March 2010 Archives

First, a great interview from Engadget with Nicholas Negroponte, who was the head of the MIT Media Lab when I was a graduate student there. What the interviewer, Josh Topolsky, correctly notices, is that Nicholas' book Being Digital, while 15 years old, holds up remarkable well in terms of its predictions. My favorite quote: "How can there possibly be books in the future?"

The United States Census Bureau has a great interactive map tracking the response rates of each city in the country. The site is specifically tracking the relationship between how long a city is taking to send in their surveys in 2010 versus how long it took them in 2000.

From Fast Company comes this inspiring story about how a simple thing can do wonders for both the environment and the bottom line. While $1 million isn't that much to a company the size of Ford, it isn't a small number and shows that the company is doing everything it can to try and reduce waste.  It reminds me of how much money is wasted here in New York by simple things like companies leaving lights and computers on at night when nobody is around.  Let's hope the trend towards reducing this waste continues.

A new toy launching fall 2010, Xachi Pets are a cuddly little stuffed animal with glowing animated eyes, an 8-bit speaker, accelerometer, robotic legs and touch-sensitivity. While that sounds interesting enough, even more exciting is that the toy comes with coordinating iPhone/iPod Touch software.

For example, a Xachi can be triggered to dance to music from your device, and there are games that display certain things on the toy and require the user to interact on the iPhone as well as a slew of education-based games. As MobileCrunch explains, it is similar to a Tamagachi (track and maintain its hunger, thirst, health, and happiness), but this is first toy to utilize that sort of technology by way of an iPhone.

Gary Flake of Microsoft gave a great demo of Pivot at TED last month that very quickly exposes how powerful navigating through data can be. I've been struggling for hours to think of something poignant to say about this, but the video does a better job than I ever could, so I'll let it speak for itself.