Friday, February 18, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
The Comeback Kid: Steve Jobs is Born
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life,” says Steve Jobs. From the day he was born on February 24, 1955, Steven Paul Jobs has been blazing his own path. As the CEO of Apple Computer and CEO and Chairman of Pixar, Jobs is today recognized as one of the top leaders and visionaries of both the computer and entertainment industries and is worth an estimated $4.4 billion.
Born in San Francisco, California to an American mother and a Syrian father, Jobs was given up for adoption just one week after his birth. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs and the new family settled in Santa Clara County, California. Paul was a machinist for Spectra-Physics who helped spark Jobs’ early interest in machines. Jobs has always considered Paul and Clara his only parents.
While attending Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School, both in Cupertino, California, Jobs spent his free time attending lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto. He became a familiar face there and was soon hired as a summer student. It was here at the age of 13 where Jobs would meet his future Apple co-founder, Stephen Wozniak, who was also working as a summer employee. After striking up a friendship, Jobs began to help Wozniak market and sell his latest invention – an illegal device that could be attached to telephones to allow users to make free long-distance calls. He also spent his free time repairing and selling stereos.
After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs registered at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but found he had little interest in pursuing a degree. He dropped out after just one semester, but continued to attend classes in philosophy, physics, and literature for another year. He returned to California two years later and began attending Wozniak’s computer hobbyist club, the Homebrew Computer Club. He also began working as a technician for Atari, a company that manufactured popular video games.
Working at Atari allowed Jobs the chance to save enough money for a spiritual retreat to India, where he went along with Daniel Kottke, a friend from Reed College and later, the first Apple employee. Upon his return, Jobs went back to work at Atari, but this time was in charge of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. Atari had offered a $100 bonus for each chip that could be reduced in the machine. With little knowledge of circuit boards, Jobs made a deal with Wozniak to work together and split whatever bonus they got. Wozniak reduced the chips by 50, surprising both Atari and Jobs himself. The design proved to be so tight in fact that the circuit board was impossible to reproduce on the assembly line.
This experience at Atari proved to be the beginning of a long business relationship between Jobs and Wozniak that would soon spark one of the most successful and revolutionary companies of the 20th century.
Born in San Francisco, California to an American mother and a Syrian father, Jobs was given up for adoption just one week after his birth. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs and the new family settled in Santa Clara County, California. Paul was a machinist for Spectra-Physics who helped spark Jobs’ early interest in machines. Jobs has always considered Paul and Clara his only parents.
While attending Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School, both in Cupertino, California, Jobs spent his free time attending lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto. He became a familiar face there and was soon hired as a summer student. It was here at the age of 13 where Jobs would meet his future Apple co-founder, Stephen Wozniak, who was also working as a summer employee. After striking up a friendship, Jobs began to help Wozniak market and sell his latest invention – an illegal device that could be attached to telephones to allow users to make free long-distance calls. He also spent his free time repairing and selling stereos.
After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs registered at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but found he had little interest in pursuing a degree. He dropped out after just one semester, but continued to attend classes in philosophy, physics, and literature for another year. He returned to California two years later and began attending Wozniak’s computer hobbyist club, the Homebrew Computer Club. He also began working as a technician for Atari, a company that manufactured popular video games.
Working at Atari allowed Jobs the chance to save enough money for a spiritual retreat to India, where he went along with Daniel Kottke, a friend from Reed College and later, the first Apple employee. Upon his return, Jobs went back to work at Atari, but this time was in charge of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. Atari had offered a $100 bonus for each chip that could be reduced in the machine. With little knowledge of circuit boards, Jobs made a deal with Wozniak to work together and split whatever bonus they got. Wozniak reduced the chips by 50, surprising both Atari and Jobs himself. The design proved to be so tight in fact that the circuit board was impossible to reproduce on the assembly line.
This experience at Atari proved to be the beginning of a long business relationship between Jobs and Wozniak that would soon spark one of the most successful and revolutionary companies of the 20th century.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Sixth Sense Technology
'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
We've evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.
The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.
The SixthSense prototype implements several applications that demonstrate the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system. The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures, similar to gestures supported by Multi-Touch based systems, letting the user zoom in, zoom out or pan using intuitive hand movements. The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger. SixthSense also recognizes user’s freehand gestures (postures). For example, the SixthSense system implements a gestural camera that takes photos of the scene the user is looking at by detecting the ‘framing’ gesture. The user can stop by any surface or wall and flick through the photos he/she has taken. SixthSense also lets the user draw icons or symbols in the air using the movement of the index finger and recognizes those symbols as interaction instructions. For example, drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application or drawing an ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail. The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch.
The current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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