According to ICT Results in ‘The Network of Everything,’ wireless experts estimate that our personal networks will include about a thousand devices in 2017, including dozens of sensors checking our health and our home. This is why European researchers have launched in 2006 a networking project called ‘MAGNET Beyond.’ The name is an acronym for ‘My personal adaptive Global NET and beyond.’ The article suggests that the researchers have in fact built the Smart Personal Network, which integrates the concepts of Personal Networks (PNs) and Personal Area Networks (PANs). Read more to discover the results already achieved…
What is AskNature? Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world. Imagine nature's most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter "filter salt from water" and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels. Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.
That's the idea behind AskNature, the online inspiration source for the biomimicry community. Think of it as your home habitatwhether, you're a biologist who wants to share what you know about an amazing organism, or a designer, architect, engineer, or chemist looking for planet-friendly solutions. AskNature is where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born. Thanks to our sponsors, AskNature is a free, open source project, built by the community and for the community.
Our goal is to connect innovative minds with life's best ideas, and in the process, inspire technologies that create conditions conducive to life. To accomplish this, we're doing something that has never been done organizing the world's biological literature by function. What you'll see on the site today is a starter culture of ideas, biological blueprints and strategies, bio-inspired products and design sketches, and biomimics you can talk to and collaborate with.
Over the next few months, this genetic pool of ideas will grow as we receive natural history information from our partner, Encyclopedia of Life. Our social web will also grow, beginning with tapping into thousands of solution seekers who are part of the Wiser Earth global network. Luckily, we live on a wildly diverse planet surrounded by genius, and now there's one site where you can celebrate, learn from, and even conserve that genius.
So please, come meet your mentors, get involved, and be part of the design revolution inspired by nature.
~Janine Benyus Co-Founder/Board President The Biomimicry Institute
Google announced that on December 31st they will shut down Lively, which was their 3D chat world, and somewhat of a potential competitor to Second Life. Room widgets embedded in other sites are then supposed to show an image but no more interaction, which would add Lively to the list of Google’s canceled products. Google’s post on this decision does not really give a detailed reasoning for this shut-down of a product which was just released this year, except that they’re saying “we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.” In particular, this leaves some questions unanswered as a company could theoretically embed ads in this 3D world app.
Lively was a great-looking Google product. On the other hand from the beginning on it was riddled with regular program crashes for some users, though the situation improved over time. There were other oddities as well, like a flood of sex rooms almost kidnapping the Lively rooms directory, or custom images never quite fitting the object you’d put them on (and then being disabled altogether for a while). It was still a fun experience, with a fresh and intuitive interface that I found more beginner-friendly than Second Life. Building rooms was entertaining and casual, with features like integrating YouTube videos by pasting the video URL, leading to quickly shareable results.
Now, Google say they’ve “always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives” but that they’ve also “always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.” Google apparently made up their mind that this bet will never pay off, even if the product was only given the chance to grow for 4 months; a short time to make a good judgment on potential future success. Others feel like Lively was an odd release for Google to begin with; Andy Baio in the forum comments, “I never understood this product. It never seemed to fit Google’s worldview, and even the standalone domain and branding were weird. I wonder what the story behind it was.”
Google says current users of Lively are supposed to make “videos and screenshots” of their “hard work” to preserve some of it. They also mention that current members of the Lively team will move to other projects. In 2006, Niniane Wang, who headed the then-secret project at Google, quoted from an email a colleague sent to their team:
i realized today during the meeting that...
- if we’re working on the best project at google, and
- we’re working at the best company on the planet, then
we’re working on the Best Project in the World.
Already by now, a website by Lively users has sprung up protesting against the shutdown. On the homepage of Livelyzens.com, which is accompanied by a discussion group, the following is written:
Livelyzens are the proud and happy residents of Google Lively. Today we are saddened by Google’s decision to shutdown lively.
We are appealing through this website to keep Lively alive and will showcase all the great things about lively and why Google MUST revisit their decision.
Also, people are currently coming together in – where else – a Lively room set up for the purpose. Called “KEEP LIVELY ALIVE!”, this room plays the song “Staying Alive.” An image from South Park reads “Don’t Kill Kenny.”
Stealth.Com have announced a new small-form-factor PC intended for embedded, in-car or industrial applications. The Stealth LPC-450M Little PC is based on an Intel Core 2 Duo with, as standard, a shock-mounted 2.5-inch hard-drive and PSU capable of running on 10-16V DC power such as supplied from a car battery. SSD storage is an option, as is upgrading the standard DVD/CD-RW to a DVD burner.
Despite measuring 5.7 x 9.9 x 1.65 inches, the LPC-450M still manages to offer LAN, two serial ports, three USB ports, FireWire, video and audio output and PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports. There are also start-up and shut-down delay timer options: start-up can be delayed by 5, 10, 20 or 40 seconds or 1, 2 or 4 minutes to give the power supply time to stabilize, while shutdown can be delayed by 3, 5 or 10 minutes.
A fanless, lower-powered version of the PC is also available, the LPC-450FM. Windows XP and Vista are supported, as is Linux, and Stealth.Com will also produce custom OEM builds if you ask them nicely.
VIA have announced the VIPRO VP7710, a fanless touchscreen panel PC intended for industrial and commercial applications but likely to prompt at least a little interest from domestic custom installers. Based on either a 1.6GHz VIA Eden or 1.0GHz C7 processor with up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM, the primary means of input is using the 10.4-inch water and dust resistant touch panel.
Connectivity includes gigabit ethernet, optional WiFi, two USB 2.0 ports, three COM ports, PS/2 support, HD audio and VGA. VIA’s UniChrome Pro II 2D/3D graphics and MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 hardware accelerated decoding is also onboard, and the VIPRO can be wall, table or VESA mounted.
Storage can be either IDE or SATA hard-drives, or Compact Flash based. The VIA VIPRO VP7710 is available now.
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.