Nick Projects

I have stopped using key lemon,  mostly because my crappy Microsoft web cam often decides it doesn’t want windows to detect it anymore,  which sort of messes up key lemon.  The technology isn’t perfect,  this product won’t be used by the NSA or any high security entity to keep out spies,  but… it has a ton of potential from a convenience perspective.   In this post I’m going to talk about some of the ways facial recognition could be integrated into different devices to make the world a better place.  

Message Status:

Some people are great at updating their status on messenger,  most people aren’t.  If a simple web cam could let my computer know when I was at my desk and when I wasn’t that would be awesome.  Of course blue tooth proximity or GPS aware cell phones may be a more logical solution for this type of thing.  

Personal Portal Sign In:  

Since I just made up the concept of a personal portal lets start with that idea.  A personal portal would be something like net-vibes or yahoo when it was cutting edge,  that aggregated information into one place online.  In theory this could be your calendar, to do list, email, and relevant news.  I would have a significantly different personal portal than my wife or brother etc.  If there were a system that could automatically load content like this based on facial recognition that would be really cool.  This would allow you to put a computer in the kitchen or corner of your bedroom to check the world when you woke up or had your coffee. Each member of a household would be able to have their own profiles and effortlessly switch between them.  

Adaptive Art:

A long time ago people used to talk about how in Bill Gates home you could carry a chip around and art would change to your preferences.  Now days most people can afford digital picture frames and LCD televisions are significantly less expensive than high end paintings.  There is really no reason that these settings couldn’t change based on the person looking at the picture.  

Automotive Preferences:

High end vehicles already can remember settings based on the key that the driver puts into the ignition.  With facial recognition this would be even more powerful because it wouldn’t be linked to a key.  Also beyond seat settings if cars could remember preset stations and play lists for music based on the driver’s face.  That would be killer.  

Comments:

I’m sure there are a million ideas I haven’t thought of,  have fun with the comments.

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If you have read many of my posts you may note a certain theme,  I like to digitize things that exist in non-digital forms.  The idea of using my phone to convert websites into audio or speek into a website and having it do my bidding, capturing perfectly good paper notes on a computer even storing reciepts as digital images are all examples of taking the “real world” and interacting with it in a different medium.  Since the real world already exists and more or less does it’s job fairly well,  this post will be to describe the advantages of digitizing things for people (like my wife) who don’t see the point.

For me being digital means one large thing,  escaping the confines of physical and geographical location.  Being digital allows you to easily store data and more importantly easily move data.  By keeping data in a sharable digital format it can be accessed and reproduced from pretty much anywhere.  This portability of information allows me to perform a variety of tasks from anywhere.  In my current career I am tethered to the office only by a phone and the other people that I work with.  I can easily move the phone home when I need to work in my home office and I am able to access my co-workers via email, instant message and chat rooms throughout the day.  The fact that I can keep most information in some digital format allows me to pick up work from home without missing any functionality.  The last corporation I worked for required dozens of pieces of paper.  The result was chaining people into traditional office working environments because there was no way to effectively move resources from work to home or back.

Digital media is also far more simple to organize.  While it is just as simple to have files buried in directories or drives that make them inaccessible,  there are tools that enable far more efficient searching.  Digital stickey notes can be searched for with a few mouse clicks while real sticky notes require tearing desks apart to find missing phone numbers.  Digital notes taken with a live scribe pen can be searched even when they are hand written,  while hunting through old notebooks on paper is a tedious task.  This ability to quickly access required data makes digital information far more efficient to use than “real world” data. For example I can rummage through a badly organized evernote database far more quickly than a filing cabinet to find a document I may have lost.  This quasi-organization is a huge benefit of digital information.

For all of these resons and…. because you can.  I will continue to follow this pursuit.

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I’ve been reading freakanomics.  One of the stories is about a gentleman who decided to sell bagels by dropping them off and asking people to put the appropriate dollar amount into a box.  This simple business yielded volumes of information about people’s trustworthiness, ethics, and job satisfaction.  I believe the bagel barometer should be used by any company that is concerned about its employees morale or job satisfaction.  Here’s how the experiment should go down:

Management sends out a memo saying that to improve the workplace environment they will have bagles delivered to the office every morning.  The cost for bagles is $1 leave a collection tin next to the bagles.

Each day tally up how many bagles were taken vs how many bagles were paid for.

At the end of each week or every other week send out a scathing email chastizing people for not paying for their bagles.  The email needs to be firm but not overly harsh.  You don’t want to scare people simply make it kown that the bagles are not free and that people are expected to pay for them.  This is to prevent the rule from becoming a guidline and eventually a joke.

What to watch for:  Obviously management should be watching for any dips in the payment rate for bagles.  This change should be tracked and refferenced to any business activities that would disgruntle employees.  If there are layoffs or if hours suddenly change the bagle theft rate should be an indicator of how employees actually feel about whats going on.  If there are no changes in the work environment that would cause employee dissatisfaction this is an indicator of a problem cropping up in employee moralle.  A disgruntled employee is more likely to steal from their employer in small ways before quitting or doing more damage.

In addition to being a relatively low cost experiment the bagle consultant has the positive advantage of making an office a better place.  Who wouldn’t be more happy working in an office where fresh bagles were brought in each morning.   This is a win win.

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Scanners have several large drawbacks when it comes to working being a great solution for personal archival.  The image quality on pretty much any scanner now is great but its sort of tedious to take whatever you are working on -> move to the computer room -> put pate one on the scanner -> scan the image and then deal with the rest of the scanning software and then repeat for each item/page.  The problem is basically that the process is such a pain it never winds up getting done.  Newer  scanners and software help with this issue,  Neat Receipts and the Fujitsu Snap Scan are both supposed to be great products, but, none can operate away from the computer.  None, are able to sit in a corner of my kitchen waiting for the receipt when I get home from the grocery store.   (more…)

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Recently there was an article on Forbes about how the GPS industry is getting hammered.  Basically,  cell phones are providing much of the same functionality and most people who own GPS systems won’t upgrade.  I agree with both of these points which is why I would like to throw out some ideas for the failing GPS manufacturers everywhere so they can build some better tools for the world to have.

Forbes Article

First:

Dump the idea of buying a GPS device,  instead think car companion. I need a GPS for 3 things: Finding places that I haven’t been before, Finding things along the side of the road when I’m traveling, Getting traffic updates.  My GPS doesn’t actually provide the third function  and I don’t care enough to upgrade it.

(more…)

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Over a year ago a company called Eye-Fi created a cool device.  It’s an SD card that connects to your existing wifi network to send pictures from your digital camera to your home computer.  Their software works with several online services to allow easy blogging and social networking updates.  Also it instantly downloads the pictures to your hard drive so you don’t need to sync your camera.  Overall this is a cool thing, but, I can’t convince myself to buy one because I don’t cringe at the thought of dumping an SD card. (more…)

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