Instantly Obsolete

Last week, David Bliss and I presented at the 2012 Planning-ness Conference.

For those that haven’t had a chance to attend, Planning-ness is described as an “un-conference” for creative thinkers who want to get their hands dirty. Each session is half teach and half workshop where participants put the presented ideas into action. This year a two-day, two-track event was hosted at the Annenberg Community Beach House in sunny Santa Monica.

In our session, we mapped the ever expanding Internet of Things landscape, broke down the “anatomy” of connected objects, and described how personal connected objects have the ability to encourage new behaviors, even increase human potential.

After which we gave the following assignment:

Think of a personal object. Imagine how you might embed sensors, log interesting data and connect it to the Internet for analysis. Consider what insights this new information would bring to light and what behaviors, or ideas those could inspire.

All of the participants embraced the challenge with passion and enthusiasm — generating ideas that sparked imagination, laughter and smart thinking for where the Internet of Things may go.

Check out the results of the work session here.

Now this is a newspaper I can really sink my teeth into.

When available later this year you will be able to set up subscriptions on your smartphone and Little Printer will gather news, puzzles and media from your social graph and stitch it all together into a sweet mini-newspaper you can print at home.

A wonderful little invention from the crew at BergCloud.

I’ll be ordering one for sure. And, thanks to Larry for the awesome find.

The R&D team at The New York Times designed and prototyped this interactive mirror they call Reveal. It displays news media content as well as personal health and lifestyle data — all controlled through voice and gestural in-puts (or “natural user interfaces”).

More here on Reveal and the NYT R&D Lab.