Month: March 2012
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Amazon’s Robot Army
Yesterday I posted videos of two kinds of robots. One showing a driverless car that allowed a blind person to pick up some Mexican food and his dry cleaning, another, some kind of hive-mind controlled swarm of micro-quad copters that seemed to come right out of a Michael Crichton novel. Today, via an high school…
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Driverless Vehicles – Two Kinds
Google released an amazing video showing one of their driverless car taking a blind man out to get tacos and pick up his dry cleaning. This is good. In a tweet the other night, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo pointed to a swarm of programmable Nano Quadrotors and mused, “It’s with confidence and dread that I’m…
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What’s Old is New
When you’ve been around long enough, you start to see old ideas, re-invented. These guys have managed to crack the nut of how to monetize social media by charging $35 to print your twitter stream onto toilet paper which you can then use in the restroom. More details from Laughing Squid. Roll back seven years…
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Will Sony Get Back it’s Original Mojo?
When Steve Jobs first visited Sony, he had huge respect for the company and it’s founder. He emulated many aspects of the company and even tried to convince Apple employees in California to adopt Sony’s famous grey ripstop nylon vest uniforms. On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman Akio Morita why everyone…
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Tsunami Debris Includes Ghost Tuna Boat
Massive amounts of debris from last year’s March 11th earthquake in Japan is making its way to the West coast of North America. While most of the objects are not expected to wash ashore until October, some of the larger objects, including entire ships are arriving months earlier. The Vancouver Sun reports: After being flushed…
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Twitter for Small Business
Twitter extended it’s partnership with American Express and building on the campaign to tap into support for local businesses with the rollout of Twitter Promoted Products. It’s a pay per-click model which can be limited by daily spend so there will be no surprises. The video is one of the nicest product videos I’ve seen. It’s…
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The Interest in Pinterest
By now I would imagine you’ve all heard of Pinterest. The latest site to cater to our need to collect and curate the world around us has boiled down the act of clip-n-share to it’s most basic form, the image. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then the endless scroll of the Pinterest front…
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Location-based DRM
Reading news of the Loopt acquisition this morning got me thinking. What if someone were to build a service that would check your location and use it as a way to unlock content that would normally sit behind a paywall? Here are a couple of the use case. Starbucks could do a deal with the…
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People Discovery Apps, a Cautionary Tale
This was the weekend everyone signed up and joined Highlight or Glancee. TechCrunch has written about it and Robert Scoble has been going on about how viral these location-based services are. No doubt about it, these new apps which run in the background on your phone and let you know when someone you know (or…