ULTRA

The business card dance could now be a simple case of poking your 'Poken' together.

The Poken Pulse is a small device that aims to link real life encounters directly with online social networks. Meet, Poken tap, and upload the information when you get home. A step aside from an augmented reality meet and greet, Poken takes the BC Dance into the paperless digital medium.

A world where animals SMS, boxes live long lives, and trash talks.

Ping, "Just swung by the art centre. Water feels good. The dissolved oxygen must be pretty high today". Jose the Beaver is having a good day.

Jose and the other animals of the Bronx and East rivers have learnt how to SMS - kind of. The crew at the Environmental Health Clinic of New York University have set up a system of buoys that detect movements of the animals in the rivers, that when detected send out animal-perspective SMS to the public, and create a live light show up on the surface of the waters.

As part of the Sentient City Exhibition the 'Amphibious Architecture' installation gives voice to the animals, rivers and a part of cities that are often forgotten under the murky surfaces.

Those in New York can text "EastRiver" or "BronxRiver" to 41411 to get the latest from Jose the Beaver and his herring friends.

More voice giving with 'A Box Life' where boxes get QR Codes and tracking numbers, that when scanned/entered onto the site tell you where the box has been and ask for your part of the story. A similar romance to Book Crossing, where books are left about the world to be scooped up to live prolonged lives with fellow Crossers, linked up via the BC Site.

Objects and animals get a voice to make you think twice about their value. Simple, but effective enough to make me figure out a way to receive Beaver news internationally and excite my cafe visits as I hunt out books.

And I'd love to go into MIT's wonderful world of Trash Tracking but this post is getting long, next up!

A blood powered lamp. Receive lamp, break top, use broken glass to cut finger, drop in the blood, lamp powers up - designer Mike Thompson laments, "The user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is."

Kind of harsh, but point taken.

On a less extreme and more mass-implementable note, a pilot program in North Carolina has measured energy savings as much as 40 percent, due to a web dashboard that lets home and business owners monitor and control their own use. A simpler more socially-conscious (neighbours-are-watching) version with Tweet-a-Watt/Kill-a-Watt.

Make it visible/visual and results shall form?

When installed, The Little Green Genie will calculate your computer use and offset it using your pre-purchased carbon credit.

Rough math - a standard desktop with a 15 inch screen, running around 2 hours a day amounts to about US$7 per year.

Watch him work it here.

The iPhone gets a solar charging skin, the Solar Surge. 2 hours of direct sunlight = 30 minutes of 3G talktime or 40 minutes of 2G talktime, the skin also stores 120% energy capacity of the iPhone battery.

Samsung Freecycle envisions a cycling world where bikes are shared and users communicate usage.

1. Locate bike on Samsung Device.
2. Message current user for access.
3. User replies with an okay.
4. Meet bike, plug in Device.
5. Cycle, repeat.

Nice idea, but PSFK highlights already apparent human hassles. I'd like to see the bikes just talking to users directly on an open platform, which would eliminate the need to associate with Samsung...which I guess defies their point...

MIT does it again, this time with SENSEable City Labs and Trash Track.

Tagging thousands of pieces of trash around New York City, MIT will follow where your crumpled up note and discarded coffee cup journeys. These 'migration journeys' will be available come September.

More smarts at MIT SENSEable City.

With at least 50% of it's parts made from 100% recycled materials, Sony Ericsson's 'Green Heart' will be using less packaging materials and opt for an e-manual rather than the traditional multi-lingual trash filler. Throw in solar-charging capabilities, the iPhone platform and HTC Hero musings and I might consider buying it. But for now...just worth a mention.

Energy without power cables, electricity lines or electricity bills.