VW "drives" Virtualization of the World

This is so cool, my running gag being that manufacturers like VW "drive" the Virtualization of the World.

Volkswagen GTI 2010 as iPhone advergame

LOU REED ON THE "GRONINGEN" CARILLON

Click here.

DOWNLOADABLE MUST READS /1

Download: Outline of the U.S. Economy

Download: The Fourth Paradigm. Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

Download: Virtual Concept > Real Profit with Digital Manufacturing and Simulation

Jaap Bloem Leaving Twitter

Post at IT Executive: Between Twitter and Hawking (Dutch).

Seven Deadly Sins - 60th Anniversary

Prologue of "Die sieben Todsünden der Kleinbürger"
(Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill. Premiere: Paris 1933)

In 1993 Kent Nagano conducted this performance of the Orchestra of the Opéra National de Lyon. Teresa Stratas acted as Anna 1 and Nora Kimball as Anna 2. Director: Peter Sellars.

ANNA 1
Meine Schwester und ich stammen aus Louisiana
Wo die Wasser des Missisippi unterm Monde fließen
Wie Sie aus den Liedern erfahren können.
Dorthin wollen wir zurückkehren
Lieber heute als morgen

ANNA 2
Lieber heute als morgen!

ANNA 1
Wir sind aufgebrochen vor vier Wochen
Nach den großen Städten, unser Glück zu versuchen.
In sieben Jahren haben wir’s geschafft,
Dann kehren wir zurück.

ANNA 2
Aber lieber schon in sechs!

ANNA 1
Denn auf uns warten unsre Eltern und zwei Brüder in Louisiana,
Ihnen schicken wir das Geld, das wir verdienen,
Und von dem Gelde soll gebaut werden ein kleines Haus,
Ein kleines Haus am Mississippi in Louisiana.
Nicht wahr, Anna?

ANNA 2
Ja, Anna.

ANNA 1
Meine Schwester ist schön, ich bin praktisch.
Sie ist etwas verrückt, ich bin bei Verstand.
Wir sind eigentlich nicht zwei Personen,
Sondern nur eine einzige.
Wir heißen beide Anna,
Wir haben eine Vergangenheit und eine Zukunft,
Ein Herz und ein Sparkassenbuch,
Und jede tut nur, was für die andre gut ist.
Nicht wahr, Anna?

ANNA 2
Ja, Anna.

Today Is So Yesterday

The NYT on Friday May 11, 2040 as appetizer for Intel's new Tomorrow campaign.

Demoscene.TV

Demoscene is a community of creative people fond of IT in the broad sense. The Demoscene community cannot simply be explained with a defintion as it finds its roots in a constantly evoluting underground digital culture (hard and software, trends…)

As the Demoscene is way too unknown to the public, ADAN (Association pour le Développement de l’Art Numérique) strives to share and diffuse all creators' artworks via Demoscene TV. We offer a video stream and associated services to allow groups from the digital scene to broadcast their creations.

Umair Haque on Constructive Capitalism

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

Lisa Randall's Warped Passages

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting Q&A with Harvard theoretical physicist and DLD 2009 speaker Lisa Randall who is collaborating with composer Hèctor Parra and artist Matthew Ritchie on a chamber opera project entitled Hypermusic Prologue: A projective opera in seven planes. Randall has emerged as a public face for the complex fields of cosmology and particle physics. In her 2005 book Warped Passages which was written for a general audience, she gives a remarkably clear account of how the existence of dimensions beyond the familiar three may resolve a host of cosmic quandaries.

China Now Ahead of German Economy

China has taken Germany's spot as the world's third-largest economy after the United States and Japan.

Video Gaming Trends

Here.

YouTube's Got Talent

The project, called the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, has two essential parts. The composer Tan Dun has written a four-minute piece for orchestra. YouTube users are invited to download the individual parts for their instruments from the score, record themselves performing the music, then upload their renditions. After the entrants are judged, a mash-up of all the winning parts will be created for a final YouTube version of the piece.

Singularity Movie Due Early 2009

The Singularity is Near, A True Story about the Future, based on Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times best selling book, will be a full-length motion picture slated for theatrical release in early 2009. The movie intertwines a fast-paced A-line documentary with a B-line narrative story.

The A-line documentary will feature Ray Kurzweil interacting with a panoply of thinkers on the impact of exponentially expanding technologies on the nature of human life in the next half century. It will feature many cutting-edge graphics and special effects.

The intertwined B-line is the story of Ramona, Ray Kurzweil’s female alter ego, starting with actual footage of Kurzweil creating and demonstrating his virtual creation at the 2001 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, where Ray – as Ramona – sang Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” This presentation was the inspiration for the Warner Brothers’ movie Simone, where the character played by Al Pacino turns himself into Simone, just as Ray turned himself into Ramona at TED.

The B-line continues as Ramona goes into the future where she becomes more and more humanlike and independent - a Pinocchio story. She combats an attack of self-replicating nanobots (gray goo) and hires Alan Dershowitz (who plays himself ) to press for her legal rights as a “person.” The judge rules that he will grant her full legal personhood if she passes a “Turing test,” in which she must appear indistinguishable from an actual human in a text conversation. She gets coaching from Tony Robbins (who plays himself ) to become “more human.” The story continues from here.

Kurzweil sets the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

Danah Delivers

Living and Learning with New Media:
Findings from a 3-year Ethnographic Study of Digital Youth

For the last three years, I've been a part of a team of researchers at Berkeley and USC focused on digital youth practices. This project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, brought together 28 different researchers (led by Mimi Ito and my now deceased advisor Peter Lyman) to examine different aspects of American youth life.

As many of you know, I focused on normative teen practices and the ways in which teens engaged in networked publics. We are now prepared to share our findings.

Live Web 3.0 - Layered Social Virtual Worlds

You'll spot quite a few characters living on this post, courtesy of CLIVEvideo.

AUDIENCE @ the Royal Opera House

Audience, conceived by rAndom International, is an installation consisting of around 64 head-size mirror objects.

Each object moves its head in a particular way to give it different characteristics of human behaviour. Some chat amongst themselves, some shy away and others confidently move to grab your attention.

Social Web to Flame Out?

Daniel Lyons in Newsweek:

Silicon Valley has suddenly realized that the collapsing economy means trouble for tech companies, too. Especially at risk are the new startups created in the wake of the last dotcom crash in 2001. The signal traits of these Web 2.0 companies are cutesy logos, odd-sounding names—Twitter, Zooomr, Digg, Ning, Loopt—and flimsy business plans based on a vague notion of luring millions of people to free Web sites and someday selling advertisements. Most lose money. Some have raised enough venture-capital funding to survive for a year or more. Some may be able to raise more from venture backers, albeit at onerous terms. But many are going to flame out.

EU To Take Lead In Web 3.0

European Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding won glowing praise for her vision of the Internet 3.0 from Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Web and now Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist.

“Web 3.0 means seamless ‘anytime, anywhere’ business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015,” she said in a statement.

I-COCOON, TINO & NAU

IMMERSIVE COCOON

NAU

TINO

TINO IN WIKIPEDIA

THE CNN INTERVIEW

Featuring introNetworks

introNetworks started at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference in 2003 as a demonstration of the capabilities of Macromedia’s Flash technology.

Built in just eight weeks and with the help of TED Curator Chris Anderson and some very talented developers and designers, the first introNetworks smart social network was born, connecting over 1,000 attendees through the company’s breakthrough visual matching engine that instantly creates a compelling and intuitive picture of a network so that each member can instantly see all people and information relevant specifically to them.

Source: Eliane Alhadeff

Enjoy 3DVIA

3DVIA Studio is the online showcase for fully interactive 3D experiences built by the 3DVIA user and partner community.

Do you have a game, interactive experience or other 3D project? Gain exposure and get noticed! We will soon release a whole new way to publish your 3D work online. Top content will be included in the showcase pre-release.

For instance, become a virtual reality running man with your very own Facebook 3D avatar. Upload your photo and take part in the "Virtual Plus Reality Challenge". This experience allows Facebook users to follow marathon man Philippe Fuchs as he runs from Paris to Beijing in 3D.

Struggling with Interactivity

We use stories for more than entertainment, stories hold tremendous value for social progress and preservation of culture (history), the industry (advertising), creativity and inspiration (fiction), expression and nearly any other field of human interest. To communicate these stories we’ve used a number of media types so far, and very effectively at that, but they all seem to struggle with the up and coming trend of the 21st century: Interactivity.

SHOOTDESIGN

These (daily) findings of a design student, and things to remember for the future are both illuminating and intriguing.

Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work

The core strategy, to find innovations that fundamentally reshape markets, is still difficult for market leaders to follow. Leaders' instincts are to protect market share and "feature up" their products, precisely the wrong approaches to disrupt a market.

Read all of what John Caddell has to say.

Tor Has Been Launched

Here.

Business Tribalization in 2008

Beeline Labs, Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research have produced the first study of its kind to learn from the early experiences of more than 140 organizations on how they’re managing communities, measuring success, and deriving business benefits.

The survey and interviews examined online community initiatives at a mix of business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies, as well as non-profits, with communities ranging from fewer than 100 members to more than 10,000 members.

The Industrial Design Bookshelf

Here.

Felix Petersen on Plazes & Nokia

Plazes.com $$$ Nokia - Felix Petersen from Tiburon-TV - Viktoria Trosien on Vimeo.

All the World's a Game

Raph Koster, Doug Thomas and Dave Elving at Supernova 2008 on how massively multiplayer games bleed over into real life.

Neuroengineering the Future Virtual Minds and the Creation of Immortality

Look at the future of man and machine. We are on the cusp of a broad revolution, one with startling implications for perception, cognition, emotion, and indeed, personal identity.

Still in its relative infancy, this rapidly progressing field is poised to move from perceptual aids, such as cochlear implants to devices that will enhance and speed up thought, to the ultimate goal of researchers - that of downloading the mind from its bound state in the body to a platform - independent existence.