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We were very excited last week to get ahold of a LittleBits starter kit here at the Lab. LittleBits is a very interesting and simple way for kids of all ages to learn about electronics. The individual modules are color-coded and the directions are very simple. As you can see below, the starter kits comes with a nice selection of modules that snap together with ease.

It took us all of 30 seconds to assemble the below contraption, from a 9V battery, the knob module and the light module. It is effectively just a light dimmer:

This is another example of a larger trend in DIY, from electronics to content creation and even self-designed and printed plastic toys.

I know there is typically no hyphen between “video” and “creation”, but hey, I was on a roll.

This afternoon we played around with the web tool of Stupeflix, a Paris-based company that is forging new ground in user-generated content creation. Using their web-app, I was able to create a snappy photo-montage video in about 10 minutes. You can pick one of their pre-defined templates (I picked “scrapbook”). It lets you upload your own soundtrack or choose from their royalty-free options. You can also upload your own videos into the tool, which it plays as part of the slideshow.

Creating the video was very fast, and would have been even faster if I’d just pulled in pictures from Facebook or instagram rather than digging on our server for CES pictures. Stupeflix recently was included in a Google-curated selection of web-apps for their Chromebooks aimed at the educational market.

Check out our video here!

Here at the lab we’re very interested in Microsoft Kinect and all of the possibilities it opens up for marketers. We also keep an eye on its more traditional use, as a peripheral for Xbox. Lately we’ve been fond of the Official 2012 Olympics game, especially the archery event powered by Kinect. I think some of us may actually be good enough at it to try real archery. Maybe?

But I digress. We recently saw an interesting article about Microsoft potentially incorporating Kinect technology into automobiles. Obviously not for playing the Olympics games, but there’s all sorts of interesting things you can do with an inward-facing 3D camera. You can know how many people are in the vehicle and where they’re sitting, you can control things, including media, using gesture and voice. Hopefully this can help reduce distracted driving while broadening the interactive capabilities of reaching people in the in-car environment. So although it may not save our archery score, it might save some lives – or at least be really fun to use.

via Cnet