Filed Under: Socialmatic

How awesome is the Socialmatic, a prototype for an Instagram camera?!

The device would connect to all your favorite social websites like Facebook and Twitter to share your beautiful pictures, and spit out Polaroid-style prints with a sticky glue strip on the back, so you can share your images just as easily in the real world as you would online.

It’s just an idea for now, but I’d buy one in a heartbeat!  

I don’t know what it is with boys and digging holes in their parents’ yards, but it has to be something that is built into us. I know growing up my parents and the Chicago Water Company were not thrilled when one long summer I decided I would dig until I started hitting lava or China, but I hit Chicago sewers instead. Now kids won’t have to do the digging to find out where they would get if they when straight down with the help of Antipode Map.

Everyone in my life has been lying to me about this whole China thing it turns out. You know where American kids would get if dig? The boring Indiana Ocean! What other lies are we feeding the digging youth of America?

Mint. Tangerine. Aubergine. Even if you’re confident in the latest cuts in fashion, figuring out the most current color trends can be tricky. But don’t get lost in shades of grey, spotting the next hottest shade just became easier with women’s fashion brand Pimkie’s digital tool Color Forecast. It shows users exactly what colors are being worn, in real time, in Europe’s most fashionable cities. High-speed digital cameras positioned in heavily trafficked, fashion-conscious retail areas of Paris, Antwerp, and Milan stream live feeds 24/7 into a system to identify the key trending colors by the minute, then build an infographic of what people are wearing right now. Color us impressed!

FriendVerifier, the first app to scan your Facebook friends and all incoming friend requests against the National Sex Offender Registry has been developed by a private firm VerifyAnybody. I found it to be very, very faulty: all friends that had the same name as any convicted rapist (with conflicting birth years, racial identification, etc.) popped up as potential sexual assailants. While that is better than no information at all, it would be really helpful if a government agency developed something like this to prevent future assaults. 

Love listening to music on YouTube? Hate the clunky interface and totally unrelated ”related videos”? Never fear, internet music addicts, Tubalr is here! Your friendly web app DJ, Tubalr allows you to effortlessly listen to a band’s or artist’s top YouTube videos without the ads/spam videos/inefficiency that YouTube can bring. Just type a band’s or artist’s name into the search box and select only or similar, and Tubalr will instantly serve up an excellently selected playlist of YouTube videos in its own sleek site. Perfect for parties and discovering music!

Disney’s new AppMATes toys link the tactile, physical world of child’s play with the infinite images of the virtual world on an iPad. The toys come to life with digitally with integrated sensors on the bottom, enabling them to automatically interact with a dedicated iPad App that lets children explore the virtual worlds of favorite Disney characters—the first line of toys are from Cars 2.  It’s like a virtual play mat, so at least you won’t be tripping over piles of blocks and LEGOs—but your iPad may be jeopardized by “enthusiastic” playtime! 

In this first release of AppMATes featuring the world of Cars, children can compete in races, complete missions, upgrade cars or explore Radiator Springs. The iPad app differentiates between characters, so narration and dialogue vary depending on the vehicle they’re playing with.

This new venture from Disney demonstrates how digital is not the demise of toys and imagination, but possibly just the beginning. And of course, we should expect new apps and toys from popular Disney films in the future.  

FILED UNDER: FACEBOOK FORWARD

The new profile announcements from Facebook’s developer conference f8 marked a big step in both the development of the platform—the website’s biggest changes since 2007. By the end of 2011, the images you see above will be the new Facebook. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech at f8 introduced a lot of new features with some of the worst, buzzwordy names I’ve ever heard. The bottom line? 

• Facebook aims to be your one-stop shop for all your web doings: listening to music, watching movies, video chats, catching up on the news. 


• The update brings much more of the data they’ve been collecting about you (your favorite songs, activities, movies, books, events you attend, so forth) to the surface, and highlights common interests between you and your friends. 


• Your profile will become a lot more visual. The new “Timeline” offers the ability to choose a “Cover Photo” in addition to your profile picture, a larger image that may give a sense of your overall interests and personality. The entire layout of the site is expanded and fills more of the browser window. Applications and “stories” (read: status updates) are given much more screen real estate, with lots more ability for customization. 

There’s a lot to digest here; these aren’t little tweaks to the site’s interface. For even more details, Slashgear.com has put together an excellent guide to all of these changes for the average Facebook user. If you want to start playing around with the new features now, you can sign up for Timeline Beta and be among the first with the new profile. A friend of mine was already granted access—you can check out his thoughts here. (Browse around on his blog if you have a second, there’s good fashion advice and true-life accounts of partying with Miley Cyrus on there, too.)

I’ll admit it—I’m stoked for THE OMG NEW FACEBOOK OMG. I like the aesthetics of it, the ability for a large cover image, how it allows for more customization. I trust in Facebook’s ability to not repeat the mistakes of Myspace past and let people go crazy with Blingees. I believe that when everyone gets the new profile, it will spark changes in online behavior with a concern for greater privacy controls because there’s so much more information available on the page. And I dream of the day that Facebook partners up with Visual.ly and offers me custom, auto-generated data visualizations based on the actions of myself and my friends.

Mashable reports today that the Flip cam of yesteryear is no more; manufacturing company Cisco announced today that they were ceasing all production of flip cameras.

Doesn’t it seem like it was only yesterday that we were all so impressed by the Steven Tyler-endorsed flip cam commercials? Apparently, Flip cams have gone the way of the netbook, an intermediary technology that held us over until the real successor took the stage—the smart phone. Are digital cameras to follow suit as camera phone technologies get better and better? Maybe. Maybe not.