A born natural!
Archive for the 'R&D' Category
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These are the 5 guiding principles I believe need to be implemented by companies moving into digital:
- Trust
- Identity
- Openness
- Innovation
- Simplicity
Each piece of work should strive to touch each of these 5 principles.
I’ve been writing this blog for about a year now. During that time my RSS feeds have grown exponentially to crazy proportions (I go through 600+ a day). Over the last week I’ve begun to add the most interesting ones to my Google Shared Items – it’s much quicker than posting them and most of the time I don’t have a particular opinion to add – they’re just interesting. Hope you enjoy it.
Feel free to subscribe to my Google Shared Items to get a pick of the most interesting stuff.
I’ll still be writing on this blog so keep checking back, or subscribe to my pixelblog feed Cheers.
Following on from the below quote, AGRs have really taken off recently.
‘Lost’ carved out a huge following last year with it’s online biscuit trail of rumour and intrigue, and it’s going for it again with Fly Oceanic Air.
It started with billboards spotted in Knoxville, Tennessee. The billboards advertised a URL, www.flyoceanicair.com.
On visiting the website, you are sucked into an adventure involving multiple websites, video diaries, photos with text hidden among the pixels, clue hunts, and strategy games. You can even call a toll-free phone number and get progress updates about the search for missing Oceanic Flight 815. Interesting characters and mysteries keep web players engaged and new content is posted at seemingly random intervals, forcing frequent check-ins to see if there’s anything new.
Last week Enitech Technology popped up as well…
- Enitech Research’s blog began posting in June last year, with links off to other bogs starting in October. Content on it started coming thick and fast at the beginning of the month.
- Despite that, even as early as October there are blog posts which link out to other fake blogs which go into minute details concerning the physics behind the research companies.
- 4 days ago a video was posted onto YouTube by an Enitech employee, in it she mentions that they’ve created something that enables them to see something like 1193 into the future.
- The FOX promotional website to Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (http://www.takebackthefuture.com/) has a countdown clock matching the same number of days.
- In the video she mentions that one of her previous jobs was at Cyberdyne (which any Terminator fan will remember as the California tech outfit that reverse-engineered the technology to build Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger).
- There’s a Facebook group for Former Cyberdyne Systems Employees.
- Enitech’s blog post today integrates comments & suggestions left by visitors on previous posts.
ARGs are a perfect fit for sponsors looking to fund immersive, cutting-edge brand experiences and for people who love a good story — not to mention the feeling of contributing to it — There’s a whole genre of interactive experience here that we’re only just seeing the start of…
This is genius – and long overdue – Expect this to appear all over the place from MySpace to Facebook in the very near future.
Obviously the biggest drawback is that it won’t work in Firefox…which is a shame.
Update: The cross-browser issue has disappeared. I can confirm that this does work in Firefox.
Guy Kawasaki hosted a panel discussion with some teenage adults which bore some interesting insights. You can view the whole discussion here. This is a US panel, but the information is still insightful.
- In this panel of 6 people 2 of them (girls) send over 4000 text messages a month.
- Very few of them watched more than a couple of hours of TV a week and all of it was tivo’d so all ads were skipped.
- Almost all of them subscribed to or at least read wired.
- Almost all of them are on Verizon.
- When asked what gadget or service they would want they almost all wanted a converged mobile device that held everything all their content, music, video, and acted as a billing device so they could buy stuff.
- All of them were on myspace or facebook (no surprise there).
- None of them knew what RSS was.
- None of them wrote a blog but most read them.
- Only one of them knew what a wiki was but they all used wikipedia.
I think it’s interesting that only one of them knew what a wiki was, but they had all used Wikipedia. I also think it’s interesting that they all read blogs but didn’t know what an RSS feed was.
With Google Reader’s new search functionality, just adding feeds and mining them for data, as and when you need that info, is very powerful. I’ve been doing that with GMail for years now on developer mailing lists and it’s incredibly useful.
Given the announcements at MAX this morning, this is very interesting.
Aviary is a suite of rich internet applications geared for artists of all genres. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for everything. At Worth1000, we are creating a complex ecosystem for artists and providing the world with free, capable collaborative tools and an approach to collaboration and rights management that will turn the marketplace for online art on its head.
“All of our tools are based right in your browser or as downloadable AIR applications. Our tools all communicate and relate to each other. To illustrate an example: You can import a swatch from Toucan into Phoenix, while doing complex bitmap processing of a 3D object developed in Hummingbird. Finally, you can take your finished artwork and lay it out in Owl as the DVD artwork for a music CD you and your friends put together in Roc and Myna and offer it for sale in our marketplace, Hawk.”
From the screenshots on their blog, it would seem as if all these applications are built in Flex or AIR.
Woodpecker – their smart image resizing app – was demoed at Techcrunch40 the other week and incorporates Seam Carving, the process of smart image resizing first pioneered by the brilliant Dr. Ariel Shamir, and can be seen working at MAX if you email the guys at aviary( a )worth1000.com.
The full suite of applications which sit in the Aviary are:
Phoenix - Image editor
Toucan - Color swatches and palettes creator.
Peacock - Computer algorhythm-based pattern generator.
Raven - Vector editor
Hummingbird - 3D Modeller and skinner
Myna - Audio editor
Roc - Music generator
Starling - Video editor
Owl - Desktop publishing layout editor
Penguin - Word processing software geared towards creative writers.
Pigeon - Painting simulator
Tern - Terrain generator. This is a mini tool.
Horus - Font editor
Woodpecker - Smart image resizer (seam carving). This is a mini-tool.
Rookery - A free, unlimited distributed file system network that anyone can connect to and store data in. It also powers our search engine.
Hawk - Digital content marketplace
Eagle - A smart online application that can identify complex data about an image based on the pixel patterns (i.e. which specific camera an image originally came from).
Crane – Custom image product creator, that can integrate with other websites.
A complete list of tools that are being created can be found here.
Buzzword, the online word processor Adobe announced purchasing this morning would seem to fit into the ‘Penguin’ category…I’ll be watching this space avidly since they seem to have covered off pretty much every aspect of digital design.
John Maeda, has written an excellent piece entitled “The product is the message; the message is the product“. namely that communication itself is becoming the primary core of consumer products.
In it he describes how consumer products are now being developed with communication at their heart. Whereas in the past technology would drive a product release, now the emphasis is on the software that comes with the product and the ability of the consumer to communicate easily using that product.
…and he doesn’t just limit these products to technical gadgetry. Another example he cites is Webkinz. Webkizs are cuddly toys that have a ‘unique secret code’. Once this code is used to access the Webkinz World online, they can create virtual versions of their pets which they look after online, answer trivia quizzes and play exclusive games which can earn kinzcash, chat with others via kinzchat and enjoy a plethora of other content.
It’s this content, accessed via the Secret Code, and not the toy itself which is driving demand for this toy in the US.
It’s exactly the same with technology. Give me an average phone that uploads basic photos to Flickr or videos to Youtube easily and syncs with my address book seamlessly and I’ll value that phone more than one which has a 5 mega pixel camera and video slow-mo but no way of easily uploading and sharing those photos with my friends.
What’s OpenID?
1st major Telcom to support OpenID
Reaction on Techcrunch.
What France Telecom (and Orange) needs more than anything is a consumer-focused marketing strategy as to why OpenID is useful/beneficial. Right now it just yells ‘so what’, but with its customer base of 40million users, all of whom can be verified as real people, France Telecom is going to have quality OpenIDs, with billing addresses, likes and dislikes and spending patterns.
