Category: Tech
With all the technological advances we’ve seen in recent years, if there’s ever been a sign that said “welcome to the future”, it’s the N Building.
This commercial building in Tachikawa, Japan, has a QR code designed on the outside panels allowing cell phone users to take a picture of the 2D barcode (similar to Blackberry Messenger & other apps) and be directed to the building’s website.
Furthermore, users with an additional app installed on their device (only available on iPhone right now), can aim their camera towards the building and be greeted with an augmented reality layer over the building, showing a more interactive display of the the building’s stores, their sales/promotions, and even showing tweets from within the building.
If you’re confused – or amazed – just watch the video below.
Welcome to the future 2010:
N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district. Being a commercial building signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade which we feel undermines the structures’ identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code as the facade itself. By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself.
December 15th, 2009 we held an opening which included the limited release of an iPhone application made specifically for N Building. If a QR Code is static, what could we do with a dynamic device like the iPhone? Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons. Rather
than broadly tagging, we display information specific to the building in a manner in which the virtual (iPhone) serves to enhance the physical (N Building). Our goal is to provide an incentive to visit the space and a virtual connection to space without necessarily being present.
Project by teradadesign+Qosmo.
Music by Airtone.
It was hilarious. People kept staring up at it and then ran into each other. Samsung definitely has the biggest balls in consumer electronics
Yesterday Landon Donovan tore up the right flank of the pitch at the Emirates Stadium and helped his new club Everton secure a draw against my beloved Arsenal. This morning one of the soccer blogs I follow showed this great visualization of Donovan’s impact on the game.
The graph shows Donovan’s completed passes in blue. If you roll across the dots you can see when he passed to which team mate.
The graph is built with the Guardian’s interactive chalkboard which has apparently been around for almost a year. I have to say that I am ashamed that I only found out about this fantastic little tool today. OK, I have been living in the US now for 6 years and I have started to refer to the beautiful game as soccer (mainly because I discovered the other beautiful game of American football). And coverage of soccer in the US media is spotty at best. But that should still not be an excuse for not knowing about this amazing interactive visualization tool.
It uses data collected by UK company Prozone who record all Premier League matches and use that footage to code all data on passes, shots, tackles etc for every player on the pitch. The guardian then build this very easy to use application that allows every aspiring Arsene Wenger (who was one of the early Prozone adopters) to analyze the patterns of the game.
What is probably most impressive about this little application is the ease with which one can share chalkboards with others. This makes it a potentially powerful social media tool. And with most of the coverage of soccer in the US happening on social media, it could be a great tool to educate the US audience on the tactical aspects of the game. Nothing gets America more excited about sports than stats and analysis!
A rather fantastic deck this.
Designer Karim Rashid’s latest product aims to make the task of preparing a baby bottle much easier. The Iiamo Go is a self-heating bottle that allows parents to serve body temperature milk to their baby anywhere without the use of electricity for warming. The bottle uses a new patented organic cartridge made of dehydrated salt and water. Milk is warmed by a reaction that takes place when energy is released from the salt becoming re-hydrated.
Rashid wanted to modernize the bottle and bring a new emotional and aesthetic appeal to the product. The bottle is molded from 100 percent BPA-free polypropylene.
Children love reflective shiny colorful surfaces and materials – I do too – maybe I am still a child. So it was time to make a baby bottle a wild interesting sculptural colorful animated object so the baby actually gets excited about being fed.
[via dezeen]
via psfk.com
Treehugger reports on an intriguing cell phone concept design that’s powered by sugar. Daizi Zheng’s mobile phone runs on a battery that can generate power using soda, or any other kind of sugary liquid. It’s unique idea, and a potential solution to the environmental problems that come with disposing traditional batteries.
Zheng explains:
Through my research, I found that phone battery as a power source, it is expensive, consuming valuable resources on manufacturing, presenting a disposal problem and harmful to the environment. The concept is using bio battery to replace the traditional battery to create a pollution free environment. Bio battery is an ecologically friendly energy generates electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar) and utilizes enzymes as the catalyst. By using bio battery as the power source of the phone, it only needs a pack of sugary drink and it generates water and oxygen while the battery dies out. Bio battery has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium batteries and it could be fully biodegradable.
via psfk.com
via Treehugger
Wallpaper*’s excellent City Guides to London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Milan, Rome and Tokyo are now available as iPhone apps. The Berlin one is currently a free download; the others are £2.39 each.Via Notcot.
Feast your eyes. At least this one doesn’t have that Fatboy Slim backing track.
“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.”
– Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky
A few key messages:
1. Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.
2. Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.
3. Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers.
4. BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube.
5. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter
6. Obama Social Media Marketing resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising.
7. 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It
Via Socialnomics
I found out about this rather swish site for displaying news called Newsmap.jp. It’s brilliant.
To help you get a better idea of what i’m talking about and in true Blue Peter style, here’s one I made earlier.. I’ve just selected UK as the region but encapsulating all topic areas.
Immediately and rather nicely you get a snapshot of what is going on, colour coded by region and interest. Amazing stuff. I can see this becoming quite handy.
Filtered to only include UK technology news this time..
… and here’s another one, just UK sport time. You get the idea. It’s awesome. Go try it yourself now.
I’ve omitted the word ‘influencers’ from the original headline because it still bugs me a bit but nonetheless this is a brilliant compilation of so many varying predictions on 2010 in the one place from some of the biggest movers and shakers. I’m merely there to fill up the numbers obviously and being next to Seth Godin has provided many with much amusement. But I’m all for a bit of self-deprecation every now and then. Hat tip to @tim_whirledge for the original heads up.
Everyone that is featured in the presentation is listed below with their @names, making it easy for you to follow as many as you wish.
2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters
View more documents from Taly Weiss.
Major trends that came to the fore out of all the predictions were:
Mobile, Location, Transparency, Measurement, ROI and Privacy.
Not much new there then for 2010. Mobile, Location and Privacy would be my three to watch in 2010. Transparency shouldn’t even be there because it should happen without a second thought. But in 2009 we have seen and still in 2010 we’ll continue to see ideas, campaigns and executions which will pretend to be something they’re not / mislead consumers in some way or fake its roots and originality. Sometimes it is purely for the sake of controversy and to get people talking about it but other times you wonder who initially thought it would be a good idea and then how it ever made it in to the public spheres.
It was concluded that 2009 did not meet expectations. What should we expect in 2010?
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In this report, the 2010 Social Media trends are foretasted by:
@petecashmore PETE CASHMORE Founder, CEO Mashable
@armano DAVID ARMANO Senior Partner, Dachis Group Author, Logic and Emotion
@chrisbrogan CHRIS BROGAN President, New Marketing Labs
@peterkim PETER KIM Managing Director, N.America Dachis Group
@seth SETH GODIN, Bestselling Author, Entrepreneur & Agent of change
@litmanlive MICHAEL LITMAN Social Media Strategist Consolidated PR
@tamar TAMAR WEINBERG, Community & Marketing Manager, Mashable
@johnbattelle JOHN BATTELLE Founder & Chairman Federated Media
@mariansalzman MARIAN SALZMAN President, N.America Euro PR, Trend Spotter & Author
@mzkagan MARTA KAGAN Managing Director, US Espresso- Brand Infiltration
@danzarrella DAN ZARRELLA Social & Viral Marketing Scientist HubSpot
@emarketer eMARKETER Digital Intelligence
@drewmclellan DREW McLELLAN Founder and Author The Marketing Minute
@idc CAROLINE DANGSON Digital Marketplace Research Analyst IDC
@jasonfalls JASON FALLS Social Media Strategist Social Media Explorer
@charleneli CHARLENE LI Founder Altimeter Group
@gauravonomics GAURAV MISHRA CEO 2020 Social Online
@marc_meyer MARC MEYER Principal Digital Marketing Response Group
@emarketer JEFFREY GARU Senior Analyst eMarketer 2010
@jimmy_wales JIMMY WALES Founder Wikipedia
@alecjross ALEC ROSS Sr Advisor -Innovation State Department
@CraigNewmark CRAIG NEWMARK Founder of Craiglist
@scobleizer ROBERT SCOBLE Technical Evangelist Rackspace
@dmscott DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT Marketing Strategist & Author World Wide Rave
@roncallari RON CALLARI Social Media
@ravit_ustrategy RAVIT LICHTENBERG Founder & Chief Strategist Ustrategy.com
@equalman ERIK QUALMAN Author Socialnomics
@pgillin PAUL GILLIN Writer, Author & Social Media Consultant Principal
@adambroitman ADAM BROITMAN Partner & Ringleader Circ.us
@cbensen CONNIE BENSEN Director of Social Media & Community Strategy Alterian
@mikearauz MIKE ARAUZ Strategist Undercurrent
@nenshad Nenshad Badoliwalla Co-author Driven to Performance
@adamcohen ADAM COHEN Partner Rosetta
@danielwaisberg DANIEL WAISBERG Head of Web Analytics Easynet
@communitygirl ANGELA CONNOR Journalist & Community Strategist
@trendsspotting TALY WEISS CEO and Head of Research TrendsSpotting.com
2009 has been the year I fell out of love with Google Reader. It is probably due to the quantity of unread feeds subscribed to becoming unmanageable within.. say a a day. It was as if I was hunting for my football in a field that hadn’t been tended to for a year. There’s been immense growth yet still difficult to find anything. Reader for me wasn’t the place any more that I could dip in to for a few minutes throughout the day to see what was going on at a glance. I felt guilty for not coming back regularly and lavishing it with the time it required. In the end it bothered me so much I changed one of the options for it to not show the unread count of items. But that was just me hiding from the problem. The problem was an inefficient organisational hierarchy.
I’m starting my new years resolutions early this year. None of this traditional signing up to the gym, quitting chocolate, smoking or alcohol business. (I don’t even smoke!) One of mine is going to be to get my Google Reader organised. Hey, it’s a non stop party time at my place. An easy job you say? Well, i’ve accumulated close to 800 subscriptions and i’m starting at square one with them all.
I’ve become inspired of late by doing something about this due to a few people. Namely Fernando Rizo, Mat Morrison and Marshall Kirkpatrick who have given me a fresh perspective and a renewed vigour for changing my perceptions of how I should use Reader and what my reading hierarchy should look like. So when categorising feeds or organising favourites on your computer, if you partake in such an activity to start with, you would traditionally put them in folders due to their interest eg Sports, Music, Marketing, Gaming etc etc.. This hasn’t worked for me and i’m going to try out a new system alluded to by the guys above. Something more akin to ‘Must reads’ ‘News’ ‘Skip ’em’. I love Fernando’s analogies and rhetorical questions when it comes to how we have adopted (perhaps wrongly) the newspaper model for RSS..
“Website taxonomy was a waste of time, perhaps, but I loved it. When I would describe the contextual system to people, I would often ask, rhetorically, ‘who sits down and says, it’s time to read about economics or sports?’ This was the newspaper model in practice: the RSS reader is a newspaper you edit yourself, populated with a huge variety of topics. The RSS reader isn’t a newspaper for me: it’s a magazine rack, filled with specialty niche magazines that I read one at a time.”
So how have I got around not using Reader this year? Firstly, I started using Posterous more and more as a place for me to reblog cool stuff I’ve seen throughout the day. As I got more up to speed with using it myself, I found out about the reader feature on Posterous itself. It is truly fascinating and not well documented enough that it even exists. It is simply found at posterous.com/reader when you’re logged in. This was purely and simply page after page of content by the people I’m subscribed to. This works much better for me than reams of text in Google Reader. How I’d describe it is a much more visual RSS reader. But it’s not RSS. For me it’s bite sized nuggets of inspiration. It’s generally not hugely long textual posts to read and digest, mostly being the odd thought provoking / interesting image or slideshare embed with a line of commentary at the end of the post saying what they think about it.
Obviously, the ever present issue of garbage in, garbage out is something to be mindful of. If you subscribe on Posterous to accounts that don’t inspire, inform and satiate that constant appetite for information then you’re not going to get anything out of that either. I feel ‘closer’ to the people I subscribe to on Posterous than I do in Reader, because of the bookmarklet. A simple widget type thing that sits in your web browser address bar that allows you to reblog anything you see on the page before you. Try it out yourself with this page if you like. Sign yourself up with Posterous, get the bookmarklet and see just how easy it is! This is how I mainly use Posterous so the cool stuff comes to me through the Posterous Reader and I am simply a filter, disseminating the information that I feel has value in one way or another. In turn I enjoy more of a community element than I do with Google Reader. But then that’s entirely a subjective point of view. I know Rizo shares stuff on Reader, much as I do on Posterous and friends comment on it so it’s different horses for different courses.
It was this article that got the ball rolling for me. Hope it helps you too. I implore you to read and digest it. It links also to this article and this one too. Read them both. You can read about elegant triage systems and everything!
I better get started with it all then..
Just what happens to all this endless ‘stuff’ that we produce online after we’re no longer around to enjoy it? It was one of the topics of conversation recently when @faris was over in London and held an impromptu Beersphere. Which got me thinking, what if there was a way to pre-emptively update our Facebook page, our Twitter page, our blog and all the other online destinations we produce content for with a message. What would that message be and would we use it?
A new service which caught my eye is Webwill which prefaces with asking the question “How do you want to live your life online after death?” In one sentence it describes what it sets out to do, I like that. It’s not an easy thing to do. Ironically, it’s in Beta at the moment and on an invite only basis.
A couple of the facts they give in the video is that 1 in every 3 women in Sweden has their own blog and 850m photos are uploaded to Facebook every month. Over 10billion photos a year. What will happen to those photos in 10 years? Will they be as relevant?
It seems to have all come to the fore recently with Facebook recommending you to people you know who have passed away. Then ask the question, how would Facebook have known? These kinda measures need to be put in to place and I think something like Webwill could help to moving in the right direction to do that. It must be harrowing for someone to be recommended to reconnect with a friend or loved one no longer around. Check these posts out, first from Mashable not so long ago documenting ‘How to eliminate “dead friend” suggestions’ and second from Consumerist where Facebook were embroiled in a lengthy battle for this very reason and performed a u-turn on their own policy which states that “it was their policy to keep dead members profile’s in a “memorialized” state.”
Back to this whole notion of why we even have a desire to keep all these different profiles updated. We’re living for the era of now, so consumed in what we’re doing this minute and maybe not taking the time to enjoy the here and now because we’re too busy documenting it. (For when and for who?) Putting up pictures on Flickr, tweeting about it, writing a Facebook status update, telling people we don’t know on a chat room or forum what we’re doing. This is important but all those little artefacts you put up online, stay online, indefinitely. It’s always something people seem to forget about when they engage in sometimes hugely libellous slanging matches online where an apology has to be made public or when emails containing conversations which shouldn’t have happened in print are written. Once it’s down on the online notepad, it’s permanent.
So with that morbidly futuristic post in mind check out the video below, pretty fascinating stuff.
myWebwill – in english! from Lisa Granberg on Vimeo.
Update – Here’s a video explanation from the founders via Venturebeat
An educational presentation by Jeff Brenman of Apollo Ideas who explores how technology is changing the way people work together.
The Future Of Work
View more documents from Jeff Brenman.
I think i’m part ‘Freeform’ and part ‘Self actualised’ – hey i like some schedule!
How about you?
Bit of a media cliche but I love a good Moleskine. I could get free notepads from work and save myself a fortune but there’s something intangible about writing on one of these beauties. I may have to confess even for the purpose of this post to ordering a few limited edition models (these ones) only available in Hong Kong to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Helvetica font. If that’s not overly needlessly geeky then I don’t know what is.
Via Lunchbreath
10 Trends To Watch In 2010
View more documents from David Stutts.
Interesting to note that crowd sourcing is one of the top trends for 2010. It’s been fascinating reading at length the thoughts of Amelia, John and many others to name just two, with Peperami being the case in point in this instance. In some cases, I think it’s akin to authorised stealing but can see its merits.
I don’t know if the trends are in any order of importance but Augmented Reality comes in at #1. I’d agree with this for the most part, it’s a truly new, interactive and immersive experience when it’s done properly but there’s only a handful of solid examples to date so far.
Mobile payment is definitely en vogue for 2010 with the announcement by Jack probably most well known for being one of the guys behind Twitter. He recently announced his latest project, Square. This is a “new e-payment technology which he hopes will revolutionise the way consumers pay for goods and services.” with an iPhone or iPod Touch to begin accepting credit or debit card payments instantly.
Check it out in action here:
Watch this. Amazing stuff. You’ll be fascinated by some of the facts.
Did you know?
- Of the 6.1 billion people in the world, 3.1 billion of those are in work
- 77% of the US workforce have a Facebook account and 26% speak a second langauge
- Fortune 500 companies receive about 2000 CVs a day
- In 2007, 1 out of every 3 hires was made online
- There are more Blackberries and iPhones in the world than there are people in the UK
- More than 1m people signed up to Google Latitude in the first week
- US workers collectively take 917 million sick days per year
- Employees who surf the web are said to be 9% more productive
I found out about this via @BBHLabs and it’s just one of a whole host of sites that are going to make Lists even more useful. We’ve barely scratched the surface I feel so watch this space.
Here you can build up a picture about someone and their interests just by the lists they’ve been added to on Twitter! Also quite handy is the similar lists that have been created by others on the right hand side.
To see what yours looks like add your twitter name to the end of this link.
So here’s what mine looks like:
It’s similar to Twittersheep which builds up a picture of the people who follow you. The above is simply a natural extension and an evolution in how people are using Twitter. The difference with MustExist is that it displays info about you, compared to Twittersheep which shows information about your followers. All still quite useful to build up a richer picture of a) how people perceive you and b) who is following you.
Andy Berndt, MD of Google Creative Lab and Tom Uglow, Creative Lead presented this recently on Day 1 of Advertising Week 2009. Well worth your time.
You can grab the PDF and the PPT versions of the presentation here. The podcast is here also.
During, Andy asked them to obviously think about Google when creating experiences. For me, what resonated most was that he reminded everyone to experiment often, be creative, try new things, and don’t be afraid to fail.
I don’t think that happens enough. Trying, innovating and sometimes failing. It’s easier to stick to what’s known rather than taking risks to potentially produce truly innovative stuff. Creativity and ideas generation is still alive and well but execution is being stifled by budgets and ignorance to enter new and unchartered territory. Budgets will always to some extent stifle what can and can’t be done. Also, understandably, it’s difficult from a large client perspective when there’s a lack of knowledge about all things digital and a hesistancy to try something that bit different. But that’s what the agency is there for, to bring them in to this new age of brilliance. I commend the one’s that make it out there in the wild and receive award after award but for every one stand out idea, there’s a thousand that get binned. It’s a shame.
Many of the experiments in 87 cool things highlighted mashups, interactivity, unique data usage, and the fusion of virtual worlds and reality.
From Google Maps and YouTube Annotations, to Insights for Search and a wide array of APIs, it’s easier than ever to play with inventive marketing ideas, using Google of course. We’re told to think of these tools and platforms as our blank canvas, and just have fun.
These innovative campaigns, projects, and even accidents can encourage us to expand our imaginations, think beyond our expectations and consider the impossible. Did you ever think Ohio could be a piano? Or that you would analyze your daily food consumption, and catalog it by cuisine? Or that an engaging and informative website could live entirely on YouTube? I didn’t!
Enjoy!
This is brilliant.
Click for the full size version.
Your phone is going, you’ve got a direct message from someone on Twitter, and a new Facebook message also. Which do you look at first? Never fear! The above will take you through the hierarchy of digital distractions.