Time has a great slideshow of up and coming gadgets. A few that I really like are a new cellphone from Samsung that’s thinner and lighter than the Razr, the Sanyo Xacti HD camcorder, the swivable laptop display from Intel, and the “sideshow” display that allows you to check email and play music without opening the laptop, compatible with Vista. Click on the thumbnails below to view the photos, courtesy of their manufacturers.
I was in my car, driving back from lunch, when I got a call on my cellphone. I’m holding out on buying a Bluetooth headset, because they look ridiculous. So I still have to answer the phone the “old fashioned” way, by flipping it open and pressing Speakerphone. I know, what tough luck… But I realized that these wireless/Bluetooth headsets could be made really tiny, and could fit in the ear, if the battery could be made really small. Sure, it’d be a hassle to change the battery, but what if you didn’t have to? What if the battery charged itself? How could that happen? Well, let’s look at three existing technologies on the market today:
Given these three very interesting methods of generating energy or electrical impulses, why can’t we make a really tiny battery that can charge itself from the movement of our body, our body heat, or the vibrations caused by our voice? We could be charging the battery as we speak, as we move, etc.
This sort of battery could be used in a tiny headset that could be placed in the ear, or in some other fashion, but the point is, it would be really small, almost unnoticeable. I wouldn’t look like a geek, with a big Bluetooth headset strapped to my ear, a menacing blue light flashing on it, as if I were an android. I’m sure many of you share my feelings here. Instead, I would use a small device, no bigger than the tip of my small finger, or even smaller, that could go inside the ear, or hook right outside the ear canal with a thin wire that goes behind my ear. It would let ambient noise pass through unchanged, but would block it when I’d be using my cellphone.
Wouldn’t this be cool?
Are you interested in using this idea? Then please see my rules about using it.
I was in the bathroom, whistling a tune I’d heard in a movie last night (“Anchors Aweigh”, with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra,) and wishing I could find out its title, when it occurred to me. Why shouldn’t I be able to search for it?
I should be able to whistle that tune into my computer’s microphone, and have it search the audio and video files on my computer for similar sound patterns. It wouldn’t have to give me an exact match, a few possible matches would be fine. A desktop search engine, like Spotlight, or the Google Search Engine, or the Microsoft/Yahoo flavors, or whatever, brand isn’t important here, could index sound files for sound patterns – in its most basic form, it would search for inflections, and could then expand to more complex characteristics such as pitch, tone, timbre, human/instrument, etc. Wouldn’t this be an amazing thing?
Similarly, this could be expanded to movies. I could speak a phrase I remember from a movie into the microphone, and it would then search my movie files and find the movie and scene where that phrase is spoken. I know this is probably more difficult than a simple inflection in a sound file, but it is possible.
Just brainstorming… a possible offshoot could be searching movie scenes based on descriptions such as: male character dressed in a white shirt and grey pants, black shoes, hair parted from the right, in his 50’s, holding onto the side of Mt. Rushmore, bad guy stepping on his hand. This isn’t hard, it’s… Cary Grant in “North by Northwest”. The computer should be able to do that, too. I realize this may be some years away, but again, I think it’s possible.
Realizing that most people haven’t got extensive movie and music libraries, and sometimes the things they want to find aren’t on their computers, an Internet site could be set up with a large library of movie and music files. People could then whistle a tune into their microphones while they’re on the site, and could search its extensive library for the song where that snippet is found. They could choose to purchase that file afterwards. In a similar fashion, they could do all these other things I’m talking about here, eventually. Wouldn’t this be an amazing use of processing power? I for one look forward to this!
This idea is so simple I can’t believe it’s not already in use! There I was during lunch, listening to my iPod in Shuffle mode, and it dawned on me how annoying it was that if I wanted to change the Equalizer present, I’d have to maneuver through several menus, then when it advanced to the next song, which might be of a different genre, I’d have to adjust the Equalizer once again. Since I didn’t want to bother, I left the Equalizer on None, but how much better would it be if these Equalizer modes could be automatically changed!
It’s so simple, too! They’re already named about the same as Genres, and so all the player would have to do is to look for an Equalizer mode that matches the Genre of the music currently playing. When I’m playing Pop music on my iPod, the Equalizer should automatically switch to the Pop settings; by the way, if you haven’t noticed yet, my last name is Pop. 🙂
There should be some level of tweaking though. I should be able to select different Equalizer presets for different genres, and I should be able to edit presets, as well as create new ones. These last two options are already available in most music players, but what I’m trying to get across here is that they should work together with the genre/equalizer matching.
I look forward to seeing this feature in upcoming versions of the popular music players like iTunes or WMP! I think it should also be integrated into the portable players like the iPods, which were really the impetus for this idea in the first place.
I sat down to breakfast this morning and kept thinking about my media and the problems I face when trying to get things properly cataloged, and realized the tools still aren’t out there to do things correctly.
Current media players (such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc.) are good for playing music, or for playing video, and are fairly good when it comes to cataloging audio, but they have a ways to go when it comes to cataloging video or – and this is the most important thing – cataloging MEDIA.
Let me explain myself. Audio files are one type of media. Video files are another. Writings are yet another. So are photos or graphics. Web pages can use all types, and they can be though of as another media type as well, a hybrid, so to speak. There isn’t a media player out there that combines the ability to play and properly catalog ALL of these different types of media, and in particular, to correlate them in meaningful and flexible ways. Here’s are a few example that illustrate the current shortcomings:
The good news is that we can do this with the current technology. This isn’t some fairy tale. It should only take about 6 months to 1 1/2 years or so to develop the product. Yes, some of the media types will have to be re-tooled to allow for syncing of text and audio/video, but this CAN be done, and an amazing product awaits at the end of the tunnel.
Raoul Pop 