Lasers and Maps and such....

It's been a big week for technology with the TED conference taking place and collectively blowing people's minds with fancy pants technology.

Often these events have a tendency to turn into an industry back-patting, pant tightening  session of gratuitous self-love. One only has to look to the now fabled and mythologized Apple keynote speeches that are waited for with baited breath by thousands of white shelled, wide eyed, maniacal fan boys, slowly rubbing their legs and muttering sweet-nothings into each other's ears. (Of which some of us are, so it's fine to be a little critical. Also this took a turn for the homoerotic very quickly didn't it?)

Smugness has come to define these events, leaving many more than a little cold to the promise of new technologies that are eager to invoke words like 'interactive' and 'personal' and 'REVO-FUCKING-LUTION!' In fact with the amount of revolutions that have apparently happened in the digital world over the past ten years it's not surprising that it is apathy that has come to define the embryonic years of the new millennium (massively generalized statements with no real grounding are fun!). 

"What's that dear another revolution? Ok I'll put the kettle on. How many dead in the blood filled streets of change? Ohhh that's a few more than last week, oh look Shackled Bears, dancing on ice is on. Super".

However the TED conference is a little different. As a non-profit organization with fuck-tons of funding, their aim is to essentially change the world through the encouragement of the integration between creativity and technology and then showcase those efforts they feel worthy of such ambitious criteria. Bold some may say, but interesting non-the less. They can explain themselves a lot better than us so check them out here. 

All this being said one of their strongest points has to be their dedication to reaching those poor backward non-English speaking people wherever they may be (All 4.5 Billion of them), using hundreds of volunteers to translate the conferences and presentations into over 40 languages. Apparently. So well done them.

The two internet 'hits' from the conference that people have been shitting themselves over, as if the secret bowl emptying musical note had been discovered are firstly; Microsoft's new interactive augmented reality mapping system, which can only be described as completely fucking nuts in both its appearance, smoothness and down-right good ol' fashioned applicability.

Next up is the Death Star. Yup. The Death Star. For Mosquitos. Nobody likes Mosquitos and whilst this all may seem a little weird and bleak, conjuring the image of Darth Vader cackling as Alderon is blown into nothingness, the application of this technology is meant to combat Malaria in Africa. So fine. Probably. (It reminds us of this classic as well, which might be a bit more problematic considering the whole Nazi thing.) 

So there's some technology for you from the still smug, but impressive none the less TED. Viva la Revolution!