It everything works as they say, this would be one great, great innovation.
Tag Archive for 'innovation'
Checking-in on Foursquare can sometimes be… redundant.
Well, a clever developer took advantage of this check-in fatigue by developing an iPhone app that detects your favorite spots thanks to a “Favorite” menu within the app and checks you in while you’re near this place. Automatically.
So, what is Enole?
A platform for identity management utilizing near field communications, strong authentication, and lots more buzzwordy awesomeness to help developers build something just plain cool.
Enole builds an API that will help developers optimize our identity management in the real world, using, of course, technology. Enole’s ultimate goal would be a world where your phone is the only thing you’d need to be recognized as yourself. No ID, credit cards, passport, etc.
Ok. That wasn’t enough. GigaOM writer Liz Gannes gives more information. She met with the co-founder. And sometimes, examples are great:
Co-founder Kurt Collins came by our office yesterday and showed me a few examples: In one called Viploc, a Mac is set to lock itself when it’s not in Bluetooth range of its owner’s mobile phone. So when the phone is not present (or its Bluetooth is turned off), the computer logs out of its current session. In another demo, an iPad app called ZapCash, users can send each other money when they are in proximity of each other.
One of Enole’s early success is that they’ve managed to transform security into a key feature of their product. And that’s well done.
Rather than requiring a mobile app to be installed, Enole uses a unique identifier associated with a phone, such as a Bluetooth ID or MAC address. The company offers developers a REST-based API for identity and authentication using secure sockets layer encrypted transport and public key infrastructure (PKI). And to ensure reliability, Enole has also developed a way to use DNS to authenticate a user’s token should its servers be down.
I’ll keep an eye on this start-up.
This is pretty crazy, people.
Nadia doesn’t even contain a proper camera. Inside the black box is a Nokia N73 cellphone which talks to a nearby Mac via Bluetooth. The Mac sends the image off to Acquine’s “aesthetics inference engine” on the web and gets back a score, which it then displays on screen.
Nice project.
Aza Raskin is—literally—a designer. He crafts interfaces for Firefox and is the designer lead for the browser project. He came up with a new feature called: Tab Candy.
The idea is great: it’s a pure innovation—I’ve never heard of something like that before—and it applies to something that wasn’t improved since a long time: tabs.
Well, you use tabs all-day long. And so do I. Now, what is Tab Candy?
An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Great idea, indeed.
Music needs to be like water. It needs to be ubiquitous. We need to understand that this is not about MP3 files anymore; the MP3 file has become the URL and through that unique identifier I can send you something and you’ll be able to know what it is and listen to it.
Has it, though? Well, the world is not yet thoroughly connected to the Internet. Even if the URL kills DRM-like issues, I think a lot of users would prefer to store their MP3 files.
