Archive for March, 2008:
New York cab of the future?
Mar. 20 – Ford unveils a taxi cab concept that’s short but tall, offering lots of storage space.
The cab is 30 percent more fuel efficient than current cabs.
Fred Katayama reports from the New York International Auto Show.
Robo-chop
Mar. 25 – Fighting robots battle for supremacy in the latest of Japan’s Robo-One Championships.
More than 100 humanoid robots were entered for the two-day contest which, at the end, saw less than half still standing and divided between heavyweights and featherweights.
myYearbook
Social networking is all the rage these days and one of the latest and greatest sites on the national scene is myYearbook.com, which is sort of a combination of the viral widgets of Facebook and style and features of Myspace. The network already has over five million members and is growing rapidly.
On their “Our Story” page, they claim the site was created by a couple high school kids, which I find hard to believe, considering the venture capital funding and national advertising contracts the site had already attained at its inception.No, this was a website created by corporate America with the sole purpose of APPEARING to be a hip site created by and for kids. Their claims are about as believable as boy bands writing their own songs.
Despite this, they are situated nicely to become the new cool hangout now that even parents and grandparents are hanging out on Myspace by the tens of thousands. After all, once everyone knows about a site like Myspace, it’s no longer cool, so the in-crowd has to find somewhere else to hang out. Whether or not myYearbook is that new destination has yet to be determined.
Dinosaur wows the techies at CeBIT
Mar. 5 – Pleo the robotic dinosaur proves to be a star attraction at the CeBIT annual computer expo in Germany.
Pleo was designed by its creators, the Californian company Ugobe, to emulate the appearance and behaviour of a week-old infant Camerasaurus.
It’s being marketed as a household pet.
Helen Long reports.
The ‘Morph’ mobile of the future
Mar. 7 – A concept phone now on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art demonstrates Nokia’s vision for how handsets might evolve.
The Morph concept is the result of a collaboration between the Nokia Research Centre and Cambridge University’s nanoscience centre.
Reuters Technology Correspondent Matt Cowan reports on the likelihood of it becoming a reality.
Stuff On My Cat
Stuff On My Cat is one of those silly, time wasting sites that I visit maybe once a year when I remember it exists. It’s not quite as funny as its sister site, I Can Has Cheezeburger, but it’s worth the occasional visit. The photos on the site feature, as you may have guessed, cats with stuff on them. If you’re wondering why this is funny, well, you’re either the type of person who gets it or you’re not.
