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September 16 2010
iPhone App Lets You Tell Drivers Exactly What You Think of Them
A new smart phone app aims to get you communicating with the drivers around you, and we don’t mean yelling choice obscenities through the window or shaking your fist of rage when someone cuts you off.
By photographing, typing, or saying a license plate number and state you’ll be able to message the driver–if they’re also signed up for the service, named Bump. The message recipient can choose how they get their messages, through text or the Bump.com website. Bump launches today on iPhones, and an Android app will soon be ready as well.
Venture Beat talked to Bump’s CEO, Mitch Thrower about the idea:
Thrower says his social network for cars brings to mind a classic scene in the film American Graffiti…. Actor Richard Dreyfuss sees a beautiful blonde played by Suzanne Somers in a white T-Bird. She blows a kiss at him. He tries to follow her but can’t catch up. Maddeningly, he never sees her again. Oh, if he had only gotten her license plate.
And while the idea of giving drivers more reasons to constantly be on their phones gives most of us the willies, Bump’s developers say using their application could encourage a safer diving experience overall, bringing personal accountability to the road–a normally anonymous place. As fun as scolding bad drivers sounds the service can also be used to warn other drivers about low tires, broken tail-lights, car alarms, or headlights left on. Or, of course, we could turn traffic jams into the new singles scene.
The company is touting the app as some sort of social network for drivers, but it also has a data-mining trick up their sleeve. Bump wants to offer up its users as targets for advertising, by selling businesses the ability to contact people who frequently drive by their establishments.
Bump’s VP of technology, John Albers-Mead, explained the idea to Technology Review:
“It allows us to track users, it’s like putting a cookie on a car,” says Albers-Mead, likening his technology to the small files used to track web users and offer functionality like autologins online. Once connected up to Bump’s tech, a camera at a store or drive-in burger joint could, for example, showing menu choices similar to those you’ve selected before. That extra data could be valuable to store owners, Bump say, who could also make use of the messaging functions. “You could register as a fan of the Dodgers and then receive a message welcoming you to the stadium and offering discount vouchers when you visit,” says Albers-Mead.
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Discoblog: Texting-While-Driving Coach Slightly Delays Appalling Crashes
Discoblog: Woman Receives First Ever PhD in Texting
Discoblog: NASA iPhone App Lets You Drive a Lunar Rover (Just Try Not to Get Stuck)
80beats: Sorry, Australian iPhone Users: You’ve Been Rickrolled
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Ed Poor
August 23 2010
Gr8. Victorians txted 2. B4 cells.
A message from the Victorians: “I 1 der if you got that 1 I wrote 2U B4.” Helz ya, 1800s Brit10! We got it. Though they didn’t have cellphones or their 160-character limits, phrases like this one show nineteenth century English writers weren’t above an occasional stylistic shortcut.
The line comes from the poem “Essay to Miss Catharine Jay,” part of Charles Carroll Bombaugh’s 1867 Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature. The poem will appear in a forthcoming exhibit at The British Library as an example of “emblematic poetry.”
As Discovery News reports, such shortcuts appeared even before the Victorians; for example, the phrase IOU (for I owe you) originated in 1618. Txtese abbreviations appeared in literature from both sides of the Atlantic, with Americans also writing to Miss Catharine Jay, or Miss K T J.
Perhaps the proto-texts teach an important lesson: Lopping off word parts doesn’t mean you don’t have class. Another excerpt meant for Miss Catharine Jay:
But friends and foes alike D K,
As U may plainly C,
In every funeral R A,
Or Uncle’s L E G.
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Discoblog: Texting-While-Driving Coach Slightly Delays Appalling Crashes
Discoblog: Texting While Diving? Buoy Allows Text Messages From Submarines
Discoblog: Woman Receives First Ever PhD in Texting
Discoblog: Watch Those Thumbs Go! Champion Texter Wins $50,000
Discoblog: The New Defense Against Despotism: Text Messaging
Image: Wikimedia
August 11 2010
Texting-While-Driving Coach Slightly Delays Appalling Crashes
If your car could talk, it might tell you to stop texting. At least that’s what one research team hopes: after paying young drivers to perform texting-like games while driving a simulator, they found that visual warnings from an in-car “coach” helped keep drivers’ eyes on the road.
For high-risk drivers, the warning system “more than doubled their time until a virtual crash,” a University of Washington press release says. That might not sound entirely reassuring. But the researchers say a similar system installed on a real car might help risky drivers avoid a crash altogether.
A team led by Linda Ng Boyle, an industrial and systems engineer at the University of Washington, first had a group of 53 drivers, ages 18 to 21, attempt to drive a simulator while simultaneously playing a matching game. As an incentive to take the game seriously, they paid drivers according to the correct number of matches they made. The riskiest drivers took their eyes off the road for between two and a half to three seconds, compared to moderate and low-risk drivers who would glance off the road for less than two seconds during their longest glances.
In later tests the researchers activated the driving coach, which flashed warnings on the matching game’s screen. The study noted that the coach decreased the length of high-risk drivers’ glances by an average of 0.4 seconds, decreased their longest glances by about one second compared to risky coach-less drivers, and increased high-risk drivers’ time to collision by around 8 seconds. In the press release, Ng Boyle says the research shows that driver coaching systems can work for both risky and safer drivers:
“I think that drivers are coachable…. The worst drivers can benefit the most, because we can change their behavior the most dramatically. We can also reinforce the good behavior for safer drivers.”
If future driving coaches can talk, we suggest the voice of Knight Rider’s KITT or, better yet, Obi-wan.
Related content:
Discoblog: Texting While Diving? Buoy Allows Text Messages From Submarines
Discoblog: Woman Receives First Ever PhD in Texting
Discoblog: Watch Those Thumbs Go! Champion Texter Wins $50,000
Discoblog: The New Defense Against Despotism: Text Messaging
Image: Linda Ng Boyle / University of Washington News
July 12 2010
Texting While Diving? Buoy Allows Text Messages From Submarines
When it comes to submarines, stealth is no longer an excuse for being anti-social. A 40-inch-long buoy may soon allow submarine captains to send text messages from under the sea.
After leaving the submarine’s trash chute, the buoy stays tethered to the vessel by miles of cables, LiveScience reports. Once sailors have texted to their hearts’ content, they can cut the buoy loose. Alternatively, Lockheed Martin, the system’s designer, also pictures buoys dropped from airplanes, which could receive submarine messages via an “acoustic messaging system” that resembles sonar and send them along in text message form.
By air or by garbage disposal, the buoys would improve current submarine communications, Rod Reints at Lockheed Martin told LiveScience.
“Currently, they have to go up to near periscope depth to communicate . . . . They become more vulnerable to attack as they get closer to the surface. Ultimately, we’re trying to increase the communication availability of the sailors while increasing their safety.”
If successful, one could only imagine the buoy’s other applications. Underwater robots, for example, could text us live updates about sunken vessels or oil leaks. Also, given that we can now text in caves and tweet in space, the buoy, by allowing people to text from miles under water, means that there is nowhere lft 2 escape.
Related content:
Discoblog: Submarine Sonar is Confusing Whales, British Military Says
Discoblog: Woman Receives First Ever PhD in Texting
Discoblog: Watch Those Thumbs Go! Champion Texter Wins $50,000
Discoblog: The New Defense Against Despotism: Text Messaging
Discoblog: Astronauts in Space Finally Enter the Intertubes
Image: U.S. Navy
April 20 2010
OMG! Study Sez Teen Textng’s Totally Up :0
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