The Pin-On Video Screen
I remember looking up across Times Square just after New Years in 2000 and seeing the new 60-foot tall LED video display that curved around Nasdaq’s Times Square showroom. It seemed at the time to be akey marker of what the next century would look like. The Nasdaq sign cost $37 million, but we know that the price of semiconductors is crashing toward zero. And sooner or later, nearly every surface in our world is going to be a computer display.
Month by month, more and more of what had been static images — billboards above subway stations, menus in McDonalds, maps in the back of taxicabs — flicker with video and computer-generated text.
Now, riding the economics of the iPod comes the digital “Hello-My-Name-Is” badge. I received a press release from an outfit called My iButton. For $79, they will sell you a generic portable video player set in a plastic frame that you can pin on your clothes. Soon every car salesman and trade show booth babe will be wearing a video screen with their latest spiel.
The company hopes to attract ordinary consumers as well, and offers frames for every phase of life, from baby birthdays to twisted yellow ribbons. We have already seen a similar video belt buckle, but at $279 it was a very expensive novelty. As the price of memory and displays falls ever faster, moving images are going to become routine in the most mundane places: baseball cards, take-out menus, exit signs.
The century, after all, is only 7 years old.
from the New York Times
For those moments when you really don’t want to talk to anyone…..or for when you do! Brilliant! Electronic plumage! We predict this will become an essential electronic element in the modern mating ritual.
how cute is that lil puppy