This past weekend we had the opportunity to attend the Planning-ness conference at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, lead by PSFK friend (and Likemind SF host), Mark Lewis.

Swedish-American company Plantagon have come up with an idea is to build greenhouses to use within urban environments that will make cities self-supporting.
They explain:
The Plantagon® greenhouse will dramatically change the way we produce organic and functional food. It allows us to produce ecological with clean air and water inside urban environments, even major cities, cutting costs and environmental damage by eliminating transportation and deliver directly to consumers. This is due to the efficiency and productivity of the Plantagon® greenhouse which makes it economically possible to finance each greenhouse from its own sales.
According to Plantagon, the plan is to have the [...]

The people over at Beeple have directed this fantastic video illustrating the instability of the American housing market. Every successive house that is built folds into itself and sprouts the growth of a new one, only to repeat the process again.

subprime from beeple on Vimeo.
[via Doobybrain.com]

Visa in collaboration with Nokia have launched a new service using NFC (Near Field Communication).
The Visa PayWave service is being tested in Malaysia and allows users to make payments by just waving their phone in front a contact-free reader. The transaction will then appear on the next cell phone bill.
Currently, 1800 shops accept the system in Malaysia. Users can also take advantage of the payment method when using public transport, and at highway toll gates and car park facilities.
The image shows the Nokia 6212, the world’s first NFC approved phone.
[via PCWorld]

British start-up company Onzo has developed a device that monitors your power consumption in real-time. The Onzo smart energy kit is a powerful energy management tool that collects and logs data about your home’s electricity use. It consists of a sensor, display and integrated website. The idea is to empower consumers to make positive decisions about how they use energy.
Onzo has a strong emphasis on design. From the user-friendly interface to the self-charging sensor, it is clearly developed to be as easy and intuitive to use as possible.
At their website, Onzo shares their mission: To help consumers and utilities reduce [...]

This week game creators from all over the world are gathering in San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC). Popular themes this year will be casual gaming, which consists of games like Guitar Hero, Rock Band and SingStar, social gaming, which are run on social networks like Facebook or MySpace, and  mobile games (like Mobster) that are played on mobile devices such as the iPhone.
One of the busiest game developers right now is Swedish studio Grin with three upcoming games within the next two months – Bionic Commando, Terminator Salvation and Wanted: Weapons of Fate.
The video game industry [...]

Today the largest and most important court case in file-sharing history starts in Stockholm, Sweden. The trial against The Pirate Bay is expected to be followed by countless others around the world. TorrentFreak explains:
Almost three years have passed since The Pirate Bay’s servers were seized by the Swedish police.
In the years since the raid a lot has changed. For one, The Pirate Bay grew to become the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet and one of the most prominent sites in the world (as of right now the site is ranked 102nd largest with 25 million unique users). Some estimate [...]

One of our favorite collections exhibited at Copenhagen Fashion Week (which ended last weekend) was from Danish brand Woven Flesh.
Established in 2006, Woven Flesh is inspired by the shapes of Japanese packaging, Slovakian folk tales and New York street music. Their goal is to produce 4-5 collections per year, each based on a universal theme and all the fears and wonders of the world, especially the darker ones.
The new collection “Nevermore” is inspired by the American author and poet Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre and mystical stories.
Nevermore will be available from the middle of February.
[via Below The Clouds]

Spotify (still currently in invitation-only beta) is a new Swedish service that lets users listen to the music they want, when they want. They simply have to download and install the free software and they can start enjoying instantly. There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when because Spotify has cleared the rights to the music.
Spotify operates under the belief that music is social, so it was designed to allow users to share songs and playlists with their friends and even work together on collaborative playlists. The site is a free service financed through [...]

Animasher is a new Swedish service that enables users to create short animations. The system offers an easy to use interface that allows users to manipulate a large library of images and sounds to come up with fun, YouTube-style animated movies without having to use creative suits from your desktop.

Swedish-based Bambuser is a new service that allows users to broadcast live streaming video directly to the web with their cell phones – kinda like mobile-TV, but the other way around.
With Bambuser, users can broadcast whatever they want, to whomever they want, whenever they want, on the go. Members can also follow the broadcasters they like most and view the mobile-TV broadcasts live and chat with the broadcasters, or save the clips for viewing later.
As of today, the service has 1750 users from 50 countries; the focus is still on Sweden but expanding.