Yes, that looks like a Princess phone and an early computer had a baby.

Happy New Year!

It will be interesting to see how mobile phone shopping and purchasing evolves. In the early days on online banking (just about 15 years ago), consumers were willing to review information on their laptops but felt the desktop was much more suitable to make actual transactions. Back then they indicated they felt that desktop computers were more secure and they’d be less error-prone when entering numbers or commands. It may be that as consumers get more and more used to employing smaller mobile screens in the shopping process, increased transaction numbers will follow.

Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll see an easy return the Christmas presents you don’t want app.

So much has been said, read, and posted about Steve Jobs in the months since his passing. While so much was known about Steve Jobs as an innovator, marketer, and world-class jerk, It’s been interesting to hear more about who he was, personally and philosophically – to really get a sense of what made him tick. Maybe he was too guarded in life, and all of this insight about him was only able to emerge after his death.

The above video is a great example. He’s not talking about a specific product…even technology in general. He’s talking about a philosophical approach that guided the way he sees the world. This becomes even clearer in this article. What’s becoming clear is that he had big ideas about the way the world worked. These ideas made it possible for him to see something most of his peers missed. He was able to take something confusing and make it simple – to take something ugly and find a way to make it elegant.

So what are they doing? They’re making custom bound journals by marrying technology with just-in-time printing capabilities, using technology to create custom clothing, and making doughnuts (hey innovation needs fuel).

Durham is a great example of how a once industrial town can reinvent itself through an educated populace, creative thinking, and technology/innovation.

It’s a clear reminder that users/customers/consumers whatever you want to call them, feel they have a stake in your brand.  Sometimes they feel their stake is as much as the actual owner’s. It’s yet to be seen if the new owners of Delicious can make enough changes to keep users attracted to their site, or if they’ll drive away existing users and do little to encourage growth. One thing is clear, they may have misjudged the passion and expectations that many of their customers have for their brand and service.

Check out the list of sites and brief descriptions over on All Things D.

OnTheMap is useful for more than work location, however.  It’s a multi-layered mapping tool, with companion data on demographics, earnings, industry characteristics.  We’ve also used it to identify exact metropolitan statistical areas and radius ranges, to find transportation routes, greenspace, and tribal and military lands, and to simply better understand a physical marketplace.

For years, organizations like the Census Bureau relied heavily on point-in-time estimates, tables of statistics and physical and static maps for data exploration like this. As new systems come online, are developed further, and improved over successive versions, our ability to access information from our desktops is not only facilitated but empowered.

Chief Executive of the British Library, Dame Lynne Brindley, said, “We are delighted to be partnering with Google on this project and through this partnership believe that we are building on this proud tradition of giving access to anyone, anywhere and at any time. Our aim is to provide perpetual access to this historical material, and we hope that our collections coupled with Google’s know-how will enable us to achieve this aim.” (Press Release)

The books, pamphlets and periodicals are from the early 1700′s through the 1870′s. This time period includes the American, French and Industrial Revolutions, the age of Enlightenment, the inventions of the steam engine and telegraph, and the fall of slavery.  According to the press release, “the first works to be digitised will range from feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775).”

The books will be available for free to anyone through Google Books, the British Library website, and the European Digital Library, Europeana.  Google, who is also helping 40 other libraries around the world, is incurring all of the costs.  Even though Google may have dropped its motto, “Don’t be Evil,” they’re certainly trying to do some good.

I, for one, can’t wait to read about this hippo.

The band is selling a customizable CD: Buyers can select 10 tracks from an available 20 to include in their CD, and then choose combinations of and adjust several available graphic components to create their own cover art. Once completed, a buyer’s customized CD is made available on the band’s site, where other buyers can opt to select your production (plus, you get royalties for every purchase of your produced version). The site even tracks purchases made of each version produced, allowing buyers to track how their version is faring against other buyers’ productions.

It’s not only a great idea, but a well executed one – This process, if cumbersome, wouldn’t provide any type of incentive for fans to engage with it. But putting together the CD is simple and fun. Check it out here.

It deals with entropy, a thermodynamic concept that seeks to explain how energy within a system tends to distribute towards balance…A good illustration of entropy are ice cubes in a glass of water. Heat will transfer from water to the ice, ultimately melting the ice cubes and equalizing the molecular energy of substance within the glass. Another thing to know about entropy – the energy that’s being applied to this process of distributing energy throughout a system can’t be used to do any other form of ‘work’ (mechanical processes that consume energy).

This notion is central to the ETH’s published study. Up till this point, it has been assumed that, like all computations, deleting data from a computing system is work, one that releases energy. Just like the edits you’re, say, making to a spreadsheet on your laptop when you notice that the device is warming up.

The team at ETH has invoked quantum mechanics, however, to demonstrate that a computing system is actually tied to its operator – And so when data is deleted, by law of entropy the energy that is dissipated from that work can be absorbed by the operator. Moreover, the more entangled the operator is with (or in other words, the more knowledgeable of) the computing system , the greater the amount of energy they can absorb from this deletion task.

This is fairly heady stuff, but it doesn’t take too much to see some significant applications – You know what I mean if you’ve ever seen an IT team meltdown due to an overheated server room. While the this knowledge is still far from being harnessed for practical utility, it’s still pretty neat to consider.