At ETech today members of the InSTEDD team spoke about how they have been building SMS and mapping applications, in the Mekong Delta in the jungles of South East Asia. InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) was organized in 2006-2007 and aims to harness technology to help with early warning, prevention and response to disasters and public health threats. Some of the issues InSTEDD came across in the Mekong Delta were figuring out multilingual issues, human interaction design for 140 characters, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems. After the jump is a summary of their presentation at ETech.
Nick Bilton from The New York Times R&D Labs was at ETech today, talking about how NYT is preparing for the future of news delivery. His presentation explored how "sensors in every part of our lives [are] helping us aggregate smart content that is relevant to the device we are using". Bilton said that New York Times is building out more real-time analytics, device detection and granular user interaction, in order to deliver this "smart content" to each user and device. They are focused on the "3 screen" experience: web, mobile, and living room. Bilton said that NYT is also exploring "Newspaper 2.0" and next generation e-ink devices (such as flexible displays).
Mike Kuniavsky from ThingM Corporation spoke this morning at ETech about merging machine-readable identification with pervasive networking. Kuniavsky said that when a digital representation of an object is accessed through a unique ID, it is the object's "information shadow". Nowadays, he said, these information shadows are attached to just about everything. One of the consequences of this is that the physical object changes to a service. This is another manifestation of the bigger trend of internet connected objects. Kuniavsky outlined a couple of examples of objects as a service in his presentation.
