<![CDATA[Gizmodo: itp 2007]]> http://tags.gizmodo.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gizmodo.com.png <![CDATA[Gizmodo: itp 2007]]> http://gizmodo.com/tag/itp2007 http://gizmodo.com/tag/itp2007 <![CDATA[Ambient TV Brings Web 2.0, Derision of Your Friends' Viewing Habits to TV]]> Oh, these NYU kids and their big ideas. (Disclosure: I was an NYU kid until Thursday.) Myra Einstein's project, Ambient TV, aims to bring Web 2.0 tech to TV and would make a great add-on to TiVo or the upcoming Xbox 360 IPTV setup. While some of the ideas aren't so new—swarm recommendations, so that Lost watchers would be directed to follow fellow viewers to Heroes, for instance—its friend setup in particular seems like a big draw and a natural fit for IPTV.

Basically, you can recommend a show to any (or all) of your friends on your list, and it'll simply pop up in their friends channel. It also works to some extent like a Flickr pool, so you check out what your friends have been watching.

The other Flickr/YouTube-like feature is the ability to tag shows, which is potentially extremely cool and incredibly useful, more so than automated recommendations. I just wonder how long it would take for every show to be tagged "09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0." Video demo after the jump.

Ambient TV [Project Page]

]]>
http://gizmodo.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=260046&view=rss&microfeed=true
<![CDATA[News Brews: Turn Depressing World Affairs Into Coffee]]> I like coffee. I like RSS. So naturally, I dig Benjamin Brown's News Brews project, which crawls through RSS feeds and takes "the relative frequency at which different coffee-growing regions are mentioned" to determine their respective bean proportion in the blend.

In English, that means if Ethiopia is mentioned 30 times, Kenya 20 and Colombia 50, your brew would be 30 percent Ethiopian, and so on. (You could, of course, fill the respective canisters with all the same bean to make a standard cup, but where's the fun in that?)

On top of flaunting the ever-popular steampunk look, it grinds the coffee fresh before it brews, so you don't need a separate grinder. The only downside is that it's drip—he told me he thought about French press, but the mechanics didn't work out. It still made a pretty damn good cup at the show, though.

News Brews [Project Page]
NYU ITP 2007 [Gizmodo]

]]>
http://gizmodo.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=260028&view=rss&microfeed=true