I was at the D conference this week, and during one of today’s last sessions, Dean Kamen showed off some of the work his team has done for the US Army. Check out the interview and demo clip below — pretty incredible and definitely worth watching:
Vodpod videos no longer available.[ more info over on allthingsd.com ]
MSNBC.com has a new “visual news reader” called Spectra. You pick buckets like politics, sports, etc and it starts displaying news items as 2.5D visual blocks.
I spent some time with it — and I like it. It’s not going to change or replace any of my RSS reading, but it’s a nice change of pace — also reminds me a bit of the Digg Labs work being done.
You decide: manbabies ( totally safe for work ):
On WordPress.com right now, and in the next release of self hosted WordPress – version 2.6 – you have a few extra settings that relate to avatars:
What’s cool is that for people who haven’t yet added an avatar, like my friend Rama, instead of the “mystery man” icon, I am now showing an Identicon.
What’s an Identicon you ask ? “An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of the IP address, serving to identify a user of a computer system” ( source Wikipedia ). In addition, the Identicon will show the same generated avatar each time for that person without an avatar.
I’ve turned it on on my blog, and you can see it in action in this post. If you blog on WordPress.com, you can access these new option in Dashboard > Settings > Discussion.
More info posted by Matt over on the WordPress.com blog.
Impressive editing job:
My buddy Dave Pell, of Rollyo and Davenetics fame, launched Addict-o-matic yesterday. Addict-o-matic is an innovative yet simple to use news aggregator meant to give you a very quick snapshot of what’s going on based on a search term / topic. Dave describes it as a service that:
… searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up and what’s now.
I’ve been beta testing it for a bit, and I really like how it doesn’t require login credentials even when customizing. Rather, it creates a unique URL you can share with friends. You can also choose which sources you want displayed including WordPress.com search results.
Techcrunch reviewed it and said:
Addictomatic sports a very clean and manageable layout – a necessity given the amount of information it throws at you. Users can add, remove, and rearrange the location of each headline feed, and layouts can be saved by simply creating a bookmark. The site is also offering plugins to integrate Addictomatic into browser search fields.
The very smart Seth Godin agrees:
It’s pretty simple. It gives you a popurls type view of the web for any search term you can imagine. Nicely done.
Definitely worth checking out @ addictomatic.com
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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