Posts tagged I wish I had a better phone
I want an iPhone/iPod Touch so badly.
Is the fact that so many fantastic innovative museum things are occurring on an exceptionally expensive pieces of kit a form of social inclusion?
Museum of London Street Museum
Ok, it’s all a bit London heavy the last couple of posts, but I’m excited, OK? This is a pretty cool iPhone app that lets you use satellite positioning to come up with old photos of the area you are standing in, create trails and get extra information about historical events and what not that happened nearby.
iPhone app that guides you around London poem by poem
The result is an app called City Poems – published today – that uses satellite navigation to guide culture vultures and tourists alike through the streets of central London poem by poem. After weeks of researching poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and histories. Wherever you are standing in London (or New York for that matter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been written about.
They include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), public burnings in Smithfield (“His guts filled a barrel”) or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square, which I had passed by in ignorance for many decades. There are, of course, plenty of other platforms for developing apps – Google’s Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Nokia – but it is Apple that is making the running at the moment – even though it accounts for less than 1% of the world’s phones.
iPhone Picasso’s promote an upcoming Picasso exhibition at The Tate museum. Spin it, zoom in on it to examine the way each brush-stroke fell onto the canvas and dial up detailed info on the painting itself at will.
Educational and promotional.
Now this Plink thing seems pretty cool
Google Acquires UK Visual Search Engine Startup
By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service (PCWorld.com)
Google has acquired a two-person U.K. startup called Plink that scored a hit with a mobile phone application that identifies artworks and enables users to buy a print.
Plink, based in Oxford, England, was founded by Mark Cummins and James Philbin, who will now both work for Google. The technology comes from their doctorate degree research in the mobile robotics and visual geometry groups at the University of Oxford’s department of engineering science.
Their mobile application, called PlinkArt, hit 50,000 users within four weeks. It gives users information about an artwork, let users share it with friends and allow people to order a print.
The application, which only works on the Android operating system, will still be available but not updated. Cummins and Philbin will now work on Google Goggles, a project that lets users search Google by submitting photographs from mobile phones.
“Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up,” according to Plink’s blog.
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
