Mobitrends

Thanks @sdelbecque for pointing out this app – “Character” is an iPhone app available free on App Store that lets you search for you WoW avatars and retriever their stats/items/stuuf and displays them live on your iPhone. Wanna show your latest cool epic loot to your frinds in real life, now you can do it straight from your iPhone !

While I had almost forgot I had music on my computer – I have been switching progressively to Last.FM enjoying its automatic playlist features and discovering new music, the arrival of iTunes 8 brought much rejoice to my 20Gigs of music thanks to the Genius smart playlist feature. This generates playlist that match the song you’re playing.
Next to that I’m having lots of fun with the new visualization plugins in iTunes 8, really nice effects !
I’m a bit disappointed by the itunes-only news of yesterday but I guess you can’t launch a new cool device every few months…

Two announces around the same technology/use case in a few days,
Violet, on one hand, announces its “mirror”, a USB RFID reader along with bunny-shaped tags
Alcatel-Lucent’s startup (!?) tikitag announced today its tikitag rfid reader + 10 tags will be available soon on Amazon at 50 USD
This is nice – as a geek I love connected devices, yet I still wonder what the real mass-market use-cases for this technology really are. It’s “nice to have” to bind a digital action with a swipe of a RFID tag but having a USB connected reader really makes me wonder what’s so much easier when anything can be done from the computer itself… at least the tiny nabaztag are super-cute – I would buy them without the reader !

There will be a full wee of conferences being held on Orange Island in SL, here is the official flyer from the Orange Island blog.

I’m totally excited, we just put live a dedicated website for our modified SL viewer at http://sl.vr-wear.com with the first public beta of our modified Second Life client that includes head analysis. It now features :

• Head motion Yes/No
• Head bending left/right
• Surprise detection
• Smile detection

Still a long way to go, and we’re taking the challenge step by step, but it’s great to see the feature list get longer and get the user feedback.
Again if you’re a signal processing expert and want to be part of a revolution that will turn puppet-like avatars into emotional selfs, get in touch with us !
We started a thread on seesmic to get feedback, download and try the software and join the conversation !

VRW – SL Viewer mod – 0.99 beta 1 public release