Back in the old days as a child, I and many of my generation were taught the importance of the environment, and how we had to work to protect and conserve it for the future.  This was a reasonably straight forward thing for us, as most of us lived or were brought up on farms where our lives and future seemed very intertwined with said environment.

Now, farming and a lot of the direct industries which work with the environment, have undergone massive changes to their practices and products.  Farming today is more in tune with the environment that it shares, mainly because if it wasn't, there probably wouldn't be a environment to support farming.

I often wonder if any of that education on the importance of protecting and conserving the nature has had any effect on the technology that we have.  If those of my generation have been working on new technologies destined to solve the problems or practices of the previous generation's technology.

I found a post on Environmental Graffiti on "11 Green Technologies That Vanished..." and I found some of my answers.  It appears, and I can remember a few, that there have been a number of noble efforts to create green technologies, it's just not many make it to market.  Classed as 'Eco Vapour-ware', these technologies have promised much, and as the conspiracy theorists fight over the reasons why they came to nothing, we can only hope that the real technologies will one day make it through.

As a side note, it is interesting to see the role that the new tech 'A' listeners seem to be taking.  Kevin Rose grabbed a bit of attention with his iPower idea this week, and as the Tesla's start getting delivered, it seems that the tech crowd are putting their money where their carbon footprint was.  As much as I won't be able to afford to buy into these green technologies now, as was pointed out by Jason Calacanis, (when questioned about his coming Tesla ) he and the others are founding the development of better price, and featured versions.

So maybe the above list of failures may have been shorter if they were pitched to the 30 somethings that had the dollars and the celebrity to support them.  Are we seeing the changing of the old business guard? and the power of the little company to make the odd dollar, giving more of the Jason's and Kevin's of the world the chance to practice their Eco conscience's?  I hope so, because a cell phone I can charge just by shaking it would be really cool.

Jason Remnant.

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I have some friends in the telecommunications industry, yes, I know it's hard to think of me having friends, but just look at it as hope for my geek brethren.   As I was saying, I chased up my friends on the inside trying to get the goss on the iPhone launch for Telstra.  Well, I even offered chocolate but no dice, this could mean two things, 1) There is no news regarding the iPhone launch for Telstra or, 2) I need to get some new friends, ones who are easier to bribe with chocolate.

It wasn't all a loss though as they sent me this link:

http://www.qrious.com.au/main.html

I got this a few days ago, and due to being a little busy I didn't get to post about it.  There was this cool countdown thing and it was all mysterious, but there wasn't much actual information.  I did fire out the link on Twitter in the hope that a new friend may have some insight, which got me this link this morning:

www.qmcodes.com

In the tech world we see a lot of crazy ideas, and most of the those ideas stay crazy.  If you are a fan of the TWIT Network you may have heard the discussion about adding a barcode reader on the iPhone.  The idea was that you would be able to walk into the store and using a app on the iPhone from, say, Amazon, scan the barcode of the item you want and purchase the item online and have it sent to your home.  But this isn't it, I think.

Although this Telstra service will probably turn into another of their gimmicky services that goes nowhere, I have to give them points for trying.  And maybe it is the start of something useful, maybe Myer or Big W will pick up on it and we will be able to walk in, make a wish list by taking pictures of the Qmcodes with our phones, and order the items online after we have checked that the item will fit, plug in, or is approved by the significant other.

It looks like only a couple of phones will be able to work with Telstra's version of Qmcodes, although we may be able to download the software from qmcodes.com.  That being said, I'll be waiting till there is more to do than just checking out old Bond clips.

Jason Remnant