Yes, it's quite cool, but I don't really see any practical applications of it. Our brains simply didn't evolve to perform calculations. But we have calculators now, so it's a moot point, anway.

That said, I think that knowing that this technique works might be usefull for other areas. Perhaps it can be used to ease other mental processes that we can't easily replace with a machine. The author himself said that he only picked multiplication because it was a "widely-familiar problem that many people can solve with pen and paper".