Nubot – A Video Chat Robot Doll

Nubot is a doll ready to host smartphone video chats via Skype.

The remote user can control the doll’s body gestures (wave, bow, turn) giving them more of a physical presence.

The folks at Nuuo that developed Nubot use it to have teleconferences between their offices.

We’ve seen a more mobile, albeit less cute, telepresence robot named Texai in the past.

livehoods

A very cool project from the smart people at Carnegie Mellon University to map (and remap.. and remap) Livehoods..  Neighborhoods that emerge in the moment, based on check-in and social graph data.

Contributed by: Ralph Paone

Cinemagrams

Cinemagrams are the new GIFs — get them before a creative asks you about them!

http://cinemagram.tumblr.com/

Contributed by Jeremy Adirim

Fühl-o-meter – Public Face

Fühl-o-meter assesses the sentiment of peoples faces’ and projects the ambient mood of the city through a smiley face atop a tower.

via laughing squid

Circle of Trust

This project from Brazilian company D3 uses the new Google+ API to visualize the closeness of your circles on Google+. Curious how many people in your circles looped you into theirs as well? About how many people only you’ve circled, or who the lurkers on the outside are who’ve only circled you?

Give it a try here: http://www.d3.do/labs/circleoftrust/index.php

Aside from providing a new tool for social network investigation, the Circle of Trust visuals are beautiful and it’s exciting to see what the first experiments manipulating Google+ API yield.

Contributed by Sergio Mugnaini

Give a smile, get a smile

On the site Two of Us, anyone can take a picture of themselves smiling and share it with another smiling stranger.

Amazingly simple, but still a fun way to connect and add some humanity back to the Internet.

Augmented City

Keiichi Matsuda imagines what it would be like when digital layers of information converge with the physical environment – no device required. (Best viewed in 3D if you have 3D glasses handy)

Getaround Social Car Sharing

A new social car swapping site, this service allows individuals to put their own vehicles up for rent at an hourly rate they get to set (e.g. Tesla Roadster $50/hr).

No idea how it all works or whether it will catch on, but it’s pretty interesting.

http://www.getaround.com/

Test driving is becoming a lot more “social” and “consumer driven” than before.

Contributed by Ralph Paone

Socialnomics Stats Video

Kinetic type video of social media stats from Erik Qualman’s Socialnomics v3 book.

Google+

Here it is finally, Google’s version of Facebook: Google+

Read the official Google blog post here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html

Or take a video tour with sentimental music here: