I always tell myself that one of the joys of working in the online space is that you constantly get exposed to human ingenuity in all its glory. To prove the theory, I experienced two innovations this morning and read about another.
The iPhone is the new Star Trek Communicator
I’ve had my iPhone for over a year. It drops calls, heats up like a stick of uranium and sometimes crashes, but it is a thing of beauty. I read about RedLaser – the hottest barcode scanner app – and installed it this morning. It is a work of genius. You can scan any barcode and within seconds it will tell you where you can buy the product online and for how much. Retail will never be the same again. People are already innovating – one bright spark used it to catalogue his book collection before packing them all away. You can also get a dieting version.
Another amazing app I witnessed today was Layar, which uses augmented to show web data overlaid on the iPhone’s camera display. In fact this is more Terminator than Star Trek.
The Ethical Web
Tim Berners-Lee is at it again. Not content with making the web ubiquitous in the developed world, TBL launched The World Wide Web Foundation; its aim is to “ensure a free and open Web that empowers people to bring about social and economic change.” The first two initiatives have been launched – one to help inhabitants in the Southern Sahara use the web to access knowledge that will help them to combat climate change.
The other is the launch of 800 computer community centres across Latin America and the Middle East.
For the full story read the Fast Company article: http://tinyurl.com/yfw2hmj
