Ricardo Sato

the next-generation music tool/communication device for the musically creative and the aspiring musician as well.

Taking inspiration from the works of Dieter Rams, designer Anton brings us this unique radio for the kitchen. The design takes into account wet-fingers, food smudges and greasy gloves. Going for a minimalist approach, the DAB Digital Radio features decent enough goodies to entice you. Stuff like rubberized weighted base, splash-resistant design, enclosed speakers and battery operation make it more durable given the environment it is intended for.

Modular computing isn’t anything new. Designers have been toying with the idea for years but the Stream concept is unique in packaging the whole experience in a form more conducive to zen relaxation creating a stronger relationship with the user. The Stream concept consists of Experience Modules, the Core Component, Component Modules, a Display, Charging Cradle, and Charging Base.

Expanding Horizons is a quarterly publication aimed at ICT decision-makers in the private and public sectors.
It explores the socio-economic benefits that mobile technology offers as well as best practices from around the world in order to encourage affordable mobile communications and bring Internet to the next billion consumers. It also shows how to create a favorable environment for market growth.

Ubiquitous computing is coming. It is coming because there are too many too powerful institutions vested in its coming; it is coming because it is a “technically sweet” challenge; it is coming because it represents the eventual convergence of devices, tools and services that became inevitable the moment they each began to be expressed in ones and zeroes.

The Guardian published a special section on the role of mobile phones in emerging markets:

The Technology for Emerging Markets Group seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people who are increasingly able to afford computing technologies and services.

Lift is a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies. Each conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.

As something of an unbook avant la lettre. It’s why we’ve [Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield] always insisted on keeping you in the loop as to the book’s fitful progress, it’s why I take every opportunity to test its ideas here, it’s why I make explicit the fact that your response to those ideas is crucial to their evolution and expression. And it’s why, even though the process is inevitably going to result in a static, physical document as one of its manifestations – and hopefully a very nice one indeed – we’ve committed to offering a free and freely-downloadable Creative Commons-licensed PDF of every numbered version of The City, from zero onward.
You buy the book if you want the object. The ideas are free.

Lots of people can start playing with home energy monitoring, social aspects of the data sharing, home automation, ambient displays, etc. The powerful thing about messaging middleware like MQTT, is that you don’t have to worry about how to get the messages from A to B: you can focus on how to capture the data, and what to do with it when it gets to the other end.

Avi was co-founder of Keyhole, maker of Earthviewer (which later became Google Earth). Also, Avi developed technologies for Second Life, including the procedural 3D object rendering code.” The pictures above are from his portfolio (from left to right, Linden Lab’s Second Life, World Design’s Virtual Environment Theater, Disney Imagineering).

Although Robert’s new AR platform is still under wraps, I think you will get a good idea of what direction he is going in from this interview (full text at end of this post). Robert is the author of “MMO Evolution” and is a key developer and thought leader in persistent immersive environments, simulations, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games as well as large scale communities and social networking.

Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), a protocol for sharing sensor data between remote responsive environments, both physical and virtual.

Welcome to Pachube, a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.

Wikitude is a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content. It is a handy application for planning a trip or to find out about landmarks in your surroundings; 350,000 world-wide points of interest may be searched by GPS or by address and displayed in a list view, map view or cam view.

Here's a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm. User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they're increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).

Check what I’ve found on Vimeo – cool videos exploring UIs of 4 cool devices. Among the demos you’re about to see are such popular devices as Gigabyte g-Smart S1200, Toshiba (OTCPK: TOSBF) TG01, Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) Idou and LG KM900 Arena. First comes the g-Smart S1200, while the rest is following after the jump.

Today we introduce Fingertouch, a technology designed to make interacting with the Web easier and simpler on these touch-based devices. Fingertouch provides visual feedback when you hit a Web link, and assists you when you come across multiple links or other selectable elements in close proximity to one another.

Mobile Learning Network is a podcast series focused on continuous and anywhere learning.

The BBC World Service Trust has selected Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) as its strategic mobile partner to help develop its mobile learning strategy in Bangladesh. The BBC World Service Trust, the BBC's international development organization, uses the creative power of media to reduce poverty and promote human rights.

Taking the place of all the notes traditionally placed on the fridge door, the O2 Joggler is always on and can be used by the entire family. It sends text message reminders which mean every family member will know who needs to be where by when. The O2 Joggler launches in early April.

The O2 Joggler has been built on the insight that family life is hectic and can be difficult to manage. Appointments, birthdays, school runs, work deadlines and more can all be stored on the O2 Joggler’s calendar, which will text handy reminders to family members’ O2 mobile phones.

A simple mobile phone for people who don’t need any features like camera, sms, GPRS, E-mail or Internet surfing. The phone is called Simplicity Phone and it is just a normal mobile phone which can only be used to receive and make calls. It has a touch screen display, which makes it more user-friendly. The design is also very simple which comes in a flip open form and it also has a digital clock in its cover so that you can see the time. It is very simple and quite affordable with no added complexities.

Adam Greenfield is Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services. An American writer and consultant, he was formerly well-known as an information architect, though (as of mid-October 2006) he no longer describes himself as such. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1968.

When Microsoft decides to imagine the future, it never fails to impress. Not only do you have some of the smartest people envisioning what’s possible, but they also invest so much into communicating these ideas through sights and sounds which the production value can be compared to most blockbuster sci-fi films.

This playground showcases our ground-breaking visual search technology.

We advocate using CSS whenever possible, and we often successed. Modern browsers have very good support for CSS — it’s certainly good enough for you to use CSS to control layout and presentation. Sometimes however, certain page elements will appear differently in different browsers. That’s why today we wanted to highlight 15 jQuery solutions for the most common browser issues that you’ll encounter when building web applications among other jQuery plugins that will give you a nice browser effect.

The idea is to take something invisible and make it visible, aesthetic and pleasing to watch. We have chosen to work with speech, one of the key elements in our social interaction.
We see our prototype as a cultural piece and not as a problem solving gadget. We want our technology to be secondary, or on the periphery to the bigger picture, giving the participants a visually exiting table. But if you sit at the table for a longer time you will hopefully understand how the table works.
The effect that we are aiming for is not to disturb the already existing social patterns but rather to give them an extra dimension if you choose to pick up on it.

No pointer, no highlight, the hand gets in the way. Inadvertent touches are easy. Stylus pointing is somewhat inaccurate due to parallax and digitizer issues, finger-pointing is much worse.

This Interaction Design Guide presents guidelines for finger-operated touchscreen applications. It is a collection of guidelines drawn from the literature, from the web, and from own experiences in the design of applications using finger-operated touchscreens

As chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, Mundie is a living portal of future technology, a focal point between thousands of scattered research projects and the boxes of super-neat products we'll be playing with 5 years, 20 years, maybe 100 years from now. And he's not allowed to even think about anything shipping within the immediate 3 years. I'm pretty sure the guy has his own personal teleporter and hoverboard, but when you sit and talk to him for an hour about his ability to see tomorrow, it's all very matter of fact. So what did we talk about? Quantum computing did come up, as did neural control, retinal implants, Windows-in-the-cloud, multitouch patents and the suspension of disbelief in interface design.

Table toss is a Microsoft Surface game in which players take turns tossing a bean bags towards a target. Scoring is determined by the distance of each bean bag from the center bulls-eye. Each bean bag contains a unique Microsoft Surface tag to associate the score to each player. The combination of a baseball theme and photo-realistic particle effects creates a one-of-a-kind experience on Surface.

Once your latest project is finished, you are very likely to forget the structure of the project’s layout, with all its numerous classes, color schemes and type setting. To understand your code years after you’ve written it you need to make use of sensible code structuring. The latter can dramatically reduce complexity, improve code management and consequently simplify maintainability. However, how can you achieve sensible structuring? Well, there are a number of options. For instance, you can make use of comments — after all, there is always some area for useful hints, notes and, well, comments you can use afterwards, after the project has been deployed.

A partir da pergunta do leitor Carlos Henrique Amoreira (Como é possível ser mais comprometido no trabalho ou num relacionamento afetivo?), o colunista fala sobre a importância de existir interesse genuíno por uma causa para haver maior envolvimento

Check these blocks out. They play music. One block, the base block, is the control block. This is the block that plays the music and responds to controls. The controls – they are the other blocks. Each block, depending on weight, adds volume to the music. To switch to a new track, turn a stacked block. Beware of using these blocks in high-traffic areas – birds, cats, and girlfriends, because if the blocks are knocked: no more music!

Cross-browser compatibility is still one of the most complex issues when it comes to web-development. Web standards usually guarantee a (relatively) high degree of consistency, however no browser is perfect and particularly older browsers have always been quite good at surprising web-developers with their creative understanding of (X)HTML/CSS-code. Still you need to make sure that (at least) most visitors of your web-site can use it, navigate through it and find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a W3C standard for describing resources on the Web.
RDF is a framework for describing Web resources, such as the title, author, modification date, content, and copyright information of a Web page.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling, of information that is implemented in web resources; using a variety of syntax formats.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.
The W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement explains W3C's plans for RDF, including the RDF Core WG, Web Ontology and the RDF Interest Group.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing information in the Web.
RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax defines an abstract syntax on which RDF is based, and which serves to link its concrete syntax to its formal semantics. It also includes discussion of design goals, key concepts, datatyping, character normalization and handling of URI references.

In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well – a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.

Now we're going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We've reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list – so if we haven't mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

The Beta, tbeta for short, is a open source/cross-platform solution for computer vision and multi-touch sensing. It takes an video input stream and outputs tracking data (e.g. coordinates and blob size) and touch events (e.g. finger down, moved and released) that are used in building multi-touch applications. tbeta can interface with various web cameras and video devices as well as connect to various TUIO/OSC enabled applications and supports many multi-touch lighting techniques including: FTIR, DI, DSI, and LLP with expansion planned for the future (custom modules/filters).

At its core,the concept of Tangible Interfaces leverages the idea of using the movement of the body as an inherent part of the human side of a human-computer interaction, assuming that bodily engagement and tactile manipulation can facilitate deeper understanding and more intuitive experiences. However,as an interaction principle in our era of digital design,motion construction and control has been underutilized as a design tool,leaving open the possibilities of motion's natural ability to draw our attention,provide physical feedback,and convey information through physical change. This dissertation postulates that the ability to experiment,prototype,and model with programmable kinetic forms is becoming increasingly important as digital technology becomes more readily embedded in our objects and environments. The need for tools and systems with which to create, manipulate, and finesse physical motion in response to computational and material input remains an under-developed design area.

SiMa Systems is a pioneer of Multi-Touch and Multi-Force (MT/MF) touch sensor technologies. SiMa’s resistive MT/MF touch technologies have unique functional characteristics enabling a new dimension of touch, gesture and pen input. Resolution of up to 20 points/mm affords uncompromised accuracy even for the most demanding applications. SiMa’s touch technologies can be integrated into a broad range of products from displays to touch pads.

On MacBook Air and recent MacBook Pro systems, Adobe Photoshop CS4 reads multitouch gestures to rotate of the document canvas. But it's easy to accidentally rotate the canvas on newer trackpads.

Internally, our devs have created several different physics simulators based on the applications they are working on which always seem to make adults giddy as schoolkids.

If you're remotely like me, you'll also like what Dave Brown has created. Dave works in the UK at one of our Microsoft Technology Centers. His job is to create proof of concepts for organizations working with Microsoft products. He's also a part time wizard. Seriously. Not only is the simulator crazy fun, I'm told his code is very elegant as well.

These plugins can help you integrate Zotero with other software.