Media Technology

Long before flash mobs became the phonebooth-stuffing of the naughts, science fiction author Larry Niven speculated how the invention of teleportation would cause sudden flash crowds of gawkers to appear wherever a newsworthy event is taking place. Over at Searchblog, John Battelle suggests we’re bound to see something similar happen in couch-potato-land once channel surfers can automatically see what show or media event everyone else is watching…

Image credit: Jeff Han

Jeff Han at NYU has a very nice demo video of what you can do with a multitouch-sensitive screen (video is also cached at youtube). This is using Frustrated total Internal Reflection to sense both pressure and location of multiple simultaneous touches.

(Thanks to /amq for the link!)

In many ways I see the problems with Google’s centralization as just another facet of a tension that has existed since the Internet started: the tension between the decentralized “every end-user is his own service provider” model and the centralized fiefdom model where you sign up for one of a handful of service providers. I think it was the coming of the Web in the early ’90s that finally tipped the scale in favor of the decentralized model, and as a result we saw an explosion of URLs and email addresses that weren’t only from AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy. This, I think, was all for the better. But now the proliferation of GMail addresses and Google Base scare me precisely because they smack a little too much of the fiefdom model we so wisely avoided 15 years ago.

From CNN Money:

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) – Aiming to increase access to the Internet, particularly for people away from home, Google, Skype and other leading Internet investors Sunday announced a $21.5 million investment in an innovative new Internet access network called Fon.

The company, founded by Spanish entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, aims to build a network of WiFi hotspots far larger than those from companies like T-Mobile and Swisscom, none of which have more than 30,000 hotspots worldwide.

Fon aims to exceed that in its first year, and to have one million hotspots in four years. It hopes to achieve this by getting individuals and businesses to contribute their own hotspots to the network in exchange for getting access wherever they go. Those who contribute access get to use the access of others.

If Fon comes through with a simple-to-install and manage setup I can see this idea really gaining traction — it sounds like he’s got the right level of incentive to end-users who donate their bandwidth, and the technology for charging non-members for hotspots is already tried & tested. (Heck, if it works well I’d pay $25 just to get his “use only 50% of your bandwidth on outsiders” software; I keep thinking something like that must exist, but I’ve yet to find one.)

Long as he can jump-start the process and can convince ISPs to let him in on a racket they’d love to control themselves I’d say he’s got a good chance. (I see he’s already signed on Speakeasy in the US, though they also have one of the most liberal wireless sharing policies around so others may be a harder sell.)

Quick plug: Misprinted Type has several nice freeware fonts (plus a few commercial ones) available for download for Mac and PC.

I’m not sure yet what I’d do with it, but the Optimus mini-three keyboard looks very fun: it’s an auxiliary keyboard with three keys, each with its own little OLED screen displaying the current function (potentially animated). The most compelling examples are where not only is the button’s function displayed but also what effect it’ll have in the current context, like what image, song, or PowerPoint slide is coming up next when browsing through media.

USB 1.0, currently Windows only for the configuration software but others are coming. Pre-orderable for $100 until April 2nd, shipped to arrive on May 15th. This is coming out of the Art. Lebedev Studio in Russia — looks like they’ve also got a complete keyboard coming soon too.

(Thanks to Nerfduck for this link too!)

Via Reuters: UC Irvine professor Beatriz da Costa will be releasing 20 pigeons into the San Jose skies during this year’s International Symmposium on Electronic Art. Each pigeon will be equipped with a camera, GPS, air-polution monitor and cellphone, and images and location-based polution data will be automatically posted to a PigeonBlog. (No word on whether PigeonBlog will comply with RFC 1149.)

Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!

Almost exactly a year ago I made fun of the UK newspaper The Times for suggesting Google was gearing up enter the Voice Over IP space. Now it’s starting to look like they were right…

The Wikipedia community is trying to respond to whitewashing of politically-sensitive articles that appear to be coming from congressional staffers themselves (with the staff of Marty Meehan (D, MA) being one of the biggest culprits).

I’m always amazed that Wikipedia works as well as it does — hopefully the bad press Meehan and other congress-critters get over this flap will outweigh any good press specific staffers may have hoped to achieve.

Detailed coverage at Lowell Sun, C|net and Slashdot.

I’m a bit late on this, but I’m psyched to see that last week Google flipped the switch to allow all their Google Talk instant messenger accounts to talk to any other Jabber client out there. I’ve not verified it yet, but I think that included people with .Mac accounts using iChat, and BigBlueBall has a nice tutorial on how to use the federation to hook up your GTalk account directly to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ using Jabber transport services.

This is the final step I’ve been waiting for before ditching my AIM account and going entirely to Jabber!