Digital Degustation

Coin replaces the need to carry multiple cards

From the creator of Flipboard – Coin is a regular-size card device that consolidates all your credit card and debit card info in one nifty piece of technology. When you want to use it, you simply flick to the card you want to use and, using the data encrypted in Coin, your chosen card is activated and ready to use at POS. To get your card data onto the Coin card, you swipe your existing cards through a card reader connected to your smartphone. Surprising a bank did not have the foresight to think of this?

Forget Sepia, today’s photo craze is colourising famous black and white shots

There is no shortage of enthusiasm for nostalgia in photography these days. The popularity of sepia, black and white and other historic filters on instagram tells this story. But suddenly we’re seeing a new trend of bringing history to light… through colourising. While colourising old photographs is nothing new, it’s the application of this technique applied to some of the world’s most famous snaps that has given this practice some notoriety of late. Click on the picture of Anne Frank (below) to see more of the colourised pictures.

Subway dispenses free tickets in turn for squats

The Russian Olympic Committee has cleverly integrated some behaviour change thinking into their communications strategy ‘to add elements of sport into everyday life’, by creating a special vending machine in Moscow that dispenses free subway tickets to those who do 30 squats. The squat for rides machine is built using sensors that monitor squatting activity for two minutes, after which the machine generates a free ride on the subway. Click on the picture below for more.

You can now touch things through computers

The insanely brilliant people over at MIT have developed an interface whereby humans can directly engage with the physical world using digital information. Unveiling inFORM, a dynamic shape display, which is a Tangible User Interface to help encourage the “heightened ability to sense and manipulate the physical world” that humans have evolved. Simply, it means touching real objects located somewhere else via a computer – watch the video.

Have you ever been lost in an Ikea? There’s an app for that

For a population who are increasingly reliant on our devices to find our way in the world, it’s a problem when the technology we rely on, GPS navigation, doesn’t work well indoors. That why startup Indoor Atlas has started mapping indoors places like giant Las Vegas hotels and more practically, mines. Using magnetometers, a native feature of smartphones, they can detect anomalies in the magnetic fields that emanate from such things as steel beams in buildings and this allows them to create a picture of interior spaces from which users can find their way to ‘Ikea bedding’ or an emergency exit.

Amanda Kramer, strategic account director, Naked Communications

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