A provocative (or is it prophetic?) piece from The Register’s Andrew Orlowski who sees the end of Skype and VoIP: It’s small, it’s boring and won’t turn any heads – but it probably spells the end of the road for Skype, Vonage and any other hopeful independent VoIP companies. It’s Nokia’s 6136 phone, which allows … Read more
Another very cool kind of newsmap (via the excellent and addictive information aesthetics). This one, reverbiage, uses the NPR feed to generate a map over which a fast moving zoom moves to the places where stories are breaking: There’s also another neat way of viewing stories — select a topic, or tag, from a list on … Read more
China is about to launch a new facial recognition system “which will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities”, according to today’s China Daily (no URL available yet.) The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved … Read more
Here’s a useful innovation for foiling scammers stealing money from ATMs with their heads covered to avoid identification: a system which “can distinguish between someone whose face is covered or uncovered, and only grant access to those who bare their faces.” No face, no dosh According to Taiwan’s Central News Agency (no story URL available; … Read more
My conversations with some quite senior PR people are often somewhat bizarre: stilted, me trying not to sound like I’m the ghost in their machine, the castle-wall destroyer, them so defensive about their product and brand they could easily be replaced by robots. Cluetrain Manifesto should be required reading for these guys. Or at least … Read more