In this age of email, texts and posts, wouldn't it be nice to get an honest-to-goodness handwritten letter by hand-delivered mail? Real mail, not the "e" kind. Well, the trends says yes, but who's got time to write? Lately we've seen several services emerge that use technology to create old-fashioned looking mail that sets its senders apart and...
Any athlete can tell you how important it is to have great shoes that hold up to hours of game time and miles of footwork. Perfecting fitting footwear helps optimize performance by minimizing pain and maximizing efficiency. Trouble is that each of us has a unique footprint that is additionally impacted by factors such as how and where we put...
People who love music have always had to make a choice: either stay at home and hear great sound, or pack the travel speakers and sacrifice quality for light weight. While digital music has made our favorite songs a lot more portable, many of us end up listening on tiny laptop or smartphone speakers with less-than-optimum sound quality. Decent...
Selfie sticks, those long rods that people are using to hold their camera-phones at greater than arm's length, are so last week. Why tire your arms when you can have a device hold your camera for you, facing you at all times, of course. Japanese anime network Animax recently released a just-for-fun commercial featuring a young man liberated by...
3D printing has already boldly gone to create everything from automobiles to entire houses. Some companies are even using it to create parts for commercial jet engines. Yet somehow it still comes as a surprise that the technology is now being used to create rocket ships. Because 3D printing can make featherweight flying objects more quickly and...
A social media fad is hitting Japanese high schools. Called Insta in My Hand, the "foto fad" is basically an image of the user’s hand overlaid with a translucent screen grab of their social media page. Yup, that’s really all there is to it, essentially a photo of someone’s smartphone screen without the smartphone framing the image. This flash-...
If you’ve been to a museum in North America or Europe lately, you may have noticed signs banning those popular selfie sticks. And we are seeing endless media stories linking selfies to an unhealthy self-reverence, creating a backlash against the recent selfie obsession. Because you’re a selfie fanatic yourself, you probably getting a bit...
3D printing is helping to drive a long-term trend towards personalization and customization that can give everyone exactly what they want. Because it is so personal to begin with, fashion has long been at the frontline of personalization. And the epitome of personalization when it comes to apparel has always been bespoke goods: one-offs that...
If you're an international flier you have almost certainly come home with a pocket of foreign change that ended up in the bottom of a junk drawer. Many airports and some airlines collect spare change for charity, but so far these initiatives seem to have failed to ignite the imagination of travelers or get a very big percentage of the billions...
Creative, often technologically advanced, pieces of interactive public art seem to be popping up everywhere these days. The trend reflects a willingness and desire to utilize public space in playful, innovative ways that people find fun and inviting. One particularly exciting example is an interactive art piece in Granary Square in London...