Federal Australian Government funded Digital junk storage

“ACRO is a Federally funded archive of video, music and other creative material built to provide creative raw materials that help stimulate the production of new broadband content.

ACRO is designed to fulfil an important role in the new creative environment offered by broadband technologies. Artists, educators, and researchers are becoming more restricted in the material they can use because of changes to copyright law. ACRO will reverse this trend by providing access to large amounts of high quality multimedia material.

Using Creative Commons licenses, content contributors can maintain more flexible control over their material than that offered by traditional copyright.”

Sony NAVITUS Remote Control

“You’ve never seen anything like the Sony NAVITUS A/V remote control. Pick it up and you’ll see your commands displayed in 65,536 dazzling colors. You’ll execute those commands with the tactile feedback of Sony’s TouchEngine™ screen. And you’ll enjoy the power of fully customizable screens, keys, interfaces and wallpaper thanks to the supplied PC software. With a powerful 200 MHz processor, 32 megabytes of on-board memory, USB interface and a Memory Stick™ media slot, this remote is the perfect complement to the most advanced A/V systems. Yet it is so easy to use that advanced A/V systems suddenly become family-friendly.”

What is most exciting to me about this is its use of ‘TouchEngine™ Technology’ which is sony’s technology for giving tactile feedback to the user. This is employed on the devices LCD screen because as you know, they don’t ‘click’. The smart home page states

“Most touch screens are lifeless and inert. It’s often hard to know whether or not your command has even registered. The NAVITUS remote is dramatically different. Imagine an LCD screen that actually presses back against your fingertip to confirm each command.”

Good to see companies doing stuff like this. I know keef will be happy!

Earlier this year I came across an open technology called ‘dashboard’. Currently an app for Gnome/linux it aims to show information to the user that is in context and useful with what the user is doing at the time. Microsoft are doing something very similar in Longhorn.

Now Apple have something called Dashboard coming in ‘Tiger’ though it is nothing like the other dashboard but rather similar to Konfabulator.

(I am not passing judgement on any of this – just pointing out the situation.)

Both technologies are great and i’m really looking forward to having them at my fingertips at all times. I’ll get ‘Dashboard’ in Tiger but will have to wait for ‘open dashboard’ tech, especially on windows and OS X.

After reading about the additions Apple are making to webkit (and potentially css/html) Dashboard (and web apps in general!) seems much more exciting. Aaron Swartz puts this well on this blog.