Technology

The North American International Auto Show, in preview week right now in Detroit, was chock-full of hot cars and sweet interactives, and the digital star of the show was the Toyota Vision wall. The wall is made up of three 82-inch LCD panels, equipped with multi-touch technology and loaded with tons of content and features about the new Prius. Each of the three screens focuses on one area of content, combining to tell the whole ownership story of the Toyota culture and the lifecycle of the vehicle. The software that runs the experience is based on Microsoft Surface, but is custom-designed.

To begin building popular and political support for its bid on an upcoming high-speed rail project in Florida, tech giant Siemens’ Mobility Division will hit four of the state’s cities to educate consumers about the high-tech public transportation system, which would be one of the first of its kind in the U.S. The project has an allocated $2 billion in federal funding and is expected to award the winning bidder in the summer of 2012.

This holiday season, Microsoft gave passengers at several U.S. airports the gift of free photos with Santa Claus. From Nov. 23 to Dec. 21, the brand set up its Holiday Photos on the Fly booth at 26 airports where it snapped holiday photos of consumers and then enhanced them on-site using Windows Live photo features, including Photo Fusion and Photo Mail.

Ask anyone who’s ever waited endlessly to get into an event and they’ll agree—a long check-in line is a short distance to frustration, second only to forgetting your ticket. It’s a feeling often shared by the event organizers themselves as they flip through pages of printouts, checking off names, and inevitably missing a few. But now, thanks to mobile ticketing services that take advantage of smartphones, bar codes and other technologies, the hassles of paper tickets are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Even airlines and public transportation systems are jumping on board.

In 2009, Cisco Systems set out to save costs by taking its weeklong annual sales meeting, the Global Sales Experience (GSX), out of the real world and into a virtual one for the first time in its 20-year history. That experience taught the tech giant several valuable lessons about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to educating and motivating a driven and competitive sales force in a non-physical space.
(Check out last year’s story here)