Do you want to make your own layer? This tutorial tells you how to do it! These are the requirements to create your own layer:

Webserver with PHP and JSON support
MySQL database with phpMyAdmin
For testing: Layar installation on your iPhone 3GS or Android based phone (with GPS and compass)

Stedelijk Museum: Creating a Layar layer: a step by step tutorial

(via Bruce Sterling)

In Skinput, a keyboard, menu, or other graphics are beamed onto a user’s palm and forearm from a pico projector embedded in an armband. An acoustic detector in the armband then determines which part of the display is activated by the user’s touch. As the researchers explain, variations in bone density, size, and mass, as well as filtering effects from soft tissues and joints, mean different skin locations are acoustically distinct. Their software matches sound frequencies to specific skin locations, allowing the system to determine which “skin button” the user pressed.

Read More -PhysOrg: Skinput turns your arm into a touchscreen

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

Last July TAT (“The Astonishing Tribe“) posted a concept video of their augmented social face-card system (okay, I made that term up, what else should we call it?). The video tickled the imagination with over 400,000 views.

TAT has since teamed up with Polar Rose, a leading computer vision services company, to turn that concept into a reality. The TAT Cascades system combined with Polar Rose’s FaceLib gives us this prototype called Recognizr.

Read More – Games Alfresco: Your Face Is A Social Business Card

(via Bruce Sterling)

An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Technology Review: A 50-Watt Cellular Network

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

Who’s going to start settings these sorts of things up in American cities to power decentralized wireless networks?

Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

What’s more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.

At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.

Futurismic: Re-skinning the city – the dark side of augmented reality

In the days before the new Apple tablet was announced the anti-DRM group Defective by Design dubbed Apple’s announcement event the “Come see our latest restriction” event. Since then, there’s been a lot of chatter about the various limitations of the device – DRM, or otherwise.

I think some of these limitations could be important for the future of computing and media.

Read the rest of this entry »

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology. [...]

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

Hot on the heels of this court decision, it looks like Taser is trying to diversify their product offerings:

Stun gun maker Taser wants to help parents, not with jolts of electricity but with a tool which allows parents to effectively take over a child’s mobile phone and manage its use.

“Basically we’re taking old fashioned parenting and bringing it into the mobile world,” Taser chairman and co-founder Tom Smith said at the Consumer Electronics Show here, where the Arizona company unveiled the new product.

“Because when you give your child his mobile phone you don’t know who they’re talking to, what they’re sending or texting, all of those things,” Smith told AFP.

The phone application, called “Mobile Protector,” allows a parent to screen a child’s incoming and outgoing calls and messages, block particular numbers and even listen in on a conversation.

A dashboard on a parent’s phone or a personal computer shows the mobiles being monitored and the permitted callers such as friends and family.

AFP: Taser adds mobile phone monitoring tool to its arsenal

(via Cryptogon)

Sub-Saharan Africa is not famous for technological innovation but a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates that mobile telephone use has grown twice as quickly there as anywhere else in the world. Even in tiny Rwanda, the government estimates that revenue from mobile phones will reach US$1 billion by 2012.

Africa Confidential: Don’t forget your SIM card (Free preview, haven’t read full article)

(via Appropedia)

Asked to name the single biggest benefit of America’s invasion, many Iraqis fail to mention freedom or democracy but instead praise the advent of mobile phones, which were banned under Saddam Hussein. Many Iraqis seem to feel more liberated by them than by the prospect of elected resident government.

In the five years since the first network started up, the number of subscribers has soared to 20m (in a population of around 27m), while the electricity supply is hardly better than in Mr Hussein’s day. That is double the rate for Lebanon, where a civil war ended two decades ago and income per head is four times higher. [...]

They also became a tool of commerce. Reluctant to risk their lives by visiting a bank, many subscribers transferred money to each other by passing on the serial numbers of scratch cards charged with credit, like gift vouchers. Recipients simply add the credit to their account or sell it on to shops that sell the numbers at a slight discount from the original. This impromptu market has turned mobile-phone credit into a quasi-currency, undermining the traditional informal hawala banking system.

Economist: Better than freedom?

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Somalia’s mobile phone business is booming despite the almost daily artillery fire that flies over expensive satellite dishes and the violence that has brought misery to the population of the Horn of Africa nation.

The three largest firms, Hormuud Telecom, Nation Link and Telecom Somalia, have a combined 1.8 million mobile users who enjoy some of the world’s cheapest calling rates, allowing them to stay in touch with their loved ones amidst the conflict. [...]

With mobile phone use at about 18 percent of the population, Somalia lags its neighbour and east Africa’s largest economy Kenya, where it is above 40 percent, but it is ahead of several other poor African nations.

Reuters: Somali mobile phone firms thrive despite chaos

(via Global Guerillas)

The hacker/performance art/activist organization Electronic Disturbance Theater has invented a new device, the Transborder Immigrant Tool:

We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway—things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border.

Some background:

In the 80s I was a member of something called the Critical Art Ensemble. We wrote a series of books published in the 90s that speculated on what the future, and computers especially, might bring. Our core speculations were that we would see the emergence of three different arcs of capitalism in the 90s: digital capitalism, genetic capitalism or clone capitalism, and particle capitalism or nano-driven technology. We decided we would speculate not only on the artistic aspect of these emerging capitalisms but also on how we could intervene as artist-activists into each of these areas. We developed the idea of electronic civil disobedience as a way to mediate the emergence of digital capitalism. Some Critical Art Ensemble members have even been arrested for their work. One in particular, Steve Kurtz, was brought before a grand jury in 2004. Homeland Security considered his use of nonpathogenic bacteria in certain museum installations a bioterrorist threat.

Vice: Transborder Immigrant Tool Helps Mexicans Cross Over Safely

(Thanks Josh Ellis)

Programmer Joey Hess found that Palm Pre’s operating system webOS sends his GPS location back to Palm every day. Hess also found code that sends Palm data on which webOS apps he has used each day, and for how long he used each one.

“I was surprised by this,” Hess, who bought the Pre about a month ago, told Wired.com. “I had location services turned off though I had GPS still on because I wanted it to geotag photos. Still I didn’t expect Palm to collect this level of information.” [...]

Palm’s actions trigger questions about consumer privacy and the extent to which handset makers and developers are gathering and using data about buyers’ behavior. In this case, some of the concerns may be overblown, says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Golvin cites Sun CEO Scott McNealy, who said in 1999: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” Says Golvin, “While that is certainly overstated, it is also true. Consumers, in general are concerned about privacy but look at the number of people who are willing to give up every detail of their personal lives for the opportunity to win a big screen TV.”

Wired: Palm Pre Snoops on Users by Phoning Data Home

Shizzow encourages users to accompany each location update with a short message describing their current activity. The added context is super helpful in real life social applications, and it elevates Shizzow above a simpler service like Fire Eagle, which just provides location data, and Brightkite, which is being used more like Twitter with location attached. By contrast, Shizzow puts location at the fore.

Full Story: Wired

The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror — all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface — walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the brains behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, and colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers (red, blue, green and yellow) helped the camera distinguish the four fingers and recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created.

The gestures can be as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.

When he encounters someone at a party, the system projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to provide more information about him — his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. “This is a more controversial [feature],” Maes said over the audience’s laughter.

In another frame, Mistry picks up a boarding pass while he’s sitting in a car. He projects the current status of his flight and gate number he’s retrieved from the flight-status page of the airline onto the card.

“If you need to know what time it is, it’s as simple as drawing a watch on your arm,” Maes said, while Mistry used his right finger to draw a circle on his left wrist. The face of a watch popped up on his hand, which the audience liked.

Full Story: Wired

Google is promising that its new location-reporting service Latitude, which lets you broadcast where you are to your friends, will have a memory leak and won’t remember anything.

That’s a feature, not a bug. The intention is to make sure Latitude doesn’t become an honeypot for cops wanting to be able to easily find out where you have been or even say the names of everyone who attended, or was near, a political protest.

The policy, created in consultation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts Latitude on equal privacy footing with Loopt, a popular friend-finding service that predates Latitude. Both services now overwrite your previous location with your new location, and don’t keep logs.

Full Story: Wired

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that his organization will be cutting half its staff and ending in-house development of Sugar, the Linux-based operating system that ships on its tiny XO Children’s Machine laptops.

Even though the OLPC project has been praised by the mainstream media, the free software elite and humanitarian organizations for its goal to supply low-cost, educational computers to developing countries with little or no technology infrastructure, the project has been beset by a host of problems and delays. The worldwide economic downturn has slowed hardware orders, but the project was largely sidelined by the revolution it helped create — a wave of low-cost, low-powered laptops built to run Windows, like Intel’s similar Classmate PC. Now, even the OLPC project is transitioning to Windows after realizing it’s what customers want. [...]

Sugar will continue to grow, thanks to Sugar Labs, an open community founded by OLPC-er Walter Bender dedicated to building up the OS.

Full Story: Wired

His solution is an elegant new software stack called Jolicloud – users will download Jolicloud to their Netbooks and then install it. Whatever operating system and software is on the computer will be wiped off, and replaced with a stripped down Linux operating system and custom browser. [...]

For competition, check out Good OS, which is another stripped down operating system that’s perfect for low end PCs. Good OS is different, though, in that the company is targeting device manufacturers to add it as a dual boot option. Jolicloud is going straight to the consumer to encourage them to try it out.

Full Story: TechCrunch

Coby Electronics, a leading international manufacturer and distributor of electronics consumer-packaged goods for discount stores, plans to introduce the first under-$100 laptop by March 2009. Well, it’s $99.95, if you call that “under $100.” You’ll find Coby in dollar stores, drugstores, etc.

Forget Cyber Monday: COBY Plans “Moore’s Law” MIDGET PC for $100 in March

Late Update: Turns out this story was a hoax. Read about it Ars Technica

During a terrorist attack — during any crisis situation, actually — the one thing people can do is exchange information. It helps people, calms people, and actually reduces the thing the terrorists are trying to achieve: terror. Yes, there are specific movie-plot scenarios where certain public pronouncements might help the terrorists, but those are rare. I would much rather err on the side of more information, more openness, and more communication.

Schneier on Security: Communications During Terrorist Attacks are Not Bad.

Noted here earlier, the OLPC 2.0 indeed feels like the future. Really, anything else (short of the Nokia Morph concept) seems stale in comparison.

Here are some speculations at ComputerWorld about what the future may hold.

Kazi560 is a txt based job hunting tool available in Kenya. It allows job hunters to subscribe to job alerts by SMS, and allowing them to find employers who are hiring rather than going door to door looking for work – a very time consuming process. They’re adopting Craig’s List’s business model: employers pay to have to list their jobs.

This is a project of One World’s Mobile for Good

(via Ethan Z)

Sound Candy is a wearable sampler that lets you record into its built-in mic and manipulate its sound by changes in speed, angle, vibration and rotation.

(via Califaudio via Grinding)

A Step in the Right Direction is a sneaker based wearable technology project designed by mstrpln in collaboration with Ubiq boutique.

Once the pressure sensitive insole is activated, the unit scans the surrounding area for Wi-Fi signals and displays the result through LEDs.

The three LEDs on the flap enclosure represent the signal strength of any wireless internet signals within a 50 meter area. A blinking LED represents no signal, while a solid LED shows that there is a signal present.

Full Story: A Step in the Right Direction

Seems cool, but unless it tells you if it’s an open network I don’t know how useful they’d actually be.

(via Grinding)

Please see update/correction in the comments

Two economic crises face the world today: the credit crunch resulting from the subprime mortgage crisis, and the food prices crisis precipitated by the demand for biofuels. Both are problems we should have identified and solved years ago, but didn’t. Why did we ignore the warning signs and allow ourselves to be hoodwinked into this mess? I believe they both relate to our tendency for wishful thinking.

Money for nothing

First, the subprime mortgage crisis. I remember first becoming aware of the problem in 2005 when I read an article by Whiskey Bar. I can’t find the specific article, but I remember Billmon calling subprime mortgages “future foreclosure loans.” I also remember my boss at the time being completely dumbfounded at how banks could possibly be making loans at the rates they were. It just didn’t make sense – there was no way this was a sustainable lending practice, and someone was gonna get burned.

Still, in 2006 I considered buying a home. After all, I was steeped in pro-boom media, and friends and co-workers were singing the praises of home ownership and encouraging me to buy in before prices got any hirer and interest rates went up. Bubble deniers were suggesting that those of us concerned about a bubble were just jealous of owners. So I spent more time looking into it, and was almost convinced to buy for a while. But in the end, I still came to the conclusion that variable rate and no money down mortgages were a bad deal compared to renting (the only types of mortgages I would qualify for), and that these lending practices were unsustainable.

By the time I started seriously looking at the situation the crash was already in progress, it was actually all too late. The damage had been done. “The new road to serfdom”, but people still balked. By summer of 2007 the whole house of cards was crashing down, just like we’d been warned. The Nation has a lucid retrospective of what happened.

So who to blame? Much blame is to be laid at the feet of realtors and lenders – in fact the whole “FIRE” (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector. They made severely bad business choices, and now the entire economy is suffering for it. Why did they do this? Was it the short term gain? Not looking beyond this quarter’s profits? Or was it the promise of a bail-out? I’m not sure.

However, no one made anyone take out a subprime loan. Certainly borrowers were misled by slick realtors and lenders into believing they were getting a good deal. But all the numbers were right there in front of them: the interest rates, the interest rate hikes, the cost of the principal… why couldn’t people look at the numbers and realize they were getting screwed?

Some blame should be laid at the feet of the mass media. Danny Schechter asked for Editor and Publisher:

There is more to this very sad failure. Many newspapers and TV outlets were complicit. They accepted and made tons of money carrying slick and often deceptive advertising for shady mortgage lenders and credit card companies encouraging readers and viewers to accept more debt. Some major newspaper are tied into local real estate syndicates and get kickbacks from sales tied to their extensive advertising of homes for sale.

Was there a conflict of interest perceived in taking these ads—which were important sources of revenue in a soft ad market—and producing watchdog journalism warning of the dangers of buying into subprime loans and other injurious products?

The media certainly could have helped prevent a crisis, if they hadn’t been too busy dismissing skeptics as Chicken Littles. They may also have contributed to the problem by failing to report accurately on the economy. During the same period as the housing bubble, the media, complacent with the Bush Administration, were pushing the line that the economy was strong and growing. However, at the time the value of US dollar was dropping against foreign currencies. Wages were not increasing as quickly as inflation. The US The US imported more than it exported. Job growth didn’t keep up with population growth. In other words, despite the housing boom, the US economy was poor.

So perhaps all these home buyers were convinced the economy was doing great, housing prices would soar forever, and they’d be making plenty of money to make their increased mortgages payments by the time the rates went up.

But lack of information in the mainstream media is only so much of an excuse. Better media coverage may have been able to prevent some of the problems, but it certainly didn’t cause them.

And what did? As far as I can tell, wishful thinking. Millions of people who just really really wanted to believe that they could actually afford to own a home. They didn’t want to believe that they would probably not be making significantly more money in a few short years. They didn’t want to believe that they should really have a 20% down payment. They didn’t want to believe that they had to WAIT and SAVE in order to own a home. They wanted to believe they could have one NOW.

Side effects may include deforestation, mass starvation, and global warming

So what does this have to do with biofuels? Last summer I started thinking about buying a biodiesel car. I wanted the convenience of a car, without feeling guilty about supporting repressive regimes in the middle east and polluting the environment. But after some research I concluded that biodiesel was actually worse than petroleum based fuels. Increasing the demand for crops for fuel raised food prices, and there was simply no way we could even knock a dent in our foreign dependence on oil. Also, increased crop production would cut into wildlife preserves and contribute to deforestation. I knew before I started seriously thinking about it that biofuel wouldn’t solve our energy problems, but I thought every little bit counted. Until I realized that since it wouldn’t solve our existing problems and would create an additional ones. More recently I’ve seen articles reporting that have determined that it takes more carbon to grow the damn fuel than is saved in burning it. So it’s actually WORSE for the environment, contributes to new social problems, and does little ease existing ones.

Yet, as Michael Grunwald wrote for Time Magazine “It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots.” There was little coverage of these problems until, apparently, recently. And it’s only now that we’re reaching crisis mode that the problems are getting serious attention. There were, of course, people warning about it years ago. Again, much of the blame here lies not with consumers for buying biofuel cars, but with those nebulous “powers that be”: the farm lobby, the energy industry, and politicians dolling out pork.

But what about the people who bought biofuel cars? I’m unable to determine the exact number sold (likely very difficult since they are easily converted from regular diesel engines), there must be someone buying all this subsidized fuel. I see an awful lot of those “powered by biodiesel” stickers on the backs of Benzs and Volvos around Portland. Why didn’t these people do their research? I suspect it’s again a case of wishful thinking. Like me, they wanted a guilt free car.

Today’s lesson

As individuals, we often feel that we have little power over how our country is run. Voting machines appear rigged, protests are confined to “free speech zones.” What agency do we now have? “Consumer activism” has been a buzz word for several years, but is often cynically dismissed. But we could have said no to subprime mortgages. No to biofuel vehicles. Neither the government nor FIRE forced anyone to take a mortgage or max out a credit card. No one forced anyone to buy a biodiesel pickup truck. And we’re now collectively suffering an economic downturn and increased food prices.

Apparently, the old maxims “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” hold true.

What to do about it

So enough of the doom and gloom – what’s done is done. What can we do to improve our situation? The solutions are at least as old as the problems.

Alternative currencies helped Argentine through its economic collapse (see here [pdf]). There are a number of alternative currency systems available such as: HOURS and LETS. There’s even An Exchange Protocol for Alternative Currencies .

Ten tons of perfectly good food is thrown out each month. Food Not Bombs groups throughout the country liberate discarded food and redistribute it to those who need it.

Also of note: Food Not Lawns, an interesting way to possibly retrofit the suburbs and provide more food.

We can get rid of our biodiesel cars and switch to bikes or public transportation, or at least back to gasoline.