Pachube bought for 15 million dollars.

Something I've been trying to figure out how to do for a while. LED and optic fibre decoration + Arduino creates quite a living effect.

This is just a hacked together concept demonstration, but it would be nice to take it further.

Playing with pencils as input devices.

This is nice :

One thing’s for sure though, this new raft of watch accessories and the iPod nano being close to being jailbroken means that 2011 is shaping up to be an exciting year for nano owners and watch enthusiasts alike.

Could Kinect control your internet of things?

Wow! Touchable Holograms

Hat-tip Giles

Nice TED talk from John Underkoffler showing "Minority Report" style UI : g-speak.

Bonfire, nice.

Augmented Reality Face Recognition

Update : Answering Ben and John's comments :

Ben: I guess the question is, now the tech. is out there, how long does it remain "opt-in". Let's suppose it was, say, Facebook that bought this technology and incorporated it into their iPhone / Android client ... ie. see which people around you have FB accounts.

Then, one day, they find that not enough people opted in, so decide to make the system opt-out instead.

John : Yes, I love Github; and the social aspect of Github is very cool. ( http://github.com/interstar )

I use it for work, and will start putting social projects up there. But you have to be careful with making too many inferences (eg. about code quality) : sometimes I check-in code written by colleagues, and they check-in my code ...

On the broader point, I'm more convinced than ever we're heading into netocracy. And one of the symptoms is when people start making inferences from the social graph itself as opposed to using just navigating the social graph and then analyzing. Ie. when people start saying "X is probably a good potential hire *because* he's connected to these people and worked on those projects" rather than "I found X via these people, now let's see if he's a good hire".

What I really think is that there's little chance for society as a whole to retreat from netocracy.

And when we arrive, there'll be no way for individuals to opt-out. We could try to avoid making our social network explicit and publishing it, but it will become increasingly difficult to function in society without doing so.

In a real netocracy, not being in a social network will be as debilitating as not having any money under capitalism.

What is much more likely though, is that smart operators will work through secret or more private social networks (much as smart operators under capitalism have Swiss bank accounts or use otherwise dark payment schemes)

However, such secretive individuals and organizations will need to break cover and become partly visible, in order to operate at all in netocracy (witness this story about a criminal gang, who court certain kinds of visibility and connections)

This is majorly damning. HP computers are racist.

There's a real danger, that moving into a world of ubicomp, some groups are going to be systematically empowered or disempowered by generalizations built into video recognition software.

Wow! Pranav Mistry is the new Doug Engelbart.

Sixth Sense ... oh boy!

Apple patenting a magic wand input device.

Update : more.

Open-source hardware bank.

This is arguably one of the coolest things I've seen. Self-assembling wifi meshes with mini-helicopter swarms.

Some quick(ish) news about a few changes that are going on, spread over a number of posts :

News 1 : Superstruct

In the next two months or so, I'm going to be heavily involved in Superstruct as an assistant game-master, "community leader" in the "Outlaw Planet" scenario. What that means is that I'll be writing somewhere (not 100% sure where yet) in the role of myself in the year 2019.

By then we'll have had another 10 years advance in ubicomp (the device swarm gets faster, cheaper, denser.) The swarm will become a focus of conflict between "legitimate" authorities (who would obviously like to use it as an instrument to protect and promote the nation-state) and anti-state, 4GW, criminal and general miscreant groups, who for a variety of different reasons are trying to use the swarm destructively.

This conflict is played out against a backdrop of four other super-threats : a peak-oil related energy-crisis; a virulent new respiratory disease with no known cure; an increase in mass-migration as people flee wars, extreme weather and other natural problems; and a break-down in the current food supply-chain (due to energy and environmental problems).

The task of the players is to tell stories about themselves and their lives, 10 years in the future, while inventing new social institutions (purposeful collaborations between previously non-collaborating groups, that we call "superstructs") to help humanity cope with the catastrophic results of the combination and interactions between these threats.

Having been doing some preparatory collaboration with other members of the Superstruct team, and going through our orientation meetings today, I can see that this is actually going to take up a lot of time and energy. (More than I originally thought.) So, expect to see lighter than usual blogging from me, or engagement in other projects (both here or on Smart Disorganized, Platform Wars, OPTIMAES etc. etc.)

(Apart, that is, from a collaborative project I have in the works with Zby, and a couple of outstanding things that are basically done and I just need to write up.)

Video of Microsoft's Crystal Ball

OReilly's "physical computing" Radar theme.

Plastic, flexible, electronics and NanoNets

Privacy is nearly dead.