Inspiring TED video – Siftables, coolest toy ever…

Here’s another video from TED: In this one, David Merrill explores the world of Siftables, perhaps the coolest toy ever. If you are casting about for a premise for a new product/app, I strongly urge you to check this out. This feels like the beginning of something big, the first bit in a new wave of interaction. When I first saw Surface (the interactive table from Microsoft), I thought, this is interesting, but self-limiting. It can’t go anywhere, the technology doesn’t transfer well. Siftables are similar, but done in a much more granular way. The elements interact with each other and are portable, two features that changed everything for me.

Take a look!

– Dave

Tags: David Merrill, Microsoft Surface, Siftables, TED

RFID Passport cards easy to clone…

This video shows a white hat hacker explaining how he wardrives around San Francisco with a store-bought RFID detector rigged up to an antenna and a laptop, sniffing out RFID passport cards. Note that he does this from the street, detecting RFID signals from, effectively, across the street. RFID, or Radio Frequency ID, generally involves a transponder (sending) tag embedded in an object, in this case, a passport. The transponder transmits the passport ID on a constant basis. If you have an RFID detector, you can pick up someone’s passport ID without them knowing about it. Ouch…

– Dave

Tags: hacker, RFID passport, wardrive