In the push to develop mobile applications for our libraries, should librarians be paying more attention to the technological differences between mobile and smartphones, especially with low smartphone penetration in Canada?

As explained by Mac Slocum of O’Reilly TOC,

Comparing a basic mobile phone to a spiffy new smartphone is like comparing a circa-1993 desktop computer to a Macbook Pro. They’re related in a basic sense, but the discrepancies are immense.

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Last month during my thunder talk at Digital Odyssey I mentioned an iPhone app called StreetMuseum, created for the Museum of London by the creative agency Brothers and Sisters, that overlays images from the museum’s collection of photos onto the user’s view of the street.

Historypin, a new project by We Are What We Do and Google, comes very close to allowing anyone to recreate this. Unfortunately there is, as yet, no mention of a mobile app. However, the reason for the project, “to get generations talking more, sharing more and coming together more often” is a worthwhile undertaking and places a much needed emphases on the important social role that technology can play. Continue Reading »

If you want to know what future technology could look like, it might be a good idea to ask the people that are going to be using it. With this in mind, Latitude Research and ReadWriteWeb conducted a study asking children (ages 12 and under) to describe their ideas for new technologies. The results have just been released in a report yesterday.

The key findings include;

Digital, Meet Physical : 38% of children’s innovations called for more “immersive content experiences” particularly the seamless integration of digital and physical spaces.

Intuitive Interaction : The majority of children (83%) wanted “anthropomorphic technologies”-devices that offer human-level responsiveness.

Look, Ma, No Hands! : 37% of children’s technology concepts did not include the traditional keyboard/mouse interface, with 12% incorporating touchscreen features, 8%, visual controls, and 4% used telepathy!

The Social World is Growing and Shrinking? : The report explains “For kids today, the world, ironically, feels smaller and more accessible -just as their awareness of its size, diversity, and possibility is increasing.”

Confidence Through Creation & Creativity : 31% of technologies proposed by children were a tool for creating something, with artistic design rated close to gaming.

The report is described on ReadWriteWeb in more detail, Part 1 and Part 2.

A new technology from Ricoh Innovations called Visual Search may revolutionize the relationship between print and digital content.

At Ricoh Innovations we are developing visual search technology for paper documents. Our mobile visual search algorithms create “clickable paper” — documents that have the interactivity of web pages and can be used anywhere a camera phone can connect to the Internet.  Our full-page visual search techniques instantaneously find documents that match what’s scanned on a copier.

This means that any page of text can have digital content added to it, without the use of QR codes or similar technology. Continue Reading »

I’ve chosen Neri Oxman for my Ada Lovelace Day blog post. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Neri Oxman is an architect and researcher whose work attempts to establish new forms of experimental design and novel processes of material practice at the interface of design, computer science, material engineering and ecology. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture and previously a medical scholar at the Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, she is currently based at MIT where she is a presidential research fellow and a PhD candidate in Design Computation. Transcending disciplinary and professional boundaries, Oxman’s work pioneers Material Computation as a design paradigm beyond typological expression. She promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism…. Neri is the founder of Materialecology, an interdisciplinary design research initiative engaging in design research featuring new initiatives at the intellectual and productive interface between science, art and design…

The following is a talk from PopTech “Neri Oxman: On Designing Form”