Category Archives: innovation

Google Goggles – Search with your camera phone

Google has just released a new service. It is called Google Goggles and it runs on cell phones (not many people know that Google produces a mobile phone operating system).

Basically, you take a picture with your phone and the service gives you information about what you’re looking at. In this example the service recognizes the Golden Gate Bridge and returns information on it.

Google Goggles example

It’s a very early version of the service, but it also works on books, business cards, paintings, logos, and even wine labels! Take a look at the official site to get a better idea.

I’ve read a review of the service and it seems to work reasonably well. Amazing!

It feels a lot like magic! This could also be quite scary. Imagine a day when people can find your Facebook profile by scanning you with their phone!

Americans shouldn’t worry much about the rise of China

Sad americaAccording to this article from The Economist Americans are apparently unhappy with the state of their country in general. According to the article 80% of Americans think the country is going the wrong way.

The article lists several reasons that the national mood is low – the war on terror and the economy are the major categories. The rising China also seems to be freaking the Americans out pretty badly – let’s see how they react when China wins more medals in the Olympics.

America has gotten into sullen moods before and recovered. But:
“Still, countries, like people, behave dangerously when their mood turns dark. If America fails to distinguish between what it needs to change and what it needs to accept, it risks hurting not just allies and trading partners, but also itself.”

There are things that do need to be changed. For instance: education, health, the war on terror and Guantánamo Bay. However, it is an attitude adjustment that is required when it comes to the rise of Asia and China.

There are two reasons not to worry about the rise of China:

  1. “Even at its present growth rate, China’s GDP will take a quarter of a century to catch up with America’s; and the internal tensions that China’s rapidly changing economy has caused may well lead it to stumble before then”
  2. “Even if Asia’s rise continues unabated, it is wrong-and profoundly un-American-to regard this as a problem. Economic growth, like trade, is not a zero-sum game. The faster China and India grow, the more American goods they buy”

I like the last paragraph:
“Everybody goes through bad times. Some learn from the problems they have caused themselves, and come back stronger. Some blame others, lash out and damage themselves further. America has had the wisdom to take the first course many times before. Let’s hope it does so again.”

Do Stuff in Cape Town – my new project

If things have been a little slow on this blog lately it’s because I have been working on something new. It’s a site called Do Stuff in Cape Town and I have described it as an encyclopedia of activities in and around Cape Town.

The cool thing about it is that it works like a Wiki so anyone can contribute to it. I have developed it so that anyone visiting the site can easily:

  • Create new activities – there is a simple form for adding new activities
  • Update existing activities – say there is some detail or tip that you would like to add to an existing activity
  • Rate activities – it’s as simple as clicking on the star rating you want
  • Browse/search activities – I have put quite a lot of thought into making this as simple as possible
  • Subscribe to new activities – Get updates when new activities are added to the site

I have tried to make everything as simple as possible, but please give it a try and let me know what you think. Add an activity, or browse through those that are already there. I think that the site is almost ready, but I would really appreciate feedback!

Some of the activities that have already been loaded:

Evolutionary design – getting the computer to evolve novel designs

The Economist has this article about how designers are using software to evolve better designs. The approach is called evolutionary design and it “enables a computer to run through tens of millions of variations on an invention until it hits on the best solution to a problem.”

The system takes the design blueprints as a genetic makeup and then evolves a population of different designs. Ones, that work well, are discarded and those that are promising are mixed with other promising designs. This process is repeated for perhaps millions of generations until some truly “inspired” designs are generated.

The article describes cases where evolutionary design has come up with novel designs that human designers had not thought of. For instance:

  • At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos used an evolutionary algorithm to come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre’s bandwidth.

The evolutionary algorithm (creating and mixing blueprints) is quite easy to develop (I once wrote one), the hard part is evaluating which designs are “good”. That is done using a software simulation of the designs and is the true constraint on this novel technology.

Still, very interesting.

Interesting new door design

Wired has this brief article about a new door design. The door is made of horizontal strips which can slide out independently. Sensors will open the strips just enough to let an approaching person through the door. Apparently this saves energy and is better at keep dust out.

Pretty cool, but I think that it could be a little disconcerting to walk through – at least in the beginning.

Cool tools – Launchy

I’m banging away on my computer all day long, so anything that increases my productivity is welcome. Launchy is one of the best programs in that category and I probably use it hundreds of times a day.

Basically, Launchy is a quick program launcher. For instance, if I wanted to open up a new Excel window quickly I would:

  1. Hit control-space to open up the Launchy window
  2. Start typing what I am after and Launchy would guess what it is. In my case ‘ex’ is enough (Launchy learns your favorites)
  3. Hit enter and up comes Excel

That’s 4 keys to open Excel!

Launchy indexes all of the shortcuts in your start menu and on the Desktop. No more scratching through the start menu looking for a shortcut.

You can do all sorts of other clever things with Launchy. Get it to index text files or commonly used Excel files. Index your bookmarks folder for each access to your favorite sites. Make a shortcut to shut down your computer.

It’s one of those programs that just works. It does what you want, it’s quick, it looks good – you will never look back.

Chinese rip-offs

This article is about the Chinese rip-off industry – very interesting.

The article is basically discussing how far counterfeit goods have come in China. From poor quality t-shirts, now cars and serious electronics are also being copied. For instance when LG recently launched a new phone in China it didn’t sell because everyone already had a fake which worked just as well.

Maybe the real companies should push up volumes and make a little more money?

From the article:

  • Nearly every type of product can be—and is—cloned in China, sometimes so well that the ripped-off manufacturers inadvertently service the fakes when warranty claims come in.
  • In the south, one cloning operation didn’t just copy a technology company’s product line—it duplicated the entire company, creating a shadow enterprise with corporate headquarters, factories, and sales and support staff.
  • In the mid-’90s, developers began to build shadow factories—identical plants, often constructed from the same blueprints legitimate manufacturers used to launch their ventures. Sometimes the plans were sold by managers at the genuine facilities. Other times, local officials and organized crime conspired to create a second set of blueprints.
  • The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.) Both processes take about a month. By then, ancillary items—plastic casings, accessories, manuals and packaging—are ready as well.
  • When Samsung busted some of these cloners they were “impressed by the efficiency of the cloners, so much so that the company offered them jobs. The cloners said no. Earning about $1.25 per phone, the cloners said, they found it easier and more profitable to make fakes.”

Armed robots to be deployed in Iraq


The Americans actually have a surprisingly high number of robots in service in Iraq. They have been heavily utilizing robots bomb disposal robots to good effect.

Wired has an article saying that the first armed robots are now to be deployed. There are already 3 of these deployed in Iraq and they haven’t yet fired the attached M249 machine guns.

Pretty scary that we are already at this point.