Recently in emerging technology Category

Being a geek with one eye on the internets at all times, I am finding that there are a lot of technical marvels that are slowly sliding into mainstream acceptance. Okay, lest you think I've forgotten, I definitely qualify as an early adopter. No question. But take a look at this bicycle hubcap, that makes any standard bike an electric hybrid:

As someone who spends a lot of time on Google apps, I follow Google's blog for the insights and quick tips. This afternoon, Google posted an Update on Google Wave which basically says that as much fun as it was to make and cool to play with, high on innovation and reframing our ideas of communication, Wave just wasn't taking off as they'd hoped.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave's innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily "liberate" their content from Wave.

EpicWin is an an iPhone app that combines a to-do list with a streamlined RPG, so you're rewarded for completing your real-world tasks with XP, loot and levelling-up. I could totally see us using this in higher education. You know I'm going to be all over this when it's finally released. I want to be a Mistress of Domination. 

Ooops. I mean, Task Domination. Yeah, that.

Yes, I Foursquare. Yes, there's an app for that -- and I use it. A lot. I have a lot of mayorships, but it's mostly because I live in a small town. Okay, we have more than two stoplights, but believe me; to me, this is a very small town. But that doesn't make today's Oooh, Shiny! any less cool. Where Do You Go (WDYG) is a Google maps and Foursquare mashup that creates a heatmap from your Foursquare checkins. You can customize it, specify another city (besides the one where you currently are), and choose a color scheme from a handfull of different looks -- and finetune it to suit. Perhaps even cooler, once you create your map with your OAuth credentials, it will continue to pull your checkin data and dynamically update your map while you're on the go.

Phones are incredibly personal. If you're like me, they contain most of our lives within their circuitry. The smarter these phones get, the more dependent I get. My CrackBerry greatly expanded my capabilities to manage the data in my life. I could access my email, and add addresses and other relevant data to my contacts. I could even access the internet, although I was dependent on sites which had the foresight to have mobile css. 

I used to be a web designer. I knew how to hard code, and I scoffed at design applications like Dreamweaver and FrontPage (okay, so it's appropriate to scoff at FrontPage). They would do hideous things to the code, and I'd be above it all, pulling out a simple html editor that wouldn't add crap to the back. After all, the beauty of a web page is both what's on the screen and the code behind it. I knew my CSS, and I could rip apart pages with the best of them. My feeling about design is pretty clear, and whenever I'd get myself tied up in knots, I'd come back to KISS the basics: Keep It Simple, Stupid. 

Back in the day, I used to be a DJ. To prove how old I am, I was on the air back before Howard Stern could say anything he wanted, in olden days when you actually had to have an FCC license. Really. I spent 10 years in radio, first in high school outside Princeton, then in college in Austin, and even in a renegade SUNY station in midtown Manhattan. I even spun at a dance club for a while on the east side (dead shift Sunday-Mondays, but still) until a couple guys with guns came running through the club and out the back door. I decided I could do without that kind of excitement--or critics, for that matter. And of course, I was heavy into the indie music scene, with friends in groups playing all the cool NYC clubs (a moment of silence, please, for the now defunct CBGB, may it rest in historic music and sticky floor peace). If I wasn't with the band, I knew a guy who knew a guy. I've had more backstage passes than I can count, and I felt seriously cool, even if it was only by association.

Daniel Frommelt was in town, as usual, for the Penn State Web Conference and, this year, totally blew me away with his presentation on Augmented Reality (AR). It's the first time I've really come into contact with this emerging technology, and I was mesmerized. Here's the slick video from "We've got a huge budget and a ton of people to throw at this" GE.