Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, ODEO, and most recently Twitter talks at TED about the amazing uses Twitter is seeing. With just 140 characters, but complete mobility, people are using the micro-publishing platform to broadcast their status, coordinate with others, and monitor any and every type of activity.

Continually progressing UI in the mobile phone arena, The Astonishing Tribe does it again with Nexus. In their latest demo, TAT shows off LinkFlow, Drag and Drop, and a whole host of other newly minted features in the TAT Cascades code.

David Armano, VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, speaks at the Motion Graphics Festival on how to visually convey information, stories, and a point of view.

Effective communication is everyone’s job—whether you are trying to sell in a concept or convince a client. Visual Thinking can help us take in complex information and synthesize it into something meaningful. In an increasingly fragmented and cluttered world, simple imagery, metaphors and mindmaps can get people to understand the abstract and make your ideas tangible. Find out why thinking visually may be one of the most sought after abilities of the 21st century.

Lachlan Cash from Microsoft demonstrates using touch technologies for business applications. Moving beyond rotating and resizing photos, Microsoft Dynamics has adapted Microsoft Surface for use as a wearhouse management tool. And while Surface in it’s table top form may not make it into offices very quickly, with Windows 7 supporting multi-touch, there is a great chance that other form factors will.

Team Commack, a 15 member team from Commack High School in New York places 2nd at the 2009 JETS/AbilityOne NEDC National Finals. The team developed the New Office Workspace (NOW) which was inspired by Jerina Porterfield. Jerina is a receptionist who is affected by Cerebral Palsy, and the NOW system is a modular universal design which can be adapted to the workplace environment to assist those affected by diseases like Cerebral Palsy. More pictures and information is available on the Commack School District website.

Ms Brown’s class, now among many others around the country are allowing students to stand up at their desks if students choose to. Ms. Brown, with the help of Sunway, a local ergonomic furniture maker, designed the desks (named AlphaBetter) two years ago and it has been spreading every since.

To be presented at CHI 2009, Nano Touch uses a touch sensitive input on the back-side of devices to get around fingers obstructing the screen on the front-side of the device. A big problem on very small displays, nano touch is poised to be highly utilized in future electronics. The Nano Touch has been designed by Patrick Baudisch and Gerry Chu at Micorosft Research and in partnership with Hasso Plattner Institute.

Designed by Silke Hilsing, Impress is a display system which allows physical manipulation of the display surface for input purposes. Learn more about this project from concept to prototype on Silke’s Website.

Sebastian Vettel, driver for Red Bull, gives a run down of the design changes made to F1 vehicles for the 2009 season. Beyond the body-work Sebastian mentions the new Kinetic Energy Recovery System which will recover energy from breaking and enable drivers to use that boost of energy later on during the race.

Hard at work, TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) demonstrated its 3D Eye UI at Mobile World Congress 2009. The prototype system demonstrates the use of eyetracking to simulate 3D windows layers by manipulating the UI layers based on the positioning of the screen relative to the person looking at it. To see the method explained, check out Jonny Lee‘s 3D head tracking using the Wiimote.

TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) demonstrates its Foldout UI at Mobile World Congress 2009. Utilizing a physics engine, the screen content reacts as the user flings content around the screen reminiscent to the game Little Big Planet on the Sony PlayStation.

In the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the head of Benjamin is 100% digital for the first hour of the movie. Ed Ulbrich, Executive VP at Digital Domain, talks about the experience of creating the new technology necessary to create such a realistic and believable face. Afterward, check out the behind the scenes video provided by Digital Domain.

Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, talks about utilizing engineering principals developed by nature to tackle modern day challenges in every aspect of industry. Between frogs, spiders, and leaves, Janine inspires designers, architects, and engineers all the same.

Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC and Mark Solomon, Lead Designer share their design philosophy behind the HP Firebird gaming PC. Marketed as a next-generation Gaming PC, the Firebird ushers away an era of large, highly expandable, and expensive computers, and comes in as a moderately priced high-performance PC with a very small footprint.

In 1968 Douglas Engelbart and a group of 17 researchers from the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS.

The research they had worked on for 6 years was shown to an audience of 1000 and demonstrated many innovations which are used today including the computer mouse, hypertext object addressing, dynamic file linking, and collaboration with audio and video involving persons at two different sites.

Aston Martin CEO Dr. Ulrich Bez and Design Director Marek Reichmann talk about designing the Aston Martin One-77. With only 77 cars being made, the 700hp are all built by hand and customized to their owners. Be sure to watch parts 1, 2, and 3 of the video.

Aptera, one member of a new breed of vehicles built around energy efficiency, is taking to the road. Aptera claims a fuel efficiency of 300 mpg at 55 mph and has a range of

Lev Manovich, Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD, talks about how art studies and high-performance computing are being combined like never before.

Scientists at Calit2 have equipped a robot modeled after the famed theoretical physicist with specialized software that allows it to interact with humans in a relatively natural, conversational way. The so-called “Einstein Robot,” which was designed by Hanson Robotics of Dallas, Texas, recognizes a number of human facial expressions and can respond accordingly, making it an unparalleled tool for understanding how both robots and humans perceive emotion, as well as a potential platform for teaching, entertainment, fine arts and even cognitive therapy.

The LambdaTable, developed at the University of Illinois Electronic Visualization Lab, is a tiled LCD tabletop display that supports collaborative visualization of ultra-high-resolution data.