Do you typically collect business cards that you never enter into your address book? Do you ever make missed calls to contacts you have just typed into your phone's contact list to send them your phone number?

As the name of this mobile app indicates, Bump is here to make those contact info exchanges as simple and playful as bumping your mobile phone against your colleague's or friend's.

Bump allows you to define profiles for different situations, like a personal and a professional profile, define the data you'd like to share as well as the social networks you'd like to connect with this person on. For the moment, Bump only supports Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, but since it has an open API, connection on other social networks, services or even money could be bumped between users soon. 

The data that you can bump to your new contacts or get from them doesn't only include contact information, but also photographs, calendar invites and calendar sharing. Music, ringtones or other type of files that may be subject to copyright issues are not supported by Bump. If you are wary about the security of the application, the company claims that transfer of information is secure and it uses the same type of encryption as online banking.

Bump is a free app that currently has versions for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices, with support for more platforms to come soon. Any two devices connected to the internet and running Bump can bump each other, so that means that an iPhone and a Droid could exchange data, for example.

Bump will only work with people in your proximity, so it won't let you push content to a user who is not by your side, but once you have made the connection, you'll be able to chat with this person and share files via chat.

http://bu.mp/

Whether you like Flash or not, it's a technology that defines a lot of of our web experience: rich media applications, games, animations, video and audio content players, are built with Flash.

With the evolution of smartphones, browsing the web on a mobile device has become more and more a standard, but up until now, most mobile users had to download a Flash Lite plug in to load sites, apps or players built with that Adobe Technology.

Things are about to change since Adobe recently announced the release of Flash Player 10.1, redesigned with new performance and mobile specific features that will bring the full web experience across desktops and devices.

These release is not free of polemics, due to the recent refusal of Apple to support Flash in popular products like the iPhone and the iPad. Steve Jobs recently argued that the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards, and they are all areas where Flash falls short. Coincidentally, high performance and low power consumption are two improvements of the Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, Apple wants developers to take advantage of iPhone's features and not make them all look on all mobile platforms.

This decision will force developers to use HTML 5 to load videos, or create animations, for example, instead of Adobe's proprietary plug-in, if they want their content to load correctly on iPhones.

Opposite to Apple's stand, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm will include the the Flash Player 10.1 on their products, so that users can choose whether they want to enable that content on their devices or not.

The ability to load Flash content will then be one of the differenciating factors between the brand new iPhone 4.0 and the announced update of Android's OS: Froyo, to be fully released soon.

We'll have to wait and see how these battle of giants unfolds.

http://tinyurl.com/2bwtack

Attaching digital information to physical objects and locations is a growing trend. A few years ago projects like Semapedia or Yellow Arrow paved the way for other types of applications that are being developed today. Semapedia used 2D barcodes to link objects to Wikipedia articles, whereas Yellow Arrow used numeric codes attached to yellow arrow stickers that allowed publishing and retrieving information via SMS messaging.

As technology evolves and new services are born, these applications become a bit more sophisticated.

Stickybits stores digital content in traditional barcodes. Generate your own barcodes, or scan existing ones, and post your photos, videos, music, text or other files to them. The barcodes can then be sticked to anything from business cards, flyers, walls or  any other surface.

When someone scans a given barcode, all the content that has been attached by any user will be revealed, or, if none, a new reference will be created in the Stickybits database. The service will also notify you when a barcode is scanned, has new content or even changes location.

The Stickybits app is available for iPhone and Android devices, and the service is now opening their API for developers to create their own projects.

On a different note, Spotisquare, as its name implies, is a mashup of Spotify and Foursquare, that allows users to link song playlists to locations. The mobile web app will log you into Foursquare and will reveal if there is any music tied to a place or venue. If so, the browser will launch that playlist on Spotify. If not, for the moment, you'll have to use Spotisquare on your desktop to connect music to Foursquare venues.

http://www.stickybits.com/

Are you on the go and you're feeling lazy to type in a search on your mobile phone? You don't know what landmark you're looking at? Need to enter in the details of a business card into your contacts list? Maybe you're wondering about a particular piece of artwork in front of you.

Google Goggles has the answer. With this Android application, you will be able to run searches by just taking photographs. The results will be the type of web results you'd get on a text search, plus a few suggestions specifically for the types of objects the application deals with the best.

For the moment Goggles works best with books, CDs, DVDs, works of art and products that have a text legend. It is not so accurate with food, animals, furniture or clothes yet, for example. However, the application can also provide information about businesses near you by displaying their names directly in the camera preview.

Visual search technology is still in its infancy but the applications of this technology are innumerable. Imagine asking for a suggestion for a chess move, identifying plants taking pictures of leaves or finding recipes to cook with a particular set of ingredients.

Goggles allows you to choose to save the pictures you take into your history or to delete them after the search. Also, a rating system helps train the system by asking users how accurate results were.

If you have an Android device, download Google Goggles from the marketplace for free. Versions for other devices will be coming out soon.

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

The 'Internet of Things', a term that refers to real world objects connecting to the Internet and interacting with each other, has been opened up beyond the big corporations thanks to a British start up.

Pachube, pronounced as "patch-bay", defines itself as a web service that enables you to store, share and discover real time sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices and buildings around the physical 'and' virtual worlds. Yes: Pachube also interacts with Second Life.

The website is the platform that connects the community and allows posting sensor feeds as well as extracting real time sensor data from other people's feeds. If YouTube is meant for users to post and view videos, Pachube was created to post and share sensor data.

What type of data can we work with? Pollution and temperature readings from an iPhone data logging app, messenger online statuses, Twitter feeds, electricity meters or readings from sensors hooked to an Arduino board, for example.

What can we do with that data? Monitor feeds on your Android Pachube viewer, publish dynamic graphs on your site, calculate the carbon footprint of your energy consumption, generate 3D models of environmental or sensor feeds with Google SketchUp, map feeds to geographical locations, or send SMS alerts when a particular activity is registered in a Pachube data feed, among others.

The service uses an Extended Environments MarkUp Language (EEML) and an extensive RESTful API that makes it possible to both serve and request data in many formats. All the feeds will be hosted at no cost and will be accessed for free, but if you want to keep yours private, the company will offer that service for a fee.

Environmental monitoring systems, home automation systems, remotely coupled interactive environments, networked furniture, vehicles and objects, remote control systems, building management systems are only going to become more and more part of our daily routine. Pachube is here to let us start playing with them ourselves.

http://www.pachube.com/

Knowing the visitors to your site is one of the tasks of a good webmaster. Depending on the activity of the users on your website, and also depending on the computer or device that they are accessing your site from, you’ll be able to optimize its content and structure.

With the proliferation of smartphones, a growing segment of your visitors will come to your site from their multimedia phones. PercentMobile is a startup service that allows you to create reports of your site’s mobile traffic. Whether you built a desktop or a mobile site, this service will tell you what devices and brands are accessing your site, their screen sizes, carrier and country of origin, among other information. 

Open an account with them for free, paste their tracking code into your website’s templates, and drop a small file on your web server. You’ll be able to get basic reports at no cost, and you can get “pay as you go” upgrades if you want custom reports or have a lot of traffic.

This service has an extensive database of over 3000 devices and more than 2000 networks, and they publish monthly snippets of industry stats based on the traffic they monitor, so that you can get a sense of the market evolution and the worldwide mobile ecosystem.

PercentMobile just won Gold at the Early Stage Innovation of the Mobile Premier Awards in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

http://percentmobile.com/

Have you ever wondered where to go to have a drink when you're out and about? What do people recommend at a particular restaurant? Or whether or not your friends are anywhere nearby so that you can meet up and hang out together? Foursquare is here to help.

Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare, is a veteran of social mobile software. Years ago he co-developed Dodgeball, an SMS based mobile application that was acquired by Google in 2005 and that planted the seed of the now grown up sibling. Dodgeball allowed users to broadcast their location to their contacts and facilitated serendipitous encounters. Google shut down the service in early 2009, but Foursquare took that concept to a next level, by adding elements of gaming, local guide, humor and incentives to use the application, as well as a nice UI.

How does Foursquare work? Download the application for free. There are versions available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones, and for the rest of mobile devices, you can access their mobile site, or use limited functionality via SMS.

Invite friends! This application is all about sharing your experiences with them: let your peers know where you go and what you enjoyed there, and ask them to do the same.

When you are on the go, check in at the places that you visit, so that your location is broadcasted to your contacts. Add tips or recommended todos so that they know what to order or what not to miss. Your activity will earn you badges that you'll be able to show proudly to your friends, as well as points. In some venues, Foursquare is partnering with the owners to offer discounts to you, mobile socialites, so do not forget to check in. The more you become a regular of a place, the more chances you'll have to become the mayor of that venue. What will that get you? Free drinks, free coffees or even free stays at hotels.

Foursquare was born in New York City, but its user base is now international. Go to the site to check out the information that has already been entered for a given venue, or see who is using the application already. Go head and give it a try.

http://www.foursquare.com

Technology sometimes makes our life easier, and sometimes it makes it more complicated. For people with disabilities, it can be a source of frustrations, since it may expose their deficiencies. However, used in a sensitive way, technology can be a key tool to alleviate their difficulties to carry out certain activities.

In the case of a physical paralysis, the brain works but the body does not respond. How can a bedridden graffiti artist suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a motor neurone disease, continue to do his work when he cannot move his limbs? Like in the real story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, that Julian Schnabel filmed in 'The Diving Bell and The Butterfly', the eyes can be the vehicle of expression and liberation of those who are trapped in their body.

In the intersection of art, open source and guerrilla, a group of hackers and artists decided to empower a legendary LA graffiti artist, Tony Quan, aka Tempt One, to continue to do his work using his eyes. EyeWriter is the name of the open source project created by members of different collectives: Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group.

EyeWriter has different components. First, the glasses where the hardware that tracks the eye movements is mounted, built with a hacked eye camera and near-infrared LEDs to illuminate the eye and make the pupil more distinguishable and easier to track. Second, the software that captures the pupil movements and maps them to positions on a plane. And third, the software that specifically draws, manipulates and styles objects in a time-based interface that responds to eye commands. 

The EyeWriter's site provides instructions to build the hardware for about $50, and it also offers the dowload of the software for those who are interested in this initiative.

Thanks to EyeWriter and the inventive of this collective, Tempt One has already projected his graffities in Vienna and Tokyo. His intention is bring awareness about his illness, to promote health reform in the United States and to help others in his situation. 

http://eyewriter.org

Mobile phones are the most pervasive computing and communication device in developing countries. Where most of the population cannot afford to buy a computer, many of them can afford to get a mobile phone and use it in creative ways to lower the cost of the bills.

The majority of these mobile phones are less sophisticated than the smartphones taking over the first world markets. However, innovative ways of using lower common denominator technologies in mobile phones are bringing about new services.

Such is the case of M-Pesa, a mobile banking service originated in Kenya and provided by Safaricom, which means 'mobile money' in Swahili. In countries where most of the population does not have a bank account, this branchless banking service uses the customer's mobile number as their account, and transactions happen through SMS.

M-Pesa customers buy airtime for their mobile phones through a network of M-Pesa agents, but instead of using the credit for calling purposes, they use their phone to make transfers to other M-Pesa users, to pay bills or to keep money safe, turning their phone into an electronic wallet.

Digital funds that are sent by SMS to another mobile phone user anywhere in the country can be redeemed for cash at any M-Pesa agent, helping bridge rural and urban areas, and some of the services that can be currently paid with M-Pesa credit are utility bills or school fees. The lost of a phone does not mean a disaster, since a PIN is required to access an M-Pesa account.

After Kenya, M-Pesa launched in Tanzania, and it currently has around 8 million customers globally. The service is going to be expanding to other markets like Afghanistan, India, Egypt or South Africa. 

http://www.safaricom.co.ke/index.php?id=745

Musical instruments, robots, art installations, ambient devices, lights that turn or or off based on presence of people in a given space: now you do not require the expert skills of engineers to bring them to life any more, because there are tools and technology available to artists, designers and hobbyists without a technical background but interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Born in Italy, Arduino is one of such tools that has gained traction among the educational and artistic communities because of its flexibility, ease of use, durability and low cost when compared to other microcontrollers. Arduino is an open source platform composed of a board, a software package and community of developers and users that define the possibilities and direction of the project.

Arduino is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. To get started you'll need to buy an Arduino, download the programming software (for free), and get some electronics components to build the circuit required for your application. Hook up the board to sensors, motors, LEDs and/or computers running software like Flash or Pure Data to receive input from the physical world and process it to generate the desired output. All in all, you can be doing elaborate electronics for less than $100.

The site is a reflection of a vibrant community, and there you'll find code examples, reference materials, a forum as well as resources to buy the components you'll need. Because of its open source nature the site also offers the schematics and design files to manufacture an Arduino yourself, so take it as far as you wish. 

http://www.arduino.cc/

What happens when a website is taken down or redesign? Where do these websites end?

Just like libraries preserve paper publications and some audiovisual material for posterity, there is an institution whose mission is to keep digital age materials.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that was born to build a library for the Internet and digital born materials. The so called Wayback Machine is the tool that offers public access to websites from as far back as 1996.

Lycos, Altavista, Tripod, Geocities, the first portals, the first webmail services, the first online newspapers... they are all portraited in this trip down the recent past. Remember when sites started or when they were discontinued, and what they looked like years ago through this tool.

Internet Archive also preserves movies, audio, texts and software over a decade old. Cartoons from the 30s and 40s, machinima, BBS documentaries and software from the Tucows Library are all present in this big archive managed from El Presidio in San Francisco. A XVIII Spanish fort as the bastion of the digital age memory.

http://www.archive.org

In this International Year of Astronomy 2009 if you cannot participate in any of the activities organized by UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union on the occasion, you have one more tool to enjoy starry nights.

Sky Map is a free application for mobile devices that will let you navigate stars, planets and constellations just aiming your phone at the sky. Sky Map has been developed by Google engineers and it is only available for Android devices for the moment.

Using the phone's compass, GPS and tilt sensors, Sky Map will show you the map of the sky as it is seen from your location. The application will display the celestial bodies that surround you as you move around, but you can also find specific things, like Mars or Sirius, by searching. Sky Map will point the direction you need to look to find that star or planet.

Rediscover the ancient pastime of charting the starry night. Sky Map brings the stars to the palm of your hand.

http://www.google.com/sky/skymap.html

50 years ago, at the beginning of the computers era, people believed that these machines would be able to answer any factual question we may have, that they would be the gateway to all the world's knowledge. While we have undoubtfully made remarkable progress in organizing and accessing the world's information, we have not crossed the line that separates information and knowledge.

According to the founders of Wolphram Alpha, this new online service brings us closer to that future. Enter a query in natural language in its search box, and this engine will compute the answer for you. Whether you want to know the nutritional information of a slice of pizza, or what the largest countries in the world in terms of area are, whether you need to solve a simple mathematical equation, or you want to convert Roman numerals to their decimal form.

When you enter a query, this online service won't return web documents and sites that may contain the answer you are looking for, but the actual solutions and any relevant visualizations.

Wolpham Alpha will infer the answers using a series of algorithms, computational models, natural language processing and a large database of data from public sources and curated by experts across the globe.

This is the public release of a long term endeavor. Today's answer engine is the result of over 20 years of research and development, but Wolphram Alpha still has important limitations. We need enter concise and concrete queries to obtain best results, scientific knowledge is its strongest area compared to other fields, and, for the moment, it only speaks English.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Last Fall male targeted magazine Esquire made the news because of one of their covers. On the occasion of their 75th anniversary, they featured a panel of moving words and flashing images displayed on electronic ink.

Electronic paper, also referred to as electronic ink, is a new display technology that mimics the appearance of ordinary ink on paper and it is an evolution of flat panel displays towards efficiency and user-friendliness. A few notes on how each of them work.

Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), like the ones on our laptops, mobile phones or PDAs, use a technique called backlight. Millions of pixels in front of a light source are turned on, off or regulated in intensity through light valves that control the passage of light.

In electronic paper displays, that still currently exist only in monochrome version,  electrically charged micro spheres or pigment particles, move on the display to indicate the presence or absence of content. Depending on the type of display, when voltage is applied to them micro spheres will rotate and make their white or black side face up, whereas the particles will either move to the front or the rear of the display, where they will appear dark.

Electronic paper displays have clear benefits over the flat panel displays. They use less power, because they can hold text or images indefinitely without drawing electricity, they are lightweight, you can read on them in any light conditions and they are less tiring than LCD screens, since image is more stable and the display doesn't direct light towards your eyes.

Other than an anecdotical Esquire magazine cover, electronic paper has reached the consumer market primarily in the form of e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. On a different area Motorola created a low cost mobile phone targeted to developing countries, the Fone F3 aka. the Motofone.

The digital age is pushing the publishing industry to rethink their business, and electronic ink is making them explore new formats. E-readers can refresh content, store multiple works and download new material from the internet, they provide a seamless reading experience and there even exists flexible electronic paper. Combined with a touch panel, they could allow users to annotate pages in electronic books or edit documents with a digital stylus, bringing the feel of printed paper closer. It's only a matter of time that they will support color and its uses will expand to other areas.

Technology progresses, but still there will always be people who will prefer the sensorial experience of printed paper, its smell, its different textures and qualities, the pleasure of turning pages over and maybe even the stains of ink on your fingers after having been reading the newspaper.

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/video/e-ink-cover-video

Have you ever been to an electronic music concert where the performers were staring at their laptops? Have you attended any events where imagery was projected onto screens in synch with the music or audio?

Those people behind their computers often are using a software called Pure Data, a.k.a. Pd. Pure Data is an open source data flow programming environment for real time manipulation of any digital media: audio, video and graphical processing. Open source means that Pd is not only free software, but also a community of developers that contribute code collaboratively under the GNU General Public License.

Dataflow means that programs are not written in lines of text, but connecting boxes or objects that have different functions and trigger different events in an application. Pd applications are called 'patches' after the patch cords of analog recording studios, and their visual component makes them a bit less intimidating than cryptic text for those not so well versed in programming.

The Pd site offers all the information you need to get started. Download the software free of charge, follow the manuals and tutorials, run the examples provided and start creating patches. Pd is multi-platform and runs on Windows, Macs, Linux and some mobile devices.

What can you do with Pure Data? Audio-visual solo or networked performances, robotics, telephony systems, audio installations... there are no limits in the distribution license as to what you can do, and the possibilities are up to you.

http://puredata.info

The devices we commonly refer to as printers, the ones we have in the office and at home, are specifically 2D printers. They output digital documents that have two dimensions: height and width.

To create volume, there's actually another kind of printers, 3D printers, a.k.a. rapid prototyping machines, that are used for testing designs in product manufacturing. They sculpt objects in a solid block of material, following designs created in 3D modeling software. These are machines that printed the models of your mobile phone, your toothbrush or your car's parts.

These 3D printers are rather bulky and a cheap one costs tens of thousands of dollars, but there are now different kits that introduce three dimensional printing to a low end user and reduce the cost substantially. It's the case of MakerBot or Fab@Home that put a 3D printer in your hands within a price range of $750 to $3000. Download designs from the web or create your own models, hook the 3D printer to your computer and start turning them into physical objects.

The materials these kits can handle include ABS plastics, corn based plastic and even frosting, but be careful not to use hazardous or toxic materials if you try it yourself.

http://makerbot.com

Thank you for calling us...  For location and hours of operation, press 1. To talk to customer service, press 2. To hear this menu again, press 3...

Call managing applications like the ones we have been greeted by many times when calling institutions, businesses or customer service numbers, or even further, office phone systems, are now at anyone's reach, thanks to open source software like Asterisk.

With Asterisk all you need is an internet connection, a VoIP service provider and a computer to run your Asterisk application on. Connect your telephone to the computer, and you are ready to make and receive calls. Create your own interactive voice response systems, the menus you're going to guide your callers through to direct them to a particular receiver or provide data base driven information. Other features provided by this software include voice mail or conference calling.

Digium is the name of the company behind Asterisk. They lead the development and provide setup and support to those customers who want it, but an independent developer could configure the system herself too. The software is released under the GNU General Public License, is available for download free of charge and it's free to use for whatever you want. Asterisk was originally designed for Linux, but it now also runs on a variety of different operating systems.

Offering a mix of traditional and VoIP telephony services, Asterisk gives you flexibility, customization capabilities and competitive advanced communications solutions.

http://www.asterisk.org

Microsoft recently announced their new operating system to be launched commercially in 2010. It will be named Windows Azure and it will be significantly different from their previous OS in the fact that this platform will be exclusively online, both for developers to build software, and for users to work on it. Applications and data will live on Microsoft's servers and users will be able to access their software and information directly from the web on multiple computing devices.

It's the same principle behind Google Apps, a suite of online messaging and collaboration applications and the Google Apps Engine, a platform for independent developers to host and build web applications using Google's infrastructure. Going one step ahead, Google Chrome is an attempt to optimize the experience of accessing rich content and using interactive applications by streamlining and simplifying the web browser, the frame through which we access this content and software.

Having software online definitely has advantages, like making our data available from multiple computers, or saving us the trouble of having to deal with software and hardware upgrades, as well as version compatibility issues. However, at the same time, for some it may raise issues of privacy and security, since our information is stored by third parties, who will ultimately be responsible of our data's integrity and confidentiality.

Before the PC, from the 50s till the 80s, most computers were big centralized machines called mainframes which hosted data and software. Users accessed them via terminals with basically no computing capabilities in order to perform different operations. Software in the cloud is actually not a new idea.

Do you want to know what topics a blog or newspaper is covering? Do you want to visualize the essence of a text?

Wordle is an online application that allows you to graphically represent texts, highlighting the words that are used the most in a given article or RSS feed in a fun and customizable way. Wordle does not discriminate between word types, but it still gives a very good idea of what the content of the source is.

Create your own graphic, play with the color, font type or orientation of the text until you like it, and share your word maps with your friends. Browse the different compositions that Wordle can produce in the site gallery.

http://www.wordle.net

Digital screens that allow for gestural interaction. No mouse or stylus, just tapping, pressing, gliding, bringing your fingers closer or further from one another directly on the device screen to load or manipulate media. The Apple iPhone has given us a taste of what it can feel like to interact with a multi-touch display on a small device. Now the research work on large multi-touch sensitive surfaces is reaching the market and will enable a range of novel multi-user interactions. Two examples:

Jeff Han, one of the academic research leaders on multi-touch sensing technology at New York University has now created a spin off company, Perceptive Pixel. Some of the clients they target include TV stations, film studios or other clients that may use these touch screens as high-tech blackboards.
http://multi-touchscreen.com
http://www.perceptivepixel.com

Microsoft Surface went commercial last Spring. Microsoft's product will initially be available to hotels, restaurants, retailers or public entertainment venues willing to offer information on-site and new interactive experiences. Watch for it. You may spot one in your next trip.
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.html

If these products are out of reach for you and you have a Wii, you can create your own home made "Minority Report" experience. Follow Johnny Chung Lee's instructions and have fun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU

Semapedia.org allows you to generate 2D barcodes with links to any Wikipedia article that you can print and stick on real world surfaces: a building, a book. a bench in the park... any place or object can be related to a concept, an event, a historical figure that are on Wikipedia.

Read those barcodes right where you come across them from your camera phone. You'll have to download an application that will decode those tags when you take a picture of them and will open the corresponding Wikipedia article on your mobile browser, right on the spot! Download the 2D barcode reader from the project site.
http://www.semapedia.org

After much speculation and rumors about Google entering the mobile market and a growing expectation for a Google handset, Android was unveiled in November 2007.

The Google phone turned out to be not a new gadget, but a software platform for mobile devices, a new mobile operating system based on Linux and developed by Google and over 30 other technology and mobile companies grouped as the Open Handset Alliance. Android attempts to fight against the mobile platform fragmentation by bringing together manufacturers, carriers and technology companies in creating this OS that will run on multiple different devices.

Given the fierce competition in the industry, to make this initiative successful, Google will have to engage both developers and users into embracing Android.

As far as developers go, Android is born under the promise of being a free and open platform (neither of them guaranteed or fully delivered yet), and it will allow any third-party application to access all the handset's functionality, unlike what happens in other mobile platforms. Development tools are available for download from the site and Google recently organized an Android Developer Challenge which will offer $10 million in awards for the best applications.

The competition will help get a taste of what Android could be like, but it will also let Google discover any killer apps that would make users want to switch to Android. Given the precedent set by the iPhone, a slick user interface and great usability are also areas that Google is putting emphasis on.

When will we get Android on our phone? The operating system is still in prototype state, and the mobile phone manufacturers who have joined the project won't have handsets that support it in the market until the second half of 2008. 

http://code.google.com/android

The world of human genome is an absolute mystery.  The reasons behind been browned or blue eyed, have stronger bonds with your mother or your father, three cases of cancers in the same family, continuous headaches…

We search for answers in our ancestors, believing that diseases and skills can be inherited. The truth is that most of these doubts can be answered through our ADN. We all have 23 pair of chromosomes, 17% are left handed, 22% have intolerance to lactose, 41% have tendency for strong headaches… Find out who to thank for an impressive athletic condition or who to blame for your allergies.

23andme offers the first personal genome service to unlock the secrets of your ADN.

23andme can help a user discover through his genetic blueprint not only the chances of developing various diseases, but also other qualities such as athletic ability.  Although no one is born as a long distance runner it’s sure that some can grow to become one.

https://www.23andme.com

HUBBLE SITE it’s not only a collection of incredible images captured by telescope HUBBLE, but also a powerful vehicle   in spreading scientific information. Besides unique images and videos of the universe never seen before, one can also discover more about the greatest telescope created by men and access specific tools for teaching.

The potential of HUBBLE SITE goes even further. Until recently, astronomers only had access to the images delivered by their observation centres. Thanks to HUBBLE SITE now they can use and accede to a wider list of high resolution images.

HUBBLE SITE allows the democratization of astronomy and usage of precision telescopes that for sure will help human beings in a deeper understanding of its universe.

http://hubblesite.org