Casio Exilim EX-S880, EX-Z77 boast YouTube capture mode
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
SoonR Talk workaround enables VoIP on your iPhone
Musipen DAP concept breaks from convention
Filed under: Portable Audio
Good vibes power tiny generator
A tiny generator powered by natural vibrations could soon be helping keep heart pacemakers working. 
Here the generator, in the centre of the chip, powers an accelerometer
Created by scientists at the University of Southampton, UK, the generator has been developed to power devices where replacing batteries is very difficult.
The device is expected initially to be used to power wireless sensors on equipment in manufacturing plants.
The generator's creators say their technology is up to 10 times more efficient than similar devices.
Power packed
The tiny device, which is less than one cubic centimetre in size, uses vibrations in the world around it to make magnets on a cantilever at the heart of the device wobble to generate power.
Although the generator produces only microwatts this was more than enough to power sensors attached to machines in manufacturing plants, said Dr Steve Beeby, the Southampton researcher who led the development of the device.
"The big advantage of wireless sensor systems is that by removing wires and batteries, there is the potential for embedding sensors in previously inaccessible locations," he said.
Using the tiny generator also made it possible to use larger numbers of sensors because there was no longer the need to visit them to replace or recharge batteries, Dr Beeby added.
The generator was developed to sit inside air compressors but, said Dr Beeby, it could find a future role in self-powered medical implants such as pacemakers.
In a pacemaker, the beating of the human heart would be strong enough to keep the magnets inside the device wobbling.
It could also be used to power sensors attached to road and rail bridges to monitor the health of such structures.
Work on the project was funded by the EU as part of the 14.3m euros (£9.67m) Vibration Energy Scavenging (Vibes) project that is looking at how to use environmental vibrations to generate power.
King.com got MyGame
If you hadn’t guessed it, casual gaming is so hot that even normally lumbering Electronics Arts has jumped on the bandwagon. Nevermind them, for casual gaming is still the playground of start-ups. We have written about Boonty’s Cafe.com and Kongregate in the past. And now three-year-old casual gaming company, King.com is getting its game on with MyGame.com, a new service that lets you create, play and also share games (via widgets of course.)
The service which is going to be widely available tomorrow allows anyone to create games in 2-minutes, London-based King.com claims. You can pick a game template, personalize it with text, sounds, and a photo, and start playing. Since the company is going for big impact, some of the games are downright hokey, and simple.
You can share the games on social networks, embed them in your MySpace profile, or even post them to your blog. If your game gets really popular, then King.com plans to share advertising money with the game creators. (I have labeled this share-the-profit concept, iCompany, and have written about it in the past.)
Going Bonkers by the Bay
There is no getting away from Facebook: everyone is talking about it on the email lists, on the blogs, in the restaurants. Even grownups are happily confessing their addiction to the Silicon Valley's own Furby. What is more amusing is that seemingly clever guardians of wealth are getting caught up in the euphoria and loosening their purse strings.
Take Bay Partners as an example. A sedate venture fund that typically invests in semiconductor companies and infrastructure start-ups has started a new effort that invests exclusively in Facebook applications. The right applicants can get anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 as an investment for their applications.
The collateral of this project, imaginatively dubbed App Factory, is interesting, cringe-worthy reading filled with clichés like "application entrepreneurs" and "affect adoption, virality, and usage." Here is just a nugget of wisdom from the press release announcing this new funding strategy.
A fully baked business model is also not a requirement, as long as there are reasonable theories and approaches that can be explored together.
Putting my newly acquired Hebrew Yiddish skills to use, I say, Oy-vey!
Facebook, despite the cleverness of its recent platform strategy, is still a start-up, and a funding vehicle focused entirely on its ecosystem seems a bit rash. There is still a fog around these Facebook apps-as-businesses. Advertising on social networks is still a hit-and-a-miss phenomenon, still heavily reliant on banner advertising than anything else.Sure some Facebook apps have been acquired by other start-ups, like Favorite Peeps bought by Slide, but there is less to this land grab than meets the eye. Travel-focused vertical search engine, SideStep recently snapped up Extended Info, which has nothing to do with travel.
Rob Solomon, CEO of Sidestep told Liz earlier today "Trey Philips, the guy who built it, hacked it together at the facebook event. He's a talented young guy who understands these social networks."However, since Phillips is still in school, Sidestep hired him as a summer intern who is basically advising them on building Facebook stuff. As I said earlier, there is fog of confusion.
But Bay Partners (via the press release) rationalizes its decision by saying that since Facebook is a Social OS , it is an opportunity to develop in the marketplace and ecosystem around it.
They are partially right, except for the fact that this OS is inward looking: people work on Facebook's terms, and not the other way around. Last time an inward looking ecosystem caught the imagination of developers, it was Windows 95, the defining moment for Microsoft.
The winner of that movement: Microsoft.
FatFreeCart: Two Carts for the Price of Free
PayPal has 133 million account holders and Google Checkout handles one transaction for every 70 that PayPal does, according to Hitwise. EJunkie has a simple free cut and paste solution to this problem for small sellers called FatFreeCart. It lets anyone easily put a shopping cart on their site. PayPal has their own cart creator, but FatFreeCart gives users more choice: both PayPal and Google Checkout can be used.
To install the cart on your site, you just need to cut and paste this code to your page and change the text in red, filling in details like merchant id, product description, and taxes. Customers can add and subtract items from their carts and commit to a final checkout by being taken to a prefilled order form on either of the services. When the order is completed, the merchant is notified of the purchase via email and can fulfill the order.
Readers interested in other simple web solutions should check out JS Kit’s website widgets.
Gigya’s Big Win With Top Widget Companies
Gigya’s “embed this” widget is a simple tabbed menu of social sites that lets anyone post your embed code to their page by just entering their credentials. It even works with Facebook applications. You can see the full list of partners here.
It’s a distinctly different strategy than what other widget tool startups are doing. We reported on another company, ClearSpring, which similarly helped developers track and spread their application. However, in contrast to Gigya, ClearSpring is open to any developer and focuses on widgetizing content, not easily posting them to social sites. Gigya is aimed at enabling large widget publishers low friction adoption on social sites.
Gigya recently closed a round of funding with Benchmark and First Round Capital $2.4 million on June 25th.
Diesel's "bioluminescent mechanic cephalopod" runway show: video
Xeni Jardin: 
BB reader Jeremy Tolbert says,
Fashion designer Diesel recently held a fashion show in Florence that featured 3D holographic sea creatures accompanying the fashion designs. The art is amazing and very fluid, like creatures from the deep sea or another world. The technology behind it seems similar to the recent live appearance by the Gorillaz at an awards show.Link to photos and writeup at Creative Review, and here's the entire "Liquid Space" show on Youtube: Video Link. The reviewer describes the hologram quality as "incredible," and even from the shitty YT footage, you can see this is accurate.
Previously on BoingBoing:
Fashion show promises bioluminescent mechanic cephalopodsReader comment: Spence says,
I don't believe this is a hologram, but an incarnation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's obviously taking a public event to show itself in all its grandeur. Maybe Diesel has proven to be a loyal follower and this is the reward!Anonymous sez,
From the article, it appears that Diesel's "bioluminescent mechanic cephalopods" were not actually holigrams. Like the Gorillaz Grammy performance (or the ghosts in Disney's Haunted Mansion), they were created using the pepper's ghost effect, in which an image is reflected off of a glass-like (or in this case mylar) surface between the stage and the audience. More info on the tech behind the Gorillaz performance in the link.
TED talks videos
Mark Frauenfelder: 
I went to TED2007 as a member of the press and was profoundly impressed by the quality of the events and the speakers. I drove home dumbfounded by the cascade of mind-boggling information in the presentations I saw there.
I went to TED2007 as a member of the press and was profoundly impressed by the quality of the events and the speakers. I drove home dumbfounded by the cascade of mind-boggling information in the presentations I saw there. I told my friends about TED and its effect on me, but I knew I wasn't able to convey how wonderful the speakers were. Fortunately, TED is offering the talks on its website in the form of 20-minute videos. There very high quality, and they're free.
I recommend starting with researcher Hans Rosling's presentation of his Trendalyzer software, which converts inscrutable database numbers into instantly-understandable and revealing dynamic animations.
In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software -- which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels. Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.Link
Web zen: illusion zen
Xeni Jardin: 
- akiyoshi's illusion page - exploratorium - optical illusions + visual phenomena - depth perception - masters of deception - best visual illusion - natural hallucinogen
Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)
Image: Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s "Out of Focus," Link to explanation of the optical magic this induces.
Timeline of hazardous made-in-China products, 2007
Xeni Jardin: 
Who-Sucks.com has compiled a master timeline of incidents involving dangerous (sometimes lethal) "made in China" products banned or recalled by the US Consumer Products Safety Commission in 2007.
Who-Sucks.com has compiled a master timeline of incidents involving dangerous (sometimes lethal) "made in China" products banned or recalled by the US Consumer Products Safety Commission in 2007. It's a big list. Well-known killers like Thomas the Tank Engine of Death and Antifreeze Toothpaste are in here, but so are less-known gems like "razor blades for kids," "lead bracelets," "toxic jackets," and "dangerously crappy hammocks."
Link (thanks, Fred Hall)
Reader comment: Dan says,
This reminded me of the great old SNL skit with Dan Akroyd portraying a purveyor of such "exciting" toys:"Okay, Miss, I wanna correct you, alright. The full name of this product, as it appears in stores all over the county, is Johnny Switchblade: Adventure Punk. I mean, nothing goes wrong.. little girls buy 'em, you know, they play games, they make up stories, nobody gets hurt. I mean, so Barbie takes a knife once in a while, or Ken gets cut. You know, there's no harm in that. I mean, as far as I can see, you know?"
Wellcome Trust releases 2000 years of medical images under Creative Commons
Cory Doctorow: 
Ian sez, "The Wellcome Trust, one of the UK's largest medical charities, has released its image collection under Creative Commons licenses, with a new web site to search through it. I'm not sure how many thousand images there are, but for science teachers and anyone doing research into the history of medicine and biosciences, this will be a huge bonus." Link (Thanks, Ian!)
Ian sez, "The Wellcome Trust, one of the UK's largest medical charities, has released its image collection under Creative Commons licenses, with a new web site to search through it. I'm not sure how many thousand images there are, but for science teachers and anyone doing research into the history of medicine and biosciences, this will be a huge bonus." Link (Thanks, Ian!)
NASA scientist: ban coal plants now!
Cory Doctorow: Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We just published a new letter from NASA's Jim Hansen, in which he essentially says the world can't afford to burn coal any more, and we should have a moratorium on coal-burning (except perhaps in a new generation of power plants with carbon capture and sequestration technologies)."
Link (Thanks, Alex!) (Image ganked from Jay Dugger's Flickr photostream: Unknown Coal Plant Near Saint Louis, Missouri)The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.
Mileage Runners hack air travel for maximum miles
Cory Doctorow: Wired News has a great story today about "Mileage Runners" who tweak the airline reservation system to plot insane (and insanely cheap), multi-hop air trips that accumulate bazillions of air miles. A hacker friend of mine recently came out to me as a mileage runner, and described a system he'd worked out for gaming the reservations computers to get $400, round the world business-class fares.
Mileage Running isn't good for the planet, but it makes a certain perverse sense as a response to the airlines' incomprehensible pricing schemes, capricious upgrades policy, and emphasis on mileage. It's probably not a coincidence that Southwest Airlines, who pioneered simple, transparent pricing schemes, is more profitable than all the other US airlines put together.
In my last job, I flew to 31 countries in three years, fighting copyright treaties and DRM standards, and made top-tier on three different airlines. I didn't get much sport out of it, but I can now locate a working electrical outlet in the meanest airport.
"I personally find airlines and airplanes to be really neat," explains Joshua Solomin, a 28-year-old mileage runner who works as a software manager in San Francisco. Solomin began running in 2006 after a year of business travel vaulted him into the Premier tier of United's Mileage Plus program, giving him his first taste of the first-class upgrades and other coveted perks that come with elite-level frequent flyer membership. "Mileage runs are a way to maintain that status," he says.
Of Solomin's five runs to date, one of the more impressive was a trip from San Francisco to Tampa via Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington, then back with connections in D.C., Seattle and Portland. Thanks to his Premier status, he earned double miles for the trip, more 16,000 of them, for just $232.
On Sunday, he completed his first international run: a $1,450 round trip between San Francisco and Singapore with stops in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Sure, he had only five hours in the middle of the night to explore Singapore, but with United's July triple mileage bonus he earned a whopping 78,000 miles. And he flew business class the entire way.
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