With F.A.M.P. store asset details in your iPhone

17 Replies RonF

The need for managing details about one’s assets, valuables or important documents in a quick, streamlined manner is something that is required today. A few people of the extremely wealthy group, have that luxury of deputing their own wealth managers, while some take their own approach to have the time to handle it. If you are like me and tech savvy, well then you can get a little bit of help from ‘F.A.M.P – Archive Assets’ iPhone app.

F.A.M.P. (Find and Archive My Property) helps users record and store information about their valuable assets to keep track of them. This app is pretty simple to use, to be honest – just take a snapshot of your assets and label it accordingly that you may remember for future reference. Users can also edit the archived details and also have an option to export them to their emails accounts as PDF files, pretty cool. There is also an archive calendar that one can use to sift through information in a periodical manner. In short, the F.A.M.P. iPhone app, offers a simple method to organize, label and store information about one’s assets for future reference.

FAMP iPhone appThis app is somewhat unique, I searched the app store for a similar app but did not find one. The concept of the app is clear and the interface is easy and intuitive to use. No fancy gimmicks and this shows that the developer has tried to keep things simple.

Even though the app is simple to use usability wise, the interface is a blast from the past. The developer needs to address it and I would personally prefer a web 2.0 style interface with a quality and clean design.

Moreover, the app also needs clear set of instructions in its ‘Help’ section for users to easily get a grasp of things. There is also a game within the app called ‘HOT and COLD’ and this too needs clear instructions as I had a hard time to learn how its played. It turns out to be a ‘identity’ game that one plays with his family / friends by guessing what the asset is about. Not sure if this is my cup of tea, but try out yourself to find out.

Another feature I would like the developer look in to is security, which I assume they have overlooked. What happens if my iPhone is lost? Will the data be secure? Are there any means to password protect the details? This is a serious feature that needs to be addressed and I would like the developer to have this solved in the near future.

F.A.M.P. is available for US $1.99 at the App Store and this app is compatible with the iPhone and iPad running iOS 3.0 or later. Have a play with it and share our experience via the comments section.

See Anyone You Know? Face Recognition Comes Of Age

12 Replies Jonny Hankins

The National Academy of Sciences are about to publish an article in their proceedings entitled ‘Privacy In The Age Of Augmented Reality’, co-authored by Alessandro Acquisiti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stuzman. It is about developments in face recognition software.
How 2D facial scanners record identitiesTo use the authors’ words the document

“investigate(s) the feasibility of combining publicly available Web 2.0 data with off-the-shelf face recognition software for the purpose of large-scale, automated individual re-identification.”

They are also working on an app that can do it all from your phone! See the FAQ section here for more information. The article reports a series of experiments conducted over the last year or so during which the researchers try to identify a person from their photo using an over the counter face recognition software using information that is freely available over the internet.

The results are interesting. The experiments are as follows:
Students walking through the university campus were asked if their photo could be taken and to complete a questionnaire. As they were answering the questions the computation task was carried out, looking for a picture match on Facebook and requiring only seconds. In this case more than 30% of the students were immediately traced.

Because the faces were the same but the photos taken from different angles, humans had to decide which of the possible matches were the most appropriate, but that is not always the case. Some photos are replicated and therefore the computer can give a 100% guarantee that the match is correct.

For example in another experiment the researchers used an online dating agency that provided anonymous photos. In this case they could match names to the photos in about 10% of cases. In several cases the same photo had been used on different sites.

In a third experiment the knowledge gained was used to search for further private information, all freely available on the web, such as details of sexual preference, date and place of birth and this information even allowed them to generate the first five figures of the individual’s US social security number.

So it seems that we can draw a simple conclusion here, either now or in the very near future, as these technologies are improved and made freely available, anybody will be able to recognize anybody they see on the street, identify them through an app in their telephone, and find out about their interests and other personal information, if they have ever posted (or had posted for them) a photo of themselves on the internet.

For more information, please read my face recognition article on the Bassetti Foundation website.

Are bionic suits a thing of fantasy or the future?

22 Replies Christopher Roberts

This is Technology Bloggers 100th article!
Well done and thank you to our 16 fantastic writers who have made this possible. Also thanks to all our readers and commenters for your support.
Lets aim for 1,000 now! 🙂

So, to the article! Everyone has heard of Iron Man – well I would think they have. The idea that such a suit could become a reality, is well… fiction. Until now!

A technology company called Raytheon has developed an exoskeleton, designed to effectively act as a bionic/robotic suit. The suit is designed to perfectly mimic and aid human actions, so the wearer can feel normal whilst performing tasks that they could never achieve without the aid of the suit.


One way of thinking about how it feels is to think of the power steering in a car. Without the power steering it can be really tough to turn the wheel, activate the power steering however and the car still feels normal and responds in the same way, the difference is, minimal effort is required to do a rather demanding task.

Doing press-ups in a bionic suit with ease

Performing everyday tasks is easy when wearing a bionic exoskeleton!

The suite has the potential to be fitted with some sort of amour plating, to protect the individual form attack – assuming it were to be used in a war-zone, and not in industry! D3O could actually make it a pretty invincible suit!

The suite can help the wearer lift up to 17 times what they could normally life, making tasks 17 times easier! A massive positive is that it doesn’t restrict the wearers range of motion, meaning that they can more freely and normally.

There is a problem though. The suit has to be attached to an external power source, as it guzzles power like crazy. Current batteries are either too weak, or too dangerous. For example, lithium-ion batteries can’t be strapped to a human, as they are prone to explosion if they get damaged!

A lack of power makes the suit extremely heavy, meaning that every movement becomes more difficult. This means that if there is a loss of power, the suit is hindering, rather than helping the occupant.

Aside from the lack of power, the main difference between the suit Raytheon have developed and Tony Stark’s suit is that Tony Stark’s can fly. Stark’s suit is also loaded with flairs, missiles and weapons galore, and has Stark’s supercomputer Jarvis running the interface. Raytheon’s suit is still in the early stages though, and no doubt will soon catch up 😉

Four Iron Man Suits

Tony Stark’s collection of Iron Man suits

If you want to know more about this super cool invention read CNN’s article about it.