February 2008 Archives

What made Robert Scoble cry? A valid question these days and TED gives an answer: Mike Arrington and Dan Farber were right - Microsoft Research's World Wide Telescope. Ray Gould previewed it yesterday and the talk is live already. Not really inspiring in nature in my point of view - I link you to Google Earth Sky instead.

Isn't the Microsoft World Wide Telescope a Microsoft Me Too again? Sure, there was Jim Gray working on the topic some time ago already ...

[Update March 3: @Scobleizer himself twitters a much more inspiring demo of the WW Telescope right now! Watch FastCompany!]

[Update May 13: Download it now!]

Get Google Earth Sky!

It can.

Eye candy or eye meat? Simplicity patterns.

TED Talks 2007, John Maeda. View the talk!

My dream about the future of medicine. - Eva Vertes, 2005.

View the talk!

Fantastic voyage inside a cell. - David Bolinsky, 2007.

View the talk!

Rolling along, helping students and the third world. - Dean Kamen, 2002.

View the talk!

The art of creating creatures. - Theo Jansen, 2007.

View the talk!

Let's take a nuclear-powered rocket to Saturn. TED Talks 2002, George Dyson. View the talk!

Simple designs that could save millions of children's lives. - Amy Smith, 2006.

View the talk!

Fly me to the moons of Saturn. - Carolyn Porco, 2007.

View the talk!

How does technology evolve? Like we did!

• The talk: "Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks 'What does technology want?' and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life."
• The speaker: "Kevin Kelly has been publisher of the Whole Earth Review, exec editor at WIRED, founder of visionary nonprofits, and writer on biology and business and 'cool tools.' He's admired for his new perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and religion."

TED Talks 2005, Kevin Kelly. View the talk!

Underwater astonishments. - David Gallo, 2007.

View the talk!

Today some wealthy people (6000$ for a ticket? Give me a break. Comparison to Davos. 1000 of the world's most remarkable people in TED speak.) are gathering in Monterey, CA for the 25th (correct counting?) TED conference.

TED?

Technology, Entertainment, and Design.

Founded by Richard Saul Wurman (father of the term Information Architecture) in 1984 and hosted by (not Long Tail) Chris Anderson since 2002.

Pure inspiration.

As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, "I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net." A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

View the talk!

Apart from the future of advertising, luxury brands, and customer experience design, Idris Mootee has a series of lectures on Brand 2.0 - a masterclass.

Google announced Talk chatback today and we added it right away. Feel free to click the balloon in the right column - above the fold in Tools - which reads "Chat with Harald Felgner".

No IM account or software required! Immediate answer assured!

Read the Google announcement!

Idris Mootee's take on customer experience design. Some bullets:

• Crossing over of business, technology & design will create a new strategic business discipline within 5 years …. the Next Competitive Advantage!.

Idris Mootee's take on luxury brands.

From Wikipedia: "David Deutsch pioneered the field of quantum computers, and is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics."

Support this blog and order one of the books below:

Idris Mootee's take on the future of advertising. The slideshow ends after 2009. What will be next? Are the following slides omitted due to an NDA? Some bullets:

• Scenario 2005 - Digital is just a bunch of websites. Someone can do it.

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

Retro Special.

David Deutsch: “Take 2 stones and carve on one of them: Problems are soluble. Carve on the other one: Problems are inevitable.”

Human beings are not the hub of existence. What does a typical place in the universe look like?

View the talk!

Walt Mossberg gives his opinion on multi-touch. The next revolution in UX? Maybe.

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

E*TRADE Special.

View Larger Map

& the Red Fez is a stream of ideas and inspirations, ranging from international marketing to IT - mixed with some completely unrelated topics of personal interest - and it might be located in the Antarctica.

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

This is based on Tom Peter's book "Design".

Image © University of Texas at Austin

Let's start the week with science. There are just too many interesting ideas from biology and related fields! Kevin Kelly points us to a social/ evolutionary graph based on rRNA sequences from the University of Texas. A Facebook of ancestors, MyCosurvivors of evolution, and LivedIn contacts. Admire the circle of life! We are only a small piece of a larger picture.

U are here!

Follow Kevin Kelly's Lifestream! | Download a hi-resolution PDF!

Esther Dyson had an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing the shrinking effectiveness of traditional online advertising compared to the new models of marketing. Some of her points:

• Concerning their online data, users are no longer looking for privacy, but for recognition as individuals - whether by friends or vendors.
• New ad networks are starting to track users and show them relevant ads (behavioral targeting) ...
• ... in whatever online context or space those users are moving.

Combine that with recommendations or "Your friend just bought" messages from your personal graph/ social network contacts (all of them, not only on Facebook); including vendor-friends that you invite into your garden.

Think of it as personalized billboards that show up wherever you commute - based on your yesterday's window shopping habits and depicting your best friend Bob who already bought the featured product.

What powerful new tools for your brand!

The WSJ!

"We believe innovation is a journey, not a destination. When we get to the finish line, we move it."

Agree! We have to sell science and technology to our kids in order to move the finish line during the next decades. Remember Sputnik?

Michael Krigsman from ZDNet had JP Rangaswami yesterday. We support his point of view:

Coming back from biology to design. Ross Lovegrove at TED 2005: "They looked straight through me. What a waste. Anyway. I'm delivering - they're not taking."

Couldn't we make a car from 300 components? Call it fat-free design!

View the talk!

Let's stick with biology/ evolution for a moment and feature 4 Richard Dawkins books from the 70's to 90's.

From Wikipedia: "He first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme, helping found the field of memetics. In 1982, he made a widely-cited contribution to the science of evolution with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including into the bodies of other organisms. He has since written several best-selling popular books, and appeared in a number of television and radio programmes, concerning evolutionary biology, creationism, and religion."

Support this blog and order one of the books below:

Following up on yesterday's presentation by Michael Pollan, Steve Yastrow pointed us to three books that everyone should read. Here they are. Thanks, Steve!

Support this blog and order one of the books below:

TED: "What if human consciousness isn't the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn's clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination?" Michael Pollan, 2007.

View the talk!

FastCompany: "Do you need a fresh start on creativity? Stanford professor Robert Sutton is a unique voice with an urgent message about how to generate and capitalize on new ideas."

Support this blog and order one of the books below:

Jeff Brenman: "This presentation was created as an assignment for an undergraduate psychology class.

Jeff Brenman: "This is a stylization of a slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining globalization and America's future in the 21st century. It is designed to stand alone, without having to be presented in person. Enjoy!" View the presentation!

Until now we have omitted 1 Stephen P. Anderson slideshow as there was Star Wars in the title - and I was not quite sure ....

We had Dan Saffer in video. Here are the slides ...

Dan: "TIP: Wacky cultural practices always impress. For international research, be sure to throw in a couple of unexpected cultural practices to make people feel that they've really taken the time to consider diverse perspectives." and "Toss out data you don’t like. Don’t let a research subject ruin your design idea. When it comes time to analyze the data, it is essentially about culling your data, separating the wheat from the chaff. You have to use some criteria to make those calls. Some people use things like prevalence or, on the other hand, uniqueness. Why not use your own preferences? Don't make the mistake of letting rigor or a quest for objectivity lead you to keep data with implications you don't want to deal with."

View the presentation!

Pedro Custódio gave a workshop at LIFT08.

Our Stephen P. Anderson series continues:

French and Latvian Ninjas. Is it something about culture or food? Shouts to Tim Ferriss, who pointed us back to the topic. Don't EVER try this at home!

Dan Saffer: "Experience shows that, especially with qualitative research like the type designers often do, two researchers can look at the same set of data and draw dramatically different findings from them. How do we deal with this?"

View the talk!

I especially like: "Myth 7: Creativity is not for adults or people with serious careers."

Geneva? Not really. Robert Scoble twitters that there are connection problems in Switzerland. My impression is: QIK opened a Pandora's Box. Follow not only celebrity voices but their eyes as well. Privacy, where have you gone?

View QIK!

There are quite some definitions of Web 3.0 flying around. Alan Patrick collected different voices. Thanks for the overview!

View broadstuff!

Will.i.am: "I'm always a little wary of actors or musicians declaring their support for a cause. Why care more about their opinion than anyone else's? No one's ever convinced me that support of a figure from popular culture ever made a real difference in a political campaign, and it could do more harm than good. This remix of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech by will.i.am of group, Black Eyed Peas, features a motley assortment of creative characters, from A-list to random-list. It's eye-catching -- and given that in two days it's been uploaded by a ton of different users, and has been watched millions of times, it's certainly testament to the way the Democratic candidate has caught the attention of the YouTube generation. Will it make a difference? I guess we'll see tomorrow."

In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly looked back at the bursting Web 1.0 bubble, and defined what was thereafter known as Web 2.0 - every single e-marketing pitch riding that wave now. Make sure to have read the initial article once.

By Improv Everywhere! | Watch the video!

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

As you might have noticed, I am sorting my bookshelf today. And I came across another must-order, must-have, must-browse, and must-read: Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions.

Support this blog and order one of the books below:

I was reading Selling the Dream and The Macinosh Way in late 1995 - switching my interest from biophysics to all things Apple, marketing and the uprising internet. Searching for Guy Kawasaki at amazon.com does not lead to many results today, so please enjoy our collection ...

Support this blog and order one of the books below:

Bill DeRouchey: "The five minute whirlwind on the history of the button, presented at IgnitePortland on 25 Oct 2007."

View the presentation! | Visit the history!

There is an excellent comment on cnet today:

"Whatever happens, the salad days for Yahoo are long gone. 2008 will be the year Yahoo ceased to be one of the big independent Internet heavyweights. They’ll almost certainly become an operating subsidiary of Microsoft, or Google’s whipping boy. And if by some chance the government puts a stop to either deal, they’ll have a short reprieve before facing similar decisions next year or the year after. The world is an unforgiving place. Yahoo is cute, cuddly and likable, but they did not execute the way Google did. And because of that they are quickly turning into collateral damage in an epic war that is really just beginning between Microsoft and Google."

It's TechCrunch time!

Two weeks ago Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae and Nick Carr's The Big Switch arrived as an international shipping here in Switzerland from amazon.com. I decided to go for IT versus business first and jumped into Nick Carr's vision of the Internet's global computing grid.

It's time for marketing now.

[Support this blog and order via the Amazon widgets below.]

I just finished Nick Carr's The Big Switch last night. This is definitely essential reading for 2008! I have to admit that Nick Carr was one of the names in the Gillmor Gang 3 years ago I had never heard of before.

Waiting for a copy of Does IT matter? to arrive.

Support this blog and order via the Amazon widgets below.

The United States are voting on this historical date (24 states). Wikipedia: "In a democracy, voting commonly implies election, i.e. a way for an electorate to select among candidates for office. In politics voting is the method by which the electorate of a democracy appoints representatives in its government."

My Central European teachers told me that a voter's choices are confidential 30 years ago. Contrast that with all the voices on a Google plus Twitter mashup visualizing the primaries ...

Explore Google Maps!

Kevin Kelly undiggs a post from Nick Carr. "Downtailing!! This is the perfect word for the slow descent down the ranks of influence. One can imagine one's book, movie or career downtailing, which indicates not only a move down, but more importantly a move out - to the edges of irrelevancy. To the wilderness of obscurity. To the silence of the solo audience. With tail down between legs, it's a cross between demotion and exile."

Follow Kevin Kelly's Lifestream! | Read Nick Carr's Rough Type!

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

According to Wikipedia, the first TV ad was broadcast in the US at 2:29 PM on July 1, 1941. Today, over the course of 10 hours, there are approximately 3 hours of ads. Take a medium length of 30 sec per clip and you could air 360 of them on one channel within 10 hours. Below we have 9. Multiply that by 40. Start the clips and enjoy a visually inspiring 5-minute coffee break - a selection worth watching:

[Please be aware that certain spots may contain mature content, which is unsuitable to minors.]

Marc Andreessen's take on a potential Microsoft/ Yahoo! merger and it's impact on Silicon Valley:

"The Microsoft/Yahoo deal, if it happens, means very little for the entrepreneurial climate in Silicon Valley, or the opportunities available to you and your startup.

Your job is exactly the same as before: build something people want, scale it up, make sure it's defensible, and make sure you can make money with it."

Read Marc Andreessen!

Christopher Fahey's slides from the ASIS&T IA Summit almost 1 year ago.

"It's Design Thinking. 'The most fundamental difference between [design and science] is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is.

I stumbled upon Christopher Fahey today while performing some research on interaction design. Very valuable insights - I recommend subscribing to his blog immediately:

"It's the process of making the diagram that produces innovation. The most powerful design insights do not simply emerge from the diagram for any third-party viewer to read as if they were reading a billboard. More likely the design insights enter the mind of the diagram-maker while they are assembling it. The final modemap artifact simply serves as a tool to explain the designer's inspirational process to other people (non-designers, especially, but also to other designers) in the hopes that the customers of the diagram (whether they be clients or collaborators) may understand the merits of the design. The diagram may even, in fact, be let incomplete or even discarded upon completion if the design insights may be better expressed through another means."

Visit graphpaper.com!

Our regular Essential Reading features books and authors we want to share with you providing inspiration!

We shared: Paul Arden, Arno Schmidt, Thomas Mann, Fons Trompenaars, Bit Literacy, 'Core Memory' and 'An Illustrated History', Tom Peters, Michael E. Porter, Marty Neumeier, and Don Norman.

For other tags and topics, check our quick guide for first-time visitors.

Look for everything Essential Reading!

People take action (mostly) based on one of three emotions:

Fear
Hope
Love

Read Seth Godin!

Our regular Just Found features all things out there we find worth commenting and sharing with you - launching your interest!

We found quite a lot since May 2007 - our series with the most entries up-to-now, amongst others: Blogs before 2003, UiaML, pliancy and fluency, the homepage, customer support, user experience design, understanding the medium, technology waves, the enterprise software dispute, CIO versus CTO, Microsoft MSN, DRM, Six Sigma, Bob Muglia, tribe management, and Yahoo!.

For other tags and topics, check our quick guide for first-time visitors.

Look for everything Just Found!

Image © NASA

From interface design to surface design: Simply beautiful. Images from NASA's MESSENGER historic first flyby.

Fly with NASA!

"Design is NOT about decoration. It's about communication and problem solving." Garret Dimon at Web Visions 2007.

View the presentation!

& the Red Fez is a stream of ideas and inspirations, ranging from international marketing to IT - mixed with some completely unrelated topics of personal interest.

[Update December 2, 2008: Replaced by About & the Red Fez.]

There have been three talks of Dan Dennett at TED. This is the first one from 2002.

Peter Merholz gives a thorough presentation on technology, features, and user experience. His words: "Don't focus on technology and features. Heck, don't focus on the 'product.' Focus on the experience you want to create, and build a system that gets you there." Listen to the presentation!

Though it is everywhere, we repeat it here: Microsoft offers $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo. We had the two companies approaching before, so let's close the deal. Or Google jump in alternatively ... Have a look at Steve Ballmer's letter with TechCrunch.

[Update February 3: Follow Google News and Google Blogs ...]
[Update February 4: No decision yet - but Google moving. The WSJ!]
[Update February 9: Yahoo board to reject takeover bid. The NYT!]
[Update February 14: Too many zigzags to follow on this humble blog. In case you are interested, make sure to subscribe to a Google Blog or News feed View the Blog feed! View the News feed!]

It's TechCrunch time!