Japanese graphical search engine

/ Media Technology

MarsFlag is a new search engine in Japan (went live in March) that provides links as thumbnail images of returned results instead of text, with larger-version pop-ups when you rollover with the mouse. Supports full-text search (e.g. this search on wearable computer) as well as pictorial topic areas like movies, fashion magazines and motercycles.

According to Internet Watch [JP → EN], the search engine at least in part determines results ranking using bookmarks kept by the 35,000 subscribers to the Mark Agent web-based bookmarking service that the company also owns. MarsFlag claims this helps thwart attempts to gain page rank by creating link farms, a process called search engine optimization. (Presumably that’ll only work until SEO companies start generating fake Mark Agent accounts…)

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Panasonic shows off color eBook prototype

/ Media Technology

Tech-On reports that Matsushita (Panasonic) showed off a new prototype color eBook reader with a 5.6″, 210 points-per-inch display at the NE Technology Summit 2005 event held in Tokyo yesterday. Given that their current grayscale Σ book uses a bistable display made by Kent Displays, I would hazard a guess that their prototype is using Kent’s new color ChLCD display (but that’s just a guess). Bistable displays like the ChLCD and eInk‘s microcapsule display (used in the Sony LIBRIé) take power to change an image but not to maintain it, so they’re incredibly low power for low-framerate applications like eBooks.

(via engadget by way of Steve)

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Location-based apps

/ Wearable Computing

The theme for NPUC this year was The future of portable computing, so naturally there was a lot of talk about location-based applications. Ian Smith‘s talk on social mobile computing especially focused on using location. Personally I’m getting more and more skeptical about location-based apps. They’ve been right around the corner for a good decade now, and I’m starting to wonder if location-based apps are like video conferencing — something that sounds like it should be a hit but once they’re implemented nobody seems to care.

That said, I think if there’s ever going to be a successful location-aware application (outside of the ubiquitous museum-tourguide app) it’ll be one that uses location as an excuse to socialize. I’m not sure whether the final winners will look more like Dodgeball, GeoCaching, moblogs, or a cross between LiveJournal and the geospatial web (or all of these), but I’m pretty confident that when you scratch the surface the real point won’t be location, it’ll be human-to-human interaction that just happens to use location as the medium.

That also fits my general rule of thumb: The killer app is always communications. (That or sex, which is really a subset of communications.)

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Wrist-top computers

/ Wearable Computing

Aaron Marcus of AMandA just gave a talk promoting the wrist-top computer as a prime ubiquitous computing platform. I’m skeptical — It feels to me like the wrist is good for quick access to info that’s already showing or just a button-press away, but if you have to drill down (pushing small buttons with your wrist in front of your face) then that quick-access gets washed out by the slow interaction speed. That leaves a pretty narrow set of applications where you just a little bit of information with very little cognitive load.

Reasons to work on wrist:

  1. quick access for quick snippit of visual info
  2. fashionable on wrist (bracelet)
  3. quick access for interaction (a little better than phone clip?)
  4. need wrist access (e.g. pulse monitor)

Reasons not to work on wrist:

  1. small screen
  2. very limited input possible
  3. anything you need to look at for a while (wrist gets tired of being held in that position).
  4. needs hardening (so it won’t break when you bang it on something)

So what applications have the wrist-top as the clear winner interface? Well, there’s telling the time, there’s textual alarms, there’s … um … gimme a second, there’s gotta be more ….

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