What happens when a food trade company and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence team up? You get high tech, food-of-the-future fortune cookies: ‘Consumers bake the cookies before decorating them with the enclosed QR codes, printed on edible paper. The recipient of the cookies scans the QR code with their phone to be directed to either a video on YouTube, a photo on Flickr, or a personalized web page containing a specific message, as dictated by the sender’.

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My neighbour, John Evans, an 88-year-old electrical engineer, built himself a TV in the 1970s and watched it until digital took over.

Mario Wagner is a German illustrator based in San Francisco. His work features lots of color and hints strongly at the position of technology in our modern society.

By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (‘sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading?

If we accept that Google is becoming the repository of all our information (via its enormous web archive of over 25 billion pages), and the collector of all our questions (via our 400 million search queries a day), it’s not a such big step to argue that by owning the input and the output, it’s becoming a collective world brain.

If Google can predict flu outbreaks, presumably its engineers can also pull back our collective mood (the world is ‘grumpy’ based on search terms), hopes, dreams and more.

Should Google become a collective asset for the world to harness in non-commercial ways?

Judging by Yahoo’s top searches for 2008 (with Britney Spears at number one), Yahoo is its teen sibling.

Swedish company myFC are working on a fuel cell sticker to charge your portable devices. The prototype is a flexible, 0.11-inch-thick strip that generates 0.9 watts of power at 0.5 volts as long as it is exposed to hydrogen and oxygen in the air. The strip can also be stacked to provide even more power.

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Here’s one for all you tech savvy fashionistas. Outfit your iPhone 3G in form-fit style with a case from Speck. The lightweight, snap-together design lets you instantly make your iPhone 3G a fashion statement, while the soft fabric provides added comfort and extra grip in hand. Personally, I’m digging the plaid. But maybe that’s just because it’s getting chilly outside.

Israeli computer scientists recently created a computer program that changes photographs of people’s faces into more attractive images based on an algorithm that determines ideal distances between lips and chins, foreheads and eyes, and distances between eyes.

British inventor Kane Kramer apparently invented a portable, digital music player in 1979, when he was only 23. He was unable to renew his patent after almost a decade of trying to develop the product, and as a result, he will not see a dime from Apple. Poor dude.

The latest version of the Zune player is a nifty looking thing packed with some features that would make an iPod blush. It’s all about music discovery, and being portable in the process. So with that in mind Zune have added a Buy from FM feature, which allows users to tag and buy music directly from their player from virtually anywhere. If using the radio, you can tag the track to buy later when connected online. If you’re in a wi-fi hot spot, you can buy the track directly to the Zune. Oh, and it comes with Zune Marketplace too so you can buy directly through the store from the palm of your hand. And there’s video games — two of them — which are free with the latest software update. Now, if only the palms of my hands were that much fun.

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Face Your Manga allows you to create a cool looking, free Avatar for yourself or your friends. You can use it with the most common Instant Messaging programmes, such as LiveMessenger, Skype, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, MySpaceIM, and many more. Sweet.

With Capsule Rebel, SwitchEasy has utilized new materials and radical design to protect your iPhone. The UltraFrame hard protection system is a unique cover-all hard shell with an exo-skeleton frame made with Lexan polycarbonate, protecting all the important parts of your iPhone 3G that may be prone to impact. It’s a very cool design. We dig it.

A film festival that is free and available to anyone, anywhere, anytime with an Internet connection. Sounds okay huh? Well that’s the Portable Film Festival and content can be downloaded to a laptop, iPod, PSP, or 3G capable mobile phone after registering at their website. It’s high quality content as well, after entries were gathered internationally between March and June. August is then the time for judging with awards decided by user votes gathered from August 1 to 31. The audience is free to vote across the categories which include: Short Film, Music Video, Look At Me and First Hand Capture. New for 2008 are the categories Get Animated and Feature Film. Also at the beginning of August 2008, the Portable Film Festival launched a daily channel for film exhibition and distribution, delivering a new international release every day and that will continue all year round. As part of the festival, several events are happening throughout August including screening days, a symposium series, seminars and workshops. The winners will be announced in September.

Apparently Motorola designed the ROKR E8 to deliver an ‘uncompromised consumer experience for music or talk’, and they’ve done a pretty good job of it. I got sent one with the new Black Kids album loaded up on it (it’s a killer album), and it’s been fun playing around with the various features on it. Motorola say it better than I could: ‘using breakthrough ModeShift technology from Motorola, the quad-band GPRS/EDGE device presents users with only the controls they need, at the time they need them, instantly transforming from music player to phone with the touch of a button’. Nice.

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Introducing the world’s finest touch-through case for the iPhone, providing full protection for your screen. The patent pending electrostatic membrane on the front of this case actually mimics the way the iPhone screen works, allowing full touch-through access, while still protecting your screen from scratches.

With rising fuel prices dominating the news and affecting every level of the global economy, some solutions to fuel-efficient transport aren’t necessarily hi-tech ones. Many draw on older technology that until now was nearly obsolete. Germany has recently been producing airships again, which could soon be ferrying people around Europe and even to farther-off destinations. The slow-moving zeppelins are still as fast as high-speed trains, and in addition to low fuel consumption and low flight altitudes, very little new infrastructure has to be built to accommodate them. Let’s just hope they don’t still fill them with hydrogen.

With the Slacker Portable, get free and easy access to millions of songs from thousands of artists wherever you are. The music is delivered to your Slacker Portable for free at any Wi-Fi hotspot or through your PC via USB.

Now, this is fun. We have five awesome 3 Skypephones to give away to randomly selected Lost At E Minor subscribers. These stylish mobile phones call, text and take pictures, but also enables you to do Instant Message and make calls through Skype too. For free. The 3G 3 Skypephone has a 2-megapixel camera, mp3 player, mobile TV and internet. The giveaway is open to residents of the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Republic of Ireland.

To be in with a chance of winning a 3 Skypephone, be a Lost At E Minor subscriber, and leave a message under this post saying: ‘Ah, yeah. I will take that, thank you very much’. Entries close Monday morning New York time and the winners will be announced shortly thereafter.

Oh, and to celebrate the power of the phone, Aussie girl Rebecca Campbell has been given the best job going. The Skype Nomad challenge has seen Campbell embark on a 33 day round-the-world trip across 15 countries including China, Australia, America, Italy and Estonia to product test and demonstrate how Skype can be used wherever you are.

She is constantly blogging, video blogging, facebooking, podcasting, twittering and using Skype to keep people up to date with her travels live, using a variety of Skype enabled gadgets from 3 Skypephone to the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet to keep in contact.

Yup, it’s a tough life …

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Man, this clip by Junior Senior brings me back to the days when Atari and Commodore 64 ruled the heap and technology was but a freckle on the great armpit of life.