All props to Eli, but the stars of the Super Bowl were a set and an ad.

With more precision than the Giants’ final drive to win the game, the “show-technology” company LMG rolled out nearly 800 custom-constructed LED tiles, built an electronic set over one-third of the football field, and rigged 32 projectors 150 feet above the set in less than seven minutes.

The display of imagery, video and 3D effects that followed — living VOGUE magazine covers, reverberating speakers and a heavenly universe — dazzled. Not even production excess, Madonna, M.I.A.’s middle finger, a pageant wish for “world peace” or something called LMFAO could ruin the twelve-minute media spectacle known as the halftime show.

Then came Clint. “Halftime for the Auto Industry” brought a lump to the throat of this former Detroiter with a gritty, reality metaphor about struggle and perseverance. The spot, more compelling than the half of football that preceded it, roiled the gods of football. Google and You Tube pulled the video after the NFL apparently suffered a concussion, filing a copyright claim that the commercial was political. Can’t have emotional honesty in the Super Bowl; it might draw attention from a violent sport, entertainers shooting us the bird, and wardrobe malfunctions. Fortunately, the video is back up today.

A sequel to the pulsating, Eminem “Imported from Detroit” campaign by Wieden+Kennedy, “Halftime” is rich with the unapologetic this-is-who-we-are-and-this-is-what-we-do attitude that made me proud to work in the Motor City. A pretty good metaphor for America, too, if you want to take it there.

Written by Steven Rosenbaum, @magnify

Steven Rosenbaum

I love the smell of old records. The cardboard sleeves, the vinyl and the memories. I like the sound and the feeling of a rotary phone. And I like thinking back to a time when the web was something we ’surfed.’

Remember that?

Surfing the Web. Ah, back when the waves lapped against the shores and then pulled back. With a rhythm and a volume that was at human scale. Today, no one surfs the Web, we survive it. We tolerate it. We try not to be enveloped by it. Because, the Web no longer operates at human scale. It’s Moore’s Law applied to information.

Which is why I was both charmed and surprised to hear Google’s Dan Russell being interviewed by Leo Laporte on “This Week in Google”. Russell is in charge of “User Happiness” at Google. “Well, you know, people are pretty happy when they’re searching,” Russell said, in describing his role. “That’s one of the reasons Google is where it is. Happiness comes from a lot of things. One thing it comes from is whether or not you get that sense of delight.”

Okay, reality check here. How many of you remember when the Web, and in particular Google, was delightful? I do. I remember Mosaic. I remember when Google was amazing. The Web was seemingly growing volumes of quality content, and Google helped me find it fast. Awesome.

But recently, I find that Google isn’t my first stop when I’m looking for what Jeff Jarvis calls the serendipity of “unexpected relevance.” There are just so many choices, and so many of them that seem to know me better than Google does.

Russell seems to understand this. “If we could read your mind, and help to presage what’s coming next,” he says, “that would be great!”

But you have to understand where he’s coming from – where Google’s coming from – to understand how he defines delight.

Russell has been at Google for more than five years. Before that, he worked at Apple for 5 years, and before that, Xerox PARC for 12 years, and before that, IBM. And while Laporte gently suggests that what Google needs is less computer scientists and more social scientists, Russell laughs and admits he has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence.

So while Google is defining ‘delight’ as popping a weather graphic on your screen, users are drowning in a flood of tweets, blog posts, check-ins, and other real-time data that overwhelm comprehension and exhaust users. And it’s clear that Google understands this – with new CEO Larry Page making sweeping changes in the goals and management of the company.

Page is hyper-focused on competing with Facebook in the social sector, recently sending out a memo to employees that ties 25 percent of their annual bonus will be tied to the success of Google’s social strategy in 2011. But after just one week on the job, critics like Computerworld’s Mike Elgan say Google still doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about over at Facebook. ”Google doesn’t seem to understand that Facebook is a party,” says Elgan. ”People prefer Facebook to Google because Facebook is a place they can go to be social. With Google there is no ‘place.’ There is no party. Google’s approach to social isn’t fun.”

Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, is the author of Curation Nation: How To Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators.

With most Internet services blocked, Google quickly created a “speak-to-tweet” service to allow people in Egypt to tweet with a voice connection. It allows those on the ground in Egypt to dial three international numbers and leave a voice message sent out as tweet with the #egypt hash tag. You can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or by going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

The numbers are +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855 and no Internet connection is required. There are already dozens of messages on the Twitter page.

Earlier, TechCrunch reported that Noor Group’s DSL service, the only remaining Internet service in Egypt, had been shut down. Noor powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange and major brands such as Coca-Cola and Exxon Mobile. Egypt’s four main Internet providers — Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr — abruptly stopped Internet traffic into and out of the country on Friday.

Speak-to-tweet underscores the the worldwide communications revolution that has been so much a part of the political uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and has implications throughout the world. Cell phones are the Internet for many citizens in northern Africa and the Mideast. Demonstrators have used their phones to mobilize and spread news. Social media — blogs, tweets and Facebook messages — have become a useful tool, inside Egypt as well as outside to the world, for information, discussion and action. About 30 percent of Egypt’s population, mostly young adults, uses social media,

Speak-to-tweet was developed over the weekend by engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow, a company Google acquired last week.

The revolution within the revolution unfolds in Egypt in realtime. The latest: reports that the government will shut down remaining cell phones to block access to Speak-to-Tweet.

SXSW Accelerator, part of the annual SXSW interactive conference, showcases new apps, products and services in front of a jury of industry experts, venture capitalists and a live audience.

There’s an emphasis on new and innovative technologies, and to show off yours it must fit into one of five categories: web, social media/social networking, entertainment, health or news.

There’s a $150 non-refundable application fee, and the entry deadline is Dec. 10, 2010.

Info and application at SXSWi.

A few weeks ago I recorded a conversation about the future of documents with Francois Ragnet, an internal champion of big ideas at Xerox Global Services.

As you can well imagine, the future of documents is more than a curiosity for a company famous for its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox Parc) and world-changing computing innovations such as the graphical user interface and computer mouse – but still synonymous with copying machines. Today Xerox is a major provider of consulting and outsourced printing for big companies that churn out boatloads of paper.

Among other things, Francois and I discussed how social media and the changing nature of the document enable a new kind of workplace powered by real-time knowledge sharing and perpetual creativity. We’re already seeing the rise of the networked work experience. Legions of loosely organized, cloud-powered solo entrepreneurs, contractors and free agents work at home, in coffee shops and in co-working collaboration hubs like our own WeSpace in Reston, Virginia.

What does all that have to do with documents?

Here’s a starting point: Our culture is built around documents. Whether it’s contracts, invoices, magazines, Microsoft Word or Google docs, legal records, blog posts, cave paintings, paychecks or even cash, it’s hard to imagine organized society without something that looks or acts or at least represents a collection of words, numbers, pictures and ideas fashioned into a human-readable format that we call a document.

I can imagine paperless news and a paperless workplace. I can’t imagine a society without documents.

What’s worse, the more I think about it, the less sure I am of exactly what I mean by the term “document.”

As the information required to organize our lives becomes more distributed, atomized, personalized and streamed, like magic, from unseen computers in the invisible digital cloud, the distinctions between disorganized data, loosely organized content, curated documents and full-fledged media experiences – or products – becomes fuzzier. Is a Tweetdeck dashboard, which displays a realtime stream of Twitter updates, a document? How about a screenshot of it? What about a Google Docs spreadsheet shared and updated continuously by a distributed work group, or a personalized newsletter delivered to your email inbox and posted to your Facebook wall – where friends “like” it and add comments?

What, exactly, is a “document” in a world of apps, screens and perpetually changing representations of information? Storify, a new web service, helps people create documents of documents – it’s a drag-and-drop tool to collect content from whatever online sources they like (Or, so it appears from what I’ve seen of it – I’m still awaiting access to the private beta so I can give it a try).

We know intuitively what we mean by a physical document, but what about information, knowledge and ideas that are not fixed in space and time? They’re revised, redacted, retracted, redesigned and refreshed continuously – like the advertisements and futuristic edition of USAToday from the 2002 movie Minority Report.

Of course, a digital newspaper, even on fabulous e-ink that’s vastly more capable than what you get now with a Kindle, is a modest mental leap forward from a world already hooked on the web, mobile apps, iPads and the like. But packaged news is just one kind of document, it’s already digital, ephemeral and hardly the most important document in our lives. How about your medical records, photo collections or online banking records?

What happens when realtime touches everything?

Have a listen, then please add your thoughts.

The podcast is broken into four parts, or click here to listen to the entire conversation.

Part One
What is a document in the age of social media? Is it time to update your definition?
Listen

Part Two
How will “social documents” impact organizations and knowledge workers?
Listen

Part Three
What are the social implications of virtual work?
Is there a clear vision for a cloud-based, app-driven workplace?
Listen

Part Four
What will become of security and privacy in an information overloaded world?
Listen
–
Photo Credit: By Ludovic Bertron

One way or the other, Flipboard will make you flip. The new Pad app is either the personalized, social magazine you’ve been waiting for. Or it’s just another slick, content thief that fails to deliver on a fresh promise.

At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just an elegant aggregator: a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations into a new ditch. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content gets love, that it is curated, redesigned or re-edited with care.

Incumbents are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies a beautiful, interactive metaphor to news access, an alternative to the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war they’re winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page.

It’s not a ha-ha spoof, and it’s not a ha-ha issue, either. The environmental, social and human impact of our consumption gets so much less attention than the features and flaws of the latest release, the debates about business models, the righteous indignation about bandwidth and fees.

For the record, I own a MacBook and an iPhone 3GS, which I just updated to iOS4.

Tech stars, including friends of We Media, get their own video from Terence Kawaja of GC Savvian, who moonlights as a comedian when he’s not brokering companies.

Spend a little time at the Googleplex and you begin to believe that business is all fun-and-games and that The Life Google serves a better world.

Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

Today we’re announcing Tabula Rasa DC, our second event in just a few weeks at a moment of change for personal computing and communications.

Tabula Rasa

What’s your app?

We’ll help you answer that question. Check out the program. Read our agenda.

We’ve been waiting for this moment since we bought our first Mac II back in the Dark Ages.

A scant four weeks after iApple introduced the iPad, we played in NYC’s Digital Sandbox by staging the first throwdown on tablet computing. First-movers showed a stunning array of mobile applications for connected citizens and consumers. A talented group of innovators, developers, entrepreneurs and visionaries helped us flash-forward to a new marketplace for mobile engagement.

Beyond exuberance, one million iPads have been sold in a month. This is just the beginning, not just for the iPad but for personal computing on a stunning array of high-concept, high-touch devices heading our way.

Advantage goes to those who move first. As with other moments missed, slackers and laggards are left to compete for scraps, then complain.

Suddenly, everyone has an iPad or e-reader conference to show struggling vintners how to pour old wine into new bottles. Which may be fine for winemakers whose vineyards have gone fallow. Learn how to squeeze more juice out of fermented grapes, then charge more for the stuff. Even if it leaves a bad aftertaste.

We’re vintners of another kind. Plant anew. Cultivate. The terroir is rich, bold and complex. Join connoisseurs of creativity for a tasting from 1-4:30 pm on June 14. The vintage may be inexpensive, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption. Drink up.

Online registration here.

At Tabula Rasa NYC we asked a stunning group of innovators, developers and visionaries to consider five questions at a pivotal moment for media and the people who create it:
How does moment of opportunity look?
What has been created in just a few weeks?
What should be created?
What are the challenges?
What problems can we solve?

We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

Just as the iPad stirs the imagination (at least in the U.S.) about content on the screen, comes technology that makes content jump off it.

Samsung’s W960 mobile phone, released in South Korea in March, delivers 3-D video content that can be viewed without special glasses and can be manipulated by turning and twisting the device.

Years before there was the iPhone or the iPad, we saw applications and utilities on mobile devices in South Korea and Japan before there was an app for that here. Which is to say reimagined by Apple.

Now get ready for a three-def physics that could alter Apple’s’ gravity. Technology developed by Julien Flack, CTO of Dynamic Digital Depth, could be built into many mobile devices within the next two years. Flack has spent more than decade converting 2-D content into 3-D in real-time, solving the the problem: the need for special glasses that deliver a separate image to each eye. You can climb inside Flack’s multi-dimensional brain at a Technology Review video

The remaining problem: a shortage of content for the three-def experience. For now, the technology best handles animated, computer-generated content. Thus the current sweet spot: games that simulate 3-D spaces. Just as games are driving adoption of 3-D television screens, they are likely to lead to new interfaces and applications — augmented reality. That could get very interesting across a range of content.

Triple def TVs, which hit stores after this year’s Consumers Electronics Show, require glasses. Phones may provide a better experience. 3-D displays work by directing light to deliver different versions of an image directly to each of a viewer’s eyes. The effect works best over a narrow range of viewing angles, so it is not well suited to television or cinema screens — the places where we’ve first experienced 3-D. But phones are generally used by one person at a time and are easily held at the optimum angle. That’s why mobile multimedia devices may bring 3-D into the mainstream

In addition to Dynamic Digital Depth, based in Santa clara, other companies working on the mobile 3-D experience include 3M in St. Paul, Nintendo in Kyoto, Nvidia in Santa Clara, and N4D in Atlanta.

We’re delighted to announce that The Hive at 55 has joined us as a co-sponsor of Tabula Rasa.

The Hive at 55 provides work and collaboration space for independent tech and media developers, and serves as both a network and community for developers and entrepreneurs. It’s located at 55 Broad Street in New York. Familiar? It’s the location of the Digital Event Sandbox, Tabula Rasa’s home-for-a-day. The Sandbox is on the fourth floor of 55 Broad.

An initiative of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s MediaNYC2020 plan for the media industry, The Hive opened to freelancers and small business owners in December with shared workspace, meeting space, networking events and business services. It’s a cool concept that’s emerging in urban centers throughout the U.S. and Europe. Check out the concept, take a tour through a gallery and video, or read more in The New York Times’ City Room blog.

Meet and mix with The Hive’s creative community at 55 Broad on Thursday, April 29. Our video and the latest on the program and participants are here.

Register.

Charlton Heston channels Moses. Steve Jobs assumes a higher authority. Crazy guys throw down an iPad at batting practice. All this and more in The Throwdown Video, a preview of Tabula Rasa. Check it out on the program page and on YouTube.

I was wrong. There are at least nine people outside of Apple who have the iPad. One is Stephen Colbert, who has the best review yet.