A Homecoming and That Hip & Happening iHub

Ever since I met Erik Hersman, I have dreamed of traveling to Nairobi to work with him. So now, my dream has come true. Last week, I traveled with my daughter and mother back to the country where I was born, Kenya.

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Think Events with Google: The future of life online

Smartphones, tablets, and TVs — oh my! It seems every day a new device hits the market, providing consumers with even more options to stay connected. As a result, consumers are increasingly sophisticated in the ways in which they engage with media. Advances in technology have uncovered new ways to communicate, inform, and transact — how can marketers maintain a strong consumer connection as consumption habits and purchase decisions shift amidst an ever-changing marketplace? Are you sending the right signals to reach your customers?

Over the last several weeks, the Alphachimp Team has had the pleasure of supporting these gathering of media partners and major marketers at Google New York office.

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Kindle: Future Book

See what Amazon's Kindle is like. Besides being wireless (with no service plan!), the display uses electronic ink instead of backlit displays, allowing for easy reading outside in any light.

An electrophoretic display is an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field.

clipped from www.amazon.com

The Smart Pen: The Past and Future of Pen and Paper

Check out these video demos of the pen that records what you write while recording the audio of the conversation. It also imports both the audio and visual notes into your computer.

Smart Pen uses the Livescribe Paper-Based Computing Platform that turns a spiral notebook into a user interface. The pattern of simple, micro-dots enables a patented dot-positioning system to precisely track the smartpen’s movement on paper. As a result, anything you write – words, numbers or drawings – can be stored, recognized, and intelligently responded to by the Pulse smartpen.

clipped from livescribe.com

From prehistoric cave walls and charcoal to the modern notebook and fountain pen, the human need for spontaneous self-expression through drawing and writing has endured. People have actively used writing tools and paper, in one form or another, for thousands of years.

Livescribe Chief Executive Officer Jim Marggraff introduces a new solution to this age-old problem and a long-term vision on how paper-based computing will advance the next chapter in mobile computing. Livescribe’s intelligent writing system includes an innovative smartpen and dot paper that together bring traditional paper to life.

By developing a paper-based platform, Livescribe will fundamentally change the way people capture, use and share information with pen and paper, making the possibilities of pen and paper endless. With Livescribe, people will no longer have to settle – they can have the best of both the paper and digital worlds.

Nokia's Nanotech Morph

The future may be here already (and just not evenly distributed) but I want to know where to buy i!

clipped from www.engadget.com Why is Nokia always trying to outdo everyone with its fancy-schmancy concepts and designs? Why can't they just get in line and keep it simple? We may never know the answer to those questions, but what we do know is that the company is presenting a new concept device called the Morph that would be right at home... in the year 3000. The unit is included in the MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition catalog, and boasts the ability to stretch and flex to almost any shape a user could think of. The nanotechnology-based device would deliver transparent electronics, self-cleaning surfaces, and the malleability to transform into any number of configurations. Of course, the actual technology required to put this together is years or even decades away, though Nokia expects to see some of these innovations making their way into high-end products within seven years. See the device doing its thing in some photos after the break.

Ready to Ware

Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs, Too

clipped from www.wired.com De Rossi, who has worked on robotic skin and motion-capture tech for Darpa and the US National Institutes of Health, began exploring the idea of fabric as a data-collection medium 12 years ago. Most of his designs employ thin, pliable strands of conductive steel spun with cotton or polyester fibers into yarn. The Wealthy suit has nine electrodes and conductive leads woven in, yet the fabric looks and feels completely normal. The challenge in incorporating sensors into clothing — even skin-tight unitards — is that the fabric shifts when the body moves, resulting in sloppy, irregular signals. To deal with this, De Rossi's team developed software algorithms to clean up the data, along with code to reconstruct the wearer's movements. These programs are the real genius behind the company's work. "Even when you are sick, if you have something that doesn't look nice, you don't want to put it on."

Unplanned Obsolescence

Grameen's famous Village Phone Program lifted thousands out of poverty-- and helped Muhammad Yunus win the Nobel Peace Prize. The problem: It's not working anymore.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com On March 26, 1997--chosen because that day was the anniversary of Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan--Begum became the first participant in GrameenPhone's Village Phone Program. Now widely known, the plan offers small loans, or microcredit, that enable people in one of the world's most impoverished countries to buy cell phones and rent them, call by call, to neighbors who can't afford telephones of their own. A decade later, instead of begging on the streets and sleeping with cattle as she once had done, Begum shares a two-room brick house with her husband, two sons, a daughter, a television set, and a refrigerator. Next door, she has built a barn, shops, and temporary housing that she rents to five poor families. Today, her banker estimates her net worth at $145,000, which may be more than everyone else in her village combined. In Bangladesh today, the only one making real money on GrameenPhone's wireless service is … GrameenPhone.