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• Asus showed a notebook embossed with the Disney logo, and running a Disney-specific user interface that can be configured to restrict the allowable actions of its young users. HP showed a new edition of its notebook branded by fashion designer Vivienne Tam, and a new notebook inlaid with patterns from designer Tord Boontje, whose work is featured at the Museum of Modern Art.
• HP DreamScreen adds intelligence to the digital photo frame category with TouchSmart software, which provides real-time data feeds such as Facebook updates, Pandora music, and SnapFish photos.
• Pong Research showed a cell phone cover that reduces radiation by 60%, and iSpeech.org featured mobile phone software called drivesafe.ly that automatically performs text-to-speech conversion of text messages received while its user is driving. The software also automatically replies to senders that the receiver is driving, so they might consider waiting to send their next test message.
• Contour showed its wearable camcorder designed to capture first-person perspective videos of extreme sports, and allowing them to be easily shared with communities of users. It is bulkier than the old DejaView head-mounted system, but has the advantage of capturing video in HD quality.

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• The combination of advanced graphics and location awareness in smartphones is helping to drive Augmented Reality applications into the mass market. This NY Times article (free registration required) highlights new AR platforms such as Layar and Wikitude. Also, this article on iSmashPhone has some demo videos of AR applications specifically designed for the iPhone.
• Five Futuristic Interfaces were demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2009, and earlier this year, the 2009 TED conference showed Siftables interactive electronic building blocks, as well as the Sixth Sense system that augments reality by combining wearable computing with projection.
• This New Yorker article about the Amazon Kindle concludes that reading books on an iPhone is a more pleasurable experience.
• The Flickr group KnowledgeCartography has a nice collection of knowledge visualization images, with examples of relational/thematic cluster maps (including this one applied to social networks) and thematic temporal maps.

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• BumpTop makes the big time with a feature story in BusinessWeek;
• Glasshouse couples 3D visualizations of database query results with virtual worlds;
• This NY Times article (free registration required) examines in some detail how how the convergence of cell phones and computing is changing the way users think about information;
• Uber-curmudgeon John C. Dvorak laments the death of the PC app, and goes on the lookout for mobile killer apps;
• At a Microsoft internal science fair, visitors were able to climb inside a spherical version of the projection system used by its Surface interface (see also UCSB's AlloSphere project);
• Yet another effort to produce a Minority Report-like gesture interface, this one from MIT called Sixth Sense;
• Google may finally be starting to embrace the Semantic web after years of downplaying its importance;
• An overview of the current state of Virtual Currencies, which are becoming a feature in some social networking sites.

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• The iPhone is apparently single-handedly propping up the Smartphone market, but Nokia's N97 may start raining on Apple's parade by reaching a pivotal convergence point between Netbooks and mobile phones (and Windows Mobile still has its fans).
• This article in Smart Device Central has a thoughtful analysis of the growing use of touch screens in mobile phones, pointing out that they are paving the way for a new crop of Natural User Interfaces (NUIs).
• The Mobile Millennium project at Berkeley is developing a system that allows mobile phone users to contribute data on traffic flow. Participants download some software that tracks their movements and in return, they receive personalized traffic information on their cell phones. Unlike existing traffic monitoring services that focus primarily on major highways, the hope is that this approach will collect traffic data on smaller side roads as well.
• The X Reality (Cross Reality) project at MIT merges real and virtual worlds (see discussion in this Forbes article). The lab has PDA-sized devices mounted on the walls with an iPhone-like touch screen, Second Life software, sensors, and wireless connections. Anyone in the building wearing an electronic badge can peer into the screens to see a Second Life landscape and communicate with virtual users.
• Oblong Industries takes another step closer to the gesture interface shown in Minority Report with the g-speak interface, which is described as Spatial Operating Environment.
• Some brief thoughts from IEEE's Computer.org about how Semantic Web interfaces should behave. The wrong way? Display a Big Fat Graph.

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• Microsoft is stepping up its attention on touch interfaces. In addition to keeping its researchers busy studying touch interface concepts(see see photos), it may be preparing to introduce a consumer version of its Surface table-top computing interface. Microsoft is opening up access to the Surface Software Development Kit, and conducting consumer surveys, which indicate that the target price for consumers might be $1,499. Commercial applications of large touch interfaces are catching on, showing up places like restaurants.
• The Semantic Web may get a jump-start with the launch of Twine, an organizer tool that can be used to register W3C-compliant metadata for user data. Twine uses artificial intelligence to parse the contents of Web pages and extract key concepts, and then uses these concepts to link users and information (see video).
• As part of the Glow 08 arts festival in Santa Monica, CA, an enormous mist projection system was set up on the beach. The system coupled a fog display, in which images are projected into droplets of water in the air, with a sound-detection system that responded to crowd participation. The result was a mirage-like appearance of colorful patterns projected into the sky, changing based on music and screams of people nearby (see video).
• Researchers at the University of Utah are working on novel approaches to visualize election polls, which might make it easier for news reporters and citizens to analyze election results, political opinion polls or other surveys. The system represents data in concentric rings, listing questions on the outside, and narrowing the question to certain demographic groups on the inside (see example).
• A secretive startup named Siri is planning to introduce a new paradigm for the consumer Internet experience that applies artifical intelligence in the interface. While the company has not yet disclosed details about its design, it is possible that the system will make inferences of users' intentions based on their activity, learning what they do over time, so that it can automatically take actions on their behalf. The company plans to release a beta version of its product in the first half of 2009.

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