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In fact to those who have access to it, it has made life exciting and somewhat contributed to empowerment and the development of some communities. However, despite all these positives, there are still concerns from the library and academicfraternity. In the early 2000s, most librarians were concerned the Internet was threatening the existence of the libraries and the professions of librarians. These arguments even delayed Google’s expansion of its vast digital library in 2009 arguing that, it would kill the book, render thousands of librarians jobless and deny access to knowledge to those who could not afford online subscriptions.
Is the Internet a threat to libraries, reading and writing culture?
We get a lot of infographic pitches. Almost all of them suck . Why?
Why “Infographic Thinking” Is The Future, Not A Fad | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
Siri Is Only The Beginning | TechCrunch
Dag Kittlaus was co-founder and CEO at Siri, which was acquired by Apple in 2010. For decades, Hollywood has been portraying machines that humans can converse with, delegate tasks to, and command. Remember the HAL 9000, KITT the car, COMPUTER from Star Trek, or even the brilliantly conceived and visualized Apple “Knowledge Navigator” from over 20 years ago? The day is dawning. Hello Siri.
Watch These Scientists Grow Bones Using Lego Robots | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
“Like it or not, all scientific research costs money, and we in the research field work hard to be creative about how to do the most research and the most exciting and groundbreaking research for the least amount of money.” That’s Michelle Oyen , a researcher at the University of Cambridge. She and student Daniel Strange are growing bones in the lab. That sounds impressive enough, until you learn that they’re not just growing bones. They’re growing bones using off-the-shelf Lego Mindstorm kits. You may call the idea innovative.Everyone and their mama are about apps these days. No wonder there are so many new companies in this space, with more emerging every day. As a matter of fact, according to one statistic, the app economy accounted for nearly half a million new jobs on the market, which is an impressive figure alone. But that’s not all. Mobile apps have also changed the way we do many things, bringing a number of improvements to our everyday lives. People are using apps to get (and stay) in shape, remember things, get organized, save on their purchases (deals), save on gas, get in touch with other people and so on.
The Radical Growth of the App Economy [Infographic]
The Future Of Service Is Data | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
Before I lose you, let me inspire you. Ami Dar, executive director of Idealist.org, painted this vision for me about a year ago: A homeless shelter in Topeka, Kansas, desperately needs haircuts for its clients; a barber down the street would gladly give free haircuts. Unfortunately, neither knows the other exists. There are millions of good intentions floating around the world and an equal number of needs. Currently, there is no efficient way for them to find each other.Left: Austin on Sunday, after rain dispersed. If you didn’t attend SXSW and want a first hand perspective (or maybe you did go and partied too hard) then this post is for you. There’s a lot to learn from SXSW: A Petri dish of social and interactive behaviors, a bellwether of what could be a trend for the year.
SXSW Interactive 2012: As Crowd Swells, New Technologies Emerge for Intimate Relationships « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) We’re at the dawn of the tablet era now. Earlier this month, Apple sold 3 million of its new iPad during the opening weekend, with some analysts expecting over 60 million of the tablets to be sold worldwide. What’s more, e-book readers are selling even more briskly than tablets. People are using those e-readers, too.
Are Apps The Future of Book Publishing? - Forbes
Move over Foursquare, SXSW’s next big location app is Highlight
The latest in mobile trends is "ambient social networking." And leading the pack is an app that recommends users with similar interests and mutual friends: Highlight There’s a new trend set to emerge at this year’s SXSW know as “ambient social networking.” At the helm of this burgeoning trend is the budding two-person startup, Highlight , headed by founder and CEO, Paul Davison. While in the past, Foursquare and Gowalla were the location-based apps that made headlines, the latest innovation a is new breed that sits on your phone and runs silently behind the scenes. Rather than the check-ins feature that even Foursquare founder, Dennis Crowley, has admitted was losing steam, ambient social networking applications will only notify users with a pop-up notification when another user of the same application approaches your immediate vicinity.
Three Technologies that Will Change the Way We Shop | DigitalNext: A Blog on Emerging Media and Technology - Advertising Age
On the heels of two major powwows on technology and retail-- CES and the National Retail Federation's big show --shopper marketers are heading back to their offices trying to make sense of what big ideas are coming out of these conferences. Understanding the technologies that will change the way we shop is the first step. At the end of the day, retailers and brand marketers want to know: Which of these gadgets or do-dads will move more units? While much buzzed-about technologies like touch-to-pay Near Field Communication (NFC) or augmented reality glasses are awe inspiring, in the retail universe, the widespread adoption and fulfillment of these technologies at scale is still a few years off.Anything You Want | Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Blog - By Mitch Joel at Twist Image
What If You Can Have It All? This past week, Montreal hosted the first-ever International Startup Festival (from July 13th - 15th, 2011). It was attended by close to one thousand participants from all over the world - all of which were hopeful of leaving the drudgery of nine-to-five work to start their own entrepreneurial venture and let go of a traditional working environment. Moving towards being a Founder of a Startup is the 2011 version of "take this job and shove it," but the journey can be long, hard and confusing. This is one of the reasons why so many people attend events like this. It's also the main reason why the majority of startups never succeed.Near Future
User Driven Innovation
Crowdsourced science
Travel
TV 2.0
Real Time
Work 2.0
Nowadays, our gadgets meld seamlessly into our lives straight out of the box. Once charged up, we can make sense of them after a few minutes of exploratory button-pushing. The horror of VCR programming seems like a faint memory, thanks in large part to Steve Jobs and Apple, whose intuitive user interfaces (UIs) have informed everything from thermostats to social media sites.
14 Of The Year's Best Ideas In Interface Design | Co.Design
Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu
Presentation on rethinking the way we’ve been designing websites for mobile devices - for Over The Air 2010 in London by Bryan Rieger of Yiibu.Depending on who you talk to, the fact that you need a light to read e-paper-based e-readers like the Kindle is either a strength or a weakness. It’s become part of the branding, after all: “just like real paper!” But with increasing competition from LCD-based devices, it might be that E-Ink and its many clients will need to level the playing field. How about a softly-glowing screen? The eBook Reader points out a newish technology being pitched as the next step in passive displays.