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Donnerstag, 25. November 2004 |
Digital Signage in Retail. Below, dual high quality displays at the Metro Extra Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany. The displays can be programmed and updated remotely to serve traffic and demographic needs.
Below, related BusinessWeek Online article on article on digital signage.
"Slim screens in shops give retailers innovative and dynamic ways to
keep consumers informed, entertained,and more likely to buy".
[...] Increasingly, retailers are not only using them to play
commercials but also loading them with eye-catching video to draw you
inside their store and enhance the experience while you're there".
From Future Now.
[we make money not art]
6:15:08 PM 
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Reading Print Publications Electronically.
A trend I've been seeing lately is distribution of print publications
in "reader" software thats presents them just as they were printed.
This goes beyond just PDF [~] entire magazines and newspapers are being
pushed to readers with their own software for viewing them.
I tried two such solutions, and they were both quite good.
Zinio: This company distributes
magazines with its "Zinio Reader." The reader displays the pages just
as they were printed, complete with page-flipping animations. It's
surprisingly readable, despite the loss of the "straight up-and-down"
layout of Web pages. The reader is unobtrusive and straightforward.
They have several issues available for free.
Newsstand: New York Times:
This company does the same thing as Zinio, but for newspapers. I used a
7-day trial of the New York Times, and it was almost good enough to pay
for. I'm cheap, of course, but let me say that I'd pay for this version
before the print version. Again, like Zinio, the reader software was
easy to work with. At full-screen, two entire pages of the Times
appeared side-by-side, with text big enough to scan the headlines, and
a little magnifying glass to zoom in on anything I actually wanted to
read.
Both systems have automated downloads [~] they run a scheduled check for
new content, and notify you when it's downloaded. I'll gladly admit
that it was nice to scan through the New York Times every morning when
I got to work. There was something...relaxing, about reading a "paper"
with no hyperlinks tempting you off the page, or animated banner ads
yelling at you. It felt as leisurely as sitting on the living room
floor with the paper spread out in front of you.
This would be a great solution for commuters. Set your laptop to
download the paper in the wee hours of the morning while you're
connected, then read it on the train on the way to work. Everything is
in one big file, so you don't need a connection.
One more that I didn't try: NXTBook
While this stuff is cool in its own right, it highlights one of the big
problems with the Web: it's tough to keep your attention on Web
content, because the Web is ever-changing and it's so easy to get
distracted. Hyperlinks beckon you on to more content and you know that
different...stuff, is just a bookmark click away.
What I found when reading content designed for print, was that I spent
more time reading
it. I would actually read an entire article, rather than just skim it,
and I could actually be semi-contemplative about something, instead of
rushing to finish so I could move onto the next thing. There was an
unmistakable sense of peace about the entire process that I've just
never gotten from Web content. [Gadgetopia]
6:11:22 PM
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Switched On: RoboSleepingIn.  Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched
On, a weekly column that covers everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other
multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days. Last week he looked at
the Juice Box, Mattel[base ']s new personal video player for
kids, this week he talks about the robot gap:
One of the greatest gaps in popular technology application exists in robotics. Depending upon your definition,
robots have been used for decades in manufacturing, helping to automate assembly lines. In terms of intelligent robots,
though, the adoption has been much lower; in fact, they[base ']ve been largely confined to the entertainment, toy, and
education markets. From the high-tech Aibo to the
lowbrow Robosapien (pictured at right),
hobbyists embrace consumer robots not for what they can practically do. Indeed, many eight-year old boys will happily
provide a belch at least as robust as Robosapien[base ']s for free (and dance as jerkily with enough sugar and caffeine).
Rather, hobbyists are attracted to the experience gained from thinking about programming concepts. Mindstorms was a
perfect logical complement to a product that has long stimulated children[base ']s creative impulses. Indeed, Dean Kamen[base ']s
FIRST competition, essentially a robotics competition for high school students that has grown to fill the Astrodome, is
to BattleBots what ballet is to professional wrestling. All this is worthwhile for the early adopter and curious
tinkerer, but isn[base ']t this equation backwards on some level? These humans are spending more time serving robots than vice
versa. In terms of robotics, there are more mechanics than drivers.
 Aibo (pictured at right) is a talking dog in
more than the literal sense, and it[base ']s not alone. Moving up the consumer robotics food chain, or what would be one if
robots ate, are the advanced robots like Asimo and Qrio from the likes of Honda and Sony. Their creators take great
pride in showing how they can perform tricks like climbing stairs, but what are they going to do when they get there?
Perhaps the most useful consumer robot available today, which combines a modicum of intelligence to tackle a household
chore, is the Roomba from iRobot. A turgid
overgrown hockey puck, it is a long way from the Jetsons[base '] Rosie, whose purpose is to faithfully serve her family, or I,
Robot[base ']s NS-5, whose purpose is to get its ass kicked by Will Smith.
If this all sounds familiar, it hearkens to the state of affairs when the PC was in its early days and many of its
hobbyist users were programmers. However, the realization of the consumer robot will take longer to mature than its PC
counterpart, and will likely, as the PC did, take a different direction. Before the PC became mainstream, computers
were portrayed in science fiction as omniscient oracles. It turned out to be relatively easy to build a perfect
calculating machine, but PCs ultimately became tools for such noble pursuits as writing novels, editing films,
composing operas, and creating Web sites for rating poo.
Robots, at least the android variety, have a far harder task ahead of them, because we ultimately expect them to pass
for human not only in psychological and physical behavior but in terms of appearance. The appearance part will probably
be solved earlier, but it[base ']s difficult to predict when robots will be intelligent enough to handle any sort of complex
task that requires adapting to a potentially dynamic environment in real time, much less be stimulating enough to be a
satisfying companion. Until then, you can slowly prepare for war against the new superhuman masters by learning to
stealthily remove [base "]D[per thou] cells.
Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis at NPD Techworld, a division
of market research and analysis provider The NPD Group. Views expressed in Switched On, however, are his own. Feedback
is welcome at fliptheswitch@gmail.com.
[Engadget]
6:08:58 PM
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Combined Subscriber Stats for Aliased RSS Feeds. This is a copy of a suggestion I've just sent to Bloglines Support. It was inspired by
a Feedburner Forums thread
I started a few days ago, regarding whether Feedburner was counting all of my RSS feeds in
their statistics. Turned out they weren't and there was indeed an issue "with online
aggregators when you have multiple aliases to a single feed". Feedburner was already
working on it at the time I started the Forum thread. Happily, it's now been solved and
so it got me to thinking: Bloglines has the same issue with their subscriber stats, so
can't they solve it too? I've emailed them before about it and blogged it here. Here's my
follow-up which I sent to them today:
Hi, I am writing regarding your Subscriber stats functionality in Bloglines. There is
one major problem with it. If a blog has multiple RSS feeds, then for each user the
Bloglines subscriber count only displays the stats related to the feed subscribed to.
That is, Bloglines *does not* aggregate the stats for all of a blog's feeds and display a
total count of subscribers. I call this a feed-centered stats service, whereas what most
people want is a blog-centered one. More on that here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002350.php
It's very common these days to have multiple feeds for a single blog - a typical blog
could have feeds for RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom, and now Feedburner. I've emailed you before
about this issue, but I'd like to point you to a recent Feedburner Forums thread in which
Feedburner has solved it: http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=273
As an example, I now have 3 RSS feeds for my blog Read/Write Web - including a
Feedburner one which I started (ironically perhaps) to get better stats. So my blog's
subscribers are spread over those 3 feeds, which Feedburner now correctly tracks as one
(after they fixed the issue with aliases).
A more prominant example is Boing Boing, which
has a new Feedburner feed and they're using it as their main feed now. I subscribed to
the new Feedburner-powered one and it currently displays in Bloglines as having 36
subscribers. Of course their old feed has well over 12,000 Bloglines subscribers. It may
not be a big deal, but in the interests of accuracy wouldn't it be a whole lot better if
Bloglines counted *all* of Boing Boing's feeds in your Subcriber count for them that you display?
(nb: Boing Boing illustrates some other issues with blog stats - e.g. there are "lite"
versions of their feed available elsewhere and it's possible to create category and
filtered feeds for Boing Boing. But one thing at a time, let's solve the issue with
aliases first :-)
So, in summary I'd like to once again request that Bloglines takes the number of
subscribers on the RSS feed a user subscribes to and combines that with the number of
subscribers on alias versions of that same feed. Thus giving a blog-centered subscriber
count.
It shouldn't be that hard to do, because you already know which feeds belong to a
single blog. e.g. when you click on "Add" and enter a blog's homepage URL into the
subscribe field, Bloglines then presents the user with a list of that blog's feeds to
select from. So you already have the grouping of feeds for a single blog done.
I realise you have more important things to develop, but it'd be great if you could
solve this one issue with your Subscriber stats functionality. Feedburner has solved it
now, so perhaps you two innovative Web 2.0 up-and-coming companies (both of which I'm a
big fan of) can swap emails about it? [Read/Write Web]
6:07:42 PM
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Sound-based pistachio sorter.  We hate getting those pistachios that can[base ']t
be opened without a hammer, and neither does Tom Pearson, who created a sound-based pistachio sorter that listens to
the sound the nuts makes when falling into a steel plate, detects whether they[base ']re open or not, and whooshes the
unopened ones away with a blast of air. His sorter is 97% accurate, which means you[base ']re still going to be annoyed every
once in awhile. It[base ']s just that[base ']ll be less than you are right now, since current sorters only have a 90% accuracy
rate.
[Engadget]
6:06:56 PM
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New from the inventor of Karaoke: A $3,800 jug
There's a great story here
about Daisuke Inoue, the former keyboard player who invented Karaoke.
In 1971, Aged 31, he hooked up a car stereo, an amp and a coin box, and
made history. (He forgot to patent it and his company flopped when
Laserdisc machines were invented). This is his new invention, the New Aqua Trio,
which "is purported to electrolyze water for washing laundry, cleaning
dishes and even rinsing mouths without detergent or chemicals". At
$3,800, sales are apparently slow. (Link from Create Digital Music) - Tom [Music thing]
5:36:54 PM
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The SeeLinder: Make 3D holographic video calls, at least eventually.
Regular 3D displays must be getting a little too commonplace in Japan or something
(they[base ']re even popping up in cellphones), because now
researchers there are showing off a technology called the SeeLinder that takes things up a notch and let[base ']s you make 3D
holographic video calls. SeeLinder uses a 360-degree digital camera and cyliderical tube to create real-time
three-dimensional holograms that[base ']ll let you view the person you[base ']re talking to from almost any angle (i.e. you can walk
around them and stare at the back of their head while their talking, etc.). Most 3D displays have a sweet spot that
only gives you the full effect when you[base ']re looking at the screen from a specific angle.
[Thanks, Jason]
[Engadget]
5:34:26 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Joerg Rheinboldt.
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