No more keyboards.. surface computing approaches

I want to talk to you about a technology that I found interesting, that has been under research for some years but it is not taking off yet commercially... Multi-touch or surface computing.

Microsoft developed a product based on this technology that they already commercialize under the name of Microsoft Surface. It is still a caprice for a handful of people (I read its price was about $10.000..). You can see a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtKQNwqNLLk

Apple's iPhone or HTC phone touch screen already showed us how we can play with screens. This technology is just the next link of the chain, a continuation of a regular evolution process and may be a previous stage of the future trends.

But this is actually what motivated my interest towards this field: a musical instrument called "reactable". It was created in 2005 by the musical technology group of the university of Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). It is an musical instrument but as important as the auditive aspect is the visual appealing (see pictures above) and the interaction it provides.. all this together makes it a game that everyone would like to play. It sounds quite experimental but we all know that music is about that, in fact there are branches of music basing on the experimentation. Indeed it is fairly suitable for music such as for instance Bjork's, who actually has bought one unit. Check out a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-RhyopUmc

It is very interesting how they are "redefining what conventional Human-Computer Interaction means" (as they claim) regarding the music plus animation combination..

About this technology I believe it is going to grow in terms of real usefulness (even as a tool for certain jobs) as well as in popularity. Hence, some day it might be part of our environment as another useful device (home entertainment, educational purposes?). These kind of devices are still unreachably expensive and they lie on an early adoption stage... but let's see the progresses in this field and how people react...

MS Surface official site: http://www.microsoft.com/SURFACE
Reactable official site: http://www.reactable.com

Social networks... money makers?

Facebook rejected to be bought by Yahoo! in 2006... they probably thought: "only $1 billion? we can milk the cow and make more than that.. ". They certainly have ways to do it. The first thing that comes to our mind is the ads they stick along the side of the page. The click through rate is really low (under 0,1%) but companies are willing to pay loads of money to be seen by the huge amount of users that Facebook has.
Not only the ads make this social network profitable but a good monetizer may be the valuable information they possess about their user base. It is a great amount of data for marketers to be used in their favour. They have a representative sample of the trends and demand that society has in real time.
Another way to profit out of Facebook is to charge brands that want a group with their name and logo.

What other ideas are to capitalize on Facebook? imagine an application such as geo challenge (you are challenged to guess the name of several countries with a time limit given only their silhouette). It would be interesting for McDonalds to have a similar application (questions obviously adapted to the matter of hamburgers, for example "when was the hamburger discovered") and offer discounts for the people that top a certain score. This would be appealing for users (challenge + reward in case of win), companies (promotion) and Facebook (companies are charged to have their apps in Facebook).