Things I learned lately 24 Feb

• There's a very good chance that all or part of your future smartphone will be built into a pair of glasses a-la Google Glass. We're already most of the way there and this new phone format would respond to voice, head and hand gestures, with a display just above one (or both) of your eyes.
• Seoul will blanket the city's public outdoor spaces, sidewalks and transit with free wi-fi by 2015.
• Dubai's Metro is the longest fully-automated (driverless) system in the world. Seating is divided into 3 'classes', Gold (1st class); Women & Children class; Silver (economy).
• Some Japanese road signs have built-in 'heat maps' that show where traffic congestion exists in real time so that drivers can avoid those areas if they choose to.
• Ubuntu (one of the many flavours and arguably one of the most popular distributions of Linux) now makes an Operating System for phones.
• The average American teenage girl (13-19) send about 4050 texts per month.
• A new trend in Asia involves putting fake braces on your teeth.
• There are now 3 big players separately trying to blow up the cable TV industry. Google, Intel and Sony. Watch this space.
• The Vandals, a Germanic tribe, sacked Rome in 455. More than a thousand years later, their reputation still hadn’t improved, when in the 1660s their tribal name was embedded with a secondary meaning: “willful destroyer of what is beautiful or venerable.”