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Thomas Frey - Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

Currently browsing posts found in April2008


The Coming Era of E-Newspapers

April 10th, 2008 at 10:41 am » Comments (0)

 
Sometime in the next two years, if Hearst Corp.’s plans work out, a handful of Seattle Post-Intelligencer readers will begin getting their morning news not from the paper on the front stoop or by dropping change in a corner newsbox — or even on their laptop — but from a new electronic newspaper that’s displayed [...]



Japan’s Super Crowded Trains

April 10th, 2008 at 10:09 am » Comments (0)

This is amazing.  Next time you start wishing you could live the simple life in Japan, think again. True, not everyone has this problem, but these sheer fact that the staff people have to assist with cramming people aboard indicates this is nothing new.
 



The Cellphone Gun

April 10th, 2008 at 9:59 am » Comments (0)

The next time you start feeling comfortable about airport security, just think about this video.
 



Ubiquitous Computing – The Bleeding Edge

April 10th, 2008 at 9:51 am » Comments (0)

 Tricy Nicole Predki, a University of Colorado student,
in a sensor suit that controls her dance music.
Plants that send thank you notes, player pianos that follow the dancer’s movements, and umbrellas that warn you of upcoming rain are just a few of the uses of embedded computers described in this article from the NY [...]



ZRAD Covert Digital Video Recording Pen

April 10th, 2008 at 8:03 am » Comments (0)

Vavolo has released this pocket digital video recorder hidden inside a functional pen. The pen has a 1/3 inch CMOS camera that captures AVI video in 360 x 280 resolution and stores it on the built-in 2Gb flash memory. While it can record for more than six hours, the built-in rechargeable Li-ion battery limits recording [...]



New Invention Lets You e-mail A Smell To Your Living Room

April 10th, 2008 at 7:55 am » Comments (0)

The Smellovision and Smellophone are two concepts that have been around for many, many years, but have never really gotten off the ground. Why? Probably because they’re terrible ideas— what if someone sent you a really gross message?
The newest twist on sending remote smells comes from NTT Communications. The company wants to sell you [...]



George Takei Singing “On the Road Again”

April 10th, 2008 at 7:47 am » Comments (0)


Online Video Ads are Blazin’ Hot

April 10th, 2008 at 7:15 am » Comments (0)

There is no question that online video advertising is generating plenty of excitement, and also a great deal of confusion.
In-stream, in-banner, in-text, linear, non-linear, pre-roll, post-roll, layovers; when it comes to online video ads the jargon piles up faster than e-mail messages. But what exactly does it all mean?



Hacking the Power Grid

April 10th, 2008 at 7:09 am » Comments (0)

 

Cracking a power company network and gaining access that could shut down the grid is simple, a security expert says, and he has done so in less than a day.
Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they [...]



American’s Addiction to Texting

April 10th, 2008 at 6:45 am » Comments (0)

Data revenues at US mobile service providers surged to $23 billion in 2007 and now account for 17% of all mobile service revenues, according to the CTIA. The total represented a 53% increase over 2006.
Much of that revenue is due to the enormous popularity of text messaging. Nearly 50 billion messages were sent in [...]