The Post Social Age

More wearable computing innovation. This is pretty cool:

Microsoft’s 10th annual Imagine Cup, a competition focusing on student technology innovations, ended today with a Ukrainian team taking the top place prize of $25,000. Team quadSquad developed a pair of sensory gloves, called EnableTalk, that translate sign language gestures into speech using a Bluetooth-enabled Windows Phone and Microsoft’s Speech and Bing APIs. The team’s project is designed to improve the lives of deaf and mute individuals by allowing them to communicate verbally.

Microsoft and Microsoft Imagine Cup are clients but I was not involved in this years competition. 

This is very intriguing to me. I can’t tell if there’s user involvement in the actual “crowdsourcing” or if it’s completely automated by the tech.

If it’s completely automated I find it weird that the term “crowdsourcing” is being applied to a network of connected devices. It’s got a very AI kind of feel to it.  

It;s a really good question and one I used to ask myself all the time. I don’t ask this question very much anymore because I don’t know that it matters. Does it matter? 

If it does, I like Alex’s attempt at a definition:

These questions are pretty easily resolved. You are a technology company if you are in the business of selling technology. That is to say, if yourproduct – the thing you make money by selling – consists of applied scientific knowledge that solves concrete problems and enables other endeavors, you are a technology company.

By this definition, most of the companies that dominate the “tech blogs” are not technology companies. They’re just, well, companies. These businesses might use technology, or develop technology, or even be run by people who used to work at technology companies, but they don’t exist to create and sell technology.

But I don’t know if it really matters anymore. Technology is so ingrained in our life that it just is. I think how companies are using technology is actually far more interesting than the technology that’s created.