







Four months ago I went through a life changing experience: My first daughter was born, and I fell immediately in-love with the little adorable baby that became an important part of our (now mostly sleepless) life.
From the moment she was born, my wife and I photograph and videotape her, using our iPhones, and our DSLR camera.
At the same time my parents aren’t getting younger. My father turned 72 this year, and my mother 66. On his 70th birthday, I made a short film about him, as an excuse to both hear and document the story of his life. We went through old photographs that were lying in our living room drawers, and with each picture came a story, about love, war, family, and friendship. Most of these pictures were older than me –from the 50s and 60s — telling the story of his life as an immigrant, young tank commander, husband, and young father.
Not surprisingly, I love gadgets, applications, and great sites. That’s why I upload my daughter’s pictures to Flickr and Facebook, and save all of them in our centralized media hub, and I also back it up using Dropbox. I use Twitter, Foursquare and serendip.me to tell the story of my life – places I’ve been at, songs I’ve heard, thoughts I’ve had at a specific point in time.
Up until now, I was certain this is enough. We have all those cameras with their amazing images, those fancy video cameras, these smartphones that are actually point and shot cameras that can also call people. But something is missing:
When you look at it from an historical perspective, all these sites and gadgets lose their sex appeal. The reason is simple – in 40 years perspective, suddenly Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, hard disks and iPhones seem like not the best way to store memories.
I don’t know what will happen with Apple, Yahoo!, Twitter and Facebook 40 years from now.
I don’t know if the images I am taking now will be compatible with the technology 20 years from now.
I don’t know if my media center’s hard disk will survive the next 5 years.
And maybe, just maybe, Dropbox will go out of business.
There is a missing link in our digital age. There is a crucial element that is not guaranteed in our advanced technological environment. It is a simple thing: the physical element of our memories. The real life scrap book. The image, printed on a paper.
Yes, I know, these physical representation of our memories can be lost or destroyed. In fact, history teaches us that the physical element of our memories could be easily destroyed (such was the case of the Library of Alexandria).
However, if there is one thing that is for certain, it is that we will be able to see the pictures of our lives in the future. It is not a matter of file formats, web applications, and smartphones. Our eyes will still be able to see pictures. Our fingers will still be able to feel the aging paper they are printed on.
Think about it, next time you look at your hard disk full of those priceless images of your life.

March 8, 2012
Babylon Touch, PrimeSense and OpenNI at GDC 2012, and the OpenNI Challenge
Sarah Tuttle-Singer Babylon, Game Developers Conference, GDC, iphone, OpenNI, Twitter, Video game developer Babylon, Big Ideas, Business, Events, Media, OpenNI, PrimeSense, Twitter 0 Comments
We’ve got some exciting things happening for our clients:
Babylon just launched a cool new app for the iPhone that received over 100,000 downloads in the first week! The reviews are coming in, and the consensus seems to be that the Babylon Touch is both useful and user-friendly.
See?
In other news, OpenNI and PrimeSense just presented at the GDC in San Francisco. The discussions were lively and stimulating, and covered an array of topics including the capabilities of 3D sensing technologies.
Meanwhile, OpenNI is also getting ready to launch an exciting challenge for game developers. This contest will take place from April 1st-August 1st, and is two-fold: The first part of the competition is a Twitter raffle from April 1st-May 1st where participants tweet in order to enter to win one of ten free ASUS Sensors. Anyone can enter — you just have to follow @OpenNI on Twitter and tweet with a specific message which will be released by our client very soon.
But that’s not all! Meanwhile, developers will also be able to create an app using the OpenNI standard — and, if they win the Twitter raffle, they may also use the ASUS sensor. Once completed, they can upload the app and a short video explaining how the app works to the official competition website where it will be voted on by website viewers as well as by a panel of distinguished industry leaders. The grand prize is a free trip to IBC 2012 in Amsterdam in September!
For more information, please check out http://www.opennichallenge.com/
We’d also love to hear what’s going on in your company! What’s new? Has it been an interesting and challenging week? What sort of projects do you have on the horizon?