While big companies and banks are battling it out for supremacy in contactless payments, hard plastic cards still reign. But credit cards, debit cards and rewards cards are stuffing wallets to their limits. The Coin card, a thin black wafer of high-tech ingenuity, is a clever answer to this problem. In short, it's a single digital card that can...
Livestreaming is a trend that keeps getting more so, as it gives cheap and easy access to growing range of events from concerts and protests to news and weather reports. Now livestreaming is being embraced by funeral homes worldwide, becoming a normal part of our cultural last rites. Two companies, FuneralRecording and One Room are offering...
Just when you thought there was already an app for everything, here comes one that that's like Shazam for pills. If, like many people we know, you take several different pills per day, at one point or another you have probably gotten confused about which one is which, or perhaps found yourself wondering whether the pharmacist handed you the...
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...
One of the biggest trends we're seeing recently is related to products that analyse the many things we come in contact with every day, giving us information that makes our world more transparent and more personalized. Examples include everything from wearable monitoring devices like the Apple Watch to electronic tattoos let doctors monitor...
The Internet, social media and smartphones have all changed journalism and the way journalists do business. We now live in a 24-hour news cycle and stories need to be published immediately to avoid being scooped by Twitter. But as a look at any newspaper's balance sheet will tell you, traditional media outlets were slow in adapting to 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-...
Critics malign the selfie trend for celebrating narcissism. Companies, on the other hand, are embracing this trend as an avenue for free promotion. More and more we are seeing tourism destinations and other venues creating "Instagram moments" that invite customers to take photos of themselves and post to social media. Now Virgin Atlantic...
Naturally controversial as faceless robots in the sky, flying drones also have the potential to solve all kinds of challenges that helicopters, satellites and GPS devices haven't been able to tackle. As they get cheaper and more pervasive, creative people from all walks of life are finding novel uses for the aircraft. Even if you are not a game...