Freyburg

Welcome to the first episode of Platformer, the show about the tech you use to work, play and create. Sprung from the loins of the Platformer audio podcast on platformer.ca, our new show aims to inform and entertain you with the latest tech news, reviews and interviews with amazing innovators.

In this episode we look at the new iPad and go to the White Day Hackathon at A Thinking Ape (www.athinkingape.com).

Sponsors for White Day Hackathon included A Thinking Ape, Silicon Sisters, EA, Microsoft, East Side Games, and the UBC Computer Science department.

You can check out a photo album from the event here.

Make sure to subscribe to Freyburg Media’s Youtube channel, like our videos, and follow us on Twitter at @freyburg_media.

Nepal is one of the poorest and least connected nations in the world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many Nepalese geeks looking to stake a claim on the web and better themselves and their families. Boing Boing went to Nepal’s biggest tech fair and documented the goings-on in a fascinating photo essay.

Vancouver Sun tech reporter Gillian Shaw interviewed myself and several other technology enthusiasts on the day of the Apple iPad announcement, and you can check out my thoughts online on her blog (as well as in yesterday’s dead tree version of the Vancouver Sun.) Techvibes.com also reposted “The iPad cometh“. Neat!

TEDMED is the newest offshoot of TED, the conference/video channel that brings big ideas to the Internet in digestible videos. Biotech and medicine have reached the point where an entirely new site dedicated to just medicine is now viable. The site is pretty sparse at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll be well populated with great videos inside of a month. Also, the opening graphics for the videos, which consist of CG flybys through the nervous system, are pretty damned cool.

Here’s an interesting video about growing regenerated organs:

I could do without all the ads, but the rest of it looks mighty neat. Plus if ads move to an AR format, you just turn ’em off until you need access, rendering the real world blissfully ad-free.

Shai Agassi has an audacious plan for implementing electric vehicles on a massive scale, and he may just pull it off. Below I’ve posted a video from Agassi about how important it is for the world to use technology and entrepreneurship to kickstart a revamp of our industries in order to keep us from a climate crisis.

I know some people deny the existence of the climate crisis, but to my mind this is a change that should happen regardless. We will run out of oil in this century, and we’ve been coasting on 19th century technology for a long time. Even if the climate maintains stability or heats up without our help, at the very least we’ve updated and innovated our infrastructure, created many new jobs and will likely make many new discoveries along the way. There’s no good reason not to do this, other than keeping established players wealthy. And those established players stand to gain as well, as long as they get in front of the problem and push their resources towards a solution.