I’m doing daily (if not more) conf’calla through skype, and since I moved to PC I must confess the quality of those drastically dropped (why-tf did Dell put the microphone next to the fan !?). Just bought this gizmo and the sound is stunning, it’s very compact (and the USB chord folds nicely in the back cover) and the sound both in output and input is diamond-clear just like the big well-known Polycom squid.

Cool presentation by 37 signals about getting real in the Internet economy. Thanks Alexis for the link!

This is something that has been cooking since Linden Lab’s 2008 partnership with IBM : an appliance for an Enterprise version of Second Life. The price is a bit hefty, 55KUSD, but for corporation with many remote locations who recognize the value of Virtual World to organize live meetings without the need of actually having people fly to a same spot, this is going to be a good value for money. The only drawback is that it still requires a 3D video card in your laptop to render somehow nicely (read, LL, please do invest more in your viewer!).

I hope F-Secure will try this soon, since this would definitely help save on plane fares and phone bills !

If you’re a corporation and you’re wondering what Virtual World could bring to internal communication processes, I suggest you read Thinkbalm’s reports on the topic who are more than insightful (I’ve been myself a contributor to some).

I’m playing again with DeviceAnywhere which I encountered first a couple years ago at Mobile World Congress. If you remember, Mobile Complete make appliances where they hook up a mobile, wire it to a computer and let you access this device from remote through a convenient application. One of the main advantage is that it lets you run QA tests on very heterogenous devices with various operators-related factory settings.
I must confess I’m pretty impressed by the amount of devices they are now supporting along with the number of native operator devices. Haven’t deeply looked at the pricing but it seems quite reasonable (couple bucks an hour) and totally worth the flexibility of the service.

Japanese operator KDDI and Tokyo-based Flower Robotics to develop a new concept mobile phone/robot system designed to be a receptacle to the user’s mobile phone when he gets back home. Once the phone is placed in this high-tech coffin, all your daily lifelog is being backed up including the list of people you met. Quite nice!

This is my preferred casual game right now, Taito has been revamping his old classics (like puzzle bobble) and have successfully managed to give them an HD spin while keeping the old magic. Can be tried/bought from PSN right from your PSP.

Just realized NeuroSky MindSet is finally out. For those who remember, it reads brainwaves and uses them to have you interact with the game. The demo is quite cool, can’t wait to use it combined with a head tracker to enhance my aim accuracy in Quake!

This prototype from Sony has been unveiled this week and while Sony still sounds unclear about what to do with this, It’s still an amazing piece of tech !

@yazzgoth showed me the Livescribe pen a couple of weeks ago, and I must confess it’s really an amazing toy. To keep it short this smart pen understands your handwriting, stores it and syncs it with the sounds he also records, recognizes it and lets you process it on the go. The most amazing demo is the language translation where you write a word and hit a function button on a hot corner of your page and the pen start saying the same word in chinese or any other language you choose.
Now apparently we’ll get even more cool apps to fill this thing making it even more appealing. I’ll try to be strong and not to buy one (since my handwriting is the worse…).

MXP4 – Play with it! from MXP4 on Vimeo.

Beautiful video trailer explaining the MXP4 concept. Well I shoudl say trying to explain since I tested on someone unfamiliar with MXP4 whose conclusion was “So MXP4 let u listen to music while walking?”.
Nice to have the money to make that kind of clips anyway – and while I still don’t understand why I should be interested in remixing music myself, and why I should care, it’s still quite puzzling.