Yes, it's true: the iPhone actually needs spectacles to correct its vision on close-up shots. Otherwise they get blurry.



Now, this isn't a problem for the regular family meeting group shots, BUT, if you're into REALLY futuristic stuff, you'll realize that the Apple design crew missed an important point: by not choosing a lens with auto-focus, they crippled the iPhone's vision to a point it performs text-recognition badly, or not at all.

Text-recognition? Yes, the iPhone does text-recognition. It does stuff like "reading" a business card, or "identifying" a product from a bar-code, or simply "opening" physical-links. These are all actions that are available in several apps from the App Store. Text, image, sound, music and speech recognition are in the inevitable path of the future of hand-held devices, and, frankly, this is mostly why I get excited with the iPhone.

Now, the people at Griffin propose a solution: they sell spectacles for the iPhone. By sliding in a $31 special lens, dubbed Clarifi, one can get crispy close-up photos. Oh, and the lens wrapper also acts as a protective iPhone cover.

Popular text-recognition apps like Evernote and Snappr are recommended to be used with this corrective lens.

We can only hope that the Apple crew will correct the device's faulty vision in the new version. Meanwhile, you can check out this exciting Snappr demo:




Just a word about Snappr: the service tries to do exactly John Battelle's vision of the future he described in his 2005 "The Search" book about Google; and that was to google a product, from a shelf in a store, and instantly get the best price and where to look for it.

P.S: you'll notice that the Snappr logo is, well... a snapper. That's a fish! But this one is to stick in the eyes and not in the ears ;)
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Labels: clarifi evernote iphone snappr

Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal.

Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media". However, back then, it really wasn't the modern facebook-ish "social-media" model that was tingling my neurones; it was rather the emergent nature of these disruptive new tools such as blogs, wikis and web-based productivity apps such as Google Docs or Zoho.
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Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ... what is the REAL future of computing, as seen from 2010?

I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.

Somebody wrote a while ago:

Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

To which I add:

Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.

And, to my insistence, beyond games/apps, music, movies, tv-shows, books and magazines, Apple will try hard to become a vacations, travel and experiences re-seller. It's the natural next-step for them ...

I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,

I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and a horde of PT finest geeks. I'll participate and assist to the biggest festival of creativity in PT geekdom. Missed it last year.

One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted.

Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.

At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform. But first, the life/body-hacks platform will need to walk the walk it has to walk, and I expect it to be, at least, a five-years march.

Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
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