Creating the Internet of Things

May 6, 2010 by sean.

Researchers from University College London have developed a digital tool that allows people to attach memories to objects in the form of text, audio or video [via PhyOrg]:

Trailer for Tales of Things from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Posted in innovation, science, software, collective intelligence | 1 Comment »

Bionic Eye iPhone app

September 24, 2009 by sean.

Posted in fun, innovation, pervasive computing, software, augmented cognition, mobile computing | No Comments »

Can Augmented Reality Help Us Be Greener?

September 5, 2009 by sean.

Augmented Reality layers data on physical space to enhance our ability to see richness that is there but often hidden. Applications for marketing, gaming, education and entertainment are obvious. But can AR help us improve the planet as well? [via Mariamz]:

We move faster and faster in our cyber age, all knowing, ever-connected, always-on. Augmented reality beckons: the devices in our pockets become more powerful and our ability to connect digitally everywhere excites and exhilarates whilst pushing the odd few over the edge into internet rehab. Yet something else is happening scarily fast, something only the most obstinate dare deny.

Posted in innovation, science, pervasive computing, augmented cognition, mobile computing | 1 Comment »

Augmented Reality Shopping

August 18, 2009 by sean.

A virtual hand to guide you to your next purchase…

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Locative Art / Augmented Reality on the iPhone

August 5, 2009 by sean.

Locative Art / Augmented Reality applications which “overlay textual information and pictures over a real-world view of your surroundings” are coming to the iPhone [via geeks. co.uk]:

A new Twitter client makes eye-popping use of the technology and though it uses several parts of the 3GS development system that haven’t “officially” been unlocked by Apple yet, iPhone app TwittAround can’t really be described in words as adequately as it can in this amazing demonstration video. Take a look:

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Google Wave!

May 30, 2009 by sean.

At this week’s 2009 I/O conference, Google gave a demo of Google Wave, game-changing platform that could integrates the functionality of email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs and more with real-time collaborative editing, playback of each message’s evolution, real-time language translation and more. You have to see the demo for yourself to begin to understand how this works:

Also, check out Mashable’s Google Wave: A Complete Guide and Live With The Google Wave Creators article at TechCrunch.

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Microsoft Office Labs Video Montage of Future Technology in 2019

March 4, 2009 by sean.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

[via laughingsquid]

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TED Curator Chris Anderson on Charlie Rose

February 22, 2009 by sean.

[via Charlie Rose]

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Twitter’s Beginnings

February 19, 2009 by sean.

[via LA Times Blog]

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Mind Reading with fMRI

February 19, 2009 by sean.

“In a study published online today in Nature, researchers at Vanderbilt University report that from fMRI data alone, they could distinguish which of two images subjects were holding in their memory–even several seconds after the images were removed. The study also pinpointed, for the first time, where in the brain visual working memory is maintained.” [via Technology Review]

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Numerati Prepares to Exploit Government Tranparency

February 18, 2009 by sean.

Could transparency of government data itself [see Recovery.gov] help boost the private Numerati [via Wired]?

[A]ccessible government information—particularly databases released in machine-readable formats, like RSS, XML, and KML—spawn new business and grease the wheels of the economy. “The data is the infrastructure,” in the words of Sean Gorman, the CEO of FortiusOne, a company that builds layered maps around open-source geographic information. For every spreadsheet squirreled away on a federal agency server, there are entrepreneurs like Gorman ready to turn a profit by reorganizing, parsing, and displaying it…

[O]bvious economic benefits, however, will come from innovations that pop up around freely available data itself. Robinson and three Princeton colleagues argue in a recent Yale Journal of Law and Technology article that the federal government should focus on making as much data available as RSS feeds and XML data dumps, in lieu of spending resources to display the data themselves. “Private actors,” they write, “are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

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Amazing Augmented Reality Tech Unveiled at TED

February 5, 2009 by sean.

One word: wow! [via wired]:

Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group demonstrated a wearable computing system that turns any surface into a display screen, becoming a kind of “sixth sense” for the user. The prototype involves an ordinary web cam and battery-powered 3M projector with an attached mirror that are all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The set-up, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface — walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the genius behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, along with colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers, each one red, blue, green or yellow to allow the camera to distinguish the four fingers. The caps help the camera recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created. The gestures can be something as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.

When he encounters someone at a party, the system calls up information about him and projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to help him remember the person or provide more information about him, such as his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. “This is a more controversial [feature],” Maes said over the audience’s laughter.

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Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

February 4, 2009 by sean.

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Did You Know 3.0

January 28, 2009 by sean.

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Rumors of Google GDrive Heat Up

January 26, 2009 by sean.

Bringing everything to the cloud [via xxx]:

Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals’ personal data.

The Google Drive, or “GDrive”, could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet.

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Cognitive Computer

December 18, 2008 by sean.

University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists building a “cognitive computer” [via physorg.com]:

The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through multiple streams of changing data, to look for patterns and make logical decisions…

There’s another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It’s a major challenge. But it’s what our brains do every day…

(T)he ideal artificial brain will need to be plastic, meaning it is capable of changing as it learns from experience. The design will likely convey information using electrical impulses modeled on the spiking neurons found in mammal brains. And advances in nanotechnology should allow a small artificial brain to contain as many artificial neurons as a small mammal brain.

Posted in innovation, neuroscience, learning theory, software | No Comments »

Semantic Desktop

December 17, 2008 by sean.

“(A) European endeavor called the Nepomuk Project will soon see the effort take new steps onto the PC in the form of a ‘semantic desktop‘…software that can spot meaningful connections between the files on a computer (by generating) semantic information by using ‘crawlers’ to go through a computer and annotate as many files as possible. These crawlers look through a user’s address book, for example, and search for files related to the people found in there. Nepomuk can then connect a file sent by a particular person with one related to the company that person works for.”

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Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check

December 4, 2008 by sean.

Excellent short film introducing Guy Kawasaki’s new book Reality Check and the relationship between innovation and evangelism [crowdsourced marketing]:

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