Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson captured this scene depicting preparations for the Baris Dance by two young female dancers in the town of Ubud, Indonesia in 1949.
It’s a compelling image, and a work of art in it’s own right. In looking beyond the descriptive/narrative/travelogue pleasantries of the image, some creative tensions emerge.
The two subjects display signs of [...]

The London Times has a pithy article on the cost-effectiveness of many common household gadgets. The Times chose to rank items by cost-per-use so as to determine which items are a waste of money and which deliver the most value. The least efficient gadget by far was deemed to be the ice-cream maker, which worked [...]

The New York Times in a recent article, describes the ascent of Samsung Electronics to the rank of world’s premiere gadget maker. Samsung, or ‘Three Stars’ as it’s known in Korea, has long strived for recognition as an innovator by developing products that can legitimately have the adjectives world’s & first attached to [...]

Panasonic announced the world’s largest TV, at 103 inches, a few months ago, and it’s still making the trade-show and marketing rounds. The TV, which has no model number as yet, made recent appearances at Display 2006 in Japan and at the NYSE.
Some specs include 1920 x 1080 resolution, 3000:1 contrast ratio, size of 7.5 [...]

Sharp is now shipping the world’s first cell phone that has a VGA display. The model 904SH will be sold by Vodafone with the main selling point being the outstanding 480 x 640 pixel screen, which quadruples the resolution of other phones.
Other phone-ish features include a 3.2 MP camera with 2x optical zoom, Bluetooth, [...]

Consulting firm Oxford Analytica teamed up with insurer Aon to publish their revised 2006 Political and Economic Risk Map back in January of 06 . The map identifies the relative danger of working in or with the 200+ countries that make up the political map of the world. The low risk countries are shown in [...]

The mobiBLU DAH-1500i digital music player made a big impact when it was introduced last year. It’s ultra-compact at 0.94 inches cubed, well-reviewed, stocked at Walmart and backed up by good marketing.
But that was then and this is now and the DAH-1500i is continuing it’s slide off the CNET Weekly Hit List after a [...]

Toshiba informs us that the Gigabeat S series will be available in Japan starting April 28, 2006 and that the higher-end 60GB model S60V will sell for $399, with the lower-capacity S30 going for -100.
We’ve made note of these hdd-based iPod-esque music and video players from Toshiba before, continue to think well of them, but [...]

The Nikon Coolpix S6 camera has been available for a few months now, and reviews are trickling in. The 6-Megapixel camera has 20MB of on-board memory plus an SD card slot, offers built-in Wi-Fi to avoid all those cables, and is intended for novice to intermediate users. Specs are here.
Reviewers at Steve’s Digicams just [...]

Japanese co Horiba Itech has a new in-vehicle video recorder intended to capture the moments before and after an auto accident. The device has a small camera that starts recording after detecting an impact to the car and records video for 15 seconds before and five seconds after the impact. The device also records the [...]