In some cities the future public service will offer passengers a way to get from A to B, mentally and physically insulated from what’s out there, creating a head space that’s just ripe to feed the message of the day/minute/second. The easiest way to kick-back is to retreat further into your own bubble – using a superlite version of today’s head mounted displays perhaps, or simply your tunes.

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He added that this was one of the finest depictions of the Roman ruler.

The emperor wore exquisitely carved army boots decorated with a lion skin, tendrils and Amazon shields.

The torso was probably covered in bronze armour filled inside with terracotta or wood. When the niche’s vault collapsed in the earthquake, the torso would have exploded.

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What people are buying and participating in has pretty much nothing to do with a TV show, and to look at it as just a “viral marketing” campaign is a complete misunderstanding of what’s going on here. This is a full-on Alternate Reality Game:

“An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.”

Notable prior forays into the ARG world have included promotions for A.I., HALO 2, and Nine Inch Nails’ latest album, Year Zero. But why stop at a campaign, when you can create a culture? In a sense, this kind of “narrative” that takes place in the “real world,” and involves various media to tell a story–which the actions of “participants” certainly do affect–is probably an effective way to think about the contemporary fate of any brand. Every brand. This just happens to be an opportunity to turn the brand itself, and its narrative, into a new form of 21st Century-compliant entertainment.

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Apple is taking responsibility for “the user interface and people.” It’s designing the devices themselves, which will be typically elegant machines that run versions of OS X. While Apple puts together the front end of the integrated network-computing system, Google provides “the perfect back end” – the supercomputer that provides the bulk of the data-processing might and storage capacity for the devices.

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At its heart, the anger with Twitter is not over its wanting to monetize its invention but rather the violation of the contract we all signed on for, namely to establish relationships with our friends and most importantly friends we don’t yet know about. It’s a bait and switch Twitter has pulled, establishing the cloud and then pulling the plug on our relationships, and I for one of many take it personally.

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s it Gibson’s vision? Not quite. There’s no way this film can ever achieve what Gibson did. He practically changed the world and how we imagined ourselves growing up into it. The novel is always going to be the superior work of art. The book’s a legitimate work of genius in a millenial way, not the Richard Roeper thumbs up way. I’m working on a two hour movie, so it’s my distillation of his vision into a much shorter form. Compomises and interpretation will be required, and the personal issues I chose to focus on will be the things that turn me on about the book. So at the end of the day, there’s wiggle room: the good shit is his, the bad shit is mine.

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In many violent regions, multinational corporations are the only institutions with the financial resources and technical expertise necessary to reduce armed conflict. In countries as diverse as Nigeria, Colombia, and the Philippines, such companies are working to diffuse violence by supporting community development, creating new security structures, and supplying social services.

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In the near future, as humans create transhumans, the script of history will start to be written in a more sophisticated font that we lack the cognitive wherewithal to make direct sense out of.

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Today over 3 billion of the world’s 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why, as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn. These are places where for many, it’s the first time they have the ability to communicate personally and conveniently over distances – without having to worry whether someone can overhear the topic of their conversation – communicate with whom they want, when they want. It makes new businesses viable and creates markets where there was none. For many it’s the first time they can provide a stable fixed point of reference to the outside world – a phone number, which in turn creates a new form of identity that in turn enables everything from rudimentary banking to commerce. And not least – each new feature on or accessible through the mobile phone brings new modes of use – unencumbered by my, and probably your entrenched (and increasingly outdated) notions of entertainment, the ‘right’ way to capture and share experiences, the internet. If you work or study in the mobile space and you’re expected to innovate, these are places that bring fresh thinking and new perspectives.

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Unfortunately, Android doesn’t seem to be going so well. Third-party developers are pissed that Google is cherry-picking who gets platform updates, which makes the openness story more of a fairy tale. Rumor around the Bay Area tech community is that key Android team members have split over Google’s mishandling of the project.

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