plus nine. neo now.

The size of the device changes depending on the amount of data it holds. When the device is about to blow up you will see the familiar error message on your screen: "There is not enough free space". When swithched off the flashbag remains pumped up, so you can estimate with the naked eye how much more pics, books and music albums can be transferred into it.
The flashbag is a memory stick which inflates according to the amount of data stored, or as Random Good Stuff calls it nicely: the TickDrive / iTick.

[via Boing Boing]

Update: Max/Design-Crit posted another funky memory stick in the Gizmodo comments on the TickDrive:



(Go check out his awesome collection of shopping bag designs, too!)


And one of my all-time favorites posted awhile ago:




Update: While keeping reading, more and more unusual memory stick designs pop up. Not so sure if they actually work - looks massively photoshopped - but anyway:



and, last point for now, some USB-related art: dialog05

Very soon, credit card companies and game makers will reward their customers who spend money in the real world using private label "rewards" credit cards. They will use gifts of virtual currency such as Blizzard's World of Warcraft gold and Second Life's Linden dollars.

Phillip Torrone of MAKE Magazine with an interesting text on how real-world currency and in-game currency will merge more and more. His piece focuses on credit cards - which makes sense, given that they're the weapon of choice to pay electronically via PayPal, Amazon, Second Life and all.

Also, Phillip assumes that credit cards will be issued in a more and more personalized way:

art of a future private label credit card will likely be card personalization. With low(er) cost one-off printing and credit card companies looking to make their offerings more valuable, getting a credit card with your avatar on it is worth a lot.

As with mobile phone ringtones, you can think about this kind of personalization what you want (personally, I don't think I'm a big fan of either one), but the idea is there to stay, and it's gonna be there big-time. What I'm still wondering about is: How is fraud dealt with if i t happens in-game, if it influences real, hard cash out there?

[via Joi Ito]

Cornell University has built this weird robot that can build and re-build itself. Like, in the beginning it's just a bunch of loose blocks lying around, then it assembles itself into some functioning robot. Check out the video of, as gizmodo calls it, the beast in action.

yeah!

Trying to downplay the havoc Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile will wreak on the mobile telecoms industry, Ballmer chose a topical Valentine’s Day theme for his announcement....But Ballmer’s announcement may be closer to a St Valentine’s Day massacre than a love letter for the mobile operators concerned.

Microsoft has developed a free voice-over-IP service for mobile phones: Think skype on your mobile. This would mean free phone calls from your mobile whenever you're in a WLAN. (Which at the moment isn't the case in the subway, but it is at universities, in office buildings and plenty of coffee shops, for example.) For the big mobile phone service providers like vodafone etc this will have some nasty impact; For users & consumers it'll be paradise...

it'd be scary. if it wasn't so damn cool: 3D painted rooms.



[via boing boing]

This has been around for a little while, but eventually i just couldn't resist posting it: Gizmodo announced a contest. The task: To sample/remix/re-edit some soundfiles. So far nothing special. But the soundfiles you had to sample were - (awesome!) - recordings of failing and dying hard drives. Yup, the sounds that your hard drive would actually produce if it gave up. If it happens to be a Hitachi drive, that is: The soundfiles originated from the Hitachi Website and were supposed to help users find out what's wrong with their drives. The songs had to be "based on the sound of Hitachi hard drives failing". Weird, eh? And, well, they are, and they're good, too! The winner, Hitachi Hard-Drive Project - Noriko Version, makes it really hard to even tell what it's remixed from.

What I like about this contest is not only that it's very creative & unconventional. It also poses a bunch of questions: "are they copyrighted? can you copyright ambient sounds? can you copyright a sound made by a machine if there's no human intervention to produce that sound?", asks Copyfire. Good point! This is remixing taken to cutting edge. You just gotta dig it.

this is a great idea: kiva raises micro-loans - down to as little as $25 - for starting businesses in developing countries. (the money seems to go straight into the loan, not into funding the organization overhead.)

When interviewing entrepreneurs about their standard of living, one simple question she would ask was, "Can you afford to take sugar with your tea?"
the worst case is that the business can't make it - the you donated a tiny amount of money and helped some families get by for another few months. either way, it's a win-win. but as i said, that's the worst case. usually you should get your money back after a year or so, plus a little interest.

the cool thing, though, is that you can actually see quite detailed where your money goes, and how it helps an east african entrepreneur set up his shop and maybe lift his family out of absolute poverty.

read the about, it's worth it.

[via die romantische komödie]

I lent them my bathroom to be their first POP in Japan. (People wouldn't rent space to an unknown US company.) I was probably one of the first people in Japan to have a 128K leased line in their toilet.

Joi Ito about PSINets expansion to Japan (via his bathroom). Nowadays, among other things, he's on the board of directors of creative commons.

I probably shouldn't be admitting this, but the truth is: I like geeky people.

Und nur nochmal zur Erinnerung: Das MIT stellt alle Unterrichtsmaterialien online, free & open: MIT Open Courseware.