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Spanish barcode marketing company Macanudos has developed a scannable QR-equipped dress to promote flamenco. Flamenco (which includes the older, more profound palos of deep song) has been declared a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. To promote it, the company has created QR lunares for women's attire.

The lunares, or circles that customarily decorate dresses used in flamenco dance or worn by women singers, are embedded with a QR code that, when scanned, will trigger one of nine flamenco forms.

The GSM Association (GSMA) has announced the formation of a task force to spearhead development of an embedded SIM technology that can be remotely activated. The task force includes technical experts from major operators worldwide, including AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom Orange, KT, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, all of whom will work together or the technology's development.

The goal of the new SIM is to bring Internet connectivity to more devices, like cameras, eReaders, smart meters and standard MP3 players - in other words, it's a major step towards the creation of the Internet of Things, a vision of Internet's future where nearly all objects are Web-enabled.

Are you ready for IPv6? Did you know you'd better soon be ready? Is your ISP, or even country ready, and do they know why?

If you don't even know what IPv6 is, you are not alone. There are billions of people who don't know, and they shouldn't, since this fundamental protocol - IPv6 being the latest version of IP, invented in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn - is so deeply buried in the Internet services we use every day that when you are forced to see it, you know something is very, very wrong.

Swiss drug company Novartis will start testing pills with broadcasting censors in them in about 18 months, if regulatory approval comes through as expected.

The test program will feature organ transplant patients. The medicines they will take to avoid organ rejection will be outfitted with chips that will gather and broadcast information on dosage and timing.

Internetome, the U.K.'s first full day conference dedicated to the Internet of Things was held on Nov 10 in London. In front of a full attendance, with representatives from academia, government, and enterprise, a wide range of speakers illustrated the promise and the challenges of the complex systems based on smart sensor networks.

The Economist magazine featured in its current issue a special report on Smart Systems, underlining how rich, and important these ICT solutions have become, and how they will in the future sustain value added services for a wide set of vertical application areas.

On a trip to Silicon Valley last month, I had the pleasure of visiting the famous PARC campus (Palo Alto Research Center, formally Xerox PARC). One of the people I spoke to was Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of PARC's Ubiquitous Computing Area.

Begole showed me an app that brings the concept of 'ubicomp' to a commercial reality. Magitti is a next generation location-based mobile app, currently in commercial trials in Japan. It goes further than popular apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. As well as using GPS data to figure out where you are, Magitti computes a user's preferences and context. It then makes recommendations of near-by places to go, based on that personal data. Location has been one of the biggest trends in 2010 and Magitti is one probable future of such apps, so let's check it out.

To the litany of reasons why you should support open source, make sure you add this: robots.

Today marks the third anniversary of ROS, Robotics Open Source. The robotics software project initially began as a collaboration between the STAIR project at Stanford and the Personal Robots Program at Willow Garage, and there are now over 50 public repositories and at least 50 robots using ROS in mobile manipulators, quadrotors, cars, boats, space rovers and more.

Correos, Spain's postal authority, in conjunction with the company Macanudos, has released a QR-coded stamp that you can scan with your mobile phone.

Although it is not the first such stamp to be released by a national postal organization, it is the first is available to private companies to use for promotion.

The Kinect has gone on sale today. Microsoft's new touchless, full body (plus facial expressions), gesture-based interface for the XBox360 gaming system is going to make a big splash in the contemporary consumer market- but how far could it be extended as an interface for the technology of the future?

Could Kinect, or something like it, someday be the way we flick a phone call from our mobile device to our smart TV? Could it be the way we gesture in the air to switch views on our home monitor from room to room? Could it be the way we dial our web-connected home appliances up and down, based on recommendations provided by online services that are watching local energy prices fluctuate? In the following article, we'll consider the perspectives of three of the world's top technology analysts, all with very different perspectives on the future of Kinect beyond the Xbox.

General Motor's Volt - the company's new electric car - has 100 electronic controllers, its own IP address and Volt owners get access to a set of mobile apps that give them access to information about their car. Very few people will get to drive a Volt this year, but thanks to a new set of mobile apps, owners of 2011 Chevrolet and Cadillac models (Buick and GMC apps are coming in November) will now get access to a similar set of OnStar-powered mobile apps that can provide diagnostic information about the car, combined with a number of location-based services.