Its that age old problem, we’ve all been there. A deadline is looming, you’ve misplaced your Pantone swatch book and you can’t seem to find your trusty Rubik’s Cube. Well fear not, there is a solution and it’s called the Rubitone. This clever adaptation of the 80’s classic from Ignacio Pilotto is simply an ordinary Rubik’s Cube with the traditional coloured stickers replaced with swatches from the Pantone colour system.

Sadly it appears that the Rubitone is not intended to be a commercial product. Probably a few licencing issues. The original Rubik’s Cube is rumoured to have sold over 350 million cubes worldwide since its launch. Bit of a shame really, we could see the Rubitone easily outselling the Pantone mugs!

So, if you find yourself in a conundrum and you don’t want to run another algorithm, you could easily give your old Rubik’s Cube the Rubitone treatment with a few left over Pantone chips. In a colour of your choice of course.

The newly launched decision making engine hunch.com has already helped some of us here solve a few long standing personal dilemmas! The site helps visitors make decisions based on how they answer questions from user created data. Hunch claims you only need to answer 10 sample questions for it to start delivering customised recommendations. It also functions as a social networking site, allowing you to follow other users and topics to see how they evolve.

There is an algorithm running in the background that learns more about your personality as you use the site. First, it tries to find a question which will discriminate well among the remaining possible decision outcomes for you – thus filtering the remaining choices from ‘many’ to ‘fewer’. Second, the algorithm looks for a question which can help optimise and rank the remaining decision results to present you with the ones you’ll like the most. It’s trying to ensure that you’ll like outcome number 1 better than outcome number 5. Basically, Hunch utilises information that it knows about you to improve the relevancy of results.

Although not really based on personality, and more of a troubleshooting question, the example below answers that age old question…

Obviously, steps have been removed in getting to the result,
but… it looks like it might be Bakelite!

So, once again a new iPhone has been unveiled, the interestingly named 3G S, boasts much faster speeds than its predecessor the 3G. The name change reminds us of a new trim of car, personally we would have preferred the iPhone Ghia, or the iPhone XR3i, but we’ll have to settle for the S. Obviously there are plenty of other additions to the new model, including voice control and video capture, however once again there is talk of rivals (the Palm Pre) being a significant alternative option. But it’s not an Apple product at the end of the day and is unlikely to convert the diehards.

Sticking with the iPhone, the iPhone apps continue to expand, there seems to be an app for almost anything now with over 50,000 available to download at the app store. The Apple WWDC conference in San Francisco was a perfect opportunity to show off the vast array on offer with a collection of cinema displays mounted together, each one crammed with app icons pulsating when purchased.

The youtube clip below illustrates the huge numbers of apps that are currently being downloaded.