December 2011
“For the last six months, orangutans … at Milwaukee zoo have been playing games and watching videos on Apple’s (seemingly ubiquitous) iPad, but now their keepers and the charity Orangutan Outreach want to go one step further and enable ape-to-ape video chat”
—Orangutans to Skype between zoos with iPads | ExtremeTech
“Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. A book page turns into something like a Web page, able to be revised endlessly after its initial uploading. There’s no technological constraint on perpetual editing, and the cost of altering digital text is basically zero. As electronic books push paper ones aside, movable type seems fated to be replaced by movable text. That’s an attractive development in many ways. It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed or to once charming inns that have turned into fleabags. The instructions in manuals will always be accurate. Reference books need never go out of date. Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents. Polemicists will be able to bolster their arguments with new evidence. Novelists will be able to scrub away the little anachronisms that can make even a recently published story feel dated.”
—Nicholas Carr on E-Books - WSJ.com (via infoneer-pulse)
“
In 1988, Richard Stallman created his own copyright licences to try and get around what he saw as the problem of “software hoarding”, where companies would take public domain content, modify it, then refuse to release the ensuing work into the public domain. He created the Emacs General Public Licence, the first copyleft licence, which eventually evolved into the GNU General Public Licence, better known as the GPL.
The GPL, which has become one of the most popular free software licences, explicitly made clear that the maximum number of rights had to be transferred to the program’s users, despite subsequent revisions to the code. It also laid out the rights that the user had — the freedom to use a work, the freedom to study it, the freedom to copy it and share with others, and the freedom to modify it and distribute derivative works. These four tenets became common in copyleft licences.
” —Some rights reserved: the alternatives to copyright (Wired UK)
“(Grace Hopper) is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer)…. The remains of the moth can be found in the group’s log book at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.”
—Grace Hopper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Shopperception uses Kinect sensors to bring 3D spatial recognition capabilities to market research applications that have traditionally relied on costly and error-prone human observers. Brands, researchers and retailers can then continuously monitor the way shoppers interact with the products on the shelves, including metrics such as how long they spend, which products they touch, which are put back and which are ultimately purchased. They can also use the technology to compare the success of competing shelf layouts or point-of-sale promotions, for example. “Heat map” reports”
—In retail stores, research tool uses Kinect to track shoppers’ behavior | Springwise
“Under an agreement reached this week with labor representatives, staff members at Volkswagen will receive e-mails via BlackBerry from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they finish, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time”
—Volkswagen Curbs Company E-Mail in Off Hours - NYTimes.com
“Described by some as a duct tape for the Internet, IFTTT allows you to program the Internet to work for you by creating tasks. If, for instance, someone posts a photo to Flickr, you can have a text message sent to you.”
—IFTTT Celebrates 1 Year and 433,000 Tasks
Snapheal Brings Magic to Photo Retouching →
thenextweb.com
this looks pretty good from the demo video… I’ll remember it next time I have to do serious edits…
“
Schmidt spoke of the emergence of two rival systems which are being brought together by the Internet: offline institutions — such as government, politics and law — and cyberspace.
They are getting into conflict in some governments and places, as technology is empowering people in ways they have never been empowered before. You can think of this as a community of citizens and a community of governments.
As technology develops and time passes, Schmidt believes that “a new equilibrium will emerge” to serve both communities in different ways. Cyberspace, he says, will ultimately serve to keep governments more honest in many ways, while equally government will have influence on the negative things that happen in cyberspace
” —Eric Schmidt: Technology Can Change the World
“A Dutch gaming company is testing a game called, Pig Chase. It will connect users to real live pigs that they can interact and play with on their iPads”
—Use an iPad to Play With Real Pigs — Without the Mess [VIDEO]
Play
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The new Dropbox photo upload feature — which is currently available in the latest Experimental Forum Build of the desktop app — works in a similar manner.
Once enabled, plugging in a camera or memory card will give you the option of automatically importing the photographs and movies and then uploading that content directly to Dropbox
” —Dropbox Tests Automatic Camera Uploads
Easily Move Your Flickr Photos to Facebook →
thenextweb.com
I’m not planning to give up on Flickr just yet but it never hurts to have a backup. Plus I’m curious to see how my photos will work in FB now there is the TimeLine. It’s a pain having things all over the place. Now I just need someone to do a version that gets from Flickr to G+ then I’ll be fully sorted. :-)
“Amanda Schuster… says she never shops in actual stores after drinking, but she finds it hard to resist the Web. “It feels productive in a way — like I didn’t just come home drunk and pass out, I went home and did something,”
—Online Retailers Home In on a New Demographic - The Drunken Consumer - NYTimes.com
“(Asahi Beverages) announced yesterday that it will roll out a brand new machine that along with providing the usual beverage choices will dispense free wi-fi signals to anyone using it within a 50m radius… The company looks to roll out 1,000 next year and up to 10,000 more in the next five years. … the home page shown to users on the network will display local shop and restaurant information”
—New Wi-Fi Dispensing Vending Machine
“3.7 million new Android devices were activated over the holiday weekend. The 1.85 million daily average more than doubles Android’s current rate of 700,000 daily activations”
—3.7 million Android devices activated over Christmas weekend | The Verge
