This blog is about web 2.0, traditional media and advertising, how they affect each other and how they affect us (especially me). It is also about stuff I like such as art, design, animation, music and photography. what I feel like writing. Nothing written here should be taken too seriously...
Called Skinput, the system is a marriage of two technologies: the ability to detect the ultralow-frequency sound produced by tapping the skin with a finger, and the microchip-sized “pico” projectors now found in some cellphones.
But how does the system know which icon, button or finger you tapped? Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, working with Dan Morris and Desney Tan at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, exploit the way our skin, musculature and skeleton combine to make distinctive sounds when we tap on different parts of the arm, palm, fingers and thumb.
Ubiquitous technology, long battery life, known interface, touch sensitive, highly customizable, plug and play, speech recognition, interoperable and above all mobile.
We’ve been talking for years about media convergence since first Nicholas Negroponte coined the term and, we’ve grown accustomed to it on the web the hypermedia where all the rest converge.
As I often ask my students, I you didn’t knew the language in a website, would you be able to tell apart a newspaper, a radio station and a TV station only by watching at their websites?
You probably wouldn’t. Each medium trespasses its own traditional boundaries adding content formats from the others:
Radio websites feature of course audio but are mainly made up of text and images
TV station websites feature video but also text and audio
Newspapers website are oftentimes mere translations of the printed medium but they add a layer of rich-media in audio and video
Traditional media on the web become hypermedia and are the medium of choice for the ever growing web generation. I don’t think this generation will settle, either on a desktop or on a mobile device, for a mere digital copy of a physical medium such a newspaper.
The reasoning is quite simple and it goes as follows:
I don’t read newspapers. So, why would I want a digital copy of a newspaper?
But what if I could experience the quality contents of a magazine/radio/TV the way I’m used to, meaning rich-media, interactive, personalized, social and real-time? Would I care if I’m browsing a magazine a radio station or a TV station? Probably not as long as I get what I want, where I want it and the way I want it, which is coincidentally what the iPad promises us.
The forthcoming Apple tablet brings us a little step closer to full media convergence, not that there’s anything especially new you can’t do right now with a browser and decent internet connection, but the new apps (or rather the new content and interaction design), the physical proximity, the multi-touch interface and the position sensor make the sensorial experience somehow different to anything we’ve seen so far.
Check also the Sports Illustrated demo and ask yourself if this is just a magazine or finally a true interactive TV.
Next week is the world’s renowned World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, where over 50.000 world experts in mobile technologies will meet and what will be presented there will have a worlwide impact.
Prices range from 599 € for visitors to 4.999 € for an all areas all events pass.
After trying to register twice without success with Firefox I switch to Safari and I get a nice “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris sem. Donec tincidunt pharetra urna.” when requesting my pass.
And this people own all my personal data!
11:23 Update: One hour trying to register and still without a pass. No luck with Firefox or Safari. Calling for help!
11:30 Update: Give up. My colleague Jordi Ramos from RAC1 radio will register me via phone. He’s been through the process yesterday.
12:32 Update: After Twittering about my problems, @soniagraupera from Fira de Barcelona forwards this post to registration support resulting in a really nice and professional phone call from Josep offering help. I refuse because I assume it’s already being handled by my colleague Jordi Ramos at RAC1.
12:40 Update: I get 3 emails with the following subject “Your Mobile World Congress 2010 Registration Acknowledgement”
13:00 Update: Calling Josep to thank him for his help. My initial complain tweet when as far up as the COO of the organizing company.
I just came from my small town’s antique street marquet where I saw a cool 70s jump-hour watch exactly like this one, except for the brand. The one I saw had the Sears brand on it.
At the stall, after checking that it still worked, I asked the price. It started at 70 €, dropped to 65 without asking and after a while it was already 50 €.
It wasn’t obviously new, a few scratches and wear here and there but the overall condition was good. While I was still thinking it over, it came to my mind that I could Google for it on the iPhone and check some background data about the model.
Join the advanced features on the iPhone, a fair flat rate data plan and the power of open source and you have Wordpress for iPhone, the first open source native app for the iPhone downloadable from the iTunes App store (which means installable with a single tap).
It supports self hosted blogs as well as the free blogs at WordPress.com
But I just realized that the real GTD is having no internet access. Stranded near St. Tropez with my Mac and no internet connexion I did more actual work in a couple of hours than in a whole online working day. How?
No email
No Skype (huge time consumer)
No Twitter
No Safari
No Google Reader
No Wikipedia to fill my knowledge voids
No bittorrent
No iTunes (my music library sits in an external drive)
No phone calls (don’t like roaming costs)
No application or system upgrades to download and install
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