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Check out this article I found on Gizmodo by Rosa Golijan …. What ya think?

Every single day we oooh and aahhh over the latest design concepts, but right now, let’s focus on one of the minds behind such designs and smile in awe of her motivations and inspirations. Meet MIT designer, Neri Oxman.

Oxman
went through medical school, but abandoned that career path for a
“mishmash of design, architecture, art, and computer programming.”

She
works out of MIT’s media lab and strives to bring about her vision of
the future which consists of all objects living, breathing, and
adapting as we interact with them. She imagines organic architecture
designs, nanotube walls which change size, chairs that change shape as
you sit, DNA-encoded clothing that grows with you. She explains that
studying how human bones adjust, getting thicker when a woman is
pregnant or thinner when individuals are in outer space, inspired that
vision of hers.

As with many other designs that we see,
Oxman’s are stunning in their intricate plays with textures and
materials, but to me the dreamy vision that pushes her to create them
adds so much more to the way I view her works. I expect them to draw
breath. Maybe we should start taking closer looks at the minds behind
the eye-candy we so enjoy. Are there any objects, maybe even gadgets,
that truly made you want to know how they were inspired? [Materialecology Blog via Materialecology via Esquire]

This week we picked up some of the Twitter chatter around Microsoft, the agony and the ecstasy, (oh yeah, and Windows 7).

Retrevo’s Top 5 Tech Tweets of The Week – 10.20.09

Note: All Twitters remain the property of their original author and are presented here, as they were found on Twitter.

5. beckymarlow That Windows Phone advert’s scary – who wants to be followed out of their house by Outlook and Word?!

4. wildafrikan Anybody have Microsoft office for for mac? (Ahem), clearing my throat for a reason.

3. antecoyote Finally got my Windows 7 student discount e-mail. Too bad I’m broke.

2. paulingalls so, I let a windows 7 update run. now all my settings and applications are gone. stupid me expecting anything good from microsoft. #fail

Retrevo 140 Award Winner:

1. Kichigai @radiocolin Ppl are scared of new things. It seems Microsoft doesn’t have the guts to say “Change Happens. Deal with it” like FaceBook does.

This Week’s Honorable Mentions

BradatNOS Just finished a install of Windows 7 Ultimate within VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. Total time with updates = 45 minutes, not bad Microsoft. 

Cait_Elizabeth just realized how inconvenient it is not to have Microsoft Word on the computer: really really inconvenient

JonathanWorent Awe friggin sweet, they have some Microsoft Surfaces in the lobby downstairs. How wants to play me in a mad game of Checkers? #aea

dannydehlin Absolutely amazing how crippling it can be when you work from home and your Microsoft Exchange server bites the dust.

forestbaker I’d just like to say that Windows 7 is totally awesome!

This week’s tweets focus on life, love, loathing, and longing from the eReader side of the Twittersphere. You know you’re a book geek when…

Retrevo’s Top 5 Tech Tweets of The Week – 10.05.09

Note: All Twitters remain the property of their original author and are presented here, as they were found on Twitter.

5. lovelee8 Kindle died. Reduced to doc office lit

4. rickpond Holy cow! About a week’s worth of reading and I JUST now dropped one of 4 bars of battery on my Sony eReader! Crazy!

3. Muzzwald why would anyone want a kindle? surely the point of reading a book on the tube is to show the book off to everyone else (eh @sjoeyrob)

2. sherigurock A Kindle tragedy – fell from my nightstand and broke (98% thru The Lost Symbol!). A 2ft drop was all it took. Will @amazon stand behind it?

Retrevo 140 Award Winner:

1. alexandriabrown You know you’re a book geek when you know what book is being used in an ad for the Sony ereader by reading the name of the chapter

This Week’s Honorable Mentions

KickMeHarder Time to read. I love my Kindle. I don’t love the tax I get to pay on my downloads. Bastards. (word of the day is *******.) 

KateJackman Why can’t every company makes things as well as Sony do? I think I’m in love with my lovely red laptop and ereader! *mwah* Sony!

geektonic After using Shelly’s Kindle to read Dan Brown’s new book I have gadget envy – won’t be able to resist a ebook reader longer than 2Q 2010

Dorto Everyone on the subway had a Kindle this morning;naturally i now want 1.This might be exactly what i need to begin my love affair with lit.

Every week Retrevo scours the Twittersphere, looking for funny and interesting tweets about tech. Some are strange, some are serious, and some just make you wonder what the person Twittering was thinking. The Twitters that reach the weekly number one spot have hereby earned the prestigious Retrevo 140 Award.

Retrevo’s Top 5 Tech Tweets of The Week – 9.30.09

Note: All Twitters remain the property of their original author and are presented here, as they were found on Twitter.

5. KarenEPrice Woke up with a scratchy throat. Blaming the six days of friggin’ rain. Oh and the lack of zoom on the Iphone makes me sad.

4. berberich I could be watching last night’s episode of Fringe right now if I could find my iPod under all of the stuff in this van

3. Dianexis Some guy on the bus saw me with my zune hd, he then told me all the reasons an ipod touch is better. His best reason? “Its made by apple”…

2. taniyagrayson I mean if my iPhone “accidentally” falls in the toilet, gets ran over, dropped from a 5 story building or all the above..I’d be super sad…

Retrevo 140 Award Winner:

1. Tim_Stevens Surprised to learn the Tachyon XC helmet cam has a security camera mode. I can finally learn what talk shows my dog watches during the day.

This Week’s Honorable Mentions

sciencegoddess Guess what? I broke down and ordered a Kindle DX! Then I read about Apple Tablet. http://bit.ly/MCsRG

typesetjez YOU GUYS. December, it’s gonna be EPIC. I am so excited. 97 days is far too many. (and yes, I have a countdown app on my iPod already)

Sunshine_Kath haha my cell phone is SO useful. W/o a good Bluetooth, it serves as a great paperweight. It also serves as a good doorstop.

By JAY ALABASTER

CHIBA, Japan (AP) – Japan’s big-name electronic manufacturers are readying flat-screen TVs that can show high-definition movies and video games in 3-D for launch next year.

At the country’s biggest consumer electronics show, which opened Tuesday just outside of Tokyo, all the major makers had large 3-D prototypes on display. Visitors to company booths at the CEATEC show donned special electronic glasses and watched as soccer balls flew toward them in sports clips and virtual heroes dodged deep into the background of video games.

Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp. have both said they will bring their first models to market next year. Details about what will be available to watch on the new TVs are still sparse, though the companies said they want to begin with movies and games.

“Content is the most important thing,” said Masanobu Inoe, a Panasonic engineer who worked on his company’s new 3-D plasma sets.

The companies are working on standards for broadcasts and discs, which may end up as an enhancement of Blu-ray, the high-definition format designed to supersede standard DVDs. Sony, which also runs a large movie studio, plans to release selections from its holdings.

“They will be in a standard format that can be viewed on other companies’ TVs as well,” said Sony spokeswoman Satsuki Shinnaka.

Some companies such as Sharp Corp. displayed 3-D sets but are waiting until more content and TV broadcasts are available before they set a product launch date.

Most 3-D technology involves showing two images, one for each eye, that viewed together are seen as a single three-dimensional scene.

Movies have been shown for decades using an older technology that requires bicolored glasses to filter out an image for each eye. The new generation of 3-D TVs uses a technology that rapidly flickers between two images, together with electronic glasses that allow each eye to see only one. Without the glasses, images on the screens are blurry and a bit nauseating to watch.

Toshiba Corp. also introduced a new TV, slated to go on sale later this year in Japan for about $11,000, that includes a high-tech chip it developed together Sony and IBM Corp.

The ‘Cell’ chip, which is also used in Sony’s PlayStation 3, allows the TV to show and record eight channels at the same time. A prototype, due for release sometime after next year, can convert standard images to 3-D images for viewing with glasses.

Other companies including South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and Hyundai have already launched 3-D TVs with lower specifications. Cable stations in Japan broadcast short clips in 3-D a few times each day.

The coming wave of 3-D TVs has been enabled by new technologies, but is also driven by manufacturers searching for ways to spur sales and differentiate themselves from a host of low-end TV makers cranking out flat-screen models at low prices.

But in a keynote speech to start the show, Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo said his company would not lose sight of products for lower-income countries, where markets are rapidly expanding.

“In each region, we want to create a new ‘volume zone’ of products that people want,” he said.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All right reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Source: BN9.com

Google just officially announced that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave tomorrow. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

What is Google Wave?

Even after using Google Wave for a few months now, it is still hard to describe exactly what it is. It’s as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organization, or just to organize a pub crawl, as Wave’s Lars Rasmussen points out in today’s blog post. There can be no doubt that Wave feels oddly familiar, especially because of its typical Google design, yet it also represents an alien concept for most users, as it combines so many services into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

We got a chance to talk to the core Wave team, including Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon, last night. They were obviously quite excited about the launch and told us about some of the details regarding the invitation process, Wave’s current features, and some of the team’s plans for the future.

Highlights

We will look at the details of the launch below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Google will send out more than 100,000 invites tomorrow
• they will go to three groups: current users on the sandbox server, users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com over the last few months (first-come, first-served), and a few select enterprise users on Google Apps accounts
• more invites will be sent out as the team expands capacity
• users will not be able to invite their friends to Wave directly, but every Wave user will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 friends who will get to the front of the queue for new accounts
• all Wave accounts will move from the sandbox to the wave.google.com domain
• Wave’s contact management system will be integrated with Google Contacts
• the Wave team will highlight robots and widgets from a select number of vendors
• Internet Explorer users will be prompted to install and use Chrome Frame

Wave.Google.com

While the early Wave testers were on a wavesandbox.com account, starting tomorrow, all of these accounts and all the new users will move over to the wave.google.com domain. If you have tested Wave before, don’t expect any new features yet. The Wave team plans to add new features over the next few months, but the current focus in on making sure that the system can scale.

Nominate 8 of Your Friends

Unlike the Gmail beta, Google Wave users who get into the preview tomorrow won’t be able to invite friends directly. Instead, they will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 of their friends for accounts. As the Wave team plans to continue to send out additional invites as it stabilizes the system and adds capacity, these nominated accounts will move to the front of the queue and should get accounts relatively quickly.

For tomorrow, Google officially says that it will send out about 100,000 invitations, though as the Wave team told us yesterday, it will probably send out a few more than that.

Google Contacts

Google Wave will be able to tap into your Google contacts (the developer preview didn’t offer this feature). For now, it will only show contacts who are already using Google Wave, though.

Invite a Robot to Your Wave

On Wednesday, 100,000 users will also be able to use some of the robots and widgets that the developers in the preview wrote over the last few months. These range from widgets that allow you to play games with friends to sophisticated teleconferencing apps, with Twitter and blogging apps in between. We will have a close look at some of the more interesting applications tomorrow, but the featured apps will include a real-time, competitive Sudoku game, a Lonely Planet travel widget, and video chat from 6Rounds and a teleconferencing plugin from Ribbit.

For now, Google Wave will not feature an app store or marketplace for widgets and robots. Instead, every user will see a wave with a small number of featured apps in their accounts and be able to install these thanks to the new installer process the Wave team introduced just a short while ago.

Chrome Frame

When Google launched Chrome Frame, it’s Internet Explorer plugin that can replace the IE rendering engine with Google Chrome, the Wave team already announced that it would support this feature. And indeed, when you go to the Wave homepage with IE, you will now be prompted to install Chrome Frame. As Lars Rasmussen told us, the team is very enthusiastic about Chrome Frame, as it allows the developers to focus on features instead of making sure that Wave runs in Internet Explorer.

In our own experience, Wave definitely works best in Chrome. It will work just fine in Safari and Firefox, though for the most fluid experience, Chrome is currently the best browser.

Still Some Kinks to Work Out

The Wave team stresses that there are still a lot of problems to work out before Wave can really live up to all of its promises. While there was some doubt that the Wave team could actually get the system scaled up and ready for a wider launch earlier this summer, our experience with the developer preview has been very positive over the last few weeks and we definitely noticed that the system became fast and more stable. Now that 100,000 new users will join in, we will obviously have to wait and see how well Wave can scale up to this kind of demand.

For now, chances are that Wave will still crash at times. For major updates, the team will also have to take the whole system down for a few hours now and then.

Missing Features

Some features, however, still need to be implemented. Some of these are quite basic, like the ability to remove users from a wave, while others are a bit more complicated, like the ability to set specific user permissions on a wave. According to the Wave team, many of these missing features will be implemented within the next few months.

How Will People React?

Overall, it will be interesting to see how the Wave infrastructure holds up tomorrow and how people will react when they first see and use Wave.