Internet Eyes is an online service that opens up access to closed-circuit cameras to the public, awarding cash prizes up to £1,000 each month to the users who catch the most crooks.

Carlo Ratti, from the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT has initiated a project to track where trash goes when we throw it “away”.

A Box Life encourages re-use by tracking the life and use of cardboard boxes.

To help track Washington DC hospital patients in the event of a disaster, the US Government is exploring the use of RFID tags to locate them in real time. Nextgov reports that the radio frequency identification tags, which if they’re battery powered, can have a range of about 300 feet, can assist in locating people (with an accuracy rate of 95 percent) during crisis situations when every second can be critical.
Many hospitals already use RFID to track supplies and other assets, but using the technology to follow people is a relatively novel practice.
Nextgov: “RFID tags eyed to track Washington-area patients [...]

We love to know where things are and companies that offer online tracking services tend to do better, no matter what their business is. When UPS first started offering online tracking in late 1995, it got around 100,000 requests.  Last December, UPS got 27.3 million requests per day. Today, there are services to track our flights, the buses in our neighborhood, even where the money is going.  What does this growing consumer demand say about our culture?
Perhaps it is the sense of security and accountability that comes with following your purchases online, but the trend also indicates our constant need [...]

Taking your phone to bed has up until now meant answering e-mails and working until it is time to shut off the lights. Not anymore. With the new iPhone Passion application your lovemaking can be rated on a scale from 1 to 10, or “bad” to “perfect”. By strapping the phone to arm or belt, users are rated on duration, activity and climax.

In an effort to help dairy farmers better manage their herds, Danish technology firm, SmartFarming has developed an animal tracking and monitoring system called CowDetect. The system enables farmers to maintain a more meaningful account of individual animals by analyzing movement and eating patterns in real time.

Socialseek is a new desktop app that allows you to search topics, brands, companies and trends through all aspects of social media- such as blogs, image, video and event sites.
You can measure and compare the popularity of each topic, localize your searches to specific cities, and receive real-time updates about how active your query is across specific platforms.

Socialseek is one of many new apps offering social media tracking- competitors include Viralheat and Peoplebrowsr. You can download it for free here.
[via Tech Crunch]

While GPS and cellular tracking systems have opened up new ways to navigate our daily environments, the viability of the technology is often less than stellar when we find ourselves indoors or in dense urban areas—which is a lot of the time. Nokia has released a trial technology that allows users to pinpoint their location indoors inside the Kamppi Shopping Center in Helsinki. The service will present shoppers with their location inside the mall along with supplementary information about its stores, coupons, and the ability to share locations with friends via SMS. The service is currently limited to the Kamppi [...]

Canadian artist Jeremy Bailey combines performance art with video and technology. The Rhizome Commisions supports new media artists with grants for projects, and Jeremy’s proposal is to create a Dialectical Software Gundam Suit.
Jeremy’s project intends to:
create a new live performance involving a software “suit” that augments and extends both the creative and destructive abilities of the performer (myself). The image of the suit will be superimposed in real-time over the artist during the performance. The work will be satirical, but will appear as a sincere attempt by the artist to create a more advanced human form.
[ via Beautiful/Decay ]