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Wednesday, February 06, 2002 |
Hey, Kate - I'll bet you think I forgot. No way. Happy birthday, girl! For your present, I won't note here how old you are. :-) JK!
11:39:26 PM Permanent link here
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Too damn cool: Mitsubishi Crafts Tiny LCD "The Mitsubishi Electric engineers got around this problem by moving the light about 1 inch away from the display panel so that the image is more tightly focused on a small area of the eye. Look down to view the image and you can see it, just as normal. However, look up from the display to see something in front of you, and the image is now hitting a part of the eye away from the pupil, so it becomes invisible. More precisely, a movement of more than a hundredth of an inch in the vertical plane or a tenth of an inch in the horizontal plane puts the display out of view." [at PC World]
Again, I say eBooks, PDAs, wireless browsing... you just don't know what's going to happen.
11:02:54 PM Permanent link here
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Glenn Fleishman has put to byte some thoughts about Bluetooth and (not Versus) Wi-Fi. It's one of the better short-and-to-the-point explanations of the two technologies, explaining why they can co-exist. If you need to explain to someone why you would use either, this is a good starting point.
"Bluetooth proponents picture a world of roaming devices and people.... Wi-Fi backers break the world into zones at home, work, and on the road, that offer access to larger networks."
"Distilled: Wi-Fi solves bandwidth-heavy, network-based (whether intranet or Internet) connectivity; Bluetooth offers ad hoc, resource-based opportunistic availability."
8:55:29 PM Permanent link here
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I finally found my second Amazon wishlist, so I added more titles to the Shifted Reading List. Of course, they're all books I haven't read (or listened to) yet, so it's really just for my benefit more than yours. But there you go.
5:01:21 PM Permanent link here
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ActiveBuddy lets companies control bots "The program highlights the company's aggressive efforts to expand the capabilities of instant messaging, which is slowly evolving from offering informal personal chats to supporting applications such as file-sharing and videoconferencing, as well as multiplayer games. ActiveBuddy has been working to make its technology the de facto standard for creating interactive agents. For instance, someone could ask a bot when a movie is playing in a certain neighborhood and receive a short response that lists show times. The company said it hopes to see bots sitting on most IM users' buddy lists within the next year or so." [at News.com]
If you haven't played with SmarterChild (ActiveBuddy's first demo bot), you should. It's interesting, if for no other reason than to show how great librarians are. I'll bet you'll be surprised at some of the things it can do for you.
Still, I can foresee possible uses for this. Library hours, answers to questions in your local ready reference file, registration for programs, maybe even integration with the OPAC to let you know when your ILL request is in. What if one way to search the OPAC would be via IM on your cell phone? Maybe this could be the automated "Wal-Mart greeter" and the second-level of questions goes to a human being. Just thinking out loud here....
Hey, Paul - you want control, eh? Maybe this could get interesting with some grant money. Want to come out and play?
4:29:44 PM Permanent link here
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Your smile for the day: Alternative Authors' Versions of The Lord of the Rings [via MeFi]
"Sam, I've decided to go and overthrow the Dark Lord by tossing his jewellery into a volcano."
"Very good, sir. Should I lay out your crazy adventure garb? I presume that this will pose a delay to tea-time. I would remind your Hobbitship that your Great Aunt Lobellia Sackville-Baggins is expected for tea."
4:16:47 PM Permanent link here
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Report: Better PDA Sales Await. " 'Shipments in 2002 for PDAs will increase about 18 percent as new manufacturers enter the market and a wave of wireless functionality takes hold in a big way,' said Neil Strother, a senior wireless handset analyst with In-Stat/MDR. 'The future will be all about making the PDA a more ubiquitous device and more useful to both the mobile business user and the on-the-go consumer.' The market will peak in 2004 with an annual growth rate of 30 percent, the report predicts." [via allNetDevices]
Do you think they're counting Cybikos and the like as PDAs? One of the biggest questions I was asked this past holiday season was, "What type of PDA should I get my kid for Christmas?" ("kid" usually referred to a high school or college student), so I think that this figure is either conservative or the projected growth for combination PDA/cell phones is higher.
4:07:57 PM Permanent link here
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This is interesting. AT&T is offering a beta version of free Privacy Bird software that "will help Internet users stay informed about how information they provide to Web sites could be used. The AT&T Privacy Bird automatically searches for privacy policies at every website you visit. You can tell the software about your privacy concerns, and it will tell you whether each site's policies match your personal privacy preferences. The software displays a green bird icon at Web sites that match, and a red bird icon at sites that do not."
It's built to take advantage of the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). Only Windows and Internet Explorer users get to monitor their privacy, though, as these are the only platforms supported. Does anyone already have a privacy policy written according to the P3P standard? I'd like to develop a template my libraries can use.
2:08:21 PM Permanent link here
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Libraries trying to reach teens " 'They're the customers of the future,' said Penny Halle, a public services librarian at the Muskego Public Library. 'If we turn them off in seventh grade because they can't find anything here for them or they can't find a friendly face, what makes anyone think they're going to come back when they're 22?' " [via Library Stuff]
Excellent point! It's great that these libraries are implementing discussion groups, and I'm not putting down books or print in any way, but we have to be much faster to adopt other types of outreach to teens to prove to them we're still relevant in their lives (now and in the future). If they can't reach us in ways that are natural for them, then we won't exist in their world.
1:51:38 PM Permanent link here
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The Next Generation Customer Communication Platform "In the not-too-distant future, we will begin seeing unified customer support platforms that allow companies and their customers to communicate seamlessly via the Web, telephone, and wireless devices. In this article, we will learn how two evolutionary trends are creating a new generation of unified customer communication platforms. The lines between a phone customer and a Web customer are going to blur." [at VoiceXML Planet, via WebDeveloper.com]
This illustrates my theory that in the future, libraries will have a version of the "Wal-Mart greeter" handling incoming communications, whether via email, Instant Messaging (IM), SMS, or telephone. And for a long time, that intermediary will be a human being. Most libraries have moved to automated answering systems for incoming phone calls, but that doesn't work well in the world of electronic communications (except maybe for an email autoresponder acknowledging we got your message and will respond).
We have to shift in order to communicate with our patrons in their world, not ours. We can no longer sit behind a desk waiting for a phone call.
8:56:06 AM Permanent link here
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"A company called Digit Wireless has developed a unique keyboard called the Fastap for mobile phones and devices that combines the functionality of a full-sized keyboard with the form factor of a cell phone. Very interesting..." [CamWorld]
Finally some input innovation for a cell phone. I read somewhere that kids in Finland can type faster on their cell phones than on a computer (I can find the cite if you really want it). Imagine what they'll do with this little puppy. Maybe they'll write the great Finnish novel on their cell phones.
This is why I say you can't discount eBook technology. You just don't know what someone will think up that make it better, faster, stronger. "We have the technology."
8:38:57 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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