I have obviously been away but to miss something such as this is a crime.
Apple Devices with Built-in Micro Projectors
07.06.2009 by LukeW
Expanding even further on my recent articles about understanding capabilities, Mac Rumors reports that Apple is expected to launch devices with built-in projectors later this year. The projectors would allow the iPhone and possibly the iPod touch to directly project video output onto an external surface.To better understand the impact of this capability on consumer devices, take a look at this video of Pattie Maes’ talk at the TED conference this year. In it she demos a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for rich interaction with our environment.
This is a very insightful entry by Michael Nielsen. Due to my bias, I had to immediately skip to Part II before i came back and read Part I. Some of the things i might question – Automatic spelling correct/relevancy ranking/alerting service, etc are indeed offered on Scopus. But whether they are good (I believe they are competitive) is certainly something the users will judge and Michael would qualify as one. I haven’t heard from any of the users i talked to that any of these feature are poor but again it could be my bias.
A great search engine for science: ISI’s Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s Scopus and Google Scholar are remarkable tools, but there’s still huge scope to extend and improve scientific search engines [6]. With a few exceptions, they don’t do even basic things like automatic spelling correction, good relevancy ranking of papers (preferably personalized), automated translation, or decent alerting services. They certainly don’t do more advanced things, like providing social features, or strong automated tools for data mining. Why not have a public API [7] so people can build their own applications to extract value out of the scientific literature? Imagine using techniques from machine learning to automatically identify underappreciated papers, or to identify emerging areas of study.
Sometimes the simplest of solutions can be most useful. For example, if you are out looking for a house and want to calculate how much mortgage you can afford, one simple solution would be look up a mortgage calculator online. I’ve used this tool from Bankrate in the past and found it useful.
Anyway – my point is – sometimes simple tools that focus on a niche area can be very helpful. We are always looking for the next killer app, the next ‘cool’ idea that will solve problems for a lot of people. While we’re trying to build that one solution fits all, we can often get lost in complexity.
Twitter, in my opinion, is a really simple app. I remember years ago, i built a silly little VB client app to post updates on tasks I was working on for this dot com startup. My team mates could also get on the same app running on their machines and post their updates. None of the updates were lost since we stored them in a central dB. Didn’t think too much of it and it got lost in time as we all moved on with our careers. Goodness me… if only I knew.
Here’s another example of a simple app that will have its uses. Kevin Marks is a former Google employee (Read news about his departure). Brilliant guy who worked on all kinds of stuff – Orkut, OpenSocial, Microformats, what have you. You can check out his blog (Epeus’ epigone) for more gory details.
A couple of days ago he put together this application in 12 hours. Amatwit. Using Amazon’s API and the Twitter’s API users can search Amazon for items (currently defaulting to books) and from the search results you can tweet links to those books. Nice.. simple.. useful.
Do you have any simple and useful solutions? Maybe you already have something and just don’t realize it.
