Vodafone Australia’s non-profit arm, the Vodafone Foundation, is hosting it’s first ever hackathon in North Sydney from September 20-22 to get mobile developers coding for a good cause.

To get the blood pumping for developing mobile apps, Vodafone Australia has asked me to give away a Samsung Galaxy S III.

The Vodafone Foundations App Aid Charity Hackathon, supported by Samsung and Facebook is a 48-hour soft-drink-powered codefest where mobile app developers of 10 teams and tasked with designing and developing a prototype mobile app for a charity member matched on the day.

The winning app, selected by a panel of judges, will win $30,000 for the charity associated with the app. There’s a further $10,000 for the second place app. That’s a lot of sweet sweet karma if you ask me. But that’s not all.

Since the event is supported by Samsung, there’ll also be some sweet Samsung prize packs at the event awarded to the team with the most innovative app. Plus, charities will also have the discretion to ask teams to work commercially with them to bring apps to the market.

Developer registrations close in just under a week on the 10th of September, so sign up today. The event is open to all mobile platform developers so Windows Phone developers are more than welcome. More information about the event can be found on the Vodafone website.

Samsung Galaxy S III giveaway

As for the Samsung Galaxy S III giveaway, from what I’ve heard, it’s a sweet pretty Android phone. Simply leave a comment below for a chance to win. I’ll randomly pick a winner on the 10th of September. (Only Australian residents are eligible to win.)

Update (10 Sep): Vodafone Australia announces Guy Kawasaki, high-profile venture capitalist former Apple fellow, is the guest judge for the App Aid hackathon.

“We are honoured to have Mr Kawasaki join us in Sydney for App Aid. As one of the most revered and influential innovators of our time, Mr Kawasaki brings with him incredible insight and experience that will be invaluable to the developers and charities participating in App Aid,” said Demelza Farr, Head of the Vodafone Foundation.

Update 2: The winner of the Samsung Galaxy S III has been chosen. Congratulations to David K. of Melbourne.

Last week at a rare press event inside its newly renovated Ford Design Centre of its Melbourne headquarters, Ford showed off the SYNC technology which it is introducing to Australian cars this month, with support for Australian accent.

Ed Pleet, director of connected services for Ford said Australian drivers can now experience the SYNC product that is already in over 4 million vehicles in the US and Europe, with text-to-speech and voice recognition in Australian English. The delay in rolling out the technology to Australia has been attributed to a global rollout of SYNC that had to be customized and tested for many regions and languages.

The technology originally shipped in 2007 for US drivers is developed in collaborations with Microsoft and is powered by Windows Embedded Autmotive. Ford hopes the technology bundle will be in over 13 million cars by 2015 and bringing it to international markets will be a factor for that success.

Unfortunately SYNC in Australia is currently only limited to the standard non-touch interface and on new factory-built 2013 Focus. The company hopes to roll out the much more featured MyFord Touch interface in the near future as well as making SYNC available to the wider Australian car range.

The coolest feature of SYNC, AppLink, which allows iOS, Android and Blackberry apps to natively provide enhanced functionality when used with SYNC through a custom dashboard interface and voice commands is also not available today in Australia.

Having said that, Ford has been scouting local developer interest with SDK units to start preparing mobile apps for, so it can’t be too far away. (Yes I’m already signed up to get my startup’s SoundGecko app on it).

For Windows Phone users, unfortunately because WP7 doesn’t support the Bluetooth Serial Port Profile so AppLink is not compatible. Current indication of Windows Phone 8’s Bluetooth profile is that it also won’t support SPP either which is an unfortunate oversight.

To get a taste of Ford’s vision for future connectivity, Ed believes vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure will enable many innovations. For example, if a particular icy area of road is detected by a vehicle’s ABS and temperature sensors, the GPS location can be transmitted to the cloud or other vehicles to either slow down or avoid that area altogether.

The same technology used to make the Gollum come alive in Lord of the Rings is now also available to the designers at Ford’s refurbished Asia Pacific and Africa Design Centre in Melbourne Australia.

Formally reopened a few weeks ago, the new Design Centre onsite at the Ford Australia Broadmeadows manufacturing plant is just one of three such facilities in the world alongside US and Germany.

Among the number of new technologies introduced with the upgrade is a 4K-resolution projection wall for life-size and interactive 3D rendering of upcoming car models. But the key attraction is the Virtual Reality Centre (or more realistically, the Virtual Reality room).

Inspired by Hollywood motion capture systems, this is only the second system Ford has built anywhere in the world. It uses a combination of 3D VR headsets, infra-red motion capture cameras, gloves and a plastic model to simulate a life-size vehicle two users (driver & passenger) can sit in and step out of.

The system was designed to test for practical day-to-day design optimizations such as the distance of buttons, gear shifts, mirrors and whether or not pillars obstruct the field of view. Virtual users from multiple Ford headquarters around the world are also able to teleconference in the same virtual environment to discuss design changes.

Costing in the high six-digits, the environment is rendered using NVIDIA Quattro graphics adapters to produce a stereoscopic image for two different viewpoints in the same virtual environment which contains a high-resolution model of in-development Ford vehicles. Inside the cockpit, it’s detailed enough that you can even see the fine leather textures on the dashboard.

Unfortunately due to the amount of processing and rendering involved, the system currently works at what I presume to be around 20 frames per second, it’s not viable yet to simulate the actual physics of interacting with the car or driving it in a virtual world. Having said that, Ford representatives did say they were looking to add tactile feedback to the glove system in the future.

In my own tests today, it’s definitely fun being able to walk straight into the roof, side and boot of a car and actually see the space between two sheets of metal of a production car. There’s actually quite a gap (for crash impact buffering).

V, a popular energy drink in Australia, is set to introduce a completely new flavour to its range to coincide with a month-long promotion it will be running to promote Microsoft’s Halo 4 XBOX 360 game next month.

In a Facebook post this afternoon, V revealed a picture of the 500ml drink can which prominently features Halo 4 and Master Chief with a purple background instead of its traditional green design. The flavouring dubbed “Purple Plasma” is expected to be grape flavoured, based on my research so far.

The V website also shows a teaser for the lineup of Halo 4-branded products that will be on the market between September 24 and November 18th 2012 during which the claim to be giving away an limited edition Halo 4 XBOX 360 console to a lucky drinker every hour.

The company behind V seems to be keen on XBOX game tie-in promotions as this campaigns follows the limited edition Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3-branded V cans from last year (without a new flavour).

It’s been a few days since Microsoft introduced its new logo, you know, that one with the squares. Since then, I’ve been asked a very simple question many times “what do you think about it?”

Just to get that part out of the way, I quote from the Brand New blog.

(Microsoft) have all introduced Metro to the larger masses the new logo does not come as a surprise. It falls perfectly in place with what we’ve been seeing. Leading to a general shrug of the shoulders when it comes to this logo. I described it as “Meh” on internet television. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this logo but there is also nothing absolutely exciting about it.

You can’t really hate it, because how can you hate four squares arranged in a square — if you hate on it, you have serious anger management issues. And you can’t really love it, because how can you love four squares arranged in a square — if you love it, you have seriously low standards. All these statements are to say that Microsoft did the right thing: they are sticking to their design strategy and they are not antagonizing anyone.

It wasn’t an issue with any of Microsoft’s previous individual brands – Windows, Office, XBOX. Each demanded a certain amount of presence and respect in its individual market segments on its own merits. But side-by-side, you could tell it was the result of many separate graphics departments, legal teams and marketing strategies smothering what should have been a unified vision.

The question that people should have been asking is “what do you think of Microsoft’s new consistency?” to which I would answer “hell yes”.

The folks at Neowin.net have composited an interesting graphic of most of Microsoft’s old-vs-new branding to show off what happens when you put in a little of effort in consistency.

At least now it looks like it was all designed by the same graphics department.

Lala Ninja, Microsoft Australia’s “unofficial” website has just announced Jason Silva, “a part-time filmmaker and full-time walking, talking TEDTalk” is now scheduled to keynote at the Microsoft TechEd Australia 2012 conference on the Gold Coast from September 11 to 14.

Although I wasn’t aware of Jason Silva before, the TEDTalk blog prominently features him as

a “performance philosopher” driven by the concept of awe. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller and Timothy Leary, his background of film and philosophy has given him the tools to create movie trailers for ideas — what he calls “philosophical shots of espresso.”

At the Gold Coast Convention Center, Jason wants to deliver “an absolute mind-meld” and |explore the shrinking of the lag time between what we can imagine and what we can create”. To give you a taste of what Jason is capable of, here’s his short movie on “The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck”. It’s pretty good.

Jason is also scheduled to participate in a Reddit Ask Me Anything tomorrow.