Michi Kono

Here’s a cool piece of technology: a fabric keyboard that can be turned over to reveal an alternate set of keys. Cool!

I guess the engineers didn’t get the memo about e-Paper, my favorite upcoming technology. That same keyboard could have been developed to have a fully dynamic keyboard where the keys could be swapped on the fly, much like a touch pad. Such a space-saving (and low power usage) device would be ideal for laptops and has tons of potential in various data entry applications.

Imagine a device where you can customize the keyboard for your clients depending on the needs of the application. When you click on the media player, the keyboard would switch to media controls. When you click on an excel sheet, a number pad shows up. Or maybe part of it could be a track pad. This invention could have used (and probably some day will appear on) e-Paper.

Take my idea a step further, and you end up with a tablet PC with a full-touch interface, much like the iPhone. Although, I think the ability for e-paper to refresh quickly enough to replace conventional screens is still a few generations away, e-paper as a computer peripheral is just a great idea. See why I think e-Paper has so much potential?

So only recently have I been paying attention to the RSS capabilities of my blog. I recently installed FeedBurner, which helps in tracking my readership. Well, another thing I did is install a module that lets me see how many people are currently viewing my blog. Usually, at any given time, I’ll see one search bot and one guest user (you). After my recent request for my readers to subscribe to my blog, I’ve noticed something.

Whenever I make a post, I see a spike of maybe a dozen visitors within one minute of making the post. Neat!

As a side note, my blog continues to suffer from periodic lag caused by FeedBurner’s tracking script. I’ve never seen this be an issue with Google Analytics. Grr. I continue to use it because the stats FeedBurner tracks are more granular than Analytics.

Are you one of my RSS readers? If not, click on that orange RSS icon!

Well, this is old news to anybody who uses Google Maps Mobile, but you can now see traffic on Google Maps in major cities.

This was an often-requested feature of Google Maps and will be a welcome addition. I wonder if we’ll see drops in traffic to sites like Sig Alert. Either way, this helps heat up the competition against Yahoo and Map Quest – of which only Yahoo overlays live traffic information.