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December 02, 2011 14:26  by Kris Abel
Folktales have long held that the greatest mountains hold the oldest secrets, that their roots can dig back deep into memory and their caverns will play home to ancient dragons. Within the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia lies Mount Burgess, home not to dragons, but dinosaurs and other strange creatures in a world you can explore online through a new virtual exhibit from the Royal Ontario Museum.

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August 22, 2011 08:25  by Kris Abel

The next time you plan to redecorate your home, you may have the choice of adding murals that come alive when captured with a cameraphone. Yiying Lu is a celebrated artist best known for creating Twitter's Fail Whale image and a line of innovative peel-and-stick wall graphics that she sells through her own company, Walls360. Her new project is a smartphone app that will allow her friendly wall murals to come alive when viewed through a phone's camera. When the app recognizes an image on your wall, it triggers your phone to display animations, images, and other hidden content across your screen, which you can then further interact with using your touch screen. Her preview video below shows the concept in action:

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July 08, 2011 00:27  by Kris Abel
If you’re looking to explore the city of Toronto you’ll find a fantastic guide within App Central. Each week I take a mobile app and test it out in the wild. Being based in the city, we’ve done all the research in finding cool places and exceptional people to partner with and are happy to share that list with you for your own adventures. Be they as fun and memorable as my own.

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June 19, 2011 10:09  by Kris Abel
Ah the thrill of the hunt. To walk into an interesting store and scan the tables for that one image, that one idea that stands out amongst the black thread piles with imaginative fanfare. Here I present to you all the shirts I found for App Central. With the launch of a new television series I decided it’d be fun to wear a different shirt for each episode and being Canadian to focus my choices on local artists.

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June 15, 2011 08:40  by Kris Abel

Go The F To Sleep

Audio book seller Audible.com is often at a struggle to encourage iTunes users to try out their catalog of voiced novels and narrated biographies, but this week has scored a promotion that is sure have frustrated parents around the globe signing up for an account. For a limited time their online store is offering a free download of Adam Mansbach's viral hit "Go the F--k to Sleep" as voiced by actor Samuel L. Jackson. A parody of the children's books often read by parents to their energetic kids, the book includes the same style of illustrations and rhyming sentences, but with the coarse language and expressions some parents might be thinking when feeling pushed to the edge. [More]

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June 06, 2011 08:19  by Kris Abel

True Knowledge

No links to articles that happen to have your keyword in them, True Knowledge is a new search engine designed to simply tell you the answer you're looking for immediately. It's designed around the idea that you should be able to access the world's knowledge simply by asking a question in a way that comes most naturally. Just type in your question as you would if you were speaking to another human being and True Knowledge will deliver a single answer to match. Like major search engines it's fast, offers instant suggestions, but doesn't pretend to have all the answers either. If it doesn't know what you're looking for, it's quick to admit so, but the team behind the project say they are constantly adding to it's knowledge base so such empty queries will become less frequent over time and their special semantics means that it can understand questions posed in a human way, so when it does find a matching answer, it will get it right the first time.  [More]
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May 18, 2011 08:43  by Kris Abel

Anasomnia

A website that is light-sensitive (thanks to your webcam if you have one), Anasomnia is an interactive art project that delivers a number of surprises when you turn the virtual lights out in a little girl's room. Her little imagination soon brings the shapes alive thanks to illustrations by Kim Koster. The levels of light the website detects in your reality determine the visions you see, so feel free to visit the website again with different lighting for different results.  [More]
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May 06, 2011 08:10  by Kris Abel

The moment the news broke about Bin Laden's death, his location in Abbottabad, Pakistan instantly became a point of fascination on Google Earth and you can bet it will remain so for many years to come. It hasn't taken long for enthusiasts of the geography application to design and build a number of 3D model renderings of the Bin Laden's compound with a large selection of them popping up within the Google 3D Warehouse. The Google Earth Blog has put together a list of five of the more detailed versions, complete with links to their KMZ files so you can open them up for a visit in Google Earth. They range in detail and realism to touches of humour such as a "For Sale" sign, given the state of the property now. 

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April 01, 2011 15:44  by Kris Abel

Now that most of April the 1st has passed, just a heads-up that the next twelve posts that follow detail creative April Fools stories I found across the web today.

Have a great weekend. 

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April 01, 2011 10:52  by Kris Abel
If you're a Virgin Mobile user in Canada the company says it has good news. They're launching a new service called "Auto Ad-vice" that will monitor your conversations looking for keywords purchased by ad-buyers. When you say the magic word, your phone will play a notification tone followed by an audio ad targeted to the very subject you're speaking about with the caller on the other end. Check out the video below for full details:

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