Future

Future tech

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According to USA Today, True hipsters include gizmos of 2010 on their wish lists. There is a nice summary of potential futur gizmos.

  • Like, maybe a translating digital camera. (...) There's actually a working prototype in Hewlett-Packard's labs.
  • Personal Smart Stuff Technology (PSST). Open a box of PSST, and you'd find sheets of dot-size stickers, each embedded with a tiny RFID chip that can store a few bits of data and transmit it wirelessly. You'd also find a half-dozen or so RFID readers to place around the house to tie in with your wireless network. You put the stickers on things — your iPod, key chain, jacket, notebook and so on. On your home computer, you enter some information that corresponds with the sticker on each item — perhaps what the item is and some instructions. Maybe you tell PSST that if it senses that your jacket (presumably with you in it) leaves the house but your keys are still on the kitchen counter, PSST should send a text message to your cell phone, giving you the number of a good locksmith.In essence, your stuff would be on your home network, much as Web pages are on the Internet. "I want everything I own to be indexible,"
  • The Mach-X ND Razor (never get dull or corrode, One blade for the whole of a man's shaving life) and Never-Smell Sox.
  • Subscription robots. Start with something like Sony's Aibo robot dog — but a more advanced version, with excellent speech recognition and a wireless Internet connection. (...) A "toy" for your kid that can download and deliver content and services from the Net
  • Personal theater. A cell phone that's also an MP3 player is cool this year. A cell phone that can download and play movies on a tiny screen will be cool next year. By 2010, you'll want a cell phone that can deliver a complete surround-sound home theater experience, says Padmasree Warrior, Motorola's chief technology officer.
  • ...

Why do I blog this? Of course, it's like scifi or crazy stuff from the future, but the interesting point here is that those gizmos are coming out of existing research lab in the US. It's nice to see what's done there, even though it's not so precise and there is no picture.

A Samsung\'s mobile phone with haptic capabilities

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According to gamasutra, Samsung is planning to release a new mobile-related games product this year in Europe.

According to Park, "There will be a games product and service this year, though not necessarily in a games-specific form factor. Functionality such as 3D does not now require a dedicated handset and can now be found in regular form factors." Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that the new device will be aimed more at the mobile phone/N-Gage market than the PSP or Game Boy.

In other Samsung news, the company has licensed haptics-related 'force feedback' technology from San Jose-based Immersion Corp., best known for recently winning a court case against Sony over patents that the Dual Shock controllers had violated.

The haptics technology will debut in some Samsung phones next month, and a New Scientist report points out: "These devices give you a sense of how good a virtual golfing shot was from the force feedback, or let you feel how close you are to being run off the road in racing games", meaning it's possible that future Samsung mobile game products could use haptics as a significant part of gameplay.

Why do I blog this? Well things are going to become interesting if we have more and more competitors in the field of mobile-phone-merged-with-portable-consoles! Among the diversity we can expect something cool to emerge. Samsung begins to be a really amazing companies, definitely a serious competor for Nokia. I mean, in terms of innovation, it's becoming more and more ahead of the curve.

A lab to keep an eye on : Minatec ideas lab

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Minatec's Ideas Laboratory (Grenoble, France) seems to have a smart agenda:

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory is a laboratory dedicated to design of new products and services using micro and nanotechnologies. Its approach is based on a rigorous creative process integrating validation of the concepts by the users at a very early stage.

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory is composed of teams from widely varying backgrounds: scientists from numerous fields (including human sciences such as sociology, anthropology or ergonomics) rub shoulders with technologists and users of all ages.

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory

  • creates a place for exchanges and collaborative multidisciplinary work
  • innovates by interaction between different professions and technologies
  • verifies the value of use and the economic value of the new objects and services

Located in the heart of the MINATEC excellence centre, the laboratory benefits from resources at the leading edge of research in the micro and nanotechnologies sector.

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory is a joint venture by the Grenoble CEA Leti, ST Microelectronics and France Telecom R&D. Around the core formed by these three founders, the laboratory is progressively opening up to other partners, industrialists and research organisations.

From R&D to \"Connect and Develop\"

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(via) More than the sum of its parts by John Bessant: I am a bit late commenting this September 2004 column from the Financial Times. However it reminds me a report produced by the Institute For the Future called "Shape Shifting in the World of R&D" (I advise you to read it carefully). One of their claim was that social networks will support new R&D forms. That is also what the FT author states:

In the 21st century, innovation involves trying to deal with an extended and rapidly advancing scientific frontier, fragmenting markets, political uncertainties, regulatory instabilities and competitors who are increasingly coming from unexpected directions. The response has to be one of spreading the net wide and trying to make use of a broad set of knowledge signals. In other words, learning to manage innovation at a network level. (...) Even the largest and most established innovators are recognising this shift. Procter Gamble uses the phrase “Connect and Develop” to refer to what was previously called R&D, and every year spends about $2bn on this activity. The company has set itself the ambitious goal of sourcing much of its idea input from outside the company. As Nabil Sakkab, former senior vice-president of R&D at the company, commented recently: “The future of R&D is C&D - collaborative networks that are in touch with the 99 per cent of research that we don’t do ourselves. Procter Gamble plans to keep leading innovation and this strategy is crucial to our future growth.” Similar stories can be heard at other companies, including IBM, Cisco and Intel.

Why do I blog this? We have a interesting pattern here. I would like to think about the conclusion we should draw with regard to future R&D workers. That means learning how to network, a bit of PR and a lot of scouting (or either competitive intelligence) to know what's happening and who meeting to find solutions to one's (present/latent/future) problems. Carrying out R&D or research or something related with this means both producing knowledge AND giving some insights to others. That's exactly a feeling I have when I work with companies: they need insights that act as a framework for what they do. They don't have time and resources to conduct their own research (or at least not on all the issue they have), so they have to go seek it in the wild.

A nice book about innovation and user-centric development

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During my holidays I read a very relevant book (in french) about innovation and how to invent futuristic stuff: Fabriquer le futur : L'imaginaire au service de l'innovation by Pierre Musso, Laurent Ponthou, Éric Seulliet. The book is well connected to the France Telecom/Orange/Wanadoo galaxy (the preface is handled by France Telecom R&D boss), which is cool because as I already stated here it's difficult to get some information about this company does. It is a pity since I know that there is plenty of valuable research there. Back to the book, the authors offer a review about how the design of futuristic applications are carried out. They also advocates for more user-centric approaches. I won't go to much into the detail now because I don't have time for that. I will rather wait a bit and put my notes next week about it. Dunno whether I'll have enought time to write the notes in french or english. I'll see

Besides, one of the author also has a blog: e-mergence which offers a nice follow-up to the book.

A nice aerial vehicle

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Urban Aeronautics is a new company that work on aerial vehicles. Their puprose is to create and market the world’s first FAA certifiable, VTOL, multi-mission, aerial, utility vehicle capable of operating safely in complex urban and natural environments. Quite a nice innovation! Their X-Hawk is cool:

Swedish interactive lab PLAY becomes RE:FORM

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Th swedish interactive lab PLAY now becomes RE:FORM.

The Interactive Institute's RE:FORM studio investigates technology as design material. While the typical notion of 'form' is physical shape, we believe that in considering computation as a design material, concepts of form must be fundamentally re-interpreted since time, flow, and energy and other dynamic elements become central in the interaction with computational things. In our research, we develop both methodological foundations and practical examples, exposing the experiential, social, and design implications of new technologies.

Why do I blog this? This lab is one of the most interesting in Scandinva, forpeople concern with interaction design.

About independent research

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I think I already mentioned here my interest towards independent researchers or non-institutional researchers (here or here). When it comes about this very topic, appears the needs for resources, as described by rashmi:

in recent years, the internet has enabled the rise of a new type of internet enabled, independent researcher. I first realized this during my last year at Berkeley - that I could now do the same research on my own. Between subscriptions to a few academic journals, Google and a few trips to Berkeley/Stanford library, I can have access to everything I had while at Brown University or UC Berkeley. I would probably not have left the safe cocoon of academia if not for this realization.

Self-service technologies, in which human interaction seems a relic of the past

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A very relevant column in the International Herald Tribune about "self-service technologies", this recent trend in service consumption. It deals with the potential damage to customer relationships. Of course, the author mentions automated phone system which are often a pain ("nine out of 10 consumers expressed anger over aspects of these systems").

If you want a boarding pass issued for a flight, you do it yourself. If you want to check out food at the supermarket, you do it yourself. Even if you want to buy toys, jeans, furniture, or best sellers, you find them and order them on the Web - yourself.

The world today is one of self-service technologies, in which human interaction seems a relic of the past. (...) The money a person can save by using self service varies widely. (...) But although the idea behind self service is to increase convenience for consumers - and to cut costs for businesses - the systems are not always all they are cracked up to be.(...) Also troublesome for those who may not care to use self-service technologies, like the elderly, is that discounts may be given to those consumers who do use them (...) "We preach to our customers that self service is just one channel to consider but not an exclusive one," Smith [managing director of Kynetix, a London-based consultancy that helps businesses adopt self-service technologies] said. "You have to have simple ways for consumers to get what they want, and that doesn't always mean self service." When it comes to the future, Smith predicts a more "proactive" type of self-service world. "You'll have a profile with an organization - perhaps a bank or an airline - and they'll notify you proactively about things you need to know about, whether it's a flight delay or an investment gone below a certain threshold," he said. "More and more, timely and important information will be pushed at you. "It's a way of the companies getting to you before you can get to them," he said. "And I believe this is the future."

About ETH World

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I recently discovered ETH World:

is a strategic program to establish a virtual space for communication and cooperation independent of time and place. The program aims to make this space widely used and accessible to all stakeholders of ETH Zurich. ETH World supports all members of ETH in their core business - teaching, learning, research and the associated management tasks. The program enables new forms of networking and cooperation with business, industry and society.

ETH World contributes to realizing the vision of a university of the future and thereby strengthens the international competitiveness of ETH Zurich.

I digged a bit on this website and came across a very interestinf report about study tour (.pdf):

In November 2004, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) organized a study trip to leading universities and research labs in the USA and Canada to learn about best practices in the use of information and telecommunication technologies (ICT) to support teaching, learning, research and services.

France\'s call for project about competitivity

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The french government just launched a call for project dealing with competitivity as explained in Le Monde. Cities have to come up with concrete industrial projects focused one specific domain, plus partnership with universities, companies and other forces. The best example is Grenoble with its nanotechnology pole. The call wants to foster Silicon Valley-like areas. Don't know whether ut's going to work...anyway academics, big chips and startups will at least talk to each other... awareness might be the first by-product.

Les candidats intéressés par cette politique du gouvernement doivent déposer leurs dossiers avant le 28 février. Responsables politiques, chefs d'entreprise et chercheurs ont travaillé à leur élaboration, en s'appuyant sur les points forts du tissu économique.

The next writing paradigm

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The NYT has a very smart column about the coming "tools for thought" that may radically change how people write.

The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think. (...) But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did. (...) What does this mean in practice? Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.

IM as THE interface?

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I recently tried the SmarterChild, this little bot you put in your AIM contact list.

SmarterChild is an interactive agent built by Conversagent, Inc. Interactive agents are software applications, often called "bots," that interact with users on Instant Messaging or other text messaging services. You can "chat" with an interactive agent, whether on the web, over IM, or on a wireless device, the same way you talk to any other contact.

You can chat with him, talking about news and info, (Headline News/Movie Showtimes/Sports Scores/Sports Standings/Weather Conditions/Weather Forecasts), play games, ask for dictionnary definitions... It's a bit US-centric at the moment, because of the data sources they use ("Not all of our information providers supply us with international information"), but it seems promising. Why do I blog this? This tool seems promising even tough it the bot idea is a bit passé (MUD or MOO bots were close to it). What is new and interesting here is: (i) the interconnexion with lots of database (ii) the fact that your IM is more and more seen as THE interface. This, because now some IM supports asynchronous messenging (you can send messages if your partner disconnected), file transfer and now database query (well the bot thing is nothing more than a database query mixed with some regular expression).

There seems to be 3 important tools nowadays:

  1. the browser seen by google dudes as the interface that can be substituted to the operating system: to search (google core mission), network (orkut), read (webpages), send messages (gmail)...
  2. the webfeed aggregator (to gather news, calendars, todo list, weather forecast, remiders...), which is interesting because an aggregator is just an interface to deal with lists (RSS = list of stuff).
  3. the Instant Messenger to send/read messages and now ask for information

All these tools use the http protocol and are used differently by groups. Newsgroup and email are still here but some group of users tend to leave them (see the korean example in which email is only used to contact old persons). It would be interesting to study how the use of those tools is mixed and for which purpose (with regard to socio-cultural aspects).

Is this the street art future?

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I am a great fan of 'fiducial marker', namely, the tag used to be recognized by Augmented Reality systems to display virtual stuff on glasses or screen. I like it because it tells me that the area I visit has some related content (since somebody tagged it). Of course I would need glasses to access this content (would it be a monster? a postit?). It can also be a simple trick related to nothing (absurd tagging!). Would this be a street art artifact in the near future? Anyhow, we should take into account that the marker as shown below are to be seens by both users: on the one hand, the one with augmented glasses and on the other hand, the regular passersby who will have to learn mor about this weird black and white dotted pictures... Picture taken from a paper about ARQuake

What computer professionals call \"software hell\"

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Nicholas Carr strikes again in the IHT:

A look at the private sector reveals that software debacles are routine. And the more ambitious the project, the higher the odds of disappointment. (...) Research by the Standish Group, a software research and consulting firm, illustrates the troubled fates of most big software initiatives. In 1994, researchers found, only 16 percent were completed on time, on budget and fulfilling the original specifications. Nearly a third were canceled outright, and the remainder fell short of their objectives. More than half of the cost overruns amounted to at least 50 percent of the original budget. Of the projects that went off schedule, almost half took more than twice as long as originally planned. A follow-up survey in 2003, however, showed that corporate software projects were doing better; researchers found that the percentage of successful projects had risen to 34 percent. (...) What happened between 1994 and 2003? The Internet boom went bust. Stung by wasted investments in complicated software systems, business executives began taking a more skeptical view of such projects. They scaled back their expectations, pursuing more modest software enhancements with narrower goals - and far higher chances of success. Equally important, they stopped trying to be creative. Rather than try to customize their software, they began looking for cheaper, off-the-shelf programs that would get the job done with a minimum of fuss. When necessary, they changed their own procedures to fit the available software. Old, generic technology may not be glamorous, but it has an important advantage: It works.

It may well turn out that the FBI's biggest problem was its desire to be innovative - to build a new wheel rather than use an old one within easy reach. When it comes to developing software today, innovation should be a last resort, not a first instinct.

Why do I blog this?It 's because the Carr debate it something important we should keep in mind even though we don't agree with Carr. The author has still mixed feeling toward innovation...

[Tech] Turn old-handsets into useful gizmos

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The Guardian on "Unwanted mobiles to get new lease of life ".

The communications giant Nokia has developed technology that turns unwanted mobile phones into a range of useful electronic gizmos, including alarm clocks, handheld games and TV remote controls. The move is designed to help dispose of the growing number of obsolete handsets thrown away or forgotten in drawers by people striving to keep up with new technology.

That's a nice move and a smart initiative.

Nokia says redesigning old handsets makes the most of extra functions such as the clock and memory while hiding communication features. (...) The casing of the phone can be reshaped to "provide a more stylised device", alarm clocks could get a snooze function and software could be reprogrammed to talk to remote-controlled devices. (...) "The cell phone is transformed from something having a short lifespan to a device with an undeterminable lifespan."

[Tech] Passionate ethnography of power outlets situations

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The NYT has a great piece about electric plugs. It is indeed le nerf de la guerre as we say in french; I mean the crux issue when you're out of you're regular living/working bubble.

Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.

Where do I put the stuff below? Thus, some people develop a passionate ethnography of electric plug situation. I really fancy this kind of technosocial situation:

Sean Spector, a vice president and founder of GameFly, an online video game rental service, said he tries to book flights that have power adapters near the seats so he can plug in his electronic gadgets.

I tend to wander around before seating at the perfect place in the train to be clsoe to a power plug. Unfortunately as I travel a lot both in France and Switzerland, I noticed that only french trains provide them (not all).

[Prospective] Did IBM make no effort?

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A Wall Street Journal columnist argues that IBM should have made an effort to innovate rather than selling its PC unit to the chinese. The author describe how they could have improved the PC. One of the option would be to deal with portability:

Like many people, I have several PCs in my life--and I constantly need to ask such ridiculous questions as, "Where did I leave the latest version of that file? By what clumsy method should I move it from where it is to where it's needed?" Such questions are like asking "Where did I leave the starter crank for my Huppmobile?" If you have to ask, your (formerly) hot-shot machine is ready for the folk-art museum. (...) IBM might have done well selling PCs with built-in "transparent information sharing." As soon as you connected such a machine to the Internet, all your electronic documents would immediately be available--no matter where you created or last worked on them.