Entries tagged 'news'

There seems to be a race going on for the worlds first pico projector.
This is a build in projector for your mobile phone.
Lately we are talking about several widget blocks in GLOWE such as the picture block or a video block... But who knows, in the future there might even be a projector block...
check this video of a texas instruments blackberry with a projector:

source: crunchgear

Mobile widgets are the future, we know that, But nokia made some futuristic announcements that may or may not come true.
10 years ago it was great if you could make a phone call on the go, today that's almost unmissable. A chief visionary at nokia said that they are looking in to things that could be relevant for 2015. It could be relevant to patent a product in 2015 but the product may be further away in the future. For reaseachers any starting point is possible. They are even playing with possibilities of growing your own phone or just print a new phone.
Recently Nokia launched "Morph nanotechnology concept". This could result in phones with very flexible and self cleaning materials within the next 7 years.

We thought this was very cool, though we did wonder, if you could really grow your own phone. Would it still be in garantee if you had a failed harvest?

check the full article here

Marketeers convened this week to figure out what the best way is to reach teens thru the internet. The answer in short: "The mobile phone"!

Teens spend their time mostly online, gaming or with cell phones and the prediction is that mobile phone usage will surpass the popularity of the desktop computer. It is only a matter of time that most people will get a smartphone for themselves. Geographic ad targeting will probably explode the coming years. But it won't be the providers that will be entertainment leaders on the phone, other companies such as google, apple or yahoo will be more effective in doing so.

source: cnet

Very cool website I heard of today, from Geert.
Thanks to dapper you can convert html websites to xml or some xml based format such as RSS.
This is great if you want to avoid using regular expressions for your widget. Just select your website, run it thru dapper and you'll have an xml feed of the html website. You can even name your input fields with variable names. Extremely handy if you have a widget for searching on a website.
Check out the video here!

In the very near future we may face a turning point, the birth of Web 3.0.
Many people speculate what Web 3.0 could be like. Though, some of these speculations are very interesting for mobile developers.


To start from the very beginning, from the burst of the dot com bubble in the fall of 2001. Many people believed that the web was overhyped. But it wasn't the end of the web. Far from it infact. New and exciting sites and applications started poping up and it were the good web solutions that showed their strenght by surviving and thriving while the pretenders dissapeared.
In the first conferences (source from o'Reilly), Web 2.0 was described as "the web as a platform" and later Web 2.0 meant something about democracy. When speaking of Web 2.0 today we think of Ajax, RSS, user generated content and democracy like blogs and wiki and mashups.


Some speculations for web 3.0 suggest that the web will be everywhere on various devices, anytime, anywhere. Crucial applications such as mobile applications and intuitiveness in usage where a mobile powered web will play a big part in.


imagin walking in a store with your phone and you automatically switch over to the in-house wifi. Now you are online located in the store and browsing the web deliverd catalog and if you want to find a product in a certain department, your phone shows you a map of the store.


Or the search engine of the future where your search results are based on the radius of your location.


Social networking may change drastically aswell. Imagine in the near future where you take out your phone and see several people online near you, you don't have to talk to them yet, you can first see their profile and their hobbies and the other way around. All you have to do is walk to that person and start a conversation.


Seems to me, It's only a matter of time...

Today the website of GLOWE is updated to the newest version. What has changed?

• The logo was updated to the winning one in the logo competition.


• A favicon was added.


• The page system is update. The current page that is displayed is now visible.


• A new system for displaying tutorials, downloads and presentation was made and integrated.

Have fun!

Usability is very important when creating software. In the nineties there were a few million internet users, and most of those people were geeks. Today there are more than a billion internet users and most of these people don’t have a technical background. Unless you’re making applications for fun, games or applications replacing intimacy, most people don’t want to use software, how great it may be.

An example may be that when someone buys a lottery ticket, that person is not buying a piece of paper. He’s buying hope. If someone is buying toilet paper, he’s not buying just paper because it looks nice or stands well between the furniture. That person is buying hygiene. This is the same with software. People aren’t using software because it’s just cool. Most people don’t want to use software but they want to have used software. It’s a big difference. With software they want a solution to their problem. And those people also want the software to “just work”. When you go to technical conferences today, you may or may not be dazzled by new possibilities. With some new technologies for .Net for example you can create very beautiful interfaces with 3D effects and crazy colors. But do you need them?

An example: Google earth has a very cool feature when you look for a location it zooms in to the earth. The first time you might think this is so cool to see. But the 10th time you’ll be thinking, hurry up now, it’s taking 20 seconds to finish it’s zooming in. On the other hand, if someone in a power plant can graphically see the level of some device in his central with 3D images and video he’ll be helped a lot, because it’s easier to look at 3D moving images than just looking at numbers.

Use your ideas for good and not evil. These ideas’ come from David Platt, a speaker at the Devdays in Amsterdam and .Net professor. The GLOWE core team of course completely agrees that usability is important for end users and we even take it a step further. We also believe solutions should be easy, especially for mobile, because today, creating solutions for mobile isn’t always as easy as it should be.

A part of our GLOWE mission is to enable people to easily create personal and relevant widgets that can be used anywhere. Usability is very important for the end user, but we also believe this usability should also exist in more than 1 level, at the level of the end user, but also with the person creating the widget.

GLOWE has made it in the news. T-zine, a blog of a Belgian newspaper "De Tijd" reported our presence at the webcamp. You can read the full article here.