Sixth Sense – an invention by Pranav Mistry @ TED

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design (think of it like a group of guys with great innovative brains coming together to demo their inventions).

If you have seen Mission Impossible and Minority Report then you will easily relate this gadget to those.

If you thought iPhone was so cool, just wait to see this video.

Pranav is a PhD student in MIT, Mass.

Let this gadget come to market i will be waiting in queue to buy it :)

I was amazed by the list of practical, day-to-day scenarios explained in this video, the video starts slowly and please wait to see the entire one and then you will realize how cool this invention is.

Microsoft Surface - no mouse no keyboard touch screen technology

Microsoft Surface

When I saw this today on news i could not believe my eyes and when i saw those 3 videos on microsoft site it was so amazing.

Microsoft Surface - is a 30 inches length table top screen which you keep like a coffee table in your room. It has got no keyboard or no mouse and is going to change the way you interact with computers.

The videos show the following,
1) A girl places her digital camera on the surface and immediately on the 30 inch table top all the images are shown, she selects what she wants and moves it and deletes what she does not want to a recycle bin.
2) A guy moves songs in to a zune player kept on top of the table top.
3) Two users play cards on the table top,
4) We can see videos and pictures, to resize a picture you need to hold the image corners and stretch your fingers, to shrink it - bring your fingers together.
5) When you place your credit card on the surface it reads the info
6) Also you can see a kid painting with bare fingers and picking colors from a pallette on the left.

http://microsoft.com/surface

Also Bill Gates spoke in a TV Show today how it is going to revolutionize our outlook, and guess what already early adopters are there,

Who all are rushing to get one?

a) T-Mobile the cell phone giant is going to keep each surface pad in its branches so that you can pick up a cell phone and keep it on this table and it will show the price and specifications of the cell phone
b) Sheraton Hotels is going to have one soon.

c) Harrah's entertainment.

Do you want to see it live?
1) The first technology preview is going to be on Sat June 9th 2007 at New York City and also
2) Aug 5th 2007 @ san diego, CA.

It is available for purchase starting winter 2007. I dont know how much they are going to price it yet !!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm... so developers like us will have to start writing applications for the surface, no more right click, context menu code, no more lost focus, got focus, selected index changed, new api may come like got finger, lost finger, click intensity changed etc

Also i was so happy to see one of the person behind this techology who is in the surface team is an indian - Anusha.

It is so amazing to see what all technology can do in our life.

But if you think about it, it is not new because when you go to the railway station they got these huge touch screen terminals where you touch with your finger to buy tickets.

Seen above is the picture of a kid who selects green color using one finger and draws a face on the surface screen.

Did you Jott today? A useful tool for people on the move

I recently started using Jott (a great tool/site). Let me explain this with a simple scenario,

You are on the road driving your car, you want to immediately send a message to your friend or team member, you simple call a phone number (Jott # is 1-877-568-8486) and spell out to whom the message is intended for and then talk the message (like in voicemail), Jott collects your voice mail and sends it to the person via email/cell phone.

Hmmm that was simple, you can say it is a "voice to email" application, so next question is why am i so excited about it, you can say why call jott instead you can call your friend itself right, here is where it is very useful to me,

1) Most of my contacts are in india while i live in US, so i can simple call a local US number and jott a voice mail, it will transform my voice in to an audio file and send it to my team mate in india or my friend. So when you are on the road but need to send urgent msg use jott :)
2) You can leave simple reminders for yourself via voice which gets collected in your e-mail box.

The site is very well done,

• During registration they ask for email confirmation and validation,
• Followed by cell phone confirmation and validation (great),
• You can add contacts option to give email or phone #, so if your contact is in another country (say India) you can give his/her email, the voice mail is translated to audio file and mailed to his email (again it is not sent as attachment clogging your friends email inbox) they provide a link to jott where you can play it on the internet (Great job guys)
• If your friend has a cell phone # which is a US# they send the voice mail jott message to cell phone as well as audio file link to email.

So why wait go and create your jott account here,

http://www.jott.com/Jott/login2.aspx

(Read my other topics on Innovation by clicking Labels: Innovation)

Orkut Tube - ultimate user networking

Yes this is what is called ultimate user experience, the guys @ google really rock. Orkut is a very nice networking site, now they first integrated google talk to orkut, next step now they have brought you tube and google videos in to orkut.

Yes there is a new video section, so you can bookmark and link all your favourite videos on you tube so that your friends can also enjoy what you enjoyed, isnt that a cool idea :)

I have added my first video, a car chase :)

Bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you :)

So here is my wishlist for google:

1) Add calendar sharing to orkut, so that i can share events with my friends and have public and private google calendar events.
2) Bring in docs and spreadsheets in to orkut, so that we can share documents and excel sheets with buddies,
3) Also increase the number of album snaps or link to picasa,
4) Allow conference option in gtalk and provide for plugin development so that users and companies can add more plugins to gtalk like yahoo or other ims allow.

Clones clones clones....... but originals rock

Web is so dynamic, if a concept is brought and if it becomes a success you can immediately see different clones of the same. But unfortunately the clones do not become a success.

Here are few samples (since they are still in evolution we dont know if they would be a success or not but still you can clearly see why they are clones).

Blogging Tools:

1) Blogger - http://www.blogger.com
2) Type Pad - http://www.typepad.com
3) Word Press- http://www.wordpress.com
4) Live Journal - http://www.livejournal.com/
5) PayPerPost - http://www.payperpost.com (they pay you for blogging)

I use blogger a lot and like it too.

Social Networking Tools:

1) Orkut - http://www.orkut.com
2) Hi5 - http://www.hi5.com
3) Yaari - http://www.yaari.com/index.php (Indian Clone)
4) Hikut - http://hikut.com/ (Indian Clone - they should have their caption like we are not orkut lol)
5) My Space - http://www.myspace.com/
6) Friendster - http://www.friendster.com/
7) Face Book - http://www.facebook.com/
8) Agloco - http://www.agloco.com/web/guest/home (they even pay you for using their site)

Video Streaming:

1) Google Videos - http://video.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wv&q=
2) You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/
3) MetaCafe - http://www.metacafe.com/
4) Mera Video - http://meravideo.com/ (Indian You tube) dude alteast change the layout why copy cat just like that.
5) Eye Spot - http://eyespot.com/
6) Grouper - http://grouper.com/
7) Jump Cut - http://jumpcut.com/
8) Video Egg - http://www.videoegg.com/
9) Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/
10) VSocial - http://vsocial.com/
11) Sharkle - http://www.sharkle.com/
12) CastPost - http://castpost.com/
13) Pickle - http://www.pickle.com/
14) DailyMotion - http://www.dailymotion.com/

Photo sharing

1) Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/
2) DropShots - http://www.dropshots.com/
3) Slide - http://www.slide.com/main
4) Yahoo 360 -
5) Pbase - http://www.pbase.com/
6) Photo Bucket - http://photobucket.com/ (next in line photo jug, photo mug).
7) Fotki - http://www.fotki.com/
8) SmugMug - http://www.smugmug.com/
9) MyPhotoAlbum - http://www.myphotoalbum.com/
10) Picture Trail - http://www.picturetrail.com/
11) Snap Fish - http://www.snapfish.com/
12) Zoto - http://www.zoto.com/ ($19 hello you want us to pay please look what the rest of the world is doing)
13) Dot Photo - http://www.dotphotopro.com/pro/
14) Picasa - http://picasa.google.com/
15) Shutterfly - http://www.shutterfly.com/

What is amazing is if you look at all these sites someone or the other is using them, so many out there and so much people using every site.

Note: This list is never ending if i find a new site ill add it, keep visiting my blog if you want to see updated lists.

Google Rocks - New Call feature

I was amazed to see how google is coming up with new features which helps a lot of us.
Recently they released the "Call" feature.



This is how it works,



Let us say you search for grocery stores in boston, then you get a call link, once you click it you can enter your phone # and then google will call the grocery shop and call you and link you both.

Isnt that awesome.