Blink Contactless Credit Card

Reuters: JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Thursday introduced a credit card that allows a consumer to merely wave it past a sensor to make payments, a function already common at many U.S. gas stations. A top issuer of credit cards in the United States, JPMorgan Chase said its new credit card, called “blink,” will be marketed this summer and can […]

Love Fakes?

Iconoculture: As fakes become harder to spot – and more expensive – taking the low road has become more acceptable. And Millennials just love to make a stylish statement. Dutch design boutique Mind What You Wear takes faux up a notch with its Fakewear line. The popular faux designer bags are labeled, in spray-paint print, “Fake.” Just so we’re clear […]

Sleeping Partner Music

We Make Money Not Art: Aura is a prototype background communication device that aims to create a sense of emotional presence between two people who are separated by space or time. An augmented sleeping mask records sleeping rhythms and infers an emotional state of the wearer. This information is transmitted to a remote location and mapped to musical selections in […]

CoolBusinessIdeas Newsletter Issue 16

CoolBusinessIdeas Newsletter Issue 16: 07/05/05 – 22/05/05 New Business Ideas/Opportunities Featured In This Issue: WIRELESS Bookmarking Retailers A Tokyo-based company TechFirm is launching a service that connects consumers and small retailers using RFID. GAMES Playing Pacman On The Streets The classic arcade game PacMan has resurfaced on the streets of Singapore using “augmented reality” technology developed by military-backed scientists at […]

TV From The Internet

TechnologyReview: Cable television often boasts that it can deliver esoteric fare suiting nearly any taste. But it could be rendered obsolete by the likes of Bill Eason’s hog cooking class. The North Carolina cook’s program — self-described as an “all-day, whole hog class edited down to 45 minutes on how to find, select, prepare and serve whole hog from the […]

C28 Evangelists

World Magazine: At first glance, the narrow store near the merry-go-round at Parkway Plaza could be any of a dozen Southern California mall-chain clones, the kind that hawk stud-belts and double-entendre T-shirts to skater-punks and posers: Back-alley brick walls, exposed-pipe ceilings, cutting-edge clothing lines, rock music throbbing from the rafters. But the only double-entendres shoppers will find here are based […]

Playing Pacman On The Streets

New Scientist: The classic arcade game PacMan has resurfaced on the streets of Singapore using “augmented reality” technology developed by military-backed scientists at the University of Singapore. While virtual reality immerses a user completely inside a computer-generated environment, augmented reality combines both real and virtual sensory information to produce a digitally-altered version of the real world. The original arcade game, […]

No More Botox

Iconoculture: Ask Cleopatra. Empowerment through beauty is an ageless desire for both women and men. Bye-bye, Botox? Probably not, but acupuncture facials do offer a drug-free (albeit pricier) alternative: special tiny needles placed in the forehead, chin, and cheeks to tighten up loose skin and reduce wrinkling. From an acupuncturist’s perspective, the treatment works by increasing the flow of chi, […]

Connect For Music

We Make Money Not Art: The Haptic Gloves allow their wearers to create musical compositions by linking hands together. Each participants wears the gloves, headphones (through which they can hear their personal music) and a clip-on box housing circuits. As soon as they touch the gloved hand of another, they can hear their own music mixed with the other person’s […]

Home Searching

Wired News: When David Yang recently looked for a new apartment in Chicago, he took an aerial tour of the city. As a 22-year-old on a limited budget, Yang couldn’t afford to hire a helicopter for his visual inspection of Chicago. Instead, he turned to HousingMaps, a hack that combines craigslist real estate listings with city maps from Google Maps. […]