Smartbolts have little discs in their heads that change color as the right amount of tension is applied to them. I recently installed a child safety gate with a similar mechanism: a red, spongy washer between the bolt and the frame; once the right amount of tension was on the bolt, the washer was squished down so much it disappeared and you could stop tightening. Unfortunately, a torque-wrench does not measure bolt tension accurately, usually only about +/- 30%, because it does not take friction into account. The friction depends on bolt, nut, washer-material, plating, surface smoothness, machining accuracy, degree...
Amazon has just jumped into the iPhone app game with Amazon Remembers. The idea's pretty nifty: if you see something that you think you might want to remember to shop for later — a book, a coffee grinder, a novelty USB drive — you can simply take a picture of it with your iPhone camera. The image gets whisked away to Mechanical Turk, where an armada of bored grad students are tasked with identifying it. When Amazon has a plausible answer as to what the product in your photo is, you're sent an email giving a link to the product...
AT&T announced Wednesday that it has formed a strategic partnership with ChaCha, a mobile service that allows users to submit questions via text message or phone and receive their answer in a text message. The deal calls for a co-branded greeting and AT&T promotion when consumers call ChaCha's answer hotline or text message the company a question. More important from a business standpoint, the two companies will also work together to improve ChaCha's mobile-answers service and develop both text and voice ad-based services. The partnership between AT&T and ChaCha is interesting, to say the least. At first glance, the...
Skyhook Wireless' WiFi positioning technology has already found its way into quite a few previously position-less places, and it now looks like it's added one more feather its cap, with Awareness Technologies announcing that it has added the capability to its Laptop Cop laptop protection software. In addition to pinning down a location (supposedly with a "higher degree of accuracy than GPS"), the software will also let you remotely retrieve or delete files, among other tasks -- assuming it's a Windows laptop, that is. If that's not a problem, you can grab the software on its own now for...
This afternoon I was reading a New York Times article about improving Netflix’s Cinematch, video suggestion algorithm. The article is a great overview about the benefits of using consumer activity data for commercial purposes. The more data we have about consumer activity, the more likely we are able to predict their purchase behavior. One thing that is missing from the equation, as the New York Times points out, is the ability to track consumer emotion when they are browsing the web. In one sense, collaborative filtering is less personalized than a store clerk. The clerk, in theory anyway, knows a...
The New York Times Magazine published an interesting article that discusses the Netflix $1mn challenge that has some developers working tirelessly to improve the accuracy of the Netflix recommendation engine by 10%....
While the Wiimote opened the door to motion-sensitive gaming, it's obvious limitations even have Nintendo pushing the tech forward with add-ons like the MotionPlus -- but a company called Sixense might have leapfrogged the field with a system called TrueMotion 3D. Rather than relying solely on an accelerometer, this controller uses a magnetic field to track both your hands' positions in 3D space. With a refresh rate of ten milliseconds and accuracy up to a millimeter, and interest from developers including Activision and EA, this guy could someday relegate your Sixaxis to the back of your junk drawer --...
The Gadget: Awethumb, a thumb attachment that's meant to reduce hand discomfort and increase typing speed when texting on smartphones. The Price: Who the hell cares! Don't buy this thing! Ok, it's $8. The Verdict: Hello? Didn't I just say not to buy this thing? Not only is it pretty useless in adding any kind of support to your thumbs when you type, it actually makes you cramp up MORE because you're trying to keep these Awethumbs from sliding off. The thumbs, which have a rubbery tip, also can't be used on capacitive touch-based phones, like the iPhone and the...
