1. I came across Amber Case's TED talk on cyborgs recently. Coincidentally, the March 2011 issue of Wired UK has a profile of her as well. Amber is a cyborg anthropologist (who, apparently, is someone who studies the relationship between people and technology) and user experience designer from Portland, Oregon, and the founder of Geoloqi, a real-time web and mobile platform to securely share location-based data. Amber covers a number of intriguing concepts in her talk, such as  ambient intimacy and second selves (your real self and your digital self). Here's what she says about ambient intimacy:

So we have this thing called ambient intimacy. It's not that we're always connected to everybody, but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want. And if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone, the room would be very crowded. These are the people that you have access to right now, in general -- all of these people, all of your friends and family that you can connect to.

2. Craig Mod is a writer, designer and publisher of books who spoke at last year's DO Lectures about how the concept of books is changing in the iPad era. He does a very nice thing, probably quite typical of hardcore book lovers, when he visits a new city: he goes to the local bookshop. He thinks of the book as an artifact and a pivot point to help communities, and did precisely this post-Katrina in New Orleans. 

3. Lisa Gansky is the author of 'The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing'. She's speaking at SXSW in March, so I'm definitely going to go to that talk! She believes

that the growing ubiquity of networked information and relationships are leading to what she calls a “mesh” economy of shared services and products.

Lisa Gansky: The Future is Sharing from PopTech on Vimeo.

Enjoy!