“First it was smartphones integrating cameras. Could we be about to see the inverse – cameras integrating smartphone technology? That’s the concept being explored by Seattle design company Artefact.”

The Future of the Camera

“With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.”

“Music is almost universally important to human culture, but instruments are not strictly ‘useful’ and it seems strange to think of them as mere tools. That said, from the first bone flutes and stone tools, the evolution of musical instruments has closely paralleled to that of more utilitarian technology. As inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil puts it – [musical expression] has always used the most advanced technologies available.”

“Apple said it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the device’s first day on the market. Apple iPad users downloaded more than one million apps from the company’s App Store and more than 250,000 electronic books from the iBookstore. Some reviewers said the iPad could challenge the primacy of the laptop. But others said the device, though gorgeous, simply doesn’t fill an obvious need. Does the iPad offer designers and users a new medium, or is it merely an iPod Touch on steroids? How much does the form factor of a device drive the creation of new kinds of content and how that content is read, heard and watched?”

From Room for debate at NYTimes

“Gartner, Inc. has identified 10 mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2011 in ways that will impact short-term mobile strategies and policies.”

“Linux enabled Google to build dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and Ruby have become the lingua franca for building Web 2.0 applications; and the free Web-server software Apache powers nearly half of all Web sites in the world. Open source software gave birth to the Internet age, making everyone—even those who donated their labor—better off.”

Can open source hardware do the same thing?

This article from Wired Magazine explores these issues and more.

Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.

This course is designed to help you understand and effectively use a variety of “web 2.0″ technologies including blogs, RSS, wikis, social bookmarking tools, photo sharing tools, mapping tools, audio and video podcasts, and screencasts

“Here’s a scenario: you go to Blockbuster.com and rent a movie. A little interface element pops up and tells you that Blockbuster is sending information to your Facebook account. It gives you ten seconds to say no…and then it sends it anyway. This is called “opt-out”. You only have the option to say no. It sends your personal information by default. “Opt-in” would be where no action is taken by default.

You then log into your Facebook account, and it says that “Blockbuster is sending a story to your account”. You have the option to say no to this, but it is not apparent at all. In fact, Facebook gives you the option “Don’t show me this again”, which seems to suggest that they agree this message is annoying. They have designed this screen for you to focus on the pain of having to read a silly message and dismiss it. But what isn’t very clear is that when you do so you’re also giving implicit instruction that all services can send information to your news feed in the future. This is a HUGE deal to Facebook…this is how they’re going to make money.”