New Florence. New Renaissance.

Mobile Phones as Diet Aids

"With cell phones ubiquitous in Japan and rising concern over expanding waistlines, health care providers have put two and two together to allow the calorie-conscious to send photos of their meals to nutritionists for analysis and recommendations."

CNN.com

"The iPhone's Untapped potential"

"But while people are fawning over features like the smart, multitouch screen and the advanced Web browser, there is important technology under the hood that will likely go underappreciated. The iPhone has tiny, powerful sensors--an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and an infrared sensor--that are able to pick up cues from the environment and adjust the phone's functions accordingly."

MIT Technology Review

Update: results of a iPhone "teardown"

Second Earth

MIT Technology Review

"The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth."

Surreal.

Anthropology and Telecommunications

"Industry leaders expected people to embrace videotelephony, which flopped, but failed to anticipate the success of text-messaging. So they are turning to social scientists, and in particular to anthropologists, the better to understand how telephones are used."

The Economist

UMA - Unlicensed Mobile Access

T-Mobile is finally giving the converged WiFi/cellular technology called UMA, it’s long awaited day in the sun in the U.S....

read more at GigaOm and BusinessWeek

Next-Gen Process Documentation

"A digital camera inside a parcel looks out through a small hole and captures images of its journey through the (UK) postal system.  The Spy Box was sent from my studio to the gallery taking an image every 10 seconds recording a total of 6994 images these were then edited together to create an animated slideshow."

Tim Knowles

Think this could have some applications in process reengineering?

Gadget Tracking

"Luckily a man did return her Nokia N70 handset within an hour -- but only after he tried to steal it first.

When the thief inserted his own SIM card into her phone, that triggered software she'd installed on the handset."

CNN.com

Internet as Giant "Tootsie Roll"

"It’s a mathematical representation of the pipes, routers and other bits of hardware that ferry data across the Web. At the map’s red gooey center is a cluster of 100 networks operated by massive corporations like ATT Worldnet and Google. Its purple crunchy outer shell consists mostly of small ISPs."

Read more at Popular Science

Digital Barbie Dolls

"Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who is 9 years old, prefers a Web site called Cartoon Doll Emporium."

Read more at NY Times

"Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who is 9 years old, prefers a Web site called Cartoon Doll Emporium."

Read more at NY Times

Shopping and paying by phone

Comparsion Shopping by phone

Payment by phone