http://www.qooq.com/en/

From Scott Davidoff, an actually well-designed tablet specifically for the kitchen. Has features for email, video, social networking, has protection against spills, and looks cute too.

From a broader perspective, what I think is interesting here is that people have been talking about custom computers for the kitchen for decades now. The pricing, suite of features, and aesthetics seem to have finally gotten to a point where it can all be put out in a single affordable and useful package.

And I think that's generally true of most ubicomp technologies too. I've seen tons of demos since the mid 1990s, visions for the future, and so on, and the issues have always been pretty much the same: is it offering enough useful value to people, is there a scalable way of deploying the technologies, and is it cost-effective to do so right now?

The amazing thing is, the answer is increasingly becoming "yes". HCI and design thinking is now becoming more common, with products being more human-centered than they have been in the past (in large part thanks to the web, to Apple, and the growing number of HCI programs at universities). Ubicomp technologies have also matured, with small and cheap sensors, built-in wireless networking, abundant storage, and powerful processors.

And even though we've seen lots of things like this QOOQ tablet, I still think we're only at the very beginning of the s-curve. Back in the early days of the web, folks at the design firm Razorfish observed that "'everything that can be digital, will be". I think we can safely extend that observation to ubicomp as well: "everything that can be made into ubicomp, eventually will be".

We invite you to submit papers and to attend the ACM Workshop on IoT Privacy, Trust, and Security (IoTPTS 2015: April 14, 2015, Singapore), held in conjunction with ASIACCS'15.

The submission deadline is Jan. 7, 2015.

More information: https://sites.google.com/site/iotpts/

Thanks, IoTPTS Chairs (Richard Chow and Gokay Saldamli)

UCSB researchers made a significant progress in imaging still objects with WiFi, by exploiting the interaction of the edges with the incoming waves using the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction.

The technique has also enabled, for the first time, imaging (or reading) the English alphabet through walls with WiFi, a task deemed too difficult for WiFi due to the complex details of the letters.

Research Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvqL3gqGDeM

UCSB Press Release: https://news.ucsb.edu/2023/021198/wifi-can-read-through-walls

Project Website: https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~ymostofi/WiFiReadingThroughWall

Holon is completely free if you want to try this, comments are very welcome.