Category: Web/Tech

Tony Connock reports in a Telegraph article, “The Naked Self Revealed”, how mobile phones reveal more than many people realize. For example, his mobile phone word dictionary includes terms that he has added such as “Gucci”, “bendy”, “lovey-dovey”, “straighteners”, “fois” and “diva”, which, if perused sereptitiously, may provide a different image of him than that…

On my flight back from Vienna, I read an item in Scanorama (the high-quality SAS in-flight magazine) about the Nokia Medallions, 4096-color, 96×96 pixel, wearable displays (two models), attached to a steel chain or rubber matte choker that can be worn around the neck or wrist. Images are uploaded via infrared, the device can hold…

FreeFi has announced QwikBar, “a persistent presence at top of the screen which displays ads” and has tabs for the usual suspects (news, sports, weather, etc.). The QwikBar is presumably launched upon connection to a wireless access point provided for customer use. FreeFi plans to share revenue generated from the advertising with the sites that…

Alex Steffen cites John Thackara‘s vision for the upcoming era of the post-spectacular city, in which the focus of urban design will shift from “point-to-mass advertising, onanistic art, and big-ticket spectacles” (one-way messages) to creating capabilities for “collaboration, encounter, intimacy, and work” (interactions). Thackara describes the mobile phone as a device for creating new opportunities…

Smart Computing has an article about a field test of the Wherify Wireless GPS Personal Locator for Children, a wristwatch-style device with a GPS receiver and PCS transmitter that can be “locked” onto a child’s wrist and send periodic updates to a web server about the location of the device (and, presumably, the child). Parents…

There has been a great deal of discussion about the use of social computing technologies (primarily IRC chat) to create backchannels — for discussion — at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. this past Monday and Tuesday. Given the theme of, and participants at, the symposium, it is both ironic (or at least sweetly self-referential)…

Clay Shirky describes social software, applications written for a particular situation — a small group of people, period of time and, possibly, physical space — contrasting this with the “Web School” approach where applications have to scale to large groups of people for long periods of time, and usually with out any space boundaries. By…

The New Scientist has a recent article on an MIT Media Lab project called Serendipity, which seeks to enable people to discover potential dates in their vicinity. According to the article, people would be able to subscribe to a service in which they would create a personal profile and then associate that profile with their…