A professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has invented a device which allows people to have phone conversations without actually speaking anything out loud.

The problem with online shopping is that its, well, online. Until we have photorealistic 3D avatars of ourselves, it will always be better to try things on IRL. But the truth is, we dress for other people, and we often need outside opinions when deciding what to buy. So we shop with friends or, more often, end up returning half of our purchases. Though perhaps you have snapped a photo of an item with your cellphone and sent it to a friend. This is what Brooke Moreland and Joe Weisenthal noticed people doing, which gave them an idea: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you got a personalized review about how something looked on you “in real life”, before you made the purchase?”

It appears the act of dropping out is truly getting hard indeed, following news that post-apocalyptic, counterculture mainstay Burning Man will be connected to the outside world during this year’s festival with cellphone service. While some posit that the emergence of service is merely a result of increased coverage being provided to the nearby town of Gerlach, NV (Pop. 499), the fact remains that an event defined by its manifestations of authenticity, progressivism and escapism, has just gotten a little more, well, conventional.
The SFist imagines the impact from a constant stream of desert tweets and Facebook updates to be the final straw [...]

When we look at the discussion happening around monetizing content on the web, payment models from the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports and Apple’s iTunes are the successes that are most often held aloft as potential saviors for an entire industry of producers. But no one seems to be talking about the quiet successes of cellphone providers and mobile content creators. Consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices to download everything from games to ringtones and often for a price, yet no one seems to be complaining about not being able to get them for free. Why [...]

A team of scientists at Edith Cowan University have developed an amazing new kind of color bar code that can hold large amounts of data. It’s called  the Mobile Multi-Colour Composite 2D-Barcode, and they are apparently able to hold images, video or any other kind of data which can be literally “downloaded” by camera phones.
Uses with appropriate software could take a picture of the MMCC code with their phone, and the embedded digital content would be transferred to the device. And since the codes don’t connect to the internet, they will work even where there is no kind of cell [...]