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iSpoil: A shopping app with an environmental twist

iSpoil: A shopping app with an environmental twist

Expired MilkiSpoil is a grocery shopping list app with a cool twist. Its main purpose is to combat the amount of food users are wasting. The last time you cleaned out your fridge how much food did you throw away? Why should you care?

In the UK alone, 8.3 million tonnes of food is thrown out of households every year, it?s an issue that costs average families £680 annually, and it has a serious impact on the environment. As environmental groups in the UK have pointed out, the CO2 impact of all that wasted food would be equal to taking one in four cars off the road.

It?s the same case in North America:

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture?s Food Loss Project, we throw away more than 25%, some 25.9 million tons, of all the food we produce for domestic sale and consumption ? The Environmental Magazine, 2010

food waste

The iSpoil iPhone app has a database full of typical food items that speed up the process of entering expiry dates. After selecting an item such as milk, users can easily scroll through and select a date. Items that are not found can be added to iSpoil coupled with a picture taken from the iPhone?s cam or from the device?s photo library. Within any item, the app enables users to add the item to a shopping list displayed on a separate screen.

iSpoilWhen a food item is close to reaching the end of its shelf life, iSpoil will send you an alert that can be customized to tell you from one day to one week before its expiry date.

Wasting food might not be one of your number one concerns, but in many places around the world it?s completely sinful.

In my house growing up, you didn?t leave the table until you were finished your food. Despite whether you liked the meal or not, throwing out perfectly good food was something that was unfathomable to my parents. It?s a value that, for whatever reason, is lost on my generation.

This app is beneficial to users for a few reasons. It reduces the amount of food you throw away which saves you money, and it?s a pretty solid grocery app because in addition to the shopping list, you have access to the database of expiring food. The only drawback here is taking the time to enter the fresh dates, something that we?re hoping can be done in the future by simply scanning a product?s barcode.

iSpoil is available for .99 in the app store.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/02/05/ispoil-a-shopping-app-with-an-environmental-twist/

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The Internet Just Ran Out of Numbers

On February 3, it finally happened: the clock ran out on the Internet as we know it. That was the day that the stash of Internet protocol addresses that are used to identify and locate computers connected to the Internet?the telephone numbers of the online world?was exhausted. 

The problem is that the current system for IP addresses, IPv4, uses numeric addresses that are 32 bits long?giving a total of just over four billion potential numbers, which must have seemed like a lot when IPv4 was introduced in 1981. But there are now seven billion people on Earth, and more and more of them?and their devices?are going online all the time. Fortunately, engineers realized the limitations of IPv4 a long time ago and lined up a successor, called IPv6, in 1998. (IPv5 was an experimental system that never went public.)

IPv6 uses 128 bits rather than 32, producing a pool of numbers that is staggeringly huge?some 3.4 x 10 to the 38, or 48 octillion addresses for every person on Earth. The trouble is that although most servers and all major operating systems have adopted support for IPv6, Internet service providers have been agonizingly slow to follow suit. 

For ISPs, it's a straightforward business dilemma: the two addressing schemes are not directly compatible, which means it would take a significant investment to let IPv4 users connect to IPv6 services. And having relied on the same system for as long as 30 years, they may not feel the need to change.

"It really highlights the failure of the Net at the most basic level to innovate, despite the fact that at the visible levels, it has had unbelievable innovation," says Jon Crowcroft, Marconi professor at the University of Cambridge's computer lab.

He points out that the current concerns about IPv4 space don't really affect those who already have an address?only those who need new numbers. So it is a minor problem for ISPs that have already stockpiled blocks of IPv4 addresses.

"Why does anyone with IPv4 space care? It's all working, and there's been no big, terrible disaster," Crowcroft says. "But it will be interesting to watch how this slow degradation of things [affects] new entrants."

"New entrants," in this case, could mean nations with rapidly expanding online populations. Such countries may face significant trouble if their allocation of IPv4 addresses fails to keep up with their appetite for connectivity. Countries like China are already beginning to concentrate on IPv6 support, with the result that parts of the Internet are being created that are, effectively, inaccessible from the parts of the world that only use IPv4.

While the idea of Internet balkanization might sound disturbing, in practice this is still not a pressing issue for ISPs in the West. There is, however, one area where Western nations might begin to feel the squeeze: the "Internet of things."

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=38735917701a084d0bd8d71f2c29ca30

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Blog - Fruits 'n' Forests

Blog - Fruits 'n' Forests