The Order of the Spork

It's clear that the Fraunhofer researchers didn't set out to hit this milestone in camera technology. What they were really interested in was trying to improve upon endoscope technology. An endoscope involves a camera at the tip of a tube. The tube contains a wire that transmits the image back to a computer. The tube also serves as a way to physically manipulative the camera to snake it through the gastrointestinal tract, for instance. Typical endoscopes cost around $25,000-30,000 so they must be reused many times. Because the endoscope is going in and out of people's bodies, it must be cleaned and sterilized between each use, which just drives up the cost of maintaining the instrument. It's no wonder that hospitals charge more than $2,000 per endoscopy. All of this, however, would change if the camera was cheap enough to throw away.

The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow, all of which activate the microphones in users' iPhone or Android devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.

Research out of Brigham Young University shows that political entries on Wikipedia are quite accurate and reliable locations to get information. 

Wired summarizes the state of the "Do Not Track" flag for browsers.  Only Chrome is left not moving forward with it.  There does still remain ambiguity as to what the flag means. 

encryption, as a preventive measure, assumes the primary threat is coming from the "outside" - typically (but not exclusively), in the form of a hacker trying to intercept communications or extract data from a lost or stolen device. While such threats are real and you absolutely must guard against them, we've reached a crucial point in the evolution of mobile technology, and just as importantly, user behavior where the primary mobile security threat is no longer the faceless and malicious hacker, but instead the legitimate, fully authenticated owner of the device itself.

an indepth look into the various claims being made by Google and Microsoft. 

An update of Rober Shiller's famous chart showing value of home prices over more than 100 years with predictions extended to guestimate how much further home prices have to fall to get back to the historical average. 

Google announces three new languages to translate on Android and this article summarizes just what's happened in the last year on this front.  

New tools from Google help integrate Android 2.2+ smartphones into corporate intranets. 

Open Atrium is an open source platform designed specifically to make great teams communicate better. An intranet in a box with: a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all. Let's not forget that it's also completely customizable.

"A sotry about the Semantic Web".  Author also provides a downloadable transcript and video.  

Major update to Google Maps now includes ability to "Check in" to home and see a history of how much time you've been at home/work/out.  

"The 'Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience' was an ambitious collaboration between Cisco and Musion Systems, which took place during the opening of Cisco's Globalization Centre East in Bangalore, India. Musion seamlessly integrated their 3D holographic display technology with Cisco's TelePresence's system to create the world's first real time virtual presentation."

Tool allows you to connect Amazon's CloudDrive as a mappable folder in Windows.  Drag and drop files to Cloud Drive just like you would any other folder.   

"uClassify is a free web service where you can easily create your own text classifiers. You can also directly use classifiers that have already been shared by the community. Examples: Language detection, Web page categorization, Written text gender and age recognition, Mood, Spam filter, Sentiment,, Automatic e-mail support.   So what do you want to classify on? Only your imagination is the limit!"