Ratchet Up

Instant Panorama Pix From Your Mobile

With the PanoMan program you simply turn in a complete circle while snapping pix. The software automatically stitches the images into a full 360 degree panorama in real time.

[PanoMan via Unmediated]

Inuit Signal Hunters

Inuit communications guru Adamee Itorcheak is “a high-school dropout and former Bell worker who now runs Nunanet Communications in the capital city of the newest territory.

He has 520 clients on dial-up connection for the World Wide Web and another 140, and growing daily, on what he is convinced is the future of northern communications: high-speed wireless. He is, he would happily acknowledge, a bit of a fanatic, a true believer so intense that he will sometimes head out on snowmobile to hunt camps -- but in search of signals rather than seals. He has been able to surf the Net from as much as 25 kilometres beyond where his servers are supposed to reach, convincing him it is only a matter of time before everyone in this massive, isolated land mass is connected. By January, the territory hopes to have high-speed availability in every community. ”We are already the most-wired society in the world,“ he says.

In a land where air travel is almost prohibitively expensive, he sees data transmission as one more potential resource for the Far North: meetings by video-conferencing, health care by video, family contact, weather information, tracking hunters and fishermen. . . . [...]

When he speaks of his mother, Kilabuk, it becomes clear how quickly change is coming to this part of the world. She was born in the 1940s to a semi-nomadic family based on a much smaller island. She had only the barest of formal education. And yet now, along with her husband, Mosesee -- Itorcheak's stepfather -- she uses the Internet to search out old photographs of Inuit hunting families from the 1940s and 1950s. ”We're survivors,“ says her son. ”We're masters at adapting.“ [...]

Itorcheak, who a few years ago was the only aboriginal invited to sit on the National Broadband Task Force, has always held that the people here will make their own way in the digital world, deciding everything for themselves as they always have. ”We're coming from an experiment where we've created our own government,“ he says. ”And yes, it had hiccups, but it's not every day you make a new government and redesign the maps of the world, is it?“

As for the Internet, it will also require some designing. ”We need translators just to come up with new words for what we're doing!“ he laughs.As for who will use it, the young are already on-line and the old are becoming increasingly curious.”I had to take my stepfather's modem away the other day when one of my paying customers' modem went down,“ he says. ”I think he had withdrawal.“

[Globe and Mail] [via Smart Mobs]

Musical Toothbrush

Remember the the bone-phone that used your jaw bone to conduct the sound? Well, Hasbro has something like about to appear according to the Wall Street Journal.

“When pressed to the teeth, the toothbrush renders a recorded riff from a pop star that lasts two minutes -- precisely the amount of time dentists say children should spend brushing their teeth.

How does it work? ”The two-minute recording is stored on a microchip no bigger than a dot atop the letter i. Push a button on the toothbrush, and a minicomputer starts playing the song. Sound waves are transported through the transducer to the front teeth, traveling from there to the jawbone and then to the inner ear.

Hasbro is in talks with several recording artists about getting rights to their recordings. Many artists would probably consider a gig in a toothbrush beneath their talents. But others might welcome the daily exposure in their young fans' lives.“

You Ought To Be In Pictures

No More Boring Linear Life

Somehow I'm taken by the notion of a revolving domicile as envisioned by the German group TurnOn. Inspired by “2001: A Space Odyessey,” Japanese pod hotels, and who knows what, the idea is that you can rotate through sleep, work and eat, all in one simple spin of your own custom gerbil-run.

“In Rethinking traditional ideas of the house as a structure composed of walls ceiling and floor, Austrian Architecture firm AllesWirdGut, looked to the future. Well, the past really... Temporal Semantics aside, their inspiration for their project, TurnOn, came from Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Specifically, the rotating zero gravity room. TurnOn is a unique curcluar living module designed to accommodate multiple functions associated with the house.”

[Core 77] [TurnOn]

Projecting Images From Your Phone

“Sony Ericsson's head of design, Hiroshi Nakaizumi, realised that there may be a future for small camera phones that project images instead of showing them on a screen. 'Why carry around a display when you can project it onto a wall or page?' says Nakaizumi. The idea is that we select which photo or film we want to show using a trackball on the end of the phone, then simply point it at any surface and view the projected image. The possibilities it creates are mind-boggling.”

[Wallpaper]

WebMags

There are, of course, many flavors of web-based magazines. But if you have never checked out the genre as imagined by MagWerk, you ought to. They follow the format of print mags, but incorporate new media riffs in interesting ways.

Hacking the Museum

A group at Marymount Manhattan College is producing their own audio guides to works in the Museum of Modern Art. You just download the commentaries onto your iPod and stroll through the galleries.

Interested in a taste, downloaded as an .mp3 file? Then just make a selection from their Audio Guides page.

More on this in the New York Times.

Technologies of Cooperation

Important new paper from Howard Rheingold and colleagues--don't miss the .pdf and visual map graphic linked to below.

“Together with my colleagues Andrea Saveri and Kathi Vian, I've put together a report (PDF) and visual map of technologies of cooperation for publication by our sponsor, the Institute for the Future. Taken together with Mobile and Open: A Manifesto, this report and accompanying graphic map are offered as resources to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, operators, service providers and activists who seek to use these new tools to alleviate suffering, create wealth, educate, liberate, create and inform.

Although we report about technologies, the power of these tools derives from the social practices they amplify -- specifically the ways people, machines and institutions can cooperate. These emerging digital technologies present new opportunities to change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth. Central to this class of cooperation-amplifying technologies are eight key clusters, each with distinctive contributions to scientific, economic, social and political forms of collective action:

Group-forming networks support the emergence of self-organized subgroups within a large-scale network, creating exponential growth of the network and shortening the social distance among members of the network.

Social software makes explicit, amplifies and extends many of the informal cooperative structures and processes that have evolved as part of human culture, providing the tools and awareness to guide people in intelligently constructing and managing these processes to specific ends.

Social mobile computing includes a cluster of technologies and principles that allow large or small groups of people -- even if they are strangers -- to act in a coherent and coordinated fashion in place and space, supported by information accessed in real time and real space.

Self-organizing mesh networks define architectural principles for building both tools and processes that grow from the edges without obvious limits, that distribute the burden of the infrastructure throughout the population of participants, and that establish the foundation for the emergence of swarm intelligence in systems of people and devices.

Community computing grids provide models for recovering currently squandered resources from distributed sources and for providing mutual security within a network of people and/or devices, supported by explicit choices about when and how to foster cooperation versus competition.

Peer production networks create a framework for volunteer communities to accomplish productive work in parallel. These potentially unbounded communities create new value by rapidly solving problems that would tax or stymie smaller workgroups; self-organization dramatically reduces coordination costs.

Social accounting tools suggest methods and structures to measure social connectedness and establish trust among large communities of strangers, building reputation along dimensions that are appropriate to a specific context and creating a visible history of individual behavior within a community.

Knowledge collectives model the structures, rules and practices for managing a constantly changing resource as a commons, for securing it against deliberate or accidental destruction and degradation, multiplying its productivity and for making it easily accessible for wide-ranging uses.”

[The Feature] [Get it hot in .pdf] [Visual Map]

Flicker Tag Viewer

I'm a big fan of Flicker. If you're into tagging pix, or searching by tags, this new Tag Browser from Air Tight Interactive is pretty cool.

[Air Tight Tag Browser]

Looking for a convenient Macintosh interface for uploading and viewing Flicker pix?

[1001]