Hardcore gaming gets even more serious as Hot Hardware has the details on an awesome brain-to-computer interface:

OCZ Technology has laid claim to being the first company to bring a “brain-computer” interface to the retail market and they have aimed it squarely at the gamer. The device is called the NIA, which is an acronym that stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, and instead of buttons, sticks, gyroscopes or motion sensors, it reads the body’s natural biosignals and translates them into commands that can be used to control PC games.

[...]

The NIA is able to detect three types of biosignals generated by your brain, facial muscles and eye muscles via a special headband. The user can bind these signals to any keystroke using the driver and configuration software.

Before you beginning doubting the claims, Hot Hardware did a month study on the product and actually found it to improve gaming performance at a cost of $150… and for any real gamer, that’s chump change when they’re buying $7000+ gaming computer.

That means the next time you’re thinking they are hacking, he’s not — he’s mind gaming!

Taking it beyond gaming, this device could be used to implement odd strokes that are odd to type on the keywboard (caps key, shift key, alt + shift for typing in Chinese…).

That would be a fun device to add to my regiment at work as well… Borgtown here we come!

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How to know you’ve reached the height of being a nerd?

Owning one of these:

A wonderful personal soundtrack t-shirt that you can change with a small remote control. Reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Peter wishes for his own theme song.

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In the past, the Chinese were well-known for a whole variety of inventions up until around the late 1700s where a new emperor decided that having reached it pinnacle, could just slack off and coast. The West, after falling behind after the fall of Rome, innovated massively upon Chinese inventions over the years and came back to teach China a hard lesson about taking things for granted. Now, in our globalized world, the Chinese are innovating heavily:

This is either the best or worst iPhone review ever. Wendy Cheng is apparently the most popular blogger in Singapore. Before giving her the real iPhone, her producers tricked her into reviewing a Chinese knockoff. But she actually liked the fake, saying it’s “not bad for a shit*** China phone.” The real iPhone? Only “mediocre,” and “I really don’t like the touchscreen…it’s f***ing shitty.” Oh, that’s just the tip of this iceberg of awesome.

The iPhone in my opinion is definitely crippled here in the US, primarily from how very non-free market it is currently and also has limitations on what I kinds of files I can place on it as well (hence why I gave my wife an iPod–I want a music player that I can place any kind of file on it).

Nonetheless, my point is that the Chinese are innovating heavily on a variety of products and are learning in turn from America. And America should keep an eye on not becoming too complacent, protectionist, or lazy as otherwise the Chinese will surge past the US.

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Technological improvements are really amazing where we can start to mimic four-legged animals:

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China’s prominence is rising in the high-tech world on a variety of fronts as China’s Alibaba.com has enjoyed a massive 340 percent gain in net profit tied to China’s fast-growing economy. The number of unique visitors (as of October 2007) is second only to the US (yes, China’s large population has helped), however, their presence is being felt all around the world from World of Warcraft users having to sell their characters at a cheaper rate to compete with the Chinese ones to within China as homegrown sites such as TenCent, Baidu and Sina all reach more native Web surfers than Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo.

Nonetheless, one should be careful to equate fast growth, large numbers, and impressive actions with that of how China will overtake other first world nations in the near future. Strong growth now, does not mean it will continue to do so in the future.

Even more so, one should always be careful about making predictions of country growth with innovation and new tech centers. A new book called Silicon Dragon by Rebecca Fannin notes:

It’s going to be years before it becomes very pronounced, but China is slowly emerging as the next Silicon Valley.

If you look at venture capital money flowing in, it’s a phenomenal rate. China has been the fastest-growing target for venture capital in the last four years: far faster than anywhere else in Asia or the U.S. or Europe.

Venture capitalists used to say they’d never invest outside a 30-mile radius of their offices. Now VC firms like Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Accel Partners are all focused on China. Virtually all of the major venture capital firms in the U.S. have teams and funds there. It’s been a huge shift. And for every startup that’s funded in China, there’s a startup that’s not funded somewhere else.

Yes, the growth and money put into China has been tremendous, but if its going to be years in the future, we can only imagine how long China’s growth and strength can last. The Asian Tigers were seen as phenomenal and Japan itself was seen as going to overtake the US back in the 1980s, but as we all saw, some fundamental economic instabilities became too pronounced to avoid leading to stagnation within.

Keep in mind one important point from all this:

We have to ask: what innovation has the new China produced already? [B]eing a manufacturing powerhouse is quite different from actually [originating] the products, let alone inventing novel ones.

In other words: Look beyond how fast the growth is, beyond how much money is being invested, but dive into how stable is this system? Is this growth based on sound principles? Is the country able to adapt to economic downturns? Are there any intrinsic problems that will prevent future growth during the hard times? Lastly, what is actually being created and not just mimicked?

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I happened upon a podcast interview over at Thomas Crampton’s blog of Duncan Hewitt, veteran China correspondent and best-selling author of Getting Rich First, who thinks that money and angry people will play a growing role in the battle against China’s Great Firewall. Though I agree with his commentary, I think the biggest thing he neglects to mention is how technology could really change the outcome of Chinese Internet censorship (USBs are already a favorite in Cuba to spread information). First watch the interview below and then read further into what I think is missing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-k2MXgwrOM

So, what’s missing? Global Satellite Internet. I’m seeing it already on BART, on TV for commercials, and it’s been tested to work all the way in Africa.

Imagine a world where any foreign nation’s corporation can sell their satellite Internet to any person around the world for an affordable price with basic to no set-up required on the consumer’s end. Get a new computer, acquire the bootleg software (that’ll get the government to really crackdown on bootleg VCDs, EVDs, etc.), and suddenly you have 1 billion Chinese online with no government censorship, no government watchers, and no website around the world being blocked.

Sure, the government could try to prevent its distribution, force computer makers to make their computers incompatible with satellite Internet, but with the ingenuity of Chinese bootlegging and IPR violations, I’d be loathed to side with the government’s ability to really control new technological advances such as these.

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The New York Times has a long article about new technologies coming to computers and the web allowing people to interact with their computers without the need of keyboards, focusing around touch screens and browsing the web without browsers:

This software plug-in for Web browsers tries to make it possible to navigate, find and share information by directly browsing the images, video and other digital media that are increasingly common on the Web.

PicLens currently offers a small icon cue inset in each Web photo that lets users know they are at a site like Facebook, Google or Flickr that can be browsed with the software. Clicking on the icon transports the user away from the conventional page-oriented Web into an immersive browsing environment.

The software does away with the browser frame and gives the user the effect of flying through a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images. In the future, the Cooliris designers plan to make it possible to browse text and video as well.

What particularly surprises me about people within my industry (SEO) is how many search strategists or online marketers in general seem to place such a faith in Google’s search engine algorithm in being able to figure out every little thing about human nature essentially.

I consistently read how the Google can determine links and relevance algorithmically, only to spout the latest Google Bombing in the next sentence. Let’s think about this: Google Bombing should never work if the relevance is so far on the opposite ends. So why does it? Google still relies heavily on text and links to help piece together the puzzle of what people want.

Don’t get me wrong here, Google’s ability in this regard has definitely worked, but only to a degree. Relevance is very relative: a site selling pants linking to another site that talks about China may seem to be on separate issues, but could possibly be under the same organization, may be an affiliate, or could be actually be unrelated. Humans can easily take a look at a site and see the design of the two sites looking the exact same and immediate know that they are related, but an engine based solely around text may never know the similarity.

The fact is, search engines still cannot read images, (even closed captioning at this point in time otherwise Captchas would be essentially pointless), flash, and videos without the help of text on the page describing what the subject is about. Google is being left behind as more and more technologies are developing around widgets, flash, and video as many developers either do not know how limited Google really is on needing text to find their products or do not have the desire to provide thousands of pages of text to describe each and every action.

In my opinion, the fact that Google’s homepage and search results are still heavily text and relatively unchanged since its founding over the past decade only goes to show how far behind Google is in terms of being able to find these products. And unless Google can start read image text, it will continue to fall back as new technological developers will not put “search engine readable” on the top of their list–the only concern will be developing a new product that will continue to revolutionize the web in ways that will make our lives that much easier and more interactive.

The question then becomes, in a world that begins to operate around these amazing widgets, flash, and other interactive content (duplicate content!) what mode of thought takes over in place of searching?

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I keep watching the history channel and am never ceased to be amazed by what I can learn about Chinese history and its technological prowess in ancient times.

(more…)

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So I decided to take a look at twitter today as some people in my company have been spouting it as of late and I have to say that I found it to be wholly lacking.

I do not mean to insult the service, I think it definitely appeals to a certain segment of users and hard-core marketers/networkers, but from a nerd/techie point of view, I just feel it’s a huge step backwards.

Think of all the widgets, flash, blogs, social media, and other heavily graphic intensive stuff out there. In fact, go to many of those sites that exclusively uses things beyond text. Now, go to someone’s twitter page–do you not feel as if you’re back in the early 1990s chatting on mIRC or TELNET?

Yes, I can definitely understand the ease of its use and the ability to post what you are doing from your cell phone to the twitter page anywhere around the world–if this was back in the 1990s I can definitely say this would have been revolutionary, but in today’s world where even a forum is considered passe, I am amazed at how some simplistic and downright antiquated ideas can be brought back to life through the use of an interconnected world.

I must say, if twitter would get itself fully out of the 1990s by allowing one to post pictures, videos, and music  from my cell phone,  then that would be something!

… Oh wait, that’s right, it’s called a blog.

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This flashlight by wicked lasers just screams to me that they really should begin building a phaser. You know how many Trekkies would buy that?

Okay, so maybe not as much profit off Trekkies as a military contract, but still would be sweet.

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