Nikolaj Nyholm

Two major challenges abound in the mobile app world; flat-rate data and handset incompatibility. While roll-out flat-rate plans is slowly gathering speed across most of the world (go figure why the US will overtake the #2 position soon if European carriers don't get their act together), device incompatability is still the single-biggest problem of the mobile app hacker. Symbian (including…

The trend towards fabbing reaches some sort of logical conclusion in this sketch furniture project by Swedish design team FRONT. 3D motion capture techniques are used to capture live 3D sketches of furniture. The resulting 3D plot is then processed and the sketches fabbed to produce real furniture from pure handwaving. The video of this process is mesmerizing….

As Rich Gibson, co-author of the excellent O'Reilly Mapping Hacks book puts it: "Doesn't the President have access to something a tad more exclusive than Google Maps?" "One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and…

A couple of days ago I pointed to Justin Hall's call for more intense datamining to enhance the web experience, and just yesterday Marc pointed to the Netflix recommendation algorithm contest. The Netflix contest is interesting for several reasons, but maybe mostly because it points directly at the dilemma between data usefulness and data privacy. The utility of good film…

Larry Lessig once proposed a fee to renew copyrights – not to make the creative process more expensive but to ensure that the public retains effective access to intellectual property even if the creator/rights owner no longer sees any value in. Lessig's concern is that a lot of material languishes in uselessness because the rights holder has lost interest or…

This bit of news from the future is actually here already: Jan Chipchase recently spent 3 hours trying to "security reset" his rental car – part of which procedure involved sitting inside the car in a hot parking lot, with windows shut, touching nothing for a full 20 minutes with no results. (via Blackbeltjones, who as user experience manager for…

The Hutter Prize, established earlier this year, is fashioned after the Methuselah Mouse Prize mentioned yesterday — but where the M-Prize is set up in the quest for eternal life, the Hutter Prize is set up in search of artificial intelligence. On first looks, all the Hutter Prize asks contestants is to come up with best possible means of compressing…

Last year I had the opportunity to meet the extraordinary life-hacker Aubrey de Grey and talk to him about his extraordinary antiaging research and spectacular Methuselah Mouse Prize. de Grey is a life-hacker in the fullest meaning — his goal is to extend human life from the current ~100 cap to 500 and eventually 1,000 years by stalling or repairing…