Fancier conferences put up two projectors to let the audience see the slides. But the presenters still look at their slides on a notebook on the podium, or in some cases on a monitor on the floor below their stage.

How about adding a projector that projects on the back wall, just above the heads of the audience, for the speaker to see their own slides? Then they can roam the stage and see the slides without losing eye contact with the audience. They may not be able to see clear detail on the slides but they shouldn't need it.

It's true this does not work as well for "Presenter mode" which shows the speaker a different display on the notebook from what is seen on the projector, both because most notebooks don't have two video outputs, and also because you don't want to give the audience access to your notes and the title of the next slide as is often shown in presenter mode. However, not too many use this and it's not usually the end of the world if somebody can look back and see the notes.

You also want to show the speaker a clock. If that can be overlaid on the rear screen, great, but this can also be done as a different screen with a big clock. Projectors and screens are small enough to make this workable at fancy conferences.

I just went through a hellish weekend at the hands of United Airlines, trying to change planes at Dulles on Saturday, and not getting to California until Monday. I wasn’t alone, and while I do wish to vent at the airline, there are things that could have been better with a bit of new thinking.

As flights were canceled or delayed, and planes filled up, for most customers the only answer was the customer service centers inside the terminals. These quickly had lines of hundreds of people with waits of several hours. In some cases, just for simple transactions like getting a hotel voucher because you had been moved to the next day. (While it is possible to get such vouchers at the ticketing desks outside the secure area, Dulles is not an easy airport to move around, and people were reluctant to take the shuttles to the master terminal and leave the secure area without knowing their fate.)

Among the many things the airline is to be faulted for is having no real way to deal with the huge numbers of customers who need service when a cascading problem occurs. Multi-hour waits simply don’t cut it. The answer lies in extending the facilities of the self-service kiosks. At those kiosks you can do basic check-in, changes of seating and some other minor changes. You go up, put in your card or confirmation number, and you can do some transactions. You can also pick up the phone and talk to an agent sitting in their Nova Scotia call center. The kiosk has a printer that can print boarding passes. Unfortunately the agents are not empowered to do more than help you with what the kiosk can do. They can’t be like the other customer service agents and rebook flights or issue vouchers.

When you have a big company like an airline, that may suddenly need hundreds of agents for one trouble spot, video kiosks with printers (and scanners) seem like a great idea. Stations could be installed where customers can come and talk to an agent by videocall. They can feed documents into scanners or show them to the camera. They can feed documents into hoppers that will destroy them if that’s needed. And a more full printer could print them any documents they need — boarding passes, tickets, hotel, food and transportation vouchers. In fact, unless agents have to physically handle luggage or control who gets on a plane, they don’t need to be right there at all.

Of course this is not as personal as a live human in front of you. But it’s much better than a phone agent (and lots of listening to Rhapsody in Blue.) And, if the need arises, you can suddenly have 100 agents serving a problem area instead of 5, and focus the on-site agents on on-site problems.

Of course, the scanners and printers are only needed at rare intervals during the transactions, so another approach would be to let people have a combined web/videocall experience on any laptop computer, and to contract with the providers of airport wifi service to make access to the airline’s support website a free feature. Do that and suddenly there can be a thousand customer service videoconference tools in an airport that needs one. (They can all show video, and a growing number of laptops can also send it.) A smaller bank of scanners and printers can handle the portions of the transaction that need that. For example, you contact customer service on the laptop and the agent tells you to line up at scanner #5 and scan your documents. Then you work out your problems, and the agent tells you to go to printer #3 and get your new documents. (Destruction of old documents can be handled by the machine or possibly an on-site agent who does little but that.)

In fact, a lot of the stuff done at airport gates could be done this way. All the hassling at the desk is easy to do remotely. Only the actual ushering onto the planes needs live people. It may be less personal but I would rather have this than standing in line for long periods. They key factor is the ability to move agents around to where they are needed in an instant, so that there is no waiting (and little wasted time by agents.)

Of course, agents can also be very far away. Though I would resist the temptation to make them too far away (like India.) Not that there aren’t good workers in India but too many companies fall for the temptation to get employees in India that are even cheaper than the good ones, and simply not up to the jobs they are given. The Nova Scotia crew were helpful and their distance was not a problem.

This principle can apply to conference and tradeshow registration as well. Why fly in staff to a remote tradeshow to do such jobs which tend to be quite bursty. Have local staff to man scanners and printers, and remote staff to talk on the videophone and solve my problems. It’s so much cheaper than the cost of transporting and housing staff.

Of course, you can also just plain have a good internet/web customer service center. But I’m talking here about the problem of people who are at your facility, and deserve more than that. They need a live person to solve their problems, they need to combine what they can do on the computer with what a skilled (and authorized) agent can make happen, and because they are on location and upset, and not just at home on the computer, they deserve the expense of a bit more money to provide good service.  read more »

I wrote before about how the fancy bags they give away at conferences very rarely get used. I have a stack in the closet, and I’m not going to use them as my bag with sponsor logos plastered all over them. The people who attend such conferences aren’t the sort who want to carry your advertising everywhere, or scream out “I’m so cheap I’m using a sponsored bag.” And you can’t give them to friends as gifts, even if they are nice bags. So I suggested that they put logos on the inside but of course that doesn’t yet happen.

So here’s a business: Decent quality sheets that one can use to cover up the logos with something else. Either a sheet with the same common “ballistic” nylon texture, or even better, a sheet that I can print out on my inkjet printer (like a iron-on T-shirt transfer) which is thick enough to cover the other logo and let me have my own image or name.

Yes, this is sort of unfair to the sponsors of the bags. But the truth is, their sponsorship really doesn’t work after the conference is over. How often do you really see bags with logos plastered all over them out in the real world beyond the flight home from a conference? So this is more a reaction to waste than a desire to cheat the sponsors.

I’m not sure why, but beaming business cards between PDAs never caught on as much as I would have liked. Of course Palm and Wince PDAs don’t speak the same beaming language (of course) and I never saw it much in Windows anyway.

With my new fancy scanner, I can scan a stack of 60 business cards in a minute, so it’s not going to take me long to do the physical scanning. Business card scanning has been around for a while, but it still presents challenges.

People like to do funny things on their cards. They put stuff on the back (not just for foreign language contacts, where it makes sense.) They put in coloured backgrounds and pictures to make the OCR process as hard as possible. They like to do embossing, or even strange shapes. (Some people used to put rolodex tabs on their cards to make them stand out in a rolodex.) They will put lines or other OCR killers in the background too. People should start expecting their card will be scanned and OCRd, and design accordingly. That means if you put in your stylized logo, but the company name in in plain text too. (Though the need for a URL on a card helps this nowadays.)

Of course, even better to solve the OCR problem would be to put just one string in a clear, easy-to OCR format, which is the URL of a vcard. Then it doesn’t matter if I can’t OCR anything else, I can get reliable (and up to date) information from there. (One could also imagine a hosting service with a standard URL prefix to put in front of a vcard ID so you don’t have to take up that much room on your card. Another idea would be to standardize the VCARD URL so that it says something like “VCARD: S/xxxxx” where xxxxx is a semi-private string, and “S” means use the web URL found elsewhere on the card, with “std-vcard/xxxxx” appended to it. This way you don’t have to duplicate the domain name, but nor can vcards be harvested. Otherwise we could just use the E-mail to extract the vcard.)

Anyway, I came up with another idea I will try instead of beaming. “Can I take a picture of your card?” Since I plan to scan people’s cards anyway, why not save the trouble and use a small pocket camera I am carrying, and take a photo right there. You don’t even have to give me the card. Will I be rude if I don’t take the physical card?

Now admittedly, camera phone pictures may suck, and for this you really need a camera with a macro mode. On camera flash may present a giant glare spot unless you learn how to do it right, or are shooting in bright light without flash. The photo won’t be nearly as good as a scan, of course. (I suppose one could imagine putting a 2” long hand-scanner line on the side of your PDA to hand scan cards, bar codes and many other things.)

The bad news is that cell phone cameras probably can’t make the cut. They don’t have macro mode, and if they have a flash, it’s going to be very hard to get a good exposure on the card. You have to tweak what you can tweak and even then it may not be possible. (I found I had to use my cell camera’s exposure compensation to drop it by 2 stops to avoid having the LED that counts for a flash not wash out the card, and even then it wasn’t very good.)

There’s a lot of equipment you don’t need to have for long. And in some cases, the answer is to rent that equipment, but only a small subset of stuff is available for rental, especially at a good price.

So one alternative is what I would call a “ReBay” — buy something used, typically via eBay, and then after done with it, sell it there again. In an efficient market, this costs only the depreciation on the unit, along with shipping and transaction fees. Unlike a rental, there is little time cost other than depreciation.

For some items, like DVDs and Books and the like we see companies that cater specially to this sort of activity, like Peerflix and Bookmooch and the like. But it seems that eBay could profit well from encouraging these sorts of markets (while vendors of new equipment might fear it eats into their sales.)

Here are some things eBay could do to encourage the ReBay.

• By default, arrange so that all listings include a licence to re-use the text and original photographs used in a listing for resale on eBay. While sellers could turn this off, most listings could now be reusable from a copyright basis.
• Allow the option to easily re-list an item you’ve won on eBay, including starting from the original text and photos as above. If you add new text and photos, you must allow your buyer to use them as well.
• ReBays would be marked however, and generally text would be added to the listing to indicate any special wear and tear since the prior listing. In general an anonymised history of the rebaying should be available to the buyer, as well as the feedback history of the seller’s purchase.
• ReBayers would keep the packaging in which they got products. As such, unless they declare a problem with the packaging, they would be expected to charge true shipping (as eBay calculates) plus a very modest handling fee. No crazy inflated shipping or flat rate shipping.
• Since some of these things go against the seller’s interests (but are in the buyer’s) it may be wise for eBay to offer reduced auction fees and paypal fees on a reBay. After all, they’re making the fees many times on such items, and the paypal money will often be paypal balance funded.
• Generally you want people who are close, but for ReBaying you may also prefer to pass on to those outside your state to avoid having to collect sales tax.
• Because ReBayers will be actually using their items, they will have a good idea of their condition. They should be required to rate it. No need for “as-is” or disclaimers of not knowing what if it works.

This could also be done inside something like Craigslist. Craigslist is more popular for local items (which is good because shipping cost is now very low or “free”) though it does not have auctions or other such functionality. Nor is it as efficient a market.

A lot of people want to catalog their extensive libraries, to be able to know what they have, to find books and even to join social sites which match you with people with similar book tastes, or even trade books with folks.

There are sites and programs to help you catalog your library, such as LibraryThing. You can do fast searches by typing in subsets of book titles. The most reliable quick way is to get a bar code scanner, like the free CueCats we were all given a decade ago, and scan the ISBN or UPC code. Several of these sites also support you taking a digital photograph of the UPC or ISBN barcode, which they will decode for you, but it's not as quick or reliable as an actual barcode scanner.

So I propose something far faster -- take a picture with a modern hi-res digital camera of your whole shelf. Light it well first, to avoid flash glare, perhaps by carrying a lamp in your hand. Colour is not that important. Take the shelves in a predictable order so picture number is a shelf number.

What you need next is some OCR of above average sophistication, since it has to deal with text in all sorts of changing fonts and sizes, some fine print and switching orientations. But it also has a simpler problem than most OCR packages because it has a database of known book titles, authors, publisher names and other tag phrases. And it even would have, after some time, a database of actual images of fully identified book spines taken by other users. There may be millions of books to consider but that's actually a much smaller space than most OCR has to deal with when it must consider arbitrary human sentences.

Even so, it won't do the OCR perfectly on many books. But that doesn't matter so much for some applications such as search for a book. Because if you want to know "Where's my copy of *The Internet Jokebook*" it only has to find the book whose text looks the most like that from a small set. It doesn't have to get all the letters right by any stretch. If it finds more than one match it can quickly show you them as images and you can figure it out right away.

If you want a detailed catalog, you can also just get the system to list only the books it could not figure out, and you can use the other techniques to reliably identify it. The easiest being looking at the image on screen and typing the name, but it could also print out those images per shelf, and send you over to get the barcode. The right software could catalog your whole library in minutes.

This would also have useful commercial application in bookstores, especially used ones, in all sorts of libraries and on corporate bookshelves.

Of course, the photograph technique is actually worthwhile without the OCR. You can still peruse such photographs pretty easily, much more easily than going down to look at books in storage boxes. And, should your library be destroyed in a fire, it's a great thing to have for insurance and replacement purposes. And it's also easy to update. If you don't always re-shelve books in the same place (who does) it is quick to re-photograph every so often, and software to figure out that one book moved from A to B is a much simpler challenge since it already has an image of the spine from before.

As workers search for trapped miners in Utah, having drilled a 9” hole down to what is hoped to be their area, they plan to use things like sound and detecting CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere to find the miners.

It occurs to me that it should be possible to fit one of those inflatable radio controlled blimps down such a small tube, inflating it after it gets to the bottom. There are models that support small video cameras (and LED lights would not be too hard) especially in the denser air at the bottom of a mine. You would send down a radio relay station as well, and if things were really fancy, a way for the blimp to be told to dock for recharge or exchange of battery packs. (Small butane motors might also provide better power for weight.)

It’s also possible that power could be provided by paying out a wire, if it could generate enough thrust to drag that wire. There is a high risk the wire could get caught except on smooth floors, though. One might imagine paying out wire as far as one can go, and then disconnecting, fully charged, for a modest time on internal power. These blimps are cheap, you could send down several. They could easily sail over debris a ground based robot could not handle, though they could not crawl through small holes without deflating.

Another option would be an enclosed fan hovering robot. Such a robot would be able to go through smaller holes, though it’s hard to imagine remote pilots good enough to send them through such channels with only a video camera to see by. In the future, we may well have hovering robots able to use sonar to keep themselves stable and away from obstacles. They would go on ground when they could, then use bursts of hover to get over obstacles. But the blimp is something that could certainly work in ordinary mine channels today, though only for a limited battery life.

The radio had a tribute to Bob Barker, who retires today after 35 years hosting The Price is Right. I always admired the genius of that show in making product placement an essential part of the show -- the show was about the advertisers and made the audience think about how much the product was worth and remember it. I'm surprised we didn't see more copycat game shows. There's plenty of product placement today, but it's largely gratuitous, not integral as this was. The fans on the radio said that while the show was gone, they could always watch reruns.

At first I laughed at this -- clearly you could not watch them too soon. But then I thought it might be amusing to see reruns from decades ago just because it would shock us as to how the prices of the items had changed. And then I thought you could recreate the show today, with modern people, and their puzzle would be figuring out the prices of items from the past. And this could be not simply the recent past -- there is no reason the game could not go back centuries, and puzzle the audience about history as well as commerce.

One could even invert the question. "I have here one gallon of gas. What year did it first hit 25 cents?" instead of "Here's a gallon of Gas. What did it cost in 1950?" Of course, the product placement opportunities are perhaps not nearly as good. Companies would not love to remind consumers how much more they charge for things today.

Everybody’s been discovering things in Google Street View. While Microsoft and Amazon did this sort of thing much earlier, there’s been a lot more publicity about Google doing it because it’s Google, and it’s much more high resolution among other things.

But now that it’s out, I expect we’ll see web sites pop up where people spot the Google camera-car and report on its location in real time. Allowing people to prepare for its passage.

I expect we’ll see:

• People flashing various parts of their bodies
• Dances, pyramids, etc.
• Spam, and signs with sayings and ads and even anti-google slogans
• Signs designed to look like a large Google ad box
• People holding Google Maps flags like this crowd from Bay to Breakers

And more clever things I haven’t thought of. Soon they may have to stealth the vehicle!

At our new favourite Indian buffet (Cafe Bombay) they run Bollywood videos on big screens all the time. In Bollywood, as you probably know, everybody is dancing all the time, in wonderful synchronization, like Broadway but far more. I’ve never been to an Indian dance club to see if people try to do that in real life, but I suspect they want to.

I started musing about a future where brain implants let you give a computer control of your limbs so you could participate in such types of dance, but I realized we might be able to do something much sooner.

Envision either a special suit or a set of cuffs placed around various parts of the arms and legs. The cuffs would be able to send stimuli to the skin, possibly by vibrating or a mild electric current, or even the poke of a small actuator.

With these cuffs, we would develop a language of dance that people could learn. Dancers have long used Dance notation to record dances and communicate them, and more sophisticated sytems are used to have computerized figures dance. (Motion capture is also used to record dances, and often to try to distill them to some form of encoding.) In this case, an association would be made between stimuli and moves. If you feel the poke on one part of your left wrist, move you left arm in a certain way, a different set of pokes commands a different move. There would no doubt have to be chords (multiple stimulators on the same cuff) to signal more complex moves.

Next, people would have to train so that they develop an intuitive response, so that as soon as they feel a stimulus, they make the move. People with even modest dance skill of course learn to make moves as they are told them or as they see them, without having to consciously think about it a great deal. The finest dancers, as we have seen, can watch a choreographer dance and duplicate the moves with great grace due to their refined skill.

I imagine people might learn this language with something like a video game. We’ve already seen the popularity of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) where people learn to make simple foot moves by seeing arrows on the screen. A more advanced game would send you a stimulus and test how quickly you make the move.

The result would be to become a sort of automaton. As the system fed you a dance, you would dance it. And more to the point, if it fed a room full of people a dance, they would all dance the same dance, in superb synchronization (at least for those of lower skill.) Even without the music though normally this would all be coordinated with that. Dance partners could even be fed complimentary moves. Indeed, very complex choreographies could be devised combined with interesting music to be done at dance clubs in moves that would go way beyond techno. I can see even simple moves, getting people to raise and move hands in patterns and syncs being very interesting, and more to the point, fun to participate in.

In addition, this could be a method to train people in new and interesting dances. Once one danced a dance under remote control several times one would presumably then be able to do it without the cuffs, and perhaps more naturally. Just like learning a piece of music with the sheet music and eventually being able to take the music away.

I suspect the younger people were when they started this, the better they would be at it.

It could also have application in the professional arena, to bring a new member of a troupe up to speed, or for a dance to be communicated quickly. Even modest dancers might be able to perform a complex dance immediately. It could also possibly become a companion to Karaoke.

There are other means besides cuffs to communicate moves to people of course, including spoken commands into earphones (probably cheapest and easiest to put on) and visual commands (like DDR) into an eyeglass heads-up-display once they become cheap. The earphone approach might be good for initial experiments. One advantage of cuffs is the cuffs could contain accelerometers which track how the limb moved, and thus can confirm that the move was done correctly. This would be good in video game training mode. In fact, the cuffs could even provide feedback for the correct move, offering a stimulus if the move is off in time or position.

There have been some “use people as robots” experiments before, but let’s face it, dance is more fun. And an actual Bollywood movie could come to life.

Many people accumulate a lot of frequent flyer miles they will never use. Some of the airlines allow you to donate miles to a very limited set of charities. I can see why they limit it — they would much rather have you not use the miles than have the charity use them. Though it’s possible that while the donor does not get any tax credit for donated miles, the airline does.

However, it should be possible for a clever web philanthropist to set up a system to allow people to donate miles to any charity they wish. This is not a violation of the terms of service on flyer miles, which only forbid trading them for some valuable consideration, in particular money.

The site would allow charities to register and donors to promise miles to the charities. A charity could then look at its balance, and go to the airline’s web site before they book travel to see if the flight they want can be purchased with miles. If so, they would enter the exact itinerary into the web site, and a suitable donor would be mailed the itinerary and passenger’s name. They would make the booking, and send the details back to the charity. (Several donors could be mailed, the first to claim would do the booking.) In a few situations, the available seats would vanish before the donor could do the booking, in which case the charity would need to try another airline or paid seat.

Donors could specify what they would donate, whether they are willing to buy upgrades or business class tickets (probably not) and so on.

Now it turns out that while the donor can’t accept money for the miles, the charity might be able to. Oftentimes non-profit representatives travel for things like speaking engagements where the host has a travel budget. Some hosts would probably be happy to cover something other than airfare, such as other travel expenses, or a speaking honorarium with the money. In this case, the charity would actually gain real money for the donation, a win for all — except the airline. But in the case of the airline, we are talking about revenue it would have lost if the donor had used the miles for a flight for themselves or an associate. So the real question is whether the airline can be indignant about having miles that would have gone unused suddenly find a useful home.

Now it’s true the booking interfaces on the airline sites are not great, but they are improving. And some employee of the non-profit would need to have an account, possibly even one with enough miles, just to test what flights are available. But this will be true in many cases.

Would the airlines try to stop it? I doubt it, because this would never be that big, and they would be seen as pretty nasty going after something that benefits charities.

Miles could also be used for hotel stays and other travel items.

My father was famously a preacher turned agnostic. We used to argue all the time about the difference between an agnostic and an athiest. I felt the difference was inconsequential, he felt it was important. And I’ve had the same argument with other proclaimed agnostics. I found an amusing way to sum up my view of it in one answer.

What is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic?

The difference is the atheist says she’s an atheist, while the agnostic says she’s an agnostic.  read more »

When I watch the boundless energy of young children, and their parents’ frustration over it, I wonder how high-tech will alter how children are raised in the next few decades. Of course already TV, and now computers play a large role, and it seems very few toys don’t talk or move on their own.

But I’ve also realized that children, both from a sense of play and due to youthful simplicity, will tolerate some technologies far before adults will. For example, making an AI to pass the Turing Test for children may be much, much simpler than making one that can fool an adult. As such, we may start to see simple AIs meant for interacting with, occupying the minds of and educating children long before we find them usable as adults.

Another technology that young children might well tolerate sooner is virtual reality. We might hate the cartoonish graphics and un-natural interfaces of today’s VRs but children don’t know the interfaces aren’t natural — they will learn any interface — and they love cartoon worlds.  read more »

Lots of people love model airplanes, and I bet they would love to simulate dogfights. They can't fire actual projectiles, as that would be dangerous, expensive, unworkable due to the weight and actually damage planes.

It should be possible to set up a system for dogfights using light, however. One way would be to have planes mount lasers that send out a coded pulse with a bit of dispersion, and have the other planes mount receivers with diffusers to pick up light from a lot of directions. It might be better to go in reverse, the way many shooting games do -- the planes broadcast a coded pulse from some bright LED in a specific colour and the "gun" is just a narrow sight that tries to pick up these pulses. When the gun gets one, it sends it down to the coordinator on the ground, and that tells the target plane it's been hit (possibly forcing it to leave the airspace after some number of hits, or impair the flying controls, etc.)

Of course you need authenticated equipment. If people provide their own it's too easy to cheat, and one could also just make a gun that has no barrel instead of a wide one, or have one on the ground. So some honour might be required here.

It would of course be hard to do, with no cockpit view. Some larger model planes can carry small video cameras for a more realistic dogfight of that sort, but I suspect people could figure something out. The gun could have sensors for the pulses that are wider than the actual "direct hit" sensor, allowing them to tell you when you're getting close, and even showing a screen on a laptop that is not a camera view from the plane but at least a view of how close you are to the target.

I wrote earlier about the bluetooth vibrator watch. I pushed this in part to promote the idea that phones should (almost) never ring. That ringing is rude to others and violates your own privacy, too.

Sony, Citizen and some others are now releasing bluetooth watches that go beyond this. Your watch should become a very small control station for your larger PDA/phone. Of course digital watches have a small screen, and there are also some nice analog watches where the background of the watch is secretly a screen. This should become cheaper with time.

As before, when a call comes in, your watch should gently vibrate or even just tingle your skin with a small charge. On the screen should be the caller-ID, and the buttons should be marked with choices, such as rejecting the call or accepting it. (These features will be in some of the upcoming bluetooth watches) If you accept it, the caller would hear you saying that you are getting out your real headset/handset and will talk to them in a few seconds. If you were in a meeting, they might be told it will be more than a few seconds, as you must excuse yourself from the room.

Your watch of course knows if it is on your wrist in many ways, including temperature, so the phone can know to actually ring if you’ve taken the watch off — for example when going to bed, if you want it to ring when you’re in bed, that is.

As the screens increase in resolution, they could also show things like the subject of emails and pages. No more pulling out the blackberry or cell phone — just a subtle glance at your watch when it tingles. Be nice if you can set your presence on your watch so that all calls go to voice mail, too.

Most flip phones have a 2nd small screen on them so you can see the time and caller-id when the phone is closed. This would not be needed if you use a watch like this, so the cost of the phone can be reduced to make up for the more expensive watch.

Your watch could also bind to your desk phone at the office. And the phone would also know if you are in the office or not.

Imagine a world of peace where you’re never hearing phones going off, and you aren’t seeing people constantly pulling out phones and blackberries to check calls and messages. Imagine a world where people no longer wear cell phones on their belts, either.

The watch could have a small headset in it too, but that would add bulk, and I think it’s better to pull out a dedicated one.

The only real downside to this — you would probably have to charge your watch once a week. This might not easily fit in with the smaller ladies’ watch designs. It should be possible in any larger design. E-ink technology, which takes no power to run a display, could also make a great material for the background of your watch dial, or even display a tolerable virtual watch dial for the many who prefer an analog set of hands. It might be necessary to design a protocol even lower power than bluetooth to give the watches even better battery life, and of course a standard charging interface found in hotels and offices would be great.

I think once this happens it will be hard to imagine how we tolerated it any other way. Yes, people get fun and status from their ringtones, but I think we can handle sacrificing that.

The watch could also be a mini-screen for a few other PDA and phone functions. For example, if you use a bluetooth earpiece, you can keep your phone in your pocket or purse, which is really nice, but sometimes you want a bit of display, for example to assist with voice command mode.

(Of course if you know about Voxable, you know I believe phone calls should simply not happen at all at the wrong times, but that’s a different leap.)

Most of us, when we travel, put appointments we will have while on the road into our calendars. And we usually enter them in local time. ie. if I have a 1pm appointment in New York, I set it for 1pm not 10am in my Pacific home time zone. While some calendar programs let you specify the time zone for an event, most people don't, and many people also don't change the time zone when they cross a border, at least not right away. (I presume that some cell phone PDAs pick up the new time from the cell network and import it into the PDA, if the network provides that.) Many PDAs don't really even let you set the time zone, just the time.

Here's an idea that's simple for the user. Most people put their flights into their calendars. In fact, most of the airline web sites now let you download your flight details right into your calendar. Those flight details include flight times and the airport codes.

So the calendar software should notice the flight, look up the destination airport code, and trigger a time zone change during the flight. This would also let the flight duration look correct in the calendar view window, though it would mean some "days" would be longer than others, and hours would repeat or be missing in the display.

You could also manually enter magic entries like "TZ to PST" or similar which the calendar could understand as a command to change the zone at that time.

Of course, I could go on many long rants about the things lacking from current calendar software, and perhaps at some point I will, but this one struck me as interesting because, in the downloaded case, the UI for the user is close to invisible, and I always like that.

It becomes important when we start importing our "presence" from our calendar, or get alerts from our devices about events, we don't want these things to trigger in the wrong time zone.

At various times I have been part of dinner groups that meet once a month or once a week at either the same restaurant or a different restaurant every time. There’s usually no special arrangement, but it’s usually good for the restaurant since they get a big crowd on a slow night.

I think there could be ways to make it better for the restaurant as well as the diners — and the rest of the web to boot. I’m imagining an application that coordinates these dinners with diners and the restaurants. The restaurants (especially newer ones) would offer some incentives to the diners, plus some kick back to the web site for organizing it. As part of the deal, the diners would agree to fairly review the restaurant — at first on public restaurant review sites and/or their own blogs, but with time at a special site just for this purpose. Diners would need to review at least 80% of the time to stay in.

Here’s what could be offered the diners:

• Private rooms or private waiter, with special attention
• Special menus with special items at reduced prices
• Special billing, either separate bills or even pay online — no worrying about settling.
• Advanced online ordering and planning for shared meals, possibly just before heading out.

For the restaurant there’s a lot:

• A bunch of predictable diners on a slow night
• If they order from a special menu, it can be easier and cheaper to prepare multiple orders of the same dish.
• Billing assistance from the web site with online payment
• A way to get trustable online reviews to bring in business — if the reviews are good.

Now normally a serious restaurant critic would not feel it appropriate to have the restaurant know they are being reviewed. In such cases they will not get typical service and be able to properly review it. However, this can be mitigated a lot if all the restaurants are aware of what’s going on, and if the reviews are comparative. In this case the restaurants are being compared by how they do at their best, rather than for a random diner. The latter is better, but the former is also meaningful. And of course it would be clear to readers that this is what went on.

In particular, I believe the reviewers should not simply give stars or numerical ratings to restaurants. They can do that, but mainly they should just place the restaurants in a ranking with the other restaurants they have scored, once they have done a certain minimal number. This fixes “star inflation.” With most online review sites, you don’t know if a 5-star rating is from somebody who gives everything 4 or 5 stars, or if it’s the only 5-star rating the reviewer ever gave. All these are averaged together.

In addition, the existing online review sites have self-selected reviewers, which is to say people who rate a restaurant only because they feel motivated to do so. Such results can be wildly inaccurate.

Finally, it is widely suspected that some fraction of the reviews on online sites are biased, placed there by the restaurant or friends of the restaurant. There are certainly few mechanisms to stop this at the sites I have seen. Certainly if you see a restaurant with just a few high ratings you don’t know what to think.

This dining system, with the requirement that everybody review, eliminates a good chunk of the self-selection. Members would need to review whether they felt the mood or not. (You could not stop them from not going to a restaurant that does not appeal to them, of course, so there is still some self-selection.) It is possible a restaurant might send its friends to dine at “enemy” restaurants via the club to rate them down, but I think the risk of this is much less than the holes in the other systems.

Restaurants with any confidence in their quality should be motivated to invite such an online dining club, especially new restaurants. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for new restaurants to offer the general public things like 2nd entree free or other discounts to get the public in, with no review bonus. If the site becomes popular, in fact, it might become the case that a new restaurant that doesn’t invite the amateur critics could be suspect, unwilling to risk a bad place in their rankings.

Last week, I wrote about new ideas for finding the lost. One I’ve done some follow-up on is the cell phone approach. While it’s not hard to design a good emergency rescue radio if you are going to explicitly carry a rescue device when you get lost, the key to cell phones is that people are already carrying them without thinking about it — even when going places with no cell reception since they want the phone with them when they return to reception.

Earlier I proposed a picocell to be mounted in a light plane (or even drone) that would fly over the search area and try to ping the phone and determine where it is. That would work with today’s phones. It might have found the 3 climbers, now presumed dead, on Mt. Hood because one of them definitely had a cell phone. It would also have found James Kim because they had a car battery, on which a cell phone can run for a long time.

My expanded proposal is for a deliberate emergency rescue mode on cell phones. It’s mostly software (and thus not expensive to add) but people would even pay for it. You could explicitly put your phone into emergency rescue mode, or have it automatically enter it if it’s out of range for a long time. (For privacy reasons you would want to be able to disable any automatic entry into such a mode, or at least be warned about it.)

What you do in this mode depends on how accurate a clock you have. Many modern phones have a very accurate clock, either from the last time they saw the cell network, or from GPS receivers inside the phone. If you have an accurate clock, then you can arrange to wake up and listen for signals from rescue planes at very precise times, and the planes will know those times exactly as well. So you can be off most of the time and thus do this with very low power consumption. It need not be a plane — it’s not out of the question to have a system with a highly directional antenna in some point that can scan the area.

If you don’t know the exact time, you can still listen at intervals while you have power. As your battery dies, the intervals between wakeups have to get longer. Once they get down to long periods like hours, the rescue crews can’t tell exactly when you will transmit and just have to run all the time.

If you know the exact time a phone will be on, you can even pull tricks like have other transmitters cut out briefly at that time (most protocols can tolerate sub-second outages) to make the radio spectrum quieter.

At first, you can actually listen quite often. The owner of the phone, if conscious might even make the grim evaluation of how long they can hold out and tell the phone to budget power for that many days.

When the phone hears the emergency ping (which quite possibly will be at above-normal power) it can also respond at above normal power, if it feels it has the power budget for it. It can also beep to the owner to get input on that question. (Making the searcher’s ping more powerful can actually be counterproductive as it could make the phone respond when it can’t possibly be received. The ping could indicate what its transmit power was, allowing the phone to judge whether its signal could possibly make it back to a good receiver.)

Of course if the phone has a GPS, once it does sync up with the picocell, it could provide its exact location. Otherewise it could do a series of blips to allow direction finding or fly-over signal strength location of the phone.

In most cases, if we know who the missing person is we’ll know their cell phone number, and thus their phone carrier and in most cases the model of phone they have. So searchers would know exactly what to look for, and whether the phone supports any emergency protocol or just has to be searched for with standard tech.

I’ve brought some of these ideas up with friends at Qualcomm. We’ll see if something can come of it.

Update: Lucent does have a picocell that was deployed in some rescue operations in New Orleans. Here’s a message discussing it

There is a story that Ikonos is going to redirect a satellite to do a high-res shot of the area where CNet editor James Kim is missing in Oregon. That’s good, though sadly, too late, but they also report not knowing what to do with the data.

I frankly think that while satellite is good, for something like this, traditional aerial photography is far better, because it’s higher resolution, higher contrast, can be done under clouds, can be done at other than a directly overhead angle, is generally cheaper and on top of all this can possibly be done from existing searchplanes.

But what to do with such hi-res data? Load it into a geo-browsing system like Google Earth or Google Maps or Microsoft Live. Let volunteers anywhere in the world comb through the images and look for clues about the missing person or people. Ideally, allow the map to be annotated so that people don’t keep reporting the same clues or get tricked by the same mistakes. (In addition to annotation, you would want to track which areas had been searched the most, and offer people suggested search patterns that cover unsearched territory or special territory of interest.)

These techniques are too late for Kim, but the tools could be ready for the next missing person, so that a plane could be overflying an area on short notice, and the data processed and up within just minutes of upload and stitching.

Right now Google’s tools don’t have any facility for looking at shots from an angle, while Microsoft’s do but without the lovely interface of Keyhole/Google Earth. Angle shots can do things like see under some trees, which could be important. This would be a great public service for some company to do, and might actually make searches far faster and cheaper. Indeed, in time, people who are lost might learn that, if they can’t flash a mirror at a searchplane, they should find a spot with a view of the sky and build some sort of artificial glyph on the ground. If there were a standard glyph, algorithms could even be written to search for it in pictures. With high-res aerial photography the glyph need not be super large.

Update: It’s also noted the Kims had a cell phone, and were found because their phone briefly synced with a remote tower. They could have been found immediately if rescue crews had a small mini-cell base station (for all cell technologies) that could be mounted in a regular airplane and flown over the area. People might even know to turn on their cell phone if they are conserving power if they heard a plane. (In a car with a car charger, you can leave the phone on.) As soon as the plane gets within a few miles (range is very good for sky-based antenna) you could just call and ask “where are you?” or, in the sad case where they can’t answer, find it with signal strength or direction finding. There are plans to build cell stations to be flown over disaster areas, but this would be just a simple unit able to handle just one call. It could be a good application for software radio, which is able to receive on all bands at once with simple equipment, at a high cost in power. No problem on a plane.

Speaking of rescue, I should describe one of my father’s inventions from the 70s. He designed a very simple “sight” to be placed on a mirror. First you got a mirror (or piece of foil) and punched a hole in it you could look through. In his fancy version, he had a tube connected to the mirror with wires, but it could be handheld. The tube itself had a smaller exit hole (like a washer glued to the end of a toilet paper cardboard tube.)

Anyway, you could look through the hole in your mirror, sight the searchplane through the washer in the cardboard tube and adust the mirror so the back of the washer is illumnated by the sunlight from the mirror. Thus you could be sure you were flashing sunlight at the plane on a regular basis. He tried to sell military on putting a folded mirror and sighting tube in soldier’s rescue kits. You could probably do something with your finger in a pinch though, just put your finger next to the plane and move the mirror so your finger lights up. Kim didn’t think of it, but taking one of the mirrors off his car would have been a good idea as he left on his trek.

Ok, this is a silly idea, but it would make a great baby shower gift. Crib sheets — which is to say sheets to go on a baby’s bed — printed with small notes on your favourite subjects of choice — math, physics, history, as you would need for taking an exam. And who knows, maybe you can pretend if the baby sleeps surrounded by Maxwell’s equations she’ll become a genius.