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The Clover coffee maker, an extraordinary machine for making a great cup of coffee – and now in the hands of coffee’s “evil empire”.
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Article from ’06 that details the beneficial impact of CoE on excellent small estate coffee growers.
links for 2008-07-30
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Fortune article about research at HP’s ‘Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory’ around nanotech and ubicomp that would provide something like, what the journo called, ‘a central nervous system for the earth’. Interesting ‘visions’, promises and hopes
Queuing for kudos or an iPhone 3G?
At the Apple Store on University Avenue in Palo Alto this morning there was a queue of around 25 people, some had brought books, others were playing with gadgets, such as iPhone’s (Mk.1) or iPods, and one chap was sat on the pavement with a laptop resting on his knees going through his email. All of these people were in line for one thing – an iPhone 3G.
links for 2008-07-26
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Interesting research in California around the support for privacy of location data. Many Californians are willing to pragmatically ‘give up’ that privacy for perceived benefits:
“A majority of Californians understands that wireless phones can track th
links for 2008-07-25
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“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”
links for 2008-07-22
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“ThingM is a ubiquitous computing device studio. Here, networked electronics meet user experience design in products for everyday problem solving and self-expression. We bring together people’s lives with cutting edge technologies to research and develop
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UAVs are controlled by British Army operators using x-box style controllers and “at the Farnborough air show this week… arms-maker Raytheon showed off its new Universal Control System for robotic aicraft. It’s based on the same technology that drives Ha
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“…part of the urban computing vision are driven by the newly available data, with a “let’s map and see” trial and error approach rather than starting from human and urban considerations”
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” One thing about technology, is that it tends to make people generally lazy about their levels of commitment. Perhaps we should push instead for the development of technologies and applications that encourage people to invest time and effort in an activi
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Ubicomp may come in unexpected guises perhaps… “Reportedly, deodorant manufacturer Right Guard has created an armpit-based method of advertising which has cleverly been dubbed ‘pitvertising.’ “
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Ubicomp style project ‘cityware’ courts controversy with bluetooth sniffing techniques, privacy concerns are raised: “Tens of thousands of Britons are being covertly tracked without their consent in a technology experiment which has installed scanners at
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“Most people no longer look at the physical journal in the library, which the library clearly owns outright, but look at articles through online services. The questions then become: how is that paid for? What is owned? What happens to the “owned” content
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Nova picks up on the recent special issue of IEEE pervasive computing on ‘hacking’ – “hacking can play a powerful role in pervasive computing as it can inspire ‘thought processes and reduce the time it takes to create a viable prototype’. This process can
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“Valerie Cunningham interviews Jamis McNiven, the owner of Buck’s Diner, in Woodside, Calif. This is where many of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies got their start: pitching their business plans in breakfast meetings with local VCs” – a dreadful
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Nova crits a posting by Janne Jalkanen and throws in his 2p, describing three flaws with the vision (shoudn’t that be plural?) of ubicomp: 1) limited options makes the user feel smarter but constrains creativity; 2) building & maintaining an infrastructur
links for 2008-07-15
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“igg’s entry into the field of recommendations is interesting because news has a very different character from e-commerce. While shopping sites are dealing with fads that play out over the course of weeks and months, news sites are dealing with fads that
links for 2008-07-11
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Nova on representations of imagined online places/spaces: “Working on both fields of video games and urban computing, I find interesting to observe the relationship between the image of the city and its physical counterpart. For that matter, it seems that
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Nova on the changing face of the differentiation between user and bystander in ubicomp games: “The presence of bystanders in some pervasive games or ARG is interesting as it shows how the notion of “user” in ubiquitous computing is flawed. Unlike face
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Fabien Girardin on ‘sentient cities’ research: “In this presentation I discussed the deployment of new urban actors as instigators of new types of data at the source of a sentient city. These new technologies should not be perceived as drivers of urban ch
links for 2008-07-07
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My new, temporary, purveyor of coffee. A good choice of varieties and they don’t seem over-roasted!
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“The future of mobile phones is perhaps”¦ not a mobile phone at all, but rather a contextually aware and active mobile magic wand. It’s not about skins anymore. Not even about features, open source, multi-touch or iPhoney. It’s about who is going to
links for 2008-06-21
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“This list of unthinkable futures — probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking — was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to pr
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“More than 20 years ago a generation of schoolchildren sat down to complete a questionnaire they were told would predict their future… Their answers were fed into the Jiig-Cal computer, which filled an entire building at Edinburgh University and promise
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“We would be better off having fewer academics and using the savings to fund more grants, because then more research could be done for the same national expenditure. Such action has to be taken by governments, as universities currently have the freedom to
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“The goal of scientific excellence should trump nationalistic considerations.”
The Nature editorial of June 2008 praises the launch of the European Research Council (ERC) as an independent research council with a Europe-wide reach to distribute conside