Creative and productive information interchange in organizations is often stymied by a competitive setting among the members. We transform that competition into a positive exchange by using market principles. Specifically, we apply innovative market mechanisms to construct incentives while still encouraging pro-social behaviors. Barter includes means to enhance knowledge sharing, innovation creation, and productivity. It is being tested at MIT and in three sponsor companies and is becoming available as a readily installable package. We will measure the results and test the effectiveness of an information market in addressing organizational challenges.

Ego presents an agent-based, user-centered architecture for storing, discovering, and sharing information about an expandable set of applications, such as location, reviews, or buying and selling goods. Users can fluidly create agents that hold information relevant to their intentions. For example, for buying or selling, users could announce a product they are interested in, then the system creates a group of users interested in the same product, allowing direct discovery and analysis. Tradeoffs between factors such as reputation and physical location are considered. We demonstrate an interactive, tabletop visualization of different urban scenarios involving 1,000 agents that discover each other in the context of some personal interest.

Were you ever in the middle of a conversation and needed to share your location with the other party? Geo.gy is a location shortener service. It allows you to easily share your location with your peers by encoding it in a short URL which we call a "geolink". It is platform-independent, based on HTML5, so you can use any device with a modern browser to generate a geolink, simply by visiting the project's page. There are no user accounts so geolinks remain anonymous. You can use Geo.gy to add location context to a post, SMS, anything you want decorated with location context.

The Junkyard Jumbotron (JJ) lets one take a collection of random screens and instantly stitch them into one large virtual display simply by taking a picture of their arrangement. The software works with laptops, smartphones, tablets–anything that runs a web browser. It shows a new way of using mobile devices to create a feeling of community: ganging mobile devices together to create a shared experience. And the JJ is designed from the ground up to make the process of connecting heterogeneous user devices together "in the wild" easy and fun, with no anti-social wireless configuration, app installation, or device compatibility anxiety.

Meld provides a new perspective on your social life. By presenting your social graph as a moving picture, Meld breaks free from the text-centric interfaces of today's social networks, offering a fresh, holistic perspective. Unseen trends, before lost in mountains of text, can be better understood, providing an organic and evolving view of your relationships. Meld is a semi-finalist in the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Today, marketplaces like Craigslist and eBay connect people who buy and sell goods and services without leveraging the power of mobility, localized posting, and community. With GPS- and Internet-enabled mobile devices in almost every pocket, we see a space for a new type of marketplace which takes into account your physical location, availability, and means of negotiation. What new and exciting interactions await for mobile marketplaces in the age of the app? How do you redesign the fundamentals of buying and selling goods or services with the people around you, by focusing on simplicity, trust, and discovery? With Peddl we explore this possibility by creating one of the first broadcast marketplaces.

Human beings have long shaped the physical environment to reflect designs of form and function. As an instrument of control, the human hand remains the most fundamental interface for affecting the material world. In the wake of the digital revolution, this is changing, bringing us to reexamine tangible interfaces. What if we could now dynamically reshape, redesign, and restructure our environment using the functional nature of digital tools? To address this, we present Recompose, a framework allowing direct and gestural manipulation of our physical environment. Recompose complements the highly precise, yet concentrated affordance of direct manipulation with a set of gestures, allowing functional manipulation of an actuated surface.

Social Transactions is an application that allows communities of consumers to collaboratively sense the market from mobile devices, enabling more informed financial decisions in a geo-local and timely context. The mobile application not only allows users to perform transactions, but also to inform, share, and purchase in groups at desired times. It could, for example, help people connect opportunistically in a local area to make group purchases, pick up an item for a friend, or perform reverse auctions. Our framework is an Open Transaction Network that enables applications from restaurant menu recommendations to electronics purchases. We tested this with MIT's TechCASH payment system to investigate whether shared social transactions could provide just-in-time influences to change behaviors.

T+1 is an application that creates an iterative structure to help groups organize their interests and schedules. Users of T+1 receive instructions and send their personal information through mobile devices at discretized time steps, orchestrated by a unique, adaptive scheduling engine. At each time-step t, T+1 takes as inputs several relevant factors of human interactions, such as participants' interests, opinions, locations, and partner matching schedules. It then computes and optimizes the structure and format of a group interactions for the next interval. T+1 facilitates consensus formation, better group dynamics, and more engaging user experiences by using a clearly visible and comprehensible process. We are planning to deploy the platform in both academic and political discussion settings, analyze how user opinions and interests evolve in time to understand its efficacy.