Too Late To Be First

Put an Augmented Reality Time Machine in Every Pocket

2010-06-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

Others may have done similar experiments, but it looks like HistoryPin is first to put one of these gizmos in every pocket.

Build a Fully Operational Lego Sniper Rifle

2010-06-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

Yep. You might of thought about doing it, but you didn't do it. Again. Jack Streat did.

Cool Lego Sniper Rifle - Watch more Funny Videos

Source: Break.com.

Ship the world's first globally viable mobile video phone

2010-06-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

Steve wins. Fantastic. In contrast to this earlier LG Dick Tracy video watch announcement, the iPhone4 appears to have shipped first. Just wow.

Apple - iPhone 4 - One-tap video calling with FaceTime on iPhone 4

AugSatNav: Live GPS Overlay on the Real World -- On UR Phone

2009-12-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

too.late

Create LED Wrenches

2009-08-31T15:48:00.000-07:00

Brilliant Solution: Inventor Creates LED Wrenches: "We've all been there -- cursing like a sailor trying to tighten a bolt we can't see. A San Diego inventor comes up with a light-equipped wrench. Why didn't we think of that?"

Home injection molding

2009-08-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

Home injection molding: "

[Kenneth Maxon] is a wizard who only does things one way, beautifully. While out of the average hacker’s production capabilities, his injection molding machine is amazing to behold. The machine has all features a commercial model would. It heats and cools the mold, produces over a ton of pressure to inject plastic with, and ejects parts automatically to name a few.

Feck the Ankle-Biting "Normals"

2009-05-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

Q: How many times have we read this same line, below? A: Too many times to prevent an immediate sprint to the loo to vomit with revulsion, every time:

While early [insert feckin' amazing technology] roll-outs in [trial area] may have been trying to push the [feckin' amazing] idea too early -- and with immature technology -- now the situation has reversed and the pull is all from the user.

"Too early" ... "immature" ... where the feck do you think all your amazing new stuff comes from, monkeys? Feck the normals. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Keep building the better future even if the monkeys don't deserve it; because they don't. Do it for you because it is who you are and what you DO. Finally, do all you can to eliminate the VC's from the equation. The coded language above is one of their favorite ways to beat you down take YOUR innovation from you. Don't let it happen. Money is a zero-value-add pure commodity. Innovation and Human Creativity are the exact opposite.

Incorporate Real-time #socialcognition into Conference Planning and Execution

2009-03-04T12:10:00.001-08:00

As far as I know, the Emerging Communications Conference, eComm09, is the first conference to incorporate pre-conceived #hashtags as a twitter-mediated #socialcognition backchannel into its conference planning and execution as we've been evangelizing for the past six or seven months.

Congratulations to Lee Dryburgh and all the summit planners!

LG shows off ‘Dick Tracy’ wristwatch phone

2009-01-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

About a half an inch thick, device has a touch-screen interface. LG Electronics plans to introduce a wrist phone later this year, giving reality a chance of catching up with the comic-strip hero who famously used a two-way "Wrist TV."

Facebook: FAIL

2008-12-13T12:28:00.000-08:00

We've been tilting toward this one since about the same time we called Time of Death of Web 2.0, a good six months before Techcrunch dared the same proclamation -- AFTER it mattered.

Today, we are officially calling the end of Facebook's reign and the rise of the Friendfeed model. In the end, open, transparent, flexible, and uncompromisingly adaptable wins over closed, walled, proprietary. AGAIN.

All this clamoring to "Connect" suddenly is the last desperate grasping. "Oh wait, we didn't mean to be "that" Closed." Grasping that may last a couple years; nonetheless, AOL-style Game Over.

The analogy of Apple's success is often paraded as a kind of ultimate victory for the closed and proprietary, but what is MacOS actually built upon? A custom version of an OPEN *IX OPERATING SYSTEM. Underneath it all, is essentially BSD, right?

So Apple is actually the ultimate triumph of OPEN SOFTWARE PLATFORMS with the option of building unique, custom, supported builds. It is also the triumph of USER-CENTRIC DESIGN.

Friendfeed is the current social web fire hose most headed in that direction; however, whoever can blow away Friendfeed's HUMAN INFORMATION PROCESSING (HIP) interface, could knock them down a notch in a matter of weeks or months.

Yep, we're also today asserting first claim upon the Era of HIP UI. The bottleneck has become Human Attention and Human Information Processing capabilities. As humans, we each possess varying asymptotic natural aptitudes; however, we share the fundamental ASYMPTOTIC characteristic of reaching a point beyond which we simply CANNOT EFFECTIVELY PARSE, UNDERSTAND, AND SYNTHESIZE *MORE* KNOWLEDGE per unit time.

Call it "Peak Cognition" to play on the peak oil phenomenon. This point is relatively tangential here, yet fundamental to where we go NEXT. Everyone knows where we've BEEN. What we want to know and must DECIDE is where we choose to GO, from here. It's not written in any stars, it's created in our every day CHOICES.

NOBODY can predict the future; rather, every day we contribute to BUILDING our future. So, you can simply ask yourself, which future am *I* building today? Is this really the future I want? If not, STOP IT. Make a better choice.

Bottom line for this post: Facebook's Fleeting Billion Trillion Dollar Moment has passed. Zuckerberg missed it.

FAIL.

too.late

TokBox: The Trillian++ of Video Messaging?

2008-11-13T12:20:00.000-08:00

Tokbox keeps Unbundling, Unleashing, Integratin' n' Rockin' Video Messaging

Share YouTube Videos, Slideshares and more during video calls!
Video IM to nearly every platform
Super easy video mail

Latest Newsletter:

Dear TokBox friends,

We’ve been listening to your feature suggestions! Here’s the lowdown on what we've built...

All Eyes on Instant Messaging
As you may have noticed, we've just released a newer, more connected TokBox than ever before. In a very ambitious effort by our fantastic engineering team, you can now video call all your friends through AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. We think that’s pretty rad.

Friends, friends, and more friends
TokBox is all about connecting to your friends and family, and we've made it easier for them to see your gorgeous mug any day, every day. Now whenever someone adds you as a friend you'll get an email update and a humongous red button at the top of your Friend List telling you someone wants to be your "Friend" and chat you up. You'll soon have more friends than you could want! Which brings us to...

Privacy!
Too much of a good thing is never a good thing, so we've hooked up all sorts of ways for you to block those unwanted callers, video mails, anything you deem "too much information". Go to the "Privacy" link near the bottom of the left-hand pane, and block, deny, and flat out stop all forms of unwanted contact. The lovely Lauren can tell you all about it.

As always, stay tuned. Much more is on the way.
Now it’s up to you to help us improve and make TokBox greater than ever. Call us. Send us vmail. Email us (email? seriously? I hear TokBox vmail is all the rage). We love you. Thank you for all the support.

- The TokBox Team

User As Content: Knight News Competition Entry

2008-10-31T04:22:00.001-07:00

Okay, it's ready for your Full Flamage. Please do comment, rate, berate, belittle, destroy, discredit, dismiss, mock, and otherwise make it better. If you click now, it might not be too late to be first to cast the first stone!

User As Content: Revenue Share-Enabling Software for Social Media Contributors

Create an Extensible Persistent Augmented Social Cognition Mindspace

2008-10-26T13:34:00.001-07:00

It appears to me that the extraordinary attendees of Singularity Summit 3 have the opportunity to create something on a scale that has not yet ever existed. For lack of a better term we can refer to it as an Extensible Persistent Augmented Social Cognition Mindspace (ASCM). I saw someone tweet the idea of keyboard-mediated Digital Mental Telepathy. However you prefer to conceptualize it, the opportunity that appears to us here is to provide a specific space for SAM (Singularity Audience Mind) to keep thinking in a manner and fashion that we all experienced during the summit itself. For now, that space is #samthinks.

1640PDT 26Oct08 UPDATE: Apparently in between uplifting new civilizations in SPORE on a lazy post-summit Sunday afternoon, and while the markets were all closed and nobody could protest, @silverton and @elbizri has a little fun drafting a quick story of evolution from the lexically aesthetic, but 10 character-heavy #samthinks to the 60% information payload improvement of #samz

It's worth noting that I fully recognize the quality of immediacy by which a physical conference creates a field that significantly focuses the behavior of the participants within the ASCM. We might experiment with other timed, scheduled, planned, and impromptu online means and methods to emulate that immediacy, moving forward.

Or, we might be able to pose some challenging question in the context of, "I wonder what Sam thinks?" and learn that answer relatively quickly, if partially, as only portions of SAM might be alert, firing, and available for handling an individual interrupt request at any given time.

Or it could simply not prove worthwhile at all. Remember, a FAIL case is nothing but that, a signal to end one process and spawn another. FAIL is particularly GOOD when you can quantify it and flag it without wasting cycles, right?

Feel free to share the tinyURL for this idea http://tinyurl.com/samthinks with others whom you believe might be interested.

UPDATE: The "perfection appeal" of having a custom tinyurl that matched the rest of the program gave way to the argument for maximum carrying capacity for individual messages. While that URL will still work, here's the samz version http://tiny.cc/samz

UPDATE: @mcmurrak points out that I also missed registering @samz ;-(

UPDATE: Multi-topic or -domain version of the experiment possible with TweetGrid.

Onward.

Create Greasemonkey for Chrome

2008-10-25T04:57:00.001-07:00

Yeah, you *thought* you had another original idea, right? But too late again, Kazuho Oku has done it with Greasemetal. Not to say you can't do better; but you're just not FIRST. Again.

Invent a Camera that Reads Bedtime Stories

2008-10-22T08:25:00.001-07:00

Okay, so Ray's Read-Aloud Camera is a bit dated and no, you probably wouldn't use it primarily to read bedtime stories; but you could if you wanted to. This is mostly to check out the Brightcove syndication thingie.

Establish FM Radio in Nepal

2008-10-19T00:56:00.001-07:00

The Real Innovators beat you to it a lifetime ago in Internet years.

Scattered Frequencies: Radio Networking in Nepal (2002)

Click the play button to begin.

Gen U

2008-10-15T11:58:00.001-07:00

I'm dubbing the current tween generation as Generation U (Gen U) and assert that it is named here on too.late, FIRST, until someone can show me otherwise. Also, it could be the LAST use of the moniker, if nobody cares or agrees. It's not like there's a huge risk/reward disincentive to play around with such terminology, right? :-)

Gen U makes sense as a generational identifier because this cohort is growing up in a completely video-centric YOUniverse that doesn't even care if there is something called "the internet."

The Internet is Irrelevant. WE matter, and WE can just vidphone in a thousand different ways. You're a retard if you consider pervasive P2P video novel or innovative in any way. It's just "the way things have always been."

Content is still King; however, everyday video Communication as Content, User As Content, is now co-equal Queen.

Exponentially expanding TMI is a fundamental Challenge for Gen U; finding the Right Amount of What Matters is one Gen U quotidian ambition. *Defining* What Matters and setting the dominoes of viral distribution in motion are a big part of what separates the Popular Kids; aka, bell cows, opinion leaders, etc., from the herd.

Young Geniuses and Old Masters agree: it does not matter if it's threaded video conversation, vlogging, vcasting, or whatever. In the end, it's all about Attention Management and Efficient Context Navigation.

Set a new Tokbox World Record

2008-10-01T02:25:00.001-07:00

Perhaps NOT too late to claim your own personal FIRST!

Feel free to try out this embed example at http://tinyurl.com/my-tokbox ... even if I'm not there at the time, invite 2 or 3 others to try it out. Our world record so far is 22 simultaneous users. Yes, Twenty-Two. It was crazy, but also crazy fun.

Why not see if you can break the record with YOUR friends? If you do, be sure to grab a screen capture (or better, a Jing Video or something) to show your accomplishment!

Here's how to conduct this unofficial user-generated experiment:

0. HEADPHONES ARE MANDATORY. See #2 below.

1. Give everyone the url above http://tinyurl.com/my-tokbox and a time to login to that page.

2. Let everyone know that HEADPHONES ARE MANDATORY. Echo cancellation may come later, but for now, anyone without headphones will ruin the experiment.

3. Let everyone know that as the room grows and conversation begins to become hard to follow, do like you would do in ANY crowded room - segment into smaller groups. To do this, click the (x) on the top left of several window panes to HIDE those windows. Don't worry, the person is still "there" and you could include them in your "discussion circle" later if you want to experiment.

4. This might result in some people having 15 "hidden" window panes and 5 active people in a conversation. Others may be able to track 15 people and only hide 5.

5. There will be overlap, don't worry about it. It's an experiment. If someone seems to not be responding to you, they may have "hidden" your window. DON'T FEEL DISSED! Enjoy the conversation with those who do respond and who constitute your current discussion group.

6. IF the thing doesn't crash, experiment suggesting to people, "hey, i'm going to hide you for a minute and try opening up another window pane."

7. IF you get 'interrupted' by someone bringing in one or more "too many" windows, don't sweat it! Just say, "Hi, I'm getting overloaded, going to block you for just a sec, okay?"

8. Above all, DON'T TAKE OFFENSE, and don't feel LEFT OUT. Have fun and experiment!

9. HEADPHONES ARE MANDATORY, okay? It's a teeny tiny hassle to have a crazy fun time for those interesting in the leading edge of P2P video conversation. :-)

Sue Secretary of Defense Over Mandatory Christian Prayer Sessions

2008-09-30T11:53:00.001-07:00

The U.S. Army has been subjecting soldiers to fundamentalist Christian prayer ceremonies against their will during mandatory military events in violation of their basic constitutional rights, according to a new lawsuit filed against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates by a U.S. Army soldier.

Atheist Soldier Sues Gates Over Mandatory Christian Prayer Sessions
The Public Record - Tuesday, 30 September 2008

Compose Classical Piano for Telephone Keypad

2008-08-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a little bit more right-brained than we generally post, but I'm happy to extend the challenge to find an earlier version of a more complex composition for "mixed phone format" (desk & mobile). After all, that's how we play "Too Late, Somebody Is Already Doing (Has Already Done) That!"
Thanks again to Digital Retina for this one!

Exoskeletons Old News

2008-08-06T12:02:00.001-07:00

Yeah, so you won't be first to create shipping exoskeletons, either. Move along ...

Create USEFUL Ammo-bots

2008-08-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

Boston Dynamics: The Leader in Lifelike Human Simulation, has done it with BigDog. I don't know what all that weird noise is about, but sure it will be addressed in production models. It HAS to be silent to be of any use in the field, right?

Some browser will need to double click on the video to start.

The performance on ice, cinder block piles, and when kicked over is beyond impressive.

Jott my voice to blog,...

2008-07-13T12:06:00.001-07:00

Jott my voice to blog, this is a random post to the too late blog from a random restaurant in Palo Alto, you only get 30 seconds, but a lot of times that's adequate just to slap something on the blog. ____ cool, first I have seen that it works as(?) well. See you. listen

Powered by Jott

NOTE: This is one of the worst transcriptions I've seen so far, but I was pushing the envelope by using a speaker phone with plenty of background hum due to server noise. I've not edited the above in any way, so that you can get a realistic take of performance. I'll likely post a few more items here with the service and if it lives up to expectations, may never typo another post here again!

Keep having fun ..

Take Architecture into the 22nd Century

2008-07-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

Contents:

Jumeirah residents actually already moving in.
The view from atop Burj Dubai as of last August.
The planned Rotating Sky Tower by David Fisher.
Sky Tower's completely Self-Sustaining Energy Footprint.

Voice to Text to Twitter to Blog to Art to Email to Mobile to Office to Web to Go. Right.

2008-07-01T20:21:00.001-07:00

Yikes. Too many to keep up with and I just don't have the time I once had to pretend to keep up. Rest assured that I always knew it was a vainglorious delusion ... but glorious ... and vain ... indeed it was.

jott.com - get simple back. as in, get simplicity back into your life, i guess. and actually, it is pretty damned simple. lists, groups, reminders, to-dos, calendars,

kwiry.com - See it? Hear it? Text it before you forget it with mobile txt message reminders to your computer. Might not be needed if you already jott'd it, though.

websketch.com - Impressive interface for sketching up your own websites. Drag and drop your new website into reality.

LaunchSplash.com - Fills a need of 100% of web startups - drop dead simple launch pages for your upcoming site - build community before you even have one.

ZoomProspector.com - Whether you're looking for your new office across the city or across the country, find the right location by a number of factors: cost, labor market, education level, job growth, incomes, etc.