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April 22, 2007

ThingM Newsletter, April 22, 2007

CONTENTS

- News
- Smart LEDs
- Museums and Technology
- The Coming Age of Magic
- New site
- Summer internship
- Appearances
- Unsubscribe

NEWS
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We're growing as a company and it's exciting and difficult: we're negotiating fractional ownership of a 3D printer, but we still can't get the bank to give us the PIN numbers for our account. Everything takes about 3 times as long as I estimate, even when I triple my original estimates. ;-) However, we are excited to be doing work with projected video triggered by RFIDs (more on that to come!) and heartened by what I (Mike) feel is a growing convergence between the consumer electronics industry, the fashion industry and the white good industry. "Appliance" magazine had the I-Tech Bluetooth laser projected keyboard on the cover of the latest issue. This acknowledges that what unifies technologies is not how they work (the appliance world, for example, is still dependent on--judging from the ads in that magazine--electric motors), but who uses them and how. Why can't a laser keyboard be an appliance? If a hand blender can, it can.

SMART LEDS
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In one of our technology projection exercises, we started talking about what happens when individual components become "smarter" and the basic building blocks become less basic. This has already happened in software, when the benefits of encapsulation and standard communication interfaces overwhelm the computational efficiencies of working with basic components. Almost no one programs in assembly language anymore, because the tradeoffs don't work nearly as well as they did 20 years ago.

Since we love LEDs, we started talking with them. Today you can buy LEDs in many colors, but the colors have to be tuned at the factory and are immutable once the LED is made. Why can't something be called an LED, but really be a cluster of RGB LED dies with a tiny microcontroller that tunes their color to a specific combination? The LED can have the traditional 2 pins, but it could be any color.

We'd been talking about this for a couple of months when a guy named Alex Weber went ahead and did a basic one-color version of the idea. Since our idea was to have a fully RGB solution, Tod prototyped one. What you get is something that's clearly bigger than an LED, but not by much, and it's also not that much more expensive than, say, blue LEDs were when they first came out. We predict some manufacturer will jump on this idea and there will be smart LEDs soon, and soon thereafter there will be other "smart components": not devices in of themselves, but the physical equivalent of object libraries.

You can see Tod's designs and read his thoughts here:

todbot.com/blog/2007/03/25/smart-led-prototypes/

MUSEUMS AND TECHNOLOGY
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Our current client work includes prototyping for The Henry Ford, an amazing museum documenting the history of 19th and 20th century innovation in Dearborn, MI. That led me to thinking about museums and technology. When The Henry Ford asked us to participate in the Outdoor Historical Museum Forum, an annual gathering of curators and administrators of outdoor history museums, it was the impetus to think about it in greater depth. My conclusion was that museums' competition is media, that the competitive advantage they have is authenticity, but that authenticity needs to be contextualized to be relevant, and that technology can be used to communicate that context.

You can find the text and illustrations of presentation here:

www.orangecone.com/ohmf.ppt.pdf (it's a 600K PDF)

THE COMING AGE OF MAGIC
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I've been writing about animism and magic as they relate to the design of ubiquitous computer user experiences for several years. When O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference asked me to keynote on the topic, it was an opportunity to link all of those blog posts, magazine articles and talks into a single presentation that described what I feel is an emergent property of the combination of embedded information technology, people's responses to objects that exhibit behaviors and existing cultural metaphors for such objects.

You can read the presentation here:

www.orangecone.com/tm_etech_magic_0.3.pdf

NEW SITE
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We have spent much of the last six weeks working with a couple terrific folks in Berlin to redesign and redevelop our site. Instead of a handful of flat HTML files, we now have a completely redesigned site that's generated by an Open Source CMS (Typo3). I worked closely with Sylke Holz on the design and I'm very pleased with what she created.

The new site is, of course, at thingm.com
Please let us know if you have any comments or thoughts about it.

Sylke:

www.sylke-holtz.de

SUMMER INTERNSHIP
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We're offering a paid summer internship for someone with strong CAD experience, skilled at rapid rendering, and the ability to take an idea and develop it quickly without direct supervision.

15-20 hours per week, $15-20/hr depending on experience and skills, mid-May through mid-August.

San Francisco or Pasadena, CA

More info:
thingm.com/news-blog/entire-news/article/summer-internship-at-thingm.html

APPEARANCES
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Mike and Tod will be will be in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area April 25-27. If you're interested in having a drink, drop us a note! Mike will then fly to San Jose for the CHI conference (http://www.chi2007.org/), April 29-May 3.

Mike will be speaking about food and technology at Taste3, a conference focused on food, wine and culture. Robert Mondavi Winery, in Napa, May 6-8, 2007:

www.taste3.com

Tod will be demonstrating various Roomba hacks at MAKE Magazine's Maker Faire, May 19th and 20th, at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Come by, see all the amazing physical computing projects there, say hello and get him to sign your copy of "Hacking Roomba."

makerfaire.com

UNSUBSCRIBE
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