This is a slick little gadget. It’s a little green ball with cameras mounted all over it. You toss it into the air, and it created a spherical panorama at the apex of your toss.

I wonder how careful you have to be when throwing this. I bet a little bit of spin would mess up your panorama. Either way, it’s a pretty cool idea.

I’ve always got a good collection of podcasts on my iPod. In fact, I probably listen to podcasts more than I listen to music. I usually download a new batch of podcasts every couple weeks. I’ll fill up my iPod and listen until I run out, and then pull down the newest batch. I have my list of favorites, but am always on the lookout for new content to put into my podcast rotation. Below is a list of my top podcasts. Let me know in the comments what you like to listen to.

• Buzz Out Loud (website – iTunes)
  This is a daily podcast from CNET where they talk about the tech happenings of the day. I usually download about 6 of the newest episodes of Buzz Out Loud.
  
• A Life Well Wasted (website – iTunes)
  This podcast is a recent addition to my list. Their tagline is “An Internet Radio Program about Video Games and the People who Love them.” This isn’t your typical video game review show. It’s actual stories about people and video games. It includes stories about collectors, or interesting video game history, and is usually very intriguing.
• Macbreak Weekly (website – iTunes)
  This is a Twit podcast from Leo Laporte (of which I subscribe to a number). This one is kind of hit or miss with me. Sometimes I’ll listen, and sometimes I’ll just skip it until my next iPod refresh. It’s about all things Apple, and the quality of the show really depends on the guests of the episode. I find myself fast-forwarding through long Andy Ihnatko rants a lot of times.
• Security Now (website – iTunes)
  Another Twit podcast, this one deals with computer and internet security. I kind of pick and choose these episodes based on the topic discussed. There are also regular question and answer episodes that I’ll grab from time to time.
• Tech News Today (website – iTunes)
  Again, a twit podcast. I only download this one every now and then, and I usually don’t pull down many episodes. This podcast comes out every weekday and is similar to the Buzz Out Loud podcast listed above. In fact, the host (Tom Merritt) of TNT was a host of Buzz Out Loud up until a year ago, when he moved to Twit. Anyway, it’s a good podcast, the host does a nice job, but it’s not at the top of my rotation. I’ll pull an episode or two every time I refresh the iPod.
• This American Life (website – iTunes)
  This is a podcast of the NPR radio program “This American Life.” These are usually pretty good, and provide a view into a certain theme every week. Every now and then I’ll find myself fast-forwarding through a radio essay, or an author reading one of their short stories, but generally the topics are insightful and interesting.
• This Week in Google (website – iTunes)
  Yep, another Twit podcast. This one is actually about general cloud computing as well as Google. The hosts (Jeff Jarvis, and Gina Trapani) are very likable, and they usually talk about interesting things that have happened with Google (including Android), and the cloud in general.
• This Week in Tech (website – iTunes)
  This is the last Twit podcast I subscribe to, as well as the flagship program for the network. The premise for this podcast is a panel of tech-folk come together to discuss the prior week’s tech news. It’s pretty good 95% of the time, but also very much depends on the panel that gets brought together for a particular episode (sorry, can’t stand Jerry Pournelle).
• WNYC’s Radiolab (website – iTunes)
  This is probably one of my favorite podcasts. It is also an actual radio program from WNYC released in podcast format. The premise for the show is usually investigating some big science or technology question through experiments or interviews with experts. Just about every single episode is genuinely interesting, and I end up learning something. Some of my favorite episodes include investigations in to sleep, or if and how animals think, morality, or what makes pop music popular. I highly recommend this program.
• You Look Nice Today (website – iTunes)
  YLNT has not been released in quite a while, and may very well be dead, but it’s still one of my favorites, so I decided to list it. This is a comedy podcast, and is mainly made up of three guys sitting around BS’ing. That’s it… doesn’t sound like much… but it’s FUNNY. If you’re looking for a good episode, check out the one where Jonathan Hodgeman and Jonathan Coulton are guest hosts.
• 99% Invisible (website – iTunes)
  This podcast is a recent addition to my lineup. It’s a quickie podcast (most episodes are only a few minutes in length). The show is about design and architecture in everyday things. These things are usually overlooked because they’re done so well, hence the 99% invisible.
• Diggnation (website – iTunes)
  I used to listen to this podcast more than I do now. I don’t find myself downloading this one very often any more. It’s based on the Digg.com website, and involves the two hosts going over some of the top stories from the site. They usually only get through a few stories though, as their banter (which is why you listen to the podcast) normally takes up most of the time.

That’s my list. I’m always looking for new podcasts to download. What’s on your list?

Want!

(I just need some more french cuffed shirts)

Have you ever wanted to display your mood with a pair of giant cat ears? Well, the wait is now over. A Japanese project called Neurowear has created a set of robotic ears that react to your brain waves. The concept is a little odd, and I’m not sure if this is something I’d wear in public, but it’s a very interesting idea to communicate what you’re thinking using a peripheral that you wear on your body.

They need to create a dog tail to communicate happiness when it wags.

Check out this brilliant stove-top concept called The William. This makes a lot of sense… why hasn’t someone come up with this before?

I could cook 20 things at once on this!

I normally don’t do clothing/fashion reviews here, but I prefer to think of my latest purchase as an electronics accessory and not fashion, though I really do look hot in my new techie gloves. A few weeks ago I got my hands on (or rather hands in… HA!) a new pair of Isotoner SmarTouch Gloves, and they’ve turned out to be really handy (OK, I’m done with the glove jokes now, I promise). So what makes these gloves so special? They allow you to use touch screen device without exposing your hands to the elements with a bit of conductive thread on the thumb and forefingers. There are several types of gloves on the market that I looked at before deciding to go with Isotoner’s SmarTouch. I knew I didn’t want gloves with cut-off fingers so that left me with a few choices from gloves using conductive material. Out of those, Agloves and Glider Gloves were near the top of my list.

I didn’t go with the Agloves because I read several reviews that said they weren’t very warm. They were more a cool weather glove, and not a cold weather glove. The nice plus for the Agloves if you don’t need the extra warmth is that they are made entirely out of conductive material. So where the SmarTouch just have thumb and forefinger, the Agloves have the conductive stitching throughout. The stitching is actually silver, which is where these gloves get their name (Ag is the chemical symbol for silver on the periodic table).

After reading that the Agloves weren’t very warm, I dug up another type of touch screen friendly gloves called Glider Gloves. Glider Gloves are made by a company in Canada, who if you think about it probably know cold weather pretty well. Similar to Agloves, these are also made with the conductive material throughout the entire glove. They generally get good reviews on their performance, but I didn’t end up going with these either. I didn’t like how they looked. They’re much lighter in color than the Agloves, and have a lighter speckled look to them. I’ve got a black coat to wear them with, and just wanted something a bit darker. I assume they work really well, and supposedly keep you hands very warm, but totally based on my personal tastes on the cosmetics of these gloves, I didn’t end up choosing them.

In the end I ended up purchasing the Isotoner SmarTouch Gloves. They offered warmth (they are fleece lined) and the look (they are all black minus the conductive material on the fingers) that I wanted. I actually ended up ordering them twice because of some size issues. I measured my hand like the website instructed me to do, and came to the conclusion that I needed a medium-sized pair. Well, they arrived and were pretty tight on my hands, so I placed an order for large, which were just right. So the lesson learned here is that they run a little small, so I’d recommend getting a size bigger than your hand measurements tell you. Once I got the correct size, it was time to test them out. I expected them to be a bit finicky and need a little more pressure than just my bare skin on the screen. I was pleasantly surprised at how well they worked. I use these mainly with my HTC Evo 4G phone. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not the same as using your bare hands on your touch screen. They do have a little more bulk, and need a bit more pressure than your fingers, but it’s not bad at all. I can manipulate the phone just as well as I do with my fingers. That includes zooming in and out on the browser and even typing which I thought would tough to do with the additional bulk added to my fingers (those little letter buttons are kind of small!). On top of them actually performing pretty well, they are also warm. The fleece lining does its job. I have worn these for a couple of negative-temperature days and they’ve kept my hands as warm as my previous thick winter gloves. The gloves also have a nice rubbery mesh on the palms which help to keep my phone from sliding off my hand when I’m using it. All in all, I’m very happy with the purchase, and would recommend them to anyone who needs to manipulate a touch screen device while standing outside on a cold winter’s day.

This is a video of the gloves being used with my HTC Evo 4G phone.

Playing with Hot Wheels just got a lot more fun (not that it wasn’t fun to begin with). The Hot Wheels Video Racer appeared at this year’s CES event. It’s a regular-sized Hot Wheels car, but it has a small point-of-view camera built into it, as well as a little monitor on the underside of the vehicle. So you can feel like you’re driving the car through the ups and downs and loopty-loops of your Hot Wheels track. The car is supposed to hold 12 minutes of video, and it comes with a USB cable to hook it to your computer. It is also packaged with editing software so you can refine your racing videos. It is supposed to be out in Fall of 2011 and will sell for about $60. This almost makes me want to dig out my old Hot Wheels tracks again and “go play cars.”

Google puts out their Zeitgeist every year showing the search trends of the previous 12 months. This year they put together a nice video showing these trends and events as well as their various products.

I got a present in the mail yesterday straight from China. The tiny little macro/wide angle lens I purchased had finally arrived (apparently free shipping from China takes a while). Yes, you read that correctly. I purchased a lens for the crappy camera on my phone. I figured this was a $10 experiment to see if a lens for a camera phone would actually work, and surprise-surprise, it doesn’t do too bad of a job.

The lens came in a blister pack which included the actual lens, which is pretty sturdy with a metal housing. It also includes a lens cap and a little magnetic bottom cap with a tiny lanyard on it. The way the lens works is by attaching to the back of your phone with a small magnet ring around the bottom. If your phone doesn’t have anything for the magnet to stick to, they include two small metal rings (like little tiny washers) with peel off adhesive on them that you can stick to the back of your phone. I ended up sticking it to the case I have over the back of my phone. The lens itself is made two pieces screwed together that change depending on the type of photos you want to take. The lower, smaller piece is the macro lens, and the upper wider piece, when screwed on is the wide angle.

I was somewhat skeptical of how well a lens for a camera phone would work, but have been pleasantly surprised with my experiments. I started with a few macro shots and it does a pretty nice job. See the examples below. I took some shots of a few small items I had laying around. For the macro shots, I took a normal shot of the Old Capitol, then one with the wide angle lens. The wide angle shots aren’t as nice as the macros, but all in all, it’s a nice little tool to have.

If you want to own one of these yourself, I bought my from Deal Extreme, but they are all over ebay as well.

Do you want to take random trips around the world (via Google Street View)? MapCrunch allows you to teleport around the word to some pretty beautiful places on Google Street View. It also looks like you can submit you own cool places via Twitter (@mapcrunch) to be the “View of the Day” on MapCrunch. I also like putting it into slide show mode and hitting the full-screen button in the corner. Someone needs to figure out how to make a screensaver out of this.

Maybe artist Bill Guffey can use this site to help him find places to paint.

It only took me about 25 tries to find a shot from Iowa.

Happy Halloween a bit late. Did you get a lot of candy two nights ago? Michael at Utah Aerials was dive bombing kids as they collected Halloween candy with his homemade remote control Ghost (which he lovingly named “Mr. T”). Take a look at his construction video.

I think he needs to make a flying turkey for Thanksgiving, and a flying Christmas Tree, for Christmas. There needs to be a mini helicopter character for every holiday!

I ran across an article yesterday that took me for a little trip down smartphone memory lane: From Brick to Tile: We Look Back at a Decade of Smartphone Evolution

Kyocera 6035

The article walks through a brief history of smarphones, starting around the year 2000 and moving to recent phones dominated by Android and the iPhone. This little write-up reminded me of my own smartphone past. I’ve not owned anything other than a smartphone starting with my very first cellphone, the Handspring Treo 300 back in 2003, which was not only my first phone, but also my first cell phone service. I remember doing a lot of research before jumping into the cellphone world, and had my eye on several phones at that time. I remember following a couple Kyocera phones before going pulling the trigger on a purchase. The first one I remember looking at was the Kyocera6035, which was a black and white Palm PDA in the form of a phone (it was big!), and then shortly after that, the Kyocera 7135, which had a much more compact flip phone form (and a color screen!). I can also remember keeping a close eye on the Danger Hiptop (later named the Sidekick), which was a pretty cutting edge phone at that time. I ultimately settled on a Handspring Treo 300 (pdf) as my entry into the smartphone revolution. It was a great little phone, and I loved being connected to the internet wherever I was at.

It’s been interesting to watch where things have gone since the early smartphone days, and as they become much more common, it will be fun to see what the future holds.

I ran across a nice article tonight that takes a brief trip down memory lane through the history of computer icons. The first icons are from 1973 on the first GUI interface of the Xerox Alto, taking you all the way up to Windows 7′sbig shiny icons of today.

For the past several months, I have been working with a colleague of mine (Matt) on a mobile app for WebOS (Palm Pre and Palm Pixi).  It started with an idea from Matt’s wife while they were waiting at the port of entry in Nogales to cross the border back  into the US while visiting some family in Mexico. If you’re unfamiliar with crossing the border, it can take a very long time just sitting in a long line of cars waiting. The idea was to create a mobile app that you could look up the current wait times at any port of entry into the US (we added Canada too). This issue we got the ball rolling on an application called CrosT.

We decided to jump into this app using WebOS since it had a pretty simple, straight-forward development environment. The end product we came up provides quick access to current border crossing times (commercial, passenger, or pedestrian) into the US from Mexico or Canada, or into Canada from the US. CrosT will also provide a listing of the nearest ports of entry to your current location, using your device’s built-in GPS function. If you have a WebOS device, and a need for quick access to border crossing times on your WebOS device, give CrosT a download.

CrosT provides border wait times for entry into the United States and Canada conveniently formatted for your Palm Pre or Pixi, in the NAFTA zone language (English, French or Spanish) of your choice. CrosT can also tell you where the nearest crossing is and allows you to bookmark the reports you most frequently access for quick review. CrosT is the only application available for WebOS that provides this information for both the northern and southern borders of the United States in all NAFTA zone languages.

CrosT is the first of what will hopefully be a series of mobile apps we create. As we develop more apps, we’ve set up a small company called Pivotal Cog to serve as a central point for our future development.

Monday, March 15, 2010
Presenters:
Evan Williams – Twitter
Umair Haque – Havas Media Lab

Description:
Williams has co-founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, the now ubiquitous social media platform that hit its tipping-point at SXSW in 2007. In addition to his role as Director of the Havas Media Lab, Umair Haque founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries.

Twitter Announcement:

• The new @ platform for integrating twitter into websites “@Anywhere“
• You can easily follow people from a link dynamically inside a website (hover).
• You can also sign-into a website with your Twitter ID.
• 13 partners (Digg, Amazon, etc.)

@Anywhere

• It reduces fiction
• You can easily tweet from the column itself.
• You can easily follow the author straight from the byline.
• It puts things into context of a site/story.
• It can give you a connection back to users that wasn’t previously there.
• I can also get more people talking about you or your content, and bring in tweets about your site/content.

Business

• Focused on how to create the best product for consumers and businesses.
• Business is on twitter right now, and consumers are opting into messages from them now.
• What is Twitter?
  An information network that helps people discover what’s going on in the world that they care about and share what is going on around them. You can take advantage without sharing (just follow what you like).

How does Twitter handle iteration?

• Twitter experiments a lot – there are a lot of people in twitter doing what they think is best.
• People are organized into autonomous teams focused on something specific (international, mobile, etc.)
• What is Ev’s role?
  1/2 big picture direction, 1/2 is internal culture of the company. Openness is a big value of twitter.

Openness – what does it mean at Twitter?

• Openness or transparency – “a windows is transparent, a door is open” A door lets you come in and mess with what’s going on and not just look at what is going on.
• Openness is really a survival technique – being open to the idea that you’re wrong, and other people have good ideas. “Assume there are more smart people outside the company vs. inside.”

Why Give the Golden Goose Away?

• Sharing data openly: MS Bing Google get full stream. There is no business model yet, maybe it doesn’t make sense to give this data away. Decision was made on principle of giving the most value per user.
• There are millions of tweets per day – tapping into the technology of those partners will allow more people to find/search, and find valuable information on Twitter.
• It was a tough decision to come to… didn’t want to limit to just a few folks. Why limit it?
• Third party developers have been able to fill holes. How are businesses going to be able to take advantage of Twitter.
• There are real businesses to be built on top of Twitter. Twitter.com (the site) isn’t meant to be used for business. It’s a consumer interface.

Apple regulates App Store – how open is Twitter?

• Error on the side of openness.
• Some control is still needed. Bad things happen all the time. If were were totally fully open, it would be a disservice to our users. It shouldn’t be easy to spam on twitter – that needs to be stopped.
• Some management is needed for the ecosystem.

Inclusiveness – Unique Uses

• Chilean sent an email to thank Twitter for the tool to help communicate after the natural disaster.
• Twitter is made to reach the weakest communications areas. It’s very simple.
• Pushing really strong growth in areas (India now) with SMS access in regions where the communication infrastructure is not that powerful.
• The value of a little bit of information can be really powerful in certain areas of the world.

What is an active user?

• Is someone getting value out of twitter? It’s very hard to nail down what a user is (outside of just having an account).
• It could be someone just searching on a site, or using a 3rd party app to watch a brand.
• There isn’t as much emphasis on the “tell the world what you’re doing,” and now it’s more “there is something on twitter for everyone.”
• As people consume information on twitter, it’s easier to get involved.
• Robert Gibbs (white house press secretary) is using Twitter to send messages you normally don’t see in an official communication.
• India minister is using Twitter in a way that causes some waves.
• It reduces the number of walls from people who have influence and those who don’t (what the internet should be).
• If you can share with the world with as few barriers as possible, that’s a big deal!

Is state-control standing in the way of the Internet (Twitter)?

• Not all nations have the open internet.
• The internet is a tidal wave that nobody can keep back.
• We ultimately want to have an impact on the world (either small or large is good) – saving someone’s vacation or announcing the cookies are out of the oven.

Business Model

• Help people make a better decisions that they wouldn’t have already made. Help people get something done.
• Haiti awareness with the donation spread on Twitter. People want to hep out, and reducing the friction helps that.
• Looking at how businesses are using Twitter – there is a new communication method between customers and businesses. It’s more than just clicking on a link and getting information.
• If this channel helps a business get better, that’s very powerful. It’s even more powerful if it helps both large and small businesses.
• If you live on the web, you are used to having a relationship with the companies you use. In the real world, it is just a black box. You can finally close the loop with these technologies.

Ambition – 21st Century Businesses have Ambitions

• Twitter’s vision is down to fostering the exchange for information as a force for good.
• You can help people control what they pay attention to – save them time vs. cost them time and share things with other people that they’ve learned.

Where is Twitter’s Advantage?

• Twitter’s advantage only comes when everyone wins. They only do win/win deals.
• Revenue generating pieces of twitter haven’t been implemented because they don’t want to sacrifice the network.
• The advantage is having a more thriving network over the next guy – creating an advantage for other people.
• If you’re closed there is always an advantage to work around you. When open, it just works and nobody needs to work around the openness.

What makes you keep building these things?

• Creating things in the world that didn’t exist before. Your product should be at the end of the sentence, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if __________?”
• People look at business and money as the goal vs. the means.