Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007.
Some posts he’d like you to read:
The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin
His personal website is coldewey.cc.
We’ve always been interested in the Notion Ink project, which has always striven to be a true alternative to both the iPad and Android masses. Last time, it was through both a Pixel Qi screen and an interesting custom interface, but delays and yield problems more or less buried it and competitors piled up.
The sequel to Notion Ink’s Adam was originally going to have a 10″ screen running at 1920×1200. A post on the company’s development blog has admitted that this is not likely to happen. → Read More
In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” two children play in their “nursery,” a sort of home holodeck where they can conjure up any scene in which to play. Bradbury always had a wonderfully clunky sort of technobabble; in this case, as the father tells the mother, “it’s all dimensional superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief.”
Naturally, the nursery never shipped. It’s not a real thing, and there’s no mental tape film in 3M’s labs. But Bradbury wasn’t an engineer, and his story isn’t a patent application. It was a work of imagination — yet still guided by a sense of the practical.
Most concept devices, like last week’s eye-mounted display from Google, are works of imagination, and are usually good or bad concepts according to how well they manage the aspect of practicality. Sometimes they’re dead ends, pie in the sky. But often works of imagination are crystallizations of collective fear and desire: manifest destiny, in this case, for an industry. → Read More
Living in Seattle, you tend to find yourself in the company of tech people all the time. With Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Google, and a dozen other major companies established in the area, it’s never a surprise when you find out the guy next to you at the bar is working on Windows Phone 8 or Half-Life 3. This week, I was lucky enough to get a chance to see what Amazon has cooking for its next generation of e-readers. Their new offices and the mysterious Lab 126 are just down the street, after all, so I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened before now.
Back in November, I speculated that the new Kindles and Nooks and what have yous might have glowing screens, the likes of which we’ve seen occasionally but were never fully implemented. It turns out Amazon was thinking the same thing, and actually bought a company that was, I am told, the world leader in light-guide technology. They’ve finally gotten it to the point where it’s ready to be released, and a new generation of glowing Kindles will be coming our way sometime this year. → Read More
In some of the old science fiction stories I remember from Weird Tales and Ray Bradbury and the like, robots always figured. But they always came the way you might expect a new dryer or hot water heater to arrive. In a big box, packed in straw or foam, heavy and metal of course as they always were back in the day. But the world of robots is different from the way they imagined it then: the metallic golems of yore have given way to a sort of Cambrian explosion of potential robot types, imitating everything from worm to dog to bird.
A team of researchers hopes to both expand that robodiversity and change the way our future companions are delivered. Funded by the NSF, they’ve begun a 5-year-long project exploring the idea of on-demand robots.
MIT is leading the effort, specifically Professor Daniela Rus from CSAIL. They have researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard on the team, and the object is to “make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.” → Read More
Arizona’s legislature has passed some proposed amendments on Section 13-3916 of the State Statutes. The law has to do with stalking and harassment, and originally defined telephone harassment — generally a one-to-one communication that was deemed threatening or obscene.
The law has been revised with, essentially, a find-and-replace of “telephone” with “electronic or digital device,” without any thought given to how fundamentally different these forms of communication are. If signed by the governor, the revised law would potentially outlaw any speech on the internet determined by the government as being lewd, profane, threatening, or disturbing of the “peace, quiet, or right of privacy of any person.” → Read More
Cult of Mac has a great write-up of an app for iOS called Girls Around Me, which essentially displays check-ins and public profiles of girls around you. With a little shift in context it could easily be confused for a hot new startup (discoverability meets speed dating!), but no, it really is just a way for guys to creep on nearby girls who have failed to lock down their info.
It’s sad, but maybe something like this is what people need to shock them into understanding just how much information they put online. → Read More
February was a big month for Kickstarter. Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects, but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage.
But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site’s population of donors can handle?
Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. The site’s big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding. → Read More
The world of portable, general-purpose computing is moving along two parallel paths. First, and most popularly, you have devices like smartphones, which are focused on user interaction and connectivity, but are smart enough to be the “brain” for any number of more capable devices. Then there are purpose-built devices with one or a few specific functions: a high-precision range finder, or a pollutant detector, or a simple laser level.
But in the middle somewhere, and perhaps a bit into the future, you have a middle way: the tricorder. Some might consider it the best of both worlds; some, the worst. But whether it’s the one or the other, tricorders are getting more real by the day. The Tricorder Project is just one among many, but the idea is sound and hell, the device even works. → Read More
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