There's an interesting discussion going on over at lifehacker about the best ifttt "recipes." Ifttt is "if this then that" and is an automation program that does amazing, very cool things. I've integrated it with my wemo, for example, and have it turning off and on my lights in the den and logging when there is action or motion in the kitchen. This is one of those posts you'll want to look at the comments.
Once you set up Skydrive on Windows 8, you'll want to active Skydrive on IFTTT.com if you're using it for automation (I've written about this very cool app before.) It has many cool things that you can do (many like you can do with dropbox.) I'm using Skydrive for some things with school.
If you use Diigo but are researching a certain topic for a book or term paper and also use Evernote, I recommend setting up an ifttt.com recipe similar to this one I'm using for my collaborative writing book. Everything tagged "collaborative writing" goes automatically to my collaborative writing book.
You could use this for a course. You could take everything on Diigo tagged with the course number into a notebook (or into a Google spreadsheet, for that matter.) There are many other sources of information you can use to collect information on a topic in one place.
Phillip's hue is a lighting automation system. I was perusing ifttt.com and noticed some cool things like using hue to match instagram images (not sure why I'd want to do that.) I would, however, be interested in changing lighting in my room depending upon what we're doing. I do think color has a lot of impact as does smell and other environmental factors. What impact would it have -I don't know - but it is something that is now possible.