Mobile Inc » Innovation

Molly – The Desktop Robot That Turns Your Retweets Into Sweets

Murat — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:42:24 +0000

Came across this fun little project that’s looking for funding on Kickstarter.

Molly is a tiny robot that sits on your desk and counts how many times you get retweeted, then once you’ve reached your set number it does some magic and pops out a sweet.

The same company is also trying to fund Olly, another robot which turns your online notifications into smells.

Both these projects are by a team called Foundry at the agency Mint Digital in London.

Great to see this kind of experimentation with physical and online stuff coming out of a agency in London.

Check out the video below:

Visualising ‘What Inspires You’ Using The iPad And Some Web Magic

Murat — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:43:03 +0000

Came across this lovely idea by Cameron Adams (who has some amazing stuff on his blog) where he used a iPad and web technologies to create fantastic visualisations of peoples drawings.

The iPad site prompted users to ‘Draw or write what inspires you’ then their scribbles were recreated as a 3D time-lapse visualisation on a big screen. The time and position of each stoke made by the users finger was recorded and used to make the 3D visuals.

Very cool!

Rome Interactive Music Video By Google Is Absolutely Amazing

Murat — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:43:31 +0000

Check out this stunning interactive film/music video by Google showcasing the creative potential of WebGL.

WebGL allows hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the web browser without any plug-ins. So it means you don’t need Flash, Silverlight or anything else to watch amazing animation.

Creative Director Daniel Ilic explains it best:

“Most of what you see during the experience is not video, it’s real time rendering and visual modeling”

It’s hard to describe how good it is, click here to see for yourself.

Read more about the technology here and even create your own dream (brilliant).

Here’s the making of video:

In The Future You Might Be Able To Charge Your Mobile By Shouting Into It

Murat — Wed, 11 May 2011 02:22:50 +0000

According to this article on the Huffington Post researchers at South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University have developed the technology to covert soundwaves into electrical energy.

The technology has the potential to charge your phone as you talk into it. Even background noise could turn into power for your phone.

Here’s how it works:

“Currently, the researchers have created a prototype that converts sounds around 100 decibels (think: noisy traffic) to 50 millivolts of electricity. Here’s how it works: a pad absorbs sound waves and causes zinc oxide wires mounted between electrodes to compress and release, creating an electrical current that can be used to charge a battery.”

Whilst the energy produced isn’t enough to charge a phone (yet), it is still usable in small, implantanable devices. The aim is to alter the materials to generate more electricity at lower sound levels.

This follows on from the story that scientists are developing nanotechnology that uses body movement to generate power that could potentially be used in iPods and the like.

Brilliant – URL Hunter Turns Your Browser Address Bar Into A Game

Murat — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:42:30 +0000

I love everything about this proof of concept, so genius that I don’t even know where to start.

Go and try it yourself! http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

Cereal Boxes Use Wireless Power To Light Up And Create More Headaches For Parents In Supermarkets

Murat — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:27:18 +0000

Remember the augmented reality cereal boxes? Well things are about to get heavy, eCoupled want to turn the cereal isle into Las Vegas:

“eCoupled intelligent wireless power is so flexible it can actually be printed directly onto packaging. A low-cost enhancement to product packaging, printed coils allow real-time communication from the package to the store shelf, and then to the store’s inventory management system. Product quantities can be identified and tracked, expiration dates monitored, and new stock automatically ordered when supplies are low to help reduce lost sales.”

[Via Advertising Lab]

Kraft Store Kiosk Scans Your Face To Predict What You Want To Eat. Mobile Integration Too.

Murat — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:57:17 +0000

Last year I posted about a cool bit of facial recognition technology demoed at CeBit, which had the ability to detect gender, age and mood.

I wondered what type of things the technology could be used for and now I know – introducing the Kraft Face Scanning Kiosk.

Using Anonymous Video Analytics the kiosk zooms in on a customers face to determine age, gender etc and then guess what type of stuff you might like. How gutted would you be if it served up Slim Fast meals?

The kiosk can sync up with mobile phones too, allowing customers to add recipes and shopping lists via a QR code scanner.

[Via Fast Company]

Qwiki Is What Hollywood Told Us The Future Would Be Like

Murat — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:54:20 +0000

I watched far too many movies as a kid not to be massively excited by the new service called Qwiki. I’d even go as far to say we’re getting a glimpse of what information consumption will be like in the next couple of centuries, we’re talking true Minority Report/Total Recall style stuff.

Watch the video, co-founder Doug Imbruce describes the service perfectly “Information becomes a experience that I can watch”

Now go Qwiki and try the samples for yourself and sign-up for a invite.

As you can see from the video, this will also work on your mobile. Qwiki + NFC + Location + Advertising = Mind boggling possibilities.

Experimenting With The iPhone 4 Accelerometer To Create A Snowglobe in Safari

Murat — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 04:40:42 +0000

A few weeks ago I was sat with good pal and developer @frasiocht (Brendan) talking about the latest OS update for the iPhone which enabled the Safari browser to access the accelerometer. I asked him how easy it would be to create a snowglobe and be able to shake the phone to make it snow on-screen. Within 24 hours Brendan had a hacked-up working prototype.

I began to put together the template for the page and asked the awesome illustrator Leigh (@leighpearce) if he could create some lovely festive graphics and the look and feel for the snowglobe and robot. I cracked on with creating the footer. Once we were done, it all got sliced up and handed over to Brendan to stitch together.

We all managed to nick a few hours in our spare time to put this together and get it out before Christmas and although there’s some missing aestical touches, it defo works as a proof of concept.

This sort of stuff is going to be amazing for the mobile web, it gives you the ability to create massively engaging experiences whether it’s a site, advertising banner or game. We’ve already seen some examples of the possibilities with the gyroscope.

Give it a go! Demo link: http://pus.hu/g6pKPI (Tilt phone forward and back for best effect) [/alert-green]

If you’re interested in what this could mean for mobile advertising, check out this post I wrote in February 2010.

Remember this is early days for this feature in browser so there’s certain things which don’t quite work as expected. One problem is that you can’t disable the iPhone switching from portrait to landscape view when you shake the phone, so the screen spazzes out quite a bit (that’s why tilting to move the snow around works a bit better).

It may also throw you out of Safari every now and then, if you find it is running reaaallly slow, close Safari from your multi-tasking bar and then try again.

Big shout out to Brendan and Leigh for making this!

Any issues? Feedback? Leave them in the comments.

RFID Turntable By Ideo Oozes Potential

Murat — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:34:40 +0000

This has seriously got my creative juices flowing.

Design studio IDEO love to experiment, they do some very inspiring work and this is no exception. Here’s the low down:

The idea here was to find a physical representation of the elements of modern musical life that we’ve come to love (such as playlists and shuffle), but not give up on that retro mixtape, twelve inch vinyl physicality

They’ve created a turntable which reads music tracks off RFID cards (the same technology that’s in London Transport Oyster cards).

Think about the future when mobile phones have NFC, how will we interact with everyday items? Will you be able to walk into a bar and tap your phone onto a jukebox to hear your playlist? Will you be able to download live mixes at clubs by touching your phone on the DJ booth? Will touching be the new Shazam? We are going to start seeing some brilliant stuff when the technology goes mainstream.

[Via PSFK]