Flying Travel Apps: InflightFeed, GateGuru, Routehappy

To say that holiday travel can be a drag would be an understatement. Airfare costs are on the rise. Check-in lines are long and slow. Delays are inevitable, and the threat of flight cancellations looms constantly. And yet, demand for airline tickets is higher than ever. Fortunately, several new tools seek to make the process as painless as possible—just in time for winter vacation.

InflightFeed

InflightFeed: These days, airline food is often limited to a pack of pretzels, if you’re lucky. InflightFeed provides a comprehensive overview of in-air culinary options by offering travelers a platform to rate the cuisine of more than 80 international airlines. Users can check out food options prior to their flights, read detailed menu reviews, and even upload pictures of their meals after they land. The site also compiles basic, albeit helpful, information, like whether meals are included in the ticket price and what sorts of complimentary beverages are served. Next time, know whether you should bring your own spike for Mr and Mrs T.

GateGuru

GateGuru: GateGuru is a mobile app that seeks to revolutionize air travel by simplifying access to the many details associated with flying. Acting as a virtual assistant, the app keeps track of essential information, including itineraries and boarding passes, while aggregating relevant notifications regarding things like delays, weather conditions, and flight status. An updated version recently rolled out a more sophisticated interface, as well as new features like the “Journey Card,” which allows travelers to look up security line wait times, concourse maps, and amenities near the airport and designated departure terminals. Which way to the massage chair?

Routehappy

Routehappy: With more than 31 million flights jamming airports and flight paths every year, travelers are paying the price. Routehappy seeks to ensure that travelers can avoid the most notoriously bad flights. The social review startup, created by a Travelocity alum, has its eye on becoming “the world’s flight experience search engine.” Through an easily navigable website and companion app, Routehappy gives passengers a place to share opinions on the best airports, airlines, planes, and travel routes. Users can rate flights from 700 airlines, with each one receiving a cumulative ‘happiness score’. The site has accumulated 90,000 reviews already from people in 60-plus countries.

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Your Technology is Keeping You Awake [Infographic]

It’s getting to that time of the year where we realize procrastination has gotten the best of us and we need to cram for all of the finals that we have. Be warned though, late-night screen staring can seriously mess with your sleep cycle! Whether it’s late night study session or just a night-cap Netflix episode or Facebook statuses to fall asleep to, looking at a computer screen shortly before bed could be very unhealthy. In fact, the act of checking texts, emailing, Facebooking, or anything else on the web before bed has become a habit for over 95% of survey participants! This probably includes you too.

How do all of these things keep you from a good night’s sleep you ask? Well for one thing, when your mind is obsessed with checking messages constantly, it can effect your head – one in two people say that if they wake in the night for no reason, they’ll check their phone right away. But what about my netflix? Surely Netflix before bed can’t be too bad right? Well, the fact is that two-hour exposure to light from electronic displays suppresses melatonin by 22%! This doesn’t just affect your sleep but also stress and depressive symptoms. Consider using flux to dim that electronic display or just make a conscious effort not to use your computer too close to bed-time!

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Source: Daily Infographic

Hug Me, Jacket!

Ever feel lonely? Well, now shopping for clothes can be truly touching.

Hug Me Jacket

‘Hug Me’ Jacket: London College of Fashion grad Si Chan recently premiered a Fall/Winter menswear line that uses recurring hand imagery to express the concept of human connectedness. Aptly titled HUG ME, the collection aims to recreate the human embrace by strategically adorning coats, jackets, and pants with plush padded gloves. The line’s widely covered (and as-widely panned) Hug Me jacket takes this schema to the extreme, featuring a row of clasped green hands in place of the traditional button or zipper placket. Designed to make its wearer feel “warm and hugged,” the jacket will retail for approximately $1,200, making it pretty much the priciest hug we can imagine.

Like-A-Hug Vest

Like-A-Hug Vest: Subjects of Web Esteem, those people whose online popularity is irrevocably linked to their sense of self-worth, can now enjoy a real-world boost of confidence from the Like-A-Hug social media vest. Conceived by a team of MIT researchers in an attempt to make more tangible the warm and fuzzy feelings a Facebook like can generate, the vest is designed to inflate when its wearer receives a like, post, video, or photo on his or her Facebook Timeline. The vest simulates the pressure of a hug, letting the wearer know in real-time that they've been formally endorsed in their social sphere.


Source: Cassandra Daily

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Forbes: Eco-Friendly Surfboard of the Future Ecoboard

Eco-Friendly Surfboard of the Future Ecoboard

The sustainable surfboard is here but will Kelly Slater ride one?

For an insurgent group of surfers campaigning to green up the $7 billion surfing industry, Slater, an 11-time world champion, and other pro’s are key to changing the way surfers think about the iconic symbol of their nature-dependent sport, which ironically is a hunk of petroleum-based polyurethane laminated with toxic polyester resin.

Now there’s an alternative to the dinosaur-derived surfboard – the Ecoboard, a standard for a non-toxic, recycled surfboard developed by Sustainable Surf, a San Francisco non-profit founded by Michael Stewart and Kevin Whilden, surfers and social entrepreneurs with a background in creating sustainable products.

“We’ve got to get these boards into the hands of the pro’s,” said Stewart at a recent event at Saatchi & Saatchi S’s San Francisco office to launch the Ecoboard project.



Why? Flip through Surfer magazine or tune into a Rip Curl contest and try to separate the pro surfers from the products and lifestyle they’re pushing – everything from sunglasses and board shorts to surfboards and wetsuits. Get the surf gods to ride green, the thinking goes, and the masses will get onboard.

Easier said than done, however. I wrote about Sustainable Surf last April in a Forbes magazine story as Stewart and Whilden began their efforts to change a tribal industry literally stuck in the 1950s when it comes to making surfboards.

For more than a half a century most surfboard blanks – the core of a board –  have been made from polyurethane, which ends up in landfills when surfers break their boards. Polyurethane boards are coated in polyester resin, another toxic substance that poses health hazards to surfboard makers – which is why glassers wear respirators as they laminate boards.

But another type of foam, expanded polystyrene, or EPS, can be recycled and manufactured more benignly. And companies like Entropy Resins make non-toxic bio-based laminates.

Even so, many surfboard makers, surf shop owners and surfers have resisted EPS boards, believing the conventional wisdom that polyurethane offers superior performance.

That’s beginning to change, however, judging by the crowd of surfers, big-name board makers and other surf industry honchos that jammed the offices of Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability practice of the advertising and marketing giant started by Adam Werbach, a surfer and former president of the Sierra Club.

According to Sustainable Surf’s criteria, a surfboard qualifies for the Ecoboard label if its core is made from a minimum 40% recycled foam or biological content (think soy ) and the resin is produced from at least 15% bio-based materials. An Ecoboard costs about $50 more than a conventional surfboard but it cuts its carbon footprint by 40%, according to a lifecycle analysis conducted by Sustainable Surf.

A key requirement of the standard is that Ecoboards perform at least as well as conventional surfboards and require minimal change in the manufacturing process.

On display at Saatchi & Saatchi was an Ecoboard made by Matt “Mayhem” Biolos, a top shaper and owner of San Clemente, Calif.-based Lost Enterprises, as well as Ecoboards from Timmy Patterson, Hobie and Stretch Boards. Also on hand was Mark Price, chief executive of Firewire Surfboards, which has agreed to sell boards that meet Ecoboard standards for resin, Ryan Ashton, executive director of the Quiksilver Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the surf industry giant, and Jim Moriarty, chief executive of the Surfrider Foundation.

To prove the environmental bone fides of green surfboards, Todd Patterson from E-Tech Glassing set up shop in the middle of Saatchi & Saatchi’s offices and, surrounded by onlookers, laminated several boards, including one for pro surfer Shaun Tomson. (Werbach looked on a little nervously given that surfboard making is usually a toxic affair.)

Sustainable Surf has made inroads with pro surfers. Big wave rider Greg Long has an Ecoboard, according to Stewart, and he showed a video of pro Torrey Meister ripping it up on green surfboard. Meanwhile, the operators of Telo Island Lodge, a high-end surf camp in Indonesia, attended the Ecoboard launch and plan to order an entire quiver of green boards for their clients, Stewart says.

But during a panel discussion, it was clear that green isn’t good enough to persuade most surfboard buyers to switch to an Ecoboard. Will Hutchinson, co-founder of the Proof Lab surf shop in Mill Valley, Calif., said his customers aren’t particularly eco-minded but they’ll buy Ecoboards for their performance and pedigree.

Case in point: Hutchinson bought the Lost Ecoboard that was being auctioned at the Saatchi & Saatchi event for his shop and it sold in a day.

“They didn’t buy if for environmental reasons at all,” Hutchinson, who holds an MBA in sustainable management from Presidio Graduate School, said in an e-mail. “He just wanted it because it looked incredible, epoxy, had a similar Lost that he liked and wanted to complement it, etc. The environmental angle was just a bonus not the selling point, which I think is great and how it has to be to go mainstream.”

Source: Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2012/11/19/catching-the-next-wave-in-sustainable-surfing/


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You Can Quote That: Furbies

Furby 2012

"Even if you're not five years old, and dumb, exposure to the Furby is about as bad as smallpox spores."
-Sam Biddle, writer for Gizmodo

http://us.gizmodo.com/5937402/the-new-furby-review-absolute-horror
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Music Innovation: Sound Graffiti Bob Dylan

Sound Graffiti Bob Dylan

Music has long served as an audio postcard that represents an indelible marker of time and place. And, with mobile devices now allowing listeners to access their favorite memories at any given moment, aural time capsules have become more widespread and geotagging apps that allow users to create a direct link between physical location and audio recordings are starting to flourish.

Sound Graffiti: Bob Dylan isn’t exactly considered a technology innovator—his first ever Facebook update, made last week on the occasion of President Obama’s victory, spurred a flurry of headlines. Despite his hesitancy to use social media, a recent promotion for his latest album, Tempest, demonstrates that his marketing team knows what’s up. Dylan hooked up with creative agency CNNCTD+’s Sound Graffiti app to let fans unlock free songs from the album when they visited various locations possessing special significance for him (including the venue where he first played electric guitar on stage). The geolocation technology can be accessed by iPhone users from listentobobdylan.com.

Source: Cassandra Daily


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GoPro HERO3: Black Edition - Smaller, Lighter and 2X More Powerful by GoProCamera

                             

Insanely awesome video taken with the GoPro.

Liquid Bike Sharing - Make Money When You're Not Biking

Liquid Bike Sharing Rental

The transportation piece of the sharing economy goes beyond cars and ridesharing; people also are hungry to rent out their bikes.

When we first spoke with peer-to-peer bikesharing service Liquid (formerly known as Spinlister) last December, the startup was just gearing up for launch. Cofounder Will Dennis told us at the time that he believed "being able to pay your utilities or take your girlfriend out to dinner just for renting out your bike is something that people can connect with."

He was more right than he could have known--just seven months after launch, the service has 600 bikes available to rent in cities across the U.S. That’s not counting the listings from 80 other countries that Liquid is holding onto until it launches internationally. Liquid is now growing its user base by 8% each week.

Part of the site’s success lies in its simplicity: List your bike with a picture, some details, and a price (these seem to hover in the $15 to $25 per day range), and wait for people nearby to search for your bike type and schedule a rental. Details can be worked out through the site’s messaging system, and Liquid offers reimbursements for bike damage up to $5,000. The service is also insured for $1 million per claim.

The only hitch: People who request bikes can cancel at the last second without repercussions, so there’s no guarantee that someone will take your bike until they show up. The presence of user reviews discourages bad behavior, but it’s not always enough.

The service is web-only for the moment, but Liquid is building a mobile app. Work on the app began during the startup’s 12 weeks in the Greenstart digital cleantech design studio and accelerator. "They allowed us to accelerate the process, working with us to put out some great interaction design, interface design, and build the bones for something that we’re excited to put out," explains Dennis.

Like the site, the app will be simple to use. People looking for bikes need only select a bike type and size that they’re interested in, and relevant nearby bikes will pop up. Bikes aren’t highlighted only because of their high quality or low price; Liquid also takes into account whether they have owners that are "known for giving the best experiences," according to Dennis. Bike owners, in turn, are given a heads-up that someone is looking for a bike in their area.

Liquid is now raising $750,000 to hire new talent and continue building its platform. The recent name change, however, doesn’t reflect any sort of new direction for the service. Says Dennis: "We felt like Liquid was more representative of what we’re doing, creating a liquid marketplace. It’s access over ownership."

Here's their website: https://www.doliquid.com/

Source: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680829/rent-out-your-bike-for-some-easy-cash

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An Open Book

Crowdsourcing has touched every industry from automotive to astronomy. Now, it’s reaching even one of the most traditionally autonomous pursuits: fiction writing. As publishers work to stave off the demise of printed books in favor of e-books, authors are seeking new ways to keep readers engaged, such as integrating them into the writing process itself.

Naked Writer Project: Silvia Hartmann’s Naked Writer Project allows fans to read her latest fantasy fiction book, The Dragon Lords, as it is being written in real-time. Before beginning a new section, the British novelist sends an announcement to her social networks and then starts writing in a public document on the cloud-based Google Drive. Taking her experiment of complete transparency one step further, the author encourages readers to participate in the writing and editing process by sending her feedback and suggestions on everything from the title to the plot. The paperback’s target publication date is set for the end of next month.


The Collabowriters: Chicago-based artist and storyteller Willy Chyr has been crowdsourcing words instead of funding for an Internet-authored book. The Collabowriters project invites people to contribute a sentence of up to 140 characters, whereupon the community decides whether or not it should be added by giving it a rating of +1 or -1. The submission with the highest score becomes the next sentence of the novel, and the story can’t progress until a sentence has scored at least a 5. Chyr views the project as an important experiment in the dynamics of group interaction. Currently five pages long, the book remains a work in progress and is accepting new submissions.


The Diamond Club: Fifty Shades of Grey has grown into a worldwide phenomenon with over 40 million books sold and famous fans like Oprah Winfrey and Lebron James. In response, Brian Brushwood and Justin Young, hosts of comedy podcast NSFW, released a satirical video, called “How the Internet Can Troll Fifty Shades of Grey.” In the short, they explained their intention to crowdsource a book, under the pen name Patricia Harkins-Bradley, with fan-submitted sections that contained “little cohesion amongst the chapters,” but lots of badly written sex scenes. Titled The Diamond Club, the joke book ended up reaching #4 on iTunes’ Paid eBooks chart, making it no laughing matter.



Source: Cassandra Daily

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WaveJet; "Jet"-Powered Surfboard

Jet propulsion on your surfboard?  It's a dream- you can surf tiny mushy 1 ft surf like it was 5x bigger... on a short board.  So, it might cost a few grand for one of these bad boys, but when it comes to year-round surfing (those small, frustrating summer days) this can't be beat.

Check out this video and WaveJet's website:

http://wavejet.com/

And another cool take on this, a little bit more powerful:

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#Sandy Innovative Real-Time Relief

Despite significant hype from the media, few East Coast inhabitants were fully prepared for the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy. While many people are still picking up the pieces, a number of commendable companies, brands, and organizations stepped up to provide assistance immediately, helping the (literally) powerless assemble a sense of normalcy while trying to put their lives back together.

Twitter Updates: Social media proved to be a vital communication tool during and after the storm. So, to be of utmost assistance, Twitter supplied free promoted crisis tweets to FEMA, the Red Cross, the New York City Mayor’s Office, and the Maryland Emergency Management Agency to keep users up-to-date on the storm’s happenings. Additionally, Twitter published a blog post hours before the storm with a list of recommended accounts to follow for real-time updates. For those who were at risk of losing power or Internet (many of whom ultimately did), Twitter explained how to receive vital updates via SMS, ultimately leaving few storm-affected tweeters in the dark.


Charging Stations: Leading up to the storm, smartphone owners and tech enthusiasts were frantically trading tips on battery preservation. Inevitably, though, what most people still needed was a good old charge. Fittingly, Duracell took to New York’s Battery Park with its Power Forward Community Center, a power-relief center equipped with charging stations for mobile devices and phones, and computers with Internet access for those without. Mobile versions of the center, called Rapid Responders, were also sent into the streets of New York and New Jersey as needed. Time Warner Cable sent out a fleet of free Wi-Fi and charging stations as well.

Source: Cassandra Daily

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Google Making $100,000,000 on Ads Everyday? Infographic

Ever wonder how much google makes per day in ad revenue?  Well, the answer is $100 million dollars, and this is how...

What I find most interesting is the top industries and companies within those industries who advertise on google.  University of Phoenix is the #1 advertiser on google?  Damn, hopefully a lot of people get an online education.

Here's an (extra) large infographic, a bit too excited to fit on the page for you to enjoy!

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Jane McGonigal & Video Games That Make a Real Difference

Tomorrow's videogames will be more than mere fun to the next generation of gamers. They'll be lush, complex, emotional experiences- more involving and meaningful to some than real life.

This is good because Jane McGonigal, a game designer with an apparently simple idea, contends that some of the billions of hours we spend playing games can be used to solve real world problems, and it can be done by playing games.

McGonigal says reality is broken, and explains that we need to make it work more like a game. In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we're surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment. Her game-world insights can explain — and improve — the way we learn, work, solve problems and lead our real lives.

Here is an exert from McGonigal's interview with NPR:


MCGONIGAL: Well, since I first gave that TED Talk in February of 2010, there have been a lot of games that have really innovated to show exactly how you can fail and fail and fail, trying to solve a real problem in a game, and still eventually get to success without any harmful consequences.

So, one of the big breakthrough games has been a game called Foldit, which was created by scientists at the University of Washington. They wanted to teach gamers how to participate in a scientific process called virtual protein folding, where you're trying to understand how proteins in the human bodies fold and unfold. And, if they fold in unstable configurations, you can get diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's.

And, because it involves so much 3D spatial manipulation in this virtual world, moving these protein parts around, they thought gamers might be good at it. You know, like, think about Tetris or any of these games that involve manipulating objects in space. Gamers definitely have this skill.

Now, there's no consequence for failure if you fold a virtual protein the wrong way. So the gamers are just playing this crazy game, folding and unfolding and folding and unfolding, being wrong 99.9999 percent of the time. But, because they have that resilience and that ability to learn from mistakes and to collaborate - they've had hundreds of thousands of gamers working on this together - just this fall, they actually solved a real scientific problem that researchers had been working on for more than a decade.

They actually were able to come up with a stable configuration of a protein that could stop the HIV virus from replicating in the body. And I think this is a great example of an epic win where you can fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. There's no potential down side to trying. There's no negative consequence to being wrong in this environment. And yet the gamers were able to come up with a real win, a real breakthrough that could help make a medicine to treat or cure AIDS.

GAMERS FOUND A REAL MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGH THAT COULD HELP TREAT AIDS?  Maybe Jane isn't crazy.

What do you think: is McGonigal on to something?  How well would these ideas translate to the real world?  As an ex-gamer, this idea seems great to me.

You can find more about McGonigal and her thinking at ted.npr.org, as well as more games with 'real life' applications.

Source: NPR + TED


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Coming: Highways That Glow And Charge Electric Cars

Snowflakes painted on a highway with a special paint illuminates when the temperature drops below freezing.

Glow-in-the-dark roads are treated with a special foto-luminizing powder that is charged during the day to provide up to 10 hours of lighting at night.

An induction priority lane charges an electric vehicle.

Roads that glow in the dark and could one day even charge electric cars are set be introduced in the Netherlands soon. 

'Smart Highways' unveiled last week at Dutch Design Week will use the latest technologies in roads which their designers claim will be 'more sustainable, safe and intuitive' , the Daily Mail reported recently. 

The companies behind the project said their goal is to turn around the usual route of transport innovation by focusing on the highway rather than the vehicles which use it. 

Among the most ambitious of the ideas for the future of road travel are special lanes which will allow drivers of electric cars to recharge their vehicles as they travel along them. 

Another plan is to fit the roads with power-saving lights which will gradually brighten as vehicles approach and then switch themselves off after they pass. 

Those ideas are still some years off, but from next year Dutch roads will be painted with lines made from a photoluminescent powder that charges in sunlight to illuminate the road for up to 10 hours overnight. 

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/futuristic-highway-glows-dark-reports-weather-1C6670949

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Coming-Roads-that-glow-charge-cars/articleshow/17027984.cms

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hi-Call Reimagines Bluetooth Technology Application

Between introductions of long-anticipated hardware and curious new software, the digital pipeline remains packed with exciting new gimmicks. In particular, new Bluetooth applications are extending well beyond enabling standard hands-free phone conversations, and eager gadgeteers are chomping at the bit to be among the first to experiment with them.  One in particular worth checking out is hi-Call, the glove that brings a gesture to life. 

hi-Call: Playing make-believe is typically an imagination exercise, but Italian company hi-Fun has created taken it to a highly functional level. The hi-Call is a Bluetooth-enabled glove with a built-in phone that’s activated by users holding their hands to their faces in the universal “call me” gesture. A speaker and microphone are sewn into the thumb and pinkie, and the dry cleanable garment boasts a battery life of up to 10 days. While cold weather callers can also find relief from similar accessories (like text-friendly gloves), the hi-Call takes it to the next level by allowing phones to stay in pockets while maintaining a simple, intuitive interface.

Check hi-Fun out at http://www.hi-fun.com/it

Check hi-Call out at http://www.hi-fun.com/it/accessori-iphone-ipod-ipad/hi-call/

Source: Cassandra Daily

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Wieden + Kennedy Seeks Help on Old Spice in Crazy, Epic Job Listing One week, 10 insane social challenges

Wieden + Kennedy's Old Spice campaign is a hallmark for epic weirdness in advertising. So, it stands to reason that you'd have to complete some kind of weird, epic quest to join the agency's Old Spice. Now, we know the exact parameters of that question. On Monday, W+K posted a help-wanted ad on its website seeking a social strategist on the Old Spice account. Beginning today, the posting says, applicants will have a week to complete "one or more of the challenges listed below" and then create a "case study presentation deck outlining what you did and why it was effective." Here are the challenges:

• Challenge 1 - Create the best original Pinterest board dedicated to the sport of inline speed skating (NOT roller-hockey).

• Challenge 2 - Create and post an original piece of content to Reddit that then receives the most upvotes in a single week.

• Challenge 3 - Create and upload to SlideShare an original, in-depth competitive analysis of the Ed Hardy social media ecosystem.

• Challenge 4 - Get the most people to friend your mother or your father (or a parent-like figure in your life) on Facebook in a single week.

• Challenge 5 - Create an original (new) Twitter account and then use it to get the most followers in a week using any verbs you like, but only the following nouns: "BLUEFUDGE," "HAMMERPANTS" and "GREEK YOGURT."

• Challenge 6 - Create an original YouTube video that then receives the most plays in a single week using this script verbatim:

        #1: "Wait. What are you doing?"

        #2: "Trust me. This will be fine."

        #1: "Ok. Go ahead."

• Challenge 7 - Get recommendations on LinkedIn from at least three other people trying to get this job.

• Challenge 8 - Create the most reviewed recipe on allrecipes.com in a single week using cottage cheese as an ingredient. The reviews don't have to be good.

• Challenge 9 - Upload the most pictures of your armpit(s) to Instagram during the course of this challenge. The pictures must have your face in them to verify your identity and include the hashtag #mypits.

• Challenge 10 - Using Quora, give thought-out, meaningful answers to as many dream catcher-related questions as possible in a single week.

As W+K says in the note: "Good luck, cyber warriors."

Source: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/wieden-kennedy-seeks-help-old-spice-crazy-epic-job-listing-144871

DIGITAL TRENDSETTERS, KARDASHIANS, AND STEVE JOBS: A DATA-DRIVEN LOOK AT CULTURE FROM NBCUNI’S “THE CURVE”

Lady Gaga? Bangs? Neon Fashion? On the way out. So are cleansing fasts, the Occupy movement and the recession. What’s in? Stay-at-home dads, Pinterest, apps, and tablets. At least that’s the word from the latest edition of "The Curve," a bi-annual book from NBCUniversal Integrated Media dedicated to anticipating what’s next in the lives of Generation X and Y consumers. (Note to Ryan Gosling, cake pops, vampires, and zombies: You’re on the fence.)

The just-published second volume of "The Curve" is a detailed report on social and cultural trends, based on data collected from Gen X and Y survey respondents, "leading edge consumers," expert interviews, and proprietary research.  This is what they're talking about, and it isn't necessarily what you'd think it would be about...

Source: http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681825/digital-trendsetters-kardashians-and-steve-jobs-a-data-driven-look-at-culture-from-nbcunis-t

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Sim City World Will Educate Players on the Complexities of Urban Development

The acceleration of urbanization has many questioning its long term environmental and economic impact and determining ways to best prepare for it. Now, a succession of new games is helping people better understand urban development by simulating, with realistic depictions of the planning process, the difficult decisions they may face in the near future.

The new SimCity is possibly the best example of a game helping gamers (mostly millennials) realize the global impacts of everyday decisions that they and people around them make.   First released in 1989, SimCity is the legendary computer game that lets budding architects build their own imaginary metropolises. Its newest iteration, set for release in February 2013, poses much tougher social and political decisions that mirror current hot button issues, like the use of renewable energy, socialized medicine, preservation of natural resources, and pollution. Each choice has pros and cons. For example, instead of dirty, cheap coal plants, players can build alternative power sources—but those come with a much higher price tag and occupy more space. With 3D graphics and provocative examinations of class systems, SimCity has come a long way from its floppy disk inception.

Check out the video:

Sources:
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680650/the-new-simcity-will-turn-you-into-an-urban-planning-nut#3
Cassandra Daily


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Apple - iPad Mini - TV Ad - Piano

A new favorite!

Pebble e-Paper Smart Watch

A smart watch.  We have smart TVs, Smartphones, Tablets... now we have brains on our wrist.  As a gadget geek, I enjoy this type of news.  It seems great- eventually, you'll have no need to carry your ipod, your smart phone, your GPS around with you on a run.  All your apps will be available on your wrist.  Not only that, the watch interface will be as customizable as any android device.

This particular watch, Pebble, has received more than $10,000,000 in funding on Kickstarter, blowing it's modest goal of $100,000 out of the water.  Pebble receives call, email and message notifications from iOS and Android devices over Bluetooth. It supports downloadable watchfaces and activity-specific watchapps for controlling music, cycling, running and golfing. Allerta's even teamed up with Freecaddie to create a rangefinder app for over 25,000 golf courses worldwide. The timepiece can run several watchapps simultaneously -- these can be installed over Bluetooth using the Pebble App for iOS and Android

Check it out... http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android


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