the sniffer

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond talks about Hycrete, a new admixture for concrete which should make it recyclable. (via Gizmag)

Nora Young has a story to warm Cathi’s heart: Texas is once again the leader in wind power uploaded to the grid (via Wired)

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Nora Young looks at two projects: Sellaband, where many people buy shares in a band in order to fund recording sessions (via Springwise), and MyFootballClub, where thousands of people manage a soccer team in the UK. (via Fringehog)

Cathi Bond brings you one of the hits from CES, the Starry Night uber luxury bed

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond and Nora Young discuss the idea of “status spheres,” a trend noted for 2008 by trendwatching.com. The idea is that status is much more niche oriented now than just ‘luxury goods’ or ‘designer chic’. Read about it here.

Meanwhile, Cathi finds these wii-mote add ons

They’re designed to look like weapons. via Engadget

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Nora Young and Cathi Bond mention earideas.com.  It’s a new boutique site for the best podcasts of a literary, scientific, artistic or philosophical nature.  It’s run by the folks behind Collectik and Librivox (Chris Goringe and our pal in podcasting, Hugh McGuire).  Full disclosure: earideas recommends our other podcasts, Spark and the Prosecast.

Nora talks about a cool idea she saw in The Guardian: huge kite sails to power giant cargo shipping vessels, thereby reducing power usage.

Cathi discusses Microvision’s mini-projector,  so that you can take a small image from your portable media player and blow it up to shine on the wall. Share your movies, still photos etc. (via Engadget)

Nora also mentions ethiquette.ca, a Quebec-based website that lists socially responsible businesses.

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond spies doggy java, a water-and-vitamin combo to give your doggie a coffee-like experience (complete with “coffee” mug) while making sure he’s hydrated.  Cathi thinks it’s part of extending nanny culture to our pets.

Meanwhile, Nora Young mentions a very interesting Forbes article  on China’s new plans to kick up their economic full court press.

Plus, Cathi has an extensive look ahead at what happens as we move to digital TV, as people get HDTVs and try to marry them with their old DVD players.  Here are her notes:

I saw something on Gizmodo about how the FCC is changing their deadline on digital signals. In the States it was supposed to be 2009 and now they’ve adjusted it to 2012

What does this mean? Here are my scattered findings.

I use rabbit ears at the farm and get everything I want. Does this mean that I’m out of luck?

Nope. You can actually use an external antennae on a high def set, provided that you’re close enough to the broadcast tower. But it’ll have to be a special hi-def antennae.

What about my old DVDs? Can I still play them?

Not all DVD players are created equal. Connecting an average DVD player to a High Definition display can be a disconcerting experience. The process of converting a Standard Definition DVD signal to the native resolution of the display may cause a host of video artifacts if not performed properly.

If you have an expensive machine and can connect directly, everything stays digital and it’s tickety boo. If not, everything has to be converted from analogue standard play to digital before it can be played and this frequently causes the video artifacts etc.

My cheapy DVDs don’t have the special adaptor. And I imagine many others don’t either. Quality deinterlacing and scaling are the key components to stable, artifact-free movie watching,

What about watching HDTV on an old analogue set?

You’ll have to an STB a set top box. I have one of those for the DVD up at the farm because the old TV doesn’t have the RCA inputs. My contact at Telecity tells me that the big issue is that when they shut off the analogue signal there will be *no* more free analogue airwaves, ergo the only way you’ll be able to get any existing analogue channels will be through cable. Bye bye rabbit ears, but hello snazzy new HD antennae, which many bloggers say is even better than fibre optic lines.

All for now

 

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In this podcast, Nora returns from a trip to New York with some trend observations from the Big Apple. She noted the huge numbers of tourists from all over the world.  She and Cathi also talked about the gentrification of the lower east side, most particularly with the New Museum of Contemporary Art and a Whole Foods on the Bowery, which made Cathi wonder whether NYC is turning into a theme park.

Nora also fell in love with the Muji store, and, being a good, earnest Canadian, visited the Tenement Museum.  Among the trends she spotted on the Lower East Side was an aesthetic that reminded her of steampunk.  Is this something we’ll see more of in 2008?

Hi kids, just a quickie. I read online that wikipedia is getting into the search engine game and its new offspring will be constructed on the same community built model as our fave online encyclopedia. It’s called wikia.com and will be ad based, however it promises to be much more transparent than other search engines. Go forth and contribute.

SAN FRANCISCO — A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.

Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children.

But the saleswoman’s tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer researcher and founder of the nonprofit effort.

He demanded that Intel stop what he saw as efforts to undermine the group’s sales, which meant ceasing to sell the rival computer. Intel chose instead to withdraw its support from One Laptop this week.

For the rest of the article click here. Thanks to our friends at the New York Times. This is a fascinating story which, to me, is really all about the true cost of computers, and how big (read threatening) the stakes are with the open source movement.

Cath

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Nora Young talks about her own experience with LinkedIn vs. Facebook and wonders whether LinkedIn might be primed to be, if not THE, then A next big thing.  And she’s not the only one.  Wired’s Compiler blog comments on LinkedIn opening up its platform to applications.  Steve O’Hear even started ’sniffing’ the trend months ago, and a slightly more gimlet-eyed perspective from TechCrunch a while back.

Meanwhile, Cathi Bond has her eye on what she really wants in 2008: Her own personal submarine!  And who wouldn’t want the Uboatworx personal sub??

Happy 2008!