Faces from the past

There's something quite unsettling about having your loved ones watching you from their grave. But Cremation Solutions has come up with a way of doing this without enlisting the services of a medium to raise the dead with their 'Personal Urns' series. Grieving families can now remember their dearly departed with a life sized model of their head. You need never worry about forgetting your loved ones again.

NewsMap

A really nice visual interface from NewsMap of the world's news represented in a graphical format. Each topic is colour coded and shaded according to how recent the news broke. Users are also able to customise the feed according to their taste.

Type while you write

Some bright spark at IrisNotes has finally created a pen that actually recognises your writing and can translate it into text in 22 different languages. It comes with drawing software and can also be used as a tablet pen. Is this the death knell for the keyboard and mouse?

Man City goes global

It looks like Manchester City FC is flexing it's financial muscle in a bid for world domination as it's cash-rich owner continues with the incredible spending spree. The new owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, has not only backed the EPL's new big boy with enough superstars to challenge the top 4, but also a strategy to increase it's global market share through media visibility.

With the EPL being the most watched football league in the world, a lot of money is at stake. Poke were commissioned to create a slick new site with free VOD (video-on-demand) which is usually paid for on rival sites. The addition of Arabic translation and more languages to follow shows their intent at cracking the emerging new markets of Asia, Africa, the Middle and Far East.

Further reading at Guardian Online.

Return of the Mac ... Tablet

After it's much publicised canning of the Newton over a decade ago, Apple is looking to launch a tablet version of it's iPod Touch with a larger viewing display for reading, video and image content. It will not be a fully functional OSX as the product will be limited to running a single application at any one time. But it will have WiFi capabilities for access to download and streaming content.

The company has been working closely on a secret project codenamed 'cocktail' with some of the biggest names in music, EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music, Universal Music Group, to produce new content formats for a more immersive experience.

Further reading on Guardian Online and Apple Insider.

Additional speculation on the functional specification and it's viability from PC World.

Spotify for iPhone

Spotify awaits Apple's much criticised vetting process for it's iPhone application. Despite the acceptance of music apps Last.fm, Deezer and Pandora, the outcome is not certain as the process has been highlighted for it's inconsistency. Whether Apple will see it as infringing on the iTunes market will remain to be seen.

Further reading at Guardian Online.

555 KUBIK | facade projection |

More urban building projection art from Daniel Rossa and UrbanScreen. The idea behind this installation was to break the strict architecture of O M Ungers 'Galerie der Gegenwart'. Watch as the Hamburg Kunsthalle morphs and shifts impossibly into geometric shapes using the illusion of shadows and colours to trick our eyes.