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Category: technology

General technology, not anything in particular

  • Bionic Eye

    For those following the announcement of the Apple iPhone 3GS and it’s API for Augmented Reality someone has finally put a killer app into the world for all to use. Finallly all the happiness and promise that is Augmented Reality is now availble on the Apple AppStore. The prototype called Nearest Subway is now called Bionic Eye as told by this article in Wired dot Com:

    Remember the amazing augmented reality application demo for the iPhone that we saw back in July? It was called Nearest Subway, and it overlaid floating representations of nearby New York subway stations onto the live video coming in through the camera of the iPhone 3GS. These appeared to be hanging in space, pinned in place by the 3GS’ compass and GPS.

    That application is now available to buy, for just $1. There have been a few changes – it’s now called Bionic Eye, for instance – but the jaw-dropping virtual signage is still there, and the subway stations have been joined by other points of interest, hotels, fast-food joints and, splendidly, Hooters.

    via Bionic Eye: Augmented iPhone Awesomeness in App Store | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

  • Micropayments are like Flying Cars and Cities under the Ocean

    I once believed micro-payments would liberate a number of smaller Internet based ventures. Whether it was bloggers, podcasts or screencasts, DIY videos, someone would pay a fraction of a cent to watch something that really helped them out. But no matter how many people talked or wrote about micropayments, nobody took ownership of it and did anything about it. If it was do-able and profitable somone like PayPal, Google or Yahoo would have done something by now. Smarter and more connected people have gone through the list of reasons why micropayments haven’t worked. And yet, hope springs eternal and some silver tongued soothsayers are promoting micropayments as a solution to the decreased subscriptions for daily news. So just to let everyone know, micropayments will NOT save daily newspapers.

    Nieman Journalism Lab

    If you want to go back through some of the reams of text that have been written about micropayments for news, Clay’s essay from 2003 is a good place to start — especially since it lists the half-dozen or so attempts to create such a system that failed miserably. (Are you listening, Steve Brill?) There’s also a good roundup at the Freakonomics blog from awhile back that is well worth reading.

    via Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion? » Nieman Journalism Lab.

  • Lithium-Air Battery interest increasing

    PolyPlus aqeuous lithium air battery
    PolyPlus aqeuous lithium air battery

    Back on July 8th I posted an article talking about the benefits of a new battery technology I had read about on weblog called Technology Review (originally published on June 26th from MIT). It think it may have originally been linked to either Slashdot or The Register. The blog entry was essentially like a press release from a company in California named PolyPlus. They had just announced the project to create single use high energy density Lithium-Air batteries for the military (most likely for radio communications in the field). The key technology was a new way to wrap the lithium cathode in a waterproof seal while still exposing it to the surrounding air encapsulated in the battery. It seems now some other big monied interests have caught onto this new battery chemistry and are going to produce it as well, but maybe not as a single use battery but instead as a rechargeable battery.

    IBM is in the news touting the promise of the lithium-air technology as a potential technological nirvana for autmobile drive trains. Estimates are a 10X increase in energy density per kilogram of battery electrolyte material. If this can be achieved, watch out electric vehicles here we come.

    Lithium-ion batteries have the potential to deliver about 585 watt-hours of electricity per kilogram, while lithium-sulfur has a theoretical potential of about 2,600 watt-hours, and lithium-air batteries might reach targets well above 5,000 watt-hours.

    If they can be perfected, lithium-air batteries would be ideal for transportation applications, given their potential for high energy capacity and low weight. And, unlike zinc-air batteries, it should be possible to make them rechargeable.

    via Lithium-Air Batteries Seen as Hope for Electric Cars – NYTimes.com.

  • Acrossair on the iPhone

    It looks like the iPhone OS 3.1 is going to do nothing more the open up the video feed on the camera so that you can overlay data on top of that video. In essence, the Augmented Reality is using your iPhone’s video as a “desktop” picture and placing items on top of that. Acrossair’s iPhone App, Nearest Tube uses the OpenGL libraries to skew and distort that data as you point the camera in different directions, thus providing a little more of a 3D perspective than say something like Layar which I have talked about previously on this blog. Chetan Demani, one of the founders of Acrossair also points out going forward any company making AR type apps will need to utilize existing location information and pre-load all the data they want to display. So the nirvana of just-in-time downloads of location data to overlay on your iPhone video image is not here,… and may not be for a while. What will differentiate the software producers though is the relevancy, and accuracy of their location information. So there will be some room for competition for a quite some time.

    He went on to say that it’s pretty simple to do AR applications using the new 3.1 APIs, due out in September. ” It’s a pretty straightforward API. There’s no complexity in there. All it does is it just switches on the video feed at the background. That’s the only API that’s published. All we’re doing is using that video feed at the back. It just displays the video feed as if it’s a live camera feed.

    via Augmenting Reality with the iPhone – O’Reilly Broadcast.

  • Toshiba Announces World’s Largest SD Card – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com

    SDXC is yet another memory format all manufacturers will have to adopt. Isn’t it frightening how much the removable memory market has fractured into mico-formats for memory cards. About a week ago I was playing with an Olympus voice recorder at work. It had it’s own funny shaped memory cards you had to buy from Olympus if you wanted to increase the storage size. One positive thing I will say though is this. SDHC at least has consolidated some of the mindshare around a commonly supported form factor for removable storage. Compact Flash once enjoyed a similar amount of support. But nowadays you cannot even find a laptop with CardBus slots anymore. Many add-ons for laptops are installed on internal PCIe busses now.

    I hope all the device manufacturers get onboard with the SDXC format only because of the limits on the FileSystem on these cards has needed to adapt to the vagaries of long form video shooting. I remember the painful days of 4GB file size limits for video. That took a long time to dissapate on the desktop computer. It’s high time it disappeared on digital video cameras as well.

    Toshiba says all three new cards will bring a maximum write speed of 35 megabytes per second and a read speed of 60 megabytes per second. For videophiles, the new SDXC format will enable video files to extend beyond the current limit of 4 gigabytes.

    via Toshiba Announces World’s Largest SD Card – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com.

  • AppleInsider | TomTom for Apple iPhone released in U.S. App Store for $99

    Apple Insider reports this morning that the TomTom GPS application has appeared in the U.S. AppStore. And if you decided to get the external antenna you can even use your iPod Touch as a GPS. That is way cool and way more useful than I had previously thought this was going to be. Kudos for TomTom to make the thing more widely available on the iPhone platform.

    The product works with the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which include an integrated GPS receiver. It will reportedly also be compatible with the first-generation iPhone and the iPod touch once the separate combo hardware kit is made available. TomTom has not yet announced a price for the hardware package.

    via AppleInsider | TomTom for Apple iPhone released in U.S. App Store for $99.

  • AppleInsider | Apple’s tablet

    Theres no way the tablet will be as hot as the iPhone
    There's no way the tablet will be as hot as the iPhone

    Market projections are a black art. How big is the market for an as yet unreleased product? Marketing departments always have to do the  research and focus groups and test marketing to see what the projections are. But even these can be wrong or misleading. Based on this article one Wall Street analyst firm bases their projections on the market for the Apple TV a niche product if there ever was one. In the first year of it’s production the Apple TV sold 1.2million units. Given the appeal of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the projections are the Mac Tablet will sell far better than the 1.2 million units of the Apple TV. And with a list price of ~$600 US then the revenue generated would be approximately 3% of total revenue. This is all pad on paper estimates based on the up take of a somewhat less successful product, so it could be way off the mark. I’m hoping there’s something new, something nobody has guessed at so far that Apple will include in this device that will help really, really differentiate it. It should be unlike other tablets, and unlike its little brother the iPod Touch.

    We believe an Apple tablet would be priced 30%-50% below the $999 MacBook, and would offer best in class web, email, and media software,” the report reads. “In other words, we believe Apple’s tablet would compete well in the netbook category even though it would not be a netbook.”

    via AppleInsider | Apple’s tablet will be more than a niche product – report.

  • Reseller lists TomTom iPhone kit

    Not an iPhone, but definitely a lane assist!
    Not an iPhone, but definitely a lane assist!

    It’s not cheap, but the TomTom accessory kit for the iPhone 3GS is now listed on a re-seller’s website. Hopefully the Navigon and AT&T iPhone Apps haven’t stolen the thunder of the original TomTom announcement. But I guarantee the GPS performance will be a lot faster with an external device. I’m not criticizing the internal GPS on the iPhone. It is a compromise design that allows everything to sit and play well within the same old iPhone footprint. For good GPS reception and quick locks on satellites, that compromise is going to get in the way. Especially for anyone who has used purpose built, standalone model GPS navigators. My fingers are crossed in hopes the TomTom at least matches the low end of the navigator market with its hardware/software combo.

    The application is said to take advantage of iPhone OS 3.0’s support for true, turn-by-turn directions. The software will have both nation-specific and international maps from TomTom, will work in either landscape or portrait modes, and give voice directions.

    The software will reportedly be available for separate purchase from the App Store, and would rely on the iPhone’s internal GPS receiver. The hardware kit, however, comes with its own, separate GPS. It will be one of the first external accessories to take advantage of iPhone 3.0’s capabilities.

    via AppleInsider | Reseller lists TomTom iPhone kit for £99.00 ($168.50).

  • iTunes U: The Beginning

    It’s interesting to see how the whole iTunes U structure works. I’ve been reading documentation about the ‘web services’ enabled within iTunes U. It completely replicates the GUI functions but through a semi-automated interface. Reminds me a little of how you can change the underlying LDAP directory structure using LDIF commands or LDIF files with all the changes embedded within it. In iTunes U, you do an HTTP PUT securely with a signed token, and the iTunes U Web service sucks that up and executes all the commands embedded within your XML file that you put. Very powerful, but very scary too as these changes are made to your production environment. So there’s no real easy way to test the results of your commands without just taking a big risk, leaping in and seeing what happens. This is like SQL commands where you DROP TABLE, not a fun thing to do. DROP TABLE is a big black whole that makes your data disappear in an unrecoverable way. iTunes U has similar functions where you delete the structure AND the data at the same time. You may restore the structure (by backing up your data tree in XML format), but the data embedded within the tree, well that’s gone. So restoring stuff is going to be impossible if you get the syntax wrong in your XML file. The only real benefit to me now is the ability to get a listing of the whole site structure using the Tree command and then forcing an update to any groups that are of the type RSS Feed. The update will be necessary if anyone adds files to a podcast being hosted on servers within our institution.

    I discovered or re-discovered a tool called Woolamaloo which was introduced to me during the Apple iTunes training. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana created it to allow you to use a GUI to control the Web services from a desktop OS. This is good as I was at a loss to adapt the sample code into anything like a reliable generator of tokens to send to iTunes U web services. I couldn’t figure out what parts of the java example to comment out and recompile. Starting this Monday I’m going to put Woolmaloo through it’s paces. If I can force the RSS feeds to update on demand when somebody has a problem updating their Podcast feeds, I can at least speed things up. But I’m still very leery of deleting or merging any section. I will copy so I can make a course appear in more than one place without using the iTunes multi-click interface. But I will not delete or merge.

    And just today I also discovered there are Apple Automator scripts readily available that add a graphical layer on top of all the web services goodness. So now I can integrate a bunch of steps from uploading bunches of files, forcing RSS feeds to update to merging/rename whole sections all from Automator. I’m going to test it and se how good it really works.

  • AppleInsider | Augmented reality in iPhone 3.1; new Snow Leopard build

    It appears Apple is on board for fully pushing through the whole Augmented Reality capability of the iPhone. Follow the link below:

    Apple promises that its upcoming iPhone 3.1 release will be the first to officially support augmented reality apps that support the iPhone 3GS’ camera. Also, a new seed of Mac OS X Snow Leopard has been handed to developers.

    iPhone 3.1 needed for augmented reality

    via AppleInsider | Augmented reality in iPhone 3.1; new Snow Leopard build.