Put on your thinking cap when you visit CITB - here you'll find Concepts, Ideas, Thoughts and "Outside The Box" thinking, plus we call Bullsh!t for what it is. Enjoy the ride, and if we stimulate your brain, please tell others about us!
Posted by Thom Byxbe | Under Concept, Idea
Sunday Mar 9, 2008
How many times have you wished that you could just connect your computer directly to your brain. Imagine if you had a "Brain Port" that you simply plugged into your computer. Think how fast you could finish that report for work. Think how wonderfully productive you would be. Well your dream connection is one step closer to reality. Three companies are in the final development and initial production stages of bring you a "Mind to Computer" interface.
It's Game On for OCZ Technologies, NeuroSky, and Emotiv
OCZ Technologies is not the first to experiment with direct mind control as an input device for the PC and gaming platforms. They may be first to actually bring a "brain mouse" to market. It's called the "Neural Impulse Actuator", or NIA for short. Two competitors, NeuroSky and Emotiv, are preparing to release their own brain-controlled mice. So, it is "Game On" for all three players in this long fantasized about peripheral market.
OCZ's "Neural Impulse Actuator" Brain Mouse
The OCZ Technologies device makes use of a combination of EEG readings, muscle, and eye movement to control a given application. Currently, the applications are primarily games. However, you'll need a powerful PC, as the NIA has been designed specifically for multi-processor systems. The "Neural Impulse Actuator" brain mouse will not come cheap. Announced pricing is around $300 when it launches in the near future (it's currently in production).
The NIA is calibrated to deal with individual user physiology. You put the device headband around your head at temple level. The calibration GUI allows you to calibrate each of the input types - muscle movement, brain waves, and glandular levels.
For muscle movement input the NIA tracks forehead muscles and those around your eyes. When properly calibrated, these facial muscles provide almost effortless directional movement that is smoother than a keyboard.
Both Alpha and Beta brain waves are monitored by the NIA and assigned multiple inputs. In gaming these inputs are useful for operations like changing weapons. By utilizing what has been dubbed by its creators as a "Tourettes impulse" it has been demonstrated that you can raise beta waves to a high enough plateau to switch guns. The final input channel is glance (eye movement). This is useful for directional movement.
When OCZ releases the NIA, it appears it will be a functional and practical option for gamers looking to "mentally" one-up the competition. Additionally, the NIA can act as a sports and mental conditioning tool. It can help you monitor your brain's alpha and beta wave levels during meditation and visualization. OCZ points out that this makes the device not only good for fragging your friends, but also for visualizing and subsequently beating your friends in tennis, soccer, or any other competitive activity.
Communication between human and machine has always been limited to conscious interaction, with non-conscious communication - expression, intuition, perception - reserved solely for the human realm.
Emotiv Systems device allows players to manipulate the game world utilizing only their mind. Named EPOC , the device functions very much like an EEG. It has the ability to pick up on the subtle electrical impulses the brain fires off. To pick up or move an object on screen, the user need only visualize the act they wish to perform in order to make it happen.
The company has demonstrated that users could also make objects disappear with a simple thought. Much like OTC's device, the EPOC headset detects not only the emotional state of the wearer but also the facial expressions. The headset's sensors are designed to detect conscious thoughts and expressions as well as "non-conscious emotions" by reading electrical signals around the brain. MSNBC interviews Don Clark (Wall Street Journal) about Emotiv
“Being able to control a computer with your mind is the ultimate quest of human-machine interaction” - Nam Do, CEO of Emotiv.
Reserve a Emotiv EPOC
Soon Emotiv will begin shipping the EPOC neuroheadset. As with all hot new products, initial supplies will be limited. To ensure that users can be guaranteed delivery of the EPOC, Emotiv is allowing consumers to reserve one to be delivered before the product arrives in retail locations. These limited edition neuroheadsets will be shipping in late 2008. If you don't want to miss out on being one of the first to experience the first direct human-computer interaction you can reserve your EPOC neuroheadset here! Emotiv is only able to accept reservations for customers in the United States.
NeuroSky's Wearable Technology
The last century of neurological research has demonstrated that brainwaves of different wavelengths can be indicative of unique emotional and mental states, like a focused awareness, a meditative state, or drowsiness. Brainwaves have been used in medical research and therapy for years. Now NeuroSky is bringing this neurological research to consumers.
What makes NeuroSky different from its competitors is in their focus. Unlike OCZ and Emotiv, their primary focus is not gaming. NeuroSky has developed a non-invasive, dry, bio-sensor family of products. Their wearable technology translates your mental state into digital signals for a variety of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). The ultimate purpose of NeuroSky is to build core bio-sensor technology. They are focused on providing the necessary tools to enable others to develop entirely new realms of consumer and industrial products.
The ThinkGear-EMTM provides the newest and most powerful EEG-based features for consumer and industrial applications. Based upon their original ThinkGear platform, which operates in conjunction with dry electrodes, NeuroSky's second generation ThinkGear-EM offers cost and wearability improvements from its earlier cousin due to better optimization of components and physical size reductions.
eSense-EMTM (Algorithm Library)
The eSense-EMTM translates the brainwave signals (EEG) into different mental state levels, for example, Attention and Meditation. These mental "algorithms" must be tested over a wide population, and under different environmental conditions, to work across a wide spectrum of individuals and locations. The eSense-EM is delivered fully-embedded within the 3V ThinkGear-EM . The results of the eSense-EM Library are passed through the output data stream of the ThinkGear-EM to the end-platform.
MindKit-EMTM (SDK: Software Development Kit)
The MindKit-EMTM is NeuroSky's second generation development tool. MindKit-EM is a PC-based development platform used to extract, filter and amplify brainwave (EEG) signals and convert that information into digital mental state outputs for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) applications. MindKit-EM can be used for monitoring and analysis of human brainwaves, mental training for the development of consumer and industrial end-applications.
MindSetTM (Commercial Neural Headset)
The MindSetTM is the first commercially available, "consumer-ready", brainwave-controlled headset for the mass consumer market. Utilizing NeuroSky's fully-embedded, ThinkGear-EM technology, which manages the brainwave acquisition and interpretation chores, the MindSet communicates equally well with game consoles, PC's and mobile platforms, including cell phones. The MindSet is currently available to NeuroSky's OEM customers only.
"You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy." - Back to the Future Part II - 1989
The Future Is NOW!
At CITB our slogan is "We Call Them As They Are" and this story is the kind we LOVE. This story is about products we have always dreamed would become reality. We applaud these innovative companies, and hope that the marketplace will support them also. Ultimately, it will be the quality of the products that they bring to market that will make or break them. CITB believes that more of this kind of "out of the box" thinking is needed. These companies prove when you Get Your Mind Right... Your Cursor Will Follow...
CITB Quote of the day: "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds!" - Prophet Mohamed (c. 570 Mecca - June 8, 632 Medina)
It's easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. "My nose is leaking," writes someone called Zapples, "so imma go to sleep now.…" But I've heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one.
The key question today isn't what's dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here's why I'm looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers.
Businesses such as H&R Block (HRB) and Zappos are now using Twitter to respond to customer queries. Market researchers look to it to scope out minute-by-minute trends. Media groups are focusing on Twitterers as first-to-the-scene reporters. (They were on top of the May 12 China earthquake within minutes.) Loads of new applications and services are growing around the Twitter platform, leading some to suggest that the microblogging service could become a powerhouse in social media.
For several months I have been learning the ins and outs of "Twittering." Putting Twitter to use is the best way to learn what Twitter is all about and how it can best be used in your personal and professional life. I have made new friends and developed new business contacts using Twitter, and currently I am followed by over 200 people. I want to give back to the Twitter community.
I decided to give Twitter users a gift. I have packaged 6 Twitter homepage designs. Each design is available as a zip file with instructions on how to install it to have it look like the screen shot below.
Click on the screen shot to see a large view of the design.
Posted by Thom Byxbe | Under Thought
Wednesday Feb 6, 2008
This may be slightly off-topic for this blog, so I'll say up front that if any Mac blogs (or Mac-related web sites) would like to pick this up and republish it, please feel free. Having said that, I've been using a Mac mini for a little over a month (alongside a Windows box) and there are a few annoyances I've discovered that don't appear to have easy resolutions (and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of these!). These have all been observed under Leopard. Listed in reverse order, starting with the least annoying and progressing to most annoying (to me, anyway):
Finder won't save FTP passwords - you may not realize that you don't really need an external FTP client to connect to an FTP site. Finder lets you do it (while in a Finder window, use Go|Connect to Server from the top menu bar, then specify the FTP address as you would in a web browser, starting with ftp://). It will pop up a box asking for your user name and password, and that box includes a checkbox that offers to remember your password on your keychain - except that it doesn't, at least when I tested it. Once you've done this, the site opens in a finder window, and (assuming you have the proper permissions on the server) you can move files back and forth just as you can to or from any networked drive. The annoyance here is that you have to re-type the password each time. My solution? I use muCommander (a cross platform, twin-pane file manager, somewhat like the old Norton Commander program) for FTP transfers - it will remember the passwords, works very well, and it's free!
Unexplained program crashes - sometimes, for no apparent reason, a program will just crash, and a box pops up asking if you want to restart it or ignore it. This seems to happen frequently when I'm actually trying to quit a program (some programs are worse than others in this regard) but at least in those cases I'm actually wanting the program to quit. More annoying is when it happens for no apparent reason while trying to do something perfectly normal, like opening a file. This happens with both Apple-supplied apps and third-party apps. The saving grace is that this rarely happens in a way that you actually lose data, so it's just annoying that you have to restart the program (or click a button to ignore the error when you really want to quit).
Firewall blocks incoming connections only - Leopard provides a firewall, but it only blocks incoming connections, and seems to allow or disallow connections on a per-application basis only (in other words, if you allow one incoming connection to an app, you allow them all). It has no way to prevent rogue apps from "phoning home", and third-party Mac apps seem much worse about phoning home without express user permission than PC apps (although many do ask first, and in some cases the only reason for "phoning home" is to check for new versions). There is a third-party add-on that provides outgoing connection blocking but it costs money, and some users have reported problems after installing it, which is why I'm not naming it here. C'mon, Apple, one of the reasons people buy Macs is because they perceive them to be more secure than PC's, so at least give us a firewall preference panel that doesn't look like it was thrown together in a single afternoon, and actually allows flexibility in blocking both outgoing and incoming connections.
No simple way to paste plain text - Let's say you want to do a copy and paste of some text from your web browser to an outgoing mail. You'll get different results depending on the browser you are copying from, but under no circumstances will you get plain text. On a PC, using Eudora, I could always do Control-Shift-V to paste plain text. Try using Command-Shift-V in Apple Mail and it does change the formatting, but also pastes the text as if it were a quote from the message being replied to. The ONLY way I've found around this is to use a utility called Plain Clip, which sits in the dock, and when you click on it it changes whatever text is in the clipboard to plain text. But that's cumbersome to use when you are in the middle of a keyboard operation (you have to move a hand from keyboard to mouse to perform this operation). I can't believe there's no keystroke combination that will simply strip the formatting from text and paste it as plain text, but if there is, I sure haven't found it. Edit: Would you believe that pressing Alt-Command-Shift-V (or in AppleSpeak, Option-Command-Shift-V) sometimes works to paste plain text? Yes, that's a FOUR key combination. Wonder what genius came up with that one?!
No way to delay outgoing mail - While on the subject of the Apple Mail program, I'm the type of person who frequently composes a mail, clicks Send, and then realizes that I should have added something (like a URL to a web page) or perhaps included another recipient. Sometimes, infrequently, I realize I shouldn't have sent it at all. On the PC, in Eudora, I could set it up so that it only sent out mail in batches at predefined intervals (I used 20 minutes), which let me catch most of my "mistakes" before they were actually sent. With Apple Mail, you click Send and boom! It's gone, with no "cooling off" period whatsoever. I would be oh, so happy if someone would come out with a "delayed send" plugin for Mail, that you could click and it would delay sending until 20 minutes into the future (or some other predefined period) - and if you then reopened and edited the message, the clock would reset. There are, of course, times when I really do want the message to go out immediately, but most of what I send is not time-sensitive and I'd really appreciate the opportunity to have an automatic delay on sent e-mail (and one that does not involve clicking around and making an event in iCal, or something that's more difficult than it should be).
iCal can't set a recurring alarm for the exact time of the event - And speaking of iCal, maybe I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem to have a fast and elegant way to set up a simple recurring reminder (such as, I want an alarm to pop up on my computer at 9:00 AM on the third of every month). You have to create an event, and then you can specify that it's a recurring event and then specify the popup alarm, but annoyingly you cannot set the alarm to the exact start of the event - it can be one minute before or one minute after (if you manually enter those), or 15 minutes before or 15 minutes after if you take the defaults. But sometimes you don't want to create an event in the usual sense of the word, you just want a simple reminder at a specific time, and iCal makes this more difficult than it should be. Bonus iCal annoyance: If you enter someone's birthday in the Address book, an entry shows up on that day in iCal, but there's no way to associate an alarm with it. Didn't anybody at Apple consider that you might want to have a popup reminder a day or two before the birthday?
This is the one that really bugs me. On a Mac mini, you can plug in any USB keyboard, or just about any keyboard if you get a cheap PS2 to USB adapter (these are easy to find on eBay), so you can still use all those free-after-rebate keyboards you stocked up on several years ago. A minor annoyance, at least for me, is that if I simply reboot the computer without powering it down completely for a few seconds, it doesn't recognize the keyboard at all. But, that I could live with. What's really annoying is that the geniuses at Apple decided that the numeric keypad should only be a numeric keypad - the NumLock key is disabled, and there's no way to get the directional keys or Ins/Del keys to work (please note I'm talking about the keys on the numeric keypad, NOT the keys between the alpha keypad and the numeric keypad, which for the most part work fine though not always exactly as on a PC). The reason this is a HUGE annoyance for me is that I learned to type on a manual typewriter and when I want a number, I use the numbers in the row above the QWERTY line of keys. And for that reason, ever since there have been numeric keypads on keyboards I've always released NumLock and used the numeric keypad for navigation only. Do you have any idea how hard it is to unlearn a quarter century of habit? And there is simply no good reason that Apple could not have allowed PC keyboards to work as expected - their OS is built on Unix, after all, and I'm sure that most Unix-based operating systems don't disable the NumLock (no version of Linux does that to my knowledge). I hope that when whoever made the decision to eliminate the NumLock switch gets old, they are forced to change some longstanding habits just to accommodate some idiot designer's idea of how things ought to work. Can you tell I'm REALLY PISSED about this one? You would be too, if you hit the wrong key about 300 times a day (in my case it's the Delete key on the numeric pad), then had to backspace and find the right one. Yes, I finally did find a hack that works in a few programs (Apple Mail for one) but for whatever reason, it doesn't work in Firefox (such as when entering this post). Edit: Help is finally here! The program KeyRemap4MacBook now has the ability to fix the numeric keypad (even in Firefox). Be sure to get the latest release version (3.1.0 or better). In that program, you will want to enable "Use KeyPad as Arrow (PC Style NumLock)" and (optionally) "Use PC Style Home/End (Command+Arrow)" and/or "Application Key to F11" (the "Application" key is the one between the right-hand Windows/Command key and the right-hand Ctrl key on PC-style keyboards).
Well, that's my list of Mac irritants. Now, please don't get the wrong idea, there's a lot to like about the Mac, and some things are definitely easier on the Mac. Even my list of irritations are for the most part small stuff, but that's part of what makes them irritating - I have to think that none of the things on my list would take considerable effort for the coders at Apple to fix (except maybe the firewall thing), and many of them might only take an hour or so, maybe less. What I don't know is whether these things annoy anyone but me, or whether others have found acceptable workarounds.
One thing that might have been on this list a month ago, but isn't now, is a lack of good freeware and open-source software for the Mac, compared to what's available for Linux and the PC. It turns out that there's a wealth of Mac freeware out there, but you have to find the sites that list it, and they do exist. The annoyance, if you can call it that, is that on several of the Mac-based forums they just don't talk about the freeware much. It seems that there is a certain contingent within the ranks of Mac devotees that has the attitude that free software can't be good software, which is a myth long since discarded among Windows and Linux users (and I think the Mac folks are coming around, but some of them are doing a lot of kicking and screaming about it). Here are links to a few good Mac freeware sites that also have RSS newsfeeds:
There are probably other good Mac freeware sites (feel free to mention them in a comment, but be aware that I'll actually check the link, so don't try to spam!)
To see the potential in this story requires one to do some “Outside The Box” thinking. This is something that I feel it is our duty at CITB to encourage.
I believe one of the BEST ways for CITB encourage “Outside The Box” thinking is to provide EXCELLENT examples. That is the purpose of this new series. We will focus on current living and tested innovative thinkers. NOT conceptual thinkers, but individuals who have demonstrated practical functional, “Outside The Box” thinking.
The other day I re-discovered Seth Godin. Seth has been around the Internet for a LONG time. Why is he the subject of our inaugural post in the "Thinkers You NEED To Know" series? Here are SOME of his accomplishments:
Founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the interactive direct marketing company acquired by Yahoo! in 1998
Founded the "Recommendation Network" website Squidoo
Daily he helps adjust the way people think about change, marketing and work processes. He is highly respected for his intricate understanding of the Internet. Seth has lead in helping to define not only the Internet's processes, but a large chunk of its marketing vocabulary. Here is an example of how he coined the term "permission marketing", and defined a basic concept of the Internet today.
Advertisements on TV and Radio are classified as "interruption marketing", which interrupt the customer while he is doing something of his preference. Godin introduced the concept of "permission marketing", where the business provides something of value to the customer and obtains his permission, and then does marketing.
Godin combines three elements in his writings.
The end of the "TV-Industrial complex" means that marketers no longer have the power to command the attention of anyone they choose, whenever they choose.
In a marketplace in which consumers have more power, marketers must show more respect; this means no spam, no deceit and a bias for keeping promises.
He asserts that the only way to spread the word about an idea is for that idea to earn the buzz by being remarkable.
Godin refers to those who spread these ideas as "Sneezers", and to the ideas being spread as "IdeaViruses." He calls a remarkable product or service a purple cow. Yahoo! currently has a model of a purple cow in the lobby of its Sunnyvale campus.
SETH'S PHILOSOPHY in his own words...
For fifty years, advertising drove our economy. Then media exploded. We went from three channels to five hundred, from no web pages to a billion. Suddenly there are more than 100 brands of nationally advertised water. There are dozens of car companies, selling thousands of combinations. Starbucks offers 19,000,000 different ways to order a beverage, and Oreo cookies now come in more than nineteen flavors.
In the face of all this choice and clutter, consumers realized that they have quite a bit of power. So advertising stopped working.
One insight is that marketing with permission works better than spam. In other words, delivering anticipated, personal and relevant ads to the people who want to get them is always more effective than yelling loudly at strangers. PERMISSION MARKETING addresses this issue.
Once an idea is in the hands of people who care about its success, it may be lucky enough to benefit from digitally augmented word of mouth. I call this an ideavirus. Modern ideas spread online and off, and this is faster and more effective than the old-fashioned centralized way of selling. "UNLEASHING THE IDEAVIRUS" is the most successful ebook of all time and you can buy the paperback for about $10.
It's remarkable products that get remarked on. That seems obvious, but it flies in the face of the way most goods and services and business items are created and marketed. Boring is invisible.
The thing that makes something remarkable isn't usually directly related to the original purpose of the product or service. It's the FREE PRIZE INSIDE, the extra stuff, the stylish bonus, the design or the remarkable service or pricing that makes people talk about it and spread the word.
Seth's controversial book, ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS, isn't about lying at all. It's about telling stories that people want to believe. It's about the fact that people want bottled water, not tap; iPod Nanos, not Rios; and politicians who talk straight, regardless of the consequences... But most of all, it's about authenticity.
I believe that it's possible to enjoy your job, to do the right thing, to be transparent, to give more than you get and to be successful, all at the same time. In fact, that's sort of the definition of success, isn't it?
TOP 7 "SETH'S BLOG" POSTS OF ALL TIME
Small is the new big - How the net turns the advantage of the mighty upside down.
Posted by Thom Byxbe | Under Concept
Wednesday Feb 20, 2008
I have been personally involved in many business start-ups and so any site that claims to be a source for "angel investors" will always get my attention. I am glad this one did! Go4Funding.com is a platform to bring entrepreneurs and investors closer together. There are many sites which boast of offering a similar platform, only to complicate the entire process of establishing communication channels between two parties. Go4Funding.com believes in simplicity. They understand that entrepreneurs, investors and experts have more on the table than figuring out ways to fill the lengthy registration forms or hunting through various search options.
Go4Funding is designed exclusively to simplify the whole process of investing, looking for funds or setting up various resources required to take your business plans to the next level.
If you're an entrepreneur, investor or an expert it truly does not get any better than Go4Funding. We give this site our HIGHEST recommendation.
CITB Quote of the day: "Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein
Posted by Thom Byxbe | Under Concept, Idea
Thursday Feb 7, 2008
As CITB was being developed, we strived hard to create the correct look for the site. One of the areas where there was much conversation, which is still ongoing, is the color palette on which the site is designed. Creative professionals daily delve into the world of color. Color is powerful, it affects us all in countless ways. We at CITB are not color design professionals, but we have learned much about the proper use of colors, and how to work from a palette of colors that are harmonious. One of the very best tools we found was a new site known as ColorJack. ColorJack’s tools help choose the right colors for websites, print jobs, or any design project.
We looked at a lot of sites during our design phase, and clearly ColorJack was the best of the best! We give this site our HIGHEST recommendation but wish that it contained more documentation. We really only understood this tool because of reading and research done elsewhere on the net.
CITB Quote of the day: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover" - Mark Twain
We use Backpack here at CITB everyday. After trying a LOT of software solutions to manage the multitude of tasks necessary to plan, schedule, and coordinate the day to day operations of our 3 blogs we chose Backpack.
Please click below and take advantage of the FREE version of Backpack.
Thomas Byxbe is the Publisher and Editor of Concepts, Ideas, Thoughts & Bullsh!t.
Thom has been a respected Internet author for over 12 years. He has written extensively on the Internet, Technology and Lifestyle topics. Concepts, Ideas, Thoughts & Bullsh!t is one of 3 current blog projects he writes and manages.
Mr. Byxbe is President and Chief Internet Visionary of Metamorphosis Idea Lab located in Madison Heights, Michigan.
In addition, Thom is an Ordained Minister focused on pastoral counseling. He has been a certified Neuro-Linguistic Practitioner for over 20 years. In his current counseling practice he utilizes a blend of talk based counseling with NLP programming techniques.
If you have suggestions, comments or would like to submit recommendations for articles to appear in Concepts, Ideas, Thoughts Bullsh!t, please feel free to contact him at:
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