Awesome hack by StinkDigital - they setup a Nike+ FuelBand to measure the “health” of their twitter account. It’s been rigged up via an Arduino board and motor kit to read #TweetFuel tagged tweets, digesting each tweeters followers, along with total retweets and mentions to power the spins of the Nike+ FuelBand, ultimately measuring the health of their own Twitter Feed.
read moreGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin recently sat down with the Lieutenant Governor of California Gavin Newsom for an hour-long interview. Brin, as he has done in the past, wore the company’s Project Glass prototype , and even allowed Newsom to test them out. During the interview it is revealed that the device features a touch-sensitive trackpad that allows users to scroll through content.
When asked about a potential release, Brin states that he has “some hopes to maybe get it out sometime next year,” although he did caution “that’s still a little bit of a hope.”
read moreOf course, while Wallet is Google’s first big push into mobile payments, it is far from the first. Mobile payments have been “the future” of payments for decades now, long before the days of smartphones equipped with NFC (or Near Field Communication ). Early attempts in the 1990s from companies like DigiCash focused not on phones, but on standalone “smart cards,” which promised better security, no transaction fees and more convenience than traditional credit cards – one day we would use them not to just pay for items at a store, but from our home computers as well. E-cash for an e-economy.
With the rapid rise of cellphones, though, came a push for mobile commerce, or “m-commerce,” an effort that really began to pick up steam in the early 2000s when mobile payments were not just the realm of upstarts, but big players like Nokia (which would continue to push its own efforts throughout the decade). Our phones would be the one device we used for everything: they’d open doors, get us on a bus or subway, and let us pay for anything, anywhere. In many ways, that’s still the goal we’re working towards, and one that’s slowly starting to become a reality.
read moreGoogle officially rolled out its Google Wallet mobile payment system Monday. Is still in its infancy, but the system already shows a lot of promise.
It uses a technology called NFC (Near Field Communication) to securely send your payments digitally.
The only phone in the US that supports NFC is the Google Nexus S, available with t-mobile and Sprint, and there are high hopes that the iPhone 5 will support it too.
Right now, Google Wallet only works with Citi-Mastercards and the Google Prepaid Card. Visa and Google announced a worldwide agreement to support the Visa payWave app, but it will still be up to the financial institutions and banks to add support.
read moreEveryone by now must have had a discussion about future of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. You’ve probably seen Wired on the iPad , the Sports Illustrated Tablet Demo , any many more.
IDEO , respected company for their innovation and product design, came up with 3 concepts for the future of the book.
read moreCurrent predictions: Apple will launch a new iOS based device priced at $99 The iTV will only have 16Gb of Flash based storage It will mainly stream content from a local computer or the cloud It’s only capable of 720p as opposed to 1080p Apple is negotiating 99 cents rentals, down from $1.99 to $2.99, or even higher for HD. This will also apply for iPhone, iTouch, and iPad content consumption.
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