SEVENCLICK
Mobile Technology Evangelists

Playing your favorite game on your mobile phone can be very disapointing due to keyboard constraints, if we can admit the bunch of keys that cell phones includes is a keyboard.

Some students from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, seem to have thought the same and they have developed a Bluetooth driver for S60 for connecting to WiiMote, the remote control of Wii console. Moreover, they have developed a freeware motorcycle racing game as a proof of concept. And they have released the source code, as well. Thanks a lot!

Just odd stuff, but very interesting. Perhaps we could use the WiiMote for controlling more things… or use its accelerometers as sensors for our cell phones and start to play with it for new applications.

Via TheRegister
Link SymbianResources

DoCoMo presented on Tuesday, a prototype cellphone featuring a brand new contacless payment system. The main feature of this system is that instead of waving your phone in front of a  payment terminal, the phone send the data over electric signals through the human body without even get your mobile phone out of your pocket.

 These sort of improvements are quite logical when performed in a country like Japan, where contacless payment is a common way to pay relative cheap goods (ticket gates, vending machines or train fares). Anyway some other countries are developing, testing or deploying their own contacless systems (i.e. South Korea, U.S.A.,…).

The transmitter technology has been developed by a start-up called Kaiser Technology Co. while the handset integration has been done by IBM and Matsushita Electric Works.

Although this system is currently at an early stage of development its applications are huge, from presence control to security systems. You can read an introduction article here explaining the current contacless payment system used in many stores in Japan.

The future shown in Minority Report might be closer than you expected. Visa has launched a trial of a new system that will send NFC-enabled phones merchant direct marketing offers and will allow to make payments through Visa payWave.

The trial is being conducted in Taiwan between Visa,  Chunghwa Telecom, Chinatrust Commercial Bank (CTCB) and Nokia as well as 500 people acting as customers and will last for six months. Nokia 6131i handset are being used to make contacless payments at 3.000 stores.

The trial objetive is to make payments along to send and receive marketing offers according to pre-registered preferences using NFC (Near Fiel Communication) by passing by some special posters located in shopping areas.

Via: TMC.net

Video decoding is one of the most processing intensive task, thus compromising battery life, very important in mobile devices. In the most recent issue of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, researchers at the University of Maryland, describe a simple way for multimedia devices to save power.

The algorithm just take advantage of human tolerance to failure on frames decodification. While much digital vido plays at rates about 30 frames per second, human eye only catch up to 24 frames per second. So, if we miss 6 frames per second on decoding process no one will notice.

Then, researches proposal is not to try all the frames, but only the 24 easier to decode. This way a great saving of power has been reached in first lab experiments.

For sure, many research projects related to the topic of power saving on multimedia decoding will go on. We encourage to read the whole story. And, very important, don’t miss the comments, where this project is harshly criticized.

Via TechnologyReview

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This video is a presentation of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories’s project “Media Retargeting”, that was introduced at 34th edition of SIGGRAPH conferences, San Diego (California). The objective of this ‘media retargeting’ technique is just changing the size of the image in a content aware manner.

The results we can see on the video are very interesting since this technique could be a great solution for viewing one image in different devices, having immediate application on Mobile Web.

Further information on project’s web.

Via Bitelia
Link Media Retargeting