New Scientist write about a neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals in the neck

 It was demoed at a Texas Instruments conference. There’s still a bit of a delay between the thought and the speech, but it’s still pretty impressive.

Watch it here. 

It’s fair to say that somewhere in any digital agency’s business plan is a paragraph about the importance of owning code. This is fine for agencies like Special Moves who see themselves a pure production facility. For traditional digital agencies like Agency.com or AKQA who want to provide strategy and creative ideas this is a BAD idea.

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Another missive from Peter Sells, our reporter at the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona.

Noticeably absent this year are the mobile TV companies. They’re still here of course flogging their wares from the less high profile (less expensive) stands, but its no longer the hot topic. Mobile TV is not like TV on your mobile, it’s a painful experience that relies on patience, good eyesight and a commitment to consuming content that only exists in business plans. If your telly took 20 seconds to buffer after you turned it on or changed channel, consumed power so you could only watch 40 mins before it died, and the picture regularly froze up, then you wouldn’t get addicted to Eastenders.

The Nokia N96 - which comes with DVB-H as standard (and even a kick-stand to help you watch it)

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I wrote a piece a while ago about how ambient interfaces were the next step in digital - being able to control computers without the rather awkward encumbrance of a keyboard and mouse. And lo and behold, the world has gone ambient interface crazy.

The Wii remote, multi-touch screens, the iPhone - these are all devices that use your body in a much more natural way to interact with devices. They are somehow more human.

Here’s a list of some other, more recent examples:

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Isn’t it interesting how the results differ when you type the same search in Flickr as Google Images?  Google Images throws up the most obvious commercial images, whereas Flickr tends to throw up much more interesting creative work.

 Try “cat plush” in Google Images and you get this. Lots of cheap, cheesy toy cats. The sort they sell in Toys R Us.

Try “cat plush”  in Flickr and you get this. Really fresh, cool looking, quirky toy cats. The sort they sell in Habitat. 

 Amateur content really can be better than professional stuff

(Weird how Google Images doesn’t see into Flickr - I guess because it’s owned by Yahoo! If you know more than that,do let us know.)

Yesterday I got an email about Apple releasing a new version of the iPhone.

Following the very interesting article in this month’s Wired about the genesis of the iPhone, which talked about how Apple and Steve Jobs has ripped apart the fabric of the US carrier business, I was fascinated to see what the latest development was.

Was it the much anticipated 3G iPhone? Were they adding GPS functionality? Was there some new design?

Nope. Turns out it was just a memory upgrade - from 8Gb to 16Gb.

Does anyone really care that much about memory capability?

Lots of chatter this week about this article from Fast Company, debunking the notion of a bunch of ‘Influentials’ - a theory by Ed Keller and Jon Berry that there is a set of people (the 10% of us who are super connectors) who allegedly set the tone for how the rest of us get information about how to live and what to buy.

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I was thinking about a phrase that US general Colin Powell used in his autobiography. He called it the “P40/70″ rule. It’s a formula to help leaders in battle determine when there’s enough evidence to take action but I think it absolutely applies to digital decision-making too.

The thinking being that if you have less than 40% probability of making the right decision with the amount of information you currently have, then you should seek more information. But how much more? Powell’s theory is that if military leaders decide to wait until they have enough information to give them a greater than 70% probability of making the right decision, they are likely to make the wrong decision *because that decision will be too late*. The battlefield conditions will have changed.

And so it is in digital.

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An amazing slew of news from Apple yesterday, including an unbelievably sexy ultra thin laptop, the MacBook Air and much needed updates to iPhone software. For innovation and design, Apple must make it hard to work for any other consumer electronics hardware brand.

Part of the string of announcements caught my eye, however, which was an upgrade to the iPod Touch software (which lest we forget is ‘the world’s best Wi-Fi mobile device’).

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A post on PSFK prompted me to think about the huge communications challenge around changing people’s behaviour - especially when it comes to “saving the planet”.

Somewhat hysterically, the article about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) called it “an orgy of poison”. This was due to the fact that so much of the technology on show contains environmental pollutants and that the consumer electronics industry itself encourages us all to buy pointless gizmos which create a huge uneccessary carbon footprint.

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