Category: Gadgets

Socialight hits the Times

Post-Its for Passers-By – New York Times
From the article:
Socialight leaves virtual Post-it notes, called sticky shadows, in specific sites around the city. A text message pops up when a cellphone is carried into the designated space, which is generally smaller than a city block but larger than an intersection. Started last month in a Chelsea loft by two 2004 graduates of New York University, Socialight now has dotted the metropolitan region with more than 500 stickies.

SMS signup via phone in

ChristDaily.com Television Commercials by Shelly Palmer
Content aside, the ability to phone in and signup for SMS is great. Such a simple idea, I am surprised that it has been overlooked till now. It would be easy to setup Asterisk to grab caller-id and pump out an SMS message.

Excerpt from site:
these two direct response television commercials show off a new way to subscribe to a brand new information service. The spots offer the audience an opportunity to purchase a subscription to an SMS (short message service) cell phone service via an IVR (interactive voice response) system. This is important because so many cell phone users don’t know how to send a text message – but they can easily dial a toll-free number.

Ninjamonkey on Instant Mobile Social Networks

Ninja Monkey Party 411 : Instant Mobile Social Network Or; Listserv + Email-to-SMS Gateway = LOVE
Ninjamonkey describes a service he setup for his birthday party a couple of weeks ago using off the shelf components. Of course the magic sauce was that his crowd includes some tech savvy and highly motivated social drinkers.
From the page:
Social networks and mobile applications are obvious bedfellows, but aside from a few noteables like dodgeball almost nothing has been done to exploit them. The thing that many people may be missing is that SMS is pretty much like email, except with extreme size restrictions (160 characters/message) and controlled solely by the telcos (which is sort of like having a draconian ISP with terrible, terrible service). This means that as long as you can find a way to translate between email and sms (with, say, a publicly available email-to-sms gateway) you can pass messages between them.

Understand the iPod iTunesDB

ITunesDB – wikiPodLinux
From the site:
This page details the format of the binary files used on the iPod to keep track of the music it contains as well as its play history. Collectively we refer to these files as the iTunesDB however there are in fact a number of files, each with their own format, that make up this database.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet Development Platform

Welcome to maemo.org!
From the site:
Maemo is a development platform to create applications for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and other maemo compliant handheld devices. It is meant for developers with personal or commercial interests in developing software for handhelds like Internet Tablets. The software and developer community website is contributed to this audience and operated by Nokia. The platform is composed of popular open source software components, which are widely deployed in the leading Linux desktop distributions today.

Opera API for Graphic Interfaces

Device UI toolkit gains low-level graphics API
From the Article:
Opera Software has added a low-level graphics API to its user interface (UI) development toolkit for home media device developers. The addition of GOGI (generic Opera graphical interface) allows Opera’s Home Media SDK to build interfaces for devices that lack Qt, X, or other relevant graphical libraries, the company says.