In the 1960's the Siberian tiger was nearly hunted to extinction. but recovery efforts thankfully brought the species back from the brink to the point where there are now around 450 animals in existence in Southern Russia. The lesson, however, has been lost on the locals who still feel its okay to poach the animal.

To drive home the point the World Wildlife Fund partnered with the Russian arm of the Leo Burnett agency (who created Tony the Tiger for Kellogg's) to launch a campaign involving more than 3,000 Tiger shirts. These were offered through events both online and off and endorsed by many local celebrities and organizations. The shirts held a secret, though, an Augmented Reality barcode. Several trendy fashion stores in Moscow agreed to have a number of special dressing mirrors installed in their retail spaces. Whenever someone wearing one of the special Tiger tees stood in front of a mirror, it's hidden camera and computer system triggered a simulation of the person being shot, the idea that it is the image of the tiger on their chest that has attracted the gunfire. You can see actual footage of people being surprised in this manner by clicking "more". Warning: includes simulated violence. 

Canadian retailer Future Shop issued a promise today that those looking for the new BlackBerry Torch will find it this coming Thursday, September 30th at all 146 of their store locations across Canada and available for Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Virgin networks at launch. The Torch is the first design from RIM that combines a physical QWERTY keyboard with a touchscreen experience and the first model to run the company's new BlackBerry OS 6 software.  [More]

The first to introduce a budget eReader device on the market, Kobo is now ready to launch their second generation design. The Kobo Wireless eReader will be a lighter, faster model that can use a Wi-Fi connection to purchase and download books directly, bypassing the need for Kobo's desktop software. It's expected to arrive in stores in approximately two weeks for $149, but if you're willing to pre-order at their website in advance, Random House is adding two free books as a reward. At the same time, the company will finally be adding newspapers and periodicals to their Kobo store. [More]

Designed to help students understand the basics of visually telling a story through the elements of a graphic novel, Comic Master lets you easily assemble your own arrangement of panels, backgrounds, characters, speech bubbles, and special effects to create your own personal graphic novel. The tools are fairly sophisticated in that everything is drag-and-drop and can be resized and moves, edited and even printed when you're down. Produced by the National Schools Partnership in the UK you'll find a lesson plan for classrooms to go with it at Readmeresources.co.uk

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Although no release date or pricing information was shared, the company did expand to confirm that the PlayBook will have a 1 GHz Dual Core symmetrical multiprocessing with 1 GB RAM. Unlike Apple's iPad, the PlayBook will include [More]

If you write code for a living you may just be an undiscovered musician. Microsoft's Sound of Code Generator can convert any C# of VB string of commands into polished piece of rock, pop, or hip hop. Just copy and past your code into the generator, click the settings and then listen. If you like what you hear you can name it and share the music with others. Now, Microsoft uses Silverlight for this application, so when you copy and paste try the keyboard command Ctrl-V to paste it into the website. If you don't have any code handy, continue on for two samples you can try out. [More]

There's a mural on Adelaide street that I often walk past that depicts a sequence of people posing in a series of street scenes with all the styled realism of a Normal Rockwell painting and like most street art I've been left wondering just what the story is behind it. At Murallocator.org I learn that it was painted by Bill Wrigley in 1986 when the building was his home and studio. With the help of Google Maps Murallocator aims to record every important piece of community mural around the world and has entries for India, Kenya, Iceland, and New Zealand amongst many others. Anyone can submit a photograph of a mural to help build the project and when there's an artist named, there's often a link to their website to view their other works.  [More]