Olive Juice

Actually, the other way around (but that title in reverse didn’t have quite the same ring to it).

Microsoft is launching its Project Natal in October, an immersive controller-free gaming system. By kicking, twisting, shaking, jumping, voice commands, and hand gestures, you are the controller.

A few years back I developed a Pong-game using Processing, which tracked arm movements to control 2 paddles. And if you’ve ever worked with gesture recognition, facial recognition or voice recognition you’ll realize what they’re doing with Project Natal is no small feat. “The skeletal mapping technology shown at E3 2009 was capable of simultaneously tracking up to four users for motion analysis [nice!], with a feature extraction of 48 skeletal points on a human body [no-sah!?!] at a frame rate of 30 hertz [...sold!]. Depending on the person’s distance from the sensor, Project Natal is capable of tracking models that can identify individual fingers. [Finally computer vision that knows when you're flipping it off] ” (wikipedia).

If this launches with a Limbo game, I’m so in.

DandyID’s WordPress plugin is now available, compliments of talented developer [and perhaps our biggest fan] Neil Simon. The plugin places a linked list of your online services into your WP blog sidebar. First you’ll need a DandyID account and supply your identities – then download the plugin and follow the installation instructions: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dandyid-services/ – Mac undelete.

Enjoy!

Yesterday Arron and I made our way to the 11th Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference, to check out the Entrepreneur Showcase where thirty early-stage businesses from sectors including information technology, healthcare and clean technology exhibited their business vision and technology prowess. 

Three companies in particular caught my interest; in no particular order:

1 – Artaic – Innovative Mosaic http://artaic.com/
“Artaic is a full service provider of turn-key mosaic projects, from concept through installation. The creation of mosaic is brought to a new level, where art meets technology to make the medium more sophisticated and accessible.” 

2 – Delfigo Security http://www.delfigosecurity.com/
“Delfigo Security is the first in the identity and authentication industry to develop a solution using behavioral characteristics as markers in identity authentication. Our solution uses artificial intelligence based algorithms that uniquely identify users based on multiple factors including keyboard biometrics, geospatial metrics, system parameters, and reflective thinking.”

3 – Movolu http://movolu.com  
“This new advertising network is built for the mobile platform – the application is quite simple. Movolu leverages location information to enhance the mobile experience and connect businesses with customers in their area.” A detailed review can be found at http://nicholascifuentes.com/.

Although FOWA has hardly come to an end (double-days of Nikki Beach parties beginning tonight!), and tomorrow I’ll be winning the MacBook Air… however, some notes on todays happenings.

Kathy Sierra opened with a keynote “Creating Passionate Users” and cognitive seduction, stating the seemingly obvious but so often overlooked methods for relating to people and engaging users in exceptional experiences. Kathy spoke of our duty towards humanizing technology, getting people to meet – offline, while making more usable/human software. Develop easy-to-master-FAST apps, leaping to the “passion threshold”, where users are able to be great at what they *do* with the tool. It’s not about the tool. It’s about what the tool allows them to do. Get through to feelings and legacy brain. And place a “WTF” button nearby for your site’s users.

Blaine Cook, Twitter Engineer, held together his whimsical panel throughout audience notifications that Twitter was, no surprise, down. Cook warned of feature creep and the importance of adding what users *strongly* request, keep it clean, open APIs, and “use and love” the app you are creating. If you don’t love the service, others won’t either.Leah Culver, Pownce, followed, also pressing “opening code” as a top priority for any web service. 

Microsoft showcased the ever-awesome Photosynth, and a rad 3D maps application, which I didn’t catch the link to.

A panel pointing “what makes the next great startup”: Brilliance, team, confidence/ambition, depth of knowledge/research/ capital structure/right vw/legal issues, open!, distribution, extremism, and of course serendipity.

Remember the Milk’s Emily Boyd presented a quite enjoyable panel on FTM’s birth and lifespan, $0.19 budget, and various interface options (including the iPhone, yet available to the Aussies) (and a hacked GMAIL! love it). 

Off to the party, hosted by Scrapblog!  

Considering that Jobs started as a hacker himself fudging AT&T systems, why ‘o why doth they make it such a daunting task to develop 3rd party apps for iPhone. I’m losing sleep tonight setting up the SDK. I will prevail.