Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Ever walk through Times Square and wonder how much electricity all those flashy billboards are soaking up? No? Well, Ricoh has, and now they’re doing something about it. Ricoh Company Ltd. of Tokyo is erecting a 47 x 126-foot billboard at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street that will be completely powered by the sun and wind. Fueled by 45 solar panels and four wind turbines, the billboard won’t even need a backup electric generator. On days that the sun and wind aren’t enough to power it, it will simply go dark. In the end, the billboard is said to reduce carbon dioxide usage by 18 tons a year. The billboard will go live in December, or just in time for the sun to go dark.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Those billboards with facial-recognition-based tracking systems we mentioned last week caused quite a bit of consternation amongst those of us who value our privacy (read: everyone), but it at least one of the firms involved is engaging the debate and promising that it won’t share any data it record. In a letter to the New York Times and a much longer, more boring version of the same letter sent to us, TruMedia Technologies says that none of its tech will ever record or store any video, only analyze frames and increment various demographic counters. TruMedia also says that no individually-indentifiable information is ever stored, and that it’ll never share any video or images with any private or governmental body. There’s also mention of a standards body working to address methodologies and metrics for the tech. All excellent promises, sure, but we’re never going to be entirely comfortable with this stuff, even if we live in an age of ubiquitous CCTV monitoring. Full letter after the break.

Continue reading TruMedia says its facial-recognition billboards will never record video, it won’t share with cops

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Putting cameras in billboards to measure how many people look at them isn’t a new idea, but it’s starting to get a little more creepily-high-tech, with several advertisers now using facial-recognition software to record things like age and gender. A company called Quividi has supplied camera-equipped ads to McDonald’s in Singapore and Ikea in Europe, and it’s now bringing the tech to the States, where it’s been deployed in New York in ads for A&E’s The Andromeda Strain mini-series and in Philadelphia in train station ads for the Philadelphia Soul. Another company called TruMedia Technologies has supplied similar tech to about 30 locations in the US, including malls in Chesterfield, Missouri, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Monroeville, Pennsylvania. None of the systems currently record or store video, but no one’s ruling that out as a possibility — and even worse, there’s talk of gathering racial data in an effort to even further target ads. Great, now we have yet another reason to break out the Nixon mask every time we leave the house.

[Via Techdirt]

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