Worldwide wrap

In this week's wrap, a Porsche is sold for Bitcoins and doctors in Washington are using video games to manage pain. Get the details on these stories and more below.

Imagine playing a video game and improving your health while doing it. This is what is happening at the Children's National Medical Centre in Washington where a new pain care facility uses video games to eliminate pain. The specialised games make use of Microsoft's Kinect technology, with the gamification placing the kids in an intergalactic world where they can do various things, all while doctors analyse their range of motion. According to Dr Sarah Rebstock, the programme changes the way medical professionals address pain medicine.
Via: Mashable

Nuance Communications' new format of adverts will see consumers having spoken conversations with mobile advertisements. A provider of speech recognition and language technology, Nuance's Voice Ads will be more interactive, underscoring the challenge marketers face when delivering their messages on small smartphone screens. According to Nuance, these ads will demand to be spoken to. "It's designed to engage you so you can literally have a direct conversation with a brand," said Nuance chief marketing officer Peter Mahoney.
Via: Huffington Post

As an April Fools prank, Google unveiled plans to release Google Smell, which would allow people to use their noses to search for content. This "smell-o-vision" concept has appeared in bad sci-fi films for decades but now could become a reality. A team from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan have invented a "smelling screen" that makes smells waft from objects that appear on the screen. Termed an "olfactory display that can generate a localised odour distribution on a two-dimensional display screen", the technology makes use of gel pellets to feed the odours into four air streams situated in each corner of the screen. The development promises to make adverts for fast food or fresh coffee even more appealing.
Via: Daily Mail

Imagine playing a board game across four iPad minis, one for each player. The concept of connecting multiple devices into a single, interactive screen was originally the brainchild of a group of MIT students at a PennApps Hackathon. Mosaic has taken this concept a step further by creating an SDK to let other developers incorporate similar functionality into their own apps. "Everyone has an iPad, you put them together, and then you have a surface that's huge enough that you can play board games, or you have something like Angry Birds, where you have the birds on one phone, and then on another the second player can build a structure that the first tries to knock down," says Mosaic co-founder Ishaan Gulrajani of the concept.
Via: TechCrunch

Aspirant authors can now create their very own e-book covers thanks to Amazon. The company is developing a cover creation tool for its Kindle Direct Publishing self-publishing platform, dubbed KDP Cover Creator. When the tool goes live, users will be able to create a cover design for their book and can update the cover at any time. Users can upload their own artwork but will also have access to thousands of royalty free images. "The KDP Cover Creator [is] a free tool for fast and easy custom e-book cover designs," says an Amazon spokesperson. "It's currently in limited beta and we expect to roll it out to all KDP authors soon."
Via: Digital Book World

A father and son from Austin have sold their 2007 Porsche Cayman S for approximately 300 Bitcoins. That is equivalent to $39 000. The car was advertised on Cragslist and there were four potential buyers in the end. The buyer is a young businessman who does a number of things, from construction to running services in the food and beverage industry, according to reports. The father and son described the deal as a "watershed moment" both for themselves and Bitcoin. They are now considering opening an online business devoted to selling cars for Bitcoins.
Via: Business Insider