This is one of those things.  Take a look at this video (ignore the ad) and think about how amazing this would be if it were available on the national health service for free for a blind parent!

I don’t know how much this costs (being an early idea its probably prohibitive) but it has legs imho. I remember the first ultrascan that my Wife and I had of our first and second children, it was a life changing moment, we held that piece of paper in our hands, we cried, we felt reality, we grew, we bonded. Life was happening before our eyes and it was amazing.

I of course being a geek, scanned the picture immediately to keep it digitally forever, but just imagine if we had a life size model, we could touch and feel. I think this would have been a 100x more mind blowing.

In our home, pride of place on our ornament shelf are two beautiful glass hand casts of our children at the ages of 6 and 5, I’m sure we’d have purchased gladly 3D models of our children too. Its just a nice, once-in-a-moment thing to have to keep forever.

If your a parent, you’ll feel how great this idea is because you know that your children were part of your life  long before they were born.

Congrats to the creator of this idea. I really hope to see this technology get to mainstream.

I think someone should think about leading a campaign to bring this technology for free to every blind mother/father in the world, this would be amazing, for a blind parent to touch her unborn child as she can’t see a 2D printout of an ultrascan.

If this idea appeals to you, run with it. Change the world and let all blind mothers/fathers see their unborn child for the first time through touch! Get your state/county to fund it, create new donation funds to pay for it, just make it happen!

A model maker from the London Royal college of Art has created something truly, totally amazing.

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7975555

Ian Hayward

I must say, (I hope without sounding cheesy) that that the folks at Digg really are a cool bunch to work with, it was obvious they’ve got a good vibe going on at Digg HQ after meeting up face to face.

Early feedback looks promising. We are all looking forward to tweaking features and listening to users of the toolbar moving forward from here. I’ve personally found the toolbar useful and not too intrusive while playing with it over the past few weeks during beta testing! I hope you like it too, the team did a great job.

I recommend you check out this neat Digg Firefox toolbar video highlight by Kevin and you can download it from here.
Enjoy.

The venue is limited in numbers to around 250 people, to sign up on the guest list please visit http://www.glaxstar.com/party/

You can read all about it here…
facebook group
http://tinyurl.com/6js6lz

Spreadfirefox party planner annoucement
http://mozillaparty.com/en-US/events/view/853

Date: Wednesday July 9th 2008
Venue: Club Eve, Lower Ground Floor, 3 New Burlington Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 2JF
Timings: 6.30pm until late
Map: http://www.clubeve.co.uk/mappop.htm
Nearest Tubes: Piccadilly Circus or Oxford Circus

Should be a good night!

http://twitter.com/IanHayward

I also got the chance to catch up with Mozilla’s Mike Shaver today before his keynote speech at the conference this afternoon. Mike spoke for 45 mins about how the web loves people, vintage shaver, no notes & from the heart, nice job Mike!

btw if you’ve not already, you can download the official final release version of Firefox 3 today! It’s out there now and you can track how the record attempt is doing worldwide by taking a look at this live map: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord or take a look at the live counter its facinating.

There has been a cool campaign started to attempt to break the world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours for the upcoming release of Firefox 3 from Mozilla.

www.spreadfirefox.com is calling for your help by doing the following…

a. Blog about the Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 record attempt.
b. Post to your Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc social networks and tell your friends about it.
c. Email your family and friends and give them the website link so they can check it out themselves

The actual Download Day date is dependent on the release of Firefox 3, so check the Download Day site http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord for updates!

This is the first record attempt for the number of Internet downloads in 24 hours which means that there is no recorded number to beat, but we are hoping to outdo the number of downloads Firefox 2 had on its launch day which was 1.6 million.

We are shooting for 5 million this time!

I should be blogging more with everything going on great with my start up Glubble and all but it is hard to consistently find time to blog when your busy changing the world I guess.

For what its worth, I’m making a pledge to myself to find the time to blog more though.

I think this component to the Prism project is particularly important to the ‘websites as applications’ philosophy, not least because it will ultimately show what end user appetite is like for spinning out frequently used web apps like gmail, facebook, twitter et all.. as applications.

With the prism Add-on for Firefox 3 you can make any website run line an application on your desktop complete with its own desktop icon, tray icon, and stand alone profile for passwords, cookies etc..

Links:

It an early prototype. Use at your own risk.
Prism for Firefox 3 add-on
Firefox 3 Beta 3:
Firefox 3 nightly build:

Today is a very special day for me, a project I founded, today launched as a 1.0 final version.

Glubble Family Edition is a new parental control suite for Firefox. Its objective it to help extend the adoption of Firefox by providing an enhanced web experience for families of elementary school age children.

Parents and families are now protecting their youngsters online with Glubble for Firefox. We’ve had 40,000 families test drive the beta since the summer of 2007 and we’ve been actively sending out updates for a couple of weeks, initial Feedback is simply brilliant, check out the website to see some early testimonials from parents who are already using it every day.

Doing the best for our children and providing parental protection on the web is a super serious and passionate topic and Glubble just bats the problem clear out the park, parents are already going crazy for it and switching to Firefox in droves!

I have a simple call to action, Go tell all the families you know with loved ones of elementary school age please to ‘Get Firefox’ and install the Glubble Family Edition add-on for Firefox, its a whole new approach to parental control based on fun, collaboration and the family social network. There’s never been a better reason to get Firefox since Firefox!

www.glubble.com

My fellow Spread Firefox community members can read about this call to action on www.spreadfirefox.com/glubble

Get the Firefox web browser from Mozilla

Thank you in advance for helping promote Glubble for Firefox to young families.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Parents and family helpers have fun collectively deciding what their young ones can see online using a new personalization engine for Firefox that links family members browsing sessions and enables children to ‘ask a helper’ for permission to see new sites.

ENDS

I don’t know about you but a smaller (and less-warm) Mac-Top would certainly be a bit of a boon for those of us who live the old planes, trains and automobiles lifestyle.

I’ve been keeping a north-eye on the door and waiting to see what happens post-leapord-launch in some sort of lame hope that Apple would surprise me and announce the 13” pro complete with Nasa-shuttle-style heat resistant tiles on the underside.

Well, nothing so far, but, today I discovered a news article from PC World that Apple have silently upgraded the Mac Book chipset to be the same as its bigger pro cousin.

After some further looking around on the online store I found Apple are now offering a Ram upgrade for Mac books to 4 meg too (same as Pro upgrade) which is a bit of a wow factor as previously the max upgrade was restricted to 2 Meg

A new feature also enables the Mac Book to use up to 144 meg of additional swapped memory for graphics over the previous 64 meg so its creeping close enough to the 256Meg of the pro’s NVida GeForce 8600M to make me go, hmmm.

In fact if Apple threw NVida into the mac book right now and gave us that GDDR3 SDRAM we’d have a 13” mac book pro in our hands and all we’d have to do is buy the extra (not in box) mini-DVI to VGA lead for a projector. I’m sure I’d live happily without the DV to home cinema socket and the back light keyboard in the name of portability and cooler thighs afforded by the characteristics of the less heat-conductive case of the mac book.

So what to do? I’m very tempted to make the switch, even though the video memory is not as good, the trade off to a smaller almost-pro version is very tempting. It’s hard to imagine that Apple won’t bring out a smaller pro at some point. I think the way Apple refuse to make pre-announcements until it’s “in stores today” is not in the consumers best interest most of the time. On this point I’d be mighty sore if I brought the upgraded MacBook next week to then discover the 13” pro came out by end of year.

I know I’m sticking my head out here at bit with fellow Apple enthusiasts, but I am beginning to wonder when compared to some of the slick small machines on the market that the pro may be starting to look like a bit of a big hot brick. I know it certainly feels like one as I carry it around airport lounges a lot of the time.