Another nod for bitcoin

It wouldn’t be a week in tech without another mention of the increasingly accepted e-currency, bitcoin. Now it’s major US point of sale player Revel Systems getting fully into bitcoin with native support for the transactions at its customer terminals. In the past it only allowed bitcoin to be received using third party plugins.

In perfect symmetry

There’s lots to love about palindromes: those words like civic and deified that are spelled the same forwards and backwards. French designer Yann Pineill has applied the concept to a movie he says is an exploration of the dimensions and dynamics of symmetry.

The work is a marvel of editing and the symmetry comes not only from a narrative that progresses logically whether you start from the beginning or the end, but in places when you draw an imaginary vertical line down the middle of the screen and treat it as two halves.

Shooting for the moon

The thing you notice about inventive types is they observe things in everyday life that others miss, thinking about how to make everything work better. If you think like that, Google could be your best buddy with the Solve For X project.

It tries to inspire that kind of big thinking that could prompt the next leap in technological advance. At the recent Solve For X global summit, entrepreneurs and scientists presented some big proposals to solve problems of epic proportions, like generating power from nuclear waste, converting heat into electricity, an articifical solar retina to cure blindness and virus decoys to slow disease.

Doin’ it for the kids

Email has typically been the domain of adults, more specifically for staid business communications. But Tocomail has given it a spruce up and a lick of security for kids’ use. Parents can control the essentials like setting up the account, approving key contacts that are safe to communicate with and moderating potentially dodgy message content.

Then kids can choose the colourful things like their cartoony avatar. Apparently social networking features are on the agenda, so parents should be aware they may never get their child’s attention back.