Update : [ Today techcrunch has published an article on Grey Area, a  Finnish smartphone games developer, doing a alternate reality game called Shadow Cities. They raised Series A funding. ]

One of the trends that i always think is gonna be big in future is gaming in the real world. By that I mean that when people themselves will become characters of the games that they are playing in the virtual worlds. The merging of your virtual and real self.  Location based services are getting us there. Read more…

Desertification is slowly but surely destroying loads of our arable land. In fact, today one third of the earths land is desertified.

Magnus Larsson, an architecture student takes a very unique architectural view at the problem and proposes very interesting structures that could help bring back greenery to these lands.  Read more…

There are a lot of business lessons freely available in nature if we study it carefully enough.

Self organization and bottoms up systems as followed by ants and flocks of birds are already  widely documented.

Business World recently published a good article about learning from nature about how to invade into existing businesses. The article uses example ranging from Asian carp to the zebra mussel and how they create new opportunities for themselves and those that can adapt quickly enough to help exploit the way they affect things.

Read the complete article here.

Guest writer Heena put together an article for us a while ago where she redefines TechnoTicles from [Technology + Articles] to TechnoTickles[Technology as a result of a Tickle] (mind you the ‘c’ has been replaced by ‘ck’). Here she presents her views on creativity and innovation in the technology space.

A tickle makes me laugh when it catches me unaware. It’s a funny feeling I don’t completely understand. But tickles, the funny sensations, are not just related to my external being as I often find myself being tickled in my brain. The unwanted tickle causes an itch, which makes me take action involuntarily.

Tickles inside our mind can force us to think, to imagine and cause enough irritation to make us take actions that we otherwise won’t dare to do.

Popularly, creativity has been associated with the people from the art world, painters, dancers or musicians. The common trait among them being their thought process that is adapted to boundary less imagination. But creativity is not really limited to the domain of these few fields. Browsing through the history of technology and computing, there are innumerable incidents representing technologists becoming leaders when they married their technological depth to their peripheral understanding of some distant fields. Some of the innovative products and services are presented below in order to elicit this fact.

Creativity happens when we allow ourselves to make mistakes. The ideal way for an organization to be creative is to not just look to the experts, but allow explorers (people who have a passion to explore and those who are not afraid of making mistakes) to make decisions once in a while.

This notion led the Interaction design Guru Alan Cooper to reverse the trend of programming of interactions. Earlier interactions between software and humans were designed by programmers. Read more…

Thinking about the future of display and image projection has always been a fascinating exercise.

Just a day ago, we had written about the Gestural Interfaces from Minority Report which talked about the concepts of real world pixels and recombinant networks. Now Wired magazine published a article about another interesting research which is trying to use swarms of micro-helicopters to create a giant 3-D display. This project called Fly Fire is part of an ongoing project at the MIT SENSEable city lab.

This is exciting, personally for me, as I was discussing this concept with a friend a few days ago, only that we were thinking about nano-bots (which meant we had to wait for nano technology to reach that level) instead of the micro helicopters.

Ultimately this project is a step towards making smart dust, the idea of extremely small computing devices that are self contained and ubiquitous.

Read the full article here.

Checkout FlyFire and other cool projects at the MIT SENSEable city lab here.

The movie Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise) presented new methods of interactions with information. Looked very sci-fi back then, but not any more. Oblong Industries is working towards making the concept a reality.

John Underkoffler (co-founder of the company and lead of the team that created the Minority Report interfaces) recently demonstrated the interface at a TED conference.

The product is called the g-speak spatial operating environment.

As the name suggest its an Operating System that handles interactions in space. It is a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels. I have tried to put some brief explanation about these 3 concepts below the video.

Read more…

Disruptive Innovations as the name suggests is about innovations that disrupt the market. A disruptive innovation makes a product (which was earlier accessible only to richer or more skillful consumers) accessible to a whole new population of consumers.

The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen in an article in 1995.

Read more…

This one was created a while ago (more than a year ago i suppose), but I read the article only today.

This is a USB design that won a Seriban Design Community competition where the aim was to design a flexible USB, so it won`t break if someone accidentally hit it while it stuck out of the computer case.

Look out for the cool idea and the great presentation from serbian designer Damjan Stankovic.

I couldn’t resist posting this for its cool design and look, along with showing how much is possible with the smallest of things that we see around us everyday.

Check out the source article here

USBee

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