Interesting Snippets

Peapod LLC is greatly expanding its virtual grocery store program in commuter rail stations. Today it’s launching more than 100 virtual grocery stores at stations in Boston, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Farmhopping is a network of operating farms that users can part-own and manage using an interactive web platform.

Targeting both would-be virtual farmers and already-operating real-world farmers with sustainable farms to share, Farmhopping allows users to buy animals online from its network of farms around the world. Then, as owners of the animals, they get to make key farm-management decisions such as when to milk the animals or sell their wool, for example, and whether to keep or sell to other users the young animals that are born over the course of the year. Farmhopping features a game-like interface that teaches about farm management through an interactive and engaging routine based on farming activities carried out in the real world. The site’s participating real-world farmers, meanwhile, reward users for their achievements with different offline privileges, including free stays on the farm and the opportunity to consume their own organic produce and learn how to take care of their animals in person.

DeAngelo struck upon the idea when his favorite 1980s video game – in which users had to safely guide a frog across a busy road – was omitted from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s The Art of Video Games exhibition. The developer decided to create an updated version of the game, hacked to receive input from a webcam located above 5th Avenue, which translates real traffic into digital obstacles for the game’s character.

Much of the success of Monmouthpedia comes from its ability to capture the imagination of the Wikipedia community, which has embraced the town virtually. Wikipedia volunteers have contributed nearly 500 new articles in over 25 languages, as well as videos on topics such as the historic Chartists movement.
The project also has a long list of partners, including 200 businesses, several universities and nearly every school and community group in the area. Wikipedia has partnered with museums and other institutions before, as in Derby, but in Monmouth you will see over 1,000 QR codes on every school, every important building, and hundreds of shops. The County Council itself has a QRpedia code in its reception that takes you to their Wikipedia article.

Users willing to devote CPU power to running a special piece of software would be called miners and would form a network to maintain the block chain collectively. In the process, they would also generate new currency. Transactions would be broadcast to the network, and computers running the software would compete to solve irreversible cryptographic puzzles that contain data from several transactions. The first miner to solve each puzzle would be awarded 50 new bitcoins, and the associated block of transactions would be added to the chain. The difficulty of each puzzle would increase as the number of miners increased, which would keep production to one block of transactions roughly every 10 minutes

(12) Subway lines in Shanghai and bus stations in Beijing have been equipped with billboards showing around 80 products with QR Codes. The company behind the experiment Shanghai based online shopping company Yihaodian (in which Walmart has an investment) does not charge for delivery on orders that total over 100 yuan ($15.50) and are less than 10 kiolograms in weight.

Imagine standing in a place and getting a notification on your phone with a picture showing you what that exact spot looked like 100 years ago. You take a look at the picture and see just how much has changed — and how much has stayed the same. That’s exactly what the NY Daily News is attempting to do

motorists have struggled with untold hours of delay, one partial collapse, and a bridge that seems to be forever changing shape. The process won’t be complete until 2013. But as of Tuesday, transit authorities have a new way to explain what’s going on: a free iPad app that lets you drive over a constantly updated virtual version of the Bay Bridge

In the future, Morris says, there will be a smartphone app which will allow him to get near instant decisions from the online farmers. “For example, if I have wheat in the field, ripe and ready, but rain in the morning means it is damp, do we risk waiting and losing some of the crop, or combining [harvesting] it now and incurring some extra drying costs?