BinCam Facebook app, Camera, and demo-rubbish via Newcastle University
Students from Newcastle University believe people are unaware of their wasteful ways. 5.3 million tons of consumable food is thrown away each year along with 4.9 million tons of recyclable packaging in the UK alone. To solve this issue, they created BinCam, a Facebook connected waste receptacle. (Garbage in the USA, Rubbish in the UK). Every time the lid is opened or closed, a picture is taken and uploaded to the user's Facebook page. A 3g enabled Sony Xperia X10 Mini is the camera. After uploading to Facebook, the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT)takes over. The subjects garbage items are then tagged by the AMT's legion of over 100,000 human "Turkers" getting paid a few cents per tag. (AMT is a crowdsourcing Internet Marketplace that allows computer programmers to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks - wikipedia)
The BinCam is a social experiment to promote awareness of recycling with the 18-34 year old demographics. To take it further, one's recycling can be logged on a section of a Facebook app that will allow people to garner "achievements" in a sort of competition. If becoming a mayor of a coffee shop can be one person's (foursquare) passion, I am sure public acknowledgment of recycling could be another's. BinCam will begin full-fledged operation in September of 2011.
Eavesdropper
