Man Gets Smartphone Built Into His Arm
For this disabled British man, becoming a bit of a transhuman cyborg makes everyday tasks more doable. However, I think the rest of us will eventually get smartphones implanted in our arms simply out of laziness. Via the Telegraph:
Trevor Prideaux, who was born without his left arm, used to have to balance the smartphone on his prosthetic arm or put it on a flat surface to use it. But now Mr. Prideaux, 50, can call and text his loved ones without moving the mobile, which is embedded into his fiberglass and laminate limb.
The catering manager sought help from medical experts and communications chiefs at Nokia to build the special prosthethic. They carefully carved a phone shaped fibrecast cradle into the skin-colored prototype, allowing his Nokia C7 to sit inside it.
Mr Prideaux, of Wedmore, Somerset, said: “I think this is the first time this has ever been done in the world…
Fireflies: iPhone Movement Across Europe
Created by Crowdflow, a visualization of the movement of 880 iPhones across Europe during the month of April, 2011, made from the phones’ location data. In the dystopian future, a thousand video feeds like this one will flicker across a wall of screens in Big Brother’s central surveillance facility:
The Gadgets We Never Heard Of
Did you know that the iPod is basically a ripoff of a German transistor radio from the 1950s? Via the Atlantic, selections from Bill Buxton’s collection of little-known gadgets (such as early touchscreen devices, the first robotic chess game, and a “mindblowing Casio watch from 1984″) which sadly are in the secret dustbin of history:
Verizon To Put Location-Tracking Warning Sticker On Phones
Julianne Pepitone reports in CNN:
In the wake of a giant brouhaha over the news that Apple’s iPhones record and store users’ locations, Verizon Wireless says it will start slapping ‘we can track you!’ warning stickers on its products.
Verizon’s announcement came in the form of a letter to Representatives Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican. In March, they asked the four major wireless carriers to explain how and why they track mobile location data.
All four carriers acknowledged that they store location data for varying periods of time, but Verizon was the only company to suggest a warning label. The company says it will begin including the removable sticker on all new devices it sells.
The sticker warns: “This device is capable of determining its (and your) physical, geographical location and can associate this location data with other customer information. To limit access to location information by…
Can Cellphones Become Credit Cards?
AT&T and Verizon are testing a new feature designed to “supplant more than 1 billion plastic cards in American wallets” – by letting people make traditional credit card purchases using their cellphones!
It seems like a glimpse of the future, but it’s already in place in Japan, Turkey and the U.K., with smart phones simply being waved over a reader to complete in-store purchases. “This is definitely a game-changer,” an analyst told Bloomberg news, saying that already cellphone carriers are “the biggest recurring billers in every market. They are experts at processing payments.” And the concept is already being cheered on by retailers. “We have long argued that real competition is missing from today’s payments market,” one industry spokesperson added.
Plus, the cellphone carriers are attacking when credit card companies are already being reviled for their dishonest disclosures on penalty fees. (Today Forbes cited a new study which shows that some credit…
Smart Phones May One Day Be Universal Translators
Sure beats inserting a Babel Fish into the ear. Ryan Kim writes in the San Fransisco Chronicle:
In science fiction, characters often turn to a portable universal translator to help bridge the linguistic divide, either among humans or with aliens.
But the concept doesn’t just exist in the imagination of “Star Trek” writers or the pages of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Researchers are actually closing in on the technology and foresee its application in the coming years in a very familiar device: the smart phone.
Imagine walking into a restaurant in Beijing and ordering off the menu and talking with waiters in Chinese. It’s a future that is on the way to becoming a reality.
Microsoft-Borg Wearable Windows / Smartphone Eye Display
Kopin makes advanced night vision goggles and thermal weapon sights for the U.S. Army, but they’ll soon be releasing a wearable Windows/smartphone eye display!
Imagine your smartphone feeding information to a virtual 15-inch Microsoft Windows PC display that sits in front of one eye, just beneath your line of sight. You speak commands using hands-free speech recognition to control both wireless access to the internet and your phone…
