Technology

With the heightened buying frenzy surrounding the launch of Google's new smartphone, the Droid, it was no surprise that someone would piggyback off of the hype! While Google conducts its first-time TV advertising, Flipswap, a trade-in service aggressively jumped into the foray with a unique offer to swap cash for your old 'clunky' iPhones. ( Where was the Administration on this one?)

While many people who have looked into battery electric vehicles are turned away due to range limitations, others are more worried about the long recharge time.  In some cases, these vehicles can take up to a full 8 hours to recharge, which is too long for some people to live with.  However, a newly developed kind of battery may provide the answer to this problem.

Meet 'Foldy', a laundry-folding robot designed by a team at Japan's Keio University. The small, inexpensive robot doesn't just learn how to fold laundry, it remembers its lessons in time for the next load.

The Internet of Things is fast approaching and with it comes Web 3.0, where "social awareness" will replace "social networking." Soon tweets and status updates will become fully automated and generated by the world around us versus us ever having to touch a keyboard again.

Nintendo just can't enough of a good thing and either can buyers of its popular DS-series portable gaming consoles. The answer, in the form of the big-screen DSi LL, arrives in Japan this November 21 but Americans will have to wait until 2010.

November 5: Twitter rolls out Project Retweet to a limited audience. According to their recent blog post, the Twitter echelon wants to see how it  will "work in the wild," before offering it up to the Twitterverse.

Many have tried, but it's been over a decade and none have succeeded in out-Googlin' Google. Yet here we go again, with yet another search engine entering stage right trying to capture our "attention-deficit" attention. Repackaging online search as something new infers the Web has evolved. And while real-time and social search have certainly changed the alchemy of search, what does Leapfish know that has eluded Google et al?

While branding oneself takes time and effort to spin out a new product, re-branding can take several washes to redefine that same brand. Take for example the work United Airlines had to accomplish after breaking someone's guitar. Let alone the number of Twitter apologies issued forth by Chris Brown and Kanye West. But when others do it in reverse and run their good-guy image through a darkside wash cycle, the task might be a little easier. Such is the case with the re-engineering of one Mickey Mouse.

Minimalist and eco-friendly, these cool hallway and stair lights do double-duty as hand rails, so you can see and walk at the same time!

Did the "voice of jihad" just get a little louder? Afghan tribalism has origins that date back 1400 years to the early Muslim and Islamic civilizations. With a lifestyle based on jihad and an economy that thrives on opium trade, who would have thought that these warring factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would ever embrace social media as a means to communicate.

Wisk laundry detergent just launched a new facebook app called WISK-IT that extends their powerful cleaning heritiage into the world of social media. Designed to make it easy to find and remove all those photos on facebook that might be embarrasing, and a general "stain" on your reputation, this is one of those apps that isn't just functional but a great marketing idea. Conceived and developed by TracyLocke, an integrated marketing agency, the WISK-IT app reminds you that "Everyone's got a photo that needs to be washed away."

Automotive styling has undergone some very extreme changes over the past 20 years, and mostly for the better. Sometimes however, a new concept comes along that breaks that mold and really makes us step back and stare.  The BMW Lovos is a perfect example of this kind of concept.

The "watercourse cyclone air cleaner" from Seiwa circulates your car's smelly interior air through water to wash out unwanted impurities. It may not get you high but it WILL leave your ride as fresh as mountain air after a thunderstorm.

The health care reform debate this current legislative season has been more about who could shout the loudest versus who really had something to say. Earning their label as the "Party of No" the GOP's push back on health care has been perceived as protest-for-protest sake.

Honda has been working hard on the upcoming VFR1200 touring bike, with the introduction of a dual clutch gearbox into the motorcycle being among the many pieces of technology they plan on including. On top the more efficient transmission, it now appears that Honda is planning on cylinder deactivation to help keep fuel consumption down as well.

For wordsmiths the world over, a rejection notice is the common denominator shared by the entire literary community whether you are the next Hemingway or a weekend poet. However unwelcoming, those "we regret to inform you" letters have become a right of passage for writers. On the flip side, all an author really wants to see is his or her words in print. To that end Fictionaut, an online social network for fiction writers addresses that need.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch wrote a very insightful article titled "Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell," exposing Zynga and its scam-laden lead gen-type offers devised for their ever-popular Facebook games of Farmville and Mafia Wars. I challenge one of the more ethical game developers to actually use Arrington's expose to develop the real thing - an actual Facebook game called "ScamVille!"

Art, maps,imagery and graphs add context and a visual component to numbers, locations, and information. With as much influx of data we contend with on a daily basis, visualization tools allows our brains to take a rest while perceiving content in a different light. In essence, visualization allows us to stop and smell the pixels, in spite of the fact we might learn a few things along the way.

With the Holiday Season fast approaching, you might want to consider "making your list and checking it twice."Lists are the new order of business in Twitterville. Some say it will take the place of "Follow Fridays." Others think its jumping on the the Google Wave and Enterprise Microblogs' bandwagon.