E-Reads goes mobile!
From now on it will be easier to access E-Reads on your mobile phone. We’ve developed an easy-to-use way to access our blog posts on any Android, iPhone, blackberry, and other browser supporting smart phones.
Just go to ereads.com on your mobile device.
Patent attorneys are the ticks of the Digital Age. After quietly applying for a patent they set up their nest on a tree branch and patiently wait – sometimes for years – until a fat cat walks underneath their perch. Then they drop on their victim’s neck and drain its blood.
Over the years we’ve seen many instances of such ambushes. Remember the outfit that sued Amazon for violating its patent on one-click ordering online? And the suit over the BlackBerry that resulted in a $612.5 million settlement? And we recently reported on a patent filed by Amazon – four years ago but never disclosed until now – for a device that sounds exactly like the Nook e-reading device manufactured by Amazon’s rival Barnes & Noble.
And now comes news of a patent application by Microsoft – #20100175018 if you must know – for something most of us think is as free as the air we breathe. Here’s the description, taken from the filing:
A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display… The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page… A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.
Yes, it’s the good old-fashioned touch-screen virtual page-turn, the one you use to “turn” the page on such e-reading platforms as the iPad, Stanza and Android. This is according to Rik Myslewski of The Register®. But he is skeptical that Microsoft would take action against those platforms.
Microsoft’s patent breaks new ground with a couple of features. One is the ability to flip a lot of pages at once (y0u do it by dragging your finger down the right margin, Myslewski tells us.) The other is extraordinary. “In discussing input methods, the filing notes that ‘sources other than fingers may be used to execute a page-turning gesture.’ Noses? Elbows? If not noses and elbows – what? We invite you to submit photos (suitable for this family publication) of yourself turning the page of your ebook reader with something other than your finger.
Read Microsoft seeks patent on ebook page flip
Richard Curtis
Now that our speculations about Apple’s tablet (including a name) have been put to rest, it’s time to play Speculation 2.0. What are we speculating about? How about a Google tablet.
Electronista says “Google is in the midst of crafting its own tablet to take on the iPad, a leak late Sunday may have revealed. CEO Eric Schmidt at a recent Los Angeles party purportedly told those gathered that the company is working on an Android tablet. Most of its details weren’t mentioned, but it would be both an e-reader and a general computing device.”
The Electronista staff adds: “Any tablet launch would be controversial for Google, as it would not only stoke the heated battle with Apple even further but risk alienating the company’s hardware partners.”
Can’t pass up a good rumor? Then Google prepping its own Android tablet? is perfect for you.
RC
Those who think android is a noun have obviously never androided a dress or book in a retail store. The Google application enables cell phone users to point their device at the bar code on a piece of store merchandise and gather vital information about the product (including where to buy it cheaper down the street or online). You can read about it in Please Don’t Android the Merchandise.
But, instead of going shopping, suppose you want to check out merchandise you read about in a magazine or newspaper? Stephanie Clifford, writing in the New York Times, has surveyed a variety of cell phone and other devices dedicated to scanning bar codes or URLs printed on paper. In theory you should be able to achieve as much in your armchair as you can by walking into a store and waving your device at a rack of dresses or a wall loaded with television sets.
Clifford writes: “With the sudden ubiquity of smartphones, which have apps that can read bar codes, and cameraphones, which can easily snap pictures of icons, magazines like Esquire and InStyle are adding interactive graphics to their articles, while Entertainment Weekly and Star are including them in ads.”
It sounds simple, fun, efficient and cool. Unfortunately, many of the products have been anything but. Something called :CueCat required installation of software. Then, in order to research a product you had to tether :CueCat to your computer and “wave it over the printed bar codes.” In addition to being clunky, people just didn’t know how to pronounce “:CueCat”. Was the prefixed colon a variant on Xhosa click language? In any event this gadget seems to have bit the dust.
Another one called SpyderLynk “surrounds client logos with a coded ring, and asks consumers to snap photos of the images, then text or e-mail them to a certain address.” says Clifford. We’re not sure the SpyderLynk comes with a decoder ring or you have to send in fifty Cheerios boxtops, but we’ll probably give it a pass.
Esquire readers will have an opportunity to try a different approach in the March issue, where they will find an article about “the 30 items a man would need to get through life,” according to Esquire‘s editor in chief. “Printed near each item will be a small code that looks like a group of black and white squares,” writes Clifford. “Readers scan the code into an Internet-enabled phone, and the code takes them to a mobile menu that provides Esquire’s styling advice for the item and information on where to buy it.” We’ll have to wait until March to learn if one of the 30 items a man needs to get through life is a woman, but if anyone learns the code for one please let us know at once.
For more details read Stephanie Clifford’s From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.
“The world is too much with us,” wrote poet William Wordworth. Too bad he didn’t have an Android-powered smartphone.
If he did he’d realize how little of the world he’d actually experienced. By strolling through Grasmere, his Lake District hometown, and pointing the device at inns and shops, countless secrets and wonders theretofore hidden from him would have been displayed on his phone’s screen.
Wordsworth didn’t have a smartphone, but you can experience for yourself the marvels of augmented reality that the smartphone delivers. What’s augmented reality? Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, recently reported in the New York Times that “the real world is overlaid with virtual information.” By using your smartphone’s global positioning application, your phone can see precisely what you’re looking at. “The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view.”
Football fans h
ave been familiar with an early version of augmented reality: it’s the yellow stripe that appears to mark the first down line on the field on game telecasts. In fact it’s a virtual line, invisible to spectators attending the game but absolutely real to television viewers. The technology has now been enhanced and adapted to such competitive sports as golf, tennis, baseball and sailing.
And don’t forget the competitive sport called shopping. Books, for instance. We recently reported a Google book-text search tool called the Barcode Scanner that works with an Android-powered cellphone. According to Google Book Search engineer Jeff Breidenbach, when you download the software into your Android and point your phone camera at a book’s barcode, “it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN – without you even needing to click the shutter…You’ll then have the option to search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away”
But that’s just the beginning. Berlin goes on to write, “Augmented reality will ‘reinvent’ many industries, including health care and training…Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.
“The industry that may have the most to gain from augmented reality is gaming,” Berlin concludes. Actually, not. Traditionally, the earliest adapters of technological advances are warfare and the sex trade. The military has for years been developing “wearable computers” employing what it calls a Battlefield Augmented Reality System. Here’s an excerpt from a pre-Android paper published in 2002:
Many future military operations are expected to occur in urban environments. These complex, 3D battlefields introduce many challenges to the dismounted warfighter. Better situational awareness is required for effective operation in urban environments. However, delivering this information to the dismounted warfighter is extremely difficult. For example, maps draw a user’s attention away from the environment and cannot directly represent the three dimensional nature of the terrain.
To overcome these difficulties, we are developing the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS). The system consists of a wearable computer, a wireless network system, and a tracked see-through head-mounted display (HMD). The computer generates graphics that, from the user’s perspective, appear to be aligned with the actual environment. For example, a building could be augmented to show its name, a plan of its interior, icons to represent
reported sniper locations, and the names of adjacent streets.
As for the other application, pornography – well, use your imagination.
Read about recent smartphone advances in augmented reality in Kicking Reality Up a Notch.
“The real world is way too boring for many people,” one game developer declared. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”
Which takes us back to Wordworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea…
RC
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.
This is the week when everybody picks their ten best and worst things of the year gone by, and I hope we’ll be forgiven if we don’t play the game. But that doesn’t mean we won’t enjoy reading someone else’s Best Picks. I like John Mahoney’s The 10 Best Android Apps of 2008 posted on Gizmodo. It sounds like there are more Android developers than users right now, but the level of initiative in putting the technology to use is amazing.
You’ll remember that Android is an open platform, meaning anyone can play. Whether you’re a serious developer or a Sunday hacker, go to Android’s site and download the code. Our favorite is the barcode scanner application, which instantly compares the price of the product you’re interested in buying with all available prices offered elsewhere, and even directs you to the shop nearest you carrying the bargain. Using your Android in Saks Fifth Avenue calls for a bit of nerve, though, after you point your cell phone at the tag on the six hundred dollar suit you’ve just tried on, then walk out of the store and head for Men’s Wearhouse.
RC
“Androiding” may join “Googling” as the latest noun-to-verb linguistic conversion.
The other day we reported on the use of Google’s Android search system to view book bar codes in bookstores. If there’s a Search-Inside-The-Book feature connected with the book you scan, it will pop up and you’ll be able to sample the book and decide if you want to buy it.
Now comes news of a website called Shop Savvy. It not only features books but clothing, footwear, appliances, gifts, and even travel and entertainment as well. According to Publishers Lunch, the online trade newsletter of the publishing industry, by looking at the barcode through the camera, “up pops the cheapest price on the product as well as reviews from people who have purchased the product.”
It’s easy to imagine consumers trying on clothing, Androiding it, and walking out to purchase it cheaper at a competitor down the street. Or online. This already happens in bookstores, Android or no Android. Shoppers browse books, then go home and buy them cheaper on Amazon.
Got ideas for Android applications of your own? Jump right in – it’s a free, open source. And check out this video of Android founders (and their dog).
Oh – the photo? That’s Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt doing some shopping of their own. No Android is evident. Can’t imagine why it was selected.
RC
Photo via People Magazine
Google has announced a book-text search tool called the Barcode Scanner that works with an Android-powered cellphone. According to Google Book Search engineer Jeff Breidenbach, when you download the software into your Android and point your phone camera at a book’s barcode, “it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN – without you even needing to click the shutter…You’ll then have the option to search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away”
It works only on books published in the last ten or fifteen years, when barcode technology was perfected. And of course, not all books published since the mid-90s can be found in Google Book Search. But it’s a start.
Read about it here
RC
