Great use of technology...

See, now this is cool. The Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen is a theme park, and they've installed Bluetooth devices all over the place. You can hire an arm-tag for your child (or dog or husband), and if you lose them, you SMS the tag's id to a particular number, and it will reply with the location of the last device they walked past.

Someone's thinking! This is a great use of technology - people need to look at the way we use existing traditional technlogy and use it to improve our way of life, not just how we do business. Bluetooth is a traditonal technology, just with big improvements. It's still networking - but now we're finding better smarter ways to use the technology.

Another great concept I read about today is the Ambient Orb. This idea sprung from the need for different user interfaces. It's a barameter, basically, for whatever you want to monitor. Originally it'll monitor stock prices, and glow a certain colour and even intensity, depending on the stock price. You can set it to monitor visitors to websites, server performance, track book sales, guests in a museum, whatever data you can capture and make available.

It's a brilliant idea - humans are so visual in the way we look at things, we prefer pictures over text. What better way to monitor your stock prices than a soft glowing orb? You wouldn't even have to specifically look at it, you could walk into the room and subconsciously you'd know if you needed to panic about your stock price or not, or whether there are too many people waiting in the queue at your mother's sandwich bar. It's non-intrusive technlogy, and certainly more user-friendly than having to read a number from a display, or checking a stock-ticker on your computer.