AllOneWord

really useful apps

JP and I have been thinking about really useful apps lately for a client and his favourite is the Charmin Loo finder and grader - similar to the fantastically named SatLav from earlier in the year.  

I just stumbled across this app from Boxee - which turns your iphone into a remote control.  It's quite simple but a really good use of an iphone app and taps into the fact that boxee users are probably gadget lovers who would be more interested in merging two technologies, like boxee and the iphone, rather than having to buy a new piece of excess kit.  

apple to take on the gaming consoles?

Yesterday saw an update from apple and the first appearance from Steve Jobs in a while.  As expected the updated products are going to focus around the ipod and iphone but a quote from Jobs implies that the ipod may look to move into the gaming arena, with Jobs saying "You can make a pretty good argument for saying it is the best portable device for playing games"

Given the penetration of the ipod and the success of the new applications store, it does seem a natural move for apple and they have a ready made audience.  Something to keep our eye on certainly.

Intelligent Billbards and contextual tags

This seems to be quite a cute idea, a billboard in second life that listens to the chatter around it and displays ads  based on what people are talking about. Someone mentions a car we see a VW ad, someone talks about beer we see a beer ad etc .  Its application in Second Life may be a little limited but in other online worlds and games we may get some significant reach. In the real world might it be interesting to have poster sites that display ads or content based on the people nearby.

Voice activation may cause all sorts or privacy concerns, but if we include some kind of opt in press the button say a word see what you get, or something based on tags held on mobile devices ( an extension of the ring tone advertising my passions/interests idea) could be fun fad in the least and possibly a scalable business.

Yet another vision of the future video

This is a vision video from Intel, although you wouldn't know it until the money shot at the end. I spent most of the video convinced it was a clever ad for BMW ( it still might be??)

It is more style than substance, nothing particularly profound but a useful piece for imagining  a vanishingly near technocratic future.It does have very high production values for the 20,000 views on Youtube so far  All the technology in it is available today with the pssible exception of the voice recognition which isnt that good yet. An HD version of this video would be great.

Future of Mobile Phones from a Newspaper through online TV

2 things about this video, first and most obvious its a nice piece about some of the cutting edge technologies in Mobile. Mobile TV ( I guess they had to), Location Based Services (finally getting there), polymer screens ( still mono) and several others. The subtler point is that it is a news story from the Wall Street Journal presented in video and done, in my view, very well. It feels like a rich newspaper article rather than TV news story done by a non specialist. Just the facts,0 as they say. I think it possibly tells us more about the future of Newspaper brands than it does about mobile.

Visual Shopping

One problem for some kinds of shopping online is too much choice, the non-virtual 3-d transactional space (a shop) is  generally far better at presenting multiple choices and we use our visual processing units (eyes) to whittle down the choice to a manageable few. Web sites haven't been very good at this but browsegoods.com ( from Amazon surprise) is great, it allows us to visually compare literally hundreds of products in this case shoes. I think it would be a great way to represent FMCG products to the weekly online grocery shopper, I wish I could buy more my from online grocer its just that I don't know what I might want. The visual logic of mapping really helps make this an intuitive sites to use , roll your mouse in to product genre you desire and see everything available, just like er... a shop.( Via MIT Adver lab)

Blinkx video wall

A nice view of how TV in an internet world might look. We don't need to tune in to one channel at a time, why not watch dozens at once.