Gizmodo: tagging

Tikitag RFID Tagging System Makes an Internet Out of Your Stuff

Sean Fallon — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:18:00 EDT

Ideas like this have been tossed around for some time now, but Alcatel-Lucent's "tikitag" unveiled at the DemoFall conference may finally make the idea of everyday RFID tagging possible. For example, you could put tikitags on business cards and connect that card to online personal or social networking info. After that, the data could be retrieved easily by swiping the card over a tikitag reader.

If the service takes off and enough developers get involved with apps, another option for business owners would be to attach the tags to posters or advertisements that could interact with cellphones or other portable devices. The possibilities are endless. The service is set to go into a public beta on October 1st, with a 10 tag pack running about $50. Packs containing 25 tags will also be available sometime in the near future. [Tikitag via CNET]

Graffiti'ed AT-AT Walker Up For Grabs at Christie's Auction

AddyDugdale — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:40:00 EDT

If you've got a spare couple of grand loitering in your bank account, and you're a S*** W*** fan, then this graffiti'ed AT-AT walker might be so far up your galaxy it's parked in your constellation. Customised by EASE and JK5 for Suckadelic, the Hasbro toy is tagged in gin-u-wine Aurebesh language, and is expected to go for between $1,500 and $2,000. You can pick it up at the Christie's Pop Culture sale on June 25 in New York. [Christie's via GeekAlerts]

Graffiti Research Lab Draws Rude Things on Buildings

Addy Dugdale — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:09:27 EDT

The Graffiti Research Lab has been to Spain for its holidays. Packing their Mobile Broadcast Unit—nice, isn't it?—the crew headed off to Barcelona for OFFF, the International Festival for Post-Digital Creation Culture, and this is what they did, Art Terrorists that they are.

It seems they need to get right up close to their targets—while it works at MACBA, the city's modern art gallery, their assault on El Corte Ingles was diluted somewhat, as they were parked on the other side of Plaza Catalunya to the megalithic department store (the ugliest building in the city, IMHO).

Beats, Breaks and Good Times were had by all until the arrival of a bunch of short, fat men in uniform—sadly, not a squadron of catalonian stripograms—put paid to their fun. See how the GRL get their revenge at the end of the vid. – Ad Dugdale

Bombing @ El Corte Ingles [You Tube]

ALIPR Helps People Decide: Hot Or Not?

kthompson — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:04:56 EST

An amazing innovation in the software world today: ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) is a program that takes a look at digital images, applies some fancy math and then spits out a list of appropriate tags for the picture. It isn't perfect, but the designers claim it has a 98 percent accuracy rate. They've been letting it dig through Flickr and the software has matched at least one user-defined tag almost every time.

Try it out for yourself. The image above of a cat drinking a soft drink yielded the following fifteen results: man-made, texture, color, people, indoor, food, painting, royal_guard, fruit, feast, holiday, mural, cloth, abstract, guard. Not all words I'd choose to describe a thirsty kitty, but not bad for a bundle of electronics. – Karson Thompson

Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures [via Technology Review]