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Posts Tagged ‘smartphones’

Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina who combined smartphones’ many sensors into one all-encompassing tag suite. The technique goes way beyond GPS technology to recreate a photo’s location and context.

A phone’s built-in accelerometer could tell whether a person is standing still, dancing or engaged in some other activity, according to a Duke news release. Light sensors in the phone, normally used to dim or brighten a display screen, can be used to tell whether the picture is inside our outside; weather conditions can be checked against the phone’s location; and it can even use a microphone to tell whether the subject of the photo is laughing or quiet.

All these attributes are assigned to each picture, and a user can search according to various categories, the news release says.

“So, for example, if you've taken a bunch of photographs at a party, it would be easy at a later date to search for just photographs of happy people dancing,” said Chuan Qin, a visiting graduate student from the University of South Carolina.

The students tested the system using eight Google Nexus One mobile phones, snapping more than 200 photos at various spots on the Duke campus, and found it was more sophisticated than Google’s Picasa or Apple’s iPhoto tagging systems, according to Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.

The team unveiled the app at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery's International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.

Zoosh me a $20?

You can read our full primer on NFC here, but as a basic summary, NFC is a short-range wireless tech similar to RFID, in which small chunks of information can be passed among devices like smartphones and all sorts of other appliances like point-of-sale units, subway entry points, and even less mechanical items like movie posters. There's only one major NFC-enabled smartphone--the Samsung Nexus S--in the U.S. at the moment, and the infrastructure is in its infancy, but other countries have robust NFC or NFC-type setups and all signs point to a North American embrace as well.

But NFC is a few years off, and Zoosh is here right now. Zoosh, coming from a small Silicon Valley startup, is a software solution that uses the audio hardware found in phones to communicate. As every phone is necessarily equipped with a speaker and microphone, Zoosh saw an opening to use that hardware, rather than create something new. To send data (whether it's a URL, a phone number, or payment information), Zoosh broadcasts ultrasonic audio in a frequency not audible to human ears, around 20,000Hz. A speaker in another phone (or, later, a point-of-sale unit, which the startup claims can be upgraded for only $30) picks up that audio and translates it back into the intended data. You can see it in action in this wholly Silicon Valley video.

What's most intriguing about Zoosh is its ease of adoption. All a smartphone needs is a simple app that unlocks its ability to communicate in this way, and there's no need to worry about compatibility, as all phones have the required hardware. We don't know many specifics at the moment--the speed of transfer and amount of data that can be transferred is still unknown--but it's a surprising and seemingly very practical solution. At least, it's a practical stopgap until NFC gets here.

[ComputerWorld]

...and will shower your phone with deals, offers, and ads

Starting with the basics, we'd recommend anyone confused about NFC (and it can be confusing!) to check out our primer on the tech, which covers just about everything you'd want to know about the future of wallets (including the fact that we won't even be using wallets--we'll just be reaching into our robo-pockets for our superphones). All caught up? Good! So what's Google Wallet anyway?

Google Wallet is a combination of a few different mobile payment features. It's an Android app, both because Google is behind both Wallet and Android and because an Android phone (the Samsung Nexus S) happens to be the only NFC-wielding smartphone in the country. Google expects NFC to be in around 50% of all smartphones by 2014--a conservative guess, but the tech will need time to mature, so it seems pretty likely. Google's open to moving Wallet to other platforms like iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, but phones need an NFC chip to be compatible with Google Wallet. Theoretically, that could be done with a simple sticker.

The first and most obvious feature is mobile payments--you can tap your Wallet-enabled phone on a point-of-sale system (the thing on which you swipe your embarrassingly 20th-century plastic credit cards right now) to pay. Easy! But NFC is a two-way protocol, which means you can (and will) receive stuff from retailers and Google as well. Google is encouraging the use of loyalty cards (you know, the "buy 20, get one free" things that are undoubtedly cluttering your wallet right now) and coupons or deals. This feeds into Google's second new app, Google Offers.

Buy something from a store, and that store will be able to send you a coupon, right to your Google Offers app. Plus, Google's doing a little Groupon-type deal that'll send new offers to you every day. You won't have to keep track of these deals, though--Google Offers is designed to play nicely with Wallet, so that single tap at Subway will enable your $1-off coupon, pay for your sandwich, and make a digital stamp on your loyalty card so you can keep working your way towards that free meatball sub. That's what's available now, but it's just the start, and depends on how far the retailers want to go with the system. Theoretically, as in an example Google showed, you could make up a shopping list on your phone, and when you walk into a grocery store, be informed immediately of what's on sale, snag the coupons automatically, and be offered a loyalty card if you're a regular shopper. Then, you'll have the receipt saved, so if you get home and find that your milk has expired, you can take it back without having to worry about holding onto paper receipts. No more receipts! Ever!

Interestingly, even though the NFC chip itself doesn't require power, the Google Wallet app does, so if your phone battery is dead, you won't be able to use it. Once NFC spreads to essential items like transit passes and driver's licenses, they may have to rethink that--smartphone battery life is not outstanding, and it would be pretty awful to be stranded with a dead phone that can't check Twitter or buy a smoothie from Jamba Juice.

Google has already lined up a few partners, including Sprint (which just released the Nexus S 4G), retailers like Subway, Macy's, and Walgreens (and several more), and money-types Citibank and MasterCard. MasterCard is the real trump card here--they've already got a pretty extensive NFC system in place, called PayPass, that currently allows you to wave your card or keychain dongle instead of swiping it (a feature of dubious use, to be sure). But that means that field-testing of Google Wallet starts right now (in New York and San Francisco, at least), with 100,000 merchants nationwide fully set up to handle your phone-tapping.

Of course, not everyone has MasterCard, which is the only official credit card partner of Google Wallet at the moment. So Google's providing a pre-paid sort of account to every Google Wallet user, which works sort of like a debit card, allowing users to fill up their card with money from any bank account or non-MasterCard credit card.

Security-wise, we're happy to see Google is acting very proactive. The fears about someone swiping your credit card information wirelessly while your phone is in your pocket seem to be mostly unfounded. To make any purchase, you'll have to enter a PIN number. Even better, when you're not actively using the Google Wallet app, the physical NFC chip is shut down, with no communication to the outside world. If you lose your phone, there's a remote wipe in place that allows you to banish all traces of your financial information from your phone.

It's pretty obvious why retailers are excited about Google Wallet--they get an entirely new way to draw in customers, whether it's beaming them ads as they walk by their stores or putting up NFC-enabled ads that Wallet users can tap for offers. But for customers, it has the potential to be pretty intrusive, and even unsettling, from a privacy perspective. Google knows this, and have a few safeguards in place--geotargeting is opt-in, meaning retailers will not know your location unless you want them to, and they're emphasizing that they'd rather have offers delivered when users are looking for them than simply spam-blasting every NFC user in sight with ads for $0.50 off nail clippers at Walgreens.

Google keeps touting openness, transparency, and control, all important when people's money is in the mix. Hopefully Google can make Wallet useful for consumers as well as retailers, without being too annoying for consumers. The field testing is starting now, and Google says the full rollout will come "soon" after, probably sometime this summer.

[Google Wallet]

Students at Harvard University, working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, designed a system called “pattern enhancement tool for assisting land mine sensing” (PETALS). It visualizes the outline of a buried land mine according to the metal detector’s feedback.

De-miners use a sweeping motion to cover the ground where a land mine might be buried. Their metal detectors beep as they move across the ground, and trained minesweepers can make out a mine’s shape and position underground according to the pattern of the beeps.

The PETALS system takes this a step further, drawing an outline of the mine’s shape in accordance with the pattern. The system shows one red dot for every beep of the metal detector, giving an increasingly detailed picture of what lies beneath.

It takes the minesweepers’ visualizations out of their heads and onto a map, according to a story published by the Harvard Gazette news service.

PETALS doesn’t require de-miners to change their tactics at all, and it’s a simple augmentation in areas with limited resources, where many land mines can still be found. It could even help train new minesweepers, according to the Gazette — in tests, newbies performed 80 percent better with the visualization than those who did not use it.

More than 110 million land mines of various types remain hidden around the world, according to UNICEF. Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia have suffered 85 percent of the world's land-mine casualties.

The PETALS system just requires a smartphone mounted to a metal detector, according to Lahiru Jayatilaka, a researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

"Improving the de-miner rather than the equipment is a novel way to think about land mine removal technology," he said.

[Harvard Gazette]

One of the most enduring problems of maintaining a wireless connection, whether it's 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi, is what's called the "handoff." Individual wireless access points like a cell tower or Wi-Fi router have a limited radius within which a device can connect to them. In the case of 3G or 4G towers, the idea is to have those radii overlap, so you're never without service, but that means at some point you'll have to "hand off" from one tower as you move more fully into the radius of another.

The way that's done now is very simple: Your phone connects to the tower or access point with the strongest signal. But that simplicity can lead to some very sloppy handoffs, during which you might lose your service and drop a call. This is particularly problematic when using Wi-Fi, which has a comparatively small radius of signal. If you turn on your phone while walking, you'll connect to the strongest signal. But what if you're actually walking into the radius of another access point? You'd be better off connecting to that one first, even though it might not be the stronger of the two signals, because then you'd avoid having to disconnect from the first signal and reconnect to the second.

A group of MIT researchers have created a way to use the GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope found in many, if not most, smartphones to make smarter connections. By sensing your movement and predicting where you're heading, it can connect to the access point that makes the most sense. In tests, a cellphone using this system switched connections about 40% less frequently than it ordinarily would, which is better for both signal and battery life.

A caveat: These tests were carried out using Wi-Fi networks, which have a very small radius and have a much more pronounced handoff than, say, a 3G network. It seems likely that a 3G version of this system would have a much smaller effect: It's much harder to predict movement across the huge radius of a 3G tower, and handoffs tend to be much smoother, anyway. But that's not to say the system wouldn't help at least a little, and it's very cool that the project uses hardware that's already found in the phones, rather than requiring some sort of hardware upgrade.

[MIT]

The free app, which runs on the Android operating system for now, is still in alpha testing and isn’t quite ready for public consumption. But the idea is that it will allow citizens to help the city create work orders for problem areas on city roadways without requiring a phone call or email to city engineers. “It’s a new kind of volunteerism,’’ Nigel Jacob, one half of Boston’s Urban Mechanics office, told the Boston Globe. “It’s not volunteering your sweat equity. It’s volunteering the devices that are in your pocket to help the city.’’

But the city of Boston and its partners (the city is receiving help from experts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Santa Fe Complex, a technology think tank in New Mexico) aren’t the first to try to make this kind of roadway-assessing app, and the challenges are many. Microsoft has looked into it, as has MIT, with varying degrees of success.

The challenge: teaching a phone to tell the difference between a pothole and a speed bump or elevated crosswalk, or—perhaps even more challenging—a railway crossing or sewer grate. That’s pretty tough to do, and an app that issues false positives could degrade the city’s ability to respond to potholes by sending workers to repair nonexistent problems, costing time and money.

But the city of Boston seems well aware of the challenges. Street Bump will soon be distributed to thousands of testers and a $25,000 prize will be offered to programmers who can devise the best ways to correct the app’s shortcomings. If users can help the city smooth out a few bumps in the road, the city could soon have a citywide network of pothole sensors patrolling the pavement around the clock.

[Boston Globe]