Gartner Identifies Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008 to 2012

• Multicore and hybrid processors
  
• Virtualisation and fabric computing
  
• Social networks and social software
  
• Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
  
• Web mashups
  
• User Interface
  
• Ubiquitous computing
  
• Contextual computing
  
• Augmented reality
• Semantics

According to Gartner, within the next five years, information will be presented via new user interfaces such as organic light-emitting displays, digital paper and billboards, holographic and 3D imaging and smart fabric.

Read about others in the list here.

One Laptop Per Child -PCWorld

The nonprofit One Laptop Per Child has just shown for the first time images of its next-generation touch-screen laptop that goes by the name XO-2. According to Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, the laptop is under development and has a goal of costing $75. He says the first XO-2 is slated to be built by 2010.

Learn a language online -ReadWriteWeb

There are a wide variety of ways to learn languages online, many of them available for free. Below is a list of more than 20 ways you can go from knowing how to say "Hello" to fluency.

Language Lessons

• Mango Languages: 12 different online language courses presented in conversational format with prices starting at free.
• Vocabulix: Free vocab building lessons in Spanish, German and English, as well as other languages, with a baked in social network.
• Pod Network: Spanishpod - Frenchpod - Chinesepod - Free online lessons in three languages.
• BBC Languages: A host of language learning tools and self-contained online courses from the BBC.
• eLanguageSchool.net: Free lessons for learning 10 different languages online.
• Linkua: An online marketplace of real-life language tutors. There's nothing like learning a language directly from a native speaker.
• LiveMocha: This site combines lessons, with an online community allowing you to practice speaking with native speakers, which dovetails nicely into the next set of sites.

Take your own call!

Yesterday a special feature on prevailing "Food Crisis" forced me to raise few questions about an issue which seems to be nowhere connected to our “Design”. Although to an extent when Mathew had our class and called each of us a moron, this topic deserves its mention on this blog.

We might want to ask,
1) How are we directly related with such a crisis?
2) Who all are getting affected?
3) Who is responsible for such a situation?

A closer look would reveal that people in India on an average are eating lesser and lesser. Since 1993 onwards, per person calorie consumption in Indian villages and cities has gone down. Good to know who are these “people of India”? It can’t be middle class which is getting richer and richer neither be higher classes. It’s the poor, a lot of them below the line of poverty.
People do catch these issues even when these don’t seem to be related to us. Off course, we all work for our foreign clients and prices are hardly a matter of concern for us but knowing India in reality is also important.

Online Video for the Very Young -ReadWriteWeb

It's no secret that YouTube's age demographics skew young, but young still means 18-34, and much of the content on the site would be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 -- the COPPA cut off age that YouTube adheres to as the minimum allowed for anyone to sign up on the site. Totlol is a new video site that launched in beta this week aimed at children aged 6 months to 6 years. The site is community moderated to ensure that video content is always appropriate for small children.

Read more...

A short history of W3W

Year 1998, May 07: In response to a request, a one page looking back on the development of the Web from Tim Berners-Lee's point of view.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output.

Some of the websites doing such work are crowdSpring, 99designs, gfxcontest and many more here.

Outsourcing pollution

Dear all,

What industrial revolution did to Europe is the same happening in India. They migrated to States, Australia and other lands..but where do we go...We as "indians" have no such colonies to run thru...quite sensible a thought by Vandana Shiva here.