Being a Mac fan, with some occasional doubts, I found this list of future projects from the omnipresent Apple quite engaging(source: Mac Life).here is the iCar, complete with iSight and iTunes of course;the iEye, super digital camera with embedded editing options;and the iProtection, an Apple-branded stun gun.And I thought this strip from Wolff and Morgenthaler was funny!

Technorati Tags: futuristic

While googling for inspiration about children and new technologies, I found this intriguing post and a website:“This is Sophia Berglund - Right now she is 25 months old and growing so fast in her capabilities in communication - already she can muster small sentences in English, Korean, Japanese and some German! She can even translate! Sophia can create lines, shapes and forms by way of painting her communication…”“Part of her 1st and 2nd years were spent in S.Korea where she was born into one of the most advanced mobile “handphone” cultures in the world - literally 5minutes after birth her first ever picture (and video) taken by a mobile/handphone and sent to our friends and relatives, she made her first mobile location based phone call at 5months and at 6months she was surfing mobile internet and watching mobileTV! She had her first “co-location” experience in 2006 when friends “broadcast” the ? / Bi (Rain)**concert live over their handphone to my handphone - Seoul - to - Jeju…Sophia is growing up into a digital world. Already she has a real-demo phone given to her by a friend at LGe - which she mimmicks her immediate social circle in making calls and surfing data.”My apologies to Andrew Berglund (the father) for thinking at first this was a hoax I must have been reading too much SF novels. He said the child is now , hope he will post more.My question about technology usage in toddlers is first: how do we avoid sedentary attitudes and postural problems, not to talk about the over-developed thumb, a urban legend regarding mobile use among japanese teenagers, recurrent in Sunday magazines.Another question would be: although communication tools encourage enhanced sociability, how does the lack of face-to-face interaction affects learning of emotions, empathy, and all the other skills that Daniel Goleman calls “emotional intelligence”.

The Waag Society in Amsterdam developed, already in 2002, a “non verbal remote communication tool to support emotional communication”, targeting 80+years old.
Storytable offers a “multimedia jukebox” to stimulate memory and reminiscing and to encourage social interaction in elderly persons.
The Storytable is “intelligent furniture with footage from the 1920ies ot the 1950is”, also offering an Oral History database, continuously adjourned. Let’s see how it is works:
“This interface, designed in close cooperation with seniors, makes it possible for them to listen to or play digital multimedia clips from a large database. These multimedia clips contain songs, TV commercials, news broadcasts and other images from the 1900’s to present day. These clips are designed to reflect important events in a senior’s life. The Storytable’s navigation system was designed to make modern technology easily accessible to seniors. Thus, two “intelligent” buttons provide access to search and play the multimedia clips”.

Some weeks ago I discovered the educational project “Hole in the Wall” by Sugata Mitra, addressing children from Indian villages, and although that is not the same, it is interesting to note how we tend to forget that a large part of the population lacks the basic “technical literacy” to enjoy the wonders of Web 2.0.

Still at the Cross Media Week, interesting talk today to about social networks and open ID. While waiting for the ideal open ID to use everywhere without worrying about your personal data being stolen by terrorists etc., they were proposing to connect all social networks, so that it would be possible to : federate - have a friend on another network follow my content like it was on his;
synch - make the content visible in the same way from platform to platform;
move - move from one platform to the other very easily;
after this, the talk became too technical for me and I stopped understanding.
What I got, is that : social networks, like cross media, are fighting too to find common standards for more fluid communication. Technical convergence, personalization, and transferability are the main issues. The idea of an open ID, or digital identity, was fascinating, as was the concept of “shared secret”, that reminded me of secret societies where hundreds of thousands could mix with the crowd and still be connected although not personally acquainted (I think free masons and similar), an uncanny thought when related to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
By the way, here you can see Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (who looks exactly like my friend Alvise, ciao Alvise )

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, social networks, Web 2.0