Squid Labs makes cool stuff, including electronic rope with sensors woven into the braid so the tension can be measured; if the rope has gone slack, has been cut or is abrading, it can let you know. [Possible application: Hang-proof nooses. Great for us anti-capital-punishment types.] Also, they’re working on a lens molding process that creates eyeglass lenses in 5-10 minutes from a single mold surface.

Eric Wilhelm talks about zeroprestige.org and thinkcycle.org — the first is for people to post their individual ideas about kitesurfing, the second is for communities to develop ideas.

They show a bolo electricity generator — a weight on a string that you swing around. It’s like one of those hand-cranked radios or flashlights except the motion is much more natural and, they say, you generate about 5x the amount of electricity.

They want to create an open source docmentation system that breaks tasks down into modules. That by itself isn’t new, they say. What’s new is that the threshhold is being lowered for building stuff. E.g., Z corp‘s 3D printer and VersaLaser’s laser cutter. Plus, the Web has made it easy to get whatever parts you need.

Eric’ says: “The lower threshold for documentation and colalboration plus lower threshold for making things yields custom, local solutions.”

So they’ve created Instructables. You upload photos of your project, and then it makes it easy for you annotate them and create a step-by-step guide. It does some very cool stuff like associate multiple photos with each step — take a look.

What are they going to do as people post instructions for pornographic or illegal projects? Right now there’s only a review flag. They’re waiting to see what problems arise first. (Smart move.)

Colin Bulthaup then talks about distributed sensor networks that have an awareness of their location. E.g., Flocks of unmanned aerial vehicles that avoid one another or “reusable fireworks”: a swarm of tiny UAVs with lasers that form formations. Squid has gotten good at building tiny, location-aware sensors, he says.

One app: A tablet knows where you’re looking and can augment reality. E.g., in a car showroom, whatever part of a car you look at shows you more info. Colin shows a demo of a tablet that pretends the Earth is transparent, showing you what city is on the surface in the direction you’re pointing. They want to shrink it and put it into cellphones so as you look around you can see comments people have left “on” those locations. Or, give it to civil engineers so they can see where the pipes are before they start building.

Totally cool. And Squid Labs is only 6 people.

[Technorati tags: foo05 SquidLabs gis]

Categories: Uncategorized dw