Monday: January 7, 2013
Disney unveils next generation guest experience in the form of digital wristbands.The new wristbands will work in tandem with a new Disney app that you can use on your smartphone. The wristband (officially called MagicBand) can be used as your rooom key, theme park ticket, photopass, payment information and even access to FastPass for quicker access to rides and attractions. So long Key to the World cards!
Tuesday: December 18, 2012
Why Google's GMail outage may be a sign of things to come.The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.
Monday: November 14, 2011
Five future technologies for passenger air travel presented by National Geographic.What does the future hold for passenger air travel? National Geographic takes a look at some future technologies being developed right now. You just might be commuting at twice the speed of sound in a dart-like airplane and then arriving at the airport of the future. Do all airplanes of the future all have free in-flight wi-fi? That would be totally cool.
Wednesday: August 3, 2011
An interesting video showing off the impressive CGI used in Game of Thrones.Andy Gavin has written a post with a behind the scenes video from HBO's Game of Thrones depicting how most of the locations are built using modern CGI and clever scouting. If you've watched the show (and I highly recommend that you do) some of the per-CGI moments in the video may actually take you by surprise, once you see their post-CGI counterparts.
Friday: July 15, 2011
Disney testing out new mug technology in an effort out to stop drink refill abuse.The rampant use of hotel guests taking advantage of their refill privelages have finally put Disney over the edge. DIS Unplugged reports that they are currently testing new mugs that have embedded RFID chips in them. If you've exhausted your free refill privelages for that day, no soda dispensed for you. Take that, thrifty guests!
Friday: March 5, 2010
YouTube now has captioning for millions of videos thanks to new technology.So how did they do it? Each video now uses speech recognition technology to pick up potential spoken words from the audio track. It not may be a perfect solution but it's a great start. The technology only works on videos that contain English audio at present time.
Thursday: February 25, 2010
Behold the world's greenest skyscraper recently constructed over in China.These types of buildings even have their very own acronym, ZEB, which stands for zero-energy building. This particular building is 58% more energy efficient than your run-of-the-mill conventional skyscraper.
Friday: February 19, 2010
Turns out that Steve Jobs is not a big fan of Flash. Who knew?...a source of 'security holes.' He also referred to Flash as dying technology, likening not supporting Flash on the iPad to Apple dropping support for floppy drives, ditching legacy data ports, and replacing CCFL backlighting with LEDs.
Friday: January 29, 2010
PETA calls for replacement of Punxsutawney Phil in favor of animatronic version.According to legend, if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, six more weeks of winter weather will follow. If he doesn't, expect an early spring. But PETA has had enough of the tradition that dates back to 1886, and believes robotic technology could be the solution.
Monday: January 11, 2010
Prolonged 3D sessions may be bad for your eyes. Who knew?Experts say there are no studies tracking how common it is to get a headache after watching a 3D movie, but Rick Heineman, a spokesman for RealD, a provider of 3D equipment to theaters, said headaches and nausea were the chief reasons 3D technology never took off.
Friday: January 8, 2010
Palm pulls the curtain back on phones that can create personal wifi hotspots.Palm says the application will give customers the option of creating a personal Wi-Fi cloud capable of sharing Verizon's 3G network with up to five Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
Will 3D television technology save the industry?Many however believe 2010 really is the breakthrough year for the technology, helped in large party by the growing number of 3D movies at the theatre and the success of James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar.
Thursday: January 7, 2010
You'll soon be able to tweet from your automobile thanks to the Ford Sync system.Yet another way that technology is going to make the roads safer. As if cell phones, smart phones, app phones, GPS, XM weren't enough to distract from you from you know, actually driving.
Monday: January 4, 2010
Technology not quite as advanced by 2010 as some would have hoped.Nope, turns out we're not living like The Jetsons quite yet; shockingly some people aren't too happy with that. Although we still have another fifty years to go before any real complaining should go on (The Jetsons live in the year 2062 according to Wikipedia).
Ten technologies that will somehow manage to rock 2010.This covers all the bases that you've probably heard about somehow. For example, the soon-to-be-released-not-so-fabled-after-all Apple tablet, the perils of net neutrality, the hazy goodness of cloud computing, and mind altering views that you can see with some augmented reality. Woohoo.