Last week we brought together 400+ leading creatives and 18 visionary speakers in New York City for the fourth annual 99% Conference, presented by GE. For two days we devoted our full attention to exploring the inner-workings of idea execution. The attendees came with a laser-like focus on taking action on big, bold creative projects, and the energy in the crowd was absolutely electric.
As a production team, we challenged ourselves to take everything up a notch - curating a killer studio session lineup, adding still more incredible speakers, expanding our branded conference materials, and even including a TinType photobooth.

So what did we learn? Below, we give you the full monty on making ideas happen with an exhaustive recap of the insights shared by our 2012 99% speakers.

Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob. Or a smartphone that can be silenced by a hand gesture. Or a chair that adjusts room lighting when you recline into it.

A team of researchers at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have come up with a system called Touché, which uses the same capacitive technology as a smartphone's touchscreen to imbue everyday objects with body and gesture recognition.

Today Nissan North America changed the way consumers interact with cars in dealership showrooms. IdentityMine and digital agency Critical Mass celebrate the launch of the fully immersive Nissan Pathfinder Experience, utilizing Kinect for Windows. Originally, Kinect was used to enhance the Xbox 360 gaming system; now Kinect can be applied to a variety of consumer interactions. The debut is center stage at the Chicago Auto Show, the largest auto show in North America, and includes a massive interactive display. Participants can virtually navigate through the interior of the Nissan Pathfinder by interacting with the Kinect for Windows console, using hand motions to direct the experience.

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it.

Creating an NFC tag that allows customers, friends, or even yourself to quickly check in to a venue on Foursquare is easy.
To begin, you will need an NFC-capable device, some blank NFC tags, and an app to write to the tags. In a previous post, I went over where to find the tags and what app to use if you are on Android.
Today, I will be using the same app, NFC Task Launcher, on the Galaxy Nexus to program the tag for a Foursquare check-in.

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities

2011 brought ever more things to skim, sort, filter, and read, so it's no surprise that our collective Instapaper queues are overflowing. Before you mark everything as read — you're not really going to get to those 3,219 unread articles no matter how hard you attack your New Year's resolutions — we've got a couple stories that you shouldn't miss. Here's a selection of writing about technology that stayed with us, whether it offered a particular insight into a startup, added a fresh take on endless social media pandering, or simply nailed some classic pound-the-pavement, behind-the-scenes reporting.

The 13-foot-long three-seater’s interior and exterior are blank slates for whatever visuals you would like to wirelessly paint onto them in real time. And if you get too confused, there’s a holographic “navigation concierge” lady with a cute little hat to accompany you, guiding you around the vehicle’s futuristic features. She also helps you find your way from one place to another, which is probably effortless considering that the vehicle is networked with all the other cars on the road and drives itself.

I love the magically mundane virtual real world of Google Streetview, and like others I’ve longed for my 15 frames of blurry low-res Street View fame. So I’ve been wondering, how can I get into Street View without having to stalk the car and chase it down? Actually, I don’t just want to appear in Street View, I want to play in it and add things to it too. And I want to be able to invite my friends to join me on the street. I want to use Street View for more than looking at a random piece of the past. I want to use Street View as a place to make alternative presents and possible futures.

Sources close to Eurogamer claim that Kinect 2 will come bundled with future Xbox consoles. As well as lip-reading, the improved sensor will be able to detect players' emotional states by recognising facial expressions and tracking the pitch and volume of their voices.

As the 21st century approached, luxury automakers faced a technical design challenge: an increasing array of new in-car devices--phone, GPS navigation, digital radio, satellite radio, CD changers, Internet access, television, emergency notification, side and rearview cameras, and driving system settings--was turning dashboards into an unfathomable mess. Automakers were forced to rethink how drivers interface with cars.

Because of this, we decided to find out how much data a typical Siri user might expect to use in an average month. We carefully watched our data usage while performing 11 different queries through Siri, split between local phone tasks and tasks that required lookups from the Internet. We also performed four dictation tasks. Your milage, of course, will vary depending on the kinds of things you might use Siri for and how often you might do those things. With that said, here's what we found.

Siri has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. It's an as yet unreleased product that aims to be a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA). At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with two of the founders of Siri: Dag Kittlaus (CEO) and Tom Gruber (CTO). I was informed that the product will launch end of summer U.S. time - starting out as an iPhone app, but later other platforms will be supported. The iPhone app will go into private beta July/August time period, then launch in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010.

Cupertino, California (CNN) -- The iPhone 4S may not look any different from its predecessor, but it is Apple's only model with a sort of robot living inside.
Apple's new phone, which was announced on Tuesday to be sold in stores on October 14, will have a new function called Siri. The program lets people bark commands or ask questions to the phone, and it will provide an answer or ask follow-up questions in order to perform a given task.

When I wrote my post on natural user interface a couple months back (described by some as a “real barnstormer”), I glossed over most current forms of voice recognition. The problem as I saw it, and still see it, is that recognizing voice has to be bulletproof for it to be truly useful. Where computers fail at listening is that they can’t fill in the blanks. Even if I don’t catch every syllable (and I don’t, I’m a pretty bad listener), I usually know what someone’s saying — sometimes halfway through the sentence — based on context and logic. The other place where I win is that if I don’t understand someone, I can usually ask them to clarify. Voice systems like Ford SYNC ask you “did you mean…” but when you yell “no!” for the tenth time you end up right where you started, the AI functioning as a tabula rasa. What’s great about Apple’s new Siri virtual personal assistant is that it specifically addresses all three of these hangups.

Imagine when a journey from A to B is no longer routine as your car in the near-future encourages a sense of play, exploration and learning. This is the image engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) had of Toyota's "Window to the World" vehicle concept.

We created new human's organs that use brain wave sensor.
"necomimi"is the new communication tool that augments human's body and ability.

Quora has taken the tech and entrepreneurial world by storm, providing a system that works so fluidly that it is sometimes hard to see what the big fuss is all about. This slick tool is powered, not only by an intelligent crowd of askers and answerers, but by a well-crafted backend created by co-founders who honed their skills at Facebook.

In this blog post I will delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. What technical decisions have they made? What does their architecture look like? What languages and frameworks do they use? How do they make that search bar respond so quickly?

Microsoft Kinect is poised to shake up the video game console experience. Announced and demonstrated as Project Natal in June 2009, Kinect seems almost magical the way it can "see" every movement of your body and reproduce it within the video game you're playing. Plus, it recognizes your face and voice so it can pick you out in the room and know who you are, even if you're playing with a group of friends. November 2010 marks Kinect's historic and anticipated release as a new addition to Microsoft's Xbox 360 product line.

1999, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: we meet in person for the first time. We had found each other via our medium, the networked computer and had a brief but passionate virtual love affair. We got to know each other doing what we loved doing most, making websites and interactive artworks online. We begin living and working together soon after. 2003: Leaving behind careers of net.art and web design, the two of us radically redirect all our creative attention towards the medium of videogames. February 2005: After 2 years of designing and prototyping, our first project 8 is rejected by games publishers, then the only source of funding. We are devastated but determined to continue and to keep our independence. Reboot. September 2005: Launch of The Endless Forest. October 2006: presentation of the Realtime Art Manifesto at the Mediaterra festival in Athens. January 2007: Drama Princess engine complete. March 2008: Launch of The Graveyard. March 2009, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: launch of The Path.

Within the MMOG industry there are two primary server structures employed to house the player base: Separated shards of some sort (typically referred to as 'servers' though this is misleading from a hardware standpoint) and a more unified, single-world structure. Primary examples of each are World of Warcraft, which employs a shard-based structure that breaks its considerable population into separate worlds, and EVE Online which houses its entire player base in a single universe.

I joined Etsy back in February and knew immediately that there would be no shortage of technical challenges. Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts”. I got a taste of that within my first weeks on the job. We are in the process of redesigning a few of the major sections around etsy.com. Every item being sold on the site can have up to five photos posted with it. When a seller uploads a new photo, it’s resized automatically into six different sizes that are displayed throughout the site. As we redesigned some pages we realized we would need to replace a few of the existing image sizes.

My talk at Lift seemed to go down quite well but I remember leaving the stage thinking of all the things I'd meant to say; my own fault for trying to cram an hour of stuff into 20 minutes. So I thought I'd try and elaborate on some of it here. This post is what I meant to say while standing in front of this picture of one of Roo and Leila's tapes.

CCP Yokai, the Technical Director over in EVE-land, just posted a dev blog about their new rack setup. This is pretty rare insight for any operation, so it’s definitely worth reading. You don’t get the nitty-gritty details but you get a good overview.

If the absence of Flash on iPhone and iPod Touch for three years and its current incompatibility with iPad left any room for doubt, then Steve Jobs’ recent tirade to employees made clear the depth of the Apple CEO’s ill-feeling toward Adobe’s ubiquitous media platform. But more than mere dissatisfaction with the internet’s most pervasive mode of serving multimedia content, including webgames, Jobs’ support of the new web standard, HTML5, shows Apple’s deeper, more aggressive goal: to bring about the downfall of Flash by shifting the very source of how we experience games and watch videos on the net.