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Five User Experience Trends to watch–Gene Smith on Nform

February 13, 2010 in Tech | No comments

Very insightful post full of great links and resources, please read!

Today I’m sharing five trends I’ll be watching over the coming year (and beyond) along with some thoughts about how they might change our industry. And even if I’m wrong about some of these, I’ll be interested to see where they go.

  1. Services as Software (usability testing is noted)
  2. User Experience Analytics
  3. Content Strategy
  4. Return of the Mobile Web
  5. A Real Experience Economy

via Five User Experience Trends I’ll be Watching in 2010 / nForm / Blog.

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From Mashable–Best New Mashups: Social Graphing, Realtime Emotions and a Virtual Assistant

February 13, 2010 in Tech | No comments

worth a quick read…

The mashups included below all clarify mountains of information. Using APIs, they gather the data and show it to the user in a way that makes sense. In one case, it’s a bar chart of emotions expressed over Twitter and other realtime search engines. Another takes your LinkedIn connections and displays them graphically. The other brings a handful of APIs to your iPhone, responding to your voice.

via Best New Mashups: Social Graphing, Realtime Emotions and a Virtual Assistant.

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Tower Skins Modernise Ugly Buildings, Generate Energy and Collect Rain Water – Gizmodo

February 9, 2010 in Energy, Environment, Tech | No comments

Interesting approach to turning older buildings green without total gut and rehab. I’d like to see a proof of concept production building. regardless of the initial buzz for or against, it is a good idea and shows some of the more creative concepts begin generated at the moment.

Architectural company LAVA believes ugly buildings should have a shot at happiness, with these tower skins acting like a “transparent cocoon” made from mesh textile, capable of being lit up in the evening for maximum attention. They'd supposedly generate energy with the addition of photovoltaic cells, collect rain water and improve ventilation for the buildings.

via Tower Skins Modernise Ugly Buildings, Generate Energy and Collect Rain Water – Lava tower skins – Gizmodo.

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Google offers an online tour of the Ocean

February 5, 2010 in Environment, Social Media, Tech, Web, awesome, multimedia, video | No comments

awesome…

Ah, the sea. The big blue. From sharks to shipwrecks, from the perfectly formed pipes of Hawaii’s waves to the dark and chilly depths of the deepest sea trenches, it’s one of Earth’s most fascinating habitats – one that people love watching and exploring.

Tonight, Google is bringing Internet-bound ocean lovers a new portal to the amazing biological and topographical diversity that lies beneath the waves. If you’re into underwater environments and you’re down with Google Earth,we highly recommend checking out Ocean Showcase, Google’s latest product release.

via Google Rolls Out Ocean Showcase: It’s a Multimedia, Underwater Street View.

Someday soon, the Cylons will be here

February 4, 2010 in Search, Tech | No comments

Interesting piece from Tech Crunch–noting the secured financing for Cognitive Match. Working towards artificial intelligence (the machine, as the salesmen). This cool and freaky. Add this research and development with social science theory as presented in this video, out of Kansas State’s digital ethnography program and let me know what conclusions your mind drifts towards…

Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime?

The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content product, offers, or editorial to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit.

via Cognitive Match pulls in $2.5m for realtime content-matching.

Apple announces e-book store

January 27, 2010 in Tech, Web, mobile, multimedia | No comments

The iPad is priced much lower than I would have anticipated ($499) and looks like it will be rivaling the Kindle. I like the pitch, that now your books can have video and audio–so, you don’t need to read anymore?? I am not sold on e-books yet but the notion of flooding videos and audio into the books is cool, potential great teaching tool but also scary if it begins to outweigh the importance of prose and the actual skill of reading and retention.

The iPad will support the popular ePub format and authors will be able to embed multimedia such as photos, videos, and audio files directly into books. That’s a cool feature for standard books and an outstanding feature for textbooks. Imagine your history book containing video and audio snippets.

via Apple announces e-book store.

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World’s Largest Spherical Panorama

December 18, 2009 in Tech, awesome | No comments

Prague TV Tower – World’s Largest Spherical Panorama.

enjoy the awesomeness

Holy awesome online map…

December 14, 2009 in Causes, Environment, Social Media, Tech, Web, non-profit | No comments

Check out this mapping tool created by the design firm Modernista! (recent Webby nominee) out of Boston for the National Park Foundation–the site is called this land is your land (now I have Woody Guthrie stuck in my head).

I like the overlay of comments used on top of the pictures used to represent the park–this is an easy way to start building a community feel around a location and makes the image feel active and alive (potential great tool for environmental groups).  The site also uses the more traditional and common map views as a sidebar element with content overview of the Park.

http://thisisyourland.nationalparks.org/

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The Google Phone? via CrunchGear

December 12, 2009 in Tech, mobile | No comments

iPhone, Droid–get ready for Google domination…Showdown to begin in 2010

What do we know? It’s an HTC phone – probably the Passion, a distant cousin to the beautiful HD2 – with large touchscreen. It’s GSM unlocked and everyone at Google has one so whatever the super secret specs are, they won’t stay super secret for long.

But what if Google starts to sell this thing? This is “a big deal” on the level of Neo learning Kung Fu in The Matrix. This means Google is making hardware.

The Google Phone: This changes everything mostly.

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Bob Herbert, Signs of Hope: re-inventing the economy and energy production

November 24, 2009 in Energy, Environment, Tech | No comments

Bob Herbert’s latest column in the NY Times, Signs of Hope, describes just what and how the U.S. can begin doing to regain its foothold on a sustainable future, if the political will was available. This is not just fluffy granola green–this is about creating jobs and a leadership role in the world (and yes, we can actually be better stewards of our planet and our health at the same time).

As oil defined the 20th century, new forms of energy will define the 21st. The U.S. has the opportunity, the intellectual resources and the expertise to lead the world in the development of clean energy. What we’ve lacked so far has been the courage, the will, to make it happen.

Please give it a read, it is well worth a few minutes of your time.

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