seam carving.
A press release recently passed my desk announcing that onOne Software acquired a new resizing technology to be released as a Photoshop plug-in. The killer was info about the origin of the technology and a link to a video demonstration.
This is an amazing technology, best explained by just watching the video. It all makes sense after seeing it in action. This type of sophisticated, yet simple to use, image analyzation and manipulation will probably have far reaching implication in future tools and techniques, not just resizing.

awesome! i was just lamenting the other day about having to do this “manually.”