Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Kodak color-filter technology could redefine low-light shooting

from Engadget by Darren Murph

We already knew that Kodak was up to something good when it began to phase out low-end digicams and refocus on developing new technologies, and now it seems like we've got one more innovation from its laboratory to look forward to. Reportedly, Kodak has developed a "color-filter technology that at least doubles the sensitivity to light of the image sensor in every digital camera." Bold words, we know, but even Chris McNiffe, general manager of the photography company's image sensor business, went so far as to say that this very invention would enable a "2x-4x improvement in light sensitivity." The company also suggested that a variety of camera manufacturers could expect samples of said technology during the first quarter of next year, and while consumer rollouts weren't detailed, we do know that this magical concoction will hit P&S cameras first with cameraphones to get equipped shortly thereafter.

projectiondesign's Action! M25 DLP projector does 1080p

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Sure, Epson and Philips' endeavor to create a mini projector may be novel, but projectiondesign's forthcoming device packs the power we AV freaks admire. Touting an almost unbelievable assortment of niceties, this 3.7- x 9.2- x 10.8-inch DLP machine is reportedly the "world's smallest" Full HD projector to date, and if that wasn't inspiring enough, it also uses TI's 0.95-inch 1080p DMD, the firm's proprietary RealColor technology, and plays nice with home automation systems with RS-232 and IP interfaces. Additionally, it sports a 10-bit video processing engine, HDMI 1.3 compatibility, 1,000 lumens, and a even-segment, 5x color wheel. Best of all, this HD-lovin' projector is available for purchase as we speak, but we're assuming that the unlisted price is a good sign that we common folk should just keep on looking. [Via Slashgear]

Lawyers and the $54 million pants

from Blogging Stocks by Kevin Kersten

Filed under: Good news, Bad news, Products and services, Law, AFLAC Inc (AFL), Allstate Corp (ALL), Amer Intl Group (AIG), Sunday Funnies, Progressive Corp,Ohio (PGR)

America is a "sue-happy" country. Where else can you sue the dry cleaners for $54 million because they lost your Hickey Freeman pants. You think I am joking; but this is a case of life being stranger than fiction. A Washington DC judge (who in my opinion should know better) is suing a dry cleaners that lost his pair of pants.

For a moment last week my trust in the American legal system began to fail as Paris Hilton, heiress of Hilton Hotels (NYSE: HLT) fortune, spent a heart-wrenching three days in jail before being released by the sheriff for "medical reasons." Then suddenly my faith was restored as the judge sent her back to jail.

Well it didn't last long. It seems this week a pair of lost pants is worth crying over -- and $54 million. I guess America is land of the free and home of too many lawyers. Maybe this is why I respect Vice President Cheney: I mean, we all talk about the problem with lawyers, but at least he shot one.

Continue reading Lawyers and the $54 million pants

The Long Tail in real life

Wow, talk about a visualization of Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" in action! This graph indeed shows how the tail has lengthened and that music discovery sites like this one (iLike.com) are helping potential consumers of such content reach further into the tail to discover stuff that they like and to then be able to buy the song one at a time.

Wis.dm Takes a Simple Look at Q&A

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Toward the end of last year we covered a veritable cornucopia of question and answer sites. They mostly served as aggregation sites for members to post, answer, and rate questions. Yahoo effectively dominated the space, leveraging their user base and even adding an API. Q&A service Wis.dm has taken a different look at questions and answers, and added a Facebook application today.

Wis.dm is for simple yes/no questions, not about writing long answers to life’s most elusive questions. Within the Facebook application you can answer a stream of questions that appear on Wis.dm. Unfortunately you can’t ask questions through the application right now. As you answer questions, Wis.dm assigns you points and matches you with other users that answer questions similarly to you.

The long-term vision is to match up potential friends and help silo Wis.dm users into interest groups. Matching people based on their answer history is also gives them a clear way to insert contextual advertising into the question stream. Advertisers on Wis.dm will be able to target their ads based on a user’s question profile (i.e people who answer positively to sports questions, get the latest ESPN ad).

Toshiba announces new "3D" NAND flash technology

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

It looks like Samsung's not the only one trying to build a better NAND flash chip, with Toshiba now joining the fray today with news that it's made some advancements of its own. Much like Samsung, Toshiba's apparently managed to cram more storage into roughly the same size chips by changing the way the various elements are stacked, in this case busting things out into three dimensions. According to Toshiba, the so-called "pillars" of stacked memory elements can be squeezed into a tighter space thanks in part to some shared peripheral circuits, although that apparently comes at the expense of a longer and more complex manufacturing process. What's not clear, however, is exactly how big an increase that'll translate to in terms of bits and bytes, nor is there any indication as to when we might actually see some NAND units based on the technology. [Via TG Daily]

Chime.TV: A Prettier Way to Watch YouTube

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Chime.Tv’s video player has got the kind of flash and style Ruby developers would envy, especially since it’s programmed in PHP and AJAX. The player, which dishes out 22 themed channels of viral video content, with a bunch of added utilities.

The full page player is similar to Joost and Babelgum, but in your browser. Like the IPTV guys, you can flip through pre-made channels, roll your own, or search for content by keyword. The player is pretty hands off, and will just run if you give it a channel or a search term to munch on. The player searches through videos on YouTube, Veoh, Metacafe, Google Video, and DailyMotion. You can reorganize the results by title, length, or randomize. They also have a bookmarklet so you can add content to your channels as you surf the web.

So, iIf you want to create the “bikini” channel, all you have to do is search for “bikini” in the search bar and Chime will start playing through all the results. The player also has a friend feature for sharing your channels and vids with someone else.

The player can play in full screen mode, wide screen, or anywhere in between by dragging the corner of the video. It also comes with some color controls for brightness, contrast, and color in case the original quality is less than stellar.

All this thing needs is a mashup with one of the TV show aggregators.

Sparter Launches, Go Buy Some World of Warcraft Gold

Sparter Launches, Go Buy Some World of Warcraft Gold

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Sparter, a stealth startup founded by Bessemer Venture Partners, launched this evening. They are jumping into the middle of the estimated $1 billion market for buying and selling virtual currencies in games like World of Warcraft (WOW), EverQuest, Eve and others. The current spot price of 100 gold on WOW? About $10.

The company is a true person to person trading company. Users can sign up and either buy or sell virtual currencies at market prices. There are already a number of sites that sell these currencies directly to users (IGE is the largest), but they don't take sellers, just buyers. And the prices are set by the company, not the market.

I spoke to Dan Kelly and Boris Putanec, the two executives Bessemer brought in to start the company, earlier this week. They say that a major supply of WOW gold today comes directly or indirectly from "farmers" in China and India. People are paid a very low wage to play the game and gather small amounts of gold, which are then sold directly to players or to services like IGE. Those models are fine, they say, for people who want to buy currency. But it gives no way for people who want to liquidate their virtual gold into real world money.

eBay is one place where gamers currently try to trade virtual currency for real money, but the company started restricting the sale of virtual goods on the site earlier this year, and proactively removing listings that include virtual money and other items. Sparter is simply filling the void that eBay has voluntarily created, the company says.

Others note that eBay left the market due to trademark and other concerns. In particular, it is a violation of the terms of service of many of these services to exchange currency in this way. Whether these virtual worlds will turn a blind eye to Sparter's activities, or attempt to fight it, remains to be seen.

Sparter acts as the go-between for the parties, keeping payments in escrow until both sides say the virtual transfer went through properly. Users are also asked to rate each other after a transaction. Users with higher reputational ratings may be able to charge a premium.

The company only supports trading in currency for now. Other digital goods cannot be traded on the platform. They say they have no plans to deviate from that strategy, unless users show strong demand down the road.

Virtual Sales Associates poised to harass interactively

from Engadget by Evan Blass

Thanks to a beautiful marriage between digital signage company Fastrak and interactive voice response specialist Message Technologies Inc, consumers will soon be able to converse with in-store talking heads who will provide product information along with what we can only assume will be subliminal messages to max out your credit cards. These so-called Virtual Sales Associates will be positioned near particular items of interest ("Steve recommends you only buy iPod-brand MP3 players: always look for the apple!"), and are said to be capable of holding limited "natural language" conversations about said product. To include window-shoppers in their diabolical advertising schemes, retailers can also mount a VSA behind the glass and offer browsers a phone number for chatting up the salesbot. This is good news indeed for retailers like Best Buy, who will soon be able to not only automate the process of providing customers with fake pricing information, but also begin planting the seeds of those rip-off warranties even earlier in the sales pitch.

Epson and Philips ready mini projector for portable gaming and beyond

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Get ready for personal projection kids now that Epson and Philips have released this tiny joint reference design. Immediately available for OEMs, the 0.47-inch (diagonal) 3LCD panel is capable of projecting an 800 x 600 pixel image with the aid of Philips' 2.8 x 1.4 x 1-inch driver and 1.7 x 2.5-inch Ujoy lamp system. Perfect for portable gaming systems, camcorders, and PMPs assuming somebody picks this up for mass production. Hear that Microvision, the big boys are comin' for ya. [Via Impress]

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Sxipper.com – One click logins

from KillerStartups.com - published startups by Alexstl

Are you tired of always having to fill in the same information when logging into sites, or when registering online? Well, now you can save time by using Sxipper. It is a free Firefox add-on that lets you login into any website with just one click. It stores all the users' passwords and usernames securely in the users computer, and when the user is confronted with a form to fill out, Sxipper takes the users personal data it was provided with, and fills in the form for the user. Users can create multiple personas, whereas, when filling out a form they can opt to use professional info, personal, or private, depending upon the form they are filling out. At every login or form, users are able to choose which information they want shared and what they don't want shared. In their own words: "Sxipper is a free Firefox extension that saves you time on the web enabling you to easily control the release and management of your identity data. With a single click, Sxipper is trained to securely log you in with a username or an Identity 2.0 authentication mechanism such as OpenID." Why it might be a killer: Everyone who uses the web is confronted multiple times per day with a form to fill out, or a website they have to log into. It can take time and become very frustrating. With Sxipper, it can save you time with your logins, as well as help you remember you passwords and usernames. Some questions: What does it do that Firefox password manager doesn't already do?

Find Alexa Rank of any Website using Google Talk

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Imagine typing "whois xyz.com" inside GTalk to find out who owns that web domain name. Or saying "alexa abc.com" will show you the Alexa Traffic details of that website right inside your Google chat window.

You can now easily run popular network commands inside Google Talk, Yahoo!, AOL or Windows Live messenger through IMified - just add imified@imified.com to your buddy list and start using the chat window as a network command line tool.

Other than whois, commands like traceroute and ping can also be executed from GTalk.

We earlier mentioned IMified as a quick tool for publishing posts on Wordpress or Blogger blogs through messenger clients.

The service has come a long way since then and now works seamlessly with tumblr, jaiku, twitter and so on.

You can even use Imified to add bookmarks to your del.icio.us account from Google Talk. How cool is that.

New low in patent stupidty: searching for a used car with a clean title

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: The US Patent and Trademark Office has just granted a particularly ludicrous patent: Carfax now owns the idea of searching for cars that have clean titles. Somehow, this didn't qualify as "obvious."

A method of searching for used vehicles comprising:
* Using VIN numbers to look up the title status of a vehicle; * Storing the title status of the vehicle in a database; and * Providing a list of vehicles based on title status to users who search for them online.
Could this be any more obvious? Even the patent itself admits that methods of compiling title information on used cars have been around since 1991. So what's the novel aspect of this invention?

Why does stupid stuff like this matter? It matters because every click and every idea is becoming someone's property. It doesn't matter if we've been doing it forever (like querying databases!), or if it's totally obvious, someone ends up owning it. The USPTO is open for anyone who wants to claim ownership of any idea (no wonder -- their funding comes from filing fees for patents), and once those patents end up in the hands of patent trolls, it's open season on the firms and people who make great stuff.

We all pay: we pay for the legal costs of fighting patent battles, built into the price of our stuff. We pay for the technologies that never come to market because of patent fears. We pay for all the ridiculous "defensive patents" filed by startups (there's no such thing as a defensive patent: having a patent doesn't mean that the USPTO won't give the same patent to someone else, and then your "defense" consists of not running out of money to fight the patent in court), which then turn into patent-troll armaments when the startups tank.

Astroturfing companies run bogus sites like this one, where they argue for "patent reforms" that consist of not reforming anything. Sites like Patent Fairness are a good place to get the real story.

Promising New Technology for Wi-Fi Enabled Secure Digital Memory Cards

from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection by Thomas Hawk

Wi-Fi memory cards coming to cameras | CNET News.com CNET News.com is out with an article on Eye-Fi, a company that is set to release new camera memory cards this Fall which will allow you to transfer your photos wirelessly to your PC or to online photo-sharing websites. This is exciting technology indeed. It looks like the cards will hold 2GB and sell for about $100. Even more exciting to me than Wi-Fi image transfer is the possibility to use Wi-Fi hotspots to auto geotag images prior to transfer. If by using hotspot geolocational data, Wi-Fi enabled chips could accurately geotag images, this would represent a great step forward for geotagging. It will be interesting to watch this technology unfold.

Nothing Me.dium about its Funding

from GigaOM by Liz Gannes

Me.dium, a company making a browser add-on that relates the webpages you are browsing to those being viewed by other people concurrently using the tool, today announced it had raised $15 million in a second round of funding, bringing its total amount of capital to $20 million from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld, and Elon Musk.

Really? $15 million? I didn’t realize it had taken off to a level to attract that kind of bet. Me.dium is something I tried out for an early review and ended up uninstalling a week or so later during a plug-in purge.

I called Me.dium co-founder David Mandell this morning to ask how many users the company has. He said it had just opened up its private beta a week ago, and has 20,000 registered users total. How many were active users, he couldn’t say (though he said he would try to follow up). The users tend to be pretty geeky, he said, because the plug-in is only available for Firefox (IE is coming “in the next couple weeks”) and the sign-up process was until recently not very accessible.

The funding, Mandell said, is to be put toward infrastructure costs — “managing and making recommendations based on the real-time activity of everyone online actually uses a lot of hardware and engineering” — and also consumer marketing in the fall.

I have to say, $15 million is a pretty big bet for a company that has not proved many people will use its tools. In this latest round of post-bubble-burst web funding, I thought it was users first, money later, but here that doesn’t seem to be the case.

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