Nomadic Living 2.0

What European gypsies have to teach us about sustainability and the housing market.

Real estate crunch got you in the dumps? Too broke for a boat and too proud for a trailer? Fear not, the Danish have your back.

Copenhagen-based artist and activist collective N55 just released the first prototype of WALKING HOUSE, a 10-foot-high pod home that actually walks at a strolling pace.

The solar- and wind-powered pod includes a fully-functional kitchen, toilet, living room, bed, and wood stove. An on-board mainframe computer controls the six giant legs.

Developed in collaboration with MIT, the prototype cost nearly $50,000 to make, but the team believes that as design and the production process get streamlined for larger quantities, cost will go down significantly.

Inspired by the area’s large population of travelers, the WALKING HOUSE offers a unique hybrid of traditional nomadic culture and modern design solutions.

Today, the pod is taking its inaugural stroll around rural Cambridgeshire at the Wysing Arts Centre in Bourn.

We love the nomadic-living-gone-high-tech appeal of the house and its decidedly sustainable twist. The inside looks absolutely cozy — not in that Craigslist-euphemism-for-shoebox-dump kind of way. Makes us wanna curl up inside with Kings of Convenience playing oh-so-lazily in the background.

via Slashdot

LED The Way

How to stop global warming and hackers with the flip of a light switch.

THE REAL IDEA LIGHT BULB

LED lights have spent some time in the spotlight lately — be it as eco alternatives to Christmas lights or as cool little sidekicks in wow-projects like the Chronophage Clock. Turns out, however, that they could be the springboard for the next big leap in wireless technology.

Engineers at Boston University have just launched Smart Lighting, a program using low-power LED’s to develop the next generation of data communications and network technology — basically, making LED light the equivalent of a WiFi hot spot. And it would all be done over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference.

This technology would enable you to come home, flip a light switch, and have your iPod, thermostat, TiVo, Sirius and Wii instantly start communicating with you. No wires, no plugs, no routers.

The project is taking advantage of our inevitable switch from incandescent to CFL to LED light bulbs over the next few years as we try to, you know, not drown in the melting ice caps. Once enough LED’s are in place, they’d provide the infrastructure for this next-generation communication infrastructure.

Plus, since white light can’t penetrate opaque surfaces like walls, the technology would be much more secure than today’s radio-frequency-based WiFi — this means no “eavesdroppers,” no hackers, no pesky neighbors leeching onto your already feeble open wireless.

The technology relies on LED’s ability to be rapidly switched on and off with no detection by the human eye. Because data transmission comes down to patterns of 1’s and 0’s, flickering an LED light in such patterns won’t cause any noticeable change in room lighting.

We’re anxious to see where all this goes — with today’s increasing fragmentation of technology, it seems like more is invested in developing things to mediate the effects of other things (like your $300 noise-cancellation earphones to silence your roommate’s $1,000 Bose, which he uses to unwind after 15 hours in front of his $2,500 MacBook Pro), so we’re glad to see technology that focuses on cross-functionality and efficiency, utilizing what’s already there to minimize peripherals and maximize data communication.

You go, geeks.

(Thanks, @jowyang.)

Breaking: YouTube Clicks Into Retail

What peer pressure has to do with revolutionizing social media monetization.

THIS JUST IN

YouTube just announced its first move into retail land: click-to-buy links in music videos. Like most Google initiatives, the move is informed by pure organic consumer demand — Google folks noticed that the comment area below vides is fertile ground for consumer discussion of the music used in a video, so they jumped on the opportunity with an e-commerce platform that provides the answer in a direct click-to-buy format.

Currently available to U.S. users only, the platform links to iTunes and Amazon downloads from the EMI Music catalog, but is said to eventually expand into other media like TV, film and print.

We, of course, are not surprised — if it were any other company, Google would be doing this mainly as a reaction to the monetize-YouTube-already peer pressure, but because it’s Google, we know that no action is ever a reaction. There are greater forces at play, and we’re here to tug at their toys.

>>> More at the Official Google Blog

Image Search Redefined

How to hunt down interestingness by its hexadecimal color.

It’s been a while since we’ve stumbled across something along the lines of PicLens, retrievr and the Flickr Related Tag Browser.

Today, we bring you another inspired algorithm that revolutionizes the image search experience.

The Multicolr Search Lab, offers color-based search, spitting out images in up to 10 colors you’ve specified. Out of the equally inspired Idée Labs, a self-proclaimed “technology playground for visual search,” Multicolr utilizes the proprietary Piximilar visual similarity search technology that scours large collections of images without using keywords or metadata.

The Multicolr Search Lab is currently available for Flickr and Alamy Stock Photography. The Flickr version extracts the colors from over 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images. The notion of “interesting” is actually one of Flickr’s own cool algorithms that assesses an image’s “interestingness” based on various meta elements like where the clickthroughs are coming from, who comments on it and when, who marks it as a favorite, its tags and more.

Because these factors are in constant flux, so is the “interestingness” of any given image — something meant to inspire more exploration and discovery inside Flickr.

And while our 8th-grade English Lit teacher used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby,” we have to admit this brand of interestingness falls squarely on the baby pagent side.