Lumalive

Advertising can finally fill this space!
Philips' new technology Lumalive turns any fabric based product into a screen. We can only wait (and work on ideas) for products like animated national flags, near-dark t-shirt graffiti by Nike, anti-rape sweatsuits for joggers AND sexual offenders, reactive nappies, deep-sea fish disco for divers and fashion for urbanites that adjust to their surrounding style and season, wait for downloadable patterns by nerds-turned artists straight from iStyle codeFeeds.
It looks awesome don' get me wrong, it's one of the few future products that finally caught up with us. It definitely has huge potential. Once they get the batteries sized down from the size of a brick that is.
Check out the video.

multi-touch screen

A very very nice software application for multi-touch screens.
Watch the video at YouTube.com.

Next generation of Furby

"The PLEO is the first truly autonomous Life Form capable of emotion that allow personal engagement." Caleb Chung, CEO - Ugobe
The "must-have" toy this xmas so it seems, the dinosaur-like PLEO comes as a cute little fella, softer and more accessible on the outside than many of his plastic mechanical collegues like AIBO, Robo-Sapient, etc.

The video looks very impressive, let's see how well it will do with kids and how long it takes till it is hacked by artists and hobbyists.

watch Video

Banksy has a go on Paris Hilton

In proper guerilla style, famous graffiti artist Banksy, who's identity still remains unknown despite his/her fame including not only his/her urban-art but also books, commented on her latest album release. 500 fake-copies of the CD were distributed all over the UK in various HMV, Virgin and other CD shop branches including after careful treatment not only re-designed artwork of the CD's booklet, but also a 40 minutes mix of Banksy's remix of Paris' songs.














Sydney Morning Herald
The Independent
The photoset of a found CD at flickr
The video as found on youtube.com

Obviously they are getting sold already at Ebay (only few days left!?),
interestingly, the one selling the CD is proving the authenticity by posting a video at youtube as well, showing the CD and the booklet.

Human powered search engine

through San Fransisco Chronicle:
A P2P like question-answer service shall offer competition to google's service.

Scott Jones knows it's probably not wise to try to out-Google Google. But he's also not ready to concede that the world's leading search engine, or any of its main competitors, has the Web search trick down completely.

The Indiana tech inventor, who helped pioneer voice mail, is working on a new search engine model that employs thousands of paid "guides," who will provide live one-on-one help to users who need extra assistance tracking down online information. The free service, called ChaCha.com, goes live today as a test and is expected to go into full beta later this year. more

If presumably non-biased specialised can out-google google will be proven in the upcoming months. Yet in the form of wikis, this is already happening, but in a snail-mail kind of way.

If people would be patient enough to post subjects of interest on wikipedia and wait for someone to write about it, you would have a patient chaha.com as the service is called. But we don't live in patient times or do we? Considering google's fast response yet taking into account the time it takes before you REALLY find what you been looking for, I often would be happy to have someone alive around to just tell him/her what I want and get information back based on a human description. As long as google doesn't integrate searches like "you 'no I was like looking for that flic with that fella from that action movie in the arctica and the bird from baywatch", chacha might be the next thing in search engine technology.

What it just as well brings up is the question of how much human bias and intelligence is in google's bot codes and filter systems.