KillerApp Sightings

Did you ever wish someone would design a radio station just for you? Pandora has gone and done it. The Web site instantly builds a streaming-audio station around your favorite song or artist, including not only the artist you named but others that it thinks might appeal to you. It's a great way to discover new musicians without wading through hours of music you don't like. You can create up to 100 stations -- one for every mood.

Pandora's software is based on the Music Genome Project, a six-year effort to analyze hundreds of distinct musical qualities in the songs of 10,000 different artists. Songs are grouped together not on the basis of marketing genre or release date, but because their underlying musical qualities are similar.

Pandora is available as a free, ad-supported service or on a paid subscription basis. The high-quality audio stream works best with broadband connections of 500 Kbps or higher. You can even buy a device to divert the stream to your stereo.

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The Health-e Station in Peachtree City, Georgia, has medical assistants but not a single doctor in the house. This walk-in clinic treats minor ailments during hours that doctors' offices are closed, keeping patients from making unnecessary trips to the emergency room. Patients who need to be examined by doctors see them by two-way videoconferencing, using special attachments like electronic stethoscopes and ear-and-throat cameras.

Health-e-Station plans to open more walk-in centers in the near future. The company hopes its hub-and-spoke model, with a few highly trained and centrally located physicians serving patients in multiple centers will overcome the economic barriers to providing physician care for minor conditions.

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Unless there is an earthquake rumbling or a volcano erupting, we don't pay much attention to the ground beneath our feet. EarthScope aims to change all that. This huge project links instruments and observatories all over the U.S. to collect data about our continent and its continuing evolution. The high-speed California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is being used to transmit the data that EarthScope generates.

EarthScope aims to provide "a fundamental data base for the next generation of geoscientists." Geoscientists will be able to access the data base for analysis and visualization. Those of us who aren't geoscientists can play with the data here, using an interactive mapping tool.

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Even traffic intersections are smarter than they used to be. The Intelligent Traffic Intersection System (ITIS) from USA Signal Technology lets city officials keep traffic lights working during catastrophes, direct traffic flow in evacuations, monitor accidents, and even provide broadband WiFi access to the community.

In an ITIS intersection, traffic lights, videocams, and pollution sensors are wirelessly connected to a remote control center. RFID tags can be attached to city vehicles, buses or hazardous cargo and report back to the control center when they pass through the intersection.

The WiFi mesh network used for the system can provide Internet connectivity to neighborhoods as well as to riders on buses and commuter trains. Battery backups keep the system functioning even when the electric power is out.

And, as if all that weren't enough, the system calls the repair crew to tell it when anything is out of order.

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Video Birthdays lets you send video messages without all the bother of uploading and downloading files. To send a video birthday card -- or any other message -- turn on your webcam, log onto VB's site, and click on "Record." When you're done, enter the recipient's email address. The person getting the video greeting receives a notification and goes to the Video Birthday site to pick up the message, as if it were an e-card.

Because Video Birthdays gives you the code to embed your video in HTML, this is also the easiest possible way to create a video for posting to your blog or Web site.

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Eyespot, still in beta test, is a free site for editing/mixing/sharing all your videos/photos/music. The software is simple and user-friendly, geared to the cell-phone photographer, not the professional. Line up your clips sequentially, trim them down to manageable size, add a few transitional effects, and voila - a movie.

Even better, Eyespot offers a selection of music videos, vintage commercials, interviews and other footage to help users get practice in video mixing or round out their own efforts.

Here's a cool video posted by a user identified only as mytvbar.

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If you're a brilliant math student in a high school without any brilliant math teachers, what do you do? Until recently, the University of Manchester in the UK sent tutors to local schools to help students with advanced math courses. This got the students through their exams while giving the University a chance to recruit the best and brightest, but it was an expensive solution that didn't reach all the students who could benefit.

A distance learning pilot project using videoconferencing with a whiteboard let more students take the course and pass their Advanced-level exams. Tutors and students experimented with tablet PCs and different types of software, finding that some were better for presentation and others for group discussion.

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And children in hospitals don't get enough of it -- or they didn't until Giggles Children's Theater came along. Started in 2005 at St. Joseph's Children's Hospital in Paterson, NJ, Giggles now also broadcasts its shows to children in hospitals throughout the Medical Missions for Children telemedicine and teaching network.

Children at St. Joseph's see live musicians, clowns, storytellers and puppet shows at Giggles. But they aren't limited to the confines of the theater. Using videoconferencing equipment donated by Polycom, Giggles brings children on interactive field trips all over the world to swim with sharks, visit zoos and museums and explore rainforests.

You can see video clips here with highlights from some of Giggles' shows.

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PhotoShowTV is a nifty program that organizes all the photos and video clips on your computer and helps you turn them into mini-movies, complete with sound tracks, clip art and special effects. Now Time Warner Cable is running a trial of the application in its Hawaii market.

Hawaiian subscribers to Time Warner's high-speed internet and digital cable can download the software for free, create and customize a photo show up to five minutes long, and upload the show to Time Warner. Once the show is approved as family-friendly and free of copyright violations, it's scheduled for broadcast on an on-demand cable channel. The show's creators, and anyone else they invite, can watch it on cable TV.

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Plug a microphone into your broadband-enabled computer and head on over to SingShot.com, where you can create, share, and listen to karaoke performances. Pick a song from a list of more than 2500 and start caterwauling away.

Free membership entitles you to enjoy the performances of others, rate them as good, bad or awful, and create a personal page complete with a 3D avatar. Actually recording your own karaoke masterpieces costs between $4.95 and $9.95 a month, after a free two-week trial period.

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Civil servants and NGO administrators in Afghanistan are getting help from experts and academics worldwide in developing the skills they need for rebuilding their country. As fellows at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, they are using videoconferencing and distance learning tools for ongoing mentoring and discussions.

A recent session hosted by the Global Development Learning Network connected more than 40 participants in 11 cities, three continents and eight time zones.

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If shows like "ER" are too tame for you, try OR Live, a broadband channel featuring live and archived videos of surgical operations. This week alone, OR Live is showing two heart operations, a prostatectomy and a thyroidectomy, followed by surgeons' discussions of the procedures they performed.

About half of OR Live's viewers are medical professionals trying to stay up to date with the newest tools and techniques. The other half are patients (and their families and friends) who are either preparing for similar surgeries or trying to make more informed decisions about whether to undergo them.

OR Live also offers video podcasts of the operations, and it will soon be displaying video ads with product demonstrations of the latest and greatest medical devices.

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The European Space Agency distributes data from its earth observation satellites for scientists to use. Because the files are too enormous for any one computer to handle, the agency has been experimenting with Grid technology -- where a group of computers, connected over a high-speed network, acts like a single computer -- to analyze the data. This mosaic image, created using a Grid application, uses satellite data to show vegetation patterns across the earth.

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Wikimania 2006 is being held this weekend, August 4 - 6. You can travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend the conference, where you can share ideas about free and open-source software, free knowledge initiatives, and wiki projects (collaborative Web sites). Or, you can watch the proceedings as they're streamed live over the Internet.

Don't miss the Wikimania media awards! Here's one of the animation award winners:

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The Alaska SeaLife Center, which is dedicated to preserving and understanding Alaska's marine ecosystem, is now sharing its resources with students everywhere. Schoolchildren of all ages can visit with the Center's "animal guests," dissect squids, learn how to tell what sea lions have been eating, and find out about the fragile Alaskan environment.

These distance education programs, which use live videoconferencing, are available to any school that has a broadband Internet connection. Center officials say students interact with the SeaLife Center staff as if they were in the same room, even when they are hundreds of miles distant.

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FCI Vibratory Feeders makes - well, vibratory feeders. These giant vibrating bowls are used in manufacturing. They orient industrial parts so that robots can easily pick them up. FCI builds custom feeders for its clients, and tests the equipment before delivering it. Now they're making the video clips of the performance tests available to clients over the Internet so they can inspect the machinery without having to visit the facility. Here's a great video of a vibratory feeder delivering plastic cups. (Windows Media Player required.)

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