EmoDetector App is online – Hear The Feeling of SMS

EmoDetector, by University of Duisburg-Essen and Nokia Research Center, is an application that provides auditory cues in addition to the notification tone upon receiving an SMS based on a real-time analysis of a message’s contents, see [1].The application responds currently to the following characters sets:

  • 🙂 or 🙂
  • 🙁 or 🙁
  • 😉 or 😉
  • ok (case insensitive)
  • ?

There is a version for Nokia Series 60 phones and for Android, see the download site. Have a look at the http://www.emodetector.tom-lab.de/ website for more information.

[1] Sahami Shirazi, A., Sarjanoja, A., Alt, F., Schmidt, A.,Häkkilä, J.: Understanding the Impact of Abstracted Audio Preview of SMS. In Proceeding of CHI 2010, April 10-15, Atlanta, GA, USA

Google chrome, secrets, the power of search engines

Lots of people downloaded Google chrome during the conference. And it seemed that google managed to keep secret till the date it is launched – they managed that before with other released… given the quality of the software that seems realy hard – or not?

How does google manage to keep its developments secret? One random though is: keeping a secret is much easier if you have control over everyone’s search engine and can decided what shows up and what not…

Just thinking of this it shows again the power the search engine company has over the user… Perhaps I should again get used to searching regularly with different search engines (e.g. http://www.cuil.com/ crawls and have their own index). Perhaps there could be a small project to create a search site that combines results from different sources (… hostory repeats… metasearch engines were popular in the 90s before altavista came along).

PS: seems that the new browser works reasonably fast and rendering is OK.