Ricardo Sato

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).