Νέες τεχνολογίες και εφαρμογές: Ιούνιος 2007
Online Δημιουργία Βάσης Δεδομένων
Web As Desktop: Zoho Creator is like Microsoft Access online
“Set up your database’s fields (like for an address book: Name, Address, City, State) and then build drag and drop custom entry forms with different input types like radio buttons, check boxes and dropdowns. Ambitious types can add custom logic to the application using the script builder, and the whole shebang can be added to your web site or blog (say, for a feedback form or survey). Looks like a nice way to create a powerful interface to customized data, instead of wrangling with boring spreadsheets.”
Webcam communities
HeyCosmo: Webcams Meet Group Collaboration
“HeyCosmo, a new online video community from Mountain View, CA based Arsenal Interactive launches today with a well rounded package that blends web cam interaction with group collaboration tools With HeyCosmo, users are able create channels that can include up to 10 live web-cam video participants in a group discussion. Additionally up to 50 people can listen, watch, and chat during the session on top of the 10 core participants.”
Innovation networks
Powerset To Launch Social Network Around Search Engine
“Powerlabs is more than a sandbox to show off new product ideas that arent ready for prime time. They are encouraging people interested in Powerset to sign up for Powerlabs and create what is effectively a profile. Once registered, users will be able to see new product ideas and vote on them, as well as submit their own ideas to the community. Later on, users will gain points and influence within the community.”
Bone networks
Bones to allow data swap through handshake
“Scientists from the Rice University in Houston are developing ways in which human skeleton will be able to transmit commands reliably and securely to wearable gadgets and medical implants. Scientist claim that the skeleton is a surprisingly accurate transmitter of digital data, the principle could be used in medical devices and handheld gadgets. Bone is a great conductor of sound and to see if it could transmit digital signals over longer distances, to a headset, say, from a sensor worn on the wrist, the team applied a small vibrator to various parts of the body. On measuring how well bone conducted these signals they found the skeleton conducted even low-power vibrations from one location to another with amazingly few errors.”
Quantum calculations
Quantum leap – researchers achieve milestone for next generation computing
“The already breathtakingly rapid evolution of the computer is moving towards a completely new level with Researchers at Delft University of Technology successfully carrying out calculations with two quantum bits, the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer.”
Flash-free
Kodak says camera sensor may eliminate flash
“The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light. Image sensors act as a digital camera’s eyes by converting light into an electric charge to begin the capture process.”
Wind charging
Orange goes green for festival phone-fuelling
“Orange today launched a prototype wind-powered charger capable of delivering a constant supply of green juice despite “the unpredictable English climate”. How? The turbine charges a battery, and it’s from that power pack that the phone’s own battery is charged. It is, of course, a variation of one on humanity’s oldest devices, the windmill, though this time kitted out in suitable, sponsor-friendly colour. The windmil weighs a mere 150g - let’s hope it’s capable of being anchored against strong gusts - and is compact enough to be tucked into a rucksack.”
Tidy nanotubes
Nanotube Circuits Made Practical
“over the past several years, researchers have made transistors out of carbon nanotubes. However, it’s still difficult to make reliable circuits out of them. One problem is that the nanotubes, used for transistors that make up the circuits, tend to be fabricated in different directions, making it impossible to know which nanotube form which transistor. And such a chaotic arrangement can lead to electrical malfunctions. But now researchers at Stanford University have written a program that finds a working circuit layout, no matter how disorganized or misaligned the nanotubes.”
Vibration-free projection
Vibration-compensated mini projectors
“German scientists from the Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Dresden have combined a compact laser projector system with inertia and yaw rate sensors to project vibration-compensated images. The sensor system detects the slightest motion and rotates the image to compensate for it, ensuring a steady picture, even in a moving vehicle. The system could be commercially available within two years.”
Recording calls
Logitec intros digital recorder for consumer telephones
“The LIC-TRA056SD is a “private telephone recorder” that plugs right into your home phone and captures conversations conveniently on the built-in 128MB of storage. If those 50 hours of capacity aren’t enough to catch someone red handed, you can also throw in a spare SD card and create an audio archive of every phone call you’ll ever make.”
Smaller, cheaper, better cellphone cameras
New generation camera phones: smaller, cheaper, better
“their new modules are half the size of current mobile phone camera units, 30% cheaper to manufacture, and capable of supporting the high resolutions we expect from digital cameras. The company has also made some impressive aquisitions to sort out the traditional focus and zoom issues we’ve had on camera phones.”
Controlling light with magnetism
Computing with Light and Magnets
“The advance combines insights from two nascent research fields. In plasmonics, researchers are studying ways of guiding light along very thin metal wires to allow faster communication between devices on a chip. The other field, spintronics, involves manipulating a property of electrons called spin; in the past several years, spintronics research has enabled ultradense memory in hard drives. Now the Naval Lab and University of Alberta researchers have shown that by manipulating electron spin using magnetic fields, they can turn off and on light that’s being guided through metals.”
Tracking a glance
Eye-Tracking Device Lets Billboards Know When You Look at Them
“The eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-size video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet. A simple glance from a passerby scores an impression, providing a tally that enables new Google-like measurement metrics that real-world advertisers could only dream about until recently.”
Anonymous messages to friends
The Honesty Box Facebook Application
“When you install it, you can send an anonymous message to any of your facebook friends. Only that friend sees the message, along with whether the sender is male of female.”
Devices with ‘buddy’ displays
Smart Brush: Oral-B’s Triumph Keeps Your Chompers Clean by Telling You How to Brush
“The $149 brush comes with a palm-size wireless display (it uses RF technology to communicate) that provides real-time feedback as you’re brushing so it lets you know how much time you’ve spent brushing and also what quadrant of your mouth you should be brushing.”
Zooming liquid lenses
German researchers create zooming liquid lenses
“French firm Varioptic has developed a system of 4 liquid lenses that can snap from 1 - 2.5x magnification at the touch of a button. The system isn’t quite ready for primetime yet — exposure times are still a little long, it can’t zoom continuously, and the assembly is a little big at 29mm — but the team is already considering solutions to those problems and is ready to go to the prototype stage.”
Haptic time
Cellphones: Haptic Clock Tells You the Time via Vibrations
“It’s a small program for Java phones that tells you the time through a series of vibrations, allowing you to keep your phone in your pocket. Simply reach in your pocket and hit the 5 key to get it to tell you the time. How does it tell it to you? Long vibrations are the number of hours of the current time on a 12 hour clock, so 6pm and 6am are both 6 vibrations.”
Visible backchannel
The Presentation as Shared Object
“One of Roeland Loggen’s big take-away’s from MobileMonday in Amsterdam came from, oddly, not the presentations themselves, but from a screen that was adjacent to the presenters’ screen - a companion screen displaying a live Jaiku feed that audience members were using for comments and whatnot, related or unrelated to the presentation itself. It’s called “backchannel.” Public backchannel. Or, as Loggen would have it, “G2P” - group to presenter. Or, as I would have it, the presentation as a shared object.”
Techno-playground
Playground for all ages
“Among the four games available, the conquistador is a game of conquest, which gets people moving. Conquistador is played over the whole SmartUs field and players compete to be the first player or team to gain a specified number of different territories within the field. Territorial conquest is achieved by getting to the iPosts message poles and showing your iTag ID at the poles identification point. “It is especially suitable for players who are agile and alert. On the field, each player tries to conquer his/her own part of the game’s fantasy world, and helps his/her team towards a common goal. The game develops tactical ability and teamwork skills.”
Mesh networks that move
US troops to scatter crawling Wi-Fi mini-droids
“The idea is that the diminutive, cheap, expendable droids would be scattered about by US troops on foot. They would then link up to form a wireless voice/data network which could penetrate into every corner of tricky urban non-line-of-sight environments. The net would use multiple pathways for resilience, and would be able to heal itself in the event of individual droids going down.”
Life logging
Your Truman Show: Organized Life Blogging
“The service is a combination of personal blogging, user-generated video and social networking, delivering users an intuitive interface than enables them to catalog their lives. The V-link interface with in Your Truman Show visually connects related storylines making it easy for users to find and follow stories as they develop over time. Usual user rating systems are also provided with higher rating videos gaining preference at key navigation points.”
Searching sites
Featured Firefox Extension: Add any web site to the Firefox search box with Add to Search Bar
“Add any web site search to the Firefox search box with the Add to Search Bar extension.”
Environmental awareness
RIVER GLOW: Water Pollution Monitor
“Heres a brilliant idea that functions as both environmental pollution monitor and thought-provoking urban art installation: a floating LED light system embedded in bodies of water to warn of water pollution (in addition to creating an ethereal glow at nighttime).”
Web site resurrection
Featured Firefox Extension: Visit unavailable web sites with Resurrect Pages
“The Resurrect Pages extension lets you visit offline websites that are unavailable for one reason or another. Resurrect Pages displays a list of options on the “Server Not Found” page in Firefox and links to popular cached pages like Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive, etc. that could let you check out the site even if the server is down.”
Health tracking clothing
Smart clothes to monitor health
“The “intelligent textiles” contain embedded sensors designed to monitor body fluids such as blood and sweat. The aim is to use the clothes to check on groups such as recovering hospital patients, people with chronic illnesses and injured athletes.”
Fitness tracking
Casio RFID Wristband Fitness Club Gadgetry
“With the Casio “mobile Check-Fit” system you can check-in to the club, track your training on the machines, pull up your training records on a PDA station or check your health parameters with a fully automatic hemadynamometer body constitution analyzers.”
Voice payment
Pay by Voice
“People can shop online at participating stores by clicking on a Voice Pay icon on the store’s website and then entering their user name and password. Once the customer is logged into Voice Pay, the system will automatically dial the cell-phone number previously registered to the account. An automated attendant will then initiate a challenge-response procedure, asking the customer to repeat two randomly generated four-digit numbers into the phone. The system will then compare the utterances to the voice registered with the account and, if the two match, the automated attendant will list the details of the purchase and ask if the account holder wishes to proceed. To go ahead with the purchase, all the account holder needs to say is “yes,” says Ogden.”
Self-healing materials
Technology Review: Plastic That Heals Itself
“To test the material, the researchers bend it and crack the polymer coating. The crack spreads down through the coating and reaches the underlying microchannel. This prompts the healing agent to “whip through the channels and into the crack,” Sottos says. There, it comes into contact with the catalyst and, in about 10 hours, becomes a polymer and fills in the crack. The system does not need any external pressure to push the healing agent into the crack. Instead, the liquid moves through the narrow channels just as water moves up a straw.”
Reflection-free
Boffins Develop Non-Reflective Surface
“The coating is made by growing nanorods on a surface. The rods point in different directions and reduce the distortion of light by bringing the refractive index of the material much closer to that of air. Effectively the angle of the rods controls the angle of the light. Think of the way a pencil seems to bend when you put it in a glass of water. That’s refraction. The tech will boost efficiency in LED panels by up to 40%, and also help solar panels convert more light to energy.”
Mouse on your finger
The ring mouse from Global Link for convenient cursoring - Engadget
“Global Link is showing off a “Ring Mouse” which straps to your finger and allows for cursoring on pretty much any surface, including your thumb.”
Tracking by umbrella
Gratis RFID umbrellas track movements, excite marketers
“the firm has landed eight partners that will toss logos on the stark white umbrellas and utilize the tantalizing tracking information that gets recorded each time a rainy day encourages patrons to grab some cover. Merchants are required to pony up $100 per month in order to receive the marketing intelligence, and can then use it to determine where umbrella carriers go once the downpour begins in order to better position future ads.”
External graphics for a laptop
MSI’s Luxium external graphics solution spotted
“Details are a bit scant at the moment, but the device will apparently provide a PCI-e to ExpressCard interface to get your desktop GPU interfacing with your lappie, several USB ports, a “USB to LAN” connector, S/PDIF in / out, optical audio input, and 7.1-channel Dolby Digital support.”
Managing chores online
Chores Meet Web 2.0: PAYjr
“PAYjr offers an allowance and chore system that allows parents to assign household chores online, designate a money value for those chores, and provide a financial reward when chores are successfully completed.”
Widgets everywhere
Yourminis Delivering Triple Widget Play
“Today, with the assistance of Adobes Apollo platform and some clever thinking Yourminis delivers a triple play of widgets: online personalized desktop widgets, actual desktop widgets and blogs widgets.”
