By Andrew Liszewski The STM32, for a lack of a better description, is a small personal computer that has roughly the same processing power as a PDA or cellphone. Out of the box it can run a simple GUI OS and a handful of games, but it’s really designed to be customized for whatever pocketable computing […]

By Andrew Liszewski

The STM32, for a lack of a better description, is a small personal computer that has roughly the same processing power as a PDA or cellphone. Out of the box it can run a simple GUI OS and a handful of games, but it’s really designed to be customized for whatever pocketable computing needs you might have. Jingxizhang has posted a project and code on the STM32 Primer website which shows how they turned the device into a pocket sized ECG.

This project is for detecting human ECG (Electrocardiogram, or EKG). A tiny amplifier is embedded (<1mA). The on-chip Timer, ADC and DMA (double buffering) are used for getting ECG data. An IIR filter and hardware LCD scrolling are used for ECG rendering. User can simply touch the Primer by 2 hands, his/her ECG trace is scrolling alive on the LCD screen. The instant heart rate is displayed with beep sound and LED flashing. The device also delivers and displays the ECG on a PC through the USB cable.

Two copper foils were added to each side of the STM32 which act as the ECG electrodes. The user simply has to place both their thumbs on the foils to see a scrolling trace of their heartbeat on the LCD, and a beep sound that coincides with each pulse.

[ ECG Primer 1.0 ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]

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Whenever a niche gets really crowded with startups, you know that something is broken. On the web invitations, which has been dominated by Evite for the past decade, is one of those areas where there is literally a dozen services trying to make it better—MyPunchBowl, Amiando, Invitastic, MadeIt, Socializr, iPartee, Renkoo, ImThere, Skobee, Zvents, Zoji, Windows […]

Whenever a niche gets really crowded with startups, you know that something is broken. On the internet invitations, which has been dominated by Evite for the past decade, is one of those areas where there’s literally a dozen services trying to make it better—MyPunchBowl, Amiando, Invitastic, MadeIt, Socializr, iPartee, Renkoo, ImThere, Skobee, Zvents, Zoji, Windows Live Events. Now add Pingg. The site launched publicly last week. A tiny late to the party perhaps. But it starts from a very basic premise that most other online invitation sites surprisingly have ignored. States co-founder and CEO Lorien Gabel: “We have taken the approach that the invite matters.”

When you get an invite from Pingg, you don’t have to click through to a Website blaring with advertisements just to find the address for a dinner. All the information is right there where it should be, in your email. Pingg’s invites are drop-dead gorgeous. A lot of care and attention has been put into the design of every one (you can select from about 45 themes like dinner party, baby, wedding, food, travel, and eco-friendly). The invite, image, and event details all come through in your email. And you can RSVP from the email as well.

Of course, each invite is linked to a dedicated Website, where more photos, maps, videos, gift registries, and payment options exist (if guests want to pitch in to fund an event, for instance). The e-mails and Website are free. But you can also send out printed invites as postcards for $1.50 each (including postage) or send the invites as text messages to guests’ mobile phones ($1.50 for 20 messages). Gabel explains why he thinks Pingg is different in this blog post.

In addition to making money from printed invitations and sending SMS messages, Pingg has various other affiliate deals in place. If you don’t like any of the images Pingg provides for its invites, you can buy one directly on Pingg through micro-stock photography site Fotolia (or upload your own image for free). The gift registry, which is currently linked to Amazon, offers other affiliate-fee opportunities. A ticketing feature will soon be launched, as will premium subscriptions for professional and power users. But advertising will never be part of the equation. “That detracts from the event,” states Gabel. Nobody wants to see a Weight Watcher’s ad next to a dinner invitation.

The site has some other nice touches, including guest-list management and event-reporting tools. Event hosts can set up automatic reminder messages and thank-you notes when they’re creating their invites. And the RSVP options include the ability to limit an event’s capacity, or to grant invitees to bring guests or transfer their invites to others.

Pingg is based in New York City (the CEO and VP of marketing share an office with Clickable. First30Days, and independent film company PalmStar Entertainment). Its development and design team is in Toronto. The co-founders, brothers Gabel and CTO Matt Harrop, are Canadian. They founded the company in January, 2007 and self-funded it with $500,000. Then they raised an $800,000 angel round in March, 2007 led by the early-stage Actarus Funds, the investment car of Stephan Paternot, co-founder of TheGlobe.com. (Paternot now runs PalmStar). At least that 1.0 money is now being put to good use.

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By Evan Ackerman Ray Kurzweil, an inventor (of such things as the flatbed scanner and optical character recognition) and futurist gave the keynote at GDC on Thursday. Although the title of the talk was entitled The Next 20 Years of Gaming, Kurzweil spent the majority of the keynote explaining how information technology is advancing exponentially at […]

By Evan Ackerman

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor (of such things as the flatbed scanner and optical character recognition) and futurist gave the keynote at GDC on Thursday. Although the title of the talk was entitled The Next 20 Years of Gaming, Kurzweil spent the majority of the keynote explaining how information technology is advancing exponentially at a steady and predictable rate, which allows us to see where our future lies as a species. The idea that was really hammered home to me is that technologies and advances which may sound like science fiction are actually predictable, and thanks to the magic of exponential progression, much closer than we think.

Here’s a little taste of what I mean… Currently, thanks to medical and biotech advances, we are adding approximately 3 months to human life expectancy every year. With the advent of applied information technology (such as the ability to turn genes on and off, something we’ve recently figured out how to do), Kurzweil predicts that that rate is going to increase significantly:

“15 years from now, we’ll be adding more than a year every year, not just to infant life expectancy, but to your remaining life expectancy, so as you go forward a year, your remaining life expectancy will move away from you… The sands of time will be running in, not out.”

Let me restate what he’s saying: if you can make it to 2023, you won’t ever die of old age. This isn’t just speculation: it’s based on a mathematical model which has been, if anything, conservative. I’m sure there’s an asterisk in there somewhere, but even so, there’s no denying that it’s exciting to think about. More stuff like this, after the jump.

Here’s another example… Blood cell sized devices are currently in their first generation, able to cure type-1 diabetes in rats. MIT has developed a nanobot able to scout out cancer cells in the blood, and destroy them. Not too far off are robotic red blood cells called respirocytes, which work just like your normal red blood cells, except they’re a thousand times more capable. “If you replace a portion of your red blood cells with these robotic ones, these respirocytes, you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours.”

What else is in store? These two slides show some of Kurzweil’s mathematical predictions for 2010 and 2029:

Again, these aren’t just idle predictions, they’re based on trends information technology that have remained essentially stable for decades. Kurzweil actually demoed a few language technology devices, including an optical text reader integrated into a cellphone that instantly translates written text into spoken words (it’s designed for the blind) and a vocal translator, which reproduces what you say in the language of your choice using voice recognition, real-time automatic translation, and an almost but not quite convincingly human speech generator.

All this makes me want to reread Snow Crash. And The Diamond Age. And Foundation, for that matter. You can see more of Kurzweil’s predictions over on Wikipedia, or check out his website here.

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GDC08, Innovation

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Companies are starting to figure out that the contact information on your mobile phone might be the most important social network you’ve - perhaps even better than the email inbox that Yahoo is targeting. Danish startup ZYB started offering a service that simply backed up your mobile phone contacts to the internet in mid-2006. A […]

Companies are starting to figure out that the contact information on your mobile phone might be the most important social network you have - perhaps even better than the email inbox that Yahoo is targeting.

Danish startup ZYB started offering a service that simply backed up your mobile phone contacts to the internet in mid-2006. A year later they turned all that data into a mobile social network. They’re one of the small startups with a real shot at mobile social network with critical mass. As of August 2007 they had 200,000 active users.

It’s no surprise, then, that ZYB is being emulated. Israeli startup NewACT, with $6.5 million in funding over two rounds from Cedar Fund, are launching a new service called SYNCY into beta this day. The service lets users migrate contacts, calendars and media from a mobile phone to the internet. It’s part ZYB, part Sharpcast.

While Syncy supports over 700 handset models, the iPhone isn’t one, so I took it out for a spin by installing it on a SonyEricsson phone. The feature that won me over was the ability to get immediate Web access to the pics and videos I’ve takes of our children using the phone. Incidentally, the last time I had digital copies of such files was when I switched handsets. That’s when I had no choice but borrow a cable and install Nokia’s phone management application—by far, not a user-friendly proposition to access “everyday media”.

Syncy’s handset client is simple to operate and once syncing is configured to run automatically, it’s smooth sailing from there onwards. There’s also an Outlook plug-in which synchronizes contacts and events (Exchange is not required). Google calendar integration will be available shortly.

NewACT claims that Syncy is the only service to offer cross-phone synchronization. Meaning, you can sync a Nokia phone then stick the SIM in a Motorola phone and Syncy’s server will reformat and readapt the data to fit the exact data structures of your new phone.

500 TechCrunch readers will receive access to Syncy’s limited Beta by requesting an account and entering “TechCrunch.”

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Microsoft has increased storage on Windows Live Skydrive to 5GB, up by a multiple of five from its previous limit of 1GB (the 1GB having doubled the original 500mb in October). Erick compared Skydrive to Gmail in an apples and oranges comparison last time; my Gmail account sits at 6.4gb today so Skydrive is still […]

Microsoft has increased storage on Windows Live Skydrive to 5GB, up by a multiple of five from its previous limit of 1GB (the 1GB having doubled the original 500mb in October).

Erick compared Skydrive to Gmail in an apples and oranges comparison last time; my Gmail account sits at 6.4gb today so Skydrive is still behind, having said that I’m not sure how many (average) people would use Gmail for online storage, so the comparison doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The more notable point is that Microsoft continues to grow its online storage offering when Google simply hasn’t launched the fabled Platypus online storage solution despite years of speculation and rumors. This is one space where Microsoft has the upper hand, and a 4gb storage jump will further increase the appeal of the product.

On top of the extra storage, Windows Live Skydrive has dropped the beta tag, and is now available in the following additional countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

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By Evan Ackerman For the last several years, GDC has hosted the Game Design Challenge, where three talented game designers create games based on some sort of weird concept. This year, the challenge was to create a concept for a game playable by humans and at least one other species. The competitors included Brenda Brathwaite (the […]

By Evan Ackerman

For the last several years, GDC has hosted the Game Design Challenge, where three talented game designers create games based on some sort of weird concept. This year, the challenge was to create a concept for a game playable by humans and at least one other species. The competitors included Brenda Brathwaite (the Wizardry series), Steve Meretzky (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Zoo Tycoon), and returning champion and the most famous puzzle game designer you might never have heard of, Alexey Pajitnov (inventor of Tetris). Read about the concepts, including paintball dolphins and killer mutant bacteria, and learn who won, after the jump.

Alexey Pajitnov: Dolphin Ride

Dolphin Ride is an interspecies game that takes place in open water. The playing field is a cube of ocean 300 meters on a side, filled with virtual targets. Each team consists of one dolphin and two humans, a navigator and a shooter, and there are 3 - 8 teams playing against each other. The humans “ride” the dolphin in virtual reality, through cameras mounted on the dolphin’s back, and a server projects the virtual targets into the camera views based on the position and orientation of the dolphin. The navigator looks forward, and controls the dolphin through “heels” which emit “very low voltage” electric shocks (!), or through voice command (the dolphin gets a headset, too). The shooter looks backward, and has control over a paintball gun. As the dolphin swims through the real ocean, the humans will see virtual targets consisting of colored spheres 1m in diameter worth varying amounts of points. When the shooter fires at a target, the server calculates whether or not a hit was made, and if the hit was valid, fires a paintball. This is mainly for the benefit of the dolphins, since paintballs can’t travel very far underwater. Targets can also be activated by the dolphins themselves, and the shooter is granted to shoot at the opposing dolphin (!!) with the paintball gun (”killing” the other dolphin is worth lots of points). The winner is the first to 500 points.

Steve Meretzky: Bac Attack

Steve started by looking for a massive demographic, and he found it in bacteria, of which there are about five billion quadrillion. How do you make a game with bacteria? Bac Attack is a realtime classic strategy game of attack and defense. A petri dish is placed above a TrayStation game system, which incorporates a powerful digital microscope as well as a projector. Terrain is projected onto the petri dish, and the bacteria react to the different projected colors of light in different ways, either enhancing or retarding their growth rates. The human player uses the terrain to gather resources and build defenses, which consist of focused beams of microwave radiation. The bacteria will continue to evolve due to natural selection, automatically “leveling” themselves, forcing the human player to improve their defenses. Eventually, the bacterial will overwhelm the human player, at which time the human can sell the mutant bacteria to the biotech industry or the military.

Brenda Brathwaite: OneHundredDogs

We’ve played games with dogs for, um, most of human history, so why not transition that into our digital, socially networked world? OneHundredDogs is an interspecies challenge involving 50 real dogs and their owners from every say, as well as 50 virtual dogs on Facebook. Over the course of 4 months there will be challenges in 50 cities for dogs and their owners (i.e. dog-based as well as owner-based challenges), designed to build local social communities of dog lovers. The winner of each local competition becomes the “alpha dog” representative of the city, and those winners become dogs 1 through 50. Those dogs then get a Facebook friend invite from virtual dog 51, and in order to reach dog 52, communities will have to work together within themselves and eventually with other communities to solve challenges, creating a big real-world social network. Eventually, all kinds of dog and human skills will need to be combined to find the last virtual dogs, and when dog 100 is found, everybody gets a brand new OneHundredDogs.com collar. The real prize, though, is the communities that develop, as well has the fun that both dogs and their owners get to have over the course of solving each challenge. The fun starts on February 29; check it out at OneHundredDogs.com.

The winner? Bac Attack just barely beat out OneHundredDogs, and the grand prize for Steve Meretzky was a pair of Playboy bunny ears.

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Animals, Gaming, GDC08

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Personalized desktop pages have been a popular as various players have grown market share, and others have failed. Providers like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and iGoogle have a passionate user base - nearly 40 million people a month visit My Yahoo alone (Comscore worldwide, January 2008). So many of these popped up by the end […]

Personalized desktop pages have been a popular as various players have grown market share, and others have failed. Providers like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and iGoogle have a passionate user base - nearly 40 million people a month visit My Yahoo alone (Comscore worldwide, January 2008). So many of these popped up by the end of 2005 that we stopped paying attention.

As is often the case though, when an idea becomes popular enough, the barrier to entry often decreases as at first people try to design their own versions, then later you can buy a script that does the same thing. This auction on Sitepoint is offering an “Ajax DeskTop StartPage Enterprise website (like PageFlakes, Netvibes & iGoogle! )” with a starting price of $90. You can test the service youself at Mevou.com.

So what does $90 buy? It’s not as polished as the existing players, but it’s usable. Customizable widgets are offered next to theme and wallpaper support and page customization options. Except for a lack of depth in the widget offering, the experience in using this script wasn’t that much different from similar sites.

I’m not qualified to say that $90 is cheap for the script (it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be found elsewhere for less) but one thing is certain: here comes the personalized desktop page clone army.

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Tomorrow at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, attendees will get a peak at Dennis “Thresh” Fong’s newest startup - Raptr. It’s being demo’d as part of the Charles River/GDC launchpad event in the afternoon. Raptr has both desktop software and web service components. The client keeps PC-based games completely up to date behind the […]

Tomorrow at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, attendees will get a peak at Dennis “Thresh” Fong’s newest startup - Raptr. It’s being demo’d as part of the Charles River/GDC launchpad event in the afternoon.

Raptr has both desktop software and web service components. The client keeps PC-based games completely up to date behind the scenes - patches, updates, etc. are downloaded automatically. This is very similar to Steam, which keeps Valve games updated - although from what we hear Raptr will support at least a thousand games from all different developers out of the gate. The website, at Raptr.com, will pull in gaming data from the Raptr client and will include a social network around friends, stats, games, groups and other content. The website will also include a news feed of what all your friends are up to.

That’s all I know about the service for now. I should have more tomorrow. The launch date is still months away. The company is also rumored to have closed, or be closing, a significant round of funding.

Dennis Fong, who’s 30, is one of the world’s top gamers. He cofounded Xfire, a freeware instant messaging service targeted at gamers, in 2003. In 2006 it was acquired by Viacom for $102 million. Fong is also an advisor to WeGame, which we covered last month.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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By Luke Anderson I’m a horribly forgetful person. The only way I remember anything is when Outlook pops up and tells me I need to be somewhere in an hour. That is if I even remembered to enter my appointments in the first place. What I don’t need reminded to do is take a shower, as […]

By Luke Anderson

I’m a horribly forgetful person. The only way I remember anything is when Outlook pops up and tells me I need to be somewhere in an hour. That’s if I even remembered to enter my appointments in the first place. What I don’t need reminded to do is take a shower, as I’ve gotten in the habit of just doing that every day. However, if some of you need a tiny extra encouragement to do it on certain days, you might be interested in this peculiar shower curtain.

This strange water closet accessory is simply a massive 12-month calender. When you have a big business meeting, or a hot date, jot it down on the curtain. This way when you’re in the lavatory doing your business, you’ll remember that this day you really should hop in the shower. It looks like you can pick one up for around $25.

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By David Ponce To everyone reading this in sunny california, or anywhere else that’s warm, count your blessings. This is what we got up here in not-so-sunny canada. But ill get a taste of the sun soon, as im planning to spend two days in Bakersfield, CA, driving the new Cobalt SS turbo, courtesy of GM. […]

By David Ponce

To everyone reading this in sunny california, or anywhere else that’s warm, count your blessings. This is what we got up here in not-so-sunny canada. But ill get a taste of the sun soon, as im planning to spend two days in Bakersfield, CA, driving the new Cobalt SS turbo, courtesy of GM. Anyone from around there? If so, if i manage to take two seconds for myself, is there anything i should see, eat, try? Eat? I like eating.

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