Barcode Revolution

A barcode is a small rectangular area with solid dark-colored lines of varying widths usually found on the back of most products available for sale. Barcodes usually contains an item’s serial, identification, or inventory number and looks something like this:

When products with a barcode get scanned using a barcode reader, a computer can recall from a database the item’s description, price, and other pertinent information.

Barcode Revolution, unhappy with barcode’s current aesthetic uselessness, have creatively come up with many design ideas that can actually make use of the space occupied by barcodes, ultimately blending the barcode design either into the product or producing a relevant image. Here are a few we liked but we encourage you to click and check out their gallery.

Click to see more: Barcode Revolution

Video: Economist “Did you know?”

It’s amazing how much technology has changed, is changing, and will continue to change our social behavior. But rather than sit here and bore you with an essay of a blog post, we’ll simply show you this video:

Real Rhapsody for the iPhone

Apple has approved the Real Rhapsody iPhone app, the online streaming music service provided by Real Networks.

Watch the video for a demonstration on how the app operates.

A thought:

With the advent of so many subscription-based online music services, in tandem with affordable unlimited mobile data, is it even necessary to load music anymore? Why focus on how many gigabytes of memory you have on your device or which music to load when you can just stream from an online library containing thousands or millions of songs on demand?

Free Music Legally

There are two recent web services (using cloud computing) that enable you to listen to music completely free and legally:

• Spotify
• Last.fm

They both work on the principle that you listen to the music streaming, so it is not saved onto your computer. You just create any number of playlists and listen to whatever music you want. On both services there are times you won’t find the music you want because they are still negotiating with the copyright owners, but both services have millions of tracks to listen to.

So how is it legal? well because you do not download and “own” the music the licensing fees are much smaller, just how a radio station works.

It is a great way to build a free playlist of all the music you love and listen to it either on your computer or your 3G mobile phone.