Paperless office gets political
Apparently, the White House Press Corp shares my interest in technological shifts from paper to digital. I’m a research scientist at a company that makes photocopiers — I wonder what their excuse is?
March 2009
Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019
Microsoft Office Labs has come out with a very nice “vision of the future video” called “2019” — Long Zheng over at iStartedSomething has posted both a short montage and longer 5 minute version (I recommend the longer).
I’ve always loved these sort of concept videos from corporate reserach labs, and as the medium goes I’d rate this one pretty high. The production value is top-knotch (as are most other such videos from Microsoft). As you’d expect, there are many kernels of ideas that have been around — I was especially reminded of Hiroshi Ishi’s ClearBoard, Jun Rekimoto’s Pick-and-Drop and various aspects from Bruce Tognazzini’s Starfire concept video — but there were still many concepts that were new to me. And unlike so many concept videos out there they seem to have mostly avoided the trap of assuming that devices will have a combination of strong AI and psychic powers.
Wearing your tweets on your sleeve
Augmented reality meets Twitter meets CafePress? Something like that — squidder.com has hacked together PaperTweet3d, basically a barcode that encodes your Twitter username on your shirt plus an augmented-reality system that automatically overlays your latest tweet over it.
PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.
Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
Nicholas Carlson at The Silicon Alley Insider does the math.