Researchers at the Urbana Illinois University have developed a cradle and an app for the iPhone transforming it into a Bio Lab.

The iPhone becomes a bio sensor. Photo by
Brian T. Cunningham

The cradle and app are using the iPhone camera and processing capability transforming it into a biosensor to detect toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.

The bio sensing is made possible by a photonic crystal. This crystal lets pass just on wavelength  so that when anything biological attaches to the photonic crystal the reflected wavelength will be an indication of the bio substance that has attached to the crystal. This bio substance can be a protein, a cell, a bacteria, a virus.

The bio sensor cannot detect “any” bio molecule, it has to be primed to react to a specific target. For that a normal microscope slide is coated with photonic material that can “detect” the desired molecule.

This photonic crystal slide is inserted in the cradle and the iPhone camera (the app using the camera) measures the spectrum. The reflected wavelength shows up as a black gap in the spectrum. Then the measure is repeated without the microscope slide inserted and the degree of shift in the reflected wavelength indicates the amount of target molecule in the sample.
The resulting bio-sensing device is not as precise as a lab measurement but it can provide information that is not available in the lab: one can measure in real time and in several places the presence of a molecule, a toxin, using the iPhone GPS to localise the sample and this can give a good indication of the spreading, as well as the origin of a given bio molecule.

Clearly this is not for the every day user. It is a tool for bio specialists. But over time I can see that more and more sensors will become available for smart phones making detection of certain substances an everyday experience for everyone of us. We would actually refer to our phone, and be warned by it, for detecting allergenic substances or specific bacteria that may be dangerous given a specific health care problem we can suffer from.

With the progress of technology and the availability of smart materials we can rest assured of a future, by the end of this decade I would say, where most surfaces will double up as screen and interaction points.

The sketchy representation of a future cell phone patented by Apple

I had the opportunity of discussing with a start up founder just few days ago. He is focussing on new ways to interact with information based on advanced capabilities offered by Surface 2 (MS) and others. Today these technologies are still quite expensive but the day when they will become commodities is on sight.

The interesting thing, I think, is that the interaction will no longer be a property of the device, rather it will be a property of the person interacting! That is to say that if I am interacting with the surface of a desk in a public space, like  a kiosk in a mall, that surface will first recognise who I am and then will react accordingly. This can be achieved in several ways, by an identification service in the “cloud” or by an interaction with an identity tag embedded in my body (just to name to extreme cases).

The availability of plastic screens, like AMOLED, or ones based on Graphene (NED can be considered a first step in this direction) will make it possible to “wrap” any surface with a screen and touch sensitivity. This, I guess, is the technological bases for a patent presented by Apple and described by ZDNet of a cell phone having a wrap around screen, as shown in the drawing above.

The curvature of the surface, according to interpretation by ZDNet, can be used to provide a sense of 3D. The wrap around can also be used to identify (my speculation) the user by “sensing” some characteristics of her hand.

Not sure if and when we are going to see an iPhone like that but for sure the new smart materials invented every day by researches are freeing designer imagination.

Google maps are great and they change the way we see information. They are more and more “localized”. Looking for a hotel and seeing a map along with it is just normal. Taking a photo and inserting it in an album to see it becoming part of a map is also a usual experience for people with a Mac and iPhoto.

Now, thanks to Livemapp, you can expect  to change your perception of the “map” once more.

The idea is simple, the result is catchy!

Everybody nowadays has a phone with a camera and more and more have an embedded GPS. That is the case of the people wandering around with the iPhone latest models.  The Livemapp app, so far only available on iPhones but soon to be on the Androids flocks as well, let you take a phone and post it on the web. It ends up on a map so that people looking at the map through Livemapp will see it.

It is a way to add on the map the sights (and I am pretty sure the sounds as well in a short while). You may take a look at the place you are in, or the ones your friends are at the moment, and see what’s up. You can also go back in time to see what was it some times ago. And you can elect to visualize only the most recent photos in those places where lot of people are shooting and posting.

The apps can be enriched with new functions, I suppose. Why not see only the photos posted by your friends, so that you can follow their wanderings. And similarly post your photos for the eyes of your friends only.

And what about a etcher going on vacation in Greece: she might take pictures of places she will be talking about in the new semester and add comments to them. Once back in the classroom she can enable her maps to her students to see and commit upon….

The real kick is the possibility of creating your interpretation of a space and share it with others. The future, I am convinced, will be more and more like this, each one of us an actor and a spectator, in some cases living the act as it unfolds.

Moving towards crowd-movies…

A new app is ready for you on the Apple Store. It is Vyclone, an app that takes advantage of the location and time information  attached to shootings you take with your iPhone.

Suppose you are watching a sport game and shooting. As you, there may b tens, hundreds of other spectators shooting the same event, although each one from a different position. Here comes Vyclone.

You can ask Vyclone to mash ups, in a completely automated way, your shooting with those of three other people that were filming at your same time. It can be done instantly, provided you and the others have an Internet connection, like a WiFi, and are on Vyclone as well, or it can be done the next day or the next year. Vyclone checks the location and time stamp on your video and looks for identical data in other video.

Then it mashes up the clips together providing a movies resulting from a multi camera shoot. It keeps one of the sound tracks so that you don’t get a confusing audio.

The effect is really nice, as you can see in the video below. Of course, once created, you can post the video to your social network, YouTube and the likes.

The present limitation of mashing up a maximum of four movies is going to be relaxed in the future, according to Joe Summer, one of the founder of Vyclone, who is also the Chief Creative Officer (CCO, I like the new acronym), and the system can scale up to accommodate several more cameras.

What I like is this idea of social shooting and the possibility to create something through crowd sourcing. It makes the world so much more connected and let eat of us see it with some others’ eyes. Also, I can imagine in the future that the mash ups will actually be producing as many layers as there are movies so that when you watch it you can decide to take the images from a different camera. Of course that would make the resulting film much bigger in terms of Bytes (but who cares tray about a file size?) and also much more demanding in terms of bandwidth if you are planning to stream it (but who’s gonna care about bandwidth in a few years time?).

Ever noticed how many people are taking pictures and filming at any event? Be it a concert, a sport event, a wedding or  the recital at your kids’ school. I bet you did and probably you may also have asked someone near you to share a clip that you might have missed.

Well, Vyclone, a start up, is going one step further. They have created an app, running on iPhones, that can send a clip to their servers and at that point they will look for videos taken at that location (GPS mon amour) and at that particular time. If clips are found Vyclone will splice and mash them up returning a nice clip to you.

The resulting video contains just one soundtrack (you can decide the one to be selected) but provides different point of views since several cameras were involved in filming.

The Vyclone app has been made available for trials and it should become downloadable from the AppStore in the next few weeks….

So far there are several limitations: all people need to use an iPhone and should record through the Vyclone apps. However, just give it some time and Vyclone, or some copycats, will come up with more flexible options. I can easily imagine the interest (at least on my side) to mash up clips taken at different times. I can imagine taking a clip on vacation at a nice spot and wondering how that place would look like at dusk, or when there is a certain event… All of these can become possible since there are really no technical issues to spot this evolution.

As more and more people are taking clips and more and more cameras are continuously filming the world around (I always marvel at the number of car accidents being filmed live you can see on YouTube!) there will be a growing data base of clips to select and merge or mash up.

This, in turns, will provide us with a new interface to look at the world. Indeed, it is like extending our viewing capabilities, in time and in space.

Any given event, that we have witnessed from a certain spot, will become available for us to see also from a different point of view.

I can expect most sport arenas will have plenty of cameras filming what’s going on and once they make these clips available and you can use an app like Vyclone, then you can really start to appreciate the world with a whole set of new eyes. And of course the bandwidth demand will keep growing, at least in local areas and will once again transform our perception of communications. Not an infrastructure to transmit information from here to there but a fabric making all information ubiquitously available.

We have been used for over a century to connect to THE network infrastructure to communicate. The advent of wireless communications  (cell phones) has shifted the idea of connectivity from the infrastructure to a choice of infrastructures. Then the advent of WiFi networks has evolved the concept further  to a communication access area.

More recently we have seen tethering, a communication access area created by a device (like a Mac or iPhone) that in turns connect to the big internet via a classic telecommunications access.

Devices create local networks among them and will be orchestrate access to available network infrastructures

The next, revolutionary, step I feel will be in the transformation of all we have today into an Network Fabric.

Imagine having in the environment you are in many data bases (there are indeed, just think about the data contained in cell phones, in media centers…), many potential access gateways (again, you can have a number of WiFi networks, some generated by some devices, each cell phone is a gateway to an access network…).

Whilst there is, generally speaking, no problem in sharing a public WiFi access network, clearly there are issues (cost and who pays) if one is pooling cell phones access.

However, already today there are unlimited access plans for cell phones, there are “capped” access plans that may have good traffic availability on the last day of the billing period that is likely to go wasted… In the future one can be that we will see more flat or semi flat access plans and statistical pooling of these access plan can actually increase the access potential to all those participating in the pool.

Software can be the lever to crack current schemes and open the door to other paradigms, more based on a generalized ambient access. Personally, I feel this is going to happen, before the end of this decade. I understand Operators may not like it, and will try to delay this scenario. But eventually, I see a shift in business model that will take communications capacity for granted and focus on revenues generated “because” there is such an abundant capacity. At that point the sharing of access gateways will be natural and in the interest of Operators.

It will not happen all of a sudden, but one little step after another. And some of these first steps are already been taken by companies like Open Garden.

This company is currently providing software to let you share internet connection among your devices but clearly the next step is the possibility of sharing/pooling internet access among devices owned by different users.
This will lead to a new form of perception: we will be living in environments that double up as communications fabric, rather than environment that provide a connection to a network infrastructure. As I mention at the very beginning of this post this is more than “wires”. It is actually about data, so massive distributed data bases will play a major role.

Can you tell a glass of sparkling mineral water from Alka Seltzer, a “just ripe” melon from one that should be eaten only after a few days?

A NASA developed sensors for your iPhone to sense the environment

We perceive our environment through our eyes and they can only detect certain light wavelengths. Actually there are many more wavelengths available (and insects are able to exploit some of them). What if we insert in our cell phone a sensors that can be used to look at what is around detecting a much larger wavelength set? This is what some researchers at the Media Lab are trying to do.

Already today digital camera sensors (and the one in our cell phone are derived from those) can detect a broader wavelength set than the one detected by our eyes, and this is why manufacturers overlay on the sensor a filter to cut out those extra wavelengths. Remove that filter and you can get more data from the filter that would actually let a computer see more and discriminate characteristics in the environment (current sensors can detect infrared wavelength so a computer can get information on temperature of the object in the image…).

New sensors can be developed to intercept much broader wavelength spectrum and there may be a system of filters that can be over layered to restrict wavelengths depending on the purpose of the photo. There might even be sensors having individual pixel with different sensitivity to wavelength (or with different filter over layered) and these can be selected via software, thus allowing the detection of different characteristics in objects.

This is what people at the Media Lab are working on, embedding a sensor in your cell phone you can use to find out more about your environment. To this filter a glass full of Alka Seltzer would look very different from one filled with sparkling mineral water, a ripe melon looks different from one you are not supposed to eat for a few more days…

More specialized sensors are also in the making, such as the one shown in the photo, developed by NASA to fit your iPhone. This sensor plug in the iPhone port and can detect a number of substances in the environment. An app in your phone (or in the web for more serious analyses) can process these data and give you a quite different view of the place you are in.. It can also be used to create a map of the environment as more and more cell phone report data. Get ready for a new way to look around yourself!

Personally I never thought I would have a tattoo. I may like to see them on somebody else but I decided long time ago they were not for me.

Tattoo detecting blood sodium level being read by an iPhone app

But now I just discovered that tattoos can have quite unexpected application by teaming up with my iPhone.

Researchers at the Northeastern university in the Department of Pharmaceutical Science have developed nanoparticles that fluoresce when in contact with certain substances and the degree of fluorescence is proportional to the amount of substance. Specifically, they have developed nanoparticles that fluoresce when in contact with sodium. The nanoparticles are injected like a tattoo under the skin. Unlike a normal tattoo they are invisible and fluorescence is activated once light is shine over the skin AND there is sodium bound to the nanoparticles.

An iPhone equipped with a cover containing a battery and a set of LEDs to shine light at the right frequency can be used to check the fluorescence and a special app read the level through the iPhone camera. Different nanoparticles can be manufactured to bind with different substances, like glucose or a substance provided by a medication. In this way it becomes possible to measure the quantity of substance that is actually reaching a target area.

The applications are many and they open up a much easier way to monitor our physical parameters. Today people suffering for diabetes have to prick their finger several times a day to measure the glucose level. With this app all they need to do is to place their phone on the skin and click on the app.

And, of course, this approach brings telecommunications at the core of health care, since all date can be accrued by the cell phone and transmitted to a control center. I can even see a time when we will be injected with nanoparticles during the vaccination (one single shot for rubella, measles, … and nanoparticles) and we will become sensors that can provide ambient data on noxious substances that are actually absorbed by our bodies! This information will become part of a smart city and of a smart environment.

Science fiction? Well it was science fiction being able to communicate worldwide with a personal communicator just 50 years ago, or having all the library of the Congress on our desk just 30 years ago, getting television images through a flat screen less than an inch thick just 20 years ago …

If your business has scored a low evaluation  from social networks, less than 4 stars, your company might not be taken into account during the selection process by your potential clients using a mobile search engine.

Google has introduced several new features to its mobile search for iPhone and Android, including the ability to filter results by star rating, distance and businesses that are open.

For example, a user might only look for restaurants that are open right now, within a two-mile radius of his/her current location, that have a rating of four or more stars.

Searching for nearby restaurants or other points of interests on a mobile phone can be a slow and boring experience, and this feature could speed it up considerably.

Other new features include review images in search results and small design changes such as bigger buttons for viewing a map and the ability to call a business.

To try out Google’s mobile Places search, open www.google.com on your mobile browser and click on the Places link at the top of the page. The new features also work when you do a search for businesses on Google Maps on an Android device.

And one last thing: keep monitoring what is being said about your company on the internet! Social networks are getting more and more powerful every day more, so it is better to learn definitely how to deliver value to your customers in order to have a “real” good reputation in the “virtual” world. Are there, still, two worlds???

Font: www.mashable.com

It is important to notice how Social Networks are creating on the one hand Virtual Ambients and on the other hand they are aggregator for business ecosystems. In this decade we are going to see a growing use of Social Networks as market places and they are likely to become embedded in the distribution chain of many industries. This is quite a change and enterprises have better to prepare themselves.

Are bills and coins going to disappear any time soon? Will we be using digital money?

Hey, we already have credit cards and we use them most of the time. Personally, anytime I go to the US I take with me 100 $ in cash ’cause you never know but most of the time when I fly back home I still have those 100$ in my wallet. I pay most of my expenses through credit card.

However, even though it is so easy to pay with credit card I cannot accept any payment from another guy through a credit card. Never thought about it actually till I saw Square, a new start up founded by the creator of Twitter.

Now I can, and you can too. Just go on the AppStore and download Square for your iPhone and get the special card reader (a tiny square that plugs in into your iPhone earphone port) and you are all set. You can ask for a free delivery in 48 hours of the card, provided you have a US security number, directly from the Square website.

This application really makes me wonder if the time of hard currency is over. Mobile payment using mobile phone has been available in Japan and Korea for several years now and it is widely used. In Italy we are starting and I feel it will catch up. Applications like this makes it possible to anyone of us to become a merchant!