Apple is coming up with Apple Tablet. The Beta version has already been tested and here we have a feedback from the tester. How is it like?

“Apple tablet is OLED + back has solar pad for recharging, but (the charger) really doesn’t work quickly. More a gimmick. Verizon+att, wifi yes!

Apple Tablet has thumbpads on each side for mouse gestures, reads fingerprint for security. Up to 5 profiles by fingerprint for family.

Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of you.

I can tell u the battery life is great in ebook reading mode but not great when on wifi or playing games. 2-3hrs.

Yes, the apple tablet is running an iphone os flavor with ability to have multiple apps running at same time (ie pandora, browser).

The price will be $599, $699 and $799 depending on size and memory in apple tablet. Also, wireless keyboard + monitor connection for TV.

Also, the apple tablet is really amazing for newspapers. Video conferencing is super stable, but nothing new.

The best part of the apple tablet as beta user has been the built in HDTV tuner and pvr, and the chess game.

Yes, it’s true… I’ve been beta testing the Apple tablet for the past two weeks and it’s amazing!”

Really seems to be an useful tool. But despite all its functionality we should concern about all the critics related to the solar panel. Would it be efficient enough???

Talking about the “Future of Retail” why not imagine this device as a way for people to interact with the retail stores in a sense that they will be able to reach more information and be updated to the latest news of the market enlarging business opportunities?!

Digital Graffiti is a technique which allows to associate information virtually to any position and to visualize information location. It runs on a mobile device such as a PDA, mobile phone, smartphone, notebook or similar.

Compared with real graffiti on walls, digital graffiti exist only virtually. A digital graffito is associated to a geographical location.

A Digital Graffiti system consists of :

· the Digital Graffiti client application,

· a technique to determine the user’s current position

· the Digital Graffiti server and

· a technique for the wireless data transmission

The Digital Graffiti client application runs on a mobile device. The client application shows all digital graffiti which are visible for the user at his current position and match with his specified interests. A graffito is only visible if the user is within the graffito’s visibility area specified by its originator. The user can switch between a 2D map and a list representation. The map displays the visible digital graffiti at their virtual location. In both representations the user can select a graffito and, by a keystroke, load the associated content from the server. The content will be displayed. The client application also allows the user to create digital graffiti. He can make them visible for other users; he can edit or even delete them.

London College of Fashion (LCF), based in London’s übertrendy Soho district, and UK telecoms firm BT made some interesting predictions. What about clothes peppered with plastic LEDs that let you change the fabric’s pattern?

The idea is that plastic LEDs could be woven into a fabric, connected by soft circuitry. It would then be a breeze to change your patterns to this season’s colours.

According to their prediction clothing will become part of a “personal area network”, a digital bubble in which the gadgets in your clothes communicate with your handhelds. Organic wiring will be used in garments to connect different devices, such as memory chips storing photos, and thin, flexible “e-paper” displays that will screen the images.

According to news I have been reading, the current financial crisis is responsible for a change in customers’ behavior and it has slowdown consumer spending. The future retail stores need to adapt to changes that are going to define who can survive in the market in the next decade.

Providing fast and quality service along with the ability to attune to individual taste will be vital. Retailers may need to change their business models significantly.

Retailers must adapt to a number of changing factors:
1.The new generation of consumers contains more tech-savvy and more diverse groups with different values if compared to the previous generation .
2.The one-size-fits-all approach of the mass market chain store format will not be a viable one. Stores able to respond to individual tastes will become dominant.
3.The belief that bigger is better will break down—aggregation of small will be the new big. The new consumer will be more intent on quality than quantity. Mass production models will not succeed.
4. Ability to keep close contact with customers through mobile devices will be important to maintain quality of service and product as well as receive customer feedback.
5. The still large group of Baby Boomers will remain active in the economy. However, their demands will shift from goods to service and healthcare.
6. Retailers may also expand in developing economies. These growing markets have much more room to expand along traditional modes than developed nations. “

The future retailers need to react quickly to consumer trends, to treat the client as one single person (personalized services and products), make fast contact , personalised offers and be technologically updated; mobile devices are going to be one of the most important communication tools.

More at  http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/retail-consumer/assets/retailing_2015.pdf

Window mannequins are a common sight, particularly on fashion store. Vendors found out their importance to show garments and attract people to the stores. Draping dresses on those fake slim models really helps in filling up the store with people.

The Future of Retail project take for granted that mannequins will still going to be an important part in attracting clients to the store, but given the expected technology advance the mannequins will become Robot Mannequins.

A Japanese firm developed a mannequin robot that can strike a pose for customers – and watch them to see how they react and what they’re buying. 

“The female robot, code-named Palette, draws inspiration from the world’s most beautiful women, using motion-capture technology to replay the movements of supermodels.”

“Palette will double up as an industrial spy, with the maker planning to program it to judge the age and sex of shoppers and even identify the bags they are carrying and pass along the information to stores for marketing purposes.”

This can be a smart way of doing market information gathering. But are the future Mannequin Robots still going to look the same as the current Mannequins to the window shopper or will they be scaring?

I want to share with you some of the new experimentation exposed at ARS Eletronica Festival 2009 in Linz. The theme of the event this year was Human Nature, so all about using innovative high-tech methods to observe the human brain while it thinks, so that we can look behind the veil of our consciousness and see how our mechanisms of perception and decision-making capacities are reflected in our neurons.

The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) by g.tec

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides a new communication channel between the human brain and the computer. Mental activity leads to changes of electrophysiological signals like the Electroencephalogram (EEG) or Electrocorticogram (ECoG). The BCI system detects such changes and transforms it into a control signal which can, for example, be used as spelling device or to control a cursor on the computer monitor. One of the main goals is to enable completely paralyzed patients (locked-in syndrome) to communicate with their environment.

http://www.gtec.at/content.htm

Another one is a robot that is able to detect and imitates human expression faces by  moving the eyes, mouth, eyebrow and the head rotation.

See much more about Ars Eletronica Festival 2009 at www.aec.at/index_de.php

The use of the personal information in the virtual world is a big issue that social network and any other virtual storage of personal information must be concerned about.

Facebook is facing some problems with Canadian privacy law. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada found that Facebook shares its users’ personal information with developers who create applications in a way that breaches Canadian privacy law. One of the big reason for this is that Facebook is not transparent. According to them “Facebook provides information about privacy issues that is often confusing or incomplete” .

According to PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) a Canadian law related to privacy:

• Personal information must be collected for a specific purpose and cannot be used for other purposes.
• The information cannot be collected unless the person that the information belongs to has been informed and has provided consent.
• The information can only be kept for a specified amount of time, and must be destroyed when it is no longer needed to fulfill its original purpose.

“Users should be able to opt out of actions that could lead them to lose control over their personal information”, Canadian assistant privacy commissioner said. In some cases, that information could then be used for marketing purposes or even identity theft.

According to the studies of LIFE AND LIVES project, every virtual information belongs to the user so the information is personal and the user must be able to choose what could be shared and used by the social network or any other website.

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.

Searching on internet I found this interesting Digital Guide for Mobile Access which is a service for accessing multimedia information about people, artifacts, and places from Eternal Egypt anywhere in the world via data-capable mobile phones and networked devices. All information is provided in three languages, English, French, and Arabic, and is supplemented by images specifically reformatted for small screens. High-end devices can receive audio narration to accompany the text and images. In addition, location-relevant tours allow phone users to be guided around the Giza Plateau, Luxor Temple, and the Egyptian Museum. Items of particular interest can be noted and accessed via the Eternal Egypt website or added from the website for later perusal by phone.

The Digital Guide for Mobile Access is available at dg.eternalegypt.org.

The service is available on any mobile phone or network-connected mobile device (such as a PDA or tablet computer) that supports HTML over GPRS or WML over WAP connections. Eternal Egypt images and information are adaptively formatted to fit the screen size and functional capabilities of the particular device that accesses it. Owners of data-capable phones access the Digital Guide by entering the site address via the phone input pad.

After selecting a language, the phone user can select to explore sites and museums, find items by numbered labels, browse by topics in Egyptian culture, or search the collection of information. A flexible content structure enables casual reading or deep study. Location maps for Giza and Luxor provide an overview of the places to be explored. Capable devices are also delivered images and audio narration. The audio, generated by IBM® Text-to-Speech technology, permits visitors to these locations to remain engaged with the visual beauty of the sites while offering the ability to dive more deeply into the site content, if so desired.

Thinking about the Italian actual tourism scenario we can say that this kind of application should be very helpful for the hundred million of tourist that visit Venice and whole Italy annually. In one hand the “human” guide would not be happy by seeing that they would get about to lose their jobs but at the other hand we can say that it would improve a lot the tourist service in the country.

Apple yesterday introduced the new iPhone 3G S. For months now, it has been obvious that Apple would introduce its third-generation handset — it’s here. Apple addicts around the world are celebrating. Find out how the new iPhone 3G S shapes up.

What we all knew/was rumored:

• Size — The new iPhone 3G S comes with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, a 100% bump from the 8GB and 16GB iPhone 3G offerings.
• Guts — Apple also confirmed that the new iPhone sports a faster processor and a 7.2Mbps HSDPA-compatible radio.
• Camera — The old 2 megapixel sensor has been bumped up to 3.2 megapixels and there’s still no flash. Apple also added auto-focus and geotagging support.
• Video — 30fps video recording, video editing, video sharing
• Compass
• Battery life — The new kit features 5 hours of 3G talk time and up to 24 hours of music playback — according to Apple.

What we didn’t know:

• The 3G S looks exactly like the 3G
• Voice Control is now built in, hi 2002, so you can dial by voice, control iPod playback by voice and so on.
• Integrated hardware encryption.
• The iPhone 3G S goes on sale June 19th in the US.

The jump from second to third generation is very reminiscent of the jump from first to second generation; this is more of an upgrade announcement as opposed to a new product launch, most of the features are backwards compatible. Those in love with their current iPhone but looking for a little more upgrade will certainly be pleased while those holding out for things like a physical keypad, modern camera with flash, etc will have to continue to look elsewhere for another year. Will it be a new iPhone 3G S in your future?