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I impatiently wait for cordless electricity, automated public bathroom finders and car-finds-you parking lot detectors.
The point of new tech is simple: level-up the convenience meter. Faster. Smaller. More efficient. Less Time. Greater good, lesser bad.
GOOD Magazine recently featured a insta-interactive 3D augmented reality demo, and it looks something like this (clicks through to their post):
While we twiddle our thumbs waiting for something like this to be released at Best Buy, some MIT brains have developed SixthSense, a wearable device that instantly manifests a virtual keyboard or interface. Frame a photo with your fingers. Type on your hand. Search product information on the actual product itself. No iPhone required.
It looks something like this:
The video below is a delightful and charming demo. The best application I can think of is simple: the instant notepad. Pulling out my iPhone, opening the “Notes” application and beginning to type is just too many steps. Especially when I’m interrupted by all sort sof other notifications. Why jeopardize a flighty, brilliant idea? Especially while driving. Voice-activation wouldn’t hurt. After all, Siri is way too temperamental to rely on.
SixthSense via TED.com:
Thank goodness instant gratification isn’t one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
A few months ago, a techie classmate and I decided that L.A. needed a tech podcast, and HTMLA was born.
We tinkered with our school’s radio booth, lined up some interviews and tossed up a website. Twitter account in tow.
Six episodes in, and we’re ready to take a step back to re-evaluated our BETA project. We nursed this geekie baby during grad school madness, and now we have the summer to think about where to take it. Inspired by Leo Laporte’s TWiT and The 404, we want to fill a niche. If only to argue over whether it rhymes with rich or quiche.
L.A. already has socaltech.com, and we enjoy being the scrappy grad students who throw around some of the L.A. tech buzz, whether it be startups, crazy inventions, university developments or human-shaped cell phones. But we recorded our last episode (unreleased) on the USC Annenberg lobby floor, for crying out loud. Summer radio booth hours are short.
Episode 6 is our pride and joy, and we invite you to take a listen.
If only because we name-drop Captain Planet.
Or… download on iTunes!
Traditional journalism is dying, wah! We know! So how can we foster new ideas with journalistic, technological and business vision?
Lock up grad students from these fields in a room for 9 days, and see what happens.
That’s where I’ve been with 17 other USC students from journalism, engineering and MBA programs, collaborating on mobile tech for news outlets.
A charming engineering student and two brilliant MBA grads were on my team to develop a new mobile app concept for KCRW. The station told us they wanted new ways to engage listeners, so we proposed a technology that allows users to select and share just a snippet of a program. Courtesy of Ben Moskowitz, we learned this is already being prototyped with Mozilla’s new open-source language, Popcorn.js. Demo audio-snippet sharing here.
And here’s our concept video (turned around in a 48-hr timeframe):
Now that we’ve been released from the 9-day boot camp and are decompressing from the collaborative buzz, I look forward to what develops. Perhaps we’ll continue to engage with KCRW over this concept, and I’m excited to delve into popcorn.js and learn more about the beautiful things they’re making. WordPress says it best… Code is poetry.
- girl geeks
- guys who like girl geeks
- scientists
- documentary-lovers
- hungry artists
- artsy web developers
- Trekkies
- cat owners
- single-celled organisms, because they don't know any better
- scholars
- grad students
- people who buy magnetic poetry kits
- people who receive magnetic poetry kits as gifts
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Questions > Answers
Insta-Convenient Consumer Tech
I impatiently wait for cordless electricity, automated public bathroom finders and car-finds-you parking lot detectors.
The point of new tech is simple: level-up the convenience meter. Faster. Smaller. More efficient. Less Time. Greater good, lesser bad.
GOOD Magazine recently featured a insta-interactive 3D augmented reality demo, and it looks something like this (clicks through to their post):
While we twiddle our thumbs waiting for something like this to be released at Best Buy, some MIT brains have developed SixthSense, a wearable device that instantly manifests a virtual keyboard or interface. Frame a photo with your fingers. Type on your hand. Search product information on the actual product itself. No iPhone required.
It looks something like this:
The video below is a delightful and charming demo. The best application I can think of is simple: the instant notepad. Pulling out my iPhone, opening the “Notes” application and beginning to type is just too many steps. Especially when I’m interrupted by all sort sof other notifications. Why jeopardize a flighty, brilliant idea? Especially while driving. Voice-activation wouldn’t hurt. After all, Siri is way too temperamental to rely on.
SixthSense via TED.com:
Thank goodness instant gratification isn’t one of the Seven Deadly Sins.