I Love like.com!
Finally, technology that speaks my language! If you're anything like me, when you're watching television you catch yourself paying more attention to Oprah's shoes than her "scathing" interviews of self-obsessed celebrities, overweight bipolars, and imprisoned child molestors. Do you remember the luggage that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) used when she moved to Paris to be with her artist boyfriend, Alexander Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), on the final episode of Sex and the City? I do! I spent hours searching for that luggage online to no avail. If I had to guess, I'd say it was Christian Dior, but I never found it. My days of searching blind are over thanks to www.like.com.
The latest innovation in search engines is here and it's designed for people just like me. Like.com is a visual search engine--it uses pictures, rather than keywords, to search the Web for whatever it is that your fashionista heart desires. That is, as long as what you're looking for is a shoe, a watch, a handbag, or a piece of jewelry--the only four categories that like.com currently recognizes with shirts, pants, and dresses to be added in the next few months.
Like.com offers photos from 200 online retailers and a database of celebrity photos that searchers can use to highlight accessories and then instruct the search engine to find. Users are able to indicate color, shape, and pattern preferences and can use traditional text limiters to sort by brand, size, and price. Once the search parameters are set, like.com crawls the webpages of over 200 online stores such as www.amazon.com or www.llbean.com. Users can also highlight a specific feature of a product such as the strap of a watch or the buckle on a shoe and perform a search within that constraint.
A team of computer scientists developed special software that breaks images down into 10,000 numbers that represent 30 features of an item such as the full spectrum of colors that appear in a handbag, the glossiness of the bag's exterior, and its curves. The numbers are then compared with the numbers used to describe the product pictures on the merchants' websites. Some problems have been encountered with jewelry searches because there tends to be a lot of variation in the way metals and stones such as diamonds glisten in pictures. Like.com is a work in progress with many features expected to be added over the next few months and I, for one, am looking forward to the additions. No more searching for "Oprah black crocodile platform stacked heels!"
BRIDGING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Ok, so laptops aren't exactly "the newest thing," but Nicholas Negroponte's (name sound familiar?) idea to bring laptops to every child in the world is a revolutionary idea that merits a spot in a blog about new technologies. Negroponte's program One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an ambitious undertaking designed to develop and sell $100 laptops to governments of developing nations in an effort to bridge the oft-mentioned digital divide. Negroponte, the cofounder and chairman emeritus of MIT's media lab, believes that OLPC would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and allow them to work with and benefit from each other in new ways.
In our blogs and our threaded discussions, most of us have expressed concerns about those who are being left behind as technology becomes more prevalent and Negroponte obviously feels that it's an issue worth addressing as well. OLPC is a not-for-profit program that depends on private, governmental, and nonprofit organizations to help it get off the ground. OLPC has taken responsibility for the design of the laptops and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it, but the computers won't go into production until they have firm committments from foreign governments to buy at least five million units. Negroponte's argument is persuasive: "Look at the math- even the poorest country spends about $200 per year per child. We've estimated what a connected, unlimited-Internet-access $100 laptop will cost to own and run: $30 per year. That has got to be the very best investment you can make. Period."
Negroponte's idea is not going to be easy to implement because it faces several challenges. They must design and build a laptop that can withstand rough handling, function even in the absence of a steady power supply, and allow easy networking and Internet access, and whose small yet readable screen would employ inexpensive technology that is as of yet unheard of. However, several companies are already on board. Quanta, a Taiwanese company that produces one-third of the world's laptops, is slated to manufacture the computers, while companies such as AMD and Red Hat are set to provide the laptops' innards.
Perhaps the most innovative of OLPC's design components is the use of a foot pedal that can be used to power the computer when it isn't plugged in. Every minute of exertion will generate 10 minutes of power. Negroponte has said that "Out of the box, the laptops will connect with one another to form a mesh network that will make each computer a transmission node, allowing the laptops to talk to each other and greatly magnifying the range of any Internet connection. And the screen will have both a high-resolution black-and-white mode, in which it will be readable even in bright sun, and a backlit, lower-resolution color mode."
It seems as if they've thought of everything, but the $100 laptop does not yet exist. The first models are expected to come off the assembly line this month and will be sent to Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Thailand, and Nigeria for testing. The future of the project depends on the willingness of governments to purchase the laptops. So far, Libya has committed to purchasing one million units if the computers work as promised, but Negroponte has his work cut out for him.
posted by KimK at 12:49 PM
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