Group items tagged

The lessons from an infant industry, including the power of cooperation and importance of regulating with a light touch

"Thingiverse is also introducing a new "Follow" button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you'll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  " As Bruce Sterling says, it's almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality - you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors - and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We're talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 

an open-source platform that simplifies this kind of mobile data collection. They want to enable a new generation of apps that can detect social and behavioral trends in communities.

"Our group designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people's lives in more fluid and seamless ways. Our aim is to make it easier and more intuitive to benefit from the wealth of useful digital information and services. " Pattie Maes and her group at MIT, lots of fascinating projects here, often making me think 'why isn't this ubiquitous right now already?' One of the reasons might be 'the economy, stupid' - like the idea of being able to swipe a file from one mobile app to another, seamlessly.  But eventually we'll get there. The future is fluid. 

"WeMo lives on your iPhone and uses your home Wi-Fi and mobile internet. Setting up and using it is a snap."

"As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them."