Another fun iPhone photo-manipulation App, ColorSplash, allows you to use selective desaturation to really add impact to your photos.

Here's an example:

Well, I know which one I'd rather eat. Anyway, whether you want to show off your big green eyes in an otherwise black and white portrait or produce one of those nice postcard views of a red (or yellow over here) bus driving through a monochrome landscape, ColorSplash is great fun!

All you need is a nimble finger and off you go: Take a photo or load one from your Album, choose one of the four brushes and start to liberate the colour in your chosen area... Zooming in really close and panning around the picture is super-intuitive, as you'd expect from a good iPhone App.

You can even save a "session" and come back to it later to carry on editing if you need a break.

Great fun, great effects and some great results for only $1.99 or whatever your local currency price may turn out to be!

Get it from the App Store here!

More fun iPhone Apps coming soon

How do I look?

No, not a real photo of me "back in the day" but a photo-montage put together on my Wife's iPhone with a really cool App called OldBooth Premium. The App comes with a selection of photos that you can use as a template, and includes tools for resizing and fitting a photo of your own face within the template photo. Just choose a template, choose or take a photo of yourself, resize it and change the brightness to match and you've got a fun photo to confuse your friends with.

I now have a selection of photos of me covering at least 6 decades - soldier, sailer and probably also spy ;-) - not to mention a couple of 70s big hair shots that are really scary.

Top marks for fun and a nice selection of cool photos to choose from!

Click here to check the app in the iTunes App Store

Like my iPhone skin?

I decided I'd had enough of the solid plastic case I'd had on my iPhone to protect it against scratches and that it was time to get some serious ART on my phone. These skins are fantastic and much better than any I've seen anywhere before: They are high-quality, they're available in so many different stles from over 50 international artists AND they provide great-looking protection for around only $15.

I'm a big fan of graffiti and graffiti art so this was one of the obvious choices for me. My Wife has the "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli - also fabulous!

Take a look at the site and get inspired - they have great skins for your MacBook, iPod, Blackberry, mobile phone or laptop too

OK, so it's a bold statement. If, however, the decision-makers at Facebook can't start to see that they have both a global reach and a real responsibility to their users it could seriously lead to their downfall.

Facebook have made some excellent progress in the field of user privacy since their beginnings. The level of granularity in Facebook profile privacy is generally very good, as you'd expect from an online service of their size. They've now effectively undone a lot of that good work if articles like this and the new Facebook group opposing the changes are anything to go by...

However, launching a new set of Terms and Conditions with ill-informed and, frankly, rather amateurish suggestion of a claim to ownership of their users' private material is not too clever.

Facebook are in a position that other tech. start-ups have been in before: Having grown to a huge scale they now need to figure out how to actually make money from their business. Could this recent attempt to "take ownership" of their users' content be a badly-veiled attempt at moving towards some form of content-driven revenue model. Hm, seems a little "conspiracy theory"-like to me. It's more likely to just be a bad mistake. Still, we'll never know now, will we?

The new TOS have been quite rightly taken back. Now we see Facebook trying the web-democracy crowd-sourcing approach to building new TOS.

Maybe they should also check with a few international data-protection and privacy specialists too next time?

A social network can only survive if it's users remain users, by it's very nature. Privacy is a major issue, as is ownership of user-generated content. Facebook need to realise this and to think clearly. Provide a platform for people to share THEIR photos, notes, stories, whatever, but don't try to use that very content for your own benefit. Facebook's value proposition should be based around their platform and not data belonging to other people.

In a previous post I talked about the Technological Singularity and the generally-accepted view that it describes how machines will become more intelligent than us, their "masters" and take over the planet.

While this is the most exciting scenario for the filmmakers of Hollywood, it is only one interpretation of the Singularity (as I shall call it from now, for the sake of my fingertips).

I also touched on other variations of the Singularity, other possible scenarios. One of these scenarios is, I am convinced, already very much upon us:

The time we reach a new Singularity will be when our ability to interact with the internet and each other, without the need to seek out a computer and form a connection to the internet. Another, similar, scenario will see us able to extend our own physical and mental abilities through the applied use of technology.

The first of thee two scenarios is near. The second is already here in a number of forms:

Exoskeletons:

Exoskeletons are a kind of "wearable robot suit" which receive signals from your brain and nervous system and translate those signals into movements. Not only do they perform those movements but they also amplify your strength between 2 and 10 times! HAL-5 is an example that you can buy today. (Take a look at the supplier's name and suppress the dry smile that comes in the knowledge that the company's founder simply MUST have been a Terminator fan...)

The concept of an exoskeleton is not new and there are numerous versions either being produced and available for purchase or currently in development.

Muscle reinnervation:

Muscle reinnervation is (loosely described) the process of attaching a prosthetic limb to a patient and performing nerve-muscle graft surgery to link remaining nerves to the prosthetic limb, thereby enabling the recipient to learn how to control the prosthetic limb as they would a "normal" arm, for example - by thinking about moving it! While not an everyday procedure, this approach has been used to great effect already, as this article testifies. The fact that the young lady described in the article can actually FEEL things touching her prosthetic hand is amazing.

Take these two technological mini-Singularities and add the promise that DNA Computing offers, or may appear to offer if limitations can be overcome, and it doesn't take too much imagination to see how the level of technology we are in possession of today could be developed to catapult us towards a true Singularity with just a few minor advances.

Two new films - "Transcendant Man" based upon the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil and "The Singularity Is Near" based on Ray Kurzweil's Book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans transcend Biology, (see right-hand sidebar for Amazon link) and also directed by him and Anthony Waller are due to hit the Movie Screens in the coming months. Both promise to entertain and inform, both following Kurzweil's convictions that our future as a race is to become stronger and more intelligent through our adoption of and enhancement through new technologies.

This is not only a potential goldmine for Hollywood but also an area in which we can now start to gather informed opinion, to step back and view the advances in technology, in science, in research and say "yes, I can see how that could happen". Science fiction is certainly harder to write nowadays, but Science Fact is getting really interesting!

Next time I'll come back to the former of my statements: That the time when we will be able to interact with each other via the internet but without seeking out a computer and connecting is also near. Until then, happy reading...