Listen: Making New York a Senior Friendly City

Following up on this month’s New York Time’s article, Brian Lehrer of New York City’s public radio station, WNYC, discusses the challenges of improving cities for the elderly with Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor of Health and Human Services in NYC. Broadening the conversation a bit from the original New York Times article, the full [...]

New York City Aims to Improve the Lives of Elderly

The challenges associated with growing old in some of the world’s largest, fastest, most-intimidating cities are not new. Crumbling side-walks, inaccessible public restrooms, stoplights that favor cars over pedestrians are problems that can be found in most modern 21st century cities.

What is a Mobile Economy? Let’s Look to Africa

In May, the research firm Generator Research published a report in which they projected that the worldwide market for mobile payments will grow to 633.4 billion by 2014; the report was picked up by Gigaom and a number of mobile-savvy blogs, getting enough dissemination to make most entrepreneurs drool over the possibilities for growth and [...]

Composting, New Hampshire

A new green business startup is helping restaurants save money and compost in New England. Inspired by San Francisco’s composting mandate—a law which requires residents to compost biodegradable materials such as produce food scraps– Ryan Bedard recognized the demand for alternative waste disposal services back home in Maine and New Hampshire and founded the company [...]

Registering Mobile Phones to Cut Crime, Kenya

Kenya has announced plans to register all mobile phone numbers in an attempt to diminish crime. From now on users will have to supply proof of address and identity documents before they can get a phone number, while any numbers unregistered by the end of July will be disconnected. Many individuals support this new law [...]

What’s new in Mobile Health?

I’ve rounded up a number of interesting mobile health gadgets that have emerged on the market over the last 6 months. Here are a collection of self-explanatory videos which give us a pretty good glimpse at how these gadgets work and how they can be used. Check them out below: MedApps A mobile outpatient monitoring [...]

Ambient Power Sources

The suggestion of harvesting energy, electricity, has been lingering for over a century —ever since Nikola Tesla drew up plans to transmit electricity from large towers around the globe without using any connective infrastructure— and still, today, it still may strike us as as a bit of a stretch. However, it’s clear that as each [...]

Cell Phones Help Bring Basic Sanitation to Africa

It is predicted that by 2015, 2.7 billion people will lack access to sanitation—this is an especially disheartening figure if you consider that, today, more people have access to mobile phones than toilets. Optimistically, however, a number of innovators around the world are attempting to use this new found access to technology to address the [...]

Museum Mobile Phone Apps

In the current issue of Museum Practice, a journal that focuses on trends in curatorial practices, Simon Stevens presents us with an informed perspective on the costs and benefits associated with implementing mobile applications in the museum-going experience. The premise of this piece is that it may serve many museums well to pause and think [...]

Net Neutrality

Two weeks ago, the acclaimed journalist Terry Gross, interviewed Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Schatz about the question of net neutrality and the challenge to regulate the internet in anticipation of US congress’s upcoming meetings to discuss current telecommunication laws (last reviewed in 1996 when the internet was hardly discussed);

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