Most start-up technology enterprises want to do the right thing. But with the economy down, they're all too willing to do the advertising thing, since that's where the money is.
Advertisers have done just about everything to a billboard that you can imagine. They've stuck them in the sky, they've stuck them in the sand, and [give me a break!] they've even stuck them into the hands of the homeless--in return for pizza and soft-drinks. [Stay away from Pizza Schmizza in Portland, who hatched this last one.] Maine, Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii have total billboard bans. Rhode Island and Oregon don't allow new ones. Not a bad idea given what's ahead.
When Stephen Spielberg went into retreat with science wizards to identify plausible technologies for the world of Minority Report, someone obviously told him that in the future billboards would be sensitive to the proximity of passers-by, perhaps even aware of their individual identity, dishing up messages just for them. Remember Tom Cruise, hounded by billboards with DigitEyes? Well, you don't have to go to the movies to encounter this distopic landscape that seems to be coming alive. The first bits and pieces of it are here.
In California, a company is demonstrating a billboard that changes its content based on passing traffic. A sensor is able to detect the radio station of nearby cars, which it then passes to a database that calculates an aggregate driver profile based on each car's musical taste. The sign displays content tailored to that demographic. Seems to me like a lot of work for nothing. And even if the circus passes, they'll mostly be gone by the time the ad changes from cooking chickens to biting off their heads.
In London, 20 theaters are testing a way for cellphone users to point and click their mobile phones at a poster and access directly the advertiser's web page. And thanks to RFID [radio frequency identification], the Brits are also trying out billboards that trigger an audio message when they sense your presence. What's particularly interesting is that the sound reproduction technology apparently doesn't use traditional speakers; instead, the entire surface of the billboard becomes a resonant transducer. "The system works on cardboard, foam or glass, and is said to produce CD-quality sound."
On the east coast, Magink is prototyping 
a new kind of display technology [best single link alert] that lights pixels on a dry, non-glass surface that is something like "digital paper." "Using proprietary technologies, Magink manipulates the size and angle of the molecules in the ink to generate all colors of the visible color spectrum, including all gray scales." The demo display looks like it could use a trip through Photoshop, but no doubt this will improve.
There's more, but this is depressing. Without advertising, pornography and the military, would technology progress at all?
psychoanalyst examines a patient, Miss Natalija A. She tells him that her mind and body are being manipulated by a mysterious electrical apparatus operated secretly by physicans in Berlin." 
Three or four years ago in Chicago on a cold, snowy Xmas holiday I spotted an empty but tiny parking spot. I lined up just like I was taught in Driver's Ed, and with two clean, masterful cranks inserted my car. There's nothing like a little Buddhist mindlessness to guide a one-fingerd maneuver that slides 2,500 pounds of steel into a random gap. Once on the sidewalk, I discovered I had only about a foot of space between bumpers front and rear. I stood in the thick snowflakes thinking: "This is as close as I'll come to a Christmas miracle in my lifetime." And I thanked heaven that my teenage son was with me to reflect this proud moment of fatherly manhood. It's the park I'll never forget. It's Chicago, Mon Amour.
of his Olds '88 [I'm remembering the the two-tone mint and charcoal, but a fresh one came every two or three years], stumbled awkwardly backwards as far as he could, typically until he actually hit something, and snapped a picture of us in rank order as smiling stick-figures, near-silhouettes in a landscape-with-car. [These were the balmy days before palmy-cam video, of course.] He made this picture over and over because it was the only one he knew how to make. 
