Skim Reading as a Service is never going to pay the bills. It’s a tough sell. @biz and @jack, with the luxury of their incredibly brief Twitter handles, today pitched that Twitter will be better with a doubled character limit – up to 280 from the 140 it’s famous for.

Carrying better lighting to use with your phone is mostly a non-event. It’s just too hard to bother for most people.

The ‘$2000 phone’ thing annoys me. There’s a lot of it about after today’s Apple launch. It’s a classic judgment on ‘things I value’ vs ‘things you value’.

Social drives are a critical part of the human experience. Being able to comprehend these subtle cues and work with them, work around them and embrace them, could be part of the work that stays essentially human for a long time to come.

Sphero has been making excellent programmable robots for years, and last year everybody went nuts for their gorgeous little BB-8. And rightly so. Now we’re getting a new range, adding a new BB-9E (an evil twin to BB-8) and everybody’s classic favourite, R2-D2. The detailing on Artoo is excellent – including a third leg that drops out to move across difficult terrain.

Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector is a satellite launch for purely artistic purposes, delivering a reflective object that we’ll all see orbiting above us, like a comet streaking across the night sky.

VR is excellent, but the best experiences are still expensive. Microsoft has been touting the promise of its HoloLens technology, but it just hadn’t entered the real market yet and so we didn’t know much beyond the promise of demos (though we did know the early hardware didn’t live up to the videos you see online).

The partnership to allow Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa to speak to each other is big for the companies involved, and big for progress around voice assistive ecosystems. So much fighting for control in a world where users will just want to ask anything to do anything.

I can imagine a world where augmented reality key finding technology becomes the ‘killer app’ for mainstream AR adoption. At least, as a demo that makes people think “Oh! That’s amazing!” and then never actually buy one of these devices, but generally have a better understanding of what AR can do.

Design, performance art and clever security infrastructure come together at CloudFlare San Francisco. A wall of lava lamps has been integrated into the office design, with a constant feed of photographs of the fluid dynamics delivering random number generation for use in back office processes.