Getting a charge out of your batteries

Here’s another cute gadget, shown to us in the NY Times Gadgetwise blog: Size AA rechargeable batteries with built-in USB plugs, so you can plug the batteries directly into your computer to charge them. And here they are on Amazon.

They’re very cute. Only, they have several problems, some of which are pointed out in the user reviews on Amazon:

1. The USB plugs are on the flimsy side. Amazon users say they break easily.
2. They’re bulky and awkward as USB devices, and you’ll often not be able to fit two of them into two adjacent USB sockets.
3. Because the plug takes up some of the bulk of the battery, the battery itself has something shy of 2/3 the capacity of a typical AA.
4. You pay a lot for the novelty: it costs a great deal more than other rechargeable batteries.

It’s interesting how many of the favourable reviews, including the one in the Times, downplay the drawbacks, saying that they’re worth it because they’re rechargeable... ignoring that other kinds of rechargeable AA batteries are higher capacity, more reliable, and cheaper.

Amazon is selling these at two for nearly $20. For about $20 (including shipping), you can get a USB charger and four batteries. And then a pack of four more batteries costs $10. These guys just aren’t worth the cost.

Also, before you count on charging your batteries with your computer, remember that it can take several hours to get a full charge, and most computers don’t power the USB ports unless the computer is running. So you might have to leave your laptop running overnight in order to charge the batteries, regardless of which USB solution you go for.

You’re probably best off with something like this, a compact charger that packs easily, plugs into a wall socket, and works on both 110V and 240V power, so you can bring it with you anywhere.

Clever use of technology

Here’s an amusing little device that Eric Taub writes about in the New York Times:

All of this is why a new product from Zomm may wind up hitting a nerve. A small electronic disc that fits on a key ring, the product, also called the Zomm, connects to a phone via Bluetooth. Separate the two devices by more than 30 feet, and the Zomm first vibrates, then flashes and then screams.

Mr Taub notes that one disadvantage of the device is that there’s no way to alter the 30-foot distance before the alarm goes off; depending on where you are, 30 feet could be too far. Indeed, it could be... but there’s a good reason the distance can’t be controlled. 30 feet is a familiar number: it happens to be the nominal range of Bluetooth. That means the device is just detecting when the Bluetooth connection with your phone fails, and it then screams about the failure.

And that means that it won’t know the difference between a connection failure that happens because you left your phone in the bar and walked out, and one that happens for another reason — perhaps your phone’s battery is low and the Bluetooth shuts off automatically, or perhaps you turn the Bluetooth off yourself, forgetting the Zomm device’s dependency on it.

What’s more, the Bluetooth range can be drastically less than 30 feet if there are interfering factors, such as walls, machinery, and even people blocking the way. It can also drop because of radio-frequency interference. Lend your phone to a friend at a party and walk across the room to get another drink... and even if you’re only ten or fifteen feet away, you may find yourself loudly embarrassed (unless, perhaps, you can use it as an opportunity to brag about your slick toy).

It is a clever idea, but, as Mr Taub points out, it’s expensive and impractical. Still, I do have to give it points for the cleverness.

Hm, what to blog about?...

New Scientist tells us that some of my former IBM Research colleagues have been busy looking at ways to give bloggers inspiration:

Want to get more people to read your blog? A software tool that provides a list of topics for you to write about could help.

Blog Muse [PDF], developed by Werner Geyer and Casey Dugan at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, produces the list based on other users’ suggestions or by matching the blogger’s profile with other writers’, and scouring their posts for keywords.

It was created after a poll of IBM bloggers showed that new writers often struggle to come up with initial topics and were hesitant to write if they didn’t already have an audience. “People may not write about exactly what was requested, but the suggestions might inspire them to explore a new avenue,” says Geyer.

Of course, it’s not rocket science to know that people trying to figure out what to write about could use some advice. What’s cool about this, then, is how they find other bloggers with profiles similar to yours, and use what they write about — and what they say they want to read about — as a jumping-off point. I like that approach, and I think it’d be useful.

And what’s more, it appears that blog entries using Blog Muse suggestions were more popular:

While the system was intended to tackle writer’s block, bloggers using it proved to be no more prolific than others. But those who wrote blogs based on topics Blog Muse suggested were twice as likely to receive comments, the numbers reading it rose, and where readers assigned ratings to the posts, these were also higher.

It’s not clear how well this work, which was tested within IBM, would carry over into the Internet blogging world. The researchers selected participants from IBM’s BlogCentral internal blogging site, and that site has some significantly different characteristics to Internet blogs. As its name implies, it’s a central system that has the blogs cross-referenced and collected. Finding blogs to follow is a very different process there than on the Internet. On top of that, there’s a dashboard feature that shows the recent blog entries, making it easy for users to see what’s being written, even on blogs they do not follow.

It’s also not clear how effectively we could collect “what I want to read about” topics on the Internet at large, without filling the list with so much noise and silliness that it becomes useless (consider slashdot, for instance).

In any case, this is interesting work that looks like it’d be fun to play with and to adapt for the Internet. And I hope the authors have a chance to take it in that direction.

The Internet camera?

You know what I would like? An Internet camera. It would be just like the digital camera I have today: it would take pictures, compress them into JPEG files, and store them on an SD card in the camera. Of course, it would also have a GPS receiver, and it would include the GPS information in the file’s metadata, so the photos would automatically be geotagged. Nothing we aren’t already doing.

The difference, though, is that it would also have WiFi and 3G capabilities (and maybe Bluetooth as well). Using that, it would connect to the Internet (perhaps through your mobile phone, with Bluetooth). It would have software that knows how to interface with popular photo-sharing sites — Picasa, Flickr, Facebook — with an easy way to create extensions to support others.

What would happen is that after a new photo is compressed and stored, an elf software in the camera would, if configured by the user to do so, upload the picture to the user’s chosen photo-sharing site. The user would, of course, have full control over this: which site to use, the login credentials used, the album/group/set it’s put into, the privacy settings for new photos. It would happen in the background, not affecting the use of the camera (maybe with a few-minute delay to give me a chance to decide to delete a bad shot first). When there’s no Internet connection available, it would re-try a little later.

We can already email photos — or post them to sites — from our mobile phones, of course. But we have to do that manually, one at a time, and the photos from most phones suck are less than perfect. Having this happen automatically, in the background, and on a real camera would have a lot of benefits. Perhaps there might be an option for me to trigger the upload, photo by photo. If it were a quick one or two button process, that’d be OK.

There are issues, of course. For one, it’d be wisest to have the photos that are uploaded be private by default. That means that when you get a real winner that you immediately want to share with the world (or just your world of friends), you’d still have to manually change the privacy for that photo.

Sending large image files up to the Internet all the time would also eat battery power, and that’s a significant issue. As it is, I can go wild taking pictures all day on one set of batteries. I might need three or four sets, or even more, with this feature.

Is there already a camera that does this? A search of Amazon doesn’t find any. Cockamamie idea, maybe? The battery-life problem would be a killer?

Internet school bus

Last week, the New York Times published an item about putting wireless Internet on a school bus. Using a $200 router and $60/month for Internet service, a school district in Arizona has equipped a bus, and is allowing students to use the Internet connection on the way to and from school. It’s working wonderfully, not only giving the students a chance to use the dead time, but also making the bus ride more serene:

Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.”

What a great idea! I’d like to see this expanded. The cost is very small — even if the router should need to be replaced each year, equipping one bus for a school year (September thru June) costs $800. If that benefits 40 students, it’s only $20 per student. What else could we do that would give any sort of benefit for that little outlay?

And what a benefit! Sure, many — perhaps most — of the kids will be playing games, watching YouTube, or using Facebook, but there are some, as the article points out, doing school work during bus time. And by quieting things down, it’s reducing stress on the driver and making for a safer ride. Everyone wins here.

I’ll be sending this to my local school district. And I hope they’ll have been flooded with them by now.

Building a better drain trap

I’ve been critical, here, of patents that seem to have been issued for ideas that don’t represent much innovation (most recently, this one), extending existing “prior art” only a little, or not at all. Many patents, particularly for computer software, describe things that are neither novel nor non-obvious.

Contrast that with this product (pointed out on BoingBoing recently), which really seems to be a neat, original, useful, idea that is a significant step beyond the prior art.

Of course, you know that’s got to be patented. And, indeed, a quick search at the US PTO came up with U.S. patent number 7,107,634, “Method and apparatus for cleaning a conduit” (and there’s an follow-on application pending that adds the “self-cleaning” feature).

Of course, this isn’t computer software, and part of my point has always been that physical inventions are easier to distinguish and to justify than software mechanisms are. When you can actually build it and look at it, you can readily show how it improves on what’s been made before... and it’s also easy to see if it’s substantially the same as something else.

Lots of people in the Boing Boing comments section are criticizing the design of this, and perhaps they’re right — perhaps this is a seemingly good idea that won’t work out in practice. But it sure looks interesting and useful... and it’s certainly an example of the sort of innovation the patent process was meant to foster.

Poken (not Pokémon)

I’ve been in Boston for the week, attending the Open Mobile Alliance meeting. Whenever one goes to meetings, one does the dance of the business card exchange. Because it’s my first OMA meeting, I have more of it going on than usual, as I’m meeting a lot of people for the first time. So I’ve collected a batch of 2-inch × 3.5-inch cards, which I then have to copy information from and put it into my address book. And there’s no hope of reading these things without my reading glasses.

They’re inconvenient, to be sure, but they do work, and we’re used to them. Everyone has them. And guess what:

No one has tried to pull out a poken.

Yes, some folks have come up with another idea for an electronic business card. We tried various mechanisms for “beaming” contact information between mobile devices, but none of them caught on because of setup issues and security concerns. Some people have even tried passing out memory devices with their data loaded onto them, but that’s just too expensive to be practical. Now we have poken.

Basically, it’s a revisiting of “beaming”, but with some twists that resolve many of the problems we had with that in the past. There’s no setup issue — you touch your poken to mine, and we record each other as contacts. Because physical contact (or at least very close proximity) is required, most of the security problems are gone (they had to do with remote reading). The poken devices are even meant to be “fun”, looking like goofy characters with overly large “hands”, and the exchange is made to resemble a handshake. A device costs about $20... a little expensive for what it is, but certainly cheaper than a box of cards.

A poken can hold 64 contacts. I can’t tell from the web site what happens when it’s full — whether I can still give out my information, even if I can’t receive any more. But, still, we’ve all had that occasion when we arrived at a day of meetings with only two cards left. Damn! Forgot to reload. That seems less likely to be a problem here. Also, the poken timestamps the information exchange, so you know when you got your contact’s “card”. That seems like it could be handy.

Possibly the “fun” aspect is one that’s blocked it from the business community so far. Business cards are businesslike. Poken are toys.

But beyond that, the system introduces its own issues.

The main one is that you aren’t actually exchanging information. What you’re exchanging are, essentially, poken access tokens, which you take to the poken web site to get access to the real information (which then, in turn, points to a profile somewhere else, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, as chosen by each contact). Related to that, the reason there aren’t any setup problems is that it’s a single, proprietary system. Everyone has to have a poken, not any other device. Everyone has to sign up at the poken web site. Poken, thus, has all your contact information. Most people won’t be bothered by that. Some will.

Also, here’s what the “How does it work?” page says about accessing contacts, emphasis mine:

Your contacts can view your Poken Card on doyoupoken.com, but, if they want to see more, they only have to click the logo to see your profile on the social networking site you’ve chosen to share. On the Poken site you and your friends can view your contacts alphabetically, or chronologically in your “social timeline.” You can also send messages, group contacts with a label, write notes for yourself about each contact, and so much more.

Here, again: my friends can view my contacts. Are “friends”, here, the same as “contacts”? If so, I certainly don’t want all my contacts to see all my contacts. If not, then, despite their protestations to the contrary, poken is setting up yet another social networking site. In any case, it’s clear that their success is directly connected to how many people join. And, since they have access to all the contacts of their members (you can bet there’ll be a way to upload non-poken contacts to their system, part of the “so much more”), there’s a great deal of proselytizing, data mining, and second-level marketing available to them here.

Whether or not any of this bothers you, it’s likely that you’d want to export your contacts from poken and import them to some other address book or contact list. The web site doesn’t mention anything about that capability. If it exists, it’s certain to be a manual process. Having some new service that manages your contacts might be inconvenient.

Of course, in order for two devices to be able to exchange data, they must have power — they have small lithium batteries. According to the faq, the battery “should last approximately six (6) months,” but heavy use will reduce that. Better be sure you have a spare battery to hand.

Another serious issue is what will happen to your contact information if the company should collapse. Of course, your device itself would become less “fun” in that case. More importantly, though, you’d probably lose your contacts unless you’ve been able to export them, and have done so regularly.

The poken idea does seem to be getting some adoption by the younger, cooler set, so maybe it will catch on and succeed. I’ll watch it, and see what happens. Meanwhile, you can have my business card.

What will they come up with next?

I’m always interested in what innovations technology spawns. The base technology is often wonderful enough, but what people think of doing with it is what’s really fascinating. And as someone who’s in the business of trying to find innovative ways to use technology, I especially appreciate it.

I worked in what was then IBM’s Federal Systems Division when we had a part of the contract to develop the Global Positioning System (I didn’t work on the system myself, but many of my colleagues did). Conceived (and funded) for the military, the GPS system was opened up for civilian use — first with some restrictions (encryption keys were needed to get full resolution out of the system, so civilians couldn’t establish location as accurately as the military could), and then, in 2000, with full resolution.

Since then, of course, everyone knows about GPS devices, even if they don’t fully appreciate how the technology works, and just how cool it is. Many of us have GPS navigation systems in our cars, or we have handheld versions — I have one in my BlackBerry. And what would we do without them? We might not even be able to find the  railroad  tracks.

Well... soon, we won’t imagine how we ever played golf without one. Yes, Garmin, one of the top three GPS makers (the others are TomTom and Magellan), has come out with a GPS device just for golfers.

This year, one new Garmin device in particular caught our eye: the Approach G5. This waterproof, handheld GPS device uses the satellite-based GPS network, first developed by the military, for a cause vital to homeland defense: It calculates a golfer’s distance to the center of the green or other features of the golf course, so he can select the proper club.

The device is similar to the binocular-like rangefinders popular with some golfers today. But those gadgets use lasers to approximate the distance from the golfer to the target. With the Approach G5, Garmin touts the precision of the GPS network and its touch screen, which lets duffers specify with a few taps on the screen the exact distance to where they want to place the ball.

A cool use of technology. Can it be extended to other uses? This one’s clearly a specialized device: it will come pre-loaded with the layouts of “about half the golf courses in the United States”. But does this provide the germ of an idea that someone else will take to other domains?

It’s expensive, too: $500. But, as a Garmin salesman points out, “People pay $200 to $300 for a club and $200 for green fees in this sport.” Might the Approach G5 be worth, say, two new high-end golf clubs? I don’t golf, so I don’t know how helpful this would be.

I do know that it would be cool, in general, to have a handheld device that would show me an aerial view of where I am, let me touch other points, and immediately show me the path and distance to them. Put Google Maps together with a GPS device, and I’d like that. Maybe not $500 worth, though....

Streetlight serenade

Perhaps you live someplace with streetlights that stay on all night. Perhaps they shine in your windows, and that bothers you; perhaps you just wonder about the electricity that’s wasted lighting them when they’re not needed. But, of course, they have to be lit, because one never knows when someone will need them, and... well... they can’t very well have on/off switches, can they?

Ah. Yes, they can. The village of Dörentrup, Germany, for example, has set up a system wherein people can send text messages to a town telephone number, and the messages contain codes to switch on the lights for specific streets. After a short time, the lights will switch off again.

It sounds like a very cool system. A simple extension would allow a user to specify a longer time for the lights to stay on than the current 15 minutes (the radio report I heard on Tuesday was longer than the video in the link, and included a woman who went out for a late-night run, being sure to have her phone with her in case the lights should switch off before she’d finished and she’d have to stop and turn them on again).

The good part is that the codes are printed on signs on the lampposts, so you don’t have to know them offhand (though you certainly might, for ones you commonly use, and you can also look them up online). I presume the phone number is also printed on the signs, or it could be.

The bad part is that you have to register your phone with the system. That means that visitors passing through the village can’t activate the lights. That might not be a problem in Dörentrup, where there aren’t likely to be many people “passing through” after 9 P.M., but larger towns and cities might have to have an easy way for a visitor to work things.

This sounds like a great idea that could save a lot of energy and money. And, of course, it’s a cool (and fairly simple) use of technology.

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike

Last summer, Paris started a municipal bike-lending program (here's the program's
official web page). Not to be outdone by the French, Washington, DC is now starting one too:

WASHINGTON — Starting next month, people here will be able to rent a bicycle day and night with the swipe of a membership card.

A new public-private venture called SmartBike DC will make 120 bicycles available at 10 spots in central locations in the city. The automated program, which district officials say is the first of its kind in the nation, will operate in a similar fashion to car-sharing programs like Zipcar.

Of course, 120 bicycles doesn’t hold a headlight to the more than 10,000 that the French system started with, and Paris should have well over 20,000 available by now, ten months into the program. Even so, it’s worth starting it up and trying it out, and if it works well they can add more wheels on the ground.

Still, it seems odd that they’re only kicking it off with 120 bikes and ten locations, given that DC is around twice the size of Paris (though it has only about ¼ the population). And, of course, they’re worried about theft of the bicycles. They plan to charge the last user for a bike missing longer than two days... but that could kill the system if people figure out how to steal the bikes between uses, and innocent users wind up being held responsible.

The article says that San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland are considering it too (I can see cycling up some of those San Franciscan hills, yo).

In other bicycle news, New York City has designated May as Bike Month, using it to promote bike-riding to reduce congestion and pollution, and to improve health. Ms Lee’s article doesn’t mention the annual Five Borough Bike Tour, the first Sunday each May (May 4th, this year), a nice 42-mile ride that I did once, ten years or so ago. It’s a bit of a zoo, biking in a pack of 30,000 cyclists (of varying skill and politeness levels), and I see that they’ve put a cap of that number on the sign-ups, and have been sold out since early April.

Even though it’s kind of crazy, it’s a good ride, and something one should do at least once. It’s really neat riding through one of the busiest cities in the world on streets that have been closed to motorized traffic. And it’s neat to ride through the various neighborhoods, seeing the residents out on the sidewalk watching, waving, and cheering (though it’s not a race, in any sense).

It’s time to get my bike tuned up and get out in the spring air....

GeoTagging

I’ve just discovered a very cool site, loc.alize.us, a mashup that takes advantage of GeoTags.

Let me back up.

Social tagging, or just tagging on the Internet is the practice of associating a bit of (usually) shared information with some Internet thing — a web page, a photo, a YouTube video, a music file. A tag is usually a word or short phrase, so it’s just a small burst of information, not a lengthy comment. Other users can see the tags you’ve put on things, and can put their own tags on. Collectively, the tags can be used to layer a kind of ad hoc information system on the Internet. Someone looking for, say, cool places to ski, can find lists of ski resorts, or can search for ski resorts through Google... or she can look at what people have tagged with ski-related tags. It’s sort of the Internet word-of-mouth way of doing things, and it’s very popular on the various social networking sites.

Flickr, for example, has provided a specific kind of tagging: geographic tagging, or GeoTagging — you tag a photo with the location where the photo was taken. Rather handy, because people looking at your photo can see where it was (or, at least, where you said it was; as with any user tagging, accuracy is, well, not guaranteed).

OK, so now we’re back to loc.alize.us. They’ve put a very nice interface onto the GeoTags. Try it: go look at my photo of Prague Castle (Pražský Hrad), which I took in late March 2007. Note the link at the end of the description, which says, “Taken from the Karlův Most east tower.” Click the link.

You’ll get to loc.alize.us, on a page that shows the area of Prague where I took the photo, with a pink marker at the spot I tagged. You’ll also see a bunch of blue markers, where other people tagged their photos (click on the screen-capture on this page to see what it looks like). Hold your mouse over a marker, and you’ll see a thumbnail of the photo that was tagged there. Click the marker, and the thumbnail is replaced by a larger version of the photo. Hold the mouse over the photo, and you’ll see more information, and a link that takes you to the Flickr page for it.

Of course, you can zoom the map in and out. In the panes on the left, you can look through nearby photos, find specific locations or Flickr users, and so on.

Browse around; it’s fun. But, um...

...don’t waste your whole day on it!

What shall I play?

Here’s an interesting idea. New Scientist tells us about a prototype system developed at UCLA:

Ever had a party ruined by your host’s atrocious taste in music? Then you might welcome a system that polls the musical preferences of party-goers and creates a playlist to keep everyone happy.

Developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, the Smart Party system relies on people carrying Wi-Fi-enabled music-playing devices.

Software running on each device beams each user’s playlist to a nearby computer, which is connected to an amp and speakers.

The computer takes a poll of titles to work out the most popular genre and can also copy and play tracks from each device. It can then play music from the most popular overall music genre or tracks supplied by each party-goer in turn.

Of course, there are obvious privacy issues here, with reading the playlists from people’s music players, along with copyright issues, if they copy the music from the players, or even if they just play it directly at an event where the DJ is paid.

But if it’s just a question of reading the playlists of people who’ve opted into the system, that could be very cool. A system that would do that, and then pick music that’s similar to what the people in attendance already like would be sure to be playing the right sort of music and would also expose people to related music that they might not already be familiar with. Everyone wins.

This seems like a very cool idea.