Challis Hodge’s UXblog

“The $208 billion U.S. apparel industry has changed markedly over the past 50 years. Now technology is adding a new wrinkle. Mobile executives may carry as much as 10 pounds (5kg) of tech tools. This trend has already rendered briefcases obsolete and is the driving force behind a new direction in fashion: e-wear. The rapid spread of blue jeans as a fashion uniform clearly signals that consumers want easy-to-wear clothing. Garment manufacturers are responding with a raft of “smart fabrics.”"

Researchers at Philips Electronics have built a two-story, 200-square-meter house in which scientists have hidden 34 cameras and 24 microphones to record how people interact with new technology. As part of its PHENOM Project Philips refers to this wiring of living and working environments “ambient intelligence.” The company believes that distributed computing is coming to the consumer, and that these inexpensive computing components will become common in every house. Meanwhile, Microsoft, through its EasyLiving project, is studying how computers can signal people, and people can signal computers as they move through “intelligent” rooms that turn on media players and adjust thermostats. Several prominent universities are working on similar projects: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with its House_n and Living Lab projects, and the Georgia Institute of Technology with its Aware Home Research Initiative. At Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, engineers have outfitted rooms with beacons that broadcast URLs to handheld devices. The signals, sent over wireless networks, target people passing through the digitally-equipped area and are intended to help them locate information and services. Cooltown, as HP calls this “location-aware” system, is part of the company’s nomadic computing research, which focuses on how to tie Web resources to physical objects and places.

It was bound to happen. Someone would introduce an Internet portal without annoying ads jumping out of every corner. Such a site was indeed introduced last week: MyWay.com, a zen rock garden of a portal with lots of features quietly presented and no discernable advertising. And no fee. The site’s revenue comes from text advertising links listed above its Web search results. The search results and the ads are provided by Google.

Developers of peer-to-peer file-sharing application Freenet issued a long-awaited “major release” on Monday, marking the controversial project’s first such advancement since August 2001. Freenet allows people to exchange files over the Internet through a shared network. It’s creators say they designed the application with free speech, not free entertainment, in mind. The software provides a forum for anonymous publication, using data encryption and a decentralized network designed to prevent shutdown by anyone — unfriendly governments, ISPs and even the network creators themselves. “If you believe in freedom of speech, you need to protect other people’s right to it, even when you disagree or find it distasteful,” Clarke says. “Freenet is like a parallel World Wide Web, where everybody is anonymous.”

I was intrigued by this paper. The author, David Sless, starts with the following assertions or givens: “philosophy is our highest form of practical reasoning; design is our highest form of practical adaptation to our environment.” He goes on to explore from there…after the tenth paragraph I stopped reading.

Michael Moore, controversial filmmaker and author sounds off about the Internet. Moore is extremely suspicious of everything he hears on mainstream TV news and everything he reads in newspapers owned by large media conglomerates. He feels that local TV news in particular has poisoned the American public with unfounded fear. But there is a cure. “The Internet actually has been the antidote,” say Moore. “The Internet is where you get the truth. It’s on the Internet that you can find out what the real facts are.”

A Florida-based technology company has collaborated with Microsoft to introduce a PDA for users who are blind or visually impaired. Freedom Scientific, a manufacturer of assistive technology products for blind and visually impaired people, has launched the PAC Mate, a mobile version of the company’s JAWS screen reader technology, which converts objects and text to speech so that users can navigate their way through documents, images and Web content.

Pyra sparked up its popular Blogger.com site Friday after shutting it down earlier in the day in response to a hacker attack. The hack compromised individual accounts, locking out site users from their blogs. Pyra has taken the machine that was compromised offline and restored the Blogger site from its redundant servers, said Jason Shellen, the company’s director of business development. Users whose accounts were compromised should be able to access them again, he said. When I couldn’t get to my account yesterday I requested a password be sent to me. I thought I forgot it! It appeared to have been sent instead to a hacker’s address. Blogger lives on!!