a free, unique phone number which they can use to send and receive free text messages through the service’s mobile app. That’s nice on mobile phones (you don’t burn through your carrier SMS allotment), but it’s proven especially popular on the iPod Touch, which can’t typically send or receive text messages. Users are now exchanging over 1 billion text messages per month through the app (to give some context to that, in September Textfree had exchanged 3.5 billion messages cumulatively since its launch in March 2009).”
TechCrunch
Researchers demonstrate self-repairing chip
“In order to make that graceful degradation possible, the CRISP chip incorporates multiple cores. Different tasks are assigned to different cores, by a built-in resource manager. The connections of those cores are continuously tested, and when a fault is detected, the task assigned to that core is simply reallocated to another one.”
Gizmag
These Magic Cards Are The “Holy &£%!” Moment of Nintendo’s New Toy
“Alongside the built-in applications on the 3DS is a suite of Augmented Reality (AR) games—games that make it look like you’re peering through a magic looking glass, twisting and warping things right behind the 3DS like your desk or your friend’s face. Initially, you only have access to a couple of games, but the more you experiment and play, the more you unlock. When you finally make your way through the first half-dozen, you gain entry to a store with another half-dozen available for sale. Purchases in the store are made through coins earned by walking around with your 3DS. The built-in pedometer counts your steps and for every 100 rewards you with a coin.”
Kotaku
Dental hearing aid gets approved in Europe
“A new hearing aid that transmits sound through a person’s teeth has been approved for use in Europe. The device, called SoundBite, directs sound through the jawbone and into the inner ear. It is placed onto the upper left or right molars and is custom-made for each patient. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) warned that it may not be suitable for everyone with hearing problems.”
BBC News
Robot Nurses Are Less Weird When They Don’t Talk
“Medical patients would probably be OK with semi-autonomous robots tending to them, but only if the robots don’t talk to them first. Robotics researchers tested whether a verbal explanation from a robot would help people feel more comfortable with the robot administering care, but found that precisely the opposite is true. […] People generally didn’t mind being touched by Cody overall, but were less comfortable with the robot when it spoke to them beforehand. And participants were more-accepting of a potentially necessary medical touch than an attempt at a soothing touch by the robot.”
Wired.com
Konigsberger Vannucchi – The World’s Largest AR Marker
“As AR-PR stunts go, that one is pretty top-end.”
Beyond The Beyond
UK’s Cella Energy develops hydrogen ‘micro beads’ that could fuel cars for $1.50 per gallon
“Hydrogen has been touted as one of the most promising replacements for conventional transport fuels for many years, but the logistics involved in storing and transporting the gas have presented numerous barriers – until now. Fresh from winning $64,000 worth of funding from Shell’s low-carbon technology contest, UK-based Cella Energy recently revealed an innovative, inexpensive and safe method for storing hydrogen. Using nanotechnology, Cella has developed ‘micro beads’ – 30 times smaller than a grain of sand – that can trap and release hydrogen when heated. And because the beads are small enough to flow like liquid, refuelling could even be done at any gas station.”
Inhabitat
Spout for iPhone Beautifies Your Feeds One Post at a Time
“Kinetic typography has a way of making any random group of words look super important, and Spout is no exception. It takes your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds and turns posts into well-designed animations, which are then presented in real time or on a cycle, based on your preference. Even the dullest tweets become emotionally-charged works of art.”
Gizmodo
Tiki-Toki Creates Attractive Web-Based Timelines
“You can customize the background image, add media and expanded details for each item on the timeline, and so on. (I didn’t take advantage of most of the advanced features in my quick timeline.) The results are attractive and reasonably intuitive. The site is free to use, but you’ll need a paid account if you want to embed your results or create a lot of timelines.”
LifeHacker
Location-specific advice supplied by the crowd
“When users sign up with Crowdbeacon, they choose one category that they are willing to answer questions about in their hometown — nightlife, for example. Then, when a related question arises from another user, Crowdbeacon’s notification system alerts those who signed up for that area to see if they can help. Not just individuals but also local businesses can participate — in the latter case, they can also select keywords they’d like to be notified about. A flower shop, for instance, might choose “roses,” “peonies” and “free delivery”. Either way, notifications are currently delivered via email, push, sms and voice. And since there’s no guarantee that the human responses will answer the question adequately, Crowdbeacon integrates the top results from Yelp, Foursquare and Wishpond as well. Users who respond often and well are rewarded via a location-specific ranking system; businesses, needless to say, get potential leads.”
Springwise
Creating A Social Gaming Layer Over Live Sports
“The startup Thuuz is a computer program intended to tell fans when to start watching March tournament basketball games:“It analyzes live feeds of play-by-play statistics, measuring factors like the pace of the game, the closeness of the score and other factors. It then rates games on a 100-point scale, and allows users to sign up to receive alerts whenever their personal threshold for excitement is reached.”
PSFK
Blossom Bristol Brings Farmville To Farmers’ Markets
“When players harvest their crops (if they’ve been successful) they receive rewards, an established game mechanics ploy. But the locative data element of these credits means that virtual rewards can translate into reality: By offering rewards and credits when players choose to shop locally or at a farmers’ market, the game is also capable of real-life interaction.”
PSFK
DIY Anatomy Enters New Territory With 3D Printed Bones
“The Open 3DP team have made an exciting addition to the 3D – printed posthuman with their ability to 3D print in bone: The bone mixture consists of Powdered Bone Meal, Powdered Sugar, MaltoDextrin and urea formaldehyde resin is used as a binder. The resin lends the end product a great deal of strength while amazingly all the other ingredients for the rapid prototyped bones were easily sourced from a local health food store.”
PSFK
EvoMouse turns your digits digital
“Two infrared sensors that form the eyes of the small animal-shaped device track the user’s finger movements to provide the full gamut of mouse functionality such as click and select, double-click, right-click, drag and drop and even multi-touch functionality such as rotate and pinch to zoom. The evoMouse can even be used for drawing – or is that finger painting? – while a handwriting recognition feature lets you write with your finger or a pen. There’s also an optional keymat that allows the evoMouse to be used as a portable, full-sized QWERTY keyboard.”
Gizmag
Researchers develop first molecular piston capable of self-assembly
“Just like a regular-sized device requires a regular-sized motor to operate, a nanodevice likewise requires a molecular-scale motor. In some cases, that motor takes the form of a piston, and building a piston that’s just a few nanometers long … well, it’s pretty hard. It can and has been done, but it’s an extremely fiddly process. Now, scientists from France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Université de Bordeaux, along with colleagues in China, have developed a molecular piston that is capable of assembling itself.”
Gizmag
Total Immersion Develops First Ipad 2 Augmented Reality Application
“This playful application titled, “AR Magic Mirror” gives users a selection of wacky virtual hairstyles, glasses and accessories to try on, or to try on their friends. The app uses facial recognition to identify the user and apply virtual 3D enhancements to their video image in real time through augmented reality functionality. “AR Magic Mirror” is planned to be a free application available on iTunes.”
Total Immersion’s Augmented Reality Blog
New form of computer memory uses 100 times less power
“The Illinois research group, led by professor Eric Pop, has managed to lower the power per bit to a fraction of that used for existing PCM solutions by using the smallest known electronic conductors instead of metal wires. The carbon nanotubes are 10,000 times smaller than a human hair and grown by chemical vapor deposition with iron catalyst particles on silicon dioxide/silicon (SiO2/Si) substrates. The resulting single-wall and small diameter multi-wall nanotubes were both found to be capable of switching the PCM bits.”
Gizmag
Make a large display from a bunch of small ones
“Rick Borovoy of MIT Media Lab’s Civic Media Project developed the Junkyard Jumbotron, which makes it easy to turn a bunch of small computer displays into one big one. Setting it up is as simple as opening a web browser on each device, loading their website, and taking a photo of the arrangement. After that, their software figures out which screen is where, and starts streaming data to each device’s screen directly over the web.”
Make
Can a Dodo Tweet?: QRator Museum iPad App Preview
“QRator is an iPad-based system that allows everyone to be a curator and share their views on an exhibition. Visitors can examine an object before leaving their thoughts about it on an iPad to create a digital, ‘living’ label that subsequent visitors can read and respond to. By downloading a free application to an iPhone or android phone, visitors will be able to see rolling updates to the digital label after they leave the museum, or via twitter. ”
Digital Urban
Hopskoch, A Photo Challenge App That Changes Every Day
“You load the app and are presented with a photo mission: take a picture of someone who looks like Conan O’Brien, or take a picture of your favorite superhero. You snap the photo, upload it and get points. Every day is a different mission, and as you gain points you unlock new features in the game. Over time you will also be able to unlock different games, including trivia and location challenges. Players will also be able to create their own challenges.”
TechCrunch
In India, personal documents stored physically and digitally
“Users begin by visiting the Kleeto site and choosing a plan that suits them; pricing begins at INR 200 for three months of storage for up to 100 physical documents plus 500 online. Kleeto will pick up the documents in question and securely scan them for storage online as well as warehousing them physically. Once online, they’re available for password-protected search, access and downloading anytime and from anywhere. Each piece of data is secured with multiple backups as extra insurance against the risk of disk crashes, security compromise or equipment failure. If the user needs hard copies returned for any reason, Kleeto will deliver them back again. Between generations, meanwhile, all that must be passed down is a password.”
Springwise
Syndyn is a physical game but also an audio/visual environment…
“Created by André Rangel and Anne-Kathrin Siegel, Syndyn is a physical game but also a visual environment where the players control all the audiovisual events that occur in the space/time of the game. They perform a live show and simultaneously produce a database of light drawn images. The space where the event takes place is colored with light which is controlled by players movements. Their rackets and arms are decorated with electro luminescent wire and the shuttlecock (speeder) with a bright LED, providing vivid dynamic scenic effects.”
CreativeApplications.Net
A Mesmerizing Music Video Made Using Google Earth
“Google Earth makes the world look like a 1980s arcade game, and Traubeck heightens the effect by centering his own razor-sharp graphic shapes on the eerily empty landscapes. It looks futuristic and retro (and vaguely menacing) at the same time, like a targeting reticle from Halo superimposed over graphics from After Burner.”
Co.Design
SoundTracking Sets Out To Share Your Music Moments In A Postcard-Like Manner
“The idea for SoundTracking came about when founder Steve Jang realized that you could easily share all of these other bits of information easily via your phone, but not the music you were listening to at the moment you were listening to it. Sure, there are some great music identifying apps like Shazam and SoundHound. And there are plenty of music playback and recommendation apps like Rdio and Pandora. But they aren’t inherently social. That’s the key in Jang’s mind to nailing what he calls “your music moment.” And this music moment is about more than just the music. The music is the key, but it’s also about sharing where you are (location), letting your friends see what you see as you share a song (picture), and explaining your situation a bit (comment). All of those are baked-in functionality for SoundTracking a song”
TechCrunch
Hopskoch, A Photo Challenge App That Changes Every Day
“You load the app and are presented with a photo mission: take a picture of someone who looks like Conan O’Brien, or take a picture of your favorite superhero. You snap the photo, upload it and get points. Every day is a different mission, and as you gain points you unlock new features in the game. Over time you will also be able to unlock different games, including trivia and location challenges. Players will also be able to create their own challenges.”
TechCrunch
Syndyn is a physical game but also an audio/visual environment…
“In the beginning of each game, users choose on an iPod ™ touch device a soundscape associated with visuals and colors for the ambience lighting system. Syndyn rackets are equipped with sensors that detect each hit of the speeder. A radio transmitter system broadcasts the sensors data to the central processing unit (computer). The hits on the rackets are accompanied by synchronous real-time synthesized sounds, by an instant change in the ambience light color according to the previous players choices and by real time generated visuals.”
CreativeApplications.Net
SoundTracking Sets Out To Share Your Music Moments In A Postcard-Like Manner
“The idea for SoundTracking came about when founder Steve Jang realized that you could easily share all of these other bits of information easily via your phone, but not the music you were listening to at the moment you were listening to it. Sure, there are some great music identifying apps like Shazam and SoundHound. And there are plenty of music playback and recommendation apps like Rdio and Pandora. But they aren’t inherently social. That’s the key in Jang’s mind to nailing what he calls “your music moment.””
TechCrunch
I Can’t Resist Having My Own Mini-Me Sculpted Figure
“I’m glad I can at least be like Steve and satisfy my planetary-sized ego ordering my own mini-me figurine: 3D-printing company Sculpteo can now use your frontal and profile photo to make a full 3D-printed, hand painted figurine.”
Gizmodo
TaskAware Reminds You To Get Things Done When You’re Nearby
“TaskAware works like pretty much any task manager, in that you add tasks, set priorities, and assign a deadline (if relevant). What it also lets you do is assign a location, so when you are near that location TaskAware will alert you so you can stop and take care of it. TaskAware integrates with your address book so you can add locations you’ve already entered to save some time. If one of the biggest barriers to you actually getting many of your tasks done is to remember to do them while you’re mobile, TaskAware can be a big help.”
LifeHacker
Visualizing Cinema As Barcode Data [Pics]
“Moviebarcode.com uses a simple concept to provide a completely different insight into our usual experience of cinema. It compresses every frame of a movie into an individual sliver and then sequentially arranges them in a barcode – like composition.”
PSFK
Robots Communicate With One Another Through Encoded Air
“He has created a system wherein a speaker cone can project similar rings of pressurized air to a pressure sensor on a corresponding robot. Using a binary code, the two robots can exchange and decode one ASCII character every four seconds without so much as a peep or a wireless signal exchanged between them.”
PSFK
Ambient Noise Generator Masks Private Conversations
“Many people often find it rather uncomfortable to divulge private information in certain locations, such as banks and pharmacies among many others. To address this, Yamaha has unveiled a very special ambient noise generator that “cloaks” conversations by stirring more noise into the user’s desired direction. According to initial test findings, VSP-1 managed to mask between 47 percent and 89 percent of conversations in four Japanese pharmacies.”
PSFK
Organise your desktop with Ikea
“Hungarian ad agency Laboratory Ideas have come up with a nifty desktop app that allows you to organise your computer as if it were a set of Ikea shelves. We could make a very weak joke about flatpacks and allen keys here but suffice to say that Laboratory promise that their digital shelving unit is very straightforward to set up.”Just like Ikea’s furniture, the Ikea e-Folder set has to be assembled by you: it consists of a background picture with an Expedit storage unit and an icon set made of Ikea’s very own organisers,” the agency say. “Once you set it up, you can put order to the chaos on your desktop.”"
Creative Review
Swapping bodies at the Barbican
“Body Swap was shown as part of the Barbican’s Weekender Festival (March 5-6). In O’Shea’s installation, two visitors stand in front of a screen, their image is captured by camera and turned into a pair of paper cut-out versions of themselves. The images are then swapped, so that each participant can take control of the other’s movements.”
Creative Review
Physicists Build Single Atom Memory For Quantum Information
“That’s a useful piece of kit. For example, such a device could form the basis of a quantum repeater, an enabling technology for a quantum internet that could be vastly more capable than the one we have today. And although the device can store qubits for only 180 microseconds and has an overall efficiency of 9 per cent, Specht and co say they know how to make significant improvements, “with the prospect of storage times exceeding several seconds”. ”
Technology Review
State Statute Empowers Executors to Conduct Digital Identities of Deceased
“House bill 2800, recently enacted into law in the state of Oklahoma, authorized the Executor or Administrator of an estate to conduct or terminate the social media and certain other digital accounts of the deceased. The accounts are a key aspect of the digital identities of the deceased, and the provisions of this statute raise many questions of law, commercial practice and public policy.”
The Digital Beyond
Want Someone To Bring You A Beer? Get That And Anything Else From Zaarly
“Zaarly is a mobile-centric reverse craigslist service. If you want someone to bring you a starbucks coffee, you ask for it via the app along with how much you’re willing to pay and people will offer to bring it to you. Maybe one person is already at a local starbucks and notes that in his response – that may be the guy for you.”
TechCrunch
Camo That Outwits Facebook’s Facial Recognition
“Harvey’s collaboration with DIS Magazine outlines the do’s and don’ts of Dazzling: avoid enhancing the eyes (mascara and eyeliner=bad), obscure the area where your nose, brow, and forehead intersect (apparently this region figures heavily in face-detecting algorithms), and don’t apply so much that it looks like a full-fledged mask (then you’ll probably be flagged for other reasons).”
Co.Design
Active Videogames Count as Legitimate Exercise
“Bailey’s experiment examined the energy expenditure of 39 children of various body types, playing three commercial products and three consumer products. Participants played for 10 minutes and rested for five in between games. The results showed that all of the exergames boosted energy burned in a significant way, with no differences based on the children’s weight. The kids participating in the research had a high enjoyment level, too — no surprise, but a vital ingredient in motivating physical activity. The enjoyment effect was greater for “at-risk” or overweight children (BMI 85th percentile or greater).”
Wired.com
un design: UN01 iphone photography case
“to replicate the realism of using a camera, the body style and raised
lens design are inspired by point and shoot cameras. the case is a two
piece assembly that slides over the phone and is fastened secure by
a center locking ring.”
DesignBoom
hwang kim: CCTV chandelier
“Korean student of the royal college of art studying product design, hwang kim, has created the CCTV chandelier. a virtual doppelganger simulator with the intention that you can look objectively at yourself in a third person point of view. the interactive installation has 12 CCTV surrounding and hanging near the viewer’s face attached to a collar ensuring consistent point of view. this wearable visual system is connected to a series of 12 individual tvs allowing the participant to see their own body or the surrounding environment from a third person perspective. therefore, you yourself, viewer and visitor are displayed as an object in the gallery.”
DesignBoom
MIT Media Lab’s Brilliant New Logo Has 40,000 Permutations
“The basic idea here is that the logo has three intersecting spotlights that can be organized in any of 40,000 shapes and 12 color combinations using a custom algorithm. That’s enough to supply each and every new card-carrying Media Labber with his very own logo for a whopping 25 years.”
Co.Design
New technique developed to identify authors of anonymous emails
“The technique works by first identifying the patterns found in emails written by the subject. Any of these patterns which are also found in the emails of other subjects are then filtered out, leaving patterns that are unique to the author of the emails being analyzed. These remaining frequent patterns then constitute what the researchers call the suspect’s ‘write-print’ – a distinctive identifier akin to a fingerprint.”
Gizmag
Points 0
“Look up at the url bar! You are the O! You are trying to kill the a‘s. Use the Left and Right keys to move. When you are over an a press spacebar to kill it!”
Probablyinteractive.com
Infographic of the Day: Subway Map Morphs Based on Travel Times
“The iconic London Tube Map is endlessly inspirational to other designers. Here’s another one for the pile: Tom Carden’s “Time Travel Tube Map” uses the Processing visual programming language to warp London into different shapes that display the travel time required to get to any station in the system from one central location. The clever twist is that the “central” station can be any one you choose: the map reshapes itself to focus on whatever point you happen to be at.”
Co.Design
Repair-Ware Steam Iron by Samuel James Davies
“The Repair-Ware Series are a group of household appliances designed for easy maintenance and urges you to be self-reliant. For example, the Steam Iron is assembled in simple layers and is held together by two screws. These screws are a prominent feature on the surface of the iron serving as a semiotic of repair.”
Yanko Design
Vintage Knitting Machine Creates Weather Data Sculptures
“A vintage sock knitting machine creates a scarf for as long as there is wind gusting through the bespoke wind turbine. Each scarf has its own label which tells you how long it took to knit and on which date it was knitted providing a pragmatic mapping of weather data.”
PSFK
Turning Off Celebs from News Sites
“Silence of the Celebs is a Chrome Extension that allows a user to remove headlines of celebs from CNN, HuffPo and TMZ. A person can add their own people and remove the default list that we’ve provided. There’s a lot more that we’re building into this (like the ability to remove headlines from any site), but for about eight hours of work we’re happy.”
DesignNotes
Samsung demos ambient light-powered transparent LCD
“Wirelessly-powered TVs are nice, and transparent displays are cool and all, but what about an ambient light-powered transparent LCD? Well, that’s nothing short of awesome. Samsung showed off just such a device at CeBIT 2011 last week — a prototype 46-inch display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and ten-finger touchscreen capability. We aren’t sure what kind of black magic Sammy put in this thing, but it’s an incredible feat of engineering to make such a large display — and its accompanying solar cells — efficient enough to run exclusively off the juice it pulls from surrounding light sources.”
Engadget
Want More Creepy Strangers to Approach You? Use This App
“If you’re sitting around and thinking “Gee, I wish strangers would approach me in public and perform weird actions on me,” then boy, have I got an iPhone app for you! The app’s called Situationist and it basically encourages you to upload a photo of yourself along with a list of appropriate things you want a stranger to do to you in public. Simple enough, right? Then all you have to do is wander around until someone who is using the same app spots you and picks an action off the list:”
Gizmodo
What humans really want – creating computers that understand users
“By obtaining 3D scans of the faces of 100 subjects, Yin and Binghamton psychologist Peter Gerhardstein have created a digital database that includes 2,500 facial expressions. The emotions conveyed by these expressions all fall under the headings of anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. By mapping the differences in the subjects’ faces from emotion to emotion, he is working on creating algorithms that can visually identify not only the six main emotions, but even subtle variations between them.The database is available free of charge to the nonprofit research community.”
Gizmag
Bandage with integrated sensors to monitor the healing of injured knees
“The new bandage, developed by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, comprises a bracket that incorporates special sensors that measure and record the joint’s range of movement, as well as determining to what degree it rotates and what forces are acting upon it. The sensors used in the bandage include angular measurement systems based on magnetic principles, and acceleration and rate-of-rotation sensors.”
Gizmag
3D-Printed Bike
“The ‘Airbike’ is made of nylon but, according to EADS, is strong enough to replace steel or aluminium and requires no conventional maintenance or assembly. It is ‘grown’ from powder, allowing complete sections to be built as one piece; the wheels, bearings and axle being incorporated within the ‘growing’ process and built at the same time. Because it can be built to rider specification, it requires no adjustment.”
Make
What It Is Without the Hand That Wields It
“Each time a player dies in a game of Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, electronic solenoid valves open up and dispense a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of virtual kills, bridging the two realities. During the show’s run players who have a copy of Counter-Strike can join the game and spill more blood over the walls and floor of the exhibition space:”
we make money not art
A Tactile Twitter at the V&A by The Decorators
“Visitors at the V&A Museum for their Archive Late Night event last month were surprised with a poster of their commentary on the way out.”
Mocoloco
