Picture Frame and Vaporware!
It is a picture frame with built-in WiFi. The device operates independently of a PC, it can be configured to check RSS feeds from Flickr, Webshots and other photo-sharing sites, automatically adding new images to the rotation as they become available. Sounds great!
Just for fun:
* Vaporware Awards
* 100 things we didn't know last year
Happy New Year!
Multipoint technology
Unfortunately, when there is only one mouse pointer on the screen, so you have to fight for it! Multipoint sounds like a great idea!
Don't touch my screen, please! Could you use the second mouse to point something on the screen? :)
Microsoft and RSS
Microsoft isn't attempting to patent RSS itself, they are trying to patent two applications of RSS:Technology patents should be actually innovative, but they are trying to patent obvious inventions, sounds like the entire process of reading, parsing, and storing RSS for multiple applications to utilize. Funny!
Pandora - New Social Feature
Pandora was created by Music Genome Project, it's an useful service, especially as they added social features. It has a different approach from listening to a tag station on last.fm. Musicians analyze the musical qualities of songs and build a database based on this analysis, but I think Last.fm has a better approach than Pandora. Anyway, similar artist radio is awesome.
Amazon selling DRM-free mp3s
They will only sell DRM free mp3's and will offer variable pricing. You would download the music, no more restrictions to burn and to share in your computers. Is DRM-free the best approach?
Google Maps Mars
Yes, it is true! Google and NASA have partnered for a “
Space Act Agreement". The press release says:
"As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA’s information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future."
Location-based application
I did some research in Location-based applications few time ago, mainly privacy and data storage issues. Today, I read about
iFind, it is a new social networking application. The approach was:
- There is no centralized storage of data, and everything happens on encrypted peer-to-peer transmissions among users.
It is a good idea, in my opinion, because all the intelligence is inside the client application instead of on a central server, so nobody can track your position unless you want.
Google Patent Search
Google Patent Search uses the same technology as Book Search. Google says there are currently 7 million patents in the database.
Flickr - Camera Finder
What’s The Most Popular Camera or CameraPhone? Flickr can help you discover!
Flickr is now offering a
Camera Finder that lets you see which cameras are most popular on Flickr. Lists and Graphs are generated automatically by periodically sampling the
EXIF data from the stream of recent upload. The information is ranked by the number of photos uploaded to Flickr by each camera model.
Right Now, I can see the quality of the Cameras for myself before I buy one. Current, I have a
Nikon Coolpix L3.
Platform for Wi-Fi Radio
"At CES 2007, Cambridge Consultants will launch a platform design which rewrites the economics of the emerging internet radio market. Based on just two ICs, the Iona Wi-Fi portable radio can be built with an electronic bill-of-materials (eBOM) costing less than $15."
It supports RTP, HTTP, RDT and MMS, and audio streams such as MP3, WMA, AAC, AIFF.
Music Search Engine
Owl Multimedia developed a new
music search engine, it enables to discover tracks released under
Creative Commons licenses by comparing the sounds of songs they own with the sounds of thousands of new songs. You use sound similarity instead of text-based queries. That's a great initiative. I've already tried Acoustic Discovery Services like
MusicIP.
Gstreamer - Distributed Multimedia
Gstreamer provides a network clock, serialization of events and data buffers. Therefore, we need to control a pipeline remotely, to allow multiple devices inside the home to listen to the same stream while maintaining only a single connection to the server (Proxy), and to enable session sharing service. These are some of the challenges that I have discuss with
Zeenix (Gstreamer On-Demand Project) and
Marc-André (Gsmartmix).
I have some use cases in mind, and I am sure that we will reach the goals! We could concentrate effort to make the "remote system" work at all. Let's share ideas!
Joomla!
I was looking for a content management system.
My wife needed to publish web content, to use Calendars, to enable Subscription services and to assign roles and responsibilities. After some research I choose Joomla. It is very simple, and flexible! Ok, I am losing the opportunity to learn Python! But, Joomla/PHP does the job!
Mugshot
Recently, I discovered
Mugshot, it allows to show off the music you listen to using services like
Last.fm. Mugshot works with "social networking" sites, but it doesn't replace them. Some Features:
- Create and customize your own Music Radar to display on MySpace, LiveJournal, or other blog site
- Display your music playlists as you're listening
Don't speak!
Imagine a device that translates what you are saying, but does not require the you speak the words out loud. Researchers of Carnegie Mellon University has
developed a prototype! Currently, the prototype supports English to Spanish or German and Chinese to English. I would be able to talk effectively in multiple languages, quite nice!
Music in you!
Typically Wireless Headphones use infrared or Bluetooth, but they would basically use your own body to carry the music up to the headphones. I am talking about a
Human body communication system, Sony's research lab did the
body-wired headphone patent application. The new system uses the listener's body as a capacitor that carries a tiny electrostatic charge. A music or video player sends a fluctuating signal to a conductive cloth pad.
Google Patent Search uses the same technology as Book Search. Google says there are currently 7 million patents in the database.
