Asylum has a succinct summary of the pros and cons of having sexual relations with a robot such as a Japanese kissing doll or love doll. Please note this story has no relation to an earlier Pikachu genitalia piece.

Is having sex with an ultra realistic robot hooker cheating? Truly it’s a modern conundrum and Asylum has the details and a bonus question:

What if a robot hooker looks like a celebrity?

These are deep digital philosophical questions and perhaps something Qajack might be able to help with, I’ll add it to my list of beta questions.

I had intended to write a post about cloud computing but became distracted by my winking and trusty RSS reader, Newsfire, also it’s hot today and I have to go to a strangers house this evening and massage my wife in front of other men massaging their similarly heavily pregnant wives. It may also involve yoga which concerns me.

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So the thought process could have gone something like this:

Hey let’s sell t-shirts?
Yo
You hear me?
Yo
Let’s get other people to design them
Yo
Then mash it up with Pop Idol
Yo
So people vote on designs
Hmm… yo
And buy them, buy them by the million
Another Oreo?

Read the rest of this entry »

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(via psfk)

Much rabid excitement was generated last week with the announcement of GPS for the 3G iPhone. A host of location-based software is scheduled for mobile phones which should be genuinely useful. However, this technology raises a big question: what does broadcasting your every move mean to our eroding notion of privacy?

New York Magazine reports:

Technology was certainly not supposed to know you were at the laundromat. Or the Yankees game. Or your co-worker’s apartment when you were supposed to be working late. But now when you’re at the laundromat, everyone will know. Because you’ll be letting them Read the rest of this entry »

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Thanks to Mike at Techcrunch for the ticket for this Mashup Conference. We declined the optional upgrade to demo Qajack for one of two reasons:

a. It’s not ready to demo
b. There is no demo
c. This is a third reason

Highlights were meeting Kosso from Phreadz, Mark at Netbenefit and the guys at Ugame and failing to locate Kate Burns from Daily Motion or Ben Mason from Cake who looked sharp and disappeared.

The wonders of being able to text questions to the panel on stage so that they appeared on the screen behind them led to some classics, which went somthing like this:
Read the rest of this entry »

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Not my words, but Y Combinator, general good guy Paul Graham’s in a great article about the Attention Crash:

‘Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. And technology is continually being refined to produce more and more desirable things. Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.’

I thought Chesterfield was a type of gun or a cigarette I once smoked to look cool in front of topless ladies on a beach in Nice when I was an exchange student.

Steve ‘beige polo shirt’ Rubel has some greats posts about this modern malaise, which seems to be crippling most Gen Xers and empowering Millenials. As I consider myself a Post Xer/Pre-Millenial/Neo Despot, I am both afflicted by the Attention Crash but also carrying antibodies necessary to manufacture a vaccine.

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… and so say all of us, but think about it for just a moment those of you who know and love Om, he’d make such a great Bond villain, ‘open source cloud computing Mr Bond?’.

Om has a great post about how Twitter might actually turn it’s hype into a scalable business, in short it’s a Scoble Tax, or so it shall be called hence forth. Essentially charge users with over 100 followers, charge people who send over 500 updates a week, charge them $10, go freemium or go for another major outage when your user base might be less forgiving.

‘This would also fit the Freemium business model that Twitter investor Fred Wilson so loves. And at the same time, it would help Twitter overcome its abhorrence for adding advertising to the messages. I think many of us have a lot to gain from the service: My alerts about my posts on the system are a form of advertising for my work, and generate enough attention that paying for the service makes lot of sense.’

Hey I’d pay $10 per month to keep Facebook clear of all the crapola that dogs the wannabee next new operating system, for more on how this won’t happen read the fragrant Kara Swisher, who I’m beginning to form some sort of ‘you write really well’ tech crush on.

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I love tech conferences and I love soundbites, you know the ‘take home’ phrase that makes you glad your hefty entry fee was not squandered on cliche.

I wasn’t at Mediabistro in Toronto, but I do know where Canada is. So does Chris Anderson, he of the Long Tail and Wired fame.

Chris gave a talk about pyramids and DIY Drones and then unveiled this take down of all take homes:

“Be the tallest dwarf”, he recommends to anyone who wants to create their own niche network.

It seems take home’s have become oxymoronic riddles, further riddled with Erick Schonfeld’s comment about Chris’ comment:

“It’s not bad advice. But can old media survive in a land of dwarfs? They tend to be awfully hard to control.”

So on the back of that I’m starting a social network for people who love controlling dwarves.

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newteevee has a story about 2008 being the year of VOD:

‘For all of you too lazy to drive to the video store or too impatient to wait for your DVDs in the mail, 2008 is shaping up to be a banner year for you. The video-on-demand (VOD) space is heating up, which means you have one less reason to pry yourself off the couch.’

Now I don’t know what a banner year is, but I hope it means someone will be kind enough to make me a banner that I can stick in my window, perhaps VOD could make it himself?

What it and the Wall Street Journal article it references don’t mention is the opportunity to release a film in the cinema and online simultaneously, let me choose to watch it as nature intended on the big screen with my atomized Read the rest of this entry »

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You ain’t a net denizen if you don’t know about the hoopla surrounding the release of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV.

The last game I played with any real compulsion was hide in a bale of straw from the farmer with the gun and the rabid dog. I was 9 and my Sinclair 48k Spectrum had over heated after a zealous neighbour denied its simple pixelated pleasures, played Jet-Pac Willie until steam rose from the memory board.

So instead of reviewing Grand Theft myself, I’ll simply link to the New York Times who see it as ‘…a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun.’ Which pretty much sums up my life to date.

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I love Google Alerts, my only criticism would be that it should also suggest alerts you should be alerted to even though you weren’t aware you needed alerting. Let’s call it, ’semantic alerts’.

Fear of defamation and not vanity mean I subscribe to alerts of websites featuring the phrase ‘Adam Martin’.

So it was refreshing to see my name come up associated with goat meat, the so called ’soccer of meats’, an analogy which needs explaining to me please?

The full article is here and I urge you to read it, but some choice quotes include:

“It’s the No. 1 consumed meat in the world,” said Scott Hollis, a goat specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It’s very popular - except here.”

While goat meat-burgers may not appear on the menu at McDonalds any time soon, we’re glad to see a more worldly, eco-friendly meat treat gaining popularity. A brief internal poll revealed MP staffers overall like the stuff in curries, Jamaican jerk-style, in burritos and whole on the bone. MP Chicago editor Adam Peltz remembered a particularly transcendent cut he ate in Lima: “…i got this amazing leg of kid — so succulent and flavorful for juvenile meat.”

I never want to hear the phrase ‘transcendent cut‘ nor ‘juvenile meat‘ again.

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