The Innovation Diaries

The Washington Post has picked out a few obsolete technologies that have passed away in our lifetime - amongst them, “Getting Lost”(thanks to GPS gadgets), “Truly ‘Blind’ Dates” (good old Google and Facebook image searching) and the iconic Mixtape. But hold on, what’s this? The humble C90 has been given a facelift for those star-crossed lovers who find it impossible to express themselves through words, and yet find themselves without a cassette deck giving them the ability to “say it with lyrics”. Thanks to the Mix Tape USB Stick, you can put your long-laboured iTunes playlist onto a pen drive, which sits inside a faux-plastic deck, and give it to your nearest and dearest.

This little gizmo could be seen as the poster child for a tech-nostalgia movement - you read comics online, instead of via the Beano; you watch Mr T commercials on YouTube because you loved The A-Team as a kid; you play Skate on your XBox 360 as the kids would laugh at you trying to pull an ollie on the streets today . Those with the dispoable income to spend on such things are digital natives, with technology integral to their upbringing, and are now viewing the past through their binary-tinted spectacles.