Articles - Innovations

HACKS AND INNOVATIONS FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

Google goes Chrome
The biggest tech story of the week sees Google's fledgling search engine Chrome, barely out of beta, morphing into an operating system. The buzz is that Google  is bringing on the big guns to rival Microsoft's popular but expensive Windows OS, which at around 90% has the lion's share of the market. Chrome, unlike Windows, will be free and open source and is likely to hit the software giant where it hurts the most – at the heart of its proprietary hold over millions of Office users worldwide. On the TechCrunch blog (techcrunch.com), M.G. Siegler writes: "Let's be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of all bombs on its rival, Microsoft." And the artillery is at the ready. Google will simply migrate its applications from browser to web-based operating system. Essentially, the web will become the operating system, taking so-called "cloud computing" to its outer limits. Google plans to launch Chrome in the second half of 2010.  

Cloth coffin
The UK’s leading coffin manufacturer, JC Atkinson and Son, has joined forces with Hainsworth, a Yorkshire-based speciality textile firm, to produce an ecologically friendly range of coffins made from wool. According to a press release on the Hainsworth website (hainsworth.co.uk), burying people in woollen coffins is not a new thing. Between 1666 and 1680, in an effort to boost the English wool industry, Parliament passed the Burial in Woollen Acts which required the dead, except plague victims, to be buried in pure English woollen shrouds to the exclusion of any foreign textiles. The coffins are made from pure new wool, a more sustainable, biodegradable material than wood or steel, supported by a frame of recycled cardboard and  are “suitable for cremation and all types of burial.”

Tourist killer
This week the G8 leading industrial countries agreed that  carbon emissions be cut by 80% by 2050 which means, I guess that the rest of us must begin taking the efforts to reverse global warming seriously. One of the simplest ways to do this is to get on a bicycle instead of into a car. To facilitate the transition, cordarounds.com has created these bike-to-work pants with a lining that reflects light when you roll up the cuffs to make you more visible on your self-propelled commute.