In this trendwatching podcast, Nora Young is sniffing the return of smart.  She mentions the new blog, The Awl, and the fact that Clusterflock seems to have a bit of buzz around it.  (Kottke.org blogger, Jason Kottke, first told Nora about Clusterflock in an interview on Spark).  

Meanwhile, tired of your mobile gadgets running out of juice?  Here’s an interesting concept The Etive Kinetic Energy Charger: a device that harvests the body’s energy while you’re walking and uses it to power tech such as cellphones (via Gizmag).

 

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In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond talks about the potential for GPS enabled phones to be used for tracking workers’ movements, and the potential that data about your travels could be sold via the kinds of startup services that tell you where your friends are. (via Popular Mechanics). Nora Young mentions the sorts of anonymized ‘reality mining’ experiments going on at MIT.

Meanwhile, Nora talks about ImAMrs.com, a Vancouver startup that makes it easy for women to change their names when they marry.  A cranky discussion about ‘what’s wrong with the kids today’ ensues. (via Springwise)

Plus a fashion update from Cathi.  At New York fashion week, the buzz was about the return of 80s looks, including full-on shoulder pads and bright colours! Yikes! (via JC Report)

 

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