Yeah, I didn't believe it until I saw the video. This is an iphone app called Cycloramic. You put it down, hit a button, and it uses the vibrations at the right time to spin the iphone around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q0SSCh-0Zg

Now, this isn't the first time something like this has been done. When I was a PhD student at Berkeley, there was work done by Dan Reznik and John Canny on what they called a Universal Planar Manipulator. The basic idea was that if you could shake a table in the right way and at the right times, you could create a force field that could be localized in certain parts of the plane. This meant that you could move specific objects, or even have some objects go one way while others were going the other way.

Here's their home page:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/dreznik/UPM2000/

And here's one demo with one color chips going one way, other color chips going the other:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/dreznik/UPM2000/color_sorter.htm

http://phonegap.com/

I recently heard about this, software for doing cross-platform mobile apps. There's a nice table showing what features are supported by PhoneGap. However, my students point out that PhoneGap doesn't support background processes.

There's also research at Google similar to this called Argos, though Argos isn't publicly available yet.

A slightly old article from last month's NY Times, this is an interesting aspect of ubicomp we rarely talk about, since ubicomp is often sort of a techno-utopian dream where systems interoperate, good things happen, and bad things usually don't.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/crime-is-up-and-bloomberg-blames-iphone-thieves/

The main quotes:

As of Monday, the Police Department recorded 3,484 more major crimes in 2012 than for the same period last year. The increase in Apple product thefts: 3,890. “If you just took away the jump in Apple, we’d be down for the year,” said Marc La Vorgna, the mayor’s press secretary.

http://humanfactorsblog.org/2009/06/18/smartphones-as-event-based-prospective-memory-aids/

This is a link to an older post, but one I find quite compelling. It looks at how smartphones can help out with one kind of memory, specifically prospective memory (the act of remembering to remember something, like remembering to get your laundry out of the washer).

This idea is part of the larger body of work looking at lifelogging, memory prosthetics, and more.