links for 2008-10-30
October 30, 2008
- Foldable user interface
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The folks over at Nike Labs have teamed up with W+K Tokyo and a52 to create this amazingly simple, but beautiful, commercial.
links for 2008-10-28
October 28, 2008
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It’s time to think about leaving your laptop at home.
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Idee has built a remarkably easy to use tool for searching Flickr for photos according to color palatte.
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The economic crisis might leave growth-oriented companies like Twitter with little choice but to start focusing on the bottom line.
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Blurring the lines between what is a floor and what is a ceiling, the Jenga-like structure of Final Wooden House allows its occupiers to decide how to use the space according to their position.
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The use of the typically green/red colored treemaps to depict the stock market exchange is not particularly new, especially for those who know the now famous SmartMoney Map of the Market. However, FinViz.com takes the more traditional flat treemap version one step further by introducing a 2.5-dimensional perspective [finviz.com] as well as a geographical overview [finviz.com] version.
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Yet another competitor of Many Eyes, Swivel, Track-n-Graph, WidGenie and the just-posted iCharts: Trendrr [trendrr.com] has the capability to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from search engine results, news stories, social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.
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I’m not sure how many of you are catching up with BBC TV via iPlayer on your Wii but apparently it’s been a less than satisfactory experience. The Beeb has now tweaked it all though to make sure that all you arm-wavers will have a much easier time with iPlayer from now on.
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Google Earth. On the iPhone. That is, I would imagine, all you need to know to send you careening off to the App Store, from where you can grab the free download of Google’s Aerial Opus.
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Looking for growth in new markets where it is increasingly being bypassed, Microsoft said Monday that late next year it would begin offering a new “cloud” operating system that would manage the relationship between software inside the computer and on the Web, where data and services are becoming increasingly centralized.
links for 2008-10-23
October 23, 2008
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- The Do Lectures
The Do lectures are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about.
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- Fiat EcoDrive
links for 2008-10-20
October 20, 2008
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Going green doesn’t mean giving up wheel-spin-inducing, tire-shredding performance, as this 300-horsepower natural gas-burning Mustang GT proves.
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Major leadership changes Thursday at Twitter renewed questions about its business prospects — was the replacement of CEO Jack Dorsey by fellow co-founder Evan Williams a shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic?
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The Zombiefie Six is a set of six papercraft zombie dollies for you to print, fold and play with.
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Popular music service iLike has teamed with TuneCore, a music distribution platform, to help artists promote and sell their music as easily as possible.
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“Web Without Words” [webwithoutwords.com] is a website that takes a popular website each week and reconstructs it without its words and images. Instead, its replaces them with blocks, similar to the “wireframing” process in information architecture. It is quite similar to Internet Soul Portrait, in abstracting a popular web presence to its bare minimum.
links for 2008-10-16
October 16, 2008
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Treehugger has a collection of a dozen fantastic, recession-compliant homes and buildings made from old shipping containers, the packets of the sea.
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Futurists have long predicted the day when we zip along in autonomous and electric monorail-like systems they call Personal Rapid Transit, and several projects underway in cities around the world suggest we soon may be freed from the bondage of gridlock.
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Yesterday, Apple didn’t announce a netbook. When asked why, Jobs replied “That’s a nascent market that’s just getting started, and we’ll see how it goes.”
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When Fuzz launched a microblogging service for music aficionados called Blip.fm last May, no one in the company expected it to rise above the status of an experiment.
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When Twitter acquired search engine Summize, it immediately rebranded and relaunched it as Twitter Search.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla Motors, an electric car start-up in Silicon Valley, said Wednesday that it would lay off employees and delay production of its second car, the Model S. Tesla also removed its chief executive, Ze’ev Drori, and appointed Elon Musk, the company’s chairman and principal investor, to the position.
links for 2008-10-15
October 15, 2008
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Do you live in Muswell Hill, London or Whitchurch, South Glamorgan? If so, you are lucky sods because you’ve been chosen by BT as the latest pilot sites for fibre optic broadband which will see homes in the area getting broadband speeds of up to 40Mbps.
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If the future of the web is the mobile web, then mobile site creation is going to be a big thing. A few services have already spotted the opportunity but Jag.ag a new service coming out from Israel has a very interesting product approach that could make it stand out.
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How exactly did this happen? For so long, Internet Explorer was the dominant browser, and Firefox was the up and coming alternative; the web browser space seemed so dull just a couple of years ago. Now, suddenly, we have it all: IE is the tired old guy trying to keep up with the times, Chrome is the shy one sitting in a corner, Firefox is the life of the party, talking to everyone at the same time, Opera is trying so hard to be funnier than Firefox, and Flock…well, Flock is Firefox’ brother on amphetamines. And now, it finally reached version 2.0.
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It’s here, folks. The first beta release of the next major version of the Firefox web browser is available for download.
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Manufacturers of aftermarket iPod adapters and cigarette-lighter speakerphones take note: Your days are numbered.
links for 2008-10-14
October 14, 2008
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For the last two years Tom Smith has been running global research at Universal McCann that tracks the usage of social media. The results of which have clearly demonstrated the massive growth in usage that is occurring across the world.
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The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir’s screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.
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Looks like Toyota is bringing the 56-mpg iQ microcar to America after all, but it’s slapping a Scion badge on it first.
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To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CH friend and colleague Seth Brau recently completed the rather daunting task of bringing the words to life with motion graphics.
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Word Magazine readers have been busy building this map showing where iconic album cover photographs were taken.
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Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand will bring his work back to the United States – to New York City for the first time in 2009.
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You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat.
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Alternate movie posters about film brand integration.
links for 2008-10-13
October 13, 2008
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Researchers from the Boston University College of Engineering are currently spending their time looking at ways to use light bulbs instead of traditional wireless communication to transfer data.
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One of the highlights of the London Design Festival wasn’t a big name or flashy product, it was a low-key installation from a young design graduate placed in a corner of Tent London.
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There’s nothing like a bit of luxury when staying at a nice hotel. Be it in-room dining or the staff waiting on your every need, feeling like a king for a day is a matter of taking advantage of the hotel’s services. Unfortunately, the systems in place for requesting such things are years behind, teetering on the edge of archaic.
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Campers are usually unsightly hunks of metal spewing smoke all over the highways. We’d much prefer traveling in the dutch countryside in a Tonke Camper.
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Man, has Hulu nailed online TV viewing or what? First off, they have a huge library of content that people actually want (e.g. SNL, Family Guy, Daily Show, Colbert, Kitchen Nightmares, etc.). And then they really execute on having a usable, effective UI.
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A couple days ago, Eyebeam in New York City opened what by some has been called their best show so far. It is titled Untethered, and was curated by visiting fellow Sarah Cook to be “a sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades”.
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A textual emotion recognition & visualization engine based on the concept of synesthesia , or in other words: “code that feels the words visually”. the synesketch application is able to dynamically transfer the text into animated visual patterns.
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This morning, I had the pleasure of taking part in a podcast with Wayne Sutton and Kipp Bodnarf for their Talk Social News program. During the conversation, we discussed how to find time to participate in multiple social networks, how today’s technology luddites might some day consume information, using RSS, and what the recent economic turbulence means for today’s startups and tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.
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If you thought China’s opening ceremony was impressive for its scale and teamwork then spare a thought for the 52 German design students who were handed the knee weakening task of creating a temporary 200sqm world that tries to translate sociological terms like self-portrayal, community and retreat into tangible spatial situations. As impressive as it is, the real treat is in the details. The entire space was created by lashing together almost 1.3 million cable ties. The result is nothing short of amazing. Visitors are invited to explore the surreal landscape of cocoons, webs and light called “The Third Space” that took a staggering 16,870 hours to complete.
links for 2008-10-7
October 7, 2008
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Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York [Wired]
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. -
Yahoo is continuing its marathon merger discussions with AOL, sources close to the negotiations have whispered to us, and a deal could happen as early as this month. Is this just a rehash of the reported discussions in February and then again in April?
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MINI Motoring Graphics is MINI’s partnership announced today with Original Wraps, Inc. that allows MINI owners to add a little flair to their exteriors and interiors. From full-on custom jobs to small round badges, the program presents over 5,000,000 options enabling drivers to stand out from the masses on the road.
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SomeRightsReserved is the awesome online store of the London-based KithKin design collective. The shop, billed as “a download revolution” features both digital products (such as music and fonts) and directions/instructions for building physical items.
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During Sotheby’s record-breaking Damien Hirst evening auction last month, the saleroom felt like something out of a Cold War science-fiction novel. On the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the American financial markets began their freefall, the Russians seemed to be celebrating their new-found billions by buying diamond cabinets and gold butterfly paintings with names like New Midas’s Lie.
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Every week on AMC TV’s Mad Men John Hamm’s character, Don Draper, and John Slattery’s Roger Sterling lead the men and women at the fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper. They create and design retro 1960s ad campaigns, while they chain-smoke, drink and womanize.
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If George W. Bush and John Kerry campaigned for the presidency on the Internet four years ago, I wouldn’t have seen the point and likely would have laughed in their faces. Who would have heard and listened to them?
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The future for the BBC lies in the technology that can open it up to the world, just as technology gave it life last century. In the corporate world, Facebook, Apple and Google have launched platform services that allow external developers and companies to build services using their code – but the BBC is uniquely placed to use those same principles to create a cultural and commercial resource for the nation.
links for 2008-10-3
October 3, 2008
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Here are some initial shots of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic aka the Tube aka the first Symbian S60 touchscreen phone.
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The U.S. will snatch the lead in mobile technology from Europe as the Internet is integrated with mobile devices, Nokia’s CEO told a Silicon Valley audience on Wednesday night.
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a visual representation of (a sample of) over 1.4 million rows of data originating from the Federal Election Commission, aiming to reveal donations & examine any patterns in the type of donations given.
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an online information dashboard for the Indianopolis Museum of Art, which attempts to measure & visualize various aspects of the museum’s performance. the goal of this dashboard is to seek to quantify & report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum observers & to particular interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues & patrons. tracked data attributes include “Fans on Facebook”, “KWh per Day Energy Consumption” & “Number of Art Works on Loan”.
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Apart from 3D forcing you wear silly hippie glasses that make you look like a dork and which leave you with a splitting headache, 3D is still largely a novelty. But now TV makers like Philips are determined to make 3D tellies a reality.
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Nintendo has just fired the latest salvo in the portable gaming wars.
