New fuel for Neuland

Solid methanol promises battery breakthrough
New technology makes methanol a safe source of power for portables


Simon Burns in Singapore, vnunet.com 27 Oct 2005

A Japanese company today unveiled a breakthrough fuel cell for mobile computers based on so-called 'solid methanol' technology.

Kurita Water Industries claims that the technology solves the safety issues that have previously prevented widespread adoption of this volatile material as a power source.

Methanol fuel cells promise to give notebook PCs and mobile phones battery life measured in days or even weeks.

In 2003 they called it motes, now RFID

The Real World as Database

Posted March 28, 2003
by David Pescovitz

After an earthquake, how do you know if a skyscraper is safe to enter? Try asking it.

That's the idea behind TinyDB, a database system developed at the Intel Research Laboratory Berkeley and UC Berkeley for networks of tiny wireless sensors called "motes."Only a few cubic centimeters in size, the motes collect light, temperature, humidity, and other data about their physical environment. The data is then relayed from mote to neighboring mote until it reaches its desired destination for processing. In one recent experiment, motes embedded behind a building's walls diagnosed seismic stability. In another ongoing project, sensors in the burrows of endangered sea birds on Great Duck Island, near Acadia National Park, Maine, monitor the environmental factors affecting the creatures' comings and goings (see photo gallery).

ThingLink is really a convention for marking things.

Free Product Code, by Ulla-Maaria:

....
What would be a Last.fm for the products in the invisible tail? I started to think about this after meeting Jimbo Wales at Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. With my friends Adam Wern, Jyri Engeström, and Eric Wahlforss, we came up with a definition for a free product code called ThingLink (thinglink.org/thinglinks.com). ThingLink is an open project aiming to enable anybody to create unique product codes for free. Literally, ThingLinks are meant to work as links to things that exist offline.

You can ThingLink the objects you show on your weblog or on Flickr for instance, and ask other people to use the same code when they refer to that object. This enables the tracking of the object in search engines like Technorati. We also created an open encyclopedia for products called WikiProducts. I started tagging some of my objects with ThingLinks, for example a bag, a dress, my laptop cover, and so on. And in this form it already works. Try Googling the ThingLink Thing: 618736AB, and you’ll end up on the WikiProducts page about my laptop cover.

Free product codes can revolutionize the existing markets. To break out from the domination of global brands, a topic that Naomi Klein talks about in No Logo, it may make sense to march in the streets, but it can also be effective to encourage people to tag their products with unique codes and put them online so that we can refer to them and recommend them to our friends.

Google moves into the Internet of Things

Usman Haque points me to

"google wants to make "objects" searchable..."
:

Google Testing Possible EBay Competition Oct. 25, 2005

Google confirmed that it's testing a new searchable database service, called Google Base. Google is providing few details, but the service was online several hours and at least one alert blogger snapped a screenshot.
By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News
....
In a description on the Google Base site, the company described the service as "Google's database into which you can add all types of content."
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172900366&tid=13692

We vote for Ulla-Maaria Mutanen's
Free Product Code
http://www.thinglinks.com/

You call it serendipity, I call it a prison

For the first time in the history of technology pervasive computing sets forth its own disappearance as technology as fundamental to its success. Will the result be dumb interfaces that hide all keys to the technology that drives it? Will it keep users from fixing it when it is broken? Can they build on it, play with it, remake, remodel, reuse it for their own ends? This being able to negotiate stuff, stuff that is axiomatic thinking embodied, is called: creativity.

I pod Shuffle will be the default in a ubicomp world.

Usman Haque says:

"the Ipod that disguises a design flaw with a catchy word
shuffle baby!
it's not a bug it's a *feature*..."

The 1992 Mark Weiser text on ubicomp has currently effectively cleared the field and is now the dominant global computing paradigm at levels of code (algorithm, hardware), node (distributed computing), link (sensor based interface design:wearables), and network (security as the default in politics, economy, social systems, planning, visual grid).

There are no natural predators to the paradigm now.

That is not a healthy situation.

Therefore we will develop an alternative: resonance design

Join the call for visibility.

As we move to the internet of things, let's make damned sure that it is not only Walmart and DOD and GS1.com rolling out the DNA of this new world, RFID - and call a bug a bug. Bug.

Manifesto Games The Games' Indy Label

Manifesto Games to fuel independent devs

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A new digital distribution publisher founded by American games industry names Greg Costikyan (right) and Johnny Wilson has been formed. Called Manifesto Games, it has one clear aim: "to build a trong and viable independent game industry." The move has come as a response to the percieved constraints of retail channels and their reliance on big budget titles, and is seen by the company founders as the perfect way to encourage niche content or games that would otherwise be overlooked.

Writer and games designer Costikyan (whose Game Developers Conference rant about how the games industry is "fucked" should it continue on its big-budget path Edge readers may remember from our transcription in E149), had this to say about the new venture: "The game industry has become moribund. It is now essentially impossible for anything other than a franchise title or licensed product to obtain distribution. Yet historically, the major hits, the titles that have expanded the industry to new markets and created new audiences have been highly innovative. It is time for us to find a way to foster innovation, because it's not going to happen if we leave it to the large publishers." Manifesto Games
- (through Edge Online)

South Korea's "Ubiquitous City"

In what at first seems to be a throwback to the utopian urban visions of early 20th century futurism, South Korea is developing a "U-City" from the ground up, using bleeding-edge "ubiquitous" technology to monitor everything from citizens' medical records to garbage collection.

New Songdo City, being built on a man-made island 40 miles from Seoul, will feature pervasive computer technology throughout, driven by RFID tags and CDMA wireless communication. Although many Western observers would find the lack of privacy disquieting, Asian countries are more interested in the technological potential of such environments.
(from Future Wire Blog)

The Final Cut

A rather underestimated movie, "The Final Cut" from Omar Raim gives a detailed and sophisticated look into a world where a "ZOE" implant exists, recording everything, audio and visual, that you see and hear. Furthermore, this footage is then cut and reedited in an about 2hrs film version of your life called the rememorial which is watched during your funeral.
The movie covers, in a very detailed way, the social and moral implications of such a technology affecting society. There are demonstrators in front of a rememorial event, metallic enhanced tatoos and the attached fashion youth culture involving metallic tattoo paint that can block the audio and video signal or both, commercial closure over the "ZOE" implant company's employees, a moral and ethical set of rules for the "cutters", which are the people who reedit the footage to never have implants themselves, the matter of affording the technology, the general notion of how we remember things differently than they were happening and if we should be able to not forget anything and crime. It also includes the malfunction of the technology and it's effects, here in the form of malfunctioning implants recording daydreaming images as if they were reality.
Not a woah! look what we can do with science movie like Minority Report, but a dense documentation of the focussing on individual's scenarios. Very watchable!
And I so gotta have one of Robin Williams' wood-encased labtops.

PlaceSite

if every space has a local/temporary website, what might the implications be?
Anyway, here is project to set it up.

Case of Sony vs. developers

developer's fixes and self-made handy apps are the greatest, yet companies like sony are still too scared to "loose" control. With companies like Apple managing to have their followers be too thankful never to make their god angry, what are companies really scared of?
Why does every company think that the subversive, destructive and lawbreaking part of society is a majority?

NING social applications

"Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.
Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people."

bottomline: your own zagat, flickr and other extelligence sharing. The question that always comes to my mind here is how much time we will have or spend on creating communities rather than using it. here I am posting my first post for weeks. I have been busy, in the more or less real world. Dissolved my flat and moved to Rotterdam. Am I not community spirited enough?
In a world where tools become collectables, are we still gonna create anything with them?