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Woz announces latest project: GPS locator tags for everything: Steve Wozniak's latest company is finally out of stealth mode, and even if it isn't a breakthrough it's ballsy. The co-founder of Apple, who spent much of the 90s as a 5th-grade school teacher, announced he was founding WOZ (Wheels of Zeus) over a year and half ago, but didn't quite say what he was up to. What it has turned out to be is essentially an ultra-low-bandwidth, high-range, GPS-capable, wireless network. Think, a narrowband version of Wifi with Newbury Networks technology built in. Or, at least that's my take.

Like every good viral idea, $25 GPS with no service fee will be great if it takes off, but the Negroponte Lillypad scheme for wOzNet will take some doing. And GPS that is only kinda-available will certainly cut out critical applications (this will NOT be used for stolen car locations anytime soon). Still, if the target market is the early Apple adopters; geeks who lose their tech equipment, parents with school-age kids to worry about, A/V departments trying to figure out what room the projector is in, then we've got something going on.

Wave your hand if your sure: Hold this portable printer in your hand and wave it across any surface. The inks sprays onto the surface based on your hand movements, creating reliable image (print sample). The company, Printdreams sure has a captivating product, let's see if they can last till 2005 and get it to market. If so, this opens up new opportunities for terrible graffiti artists the world round.

Palm-a-forming the ocean : You are a tiny country going through a 30-year version of our dot-com 1999 blowout; you've got filthy rich amounts of oil but can expect a massive crash in 20-35 years when the oil runs out. What do you do? You create a world destination. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is doing just this. They've created three of the most impressive hotels in the world, and now they have decided to create several Palm-shaped islands.

Thomas says, 'On the shores of the United Arab Emirates, arguably one of the coolest (and certainly one of the largest) engineering projects in the world is taking place. 100,000,000 cubic metres of sand and rock is being formed into two huge, palm-shaped islands, each with about sixty kilometres of beach and big enough to be seen from space. Designed as a luxury city for Dubai's (and the world's) very wealthy, it sounds like something out of a science fiction novel: but it's real. Amazing what a few billions in oil fortunes will let you play around with.'

Why the UAE doesn't get talked up more in the U.S. is beyond me. It's a progressive muslim country that is pushing women's rights, education, and the ability to create a sustainable revenue stream from a finite resource - oil. It also happens to be doing all of these in the kind of blatantly commercial, consumerist ways that should the U.S. government should eat up! Perhaps the issue is that they have virtually no standing army?(thanks Cory at boingboing)

Is information visualization about to go mainstream? (Economist.com): Programs aimed to help explain your data visually have been around for a while, but the Economist seems to think it just might be high time they got as popular as the spreadsheet. The article is mostly just a product push for Grokker, but the comparison to the killer-app potential of the spreadsheet got me thinking.

Data visualization tools have come and gone, all without any blockbuster success. The only one I've gotten hooked to for any length of time so far is The Brain, but I was one of the few and like most of the programs like it, The Brain never really took off. But is the consistant failure of information visualization to crack the mainstream because there isn't a demand, or like the Apple Newton, are all of these simply precluding the right mix of features and ease-of-use that spawns the next software craze.

People certainly have a constant need to explain information in visual ways, and there is a need for it to be explained more richly than Excel bar charts. The key lies in the aspirations of most of these pieces of software, they generally appeal to the high-end info consultant, or (like the Brain) they dumb down the interface so much it ceases to be useful in showing relationships.

The strength of the spreadsheet that made it such a killer app was that it was powerful enough for a scientist, but easy enough for the secretary to learn. Until a company makes information visualization software focused on the needs of the Powerpoint set, that also keeps us information hogs happy, we aren't going to get widespread religion for Infoviz. (thanks to Omar Javaid's Mobilog)

Technology Review: Model Explains Market Movements: "Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University have developed a mathematical model that shows that the stock market trading choices of the largest 500-odd players beget its big changes, including extreme swings like the crashes of 1929 and 1987." The research appears in the May 15, 2003 issue of Nature.

I was curious whether this ties in with the newly faddish interests in Small World Networks. And sure enough a little digging turned up a more more in-depth article on the market modeling that shows that indeed not only the market, but actual individual trades, exhibit a power law distribution. Perhaps this isn't just a fad after all, but a fundamental shift that may later affect the way we deal with everything from statistics to network management. At least that's what my notebooks have kept filling up with for the last five years.

Point and Shoot goes non-virtual: San Francisco and Auckland, New Zealand-based GeoVector claims to be taking the game of Doom to the streets, starting in Tokyo. We have people on the streets now, shooting each other with real bullets. And we have people sitting at desktops pretending to be shooting each other with virtual bullets. What's going to happen when the boundaries between those two worlds become less distinct?

Point-n-shoot videogames are among the oldest known species when it comes to the short history of the evolution of screen-based, interactive digital entertainment. Targeting a virtual opponent and clicking a button to see it turn into pixelated vapor has evolved from the abstracted, black-and-white grace of asteroids, to the nausea-inducing polychromatic excitement of Doom-like massacres.

The time is ripe for the next leap, and thanks to companies like GeoVector "point-n-shoot" will soon take on quite literal a meaning, with mobile phones instead of chainsaws, and real people acting as targets. In other words we are bound to soon leave Flatland, on a pilgrimage that will take us from artfully juxtaposed polygons back to our polises, from the kaleidoscopic glow of our screens to the sunlit surfaces of our cities.

Further still lie urban scenarios in which sword and gun-wielding, self-appointed heroes will keep hordes of invisible invaders at bay.
We thought that cities filled with people busy talking to themselves were strange enough a sight, but the location-based rollercoaster ride will hold quite a few surprises. Just don't leave your valuables in your pockets, they might fall out as you're spinning. - from Freegorifero

The Antigravity Underground (Wired): "The fantastic floating device called a lifter has no moving parts, no onboard fuel, and no shortage of wide-eyed admirers. Even inside NASA. Real scientists can easily shoot down the antigravity claims of lifters - but they can't stop the hard-core believers from flying them."

Extreme Mobility Ray Ozzie's latest thoughts are a good rant on his views about what the different approaches to "mobility" that are out there. Skip the first couple paragraphs before you get tired, and check out the Dimensions of Mobility, and Architectures for Mobility. A nice rundown of the different appraoches people have taken to going mobile.

It's interesting to see Ray trying to define a model for the various approaches, and reminds me of the original thoughts about "client-server" naming and the early days of network architecture (ahhh, the glory of star networks). Perhaps this language will eventually codify, but right now wireless is the wild west.