In the summer of 2009, I was in San Francisco for the first time and on my way to meet Alexis Madrigal and Sarah Rich for a drink. Equipped with only a photocopied map and a dumb cellphone, I got off at the appointed BART stop with instructions to head south and no idea which way that was. Ever the intrepid explorer, I worked out the solution using ( Read more... )

In the Pearson International Airport in Toronto, there’s a walkway that fascinates me. The walkway in question runs from where you get off the plane to the exit. If you get off the plane and have luggage, you proceed down the stairs to the carousels and the herd of humanity. If you don’t have luggage to collect, you can bypass the whole thing and ( Read more... )

On January 12th, Google announced that they’d been the target of a series of cyber attacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Their response was to stop censoring Google.cn effective immediately. In the same week, Google was granted a patent that would enable them to replace real billboards with virtual ones in ( Read more... )

In the dream, I had managed to get invited to one the sessions of the Quarantine studio that BLDG BLOG and Edible Geography were running in New York. City of Sound’s Dan Hill (who I’ve never met, so apologies Dan, for bringing you into this) had the floor and he was engaged in a spirited discussion with Nicola Twilley about how the Internet could ( Read more... )

I’d like to talk about augmented reality. Specifically, I’d like to talk about augmented reality, the things you carry in your pockets, and the things you wear around your neck.
Primer

AR basics: It’s an extension of the mobile Internet (that’s the one where people are walking around with computers disguised as phones in their pockets). The mobile ( Read more... )

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In 2008, Australian show A Current Affair broadcast an episode that included a brief hypnotherapy session. The segment was called Think Slim and the idea was that it would help viewers lose weight. This was found to be in breach of the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice which specifically forbids broadcasting shows “designed to ( Read more... )

There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An ( Read more... )

Will Wiles of Icon Magazine spent some time talking about augmented reality, Tron, and the fictional source of many design and technological innovations on his blog. I couldn’t stop thinking about the last two paragraphs.


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A little while ago, I was sitting on a bus, considering the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs (like you do). Meaning, all of the things that needs to be happening behind the scenes or have happened in the past to allow the independence of the self-sufficient super-being.


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A little while ago, I got a new iPhone. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. It’s not an upgrade or anything, just a repair job turned replacement. It looks and behaves the same as my old iPhone except that whatever was wrong with the screen on the old one isn’t on this one. The process was painless - I went in, they looked at the phone, handed me a ( Read more... )