The NUS Design Incubation Centre was won by the group that designed the Dandella

From the (press release):

The NUS DIC team emerged the top winner, beating 424 entries with their design, the
Dandella. Dandella is a hand-held GPS tracking device designed to help and guide the
lost by always physically pointing towards the destination. Its name is derived from the
metaphorical image of a dandelion in flight, floating towards its destination. The form is
kept minimal and humble, likened to holding a flower in the hand. Inspired by how
young sunflowers always point towards the sun, Dandella simplifies the complex
interface of current GPS devices to a simple notion of ‘just follow where it points”.

Combining existing GPS and robotic technology, Dandella units can be programmed to
track each other and their buds response by pointing towards one another. This intuitive
design feature allows users to locate each other by following where the bud points,
making it suitable for people of different ages from different walks of life.

Attuning to the theme of the competition, the DIC team touched on the concept of people
to people interaction and location. As the team’s industrial designers put it:

“Getting lost is a common global issue, especially for socially vulnerable people like
young children and elderly in today’s rapidly growing urban jungles.
Dandella’s design is intuitive without any complex interfacing, making it suitable for the
young and old. We wanted to solve a common social issue by first focusing on people’s needs and
behaviors, then proposing a user-centric solution with the use of existing technology.”

More discussion at Popgadget and Engadget.

There is a new section in today’s National Post (a Canadian newspaper) entitled Entrepreneur. A dorky picture of me with a decent write-up on the Canadian Tech sector. Unfortunately the paper is not freely available online.

Having recently learned about JAJAH, I was intrigued when I saw the subtle “call” link on Google
(click to enlarge)

When you click on “call”, you get this pop up …

which then gives you call status as you are calling …

I have only seen it on google.com (not google.ca) and only for US businesses, but I can enter my Canadian phone number, so this is a free way for Canadians to call US businesses!

Pretty cool feature, but you can imagine the potential abuse of entering someone’s phone number you don’t like and having Google call them over and over again. Will be interesting to see how Google solves that issue!

I recently crossed paths with a colleague I have known for a while who is now working at JAJAH, that has the tagline, “free.your.voice.”

If you goto the website, you will see that there is a really simple demo to show you how it works. There are plug-ins for Firefox that let you click on a phone number on a page to dial it, and a plug-in for the Mac AddressBook so that you can dial a number directly from there (Skype has a similar option, but you are using your computer with Skype rather then your phone)

They also have apps for your mobile phone so that any long distance calls from your phone route through JAJAH. Pretty cool!