grinderbot:

Listening to music is nice and probably the most obvious answer, but I intend to do some very creative things with it. The implant itself is completely undetectable to the naked eye. The device & coil necklace are are easily concealed under my shirt so nobody can really see it. I can see myself using it with the gps on my smartphone to navigate city streets on foot. I plan to hook it up to a directional mic of some sort (possibly disguised as a shirt button or something) so I can hear conversations across a room. Having a mic hooked up to it and routed through my phone would be handy. You could use a simple voice stress analysis app to detect when people might be lying to you. Not to say that is a hard science, but I’m sure it could come in handy at the poker table or to pre-screen business clients. I have a contact mic that allows you to hear through walls. That might be my next implant actually.

I plan to hook this thing up to an ultrasonic rangefinder so that hums can be heard when objects get closer or further away. This will basically give you a sense of echolocation like a bat has. This could be really handy for blind people (many of whom use echolocation for navigation) since it will be audible only to them and doesn’t require making clicking noises with your mouth or using some other manual noisemaker. Echolocation is something I want to start practicing with now because I might be legally blind soon. I lost much of vision in my right eye overnight a few years back. I just woke up and couldn’t see well up close or far away. My other eye has compensated for the vision loss but the doc says the good eye can go at any time and when it does it will be very rapid. I’ll lose my drivers license, won’t be able to read, and glasses won’t correct the problem. Making money will be harder. A cornea transplant will be my only option and that is a bit out of my budget at the moment. So I figure learning to navigate with echolocation is a good thing to develop now, not that I’ve resigned myself to blindness or anything.

Beyond that, I’d love to hook a geiger counter up to it and experience the world or radiation. Living near the old Nevada nuclear testing grounds provides a lot of opportunity for this. I wouldn’t mind finding some yellow cake uranium while on a hike because that stuff is expensive. Hearing a gentle hiss around warm objects might be a novel way to experience the thermal realm. The implant is going to allow for a lot of new senses. Plugging new sensors into the jack will allow me to experience a lot of the world that is normally invisible. Well, it still might be invisible but now it will be audible. This new synesthesia of sorts is an exciting way to explore the world and develop new instincts about the way the world works around you.

brucesterling:

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Pre-Announcing:  Yahoo! Tumblickr GLASS!

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Dear Yahoo! user-base:

  I have  now accumulated 40,000 of you.  That sure didn’t take y’all long.  

  So,  you ten thousand new guys must have caught on about my exciting role at the new Yahoo! combined Flickr-Tumblr service: Yahoo! Tumblickr.  Yep, things have been lively at the Tumblickr R&D lab.   

      I bet you’re not surprised to learn  this:  we’ve been way-busy with  our new Tumblickr Glass!  head-mounted display.

    I happen to be a widely-known expert on “Google Glass” (because I’ve been seen wearing one in my Flickr set).  Of course I was quickly recruited for the crash Yahoo! development of our awesome Tumblr head-wearable.  

     Once again, my horde of followers will be the first to know about it.  Pretty convenient, eh? 

     Obviously, “Google Glass” is light years ahead of any similar face-grabber gizmo that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple or Facebook are cooking up.  However, luckily for Tumblr, our Yahoo chieftainette,  MarissaMayr.tumblr.com, is an ex-Googler.  Those absent-minded Moonshot geniuses over at the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, well, they forgot to confiscate Marissa’s house keys, wink wink.  (Please don’t go forwarding or hearting that.)  

    Anyhow,  our ultra-cool if slightly-purloined knock-off of Glass  works pretty good — almost as good as Google Glass itself, almost, kind of, sorta works.  It’s even better, in some ways, since it’s much cuter.   Also, Tumblickr Glass! has exciting new Yahoo! features, such as the Yahoo! exclamation point on our Glass!, which neatly avoids Google’s trademarks.

     Google Glass merely pipes a chain of images over your right eyeball — basically, they look like old-skool 8bit screens hanging in midair.  Here at the Yahoo! Tumblickr Glass! lab,  we have *reversed this process.*  How?  We turn the camera toward your eyeball, and we take pictures of whatever image is reflected on the surface of your eye!

      That’s right!  Instead of clumsily snapping pictures whenever the userbase talks to the device — “OK Glass take a picture”  — Yahoo! Tumblickr Glass! inverts that process, and  turns *everything you see* into a nifty Tumblr-style jiff or jaypeg!  

       Then we store those pix for you, in the cloud, forever!  If you figure out later that you want to upload something to Tumblr, fine, go ahead, that’s your lookout.  You can just pick it out of the colossal database of everything that you ever saw.

       “But where on Earth do you get the battery, bandwidth and storage to obtain millions of pictures from every Glass! user?” — you may ask me.  I mean, you’ll ask me that if you’re some weirdo techno-geek — if you’re the usual Tumblr newbie, teen or cat-fancier, you (a) won’t ask and (b) wouldn’t understand if I told you.  

     The cool part is that I’m LEGALLY FORBIDDEN to tell you how it works. Yup, we can do it all right — but I can’t tell you how.   Because my lips are sealed by federal secret court order!  You may have heard of the “National Security Agency” (kids, if you haven’t, look them up on Yahoo! Search (because it’ll be the first time you ever used that service)).

      Anyway, the NSA, our cool new business allies,  are some super-smart PhD computer-science and crypto dudes who live under a hill in Fort Meade.  Man, do they ever have cloud storage in there.  Anybody who can store a “cloud” under a “hill” can solve minor tech issues like bandwidth and battery life.  

       “But — but why would I want to become a spy for the NSA whose every waking moment is uploaded straight to Yahoo!?”  Sure — that’s a natural question — but if you’re me asking that, you’re too damn old!   That’s right, geezer!   Wake up!  Your day is over!  The native Tumblr demographic is tattooed emo teen chicks stripping off their tops at the Skrillex gig!   

       Tumblr teen girls — the coolest chicks on the Internet, bar none — they’re gonna be the early adopters for Tumblickr Glass. Them, grandpa.  Not you, all gray-haired and indignant, still muttering about the Fourth Amendment like some kind of right-wing crank!   

       These inventive, adaptable young women with unusual haircuts  — tomorrow’s voters — they already know that the NSA is gonna crush all opposition underfoot,  just like the NRA did.  They may be high as kites on blunts, but they’re not stupid.  Just wait till you see the awesome packaging we’ve created for their big sexy plastic Glass! frames — dolphins, seagulls, squids, bacon, unicorns, spangles, thongs, pug-dogs, everything that Tumblr chicks really dig.

      Once they get into it, you’ll come around.  You sure don’t want to be the only guy around who *ISN’T* a spy for the NSA — any more than you want to be the last guy on your block with an unregistered assault weapon.  So it’ll take us a while, but as soon as the user-base catches on to the New Normal, man, these headmounted spy displays are gonna sell themselves. Just like you will.  When you venture out in public without your Glass! exposed, you’ll feel even nakeder than the  naked  people on Tumblr.

     Forward to 50,000!

LIVE 10,000 YEARS CHAIRMAN BRUCES