Smartphone App Favortree Rewards Users For Improving The Neighborhood
By Joop de Boer
Borrow a lawn mower, lend a video game, offer a ride to the airport or find a babysitter. Favortree is a new favor-trading app for smartphones that rewards its users for helping people in their neighborhoods. All users of the app have a virtual tree, and the more they help their neighbors, the more this digital tree grows. Favortree has launched in a beta version and is is currently looking for communities of at least five people to start playing this ‘play-it-forward’ game.
Read more →Musical Umbrella Turns The City Into A Symphony
It’s a rainy Summer here in Amsterdam, so let’s stay with the umbrella theme. Thanks to Make we found out about this rather cool umbrella that’s able to play music when it rains. For the occasion of Music Hackday 2012 in Amsterdam, Berlin-based hackers Alice Zappe and Julia Lager managed to create a musical umbrella that produces a random series of lo-fi 8-bit tones as soon as rain drops fall on it.
Read more →Street Lamp Transforms Into An Umbrella When It Rains
Say hi to the Lampbrella, a concept for a new street lamp that’s able to double as an umbrella to keep pedestrians dry. The innovative idea comes from St. Petersburg-based designer Mikhail Belyaev. The Lampbrella is made from fiberglass and equipped with a rain and motion sensor that help to figure out when it needs to open and close the umbrella canopy.
Read more →From Smoke Signals To Tweet Clouds
By Clement Adam
Similar to traditional smoke signals, Galleria Mall in Brazil spiced up the re-launch of Brazil’s first open mall not by offering people gifts, but by allowing them to create ‘gift clouds’. Using the Flogo Cloud technology, visitors of the mall were invited to send clouds accompanied with a simple tweet.
Read more →
Vending Machine Offers Free Iced Tea In Exchange For A Tweet
By Joop de Boer
This South African soda machine gives away free iced tea in exchange for a promotional tweet. The Bevmax 4-45 (‘BEV’) vending machine, located at Wembley Square, Cape Town, is equipped with a marquee that encourages passers-by to send a GPS-tagged tweet with a hashtag in it. As soon as the machine notices the tweet, it spits out a free can of Rooibos iced tea.
Read more →Data Graphic Shows What New Yorkers Complain About
By Clement Adam
311 is New York City’s main source of government information and non-emergency services. The service, launched in 2003, currently receives some 50,000 calls a day and offers information about more than 3,600 topics — school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs, you name it. Each complaint is logged, tagged and mapped, allowing for further analysis. Pitch Interactive came up with this interesting data visualization that provides insight in common complaints by time of the day. The graphic shows 34,522 complaints that were collected between 8 September and 15 September, 2010.
Read more →Mark McKeague Explores The Future Sound Of Traffic
Although many electric vehicles use synthesized sounds to simulate the sound of motor vehicles, you can let them play any sound you want. London-based interaction designer Mark McKeague explores the future sound of urban traffic by letting electric cars adapt their sound to their relationship to other road users and the environment. Can the city become a symphony?
Read more →Wi-Fi To The People!
By Emma Chow
In a technological utopia there would be free Wi-Fi for all, as plentiful as the air we breath. Many city mayors have declared grand schemes of blanketing their dominion with free Wi-Fi, yet none of these plans have come to full fruition.
Read more →Smartphone App Wander Connects Strangers Around The World
By Clement Adam
Ever wanted to get acquainted with ‘real’ local cultures? Smartphone app Wander does just that by randomly connecting users from different parts of the world. The originality of the app is the way it connects people as it provides them with daily photo-based missions that are used as a communication tool. Don’t worry if you can’t speak your interlocutor’s language, communication is made easy using a built-in translator.
Read more →Data-Driven Urban Citizenship
By ajantriks
With networked infrastructures mixing with physical fabric of the cities (check out iPavement, paving tiles with embedded microcomputer), there is a gradually growing body of urban data. Often this data is not collected or not stored. Often it is stored without being shared. A steady trickling out of this urban data, however, is taking place through open data platforms and various public-private data partnerships. While there emerges a political demand for rights regarding networked objects (see Adam Greenfield and Bruno Latour and Near Future Laboratory), a range of products, services and platforms are coming up that offer to enrich citizenship with accessible and visualised data.
Read more →