In the past, the methods of quantitative assessment were laborious and arcane. Nowadays there are clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities.

We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep—a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you’re unconscious—is yielding to the skill of the widget maker.

Much of the data-gathering can be automated, and the record-keeping and analysis can be delegated to a host of simple Web apps, an example is the Quantified Self.

There are some specific tools that open possibilities for personal tracking in areas of life that had always seemed inaccessible to quantitative methods, like emotions. Happy Factor, a Facebook app that randomly pings you with a text message, to which you respond with a number indicating your happiness level. There are protocols for measuring mental fitness that take less than five minutes to complete and provide a baseline for experiments on your brain’s agility. The Web site CureTogether lets users log an enormous range of conditions, symptoms, and feelings. Modern self-tracking systems can measure our bodies, our minds, and our movements.

The self-tracking can be much bigger than learning things from one’s own numbers, but also can be a promise of contributing for understanding and generates much more knowledge about society.

Physical resources, be it capacity of lines and storage or performances in computation and transmission, used to be the bottleneck in provisioning services. Being a smart engineers meant to be able to make the most out of these scarce resources. Efficiency was the way to distinguishes oneself from competition. We are seeing (and in certain areas we have already seen) a dramatic change in this respect. Storage and processing grow more than our needs, display resolution is reaching our physical limits, bandwidth is bound to become irrelevant sicne we will have more than needed. As this physical limitations fade away the competitive advantage shifts from efficiency to simplicity. Interfaces are winning the customer heart (and purse).

Researchers at the London College of Arts, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17372-gallery-domestic-robots-with-a-taste-for-flesh.html , have developed a number of Robots to become part of house furniture and have decided to feed them with flies and other insects.

Each robot has some sort of catching device to trap the poor fly passing by. The fly is given to a fuel cell housing bacteria that digest the insect and generate electricity. I am sympathetic with both the robot, for the unappeling diet, and the fly.

Here some photos of these robots:

Robot catching flies with flypaper

Here the robot uses ultraviolet light to attract flies

This is more ingenious. The robots uses some pins to prompt spiders to weave their spiderweb. A camera detects when a fly gets caught and the rbotic arm picks it up.

OK. We can, and should, laught about these things. We can also technically discuss how much energy is required to catch the fly and how much is generated by digesting the fly. I, personally, have some doubt on the outcome.

However, what is interesting is the fact that a lot of researchers are looking at ways to populate with robots our lives. And I feel they will slowly succeed. Once robots will be all around we will be experiencing new problems and our life will probably get new twist. Whether for the better or for the worse, I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
Clearly our environment will become more complex and artifacts will indeed form an ecosystem.

After 74 years of proud service the Kodachrome film is going to join the telegraph and telegram as (past) history. Kodak has announced its demise under the pressure of digital photography on June 23rd. Nice to Google it and look at the reaction all around the world. Nobody is using Kodachrome (and that is why they have to stop production) but everybody has a lingering memory of using it and feels the loss.

I cannot help but feel the pain for my (unused) cameras that will no longer be possible to use since we are going to miss the film, their power. I haven’t been using them for over five years now but they were there, just in case. I can no longer claim that I can take a photo with the “real” camera.

Next thought is: wait a moment. I can no longer take photos since I have run out of film, but I still have the printed ones. What will happen to my digital photos of today once some Verbatim company decides it does not make any more sense to produce hard drives, or CD reader? I will no longer be able to transfer my pictures on those storage support and in a few years I will also lose the capability to recover my picture from those obsolete devices and with that the possibility of viewing them.
If physical media is so unreliable, would the virtual media be the solution? Can I trust Amazon or other service providers to keep my pictures for my grandchildren to look at in a rainy day?

Looking at the fading away of well established technologies upon whom we learnt to shape our lives makes us worry about the present trust on today’s technology, knowing well the the future is becoming present much faster than it used to be!

As we know Users can use mobile device to take a photo of QR code, connect to the URL and receive information.

How about using QR Codes to do something more efficiently? (Not just link to a URL)

E.g.  1. Have a business card with QR Code.

→Save the time of organizing the business cards that you received .Making a database quickly without keying in a lot of email, phone numbers…etc.

Probably business people can try to use QR Code as their NEW business card. Just exchange the barcode image via the Bluetooth of mobile device.

E.g.  2. Use QR code to shorten the procedure of application.

→Save the time of inputting information and decrease key-in mistakes.

Like Japan Immigration Bureau, they will put a QR code sticker on your passport to make a control of your immigration record.

(Probably Italy government can think about installing the QR code system to improve the application process of Permesso di soggiorno.)

Besides these, I found a Japanese company called” IT DeSign” creates a different QR code. Their QR code allows another image in the two-dimensional barcode and makes the code image not just black and white.   

 

Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridge… it’s not difficult to identify famous landmarks for us. But how about computers? Unlike humans, it’s a quite complex work for them without any tags.

Last week(June 22nd), at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami (IEEE), Google presented a image recognition technology that identifies lanmarks with 80% of accuracy.

*download the paper

Google’s recognition engine has proven capable of identifying 50,000 unique landmarks from around the world without any human intervention. Google declares CVPR is a part of research not a new service yet. Nevertheless, recognizing certain pattern of the pixel in a image is a remarkable technology that enables new services possible. For instance, we will be able to know what landmark is by taking photos with smartphones.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-landmark-in-computer-vision.html

Everywhere we hear that Innovation is crucial to the business. However, if we go beyond this statement opinions differ significantly. Is it make or buy? An enterprise needs to invest in creating innovation or should be smart in looking around and embed someone else’s innovation in its products? What does it take to create innovation? Who can innovate and where are the Innovators?

There used to be few Innovators clustered around big Companies and institutions shelling out lot of money for research. Names like Bell Labs, NTT Labs, CNET rung a bell in many people in the last century. Now we are witnessing innovation everywhere, carried out by small groups all over the world. In a way Innovation has become affordable and the reason is the big platforms that have been created, call them logistics, transportation, communication, have dramatically decreased the cost of moving innovation from the point of creation to the points of possible adoption and the transformation of many users into players, receiving innovation and adding on, thus further creating innovation. Because of this, innovation has also become affordable. Cell phones are costly innovation sold at a bargain price and stimulating innovation in many field. Best way of using mobile payment? It is not Japan, but Central Africa. In Japan mobile payment is leveraging on the banking system, in Africa it is replacing a (barely existing) banking system.

Let me continue exploring differences in today and tomorrow biz with respect to the one we used to have. You are welcome to point out a few more!

The future in telecommunications used to be fairly predictable.

Technology was driving evolution and technology roadmaps are fairly accurate. We could tell with reasonable accuracy what would be the processing speed of microprocessor, the capacity of a storage device and the transmission speed of a line within a five years time. Operators used to take these forecast as starting point to design their network evolution and, in turn, that network plan was the measuring stick for planning service deployment.    
In these last two years we have seen that technology roadmaps continue to be accurate but the evolution is steered by the market since technology is no longer a bottle neck. Once evolution is steered by the market forecast becomes very difficult. More than that. If the market goes one way, funding are directed to those technologies supporting that direction of growth, hence also technology evolution gets affected. In 2003 it seemed (technologically) clear that LCD screen would be soon superseded by SED and NED screens. These latter offered better performances. What happened was that the market massive adoption of LCD drove manufacturers to invest more on that technology (this leading to a continuous improvement) diverting funds from those other technologies (that did not left the laboratory stage). Today LCD technology is leading the market place and will likely continue to do so in the next five years.

From July 1^st NTT DOCOMO will start to test a new image transfer service in the Japan market. Users can send photos from a mobile phone to digital photo frames (a specific model is needed) directly via NTT DOCOMO communication networks “FOMA (Freedom of Mobile multimedia Access)”.In the U.S., CEIVA Logic Inc also provide this kind of digital photo frame service .

Sharing photos with a single click and automatically receiving the new photos via e-mail or camera phone. Uploading photos from a memory card to unlimited online photo storage provided by the telecom carrier or digital photo frame producer.

I think users will be able to exploit these possibilities by creating a different type of social network using digital photo frames.

We have already seen a number of post on the evolution of 3D printer and commented on how this is steering the economics of production along different paths.

Now consider this news appearing on the Journal of Computer applications in Technology

http://www.physorg.com/news164525294.html

Researchers have put the concept of 3D printing and rapid prototyping at work to create biological tissues and organs.

“Scaffold structures for tissue engineering that allow researchers to grow cells, whether skin, muscle, or even kidney, in a three-dimensional could allow medical science to create natural artificial organs.”

Scaffolds are crucial in this area since it is on scaffold that donors cells are implanted and it is the scaffold that steer the cells to create the desired tissue architecture.

We can expect that the synergy between genomics and 3D will lead to significant changes in medicine in the next decade for what concerns organ replacement. Also, it may look more like science fiction to many, the use of scaffolds and 3D printing may allow the creation of tissues and organs that embed electronic circuits (powered by the sugar-glucose- in the blood, as cells do), enhancing the possibility to establish proactive cure.

The bionic man is still in the future, but parts of it are already available in some labs…