PUBLIC MARKS with search concept

We have developed a functional demo of our research UI concept that runs on a Nokia Maemo development device. It consists of a custom-built web runtime on top of QTWebKit, the Linked Internet UI Platform, written using HTML5, JavaScript, and a SQL database backend. The platform supports online and offline operation and is able to synchronize data with services for efficient offline use. Our current prototype supports Flickr, Ovi, Twitter, among others for demonstration and user evaluation purposes; and it can be extended to cover new views, content types, and services. The demo debuts at Nokia World 2009 in Stuttgart, Germany. The short video below shows its essential messages.

Last month, Condé Nast played show-and-tell with its concept of a digitized magazine. Today it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demoing a concept version of Sports Illustrated it says will be able to run on whatever tablet Apple (AAPL) or any else has up their sleeves. Eventually, the publisher imagines that it will port all its titles into the new format, which it says will be ready for primetime by the middle of next year or sooner.

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for "sign in" on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site... Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

A massive increase in international co-operation and significant investment in awareness-building and training are essential if the concept of an Internet of Things (IoT) is to be turned into a meaningful reality, says a European Union-funded project in its final report, “RFID and the Inclusive Model for the Internet of Things.”

Voilà un nouveau type de magazine qui promet en ces temps de crise, le gratuit de proximité ! C’est un concept japonais qui propose de mieux vivre son quartier et de consommer malin.

When the idea came up, we thought “wow, this is really innovative and smart”. But quickly we found out that we had not invented anything: Tupperware has been doing for years. And since 1907 a famous movement has functionned in a similar way, groups of people getting together following guidelines expressed in a book. It is of course Scouting. Scouting spread all around the world based on Baden Powell’s book. So if you thought Barcamp and Pecha Kucha’s concept of decentralized events was new, unfortunately it is not really. Welcome to the frustration of living in the 21st century, almost everything has already been done :)

After my last video about using a barcode scanner to add and search books in your library, I was feeling pretty happy. Bar code scanners are pretty cheap–mine cost about $65. But then Google released the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) and it turns out that you don’t even need a bar code scanner. Instead, you can use an Android phone such as the G1.

Just as a proof-of-concept, here’s a barcode scanner written in six lines of Python code: