Post by akiyama on Oct 3, 2009 3:10:25 GMT -6
I was just browsing through the July 2009 issue of PC Advisor magazine, and I came across an article called "Inside HP's Research Labs".
Some of the things they are working on seem interesting. I quote:
MagCloud.com
MagCloud, another publishing venture, also uses what HP calls a "bits to atoms" process. Any 'publisher' can create a magazine using their own software such as Adobe InDesign, then upload the files to MagCloud.com and sell subscriptions. As and when customers order a subscription, HP prints out the required issues on demand and posts them out.
Despite reports of its demise, the magazine industry ios actually burgeoning when it comes to more specialised mags. In the US, consumers spend about $80bn per year on magazines, and around $56bn is spent on advertising. MagCloud taps into this market with titles for anything from hardcore web programming to a retro video-game magazine for Nintendo fans.
BookPrep
BookPrep is an interesting project that allows anyone to submit an out-of-print title and turn it into a printed book. And there's a potentially vast market: Andrew Bolwell, an HP labs director, pointed out that there are at least 90 million books out of print.
Books are scanned in, removing any artefacts and yellowing, and then are printed and bound. The entire process is automated and takes 24 hours rather than the usual three to six months.
"Books are photographed and digitised as part of the Open Content Alliance," said Bolwell, describing the effort to preserve books for the library system in the US for online reading. "We have a service that converts from online quality to print quality. We automatically generate the cover, subtitles and copyright. Then we work with print-on-demand company Lightning Source to print the books."
Interestingly, there's no cost for the publishing process itself, but payment is based on royalties for each printing . For consumers, the books cost about $20 each, similar to hardcover book prices.
A quick Google reveals that this service is still in beta, will do magazines as well as books, and is being trialled with an online community of food history enthusiasts.
The next two are off-topic, but some people might be interested:
Snapfish Labs' Pet Eye
The red eye reduction found on many digital cameras won't work for pets because the technology looks for both face colour and human eye shape. Pet Eye accomplishes the same goal but uses a different method.
"Pet Eye was developed using algorithms that analyse a pet photo," said Qian Lin, an HP labs reseracher. "We knew that the pet eye glare could be any colour, and detection technology has a hard time knowing if the glow is a tree or a car light. We now look for the typical pet eye colours and the circular regions that match the eye shape of a pet. We also use a sequence of classifiers and colour data matching."
Color Thesaurus
HP Labs has developed an online Color Thesaurus as a way to chose colours: you enter the name of a standard colour and it will show you slight variations. There are roughly 600 common colour names, such as cyan or lime green, but thousands of actual colours that designers can choose from.
"Colour naming is one of those 'long tail' things," said Nathan Moroney, the HP researcher who created the Color Thesaurus. "We wanted to develop something that demonstrated the scope of colour data. Colour names are like IP names: some parts are similar, some are different. So we wanted a visual tool to help pick colour names. This is an online experiment and a reference book project.
The thesaurus is also a printed book that shows all the available colours and their names.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't get to the Color Thesaurus website - it asks me for authentication. But other people don't seem to have had that problem.
EDIT: I can use the Color Thesaurus via a different web-page:
www.mostlycolor.ch/2007/10/on-line-color-thesaurus.html
2nd EDIT: I searched for "Ulfire" in the Color Thesaurus and got the following result:
"Input text of 'ulfire' was not found. Using 'slime' instead."
Some of the things they are working on seem interesting. I quote:
MagCloud.com
MagCloud, another publishing venture, also uses what HP calls a "bits to atoms" process. Any 'publisher' can create a magazine using their own software such as Adobe InDesign, then upload the files to MagCloud.com and sell subscriptions. As and when customers order a subscription, HP prints out the required issues on demand and posts them out.
Despite reports of its demise, the magazine industry ios actually burgeoning when it comes to more specialised mags. In the US, consumers spend about $80bn per year on magazines, and around $56bn is spent on advertising. MagCloud taps into this market with titles for anything from hardcore web programming to a retro video-game magazine for Nintendo fans.
BookPrep
BookPrep is an interesting project that allows anyone to submit an out-of-print title and turn it into a printed book. And there's a potentially vast market: Andrew Bolwell, an HP labs director, pointed out that there are at least 90 million books out of print.
Books are scanned in, removing any artefacts and yellowing, and then are printed and bound. The entire process is automated and takes 24 hours rather than the usual three to six months.
"Books are photographed and digitised as part of the Open Content Alliance," said Bolwell, describing the effort to preserve books for the library system in the US for online reading. "We have a service that converts from online quality to print quality. We automatically generate the cover, subtitles and copyright. Then we work with print-on-demand company Lightning Source to print the books."
Interestingly, there's no cost for the publishing process itself, but payment is based on royalties for each printing . For consumers, the books cost about $20 each, similar to hardcover book prices.
A quick Google reveals that this service is still in beta, will do magazines as well as books, and is being trialled with an online community of food history enthusiasts.
The next two are off-topic, but some people might be interested:
Snapfish Labs' Pet Eye
The red eye reduction found on many digital cameras won't work for pets because the technology looks for both face colour and human eye shape. Pet Eye accomplishes the same goal but uses a different method.
"Pet Eye was developed using algorithms that analyse a pet photo," said Qian Lin, an HP labs reseracher. "We knew that the pet eye glare could be any colour, and detection technology has a hard time knowing if the glow is a tree or a car light. We now look for the typical pet eye colours and the circular regions that match the eye shape of a pet. We also use a sequence of classifiers and colour data matching."
Color Thesaurus
HP Labs has developed an online Color Thesaurus as a way to chose colours: you enter the name of a standard colour and it will show you slight variations. There are roughly 600 common colour names, such as cyan or lime green, but thousands of actual colours that designers can choose from.
"Colour naming is one of those 'long tail' things," said Nathan Moroney, the HP researcher who created the Color Thesaurus. "We wanted to develop something that demonstrated the scope of colour data. Colour names are like IP names: some parts are similar, some are different. So we wanted a visual tool to help pick colour names. This is an online experiment and a reference book project.
The thesaurus is also a printed book that shows all the available colours and their names.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't get to the Color Thesaurus website - it asks me for authentication. But other people don't seem to have had that problem.
EDIT: I can use the Color Thesaurus via a different web-page:
www.mostlycolor.ch/2007/10/on-line-color-thesaurus.html
2nd EDIT: I searched for "Ulfire" in the Color Thesaurus and got the following result:
"Input text of 'ulfire' was not found. Using 'slime' instead."
