mathoda.com

You can throw this tent in the air, and by the time it lands it has set itself up. What a great design: http://decathlontent.com/

One night in 1991, John Ellenby and his son Thomas were sailing off the coast of Mexico. To compensate for John Ellenby’s poor sense of direction, they tied together a compass, a Global Positioning System receiver and binoculars. That made it possible for them to simply to point at an object or a navigational landmark to identify it. The Ellenby’s, to their credit, didn’t stop there. They formed a company, GeoVector, that developed software that allows a user of a wireless device to simply point at an item in the real world and click to obtain information about the item. Japanese wireless carriers are the first to deploy this innovation.

As the New York Times states:

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at. …. Think of it as a divining rod for the information age.

This is a particularly interesting form of geographically based search. Click here for the rest of the article.

I think everyone has a childhood fascination with globes. With a slight spin, the nations of the world can pass underneath one’s fingertips.

The standard globe is pretty unimaginative however. Why just depict national boundaries?

Ingo Gunther’s globe project has taken thousands of globes and overlayed particular types of information onto them.
So one globe shows not just national boundaries, but how national boundaries would be resized if more populuous nations had a larger territory and less populuous nations had a smaller territory. Another shows all nations that have the death penalty in black, another depicts nations as block shapes whose size depends on the size of their military budgets, another only depicts green where rain forests still exist and red where rain forests have been destroyed, etc. It’s worth taking a look: http://worldprocessor.com/

As much as I liked the tangible globes in Gunther’s art project, I couldn’t help but contemplate how powerful an electronic globe on which various types of information are overlayed could be. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo… happy electronic globe dreams.