Blogs / Discoblog

Last night DiscoBlog traipsed down to the fairly swanky headquarters of giant advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, where the British-based ad folks recognized 10 “world-changing ideas”—inventions to improve people’s lives in one way or another.

The winner among the finalists was the LifeStraw, a foot-long filtering tube that purports to let you (or your friends in the developing world) drink even the filthiest, most microbe-infested water without getting sick. We’re not sure what the criteria were for winning this award—the LifeStraw isn’t exactly new, having been named a Best Invention of the Year by Time in 2005—but it seems a legitimately great item. Wiley event attendees insist they knew it would win because it fit in with what Saatchi chose in the past.

Whereas LifeStraw may indeed be the most world-changing “idea” at the event, it did not have the most compelling presentation. (Perhaps it was handicapped in this regard by the fact that the plentiful Saatchi-provided wine seemed to be downright hygienic.)

Some other finalists’ presentations were both more future-looking and more exciting for the short-attention-spanned blogger in all of us.

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Bad at remembering names? What if all you had to do to remind yourself was center a crosshair on a person’s face and his name-perhaps even his Facebook profile-would pop into your field of view?

Engineers at the University of Washington have pushed our technologically primitive world closer to this Terminator-esque dream of augmented reality: They’ve manufactured contact lenses that contain electronic circuits and red LEDs-and taken pretty sweet pictures of rabbits showing them off. (more…)