thisbigcity:

Deposit your dog’s business, you get free wifi. What do you think?

只要清理狗屎，丟入這個機器裡，就能使用免費無線網路，各位覺得如何？

Hidden Gems and City Tours From Your Neighbor’s Perspective at Trover.com

A new mobile discovery network, Trover, gives users the chance to introduce local explorers to hidden gems right outside their door. Trover is a free smartphone app, which is also accessible from its web site at Trover.com.  The app is designed for sharing discoveries, interesting things to see or do, in your city or a city you happen to be visiting, in order to help someone else enjoy the discovery just as you did. In other words, it’s a place exploration tool.

GPS drawing is hot. On Spoon & Tamago (great blog for Japan enthusiasts) we came across the Tokyo Zoo Project, a website that builds upon this idea as it transforms Tokyo’s map into one big zoo of GPS-drawn animals. The project, powered by Sony, presents a series of cycling routes around the Japanese capital that trace outlines of different animals, such as a panda that covers Shibuya and a big gorilla that crosses the city’s Haneda district.

We have been hard at work with some tech wizards to create the ONE Street Tweeter – a clever robot that can print short tweets, tweetetes if you will, (40 characters or less) on road surfaces. Yes – we want to take your messages on the road. Better still, if we print your message we’ll even send a pic of it back to you to share it with your friends.

So, what are you waiting for? You guys are more creative than any of those Mad Men types. Just tweet a message in your own words (no more than 40 characters including spaces) to encourage, rouse, and hustle the G8 to act now on hunger and poverty.

Tweet your message to @ONEStreetTweet or if you don’t do that sort of thing then you can type your message into the box below.

BBC reports that touchless smartphones and TVs could hit the markets in 2012. So no buttons any more, a gesture is enough. It’s just a matter of time before the good old visual interfaces have totally changed, as well as the ways to control them. Google is secretly working on Augmented Reality-powered glasses that “provide a display with a heads up computer interface”, turning Augmented Reality-powered worlds with digital layers of information into an integral part of the urban fabric. (Click here for an ironic Augmented Reality future scenario byKeiichi Matsuda.) By the way, who needs glasses if we will be able to implant micro-computers into our eyes? Computers are close to becoming our sixth sense. And the city becomes an interface.

Peer-to-peer renting services focus on specific stuff and commodities. TakeSpinlister, a fresh initiative from Los Angeles that enables people to earn a little extra money by renting out their bicycle. Besides offering cheap bicycle renting opportunities in any city in the world, Spinlister also connects the worldwide bicycle riders community. Even for renting luxury recreational vehicles such as boats, sport cars and even planes there is an online peer-to-peer marketplace called Qraft. In addition, Campinmygarden offers private gardens as micro campsites. Parkcirca does the same for parking spaces in crowded cities.

An Urban Anatomy

publicdesignfestival:

The project by David Molander focuses on the traffic junction named Slussen, located in the heart of Stockholm (Sweden) and aims at documenting the relations between memory, urban landscape and human beings. During the period of a year he collected hundreds of night and daytime images and film clips, that he cut up and then reconstructed into a large-scale moving collage of the area.

A wide range of smartphone apps contributes to the revival of psychogeography. An appealing example is Serendipitor, a free iPhone app that enables its users to “find something by looking for something else”. Begin by entering a destination, from which Serendipitor suggests various routes, which are shorter or longer, depending on how much time you have. As you navigate your chosen route, the app suggests actions and movements to generate interactive encounters. A similar project we wrote about isDérive, a web-based app that presents users randomly drawn task cards that tell them what to do. Highly recommended is the Inception app, that was also part of our top 5 apps for exploring the city. This app uses augmented sound to induce dreams through the headset of the iPhone and iPod Touch, changing your perception of reality. Interested in more? Adam Greenfield compiled a list of iPhone and Android apps that support surprise and drift.

Wifis.org is a start-up that aims to be a “contact form for your Wi-Fi network”. The new company, founded by Mathias Nitzsche, provides a free service that enables its users to be contacted by others through their wireless networks. How? People register a unique ID with the site (for instance wifis.org/example) and then rename their wireless network into that URL. People who spot your network can easily leave you a message by using the contact form on your personal page. Why would you use it? The company suggests that their service could appeal to “friendly neighbors might invite you to a beer, or ask if you want to share your Wi-Fi for a monthly payment”. What makes Wifis.org interesting is that it is a digital communication channel attached to place. Furthermore, it enables users to get contacted by others without revealing their personal details — the existence of a Wi-Fi network is enough to receive messages.