Group items tagged

Too much trouble The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to your phone, is that they are just becoming too much trouble to organize and maintain. It's just not realistic to have an app for every store you go to, every product you own and every website you visit. This creates an ever increasing set that must be curated, organized and culled. It's a common task we all perform, removing old and unused apps every few months, effectively garbage collecting our phones. Very organized folks relish the opportunity to tidy their burgeoning app menagerie but most can't bother and their home pages scroll into a receding haze of choices.

Movie posters with radio tags such as RFID or NFC will allow me to get an interactive version of the poster on my phone to show me more information 

Any consumer item, such as ketchup or milk bottles, also with radio tags, will allow me to not only get more information on these items just like the poster, but also track usage and even offer to purchase replacement items

Judith Cherry, Head of Research and Insight at the UK-based organization Opportunity Now and author of the report “Out of Office: Solutions for an Agile Future” [PDF] explained, “We’re moving the debate away from flexwork – because we’ve come to the understanding that we’re all flex workers. What we’re doing now is “agile working.”

The distinction is important, she said, because agile working is about more than working from home, or using mobile devices. It’s a whole new system of management.

She explained, “Technology allows us to work after hours, across time zones, at home, at the airport – we can manage this, so how come it is so hard to let people work three days out of the week? The psychology of work has not caught up with the technology.”

Boring conversation? Accessories that decipher emotional cues could save your social life – or reveal that you're a jerk

The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?

Some of our body's responses during a conversation are not designed for broadcast to another person - but it's possible to monitor those too. Your temperature and skin conductance can also reveal secrets about your emotional state, and Picard can tap them with a glove-like device called the Q Sensor. In response to stresses, good or bad, our skin becomes clammy, increasing its conductance, and the Q Sensor picks this up.

"It's a novel user interface that's got everyone interested," said Jay Wright, a senior director for Qualcomm focused on augmented reality.

The compass-based mapping feature you see now represents only the beginning of augmented reality's promise, Wright said. In an interview, he said the next generation of augmented reality will better integrate superimposed images with reality and work with a broader set of applications. He believes it represents an elegant way of marrying the tangibility of the physical world with information available in the digital world.

There are still technical hurdles to surpass. More phones are starting to use a 1-gigahertz processor or faster, which is recommended to handle such tasks. The computer vision, he said, needs to be improved to it can scan three-dimensional objects rather than just flat images, which he expects is the catalyst to opening up the feature.

If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.

PlateMate's calorie estimates have proved, in tests, to be just as accurate as those of trained nutritionists, and more accurate than the user's own logs. The research was presented at the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, a leading conference on human-computer interaction.

“We can take things that used to require experts and do them with crowds,” says Jon Noronha ’11, who co-developed PlateMate as an undergraduate at Harvard and now works at Microsoft. "Estimating the nutritional value of a meal is a fairly complex task, from a computational standpoint, but with a structured workflow and some cultural awareness, we've expanded what crowdsourcing can achieve."

In late 2008, news broke that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz was leaving the company to launch a new startup of his own, joined by early Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. It was a move that led to plenty of raised eyebrows — Facebook’s growth was (and still is) explosive, and there were clearly lots of exciting things going on at the company.

The duo later revealed that they were working on a productivity app called Asana, raising a total of $10.2 million to fund the company. And yesterday, after two years in production and lengthy beta testing, the site held its public launch (you can find our full rundown on the launch right here).