Four interesting developments

Four interesting developments to watch:

• Solar-powered marketing. A simple but compelling marketing concept used by McDonalds and the ad agency Leo Burnett.


• Speaking of marketing, now there's avatar-based marketing: advertising in virtual worlds such as Second Life. See this post in Towering Flat for a nice fleshing-out of this concept. In his book The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil predicts (correctly, in my opinion), that avatars will become an increasingly important part of our lives.


• And speaking of Ray Kurzweil, he's gone and invented another handy gadget, a scanner-reader for the blind. It snaps a quick digital photo of printed material, scans it, and reads it out loud a few seconds later with a synthesized voice. James Gashel says that he thinks this is "the hottest new technology to be developed for blind people in the last 30 years."


• Denver's mayor has announced a Greenprint Denver plan. It's a sustainability roadmap for Denver that includes measures such as converting city cars to hybrid and biodiesel.

Tags: marketing avatar Ray Kurzweil blind scanner-reader denver