“Videopaper”

This afternoon I dropped by the offices of Yahoo Research Berkeley for a BrainJam with Ricoh Innovations on videopaper and multimedia browsing techniques.

Videopaper is not as cool as it sounds. Ricoh has a process for pulling keyframes from a video and tagging them with a funky Japanese barcode. Scan the barcode under a thumbnail with your bluetooth barcode reader and the video hops right to the place you selected. If the video was closed-captioned, the thumbnails are integrated with a transcript. The purpose is a find the needle in an hour-long presentation haystack.

Half the cell phones in Japan can read barcodes! Our demo featured a Trio outfitted to read them.

The Media Times is an experiment that goes like this. A researcher has his Tivo record all night. The next day he lifts interesting stories from the Tivo and puts them through the barcode routine. I couldn’t think up many applications that are looking for this. Ironically, the sample of The Media Times was dated December 1, 2006, and carried an interview with Michael Dertouzos despite the fact that Michael died five years earlier.

Asked about e-paper, the presenter said they were thinking about it. I suggested that a copier company better think about it pretty hard.

It was fun talking with the Yahoos after the talk about GPS mash-ups, YouTube encoding, and of course, informal learning.

Snooping around their website, I came Upcoming.org, a website announcing local happenings, and found this rather strange item:

Join Glowlab, a New York-based artist-run production and publishing lab directed by Christina Ray, as they launch NOSO, an anti-social networking project that involves discovering the identity of another without being discovered. It turns recent developments in urban street games and social-networking inside out. Developed in response to the amount of online activity currently dominating our world, NOSO offers a moment of relief to the technology wearied. Via the web, the public is invited to participate in a citywide micro-intervention known only to its participants.

Also:

The Sex Worker Film & Arts Festival features films by and about sex workers, live performance by sex worker artists.

and…

The Anarchist Bookfair has been a San Francisco tradition for over a decade, and has become one of the largest annual gatherings of anarchists and radical books in the world.