Every week Naked Communications' strategist Lach Hall scours the web for all things digital, quirky and innovative and presents it in bite-sized chunks for Digital Degustation.

 

 

A Petition Signing Robot

In an effort to petition the Australian government to fund more clinical trials for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, The Duchenne Foundation and Save Our Sons have created “The Most Powerful Arm Ever Invented” – a live-streamed, petition-signing robot. Pledge your support by connecting with Facebook and the robot hand signs your Facebook name to the mass petition, snaps a photo then automatically posts it to your Facebook wall.

 

New York Times Creates an Automatic Haiku Detector

The New York Times has created an automatic haiku detector in another move that shows the innovative side of their tech department. ‘The Haiku Bot’ scans the front page of the New York Times for sentence fragments that unintentionally form a haiku structure. Once found, they’re published on the Haiku Tumblr and exceptional non sequiturs are shared on the New York Times Twitter account. For  more on this click here.

 

App Concept Combines Lego Creation with Video Game

It’s difficult to pry kids away from screens these days to play with old-fashioned toys. However, a group of Miami Ad School students have come up with a brilliant idea that combines the two. Lego Storybuilder is an app concept where the game story requires kids to build elements with Lego off screen to complete missions and progress to the next stage on screen. To see the video click here.

 

NYPD Facial Recognition Unit Scans Social Media to Help Identify Criminals

The digital era is a terrible time to be a criminal. In the past, an unidentified criminal caught on CCTV would need to be identified via the likes of a hit and miss public broadcast. Now police in New York have facial recognition technology that can take the same image and search for a match on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, making identification much more efficient. For more on this topic please click here.

 

The Facebook Phone Turns Out to be Facebook Home

All rumours of a Facebook phone were laid to rest last Thursday when Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Home. Home has the potential to be a massive step for Facebook in mobile and whilst not actually an operating system (more of a skin), it behaves like one. The premise of Home is to have Facebook at the centre of your mobile experience, so that no matter what you are doing on your phone, you have the option to access Facebook from any app to talk to friends or let others know what you are having for breakfast. 

For more on Facebook Home see B&T's coverage here. Also see Mashable's article by clicking here.