Thursday, April 22, 2004
TV-to-cellphone SD card video recorder
From engadget, "a little pyramidal device that hooks up to your TV and records video in 3GPP format onto an SD or miniSD card for playback on a cellphone. We’re sure we’ve seen an air freshener that looks like this somewhere, but hey, looks aren’t everything. Two hours’ worth of programming will fit on a 128MB card, and can be played back on any of DoCoMo’s recent FOMA phones or a couple of the new Vodafone Japan handsets."
From engadget, "a little pyramidal device that hooks up to your TV and records video in 3GPP format onto an SD or miniSD card for playback on a cellphone. We’re sure we’ve seen an air freshener that looks like this somewhere, but hey, looks aren’t everything. Two hours’ worth of programming will fit on a 128MB card, and can be played back on any of DoCoMo’s recent FOMA phones or a couple of the new Vodafone Japan handsets." This is an interesting evolution from the "view photos directly on your TV from your SD card" products -- which was the first round of dedicated memory card read/write objects. It certainly represents the larger movement towards two types of devices: converged all-in-one centers for your life (either phone/pda/tv/etc combo or the plasma TV/PC/video game object), or divergence devices that do one thing particularly well (such as memory stick display devices, music playing, or passive information display.
Monday, April 12, 2004
Hmm, why aren't there any 3G based MP3 players yet? Stream audio (a'la Musicmatch radio) based on the music you have on the player. Allows you to transfer over just 1 gig of music (to set up context) and get a virtually unlimited stream of music. It get's you away from the hard drive rat-race all the MP3 players are in, and would be much more personal than satellite radio could ever be.
Update: Now that I've done a little scouring, I've found some similar ideas around a Wifi MP3 player espoused in Business Week which would be interesting as long as you expect to regularly go through Wifi areas (it might be inconvenient if you used the player primarily for commuting, say). SonyEricsson also got about halfway there by designing a bluetooth MP3 player but didn't really set up any services layer for streaming audio from their 3G phones. And the Motorola A920 has a built in MP3 player, but no news on any of the other needs (ie profiling).
Update: Now that I've done a little scouring, I've found some similar ideas around a Wifi MP3 player espoused in Business Week which would be interesting as long as you expect to regularly go through Wifi areas (it might be inconvenient if you used the player primarily for commuting, say). SonyEricsson also got about halfway there by designing a bluetooth MP3 player but didn't really set up any services layer for streaming audio from their 3G phones. And the Motorola A920 has a built in MP3 player, but no news on any of the other needs (ie profiling).
Cameraphones could provide better location tracking than GPS
Rather than use GPS to find your way around town, a couple of researchers at Cambridge University are working on a program that can match up a photograph of a building taken with a cameraphone with a database of images and tell you, to within one meter, exactly where you are (regular GPS is only accurate to within about ten meters). Since the program could tell from the photograph you sent it not only where you were but also your orientation, it could give you directions like “turn left” rather than “go east.” The resolution of photos taken with cameraphones will have to get a lot better for this to work. And of course until someone builds a massive database of every building in the town/city/country/world it will be limited to that amount of area which can be surveyed.
This brings up all kinds of nice niche markets like virtual tourist (take picture of famous building, get info on the bldg and nearby restraunts), help on college campus, or even museum exhibit walk-throughs. In general the "recognize photo, provide context" idea is excellent if the services layer can be properly implemented.
Rather than use GPS to find your way around town, a couple of researchers at Cambridge University are working on a program that can match up a photograph of a building taken with a cameraphone with a database of images and tell you, to within one meter, exactly where you are (regular GPS is only accurate to within about ten meters). Since the program could tell from the photograph you sent it not only where you were but also your orientation, it could give you directions like “turn left” rather than “go east.” The resolution of photos taken with cameraphones will have to get a lot better for this to work. And of course until someone builds a massive database of every building in the town/city/country/world it will be limited to that amount of area which can be surveyed.
This brings up all kinds of nice niche markets like virtual tourist (take picture of famous building, get info on the bldg and nearby restraunts), help on college campus, or even museum exhibit walk-throughs. In general the "recognize photo, provide context" idea is excellent if the services layer can be properly implemented.
