Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Posted by Roberto
8:08 PM
0 comments
BLINKX: A UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROL?
Today, prime time programs you've only been able to watch in your living room on your regular TV are now accessible from your PC. To find them, you might want to check out a comprehensive video search engine like blinkx. It uses advanced speech recognition technology to deliver results that tend to be more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-based keyword searches.
When you visit blinkx.com, the first thing you notice is a very cool video wall displaying popular video clips indexed that hour.
blinkx, has raised more than $12.5 million from angel investors and earns money by licensing its technology to other sites. Check it out!
blinkx
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Posted by Roberto
3:38 PM
0 comments
SEE WITH YOUR TONGUE AND NAVIGATE WITH YOUR SKIN
How do we sense the world around us?
Eyes collect photons of certain wavelengths, transduce them into electrical signals, and send them to the brain. Ears do the same thing with vibrations in the air - sound waves. Touch receptors pick up pressure, heat, cold, pain. Smell: chemicals contacting receptors inside the nose. Taste: buds of cells on the tongue. There's a reasonably well-accepted sixth sense called proprioception. A network of nerves, in conjunction with the inner ear, tells the brain where the body and all its parts are and how they're oriented.
Can our senses be expanded?
Lots of animals have cool "extra" senses. Sunfish see polarized light. Loggerhead turtles feel Earth's magnetic field. Bonnethead sharks detect subtle changes (less than a nanovolt) in small electrical fields. Some birds can detect direction innately. And other critters have heightened versions of familiar senses - bats hear frequencies outside our auditory range, and some insects see ultraviolet light.
Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound?
The world is full of gadgets that detect things humans cannot. The hard part is processing the input. Neuroscientists don't know enough about how the brain interprets data. The science of plugging things directly into the brain - artificial retinas or cochlear implants - remains primitive.
How do we hack our 5 senses?
The solution is to figure out how to change the sensory data we want - the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared - into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins.
Source: Mixed Feelings, by Sunny Bains, WIRED magazine
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Posted by Roberto
7:20 PM
0 comments
EMERGING SEARCH ENGINES AND BEER MONEY JOBS
Technology tends to replace what was once a formerly labor-intensive process.
The business search company ZoomInfo just launched a semantic search engine that works by applying tags to information that distinguish between key concepts, such as a person, an industry, or a company name. ZoomInfo delivers a single site for quick and easy access to in-depth information on industries, companies, people, products, services and jobs, with profiles on more than 35 million people and 3.8 million companies.
ZoomInfo - Business Information Search Engine
ChaCha Search has a different approach; it combines the results that are hand-picked by human guides with the best computer-generated search results. Computers automatically index all the questions that are asked to the ChaCha guides, associate them with the search engines and resources that have been used and the links visited by the end-user. ChaCha, the human-assisted search company, pays the ChaCha guides between $5 and $10 an hour as a starting wage, and any money they earn can be dumped instantly onto a debit card and spent right away. Some ChaCha guides have specifically labeled this as their beer money job!
ChaCha Search - People Powered Search
Snap - View and Interact with Search Results
- Trend Hunter
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- we make money not art
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