Via Gadget Lab:
The budget needed for an at-home surveillance system has just been slashed to a couple of Jeffersons. The eyeCam Micro Wireless camera, a plug-and-play with a wireless transmission range of 450 ft., is now down to $40, making it one of the most affordable spy video gadgets out there.
Click-through for sample video - spy cam attached to Dragonfly remote heli, ie personal neighborhood surveillance drone. Federal laws may apply.
I have a lot of issues with Second Life - mostly because I’m frustrated by their potential and their seeming inability to act on it - but it’s nevertheless an interesting sandbox to explore the greater frontiers of virtual immersion and social ontology. To this end, Japanese researchers have wired up a Second Life avatar to respond to the thoughts of a paraplegic.
…he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.
He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan’s Keio University.
…”In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves… and click to make a purchase,” Ushiba said.
Nice to hear that Twitter is addressing their stability problems. My sense is they maybe didn’t expect to get so popular quite so fast. Still no word on their business model but it’s admirable that they’ve so far resisted the Google AdSense cancer…
Our direction going forward is to replace our existing system, component-by-component, with parts that are designed from the ground up to meet the requirements that have emerged as Twitter has grown. First and foremost amongst those requirements is stability. We’re planning for a gradual transition; our existing system will be maintained while new parts are built, and old parts swapped out for new as they’re completed. The alternative - scrapping everything for “the big rewrite” - is untenable, particularly given our small (but growing!) engineering and operations team.
In a move that further realizes the place-ness of popular immersive worlds, players of Grand Theft Auto 4 will be able to use their cell phone to mark songs they hear in the game world, then recieve info and a link to buy the song on Amazon. I like this feature since it acknowledges the increasing continuity across real life and game worlds but I think the implementation falls short of being really compelling. The game should automatically provide heads-up info on the song and artist, and I should be able to make a purchase in-game that saves a file to my console, to my mobile, and/or puts it in my Amazon or iTunes shopping cart for later download. And what about having an in-game music player I can fill with songs?
If you hear a song you like as you’re tooling around the streets, you can “mark” it by calling ZIT-555-0100 on your cell phone, and soon receive a text message with the song and artist names. If you also happen to be a member of the Rockstar Games Social Club, Rockstar’s community site for GTA IV and all future titles, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the song from Amazon for less than a buck.
Though I assume they mean you use your real-world cell phone it’s not totally clear. Shouldn’t my game character have a cell phone that can place calls/sms to other gamers in-world, across games to other worlds, and out to real-world lines?
[UPDATE: the cell phone will be Nico’s in-game mobile.]
QR Code is a a UPC-like image code very popular in Japanese cities. Codes are in magazines, on fliers, on storefronts, and on products. When a person takes a picture of the QR Code with their cellphone the code is parsed for an url embed which launches the mobile web browser that takes the user to a website. Now, QR Codes will be tested in San Francisco in the first US pilot program.
“More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows. People who have special software from Scanbuy Inc. loaded on their cell phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page.”
This is an interesting step towards smart objects where things begin to have their own websites. I suspect this is just a step along the way towards using an embedded RFID-type chip that will transmit stored information to mobiles while users pass by the tags. I can imagine a time when all consumables and media contain an alter-profile of data and cloud-aware links and can communicate these to each-other, to users/consumers, and to supply-chains…
The great century ahead of us will be dominated by the digital democratization of the individual. For the first time in history it’s possible - even simple - to collate vast amounts of data extracted through the API’s of social networks. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. All of these sites track and record the data communicated by millions and millions (billions?) of users. Instead of crufty old Gallup polls that attempt to extrapolate the zeitgeist of a nation based on a minuscule sample of a few thousand sources, social nets across the web yield precise and voluminous data about large populations of the global citizenry.
Twitter is a great example. Spend a few minutes on Twittervision and you get a feel for the amount of data traveling across the Twitternet. It’s pretty much a constant stream of tweets, each and evry one being logged and recorded. Now head over to Politweets and you can see the power of the Twitter API in action. Politweets grabs the Twitter stream, searches it for candidate names (eg Obama, McCain) and then posts the matching tweets to it’s output stream. On the left column you have the Blue tweets and on the right you have the Red. Of note, the Blue tweets are mostly positive notes on Obama, while the Red column is mostly negative tweets about McCain. And as of 6pm PST 3.20 Twitter is breaking the Obama passport scandal with the media scrambling to catch up.
All of the social networks mentioned above have deputized their users to generate the content and participate in a ranking selection that naturally brings the important bits to the top. Items of great interest stay on the radar longer while the fringe drifts off the chart. But everything stays in the database. Every post, comment, chat, tweet, vote, etc… It’s all there in beautiful, incorruptible binary ready for any savvy programmer to break open the public API and build a new tool to pull out trends and patterns. Obviously, this is a radical evolution of the community of conversation. What was once personal is now overtly and proudly public.
Social, cultural, and political trends can all be extracted from these vast living datastructures. Mike Elgen wrote about this yesterday in a post called Has Digg Already Picked the President? He talks about how the major social sites end up endorsing candidates just by the measure of their post demographics. For example:
…every link with significant popularity on Digg about John McCain that has an “opinion” is negative, every one about Hillary Clinton is also negative, and every one about Barack Obama is positive. The preference by the Digg community for Obama is very clear.On MySpace, you can gauge candidate support by searching Google for mentions and counting them, as most mentions tend to be expressions of support. Searches for “John McCain” gets 56,800 Google links; “Hillary Clinton” 120,000; and “Barack Obama” 161,000.
You can see a similar trend in the wildly popular user billboards for Obama and Clinton. Hillary is almost always negative while Barack is everyone’s best friend.
Elgen goes on to wonder how well these sites reflect the actual democracy of our country. Is there parity? Are they more accurate than the mainstream media? Is the online world inherently skewed in some fashion? Then, in the most suggestive and compelling inevitability of the modern digital age, he offers:
After all, the very definition of a Web 2.0 site is one that derives its value from the actions of users. Users are voters, and if these user-voters choose a candidate, shouldn’t that candidate win democratic elections?
And this is the final crux; the salvation of our wavering and beleagured democracy. The digital paths increasingly worn by all of us as we move deeper and deeper into the datasphere are totally traceable. Transparency is growing and it won’t be long before all of the actions that a candidate engages in - the record of their public lives, their opinions, voting history, political and fiscal affiliations, campaign promises and campaign donations - will all be a matter of public record.
New media and digital democracy is empowering everyone and simultaneously laying our lives open for all eyes. We’ve never seen anything like it.
Penned as 12 future apps for your iPhone, this ReadWriteWeb list could be a general wish-list roadmap for the near-future of mobile computing. Here are the top-level items. Click through to read the details.
1. Reality Tagging
2. People Tagging
3. Reality Recognition
4. Physical Social Networks
5. Personalized Travel Guides
6. Digital and Physical Treasure Hunt
7. Distributed Mobile Games
8. Credit Card and Biometrics as Software
9. Paperless Receipts & Digital Business Cards
10. Medical records as Software
11. Physical Browsing & Digital Shopping
12. Location/time-based deals
This was a great conference and the most consistent collection of speakers and topics I’ve ever experienced. Very fun and inspiring. Lots of hip 30-somethings trying to dream up tomorrow and make it real. It was a a very balanced, yet cutting-edge talk aimed at an eager (and surprisingly mixed-gender)crowd. I noticed that most folks were using Mac laptops - this part of the edge seems to prefer Apple - and it was fascinating to watch many who were blogging the talks while pulling up references dropped by the speakers, tweeting out to Twitter, and snapping/downloading/posting photos in real-time. As speakers dropped references I was pulling them up on my laptop and dropping links into my blog notes.
In the lobby a team was showing off a data viz video mapping real-time communications connecting NYC to the rest of the world. Andrea noticed that a surprising number were with an Italian city called Perugia. Maybe next year they could map the live feed of all web traffic from ETech. Imagine the bitstreams rising off such a gathering of digiterati.
Maybe it was just the Sudafed coursing through our virus-ridden veins (thank you Portland) but ETech was a total intellectual turn-on, from ambient objects, Asian mobile media, green policy and sustainability, hardware hacking & drone building, Austrian post-Situationists, neuroengineering, and the digital salvation of Democracy itself.
I hope I can go back next year!
Overview of Android mobile platform:
Open mobile OS platform for dev, users, industry. Open, easy dev, easy distrib, ubiquity.
More than 3 billion phones and 1000 new customers/minute. Soon, more phones than people.
How open is it? Cites example of the US gold rush. Imagine if you had to register before you could pan, or had to sign up to buy/ sell tools & supplies through approved channels? This is how the mobile platform is today.
Open to industry (carriers, manufacturers, enthusiasts). Open to developers (no permission to deploy, all apps can integrate deeply with the system, devs can replace the entire look & feel). Easy dev model (easy to build apps, freedom to integrate with any tech). Not just AJAX on phone. Optimized and simplified. JSON, XML, GData, SOAP, XML-RPC, Java, .NEt, Rails, and more. Easy Distribution (no certification for apps & dev - not interested in controlling what dev can do; multiple routes onto the device).
Beyond ubiquity: Android marries the web with rich mobile experience; cloud is always on, always with you.
Ex: Google spreadsheet with list of wines & prices. Android emulator fetches wine data from personal spreadsheet. Displays on mobile so you can parse the shelf of wines at the liquor store. User can edit ratings on the device which will be updated in the spreadsheet.
Notes: Short demo, not extremely compelling. Shows a lot of data fetching and entry on the mobile but doesn’t address the hard interface of mobile devices. Ie no indication of multitouch means interface might remain painfully encumbered by current device profiles. Also no indication of which devices/carriers might bundle cell phones with the OS.
[Ed note: I love my iPhone but gawd I wish Jobs wasn’t so tight. It sux that Apple has locked it down and will continue to lock it down. And they’re shooting themselves in the foot by not supporting FlashLite. The Android platform is very compelling, assuming the devices are equally compelling. I won’t give up multitouch. Spankulation: Adobe AIR on Android?]
Components of Asian Media Revolution: Futuretainment
Fun
Internet in china is predominantly about entertainment - onine music & film. Email is roughly 50%, unlike in US.
94& positive about entertainment as primary internet experience.
Email is moving to IM in Asia. Chat, peer-to-peer, and games. Not email and business.
TV in China sucks (obv). Marketers are having to use web content channels for advertising.
Mobility
Mobility is a lifestyle, not just a device. More mobiles than internet pc’s. More people access internet through mobiles than through pc’s.
Digital TV is standard in Korea, China, Japan. TV is viewed on mobiles. Integrated with GPS.
Half top-selling fiction in Japan last year was published/written on mobile.
“We are who we pretend to be”.
QQ IM has over 240 million users. Users have 6-digit numeric ID, not names.
Mixi (invitation-only social net) priveledges real identity. Mobagetown is social net that forbids real identity.
Highly constructed virtual identities and relationships. People act out parallel roles and existences.
Togetherness
Very common across Asian media consumption.
Too many friends in social nets. Cyworld - Korean social net. “Ilchon”: internet friend (Korean).
Asia has a strong formality of social structure. Where do you fit? Where you fit determines how much access you have into someone’s life.
Strong networks can turn small blog posts into national news. Ex. Starbucks in Forbidden City; Nailhouse campaign.
Changes the balance of power. 72 million blogs in China with 36% active. Many female. 1 in 4 users in China have a blog and publish regularly.
Entertainment, upload/display of pictures. Powerful platform to share content.
Group buying: 100’s hit a store and demand discoutns on a particular item.
Continual overlap of high-tech & low-tech. Ex: skyscraper construction using bamboo struts instead of scaffolding.
Hi-tech is treated in a very common way.
Thailand urban park: internet cafe on steroids. Screens everywhere.
India has explosive growth in mobile phones. Internet is a sleeping giant.
Virtual
Virtual economy boom in China. QQ coins are a virtual currency. Chinese bank has issued warning out of fear that QQ coins may destabilize national currency. Entire parallel trade in virtual items. Virtual economies cross-over and directly impact real economies.
Mobagetown: buy a real Coke, scan QR code, and get a virtual Coke in Mobage game world.
Status
Mobile devices can show status. Online status is very important. Naver is most popular Korean search engine, has built huge database of people answering questions. Driver is the status that comes from answering questions.
Location
Sony Advanced R&D Facility: device that tracks your location, notices deviations in your path and flags content generated on that day as special.
Popular mobile sites are often giving directions and info.
Complexity
Media density is much greater than in the West. Eye tracking of Asian users is much greater and more dense.
Fame
Chinese netstars get huge sponsorship deals. Bloggers, virtual characters, web stars find huge fame. Democratizing. Edison Chen took photos of all his naked starlet friends. His laptop went in for repair and found the photos. Hong Kong police cracked down and started arresting people. Mass protests against censorship ensued. Chinese want thyeir content.
Now
Entertainment product consumption in Asia is all about instant gratification. Tudou.com is streaming more minutes of content than YouTube. Hosting copywritten content whose distribution is limited by major providers. Again, democratizing content for instant production & engagement.
Audience networks: the connectivity of audiences, not broadcast networks. The future of entertainment.
Taiwan Tv show, Blackie/Woo. How long you stay on the show is determined by how much traffic your web/sms receives.
How many Asian models of use are being transplanted to the West? Quite a bit. Much western content appears to be lifted from Asian sites.
Middle age & older consumers? Common in Japan and India, more of a youth phenomenon in China.
[Ed note: It’s fascinating to see the expansion of the self across social nets. Virtual identities allow multiple selves and fabrication of imagined/idealized identities. The flip-side is a fragmentation of the self or a denigration of the meat self.]
Hardware is much easier to copy now. Hardware & software is blurring - ex: firmware updates.
Speed of hardware hacking is remarkable.
Why open source hardware? Contribute to the pool of knowledge; freedom to pursue software/hardware creativity; community development and quality; excitement about building things; education;
Layers:
- Hardware/mechanical diagrams: 2D models, vector, DXF or AI (KiCAD)
- Scematics & circuit diagrams: PDF, BMP, GIF, PNG
- Parts list (Bill of Materials): data sheets (x0xb0x TB303)
- Layout diagrams: physical map of parts
- Core/Firmware: on-board source code
- Software/API
Like most developers, they don’t mention the human interface layer.
Roomba has an open API. Companies that release open platforms find much greater value (and mindshare) from user mods.
Ambient Orb publishes schematics and parts list. Neuros OSD publishes schematics (semi-open but falls short).
Hardware is mostly based on patents, not copyright. Licensing: CC, GPL, BSD, MIT
Chumby: programmable data portal.
Other open source hardware resources (business models): Fab@Home, Daisy MP3 player, Adafruit, Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform. See also Make magazine & the Maker Fair.
Cool stuff: Twittering plants with Arduino - plants that call you and say they need to be watered (Twitter as SMS bridge); Open prosthetics; Minty Boost open source USB charger;
Ed note: Imagine an online repository of mechanical diagrams for DIY desktop fab/rep…
Fun with robots! Making aerial drones. Eye in the Sky. DIYdrones.com
UAV’s are very expensive. How to democratize the tech?
How cheap and simple can a UAV be?
Two requirements: stabilization & navigation.
$80 copilot: where is “down”? Use IR to seek horizon - consistent gradient between land & sky. Yields absolute frame of reference.
Could LEGO solve the probelm? Yes (under $1000), mindstorms controller in light model plane. Basic prototype, requires manual takeoff & landing.
Onboard camera takes pics with geotagging. Genereates low-cost aerial photos with very high res using low altitude with a 5Mpix camera.
OK, but can you use a cellphone? GPS, camera, broadband, onboard processing & mem.
Yes! Airplane now has a phone # - send it GPS waypoints (not yet realized in prototype).
In theory, small UAV’s can hop across cell networks for nav & comm.
IR horizon sensor can also be used to stabilize the camera so it always looks down.
Be careful, especially when flying over secured federal facilities!
Can we make it cheaper (under$500)? Yes, using homemade embedded processers. Any open source or cheap chip can support an autopilot routine.
Program & test with flight sim apps. Watch your robotic UAV run the flight sim!
How to make an aerial robotic contest for kids? Use small blimps.
Blimps are intrinsically autonomous; when they fail, they fail very gracefully; nice to have around.
Prototype maintains altitude by pinging off the ground (IR); vertical prop holds elevations; IR beacon acts as waypoint; blimp will seek the waypoint; relative frame of reference it can use compass and IR to make it’s way across waypoints;
Live demo: blimp is following the presenter around the room. ~$100. Entirely autonomous, if not very smart.
Evolution Robotics is a company that produces a bot nav solution. Paired with autopilot, the UAV can use more advanced navigation and movement. Aerial robotics is the cutting edge of robotics: “Soon the sky will be darkened with aerial drones!”
Regulations govern UAV deploy. Amateurs must fly under 400ft, maintain line-of-sight, and pilot can assume full control.
Very limiting. Power source is also a limit.
Ed Notes: could use RFID or other beacons to deploy UAV over your home or for tracking your location; pair with live hi-res camera feed.
Rough notes on ambient devices - objects that express data streams, ala Ambient Orb. Ubiquitous computing, PC-free internet.
Expressors: motion, color, angle, pattern, text.
Devices should be pre-attentive, calm, and glanceable. “Bit-trickling datatcasting”.
Energy Joule device: plugs in to outlet, exposing customers to energy use/price - real-time price of energy & own usage in the house.
“Enchanted Objects”: support continuous, thin, awareness-communication.
Amulets, pentacles, potions - objects of healing.
Pervasive is persuasive - objects that grab attention and communicate data will change behavior towards the content being communicated.
‘Glanceable…makes you…”
Dashboards as feedback devices for personal behavior, health.
Ex: mirror with led icons that reflect blood pressure by analysis; dashboard with pollen count.
Other ex: intelligent pill box that sends dose reminders to a display device; active timed glow caps on prescription bottles.
Using shared information to enlist social dynamics (info begets behavior).
Look to fiction, pop culture for inspiration about expressive devices.
Goal: Enhance quality of life and make things better. Enable data acquisition without personal computers.