iPhones with built-in pico projectors is still a dream but this solution may be the best alternative at this time. This Pop Video accessory from Micron Technology turns your iPhone or iPod into pico projectors for only 99$. The Pop Video has a Built-in Lithium-ion rechargeable battery with up to two hours playtime.

According to PoP’s site, the 3.5 ounce peripheral’s capable of 960 x 540 video output to share your favorite photos, movies, TV programs, and video clips on the fly. Micron apparently uses something called FLCOS microdisplay technology, which is cheaper to produce and allegedly more energy efficient.

The projector is designed to be used with a free app that allows you to tweak the projector settings and project content from your iPhone or iPod.

The $99 PoP Video is up for pre-order now, but you can watch the Pop Video’s Capabilities in the video below.

When some people hear the words “home automation,” they think about the Jetsons or multi-million-dollar concept homes of the future. Others think home automation is just a geek fantasy that wouldn’t add any real value to their lives. They would be wrong. 

First of all let’s define Home Automation: For some it may be something as simple as remote or automatic control of a few lights. For others, security may be the central application. Still others may choose to install advanced controllers or use voice recognition. As a very basic definition, we tend to refer to home automation as anything that gives you remote or automatic control of things around the home. For Wikipedia; Home automation is the residential extension of “building automation”. It is automation of the home, housework or household activity. Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

Technology has started to have bigger roles in our lives and day to day we become more technology dependent. Most of us can’t imagine living without using technology, anymore.

The word “Home Automation” has started to become more popular nowadays. Automation appliances are cheaper and easier to implement than it was in the past.

A University of California at Berkeley freshman named Derek Low uploaded a video to YouTube of what he’s calling the “BRAD”, or the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm. Apparently, Low set out three months ago to make “the most ridiculously automated dorm room in the school ever.” That’s a hard claim to verify, but by the looks of the results which apparently only set Low back a few hundred dollars.

You should really just watch the video below; I mostly liked the party mode.

Apple has been criticized for the labor conditions in the factories that make iPhones, iPads and Macs. When Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, the Association investigated the factories Apple uses, the most famous of which is Foxconn. The report found cases of excessive overtime, unsafe working conditions, and instances when workers weren’t paid the wages due to them. Apple has vowed to fix those problems.

After recent media reports about working conditions in Foxconn, people wonder how chinese workers assemble Apple products.

American Public Media’s Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. You can see highlights from his tour of the assembly line, the Foxconn facilities and how an iPad is made in this video.

Thomas Suarez has two published apps, a startup company and a compelling TED talk under his belt; all at the tender age of 12.

Most 12-year-olds love playing videogames — Thomas Suarez taught himself how to create them. After developing iPhone apps like “Bustin Jeiber,” a whack-a-mole game, he is now using his skills to help other kids become developers.

Thomas Suarez’s interest in technology and programming led him to learn Python, Java, and C “just to get the basics down.” He built an app and then coaxed his parents into paying the $99 fee to get his app, “Earth Fortune,” in the app store. Thomas also started an app club at school to help other kids build and share their creations, and is now starting his own company, CarrotCorp.

You should watch his inspiring speech at TEDx conference in Manhattan Beach, LA in the video below.

In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity.

Small business has almost always relied on word of mouth to succeed. There are very few national TV spots and building-side ads trying to pull you into Daydreams Comics in Iowa City, Iowa or Homespun Crafts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unfortunately, word of mouth for a lot of businesses can only go so far. Social media is essentially a rebirth for word of mouth in a digital age. Platforms like Facebook allow small bookstores to broadcast events to an always ready audience, reaching them on their cell phones as well as computers. Twitter is used by many “pop up shops” and mobile businesses to let consumers know where in the city the business can be found that day. Given the incredible success social media has had on small businesses this year, how should these businesses proceed moving forward?

Word of mouth has always been an important part of marketing, both because it is free and because, almost always, the words are going to a person from someone in their life that they trust. This gives credence to the brand and service, as well as giving confidence to the overall purchase decision. If you’re looking for what to do in Chicago, for instance, you are more likely to take the advice of a person you know and trust who has experienced it than from a kid who once saw a movie about Chicago and thought it was okay.

The massive shift to digital has opened up new avenues of marketing, which are ultimately cheaper and hold lots of promise for small businesses who have limited advertising budgets.

Google AdWords Express

In an effort to give small businesses a bit of an edge in catching the attention of customers, Google launched a service called Boost, which would later become AdWords Express. The idea here is that you register your business with Google and when someone searches for stores in your area, you stand out from the usual suspects (read: international corporations show up as red tabs and you show up as a blue tab that automatically sets you apart).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is emerging from the dark shadow of its past to become a massive force in Internet marketing. Large corporations use it to boost their rankings in search engines, but smaller business can use SEO to deepen their potential customer base. SEO is beneficial for one simple reason: people can’t go to your site if they can’t find it. Targeting keywords specific to your business and location will help more people find your site and hopefully walk through the doors of your storefront.

Mobile Marketing

After this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are considerably more smartphones and tablets out on the market. That number is growing as people move away from stationary computer setups toward mobile Internet devices. Companies like Groupon have launched local services that allow small business owners to create offers and deals in real time and beam them to cell phones of customers who could be in your neighborhood. Your deal that day might win you a new regular customer.

The shop small revolution has a lot of support behind it in the shrinking world. People are starting to reject the convenience afforded by huge corporations and re-invest in their communities by shopping small. The movement will likely grow in the coming years and businesses looking to harness the increasing public enthusiasm for “small shopping” will have to evolve their marketing methods with the digital methods cropping up and leverage them to succeed in the current economic landscape.

Engadget reports Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao robot has already received a few upgrades from both the company itself and other developers: features like a 1.6GHz Atom processor and dual HD cameras that promise to allow for better face and object recognition even in poor lighting conditions. What’s more, while robot’s outward appearance hasn’t changed much, it has also received a number of software upgrades, including Nuance voice recognition, an improved walking algorithm, and a number of other measures to cut down on unwanted collisions.

Interested developers will finally be able to get their hands on a bot of their own quite soon. To do so, they’ll have to sign up and quality for the just-launched Nao developer program, which costs €3,600 (or roughly $4,800) and will initially be limited to just 200 participants. That hefty price does naturally include the robot itself, along with a complete software suite, and “privileged access” to Aldebaran Robotics’ source code.

Andrew Clancy is a talented videographer who lives in New York. He shot and edited this video as a lyrical interpretation of New York City. He says on his blog:

Living in New York I’d grab my Canon 7D, or S95, and shoot footage of what was going on around me. It seemed like a never ending project and you could stay filming life in New York for a long time Eventually I put the camera down and started to edit. Here’s the end result, it’s a bit rough and ready but that’s life in the Big Apple I guess. Turn up the volume on this one for the beautiful song ‘We Don’t Eat’ by Irishman James Vincent McMorrow.

Enjoy watching the amazing views of New York City and listen to the wonderful background music.

A Year in New York from Andrew Clancy on Vimeo.

We will always wait for the next one more thing!

Thank you for everything you created. R.I.P. Steve Jobs…

With a jet-powered wing attached to his body, Yves Rossy expands the possibilities of human flight. On May 7 of this year, Swiss pilot Yves Rossy stepped out of a helicopter 8,000 feet above the Grand Canyon and … took off. Wearing a rigid wing powered by four model jet turbine engines, Rossy flew for eight minutes over the mile-deep trench, soaring over the red rocks before parachuting down to the Colorado River far below. It’s the latest exploit in a life powered by one dream: to fly like a bird.

Wearing his single wing, Rossy really flies, steering with the movements of his body. In the last couple of years he has crossed the English Channel, flown over the Swiss Alps and performed aerobatic loops around a hot-air balloon; for his next quest, he is developing a new kind of parachute that will enable him to fly as low as 200 meters.

Yves Rossy shared his story with the crowd at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland.

As an entrepreneur and an editor, I really like to hear founder stories. I think every entreprenur like me want to hear about what happened at famous technology companies in the very earliest days. Where did founders get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Matthew Wise also wondered what it would have been like to hear stories from founders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates during their startups’ early years. Wise felt a need for a way to get interviews of notable entrepreneurs and their success stories. Matthew Wise and Andy Saebjorensen invested co-built an open platform to enable other founders around the world to participate in FounderLY.  Any founder may film a fellow founder, so long as you follow the FounderLY roadmap, and submit the video to FounderLY. FounderLY will then package it with an intro, bumper, and a closing, and publish it to its website FounderLY.

Thanks for Wise and Saebjorensen for their visionary project. Below you can see an example video from FounderLY featuring serial entrepreneur Steve Blank.

Steve Blank Part 1 of 5 from FounderLY on Vimeo.

What can happen in one day? If you are talking social media, the answer is a lot. DBA Worldwide has made a cool video for the impressive stats of social media. For example 700,000 new users register on FaceBook every day…

A Day in the Life of Social Media from DBA Worldwide on Vimeo.

If you are an entrepreneur trying to introduce your startup or business idea to potential investors, you need the right “one sentence pitch for your startup” to attract the VCs or angel investors. Investors hear, on average, five to ten presentations each day from entrepreneurs. You’ve got one minute to grab an investor’s attention. Kicking your presentation off with a one sentence summary that highlights your idea and its potential value will help you get them interested.

Summarizing your business plan in one sentence is very hard but Adeo Ressi from Founder Institute can help you perfect the art of the one sentence pitch in an easy way. Ressi says “Most entrepreneurs manage to screw it up… How much better would the world be if every startup could explain their business well in one sentence?” . He has created created a rudimentary template in Mad Libs style:created a rudimentary template in Mad Libs style:

My company, __(insert name of company)__, is developing __(a defined offering)__ to help __(a defined audience)__ __(solve a problem)__ with __(secret sauce)__. You can see in the video below, how to use Ressi’s helpful tool for young entrepreneurs.

Madlibs for Pitching from Video4 on Vimeo.

Brooklyn-based cinematographer Luke Geissbuhler and his son built a carrier from a take-out container and placed an HD Camera and an iPhone 4 inside it. With the help of a weather-ballon they launched the carrier from New York and it reached upper stratosphere just an hour later.

At 19 miles height, the helium gas inside the balloon expanded and the balloon burst because of low pressure and the carrier started to fall back to the ground with the parachute deployed. The carrier landed 30 miles outside New York and the iPhone transmitted its position with its GPS module so Father and son picked it up.

I think, Apple and Steve Jobs must award this success. You can check their website Brooklyn Space Program and also watch the journey of the iPhone to the outer space in the video below.

The Internet Internet traffic is increasing very rapidly, close to doubling each year since 1997.    Jesse Thomas collected remarkable stats on the Internet in one video. As the social network sites and YouTube like media-sharing sites take much more time in our lives, People-Powered Internet grows up. Some of the amazing figures about people-powered  Internet shared in the video:

• - Facebook gets more than 260 billios pageviews per month.
• - YouTube serves 1 billion videos in one day.
• - The average Internet user in the USA watches 182 online videos in a month.
• - There are 1.4 billions email users worldwide.

Thanks Jesse Thomas for combining and animating these stats. You can watch the video below:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

In a funny, rapid-fire 4 minutes, Reddit Founder & Entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale’s rise to Web stardom at TedIndia 2009 Event. The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age. A great story to show how social media can effect a change in the real World. If you want to watch the video, go ahead.

Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit, a social-voting news website with geek allegiances, a small-town feel and a penchant for lighting up the memes your friends IM you about next week. Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia. It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006. Ohanian left Reddit in his official capacity in 2009, but continues to be involved with the site’s direction as a sort of godfather, dispensing friendly wisdom (and t-shirts) from his user account, kn0thing. Of late, he’s focusing on Breadpig, a hub for geeky books and merchandise.

Did you know, monkeys have 12 hairs at any one time

The first ever Gov 2.0 Summit was held in Washington,DC; in September 2009. The summit brought together leaders from the private, public and government sector to find better ways of dispensing information.

Eric Ries from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was one of the speakers at Gov 2.0 Summit. In the video below, Eric Ries is sharing his wide experience about creating “Lean Startups” by “Doing More with Less” as both a former entrepreneur and a VC advisor.

Eric Ries became a Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, after co-founding and serving as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Bunchball, FooMojo, Causes and KaChing.

Aaron Patzer’s personal finance manager Mint is one of the best examples for building a successful company from nothing. Aaron Patzer started Mint.com when he was 25. Mint launched in September 2007 at TechCrunch40 and in September 2009, Mint is acquired by Intuit for $170m. Mint.com has reached over 1.5 million users and helped them of people pay debt, manage job loss in the downturn. Aaron has packed a lot of experience in a very short time and shared his experiences and advices on several platforms.

Aaron Patzer isn’t only a successful Internet entrepreneur, but he also likes to help others about Internet business development. In the embedded video below, he  tells the story of Mint and gives incredibly useful advices for Internet entrepreneurs at a startup competition event called Juice Pitcher on the Microsoft campus.

Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris makes online art that captures the world’s expression — and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the Internet. Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web. With deep compassion for the human condition, his projects troll the Internet to find out what we’re all feeling and looking for. In this Ted Video, Jonathan Harris tells The Web’s Secret stories.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. Shirky, a prescient voice on the Internet’s effects, argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works.

In this Ted Talk which took place at took place at the U.S. Department of State, Clay Shirky tells the effects of Social Media on our livings.